Nothin' like good music and a close shave.

I freakin' love Radiohead and I say this with some trepidation, because they are so good and their goodness has been so chronicled that to say you like Radiohead almost sounds lazy. I really should be trying harder, I know. But yeah, I said it and this guy says it much better than I could. Some of the other stuff on his site veers sharply into pretention, but his song-by-song dissection of Amnesiac (my favorite Radiohead album, just impossibly, impossibly gorgeous) is almost as brilliant as the album itself. If you know the music, you can hear it clearly in your head as you read, which is as good a compliment as can be given to a music review piece.

And while I'm going on about music, check out the blogs of Sasha Frere-Jones and Philip Sherburne. Very fine writing on music and other things of interest. I used to work with Sherburne at one of the more useless search engines back when saying things like that could get you laid. He ended up starring in a Norelco commerical that was somehow tied in with Ask Jeeves (there, I said it) in a feat of advertising synergy requiring the services of a team of Chinese contortionists. In it, he was featured shaving at work as we all did back in those heady days because we were far too busy reinventing the economy to take care of personal hygiene in such pedestrian places like, oh, the bathroom. Much shit was given to him about that one, mostly out of jealously, of course; but as far as I remember, he was a decent guy.

Anyway, a week before half the company got canned, management decided to throw a bash at the Exporatorium, which was rented out for untold sums of pretend internet money. It was fucking cool. We had the place to ourselves all night and Mr. Sherburne and some other coolster DJ type employees spun the vinyl while we drank the free booze and ran around the place like little kids. Which we all were; we just happened to be running companies into the ground, as well.

I never worked with/for Mr. Frere-Jones, so you'll have to make up stories about him, I guess.