1. The person (or persons) who passed the baton to you.

The trusty Tito Perez — whom I wish I had run into while at Coachella.

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.

Somewhere in the area of 40 Gigs, although it could be quite more than that. I have a horrible tendency to put everything in one place, which includes music I buy, music I — *ahem* — try out, and music that slips into my hands at gunpoint.

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought.

This Perfect Day, C-60. As some regular readers know, I’m madly addicted to Swedish rock. (The Shout Out Louds, for example, was one of Coachella’s highlights. And I sung along to almost every song!) For whatever reason, Swedish rock contains a sense of purity that really needs to be explored and understood more. And in the Shout Out Louds’ case, I can’t think of anyone else willing to use xylophone so unapologetically in a live set. My guess is that it has something to do with Systembolaget, which I’ve yet to try. But I’d hazard a guess that drinking the stuff would probably make me pick up my guitar again and write cheery goofball songs.

4. Song playing at the moment of writing.

Doves, “Ambition” (a supremely sad song from a very good album, Some Cities)

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs)

I’ll stick with the songs in my head at the moment:

M.I.A., “Bucky Down Gun” (Really, how can anyone resist this track? Old school hip-hop mixed with crazed banshee-like rapping, a clarion call that is deliberately artificial and lyrics that demand a call to revolution, which seems particularly apposite in our current political clime.)

Nine Inch Nails, “You Know What You Are?” (Look, I’ll confess that With Teeth is a spotty album and that even a cursory examination of this song’s lyrics shows that Reznor makes little sense. But I still contend that Trent Reznor shrieks “fuck” perhaps better than most. And somehow, I’ve really come to appreciate that crazy-as-fuck percussion.)

Of Montreal, “Oslo in the Summertime” (Thank you, Kevin Barnes, for yet another addictive album, The Sunlandic Twins, that sneaks up on you after several weeks of listening. What’s particularly striking about this track is the semi-electro tone mixed with the languorous Ray Davies feel to the lyrics. The first time I heard this song, I was mildly annoyed by the buzzy timbre. The third time, I had a goofy grin on my face. And now the song just won’t go away.)

Doves, “Almost Forgot Myself” (I don’t think I’ll ever hear a track this year as uncoditionally directional as this one is this year. This may be the best use of a percussive clang in a pop song since the Beatles’ “Everyone’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey.” Plus, it sums up what’s so fantastic about the Doves: a moribund tune in a minor key driven by a defiant snare and a guitar fuzz that involves carrying on in the face of existential chaos.)

Royksopp, “Eple” (What is it about Nordic pop exactly? I’ve been relistening to Melody A.M. for the first time in about two years, and hoping that these folks might get me crazy about electronica again. This track, in particular, which offers a goofy downbeat drive just this short of mellow without coming across as yet another pretentious ambient nightmare designed for the New Age, Air-listening crowd.)

6. The five people to whom you will ‘pass the musical baton’

Maud Newton, who I hope will remind me about the importance of guitars
The Old Hag, because I’m damn curious about what she’s listening to these days
Mark Sarvas, because I know there’s more than meets the eye to his audio palette than certain CM-lead bands that get too much airplay
Speedy Snail, because he’s been considerably silent on the musical question (and I blame his insane devotion to Neal Stephenson)
Scott Esposito, because he’s younger than me and probably has a better set of ears than I do

If you’re coming here from James Callan’s Telegraph article (not yet available online), welcome. I’m not certain how accurate he was about calling this place “an addictive mix of urbane musings and taut riffs against the pack mentality of the traditional book-reviewing press,” but I’m honored nonetheless.

Callan is absolutely right about the panties, however. Callan got the info out of me only because he was an affable gent who asked a lot of interesting questions. I never announced the panties here, because I feared that this would invite more packages of panties to the P.O. Box. (Frankly, I’m more interested in panties that are worn on ladies and, if the mood is right, slid down sinuous legs, ideally with a soul attached. All this is the aftermath of a remarkably repressed upbringing, in which the very mention of sex was enough to cause melodramatic pronouncements of surprise, if not flames to spontaneously burn onyx sppors through my bedroom. The many Victorian novels I read growing up certainly didn’t help things.) But perhaps one day, I’ll offer a rundown of the odder packages I’ve received over the past year.

If you thought that Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident, brother, have I got a serious wakeup call for you.

Read this. Then come back here.

The people in charge are letting inhuman monsters perform acts that fly in the face of decency. Ask yourself if you would treat your worst enemy this way. And ask again if you would let such a corrupt gang of goons eke out such vile and despicable acts on other humans. But the key part of the article, the thing that goes far and beyond simple hatred for the enemy is this paragraph:

It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

This is not a matter of being red state or blue state. This is not a matter of being liberal or conservative. This is a matter of being American and standing up for what’s right. And that sure as hell doesn’t involve denying a manacled man water or humiliating a man far beyond the call of mere Saddam underwear pictures or letting a man die because he was a cab driver who happened to be wandering around in the wrong area.

I got the link from this Metafilter thread. It was suggested by the posters that this article and that this information be distributed to churches. Churches, as most people know, are the congregation points for many who live in the heartland. They are instrumental in disseminating information to ordinary people and promoting decency. And I think that anyone reading that article would be hard-pressed to argue that what we have here is something that speaks beyond the realm of what is decent and germane.

Inspired by the thread, this afternoon, I sent a group fax of the article to ten churches in Alabama, thinking that a state that had a history of bombing a church and killing four little girls back in 1963 because of the color of their skin might be more receptive to the current plight, which involves torturing and letting people die because of the color of their skin.

But within this idea lies the potential to take back this country. I urge anyone reading this blog to send a copy of this article by fax or by mail (keep in mind that hard copies offer a physical quality which cannot be easily deleted and that not everyone in this nation is hooked to the Net) to churches of varying stripes and distinctions.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of churches in this country. Even if we were to reach just one, we would plant a seed demanding greater accountability for our government’s actions.

Apologies for being down and out for the count. Back in the day, we made the mistake of registering our domain with Network Solutions and it took several angry words to explain to the unhelpful little bastard on the phone that we had been screwed over by his company and that the company itself hadn’t bothered to send us any notice that we hadn’t renewed this domain. So if you emailed us lately, we didn’t get it. (Of course, our backlog and response rate is so embarassing that we apologize for this too.)

And while we’re at it, we’ve got to stop using first person plural. Last we heard, we hadn’t been coronated by anyone. And in fact, the last time we played checkers, we recall very clearly never being crowned once.

All this is to say that we apologize for the delay and we offer a return to ferreting out the finest literary news of our time.