Nice story about meeting Lester Bowie and others from Phil.

Five things I will play for my kids when they are little if I have kids:

• Stevie Wonder - Talking Book
• Duke Ellington

Wait screw the list that's all I'm going to play them.

Last night in a Chipotle I heard Senor Coconut's latin cover of Kraftwerk's "Showroom Dummies". This unnerved me a little because Chipotle is owned by McDonald's, even though it'd be hard to tell from the restaurant itself - I assume that they use piped-in music, and it's usually a strange mix of rootsy music and dancy pop, some of it in Spanish, but which I hardly ever recognize. Somehow Senor Coconut's sounding "latin" got them slipped into the programming bin, I guess.

In case you missed this the first time around...

Have I written this before? I must have. But it bears repeating. Loads and loads of the guitar noises on Sonic Youth's Dirty sound like the most exciting parts of any noisy old solo from some other band, the parts that represent the furthest reaches of the freakout. Only Sonic Youth strings them out one after another, or makes a whole song out of them, or just repeats one of them over and over like a kid with a shiny new toy.

Ha, check that, "stupid French-Canadian girl". I don't suppose that counts as some kind of language barrier just like she of the three tongues and the golden hair?

Anyway I decided "harpy" isn't the right word. I need to find another mythological figure with a strange voice.

Wilco's rhythm section is so white.

Maybe my little story is just an absurd extension of the idea of being open-minded (some might say, being objective) to its extreme. (Perhaps its absurdity marks it out as something to strive for, though.) But what if we take a look at it, and want to reject it? I just want to listen to records I like. I don't care about being objective. I don't care about stretching myself. If I want to do that I'll read books, or pray, or just get a life instead of listening to records. I don't have time for this bullshit. It's impractical. Etc.

Well. At the very least, it seems like this experimentalism, this attitude toward pre-given tastes, still tells us something important, or useful, just because we can conceive of it: it underscores the importance that these life experiences can have, do have, for the records that we don't have to spend years with, that we don't have to stretch for. And if I like different records than you, and it's because of my different experiences, my different tastes, that can tell us something important about those experiences - both yours and mine. Moreover, if we hold the experiences of other people to be important - and despite moments of callousness, forgetfulness, indifference, and everything else, I think we want to regard them as important - then that matters to how we want to treat other people for liking the records that they do, what they think about those records, all of it.

To be fair: there is always the demographic of people sending dedications to people they knew long ago in a different place, and who they expect to still listen to Casey Kasem twenty years on. Vast, to be sure.