Yeah, I understand what you mean - I think a lot of this stuff comes down to a matter of degree, or a question of where to draw the line, which isn't so easy to determine for anybody.

Other folks already put it well, but I'll respond anyway:

Don't get me wrong - I already had stuff to read and I wasn't in desperate need of a new book or anything. My point is that as so many bookstores die off, we're losing valuable resources that provide much more to their communities than just a place to pick up the new Twilight novel or whatever.

Agreed. The other day I was killing some time in a small, wealthy suburban town, and I remembered that there had once been a bookstore there - it turns out that it closed recently. What this meant was that unless I wanted to look at clothes or antiques (I didn't) or get some food (I wasn't hungry), there just wasn't…

Their first, self-titled EP, which is now packaged with a bunch of early live recordings, too. It's a bit different from their other stuff but really quite good.

The New Yorker wouldn't declare hummus "over" - they would publish a long, thoughtful prose piece about why eating hummus had become unconscionable.

Yeah, what Superspamextreme and Bucky Calloway said (well, without the whole bit about some dude pissing in an alley and etc.). Let's remember that before 2003, in much of the U.S., consensual sex between two people of the same gender ("sodomy," so to speak) was considered a sex crime. Even now, people who were…

I only have one question about all this: How are there no collard greens with the fucking pigs' feet? How am I supposed to eat pigs' feet with no goddamn collard greens???

Sorry, our minds are pieces of shit today. Accoutrements.

WBEZ management oversight is provided by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia; you know, the other day, I came into the office and saw him down on his hands and knees, saying "Yes! Give me that hard dick! You motherfucker! Give me that dick you motherfucker! I want that dick!" I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of…

On the one hand, Watterson pretty much stopped working at age 35; on the other hand, for around 10 years he was producing work almost every day, so that's still quite a bit of stuff.

Some visual artists too: Francesca Woodman committed suicide at age 22, but left behind a ton of photographs (and some videos) which continue to be very influential; Jean-Michel Basquiat overdosed at 27, but made lots of paintings which have become almost a sort of template for many artists (one example: that Weezer…

Also, Roky Erickson has put out a lot more stuff since, and if you look at the 13th Floor Elevators as primarily Erickson's project (though he didn't contribute as much to the third album) then blah blah blah I must have something better to do today…

"Jelly roll" is old-fashioned slang for "vagina" so this post basically says "vagina of vagina." You can thank me later.

There's also Proust, whose massive influence comes from just one book (but it's a really, really long book).

My Bloody Valentine has actually put out a decent amount of music (only two full-length albums, but lots of EPs, singles, etc.), and there's the possibility that they could put out more records. Someday. 

Yeah, I was gonna say - this sounds a lot more like latter-day Pere Ubu than like the original RFTT recordings (which I love). It's not necessarily a bad thing for me - I like latter-day Pere Ubu, too - but I'm not really feeling the whole RFTT classification.

I thought it would be about weaning yourself off of the milk of worldly concerns and onto the solid spiritual food that is Jesus, but that would be "JesusWean". With that "a" instead of the "e"… uh, I guess "ween" is also an old English word for "to suppose". Suppose for Jesus!

Yeah, I agree with the initial post (I "like" it, even). Also, it's hard to squeeze all this stuff into America's famously reductive, left-vs.-right political dichotomy, especially when trying to parse the (often nuanced and complex) messages sent by movies themselves. Like, imagine your standard action movie: a…

There's an interesting book called "Jane Fonda's War" by Mary Hershberger - it's a progressive look at Fonda's Viet Nam-era activism. The book talks a lot about Fonda's work with/for American G.I.s and her overall commitment to peace activism, which included a lot of research in Viet Nam. I'm not gonna endorse…