Makes we wanna go re-read Speak, Memory.

Amen. I drink a fair amount of craft beer, but I'm generally much more interested in maltier stuff rather than "let's see how many hops we can cram into this fucker" stuff, which has always struck me as the hipster equivalent to putting neon ground effects on your truck.

Perhaps a little, although I think that perception can't help but be influenced by the fact that the Swede's brother is such a charismatic voice in the book, and he so pointedly dismisses Merry's ideology as moronic. I also think there's a difference in the book (and real life for that matter) between a liberal and a…

Still don't get why there hasn't been a movie of The Plot Against America. That strikes me as the obvious one that is plot-driven enough to work as a movie, and with an alt-history hook that might reach beyond the typical audience you would expect to see a prestige film adapted from a Philip Roth novel.

And with that, the era of the mashup has reached its apotheosis.

I went in there looking for Rax, which was sort of an ever-so-slightly-nicer Arby's that I really liked when I was like 10. But lo-and-behold, Rax still exists! It's nowhere near where I live, but I might need to make a pilgrimage to southern Ohio to get me some Rax.

When I realized they had made it non-searchable on purpose, I snapped up free tickets to a Weezer show I probably won't attend just to spite them. I mean, I might go, but it's like 3 hours away and I'd be going solo most likely. But regardless, that's two tickets those assholes can't sell to anybody.

Warren Zevon: "Lawyers, Guns, and Money", "Poor Poor Pitiful Me"
Ramones: "Beat on the Brat"
Bruce Springsteen: "Nebraska"
Mountain Goats: "No Children"
Digital Underground: "The Humpty Dance"
Drive-By Truckers: Ninety Percent of Good Drive-By Truckers songs
Elvis Costello: Seventy Percent of Good Elvis Costello songs
Liz…

So, let me get this straight, a 150 second pop song has a main character who is so well-developed that the interviewee is able to spend hundreds of words describing his various unsavory traits, and even points out that the song's poppiness exists in ironic tension to the utter bleakness of the main character's…

This thread led me to go look at Meinertzhagen's wikipedia page, which is basically a Wes Anderson movie.

I first heard of them in 2000 or so, and what I mostly remember is how damn difficult it was to track down a physical copy of the album to buy (eventually found one in a little record store in Chicago).

I loved the heck out of this book when I first read it in 2000 or so (I was 23). What I'm really curious about is whether a smart 18-24 year-old now would like it. What I loved about the book at the time is that I felt like it captured something about being young at that particular moment. I wonder if it would still…

If they can reduce the shittiness of Season 3 by like 50 percent, then I'm in. 'Cause Season 3 was shitty.

Has the AV club had a roundtable exploring what the hell was going on with Bruce's early 90's t-shirt/goatee/jew-fro look? Truly one of the most inexplicable moments in American popular culture.

I'm generally not a fan of the Springsteen songs with big sax excursions, but "Thunder Road" is the exception—the solo at the end is downright heroic.

If pressed, I think I'd go "From a Motel 6" or "Our Way to Fall". But "Tom Courtenay" is way, way up there.

Obviously this is a bad song, but credit where credit's due: vegetarian/septuagenarian is a pretty decent rhyme (or at least a pretty unique rhyme in the annals of pop music choruses).

The reason it sounds odd is that "I wanna be your Thurston Moore" is a line of perfect iambic tetrameter, but switching to "Kim Gordon" turns the last foot into a trochee, so it jumbles up the rhythm. You can try to force the final stressed syllable onto "don" in order to maintain the iambic rhythm, but, as you say,…

I saw them cover Fortunate Son at the Roseland Ballroom in NYC on the night of the big Iraq War protests in 2003. After spending the day getting corralled by cops in riot gear, I was pretty fucking into it.

Shit sandwich.