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Hot diggity. Sasha Frere-Jones writes a whizbanger of an article about indie rock’s racial influences, then Tim Carmody blows it out of the water. I adore dialogues like this. Read ’em both!

If you’re a music critic, you’re constantly searching for combinations of terms to describe the flavor-of-the-moment in a novel but legitimate fashion (e.g. “metal-queer,” “mumble-core”). I’ve made it easy for you. Presenting the Musical Genre Name Generator™. After you generate your new musical genre, you can click the term to search Google to see how original you are. (By the way, this won’t work in the RSS feed.)

Clearly, this is a statement on how nothing’s original anymore; everything’s been done. Even the Musical Genre Name Generator™.

Blog of a Bookslut has been posting links to the work of Shaun Tan. Pure gorgeous. Check out the wordless panels (courtesy of New York Magazine) from Tan’s The Arrival.

If you weren’t paying attention, Kottke’s begun excavating the archival treats freed by the demise of TimesSelect.

• Mr. Clive Thompson pointed out the addictive Bloxorz the other day.
• Priscilla just looks gorgeous (via Infocult).
• Flow in Games is both beautiful and mesmerizing (also via Infocult).

Whenever I think about our reflexive distrust of emerging technology, I remember Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates argues that writing is inferior to rhetoric. Socrates recounts a legend in which the Egyptian king Thamus refuses the gift of writing from the god Theuth, saying that writing will be deleterious to true wisdom. We will read, but never know, Thamus says. Writing may remind us, but it can’t educate us, the way a speaker can. The irony in this passage, of course, is that Phaedrus is itself a written work.

There’s a lot to be said about the curious intersection between technology and memory — how technology seems to allow us to both retain more and forget more — but Jenny Lyn Bader managed to leave out all the interesting parts in her NYT Week in Review essay (“Britney Spears? That’s All She Rote”) on how people can’t remember anything anymore. And along the way, she manages to fit Britney’s lip-synching, organ transplant recipients, and “The Vagina Monologues” into this tortured half-argument. it’s kind of a train wreck. I really have nothing especially profound to say about this essay, it just seemed a blogworthy exemplar of the awful our-culture’s-going-to-hell/wasn’t-it-better-when form. And she cites Phaedrus too, with no nod to the irony therein.

Edgar Allen Poe’s masked fanatic has allegedly unmasked himself. A 92-year-old Poe-head named Sam Porpora claims to be the originator of the annual tradition of celebrating Poe’s birthday with roses and cognac. But he says he’s not sure who’s continued the toast each year since 1976. The mystery remains …

This tie-tying tutorial works pretty darn well. I’ve always been a good tier of ties, but I just tried this, and it totally ups my game. (Via.)

In Romenesko Letters today, Gordon Trowbridge makes a very good point about the coverage before the collapse of 35W: the press did see this one coming. Over the past several years, newspapers have published a number of prominent investigative stories on bridge/highway deficiencies. My own paper published a front-page story in 2001 headlined “A bridge too far gone? Repairs overdue on many spans.” An excerpt:

Bridge work is getting increasingly expensive as a bubble of structures built after World War II are wearing out and requiring major renovation or replacement during the next 20 years. [The 35-W bridge was built in 1967.]

And some state highway officials warn that Minnesota isn’t keeping up.

Read more…

I’m fine.