JONATHAN L. FISCHER REPORTS FROM FAIRFAX:
After a lengthy preliminary hearing in Caralee Cottle's trial for the murder of Dirk Smiler, Cottle has been granted bond and could be released as soon as today. During the probable cause hearing in Fairfax's Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, Cottle's attorney, Peter Greenspun, asked that his motion for [...]

"The Orange Line Revolution," Aaron Leitko's December 2009 story about punk houses in Arlington, has been selected for inclusion in Best Music Writing 2010. The piece takes a look at Kansas House, as well as some group homes associated with local indie labels and movements, such as Dischord, Simple Machines, and Positive Force. As Leitko [...]

That's what the New York Times is reporting. He was 59.

Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse died this weekend, and initial reports gave his age only as being "in his forties." Caryn Ganz, who broke the news late Saturday for Rolling Stone, told me that Linkous' publicist/manager, Shelby Meade, told her his age "wasn't released."
Entertainment Weekly went with a very similar formulation to Ganz's: "Linkous, who [...]

Rocío Molina's hands snap sometimes when she unfurls her arms, a punctuation I didn't expect. Flamenco's usually fluid motions aren't the only one of the art form's conventions that she's discarded—gone, too, are cartoonish sexuality and a sense that you're watching folk art. This is precise stuff, and Oro Viejo, the program about aging and [...]

Petula Dvorak's kids are bored. (So are mine! I hear you!) A friend suggested a Lady Gaga dance party. "We did that, only it was to the Descendants," she writes in her column today.
First the Smiths, now this! Will somebody buy the copy desk a Trouser Press?

Note: This post requires a disclosure as vast and sprawling as the song it is ostensibly about.
Some people record six-minute-long prog-rock epics because they want to infuse Gilgamesh with the power of electric guitars. And others do it because their novel has just come out in paperback.
When my friend Jeffrey Rotter entered a Brooklyn studio [...]

HO HO WHO: Self-styled spitfire Griffin makes what LOOKS like a holiday CD, and if you were saving up a bunch of holiday CDs for months, you might think it IS a holiday CD rather than put it straight in your sell pile, where you might have made SOMETHING off this while you still could. [...]

HO HO WHO: This is not a Christmas album! It is an album about winter. That is what Sting says in the album's unbearably smug and prolix notes, and he has a nice house in Tuscany where Euro folkies gather while his dog Compass watches the proceedings. You do not get a life like this [...]

There'll be a memorial for Jerry Fuchs, drumming prodigy and marvelous human who died early Sunday morning in a freak accident, this Thursday evening from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Enid's in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Enid's was one of Jerry's old haunts and will be an appropriate spot to say goodbye. Below the jump, a [...]