Greenspun argued that since the last bond hearing Cottle has been undergoing mental health assessment and attending a day treatment program, so because of that and her standing in the community, plus the fact that she didn't run after she was questioned the night of Smiler's death and later turned herself in when charged with second-degree, he said she's clearly not a flight risk and asked that bond be set.

Following several hours and testimonies, including from one of Cottle's and Smiler's former roommates, Judge Kimberly J. Daniel agreed there was probable cause and set Cottle's bond at $50,000.

Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Mark J. Sullivan said that the prosecution hasn't yet decided whether to appeal the bond ruling.

If the bond is met, Sullivan said, Cottle could be released as soon as today. "With the connections she has," Sullivan said, he didn't think that would be a problem for her, an apparent reference to Richard A. Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail pioneer for whom Cottle used to work.

"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 writes in the introduction, the story is a "look back at when Arlington was punk." I edited the story, and I'm an extremely minor character in it. But that's not why I'm proud of it–I'm happy that such a good writer is getting recognized for such a good piece. Congrats, Aaron.

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 was in his forties but whose exact age is unknown," Missy Schwartz wrote. The information replicated itself.

Linkous' Wikipedia page says he was born in 1962. I'm not good enough at figuring out when that got added, but it also says he was born in Arlington and narrowly avoided a career in coal-mining, so maybe that's not important. The New York Times reported he was 47; Ben Sisario, who wrote the item, says he "found his DOB on public records, and I also got it from the police."I don't know where Ben Sisario, who wrote the item, got that. I've e-mailed him, and I'll update when he replies.

I went on Nexis this morning and found out Mark Linkous was born in Sept. 1962. When I e-mailed Meade to ask her why so many people reported such a vague age for her client, she wrote back: "Andrew he was 47."

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 the passage of time she performed Sunday night at Lisner Auditorium, seemed much less about telling a story than leaving the audience slackjawed.

That happened a lot, and not just when Molina, 25, danced alone. Her troupe takes a digital approach to its show. One number might be scored by guitarist Paco Cruz (either Paco Cruz or Rafael Rodríguez "El Cabeza"; the program lists both but I'm fairly sure there was just one of them on Sunday night) and percussionist Sergio Martínez; another just by Martínez and Molina's machine-gun heels; yet another by Cruz and the  palmas (handclaps) of Tamar González and Vanesa Coloma. There are three dancers besides Molina—Eduardo Guerro, David Coria, and Adrián Santana—and they perform in various combinations, too. Plus there is a singer, Rosario Guerrero, and you never knew when she might wander out.

I was glad when she did. In her black suit and purple ruffled blouse, Guerrero looked like she should be showing you to your cubicle on your first day on the job, but there was nothing workaday about her raspy voice, which seemed to hurt her as it snaked out and wrapped around arabesque melodies. When she really got going the palmistas would let go encouraging phrases, and sometimes so would some audience members, who shouted "Olé."

Molina got more shouts, especially when she veered toward the traditional: a pasodoble, to "La Gracia de Dios," and a fan dance that she ended by swinging her fan sometimes like Charlie Chaplin's cane, sometimes like she was holding a dirty diaper as far from her nose as possible.

I wondered if that was how she felt about more traditional flamenco, though, during a languid chair-bound dance that she did with one of the male dancers she kind of looked dismissive when her motions became more flowing. (Or maybe it was supposed to represent the restiveness of middle age.) In another piece, set to Mary Santpere's "Donde va maría," Molina and the three other dancers plonked themselves on a bench for some slapstick and boob jokes. It followed a similar piece set to "Limeña," during which two of the male dancers feigned Dean Martin-vintage drunken behavior.

The screwball comedy was an interesting counterpoint to the intensity Molina usually exhibits. She has this way of jerking herself like a short-circuiting robot, but there's no goofing there, and despite her va-va-voom bod, she's more sensual than erotic; it's as if she's stripped flamenco so bare that despite the speed with which she's dancing, you can see each motion's relation to the next. Her shoulders quiver, her torso convulses, and her knees clonk open and shut. Reading what I just wrote, it sounds like I'm describing an electrocution rather than a stunning performance. It was very much the latter. If her dancing showed little of her personality but her determination, I have to assume that was on purpose.

UPDATE 2/17: The guitarist I saw was Cruz; a Lisner rep says Rodríguez couldn't get a visa in time. I've changed the text above to reflect that.

Watch Molina in a previous performance of Oro Viejo:

The 10th Annual Flamenco Festival continues to Feb. 23 at Lisner Auditorium. On Sunday, Feb. 21, Marina Heredia and the Chekara Arab-Andalusian Orchestra of Tetouan perform; on Tuesday, Feb. 23, it's Compañía Israel Galván.

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?

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 to record a song about his debut novel, The Unknown Knowns, it was for the latter reason. "I think authors are just looking for any way they can to get attention," Rotter says. Rotter, says Obits guitarist Sohrab Habibion, "was talking about doing something musical and we thought given the nature of the story it would be really fun to do something absurd, and prog seemed like the most friendly format."

"Song of the Great Kataklysm" is crammed with themes from the book—sea life, an underwater city, volcano eruptions—as well as the goofy wordplay and outre musical references Rotter's always prized in his less-publicized pursuits. It features majestic organ lines, spiraling guitar work, and massive vocals from a heavy metal singer named Matt Payne. It is also staffed by veterans of some great D.C. punk and indie bands: Habibion was in Edsel, drummer Alexis Fleisig was in Girls Against Boys, and co-vocalist Margaret McCartney was in Tuscadero and Hot Pursuit. Payne came into the picture via Michael Hampton, a friend of Rotter and Habibion who toiled in S.O.A., the Faith, Embrace, and Manifesto before becoming a film and TV composer and often saw the metal singer on the Prospect Park playground where both their children play.

It was a playdate forged in Mordor. The players do a more-than-credible job summoning the spirit of King Crimson and Gentle Giant, but it's Payne who brings the awesome sauce, from the faux-English accent on his spoken parts to his meaty wail on the verses to the metal ejaculations with which he wallops the choruses.

Those are a subject Payne has studied extensively: "Mainly what I was working off of was Ronnie James Dio's tendency to yell 'hell yeah' and 'look out!' occasionally throughout a lot of his work," he says. His Dio scholarship does not always end happily: "Every 10 years or so someone from the Misfits calls," he says, "then cans me because I sound too much like Dio." That's not something you hear about yourself very often, I say.

"Well, I've heard it twice," he says.

"The idiom kind of requires a certain confidence that neither Jeff nor I could muster," says Habibion. Payne, he says, "seemed to actually appreciate the silliness and the seriousness. We didn't know what his voice sounded like till he got to the studio. He got up and started singing and Jeff and I just died....He seemed to know all the corny stuff that happened in that music."

Rotter says the idea to record the song grew out of an earlier plan to host an underwater reading of the book, whose main character nurses his obsession with an ancient underwater civilization by meditating below the surface of hotel pools. "That was the problem: the logistics," he says. The hotels he contacted, he says, "were pretty convinced we were gonna have a sex party."

The whole promotion thus far has cost about $600, not including the costs of a video he plans to shoot. Rotter's paid for this himself—for authors occupying the lower reaches of a publisher's "list," entrepreneurialism is beginning to become as important as a book proposal.

The novelist John Wray says he undertook a 600-mile trip down the Mississippi River when "it became clear to me that there wasn't gonna be a bunch of promotional oomph behind my second novel, which I'd worked on for six years." That voyage, in 2005, garnered him a nice writeup in the New York Times (by former City Paper editor David Carr).

"Even though that book never sold many copies," Wray says, "I still encounter people in the publishing business, but also regular people and readers who remember that article and remember that I did that. I think it's contributed to the success of my current novel which is really doing quite well," he adds. That book, Lowboy, is about a man who likes to ride subway trains; for the book's "trailer," Wray filmed a selection of subway riders reading from the book's first pages.

"Publishing is having its Napster moment if you will," says Bethanne Patrick, the host of WETA-TV's Book Studio. Even five years ago, Patrick says, authors didn't need to worry about their own promotions. There were 30 to 40 good places for book reviews, and book tours were as close as most readers got. Now publishers are loath to invest in book tours—why pay thousands of dollars and hope people will show up to a Barnes and Noble in St. Louis on a Wednesday night when you can connect with readers more often, and better, with Twitter?

Authors aren't abandoning the idea of tours, Patrick says. Rebecca Skloot, for instance, put together a tour for her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta WacksLacks [GAH! Thanks for noticing the typo, Preston!] when her publisher, Crown, said it didn't think one made financial sense. She e-mailed colleges and bookstores, friends and fans, and cobbled together a 14-city jaunt that kicked off this past Tuesday. "The reality is, in today’s market, writers have no choice but to embrace their inner PR person," Skloot wrote in Publishers Weekly.

It's worth asking why the culture of publishing has been so slow to embrace innovations such as hand-hewn tours and social media. "I can't really blame [publishers]," Patrick says, because for years "publishing wasn't even a business. It was regarded as a lifestyle. It's really changed—it is a business now."

"When you're comfortable in your tweedy space," she says, "why would you want to change?"

Say you grew up in the indie-rock scene, though, and you're considering where to place your first novel. If you're willing to do most of the promotion, at some point the example of bands like Fugazi or Thievery Corporation is going to make you wonder why you need a publisher in the first place. "I still think that there are many things that traditional publishers do for authors," Patrick says, mentioning "marketing, sales, editorial support...especially when it comes to getting a manuscript into shape to be read." Patrick has started a company called Megaphone to which publishers can outsource their social media strategies while they get up to speed, should they decide to do so (I have my doubts about this: One publicist I reached out to for this story on Wednesday still hasn't seen fit to get back to me).

"I think the key to effective publicity is bearing in mind that journalists need a story," says Wray. "They need something to write about. Simply 'book has been published' isn't really news." When we spoke on Thursday afternoon, he was on his way to a event for his book in Brooklyn where musicians he'd met on the subway would play and he would read. It was not listed on his publisher's events page, but it was easy to find on Facebook.

"All this stuff has a tangential relation to my novel at best," Wray says. "I don't have much patience for novelists who still cultivate this precious attitude about their work. the truth is if you direct a film you have to try to drum up some interest in it. If you write a video game you have to make the rounds....I don't consider that questionable or quote unquote undignified." Writing, he says, "may be an art form, but it's also a job."

Rotter says he's been happy with the PR efforts of his publisher so far, and that he's treating the song and the inevitable video (when we spoke, he and McCartney, his wife, were planning to build a volcano out of which Payne would erupt like lava) as "its own kind of project. I got to go in a studio with a bunch of friends and play some ridiculous music," he says. "It was fun to kind of switch off the taste meter for the day and admit that dual leads are really cool and there's nothing wrong with a triangle solo."

I ask him if he thinks this will help sales.

"It's worth it whether it reaches a thousand people or just two of my friends can giggle at it," he says, adding: "I'd rather it reaches a thousand people."

Listen to Rotter's song (or download it here):

And here's a video he made about the making of the song (via his blog):

[Full Disclosure: 1) I am very good friends with Rotter. We worked together at Spin, Microsoft, and Martha Stewart Living and one time went on a record-company junket to Nice, France, to interview a Belgian rock band. Our children are friends, too. 2) McCartney was in a band, Tuscadero, on the same record label as my group in the '90s. 3) In that group, I played at least five, probably more, shows with Sohrab Habibion's old group, Edsel, and he has put me on the guest list for an Obits performance. 4) I have been a fan of Mike Hampton's and Alexis Fleisig's work for many years. TOTALLY in the tank. 5) I was very happy with the publicity job done by the publisher for my book, which is still available, at steep discounts.]

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. But title and Griffin's outfit on the cover notwithstanding, the only holiday content on here is a brief rip on Kwanzaa.

THE LEZYNE PRESSURE DRIVE M MINI BIKE PUMP: Griffin is funnier than the Sleigher thought she'd be! HOWEVER, the Sleigher did not expect to find her funny at all. Her impression of T.I. phoning Justin Timberlake, who "doesn't just think he's African-American; he thinks he's a dark-skinned brother from a tribe in the Congo with a bone in his nose," is arguably more fun than editing a music-in-review issue.

THE PEN PIN THAT SOMEONE GIVES YOU BECAUSE YOU "ARE A WRITER": Boobies! Pubes! There is no joke Griffin can't improve with a wee spot of potty talk. Donald Trump's eyebrows are "a pubic wig gone wrong." The Gracie Awards, one of which she won three days before recording this concert this past June, are for women in radio and television, so they're "all about the pussy." The Sleigher smiles politely but winces while doing so.

CHEER FACTOR: 0/10 holiday-wise, 5/10 otherwise

WATCH: "Justin Out-Blacks T.I."

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 because you are full of shit, though Sting's recent propensity to prance about grasping a lute has made it hard for the Sleigher to find anyone who will even argue this point with him.

THE ITUNES GIFT CERTIFICATE: Sting sings at the bottom of his register for much of the album, which is a surprise as well as a challenge for anyone who gave up sometime around "Don't Stand So Close to Me '86": Can you forgive him for "Fields of Gold" long enough to appreciate the vintage 4AD chill of "Cold Song" or the mournfulness of "Gabriel's Message"? (FUN FACT: Mrs. Sleigher was kicked out of the choir at St. Margaret's School in Edinburgh, Scotland, for, among other offenses, singing "Most highly flavored lady" to this tune. The opportunity to tell this story is possibly the only reason she is putting up with the Sleigher's quixotic championing of this album.) Or at least give the man credit for making a Christmas album (sorry, Sting) that doesn't rely on the same damn songs as everyone else's?

THE UGLY SWEATER: Think of Sting as a man forever torn between the songs on Synchronicity and the feathered jacket he wore while promoting it. The soprano-sax solo on "The Burning Babe" and the ragamuffin-folk of "Soul Cake" are feathered jacket all the way.

CHEER FACTOR: There is no cheer in the deep deep heart of British winter. But the Sleigher, who may never have sex again because he likes this record, finds it cheery in its own weird way.

LISTEN: "Cold Song"

WATCH: Sting on Italian TV! The Sleigher sees his beard and takes it all back!

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 roundup of Jerry-related awesomeness from yesterday.

A piece from Access Atlanta that mentions that Jerry was named "Friendliest" at Walton High in Marietta, Ga.

Some icky but necessary nitty-gritty on his death from the Daily News.

Way too many great photos his friends posted on Facebook through the day. Here are a couple of my faves.

Somewhere in Europe with the Juan MacLean, I think. From Starrett Zenko.

From Treiops Treyfid

It's really too bad this one's not bigger (author unclear)

From Jayson Green

Also there was this, from the great Kylie Wright.

I'm writing this for a completely selfish reason; to make it easier to bear the loss of a friend. It's been a while since I actually set eyes on Jerry in person, and now in a big cosmic nihilistic joke I've lost the opportunity to ever do so.

The irony is that a few days ago I stumbled on some youtube videos of Jerry playing, and made my husband watch them too. I was thinking I really ought to call him and see how he's doing. Note to self: DON"T WAIT ON THESE THINGS OR IT MAY BE TOO LATE.

So all I can do now is recall things about our time together.
I met Jerry when I joined the band Vineland in 1996. He scared me he was so good, but he wasn't an asshole about it.In fact he's probably one of the most humble guys I've ever met in the rock-legend department. He always tried to find the admirable thing about the other person. He could be really funny and sarcastic but he wasn't snarky.
I remember that tour that we did with Vineland in 96; while I think we all had some rough times,I also remember feeling on top of the world when I got to play with Jerry, like we were the heaviest, baddest rhythm section of all time. Well, Jerry was the heavy one, I was just along for the ride but what a ride it was.
I remember one evening spent at his family's house when we were on tour. It was a sweet, suburban break from what had been the usual relentless sleeping on floors, driving and loading equipment, and we were sitting in the living room watching TV. An Adam Sandler movie came on, and Jerry was like "Yeah! I LOVE Adam Sandler!" He was so enthusiastic about what he liked.

He laughed like whatever it was was the funniest moment in history.

He liked crossword puzzles.

I feel bad that I teased him cause he liked Seal. It just seemed so incongruous to me but that was Jerry.

After Vineland kind of combusted, I formed another band with a couple of long time collaborators, and was amazed that Jerry agreed to play with us. He was also playing in at least 2 other bands at the time, but this is another thing about Jerry:he never seemed to feel the need to parcel out his talent. He loved playing, and was happy to do it.

One time we were walking to practice together; our rehearsal space was down near the Williamsburg bridge, only a few blocks from where his life was so cruelly cut short. I was kidding him on being the god of drums, and how he should get a crown. "A cape will do just fine" he countered. It made me laugh to envision him in a cape. With his obligatory waffle long underwear shirt underneath it.

I moved to Astoria,and we didn't talk as much but he'd still remember to call or email me on my birthday, which touched me. We both had the unfortunate birthday dates right around the new year,and had commiserated on what a lousy birthday time it was. There was always something of the kid in Jerry; I can imagine him thinking how much it sucked to have a birthday right after Xmas and getting re-gifts.

I still have a record he gave me: Rain Forest by Walter Wanderly. I'm playing it right now. It's a Boss Nova classic, which just goes to show how broad Jerry's taste was. It's a happy record. I'm glad to have this little bit of him to hold onto. I miss him dearly, and hope his family is holding up in these dark days. Jerry, you'll always be in my heart, and my yardstick to measure drummers up to.
XOX
Kylie