Morning, y’all! Last night, I discovered the trailer for the new Jeff Bridges movie Crazy Heart. As far as trailers go, this one looks promising. Bridges, playing an alcoholic country star, has the Bocephus thing nailed down tight; Maggie Gyllenhaal, as the reporter who helps Bridges turn his life around, looks smart and womanly; christ, it’s got Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall, too. But then I thought back to the trailer for Men Who Stare at Goats, a Bridges vehicle if ever there was one, and the pile of broken dreams that movie turned out to be. Will it happen again with Crazy Heart?

Anne Thompson at Indie Wire thinks no. According to Thompson, Fox Searchlight initially intended to roll out Crazy Heart in spring 2010, but with Amelia looking less and less likely to pick up an Oscar nomination, Crazy Heart will now have a limited release next month. Thompson has seen a rough cut of the movie, and says it’s a contender. I’ll take that.

More arts shit after the jump.

- RIP Daul Kim: According to the Daily Mail, the international model was found hanged–”an apparent suicide”–in her Paris apartment.

- Gibson Guitars–maker of the Les Paul, the Flying V, the Thunderbird and the Firebird–hosted a federal raid at its Nashville plant this week. According to the Tennessean, “Federal officials declined to say whether anything was removed from Gibson’s plant or what specifically the agents were trying to find. But some exotic hardwoods traditionally used in making premium guitars, such as rosewood from the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil, have been banned from commercial trade because of environmental concerns under a recently revised federal law.”

- The Guardian has a great piece on rockstars writing film scores. “Although there’s next to no money to be made in writing for film, and all along the line the musician’s vision is subordinate to that of directors, editors and producers, the chance to be a mere cog in a much larger machine seems to offer welcome relief from the essentially solipsistic nature of songwriting. All that autonomy, freedom of expression and relentless self-analysis can be burdensome,” writes Graeme Thomson. Much to my disappointment, I found no mention in Thomson’s article of Jonny Greenwood’s stellar work on There Will Be Blood.

OK folks, go seize that day!

Afternoon, y’all! I keep forgetting how self-righteous music critics can be when it comes to the term “indie,” which was coined as shorthand for “independent music,” or music that is made and released independently of the Big 4.

But as with other words–”gay” no longer means thrilled to be alive, and “damn” will no longer send one straight to hell–the meaning of indie has changed to connote, as often as not, an aesthetic.

No one really agrees with me on this, besides Carles, who agrees ironically. But I firmly believe that this word, if it still exists in five years, will no longer mean what the tofu-eating, burlap-wearing, coke-snorting Amero-Zapatistas  had in mind when they coined it in 1812 1968 the late 1970s.

Remember when CNN had that special report called “Inside the Indie Scene”? Yeah. That actually happened. In a 2006 article, CNN wrote, “According to critics, indie is now nothing more than a branding tool: a highly commercial and money-driven movement, more concerned with marketing a particular image instead of culture with a truly independent nature and passion for its art.”

When was indie *not* concerned with paying the bills? When has indie never been about selling shit? Did all these people play every show for free? Give out all their merch for free? Give away their music for free? If they did, and if that was how we defined indie–an extreme allergy to sustaining yourself financially–isn’t it a good thing that’s come to connote a profitable aesthetic?

I was hoping that some of the people who responded to the  Monitor Mix survey question, “What does ‘indie’ mean to you?” would agree with me on this. Or, at least agree somewhat that cultural evolution is OK.

But no. The dinosaurs all share a hatred for Kidz Theze Dayz and their insistence on using “indie” to describe the way music sounds or the way people dress or anything other than Fighting the Power.

My own survey question would be: Isn’t it a good thing that a bunch of stodgy critterpoos have absolutely no control over how Kidz Theze Dayz uze wordz?

As the lead library technician for the Library of Congress’ music division, Carl Cephas specialized in retrieving obscure rock and jazz materials for patrons. To a handful of his coworkers and managers, he specialized in being a major headache. There was the time he told his supervisor Mary Wedgewood, “Fuck you, go suck eggs,” after she served him with a written reprimand. The time he “engaged in a long and very loud” phone conversation about the dead mice he’d trapped in his apartment, which some of his coworkers believed was “intended to disgust everyone in the room.” There were the many times he refused to clean up the cultural curios that cluttered his work area, his penchant for introducing the word shit into conversation, and his habit of greeting his friends by bellowing, “Hey motherfucker!”

The library placed Cephas, 49, on indefinite leave this summer after 27 years of employment.

For the last three months, Cephas has spent every day in a rickety upright chair in his condo in Mount Pleasant. Empty cans of Canada Dry club soda and stacks of DVDs litter the living room floor. Two billowy orange curtains keep the room dark. A barely touched bottle of Smirnoff vodka sits within easy reach of Cephas, who is dressed in a baggy red T-shirt and brown cargo shorts. The Eagles, Cephas’ team, are pounding the Giants on a rear-projection television, but he says he’s too busy worrying about bills to appreciate the Giants’ impending loss.

“Right now, I don’t qualify for unemployment. All I get is health coverage,” Cephas says, “so I’ve been living off my friends at work, who are like my family.”

His union initially fought the suspension, citing a letter from Cephas’ doctor that said he “can suffer from altered mental status and exhibit confusion” as a result of his diabetes but has since suggested he go on disability. Doing so wouldn’t require him to stop DJing experimental jazz, vintage punk, and campy rock tunes one night a week at Lucky Bar, or to quit hosting the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, which he’s run as an unpaid volunteer since 1998.

Cephas says he’ll settle for disability. “My doctor thinks this job is killing me,” he says. But he won’t just disappear without his pension. Besides, he’s fought the library before and won.

In 1998, Cephas was suspended from his job for referencing the worst lines of the film society’s catalog of b-grade horror movies, carrying around serial killer trading cards, and flashing his copy of Terry Pratchett’s satirical science fiction novel Going Postal. All were jokes, he told Washington City Paper at the time (“Psychotic Reaction,” 5/15/1998), but that didn’t stop his superiors from placing him on unpaid leave pending the results of a psychiatric evaluation. The Library’s weeklong investigation concluded that Cephas was just a pop-culture junkie who liked to pull his coworkers’ strings, but the letter it sent him on May 8, 1998, allowing him to return to work, contained a stern warning: “I am advising you in the strongest possible terms,” wrote Ben Benitez, then the director of personnel, “that disruptive and confrontational conduct will not be tolerated at the Library.”

For several years following the “going postal” incident, Cephas says he kept his head down, convinced he’d been forever branded a problem employee.

Cephas’ recent problems began on Feb. 24, when, he says, complications from his diabetes caused him to forget to sign in to work. When he did remember, he signed in for 9:30 a.m., forgetting that he had arrived at 9:55. Walter Zvonchenko, a music and theater specialist, noticed the discrepancy, and tape from a security camera confirmed it. The initial reprimand delivered by Cephas’ then supervisor Stephen Yusko caused Cephas to feel that he was being targeted for being disabled. Paranoid that the library was trying to get rid of him once and for all, Cephas responded to all requests from his new supervisor Wedgewood with increasing antagonism. He interrupted a meeting, sent vitriolic emails, and refused tasks—such as an order to unload a hand truck—that he felt had been assigned to him for the sole purpose of proving that he was incapable of doing his job. His paranoia culminated in the “go suck eggs” remark.

Mike Wireman has worked with Cephas since 1982. “He may have said something,” Wireman says, “he may have used some bad language once or twice. But they’ve pushed and pushed him, like they’ve wanted him to do something, to act out.”

Cephas admits he overreacted (“I was being sarcastic,” he says about the “go suck eggs” incident) but says that the hostile atmosphere in his division, along with his diabetes, made it difficult for him to act normal: “Sometimes when my sugars are low or high, I get confused and agitated.” He cops to the potty mouth: “Being in the control room is like a locker room, so we sometimes are like, ‘Hey dude, hey motherfucker.’” He’s very aware of how his coworkers perceive his rambunctious behavior. “My voice gets very loud, because I’m partially deaf…if you put all that together, it’s like, ‘This guy is fucking crazy.’”

What he doesn’t understand is why that’s earned him the boot. “In the old days,” Cephas says, “people used to say, ‘If something’s gotten done, that means Carl is here today.’”

“It would be difficult for me and the vast majority of my colleagues to characterize changes in library culture over the past three decades, as few of us have been at the library that long,” says Matt Raymond, the library’s communications director. “But we have had regulations regarding standards of conduct for a very long time, and we expect all employees to adhere to them.”

“He’s not your average person,” says Wireman. “Almost everybody at the LC likes him.” Some of those people donated more than $700 to Cephas for his condo fees and food. Manuscripts technician Tracy Barton was one of them. “We worked in the stacks since we were kids,” she says.

As a gofer at the Warner Theatre in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Cephas went to extraordinary lengths to see that Lena Horne, for example, could get fried chicken late at night or that Cab Calloway could get to a horse race. He brought that same energy to the library, digging through the music archives, finding scores and other musical paraphernalia for patrons as privileged as Ted Kennedy and as mundane as the average music nerd. “A reader comes in with a slip to the circulation desk, we take the slip, and we find the book,” he says. “It may be in sheet music, music theory, or music literature. We find it and send it up in the dumbwaiter.” Another of his colleagues in the music division, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, says that Cephas “was exceptionally good at finding lost materials. If I had to find something, my last resort would be going to Carl.” (All of Cephas’ supervisors declined to comment for this story.)

As with the library, Cephas’ decade at the helm of the Psychotronic hasn’t been problem-free. He’s had a hard time putting down roots at venues, mostly because of the content of the the movies he shows. In January, the Psycho (as Cephas affectionately calls it), was booted from the Meeting Place on 17th Street NW after the bar’s regulars complained about the anal rape scene in the grindhouse movie Isle of the Damned.

The Eagles are up by 16 points. Cephas leans forward to read the score, and then wipes his forehead with a tissue. An attorney he spoke with has refused to take his case. Disability looks better and better. “I gotta keep my cool,” he says. “I don’t want to go out like this. It’s embarrassing.”

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

Further evidence that Tobias Wolff is the only author in existence who doesn’t sound put upon when interviewed for the millionth time , a great piece on Edward P. Jones, the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, and more, after the jump.

- The Bad Sex in Fiction Award, writes the Guardian, was established to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” Perfunctory is right: Philip Roth is on the short list this year, included for an absolutely dreadful threesome scene in The Humbling that moves no blood in this body whatsoever. When my mother made the mistake of putting me on a National Book Award diet in high school, the first novel I snagged was Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, which won the NBA in 1995 and which bookstores were just getting around to remaindering in 2000. The entire book is about sex, and the sex scenes–which were explicit enough that I was able to give my then-raggety 8-year-old issue of Hustler a rest–aren’t just in the narration, they’re also in the dialogue and in the goddamn footnotes. The book is chock-full of fucking, and it’s absolutely fantastic. Perhaps his nomination will spur Roth to return to writing meaningful sex scenes.

- All Our Noise has some awesome footage of Tabi Bonney rocking the mic with DJ Stereofaith at DC9. Cool to see the crowd singing along.

- Sunday’s WaPo magazine contains a stirring feature about Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World, and I should’ve linked to it earlier. Here’s a biographical snapshot, courtesy of the always-dapper Neely Tucker: “[Jones] makes his home near Washington National Cathedral in an apartment so disheveled that he allows only close friends inside. There is no bed (he sleeps on a pallet), no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver’s license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television — in particular, those judge shows — he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable. He has never been to a sporting event. He has no deep romantic attachments.” The whole thing is that good.

- Over the decade that I’ve been aware of him, I’ve read I don’t know how many interviews with Tobias Wolff. I keep waiting for him to be a bad sport about the whole process, but it just hasn’t happened. He’s always gentle and patient, taking every opportunity to teach. This interview conducted by Robert Birnbaum is now one of my favorites. When Birnbaum asks Wolff about “Best of” whatever contests, Wolff totally unloads, calling such contests “bullshit” before explaining why he participates regardless: “[I]f I don’t get my oar in, some book that I don’t like is gonna get picked, because there were people lobbying other writers for votes. Oh, don’t kid yourself. I mean writers lobbying other writers for their favorites, and especially in New York where writers tend to see each other. It’d be done in more or less subtle ways, and nobody really knew who you voted for, but nevertheless people would say things. And I know, I heard a couple. So in the end you vote for something like that because you want to have some control over what is already a preposterous idea.”

For your listening pleasure:

Good morning, y’all! Did you miss us yesterday? Bet you did! Especially the theater trolls! Top of the news pile this morning: According to the Student Press Law Center, the University of Maryland’s Board of Regents opted to not make a constitution-violating anti-porn policy for the university. “The students couldn’t be happier,” Sarah Elfreth, the student rep on the board, told the SPLC. Good on the board, I say, and good on the students for defending what’s important; free speech is the shit.

The one band everyone–save for me and NME–forgot to put on their best of the decade list, how to solve a Rubik’s cube, more still on Dave Eggers’ foray into newspapers, and more, after the jump.

- The “Best of the Decades” lists are EVERYWHERE. Here in the U.S., there’s a lot of Brooklyn on these things. But in the U.K., where the taxes are higher and trust-fund rockers have to do more with less, the lists are also better. Why, just yesterday I was telling Ted Scheinman, “Someone should include Queens of the Stoneage’s ‘No One Knows’ on a best of the decade list. It’s timeless, even though it’s like, seven years old.” Lo and behold, NME includes the entirety of Songs for the Deaf on its 50 best albums of the decade. So, high-five, self! At least you’re in touch with the Brits!

- Here’s a step-by-step for solving a Rubik’s cube.

- Hermione Hoby interviews Dave Eggers about that fancy ass newspaper he’s putting out. It. Is. Surreal. On what newspapers do best: “Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think: you need to invest in the aesthetics. We’re resurrecting practices from 100 years ago – like printing full-page comics. We want to give young people ways to engage with it, feel ownership of it.” TRANSLATION: Make newspapers prettier, to hell with the costs! On how papers can survive: “[T]he main way they can continue to exist is to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the internet.” TRANSLATION: Be slower, less amenable to correction, and more expensive, and everyone will love you!

- The new Call of Duty has sold twice as well as the last GTA game. I’m impressed.

OK, folks. Shorter roundup, I know, but it’s Tuesday. I’ll give you something big and fatty tomorrow.

Morning, y’all! Roundup’s a little late today, as your pep pep had a helluva night. Top of the news pile: the Book World podcast is in trouble! Daniel Radcliffe fulfills early 2000s-era MAD magazine prophecy by morphing into Harry Pothead! Somebody get Mike Phelps on the horn to counsel this kid through his first big publicity pitfall! And a short video about Dock Ellis’ love of LSD (via kspace.tv).

Vicious mockery of Malcolm Gladwell, the failings of great writers and of the much anticipated Amelia, and what the Beatles’ shitty recordings say about contemporary album production, after the jump.

- One could safely argue that Malcolm Gladwell, more than anyone else, helped popularize counter-intuitive nonfiction writing. For this, he should have his pubic hair plucked out by sand crabs. Or be lampooned by Vanity Fair. Here are some gems from the latter option: “Why do people unwrap Christmas presents? If we could come up with an answer to this question, it is entirely possible that we could stop all wars, erase all famines, and bring an end to global warming”; “In a controlled research investigation involving uninterrupted surveillance videotaping, a sustained loop of twinkly music, and state-of-the-art ­merriness-determination equip­ment, a Dutch santologist named Hans Bunquum discovered the secret to Claus’s phenomenal success”; “On every accepted level, Santa Claus is a total loser.” HAHAHA.

- Mary HK Choi’s review of 2012 is the literary equivalent of being punched in the face and then spun in a circle and then made-out with.

- What do Ernest Hemingway, William Golding, and Winston Churchill have in common? They all suck as writers, according to a machine that judges such things. Thankfully, the machine was developed as a joke. Just kidding! “[E]xam boards [in the UK] are working on systems which would allow pupils to sit their exams online and for them to be marked by computer.” Y’all are fucked, kids!

- Yo-Yo Ma is set to release the largest box set of all time: 88 discs.

- Andrew Hazlett, whose twitter feed is judiciously artsy, posted a doozie of a question yesterday: “Does online ‘monopoly populism’ crush niche culture?” Hazlett quotes a revealing analogy from the Whimsley blog: “[I]n Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops.” And where does that make more sense than music writing? Just keep on an eye on the Best of 2009 lists that are starting to roll out, from New York magazine to NPR to Hipster Runoff, the portion of the Venn Diagram that represents agreement is growing, but the information contained by that slice is not. Ergo, I am feeling more and more agreeable towards Howard Mandel’s views about the lack of diversity in music writing. This also (might) explain (in part) why Mark Athitakis, who knows everything about Chicago and its writers, didn’t know about Cyrus Colter until very recently.

- Douglas Wolk on why sloppy playing is actually better without Pro Tools.

- Why is Amelia sucking? Virginia Postrel has the answer.

Alright, folks, that’s it for today.

Hopefully not, but Ron Charles, deputy editor of WaPo’s Book World, says the paper’s top brass have threatened to kill the section’s podcast if it can’t rally more iTunes subscribers.

There’s no concrete  deadline for adding more subscribers, Charles says, or even a goal for how many it needs, just “a general mandate to make sure we’re concentrating our efforts on projects that are actually attracting an audience.”

That mandate sounds a lot like the one rolled out in a September memo by WaPo Managing Editor Raju Narisetti, which is supposed to rid the paper’s website of features and blogs that don’t draw enough eyeballs.

Charles doesn’t know how many  iTunes users are subscribing to the podcast, but says “it seems to be doing okay relative” to the paper’s other podcasts.

The weekly Book World show began on WaPo’s now-defunct radio station and eventually migrated to iTunes, where it was produced by Maria Marie Arana until she retired last year, at which point Charles took over.

“Each week we interview two authors reviewed in that week’s paper (usually from Outlook),” Charles wrote in an email, “and do a little song ‘n dance at the opening and closing.”

Morning, y’all! At the top of the news pile: WaPo’s Dave Malitz almost missed his date with Bob Dylan, but then didn’t! Also, my niece, who is 4 years old, does not “get” VHS.

Tony Millionaire’s potty mouth, the legacies of Leo Strauss and Lemmy, the scarcity of female comedy writers, Trace Adkins: Comic Book Hero, free vinyl, music for writing about the Simpsons, and more, after the jump.

- Millionaire, the mind behind Maakies (a very good comic strip that runs in many fine alt. weeklies, but not this one, unfortunately) and the Drinky Crow Show (a terrible, terrible TV show based on Maakies that ran for far too long on Adult Swim), is not just funny with pencils, but with words. As evidence, read this excerpt from his new book, in which Millionaire tells a Village Voice editor, “Fuck you,” then, “I’m sorry I said that,” then, “Fuck you,” again.

- Writings by Leo Strauss were not allowed at my university (I don’t think), but they’re hot shit at Kenyon College, and apparently, the upper echelons of Washington, D.C. This is both fascinating and terrifying, as Leo Strauss seems to be directly responsible for everything bad that ever happened under George W. Bush. Him, and the makers of water and terry cloth.

- Urb.com, a music site that used to be a magazine, is testing a beta site design. Check it out.

- Things that I would buy with $43.7 million: a place closer to the metro, better bike tires, a reprieve from late-night collection agency calls, clean water for people who have to walk a long way to get it, and, possibly, a complete dinosaur skeleton. Things that I would not buy with $43.7 million: a painting.

- Why did it take David Letterman confessing to the world that he bones his few female staffers for anyone to care that he has so few female staffers?

- Great point here: More people care that the story about trash island was financed by “the crowd” or “the community” than care about the fact that what the New York Times published was not a very good story.

- I am not the only person who cried multiple times during The Way We Get By.

- Country music stud Trace Adkins has his own comic book. About goddamn time, is what I’m thinking right now. “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” is one of the greatest songs of the 2000s, blending the wah-wah stylings of Isaac Hayes, the pulsating back-beat of the worst Euro trash, and the twangy sensibilities of my former Sunday school teacher, who is taking a break from his career as a NASCAR radio commenter to serve 15 years in prison for serial rape. I will never forget the time I had to explain to all the Jersey transplants whose history papers I wrote what a “honky tonk” is, or that, in Florida, “badonkadonk” is not the diminutive form for “ma’am.” Also, I did not know such a genre existed as “redneck noir.” Fantastic.

- More free vinyl at the Vinyl District. The number of commenters vying for the Gossip album is up to three. Get in there and make your case ASAP!

- Did the Gospel of Wealth help bring about the mortgage crisis? Hanna Rosin makes a compelling case in the Atlantic that it did. Tell you what, y’all, the Prayer of Jabez sure did not keep the lights on or the fridge stocked at my house!

- Who is your role model? Chris Shonting prays at the church of Lemmy. When Shonting asks Lemmy why he joined a band, Lemmy says, “Women.” Then he elaborates on his first experience with guitar-as-pheromone-enhancement: “I put strings on [my mom's guitar] and took it to school during the week after exams, when you don’t do anything. And I was immediately surrounded by chicks. It worked like a charm, and I couldn’t even play the fucking thing.” I picked up the guitar for the same reason, then made the mistake of learning jazz instead of cock rock. Stupid, stupid me. Now, instead of spreading strange venereal diseases across the globe, I am missing out on snuggle time with the gf to write this roundup.

- One of my goals for the future is to read John Ortved’s The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History before the show goes off the air. I am psyching myself out by reading this.

- Like a lot of things, this post, “America Loses Its Cool,” went right over my head. For instance, author Ted Gioia says that, “in the 1990s the Age of Cool started to come to an end in the United States,” and that “one of its dominant attributes was a laid-back personality style. It avoided confrontation, and instead made its points through humor and ironic distance.” Gioia points to Glenn Beck-types and talk radio as examples of what has replaced cool. But here’s thing thing: I thought irony was a relatively new phenomenon; like, late 80s to now. And that’s the other thing: irony is still here. Right here. In this blog post. Somebody care to help me out with this?

OK, folks, seize the day!

Arena Stage wants your children, grades 5-12. Specifically, they want your children’s ten-minute plays. If your child’s play wins, he or she “will receive playwriting master classes and participate in further script development with professional playwrights, directors and dramaturgs,” according to an Arena Stage press release. The winning children will receive $250, to be spent on pogs and therapy.

If pleased by the idea of turning your child into the most serious, self-conscious, over-worked kid in the 8th grade, you can find the guidelines for the competition after the jump.

Guidelines for competition:

Who: Playwrights must be students in 5th through 12th grades. Students must attend school in the District of Columbia, the City of Alexandria or one of the following counties: Loudon, Prince William, Fairfax, Arlington, Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, Howard, Montgomery, Prince George’s, or St. Mary’s. Home-schooled students must be residents of the aforementioned cities and counties.

When: Entries must be received at Arena Stage by Friday, December 4, 2009 to be eligible for competition.

What: Submitted plays must be the original, unpublished work of one playwright. Pieces written by more than one student will not be accepted. Suggested length is 6-10 pages. Plays longer than 12 pages will not be read.

Submission process: All submissions must include an Arena Stage cover sheet, which may be downloaded at www.arenastage.org. Plays will not be accepted without a cover sheet. All plays must be typed, double-spaced, in 12 pt. font, with page numbers. The title of the play and the playwright’s grade should be listed on each page of the play. The playwright’s name, contact information, or school should not appear anywhere on the play except the cover sheet. Submitted scripts will not be returned. Playwrights wishing to confirm receipt of their submission should enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard. Winners will be notified by Arena Stage and the list posted at www.arenastage.org in January.

Three copies of the entered play, with the required cover sheet attached to the top copy, should be mailed to:

Student Playwrights Project
Arena Stage – Community Engagement Division

1101 Sixth Street, SW Washington, DC 20024

Green Day on Broadway, sex trafficking, shit-ton of Muppet love, Playgirl and Levi Johnston explained, fall vinyl giveaway, and more, after the jump.

- The Vinyl District is giving a way a shit-ton of vinyl as part of “TVD’s Fall Vinyl Giveaways Week.” Here’s the best part: to win, you simply need to make your case for winning in the comments section of whatever album you’re jonesing for (as of now, you can choose from the debut LP from Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Damon and Naomi’s 1001 Nights, AND AND Gossip’s Music for Men). So far, ONLY ONE PERSON HAS COMMENTED! DO NOT LET THIS PERSON WIN ALL THAT VINYL! SUPPORT DISTRICT VINYL BY FIGHTING AMONG(ST) YOURSELVES!

- Tonight, pour some out for an icon, y’all: “Sheldon Dorf, who founded the world famous Comic-Con International comic book convention, died Nov. 3 in San Diego of kidney failure. He was 76.”

- Sesame Street was the only show I was allowed to watch growing up, until my mom disconnected the TV in the fall of 1995, and then I was not allowed to watch anything. Still, I got three or four good years of SS before a Luddite fog settled over our house, and yet I do not remember most of these characters on Mental Floss’ list of “9 Muppets Kicked off Sesame Street.” The only one I do remember is Don Music, the pianist who is constantly slamming his head into the keys in frustration, and who I remember thinking was being abused by his handler in a not funny way. BUT the most important character on this list is Roosevelt Franklin, a black, hip Muppet “who had his own school (named Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School)” and “often taught the class important lessons about things such as the geography of Africa and how to avoid drinking poison.” Why is this significant? Because I think Ron Howard (or somebody) may have “borrowed” the concept of Roosevelt Franklin and turned him into Franklin, Gob Bluth’s black puppet on Arrested Development (UPDATE: Wikipedia has confirmed my suspicions!)

- American Idiot (the play) will be soon moving to New York from California. Will any of you go see it?

- Jessanne Collins, former managing editor of Playgirl, knows the real reason why the magazine has pushed so hard to get Levi Johnston naked: “From day one this has been little more than a publicity stunt orchestrated on behalf of two fallen icons: a floundering brand that’s completely lost its identity and a teenager who’s trying to define his, in the wake of his incidental introduction to the bright, bizarre lights of American quasi-celebrity.” Zing!

- This video is disturbing:

OK, short roundup today. Go to work, everybody, and remember to stop by the Arts Desk throughout the day for more of what you love: me arts coverage!