Good morning! There is a difference between making love and fucking! Allow Wale to explain!

The art of making love seems like a pastime, whereas f*cking, has become this generation’s making-out. I think men pursue it a bit more aggressively then women — after clubs, after school, etc. I personally enjoy the occasional quickie but never OD. Too much sex can be counterproductive, and truthfully, I’m pursuing monogamy — even if it is pessimistically searching. Sexing, in my humble opinion, has nothing to do with feelings or physical attraction for that matter. I think a woman can be sexy but not cute or bun-able (aka “wifeable” in DC terminology). These women are the ones who get me thinking ‘bout pulling their hair back and moving some furniture, but nothing more then a 15-minute — 25 if there’s some VSOP nearby. There is no passion, no strings attached. There may be welts and bruises.

The art of making love seems like a pastime, whereas f*cking, has become this generation’s making-out. I think men pursue it a bit more aggressively then women — after clubs, after school, etc. I personally enjoy the occasional quickie but never OD. Too much sex can be counterproductive, and truthfully, I’m pursuing monogamy — even if it is pessimistically searching. Sexing, in my humble opinion, has nothing to do with feelings or physical attraction for that matter. I think a woman can be sexy but not cute or bun-able (aka “wifeable” in DC terminology). These women are the ones who get me thinking ‘bout pulling their hair back and moving some furniture, but nothing more then a 15-minute — 25 if there’s some VSOP nearby. There is no passion, no strings attached. There may be welts and bruises.

And yet the local lothario tells Honey Mag he's had his heart broken, too:

But don’t assume I haven’t been on the receiving end. I’ve even mistaken a f*ck for a love session before. Not fun.  Making love is simply put: poetry in motion. Stroke her to the beat of her favorite song. Strawberries, Champagne, a bubble bath, eye contact. Hearing her heart beat while slowly handling business.

The aftermath of lovemaking is almost as important as the actual act. Gazing at the ceiling until we doze off. Running fingers through hair. Her playing with the dreads, ears, or whatever she deems necessary after the act. Sometimes a female needs to be reminded that there are feelings behind the sex. And to never be confused with sexing.

I have nothing to add! But, um, here's a synopsis of last night's Real World episode! Real news after the jump!

- The artist Kenneth Noland, who helped establish the Washington Color School of painting and the larger Color Field movement, has died of cancer at 85. Perhaps second only to his friend Morris Louis, he was among the best-known Color School artists, and his work was key to both the abstract expressionist movement of the 1950s and the minimalism of the 1960s. Noland lived and worked in Washington from 1949 to 1962. More: WaPo, LA Times.

- Lambda Rising was egged Tuesday night, DCist reports. The GLBT bookstore will close later this month, 35 years after it opened in Dupont Circle.

- Author Nick Hornby's script for An Education is ineligible to win an award from the Writers Guild of America for a really dumb, technical reason. And Karen O and Brian Eno have been DQed from winning an Oscar for their respective scores to Where the Wild Things Are and The Lovely Bones. Karen O's song "All is Love," currently the ring on my girlfriend's iPhone, is still in the running in the Oscars' best song category.

- I love that Sea Shepherd—the scrappy-or-reckless conservation group that puts itself between whales and Japanese whaling ships on the Animal Planet show Whale Wars—has a boat named Bob Barker, which came to the rescue yesterday after one of the group's speed boats had a collision with a whaling vessel. Here's what the real Bob Barker, who donated $5 million to the group, told the Associated Press: "To think I had just become involved in it, then they had the worst accident that they've had. I thought, 'Barker, what have you brought on to these people?' " No one was killed. (Sea Shepherd also has a boat called the Steve Irwin. Nice.)

My Google Reader has slowed to a trickle—although Arts Desk writers Maura Judkis and Andrew Noz are among my favorite sharers—so that's it for now!

As the '00s have come to a close, a lot of ink has been spilled over the balkanization of the music community. It seems that 10 years ago, trends were a little bit easier to define. You had your metal heads and your bus-gypsies, and indie rock didn't sound all that different from regular rock. But new technologies—blogs, file-sharing, iPods, etc.—have changed the way new music is discovered and made genre labels a lot more hyphen-heavy. Now you have your Afro-indie, shit-gaze, and Baltic-punk, to name a few. For the most part, this is considered a good thing. Other folks aren't so sure. According to über-producer Brian Eno, we're living through the "death of uncool."

Writing for Prospect Magazine in November, Eno had this to say:

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

In a broad sense, I think this is true. Nobody is blowing up disco records anymore.

But I wouldn't say that "uncool" is totally dead, at least in music. Some band and styles will always be too taboo, too leprous, or just too damn nerdy to be fully reabsorbed into any micro-scene, no matter how desperate.

A few of my picks after the jump:

Fields of The Nephilim:

Everything:

The Rippingtons:

Inspired by Imelda Marcos, the high heels-happy wife of ex-dictator of the Phillipines Ferdinand Marcos, Byrne penned the album with Fatboy Slim. Together they're recruiting different vocalists for each track. So far, Santigold is on board as well. Byrne told BBC's 6 Music:

There is a different singer on every song including Sharon Jones from Amy Winehouse's backing band The Dap Tones, Alice Russell and Tori Amos. There's a lot of singers, it goes on and on.

"On and on"? How many tracks are on this album? Here's hoping Byrne doesn't jump the shark with this one.

I'll have more thoughts on yesterday's Bang on a Can Marathon at the University of Maryland later, but the highlight of the day came early for me. Watching the Bang on a Can All-Stars perform a beautifully arranged version of Brian Eno's Music For Airports was a real treat. This is not how Eno envisioned the music would be heard: it was not meant for live instrumentation, and was not meant to be listened to in a concert setting, with an audience sitting and watching the performers intently.

But the space in which the performers played made all the difference. The airy, modernist lobby of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center was ideal for the music, and even passably close to an airport concourse on a quiet day, with its cavernously high ceilings and skylights. While a couple hundred people gathered to actually watch the performance, CSPAC is an active campus building and as such there was a constant hum of people coming and going, catching earfuls of music and then continuing on their way. The music functioned as soothing background music for these people, yet also stood up to close listening for those of us who chose to focus out attention. So even if the circumstances were quite different from what Eno might have imagined, the end result was exactly what he intended. (Except for the standing ovation at the end: that part might have taken him aback!)

For myself, I've always been partial to Eno's Ambient 4: On Land, but the piano melody of "1/1" from Music For Airports is so deeply ingrained in my head that it was all I could do not to grin foolishly when I walked into the CSPAC lobby a little late and heard the performance just starting up. Maybe the only way this could have been better is if it had been performed at sunset.

For the past few years, the annual Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City has had my mouth watering, juxtaposing performances of fascinating and often under-performed avant-garde classical music with shows by cutting-edge popular music performers (and generally blurring the line between these two categories). Last year's festival, for instance, featured compositions by Harrison Birtwistle and Terry Riley alongside performances by Marnie Stern and Dan Deacon.

This Sunday, the D.C. area is in for a treat as a scaled-down version of the festival occupies the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for an afternoon and evening (from 2pm until about 9pm). A free performance of Brian Eno's famed Music For Airports is among the attractions, along with performances of compositions by Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche (some of which D.C. concertgoers may have seen when Kotche performed a solo set at the Black Cat back in 2006). A lengthy Terry Riley piece, with Riley himself on vocals and piano, closes out the event.

The first part of the event, from 2pm-6pm, is free; the concert beginning at 6pm is $35. Check out the full schedule of performances here.

Also of note: on Saturday evening, the D.C. Society of Art Rockers hosts renowned electric bassist Michael Manring for a solo show at Jammin' Java. Manring was long the in-house bassist for new-age label Windham Hill, but don't let that fool you, as he's also recorded with jazz luminaries like Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith and even heavy/technical metal musicians like Alex Skolnick (Testament) and Ron Jarzombek (Watchtower). This show celebrates the release of Manring's latest solo album, Soliloquy, and starts at 7pm.

I've suspected this Stone of rolling downhill for a couple years now (when Beck's "Modern Guilt" engenders the same critical acclaim as the Jonas Brothers' "A Little Bit Longer," one questions Jann Wenner's editorial prowess). But the magazine's ranking of the top 50 albums of the past year was the nail in my subscription's coffin; 2008 seems to have forced Rolling Stone's critical condition into just that.

Number one is TV on the Radio's "Dear Science," a solid, if predictable, choice. Having no real gripes with that one, I turn the page to find Dylan's dusty bootlegs "Tell Tale Signs" stealing Lil Wayne's #2 position. Neither new nor revelatory (nor objectively musically "good," if such a thing exists), the Dylan album seems out of place on this list. What's more, British divas Coldplay clock in at #7, while refreshing and revered eponymous debut of Ivy-punk/Afro-pop darlings Vampire Weekend rounds out the top ten.

These are but minor and (by now) expected disappointments from Rolling Stone. And for the most part, I can live with the flaws and false praise until I get to numbers 39 (Taylor Swift, "Fearless"), 40 (Jonas Brothers, "A Little Bit Longer"), and 41 (AC/DC, "Black Ice"). Teen queens Swift and the Jonas Brothers not only beat out time-addled Aussies AC/DC, but the trinity takes precedence over David Byrne and Brian Eno's collaboration "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." Eclectic, fresh and always creatively relevant, Byrne and Eno's work is everything that trinity is not – heck, everything Dylan's bootlegs, at #2, are not (there's a reason Dylan is just now releasing those cataloged cash cows).

So that I may let my frustration with Rolling Stone's list rest in peace, I've rearranged their top 10 of their 50 "Best" Albums of 2008:

1. Vampire Weekend, "Vampire Weekend"

2. Lil Wayne, "Tha Carter III"

3. Beck, "Modern Guilt"

4. David Byrne & Brian Eno, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

5. TV on the Radio, "Dear Science"

7. No Age, "Nouns"

8. Fleet Foxes, "Fleet Foxes"

9. The Magnetic Fields, "Distortion"

10. Girl Talk, "Feed the Animals"

What is David Byrne interested in as a musician? What does he like, and what makes him cranky? There's probably no multiplatinum-selling rock frontman who's more deliberately Sphinx-like—he's usually had some complaint or other to make about consumerism, but he's more likely to soak those messages in abstraction ("Heaven") or irony ("[Nothing But] Flowers") than in anything resembling outrage. Saying that he's a tough guy to figure out, though, is not the same thing as saying he's disinterested. For an hour and 45 minutes at the Warner Theatre last night, he played an energetic set that was drawn largely from his collaborations with Brian Eno, from their new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today back to their work with "other musicians," as he said at the start of the show. Maybe saying the words "Talking Heads" is what makes him cranky.

To be sure, the man likes to keep things stage-managed. Byrne, along with his four-piece backing band, trio of backup singers, and trio of dancers, were all dressed head-to-toe in white and choreographed for songs that ended with blackouts more often than not. The dancers in particular were meticulously arranged, moving across the stage in well-bleached outfits and disarming pasted-on smiles—as if this show was a detour from their main gig performing in a Broadway musical version of Todd Haynes' Safe. The setlist had a calculated push-and-pull as well, shifting from the polyrhythmic "I Zimbra" to the drowsier, acoustic "One Fine Day," and from there into a powerfully reconceived "Help Me Somebody," a track from 1981's Byrne-Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. There, Byrne replaced the Pentecostal fervor of the original's samples with his own hectoring vocals, and between his shouts and insistent guitar vamping, it was one of the rare moments he seemed to genuinely revel in.

Which is to say, at that moment he looked the way other, more emotionally expressive musicians do when they're having a blast. Byrne's having a good time too, but he clues you into that not by engaging in audience patter or even by breaking much of a sweat—he does it by projecting the supreme confidence of a guy who knows he has a bulletproof back catalog to work with. So in a way, Byrne's chill persona is what made a track like "Crosseyed & Painless" so rousing. With the band toiling busily around him and getting the crowd dancing, he can sink into the tune's curiously gnomic lyric. A great David Byrne show involves a host of musical ideas embedded in some art-school fuckery. But it mainly involves playing half of Remain in Light.

Photo by Flickr user miamabanta.

Download it here (free and legal!), or watch the, er, video below.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is available for digital download on August 18.