Though we generally loathe to cover concerts in any traditional sense, we'll be all over FreeFest, tweeting, taking pics, shooting video, and if things get really desperate, taking notes in an actual notebook. If you couldn't get free tickets or couldn't stomach paying $150 for the prestige ones, we feel you. Keep up with all the action, and be the first to hear about whatever crazy shit M.I.A./Stephen Malkmus/Ludacris banters about, by following us on Twitter at @citypapermusic. I'll be tweeting all day too, as will my colleagues Chris Klimek, Erica Bruce, and Ramon Ramirez. Or just scroll through the handy widget below!

We were waiting for final confirmation from T.I.'s camp, but they're focused on tomorrow's hearing and we've not gotten a final commitment. With that in mind, we adjusted set times to give artists more playing time. If T.I. is able to make it, we'll gladly adjust the schedule.

If you had T.I. as the act most likely to miss the festival due to a court appearance in your office pool, well-played. Personally, I was looking forward to his savagely underrated catalog of hits.

As for the programming's logistical complications/death matches:

• Yeasayer v. Neon Indian (3:45 p.m.)
• Pavement v. Sleigh Bells (7:40 p.m.)
• LCD Soundsystem V. M.I.A. (9:00 p.m.)

But really, let's talk a clear course of action.

Enjoy College Gameday on Saturday morning all the way through Lee Corso’s head gear-donning prognostication. Fry up eggs, peel potatoes, shred cheese, and relegate your roommate to pancake duty. Settle onto the grounds in time to enjoy the nostalgic nuggets of Jimmy Eat World’s perfect '90s power-pop (1:15 p.m.). Settle into a drinking groove before ceding to Neon Indian’s kinda-subpar-live-but-wholly danceable slacker beats. Relinquish double duty aspirations (Yeasayer) because you’ll just wind up with two bad spots, hearing echoes. Let Joan Jett (4:30 p.m.) strum in the background; check the Alabama-Arkansas score from strangers (3:30 p.m.) right after realizing your smart phone was surely crushed to death by dozens of Chuck Taylors.

Tolerate the earnest, cutesy, mostly endearing efforts of Matt and Kim’s synth pop (6:15 p.m.). Delve into Ludacris’s immaculate collection of southern fried anthems (7:15 p.m.); leave early to catch Pavement (7:40 p.m.) because you downloaded their catalog during the fall of 2005—a prerequisite to editing the Life & Arts section of your idealistic, entitled, and libelous college paper. If you have the legs, stick around for the after party—LCD Soundsystem (9:30 p.m.)—because that James Murphy guy goes all in onstage. Or just go home, because he’ll make some self-effacing joke about not deserving to follow Pavement.

Good morning, people. Happy Wednesday! Only one more day of random torrential downpours, and then it's sunny Thursday, and then it's the weekend again! And the Rock & Roll Hotel's Summer Eve party! Kind of late for summer's eve, no?

In case you missed it, NYT writes that Imagining Madoff is indefinitely postponed, Bluebrain graces us with another WTF project, and T.I., M.I.A., and LCD Soundsystem, among others, are headlining the Virgin FreeFest on Sept. 25. Tickets go on sale Saturday! In other news, Mike Riggs pens his review on These United States—the record is kind of a snoozer.

Tonight's NoMa Summer Screen features Logan's Run–life must end at 30. Intriguing. If you'd rather keep on believin', then sing your little heart away at Little Miss Whiskey's Kostume Karaoke event tonight or let the music sing for you over lunch on Woodrow Wilson Plaza.

ReadysetDC reports that Seth Goodin, bestselling author of books such as Purple Cow and Tribes (WTF?), will be live at Warner Theatre tomorrow chatting up on his latest book, Linchpin. Huge McLeod reviews:

This is by far Seth’s most passionate book. He’s pulling fewer punches. He’s out for blood. He’s out to make a difference. And that glorious, heartfelt passion is obvious on every page, even if it is in Seth’s usual quiet, lucid, understated manner.

A linchpin, as Seth describes it, is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced—her role is just far too unique and valuable. And then he goes on to say, well, seriously folks, you need to be one of these people, you really do. To not be one is economic and career suicide.

Sounds completely marvelous, except an all-day VIP ticket runs at $595 (what's he smoking?), but don't fret! The half-day ticket is only $195 and ReadysetDC is offering $50 discounts! The District's one in 10 unemployed residents probably won't be attending that session, but maybe Politico's elites will pop in?

On a sad note, the body of missing Montgomery County artist Azin Naimi was found in the District.

That's all for this morning. Please enjoy the video, and hop off to better times. I'll be finding some time to watch Inception—everyone and their mother's been raving about this mind-fuck.

Richard Branson just announced on the Virgin Mobile Live Internet radio station the lineup for the Virgin FreeFest—which is, yes, free—at Merriweather Post Pavillion on Sept. 25. Who's playing? M.I.A., Pavement, Ludacris, LCD Soundsystem, T.I., Joan Jett ("our fabulous retro act"), Chromeo, Jimmy Eat World, the Temper Trap, Yeasayer, Neon Indian, Sleigh Bells, Thievery Corporation, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Matt and Kim, Die Antwoord, Modeselektor, and surely others to come.

The radio station is playing "Gold Soundz" right now. Feels good.

If you’d rather act like the awkward kid at the eighth-grade dance, you can ignore the music entirely. Check out Lalkaare Sheran De’s bhangra moves, enjoy a few cocktails, or walk through the Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas exhibit. But if someone does catch you getting your groove on in front of a Tibetan masterpiece, don’t be embarrassed. Let your freak flag fly high.

Thursday, July 15, 6:30–10:30 PM at the Freer Gallery of Art, Jefferson Drive at 12th Street SW. $20 (includes one free drink). (202) 633-1000.

I’m going to miss covering baseball-bat crime; waxing pedantic about bad drivers; conducting opaque interviews with Zachary Mason and Van Morrison; reporting on Elie Wiesel's undue influence over Jewish theater in D.C.; remembering racial segregation in northeast; tracing the career arc of a little-known band called Das Mötørbike; offering unsolicited advice to M.I.A.; making futile attempts to resurrect this paper’s opera coverage; writing open letters to outgoing Washington Post columnists; bemoaning Eminem’s newfound sobriety; tracking down lost icons of D.C. soul; scratching my head over the indulgences of Jim Jarmusch; crashing the State of Kentucky Inaugural Ball with Ms. Hess; directing videos on newsroom fisticuffs and the idiosyncracies of one Erik Wemple; riding Darrow's coattails to the AAN award finals; and, perhaps most of all, editing this paper's tireless coverage of the Capital Fringe Festival.

Henceforth, the film and theater pages—and the colorful freelancers associated with each—are in the able hands of J.L. Fischer, and the redoubtable Emily Kaiser will now be running the paper’s online version.

The publisher’s youngest, meanwhile, will have to find someone else to give him piggyback rides around the building.

Lots of love, folks.

A lot of, though not nearly all, critics think her new record isn't so great, but everybody's talking about M.I.A. this week. I'm sort of on the same page as Click Track on this one: don't love the album, but her appearance last night on The Late Show (with Martin Rev!) was awesome.

Also riding the wave: D.C. DJ Nacey, whose remix of "Steppin' Up" recent La Roux remix hit No. 1 on Hype Machine this week. He's now set his sights on M.I.A.

DOWNLOAD: M.I.A. – "Steppin' Up" (Nacey remix)

Nacey gave a similar, if slightly more dramatic, treatment to La Roux's "Bulletproof": In both cases, he mostly just takes the vocals and sets them to pensive piano and a jittery, reverbed beat. But where the La Roux remix tampered down the infectious anthem with discordant strikes, with "Steppin' Up" extracts something fragile and pretty from the assaultive, intentionally ugly original.

Good morning!

Tuli Kupferberg, poet, co-founder of the Fugs, is dead. Harvey Pekar, grouch, legend of American indie comic books, is dead. If you belonged to a certain Greenwich Village milieu in the '60s and were an utter sad sack in the '70s, you can't be doing too well right now. I doubt the city of Cleveland is, either: The loss of Pekar is its second traumatic loss in a week. Arts Desk's Mike Rhode, who edited a book of Pekar interviews in 2008, will have a tribute on the blog this morning.

The new M.I.A. record is out and some of the reviews ain't kind. Here's WaPo's Chris Richards:

The goal, though, is to transpose that inner-conflict into compelling pop tunage — and that's exactly what doesn't happen here. She's pushing the envelope further into the unknown, but there isn't much to sing along to. Which is why the album's best songs are the tender, dreamy baubles that feel so dramatically out of place.

I like the Jessica Hopper's M.I.A. read in our sister paper, the Chicago Reader—"/\/\ /\ Y /\, officially out July 13, is like a transmission from the ultra now—an e-mailed camera-phone video compressed till it's cruddy and degenerated, a live-tweeting of capitalist culture's foreclosure proceedings on the tar-blotched shores of American apocalyptica. This is not pleasure pop—it's an allergic reaction to it, an involuntary spasm full of exploding, hissing, and banging, all uncomfortably close. " But I still think the record is nigh-unlistenable.

Fringe continues! Follow it on our unfuckwithable Fringe & Purge blog! It ends on July 25, but on July 26 the Taffety Punk Theatre Company has its own, quite fringey production: Its presenting the latest in its "Bootleg Shakespeare" series, The Noble Kinsmen, on July 26 at the Folger Library for free. The conceit? The actors won't rehearse until the day of.

Recent Taffety Punk collaborator Chad Clark helps organize the Story/Stereo series at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, and the program just received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. More on this later today.

City Desk runs down another recent Listserv-fueled controversy involving public art in Adams Morgan—involving, it so happens, a number of people who figured into the last one we wrote about.

Scott Vogel, the fine arts editor at the Post, resigns.

You dig the new M.I.A. song; you're not sure what to make of its bloody, NSFW video. Now learn about the band it sampled, Suicide. Obligatory D.C. connection: Vintage D.C. indie-poppers Black Tambourine recently recorded a cover of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" for an excellent reissue.

When will Brightest Young Things introduce us to some gallery boys?

Pitchfork's oral history of Galaxie 500 is really special. Spend your morning reading it and listening to this:

Cheerio!

Morning, readers. And Happy Mardi Gras.

*Today in Posthumousness: Hunter S. Thompson calls audio-video establishment, begins to voice coherent complaint, wavers, descends into blabbering rage, threatens to ruin audio-video establishment by writing about it. (Audio portion above.) Here, the good Doctor might've benefited from M.I.A.'s example.

*So Rip Torn tries to rob a bank. So GQ notes the eight silliest bank robberies of all time.

*Wait, you mean Nick Cave hasn't already done The Threepenny Opera?

*While new biographies of Willie Mays and Hank Aaron are welcome, let's not forget I Had a Hammer, Aaron's auto-bio co-written with Lonnie Wheeler. It's everything the ballplayer was: straight, workmanlike, and, with the possible exception of its title, self-effacing.

*More backroom politicking in The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. Think Heilemann-Halperin, except for late-'90s nostalgia junkies.

*Early sounds from the first Strokes record in four years.

*Tonight in City Lights: Henning Mankell speaks at Politics and Prose.