LOS ANGELES TIMES: The bunkers are a repository containing nearly 100 miles of shelves stacked with some 6 million items: reels of film; kinescopes; videotape and screenplays; magnetic audiotape; wax cylinders; shellac, metal and vinyl discs; wire recordings; paper piano rolls; photographs; manuscripts; and other materials. In short, a century’s worth of the nation’s musical and cinematic legacy. This is the Library of Congress’ $250-million Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, a 45-acre vault and state-of-the-art preservation and restoration facility on Virginia’s Mt. Pony. It’s here that a recent donation from Universal Music Group, nearly a quarter-million master recordings by musicians […]

ALL SONGS CONSIDERED Wilco never makes the second record twice, which makes it doubly remarkable that so many of them are tremendous. As formidable as frontman Jeff Tweedy’s catalog is, the sonically inventive rock band really stands out on stage — the place where extreme technical skill meets the chemistry and rousing showmanship of passionate rock veterans. Of course, it helps that the group has the luxury of drawing highlights from seven very different records when it performs. To see Wilco on stage is to hear the best of the best. Recorded live at The Gorge on Monday, May 30, […]

DAILY MAIL: A 22-year-old woman allegedly killed an aspiring rap singer with a single punch for a $5 party bet. Tiffany Startz is accused of killing John ‘Fatboy’ Powell with a single blow to the face and has been told she has to stand trial. The 25-year-old had agreed to be hit in the face by Starr in return for $5. After being struck and collecting his money he walked away to talk with friends, only to collapse minutes later from a burst artery in his neck. An autopsy ruled that he had died from a brain haemorrhage caused by […]

PREVIOUSLY: Why Louis CK Doesn’t Talk About Sarah Palin’s Vagina On Twitter Anymore PREVIOUSLY:  “This message—even at a time of national crisis—was a base-rousing rallying cry, perpetuating her own victimhood and alleged bloodthirstiness of her opponents. One would have thought that Palin, like any responsible person in her shoes right now, could have mustered some sort of regret about the unfortunate coincidence of what she had done in the campaign and what happened afterwards. Wouldn’t you? If you had publicly defended a map with cross-hairs on a congresswoman’s district, and that congresswoman had subsequently been shot, would you not be […]

NEW YORK TIMES:  Representative Anthony D. Weiner, one of the most prolific users of social media among politicians, said his Twitter account was hacked this weekend when someone sent out a lewd photograph under his name to a young woman in Seattle. The episode unfolded Saturday night when it was reported on the Web site biggovernment.com, run by the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart. It played out all day Sunday on the Internet, with Mr. Weiner, a Democrat who represents part of Brooklyn and Queens, addressing the matter on his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, and with bloggers from the left […]

War Veteran Cemetery,  Syracuse, New York 10:01 AM by JEFF FUSCO

SOUND OPINIONS This week Jim and Greg are joined by Mike Watt of the Minutemen, a band that changed the game of punk rock. The San Pedro hardcore group was founded by Watt, drummer George Hurley, and larger than life lead singer and guitarist D. Boon, who died in 1985. That was shortly after the release of their hugely influential album Double Nickels on the Dime. Before then, punk rock was about breaking the rules, but it actually had many of its own. The Minutemen threw that out and began experimenting with their sound, jamming out and incorporating jazz and […]