Bobby has made Mailer’s tag his own, but this is an adver­tise­ment fa mice elf agin. I’ll be read­ing my poems at Myopic Books this Sat­ur­day, Feb­ru­ary 20,  at 7 pm. Details here. Daniel Borzutzky is also read­ing, so please stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.

How awe­some is it that Sawyer was blast­ing “Search & Destroy” last night.

The pre­dictably yawn-​inducing results (by which I mean I pre­dicted the top six in my sleep—check my dream jour­nal if you don’t believe me—& the reason I was asleep is that I had been lis­ten­ing to the top six) are in for the 37th (or, I insist, 38th) Vil­lage Voice Pazz & Jop music poll. Here’s my ballot:

And some of my com­ments here (note that I pro­vide the tag line). As usual, this list doesn’t reflect my cur­rent think­ing about

A song I heard a lot of last week (not that I’m com­plain­ing) here in a new ren­di­tion by Cody Canada, Lee Ann Womack, and Asleep at the Wheel:

A guest post by Ben Tausig.

I. The enter­prise of writ­ing about music/sound has recently entered an awk­ward stage, one of those moments when tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments make us want to retreat to old habits, but when it nev­er­the­less becomes obvi­ous that we should instead move for­ward by exper­i­ment­ing with the con­tours of the medium. Specif­i­cally, in the last few years it has become pos­si­ble, thanks to increased stor­age space and faster inter­net con­nec­tions, to flu­idly inte­grate sonic exam­ples within tex­tual reviews.

II. Music crit­i­cism has always been a fraught matter, about which many people are skep­ti­cal. I’m slightly embar­rassed to dredge up the truism, “writ­ing about music is like danc­ing about archi­tec­ture,” although there’s no deny­ing its pur­chase. It means, of course, that in order to know some­thing worth know­ing about music, one should just go hear it rather than wast­ing time pon­tif­i­cat­ing. Music is best felt rather than thought, and the two approaches are inher­ently incompatible.

III. In def­er­ence to this prej­u­dice, online music writ­ers (full dis­clo­sure: like me) who pro­vide audio sam­ples offer them in a “ta-da!” fash­ion, as an object about which noth­ing can be said directly.