No, it's not a new sitcom on UPN, it's just another round-up of random things.

I'm weighing in late on the Chicago Tribune's annual list of the best magazines, but I was so stunned by what topped the list that it took time to recover. Blender? The Tribune lauds it for its British-like (read: Mojo and Uncut) mix of "zippy, irreverent writing" and "serious reporting and terrific profiles," while soft-peddling its penchant for "top-notch froth." This is some seriously skewed placement. One of those British magazines that Blender tries to ape, Mojo, is all the way down at No. 27, while Paste, previously lauded here and a much better magazine (albeit not quite as "zippy,") is at No. 21. It is nice to see Wired all the way up at No. 4, while Make, a great new quarterly of DIY projects and such, notched the No. 12 spot after just two issues. It's a bit wonky for me, but their blog is a great way to learn about a lot of new personal technology and ways to manipulate it to make it more useful (also suggested in that vein is Lifehacker, which also deals with a lot of productivity issues).

The late, lamented online site, Suck, is exhaustively remembered in a 15,000-word piece on Keep Going, an online journal. The most surprising thing to learn from the piece is that Suck still exists, albeit as little more than a museum piece that offers a different old article each day. The second most surprising thing is that Suck co-creator Carl Steadman, who still maintains the Suck site, also still keeps the over-hyped and long left for dead Plastic.com as a going concern. Elsewhere, the piece offers a very thorough look at how Suck started, evolved and eventually folded. Anyone who wonders now why the site was so consistently funny and good, only need look at the list of contributors, who went on to become Wonkette, the editor of Reason and The Rake and other high profile posts.

And finally, what is Bob Dylan thinking? First, he agrees to perform at Amazon's 10th anniversary celebration coming in July. Now, he's allowing Starbucks to be the official distributor for a new live CD. And not just any CD, but the first official release of what bootleg collector's refer to as "The Gaslight Tapes," among the first live recordings of Dylan from back in 1962. That would have made a great addition to the Bootleg series on Columbia, but the next volume of that will be the soundtrack to a new Martin Scorsese biopic, No Direction Home, to air in September on PBS. As with other Starbucks exclusives, other retailers eventually will be able to stock the Dylan disc, but unlike the six-week window afforded Starbucks for the recent issue of Alanis Morrissette's acoustic take on her Jagged Little Pill disc, the Dylan disc will be exclusive to starfish for 18 months, thus ensuring that anyone who actually cares about this will be forced to go to the coffee retailer to pick one up.

I went to Prairie Lights on Friday to catch a reading by Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher novels have quickly become favorites. I first picked up a Child book earlier this year while searching for a new mystery series (the latest from the holy trinity of Pelecanos, Lehane and Connelly either had just been read or was not yet out, and the many others I read religiously, like Block, Rankin, Burke, etc. were at points where there was nothing left that didn't require the purchase of pricey out-of-print titles (Block) or were at a place where I needed to take a break.) So, Child it was, coming from a recommendation by the folks at Prairie Lights. They did not steer me wrong. Reacher is as compelling a character as they come, and the tightly plotted book was a page turner while engaging the mind.

Child was interesting to hear. He read for about two minutes, saying he wasn't in the habit of spending months dropping clues in his well-plotted books only to give things away with a reading, but was more than prepared to fill the rest of the hour with a monologue about his career and a dialogue with the readers in attendance who had plenty of questions. The reading was part of WSUI AM-910's "Live From Prairie Lights" radio show, so there was a need to fill the entire hour (the show will likely be available soon in the show archives here. A cursory look around the web reveals plenty of details of how the one-time British television producer Child came to write a series of bestsellers about an ex-U.S. military drifter, but hearing the writer tell the tale made it even more entertaining. He was gracious in answering questions from the audience of close-reading middle-aged men who clearly had put some thought into what they'd say if given the chance, and talked about what he called the luck in his getting published so quickly and finding such success.

He didn't discuss the fact that his series has been optioned for film by Tom Cruise, simply mentioning that it had been optioned. The people in attendance were more interested in talking about the books, so we missed the chance to hear his take on the world's most famous Scientologist sheparding Reacher to the silver screen.

The Believer has been taking some hits for its new music issue, including this dressing down from the New York Times and this likeminded piece from blogger Michaelangelo Matos, who agrees that the magazine's focus on indie rock leaves a lot of uncovered territory and makes over-generalized assumptions about bookish people and their music tastes. I wonder why magazines find it necessary to do "music issues." Is the lure of a cover-mounted CD and new advertisers once a year really enough?

Salon has a Q&A with Brian Wilson, conducted ostensibly to promote the new 2-DVD set from Rhino that includes the film Beautiful Dreamer and some footage of the recording of Smile. In it, the writer seems to have unwittingly stumbled across the explanation for Wilson's addled state long these many years:

Q: And Paul McCartney is your favorite of the Beatles?
A: Oh yes. He's written so many songs, it can make your head swim. If you listened to the whole Beatles catalog in one sitting, you'd wind up feeling dizzy. That's how good he is at music. He can make you feel dizzy."

Yup. Too much Macca. That'd do in anyone. For further proof that Brian has been listening to a lot of Beatles music lately, read the rest of the interview. For evidence of earlier dizziness, go download his rejected solo album, Adult Child, which features the ridiculous ("H.E.L.P is on the Way") and the sublime ("Still I Dream of It").

The Posies, have a new disc, Every Kind of Light coming Tuesday, and Billboard gets the scoop. Not much new for fans who are intimately familiar with the ins and outs in the relationship between Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, but it does offer a nice recap.

Lastly, Fountains of Wayne will perform its new single, "Maureen," on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" tonight. It's a bit of advance publicity for the band's new odds and sods collection, Out-of-State Plates, also out Tuesday. Having diligently downloaded and/or purchased many of these songs over the years (or sponged off friends who did), I can attest that this 2-disc set is chock full o' goodness.

That being Paste magazine and Joe Pernice, Tracks magazine and Billy Corgan. Read on...

Paste magazine has a great feature about Joe Pernice on its web site (and one assumes it's in the most recent issue or perhaps the last), and the entire thing is available online. The magazine has proven to be surprisingly meaty in the couple of issue I have picked up, so it's likely this one is worth getting, too. Either way, fans of Pernice's music would do well to read this piece by Geoffrey Himes, because it lays out his history and thoughts on the progression of his music more completely than anything else I've seen. He discusses the transition from the Scud Mountain Boys to the Pernice Brothers, his parting of the ways with Sub Pop and his realization that his songs are driven not by strings and flowery arrangements, but by strong melodies.

The piece is joined online by several others of note, including profiles of Robbie Fulks and Stephen Malkmus. Paste seemed destined to fade quickly like other "adult" music mags like the stultifyingly boring Tracks, but despite an awful name, it really seems to have legs. Rather than focus on adults who buy a handful of CDs each year by providing dumbed-down pieces and obvious interviews (like Tracks), Paste offers insightful articles about a wide variety of artists. This is clearly a magazine for people who no longer have time to stay abreast of every release from the hundreds of indie labels out there, and provides a helpful filter that highlights the best of what's out there for the discerning fan with plenty of disposable income. That said, I'm still not a subscriber (good as it is, it's way too pricey just yet), but it's the best American music mag I've found since Harp debuted a few years back.

Billy Corgan is on the cover of this month's Paste, coincidentally enough (not really... in the absence of any supserstar releases so far this summer, Corgan's as close as they come and seems poised for the full-court press of coverage). Corgan took out full page ads in the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times yesterday saying that he wants his band back. As I recall, no one took if from him. Then again, there hasn't exactly been a flood of people asking him to bring it back, either.

Soul Asylum bassist Karl Mueller did on Friday after a battle with throat cancer. The band was among those that first helped to show me that there was something beyond the usual pap on the radio. Along with the Replacements, Husker Du and many others, Soul Asylum opened up a whole new world to my teen-aged self. As a budding music journalist at my college paper, I interviewed Mueller for a story to preview a show the band played in Iowa City. I don't recall much from that chat now, but I do remember how nice he was. I had been disappointed not to talk to lead singer Dave Pirner (college and small market papers almost always get the bass player), but his open, easy demeanor helped me to get over the nerves associated with talking to someone from a favorite band. I learned over time how to separate fan from reporter in my approach, and Mueller served as a test subject for my self-taught rock crit 101 course.

In other Minneapolis-related rock news, Bob Mould tells Billboard.com that fans shouldn't expect Husker Du to follow in the footsteps of peers like the Pixies, Gang of Four and Slint and reform. "Been there, done that," he says, adding that his two-song reunion with Grant Hart at, coincidentally enough, a benefit for Mueller last year, was a one-off. He does say he has been trying to get back the rights to the band's catalog on SST for a proper reissue project, but a lack of cooperation from Hart and bassist Greg Norton (who, in keeping with my above thesis, I have interviewed) has thus far stymied those efforts.

I seem to have sparked some discussion with a recent comment at Sepulculture, a good lit blog written by someone at Anchor and Vintage whose job is, in part, to create online marketing campaigns for books (I'm oversimplifying; he explains it better here). The discussion revolves around a woman who dressed up as a giant weenie to promote a children's book at the recent Book Expo America. Some saw it as demeaning for the publicist in question, others just thought it was a waste of resources. I argued that any publicity is good publicity, and that, thanks to the handful of bloggers who wrote about it, I now know about a book that would never have popped up on my radar otherwise. With the tens of thousands of books published each year, why not do anything you can to elevate your profile?

I was in Detroit last weekend, and took the opportunity to visit the only tourist spot there that held any interest: Hitsville USA, the original home of Motown Records. The word "home" is fitting; the label began in a two-story house in a neighborhood on the north side of downtown, eventually expanding into eight different houses in the neighborhood before moving to an office building downtown and eventually to Los Angeles. Today, two homes serve essentially as a museum -- the original house that once held the offices and was home to founder Berry Gordy and his family, and the house next door that housed the studio.

A friend had told a story about visiting there many years ago, and made it sound as if the people there did not expect visitors. Things are a little better today. They have brochures, give tours and sell merchandise. Still, for a place that was essentially the birthplace of northern soul music in the country, it leaves a lot to be desired. The tour starts in a cinderblock walled room filled with folding chairs, where visitors watch a video about the label. They then are taken upstairs to see a few walls filled with old black and white photos, Michael Jackson's sequined white glove and a few record covers. A preserved chunk of the Gordys' upstairs apartment completes that part of the tour, before people are hustled downstairs to see an office and some ancient vending machines.

Then comes the best part of the tour, and the main reason anyone is there -- Studio A, the place where every Motown record was recorded between 1959 and 1972. The tiny space, essentially a refurbished garage, was immortalized in the 2002 film Standing in the Shadows of Motown, which saw the reunion of the original Motown backing band, the Funk Brothers, in the studio. The space holds a lot of history. Photos of various recording sessions are hung around the space, and they give you a sense of just how packed the room could be with musicians. The adjoining control booth -- itself a converted kitchen -- still has grooves worn into the floor by the tapping feet of the engineers and producers who listened as the grooves were laid down.

Just standing in Studio A made it worth the trip, but I was amazed that Motown hasn't done more with the space. In a way, it's nice to see that it is essentially preserved the way it was when it was home to the label, but the possibilities for interactivity (how about a recreated control booth where people could do hands-on mixing of Motown classics, much like those used at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City?) are mind-blowing.

More predictable than a summer heatwave is the critical backlash that comes when the next big thing releases something new once it has become, simply, a big thing. Exhibit A: Coldplay, whose latest disc, X&Y, is facing a critical drubbing. Jon Pareles* with the New York Times says Coldplay is "the most insufferable band of the decade," while the normally vitriolic Pitchfork.com seems so unmoved by the disc that it can only sigh, "They've almost certainly become the easiest band on the planet to be completely indifferent to" on the way to giving a 4.9/10 review.

The thing is, though they and others overstate it, the reviews are at least partly right -- this is a fairly boring album. Much has been made about Coldplay being the new U2, and the band clearly bought into that storyline. It held back the record -- originally scheduled for a late winter/early spring release -- to work on it some more, and in the process seems to have sucked what little life there was clean out of it. If a room of engineers was charged with creating a Coldplay disc solely by calculating what it would sound like based on the band's previous two discs, they'd probably at least err on the side of offering a compelling hook or two, let alone a decent lyrical couplet. In doing so, they would have been overly optimistic.

I'll leave the note-by-note critical pile-on to others who get paid to do so and just leave you with this: What happens now? If the masses really see through this and word of mouth leaves most of the band's fan base happy to download a couple of tracks and move on, how does the band recover? The way the music biz works these days, it'll be 2007 before there are even rumors of a new Coldplay disc, and it'll be 2008 before they get something out (assuming there still are CDs then). They have no chance to regroup, locked into a world tour that will keep them on the road through the end of the year and beyond, I'm sure. Look what happened to U2 after it released the execrable Pop -- that came four years after the experimental Zooropa and six after the hit Achtung, Baby. Between that 1991 disc and the band's next decent (and decent-selling) disc, nine years elapsed. And that came after what amounted to an artistic retrenchment.

So, by buying into the myth-making machine (giving the band credit for being able to choose commerce over art... the jury's still out on that one), Coldplay may find itself playing halftime at Super Bowl XXXVI (that's about six down the road, folks) to promote it's new record, which will probably sound an awful lot like "Yellow." Then again, let's be honest: X&Y will probably be a huge hit, the band will become even more massive and it will still be playing that Super Bowl show, only this time it will be to promote a double-disc greatest hits package.

*By the way, Pareles gets it wrong in his review, which offers a litany of post-Radiohead pretenders as a way to infer that even at their best, Coldplay et al are pale imitations. "Particularly in its native England, Coldplay has spawned a generation of one-word bands - Athlete, Embrace, Keane, Starsailor, Travis and Aqualung among them - that are more than eager to follow through on Coldplay's tremulous, ringing anthems of insecurity," he writes. Not so fast. Travis hit the scene in 1997, and it's most obvious foray into post-Radiohead quiet/loud dynamics was 1999's The Man Who, which predates Coldplay's Parachutes by a year. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that Radiohead's The Bends begat Travis who begat Coldplay who begat Starsailor who... cares?

Any time I feel completely overwhelmed by the number of books on my "want to read" list (which is pretty much all the time), I can be made to feel even more woe when forced to think about all of the books of which I'm not even aware that I also would like to read. More and more, it has been shown that this is far from my fault; there are simply too many books published each year.

A story in today's Wall Street Journal (the daily appearance of which on my desk is among the top fringe benefits of this new business editor gig) points out that there are indeed more books published today than ever before, and the publishers are paying a price. In 2003, they write, 34 percent of adult hardcover books were returned to publishers. That compares with 28 percent in 1993. So, think of it this way: one in three books that are printed end up right back where they started. This is a bit different than taking a look at the number of titles issued each year; instead, it looks at the sheer volume and takes into account both titles and copies of each. Still, that is clearly an oversaturation of the market, and a sign of an industry floundering about in search of a hit. Surely a bit more quality control on the front end would help to alleviate some of the pain on the back end, never mind the impact it would have on those of us who constantly add to that ever-lengthening wishlist with no hope of ever putting much of a dent in it.