My review of the Dumptruck best-of Haul of Fame is up at PopMatters. Dumptruck made one of my favorite discs of the 1980s, if not all time, with for the country. I used to prowl used CD shops in search of copies of this long out-of-print disc so I always had one on hand to give to friends, but Rykodisc reissued it a couple of years ago, making it available to everyone. This collection is a good place to start for the uninitiated, but for the country really ought to be in every home, period.

Elsewhere, the Chicago Tribune offers its annual list of the 50 best magazines, as picked by staff members. It's always an eclectic list, full of cool finds and head-scratchers. It's topped this year by The Economist, a magazine that I, like many people I know, would read more (or at all) if only time was infinite. The rest of the top 5 is rounded out by Dwell, Wired, the New Yorker and ESPN the Magazine.

Former Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard has put his first collage up on eBay. Pollard has been selling posters, original pressings of old albums and other miscellany there for a while, but this is the first time he is selling an original piece of art.

This first piece, The Astral City Slickers, was used as the cover art for the 1997 Guided by Voices album Mag Earwig. The opening bid? $5,000. That's no typo. Pollard's past offerings have fetched ungodly amounts (including $6,200 for an original pressing of the GBV album Propeller), but this seems a bit steep even by those standards. Perhaps it's a bias against collage, a form of art most of us perfected in elementary school, but it's amazing to think that the winning bidder will pay mid to high four figures for four or five things clipped from magazines and glued to a piece of cardboard. It would be cool to own the original artwork for one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite bands, but I won't find it hard to pass. The cheaper route is to pick up the two volumes of Eat, Pollard's "literary magazine," that include poems, snippets of song lyrics and collages.

More power to Pollard if he actually sells this and other pieces slated for auction. If you can get someone to give you the price of a decent used car for a 5"-by-5" collage, by all means do it. As he told me earlier this year in an interview for PopMatters: "Why should I not make money on that? It's my art. Some people think, 'Why are you selling this stuff on eBay; are you desperate or trying to gouge the fans?' No, I'm not, because it's my art, and artists sell their stuff, don't they?"

Sure they do. But if Pollard is able to land $5K for this collage, don't be surprised if starving artists all around the country start up obscure indie rock bands as a way to raise their profile.

Donald Hall has been named Poet Laureate of the United States. He succeeds Ted Kooser, who has held the position since 2004.

It's a great time for anyone wanting to know more about Hall and his work. Never mind the fact that such an announcement is about the only time a single poet receives much in the way of blanket media coverage these days -- National Poetry Month and the occasional anti-war rabble rousing also draw a bit of attention -- but Hall's publisher, Houghton-Mifflin, just released a career-encapsulating collection, White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Poems 1946-2006. Hall talks about and reads from the collection in this New Hampshire Public Radio show.

As for that media coverage, the New York Times has a nice interview with Hall in which he talks about being an outspoken critic of the Bush Administration, saying "If I see First Amendment violations, I will speak up." Kooser, following in the footsteps of predecessors Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins, worked to make poetry more accessible through outreach programs. In his case, it was (and still is, actually) the column "American Life in Poetry," provided free to newspapers. Hall said he might continue the column if Kooser lets it go when he steps down this fall.

I just finished reading Bust, the latest offering from the great Hard Case Crime paperback book series. This one is a collaboration between Irish writer Ken Bruen and American Jason Starr. I've become a huge Bruen fan in short order, having devoured everything available by him stateside in the past year or so (starting with the excellent The White Trilogy). I have yet to read any of Starr's well-reviewed books, but will likely dive in. This isn't the strongest thing with Bruen's name on the cover -- it's no surprise the narrative is a bit disjointed given the presence of two cooks in the kitchen -- but it's a well-plotted story that serves as a solid entry in this series of modern day pulp fiction.

Starr reports on his web site that the two plan to collaborate on a sequel for Hard Case Crime: "We're bringing back TWO characters from BUST. One won't be a surprise; the other will."

You can hear Bruen and Starr discuss Bust on KUHF Public Radio here.

Elsewhere, Newsweek has a nice Q&A with Paul Westerberg, who talks about the briefly reunited Replacements and his worries about sobriety should the band go back on the road. That's not as far-fetched as it sounds: Westerberg says that the group recorded more than the two songs appended to the Rhino best-of coming tomorrow, and adds that he doesn't "think it's out of the realm of us making one, Tommy and I," referring to a new record.

Over at Stylus Magazine, Matthew Weiner explores the backlash against the Flaming Lips' latest, At War With the Mystics. I'd argue that it's not a backlash, but rather a fitting critical drubbing from the few people who seem to be able to hear the middling songs buried beneath the hype. Simply put, AWWTM isn't very good. This isn't so much the case of a band getting its comeuppance from the very people who built them up, but rather of a band who spent too much time reading all of that praise. This sounds very much like a disc made by a band trying to sound like the Flaming Lips as described in the reams of positive press lauded upon and The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Where once the band's quirks dressed up solid songs, they now seem to be the kernel around which songs are spun, and that is clearly not the way the Lips work best.

I tend to run hot and cold on Robert Christgau depending on how obscure and high-falutin' he is from piece to piece, but he hit the nail on the head in this week's review of Sonic Youth's forthcoming disc, Rather Ripped in the Village Voice. The disc (which can be streamed at the band's site and which has been available in file-sharing circles for weeks), is pretty great, the most tuneful and focused thing the band has ever done. Or, in the words of the Dean, "a light-seeming, unprecedentedly hooky thing that could prove one of their best."

It's not his review of SY that hooked me, however. Rather, it was the meta-critique of reviews in general embedded within the review. He discusses previous SY reviews from the VV, written by younger people, that pointed out that the band's music was getting boring. He's all for differences of opinion, he writes, but there is a difference between taste and judgment: "It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art."

With that, he encapsulates something I've been grappling with for a while, very loosely tied into the whole Stephin Merritt - Sasha Frere-Jones is he or isn't he a racist debate quietly raging in the music blogosphere. Articles about that debate often deal at least tangentially with the notion of "rockism," a term meant to signal a dislike of anything, for lack of a more coherent explanation, that doesn't focus on guitar-bass-drums and a 4/4 beat.

How does all of this tie together? It seems as if critics, thanks to the overwhelming number of them, have found it necessary to crawl as far into the obscure abyss in search of the previously unknown as a means of survival. If they simply tell us that the new disc by the hot new band is pretty good, we increasingly find we no longer need them. Thanks to aggregators like Metacritic, a number of new discs (and movies, books and games) are given a critical thumbs up or down, which is all most people have time for. Sure, some people might actually seek out a real review to find out why something is deemed good or bad (though I'd argue they usually are looking for views that simply reinforce their own), but mostly they want to be told if it's OK to spend their money on a given product. Reviews are reduced to the equivalent of stock market tips.

To combat this, critics often dig deep, seeking the new-new thing about which the masses can't possibly have aggregated an opinion. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; trendspotting is a valuable service of critics of all stripes. It just means that the critics' Darwinian self-preservation efforts are the very things that seem to marginalize them further. Frere-Jones looks for some dark secret in Merritt's musical playlists, unwilling to admit that it isn't racism that drives Merritt's taste so much as an aversion to bad music. Critics hype young bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Tapes 'n Tapes long before these good-but-still-growing bands deserve such lofty praise. And, to get back to Christgau's point, it seems some denigrate things they know are good simply to draw attention to themselves. We'll call this the Ann Coulter effect.

I've given positive reviews to many a mainstream or country act whose music I'm ambivalent about at best, because I understand that these are things that are done well and accomplish what the artist set out to do even if I don't personally like the results. There is a difference between taste and judgment, and perhaps when critics find better ways to bridge the gap between the two, their reviews will take on the very relevance they have unwittingly worked so hard to avoid. It's ironic to find this nugget of wisdom in a review by the sometime king of those obscurantist seekers, but I take it where I can get it. Thanks to Christgau's help in crystallizing this idea a bit, there's probably more of this to come.

For those who can't wait until next Tuesday, Rhino is streaming the forthcoming Replacements best-of, Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? in its entirety here.

Fans, of course, will skip to the end to hear the two new tracks, "Message to the Boys" and "Pool and Dive." Neither is great, sounding not unlike the lesser filler on the band's swan song, All Shook Down. I'd be curious to know if Westerberg wrote these specifically for this purpose, or if they were spare tracks laying around. ASCAP lists Westerberg as the sole writer for both, for what that's worth.

Who knew that the inevitable Replacements critic reanalysis would take 15 years to occur, and that it would still preceed the release of Chinese Democracy?

The Zombies are going on the road according to Billboard.com. Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent reunited a few years back and have put out a couple of discs to lukewarm response. The opportunity to see them live, and thus hear the old hits, is much more appealing.

George Pelecanos, a TIRBD favorite, has a new book forthcoming. The Night Gardener (an R.E.M. reference, perhaps?) hits stores in August, and according to his web site it iis "George Pelecanos' biggest novel ever: the haunting story of three cops -- one good, one bad, one broken -- and the murder that reunited them in a showdown decades in the making." Pelecanos could use a few more readers to cement his spot commercially among critically lauded peers like Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly, and this tale, with its surface echoes of Lehane's Mystic River, may just do it. Here's hoping.

Fans of Found magazine might not come across this interview with publisher Davy Rothbart at IT Conversations, so here t'is. Listen download or burn, your choice.