Allow me to be crypto-candid for a moment when I say that I, like many Americans, sometimes find myself.

OMGoth! I just got back from the Sisters of Mercy show. Yes, all the reviews are true: the sound is crap, and the fog machines have been cranked into overdrive, so you can barely see the band. I don't care. I have finally seen SoM live.

Plus, thanks to a couple of happy coincidences, I was standing on the side of the stage when they started playing "Dominion/Mother Russia". No, I didn't get to meet them, but I was 10 feet away from them. Squeee!

Allow me to be crypto-candid for a moment when I say that I, like many Americans, sometimes find myself.

This cracks my shit up. Also, David, as someone who feels completely intimidated by VV crypto-candid patois, I appreciate your mockery.

Crypto-candid, it turns out, works in lots of sentences. Try it yourself!

Nikki Sudden has died.

Almost everytime I post here it seems I've got some depressing musician death news. I only hope I don't get banned from the thread.

Well, based on this blog entry Sudden's death probably wasn't much of a surprise.

This cracks my shit up. Also, David, as someone who feels completely intimidated by VV crypto-candid patois, I appreciate your mockery.

I grew up on the Voice's music writing (and considers it to be the Newsweekly of Record for the 70s and 80s when it had NY Punk and the birth of Rap to document). This is hard for me to stomach. I am sympathetic to the plight of the music writer. It's tough to find a decent angle on it, and match your prose accordingly. But this stretches Bob Christgau's quirks into something grotesque. It's like he's created a bad house-style.

Crypto-candid! Crypto-candid!

I'm going for transparently oblique, myself.

Shame about Nikki Sudden. Shame that both he and Epic Soundtracks died at relatively young ages, too.

Well, based on this blog entry Sudden's death probably wasn't much of a surprise.

The Replacements ode "Johnny's Gonna Die" was part of the long-term Johnny Thunders death-watch. Nikki was the same junkie flavor of self-destruction. I'll post "Jangle Town" tonight. He was still an interesting musician.

There's a whole class of musicians who took that Keith Richards idolatry to heart. It always seemed kind of funny to me. Not that Keith isn't worth adulation, but the Keith wannabees (Nikki, Peter Perrett, Miami Steve, Johnny Thunders, Steve Tyler and Joe Perry, all of Guns n' Roses...) just seemed to not get it, because they were trying so hard to be that thing. The point of Keith Richards is that he didn't try hard to be Keith Richards.

From the 33 1/3 site:

NMH chat on WNYC, Monday March 27th

Kim Cooper, author of our Neutral Milk Hotel book, will be discussing the book and the album on WNYC's Soundcheck radio show on Monday afternoon, 2-3pm Eastern Time. 93.9FM if you're local, online if you're not.

I only caught the last couple minutes. Should be archived within the next couple hours.

In recent articles about Morrissey and Wayne Coyne I was reminded that they are about my age. So I checked in wikipedia for people born in 1961 to find people born the same year. Here's some of my cohort.

Todd Haynes
George Clooney
Lloyd Cole
Henry Rollins
Camryn Mannheim
Don Mattingly
Wayne Gretzkey
Chris Meloni
Tim Roth
Enya
Melissa Etheridge
Boy George
Princess Di
Laurence Fishburne
Heather Locklear
Dave Mustaine
Scott Baio
Dan Marino
Dylan McDermott
Larry Mullen Jr.
The Edge
k.d. lang
Meg Ryan
Ann Coulter (ptooie)
Eddie Murphy
Peter Jackson
Douglas Coupland

They don't feel like they fit together because they peaked at different times.

Side note: Neil Gaiman is one year older and Eddie Izzard is one year younger.