Two: Also returning: Kat Bakes, with a post about weddings, cakes, and their union.

Three: Shla Scanlon — whose serialized novel I really need to start reading — profiles the Seattle band ULGM for The Rumpus. I’m presently listening to the songs on their myspace page, and I like what I hear so far — notably, how there’s just a slight Dead Kennedys-esque air of menace to the vocals that contrasts nicely with the restraint of the music.

Four: Also being listened to around these parts a lot lately: 24-Carat Black’s Gone: The Promise of Yesterday, “I Want to Make Up” in particular.

Two: The Chicago Reader on onetime Punk Planet editor Dan Sinker’s new project: CellStories, in which short stories are delivered to subscribers’ phones once per day. The article goes on to discuss the aesthetic benefits of print and digital, as well as the ways in which they may be compatible.

Three: Matthew Yglesias weighs in on the Chris Anderson/Malcolm Gladwell debate on free pricing, and says some smart things about business models in the process.

One: Christopher R. Weingarten on Twitter and music criticism.

Two: Warren Ellis on criticism, word counts, and media.

Three: Michael Antman on media evolution and how it will affect creative work.

Two: Rudy Wurlitzer — whose The Drop Edge of Yonder is definitely worth your time — discusses the upcoming reissue of several of his novels.

Three: At The Rumpus, Peter Selgin explores Amazon’s customer reviews and shares some particularly memorable swings at modern classics.

2. Andrew Beaujon on link-based journalism. [via Jessica Hopper]

3. Joshua Clover on pop music and revolution. [also via Jessica Hopper]

[Apologies for the delays between posts; home internet service has been spotty for the last two weeks, a condition which seems to have been ameliorated as of Monday night.]

First: Robert Christgau on the end of Blender. (Douglas Wolk has thoughts on the same topic that are also worth reading.) And via musing on the end of Blender, we get a capsule history of music magazines in the last decade: editorial politics, histories of criticism, and shifting word counts abound. It’s eloquently done, and leaves you thinking that, hey, most things might turn out okay.

Second, Mark Morford on assorted future-of-newspapers pieces. Morford’s piece is an attempt to digest multiple theories of where newspapers are going, and the fact that he openly bristles at the bizarre quasi-joy some seem to be taking in watching an industry contort is welcome. And his analysis seems solid — there’s a good mixture of the theoretical and a sort of ground-level practicality, a solid knowledge of how the industry works.

But there’s one particular section of his that, I suspect, may well have caused a good chunk of the people who read this who’d be inclined to support his argument to shake their heads and walk away, and it’s this one:

Look, I’m all for media upheaval and revolution. I’m all for seeing what will emerge from the ashes of print, should it die out completely. But there’s a reason the traditional newsroom model has lasted 150 years, that professional journalism is still considered so vital to a healthy democracy, that it’s still a profession requiring years of training and education, and not just a casual hobby you engage in when you’re a little drunk and you’ve read a few McLuhan books and you don’t get enough sex so hey, might as well mosey over to that Planning Commission meeting and scribble some notes.

Specifically — I probably don’t need to say this — it’s the “casual hobby” bit, which very nearly made me abandon the reading of Morford’s piece. Morford makes a fine argument about the reputations and resources of, say, the New York Times — and then completely undermines his credibility by deciding he’s going to throw in some random blogger stereotypes. (I guess “hard-drinking and undersexed” is a step up from “pajamas-wearing basement-dwellers,” but not by much.) And it’s a shame, because the points and critiques he’s making are largely sensible and worthwhile. But it’s also hard to read this and wonder whether its author threw out a lot of his essay’s appeal in order to pick a relatively random fight.

It’s the last line of the piece, though, that gives me pause:

…we can at least be sure that the dingy bars and nightclubs that keep outsider music alive won’t be turned into condominiums any time soon.

Maybe not condos per se, no. But there’s a key question that comes to mind — whether Salam’s talking about actual venues (which seem to me to be in a constant state of flux) versus the overall number of venues (which does not). It’s occasionally unsettling to realize that most of the venues at which I saw live music a decade ago are either closed or no longer hosting live music; at the same time, though, new venues do seem to be constantly opening, at least around these parts.

*-as a quick aside, it’s weirdly disconcerting to see a piece on SXSW written for an audience that isn’t automatically familiar with the festival and all that it connotes. It’s an experience not unlike the one I just had reading Jami Attenberg‘s The Kept Man, which has as its primary setting the North Brooklyn of a year or two ago, and thus occasionally caused me to mentally backtrack, trying to figure out whether the setting of a particular scene was, in fact, somewhere I frequent. (Also, as it should be said: The Kept Man is quite good.)

I’ve been meaning to link to Alan Jacobs’s Text Patterns — which began its life at said now-defunct site — for a while now, as I find to be one of the smarter takes on the broader questions and implications raised by an increase in reading on digital devices. (You’ll note that it’s now included in the sidebar.) But I’m also curious as to whether a work of criticism, whether a standalone review or ongoing coverage, regardless of its author’s politics, can be inherently considered to be of the right or the left. Putting it another way: if the same record review appears in Slate, the American Prospect, or the National Review, does its context matter? And while I realize I’m nowhere near the first to ask these questions, they remain worth asking — and as the idea of a more ideologically polarized media is predicted by some, I suspect they’ll continue to be relevant.

I’m reminded of J.D. Considine’s Experience Music Project Pop Conference presentation from last year — here summarized by Ned Raggett — in which he looked into the inherent politics of pop songs. Some further digging through the Pop Conference vaults also brings up Michael Daddino’s piece on the aforementioned National Review and its music criticism since the 1960s. Which, in many ways, echoes the Homans piece that brought us here in the first place.

2. Reihan Salam on SXSW and the Dirty Projectors. (I’ll likely come back to the first of these with a lengthier post.)

3. Christopher Bird on digital comics.