Mixtapes for Hookers

$pread Magazine more than made the amount of money needed to print their next issue.  Yay!

Simon Reynolds on beards.  I am sure that many bearded men out there did feel inspired to stop shaving because they wanted to look more like the guys in Fleet Foxes.  I would like to state for the record that I am definitely not one of those people.

Speaking of which.  Dear Santa: I want this.

Vintage Mouse Porn.  I wish I liked these more than I do; the one that really stands out for me is the last one, where the mice are fully clothed.

Art critic Laura Cumming wants to know, once and for all, what constitutes an obscene artwork.  While I agree with 90% of what she’s saying, asking that question makes me wonder whether or not she gets the intentional fluidity (positive and negative) about vaguely-defined laws.

I had no idea that actor Henry Gibson died.  The bagel-loving actor co-starred in two of my favorite American epics: he played country singer Haven Hamilton in Nashville and elfin mary Thurston Howell in Magnolia.  He was also the crazy bad guy in not-actually-terrible Tom Hanks comedy The ‘Burbs.

Is the gay agenda being hijacked by the marriage issue?  Kids think so.

The Magnetic Fields have a new album out in January.  It’s called Realism, has a very similar cover to the last one, and also has a Christmas-themed song title a little before the halfway point, just like last time.  The official site doesn’t mention it yet, oddly; I saw it on The Music Slut.

I’m not sure calling this The Era of Rich Juzwiak is quite right, since the Youtube collages Juzwiak assembles on FourFour are roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times better than those that most other people are doing.

Ladytron have a best-of coming out in a couple of months, but more importantly they were on Yo Gabba Gabba! recently.

Biblioklept on what makes a cult book.  I’m not sure what the last cult favorite I read was, although it doesn’t help that it takes me months to read anything these days.  (I remember reading a book on cult films once and decided to watch some of the ones I hadn’t seen.  I chose many, many bad movies from the list.)

Finally, the wonderful nutrition analyst Marion Nestle on chocolate milk.  Talk about the importance of school lunch programs always surprises me, because I was raised by overprotective germophobic Italians who wouldn’t dream of letting me buy school lunch even if I wanted to.  Still, although chocolate milk is delicious, she has a point.  Chocolate milk is not a health food and Super Bowl ads are not cheap.