Sweet Child O’ Mine as covered by Taken By Trees: Who woulda thunk that a quiet, Cat Poweresque gal from Stockholm could have pulled off such a great cover. Her name is Victoria Bergsman, and when she’s singing she calls herself Taken By Trees, and her tiny piano is every bit as effective as Slash’s mighty axe. After you add that song to your mySpace, listen to “Julia”.

The Kindly Ones by Jonathon Littell: If you don’t finish this book, you can always use it to crush coal into diamonds, which might not take as long as reading it. But you might finish, cause you read this blog, and that makes you a big ol’ perv. I’m quite sure you will enjoy reading the sordid tale of an SS Officer who, among other things, sodomizes his sister, jams sausages up his own ass then cleans them up a bit to serve to his parents, and does walking tours of Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, after which he’s called to the bunker in Berlin during Hitler’s last days, where he meets Dur Fuhrer. I haven’t gotten this far, yet, and I dunno if I will, cause if a book doesn’t do it for me, I have no problem setting it down. But so far, so good.

My new MacBook Pro: It’s not really new, cause I bought it off my pal who just bought a super duper high powered one, but this is only a year old, and I love it, and I think it’s time for me to say bye bye to PC’s. By the way, my senior year I couldn’t do algebra, and I needed the math credit, so I signed up for computer class. (I dunno if it still counts as a math credit). We had the brand-spankin’ new Apple I with a 64K hard drive. This was 1982, I loved Oingo Boingo, but I didn’t have a mullet (that came in ’84). In other words, I started on an Apple. I’ll probably end on one. Next up: iPhone.

The Ace Hotel, Portland OR: So I’m writing this from Room #315, and I’m up here kicking it with a pal, and I’m right across the street from Gay Pride (No Way Am I Gay!) — but, more importantly, Powell’s City of Books, and across the street the dude who sells vintage smut, and down from him Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which ain’t too far from Jackpot Records. The Crystal Ballroom! And on every tap, Pabst Blue Ribbon! In other words, motherfuck me. If it wasn’t for October til May, I’d figure out a way to live here.

Greil Marcus’s Real Life Rock Top Ten as it appears in The Believer: From Wiki: “Greil Marcus (born 1945) is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.” Every month he hypes ten things he loves lately, so what’s a filthy, dirty pornographer to do but rip him off? Mr. Marcus is much smarter than I; hence, I’m only half as good. At least today.