6) Anything for Art, or You Will Know Those Who Turn Self-Deprecation into Self-Congratulation by Their Trail of Dead (Shoreline Media press release, July 25)

"Two days ago, while in Philadelphia to tape Fresh Air, Linda Thompson found out that Lucinda Williams was playing that night, and then scored tickets to the show. Williams, who was tipped off that Thompson was in the crowd, stopped midway through her set and explained that 'I feel really self-conscious Linda Thompson's in the audience.' She was, however, able to finish the show."

7) X-Ray Spex, "The Anthology" (Sanctuary)

With Poly Styrene's screech prophesying the London Hanif Kureishi would begin to write out in the mid-1980s, an affirmation of life no less fierce than Son House's affirmation of death, and a setting that burned with the same intensity. The songs tumble down one after the other, each whole, each bursting its skin: "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo," "Let's Submerge," "Identity." On the first disc, collecting the 1978 "Germfree Adolescents" album, Rudi Thompson's sax rolls over the music like a storm, but he holds the shape of each number; with the eight tunes cut in the Roxy nightclub in 1977, the sound splitting in half a dozen directions at once, original saxophonist Lora Logic (who in 1995 combined with by-then Hari Krishna sister Styrene for a few new tunes) is utterly elsewhere. She seems to be playing from a nightclub in Saigon, as if punk was as likely to first raise its head there as anywhere -- and as Poly runs her songs to ground, it's Lora who gives every performance its smell of the uncanny, the unreal, the sense that the performance this recording documents could never have happened.

8) Uncle Tupelo, "89/93: An Anthology" (Columbia Legacy)

Dull, but as Jeff Tweedy proves in a previously unreleased number that begins as a plaintive love ballad, there is no such thing as a bad version of "I Wanna Be Your Dog."

9/10) On Louis Armstrong: Julio Cortazar, from "Hopscotch" (1963, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, Pantheon, 1966) and Percival Everett, from "Glyph" (Graywolf Press, 1999)

In Paris in the late 1950s, in an apartment where every jazz 78 seems deeper than the last, an Argentine in his 40s lets his mind drift back to "Storyville nights, where the old only really universal music of the century had come from, something that brought people closer together and in a better way than Esperanto, UNESCO, or airlines, a music which was primitive enough to have gained such universality and good enough to make its own history, with schisms, abdications, and heresies" and most of all "Satchmo, everywhere, with that gift of omnipresence given him by the Lord, in Birmingham, in Warsaw, in Milan, in Buenos Aires, in Geneva, in the whole world, is inevitable, is rain and bread and salt, something that is beyond national ritual, sacred traditions, language and folklore: a cloud without frontiers, a spy of air and water, an archetypal form, something from before, from below, that brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, brings them back into that obscure and finally forgotten flame, clumsily and badly and precariously he delivers them back to a betrayed origin."

In "Glyph," his hilarious novel about the games language plays with people, Percival Everett brings Aristophanes together with Ralph Ellison, and has them put it somewhat differently. Aristophanes: "All war is unnecessary and finally ruinous for all parties, but yet I find that the notion of sincere reconciliation doesn't appear as an option for humans, or for politicians either." Ellison: "Perhaps. But the condition you call war is often the condition of life for many. We have in our time a musician who clowns before kings and queens, wipes down his sweating brow with a rag between creating the sweetest music with the same lips and breath that make a graveled growl of a voice. He is at war. Necessarily and perhaps forever. And his weapon is irony. The enemy loves what he does, but when they imitate him, try to make it themselves, they hate him because, not only do they fail to recreate his music, they are terrified of becoming the one they mimic."

Or, as Melissa Maerz of City Pages in Minneapolis described Holly Golightly's show at South by Southwest in Austin last March 27, "Little white singer-songwriter snarls the blues like a one-woman White Stripes. Somewhere, indie rockers torn between folk and garage are discovering the next big thing. Somewhere else, Son House is laughing his ass off."

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