• In the pre-digital culture, kitchen-table lyricists and pop-radio junkies devoured hokey magazines that flourished in the day, re-printing popular song lyrics and publicity photos to an information-starved audience.
• Maynard James Keenan of Tool as Satan? In a phallic laser battle with Dee Dee Ramone as the Pope? From the minute the screen explodes with bikini babes, sledgehammers, high-powered weaponry, and classic Mustangs and GTOs, you know that this isn't your father's guns-and-girlies exploitation flick.
• The most anticipated box set in memory is due this Tuesday, unfortunately now a posthumous release because of the sad passing of the Man in Black. The Johnny Cash five-CD set, entitled Unearthed, features 64 previously unreleased songs recorded with producer Rick Rubin, who had a special knack for drawing out Cash's most haunting and beautiful work in his later years.
• In what the label is referring to as "a revolution in a jewel case," Go-Kart Records has just released a compilation of gargantuan proportions. Entitled Go-Kart MP300 Raceway, the disc comes loaded with an interactive MP3 player for any computer and 300 songs by 150 bands on two CDs.
• Bringing a tear to my eye, next week the Rolling Stones give the finger to every record store in North America except Best Buy, as the band releases a four-DVD set of its most recent tour exclusively through the bland box for the first four months.
• The indie Chrome Peeler Records imprint has just released one of the more novel ideas I've heard in a while, with label honcho Jason Ziemniak reaching out to his favorite musicians and asking them to write an original song based on an assigned song title.
• As founder and frontman for Jason & The Scorchers, Jason Ringenberg's cowboy hat and corn-fed yelps fit his image of an original alt-country pioneer. This Tuesday it seems he's been spending more time corralling than hanging at the used-guitar shop, releasing his first-ever children's album, A Day at the Farm with Farmer Jason.
• Expanding his video background to feature-length film direction, Steven Hanft has created Southlander, a quirky, homespun production drawn from passed-down tall tales and quirky anecdotes found among the struggling Los Angeles musician community.
• It's a family affair this week with my sweet-as-sugar CD pick, Vintage Slide Collections From Seattle Volume I by the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, a trio of husband, wife, and nine-year-old daughter that seems best fitted to tour in some sort of Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang flying coach crusted in jewels and tassels.
• With the mountain of new releases this coming week, it's hard to pick a single favorite, so I offer up two albums that I simply can't pry from my stereo. Old-school legends Jack Grisham and TSOL are back with Divided We Stand on the Nitro Records imprint, a rich, melodic pop-punk masterpiece.

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