If the Woodstock feature length film was a worthy document of the peace and love generation at the peak of their powers, Fillmore: The Last Days is an apt tombstone for the death of a movement.

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Murder is a hot topic in music, especially in the blues, country, and gangsta rap variety. As a subject matter of songs it probably ranks third, just behind love and drinking. For this week’s Baker’s Dozen I’ve selected thirteen killer tunes about homicide.

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Few years were as successful for jazz as 1959, at least when you’re counting up five star recordings. Columbia Records has recently reissued three of these, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, Davis’s Sketches of Spain, and Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, in deluxe two CD packages.

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One of my favorite lines in the South Park movie was, “When Canada is dead and gone, there’ll be no more Celine Dion.” Rest assured, I have nothing against Canada, and I know almost nothing about Celine Dion, but I know this: my mom has a creepy, humongous book of pictures of Celine Dion with babies. That’s just wrong, folks.

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The two big switches for The Eternal are the addition of Mark Ibold (ex-Pavement) as the band’s full-time bassist, and a big-time label switch, leaving their longtime home on Geffen to once again rejoin the ranks of the indies on Matador.

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A lot of misconceptions will likely be blown out of the water once you get a listen to Far, Regina Spektor’s third full-length album. First of all, anyone expecting a girl behind a Steinway dishing on her lost loves over adult-contemporary, lite-FM, piano-centric arrangements will be shocked to find a pretty impressive diversity of sounds on the album.

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Perhaps the strangest accomplishment of my life occurred on a recent weekend night when I, along with two other individuals, judged the San Diego stop of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships. I have seen plenty of unique people play at the Casbah, but never anything quite like this.

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If truth be told, I was never really a fan of Michael Jackson. Although I was at the ripe-for-picking age of 12 when Thriller was released, I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. However, my closest friends and classmates did, and it wasn’t long before my suburban Jewish day school was overrun with young boys trying to do the moonwalk and wearing faux red leather jackets.

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