You know what America is craving right now, post-recession and during a harrowing election? That's right: a very self-important drama about New York City gays, Fosse impersonators and their ladies who all love Broadway musicals and like to be mildly catty! That's why NBC is going big guns on its mid-season spectacular, "Smash," which premieres a week from today. It's supposed to redeem their fall season. Ahem. Not even kidding, about the plot: "Former 'American Idol' contestant Katharine McPhee stars as struggling actress Karen Carpenter, competing for the leading role in a new musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe."

Talk about doing it wrong. If [...]

i walk from the Bedford L stop to the venue called Secret Project Robot in the rain to go see the 10 Year Anniversary Yeah Yeah Yeahs show and by the time i get to the venue i'm soaked and i meet my friend who works for Todd P, the promoter who is putting on the show, outside the venue and i say "hi" and wipe my glasses off with my shirt and my friend says "hey, okay, let me find Todd now and he'll get us in, we're a little late"

so right now Yeah Yeah Yeahs are on Interscope Records and play venues twelve times the size [...]

Cat shows are far more populist events than dog shows. Having a show dog can cost a fortune. Beyond paying large sums for the creature’s pure bloodline, there’s also training, kennel fees, handler salaries and all sorts of other costs. Less so with the kitties. You can get a purebred cat for well under a thousand dollars and because cats aren’t bred to do much more than live in total domesticity (lying about, sunning themselves, sprawling out inappropriately on piles of work papers, kneading air muffins) the rest comes rather cheaply. The owners of show cats mostly consider themselves to be hobbyists and regard an event like the Cat Fanciers' [...]

In the 90s music history We Never Learn, Eric Davidson (of the late scuzz-thrash combo New Bomb Turks) makes the case for what he calls "gunk punk." The term is as tossed-off and derelict as it sounds. A group of punk drifters from the late-80s took a heady mélange of horror comics and sci-fi b-movies, a fuck-all approach to recording, Cramps-worship (or -hate), Russ Meyer and Bettie Page, the Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs classic "Woolly Bully," and mixed them into an amphetamine and beer gumbo under the tutelage of figureheads like Billy Childish and Tim Warren. (The latter's "Back From The Grave" compilations-a Nuggets for forgotten [...]

Miles Klee: I think I have a little bit of a crush on Generation X. And seeing Pavement play a concert in an apocalyptic Central Park thunderstorm last night took it to a whole new level. It also didn't hurt that Cece and I ran into you, Dave, an authentic Gen X-er (if my math is sound)-by the way, you do the meanest air guitar I've seen in ages. But the point is, I pretty much swooned when I heard the opening bars of "Spit On A Stranger."