Perfect Sound Forever is a quirky online music magazine that’s been around since 1993. Their self-described foci include performers/artists that deserve more recognition,

exploring little-known corners of music (i.e. bootlegs, music therapy), the politics of music, the music of politics, and exposing cliches about certain bands and styles of music. Here’s a compilation of some of their interviewees’ favorite music and here’s a page of their staff’s favorite music. Discerning folks, it seems, although there are some who appear to have stopped listening in the early ’70’s [Who am I to talk??]

More passion from the impeccable Médecins Sans Frontières. Drug Companies and the Third World: A Case Study in Neglect.

“The poor have no consumer power, so the market has failed

them,” said Dr. James Orbinski, international president of

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, the medical

agency whose work in war zones and in the third world won it

the Nobel Peace Prize last year. “I’m tired of the logic that says,

‘He who can’t pay, dies.’ ” [New York Times]. The agency advised African states not to sign new drug laws. “The medical relief agency Médecins Sans Frontières on Thursday called on a group of 15

African countries not to ratify new patent laws that it says could deny poor people access to life-saving

drugs. ‘The revised arrangement relating to intellectual property reinforces the monopoly given to patent-holders

beyond existing requirements in international trade rules and would cause a major obstacle to access to

medicines,’ MSF said in a statement.”

Metafilter sent me to this compendium of Dumb Laws from the various states.

An adult adoptee stalked by her birth mother dismantles the fiction that all who were adopted at birth yearn for the passionate reunion. “To believe that blood ties alone can bind a family goes beyond

the cliché of blood being thicker than water to assume a

miracle. Sure, it’s possible that the long lost can be suddenly

found and reclaimed in a hail of tears and kisses, but it’s not

something I’d count on, no matter how many times you’ve

seen it on TV.” [My adopted daughter is two, and my wife and I have recently been preoccupied again, as we had not been since we first contemplated her arrival, with the issue of what lies ahead in her (and our) coping with her adoptive identity issues.]

Salon: Movies in heat

“Films used to erotically seduce us; now they tend to sedate instead.”

Rock’s Original Poets, Still Howling: Stephen Holden wants us to think that Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Patti Smith are a holy triumvirate analogous to Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. [New York Times]

National Rifle Association Unleashes Attack on Gore:

“Vice President Al Gore is the type of politician where nothing is

sacred, that will say and do anything to preserve their own

political future, even if that means using fear and deceptive

means,” Mr. Watts was to say, according to an advance text of

his speech. “His party used to say, ‘There’s nothing to fear but

fear itself.’ Now the vice president has nothing to offer but fear

itself.” I blogged below one persepctive on the centrality of racism to the NRA’s thinking. In fact, the more I read about their current defiance and grandiosity, the more it stars to look as if they’re trying to appeal mostly to the radical right of the black-helicopter, New-World-Order conspiracy peranoiacs; paramilitary militias; and tax resisters.

Challenging Islamic Myth on Organ Transplants as Ailments Rise: “…religious leaders are rallying with doctors and

community outreach workers to dispel a decades-old myth

that the Koran forbids organ donation.” Because organ transplantes between relatives, and even ethnically similar people, are more successful, both medical and transplant advocates and religious leaders in the Arab-American community are trying to get their constituents to go with the Muslim dictum that ‘He who saves a life saves humanity’ rather than the one that says the a Muslim will not see Heaven if the body does not go before God whole. [New York Times]