​It's been a rough year for the five-year-old music blog Pop Tarts Suck Toasted: in February, Google unceremoniously disappeared the site as part its merciless spring blog purge. So PTST proprietor Patrick Duffy salvaged what he could of his site's old archives, and switched URLs. At which point, just a few months later, he awoke to find that his ownership of the new domain had expired at 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. Before Duffy could re-up, someone else swooped in and took it. And that was pretty much that: "I have opted to give up the fight and seek greener pastures," he wrote in a farewell letter, telling us later: "Hopefully in the future I can continue to write about what I love without all those aggravating factors." But blogging's a habit, and so it was with something less than total surprise that we read Duffy's email this morning, informing us that PTST was coming back:

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Well, let's not say "reuniting." Writes drummer-turned-Del Posto pastry chef Brooks Headley: "It's not a reunion! It's a money losing labor of love!" Of all the bands from the first great American early '90s post-hardcore wave--Born Against, Moss Icon, Man Is the Bastard, etc.--Universal Order of Armageddon seemed like one of the longest shots to reunite: their reign was brief and fierce (see the above video) and lasted only a couple of years in the first place. But a benefit for Baltimore's Wham City drew them back in, and now Headley brings news that the band will perform in New York at Death By Audio (with locals Silk Flowers) the day after their already announced July 24th return at Whartscape.

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​The conversion of CBGB into a fancy boot emporium is ancient news at this point, and as evil or wrongheaded as John Varvatos has often seemed on the Bowery--a sliver of the old wall, behind glass! Guns N' Roses!--putting CBGB out of its misery in 2006 was a mercy killing. It hadn't been good for a long, long time. At the same time, attempts to leverage the club's considerable legacy into commercial credibility on what nowadays is called "Bowery 2.0" have never seemed less than cynical, or worse--DBGB, anyone? So though at this point we're not surprised when people call on the memory of Hilly Kristal to help up-sell commercial real estate, it's sad to see a tenant as respected as the New Museum getting in on the act. The image above is part of a brochure the museum's real estate goons put together to help advertise commercial space in a building the New Museum owns adjacent to their own, at 231 Bowery. There are more where that came from:

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Take that, CBGB! Were you booking shows with Axl Rose and his rental band back before John Varvatos graced you with some leather jackets and used audio equipment? No you were not. Fashion week would come and go and you'd just book 17 more Subhumans shows. Not like the new regime over at 315 Bowery, who will pack everyone from Sebastian Bach to Kevin Bacon in to see Alberta Cross and then surprise what remains of the audience four hours later when Guns N' Fucking Roses takes the stage and plays 17, count 'em, 17 songs, including an encore. It is 2010 and we are experiencing things we could only dream about the grubby grasp of the last three decades. Look at this setlist:

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Judging from all the adulatory nods around the internet today, it's obvious how well Saturday Night Live's Crisis of Conformity bit--in which Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Ashton Kutcher, and Dave Grohl "reunite" their old hardcore outfit at a wedding--succeeded as comedy. But, and perhaps more notably (to this old hardcore kid, anyway), the sketch also succeeded astonishingly well as a tribute to '80s hardcore punk.

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​Please welcome the Thistle Hill Tavern, serving "new American cuisine in a comfortable, laidback setting"--namely, on the corner of 15th Street and Seventh Avenue, in the space the insipid, theoretically-Middle Eastern eatery Olive Vine used to occupy. The spot, which is hoping for a March opening, is backed by an unlikely conglomerate: veteran restaurateur David Massoni (of inoteca), local East Village bartender John Bush, and Mike Burkett, who you and I and the rest of the world know as NOFX's Fat Mike. No surprise that Fat Mike has money to throw around--have you seen dude's old house? But who would've thought the guy who wrote "Don't Call Me White" would post up on one of the most pale and anodyne corners in all of our fair city? Only a Fat Wreck Chords-themed menu can redeem you now, Mike. [Fork in the Road]

​The vacated Tower Records store on East 4th Street has been a symbol of the decline and fall of music retailing in NYC since the day it closed, back in 2006. Since then the space has hosted flea markets, Halloween stores, and any number of other temporary enterprises. The store's newest tenant? No Longer Empty, a group of "arts advocates, curators and artists who orchestrate public art exhibitions in vacated storefronts and properties in New York City."

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The Under 100 office, not to be confused with this new DD172 thing. Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.

​Under 100, the DIY showspace run out of rap mogul Dame Dash's basement, may have disappeared into a December maelstrom of unwanted publicity, never to be spoken of again. But DD172--the suspiciously similar sounding enterprise being run out of the exact same Tribeca loft--apparently lives on. "People come and go at all hours," writes the Observer. "A thick cloud of pot smoke makes you think you've wandered into a building on fire." Wait, what?

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​L. Magazine comes up with the suitably photocopied-in-black-and-white flyer announcing the deal, which will send Kathleen Hanna's papers from the years 1989-1996 to the library, where the collection will "support scholarship in feminism, punk activism, queer theory, music history and more." Fales already has one of the best archives of downtown lit in the world, a bunch of which was reprinted and otherwise dissected in our friend Brandon Stosuy's Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992. So this makes more sense than the inevitable chortling about Bikini Kill show posters being placed in temperature controlled rooms, etc, might lead you to believe. Although there is something sad about the drive to do things like that. Better than oblivion? Depends on how punk you were, I guess. [L Magazine]

​Robert Christgau's one-line review of long defunt Minneapolis quarter Lifter Puller's final bow, Fiestas and Fiascos: "Postpunk E Street for fuckups clocking e-dollars." Frankly, we blanch at adding all that much more than that--the Hold Steady's Tad Kubler played bass, and Craig Finn fronted the band, to predictably poignant results. They broke up in 2000, got a kind of greatest hits in 2002, and weirdly, have had all their records out of print since then--an incongruous situation for one of the best-loved indie outfits (if in retrospect) of the '90s. But the situation's about to be remedied. The Orchard will digitally release the band's entire catalog in December, Pitchfork reports. That's three full-length albums, a singles comp, one EP, and a bunch of bonus live tracks, of which one has already surfaced. Also pegged to the reissues is a book, Lifter Puller Vs. the End Of, co-authored by Finn and SOTC buddy Jessica Hopper. To which cumulative news we just kind of make a kind of stunned but happy face, and encourage you to look into doing the same.