Darren Ankenmann

We were sent this.

Over July 4th weekend, Liz Phair released Funstyle, her first full length in five years. For just five dollars for a full album download, the 11 tracks came with a message: the music within cost her relationships with her management company and ATO Records, who'd just enthusiastically reissued her 1993 classic album, Exile in Guyville. As par for Liz Phair's last 10 years, Funstyle sent the Phair faithful into a tizzy, with its notable nods to Bollywood, humorous scatting about her recent career troubles, and ethereal electronic arrangements.

Through a distribution company called Rocket Science Ventures, Funstyle received an official release on October 19 and along with it comes 10 songs from the much bootlegged Girlysound tapes, four-track recordings that served as precursors to Guyville. Phair is headlining the Bowery Ballroom on Monday, December 13--tickets go on sale today at noon. Sound of the City recently caught up with Phair, who spoke candidly about her experience with Capitol Records in the early 2000s, letting go of Guyville, and her work as a composer for televisions shows such as 90210 and In Plain Sight.

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So our/my favorite guy on the planet, one of the few metal dudes to have evolved admirably into life after his most renowned association (unlike his more famous counterpart), just got a book deal from Simon & Schuster. He's been angling for this a long while now, as he told us when he wrote for us last May, and we're thrilled to see him finally get his due. McKagan announced this today on Reverb, the music blog of our sister paper Seattle Weekly, and in his post, he explains firmly that his book will not be the GN'R version of The Dirt.

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Stuff like this will always make Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig a good guy in our book, because it's not just any mind that could've enacted this bit of performance art, in which Koenig got the bland affirmation incarnate that is Asher Roth to sign Koenig's copy of Somerset Maugham's well-known novel of Eastern enlightenment and post-war ennui. Roth's apt inscription:

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Manson's mug shot from 2001, after rubbing his pelvis on a security guard's head

Even funnier than that Best Music Writing-feted piece in the Onion from 2001--"Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People," a classic you should reread immediately--is that it's threatening to come true. After all these years, after all the mud that's been tossed at the shock-schlock-star, the man born Brian Warner is once again lashing out at the press--more specifically, the "soon-to-be-murdered-in-their-home press." His ultimatum: if another "journalist" writes another thing about him that "you wouldn't say to my face," he will show up at said journalist's door "personally or with my fans help." Boo!

The back story, it seems, is that our sister West Coast paper LA Weekly ran a cover story about the muckraking music web site Buddyhead, and how the once-seminal site has been retooled in the hopes to reclaim its dominance to the since-bloated landscape of music sites. The piece's lede shared this anecdote about one Christmas Eve that Buddyfigurehead Travis Keller spent with Manson:

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Michael McKagan, better known as former Guns 'N Roses bassist/current Loaded frontman/guest-SOTC contributor Duff, has a 600-word piece in today's Times about his lifetime of experiences flying. Unlike, say, Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, who piloted his band's private 757 across the world last year, McKagan's spent his tour-horse time in a passenger seat for the last 25 years, but still has, per usual, spectacular rock-star anecdotes. "I've had my share of foreign-soil adventures, like escaping a coup attempt by Hugo Chavez in 1992, when Guns N' Roses was playing in Venezuela," he writes. "Fortunately for me, Mr. Chavez liked our band and waited for our chartered plane to leave before he strafed the airport." Another Duff metaphorical chestnut, put forth as evidence of how his travels have changed since his Guns' days: "Airplane cabins are my arenas where I experience many triumphs and failures against the legendary puzzle master Will Shortz and his wicked crossword makers." Certainly beats talking about the Mile High Club.

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You may be overexposed if two members of the same family have interviewed you in the span of a week. From Details:

Q: Are the girls all over you at your shows?

A: They say some funny shit. This one girl was like, "I'm a hockey player. I even have a hockey butt." And they are real obvious with their intentions. I don't find females intimidating by any stretch of the imagination, so these girls come through with their bullshit--they're like, "Oh, I care about you," and I'm like, "Get out of here!"

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It being April and all, we feel compelled to announce that the long awaited Infinity Blues, the poetry collection by Ryan Adams, is in finally in stores. To the left: a poem drawn from the "Lower Class Mythology" section, one of five chapters that also include "Bad Ideas," "Infinity Blues," "Chapter 11," and "Tomorrow Happens," which it most definitely usually does. At the moment, however, we are mostly hung up on the acknowledgments page, which to our knowledge marks the first instance of the words "Voivod" and "the Dalai Lama" showing up in such proximity to one another. Full scan below.

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