​"Lil Wayne is free. I am on the cover of the la weekly. Life is pretty alright," tweeted Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino earlier today, and indeed, her face is proudly plastered over our sister paper's front page this week, under the combative legend: "The West Is The Best." Debatable! But there's a reason for the coverline. In addition to speaking on working with Weezer, defending her pop star bretheren ("I really hate it when people talk shit about Courtney Love"), reading Joan Didion, and being called "ditzy" ("I grew up in the Valley, and I am sort of like a Valley girl"), Cosentino speaks at some length in the piece about her time in New York, interning for the The Fader and being bummed:

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Gustavo Turner

​Our fine cohorts at the L.A. Weekly report on the recent, ill-advised street-art exploits of one Roger Waters, who has apparently commissioned folks in both L.A. and NYC to tag a Dwight Eisenhower quote onto various graffiti hot spots to promo his latest tour. Haven't seen evidence of this around here (have you?), but out on the West Coast, the result wound up on an Elliott Smith memorial wall. (Which apparently gets futzed with fairly regularly, but still.) Folks are most displeased. Somebody better be keeping an eye on that Shepherd Fairey mural.

So The Runaways movie opens today, with Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning prancing about trashing hotel rooms and leering and whatnot; our friends over at LA Weekly have a long, excellent feature on a figure with alas only a bit part in the film: drummer Sandy West, who died of cancer in 2006 after epic battles with both drugs and the law. ("She told me that in some ways being in prison reminded her of being in a band," a friend notes.) Sandy's own recollections of the Runaways' heyday are suitably grim and surreal: shooting heroin with Keith Moon, literally throwing Sid Vicious off a boat, etc. The craziest quote actually comes from a 2004 documentary on the band:

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This continues. After threatening to pay home visits to quote-unquote journalists who make "cavalier statements" about him "personally or with my fans help" (this may or may not be the LA Weekly), Mr. Manson is still carrying on, posting at least one angry mass-bulletin missive via MySpace. Buddyhead, the web site at the center of this nontroversy, claims that since Sunday, Manson's amended his profile thusly:

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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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