I'm listening to Icons of Evil this morning and asking myself stupid butterfly-collector questions like "is this year-end top three or top five material," which are questions I generally try to avoid asking, for reasons I've gone into before. This year I kinda gave up though and started keeping a running list of what was killin' me just so I wouldn't forget at the end of the year when people started asking me to send 'em "my top ten." If Icons of Evil weren't just kneecappingly great, I probably wouldn't have thought to do this at all, but it is - no joke - so here's the list as it stands so far, first presented alphabetically and without album titles, since as far as I know none of these people have released more than one album this year.

Angels of Light (Young God)
Bloody Panda (Level Plane)
Bone Thugs (Interscope)
Bowerbirds (Burly Time)
Coco Rosie (Touch and Go)
Dizzee Rascal (XL)
Foetopsy (Barbarian)
Kings of Reggae (Rapster)
Laethora (Unruly Sounds/The End)
Mayhem (Season of Mist)
Melechesh (Osmose Productions/The End)
Missy Higgins (Eleven/Virgin)
Phazm (Osmode Productions/The End)
Pig Destroyer (Relapse)
Rwake - Voices of Omens (Relapse)
Rotting Christ - Theogonia (Season of Mist)
RTX (Drag City)
Vital Remains (Century Media)
Year of Desolation (Prosthetic)

Some years I feel ornery and cantankerous about lists; other years, like this one, I find or invent reasons to just get into it (the profusion of great metal releases that came out early in the year, for example, or the ever-pressing need to put off doing real work, like the lawn or the dishes). When I look over the list I think that if I were to order them they'd look roughly like this:

Bowerbirds
Coco Rosie
Vital Remains
Pig Destroyer
Bloody Panda
Kings of Reggae
Rotting Christ
Mayhem
Laethora
Missy Higgins
Foetopsy
Dizzee Rascal
Angels of Light
RTX
Rwake
Phazm
Year of Desolation
Melechesh
Bone Thugs

But then I think "the Bone Thugs album is easily better than the Melechesh album," and then "the Dizzee album feels like top-ten material to me but I sure don't wanna kick Laethora out of the top ten," and then "how can anybody argue with the proposition that Foetopsy's In the Bathroom is the album of the year?" And "why must I be scorned for loving MIssy Higgins the way I do"? Or "Ain't Rotting Christ totally awesome? Oh yes they are too you damn hater monkeys." Things like that. You know, really worthwhile use of my time and energy. The pressing stuff.

Anyhow, that's where it stands right now, and I think I'll spend the next several occasional entires picking over the list and seeing what it seems to say.

Readers who miss the long-form LPTJ entries will be encouraged by the publication of this book, which features my longest piece in some time. The book is a sequel to the well-known anthology Stranded, whose historical status is secure without further commendation from your humble editor.

It's time once more for a post rooted entirely in political hopelessness. Here, try this:

July 24,2007 | WASHINGTON -- The White House said Tuesday that there was nothing improper about Bush administration political advisers briefing top diplomats about key congressional and gubernatorial races and President Bush's re-election goals.

"You've got political appointees getting political briefings," White House press secretary Tony Snow said Tuesday with a dose of sarcasm. "I'm shocked. Shocked."

Mr. Snow is not the first political speaker to quote Casablanca in recent days. Indeed, from constantly-running mouths both right and left, you'll hear "shocked, shocked" as a presumably clever dismissal of an opponent's arguments. It's perhaps instructive, not to say "illuminating" but who knows, to remember the phrase's original context.

It is spoken by Captain Renault, played by the immortal Claude Rains. Captain Renault is a corrupt Vichy official on the take. When he closes down Rick's Cafe Americain, he states loudly that he's "shocked, shocked" to learn that gambling is going on there. The punch line of the scene is that as soon as Renault has delivered the line, a croupier hands him a wad of cash: "Your winnings, sir."

The ongoing simplification of this nifty little exchange - to dumb it down so that it means "well, duh!" - is perhaps not surprising, but something kinda awesome happens in the process. We now have the President's press secretary using the words of a corrupt Nazi-sympathizing police captain - fictional, to be sure, but drawn from real life - as a way of rebuffing allegations of impropriety within the administration. It is as if the speaker were chastising the press for not taking administrative corruption as a given, like the sun rising in the east. This is one of those situations where the irony seems both subtle and too broad to be true. Last Plane to Jakarta will personally reimburse the journalist brave enough to holler "your winnings, sir," while throwing a handful of cash at the next spokesman, politician or pundit whose idea of a role model is the lovable but amoral Captain Renault.

Last Plane to Jakarta is proud to present, for your reading pleasure & for the continuating edification of the youth, the complete lyrics to "Corpse Divorce," a song by the outstanding Wisconsin grind band Foetopsy.

I want a corpse divorce
because you are the worst
nnuh

There's three other syllables at the end, which may be "no you're not," but which may also be "nuh nuh nuh." Moot point. Song is magnificent and less than a minute long. Great leaping Christ I love this band so goddamn much.

This is another political entry. Sorry. It can't be helped. I should warn readers that the punch line of this piece - the first live link, there in the third paragraph - is a link that could contain some triggering images: not pictures, just words, but the sort of stuff that can give you nightmares.

Remember right before the invasion of Iraq - or the attack on it, or the occupation, whatever you want to call it, I'm not particular. Remember the run-up, anyhow? The whole point of striking Iraq was presented as, first, the liberation of a people under the yoke of tyranny, and, second, as a way of denying the tyrant in question the leeway to train up terrorists who might later attack us on our own soil. It's generally conceded that the second point was nonsense; Al-Qaeda's in Iraq now, but they most likely didn't move in until we'd unseated Saddam Hussein and destabilized his government. Who wants to try to get things organized under a tyrant, anyhow? It's rough work. Much easier to do in a place where chaos reigns.

The first point, though - I mean, we can't be expected to be, in Phil Ochs's memorable phrase, "the cops of the world," but when something cries out to the heavens for justice, how can a people of conscience sit idly by? And yet it seems that many countries in which the most horrific, wholesale butchery of innocents takes place daily can rest easy, confident that they won't even turn up on the U.S.'s radar as long as they're not sitting on an enormous oil reserve or the wrong end of a grudge. Case in point: the Congo. Of course, the case might still be maintained that the issue is terrorism - that the stability or instability of the region isn't as crucial in defeating Al Qaeda as is that of Iraq, often described by the administration as "a key front in the war on terror," but to this imagined response one can only say: oh, really?