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 Quite excellent special supplement on Baghdad culture in al-Ahram. Spend some time there.

 But really, who needs culture when you have Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! And Pizza Hut and Burger King are setting up franchises!

 Unknown photos from Blow-Up, my favorite '60s art film, suddenly discovered.

 Real bought Listen.com for $36 million. I'm mystified.

 Good Slate.com: Rating News Networks War Theme Songs.

 More juicy info on those CNN.com obits. The funny thing is that the experimental site Lab404.com can claim indirect credit for the leaks. Semi-related: "classic" digital art on display in NYC.

 The Post claims Pabst Blue Ribbon has staged a comeback "led by colleagues such as snowboarders and indie filmmakers." Whatevva.

 I haven't talked about Chuck for a while. Because he refuses to get a blog, I'm licensed to say whatever I want about him. If you're new around here, Chuck is a college friend, now at Spin, who recorded his college and high school memories in this book, which I hated the first time I read, probably because he doesn't talk about me enough. He recently interviewed Radiohead in England, and had this to say about Thom Yorke: "He is very unshaven and does not appear to comb his hair; he was very nice, though, and quite interesting (not difficult at all)." You can read the rest in Spin next month. And Chuck's new book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (available for pre-order), is out in August. Over Christmas, while drunk, he said there's an essay in there about the summer we lived on University Avenue and discovered Slacker, which, well, changed everything for me. And, oh yeah, he's on my Amazon list of people who have punched me.