return

I apologize for being absent all last week. I had a gigantic work project that took about 90 hours to finish. Forgive me?

FILM

 Trailer to Sophia Coppola's most recent: Lost In Translation. Looks good.

 A long time ago, I wrote a screenplay about a guy who slowly goes mad because of the innocuous mood music he hears everywhere he goes. It was my Doestovskian fable of the industrialization of culture (hey, didn't everyone write one of those?). Title: Face The Mazak. Apparently, muzak theory, which seemed to reach its zenith in the late-80s, is coming back, according to this article about Activaire (Metropolis article), who does music for big-scale boutiques (Prada). Recommended reading for the "spatial music" set.

 Craigslist.org is becoming a movie too.

INTERNET

 Google News Alerts. Sign up for any keyword and you'll get a daily email with all the articles (from thousands of publications) that contain it.

WORDS

 Words that sound dirty, but aren't.

 Annoying William Saffire multimedia auto-biographical profile. "I am an iconoclast." Sorry Willy, no one who ever said it was.

 I have never, ever, ever had this much fun reading Amazon.com reviews. Henry Raddick is a must-read, if for no other reason he has discovered actual titles like Taxidermy, a Complete Manual and Handbook of Meat Product Technology and Andrew Lloyd Webber Arranged for the Harp and Plastic Surgery - Penis Enhancement Surgery and... I could go on for a while.

 Nerve announces their Pickup Line Contest Winners. Not great.

LIFESTYLE

 Breaker from The Post: you can order drugs online without seeing a doctor. Way!

MUSIC

 Video: the best young white rapper in America. You got a big what? Chilling.

 Times Auto section: Putting Hip-Hop on the Highway.

 What Dave Eggers is listening to.

PERFORMANCE

 Maybe Blast Theory's ideas can reinvent flash mobs.

PHILOSOPHY

 According to this article, Derrida and Habermas have co-written an article that is "an unmistakable endorsement of modernist Enlightenment principles." I'm a little suspicious. Here's an interview I haven't gotten to yet.

LOCAL

 My pal Melissa, CP's music editor and now official "coup grrrl," lands another big fish. Getting Greil Marcus as a columnist was a whopper, and now Jim Walsh is bailing on the Pioneer Press to write a column for the alt-weekly (as he did a decade ago). You might have gotten the email he was sending around asking for Oct. 25 to be come the official Paul and Sheila Wellston World Music Day. Peter is tracking all the other movements in the Minneapolis music-media mafia.

 Deloitte & Touche's list of the Fastest-Growing Technology Companies in Minnesota. My workplace is in there.