Sometimes you know you’ve been working a little too closely on a certain type of band when you find something like this and hang your head in frustrated laughter.

From the Sunday New York Times, which I read on my Kindle this week, and am thoroughly enjoying:

Puzzle-solving may be unproductive “in that Calvinist, get-in-the-crops sort of way,” but that’s part of the appeal. “There is, I think, something decadent about flaunting our mortality that way; about saying, by implication, look at me, I believe I have so much time on earth that I’m going to spend the next hour doing the acrostic in the Sunday Times Magazine. But what would be the point of a pleasure that wasn’t a little bit decadent?”

via Up Front – Michael Cunningham – NYTimes.com.

I spent all weekend mulling over what I could write about.  Ideas about music, snobbery, the ridiculousness of MySpace, and connections between food and art were all possible candidates.  But I just couldn’t find the words to put on paper.  Fortunately Ian Rogers wrote a post that’s worth ten of my best, and I’d urge you to read it.

The Jazz Challenge at FISTFULAYEN.

The post delves deep into what ails jazz in today’s music economy.  I don’t need to tell you that jazz has smelled a little funny (hey Ian, that’s a Zappa quote too) for a long time.  But here is a perfectly good teardown of exactly how an entire genre is failing within the context of digital distribution and promotion.

Choice quote:

Jazz world, seriously, and I mean this with all due respect: WAKE THE FUCK UP. It’s nearly 2010 and your art form is tracking the median age of people who were once into Hill Street Blues. There are a bunch of kids out here who are exactly like I was, in fact there are even more of them. The kids reading Pitchfork are on a slippery slope your direction, yet Pitchfork won’t review a “jazz” record unless it was recorded in Africa. Where is the scene? Make it accessible. Make it cool.

I really couldn’t say it much better myself.