I love Fresh Air's "rock historian" Ed Ward. He really nails it every time out - even when he covers stuff I know a lot about I learn something, and I'm never lost when he covers something I've never heard of.

He's had two great Fresh Air segments recently. This one covered the early days of Sly Stone (aka Sylvester Stewart), when Stone was still best known as a radio DJ and record producer. It even includes some rock records he produced (I had no idea, and I couldn't be a bigger fan).

This one covered another early-70s soul legend, Syl Johnson. I had no idea his career stretched so far back before his days working with Willie Mitchell, as the bluesier Al Greene.

I can just listen to this album over and over forever.

Via Ego Trip

Below: the video for "Elevators," plus the rest of the segments on the show.

On this week's JJGo, I talked about the amazing Pakistani-Indian border sequence of Michael Palin's Himalaya. Here it is in all its late-80s-African-American-gay-man-living-in-Paris-wearing-a-headdress-and-stomping glory. One of the greatest things of all time.

The French fashion house Balmain came up on my style blog (they were selling an $1800 hoodie). It reminded me of the opening lines of this song, which is featured in Hotel Chevalier, the short film that was distributed with Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited.

The film is below.

Robin Thicke, "Brand New Jones."

Honorable Mention: Tweet "Oops (Oh My)"

Bill Burr doesn't approve of facelifts.

"Would you rather be 45, and look 45, or be 45 and look like a 28-year-old lizard?"

The show Jordan works for, The Daily Habit, has some really fantastic music bookings. This is one: Indie heroes Wavves backing Wu-Tang legend The GZA, performing GZA's iconic Liquid Swords.

I'm prepping to interview Nicolas Winding Refn, the director of "Drive," a really remarkable film that Julia and I saw a couple weeks ago. It's a crime thriller starring Ryan Gosling (along with a bunch of other brilliant folks - Albert Brooks, Carey Mulligan, Christina Hendricks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman), but it's disconcertingly quiet. Punctuated, every so often, by shocking violence.

This trailer is really just an early scene from the film in its entirety.

The song "A Real Hero" serves as a sort of theme for the movie, and for Gosling's character. It reminded me of an early 80s score by Tangerine Dream. It's both inspiration and reserved, almost melancholically so. Like the movie, though, it really gets under your skin.

I contributed an afterword to this really cool book - Mail Order Mysteries. It's a great-looking collection of ads from old comics for things like Ray Gun plans and X-Ray Specs. Each is presented alongside the actual item you received if you ordered it. I'm guessing they asked me to write the afterword because they thought it would be fun, but what I wrote turned out to be a kind of sad meditation on growing up.

Anyway, it'll hit book stores September 10th, but you can pre-order it now. Great leafing-through book, a great gift, fun stuff. Except for my afterword. That's sad.