(or click on Angus)

SPECIAL ISSUE!!!!
Some of the finest rockwriters working today are
in this issue, and I am NOT shitting you. If you don't believe me, jump to page three right now, and see what you think after reading Tony Rettman's piece on Hardcore. If you're familiar with Badaboom Gramaphone magazine, you're probably familiar with Joe S. Harrington and his very small-print, many-paged, and, in the words of Gerard Cosloy, "beautifully subjective" album reviews cum mini-histories. Joe's even got a book coming out, a maxi-history of rock (572 pages), which you can read more about here. AND he's still got time to contribute some heavy shit to Blastitude, such as "Why Does Everybody Hate The Strokes?", and the first installment of his beautifully subjective Top 100 Albums of All Time. We've also got C.M. Sienko and yours truly on To Live and Shave in L.A.'s long-awaited just-released final album, The Wigmaker in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg.

We've got our COVER STORY, Russ Waterhouse writing some nu-poetic reactions to releases from the Here See label, and an interview with Here See honchess Carly Ptak. We've got an interview with Peter Wright from down there in Nu Zealand. We've got the usual reviews by yours truly, Fuzz-O Dolman. We've got so much shit this ish, we told Brad Sonder to take a break!!

AND, speaking of someone who we didn't tell to take a break but is gonna start taking a deserved one anyway, this ish will mark Christopher Dean Heine's last installment of Only Seat in the House. His band the Holy Ghost has got a booking agent, they're putting out a record, and hell, he lives in New York City, muhfuh's busy, right? He will be missed, because I really do believe that he is THE FINEST SPORTS COLUMNIST WORKING TODAY. Does anyone else feel like writing a regular sports column? The catch is, you have to know and love yer sports, but like Mr. Heine, you also have to be an underground motherfucker, na' mean? Not one of these cheese-eatin' Dave Matthews motherfuckers, na' mean?
(NOTE: Please disregard the above -- the position has
been filled -- look for the debut of our exciting new
celebrity sports columnist in the next issue....)

FUCKIN' "A", DUDE! Big Daddy Don Rettman just coined a phrase in an e-mail (to describe his DJing palette for an upcoming show) which I feel sums up the Blastitude aesthetic pretty well too: hcpunkpsychelectrodubfunkarockspew!

The dubious HTML skills of yours truly were critiqued by some strange organization advocating the new search engine brain-teaser game called googlewhacking.
      "One-paragraph HTML lesson for the week! Hey, Blastitude: drop that crazy white_dot.gif as a background! It's one pixel by one pixel, so Netscape has to render - quick guess - four hundred thousand copies of it every time the browser scrolls. (Sure, it loads quickly in MSIE - but so do most viruses :-) At least create a larger graphic of 4 x 100 pixels, maybe 4 x 1000. Better yet, use the language as intended, setting table color with <table bgcolor="#ffffff"> - save a billion CPU cycles, worldwide! Stay calm; I'm going easy on you. I didn't mention that the spec doesn't even allow setting backgrounds within a <TR> :-) "
      Hey, Mr. Googlewhack: thanks! It'll take a while, but I'm gonna fix all my pages. In fact, I literally feel stupid and I'm very glad you enlightened me! <bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> was all I needed. I read about the single pixel background color trick in some flashy html tutorial a couple years ago and I wanted to show it off. One of the least enjoyable books I've read in my short adult life, but I did learn a couple things..