It’s one busy Friday, full of options for live music. Here are three of our faves:

c/o ATP
1. All Tomorrow’s Parties NY
The British festival has finally made its way over to the East Coast for the first year ever, and takes place this weekend at Kutshers Country Club in Monticello, NY. It’s a bit of a hike out of NYC, but it’ll be worth the journey. Bands will be playing today, tomorrow, and Sunday—and include My Bloody Valentine, Fuck Buttons, Les Savy Fav, Mogwai, Yo La Tengo, Meat Puppets, Built to Spill, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Dinosaur Jr., amongst many many others! Get your booty upstate!

c/o Stereogum
2. INDIAN JEWELRY
Indian Jewelry are playing at the Knitting Factory tonight, with special guests White Magic and Talk Normal. Expect to hear intense pysch/drone, and perhaps even expect to see some people have seizures as Indian Jewelry’s hallucinatory strobe-lit stage act can induce some serious reactions.
8 pm tonight at The Knitting Factory

c/o Mugison
3. MUGISON
Iceland’s Mugison has been gaining notoriety for his besrerk one-man-band act ‚Äì which incorporates a bluesy psych influence along with computers, screams, and pummeling percussion. He’s playing two sets in our fair city this weekend:
8 pm Saturday at Mercury Lounge
8 pm Sunday at Union Pool

via all i saw farm
A new blog has sprouted up from the seeds of Things Younger Than McCain, documenting all things in the world with approximately as many people as Wasilla, Alaska. Among them:
People Who Saw Hottie and the Nottie in Theaters
The Number of People Applying to Work at a new WalMart
The Number of People in the World’s Largest Peace Sign
The Number of People Living in Dorms near Henrietta, NY
First Week Sales of Kevin Federline’s Debut Album
and of course
Members in the Facebook group ‚”A Vote For Sarah Palin is NOT a Vote for Women’s Rights.” which notes “There are 5,590 members in the Facebook group ‚”A Vote For Sarah Palin is NOT a Vote for Women’s Rights.” She’s probably qualified to be the administrator of a group that size.”
Brooklyn, as heavily populated as it is, has about 10,000 people per square mile. Meaning, Sarah Palin could probably successfully govern a little over half a square mile of Brooklyn residents.
Visit: Approximately as many people as Wasilla

Mudflats is an excellent blog chronicling the corruption in Alaskan politics. We love their post on the “Alaska Women Reject Palin” rally:

I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage. … The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally ‚”a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages. …
Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. …
So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage!

We’ve posted a video of the rally below. The blog is a great window into Alaskan politics so definitively check it out.

This looks great. Its out in New York on October 24. Directed by Charlie Kaufman (Academy Award-winning writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), the film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener,Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Hope Davis. Higher quality version here.

[hat tip Wonkette & Rumproast]

Obama’s back in the lead.

The Sept. 14-16 Gallup Poll Daily tracking update shows Barack Obama regaining a slight, although not statistically significant, edge over John McCain, 47% to 45%, among registered voters, marking the first time since the week of the Republican National Convention that McCain has not held at least a one percentage point margin over Obama.

[Thanks Anna]

Dear YACHT,
Will you please try to tour in NYC sometime soon? You are insanely creative, your music is super unique (as are your videos), and not enough people out here know about your amazingness. It seems like you only tour in Europe now, and I can’t really blame you, but swing by here in the not-too-distant future because that would make my day.
Kthnx.
EB

You probably have about 5 hours to watch a balding Tom Cruise dance to Flo Rida in Tropic Thunder before this gets pulled down from YouTube. So, check it out.

Shouldn’t a $85 $700 billion corporate bail-out, funded by taxpayers, warrant a Congressional vote? Just asking since the media hasn’t. Here’s some things we could do with $85 billion.

Sure, they may not understand facts, but conservatives are kickass at chanting “USA…USA” and “drill, baby, drill.” This report pretty much explains the logic behind all of McCain’s campaign lies. From Huffington Post

A new study out of Yale University confirms what argumentative liberals have long-known: Offering reality-based rebuttals to conservative lies only makes conservatives cling to those lies even harder. In essence, schooling conservatives makes them more stupid. From the Washington Post article on the study, which came out yesterday:
Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.
A similar “backfire effect” also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.
In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation.

Yup, Conservatives don’t like to blink, even when they’re wrong: