Pedaling through Golden Gate Park the other day, we noticed the conspicuous absence of the giant purple half-head that has graced a lawn near the deYoung for a few months. We had all kinds of mean things to say about the head (adolescent pseudo-profundity, like something constructed for a Led Zeppelin album cover), but on the other hand, we smoked enough pot in high school to think, hey, awesome, a giant half-buried purple head with a 1000-yard stare!...

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

Today we're going to write about the Web site Wolfgang's Vault, one of those things we were always meaning to write about but never got the chance to. For various reasons which we'll get to later, we're going to write about it today. ...

Here's some good news for all you iPod owners (which would probably be all of you), Apple is finally close to an agreement with the Beatles to sell Beatles tunes on iTunes. And yes, that would indeed rock....

Happy 10th birthday, Bitch Magazine! Back in 1996, local writers Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler kicked up a furor with their provocatively-named zine about feminism and pop culture -- and ten years later, the magazine's putting out its 33rd issue (the Hot and Bothered Issue), they've put out a best-of anthology (BitchFest), and Ms. Zeisler's good-naturedly matching wits with Deborah Solomon of the NY Times Magazine (the East Coast's own Aidan Vaziri). Calls for a......

Lots of people love Memorial Day weekend because of the three-day weekend and the non-stop binging on fleshy dead animals, but we love it because all the rock radio stations bust out their "Top 500 of All Time" lists. We love those lists. It's where we get to hear what the mass of radio listeners consider their favorite songs and not the lunk-headed snots at Pitchfork. Will "Stairway" still be on top? Will people finally realize just how God-awful the Eagles really are? And most importantly, how much radio do you have to listen to just so you can hear the classic rock goodness that is the Top 20 songs? This year, both Live 105 and 107.7 the Bone busted out their Top 500 lists and that made the weekend even that more exciting. It was a veritable smorgasbord of rock. It also meant we got to hear what the favorite songs of both forty-something mullet heads and the alienated youth are. It's like a parallel world thing-- one is a list of everything before 1990 and the other is a list of pretty much everything after 1990. If we had only gotten Top 500 lists from both Alice and KFOG it would have been that much better because we could have also have gotten the favorite songs of Marina Chicks and white-bred Yupsters too. But, alas. ...

Sure, every Tom, Dick, or Harry Celebrity has a blog these days. Hell, Paris Hilton is even doing Pod casting. But that still doesn't mean it isn't a thrill when we stumble upon a blog of one of our favorite celebrities. And not just any celebrity, but Mr. "Don’t Stop Believing" Himself- the one, the only Steve Perry. Sure, he doesn't post that much, but this is the man who wrote "Patiently." The man who gave us our feature header "When the Lights Go Down in the City." The man probably responsible for more groping at high school dances than anyone except maybe the guys in Led Zeppelin or Boys 2 Men. In other words, give the man a break people. Hasn't he done enough for us? Luckily for us, Mr. Steve Perry himself was kind enough to "have a conversation with us" in honor of us featuring his blog for Bay Blogger Thursday (our, in our case, Bay Blogger Late Thursday Night). And remember we kid because we love. Seriously. ...

In a victory for the Beastie Boys, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today declined to review an earlier decision which upheld a lower-court dismissal of a case brought by James Newton which asked that the Beasties pay licensing fees on both the recording and the underlying composition for a sample of his 1978 "Choir," which was used on Hello Nasty track Pass the Mic. The Beasties had already paid licensing fees for the......

Way back in the day, we were fairly convinced that the Smashing Pumpkins were going to be the new Led Zeppelin. They were tripped out, looked great in velvet, and frickin’ rocked. In fact, we still occasionally put on our old casette of “Gish” and do some serious head-banging. We thought “Siamese Dreams” was cool if a bit over-done and thought “Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” was mighty impressive if a bit too long.......