Leading the Thursday Reading pack today, the CBC’s arts site has a fine piece by Matthew McKinnon about one of the few African faces in the whole Live8 spectrum, Toronto’s Somali-born K’naan, the subject of some riddik’ below-radar beefing by K-Os.

Speaking of Live8, my colleague John Doyle has an impassioned Irish defence of the event and heaps scorn on the haters in today’s Globe and Mail. Amen. (Sadly it’s for subscribers only.)

Elsewhere, Eye has interviews with Afrika Bambaata and Ari-Up of the Slits, both playing town this weekend. My colleague Russell Smith redeems himself (sorry, by subscription only) for his jazz-know-nothing columns with some interesting stuff on electronic music and conceptual art, including a “cloud harp” that translates airborne formations into note clusters, and Alarm Will Sound’s acoustic covers of Aphex Twin, in which Russell notes a double meaning of “analogue” - both as “not digital” and “analogous.” But he doesn’t propose much in the way of answers to his own question, “Why are so many people trying to make natural sources behave like machines and machines like humans?” except to posit a desire for “revenge on electronic music,” which is mostly silly. I think it’s less about revenge than about a continuing desire to explore our intimacy with the machinic.

The New York Times presents a bulletin on Marshall Allen’s efforts to keep Sun Ra’s legacy evergreen. And in NOW, Tim Perlich tips us off to an Electric Eels-influenced band from Portland called the Hunches, but otherwise this week’s music coverage generally suxx, because Sarah Liss looks to be en vacances.

Woo! And this just in: Speaking of the Electric Eels - and therefore of the 1970s Cleveland underground - there’s a treasure nugget of a piece in the anniversary issue of that town’s Scene magazine that tells a story I’ve always wanted to hear told: The pre-Pere Ubu, pre-Rockets days of David Thomas as a writer and art director at that ‘zine, under his Crocus Behemoth persona - “a bushy-haired hulk with the physique of a refrigerator and an uncanny thirst for vodka.” Shapes of things to come: His first article began, “I want to tell you about my fake arms.” It’s like the opening lines of Navvy!

DJs! Art y’selves up with these limited edition Christian Marclay slipmats, available only from Toronto’s Art Metropole! Because it’s always fun to think about Christian Marclay!

Passing notes:

Zoilus sends heartfelt hurrays in the sunshiney direction of Magali Meagher (of The Phonemes) and Bob Wiseman (of Bob Wiseman), two true-true-true Toronto talents who were wed last Sunday. May you have a gay marriage.

Last chance to get in on the movement to get Anthony Braxton a really nice 60th birthday present. I believe June 30 is the final day for donations. You may remember Anthony Braxton from Zoilus entries and Overtones columns past, or his appearance on the Cosby Show.

I haven’t bitched about Live8 in a while, because it’s being done to such excess all over the place (mostly based on wildly overstated notions of Arcade Fire and K-Os’s popularity). But I have to say: You wait until the last minute, when it’s long-since sold out, to tell us Neil Young is on the bill? Oh, Canada, please shove a maple tree up it. Prediction: The mass of the talent gap between Neil and most of the other performers will produce a wrinkle in the space-time flux, through which Molson Park itself may be vacuumed into a hell dimension forever. (Yes, one even worse than Barrie.) Obviously Celine had advance warning, thus the satellite feed. Tip to organizers: Position Gordon Lightfoot at the balance point between Neil Young and all the other bands, and you may be able to avert disaster. Do not allow any Barenaked Ladies to touch Neil.

Speaking of hell dimensions - although it took a mostly misplaced Buffy comparison to do it, I’m very pleased to hear Chromewaves has seen the Veronica Mars light. But folks, if you go rushing in there in search of a BtVS revival meeting, you’ll be disappointed. BtVS’s strengths were in the writing, the jokes, imagery, ensemble playing and working at an overall allegorical conceptual level way out of TV’s usual leagues. Veronica Mars is a much more kitchen-sink drama whose strengths are in suspense, tight plotting, wit (but not really jokes), steering clear of teen-soap cliches, an unusual frankness about the brutality of class dynamics in teenage life (and boy did BtVS suck on that front), a sophisticated father-daughter relationship, a bit of nice detective-genre gimcrackery, and most of all the performance of Kristen Bell, who carries the show by communicating an intelligence and integrity few youth actors ever manage. I bear no animosity for Sarah Michelle Gellar, at least not till overacted stridency took over in the final couple of seasons, but she never had a tenth what Bell’s got. Plus: Way better music on Veronica Mars, though that’s unfair competition - BtVS came up in the post-grunge hangover and sounds it, while VM is in the TV-becomes-eclectic soundtrack semi-renaissance. Still, Old 97s, the Streets, Dandy Warhols, Miriam Makeba, Ivy - they don’t break too emo, unlike a lot of shows, though they did have a Postal Service Such Great Heights moment that made me think there ought to be FCC regulation of how many shows are permitted to use the same damn track by the same damn band. <-- Ahem. Tangent. In any case, Veronica Mars, for smart-teen-TV addicts like Zoilus, is your one-shop rerun stop this summer.

As the world of audioblogs becomes ever-more mindbogglingly expansive, the themed and niche-oriented variety becomes more and more welcome. Today I found one on a subject dear to my 9-year-old, monster-book-devouring heart: The Essential Ghoul’s Record Shelf presents “the mostly undiscussed world of supernaturally themed novelty music.”

The blogger blogs: “It is Dr. Mysterian’s contention that one of the great but seldom-explored themes of popular music is the uncanny. Composers regularly write about unworldly and undead characters, including, but not limited to, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and various space aliens.” He intends to steer clear of goth and death metal takes as too obvious, and so far he’s got Mae West singing about a celebrity psychic, Lavern Baker doing Voodoo Voodoo, The Shaggs with It’s Halloween, Red Sovine’s classic Phantom 309 (which many of us know in Tom Waits’ great cover on Nighthawks at the Diner), the Coasters doing The Shadow Knows, etc. Aside from the Specials’ Ghost Town, it’s clearly got an oldies emphasis, but the accompanying notes and reflections are as much fun as a pair of trick handcuffs.

I’m just back from a couple of days out of town. Catching-up notes on their way.

I’ve always been dismissive of the Toronto Downtown Jazz fastival as thin mainstream gruel, and usually it is, but either I’m getting softer or the festival’s getting a little harder edged - this year’s program is actually pretty impressive. And this afternoon’s outdoor show by David Murray & the Gwo-Ka Masters stands out as one of the best free outdoor daytime concerts I’ve ever seen. No Hamid Drake on drums, unfortunately (I didn’t recognize the replacement but he was no Hamid), but the Guadaloupe drummers and Murray himself went all-out, even on the unfortunate departure from the African rhythms into a feel-good island party tune about Bahia that broke the trance they’d been weaving in the withering heat for an hour. And listen here: Herve Sambe (at back in this pic) is your new guitar hero, alternately scratching like a turntablist, nimble fingering it like all the jazz guitar heroes and shredding like Sepultura.

Aaron. Continues. To Bait. Me.

Hfff. Okay. It goes on (and on). And so, a list:

Moves That Are Not Critically Dubious Accusations of Insincerity.

1. An artist claiming that he or she is trying to be honest, sincere or “true to myself.” This can be cloying, but it is not illegitimate. In fact it is generally a positive thing. However, you do not encourage it by proclaiming in print that you can tell by the music someone is being dishonest or untrue to their self. That’s just playing armchair head-shrinker. Bands are not your BFF. Reviews are not “Dude, me and my girl are concerned about you.”

2. Accusing a work of art of being manipulative. Dare we suggest that you can be sincere and manipulative at once? “I wanna make people really feel what I’m feelin’ - I wanna give them the drama.” “Bring the strings in here, that’s what will make them understand my sorrow!” These are sincere impulses. They make for bad, manipulative art. If we could replace the word “insincere” with the word “manipulative” in all the Coldplay reviews, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. (Another good fill-in would be “humourless.”)

3. The Humpty Dance.

Off-blog, Mr. Wherry used the Zoilus search box against me by pointing out that I have used words like honesty and sincerity in reference to music myself more than once in the past. As I told him, I should have ‘fessed up to this earlier - I know I have, it’s just that I’ve come to think better of it. Obviously we all, if we care personally about music, have these theories and feelings about the performers/writers based on their music, and as jus’ folks and fans, there’s nothing really wrong with that. But I’ve come to think it’s not helpful as critical language, for all the reasons I’ve been yammering on about. It’s too propaganda-like - you should like this because it’s honest, you should hate that because it’s phony. It sounds too much like some Fox News guy spitting about Democrats: “We are family and they are pod people. They’re chai latte and we’re red meat.”

Zoilus has been too swamped today to hunt up much Thursday Reading for you - I haven’t cracked the weeklies except to know that if you check Now you’ll find a Final Fantasy cover story as well as The Divine Miss Liss’s mash note to Janet Weiss, with which she teased us earlier this week (in the Sleater-Kinney comment box below). There’s also an extensive news feature questioning the wisdom of holding a huge dancehall concert on the weekend of Gay Pride. (I’m not sure. I’m also somebody who finds that hater stuff hard to take, but maybe it’s the best time to hold a huge dancehall concert, so the artists and concertgoers are all out on the town and see the parade and possibly find their ideas challenged, rather than just phantasizing of phantom battymen?)

Eye’s blog also notified me of the sad news of the death of eternal Toronto Yonge & Bloor busker and would-be mayor Ben Kerr.

But beyond that I can heartily recommend one big read, which is a terrific history of the traditional blues/jazz tune St. James Infirmiry, its roots in 18th-century English ballads and how it made its way into New Orleans mythography, by my old friend Rob Walker, whom you might know as the Times Magazine “Consumed” columnist. The St. James piece first appeared in his email newsletter two years ago and is now in his new book Letters from New Orleans, which author Jed Horne called “as wistful as absinthe, as funky as a muffuletta at a joint off Tchoupitoulas.” Next stop, Da Capo’s next year’s-best-music-writing book. Gobble it up, yum.

More required reading: From Newsday last weekend, the dean of the flyboys, Greg Tate, on black shame, black rage, and the American tragedy of Michael Jackson: “It now seems Jackson’s career was leading up to this trial, which was as much about his betrayal of white America’s investment in his image as about his sleeping with young boys.”