We've been listening to more radio lately—it is a window onto a shared world, however limited, so even if we aren't getting out to see friends, we can still participate in social reality by listening to callers sound off on the Moss trade. Plus a Wilco CD is stuck in the player of the vehicle that was handed down to us. Plus unexpected rewards may be delivered by the radio, and as students of behavioral science, we know that an intermittent schedule of reinforcement is the best way to strengthen a given behavior—a slot-machine that pays out at random is going to be more addicting than one that pays out every time. "Jet Airliner" came on recently, and I guess I had never really listened to it, and my ecstatic experience of Steve Miller's pacing and delivery of rhyme fueled the next several weeks of Scan and Seek. Compulsive radio-checking was also reinforced by the rediscovery of Boston's "Let Me Take You Home Tonight," the (comparatively) grainy acoustic realism of which runs counter to the production aesthetic of the rest of the band's debut album. It just sounds less fake. Easier, funkier. In my currently impoverished mental life, its melody has taken on great importance. The austere Strat-nudity of "Before You 'Cuse Me" (the Journeyman version) is totally avant-garde, and the lameness of Clapton's fills is deceptive—if you can make it through the verses, the outro solo is other-worldly. Clapton is God. Driving over the bridge from Portsmouth to Kittery after a desperate afternoon of listening to the Shark, my ears were wiped clean by "Alive." You couldn't transcribe this melody without recourse to quarter-tone accidentals. Sasha Frere-Jones reviews the Pavement reunion in the current New Yorker, and he thinks they're pretty good, though not, as Robert Christgau claims, "the finest rock band of the nineties," an honor Frere-Jones reserves for Nirvana. Fuck that. Pearl Jam. This is just a guess, since I really don't know their music, but my hunch is that no 90s band is more deserving of critical reappraisal and hipster embrace. Last night WMPG happened to be playing a demo of "Inca Roads," and Tessa got wide-eyed and still and pursed her lips in a silent "ooh" shape of curiosity as she tuned into its sound-world.