Quick Hits

• So, did everybody make it out to a local record store yesterday? No, Best Buy doesn't count. I stopped by Reckless Records on Milwaukee in Wicker Park (yes, I recognize the irony in linking to the Reckless Web site while talking up the importance of bricks-and-mortar record stores). I picked up used copies of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, a collection of Talking Heads extended remixes, and the second Keane album. The Name of This Band . . . is special to me for a couple of reasons, but one of them is that when I was an exchange student in Japan, a few friends and I trekked up to Osaka for a Heads show (or just a trip to Osaka, as the case may be). As it turned out, it was jut a few days after the Tokyo show that was captured for posterity on this album. If you got anything at a record store yesterday, tell us about it in comments.

• There've been a couple of interesting profiles in The New York Times lately that I haven't had time to link to. This one on Joe Simon, creator (or co-creator, as the case may be) of Captain America is a prelude to his appearance at the New York Comic Con this weekend. Simon offers opinions on the new Captain America ("The new costume, with the pistol and knife, and the old shield design going down to his privates, that's not Captain America") and the recent Siegel copyright case ("That's great, Jerry Siegel started it . . . We always felt 'we wuz robbed'"), and he shows the "Last Supper" painting he created when he heard of plans for Cap's death. The article also includes an odd, unexplained cameo appearance by Todd McFarlane.

• The other intriguing piece is last Monday's profile or Professor Irwin Corey, who seems to have barely slowed down in his age. I hadn't realized quite how radical he has been throughout his career. He cowrote a musical about a union organizer and was blacklisted from network TV. He claims he was even too left-wing for the Communists: "When I tried to join the Communist Party, they called me an anarchist." And, oh yeah, there's video of him performing, too.