the dirty life and times of Bobby Joe Grooves.

Dan Jenkins has always been a personal favorite, ever since my dad brought home a copy of You Gotta Play Hurt from the library somewhere around the vicinity of ten years ago. That book remains a favorite of both of ours, mostly because I wanted to be a sportswriter like Jim Tom Pinch at the age of 14 and my dad wished he'd gone that way rather than news. Slim and None was put out in '05 in hardcover and made paperback last year, and since a lot of Jenkins is either hard to find in stores or out of print (Semi-Tough got the re-issue treatment only recently), I didn't get ahold of a copy until Dad sent me one last week.

Readers first met Jenkins creation Bobby Joe Grooves in You Gotta Play Hurt, as main character Jim Tom Pinch's golf pro of choice, and then got to know him more in the mildly disappointing The Money-Whipped Steer Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist. Now, Jenkins is chronicling Grooves' attempts to win a major at 44, while trying to get his love life jump-started with the mother of a Tour phenom after his third divorce.

The appeal of Jenkins as a writer lies in what everyone calls his "political incorrectness," and while it is fucking hilarious for the most part, some of it will rub you the wrong way. There's something questionable about the two times the NBA is mentioned that it happens to be about a player Grooves' agent has who's always getting in trouble for rape. The rest of it is what Jenkins readers and devotees come to expect: good humor, good golf lore about the course and the four major championships, etc. Bobby Joe gets screwed out of tourney victories something fierce several times in uproarious manner.

The problem is that it feels like Jenkins just re-wrote and updated Dead Solid Perfect again, without giving us a reason to really root for Bobby Joe in this book. If you read the Give-Up Artist, Bobby Joe's quest and efforts in Slim and None make more sense -- you know his back-story and his difficulties. Slim and None is Bobby Joe playing Kenny Lee Puckett, without the fun anecdotes of an imagined Fort Worth to add levity to a book about what, to casual observers, seems the most boring of sports. It's a nice afternoon read if you find a used copy, but I miss the Bobby Joe in You Gotta Play Hurt, whom, after he lost the Masters, cussed out Augusta. Now, he sings its praises like everyone else.

putting the spine back into electronic music.

This is what the Prairie Cartel advertises in their jokey bio, and being a cursory dilettante into most forms of music that involve drum machines and keyboard programming (although the Chicago-based group does involve a serious dose of electric guitar), I couldn't tell you if they were successful, or if electronic music needed a spine to begin with.

Does anyone call it "electronic music" as a catch-all? I presume it dates you to the mid-90s, when the Prodigy and Roni Size got a lot of ink and press over in the U.S. over a supposed "takeover." I mention the mid-90s intentionally, since one of the group's members is Local H brain-trust Scott Lucas (the band that got yours truly through middle and high school and also inspired me to pick up a guitar), who has a guitar with a "FUCK THE D.J." sticker on it (at right, if you click on the photo), so let's say this is a bit of a 180 for a traditionalist whose main band takes pride in straddling the line of big rock riffage and alt-rock alienation. I didn't even fucking know he had another group until I saw them in photos in the latest issue of Spin (not actually featured, but in one of the myriad adverts of magazine sponsored parties.)

Then again, if you've seen Local H live in the past couple years, you probably noticed the extraneous electronic noise that seems to come out of Lucas' walls of amplifiers (produced by a phalanx of guitar pedals, most likely). And if you bought Local H's No Fun EP, the ten-minute version of Primal Scream's "Fuck Yeah, That Wide" would have been an obvious tip-off to what the Cartel is doing (and the Cartel has its own version of that song up on the site, which is mostly just sped up a few beats, and still works better as a live song than it does through your headphones.) "Burning Down the Other Side" just builds on basic sounds, adding guitar riffs, vocal layers, etc. It's more impressive as experiment than an actual song. There's hope in "No Light," "Keep Everybody Warm," and especially "Cracktown," the best of the five tunes -- the guitars, bass, and electronic treatments pop in and out to give the tune propulsion when the chorus hits again. The problem with Primal Scream revivalism is that LCD Soundsystem does it better, but it's not a bad place to start.

Of course, you can go judge for yourself.