[From September 2007.]

You’re going to be distracted and want me to pause and say something of how Hilary Duff got to be on my iPhone at all, but that’s not the story I’m trying to tell, nor is the genealogy, involving as it does Youtube and a television show I’ve never seen, particularly engaging beyond what I’ve just said. At any rate, Hilary Duff is received with some considerable enthusiasm, as is Cake, bobbing their heads to the rhythm and sort of nodding as if they could discern some affinity, however distant, with the punjabi tunes they had just shared over the static crackle treble of their mobiles. Seeing no resemblance myself, I chalk it up to the local minima of innate or at least cross contextually stable agreeableness found by the gradient descent algorithm of the pop music machine.