Pardon, but have you noticed who’s in the music section this week? It’s kind of ridiculous: Charles Mudede, Laura Albert/JT Leroy, Miranda July, Chris Weeg, Paul Constant, Marya Sea Kaminski, Grant Cogswell, Gary Shteyngart, Donte Parks, Stephen Elliot, Brangien Davis, Brendan Kiley, and Sherman Alexie

Damn! And what the hell are they all doing here? Making out to Portishead. From Mudede’s introduction:

Let’s think about this. Why the need to make out to Portishead? What is it about the trio’s music that makes it the ideal background for the experience of eyes meeting eyes, lips meeting lips, organs meeting organs? We have been there, you and I. That moment of desire. We need it to be perfect. The city lights, the booze in the blood, the smell of flesh. What shall we play on the stereo? Whatever it is, it must enhance the mood. If the music is too angry, too happy, or too heavy, it will ruin the moment. Let’s not expose, dampen, or evaporate our desire. We need this madness of lust to be complicated by greater obscurity, more mystery. And Portishead’s music does just this.

From Laura Albert’s entry:

There was a time when we were at it like bunnies. The “modern rock” station played Portishead nonstop. It was the time of roommates and thin walls, and radios turned up to mask. And Portishead were more to mood than the Sundays (too cute) or My Bloody Valentine (too noisy) or Blur (charming beat and accents become annoying during sex, like someone playing with your nipple post orgasm).

Right? (In last week’s New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones notes that Portishead is sometimes dismissed as “dinner music,” but I think that’s just the classy, New Yorker way of saying “make-out music,” which they are, and which isn’t really a dismissal.) All this, of course, is to dance around the release of the band’s latest album and first after some ten years, Third. So far, no one we know has tried getting it on to that album.