Via Robert Ham at wweek.com.

The great but financially strapped counterculture magazine Arthur will be returning to print after a four-year hiatus. Published by Jay Babcock, the LA-based Arthur existed from 2002-2008 and ran some of the most insightful and provocative music/countercultural/ political journalism in America and helped to raise the profile of "freak folk" throughout the world, aided in part by The Golden Apples of the Sun compilation it issued in conjunction with Devendra Banhart in 2004.

Publishing such a non-mainstream zine, while aesthetically satisfying, led to $100,000 of debt. The strain of trying to edit the mag and raise revenue proved too stressful for Babcock, so he ceased operations in 2008. But a move to a location just outside of Joshua Tree, California and a reliable source of income have given him incentive to relaunch Arthur. This is great news for lovers of interestingly written, left-of-center music/art criticism.

I'm really old, guys. I can tell because my eyes just kept rolling back further in my head the more I read this post currently up at the All Songs Considered blog:

I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I'm almost 21 and since I first began to love music I've been spoiled by the Internet.

I am an avid music-listener, concert-goer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I've only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, I've never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I've never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and t-shirts.

But I didn't illegally download (most) of my songs. A few are, admittedly, from a stint in the 5th grade with the file-sharing program Kazaa. Some are from my family. I've swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo (I owe him one).

Read the whole thing here.

Then go give some money to the artists you love, who make great music. Lord knows, with people like this out there in the world, they could use it.

Look for Seattle's most adventurous hiphop group, Shabazz Palaces, on the cover of the next Wax Poetics magazine (#51, an all hiphop issue) in finer shops near you (WaxPo content is rarely made available for free online, in keeping with its pro-analog/pro-trying-to-survive-in-a-hellish-time-for-print-media philosophy).

Note: There's also an edition with Nas and Danny Brown on the front and back covers. Buy 'em both.

If you're already tuned into the local music scene, there's nothing really surprising on this list, but it's worth taking a peek at if for no other reason than to see some talented Washington bands get some deserved national press.

Congrats, all! You're making the Pacific Northwest look real nice.

(Also: It's good to see some more great bands and musicians are getting shout outs in the comments, too. Get in there and show 'em what else we've got!)

This month's Rolling Stone (with Peter Dinklage on the cover) is the first Rolling Stone magazine I've bought in probably half a decade. It's smaller and thinner than I remember. It's pricier, too ($4.99? Really?), but it was totally worth the cost just to read (and re-read) Josh Eells's story about Tom Gabel, the lead singer of Against Me!, who came out as transgender last week. Most people know by now that Gabel is going to start living her life as a woman—she's going to take hormones and eventually change her name to Laura Jane Grace. And while thousands of people have commented on the blog post announcing the news, re-posted it on Twitter and Facebook (and it's been linked to just about every other music-related blog in the world), I hope just as many people read the full story to see the person who's behind the admittedly surprising "Famous Rockstar Is Becoming a Woman" headline.

Eells does a wonderful job telling Gabel's story. I feel so many writers could've taken advantage of her generosity and used this opportunity to write a darker, heavier piece. It's the first time a famous musician has come out as transgender, after all, and her transformation still leaves so many unanswered questions. It'd be really juicy to focus on all of the dramatic possibilities—Will the band stay together? Will the marriage last? Will the fans support her?—but Eells's piece is very straight-forward. He celebrates Gabel's bravery and paints everything in a very optimistic light. He recognizes the dark places she's been over the years, of course, but then ultimately focuses on Gabel's strength and the happiness she feels now that she's being true to herself.

We get to see what it was like when Gabel told her wife (she didn't know which pronoun to use at first either), her bandmates (they got stoned and decided they needed to work out to protect her), and her mom (who sounds awesome). We get to see a very vulnerable side of Gabel, but even more importantly we see her sense of humor, kindness, and excitement. Instead of being all about the adversity, it's about the triumph. It's really, really inspiring.

Basically, it's an amazing story, it's told especially well, and everyone in the world should read it.