On The Record: Billy Corgan, With Lasers

Monday morning, while I was either bemoaning the wretched state of my fantasy baseball team (Bobby Abreu, why hast thou forsaken me?!?!) or mainlining tallboys of Steven Seagal's Lightning Bolt Energy Drink (which, for reasons not apparent to me, has recently been discontinued — sounds like the American public couldn't handle "100 percent pure Steven Seagal Juice"), the Smashing Pumpkins made their triumphant return to the world of music-video entertainment with a rather inexplicable clip for "Tarantula," the first single from next week's Zeitgeist album.

And while the relative worth of any music video may be up for debate these days, "Tarantula" can be viewed as a success, mainly because it served as a way to make lots of people — or at least lots of people here at 1515 Broadway — talk about the Smashing Pumpkins, Version 3.0. Which may or may not be a good thing