STILL A VERY SLOW "NEWS" PERIOD, but:

WALTER BECKER, the guitarist and songwriter who made suavely subversive pop hits out of slippery jazz harmonies and verbal enigmas in Steely Dan, his partnership with Donald Fagen, died on Sunday. He was 67. From the NYT obit: "Steely Dan’s lyrics were far from straightforward, depicting cryptic situations and sketching characters like addicts, suicidal fugitives and dirty old men. 'You can infer certain things about the lives of people who would write these songs. This we cannot and do not deny,' Mr. Becker deadpanned in an online interview with the BBC."  Fagen wrote his own remembrance.  Some of the Dan's finest are surveyed by The Guardian, while Pitchfork finds Becker's influence in his guitar work.  The Record salutes his understatement.

ALSO: It's, you know, "September."

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: The overall box office was supposedly 1.5 percent better than last weekend's "worst since Sept 2011" performance? Odds are these estimates are inflated.  Anyway, The Hitman's Bodyguard treepeated atop the chart with 13.4MM. Annabelle: Creation placed with 9.3MM and a roughly 91MM totalagainst a 15MM budget. Wind River showed, climbing one spot with 8MM and 20MM domestic against a 11MM budget.  Leap! slides to the fourth slot with 6.6MM, but most of its take is overseas (80MM so far). Logan Lucky rounded out the Top Five with 5.6MM and its 22MM domestic total creeps toward its 29MM production budget.

THE DUKE & DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE are expecting their third child together.

That should do it for today. More tomorrow, I would think.