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The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

Published by Black Lizard Over the past 15 years, a steady stream of good, bad and indifferent anthologies has promised to deliver the thrills of pulp fiction. But for all the retro cover art, melodramatic blurb copy and Quentin Tarantino allusions, their contents have been shockingly deficient in what aficionados consider to be the real […]

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Ghostface Killah

Ghostface Killah is a brilliant storyteller and lyricist, and is the only Wu-Tang Clan member still making relevant solo albums. He’s a prolific and increasingly media-savvy artist who nonetheless seems to constantly shoot himself in the foot commercially. He’s also a crybaby. Recently, word got out that Wu-Tang Clan would release its first album in […]

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Generation to Generation

Ritchie Havens may not be the best songwriter out there. In fact, he’s quick to defer to his peers, and he’ll tell you it took him years to get past singing other people’s songs. And he’s not the greatest guitar player — he has an idiosyncratic style that’s mostly rhythmic strumming. But he knows how […]

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Wooden Shjips

CD by Wooden Shjips. Holy Mountain Records. Psychedelic rock has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity over the past few years, and we here in California have been lucky to witness such homegrown talent as Comets on Fire, Citay and Six Organs of Admittance as they have nursed the scene from its humble beginnings to its […]

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Snoop Dogg

In concert Thursday, Oct. 25., 2007 At the Eureka Muni. I was convinced that the Snoop show, which went down Oct. 25 at the Eureka Municipal Auditorium, would be a total sausage fest (mostly dudes I mean). I thought said sausages would shed tears and scream and jump up and down excitedly, kind of like […]

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Retina Riddim

CD by Gang Gang Dance. The Social Registry Commenting on MTV in the early ’80s, the critic Greil Marcus famously claimed that the music video was an art form that was “born dead.” Marcus may have been a bit harsh, but the music video as we know it in pop culture is a medium that, […]

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Too Much Freedom

Czech prog/punk avant-rock band Uz Jsme Doma is making its way across the U.S. The day I caught up with the band’s keyboard player/songwriter and only remaining original member, Miroslav Wanek (Mirek for short), UJD had just played at an elementary school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “It was a last-minute substitution,” he explained, the indirect […]

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Halo 3

Bungie/Microsoft I have a confession to make: I don’t like first-person shooters. Most of the ones I’ve played share the following objective: “Shoot the marines-aliens-terrorists-mutants and escape from the bunker—prison—top-secret facility—warehouse full of crates.” I find this a bit boring. I therefore believe myself uniquely suited to hack my way through the dense jungle of […]

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alt. something

Who is Thurston Moore ? As they put it semi-succinctly on the Ecstatic Peace! promo for his latest album, “Thurston Moore [above], for those of you just visiting planet Earth, has been playing music and liberating whatever ossifying standards rock ’n’ roll becomes threatened by since the late ’70s when he walked the downtown jungle […]

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Shine

By Joni MitchellHear Music Over the last few years, the successful comebacks of rock icons have become old hat. Dylan, McCartney, Simon and Waits are just a few that have showered us with unexpected brilliance. And when these career resurgences are positioned as anything more than a well-executed money grab, it seems a tad inauthentic. […]

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Another Blast

We seem to have a steady stream of blast-from-the-past bands coming through for shows at one venue or another, some more authentic than others. You know what I mean — iterations of Foghat and Iron Butterfly with just their drummers from days gone by, Mike Love fronting a band called the Beach Boys. Cher-Ae Heights […]

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