Summer comes in pieces, with many unofficial starting points before the solstice. Around here, one of those points is the beginning of the Crabs’ baseball season, which started Friday. Opening night is always a big deal in Arcata, with people of all ages filling the metal bleachers and picnic tables to root for the home […]
Music
Coverage of the music scene in Humboldt County with upcoming shows from locals and out-of-town acts, reviews, interviews and more.
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Cut to Rip Torn
I’ve got a lot on my mind but very little room to write about it, which is fine; I’ve been overlong in the intros lately anyway. So I’ll just give a peek instead of an essay about what I’ve been thinking about recently. Two things mainly, both published in this still-young year, the first I […]
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Speedway at Nazareth
A little preface is needed before this week’s column gets rolling. It’s Memorial Day weekend in our stretch of the entertainment beat, coming a week after graduation at Cal Poly Humboldt. Which means that the front end of this piece will be heavy with a variety of live offerings, while the caboose is scant to […]
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Stevo by Starlight
Early last week, something terrible happened in the streets of Eureka that took the life of a man. I am not going to share the details of his passing. But don’t mistake this for an obituary, with vague allusions to death because this isn’t about death at all. This is about life, specifically the life […]
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The Buddha of Suburbia
Following last week’s introduction, one might think I was being a little too hard on the Democratic Party, and some folks might be bothered by that. Fair enough. In my defense, I’m trying to help people — not the party, I have no love there — get through the denial and bargaining stages of grief, […]
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Damaged Goods
This column begins on May 1, International Worker’s Day in most of the world. But we don’t celebrate that here because it simply isn’t allowed in the curdling nexus of industry and finance we call home. This isn’t by accident but rather design, as our nation’s relationship with labor oscillates between revulsion and fantasy. We […]
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Gloria
I went out past the back pasture in the body of this column, so no opening essay this week. In deference to Easter Sunday, when I am writing this, I humbly submit for your consideration the final words of Dante’s Divine Comedy, when the poet has looked upon God in Paradise, but finds himself unable […]
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Green Destroyed
This column’s song title comes from the highly influential — in my formative years, at least — album Human=Garbage by the anarcho crust punk band Dystopia. Lines like these were once attractive to an angry and borderline nihilistic young man: “Humanity is diggin’ its own grave From the master in the high rise To his […]
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Wildegeeses
Last week saw the departure of two very different musicians who have been extremely important to me throughout my life and to a great many other people as well, I would guess. First was Michael Hurley, the outer than outer limits singin’ stranger, with a singularly baffling songwriting skill that worked as an organic lightning […]
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In a Silent Way
Last week I experienced a brief moment of pure detachment, a period of silent grace — for the language of God is nothing if not Silence — while lying in the bed of my truck on some scraps of plywood, a flat tire propping up my legs. Pure quietude, no thoughts, no images beyond the […]
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The Merry Minuet
Today’s column is named after a Sheldon Harnick song, as performed by The Kingston Trio. It’s a satirical piece about unrest and violence in the world being solved by the modest proposal of unleashing the atomic bomb on the whole of humanity because “What nature doesn’t do to us, will be done by our fellow […]
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The Rite of Spring
Hey, check out this quote from the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus regarding Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and the reason for the season which we are just now leavin’ — according to the ancients, anyway: “But when Zeus ordered Pluto to send up the Maid, Pluto gave her a seed of a pomegranate to […]