One sleight of hand I’ve maintained over the years of writing about records is I don’t quantify them, I qualify my feelings about them. You won’t see a grade assigned here; that’s not the point of listening to music, as far as I’m concerned. My habit is to showcase a record more than review it. […]
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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Ain’t Misbehavin’
Despite last week’s wild news cycle, you will not be getting any political talk from me now. I stand by my words from a few weeks ago, before the debate, that because we are all locally removed from national electoral culpability, we are free to chase our own winds, fair or foul. I’ll even go […]
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Summer Breeze
“July is dressed up and playing her tune,” is the relevant line from this week’s headline song, a dark, soft rock masterpiece from way back when. The question is, are you listening and from where? For my own part, I am temporarily housebound, recovering from a wee medical thing from last week (I’m fine), and […]
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Fanfare for the Common Man
While I am not a fan of historical hypotheticals and counterfactual guesswork, it is enticing to imagine what a different world we’d all be living in if instead of that homicidal hayseed from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, FDR’s previous sidekick Henry Wallace had been vice president when Roosevelt died. Wallace was an avid reformer in […]
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Zero the Hero
As far as humiliation rituals go, another debate between two of the oldest and worst men to ever run for president (with four more years of decrepitude stacked on since their previous showdown) seems like something beneath the dignity of most people I know. When Alexis de Tocqueville gave his speech on socialism — he […]
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Black Hole Sun
Here’s an interesting notion: This Thursday’s summer solstice will be accompanied by a waxing full moon that will reach its peak two days later. This probably has a variety of implications; for my (mostly) nightlife beat, it means your weekend will start out with more skylight than we have had all year. To put it […]
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River Man
Aldous Huxley had a regular column in Esquire Magazine in the mid-1950s where he once observed, “The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong; the next most distressing thing is to be proved right.” He was revisiting the legacy of his novel A Brave New World during the […]
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June on the West Coast
What more is there to say? We are now nested in the month so many people love for so many obvious reasons that it seems trivial to list them. On a final climb between now and the solstice to a solar pinnacle that will lead us down the dusty western slope of summer into the […]
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The Parting Glass
I’m going to keep this one brief because I’m on the backend of the long weekend and reeling from some bad business that went down on Kinetic Saturday. I’m talking about the last call at one of my longtime favorite watering holes, the Alibi. I had a farewell cocktail there after work the day before […]
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Hardcore UFO’s
Well, it’s finally here, Memorial Day weekend, which locally means the Kinetic Sculpture whatever it’s called these days. The weather looks promising, and this stuff is always fun, a welcome diversion and genuinely organic article of regional fun that hasn’t been digested by the tasteless acid pit of global consumerism (yet). I’m looking forward to […]
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Farewell Transmission
I don’t have the space or interest for big elegies or bios just now, but I would like to note the passing last week of two American visionaries who were utterly unique, yet still enabled so much of what is organically fantastic in our nation’s music and cinema. Steve Albini was a master engineer, and […]
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Pomp and Circumstance
It’s graduation time again at Cal Poly Humboldt and due to the circumstances of our times, as well as the stupid pomposity of the University’s president and his enablers, grads will be walking just about everywhere around the county except for on the campus. I don’t have much to say about that beyond what I […]