A few weeks ago, I came across a new band while reporting on a show at the Outer Space in Arcata. As is sometimes the case, I was first drawn to the group’s name: Thee Olde Druids. I threw out a line about that first impression, something about my assumption of their knowledge of lunar events, […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
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Life Goes On
Years ago, when I was sluicing off layers of the ooze of deep irony in which I and many other older millennials were minted, I started thinking about the effects of that caul we were born and burdened with. One of the defining qualities of certain seers of my generation is a bitter clarity that […]
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The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
There’s a certain magic about waking up in an unfamiliar place at an unusual time. Even when pain and confusion are involved, there’s still a special glow surrounding the experience. One that I suspect serious alcoholics and other addicts simply register as standard turbulence in the regular flight logs they file in pursuit of those […]
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Sideways
This one goes to a hard deadline and print on the first Election Day of 2026 for us Californicators, so bear that in mind while reading whatever comes next. Regarding the gubernatorial race, I am tempted to write “whoever wins, we lose,” but that’s not my exact sentiment. I’ll be cautiously optimistic if Tom Steyer […]
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A Slow Slide Whistle Before the Bomb
Judge Doom, the villain of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, was the despotic lawman of the film’s fictitious Toontown, a zany Hollywood for animated characters that existed alongside its real-world cultural mecca in the film’s 1947 storyline. Himself a cartoon in human disguise, this demonic executioner of toons sold out his own kind to pulverize […]
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The White Rabbit
Sorry about the brief intro, but like Lewis Carroll’s running plot device, I’m late for the party. Have a great week. ThursdaySavage Henry Comedy Club is hosting the first Barnstitch Artist Collective fundraiser for the Ink People Dream Maker Project and queer BIPOC creative nonprofit. The all-ages punk show is at 7:30 p.m., with a […]
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Wildwood Flower
There’s an anecdote about how the decline of the Roman Empire was experienced by the majority of people living through it. While movies and novels depict epic battles with cities falling to hordes of frontier warriors, most citizens who were ruled under the Aquila had a much less dramatic — but perhaps more meaningful — […]
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DirtyOld Town
I wasn’t born in Humboldt, but I spent enough of my formative years in McKinleyville to say — without flinching much — that I grew up here. And while I didn’t stick around for my whole life, I have been back in the general area for a while, and that reestablishment of residency has come […]
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Rosebuds
April ends with this issue, along with a microdosing session of damnation in my house that began with an early Holy Saturday and ended with a rewatch of Citizen Kane last weekend. The connective tissue between these events came courtesy of a revisit to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, where, sometime around April 10, 1300 A.D., […]
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Never, Forever
Something interesting about the springtime is the contradiction embedded between the old sensations that stir with the rising virgin growth of the newborn season. The vitality that comes with the turgid sap-flow and exploding blooms busting out colors and scents everywhere is shaded with a heavy atmosphere of the past, a twilight zone of dead […]
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El Sueño
We’ve all been in a funny spot lately, and we all know why, so I won’t drag the pen across that point any further. One thing about living through such disastrous and deeply stupid times is that we are all aware of the horrors enough that a wave of the hand says more than words […]
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Lilac and Star and Bird
I’ve been working on enjoying the rare moments of escape from the horror of the news while still balancing my observations on those horrors so as not to slip into a state of willful ignorance. April 15 — the last day of this column’s cycle — isn’t just Tax Day, it’s the anniversary of the […]