Recently, listening to the soundtrack to the seminal Jamaican gangster film The Harder They Come after a long time away from it, I flashed back to a long-forgotten nihilistic fantasy of dressing like a dandy, wearing some illegal weapons in my belt and dying in some flashy way before I reached an age where the […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
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Land Speed Record
The title of this week’s edition comes from Minnesota punk pioneers Hüsker Dü’s intense 1981 concert album, after the group had — allegedly — discovered a performance-enhancing drug that sometimes goes by the second word in the said title, but before they essentially invented pop punk. It is a rough and wonderful crash course of […]
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The Summer Wind
We have certainly entered the part of the summer where our nostalgia for the bright and lazy days of late June is colored by the scent of wood smoke and over-ripened fruit. The kind of sensation that curls over our nostrils and into our brains like the tendrils of cigarette vapors from Rick Blaine’s ashtray […]
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Read After Burning
Burnstitch Collective has been attached to many of the murmurs I hear about simple and great ideas around here, and I am going long this week to write about them because it’s both overdue and perfectly timely. They are putting on an all-ages DIY punk festival called Against All Odds at RampArt Skate Park this […]
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You Want It Darker
I’m writing this around the 90th anniversary of the murder of the Spanish poet Federico Lorca during the Spanish Civil War by the brutal Nationalist forces under the command of eventual dictator Francisco Franco. I say “around” because the actual timeline of his abduction and assassination is still uncertain, as are the whereabouts of his […]
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Into the Great Wide Open
Everyone gets the blues, they just come in different tones and intensities, and like every color and feeling, appear different in the summer. I am no different in this respect and have recently discovered the need to work on new habits and skills to change the wavelengths a bit. One such trick is writing myself […]
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Lazarus and Co.
Last Sunday, I found myself with my arms spread against the wood-paneled base of the chromatic brass battlements of the pipe organ at Christ Episcopal Church in Eureka, my left ear pressed against the wood, while the tubes roared out beautiful sounds after the morning mass. I am not necessarily endorsing this behavior — I […]
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Dog Days and Old Ways
The summer always seems kind of dangerous to me. I could be lazy and credit my years in New Orleans for this feeling but that wouldn’t cover the issue. I can’t seem to enjoy the summer the way other people do, when they share pictures of themselves looking warm, loving, clean and happy like the […]
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Bold as Love
This month has been, for me, a period of increasing despair and detachment from the news at large, both at home and globally. It’s all so bad. And while I enjoyed the spirit of Spain beating Argentina in the FIFA finals, the whole spectacle itself felt like a stupider version of the 1936 Summer Olympics […]
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Bye Bye, Badman
I’m going to keep this brief because I am worn out. A little too much fun and sundown by the riverside over the weekend has caught up with me and I am tapped out. All work and no play might make one dull, but I’m not exactly feeling sharp at the moment either. There’s probably […]
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The Pan Piper
A few weeks ago, I wrote an intro here about a dawn chorus of birds I heard while camping. I titled that column “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” after a famous chapter from The Wind in the Willows, in which the pagan god Pan appears as a benevolent shepherd of animals to help the […]
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Born in the U.S.A.
I’m not interested in celebrating another “birthday” for America, particularly at this moment in time, but I think I am in the majority here. Not that a majority matters in a country that pretends to be a democracy while being burdened by wealthy authoritarian minority rule, but that’s not the point. There’s weariness and unease […]