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 — […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
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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 […]
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Overture
I am running down a deadline and the music I’m listening to while writing has just shifted to Rachmaninoff, so time is ticking away along with the score. For those of you wondering if there is a contradiction when I mention a different act I’m listening to while writing in the text below, there is […]
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Do-Si-Do
I’m going to be brief here because I’m writing at the coda of a beautiful day. I had a wonderful time with some loved ones and the centerpiece was visiting some departed family members in the Trinidad Cemetery, one of my favorite places. We had our picnic there in the sun, with, counting the dead, […]
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Fast Cars and Night Gardening
Spring hits the streets this week and the build-up in the air has been absolutely blooming with sensual ions and ozone for anyone with the right peepers. The forces of the Earth churn on through the wasteland detritus of human ambition and we can still feel and be animated by those primeval forces despite our […]
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Blanking Down the House
My country is raining death upon one of the largest and oldest cities in the world, and as one of the apparently few genetically abnormal American mutants who experiences grief and empathy, even for total strangers, this has gotten to me. Heavily. Let me distract myself with a little housecleaning. When I wrote years ago […]
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Twisted Nerve
I had wanted to write about something else, but once again the gears of my attention span are gummed up quite a bit. I’m all for stopping to smell the flowers, but that behavior can appear frankly insane and willfully ignorant when the endless stench of crimes against humanity has been rising for years against […]
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The Clever Hounds
This week’s offering is named after a rugged translation of an old Cajun tune whose name percolates back to a galvanic collision between French and colloquial English from the days before electricity allowed such modern alchemy. I guess I’m inspired by the inscrutable story titles of my late hero Edward Gorey, whose 101st birthday clicked […]