It’s interesting how associative memory works. I can think of someone I know or have known, and that thought will pass through like a windy cloud, shapeless and fleeting. However, if I am in a crowd of people (say, for instance, the Arcata Plaza on Kinetic Saturday) and a familiar face pops up, all of […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
Posted inMusic
You Can’t Fight in the War Room
I’ve always found it kind of odd that we call it Memorial Day, since the American consciousness is generally incapable of attaching memory to reflection in a way that serves as a reliable monument to the past. We tend to expand grievances while bumping out facts in favor of a national mythology incompatible with an […]
Posted inMusic
Timelines
Last weekend, I decided to do something I occasionally find myself driven to with the same blind intensity of purpose that steers a spawning salmonid: I rewatched a favorite movie. Not just any movie, but one I consider to be perfect from the score to the atmosphere to the acting, just a wholly enjoyable experience. […]
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Poly Promenade
Living year-round in a college town is weird and it seems living in a Cal Poly town is only going to be weirder. Assuming I will ever be able to afford to permanently settle here, my years will always be divided by the academic calendar, already askew from nature, beginning as it does, in autumn. […]
Posted inMusic
The Infinite Jukebox
Last week we lost Harry Belafonte and early this week, Gordon Lightfoot saw his last sundown. In both cases, there is in my mind a tone of triumph rather than tragedy, as they died at advanced ages, in which living is in itself an achievement. Particularly in the case of Belafonte, who was a four-year […]
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God’s Eyes
“Every love story is a ghost story” was a favorite quote of the late author David Foster Wallace, which he attributed to the later author Virginia Woolf. This wasn’t the case, however, as the quote has been traced to the Australian author Christina Stead, who was referring to writing after the death of her husband. […]
Posted inMusic
Color Wheel
Well friends, it’s the beginning of flower season again and I could not be more pleased. I’m talking calendulas, daffodils, trilliums, California poppies (not the band, but they are fine, too). I have an abstract relationship with flowers, in that I encounter them as a cheerful addition to my daily life without choosing to become […]
Posted inMusic
Bowling for Housing
Very few people are immune to the temptations of self-mythologization. This makes sense in America, where we are raised from birth by the flashing dream machines provided by the entertainment, sports and advertising industries. Narrative is injected into our minds like the processed filling in Twinkies at such a rate and volume that we are […]
Posted inMusic
Tastemakers
A lot of important figures in the music world have passed away recently, three that I consider quite notable are saxophone god Wayne Shorter, multi-instrumentalist and hired gun David Lindley, and bassist Steve Mackey, whose work with one of my favorite Brit bands, Pulp, was both melodic and charging. However, the last week has seen […]
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The Many Rites of Spring
The birth of the modern world, the fresh and terrible 20th century, is a tough date to pin down, but an argument can be made, culturally at least, that the natal fluids ran red and voluminous in Paris on May 29, 1913, when Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring debuted to an audience that was so […]
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Hootin’ and Hollerin’
At the end of the preface to Hegel’s difficult but rewarding work Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the philosopher evokes the image of Minerva (in Greece, Athena) the goddess of wisdom and justice. Minerva’s wise owl, we are told, only takes flight with the coming of the night. This means we can only grasp […]
Posted inMusic
In Bloom
I remember describing irony in a high school English class as something that fundamentally deals with opposites. I was looking down when I said it, having at the time not yet developed any of the obnoxious confidence that I am now unfortunately surging with. One girl in the class took my downward gaze as evidence […]