Cicero, writing a couple thousand years ago in a now dead tongue, wryly noted the habit among the wealthy men of Rome of copying the ostentatiousness of a great man’s sumptuous villas, while showing no interest in imitating his fine personal virtues. Ain’t that the rich for you? Then, as now, money could not buy […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
Posted inMusic
Party Safe
Last week I made a sly appeal to the Fates, suggesting we could all use a little break from the chaos of the front page and the never-ending news cycle of battery and degradation. It’s tricky putting out overtures like that because the sincerity of desire and the hope of fulfillment is usually tempered with […]
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Hail, Caesars!
As I write this, I am listening to John Entwistle’s excellent first solo album, Smash Your Head Against the Wall, and although I am not following that particular piece of advice, I am drinking enough coffee to bend small sections of space/time with my eye twitches. It ain’t much, but it’s honest work. Speaking of […]
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Come On Feel The Noise
We’ve got a lot of great local gigs this week, which is about as good as it gets regarding midsummer Setlists. And many of them are free, which certainly doesn’t hurt with the way things are at present. Despite my own hectic schedule, I was able to catch a few good ones last week and […]
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Hot, Hot, Heat
I’m firing this one off straight from the hip, so no frills, $20 words or political invective. It’s a dang scorcher today, even on the coast, and I don’t intend on spending the daylight looking at a screen, tapping away at a slowly heating keyboard, while the busy sounds of the landscaping industry hums and […]
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There Ain’t No Cure
Every week it’s more of the same. I tell myself that I will write something cheerful and light, then, without fail, the vast and seething continent on whose western edge we all live churns up some fresh, manmade horrors to bloody up the news cycle again. A mass shooting at a family-filled holiday parade, another […]
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Boom Times
This week’s headline might be a little sarcastic and only half-referencing what will undoubtedly be a spectacular fireworks display on Monday evening. Many people are really hurting and upset right now. It’s hard to look at the disorder in our world and find much hope. As someone who could be referred to as a “geriatric […]
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Bivalve Bedlam
One of my favorite sounds is the soft rustle of a breeze through the leaves of a tree. I’m talking about broad leaves here, like a maple tree, not the evergreens that tend to populate our forests, and whose branches creak and groan in the wind like the ghosts of old washerwomen attending to the […]
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Summer’s Sweetest Songs
“He’s a moody old man/ song of summer in his hand/ he’s a moody old man.” So begins Kate Bush’s “Delius (Song of Summer),” a gorgeous, impressionistic paean to the English composer Frederick Delius and his assistant Eric Fenby, who was placed into the position of scribe by the master’s deterioration at the ugly hand […]
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Land of Living People
Well, here we are, a few blinks away from the halfway mark of 2022. At least that’s how it seems to me, though I’ve been reckoning time very oddly this year. Things seem to be speeding up while staying in place. Nationally, there’s a sense of acceleration in stagnation, as if the engine is overheating […]
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Fresh Fables
It’s a brand-new month on the cusp of a new season, so let’s try something new in the Setlist. Rather than fill your head with information about some weird thing I’m reading, a new obsession I’ve developed, doom-filled mutterings about incoming degrading horrors from our broken government or an overwrought story about personal hardships, how […]
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Laugh It Up
I’m happy to report I finished last week with a show that absolutely repaired my mood and gave me just enough oomph to get back to the working week. I am, of course, talking about the Eureka Symphony’s amazing season finale. I will be brief because there is new business at hand, but two things: […]