I had plans to write about some other things in the intro this week but have instead found myself washed up on another surprise holiday, this one being inconsequential and pretty annoying, President’s Day. I’ll call it Lundi Gras instead out of deference to my former New Orleans home, and like that in-between holiday, I […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
Posted inMusic
Love in the Age of War
American English is a lot like the American national project, it steals its resources from other cultures, dumbs down the nuance and meanings into a flavorless boil, and then demands a premium from the rest of the world for being forced to use an inferior product. William Faulkner wrote about his time as a failed […]
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All Tomorrow’s Parties
Last week saw the Arcata Rising fundraiser for the victims of the fire on Jan. 2 take over Humbrews from Friday to Sunday. I am not a very good chronicler of live music when it comes to the straight-story style of reporting; I tend to paint by impressions rather than numbers, for better or for […]
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Vision Creation New Sun
Alot of the problems in contemporary society can be traced to the servile tradition of western liberal compromise, and one of central stations of failure within that tradition is the long list of Nazi officials who died natural deaths as free men after World War II. One of the more egregious examples of this in […]
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Apocalypse Now
The day before a masked ICE agent shot a woman in the face in Minneapolis, the Eureka City Council voted to allow the Eureka Police Department to look into using drones as part of its arsenal. A week later, that same council voted to condemn the illegal occupation of Venezuela by the Trump-controlled military. These […]
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Wipeout
Despite observing my habit of (relative) temperance during New Year’s Eve at home, I managed to catch that nasty flu going around, the forces of which I am still reeling from. This has been my most stricken-with-disease experience in years and the reason I was absent from last week’s issue and still writing sparingly. This […]
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Tales of Brave Ulysses
Forget what I was on about last week; that was just rope burn from all of the tension of 2025. It’s a new year and nothing quite helps grease the mystery chute to the future like a conversation with an old friend. I was lucky enough to have one of those on Christmas, and you […]
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Bah, Humbug
Until very recently, I considered using this space to write about the future, Christmas and otherwise, as a means of suggesting through gentle encouragement how we might collectively find a path through the detritus of the present. But now I find myself working remotely from the wrong side of some flooded roads, and what little […]
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The Ghost of Christmas Present
The morning holds its breath as each day begins with the uncertainty of whether the first exhalation will be expressed as a sigh or a scream. Or maybe all and more, with laughter filling out a frightening new combination. The news is just awful all the time, isn’t it? Everything we understood in years past […]
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The Ghost of Christmas Past
The diminishing returns of nostalgia are nothing new, but their false glitter is one of the central lodestones guiding the artistic compass of my generation. Millennials didn’t invent sentimental cultural artifacts — they were first minted years ago — but we did kind of define the demand built around recycling their continued relevance. It’s one […]
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How to Bring a Blush to the Snow
It’s the last month of the year, which means I will be listening to a lot of winter tunes as we barrel towards the solstice. Top of that list lately has been Victorialand, the fourth album by the Scottish band Cocteau Twins. Released in 1986, the record is a swirling terrain of sounds inspired by […]
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Hot Freaks
It’s Thanksgiving again, a complicated holiday for a lot of folks for many different reasons. I certainly have mine. Tradition is a funny thing and often gets expressed as a desperate attempt at the impossible: to sustain the existence of an immutable, geologically timeless structure on a human terrain defined by the changing whims and […]