There are a lot of things I didn’t like about last week, from comical nonsense like The New York Times endorsing Elizabeth Warren AND Amy Klobucar as the Democratic Party candidate because apparently we plan on being ruled by an executive diarchy harvested straight out of the professional managerial strata and with absurdly low support […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
Posted inMusic
Subdivisions
The new year claimed its first rock star death last week and it was a doozy. Neil Peart was probably the most uniquely influential drummer for the last four decades and his work in the band Rush is timeless and inspirational. The extremely private star’s death from a brain tumor was jarring to his legion […]
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Dust into Dust
In 1859, when Edward Fitzgerald published his English translation of the collected poetic quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam, the Persian polymath from what is now Northeastern Iran had already been dead for more than seven centuries. The Rubaiyat was a popular hit with a Victorian English audience thirsting for the romantic Orientalism Edward Said would […]
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Time Zone Twenty Twenty
This is going to be brief because we are still in the lean days of the winter break. But even though I am writing in the last days of 2019, I would like to wish you all a hearty welcome to 2020. All of those twos and zeros seem pretty futuristic, don’t they? Well the […]
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To the Future
As Robert Burns wrote, “And there’s a hand, my trusty fere!/ And gie’s a hand o’thine!/ And we’ll tak a gude-willie waught/ For auld lang syne.” Cheers. Thursday (Boxing Day) It’s Boxing Day today in the former British Empire. When anglophiles commemorate the glorious day that Sir William Box successfully routed the advance guard of […]
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War is Over (If You Want It)
Despite what the shrieking dummkopfs in the right-wing media sphere might have you believe, there was only ever one war on Christmas on this continent and it happened during the 17th century. The aggressors in question were Massachusetts Puritans, offshoots of the Mayflower borne pilgrims, whom we were taught to venerate as schoolchildren as the […]
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Pour One Out
Last week, local heavy music aficionado, New York native and Natty Dog Hot Dogs cart wrangler Eric Riccio died. That he died of a heart attack at a local heavy metal show should not be a source of grief for his many friends, customers and casual acquaintances, but one of pride. Eric loved OG punk […]
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Being Here
I had a one-two punch this week: On Sunday I got to see a beautiful brand new little baby that my friends made and on Monday I spent time in the ICU at St. Joseph Hospital visiting an older friend who is having a tough time after a very invasive cancer surgery. I hope to […]
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A New Holiday
I have been getting a lot of pushback for some of my opinions lately. This is good, people should talk. And if I’m right, I don’t need to worry too hard about defending myself, assuming that there is such a thing as objective reality and the spin cycle of post-modernism hasn’t melted us into insanity […]
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Blackened Brightness
This week is a bit of a somber one for me, as Nov. 25/26 marks the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death from cancer at the far too young age of 52. I give those dates because she passed away late at night after Thanksgiving of 1999, likely with the cold front that curls over […]
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To Autumn
It’s definitely been what John Keats called a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend of the maturing sun” recently. We have been lucky in that sense because even though I have been swerving in the low fog a lot lately to avoid the odd raccoon, dog, cat or dark-hoodied skateboarder, I have […]
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Loving the Alien
Despite some of the disapprobation I get from the public as feedback for a few of my hotter takes in this column, I am not a particularly “woke” person nor do I have much interest in being one. The only reason I talk about politics so much in a local music column is that I […]