I’ll keep this brief because I really stretched out in my ekphrastic music writing this week and I don’t want to test your patience. It’s a brand-new week, a new month dawns, my birthday is just around the corner (next Thursday for anyone thinking about buying me a rideable war bird, black market Gundam suit […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
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Iko, Iko
I mentioned in a recent tagline that I’ve been getting into the works of the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It’s a fitting coincidence I’m lately drawn to the comical and grotesque “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent,” which balances a wild pageant of characters from the lands of the sacred and the […]
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Cupid is Stupid
Love is pretty wild, isn’t it? There isn’t a lot of raw data suggesting that love as a pursuit will pay out in dependable dividends of domestic comfort. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus suggested that a lack of pain and a tranquility brought on by a dearth of fear over one’s mortality were the keys […]
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Mr. Moonlight
February is an often overlooked month, a wet and cold placeholder in the depth of the northern hemisphere’s winter that isn’t even considered worthy of 30 days. Throughout history various cultures have named the month after frost, river ice, firewood cutting, mud or even cabbages (cole crops were staples of the winter in most of […]
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A Longer Short Month
January becomes February this week and it’s a leap year, so we get an extra day out of the month. It seems almost too much that 2020 is going to be just a little bit longer than most years, doesn’t it? Well, here we are. We are compelled by the calendar to go through the […]
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From Tragedy to Farce
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 […]
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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 […]