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 […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
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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 […]
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Message in a Bottle
I’m writing to you from the murky depths of last week, ahead of a quick retreat away from wi-fi and glowing things, so apologies if I have missed some massive earth-shattering event in the news cycle. What that could be is anyone’s guess, as we have all learned time and again that things that should […]
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Songs of Love and Hate
I was texting with my sister last week after her birthday and she was in the process of making a playlist of the worst songs ever written. This was unsurprising, as we are like-minded shitheads, despite her being a formidable and dangerous Scorpio lady. We agreed on a few additions from each camp: her suggestion […]
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Hog of the Forsaken
Now that we have burst through the membrane of the macabre month of sweet decay and symbolic death, it’s time to settle into the darker reality of standard-time long nights and the spectacle of a (sort of) election in a country that is fairly anti-democratic. It’s all well and good in my household — I […]
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The King in Yellow
Written in the last decade of the 19th century, Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow inhabits a high-water mark in the lineage of weird fiction and is like nothing else in the canon, including the other published works by the author himself. Only a couple of the stories follow the titular theme to its […]
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The Twilight Zone
“Although it might feel as though you are quite still at the moment, you’re actually moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into … the Twilight Zone.” Those words, grabbed from one of the variations of introductions into the old TV show from which this […]
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Jeepers Creepers
The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valleyThis broken jaw of our lost kingdoms — From T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” Jeepers creepers, where’d you get those peepers? Well, if you are unfortunate enough to share values with the people currently executing the […]
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers
In last week’s intro I wrote about the fear of the zombification of our neighbors, teasing a discussion about a sneaky way of writing about an inversion of that concept. Well, here it is: The central idea shifts from a fear of your social equals to the creeping horror of full institutional political capture from […]
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Zombies Ate My Neighbors
It’s October, which means I’ll be culling my column headlines from various horror artifacts from pop culture. This week’s title comes from the 1993 Super Nintendo video game that I wasted many glorious childhood hours on during the twilight of the last century. A fun romp through dead-brained suburban wastelands full of invading monster movie […]
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Post-Millennium Tension
At a certain point in your life, the corrosion of your memories meets the current of dreams and the two become more or less indistinguishable. Older impressions melt away in the psychic wash, only to reappear as patchwork colors on the uninvited night coat of sleep. After all, the mind has its own efficiencies, too, […]