It’s not often that I’m impressed with the trajectory of humankind. I wonder if we’ve hit a plateau and just can’t biologically evolve in any significant relation anymore to the technology we’ve created. The quantity of experience, and the quantity of stimuli that surround us in the 21st century is really mind-boggling, if we take […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
Posted inMusic
Folklife and the Trane
Thursday The Humboldt Folklife Festival continues tonight at the Carlo Amphitheatre with “Bluegrass and Beyond” starting at 6 p.m. You’ll hear from locals The Compost Mountain Boys and Clean Livin’ along with the excellent — and formerly local — Jenny Scheinman all playing out in the Blue Lake sunshine. The sun’s been setting about a […]
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Get the Folk Up
Thursday You might want to start getting comfortable up in Blue Lake in the run up to the Humboldt Folklife Festival. Start off this evening at the Mad River Brewery with folky fiddle tunes from Fingal, which will be starting it up around 6 p.m. and for free. Remember, kids and dogs are welcome, but […]
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Musical Drag
I wasn’t on top of my game enough to get in a column relevant to the other week’s Unpopular Opinions theme but I thought, even though late, why wouldn’t I want to get some hate mail as well? (See email address below.) What could be more unpopular than me telling you that your taste in […]
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For Want and for Need
Summertime is here, and we’re all hoping the living will be easy. To make that possibility that much less certain, my wife and I decided to cut our children off from all electronic devices for the summer. While this may sound like a great idea on paper, it’s a pretty insane 21st century move when […]
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The Kids are All Right
As I wrote this column on Sunday evening in my “office” (a shed in our backyard) a serendipitous moment occurred. Over the occasional sounds of our dogs barking at absolutely nothing, I heard our son and daughter listening to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” while lying in the hammock and grass (respectively). Perhaps as Father’s […]
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Kicking Off Summer
Thursday Electric-acoustic “mayhem” are on the bill this evening at the Mad River Brewery Tap room in Blue Lake at 6 p.m. Returning to the outdoor stage is Kaptain Kirk’s Kosmic Koncoction, which will be jamming the eclectic tunes free of charge. Three hours later, David Dondero — whom NPR hailed as one of “the […]
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Rock Rock
Where did “Southern Rock” come from? The easiest answer is “The South” but you already knew that. Things get a bit more complicated after that. With a measure of the blues (from the South), early rock ‘n’ roll (built off the simplicity of the blues) and country music, Southern Rock has mutated and changed over […]
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Entertained to Death
Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. I’ve been pondering this thought for a while now. I won’t claim to be a fully out-of-the-closet Luddite, but compared to many — my children especially — I am far more wary of the trade off between what we get from technology and what we give to technology. Specifically, […]
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About Bob
My freshman year in high school, I’d hitch rides to school with my friend Cameron and his mother. Cameron and I would groggily listen to cassettes his older brother gave him: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan. We listened to Dylan from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan up to Blood On the Tracks and anything […]
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Tropicalismo
It’s never easy nail down a music genre. As with many things ineffable, the more you describe them, the more elusive they seem. Much like quantum physics, the more microscopic your view, the more you see, ad infinitum. This paradoxical quandary hit me while trying to pin what it was about Sugar Candy Mountain that […]
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Pandemic
There’s a lot that makes Humboldt stand out among the other 57 rather bleh counties in our great state. (OK, Mendocino is pretty cool. And Trinity has the Trinity River, so that’s awesome.) I don’t want to make this a long list of what Humboldt has going for it, but rather to point out one […]