I’ve been trying to make sense of how so many people, some of whom I once considered to be moral, ethical, and generally “good eggs,” as Bertie Wooster would say, can’t seem to take a hard line on the genocide our country is currently abetting in Palestine and now Lebanon. Some things don’t have the […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
Posted inMusic
Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die
Well, we lost Kris Kristofferson last Saturday, which means the only Highwayman left is the man who wrote this week’s title song. Of course, I spent the weekend listening to Kristofferson’s music, but I also turned my attention to his various interviews and actions over the years of his long career, and found a man […]
Posted inMusic
Wardance
This week’s title song comes from the debut album of one of my favorite bands as a kiddo, Killing Joke, so don’t come to me about the spelling. Welcome to autumn, and also football season, our national performative war dance ritual, other than our too-long election cycles. I’m not going to spiral about the actual […]
Posted inMusic
Mr. Blue Sky
“Hey you, with the pretty face. Welcome to the human race. A celebration, Mr. Blue Sky’s up there waiting, and today is the day we’ve waited for.” I have a funny relationship with this week’s song. There have been times when it was brightly lighting up my brain while strolling through the lees of an […]
Posted inMusic
Anywhere Out of the World
I lost a lot of weight this year from health problems but rather than bemoan my altered state, I prefer to lean into imagining contorting my body into the nude, inscrutable angles of the bronze-age etchings of human (and other) figures from the Altai region of Russia. It’s been a dream of mine in the […]
Posted inMusic
Another Day
I’m writing this just after the closing celebrations of Labor Day, which, in a country without a strong labor movement or political party invested in such, is basically just a three-day weekend to have one last crack at summer. I hope you all found a slice of the good stuff. Not much more to add […]
Posted inMusic
L.A. Freeway
I’m dropping a Guy Clark song for this week’s title because a) it’s very good and b) it was brought to my attention by a dear friend and one of the brightest stars in our local music scene. Beverly Twist and I have known each other for years now and I’ve written a lot about […]
Posted inMusic
Shadowplay
It’s fair season again, which means that late August is here a lot quicker than most of us would like. For ongoing health reasons, I haven’t been able to enjoy any swimming in our rivers, so I have pushed aside my dreams of repatriating myself with the cool, running substance of life, gliding instead over […]
Posted inMusic
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
A year ago this week, I was standing over the corpse of my dad on a bright morning, trying to manage my shock while working out the correct order of people and professional agencies to call. I was surprised by this shock for a couple of reasons. His death was expected — he had an […]
Posted inMusic
War Pigs
For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a passing interest in international news, I’ve been reading about the current evolutions going down in the world of asymmetrical warfare, specifically in drone technology. Since the days of David and Goliath, the idea of the big guy/little guy match-up being won by novel ingenuity rather […]
Posted inMusic
Evergreen Dazed
It used to be an annoying flex in the ’90s of my childhood to claim that one didn’t own a TV. Which is ironic, because that decade was probably the last true golden era of network television. Nowadays, we have lots of various-sized screens, streaming the sort of content that would look like a sickening, […]
Posted inMusic
In Between Days
We are now seated in the festival section of the summer, where outdoor collections of music and people mix with fairs and rodeos to bridge the entertainment gap through late summer and into the fall semester. There are still shows, but they are fewer in number and sometimes less reliable than those staged during the […]