I’ve been trying to find healthy ways to sublimate my grief at the maddening state of the world that doesn’t involve completely disconnecting, because I am not a monk, ascetic, Zen master, or nihilistic doomsayer. I am none of those people, I’m pretty simple, actually, as I suspect a lot of you out there are, […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
Posted inMusic
Idioteque
In a 2006 essay in The Nation by the late, great Alexander Cockburn called “The Triumph of Crackpot Realism,” Cockburn gazes at the normalized, violent insanity wrought by Washington D.C. on the Middle East and quotes the work of the American sociologist C. Wright Mills: “In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with […]
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John Brown’s Body
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]