(November 30, 2023)
It occurred to me during this year's Best of Humboldt voteing that I hadn't been putting enough thought into the trending directions of our local music scene. Blame it on...
(November 23, 2023)
Well, it's that time of year, when I must once again appeal to the reason of my fellow Americans and suggest we not only can but must do better regarding...
(November 16, 2023)
Much ink has been spilled on the colonial mythology of the upcoming holiday and the horrors in Palestine. When confronted with the unrolling and competing narratives of a real-time conflict,...
(November 9, 2023)
Last Sunday we had Fall Back, when we retreated to an extra hour of darkness — and for many, sleep — on the clock to adjust to the changing season....
(November 2, 2023)
The other day I was thinking about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, that odd musical character from fairy tales who agreed to remove all the rats from a besieged village...
(October 26, 2023)
Time for a costume suggestion. We all know about David Bowie's various personas, the most famous of which was Ziggy Stardust. There was also Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke...
(October 19, 2023)
I'd like to share with you, dear reader, an experience I had recently. For the purposes of this story, I'm going to say that it's true but you can treat...
(October 12, 2023)
There are so many shows this week that I had to be a lot more discerning than usual and carve my list down to a manageable size. An embarrassment of...
(October 5, 2023)
Years ago, I used to listen to more esoteric, dark music. This was probably something to do with age, as one of the ironies of youth is that it often...
(September 28, 2023)
I'm packing up and heading out of town this week with the promise that I'll return with tales of adventure and conquest. For me, that boils down to the possibility...
(September 21, 2023)
Things sound scarier, sadder or sexier in French. Take, for example, the mid-century jazz standard "Autumn Leaves." Every pianist in America from that era had a crack at that tune,...
(September 14, 2023)
For reasons of space, as well as a general exhaustion from my personal life that has set in with the coming seasonal shift, I am going to keep this intro...
(September 7, 2023)
Well, I made it through the long weekend without calamity, as I hope many, if not all, of you did as well. I took some of the time to throw...
(August 31, 2023)
I'm not going to waste too much of your time here, as we all have a long weekend ahead, one we can enjoy collectively only because of the efforts of...
(August 24, 2023)
In Emily Dickinson's poem "There's Been a Death, in the Opposite House," the reader is given a glimpse, from the outside looking in, of the social mechanics of death "In...
(August 10, 2023)
Now that much of the controversy surrounding Jason Aldean's latest single has been supplanted by another meaningless and obnoxious salvo in the seemingly endless, mind-crushing American culture war — thank...
