Brooklyn’s Shilpa Ray is a lady who has been churning out the art-punk jams for quite some time, with her band of merry freaks bringing the guts to undergird her growl. She’ll be stalking the boards of the Miniplex tonight at 8:30 p.m., along with an absolutely perfect support band: local melodic punk rawk chanter […]
The Bored Again
Posted inMusic
In With the Future
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 which holiday we choose to celebrate this week. Things change and historical reassessments have produced a staggering amount of evidence that Thanksgiving is built on […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Music Tonight: Saturday, Jan. 28
RampArt Skatepark is hosting an album release party for a compilation called URgE Skate Session, Vol. 1, and it looks like it’s going to be a real corker. 4 p.m. ($10). Eight (mostly) local bands of various levels of aggression and heaviness will be hitting the curved stage for the enjoyment of the gathered masses. […]
Posted inMusic
Lady Luck
Many years ago, in a Yankee cemetery in coastal Maine, I was pondering the grave of a young man who was taken out of the game by an “unruly bull,” in an incident that I can only imagine was every bit as dramatic and shocking as the gravestone (upon which I was making an etching) […]
Posted inMusic
Rock of Ages
I’ve been reading about and looking at a lot of prehistoric art recently. Maybe when the future looks bleak enough, it’s a survival instinct to look back at the far distant past. Maybe it’s because I’ve been slowly making my way through David Graeber (RIP) and David Wengrow’s excellent 2021 book The Dawn of Everything […]
Posted inMusic
Subdivisions
The new year claimed its first rock star death last week and it was a doozy. Neil Peart was probably the most uniquely influential drummer for the last four decades and his work in the band Rush is timeless and inspirational. The extremely private star’s death from a brain tumor was jarring to his legion […]
Posted inMusic
Lend A Hand If You Can
It’s been an active week for a news junkie like myself. Johnathan Franzen took a backheel approach to climate change in the pages of the New Yorker and, in doing so, cemented for all time the terminal uselessness of the establishment liberal position on nearly any topic. A brave banjo-wielding man busted the crap out […]
Posted inMusic
Anniversaries
One of the promises I made at the end of December was to spend the coming year with less of a dense layer between myself and you the reader. I have heard from some of you — and I thank you all for the feedback. As I have mentioned here before, I was a resident […]