Flashy zines and other assorted commentary.
I am no longer bound to six, and as a consequence, I can just keep shoving music, old and new, into the visor and playing it whenever it pleases me. This tends to reflect mood rather than intent, because why would it not? The Datsuns – s/t Got this for $5 used at my local… Read More What’s in the CD Visor This Week — Overload the System Edition
There is no greater rite of passage as a homeowner than a flooded basement. It is a reality unique to the existence of modern indoor plumbing, which exists in the guts of the house beyond the ability of most homeowners to maintain or have awareness of, hanging over you like a cracked dam (the Sword… Read More This Week In the CD Changer — Basement Survivors Edition
Calling anything in my CD collection a “forgotten treasure” is a bit of a stretch. I have things in my collection I haven’t listened to in years (why are they still there? I haven’t decided that they’re in the way yet), and things I find myself constantly loading in. This week, however, I made a… Read More This Week in the CD Changer: Forgotten Treasures
One of the hilarious consequences of the almost total abandonment of the CD format, smashed between the analog resurgence of vinyl and digital moving to streaming, is that CD’s you actually can actually find (neighborhood record stores usually have shelves of the bastards) and want to buy now cost about what you’d pay for them… Read More This Week in the CD Changer: Aesthetic Extreme Makeover Home Edition
I was a Strokes fan back in the day. I discovered them in a music store in a mall in 2001, when I bought their first album Is This It on CD. I loved it instantaneously as a sugar-rush amalgam of every under-celebrated New Wave band: Television, the Modern Lovers, a dollop of Doug Yule-era… Read More In Praise of Comedown Machine
It’s the first edition, but whatever. Because I am old, because I came up in a time when CD’s were the newest, hippest form of musical consumption, I have hundreds of them. True, the format has become the cultural equivalent of the 8-track, having neither the aesthetic cachet of vinyl nor the supreme convenience of… Read More This Week in the CD Changer: Interesting Failures Edition
Perfectly, the track is called “Now and Then”: “Now and Then” has a similar provenance as “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” the other two “new” Beatles songs to have been released since 1970: All are rough Lennon home demos recorded during the late 1970s and provided by his wife Yoko Ono in 1994 for the… Read More The Meme Self-Regenerates: A New Old Song from the Beatles
Jazz is, or is supposed to be, a wild idiom, invented on the fly by trained professionals, a masterpiece by midnight. Certain ontological limits exist: Jazz is a form of music, made with instruments, by people. You can have any number of people, and any instrument you want, and still call it jazz. The aesthetic… Read More Screeching Jazz, Punk Provocateurism, and Flaunting Whiteness – A Pondering of James Chance
I wish today, for no good reason, to write about Captain Beefheart. I am not, or at least not yet, an affirmed fan of Captain Beefheart, and given my stands on the concept of fandom in general, I am unlikely to become one (especially if there’s a tribal name attached to it, like “Beefheads”… the… Read More Radar Station Blues – Let us now Praise Captain Beefheart By Slapping His Fat Face
It must be Biopic season, because I’ve just sat down of my own free will and watched two fictionalizations of actual events: one from my infancy, which I look on with fascination, and one from my early adulthood, which I disdain with the snobbery of a thousand dead aristocrats. The second thing, Pam & Tommy… Read More Pam and Tommy and Steve and Johnnie
Content Blues 