In recent years, I’ve developed the rather quirky habit of naming Adore as my favorite album by The Smashing Pumpkins. Now, obivious “hipster” accusations aside, I did cite the album’s consistency as a commendable measure ahead of Mellon Collie, and, even Siamese Dream, whose uncomfortable extremes of volume can certainly be a handful. I mean, […]
I moved back to the Midwest from Colorado in 2010. Since then, you know, it’s been a magnanimous game of warfare of every kind, all the while witnessing more sexual conversations all around me and girls in compromising attire. At one point, anyway, right when I was back, I was staying with my grandmother in […]
It was astonishing to walk into that coffee shop in Sydney and see Nic Dalton and Tom Morgan sitting there. Dalton was almost indiscernible behind a huge, heterogeneous beard, enjoying his complex coffee drink as if some religious adamancy were attaching him to it. Morgan sat opposite, and I couldn’t see his face, but a […]
Somehow, on this evening, I’m getting one of those diamond-in-the-rough feelings of squalid freedom, in my everyday life. For this occasion, as it were, the Stone Temple Pilots song “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart” popped into my head, as is perhaps appropriate: “I’m not myself / But I’m not dead and I’m […]
Here from my somewhat trenchant vantage point of northern Indiana, you might say I’ve got something to say about all points of the Midwest. Ohioans are pretty funny but too obsessed with Skyline Chili, Hoosiers are funny but sometimes kind of slow, St. Louis is gross but funny, Illinois and Wisconsin people are well-dressed, skinny […]
I remember first hearing the band Franz Ferdinand — my immediate critique was that “They sound like they’re trying to be The Strokes” [1]. Interestingly, anyway, there’s never really been a band, at least that I’ve heard, trying to do what the Franz does, which of course would be those four-on-the-floor, high-hat-up-beat, disco/techno drum beats. […]
We now bid a hearty farewell to Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead’s Robin to Garcia’s Batman, you might say, guitarist, vocalist and founding member, dearly departed at 78. Weir was known for a very clear, strong and almost macho vocal disposition, and, to an extent, certain documented exploits of womanizing (“I was born in a […]