Being a curmudgeon can be goddamn delightful. It feels like a right earned with age, and let’s face it, the seemingly-unearned confidence of your average magical millennial—while probably as apocryphal as Gen X’s purported cynicism—is quantifiably annoying when you’re staring down the barrel of your own irrelevance. Even more annoying, the youth of today didn’t […]
One of the going theories on the prevalence of love songs in popular music has to do with the sheer lousiness of language. The word “love” just kinda hangs there—flaccid, overused, meaning everything and nothing. Put a slinky guitar and some aching vocals behind the sentiment, and you might be onto something. The simplest words […]
Maybe it’s the sci-fi implications of computer-generated beats or the prevalence of masks in dance-heavy rituals worldwide, but electronic music producers’ deep love of wacky disguises, multiple aliases, and trumped-up backstories is one of the genre’s most consistent affectations. I’m sure there’s a grad school thesis or two out there on the subject. I just […]
If you spent the better part of your youth being shunted from one rural Florida town to the next, you’d wear all-black, smoke clove cigarettes, and dream of rainy days in London Town, too. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and for sensitive North Florida teens battered by the sun and […]
In Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, Joshua Wolf Shenk identifies the primary characteristics shared by such dynamic duos as Lennon and McCartney, Parker and Stone, and Jobs and Wozniak. Among these characteristics is what psychiatrists call a “folie à deux,” a madness shared by two. Two people against the […]
There is a beautiful future ahead of us—one in which the infinite variability of gender, sex, and sexuality is recognized and accepted with love, love, love. You can see that future glimmering on the horizon in Turning, Antony and the Johnson’s collaboration with filmmaker Charles Atlas and thirteen of downtown New York’s reigning queens of […]
Knee-deep in producer Francis Falceto’s stellar Ethiopiques series, I was moved to catch The Budos Band live a few years ago, when they were serving up funked-up, instrumental jams by way of Addis Ababa circa 1972. Four years on, and the Budos are back. This time, someone’s tossed Africa 70’s stateside inheritors into their custom […]
I work in an office. More specifically, I am a writer who works in an open office plan, sharing a cubicle with two other souls and a world of interruption. To signal that “I’m working, goddamnit,” I don the fanciest pair of noise-canceling headphones this non-profit gal could afford and loop house-heavy DJ mixes until […]