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Best New Music 2022
I’m not a list guy or, if I can help it, even a calendar guy or, given my druthers, even a “passing of time’ guy. As Arlo Guthrie once said, “What care I for time?” You just go inch by inch, row by row until you get a zucchini. Though I aspire to be outside…
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The Pandemic Proved Graeber’s BS Argument
I wish David Graeber were around to update his book Bullshit Jobs. From “essential worker” to “quiet quitting,” mainstream culture has found a way to underscore his thesis: a large percentage of jobs are bullshit, and the people performing them are aware of this fact (much to their psychic detriment). Essential workers are non-BS jobs.…
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The Ray (and Dave) Davies Songbook — a kovers playlist with komment
I’ve got too many things to do — work piling up, plans to hatch, work to revise, children to raise, dogs to walk, etc. all that stuff plus I have to tend my garden and keep the house from falling apart. So, yeah, perfect time to spend a day making a Spotify playlist of Kinks…
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Best New Music of 2021
All of my ones of readers wonder what new music I dug in 2021. To which I say, self, do you not know that linear time has been suspended? And self retorts, sure for everything but lists. We must have yearly lists. One of the (few) fun online concert-things I endured in high-pandemic, pre-vaccine days…
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The (further) logbooks of Andrew Cheyne
This post is the current home of my transcription of the logbook “Naiad” by Capt. Andrew Cheyne, transcribed at the Shetland Museum Archives (where it is housed) in 2018.
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Rififi
My first time back in a movie theater, as a fully-vaccinated cinephile, was to watch Rififi (1955) at the Music Box Theater. I loved the movie and get why the central safe-cracking / robbery scene has been referenced / ripped off since its inception. The look, the feel, the characters, the plot are absolutely gangbusters…
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Humanism
I live my life as data points awaiting the hand of a godfound nowherein any machine.
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Time Travel, the Cilantro of Sci-Fi
I wrote a time-travel flash-fiction for the good people at Brain Mill Press which you can read here. I like time travel. It never works out, logistically-speaking (at least for my brain) but it opens up emotional possibilities. There’s something very beautiful and human about wanting to change the past, whether to avert a tragedy…
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Top 5 Albums of 2020
As an old who can’t be bothered to differentiate WAP from Wham!, literally nobody cares about the following list. Still, ’tis December and lists do as lists must. Therefore: What did one aging X-er, who doesn’t believe in generations (media constructs created for ad sales, sheeple!) like to listen to in pandemic year-1? Well, first…
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“Where the World is Thin” by Kris Drever (2020)
Well, I don’t get around much any more. Not out of the house. Not out of the city. But my ears float on over to the north of Scotland, I mean waaaaaaay north, fairly often to listen to Kris Drever. He sings about those full-empty places where he is from (Orkney). Places where the landscape…