January 29, 2023
I’m on a constant search for that pleasurable audial battering of the spirit, that thumping bass that cracks the ribs and sends the body into overdrive, past the limit of human experience into pure physical release, an ecstatic brutality unlike any other. I’m listening to Drug Store Core Boy by La Peste, an old mix by a DJ who I haven’t heard anything else from, but judging by this tape,
January 25, 2022
Nick Earhart’s Four Places, published by Lillet Press, is ostensibly a ‘comic.’ It is a deceptively simple work. Each comic vignette is comprised of four discrete boxes, or “places” as the title states. We enter into the work unsuspecting. As with all cultural productions, we expect narrative, or at the very least a robust use of symbol and metaphor. Earhart disabuses us of this notion. We come to realize that there can be no narrative herein,
November 3, 2021
About ten years ago, my friend Calvin got assigned to review the latest album by the Haunted Windchimes, an “extremely popular” band from his hometown, Pueblo, Colorado.
The album was “shit,” he told me recently. He’s right. But he feared that if he wrote that, cool people would beat him up, and he said his friends were worried for him, too.
“In Pueblo,” Calvin said, “it’s basically illegal to say anything negative about the Haunted Windchimes.”
I’m left in a similar pickle when it comes to reviewing One More Number,
April 29, 2021
Looking for a Kiss is a post-punk novel – mapping the emotional framework of the end of punk and youth, and the impact of the adult 80s. It’s an anti-coming of age story.
Set in Camden, Camberwell and New York, the book is an account of breakdown, breakup and breakout with primal scenes, screams and schemes, as well as the eternal quest for sprezzatura and the endless search for redemption.