Features
Monday, March 25 2013
SXSW: The Good The Bad and The Ugly Fest
What once began as a regional music festival that invited people to sample a local artistic community has become a spring break bowel movement and a corporate invasion that leaves the city blanketed in a cindering Dresden of bad faith branding.
Tuesday, February 2 2010
Stop Me If You Think That You've Seen This Grammys Before
The Grammys seem like a festering boomer leftover, far removed from the present where major labels live in post-apocalyptic decline.
Tuesday, February 12 2008
Dead Grammy Walking
The Grammys are a tradition whose bottom has fallen out, a relic still standing only because people are too bored to say otherwise.
Wednesday, September 12 2007
MTV Killed the Video Star: The MTV Video Music Awards
The overall effect from watching this year's MTV VMAs was club drug vertigo -- but with none of the fun of the club or the drugs.
Wednesday, July 25 2007
Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
Just as the ambiguous details surrounding Nick Drake's death led people to exhaustively make his sorrow sacred, Karen Dalton was soul country's undiscovered Ophelia.
Columns
Friday, January 20 2006
Meta-Bullshit: The Trouble with Sarah Silverman and the Fawning Cult of Meta-Bigotry
In the guise of smarts, there's woeful lack of intellect. Silverman tears-up the historical significance of the words she uses only to quilt them back together in meticulously parsed clashes of shock.
Wednesday, January 12 2005
Fighting Chance
After the 2004 US Presidential election, part of me still waited for the Diebold voting scandals to unfold, irrationally hoping that Bush's victory was simply a dirty backroom handshake hammered out during an Illuminati luncheon at Cracker Barrel.
Wednesday, November 10 2004
Smear the Queer
We were too frightened by the possibility of Bush's reelection to recognize that Kerry frets his way around the language of values, handling it in his speeches the way macho men hold their wives' purses for them.
Wednesday, October 6 2004
Derailing the Peace Train
If the former Cat Stevens were barred entry to the US due to his bad music, one might not feel compelled to defend him. As it is, we've got a problem, here.
Wednesday, June 9 2004
The Rape of Logic: Conservatives and Abu Ghraib
Conservatives have tried at every turn to whore out the country's existential fears since 9-11. Abu Ghraib is no exception. Maybe I should be more understanding of the environmental factors that have caused the Right to abandon their rhetoric of individual responsibility.
Reviews
Monday, March 18 2013
SXSW Music: Finding the Diamonds in the (Very) Rough
Although the big brands wouldn't have you know it, there's still lots of talented, indie bands littering the SXSW landscape. You just have to know where to look.
Friday, March 15 2013
SXSW Music: Hitting Up the Day Parties
The atmosphere at the Scratched Vinyl SHowcase was one steady thump of laidback head-nod while amazing emcees jumped in with the loving crowd, who rose halfway up to meet the performance.
Thursday, March 14 2013
SXSW Music: Doing Things the Old Fashioned Way
One writer dares to brave the new world of SXSW music without *gulp* proper credentials.
Friday, March 5 2010
Nneka: Concrete Jungle
Nneka clearly views pop art as a mechanism for transformation and vision, in the way that John Lennon and Bob Marley used both in a dizzying concoction of myth and talent.
Friday, March 7 2008
Hanne Hukkelberg: Rykestrasse 68
Rykestrasse 68 is not the record you put on when you're trying to multi-task your way onto the next thing on your list. It rewards stillness, listening, and deciphering.
Blogs
Thursday, March 14 2013
Brian Reich and a Response to SXSW Interactive's Brand Nation
Brand is so omnipresent at SXSW that companies strap fur to cars to try and catch your numbed out attention.
Monday, May 3 2010
High End Lowlifes
Bitterly tiny inhabitants of a tedious itinerary-driven world, most of High Society revolves around the ways in which these cruel and insensitive people seek to damage each other's mystifyingly outsized egos.
Friday, March 12 2010
Why 'Hoarders' Should Merge with 'Judge Judy'
These people are sad, but it is a sadness wholly self-imposed, accumulated over years of lacking a critical inner voice.
