Still Thinking

Dear Senior Burns, I despaired recently upon learning these posts reached a wider audience than the intended none. Truly, I believed we were alone here -- just me and you, Senior Burns, slavering at words like a meat-head pumping iron in a mirror. The only problem, keeping with the metaphor, I forgot that the internet is a giant Gold's Gym: mirrors impinge from all sides. Truly again, Senior Burns, we are not alone. My responsive choice became to either abandon or embrace the available space -- public mirrors and all. As you can see, I've chosen the latter, typing furiously as veins press the edges of my strained neck like prank-snakes in a pillow case. That final metaphor got lost. Here be the dietary bits I relished over Spring Break -- morsels that I cannot fathom anyone else giving a whipless dollop about. WORDS: I polished off Stephen King's 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption in two sittings, fully convinced by the end that Andy Dufresne's pa...

  " Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight." -- Johnny Cash Happy birthday today to the Man In Black -- Mr. Johnny Cash (1932). Admittedly, my all-time favorite Cash record is  Unchained , his second installment of the Rick Rubin helmed American Recordings. I love this record because Cash sounds strong and happy and mean on these tracks. Also, you've got Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as the backing band, which brings a tinge of sweaty swaggered rock-n-raw to Cash's gruff vocal performance.  Unchained  feels like the apex of America's musical evolution -- a signal of what's still possible when experience and expertise and patience collide sonically. It's encouraging to consider that the best music these men made -- arguably -- was in their latter years. While the industry exalts youth and the next flash-pan fad of aural anesthesia, on  Unchained  the old guard redefined greatness through the simplicity o...

Dear Senior Burns, My brain pan is full. Total bottle-necked. Words and tunes and even the color palettes from Archie comic books. Jack White said his brain was "pancake batter". Mine feels like something that needs a good wringing. And that's what I'm doing here: wringing for the spending. You might hear more from me in the weeks to come. I'm working on a thing -- or half a dozen things -- but I'm too mentally impacted to whittle down the particular notions. Thanks for the space, Burns.  NIKKI AND ALICE Imagine my shame yesterday upon realizing I am reading Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni in the month of February. Not planned! No calendar agenda! After reading three of Giovanni's poetry collections last year,  Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet  (1971) -- an actual prose anthology -- hit the top of my 2021 list. And then, to celebrate Alice Walker's birthday on February 9, I went to my sh...

The following was written as a dual review with my friend Kelly Minnis, who merely liked the new Bully record. **************** I heard Bully for the first time while playing YouTube jukebox with Kelly Minnis in my living room. We were swapping the TV remote, slamming beers because I still did, and he says, “Ah, yes. You like female vocals.” Then he played the video for “Running” from Bully’s sophomore album Losing . The recommendation took. I owned Losing less than a week later. The thing I instantly liked about Losing was the nostalgia it contained. The album felt a time-capsule of 90s sensibilities. The production. The muted, twisted guitars and trigger-thumpy bass lines. Bognanno’s riot grrrl vocals. Even the video for “Running” (minus the cell-phones) looks like something that would make a young Noah Baumbach lose sleep. Losing feels like a love-letter to a bygone, younger era. It’s a solid record, one I turn to when it’s too hot for a flannel AND a cardigan but I still don’t w...

  Those who love metal music, especially extreme metal, understand something that those who do not simply never will, and that is how a music so immediately dark often reveals a light, even while explicitly challenging it. The idea is similar to horror cinema and literature: that which deals in mayhem often points most vividly to virtue. It’s the law of opposing forces. The dance of irony. The reward of the initiated. If the Devil can appear as an angel of light, perhaps the flip begs possibility for his adversary, as well. Crazier things have happened and will again. Ask the plagued Pharoah. Konvent is a four-piece hailing from Denmark. After a ridiculously successful demo released in 2017, which shot the band into immediate prominence on the festival circuit, Konvent released their first full-length album, Puritan Masochism, on January 24 via Napalm Records. An initial listen offers one blazingly solid assurance about these ladies: they’re not messing around. Puritan Masochism ...

The fact that Amalie Bruun released her new album Folkesange under her Myrkur moniker is significant. In a career spanning a mere fourteen years, Bruun has recorded under three names, each projecting a different timbre of her musical voice. As a debut self-titled solo act, Bruun recorded a handful of schizophrenic singer-songwriter “pop” albums that paid homage to an array of artists spanning ABBA, Kate Bush, Bjork, The Beatles, and maybe early career Beyonce(?). These songs were musically quaint and lyrically juvenile, but not necessarily in a good way. In 2013 and 2014, Bruun formed Ex Cops with a forgettable and chisel-chinned male hipster. The duo released two either pop-rock or rock-pop (actually, there is a difference) LPs -- albums as sugary and delightfully easy to sip as chilled Capri-Suns by a mid-summer swimming hole.  However, in 2014 Bruun also unleashed her greatest claim to clickbait fame when she was ousted as the one-woman black metal artist known only as Myrkur. ...

Although The Ex-Optimists have a distinct sound and stage presence, I never know what to expect from their new music. And I love this about The Ex-Optimists. For instance, 2012's  Bee Corpse Collector,  nearly a decade old and half a different band ago, pays homage to swimmy-guitar college-rock radio, while 2015's  Phantom Freight  opens with a 15 minute chime-infested soundscape of "True Evil" only to be followed by 2018's angry AF full-fist, shoe-gaze rocker  Drowned In Moonlight.  Various splits and 7" releases along the way feature Ex-Ops playing post-punk thumpers ( Bee Corpse Thousand ), sweaty-stadium stompers ( Save Your Love ), and summer-love crooners ( Reruns from the '60s ). Listening through their catalogue is like reading a musical memoir of the band's influences and ideas. Life reveals itself in the progression of their recordings (2012 - poppy; 2015 - experimental; 2018 - pissed off), often telling their collective stories more throug...

I studied the Russian language in college. The Spanish and French classes were more popular, so I chose the language class with the fewest number of students. That would be Russian. My teacher was a little spit-fire from Moscow named Irene Trofimova. I loved her. She hated me. She called me “Kee-van” and told me frequently, “You vill go into the vorld, and you vill die.” One day, when only the two of us attended class, she said to me, “Kee-van, vhat is this vord, this ‘hanging-out’”. As she said the word, she threw her hands in front of herself like a farmer sowing seed. I said, “It just means to spend time together. Like you and me, right now, we are ‘hanging out’”. She blushed and waved her hands in the air. “Stop it, Kee-van. Don’t say such things!” I asked where she had heard this phrase - this “hanging out”. After more blushing and hand-waving, she finally said she’d heard it in a movie. A prostitute had said it to a client. She invited him to more prostituting. They could “hang ...

I am haunted by a party I attended three years ago. For his birthday, my friend Jeremy hosted a Lip-Sync Battle that, for two years straight, made me laugh liquor through my nose hairs. Laughing booze through the nose hurts, but I did not regret it. What I do regret, and what haunts me to this day, is not jumping into one particular performance when the audio-track pooped out. During a captivating sign-language interpretation of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” by my lovely friend, Jen, the song simply stopped in the third verse, right about the time that “she had opened up the buttons on her shirt so far, I guess that’s why I didn’t notice that police car”. Everyone in the room moaned in disappointment while Jen shrugged her shoulders and sat down. As equally sad, I could have jumped alongside Jen and rapped -- pitifully so -- the entirety of that third verse so she could complete her sign-language Lip-Sync. Why I did not come to my friend’s aid st...