poorboyoftroy

Like the Platonic ideal of a New York Times 36-hour vacationer, I will be spending the weekend in Los Angeles. Herein find my travel rider, LA rev v.2.9.4 Existential night terrors: they're going to happen and happen frequently. While physically restraining me, I'll need you to recite the Tibetan Book of the Dead until I acknowledge the inherently illusory nature of empirical reality.  I expect a new, spontaneous ekphrasis on the 110/105 Interchange each day, each applying a different school of art criticism.  Pools are part of the landscape, not to be touched. Beaches “ “. I’m not coming to pitch, but if we come up with a great idea for an anthologized YouTube Red series about the dream/erotic life of Twitter bots, I'm in.  Butter coffee is not a thing. I'm all about dystopia tourism provided there's coffee and maybe a nosh in close proximity. See note above re butter coffee . Fatherhood has annihilated my tolerance for alcohol, so kindly marshall eve...

The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.

I feel a little bad for #Burners this year (no, not #Berners). Burning Man, set to begin in one week, is very much, err, blotted out in the popular imagination by Monday's eclipse. To be fair, I'm not sure Burning Man maintains the same level of public or media interest it did in the halcyon days of the 1990s, back before it became commoditized/sanitized by Silicon Valley, when it was discussed by those who didn't attend as tantamount to a neo-tribalist orgy somewhere in the Nevada desert. All I know: nobody is talking about it, and everybody is talking about the eclipse. I would imagine, too, that some are foregoing Burning Man in favor of a trip to the nearest latitude in the Zone of Totality ("ZoT" because when else will we get to use that acronym). I have no idea what people are hoping to get out of the eclipse. It's a down year in a dark era, to be sure, so perhaps the general need for something, anything to distract us from the Trumpocalypse has latch...

As I age, so do my musical tastes, which is to say, genres and musicians I had previously dismissed in my 20's as moribund or risibly out of vogue have become suddenly much more intriguing simply by virtue of the passage of time. New Age music appears to be the latest beneficiary of this ineluctable process. Just as I've started to flirt with eastern religions and literature, so have I started listening to artists who incorporate musical, cultural, and spiritual traditions from the Subcontinent and Southeast Asia into various western musical genres, sometimes to stunning artistic success. Alice Coltrane, Bill Laswell, and Steve Roach, though fusing their appropriated material with very different western genres, have all produced excellent albums that honor their respective traditions. My interest in Laraaji actually precedes any engagement with New Age music as such, and this is entirely due to the fact that Brian Eno produced his debut album, "Ambient 3: Day of Radian...

Portland has a very distinctive retail infrastructure, one that elicits strange, public rituals and leads to experiences of unbridled, non-value add whimsy. An example of this: rounding the corner at SE 32nd and Hawthorne, one encounters a small parking lot dominated by a red, double-decker bus that houses, you guessed it, a coffee shop. It has tables, like a restaurant Tov Coffee  is much like every other food cart in Portland: larger than food trucks in other cities and just as questionably mobile. But Tov is so much more than a "mobile" retail space for upscale casual dining: it's its own vibrant, fully immersive world. Close, but not too close, quarters I was overwhelmed by the density of build-out and human activity in the back-half of the lower-level. Two baristas, a commercial espresso machine, and at least 3 people waiting on drinks -- it shouldn't all fit, not this comfortably, but it does. The custom purple paint job, which extends ...

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Don't tell the bros of  Callus Coffee , Seattle's newest coffee pop-up shop, that 2017 may be a little too late to get in on the trend of infilling America's urban cores with third-wave coffee bars bearing unfortunate, esoteric names. 2017 is a year of political upheaval, a year when the wheels of #resistance are turning, resolutely focused on forestalling #Trumpocalypse by galvanizing the American left in a united front the likes of which we haven't seen in generations. It's time to retrench, for us all to focus on our essential values and ensure that our democratic institutions have the fortitude to provide for a viable future. This requires constructive anger. Apathy is not acceptable -- if you aren't angry, you aren't alive. It's difficult to maintain one's righteous fury when sampling the single-origin pour over offerings and mulling the purchase of artisanal coffee mugs at a new coffee bar in a former industrial district, all the while dicking...

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