poorboyoftroy

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...

Cover art to Jamie XX's In Colour  [Horribly delayed, I realize…] I avoided this exercise last year in favor of...well, nothing in particular. I don’t know: I was focused on my new job, intent on maximizing my free time in a new city, and keen on ingesting the last bit of counterculture cool my then-neighborhood, the rapidly gentrifying Capitol Hill, had to offer, all of which left me unenthused with the prospect of enumerating the musical highlights of the preceding 12 months. Oh, sure, I started a list, which I’m fairly certain topped off at Swans’ To Be Kind, the lethal power cords, dislocating polyrhythms, and foreboding prophet-of-doom lyrics of which distilled the apocalyptic trajectory of 2014’s global political realities better than the news media itself. But that was 2014. This is was 2015. Now I’m settled in a north Seattle, “we’re not suburbia, we just look like suburbia,” neighborhood, saddled with and luxuriating in all the trappings of the landed bourgeoisie (mortgag...