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Dry summer/then comes the fall

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August 10, 2023
America, Blues, Folk, Gambling, Jazz, Movies, Music, Politics, Pop, Pop Culture, Religion, Rock
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“You’re still there, huh? We’re gonna do one more song, and that’s it.” His golden, overdriven guitar tone[1] was perfect. He’d already bettered Dylan in some respects; why not in Marvin?

There’s a thing about certain Canadians (two’s a company; three’s a crowd; more: that’s a trend), A few tend to write better songs about the United States than Americans can. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something like it, but from pastoral documentation, à la Neil Young[2] and Joni Mitchell, to the psychodramaticism of The Weeknd and poptimism of Carly Rae Jepsen, some friends from The North hold the mirror up to Americans better than we can do unto ourselves. 

You wanted a hit? Baby, maybe, he just did hits: “The Weight,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” fit the bill. Having backed The Hawk, Ronnie Hawkins, and then Bob Dylan, Jaime Royal Robertson, who died on Wednesday at 80, ran the gamut of roles in early rock bands. Later, he’d end up having to try to save his bandmates, and then himself. He knew how to get the best out of those around him, when the bells were ringing.

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Loud, Fast, And Keep Going

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May 29, 2023
America, Basketball, Music, NBA, Pop Culture
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Happy Memorial Day! Great to see you! So, now that you’re here, it’s time to attack: Do you ever think about instigators, or why a lot of people die unnecessarily? Did you see the BARRY finale? What do you fear the most, and why is it the mirror? Anyway, haha, *high five*, let’s honor some of what we thought were the dead, but they’re still living.

Jimmy Butler has fulfilled his mission and obligation as The Man for the Miami Heat. Via the way the game is played today, et cetera, he found himself at the foul line with three seconds to go, the exact three seconds and three shots he needed to close out the Boston Celtics and end any speculation that the best-positioned team in NBA history to recover from down 3-0 would do so. He nailed all three, Michelobs surely on the brain.

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No Way Out

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January 28, 2022
America, Gambling, Politics, Pop Culture
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Jeff Goldblum Explains How Dr. Ian Malcolm Was Way Ahead of His Time in Jurassic Park
Courtesy? None given here.

On January 27, 2021, GameStop (GME) closed out at its highest stock price at $347.51/share since the reddit community of r/WallStreetBets (WSB) sent the stock soaring, in their nomenclature, “to the moon,” a curious phenomenon that many within the mainstream press gave revolutionary significance due to the working and middle class status of some of the volatile stock’s big winners. 

I wrote last year that despite some of its “populist” character, the supposed gatecrashing by lay people into Wall Street was nothing more than a bubble created by Wall Street actors and carnival barking billionaires in which some previously precarious individuals made instant fortunes while many others lost their shirts. In the year since the GameStop rollercoaster, the increasing presence of words like “crypto”, “DeFi”, and “NFTs” has come to dominate the fintech space. This emergent language has filtered into the mainstream due to the opening of a portal into the long-prophesied techno utopian dream known as the metaverse. 

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Chasing A Lightning That Burns Forever

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November 30, 2021
Hip-Hip, Jazz, Music, Pop, Pop Culture, R&B, Rock
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Burial - Electronic Music of Brainvoyager

Burial’s seminal Untrue was released 14 years and just about a month ago. This is not a round figure, and this is not a timely commemoration of an album’s release date. Instead, I merely wanted to submit my humble meditation on one of my favorite albums of all time and what it means to me personally.

Isn’t it kind of always on-brand to write about Burial’s music whenever the hell the impetus strikes? Fitting, because this seems to be the same approach that Burial takes in releasing his work to the public. I have no other reason for writing about Burial’s Untrue beyond an experience that I recently had listening to the album in its entirety that was nothing but otherworldly.

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The Grin Is What Carried Us

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October 19, 2021
Auto Racing, Pop Culture, Sports
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The first season I kept up with MotoGP in real time was 2003. Before then, I read race reports on the Old Internet or flipped through whatever year’s Motocourse was still on the shelves at my local Barnes & Noble during my dad’s Sunday bagel run1 because I was a car kid more into F1 and NASCAR, plus we didn’t have TV access — or if we did, I didn’t know when because ESPN increasingly used its Walt Disney money to invest in mainstream sports during daylight hours while its niche coverage retreated to insomniac timeslots or got sold off to other stations entirely. I understood the gist of that world by the time our cable package added Speed Channel, in other words, but it was mostly by accident.

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The Cask of LeBrontillado

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August 2, 2021
Basketball, NBA, Pop Culture
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Jalen & Jacoby on Twitter: "Is LeBron drinking wine on the bench? We're pretty sure that's not water...@djacoby @mspears96… "

It is the latter half of the 2021-’22 NBA regular season, and the Los Angeles Lakers sit in eighth place in the Western Conference with a 28-29 record. Big man Anthony Davis, acknowledged to be a big without allowing himself to be referred to as a center, has missed twenty games, while LeBron James, the fulcrum upon which all Lakers-based activity must depend, has incurred an apparent return of the high ankle sprain which had once befallen him.

James has taken to imploring his teammates to work harder in his absence, which seemingly grows longer at his whims. On Instagram, his beseeching increasingly includes the term “brodie,” seemingly in the pejorative. Teammate Russell Westbrook notices.

The thousand injuries of Lebrunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled – but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity.

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On Conan, The Destroyer

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June 25, 2021
America, Music, Pop, Pop Culture, Religion, Rock, Television
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On Thursday night, Conan O’Brien hosted what he has said would be his final late-night television episode, on his last late-night television program. He began on TV as a largely unknown 30-year-old in 1993 with exactly the kind of pedigree you would’ve expected then: Harvard-taught, an alumnus of both The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, an advocate for the weird and disruptive trends emerging in comedy to which, despite him being an Irish-Catholic Massachusetts native, he had a singular pulse.

My introduction to Conan’s work was via Late Night With Conan O’Brien, the show he hosted as the wedge between his beloved Johnny Carson and Jay Leno and which was repurposed as a day-after lead-in to The Daily Show on Comedy Central for a while. When it came time for Conan[1] to assume his seat at the top of NBC’s hierarchy, it suffered from poor ratings and a shift back to late-night along with the Tonight Show name, which Conan would fundamentally not accept. A back-and-forth ensued, and Conan eventually ceded the seat, leaving us bereft of him for a time while he popped up on tour and at music festivals – more on that later.

I understand that his is mainly a slightly-older generation of an audience, the tweeners that both lived to experience Nevermind in real time, cognizant of it or not, and also know how to navigate social media without sparking fights at a dinner table, but my friends and I – white and well-off-ish enough as we were – liked Conan better than any of the others mostly because we never knew what to expect.

Below is a list, mostly off the top of my head, of my personal favorite Conan segments, recurring and otherwise. I know this isn’t the end, but HBOMax’s app is horrendous, and anyway, it isn’t as widely accessible as he has been for thirty years otherwise. Conan, we only wish you well, as you ever wished us.

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Sold Short?

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January 29, 2021
America, Gambling, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture
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Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen in Network (1976)

Wall Street in the American imagination is simultaneously held in a state of contempt and awe. It’s the site of both magic and misery.

The name “Wall Street” itself has become a shorthand to denote the capitalist class. Yet, Wall Street is only a segment of this class, known as Finance Capital. 

Finance Capital has become a growing segment within capitalism since the 1970s due to the decline in American manufacturing. Manufacturing took a dive during the 1970s in America due to the postwar recovery of European industries and the emergence of Asian competitors. Big swings in oil prices during the OPEC crisis of 1973, as well as inflationary spending from the Vietnam War, also broke the halcyon days of American prosperity, to which many politicians and their constituents today look to return rather than an anachronism. 

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