Super Snõõper
Post-punk prop band echoes of The Mutants
A keyboard made of meat
Jack White and Henry Rollins both dig it
At some point on every great punk album, the listener should feel like they are about to go over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. On Snooper’s Super Snooper, out on Third Man Records, the Nashville band’s tremendous debut record, the first time this moment comes is at the end of “Xerox.”
Singer Blair Tramel has been talking about somebody who has nothing to say and won’t shut up. “You're home grown, human clone,” she says. “You can delete, repeat, delete, repeat, talk, talk, talk, talk!” That’s when Connor Cummins comes in on guitar, an explosive riff with the slightest bit of twang. It’s a shock to hear the song getting even faster than it was before, which was already pretty fast. And before you know it, you’re already in the next song, “Fruit Fly.” That’s when you’re going over the Falls.
It was almost scrapped, Cummins tells me over Zoom from the duo’s home in Nashville …
The Snake and the Hawk
Hero Silsbee, Tx. Resident Fights Off Earthly and Heavenly Predators
Peggy Jones, 64, faced with mind-bending paradox of suffering and deliverance, aces test
Was the Lord’s Hand visible?
Faith is powerful!
Seldom has an appeal for heavenly aid been so miraculously answered as it was in the case of Peggy Jones, 64, a resident of Silsbee, Texas, who was riding her tractor one evening in late July when a large snake came tumbling from the sky and attached itself to her arm with cruel intent. The serpent had every advantage in this struggle, as has been true on earth for thousands of years. Four feet in length and possessed of ugly fangs, it coiled itself around Jones’ limb and sprayed what she took to be venom onto her skin.
“Help me, Jesus!” cried Jones from her Kubota tractor. “Help me, Jesus!”
Americans are a self-reliant people, and Texans most of all, perhaps, so even as Jones called out to Our Savior, she also did her part in the desperate fight. Vigorously, she waved her arm about, trying to dislodge the clinging monster. It hissed in her face, defiant. All seemed …
The Equinox
Great astronomical event summons serpent God from temple
The day when we have the most in common
Light spreads into darkness, not the other way around
Like all of the best gods, Kukulkan is not visible most of the time. His head, a gaping maw of serpent badassery, is fixed in place at the base of his temple in southern Mexico. Most days, his body is absent. Twice a year, a one-two punch of astronomical reality and Mayan insight come together, creating the massive, undulating body of a serpent out of shadow and stone.
Equinoxes are the great astronomical equalizers. Halfway between the solstices, the Earth’s tilt is neither towards nor away from the Sun. All of us, regardless of where we are on our shared planet, experience similar lengths of day and night. It is not quite true to say that day and night are equal on the equinox, however, for reasons both trivial and profound. With the help of an atmosphere, you see, light spreads into darkness, but darkness does not spread into light.
At the solstices, we are at astronomical extremes, the position …
