Soothsayers, Begone!
Bags of chicken bones portended the destruction of our liberties
Drag down the statues! Let monkeys arade!
Above all, don’t look inside the old barn
The routing of the soothsayers and magicians who have lately been haunting our county is clearly an occasion for rejoicing. No more will upright citizens wake up in the morning to find their chickens missing, or to find bags of chicken bones behind their barns; nor will they find their donkey’s ears have been painfully together harnessed with string for some unspeakable purpose. No longer will the housewives of our county have to fear that their treasured cookware has been placed under a spell, and find themselves serving burnt meals to their families on a nightly basis. No more will children fear being transformed into lizards and toads by their teachers at school, or be told that they are actually donkeys.
We all have had enough of these disreputable vagrants and their spells. The fear they have cast over our everyday interactions as citizens of this county has been considerable. First, because …
An Angel Watches Over Him
Evan Dando hits the road with his scars
No longer just another Vineyard junkie
He lives in Brazil now, but is happy to visit St. Louis and sing ‘Barrytown’
The angel that watches over Evan Dando from heaven has been doing a bang-up job for the past thirty years or so. Dando remains the dream boyfriend who would rather be playing his guitar and doing drugs than cuddle up. He is the Bertie Wooster of ’90s rock stars, with his happy dolphin smile and greasy blonde hair falling down alluringly over his eyes. An airhead with the soul of a poet.
Evan’s love for music was always entirely real, though, even if his songs were built backwards, with choruses at the end instead of in the middle, the stoned warmth of his rock star voice insinuating itself into the listener’s head like a woolen blanket that gave comfort while you looked out the window on a rainy afternoon. At the very least, his songs were always approachable. “Into Your Arms,” a not particularly memorable by-the-numbers song that Evan wrote at the height of his fame with The Lemonheads, spent …
Why Big Festivals Still Matter
Riot Fest is one of the biggest alternative music festivals in America, with three days of music, and genres across the spectrum. They even have their own alcoholic soda brand and a chapel inside of the festival.
I desperately wanted to go to Riot Fest last year, but the festival was scheduled during Rosh Hashanah so a terrible calendrical accident deprived us of the chance to see The Cure headline, which depressed me and my father for many months. This year, Riot Fest was perfectly timed between birthdays and the beginning of school, so we bought tickets before the lineup came out.
Mind you, the lineup, when we got it, was strange. NOFX was a headliner for every night. NOFX also had their own stage, which featured an awesome assortment of semi- famous pop-y (but not pop-punk) punk bands, including Circle Jerks, Descendents, The Dead Milkmen, and The Vandals. Apparently, NOFX was planning …
