Critic's Corner
Horsegirl, Phonetics On and On
A couple years ago I went to see Pavement at Kings Theater in Brooklyn, which was fine. The real surprise of the evening was seeing Horsegirl open for them. Bob Nastanovitch, a longtime member of Pavement and a family friend, had gotten us the tickets and said that I should like Horsegirl better than Pavement, because they had a younger, cooler sound. And I was a young and cool 13-year-old, after all. At the time, their youngest member was 17, which was still really impressive to me and to Pavement themselves. After the show, we also found out that one of their members used to babysit the friend I was with, so we got to meet them and they were totally nice and everything.
I’ve been sitting on Horsegirl since that moment, because I was super shocked at how good they were. Also, they hadn’t really released anything since their first …
Bouquets and Brickbats
To David Johansen, the rock singer and actor who died in his house on Staten Island at the age of 75 in February. Johansen made rock history as the lead singer of the New York Dolls whose eponymous 1972 first album and the 1974 follow-up Too Much Too Soon helped invent punk rock before British fashionista puppets the Sex Pistols ever got into it. In his later years, Johansen delighted everyone from fans of his lounge-lizard persona Buster Poindexter (“Hot! Hot! Hot!”) to appreciators of his appearances in films like Scrouged and Let It Ride. Johansen’s career is proof that you don’t have to sing in a British accent to be a punk rocker (Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, we are looking at you).
Front Porch
Donald Trump is as close to a one-man show as Washington has seen since Barack Obama’s second term in office. What that means for America’s future — and the rest of the planet — depends on whether Trump can carry through on his promises of a new American Revolution or whether the forces he has unleashed will instead replace the top-down bureaucracies he and his supporters despise with something more brazenly oppressive: Oligarchy.
The radicalism of Trump’s second term in office has been evident since Day One, which began with a salvo of executive orders abolishing the old regime of DEI and gender-neutral bathrooms in government facilities and public schools. Subsequent weeks saw the evisceration of USAID by Elon Musk’s DOGE; the seizure of Treasury Department payments systems by Musk’s young lieutenants, including a 19-year-old programmer who went by the online sobriquet “Big Balls”; an attempt to …
