The Front Porch
Every Fourth of July, after consuming my fair share of apple pie and ice cream, I enjoy setting off fireworks with my children on the hill behind our house. There are golden sparklers and red-white-and-blue rockets mixed in with some more menacing-looking items that go boom — which did an excellent job of scaring the little ones in their younger days. Sky rockets in flight, loud noises, a feeling of some mild danger contained within a curtain of safety forged in partnership with my wife, who still worries about someone’s hand getting blown off… these are the elements of a family ritual that can only be fully appreciated by people who know what the absence of family and protection can feel like. Every Fourth of July we are grateful for one another, and to live in a county where recreational munitions are available for purchase along most roadsides.
After trudging down the hill to the …
Critic's Corner
Car Seat Headrest, The Scholars
Popular music seems to be continuously wavering between favoring longer, meandering songs (think Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin) to favoring 2-minute highly-structured poppy cuts (think ’50s and ’60s classics or pop stars like Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus). The former has always seemed a little counterintuitive to me, as somebody who grew up with Taylor Swift as a streaming standard. Pop, for my generation, has mostly been an easy-listing, hyper-engaging genre. But as my guitar teacher has noticed, the pop songs that his students are asking to learn have recently been getting longer and longer.
The popularity of emotional ballads isn’t new, but the trend of longer pop songs definitely is. People always complain about my generation’s seven-second attention span, which may be true, but radio trends …
American Insanity
The Last Great Dream had its HQ in San Francisco
Bohemians became hippies and then marketed the crap out of their filthy lifestyle
Jack Kerouac sold a million pairs of Levis and many more cups of cappuccino.
I never wanted to be a hippie, not while I lived in New York in the sixties. Hippies were unkempt, if not dirty. They didn’t work and they only spoke gibberish, you dig man? When I arrived in San Francisco, though, the hippie seemed to be a different creature; he or she had a job in construction or at the post office, with hair in a tidy ponytail, wearing clean overalls and work boots. I saw that I couldn’t beat them, so I joined them. They were younger than I by a decade or so. They played a mean game of softball on Sunday mornings in Chenery Park; on Sunday afternoons they tie dyed T-shirts with the slogan “Eat the Rich” above an icon of a skull and crossbones to show they meant business.
Of course, hippies also smoked weed. Not only did they smoke it but they also grew it in the hills and the valleys above the city, sold it in bulk, transported it across the country and reaped the …
