Front Porch
County Highway is a publication devoted above all else to the American variant of the English language, which is a storehouse of descriptions and solutions to the unique set of difficulties and opportunities presented to us when we are born onto this continent. American English, which evolved to describe our relation to this place, and to allow speakers to communicate and trade, is flexible and blunt, with a wildly democratic approach towards sentence structure and the vernacular. It is capable of absorbing a wide range of influences from other places, at an angle of radical exuberance.
Imagining that American English is inherently sunny or optimistic or simple-minded is a beginner’s mistake. Raymond Chandler is as cynical as any Viennese, just as Quentin Tarantino is as violent as Sergio Leone, and Cormac McCarthy is indebted to the Greeks. Yet their delight in mayhem, combined …
Critic's Corner
Fontaines D.C., Dopamine Chamber
Dopamine Chamber is the ultimate sonic doomscroll. The ethereal way it ebbs and flows makes every song unfold like a Matrix timelapse, with each song feeling double or triple its actual length. It’s a doomscroll, because listening makes you feel, well, doomed. The dopamine chamber is taking over your brain. Maybe it already has.
Much politically charged music feels boring or uninspired, like the ideas were more important than the sound. Fontaines does both, skillfully. The first song, “Six Shot Morning,” involves a mechanical beep which I thought was coming from somewhere inside my house. Halfway through the album, you’re in a universe you can’t seem to escape. Something is going wrong, something is falling apart. Clicking play feels like you're projecting the album onto your …
The North Coast Hiawatha
The backyards and alleyways crawled by in slow motion as the train pulled out of Minneapolis, westbound. Something naked, indecent about these frozen yards, the incandescent windows with women arguing inside, the dead light of three-thirty on a northern evening. Abandoned swingsets, lawnmowers under snow.
Then the light of day went out and the windows got black and the boy went looking for the bar car. He was only twenty but legal. Actually nobody cared. Certainly not this bartender with his knowing curious glance, dusting the bottles with a rag.
Got Bud, he said, Miller, Schlitz, Grain Belt, you ever try a Grain Belt?
Is it any good?
Beer’s beer to me. People say there’s a difference.
I’ll have a Grain Belt then, the boy said, and paid for his beer, then sat in the corner of the bar car trying to see anything out the window: snow, maybe, or some kind of mist, …
