ByGD
Image from Gratisography
Last week tickets went on sale for the second annual NW Terrorfest. I had planned to buy full three day passes as soon as they went on sale. But then I looked at my balances and thought, “Maybe I’ll wait.” While waiting, I checked out a lot of the bands on the schedule. I haven’t heard everything yet, and I liked most of what I heard, but a few bands made a stronger impression. Read More
ByGD
Image by Gratisography
I like to listen to music while I work, and one nice thing about working from home is that I don’t have to use earbuds. I can enjoy it, like Lena Lamont, “nice and loud.” Of course, since I work with words, a lot of lyrical music interferes with my concentration. So I often listen to heavy metal instead.
Sometimes the music pushes through my concentration. Last week, I spent a lot of time going through the backlog of unread posts on No Clean Singing, which meant a lot of year-end lists. I heard a lot of 2017 releases for the first time. Here are some of the ones that pushed through my concentration and forced me to enjoy them even though I was trying to concentrate on work. Read More
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A couple years ago I attended Seattle’s Decibel Festival (the local electronic music festival, not the traveling heavy metal one sponsored by the magazine of the same name). In the EMP (now MoPop) Sky Church, giant visual displays moved on the wall behind the performers. I took a picture of this one, which reminded me of the Papago (now Tohono O’
In the actual myth, I think the man, I’itoi, created humans and later retired, hidden from men in a cave hidden by the maze. But he is usually placed at the entrance to the maze, and so looks to me like any other human – a person with a long journey ahead and no idea what they’re doing or what they’re in for.
This modern, electronic man is already in the thick of it. For each of the last two years, the American consensus seems to have been, “Well that sucked, I hope the next one is better.” But each year gives birth to the one that follows, so we can expect 2018 to be a tangled maze we must navigate if we’re going to repair the damage of the last two years. We can count on this year to be “amazing.” I hope some of the good connotation applies as well.
ByGD
Hmm. New Year’s Resolutions. Not really my thing. I always want to be healthier, make more money, and finish writing that novel. How is a new year going to make me more likely to do any of that? After all, New Year’s Day is arbitrary. One year, I had three of them. One on January 1st in Singapore; another a couple weeks later in India when the Tamils ran painted bullocks through town and threw apple-bananas in the air; and a third a month later when I ate Indian-Chinese food to celebrate the Year of the Horse. Read More
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These little boys performed at Doe Bay Fest a few years back under the name Brother for Sale. They play with their parents as the Crow Valley String Band. They played Doe Bay again last summer as Brograss.
Bluegrass is the heavy metal of folk music, if you follow me. Whatever name they play under, these boys shred.