It was cool meeting Rivers Cuomo in 1994 on the first tour of the Blue Album.
It was cool meeting Rivers Cuomo in 1994 on the first tour of the Blue Album.
Watched: Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC 🍿
Nightclubbing chronicled the rise and fall of Max’s Kansas City, a legendary New York club that helped birth the NYC punk scene and was sort of a rival of CBGB. I sensed that it didn’t take too much embellishment to highlight the wildness of that time and place. My favorite line in the film is uttered by trans singer Jayne County when she describes fighting with a guy who was heckling her and jumped on stage while she was performing at CBGB. To paraphrase, “I punched him and he fell off the stage, hit his head on a table, and gave himself a concussion.” Amazing how easy it is to self-administer head trauma when someone punches you. That was the scene at those clubs 45 years ago.
If The Atlantic has an enemy, it’s the pernicious tradwife.
I had to cancel my Letterbird subscription. It’s a fantastic niche service but literally no one ever used my form.
Finished reading: 30 Key Moments in the History of Christianity by Mark W. Graham 📚. The best of these kinds of historical works lend perspective to our modern times.
Moses the Black
Artist: Hunter Biden
The repaving action around here has been insane. Spotted on the walk home.
When I read that Hammock had collaborated with The Flaming Lips on their song “Chemicals Make You Small,” I was a bit shocked. Wayne Coyne and The Lips are brash, experimentally noisy, irreverent, sometimes goofy and often oversaturated. They seem to have almost the opposite of Hammock’s ethereal, slow, quiet and completive approach.
Echoes and Dust features an interview with the lads from Hammock in which they discuss the influences for their new album, The Second Coming Was A Moonrise. In it, they explain being inspired by American Head by The Flaming Lips.
With Life in Small Spaces, the upcoming album from Black Marble, the project’s creator, Chris Stewart, taps into one of my semi-obsessions. The album’s description on its Bandcamp page has further details on the clue we are given with the album title.
It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need to compromise your values for the tempting illusion of success.
One thing struck me particularly forcefully about Yuval Levin’s recent essay, Idols of the Valley, on the Pope’s recent encyclical. While the previous Pope Leo was able to formulate his philosophy regarding the industrial revolution after its effects had become mostly clear, the current Pope Leo has no such luxury in regard to AI. We are all still grasping at what the future holds for this technology and how we are going to adapt. This puts the Pope at a disadvantage, but it still makes sense for him to tackle the subject now, while we still have a better chance to put up moral and human guardrails to guide the course of events, rather than letting them overwhelm us.