Living Colour’s drummer is also a progressive force in jazz — “We were a tiny speck,” Living Colour vocalist Corey Glover told The Ringer about the band’s early days touring with The Rolling Stones. I can confirm that, because I watched the band from the nosebleed seats in 1989. Fans of the band’s early albums may associate it solely with the…

Sometimes the artist is as good as the author — In the Seventies, Bantam Books published a paperback edition of works by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962). The promotional blurbs are effusive in their praise, yet anyone who enjoys the Nobel Prize-winning writer’s work might find they fall short. As great as Hesse is, the cover art on the major…

The masters never said it would be easy — On February 7, 2005, The New Yorker ran a striking cover. The black-and-white drawing shows a crowd of people, with red lines indicating each person’s line of sight, and many of the people are looking at someone who is looking at someone else who is looking at someone else and…

A few words and 8 links — Artists and thinkers hold society together. That goes for kindergarteners finger-painting and philosophers redefining how we’ll see the world tomorrow. I play my own modest part through what I write on Medium. Below are links to posts in key areas of interest. Music For a couple years, I ran a small…

Scuzz music from Finland — The first time I heard the phrase “priapic posturing” was in an article about Whitesnake’s 2008 release Good to Be Bad. The feminist in me knows enough to look at this characteristic of much hard rock with suspicion, my libido just enjoys it, and somewhere in between is a music…

It’s an album for levity in body and soul — Winter can be a hard time. For many, that’s when seasonal affective disorder strikes. When this last winter got hard for me, I turned to the vinylophile’s tried-and-true method of purchasing a new record. …

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the grunge explosion — When I was in high school, my family moved from Small Midwestern Town A to Small Midwestern Town B. Cornfields surrounded both, a church stood on many a corner, and actual white picket fences lined the streets. My age group’s taste in music, however, wasn’t quite the same, meaning that…

Sersi is the film’s redeeming feature — According to ScreenRant, Eternals was the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe not to certify fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. The film’s negative reviews were harsh, and for the most part I don’t disagree, but the film does offer one clear good, and that’s Gemma Chan in the role of…

One woman’s noise is…another woman’s noise? — One of the best soundtracks of the nineties was the Spawn soundtrack. And one of the best tracks on that album was “No Remorse I Wanna Die,” a Slayer-Atari Teenage Riot mashup. And one of the best things about ATR was the digital hardcore movement it spearheaded. And one of…