THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

When I saw that Coachella 2012 was rolled out for two consecutive weekends as the   exact same festival , I immediately set aside time and cash for both – one with my friend Brian, and one with my lovely girlfriend Coco.  (We even called the weekend Cocochella, for maximum cuteness.)  Brian and I signed up for the first cold-as-ice weekend, and I flew out of and back to Detroit; it made for a bit of a drive there and back, but a flight with no stops was what I wanted.  However, Coco and I made the innocent mistake of flying out of Pellston, which ended up pushing back our arrival into Palm Springs the night before by at least five hours, which made for a series of unplanned pains in the ass.  (Seriously, our asses hurt from so much sitting.)  The only benefit was at Hertz, who put us into a new white Mustang instead of the car I’d reserved.  Once we got out to Palm Springs, however, I noticed it was warmer than when I’d left it a few days ago....

I am now officially old enough to say "back when I started going to Coachella, it was only a two-day, one-weekend festival."  This year, the production company Goldenvoice put on “Coachella” (the three-day festival) for two consecutive weekends as the exact same festival , but there must be something to make each weekend memorable as a unique entity aside from the bands shifting up their set lists (which they were discouraged to do).  So how about offering up two weekends of extreme weather to fuck with the patrons?  Sounds like a plan. There's no way around it -- Coachella 9.1 (my ninth straight year of attendance, first weekend) was cold.  I’m not just talking about “cold for California” cold, but actual Michigan -level cold.  (In fact, there was one day where the afternoon temperature in Petoskey and Indio was separated by a few degrees.)  So cold that I wore a thermal undershirt and hoodie with the usual Coachella gear and was still struck by...

(Well, this is nothing if not timely.) Some albums I may have forgotten to shout out are below. As always, I'm sure there are more, but the following got me all twisted: TV On The Radio - Nine Types Of Light; PJ Harvey - Let England Shake; Wilco - The Whole Love; St. Vincent - Strange Mercy; Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow; Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean; Zombi - Escape Velocity; Arctic Monkeys - Suck It And See; Jamie Woon - Mirrorwriting Some movies I saw in '11 that I really enjoyed (and I know I left some out, but whatevs): Drive; Melancholia; Hugo; Take Shelter; Meek's Cutoff; Warrior; Jane Eyre; The Skin I Live In; Bridesmaids; Super 8; Martha Marcy May Marlene; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Project Nim; The Artist; Attack The Block; Cave Of Forgotten Dreams; Contagion A few wonderful '11 books: Ready Player One (Ernest Cline); Love Goes To Buildings On Fire (Will Hermes); Robopocalypse (Daniel Wilson); The Last Holiday (Gil Scott-Heron) And a fin...

The Oprah-tization of existence means that your life is now a Story, complete with Chapters and Themes and Movements and the like. (And sometimes, when the Story is more compelling than the person, people believe in the Story so much that the person is swept along in the tide of transformation and [re]creation, such as the differences between Erick and "MrH8," but that's for another post.) So if that axiom holds true, my time at Evergreen Park Grocery – from a fourteen-year-old bottle bitch and gas pump monkey to a twenty-one-year-old counter jockey and do-everything – represents a fun and exciting set of chapters, tracking teenage crushes and midnight basketball and blood and sweat and mullets and cut-off t-shirts and tanning and high fructose corn syrup and gelled hair and grief and loss and ice cream and laughter and more. Did I mention the laughter? Lots and lots of laughter. So much laughter that I wrongly imagined all jobs to be this joyful, even if you did ha...

I’ve always been a bit of a stubborn contrarian when it comes to music, especially when I was younger. (As opposed to now, when I often feel like a stubborn contrarian about everything.) In the late 80’s, when metal-pop was all the rage, I listened to R&B and hip-hop instead. And when grunge came around in the early 90’s to paint the rock charts flannel, I couldn’t help but look to England for electronic music as a digital antidote. So when I think back to the halcyon music days of 1994, two things immediately jump out in contrast: Dookie by Green Day (which was the multi-million-selling pivot point from grunge-influenced rock to punk-influenced rock) and the self-titled hardly-heard never-selling debut from the duo of Eric Matthews and Richard Davies under the name Cardinal. Barely a half-hour in length, Cardinal was rich orchestrated ‘60s-ish pop a la the Zombies or the early Bee Gees, and it sounded both cleaner and weirder than anything else in my ears at the time. As oft...

Modern-day soul albums have jettisoned any connection to the politicized world (where the term “soul” originated) in order to explore the heights and depths of romance. So even though Wild Beasts – white, British, homosexual – don’t seem to obviously fit the mold, Smother is nothing if not an appealing and compelling R&B record. Guitars that simultaneously echo ‘70s funk and ‘80s New Pop ring and chime next to top-of-the-charts electronics, offering a sweet yet skewed take on bedroom tunes. The up-tempo skip of “Bed Of Nails” and the pulsing stalk of “Plaything” and “Albatross” express the yearning extremes of love in flower, and when the end comes too soon (aptly with the finale “End Comes Too Soon”), the idea of full immersion in love – in other words, being smothered in emotion – sparks a longing to hear Smother again and again.