THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

I've attended festivals before; after all, I went to the Coachella festival twelve times (2004-2014, 2016), and I've had a sporadic showing at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (or Movement, as it's now called). I've even been to festivals in Chicago before, from the 2006 Vice-curated Intonation Music Festival to multiple shots of the Pitchfork Music Festival. But I avoided going to things like Bonnaroo and Outside Lands and Riot Fest and Lollapalooza, thinking that they would somehow be lesser than what I'd already experienced. That all changed almost two weeks ago, when I went to my first Lollapalooza festival, right in the heart of downtown Chicago. I almost didn't go, but I was swayed by two things -- a reduced-price guest wristband, and the promise of hang time with my friend Brian in one of my favorite cities -- so I took the plunge. (As an aside, I drove from Detroit, as I saw Roger Waters perform at the Palace of Auburn Hills the night before Lolla...

The title "One-Hit Wonders" does not refer to an especially potent brand of psychedelics, but rather the evanescent burst of the perfect pop song in what quaintly was called the Top 40 era. (As in " Radio plays 'em, record stores sell 'em, Billboard ranks 'em, and AT40 counts 'em down. I'm Casey Kasem !") The writers at The AV Club have their hot takes , but once the question's out there, there's just no way I could leave my choices out, right? Here's a few that jump out without thinking about it too much (or replicating The AV Club choices), so enjoy: “ My Boyfriend’s Back ” – The Angels (1963) When the early Sixties -- that's post-Elvis & pre-Beatles -- gave us the first wave of girl groups, it was inevitable that when the Aqua Net settled, there would be some divisions within those gaggles of harmonizing estrogen bombs. One division was obvious, given the times -- black v. white -- but one division was more thematic, ...

bellum se ipsum alit is a Latin phrase that roughly translates to "the war feeds itself." It's the last thing we hear at the end of the four-part History Channel documentary entitled America's War on Drugs (more information here ). Like most things on the History Channel, it suffers from tacky re-enactments, but the core message -- a message that could be whittled down to a strong two hours, IMHO -- is devastatingly simple: the utterly ruinous policies behind the "War on Drugs" have cost trillions of dollars and millions of dead or ruined lives. It has negatively impacted domestic and foreign policy for a half-century, it is the hub of what Kerouac called the slaving meat wheel of incarceration and racism and other societal and interpersonal ills, and it is long past time to try anything else. But we won't. We won't because the United States -- by far the largest consumers of drugs, legal or other -- cannot have an honest engagement with the dr...

Just over four decades ago, on 1 May 1977, Folsom Field in Boulder, CO held over 60,000 most-likely-baked music fans for a concert featuring Country Joe McDonald, John Sebastian, Firefall, Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, and headlined by Fleetwood Mac. My parents were two of those fans, and my father captured the following pics of the event (along with some periodic commentary from my dad at the time). Country Joe McDonald ("he was extra") John Sebastian ("he sucked") Firefall ("they were very good") Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band (the middle picture features Fleetwood Mac watching from the wings) Fleetwood Mac (the middle picture shows Christine McVie playing wooden chairs) At one point, a hang glider flew over the stadium, eliciting a cheering standing ovation from the crowd. Speaking of the crowd... The center of the second shot features two women with bino...

Aside from cloying humidity and beaded necklaces designed to elicit fleeting nudity from soused dames, southern Louisiana is known for a delightful musical melange of R&B and Creole called zydeco. Largely driven by accordion and guitar, zydeco is custom built for filling the dance floor with ebullient joy, so no matter your age, color, or creed, it's pretty hard to sit still once those propulsive rhythms kick in. So naturally, zydeco connects with people who live for dance music. People like Robert Palmer. "Change His Ways," a tale of the ebb and flow of a love affair, is a musical outlier on Heavy Nova , but it does feature Palmer's trademark vocal harmonies as the foundation to the zydeco flavors, adding layers of sweetener to a song that doesn't need it but benefits from it. And I haven't even mentioned the yodeling yet. Palmer's peripatetic zest for genre-hopping may be off-putting to some, but tracks like "Change His Ways" offer further ...

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

When I was growing up, I read comic books by the score -- my favorites published monthly or bi-monthly, usually published by Marvel -- and the idea of a "graphic novel" hadn't yet permeated the culture at large. But slowly, in an attempt to court a more adult market for what my wife calls "picture books," the term "graphic novel" started popping up more and more. Now, to my understanding, a "graphic novel" is a larger non-serialized work, a la Persepolis (the Marjane Satrapi autobiography depicting her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution, later turned into a motion picture). And while I read those from time to time, I find most of my current reading torn between monthly titles and collections of those titles, collections that typically go by the "trade paperback" designation. Anymore, I'm gravitating towards the trade paperbacks of titles as opposed to the monthly model. I assu...