I spent a lot of my senior year in high school hanging out with my two gay friends. No, I don’t mean “two of my gay friends.” As I’ve covered in the entries from those years, prior to college and the internet, that aspect of…
Sometime in the late 90s, a friend of my girlfriend’s made her a mix CD with the Auteurs’ “After Murder Park” on it. I don’t think it made much impression at the time; it was pleasant enough, apart from the whole being about the Moors…
Open on a wide shot of CYBERSPACE. A vast field of dark gray filled with softly pulsing lights in every color: red, green, blue, orange, yellow, violet, white, amber, indigo. Some are just dots. Others are clusters, like snow-cones lit from within. Hairline glowing traces…
There are some albums you love from the first moment you hear them. The first song starts, and you’re immediately transported. It’s as if the music is wired directly to your spine and you wonder how you could ever have lived without hearing it. From…
It was probably 1997 when the Autumns spent the night in my apartment. I was at home when my girlfriend called me from the radio station where she was interviewing them. I’m not sure why I wasn’t there; maybe I’d been at work. She put…
Seven Fun Facts About Bis! 1. It’s Pronounced To Rhyme With “Kiss” If Wikipedia is to be believed, the band’s name is an acronym from a The The lyric. This seems extraordinarily obscure to me, particularly since I can’t hear a trace of any The…
What becomes a legend most? I’ll let you think about it, Space Ghost Coast to Coast — Rasputina, “The Olde Headboard” I imagine the term “goth” has this in common with a street drug: as a rule, the people selling it won’t use it, and…
In 1997, the way I learned about new music changed yet again. Even though I’d worked as a community radio DJ before and between my early college years, and even though I knew and liked most of the people working at the college station, I…
In 1992, I started college. I listened to Little Earthquakes on repeat. I walked into a comic store for the first time in ages, leading me to pick up issue #5 of the “Brief Lives” storyline of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and buy it knowing nothing…
Toward the end of 1995, it suddenly hit me that I would probably never see her again. She was spending the next semester at another school, studying poetry under a mentor in the land of cows and sorority blondes and Amish people, and I would…