the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been shut down, but that doesn’t mean the end of PBS or NPR. it does mean they need direct support more than ever. PBS is cheaper than most streaming services & has lots of good shows. two words: Seaside Hotel
M.I.A., Born Free –
both from 2010 🎵
Goose Island Beer Co.’s Bourbon County Vanilla Rye Stout (2024) 🍺
cheers, big brother 🍻
Julieta Venegas, Sin Documentos, live at The Kennedy Center 🎵
The Sundays: A Certain Someone, “live” (video, at least) 🎵
Wet Leg, Catch These Fists & CPR, live for 3voor12 🎵
is it fun? is this a vibe? is it love
First Aid Kit - War Pigs, live 🎵
Ken “Popehat” White, with a beautiful July 4th story:
The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.
Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out, live on NPR 🎵
I finished the book The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. what a masterpiece of dystopian speculative fiction, it belongs right next to Orwell & Huxley 📚
Lucy Dacus, Ankles, live at Glastonbury today 🎵
Katie Gavin, Inconsolable, live on WFUV
I finished the book On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed. short read (started this morning); really good 📚
happy Juneteenth! celebrating the anniversary of both the announced end of slavery in Texas (160 years ago) and my dad’s birth (100 years ago)
In America, we don’t do kings
They’ve defied our courts, deported Americans, disappeared people off the streets, attacked our civil rights, and slashed our services. The corruption has gone too. far. No thrones. No crowns. No kings.
Sat., June 14, pretty much everywhere: NoKings.org
excellent new (!) official video for Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer 🎵
Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself-a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant-was compelling and, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of similar disarray. If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.
Curiously, the "phenomenal parallels" have been applied by another historian to earlier years of this century. Comparing the aftermaths of the Black Death and of World War I, James Westfall Thompson found all the same complaints: economic chaos, social unrest, high prices, profiteering, depraved morals, lack of production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners.
– Barbara W. Tuchman, in the introduction of A Distant Mirror. A book about the 14th century, it was written in 1978.
great to have the chance to see Los Campesinos! again last night 🎵
On the last full day of our California trip, we left Yosemite and went to see the sequoias in the south grove of Calaveras Big Trees State Park, California.
A few more pictures from our second (& last) day in Yosemite National Park.
A few pictures from our first day in Yosemite National Park.
blurry shot zoomed into from the cheap seats, but a great show by Lucy Dacus (and opener Katie Gavin) last night. my first concert at Moody Amphitheater; pretty nice! 🎵
Dessa, 5 Out of 6 (live) 🎵
[youtu.be/RCp19f6Vn...](https://youtu.be/RCp19f6VntE?si=8kqmyDk5VV2kwa6z)
ouch. The Onion - Revised National Parks Webpage Describes Harriet Tubman As Human Trafficker (vs. the actual & true story)
new Lucy Dacus: Ankles 🎵 cleverest new music video I’ve seen in a while