With the release of Boys and Girls in America, Craig Finn, talk-singing front man of The Hold Steady, unveils the latest chapter in his ongoing story of drugs and redemption. This release, the band’s first for Vagrant records, finds the New York rockers picking up right where they left off with 2005’s Separation Sunday, both musically and lyrically.
Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.
—Bertrand Russell,
Marriage and Morals
(1929)
Ahead, I will discuss documentarian Kirby Dick’s This Film is Not Yet Rated and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Those involved with the MPAA claim its purpose is to warn consumers about potentially objectionable material (sex, violence, language, and drug use, for example) in films. It does this, but in a way that outsiders, myself included, often find puzzling. Read the rest of this entry »
Chris Jordan
Intolerable Beauty
“Cell phones #2”
Plasticatastrophe
Half a year ago I read an article on the North Pacific Gyre, an immense, high-pressure area of the ocean between the west coast and Hawaii. The waters within were doldrums; few ships sailed through because the winds didn’t blow. The ocean just swirled there slowly. Read the rest of this entry »
Lost my high powered job, six figures out the door.
MAN, my employer used to love me.
Fired me for taking an unwarranted leave of absence.
Unwarranted or unexpected. Read the rest of this entry »
Chocolate and beer. To have tasted the Belgian variety of these treats is to count yourself among the lucky. Believe it or not, they may be all that’s left of a strained Belgian national identity. Read the rest of this entry »
by Craig Nagoshi
This season’s tempests blustered you out
To sea, by the flash of fire
That consumed and passed those about
You. Read the rest of this entry »