Mark Tough

This is simply outstanding. Thank you.

5 authors I've read at least 5 books by:
Robert Powers
Denis Johnson
Elaine Pagels
Italo Calvino
John Banville

* AND MORE *
Alice Munro
Ursula Le Guin
Richard Ford
Thomas Merton
John Cheever
Martin Amis
Joyce Carol Oates
Colson Whitehead

... to the mean.

I did eventually hear Paul on normie, non-alt FM radio: I'll Be You in '89 -- a fleeting journey to the center of the dial. Of course by then The One I Love had built R.E.M. a small city there on mainstream FM. (I worship R.E.M. too, but this is a reply about MPLS in February.)

... given the exposure of South Central Rain and general zeitgeist ownership. "Safe, cool, and warm." Gothic, mossy maybe, but not the freezing rain under the Skyway. "Cool" and "warm" as a that kind of a diss interwoven with the yearning -- making the opposites compliments by virtue of proximity...

Nice!

And I love centering "safe, cool, and warm" in the subhead, as that's always been a subtheme of the tune to me. Lynn came to live there, yes, but also hearing it in real time on release I immediately heard the R.E.M. frenemy aspect. Always compared and by then with the 'mats well "behind"...

I mean, it is in relative terms. Ok's 2024 Presidential margin was 2.5 times that of Texas. Texas is not yet competitive, but it is substantially less uncompetitive.

Economist Original Recipe hell yes!

And yeah, I was a Kinsley era NR guy.

Then there are the completely fallen, albeit more eclectic, soldiers: Lingua Franca, Brill’s Content, and — uh — Boardwatch. And — geezer dork alert — OMNI.

I'm letting my existing sub wind down and die. And I think I started with the Atlantic in HS debate circa 1980ish, so there is some sadness in finally cutting the cord.

There remain a decent number of good folks there, but they are now sharing the premises with SO MANY . . . other folks.

Days of yore in CHill (will add alt text shortly, folks).

Note June 12!

Actually mentioned it! Wow. They know.

RH is a great venue for, like, a seated folk show. It's just NOT a CLUB club.

The Atlantic had a response that was also energizing, albeit in a very different way. : /

(I mean, maybe "lots" is hyperbole, but definitely SOME and certainly MORE than with any other band I've seen more than once or twice.)

Gotta say re back in the day: maybe there was more going on at edgy IDM shows I didn't attend, but SCOTS shows in the early 90s tended to feature LOTS of Actual Sex and Sex Adjacent activities in the audience. Those bon temps did indeed rouler.

I've been up yonder in Baltimore since '92. They often played 8x10 here in the 90s. More recently, they've tended to hit Ram's Head in Annapolis which I don't like for them as it's more of a supper club vibe. But they have started booking Elkton Music Hall up towards Wilmington and I'm stoked!

So much greeatness back at La Terazza and the old Cat's Cradle in the early 90s! And yep, they still bring it. My old Brazilian roommate's then-wife helped Mary with some Spanish back in the day (note to pedants: yes, not Portuguese). I brought the chicken on several occasions.

Re folks making the "but you see exactly where the back of your vehicle is." Yes. But it still takes an average driver more in/out/in/out to achieve centered parallel presence within the space when backing in.

A box on the houses of the backer backers.

AAA actually recommends it, which hurts my soul. Dunno re data.

It's def conservative coded -- or at least Big Truck correlated.

Absolute worst is when folks do this in garages with trad pull-in diagonal spaces; they have to OPPOSE the flow of traffic!

I used to interact with Jain a fair amount on Twitter and I think he was and is pretty good at the poll aggregation thing as it pertains to elections. Punditry has drawn him into broader realms of political strategizing, comms, social psych, etc. and he is well beyond his depth there.

Concerns over autocracy in the U.S. continue to grow Is America still a democracy? Scholars tell NPR that after the last year under President Trump, the country has slid closer to autocracy or may already be there.

No. The country has not "slid." Unless you're a child on a snowy hill, sliding implies a loss of agency. And frankly even then.

The country has been FORCIBLY DRAGGED, KICKING AND SCREAMING closer to autocracy.

Sounds like a skam to me.

"Spotlight on David Gergen."
-- the inimitable 90s Baltimore indie band Candy Machine.

Same, really: Ames, Ft. Greene BKLYN, Durham/Chapel Hill, Baltimore. (I'm ignoring the year I spent in Indianola, Iowa, working for the Congressional campaign cuz I really just slept there; my "home" was the totality of southwestern Iowa).

A few of those relationships have necessarily fallen prey to culling in These Times, but mostly not.

And for me, a first-gen college kid off the Iowa farm who knew from an age 6 visit to Chicago that he would be decamping for the city, a decent number of those friends from elementary school are still folks I catch up with when I return home.

omfg

O!

YouTube video by Reunion - Topic Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)

Still have the 45.

Life Is A Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me) -- Reunion

aka the kinda-precursor to It's the End of the World As We Know It (if only in a scat vocals sense)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kySY...

Also, the only neo-Victorian bar restaurant in the world where I have ever seen patrons having full-on intercourse during dinner (yes, they were in a basement bar alcove but still).

Closing suuuuuucks.

Closing after 30 years and having got up the creek enough not to be able to pay staff REALLY sucks.

And for my money, the best brewers in the city if one's judging by their capacity to utterly it brewing the things they chose to brew.

And I say ruefully, as a 60-year-old Xer, the numbers suggest that a PRECISE cut of GenX would likely be worse.