Prophecy tends to be dangerous for its prophets: remember the addled, broken spasms of those young women at Delphi or ancient shamans gone wild from solitude, raving hermits deep in dense thickets of white birch. It’s a tricky line of work. Engine Empire, the new collection of poems by Cathy Park Hong, is an attempt […]
Like its author, How To Be Black is a bit of a scattershot—confessional, political, comedic. But let me explain what the book is not: It is not an instructional how-to in the spirit of …For Dummies. Written more explicitly, “This book is not How to Become a Black Person If You Are Not Already Black.” […]
The more the possibilities for self-directed musicianship multiply, the more blindingly corporate radio fodder becomes. It’s difficult sometimes to consider mainstream pop as anything other than advertisement, a smorgasbord of easy feelings with which casual listeners saddle themselves. Even bands with the indiest intentions that filter into Clear Channel soon find themselves regurgitating smoothly packaged products. The […]
The Instructions, by Adam Levin (of Chicago novelist fame, not Adam Levine of Moron 5 fame), is the bibliophile’s book. But I’ll get to that later. First, business: On my way to work this morning, I noticed a woman on the train de-purse her e-reader. A fairly typical early-morning L ritual. Based on empirical evidence, it seems […]
Accompanied by nothing more than the hiss of the tape machine and the shallow echo of imagined space, Daniel Higgs introduces us to the next chapter of his entropic aural canon: The Measure of Mystery. Created as part of the Gnome Life Records ‘Echomancy Tape Series,’ this 41-minute, three song compilation was recorded over the […]
