Part 1 in a series.

Children feel both overawed and utterly repulsed by their parents. We are children, going from literal to hidden to metaphorical to crisis childhood, careening from pillar to post across the jukebox townships that are our lives. All of us, all, spin out skeins of push and pull, memory and revision, a miserable, familiar, exquisite chrysalis of family that promises a moth that cannot emerge.

I interrogate my brain, history,  my old Child Development textbooks for evidence that this is not so, or, as is true of many things I hold true, that the idea is so thoroughly  midcentury, Midwestern, middle class as to be precious bullshit. But so far it stands up. It stands up, gains speed, and runs backward and forward in parabolas across geography and time, first across Polk County, then Iowa, then the US, in grand slicing arcs of nicotine, nail polish and brick, that leads now to an entire country caught under the bowl of my family, sewn up in bedclothes, smothered by my family romance. My family has you surrounded. Full story »

NASA and its spooky Sith-lord counterpart, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are teaming up to achieve the impossible: interplanetary colonialism. DARPA, known for its role in developing such technologies as the internet and GPS, has also funded cyborg beetles implanted with electrodes that control their flight by radio, battery powered human exoskeletons, and ravenous robots called EATRs which find and consume biomass (read humans) for fuel.

The stated purpose of DARPA is to maintain military supremacy through technological superiority. During the dark nights after Sputnik first blinked overhead, Americans gathered in their bomb shelters and grumbled that we should do something before the other guys do it to us. In our innocence, we had no idea what that something might be, so we put together a crack team of scientific geniuses to discover it. Full story »

Commuter Digressing
by Davide Trame

Train window, quite a frame:
another year starts
in the ashes of bloom,
the sea of cornstalks,
withered now, bronze filaments,
a burnt crowd in the low sunlight,
or burnt gold, rustling in memory,
the stream of the past in its lush rust.
The train sails, I am stuck to the mast.

Stuck to this frame. Full story »

by Seth Michalak

I’ll never forget the day in 1992 when I first heard the album Shakespeare My Butt by Toronto band the Lowest of the Low. It was one of those existential moments where everything clicked and I thought to myself “Damn! This is what music is supposed to sound like.” As a freshman in high school, I was still forming my opinions about music, and this record would become the measuring stick against which so much other music would be compared.

Originally released independently in 1991, the album took about a year to make its way across the border to me in my home town of Fredonia, New York, a college town just south of Buffalo. Shakespeare briefly held the title of “best selling Canadian independent release,” after the band sold over 10,000 copies out of the back of their tour van at their live shows. Full story »

Welcome to the annual Scholars & Rogues/Lullaby Pit Best CDs of the Year. I should be tired of saying this by now, but for the sake of tradition: it was a good year for music. An odd year, perhaps, but a good one. Rather than blather on setting the stage, let’s get right to it. This is the first post of three – the Gold LPs will be followed by the Platinum LPs and finally by the CD of the Year. And something a little special is going to happen in that post, so don’t miss it.

Brief format note: The CD title will link to a review, usually at the AllMusic Guide or eMusic (where you can sample and click to buy, if you like it), followed by a brief comment or two by me.

The Gold LPs

This year’s music seems to line up according to genre. Up first are three very worthy discs in the category of… Full story »

I’m just back from the supermarket, where I spent so much time in the checkout line that I almost turned into a human stalagmite. I have almost no patience in these situations, largely because it’s nearly impossible to kill time. I surveyed the human menagerie, hoping for distraction, but gave up after spotting a woman wrapped in Charlie Brown pajama bottoms and a much-too-small, horizontally tiger-striped sweatshirt in pink and brown. She probably stood out because her striped top glared like a lighthouse at the edge of a sea of equally hefty men with ponytails and earrings who all were wearing camouflage shirts—as well as camouflage pants, jackets and caps. Perhaps they didn’t want to be seen grocery shopping and were trying to blend into invisibility in front of the Cheerios.

In an anxious bid to keep my mind from seizing up, I turned to the magazine display. Full story »

Progress Note
by Joseph Reich

Client informed clinician today
that he sleeps with those fangs to
replace bite plate the orthodontist
gave him. Clinician was curious about
role of mother and if she had had any
concerns about nightmares, night terrors. Full story »

At the start of the second chapter of his autobiography, Life, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones writes, “For many years I slept, on average, twice a week. That means that I have been conscious for three lifetimes.”

That means three lives’ worth of Richards’ memories from the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll, right? Well, kind of. It seems Richards spent one of those extra lives as a heroin addict and most of another one feuding with Stones front man Mick Jagger. He spares no ink on those topics, so Life actually works about to about a life and a half. Having said that, it still lends itself to being read in big chunks. Fans of classic rock will devour it.

The book begins by establishing a main theme: It’s always been the Stones vs. the Establishment (read: police), and the Stones make a fool of The Man every time. Full story »

The incarnation of “sexy,” that is, that cropped up a few years ago: exciting or trendy in a general, not erotic, way. That settled, let’s move on to a paper that Christopher Ford wrote for the Hudson Institute in which he weighs, in classic nuclear-strategist mode (bearing in mind that Hudson was founded by its most notorious example, Herman Kahn), the merits of launch on warning (LOW).

To refresh your memory, LOW refers to a nuclear state launching a retaliatory strike when it believes that it has detected nuclear weapons headed towards it soil. In another words, the attacked state isn’t waiting around for the decisive confirmation that detonation constitutes. Needless to say, accidents happen. (The most famous was in 1983 when Soviet ballistics officer Stanislav Petrov was brave enough to act on his judgment that an alarm supposedly informing him that the United States had launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union was false.) Full story »

As the griddle began to heat up, it made a single loud crack. Then it sat silent for a couple minutes as I mixed my batter, then it cracked again.

Nothing broke. My griddle just likes to protest every time it wakes up.

I watched the little orange light next to the heat controller: It would go out once the griddle heated to 400 degrees.

I still had a few lumps in my batter to mix out, so I was in no big rush. I mix mine from a box of Bisquick. Nothing fancy. A couple eggs. A cup of milk. I’m golden.

I don’t do pancakes from scratch the way my dad’s mother used to. Full story »

S&R readers have probably noticed that we like poetry around here. Something we have been talking about for quite a while, in fact, is why we didn’t take the next step and become a poetry publisher. Now, after months of planning, we’re doing precisely that.

On Monday, we will publish our first poem as a poetry journal. If you’re wondering, no, this won’t affect everything else we do. We’ll continue to be the same online magazine that we’ve always been, only now we’ll be offering up original literature.

Here’s how it will work. Full story »

Sometime during the next few months something very interesting might happen. Because during this period, the US Congress will be asked to raise the debt ceiling so that the US Treasury can continue to meet its obligations. The debt ceiling is a legal limit set by Congress on how much money the Treasury can borrow. In the past, it was raised from time to time. Over the past ten years, however, federal debts ballooned following the Bush administration’s 2001 tax cuts and the massive deficit spending that resulted (including for several undeclared wars). As a result, the debt ceiling has been raised ten times in the past ten years. And now Congress will be asked to do it again.

But we have a new Congress, with a House of Representatives now in the control of the Republicans, many of whom seem to be among the most intellectually challenged and ideological bunch you care to come across. As a result, the administration is starting its full court press early. Earlier this week, Obama’s chief economic advisor Austin Goolsbee was out there hitting the airwaves, talking about how crucial it was to get the debt ceiling raised. And yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner sent a letter to Congress–in the person of the new Speaker, John Boehner, actually–reiterating the same points, pointing out that a failure to raise the debt limit would result in “catastrophic damage to the economy, potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.” Full story »

Every great once in a while, procrastination pays. It was procrastination that got me a free iPhone…well that and Apple wanting to get rid of 3Gs models to make room for the next greatest thing. Being a step or two behind the times doesn’t matter to me; hell, AT&T hasn’t gotten off it’s lazy, corporate ass and brought 3G service to America’s social and evolutionary cul-de-sac so half of what makes an iPhone cool doesn’t even apply to me. What i wanted was a free 8Gb iPod Touch that i could use as a phone. Not a fan of many things in my pocket, and i haven’t had a music player for something like a year now. Because i’m lazy and procrastinate, that’s why.

So i’ve been music shopping and ripping old CD’s with a fervor.

Full story »

Stop me if I start rambling. Too late.

Through my long and storied educational career, I’ve only ever failed one class. Oh I’ve come close to failing. I made a D in my Bible as Literature class and was damn lucky to get that, a lapse of mine that I hope will not have eternal consequences. You might go to hell for failing The Bible as Literature. But I only ever really failed once. It was typing. I took this class as an elective when I was a senior in high school. Alas, my typing efforts were hampered by the little finger on my left hand. I broke that finger when I was 13, and it healed back at an odd angle that made typing and guitar playing impossible. I would like to be able to play the guitar. But typing? Typing was for girls.  I didn’t need the credit, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when the year ended, and I still owed the typing teacher, Mrs. Hardison, six weeks of work. I boldly backed away from the manual typewriter, looked her square in the eye and said:

“Mrs. Hardison, I’m going to fail this class and I don’t care. It’s 1973. When will a man ever need to know how to type?” Full story »

by Matthew Record

I remember listening to an old interview of Alex Chilton that aired on the radio shortly after he passed away and more than anything else I was struck by the diffidence and blasé attitude he seemed to have about his own place in the history of pop:

“I guess in the late ’70s. I spent some time in New York, and it seemed like everybody I ran into there, you know, claimed to be a fan of the Big Star albums, and that sort of stuff. And so, you know, I guess it was around then that I began to see that even though we hadn’t sold any records or made any money out of the albums, that they were still some kind of success in a way, you know.”

It wasn’t quite stunning but I’d always heard Chilton spoken of in the most reverent terms; he was a man who had more credibility with indie pop hipsters than the Pope has with Catholics and he spoke of his own brilliant musical career like a dentist discussing his unsuccessful private practice at a holiday party. Full story »

Recently released emails written by employees of the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC and other Canadian government workers show that the Embassy directly lobbied the Bush Administration and Congress in an attempt to influence regulations and legislation that could restrict exports of Alberta tar sands-derived bitumen and petroleum. The emails further reveal that the Bush Administration had asked the Canadian Embassy to lobby Congress and to use its influence with key oil companies to convince them to lobby on Canada’s – and the Bush Administration’s – behalf. Full story »

Mark Twain is rolling over in his grave. I should know: he’s buried not too far from where I live.

NewSouth books has announced that it will publish a censored version of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, paired with Tom Sawyer, that eliminates “the N-word.”

That’s “nigger,” in case anyone doesn’t get it.

I find the word offensive. Nearly everyone I know finds it offensive. But what I find more offensive is the notion that it’s okay to censor art. I find it offensive to revise history. I find it offensive that the Thought Police can bully people over free speech. Full story »

Part fiction, part memoir, Günter Grass’s The Box is an account of the Nobel laureate’s personal life as told by his eight grown children.

The Box has been billed as a sequel to his 2007 memoir Peeling the Onion, a book that focused on Grass’s life up to the publication of his famous novel The Tin Drum in 1959. In Onion Grass said, “the temptation to camouflage oneself in third person remains great.” In The Box, he camouflage’s himself in first person—nine first-persons, actually: his own voice and the voices of his kids.

The book’s conceit—Grass’s grown children gather for a series of reminiscences captured on tape—gives Grass the chance to ruminate on his own life from a safe distance. It all feels just a little too self-indulgent, though, but then again, that’s one of the themes of the book: Grass is always “working something over in his head” as a writer, and this book is just one more way for him to do that. Full story »

Let me begin by observing that I have been wrong before. I will be wrong again, no doubt. And I may be wrong here. Hopefully I’m wrong here, and I want everybody to hang onto this so that when I’m proven wrong you can mock me mercilessly as we watch the Denver Broncos win one Super Bowl after another. I’m man enough to take it.

That said, I don’t think I’m wrong here.

Today’s introduction of new VP – Football Operations John Elway, a guy with no real football management experience outside of the Arena League, produced all the things that I know smart Doncs fans were hoping for:

• The new GM will be Brian Xanders, reporting to Elway. The thinking here is that it was all probably McSkippy’s fault. Full story »