Jon Courtenay Grimwood, 9Tail Fox*
Harry Connolly, Child of Fire
Harry Connolly, Game of Cages
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Harry Connolly, Circle of Enemies
Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir
Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto Vol 53
Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto Vol 54
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 10
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 11
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 12
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Joseph Heller, Closing Time
Pseudonymous Bosch, You Have to Stop This
Raina Telgemeier, Smile (A Dental Drama)
Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 13
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 14
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 15
Andrew Peters, Ravenwood*
Tony DiTerlizzi, The Search for WondLa
Michael Lang, The Road to Woodstock
David Browne, Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970
Greil Marcus, Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 16
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 17
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 18
Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto Vol 55
Kent Hartman, The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Best-Kept Secret
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 19
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 20
Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 21
Simon Spence, Just Can't Get Enough: The Making of Depeche Mode
Robert W. Boyczuk, Nexus: Ascension*
Galina Mindlin, Don Durousseau & Joseph Cardillo, Your Playlist Can Change Your Life*
Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto: The Official Character Data Book
Lev AC Rosen, All Men of Genius

* - Did not finish, for varying reasons.

Today is the 75th Anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge! These are a few pictures of the bridge I've taken myself...



This is the view out of Spare Oom! I like looking out my window and seeing one of our famous landmarks...that is, when it's not enshrouded by fog. :)


Taken from the top of Twin Peaks. That's the Marin Headlands across the bay (and the large mountain to the left is Mt. Tamalpais). The strip of houses between the two bits of green (the Presidio to the north, Golden Gate Park to to the south) is my neighborhood of the Richmond.


My favorite picture I've taken of the bridge so far. We crossed about half of it last year on a gorgeously clear but windy day.


My other favorite picture, this one taken from Battery Spencer, which is just above and to the west of the bridge.

So my friend head58 emailed me this morning with sad news: WFNX 101.7 out of Lynn MA has laid off nearly all its staff, pending a sale to Evil Radio Conglomerate Clear Channel. It saddens me that this has happened so suddenly, and my everpresent hate for Clear Channel's practices only magnifies these emotions. Realistically, it probably would have happened sooner or later as the radio universe is evolving and changing rapidly and unexpectedly, but it still bothers the hell out of me that it happened at all.

WFNX went on the air on April 11, 1983, just shy of thirty years ago. That item by itself might not be all that important. Besides, WBCN--its main rival in listenership--had been on the air since 1968. It was just one more rock station in the growing Metro Boston area. But that's the thing--these stations were all competing for the same demographic: the prized 18-34 year olds. And given Boston, there are a LOT of them--the Boston area has a ridiculously large amount of colleges, and where there are colleges, there are young, impressionable radio listeners. So how does a station differentiate itself from the other stations grabbing for the same brass ring? Well, in the late 70s and early 80s, that often meant hiring a big name deejay, or at least hire talent that makes you unique.

The other, far riskier way for a station to differentiate itself is to make its programming unique. For every adventurous deejay or music director who wants to change things up and be creative, there's going to be the station manager (and in some cases, the FCC) who is going to keep such creativity from going overboard. It's riskier in that it's not tried-and-true; you have no idea if it's going to work or fall flat. As a disk jockey and a music lover, you might love the music you're about to play, but you might have maybe three listeners tops who agree with you. And if you only have three listeners, you don't have much station presence; no presence, no advertisement; no advertisement, no money; no money, no station. Simple as that.

WFNX came into being as WLYN in the 40s and went through all kinds of programming until it was bought out by Phoenix Media--the company that puts out the Boston Phoenix alternative weekly paper--in 1983. This underground weekly was known for keeping tabs on what was going on in the area, what shows were being played, and what was upcoming. It's also known for its coverage of alternative lifestyles, sexual and otherwise; it favored the goings-on of the bar scenes, the LGBT community, the local blue-collar jobs, and everything in between.

Owner and Phoenix publisher Stephen Mindich wanted to bring new music to the Boston area, and obviously he knew that it wouldn't be the same rock being played at WBCN and WCOZ. He saw that there was a small but rabid following for the punk/post-punk/new wave sounds that were evolving out on the fringes, and he must have known that the college kids would love it. With his knowledge of what was going on in town, he chose that second, riskier way of being a unique station, and became the Boston area's first commercial station for underground/alternative music. It might not have been the cash cow one would expect, but it certainly didn't lose its direction, in the grander scheme of things. The sounds may have changed with the times--which is normal for any given station, regardless of its format--but it never gave up being the area's main alternative network.


I started listening to WFNX in the autumn of 1989, when I started my freshman year at Emerson College. Before that time, I only knew alternative rock through the college radio stations out of the Pioneer Valley. Living in a small town, anything out of the ordinary was pretty fucking awesome and radical to me, and I fell in love HARD with college rock. Finding out that the Boston area had a commercial station that played this kind of stuff 24/7 was absolute bliss. Despite my roommate deeming WFNX to be "a sellout" (he was part of the small but annoying hipster contingent who felt that any alt.rock on a commercial station, even if they had cred, had sold out), I listened to the station religiously. My ever-growing collection grew exponentially in the early 90s because of this station.

It was WFNX who introduced me to a metric cubic crapload ton of great bands that I love.

They introduced me to Britpop and shoegaze. In the few years before grunge became ubiquitous, WFNX prided itself on playing the latest and greatest from the UK, from Happy Mondays to Ride to Pop Will Eat Itself to Chapterhouse to The Charlatans UK to the Stone Roses. As a large number of 80s post-punk bands had come from overseas, they never forgot their roots. Even when the Seattle scene took over, they didn't oversaturate the scene. You'd hear Nirvana and Soundgarden and Tad, but you'd also hear Gang of Four and Depeche Mode and The Cure. You'd hear all kinds of subgenres from different years at any time of the day. Many of these are long-forgotten, but some of them have become significant bands in alt.rock history, and they played them all.

They also introduced me to the local scene--something WFNX excelled at for years. Their music rotation always featured the best regional bands, from Tribe to Buffalo Tom to Human Sexual Response to Mission of Burma to Think Tree to Pixies to Throwing Muses and beyond. In a true Boston fashion, they took care of their own, and took care of them well.

They introduced me--physically--to musicians via their Best Music Poll concerts, including one fateful time in 1993 when I got to go to a station-sponsored meet-and-greet at Boston Beer Works and met one of my alt.rock heroes, Robyn Hitchcock. I might not have gone to all their concerts, but I went to as many as I could. They would also host concerts on the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade, and I saw as many of those as I could as well.

They introduced me to a hell of a lot of bands, most of which I still have in my collection. They were my sound salvation, to borrow Elvis Costello's phrase. I listened to the station daily nearly all the time I was living in Boston, all the way up to when I moved back home in 1995. When they took over the old signal of WMDK in Peterborough NH (92.1) in 1999, I was even more ecstatic--I still had that connection to alternative radio, even out in the sticks. I listened to them while writing my novels and while driving to and from my jobs. Now that I'm out on the other coast, I haven't listened to the station that much, but I've listened to them streaming online every now and again, so they never quite went away for me.

It's a pity to see them go, and I'm hoping that they decide to resurrect themselves online as WBCN did a few years back, but no one really knows what's going to happen at this point. I only wish they'd have stayed longer. Henry Santoro, Julie Kramer, Angie C., Juanita the Scene Queen, Joanne Doody, Morning Guy Tai, Boy Troy, Nik Carter, Duane Bruce, Kurt St. Thomas, Neal Robert, Adam 12...thanks to all of you.


Thanks, WFNX. You inspired me, influenced me, and gave me life more times than you know.

Thanks for the memories and lyrics, MCA. Peace.

This obscure little number is found at the end of Side 1 of Was (Not Was)' 1983 album Born to Laugh at Tornadoes. I'd never heard of the song until I heard PJ Harvey's version from the 1997 Lounge-a-Palooza compilation, but it's one of my favorite covers. It's a damn spooky song and it makes sense that Was (Not Was) got the Velvet Fog himself, Mel Torme, to sing it, as it sounds like one of those mood pieces he and Sinatra did so well back in the day. I do like how PJ Harvey was able to keep the torch sound in her version and also give it a trip-hop spin a la Portishead.

I drew this in college in early 1991 as a response to everything that was going on in the Middle East at the time. If I remember, it took me all of 20 minutes to do. I'd originally taped it up on my dorm room door, but after quite a few positive comments, it got printed in the college paper. I had exactly one person dismissing it, who thought the "ignorant" segment was a dig at conservatives. As Orwell might have said...hey, you're reading into it, I just wrote it that way.

There's a spot on Daniel Shays Highway in New Salem where, if you're heading south, you end up driving through a tiny wedge of neighboring Shutesbury for about two hundred feet before re-entering New Salem for about a mile and a half until you cross over into Shutesbury for good.

I don't remember when I first did it, but I know it was probably about 1985 or 1986, heading down to Amherst with my Dad to go see a movie. I was always amused by this tiny you're-in-you're-out stretch and somehow I was compelled to hold my breath in that stretch, just to say "I held my breath all the way through Shutesbury."

I brought this silly little habit to my circle of friends soon after. Our habit of "holding our breath" through the town was another silly pastime that would sometimes elicit giggles...sometimes the driver would slow down to a crawl (if no one was behind us), someone would start tickling someone else. Our road trips back then were often down to the Valley (Amherst/Hadley/Northampton) and the normal way to get down there was via Daniel Shays Highway (Rt 202) to Pelham and then cut over via Pelham Road. Later we'd take what we called Shutesbury Road (actually the stretch of Prescott/Cooleyville/Leverett Road--it's called Shutesbury Road once you're in Leverett), a twisty-windy back road that would take us through Leverett and into Amherst via the northern side of town. That was another road my Dad knew, but I think my friends knew it as well. That back road goes through the center of Shutesbury, which consists of a few small buildings--the library, the Town Hall, the fire station, and a few houses.

The majority of the town is woods. It's a quiet and unassuming drive, but you feel like you're driving through a cave of trees that seem to reach out over the road, nearly obscuring the sky. Shutesbury became sort of a running joke with us in high school--not in a mean-spirited way, more of a comment on how boring it can get growing up in a small New England town where there's really not much to do at all except go somewhere else.

I still hold my breath through Shutesbury, every year that we return to New England to visit my family and our friends. It's become habit, and it still makes me smile.

Yes, that riff totally sounds like the Spencer Davis Group, doesn't it?

This track came out in 1992 from the House of Love's third album Babe Rainbow and really didn't do anything anywhere, but it's a great song nonetheless. By that time, most of the commercial alternative stations had jumped on the grunge bandwagon, leaving a lot of the great Britpop behind. The House of Love had been around since the late 80s with minor hits like "Christine", "I Don't Know Why I Love You" and "Marble" (a b-side given a new life on the US Modern Charts), but by 1993 they'd moved on. Hearing it now, though, it's a solid party rocker that should have had a lot more airplay than it did.

What--you were expecting some other song? ;)



I will say this--the movie is pretty painful to watch, not so much for the acting but that the dialogue is pretty horrid, mainly due to too many rewrites. It's a film out of time--it's a pretty decent old school "let's put on a show in the barn" musical mashed up with a roller disco theme (it was also inspired by the 1947 Rita Hayworth movie Down to Earth).

On the plus side?

--Gene Kelly hoofing it.
--Electric Light Orchestra.
--The Tubes!
--Don Bluth cartoon sequence.
--I first learned about the nine muses of Greek mythology in this movie.
--I learned the name came from not Citizen Kane but a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem.
--I learned about how album covers are made and how they can be reproduced for sales purposes.
--It's actually a pretty decent soundtrack.

I will totally fess up here--this was the first band I ever went to see live (they opened up for Loverboy at the Worcester Centrum), and I was completely obsessed with their debut album from 1983. I loved the interplay between the Felix Hanemann's synthesizers, Randy Jackson's intricate guitar work, and Guy Gelso's thunderous drumming, and this song definitely had that EPIC sound that drew fans. It all might sound a bit dated now, but if you put that aside, you'll actually hear some pretty damn good prog musicianship there. There's even a few tracks that, if they were arranged and mixed slightly different, could easily be Porcupine Tree songs.

Before my foray into Top 40 music and well before discovering college radio, for a time I was into the straight-ahead stuff you'd hear on rock stations. Along with the classic rock, you'd hear the occasional hair-metal/hard rock stuff. A lot of it went by the wayside--mostly for good reason--but some of it actually wasn't too bad. It was lightweight fun, something to listen to that you didn't have to take too seriously...a lot of arena rock was like that. Zebra didn't get too much airplay other than this and a few other songs ("Tell Me What You Want" from the first album, and probably "Bears" from the second one), and they were a little too serious to be taken lightly. This wasn't your typical throwaway hard rock, it was prog-metal a way. The lyrics might have been a bit bland, but their musicianship was pretty impressive.