Pal Keith was ruminating the other day about his recent trip to Berlin, and how much its high-density, pedestrian-friendly model contrasts with the auto-happy sprawl on this side of the pond. Some of that can be chalked up to the encirclement the west sector of that city experienced during the Cold War, along with Europe’s […]

I turned in earlier than usual last night in hopes of better acclimating myself to the effects of Daylight Savings Time. That did not happen, but I did get a chance to catch an episode of Night Gallery on MeTV before nodding off. The plot centered around a mental asylum for rich folks (somewhere in […]

Sorry for the dry spell, but Monday’s snowstorm and Wednesday’s dentist appointment have thrown off my stride. The plague of distractions does not look like it will be easing until sometime next week, so expect the low content mode to linger a while longer. Please accept this 1982 trade publication ad as a consolation prize. […]

The Seventies were a time of terror, and I’m not just talking about the fashion styles. The upheavals of the late Sixties ushered in a Strange New Decade of heightened anxiety and an loosening of cultural mores. The face of the looming unknown took a multitude of shapes, with a significant number reflecting those subcurrents […]

NEWLY DECLASSIFIED FROM THE SECRET VPL DATABASE: THE POLYESTER FOUR PART PLAN OF 1975: 1. Trap the smell of sweat, body odor, and other environmental scents in the fabric to an eye-watering degree. 2. Cause your clothes dryer to burst into flames. 3. Realize how awful you actually look. 4. Donate the stuff to a […]

When I started getting back in the habit of buying records again, I shot my pal-slash-occasional-collaborator Daniel Butler a short list of albums to keep an eye out for at the place where he works. None of my requests were in stock at the time, though he did send me a copy of George Harrison’s […]

As much as I might’ve tried to tell myself otherwise, it was inevitable that setting up a turntable in our living room would lead to me settling back into my old record collecting ways. I tried to fight it by pulling a short stack of my perennial faves from the attic archives and hoping that […]

The North Woburn apartment where I lived as a kid was cramped, but it didn’t lack bookshelf space. Nearly every room — with the exception of the bathroom — had at some place set aside for the large number of books my family owned. The enclosed back porch which doubled as a laundry area and […]

I mean, kids are always getting into trouble, whatever, no big deal. But I think about some of the shit @ThatWeissGuy posts about all the time and wonder how he or anyone in Massachusetts is alive at all. — Smart Mark Hale (@ChaosMonkey) November 14, 2017 For some reason, Mark’s comment got me to thinking […]

None of my family’s living spaces had a unified “design aesthetic” when I was growing up. My mother tried to impose a retro Thirties style on the duplex we moved into during the mid-Eighties, but the project got sidelined by the intensifying maelstrom of domestic dysfunction. Our places were decked in a catch-as-catch-can hodgepodge of […]