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 […]

(from the 11/12/1977 issue of Billboard) While the glitterati cavorted in a costumed coke-haze and New York’s finest tried to prevent a real-life disco inferno, an equally absurd scene was going down in the suburbs northwest of Boston. A downside of having an artist for parent is that you tend to find yourself serving as […]

The “internet of things” bullshit is hardly a new phenomenon, but the current incarnation of something that dates back to the dawn of the industrial revolution. Mass production requires mass consumption, yet the mechanics of economies of scale mean that supply will eventually outstrip consumer demand. There are only so many stoves, toasters, or automobiles […]

Slot Car Night was a big event, ranking somewhere between Christmas and network airings of The Wizard of Oz on the childhood anticipation scale. Our apartment was too cramped to set up anything of a permanent nature and my brother and I were too young to play with the set unsupervised, so the box of […]

Every K-Tel “current hits” compilation was disposable by design. Their contents were skimmed from the previous seasons pop charts, pressed to vinyl, and released under some ephemerally significant title and trade dress. They stuck it out in the midlist churn for a brief period of topical appeal before getting booted into the realm of deep […]