Sonic Youth – Sloss Furnace, Birmingham Alabama (7/12/09)

It was an evening about mortality. At least, that’s the way it seemed while driving north to Birmingham with Sonic Youth’s album Daydream Nation cranked to unprecedented (at least for our new car) volumes.
The sun was doing that “don’t forget about me” thing, where it wedges itself behind a bank of clouds and turns a [...]

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Kanye West benefit show – 6/11/09

I won’t deny that I’m a lucky guy. Sometimes things just fall into my lap.
Thus it was that I was in Chicago last week for a work conference and discovered myself with VIP tickets to a Kanye West concert at the historic Chicago Theater (unofficial retail value: $500). 1) It’s Kanye. 2) It’s in his [...]

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Ani DiFranco (music review)

Regular readers of Toxic Culture know that I have been reviewing music from time to time. It has been a while. The last full album I reviewed was that Alternative NRG album nearly a year ago. The deal is this: I’m reviewing every album I own and doing them all in alphabetical order. After Aesop [...]

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Weekend Music Burst

Just a few late night thoughts about music as I am busy stuffing printouts of old Pierre Schlag law reviews into an empty Smirnoff box, using old back issues of Mad Magazine as dividers (mylar bagged to preserve their certain-to-be-skyrocketing value!).
I know we already praised them in our City Stages review when we went to [...]

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City Stages 2008 Review, Day 3

The grand finale of the 20th City Stages was tremendous. We missed a chunk of the daytime events: the milling around on the scorching asphalt, the scurrying for shade, the ritual gorging from all of the food trailers. As a sidebar, I’d love to know why there were so few local food vendors represented.

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City Stages 2008 Review, Day 2

Yes, it was Saturday the 14th. It was City Stages, Day 2: Electric Boogaloo.
There was some concern at first. We woke up pretty late since we got home from The Roots set at about 2 a.m. So we ended up sleeping late and a big rain storm caused us to wonder if the less-than-thrilling Saturday [...]

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City Stages 2008 Review, Day 1

It was a dark and stormy Friday the 13th…. Well, it wasn’t all that dark (nor stormy) when we arrived to the first day of Birmingham’s semi-famous 20th Annual downtown cultural heritage festival corporate music festival. You see, City Stages is telling folks that they are all about culture and heritage (whatever that means), but [...]

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