Approaching a fine bottle of wine, I resemble nothing so much as Derek Zoolander and Hansel attempting to crack a computer. I know that the wine is in there, and that it’s reputed to be filled with flavors so sublime that they make yuppies wax faux-poetic like Janet Jackson in a self-indulgent John Singleton movie. But how to coax out
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Still feeling the soul glow from San Francisco. Tony Joe White called it Soul Francisco, and that was no joke. Saturday night I felt the fire and brimstone of Heron Oblivion at Mississippi Studios, and it cast my memory back there, lord, to two weekends ago when I wandered the streets that gave birth to that bad-ass band and so
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Every trip begins with music. It’s a door to foreign cultures for which you need fashion no key. Your brain is a lockpick kit, capable of jimmying any sound. Film and literature are similarly functioning gateways, provided you have subtitles or translated editions, but the magic of music is you need not know the words. Even if you have no
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As I busted left off The 5, making for the wilderness of now-dried-up Detroit Lake, Compton’s Most Wanted’s “Straight Checkn ‘Em” came rolling out of my speakers. The “Scarface” samples, low-end thud, and nasal tales of drivebys and ducksicks that are MC Eiht’s forte propelled me forward through Mill City, onward toward the annual camping trip that has come to
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