Category
The Thursday Agitation
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Music, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Nadia Sirota
It’s a safe bet that violist Nadia Sirota stays busy. Her official bio encompasses work as a solo performer as well as her involvement in multiple ensembles, both for work that’s traditionally thought of as “classical” and for pieces that blur the line between that and rock, including Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s upcoming The Long [...]
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Books, Music, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Dave Reidy
The characters in Dave Reidy’s debut collection Captive Audience dwell on the periphery of scenes and cultures with which we think we’re familiar. The lives of a journeyman basketball player, an isolated student of stand-up comedy, and a character actor planning his own funeral allow Reidy to illuminate how art affects those who participate in [...]
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Art, Music, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Chrissy Piper
My first significant introduction to the work of photographer Chrissy Piper came via her 1998 collection The Unheard Music, a visually distinctive collection of live and portrait photos of bands making their way in the indie/punk/hardcore world of the 1990s. It includes bands whose names still inspire devotion today (Fugazi, Rocket From the Crypt), and [...]
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Books, Music, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Stefan Marolachakis
I first met Stefan Marolachakis after seeing his band The End of the World play a show at a Brooklyn loft space several summers ago. Marolachakis possesses an immediately recognizable voice, expansive and gritty, and that he was able to croon nimbly while handling drumming duties in a later incarnation of the group is something [...]
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Books, Politics, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Steven Gillis
Since its founding in 2006, the Michigan-based press Dzanc Books has released a number of worthwhile reads, including Roy Kesey’s All Over and Kyle Minor’s In the Devil’s Territory. In the years since then, they’ve also acted as distributor for a number of other presses and journals (including Monkeybicycle and OV Books) and, more recently, [...]
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Music, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Jeremy Bolen
Earlier this year, news came that the longstanding Chicago post-punk band Chin Up Chin Up would be playing their final show. Chin Up Chin Up’s particular skill, for me, came from their ability to balance a relentless sense of rhythmic drive with vocals that were restrained, almost reassuring. Around the same time of that announcement [...]
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Books, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Amelia Gray
Reading AM/PM, the first collection of short stories from Austin’s Amelia Gray, one can’t help but be impressed: across a series of flash fiction pieces, Gray evokes wonder and dread; romanticism and despair. And slowly, as you make your way through AM/PM’s stories, patterns begin to emerge as characters recur and situations evolve — a [...]
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Books, Politics, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Matt Bell
Matt Bell’s recent chapbooks How the Broken Lead the Blind and The Collectors occupy a surreal corner of American fiction, ranging from historical meditations to unsettling invocations of myths, folktales, and horror. My introduction to his work came via the short story “Hold On To Your Vacuum,” which appeared in the sixth issue of Keyhole. [...]
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Music, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Ryan Catbird
For seven years, the man known as Ryan Catbird has been writing about a particular corner of whip-smart indie rock — including, in recent days, Royal City and Golden Triangle — at his blog The Catbirdseat. Through an affiliated record label, he’s released music from the likes of Manishevitz, Moviola, and Jason Zumpano. Even more [...]
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Music, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Dan Friel
Dan Friel’s music acts as a literal definition of the oft-used phrase “noise pop”. His solo work, including 2004’s Sunburn and last year’s Ghost Town, achieves a near-perfect medium of frayed sounds and memorable hooks. As a founder of Parts & Labor, he has seen the group evolve from the aggressive abstraction of their early [...]
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Music, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Jon Solomon
Over the years, Jon Solomon has released an abundance of striking music. My Pal God, the label through which I came to know him, has encompassed everything from precise, experimental rock to retrospectives of offbeat pop groups to compilations of skewed holiday music. More recently, Solomon began a new label, Comedy Minus One, which has [...]
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Books, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Nick Antosca
Reading Nick Antosca’s second novel Midnight Picnic was one of the most intense experiences I had last year. A surreal ghost story (of sorts), set in both a surreal landscape and an immediately, tragically contemporary America, it moved towards its conclusion with an unknowable but clearly present logic. Via email, we discussed process, Antosca’s [...]
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Music, NYC, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Tracy Wilson
One of the highlights, for me, of my zine-editor days came when I found myself in the basement of Brownies circa 2000, moderating a conversation between Tracy Wilson and Caithlin De Marrais. At the time, De Marrais was making music as one-third of Rainer Maria, while Wilson’s band Souvenir had begun playing shows around [...]
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Books, Comics, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Kieron Gillen
Phonogram, the collaboration of writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie, is both a surreal urban fantasy with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and a detailed critique of the same. Its first volume, Rue Britannia, covered Britpop with side trips into the music of Scout Niblett and the Afghan Whigs. The Singles Club, currently [...]
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Books, The Thursday Agitation
The Thursday Agitation: Jonathan Messinger
The titles published by Chicago’s Featherproof Books to date have ranged from art-world satire to graphic design showcases to surreal evocations of the South. Their “Light Reading” series of minibooks includes work from Kevin Sampsell, Elizabeth Crane, Patrick Somerville, and Nathaniel Rich (and, full disclosure, me). 2009 finds Featherproof expanding, with both Paper Egg Books’ [...]
the scowl
Tobias Carroll lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has covered music and books for a number of publications, and his fiction has appeared in THE2NDHAND, 3:AM, Word Riot, and as part of Featherproof Books' "Light Reading" series. He is presently working on multiple projects of varying lengths.
