Robert

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  • Demon Haunting

    The Old Smithyville Burying Ground. Photo by Gerry Dincher via flickr
    The Old Smithyville Burying Ground. Photo by Gerry Dincher via flickr.

    A few weeks ago, our family took a trip to the beach. It’s an annual ritual when our health and schedule afford it. We try to look for activities, but mostly we take it easy and enjoy the ocean and the slower pace of life. This year we were interested in doing a ghost walk around the nearby town of Southport. Southport has a history going back to the 1700s and is ripe for hauntings. We did the Southport ghost walk about 15-20 years prior and were pleased to discover that the same woman who had just started it at the time of our first encounter was still leading the tour. Katie Stewart holds a degree in Antebellum Southern and North Carolina history and a long-time resident’s passion for the town’s old stories.

    About midway through our stay at the beach, I was able to hang out with one of my favorite colleagues (in truth, I like all my colleagues), who was also on a family trip at the same time. When I told his wife we were doing a ghost walk, she was intrigued. Their family had been in Southport the day before. She told me that they visited an antique shop in the town, and she had felt a negative presence on the second floor of the shop. It was so strong that she had to leave. She confessed to being sensitive to paranormal activity, and that wasn’t the first such experience for her.

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  • Parental Risk Assessments

    I recently wrote about how skateboarding taught me a measure of resilience that I don’t necessarily see in my kids. They simply have a different relationship to risky activities. As I hinted at in the post, there are upsides to this from a parental concern perspective. It’s just hard to know where that line between risk and benefit should be drawn.

    I used boogie boarding as an example in the post. When I brought up my thoughts with a friend, he relayed an anecdote in which a colleague was thrown by a wave while boogie boarding, hit his head, and subsequently died. Given his personal experience, he wasn’t too bullish on ocean sports. I told him that my sons were not really into them because of their overall risk aversion. They never even learned to ride bikes because they were so concerned about injury. My friend thought that was taking it a bit too far and that kids should embrace the bicycle.

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  • Glazyhaze – Nirvana

    Glazyhaze released Sonic in March of this year. The sophomore album from the band has received a lot of positive press for its refined take on shoegaze, with physical copies selling out very quickly and having to be restocked hastily.

    With shoegaze being such a global phenomenon at this point, you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on Glazhaze’s Venetian origins. Still, singer Irene Moretuzzo’s aquiline nose and Italian beauty, and the gratuitous smoking in the video for “Nirvana” are some clues. The band cites DIIV as a major influence, and it comes across in their music, which is full of glide guitar and ethereal textures.

    Glazyhaze – Nirvana (YouTube)

    If you enjoy this track, check out “Forward” by Distant Correspondent.

  • Blessed Adjacency

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of the gatekeepers. Even in an era where doing it yourself has never been easier, the patronage of entities like book publishers and record labels remains important.

    The case in point that revived my thoughts on the matter is the new EP I Call This One by Gileah Taylor. Taylor blends folk-country sounds with a desert-noir vibe on her latest release for Velvet Blue Records. The soft, forlorn ballads that comprise the four-song EP hit a sweet spot for me during this oppressive summer heat.

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  • Skateboarding and Resilience

    We met with some rough waves on our trip to the beach this year. Even when trying different spots along the beach, the high winds meant choppy waters that threatened to shred you up. I had to boogie board, especially since previous years have sometimes been too calm to make that activity very rewarding. At one location, close to the point where the ocean meets the inter-coastal waterway, the waves were ripe for getting on top of and riding the crest until it dropped you in a rush to get to the shore. I managed to catch a few sweet rides in before a menacing wave forced my board into a vertical position and then threw me down into the surf. I was forced through a somersault, after which my back hit the shell-coated shoreline.

    Getting up quickly, I rubbed down my wounds and walked back into the waves, wanting to redeem myself after such a heinous slam. My sons were watching from the tent I had set up on the beach. They didn’t spend much time in the water. My youngest took a pretty hard hit and decided that was it for him. My oldest just thought the waves were too rough to begin with and opted out early on.

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  • Scout Gillett – Enough

    Years ago, a friend a colleague mentioned to me how she gets choked up at daddy/daughter songs. I thought to myself that I couldn’t even name a single song that would fit into that description. It’s interesting how our interest in different musical genres put us in touch with varied subject matters. With Scout Gillett’s “Enough,” I can finally say I have at least some idea of what my colleague was talking about.

    Gillett’s last album, No Roof, No Floor, brought her Midwest rural sounds to the city, reflecting the urban environment of Brooklyn where she had relocated. The videos that accompanied those songs made a subject out of life in New York. Gillett’s new singles, created after her move to Los Angeles, bring to the foreground some of the earthiness that always bubbled a bit beneath the surface of her songs. The sunny California setting works alongside her new sun kissed look.

    Scout Gillett – Enough (YouTube)

  • Black Marble – Private Show

    Chris Stewart from Black Marble sets his Joy Division-like post punk to footage from a rodeo, what appears to be a county fair and a horse race. He plays his icy synth on the outskirts of a concert crowd watching a band that seems a much more likely rural attraction. Stewart doesn’t stray far from the sounds of his Brooklyn origins, despite the subject matter of the video. It’s a strange juxtaposition, but it works in a slice-of-life kind of way.

    Black Marble – Private Show (YouTube)

  • My Sabbath days are rarely boring. My wife Shira and I often have guests for Shabbat meals on Friday nights and Saturday lunches. And just about every Friday night, Shira and I play Scrabble, a board game that is perfect for Sabbath observers: no electricity and no writing (another Sabbath prohibition). How do we keep score? We each have a big fat book where we match our score with the page number. If you get forty points, you turn forty pages. (Shira usually wins.)

    Ari L. Goldman, writing about his Sabbath practices as an Orthodox Jew

  • Good Things Come Too Late

    Here in Raleigh, NC, we have a park that opened a few years ago on the site of a former mental hospital. Dix Park has been an impressive undertaking, though I’m sorry to say I’ve never been there. The latest edition to the park is the sure-to-be-popular Gipson Play Plaza, which opens this weekend.

    This new ginormous playground looks like a kid’s dream. Featuring several different sections such as Sensory Maze, Slide Valley and Watermill Mountain, the park spreads out over 18 acres (!!!). It makes me wish my sons were back to playground age and we were headed there today.

  • Surface Noise

    Photo by Travis Yewell on Unsplash

    When someone complained about the surface noise that came with listening to music on vinyl, the late BBC disc jockey John Peel (a notable lover of the format), was said to have replied, “Mate, life has surface noise.”

    It’s hard to argue with Peel’s assessment of life in this mortal coil. Who among us wouldn’t wish that things were different, though?

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