Category Archives: Arts

by Dr. Spin

As a prog-rock fan, I feel somewhat obligated to at least appreciate Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, but their work confounds me.  On the one hand, I recognize that their oeuvre is pockmarked with the kind of self-indulgent bombast that ultimately caused progressive rock to fall out of favor.  Conversely, there are moments in their catalog that represent the finest progressive rock of the 70s, so every now and then I put one of their albums in rotation just to make sure I haven’t missed any of those moments….bombast the prog over at the pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

I made a pretty big deal last summer about watching Fraggle Rock and listening to the Flaming Lips with the Little One, and I would not have traded it for anything. There were times, however, that I missed the freedom of doing whatever I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it. This is what made naptime so awesome.

If I was on point for my workout schedule and the house was relatively clean, I would sometimes indulge in some kind of hyper-violent and completely child-inappropriate movie, just so that I could feel like I was keeping my dude-dad cred. Of course, it had to be watched at a low volume so that any unexpected explosions wouldn’t wake her up and preempt my adolescent catharsis. One of my favorite entries in this “Quiet Time Movie” series was Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.   I had forgotten just how compelling the soundtrack was, so subsequently, I put the soundtrack in rotation...  rotate to the pharmacy to kill that bastard Bill

by Dr. Spin

Looking back on the time after I graduated from high school and began my undergraduate degree, I can clearly see how I tried to cling to my life in Austin while a new one stretched out before me in Denton. I traveled with alarming regularity on the weekends, and tried to maintain a career as a record store employee over longer breaks. During my first summer break in 1990, I got a job working at the Hasting’s at Barton Creek Mall. Predictably, I discovered a lot of music during that time. Jellyfish, a band that was brought to my attention by a fellow employee and working musician, was one such discovery. Although their debut Bellybutton seemed like a retro-pop curiosity at the time, in the long term it became hugely influential on me…under the influence at the Pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

When I took my jazz band to participate in the CCCC Jazz Festival in the spring of 2008, I discovered Charles Mingus‘ Haitian Fight Song.  This piece reinvigorated my interest in his work and its educational value. Years before, as a much younger teacher, I tried to get my band to play Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, but as great as that tune is, it requires a musical maturity that, in retrospect, is probably unreasonable for the average high schooler…forget unreasonable and go to the Pharmmacy

by Dr. Spin

In the 70s, progressive rock was almost popular, but by the 80s it collapsed under its own weight.  In the rubble, the vigilant fans of Marillion and other neo-prog bands kept the style alive, but by the early 90s, prog had become aggressively marginalized by the mainstream media. To be labeled a prog band in the United States was dreadfully unhip, and as a result, bands wishing to “make it” kept their odd time signatures and instrumental passages to themselves or faced the threat of obscurity.

Despite this cultural climate, there were still progressive bands out there (particularly overseas) that connected with a relatively small, dedicated audience through word-of-mouth and fanzines, and this scene had its own classic albums that kept progressive rock alive. Swedish band Änglagård bore torch for this era, and the band’s 1991 release Hybris is, for the serious prog fan, a classic…   find out what a prog is at the pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

The first day of school inevitably came and went this week, and it was quite the far cry from Fraggle Rock with the Little One and aikido summer camp. In truth, there was a sense that an oar violently dug up the bottom of a still pond, leaving murky and agitated water in its wake. As the week has gone on, however, the dust has started to settle, both for the students and myself, and I am getting a feeling for what kind of year it’s going to be. continue that good feeling at the Pharmacy

Writing is hard, no doubt. Minds operate in abstractions that precede words, and the human capacity to capture those pre-verbal concepts and arrange them into something as clumsy and concrete as written language is nothing short of miraculous. Capturing musical ideas and impressions, which are even more abstract and ephemeral, is particularly difficult.

For these blog entries, I often struggle to figure out when (or even if) I really “have” enough of an album to write anything meaningful.  For example, I have had at least two aborted attempts to begin an entry for Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, both of which I shelve.  browse the shelves over at the Pharmacy