Bed Books And Beyond

The 27 Club “Someone who Must Not Be Contradicted said that a man must be a success by the time he’s thirty, or never.” “To have reached thirty,” said Reginald, “is to have failed in life.” Reginald , the easy-going hero of some of  Saki ’s best short stories, probably uttered those words like I imagine he did all others- with a shrug of detachment and just enough cynicism to come across as worldly without sounding unwise. Words that could have come out of the mouths of any of my first musical heroes-  Layne Staley,  Andrew Wood, Kurt Cobain. Not to mention pioneering artist Jean-Michel Basquiat who approached life with such lightness of being, deftness of touch, that he deserves a whole musical genre unto himself.  But those words would not have felt nearly as natural coming from Chris Cornell- not even during or after his hard-drinking, dragon-puffing heyday. Cornell was the boy-done-good and lately, the Grand Old Man, of the grunge music scene. Even when talkin

Enough and more has been said and written and Reddited and subtweeted -and not nearly always kindly- about EDM duo and self-professed frat bros, The Chainsmokers . I'd previously scrolled over some of the hate in passing but it wasn't until late on a February night last year, at a house party in New Friends' Colony Snapchatted in its entirety by the 30-odd early 20-somethings that attended it, that I'd had a chance to actually listen to one of their songs in any seriousness.  It's funny because he's frat. The song was  Closer -  The Chainsmokers' runaway hit and ubiquitous soundtrack of 2016- and hand on heart, it deserves every download or stream or whatever fancy new metric determines pop music greatness these days. It's an  ohrworm  of a single, and the 'smokers are, on said evidence,  Ubermensch s of post-genre EDM. The DJ at the party, dressed in an unseasonal Hawaiian shirt and thigh high shorts combo, must have felt the same