An interview with John Tyner on Laphona’s debut album — When the heat dome struck the West Coast in 2021 and burned down an entire town, I channeled my conflicted feelings about summer into a playlist and then wrote about surf music every day for the month of July. I would have never guessed my daily devotions to surf music…

Recap — Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest still haunts me with its resonant embrace of hazy melodies. And it has become more meaningful to me after our insightful and entertaining Album of the Month discussion in late August. We made time for fun sidebars, such as which bands sound the worst and the best…

Free verse — our class photo was the standard three lines backed by mowed velvet rows and cul-de-sacs. grids we returned to for afterschool TV, sibling rivalry and benign parental neglect. kids in my town wore GAP out of the barn always striving for a higher class, finding desire in hot-handed scrawl on ruled-paper…

Free verse — In summer, I face a crisis of faith in the tradeoff of interfacing with nature and love in exchange for its stings. My feet are rock-tough with salt rims and soles are mud drudged and grass-painted. My teeth steep in cold tea like phyllo seaweed through my hot fingers. My…

Disrupting the lens of nostalgia — The title of my August Album of the Month pick is a double-edged sword. In one respect, the band’s frontman defines the title choice as representative of “a collection of fond memories and even invented ones, like my friendship with Ricky Wilson or the fact that I live in an…

A Pantoum —

After Fujioka Fujimaki’s “Ponyo on the Cliff” — bet it among trees or tower, evening makes me an only child. lost in Sayama Hills, squares cast from other people’s kitchen windows, check light on the footpath and reveal wooden signs among ferns leading to Totoro’s Forest, leading to kin: Totoro, Ponyo, Sheeta, and robots who tend flowerpots on homesick…

Free verse —

Free verse —