I’ve been going through an internal debate lately about whether to keep Is Greater Than going–as any publisher (web or print), could have told me, the challenges of running a consistently-updated publication are many, and even moreso if you have any pretensions to offering a quality product. Said product’s quality is debatable, though the intensions certainly are for it to be so.

It’s hard to consider ending it, for any number of reasons: supportive readership, a great community of contributors, and my personal attachment to the project. I’d like to think that the concept behind it is inherently sound, even if the energy it demands is even more than I initially anticipated.

All the same, it’s exhausting, and the personal burnout has taken its toll. The site, which was running as many as six pieces weekly last fall and in the spring, has sputtered into an unsteady rhythm of one piece a week (if even that.) Burnout is certainly a factor, but there are other considerations going through my head: (more…)

From the Metro Santa Cruz

Rock music is obsessed with picking over its own bones, constantly recapitulating what has come before in increasingly derivative permutations. It’s rare to come across a band with a sound that’s undeniably new, but Portland’s Menomena is just such a band, skillfully merging meat-and-potatoes indie rock with digital loops, a dub-inspired low-end rumble and a contemporary cut ‘n’ paste approach to composition. If there’s another band Menomena most resembles–philosophically if not sonically–it’s Radiohead, in their recontextualization of what a rock band can be in a digital age. (more…)

26 April 1:12pm

I often lay in bed, imagining putting my head in a vice. The vice coming down, cracking my jaw, giving at least some relief. If nothing else, it might move the pain elsewhere. I think about these scenarios all the time, obsessively; I can’t help myself, the throbbing is insistent. At least inventing these scenarios gives me some sort of escape. I think about taking a hammer to my jaw, about running a screwdriver through the abscess, about slamming my head against the wall until I can’t feel a thing. (more…)