Now comes the time on Sprockets when we dance.

I'm all about 20-year-old SNL references lately; the other day I joked that I'm gonna bring back the Church Lady's catchphrase—"Well isn't that special?"—as part of my ongoing efforts to maintain a 95 percent level of irony in everything I say, apparently. 

But the Sprockets reference came into my head thanks to my iTunes: I'm listening to the Wax Trax! Black Box compilation, and it's currently playing The KLF's "What Time Is Love?" It's not exactly the kind of thing that comes to my mind when I think of the label—it's way more of a straight-up dance track—but it's worth nothing the label's legacy goes beyond Al Jourgensen's pulverizing industrial anyway.

And that's a long way of saying I've been working on an oral history of industrial for a few months now. (And it's why updates to the site have been so infrequent.) It'll be published by Soft Skull Press in the fall of 2011, but it's due in seven short months. I've created a new section on the site to talk about the book, so check it out for updates. I'm also open to suggestions for the book.

More to come soon. I hope to link up some of my stories from last year on here too, but the book is obviously taking priority over everything else at this point. 

Mo' updates

OK, I've added all of my 2009 work thus far, and I'm in the process of adding images and kind of sprucing it up otherwise. "What about your freelance stuff?" you ask? Ha ha ha ha ha. The word "freelance" doesn't exist in my vocabulary this year, though I did pitch to This American Life a couple months back. And I did a book pitch. But otherwise, it's been all A.V. Club, all the time.

That wasn't always so, and I'll get the proof of that uploaded here soon. I have some big-ass pieces I've done for Alternative Press and Punk Planet that need to be put here, but I'm still figuring out how that will work with Squarespace's system. These external links are way easier to deal with.

Anyway, as always, more TK. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter for real-time inanity.

These are people who died, died

I didn’t grow up in the ’hood—just next to it—but three of my friends were dead by the end of sophomore year. A few others dropped out of school altogether later on. One ran away. A few ended up incarcerated. Yet, when my parents insisted I attend a hoity-toity private school instead of the nearby public one with my friends, I couldn’t understand why. Duh.

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Back at last.

Welcome to the new site. I'm still working on it, but at least it's something. Right now it's dominated by links to my pieces for The A.V. Club, but I'll be posting deeper cuts, so to speak, over the next few weeks (those oral histories for AP, some Punk Planet features, etc.). There's also a dearth of photos right now, but I'm working on that too. So, yes: work in progress.