Category: Blanks And Postage

Despite a plot that takes place a century ago, nearly every twist of Kyle Barnett’s new scholarly work Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry feels acutely connected to the present. With a big picture historical view, Barnett maps how the unsettled and undefined chaos of American music coalesced into the modern world of record labels and genres with all their racist complexities and romantic myths.

Just as many of us were folding into our geo-domes for extended isolation in early March, a tweet floated across my transom that asked the reader to “Imagine a world where there were archives of live P-Funk and Fela recordings as extensive and well-curated as those devoted to the Grateful Dead.” To paraphrase a recent viral hit: it’s easy if you try. At least, the imagining is. Just pretend that they’re the Dead…

“Psychedelic but readable” is how the proprietor of my local heady art emporium, Desert Island Comics, introduced me to the work of Jesse Jacobs a few years ago. While an accurate blurb, it only barely covers 2017’s Crawl Space, the Canadian artist’s breakthrough full-length book as a sequential narrative-maker…

For this month’s Blanks And Postage column, author Jesse Jarnow, explores the myriad worlds of psychedelic sci-fi pulp lit…and beyond.

Of the many improvisers to regularly share a stage with Jerry Garcia, almost none were women. A new archival release from 1973 brings attention to one of Garcia’s least known […]

Several recent books provide counterpoints to Michael Pollan’s best-selling How To Change Your Mind. “Psychedelics for normies” in writer Alison Hussey’s memorable phrase, Pollan’s 2018 book almost instantly transformed the dialogue around the substances with its clear and direct arguments about their miraculous power to heal trauma. Only on occasion, though, does it entertain a present or future in which psychedelics might be used meaningfully outside the medical model, or acknowledge the ways that’s occurred in the past. How To Change Your Mind is a skeptical book, and draws some of its power from this, an extension of Pollan’s role as a mainstream journalist, but its tone is also an act of erasure in other ways.