I have a new piece up @battlegroundeu.bsky.social on Ruinenkampf ("Battle in the Ruins"), the new album by German musician Toben Piel's solo project Das Kinn. If you love Deutsch Amerikanische Freunschaft, you will surely dig this. Please subscribe to our Substack! thebattleground.eu/2025/05/14/s...

My colleague Ari Paul at @battlegroundeu.bsky.social has a piece on a disturbing trend in the American Chabad movement attacks on critics of Israel’s reactionary government.

This week, I wrote about Anika's album Abyss for The Battleground (@battlegroundeu.bsky.social). It's so good that I ordered it on CD—yes, I'm one of those people—as an early birthday present for myself.

I have a new piece up today at The Battleground on Jesse Welles, whose incisive folk songs have made him a viral sensation.

I have a new piece up at TheBattleground.eu on Guillermo del Toro's 2006 film Pan's Labyrinth. I call the film "a particularly apt allegory for our own dark times," in which the war on "woke" culture mobilizes public sentiment against its neopagan underpinnings."

A good rock is not hard to find.

I have a new piece on the case of British alternative rock band Placebo's frontman Brian Molko, whose on-stage rant against Far Right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni led to him being charged under the country's unusual defamation laws, which permit both civil and criminal penalties.

Today is the sixth anniversary of my daughter and her mother having to be rescued from nearby Pima Canyon in the middle of the night. But I arrived before the rescuers did, navigating three miles up the canyon by starlight — I was saving my battery — to bring them food, medicine, and warm clothes.

Truly a case in which a picture is worth a thousand words. This one is from before the pandemic: jonmcnaughton.com

The worst thing about further messing up my knee at the end of 2023 was that made hiking impossible. I eventually got back on the trail. But today was the first time I was able to climb back up to my favorite rock. I missed the view enormously.

This should be the flag of the Faeroe Islands.

I‘m taking solace in my home.

I love how the lyrics go this one hit hardest when they are most oblique.

My idols are dead and my enemies are in power. So I made a saffron carbonara with shiitake mushrooms and a splash of Sicilian lemon-infused olive oil.

I have a new piece up at The Battleground on Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, which chronicles the Manchester independent music scene from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, with television newscaster, label head, and club owner Tony Wilson as a fun unreliable narrator.

I have a piece up at TheBattleground.eu on the legacy of 90s trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack. Immersing myself in their music for a week did a lot to keep me focused on taking positive steps. Give it a try! thebattleground.eu/2025/02/19/p...

If you look for long enough, the stars will pierce the clouds.

Late-breaking!

I was finally able to get out on the trail again and stand under my favorite cactus.

I have a new piece up at @battlegroundeu.bsky.social on exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof's film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, one of the finalists for Best International Feature Film at the upcoming Academy Awards.

I have started playing OTB blitz with my chess-mad daughter, who is vastly more talented than I am. But today I achieved a meaningful advantage with two minutes up on the clock, only to be undone yet again by my dyslexia. I was too mad at myself to speak!

I have a new piece up at TheBattleground.eu on the new album by Natalie Beridze, which uses field recordings of recent anti-government protests in her native Georgia as building blocks for disquieting ambient compositions.

The Social Network‘s portrayal now seems positively hagiographic compared to what Mister I-Like-Being-Thumped-By-Other-Boys-At-The-Dojo has become. Here‘s hoping that his competitors abroad make him 20 billion dollars poorer during the Year of the Snake.

Sure, many government jobs will disappear. But there will be new ones to take their place. A country as big as the United States will need a lot of Gauleiter!

Barred heavens.

Writing in code is destined to be a more valuable skill than writing code.

Alexander is branching out to a new platform.

Where the rubber meets the sidewalk.

I know he appreciates the irony of having to connect over the same social media platforms that are furiously engaged in Selbstgleichschaltung.

It‘s hard to muster enthusiasm for new experiences when familiar ones have become toxic.

One goal I have for 2025 is to be much more active here. My turn away from Twitter, which started earlier than that of most people I know, made me forget the way to interact on that type of platform. But with your help I will remember!

This was my most productive year as a writer in terms of total output. I published 47 pieces in TheBattleground.eu -- addiing up to over 56K words -- as well as a book collection of film pieces I've written for the magazine. Clickable links in the Google Doc I'm sharing here.

Whose tree? Her tree.

It’s that time of year again.

I have a new piece up at @battlegroundeu.bsky.social on Robyn Hitchcock's wonderful project 1967, which pairs a memoir of his experiences at a storied public school for boys in the mid-1960s with an album covering songs he loved during that period. The audiobook, read by the author, is tremendous.

I'm always going to advocate for harm reduction. But it would be splendid if we could keep conjuring good out of the bad. Because my mother was a classic early-1960s folkie, this song resonates powerfully.

If you don‘t know The Battleground — the magazine I wrote for — or want to know more, please check out our end-of-year statement.

Here’s a brand-new track from one of Tucson’s best songwriters, a punk-rock drummer — he was in the earliest incarnations of Giant Sand — who spent a long time in prison for a drug-related armed robbery, then rebuilt a life for himself after his release.

My daughter is much cooler than I am or, in fact, ever was.

This is Tosca, a great friend to humans, but also a feline settler colonialist and therefore not beloved by the other two cats in our household.

Names from my childhood rise up to confound and captivate me. For decades I have heard my dad‘s voice in my head saying that he had to „gp to Brown-Borhek.“ But I had no memory of what the name referred to. Until I got to 2:55 in this video.

I have a new post up @battlegroundeu.bsky.social about Mgła, the exciting new record by a Polish one-man-band: "While Bzdet’s lyrics are not explicitly political, they forcefully communicate the despair of someone watching people turn away from trying to solve the world’s most pressing problems."

I‘m writing about the excellent new album by Polish Dark/Cold Wave artist Bzdet for @battlegroundeu.bsky.social this week.

I was riding my bike this afternoon by one of the horse farms in our area. I reflexively glanced to the right for a look at some horses and realized that coyotes were standing in the places where I have previously seen horses, with nary a horse in sight.

This would be the perfect time for The Cure to drop a surprise holiday album. Potential track list: 1) Downsong 2) Nothing Left But Fate 3) Simply Suffering 4) Mini Bar 5) Hung 6) Still Night 7) Splitting Like Sugarplums 8) The Bottom

I'm thinking of creating a starter pack of men in their fifties who thought it was a good idea, as a teenager spending a year abroad, to flirt with a lovely Finnish lass on a long bus trip by listing the names of 30 towns in her native land and singing the praises of the country's glassware.

A meeting of the minds.

I have a new piece on Victor Erice's tremendous 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive, made in the final years of Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain: "Every time we see Ana’s eyes open wide, we are reminded how dangerous it is to close ours":