Bouquets and Brickbats – County Highway

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Ariel Pink Won't Stop Making Music

Canceled Indie Icon Plays Vegas

Exalts Art Over Politics

A Trumpist in a Teapot

By Armin Rosen

Ariel Pink is a test that America might never pass. Between the late 90s and not so long ago, Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, aka Ariel Pink, was the creative and commercial edge of true psychedelic freakdom, playing every instrument on a series of swampy self-released astonishments before penning several of the bona fide classics of the 2010s indie boom. “While y’all nigga masturbate, I’m in that Ariel Pink,” Donald Glover rapped in 2011. Charting four albums on the Billboard 200 and recording with Miley Cyrus, Rosenberg could’ve gotten massively rich and famous by making his sound everyone else’s sound too. Instead, he decided that such debasements are better left to the Jack Antonoffs of the world. Then he blew his whole career by attending the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC, on the morning of January 6th, 2021 — though not the festivities at the Capitol later that afternoon — at which point the music suddenly ended. Rosenberg was decried as the face of indie rock’s alleged male …

You Only Live Once

Bulgarian Puke

The People’s House of Humor and Satire was built by Todor Zhivkov’s daughter, Ludmilla

After eating three or four heaps of the decayed Nazi morphine powder, I felt behind me in the darkness for a handle or lever

The counter system to the counter system will show you both Great Systems in a mirror above the bathroom sink in Gabrovo, where I am washing my balls

PS: The Bogomils were right

By Ted Mann

Let us ponder the 1980s, geopolitically, economically, and thermodynamically. Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” in 1983, though it was an empire so decayed, we would later discover, it barely appeared scary enough to justify another year’s increase to the defense budget. It was a time that would later be called “the height of the Cold War.” The Soviets were bogged down in Afghanistan, the US was arming the Taliban, and Manhattan, where I lived and worked then, was awash in cocaine and disco. Artists went sour and turned on their patrons. It was the zeitgeist, they said. “I’d sell them shit if I could,” said Andy Warhol, whose gnostic snarl recalls us to the point: Soviet Russia and the Eastern Bloc nations were widely perceived as the great counter system to imperial capitalism, and as Uncle Sam’s rival for the hearts and minds of the third world. This is all by way of setting the stage for a personal account of my visit to Bulgaria at the height of the Cold …