Critic's Corner
Fontaines D.C., Dopamine Chamber
Dopamine Chamber is the ultimate sonic doomscroll. The ethereal way it ebbs and flows makes every song unfold like a Matrix timelapse, with each song feeling double or triple its actual length. It’s a doomscroll, because listening makes you feel, well, doomed. The dopamine chamber is taking over your brain. Maybe it already has.
Much politically charged music feels boring or uninspired, like the ideas were more important than the sound. Fontaines does both, skillfully. The first song, “Six Shot Morning,” involves a mechanical beep which I thought was coming from somewhere inside my house. Halfway through the album, you’re in a universe you can’t seem to escape. Something is going wrong, something is falling apart. Clicking play feels like you're projecting the album onto your …
Crime Blotter
Palm Desert Flagpole Killing
On Friday, September 4, at 9:47 AM, deputies from the Palm Desert Sheriff’s Station responded to a call for service in the 35000 block of Gateway Drive, a wealthy gated community, where they located a subject suffering from traumatic injuries consistent with a physical assault.
The suspect, 65-year-old Vicky Kim, a resident of Palm Desert, was taken into custody and was later booked into the John Benoit Detention Center. According to court documents, Kim used a flagpole to “inflict great bodily injury” on the victim, her husband, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to Riverside County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Molly Smith, Kim had been charged with a prior felony attack on her husband in 2026 that was reduced to a misdemeanor, which led to her release …
Front Porch
County Highway is a publication devoted above all else to the American variant of the English language, which is a storehouse of descriptions and solutions to the unique set of difficulties and opportunities presented to us when we are born onto this continent. American English, which evolved to describe our relation to this place, and to allow speakers to communicate and trade, is flexible and blunt, with a wildly democratic approach towards sentence structure and the vernacular. It is capable of absorbing a wide range of influences from other places, at an angle of radical exuberance.
Imagining that American English is inherently sunny or optimistic or simple-minded is a beginner’s mistake. Raymond Chandler is as cynical as any Viennese, just as Quentin Tarantino is as violent as Sergio Leone, and Cormac McCarthy is indebted to the Greeks. Yet their delight in mayhem, combined …
