Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • blues funeral

    Mark Lanegan’s gone. Hard pressed to pick a favourite tune, though Bubblegum is easily the album I’ve listened to most, so here’s one of the ones that’s always struck me as a masterpiece marriage of songwriting and delivery: Sad to lose another of the singers that shaped my youth, but—as I remarked to L____ when…

  • ankomstårsdagen

    Just realised that yesterday was the two-year anniversary of my arrival in Sweden*. As is so often the case with such temporal landmarks, it feels like aeons ago, and at the same time feels like it happened just yesterday—a cognitive distortion surely enhanced by The Still Ongoing Situation, but perhaps not as much as one…

  • cultural fracking / “indie sleaze”

    Nothing is more eyerollingly contemptible than someone else’s nostalgia, for the very obvious reason that—d’uh—there were better things to be nostalgic about when I was young. The above, for the avoidance of doubt, is meant to be read as deeply ironic, but there’s also an element of truth to it. This has become very apparent…

  • 19FEB22 / accessions

    Well, why not?

  • a means of self-branding, hardened into postures

    Offered without gloss or comment, other than “read the whole thing”. Nor will a besieged establishment’s loud existential fears of ‘wokeness’ drown out this simple imperative: that to live attentively in our times, when voices long suppressed are beginning to be heard, is necessarily to awaken to centuries of brutal history. There is no question…