All posts by R. Sal Reyes

About R. Sal Reyes

R. Sal Reyes is a writer and poet who thinks the human passion for self-expression in an apparently meaningless universe is the coolest part of this weird, sublime existence. He claims to seriously appreciate arts and culture, but has a lot of explaining to do.

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Sal's puppet.
Why, for example, has he seen St. Elmo’s Fire so many times? What possessed him to download that Kelly Clarkson song? Why did he and a fellow music geek spend those late nights at the tender age of 16 writing piano-heavy, Richard Marx rip-off ballads? Why did they make matters worse by recording one of the songs at a local studio and then having it played at a high school dance, not understanding that all of the cool kids were standing around thinking, Don’t these dorks realize they’re not in a John Hughes movie? Did he actually not know that playing the French Horn and joining swing choir would make it harder to get girls?

How could he have decorated his half of the dorm room with an “ALF for President” poster and a 5-foot tall replica of the cover of the Lovesexy album—sleeping every night beneath a life-size, gently-airbrushed, fully-nude Prince, and a short, furry, wise-cracking alien? What is wrong with this man?

Does his Velvet Underground collection get up in the middle of the night and secretly harass the Air Supply album? Is Chuck D somewhere on his iPod right now trying to keep Flav from bugging the Indigo Girls with inappropriate requests? Is his copy of Blue offended by that last comment and now refusing to be played ever again on a sunny Saturday morning? Are all of his Bill Frisell tracks quietly, gorgeously plotting their escape?

This is all we know: He was born in the Philippines. He grew up in Woodstock, IL. He’s hiding this very moment somewhere in Mill Valley, CA. You can read his poems and stories at rsalvador.com.

When Romantics Collide: Finn, Sorkin, & Dana’s Panties

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Dana in white, fully-clothed.

The final season of The Sopranos is casting a long shadow in my life these days. I know, this is a music site—we’ll get to that. But as I write this, there are merely two episodes left in the greatest television show ever, and I’m pretty deeply engrossed. Anyone familiar with the show knows that music has always played a huge role, and after a recent episode used Van Morrison’s cover of “Comfortably Numb” to set-up maybe the series’ most singularly breathtaking moment, I was ready to dig deep into why the song choice was absolute perfection…

…until I discovered that those crafty Sopranos-deconstructors at Slate beat me to it. (And did a far better job than I ever would have; I mean, the guy brings Hitler’s secret bunker into his analysis—no way I would’ve dug that deep.) But it led me to ask: what is my favorite moment of pop song/TV show symbiosis?

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A Freak’s Freak: Sign 'O' the Times @ 20

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sign_cover.jpg I could call Prince a “genius,” but would it matter? In music, art, and writing, everybody’s a goddamn genius. So let’s come at it from a different angle. My dad, a physician, tends to look at things from a genetic point of view. When we’re watching a truly brilliant athlete or musician, he’ll point out that their “genius” is based on their genetic aberrations. Basically, they’re mutants, if you want to make it sound comic-book sexy. Or, as I prefer to look at it, they’re freaks.

Michael Jordan? Total freak. Absurdly mutant-like muscular control combined with freakish creative spatial analysis abilities. He won the genetic lottery and got to test-drive the prototype genes. In 10,000 years, all of us will dunk like Jordan.

And everyone will make music like Prince.

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