Charlie Bertsch is a teacher and writer living in Tucson, Arizona. A founding editor and regular contributor to one of the world’s first online magazines, Bad Subjects, his work has appeared in numerous publications including The Oxford American, Punk Planet, Tucson Sentinel, Phoenix New Times, Cleveland Scene, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
He has served as the Music Editor for Tikkun and Zeek. His essays have appeared in Let Fury Have The Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer, The Anti-Capitalism Reader: Imagining a Geography of Opposition, and both Bad Subjects collections, Collective Action and Political Education for Everyday Life.
Charlie is currently at work on a book about memoir in the age of New Media.
Given the recent glut of books about punk, it’s hard for a new one to stand out. But White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Rage does so with ease. Co-editors Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay have put together a provocative collection that strikes a delicate balance, equally compelling as a classroom text and a call to action. (More…)
As word of Steve Jobs’ death spread, it was apparent that he had entered the pantheon of the Think Different campaign he promoted upon his return to Apple Computer in the late 1990s. Unlike the vast majority of corporate executives, he had become a celebrity that millions of people recognized on sight, someone who had transcended the need for a caption. (More…)
Although it’s been decades since baseball was as popular as football, proponents still insist that it is America’s “national pastime.” At first glance, this may appear to represent wishful thinking. But as the fascinating new film Moneyball implies, this conclusion fails to account for the peculiar connotations of the word “pastime.” (More…)
Twenty minutes into 1991: The Year Punk Broke, Dave Markey’s ragged documentary of a European tour featuring Sonic Youth, Nirvana and assorted other “alternative” acts, Thurston Moore conducts an impromptu interview with a group of fans. They appear to be in the 18-24 range, what Americans call “college age.” (More…)
Because we didn’t want our two-year-old daughter’s head to be filled with disturbing images, we had avoided them ourselves. When I headed out to pick up a video for her to watch, it had been hours since the first attack. Walking into Blockbuster, I expected to see what I always saw, with new movie releases playing on its many television screens. But every single one of them was tuned to CNN. They were showing the footage of the second plane’s strike that had just become available. (More…)
I’ve already listened to all of Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks’ new album Mirror Traffic twice, first in the car, on my hundred-minute drive back from Phoenix, and again on my home stereo, before my thinking about it starts to find traction. Part of me is glad that the songs are shorter and less solo-inclined than was the case on Mirror Traffic’s predecessors. But even the gravel strewn across their surface — a missed beat here, a splash of distortion there — doesn’t diminish their slipperiness. I have to proceed with care. (More…)
Walking across a college campus these days, one is constantly reminded how important personal technology has become for today’s students. From the sorority sister texting while her beach cruiser wobbles through the crowd, to the nerds sharing a portable videogame console, the scene is reminiscent of yesterday’s science fiction. The degree of collective distraction is truly stunning. Everyone seems to be tuning into their devices as a way of tuning out the world around them. (More…)
From the amp-straining bursts that introduce Is This Hyperreal? through the robotic reverberations that close it, Atari Teenage Riot’s comeback album forcefully reminds listeners that technology has a history. But this is no conventional exercise in nostalgia, like records that fetishize guitar pedals from the late 1960s or synth effects from the early 1980s. The sounds on Is This Hyperreal?” are theatrically dated, but thrown together like the odds and ends in a costume trunk. (More…)
When word started spreading about Wugazi, the excitement in social media circles was palpable. To those long familiar with mash-ups, myself included, this came as a surprise. It has been eight years, after all, since Danger Mouse released the form’s first widely discussed masterwork The Gray Album, an astonishingly vital fusion of The Beatles’ double-LP colloquially referred to as the “white album”, and Jay-Z’s The Black Album. (More…)
When I first noticed Monocle on prominent display near the cashiers at my local Barnes & Noble, I was excited. I’d heard a great deal about the magazine and been to its website. But I had yet to hold a copy in my hands. Sure, I could have subscribed to it, but spending upwards of $100 per year on a publication I’d never seen seemed excessive. And, to be frank, I’m more likely to make that sort of financial outlay for music or films than I am for reading material. (More…)
Now is the time for dub. No genre of popular music is better suited to the exigencies of contemporary cultural production. Technology is inexpensive and easy to come by, but people make things hard. Finding a way to play together, seems to require a complexity of scheduling worthy of a railroad dispatcher. Factor in the geographic dislocations that disperse potential bandmates hundreds, even thousands of miles away, and the appeal of constructing music with pre-existing elements, piece by piece, layer by layer, is clear. (More…)
The other day, a friend of mine asked me to share what media I’d been taking in lately. Even though it was a logical request, I was reluctant to respond. Instead of keeping tabs on new releases, I’ve been spending my limited time and money indulging in familiar pleasures: Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, and just about everything to do with J.R.R. Tolkien. (More…)