fiction and creative non-fiction from brennan quenneville
"I hope you're doing fine on your own," sings Stefan Babcock on "See You At Your Funeral," the shockingly catchy centerpiece of Morbid Stuff, the third LP from Canadian punk rockers PUP. If that seems like a pleasant sentiment, know that, characteristically, it's not. "'Cause after everything we've been through," he continues, "you better hope [...]
The year is drawing to a close and taking the decade with it (because, for some reason, we use zero-based numbering for that kind of thing). That means that we're approaching list season, when every denizen of the internet will bombard the digital void with lists of movies, albums, books and whatever else they have [...]
The Queue is a recurring feature in which I discuss some of the music that I’ve been listening to recently. This week I examine Green Day growing up and The Juliana Theory going heavy. WARNING: – Green Day The biggest turning point in Green Day's career was arguably the release of "Good Riddance (Time of [...]
The parking lot was filled with tailgaters and not a face in sight was younger than my suddenly youthful 32. This was the scene that greeted my wife and I as we pulled into Freedom Hill on a late June day, drawn to the site by the Summer Gods Tour, a nostalgic goldmine of an [...]
For reasons that can best be described as “inexplicable,” my parents subscribed to both Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly while I was in high school. Neither periodical was a particularly good fit for my already-well-developed anti-establishmentarian artistic tastes and yet this was a time (for me, at least) before easy internet access and so, with few exceptions, I read [...]
20 years ago, Blink-182 released of Enema of the State and became every 13-year old's favorite band. (Why yes, I did turn 13 in 1999.) Last week the band played Enema in its entirety at Chicago's Riot Fest and tomorrow the band will release a new album, NINE. To celebrate the last 20 years of [...]
Reading is an inherently independent activity so if there's anything unusual about my reading The Lord of the Rings every year, it's limited to the fact that I read The Lord of the Rings every year and not that I do so alone. Most years, after I finish that reading, I watch Peter Jackson's trilogy [...]
Yesterday I posted an article that compared Veronica Mars, The Postal Service's Give Up and Kenna's New Sacred Cow in a discussion of how our perceptions don't always match reality. The article was fun to write and was based on an idea that I had had a few years ago but never finished, that original [...]
Veronica Mars is an outsider, someone who doesn't fit in, someone who doesn't belong. We know this because the narration to Veronica Mars—narration spoken by Veronica herself—tells us so. We know this because, when the series begins, Veronica is repeatedly shown to be clique-less. We know this because, driving down the Pacific coast in a [...]
Having learned the art of brevity from his time as a journalist, Ernest Hemingway created what became known as iceberg theory: By omitting everything but the barest necessities of narrative, a capable writer lets the reader intuit deeper, thematic truths, thereby improving the reading experience and strengthening the story. One of the side effects of [...]
