Author Archives: Gil Asakawa

Know-nothings

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What do critics know?

I was a rock critic for years, and I always knew my opinion was just one crabby person’s opinion – nothing more, nothing less. Yeah, sure, I felt like I knew more than a lot of other people about rock and roll, and that gave me the right to spout off about my good taste.

But really, I knew I wasn’t gonna change anyone’s mind about a group they hated or liked. I figured the best I could do was to introduce new and little-known groups or artists or genres to people who hadn’t heard them before, and hopefully they’d like them as much as I did. Continue reading →

Playlist tidbits

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Every day’s bus ride from the Westminster Park and Ride is like listening to the weirdest radio station imaginable — a lot weirder than even the heyday of “underground” radio of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

And every ride, I hear gems out of the 10,064 tracks on my 40GB 4G iPod that make me smile, or take me back, or get me to notice something new and cool that I didn’t know or notice before. That’s the beauty of shuffling through the music. Continue reading →

History in the Northwest

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11:00 a.m.

Here I sit in my rental car, mere yards from the water. I’m waiting for the Bainbridge Island Ferry in Seattle — I missed the last one by just seconds and the next one leaves in an hour.

Bainbridge Island is the place captured poetically in the book and movie, “Snow Falling on Cedars” (which means, come to think of it, that it snows in Seattle, at least sometimes). Continue reading →

Comfort food

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Sometimes, you just gotta have comfort food — you know, meat loaf, mac and cheese, a nice chicken fried steak. Real mashed potatoes, not the just-add-water kind. And when it comes to comfort food, you can’t beat a great diner.

So I welcomed my lunch date today at the Rocky Mountain Diner, even though it’s a bit on the high-end side of diner cuisine. Continue reading →

Gag Me

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I just heard one of the most gawdawful songs of the rock and roll era — or any era, for that matter — on CNN.

I was working away, and the TV outside my office door started playing Joe Cocker‘s 1973 Top 40 hit, “You Are So Beautiful.” The sound stopped me cold, and I got all shakey and felt like vomiting. Continue reading →