Articles by MikeJ

Vijay Iyer – Compassion - Front cover

PoOPlists, PoOpLists 2024 January 20, 2025

Mike Jurkovic Poop 2024

If you awoke fragile today steer clear I’m standing on the dry line gathering steam And may say things I don’t mean or purport to have written Hitch my ride to the pity parade and parrot its opiate shuffle Barely disguise my disgust for the words you choose to screed your codex Your rabid unholy verse Your clown’s redress and how it persuades your querulous legion to shoot me on sight Your sucker theorems historical record Your crap orange portrait alongside FDR his cousin Lincoln and the black guy you’ve demeaned deplored You piece of shit You rat’s ass You hellbent blind soldier at war against science At war against ourselves in which no house stands Not even the gold engraved ones No not even the gold engraved

i/o - by Peter Gabriel

PoOPlists, PoOPLists 2023 January 13, 2024

Mike Jurkovic – Poop 2023

You realize of course that, in the barbaric course of human events we have wrought upon ourselves, it is not Biden v fuckface but it is who and what we are as individuals and a society that will decide this gasping November. So ask yourself exactly what the hell you want to leave as a legacy: dictators and classic rock or classic rock and democracy?

That, in an ugly nutshell, is my state of mind these days. Fortunately there’s the missus’ love, that blue sky above Lake Awosting and some great music and meds to ease the pain. #VoteLikeUMeanIt

Little Feat - Waiting For Columbus Deluxe Expanded Edition

PoOPlists, Pooplists 2022 January 15, 2023

Mike Jurkovic Poop 2022

PooPy23 yea yea I know I’ve done nothin but gripe over the last few years about the failed state of our democracy n rock n roll n the general collapse of any and all involved in our cultural degeneration but enough of that for this year. there’s always cable and streaming dystopias for all that. we’re gathered here at PooP HQ to step away and actually celebrate what little light managed to shine thru the bullet holes left by patriots n supremacists n just regular freakin knot-head incels. so as I work tirelessly to recount it all I’m listenin to…

Christian McBride & Inside Straight - Live at The Village Vanguard

PoOPlists, Pooplists 2021 January 3, 2022

Mike Jurkovic Poop 2021

Christian McBride & Inside Straight, Veronica Swift, Charles Lloyd & The Marvels, Orrin Evans, Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh & Tyshawn Sorey, Chick Corea Akoustic Band, Renee Rosnes, Julie Sassoon Quartet, Rachel Eckroth

Nubya Garcia – Source

Pooplists 2020 December 11, 2020

Mike Jurkovic – Poop 2020

my new book and cd AmericanMental arrived in March with the virus. so it’s been a seriously ironic year for me. but despite my particular circumstance, here we are on the heels of Annus Horriblis still clinging to traditions both minuscule and grand, like pOOp 2020 and I’ve something to painfully and willfully confess: I can’t listen to whatever modern pop or rock n roll is anymore. Truly, truly don’t care. Never thought I’d say that being so astute to the ch-ch-changes, so I’m not even going to try and bluff you. I’m going to list what got me through our perilous surge towards tyranny and affliction and move along to next year when the two Marks, who beat at the heart of this unscrupulous amalgam of obsession and obsfucation, hopefully email me to ask kindly, hey what you got this year dude?

Bob Dylan Travelin Thru 1967-1969 The Bootleg Series Vol 15

Pooplists 2019 January 31, 2020

Mike Jurkovic Poop 2019

PoOp 19: the decade falls It was this handful of recordings that gratefully, again and again and again, pulled my attention away from binge watching the destruction of our cherished, yet all too vulnerable democracy.  They are mostly jazz recordings I know, but they made me feel like I had some connection to the music, unlike whatever it is that passes for popular music these days and makes me feel like a god-damned intruder w/three left feet, six bad ears and a penis for a nose from Ultra Gabba Hey Hey-17 fifteen gazillion light years away. Perhaps to my detriment…

nic bartsch ronin -awase

PoOPlists, PoOPlists 2018 January 9, 2019

Mike Jurkovic Poop 2018

purposely obtuse obfuscation points (christmas letter) 2018 One of the many blessings of this time of year is the chance it gives me to connect with you, my friends, family, and fellow poopers. So save for an exquisite month w/the missus in England and Ireland, (even if were were strolling towards Churchill’s War Room that August morn of the London terrorist act); my book, Blue Fan Whirring being published; swift kicking Faso in the balls, Calling All Poets entering its 20th year as the region’s longest running poetry performance series, and my 3 hour Tuesday night gig at the Jazz…

Randy Newman - Dark Matter

PoOPlists, PoOPlists 2017 January 8, 2018

Mike Jurkovic Poop 2017

fuck 17
I know we all know someone/love someone/hate someone who said
Wow! I’m glad that fuckin’ year’s over when 2017 finally broke.
But wasn’t it a prologue in many ways? A year older/closer/nearer the fire?
And who knew that fire was a bushland combustion,
devouring our time/our senses/our songs?
Who knew the forward rate of spread
would be so rapid? The department of this/the department of that
acting as accelerants, torching canopy and street. Leaping fire breaks
w/a single bound. An uncontrolled disaster. The coup behind
the theatrics. A smoldering transition scorching the air.
Great vertical differences you feel in your bed/your shower/your soul.
A stack effect, for sure, as air rises when it’s heated. Birthing new updrafts,
sucking the air from the baby’s room.

PoOPlists 2016 January 3, 2017

Mike Jurkovic Poop 2016

well that frikkin year couldn’t end fuckin fast enough could it? Lord, what a cruel, cruel joke. a three-hundred-sixty-five-day punchline without a laugh for the little guy. a running obit. everything grey like dickens. duke’s indigo faded to Beijing smog and wildfire smoke. w/o getting deep into the existential weeds, it was a fuck of a year and the election was just the tip of the iceberg. o we fucked that up big time. but I and thousands of others tried to deliver you Bernie, but you went with reality TV. the battle of the two dying white behemoths and…

PoOPlists 2014 January 6, 2015

Mike Jurkovic – Poop 2014

if we had all died in a Koch-ian fossil fuck in twentyfourteen, here’s what I woulda been singin’ or listenin’ to when the flashpoint came.     Buy New or Used via Amazon           Rent via iTunes [?] 1) Bob Dylan and The Band – The Basement Tapes Complete Collectors, myself included, have had these dark, surreal cosmic jokes and murder ballads in bootleg form for, oh I dunno, eight hundred years? To have them all in one place, with thirty newly discovered tracks from a tape Garth Hudson sold off is just bonus.     Buy New…

PoOPlists, PoOPlists 2013 January 15, 2014

Mike Jurkovic Poop 2013

Another year of grasping at straws And this is what I heard Wise Up Ghost Costello w/Roots snarlin’ at the wankers, Karen Grainger Shiver & Sigh Love bitin’ blues from an LA lady Miles, Chick, Holland, Wayne and DeJohnette Bootleg: Europe 69 Jarrett’s Concerts Bregenz Muchen Elton, Bernie ‘n Tbones’ Diving Board Mingus’ Jazz Workshops and Potter’s Sirens Neko’s The Worse Things Get . . . among the best McCartney’s New and perhaps concerts without the other three Speaking of which Live at The BBC and Zimmerman’s ‘other Side American Hustle and Kinky Boots Elvis @ UPAC ‘n Tuscany Blue…

No Picture

PoOPlists, PoOPlists 2011 January 24, 2012

Mike Jurkovic Poop ’11

occupy poop! it’s embarrassing to think anyone still cares about this crap or even has the time to ponder it based on the sands of time runnin’ out on our democracy. . . that the only music we should have been listening to & adding our ragged voices to was the global chant for justice & equality, but since mark asked – no decisive order as usual – just what distracted me from firebombing goldman sachs or lifted my spirits –   Buy New or Used via amazon paul simon – so beautiful or so what   Buy New or Used via…

No Picture

PoOPlists, PoOPlists 2010 January 11, 2011

Mike Jurkovic Poop ’10

poop 10 . . .wire 29 . . .so little to get excited about in this banana republic awash in oil, cancer, campaign money, boehner’s tears, and palin’s illiterate army of Tucson terrorists. . . Maura Kennedy’s darkly ebullient ‘Parade of Echoes’, the Trapps ‘Cheap Seats’ and rediscovering Dexter Gordon’s 60’s Blue Note Sessions Box. . . . the rustic sensuality of Eliza Blue. The ‘Exile’ remaster was a scream ‘n a hoot until Glenn Beck marched on Washington. Providing a needed smile on a tired progressive’s face, The Sails,’ ‘A Headful of Stars’ proves that head Sail Michael Gagliano…

No Picture

Live Shows November 24, 2010

The Grand Slambovians @ Bearsville Theater, Saturday, Nov 27 9pm

Fresh ‘n feisty from triumphantly advancing their contagious and quirky Americana from Glasgow to Penzance in ye olde UK, alt-roots DIY’ers Gandalf Murphy & The Slambovian Circus of Dreams bring their haunting signature songs and sincerity back to the Hudson Highlands from whence it originated.  But myth is a must in the mind-space of  Slambovia, and Woodstock’s Bearsville Theater is pleased to loudly premiere the advent of  “The Grand Slambovians”  which is both the band’s latest reincarnation and the title of their new soul stirring CD. Manically melodic, the bold new songs stitch to the band’s classics like an old…

No Picture

Live Shows October 22, 2010

The Trapps

  Saturday, November 13,  8pm  $10 Howland Cultural Center 477 Main Beacon, NY 12508 914-474-7758 For information and tickets, please visit www.howlandculturalcenter.org Handicapped accessible.                    Limited seating.                        Geo-thermally heated & cooled. New Paltz’s nationally recognized roots band returns to rock the Grand Hall at Howland!

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Live Shows September 22, 2010

Professor Louie & Special Guests

Friday, September, 24th    8pm     $15 Howland Cultural Center 477 Main, Beacon, NY 12508 For information and tickets, please visit www.howlandculturalcenter.org Handicapped accessible.      Limited seating.                        Geo-thermally heated & cooled. About Professor Louie Tagged Prof. “Louie” by the late vocalist/bassist Rick Danko of The Band, our world travelin’, barrel-housin’ Professor co-produced, engineered and performed on The Band’s last three CD’s, “Jericho”, “High On The Hog” and “Jubilation”. A highly touted multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, other production credits include Danko’s “Live On Breeze Hill” & “Times Like These”; The David Nelson Band’s Visions’ Under The Moon, and “The Sea To The North” by Garth…

No Picture

PoOPlists, PoOPlists 2009 January 7, 2010

Mike Jurkovic Poop 09

poop o mine 09 just as I thought the country had turned a great corner, I come to realize it’s more fucked than ever. Now I gotta intelligently (a word obsolete in our manner & discourse) disinter what sucked from what didn’t (a line harder & harder to discern as my eyes and interest flee south). Hell man, I’m not Glenn Beck the great anesthesia stooge. I can’t lead you from the darkness. so I don’t know what the best of the worst was. I’m going on what made an impact. What shielded me and mine from the madness coming…

No Picture

CD reviews February 9, 2009

Bruce’s Not So Great As They Say New Disc

Bruce Springsteen – Working On A Dream From Springsteen we’ve come to expect, if not outright demand, the rich, multi-hued detail of every moment, making ‘Working On A Dream’s weird one: It sounds real good but what does it mean? Springsteen has always taken his heralded influences and made them work for him but here he works for them and, opposite his granite rep, doesn’t always get the job done. If these dark ages really were the old radio glory days his writing harkens back to, “My Lucky Day” and the CCR-ish title track would deservedly be blasting from every…