I love electronic dance music's ongoing affair with the technology that caused its birth pangs, because the longer this affair goes on, the more dense it renders the texts that result. When a dance act makes use of a soft-synth patch that emulates a Prophet-One synthesizer, it's doing something different from what Brian Setzer, say, might have been doing when he played a vintage hollow-body Gibson. The latter case has its own theoretical complications, to be sure. But for electronic dance music, so long described by loaded words like "cold" or "mechanical" (and even, let's be honest, "electronic"), real engagement with nostalgic tropes carries the possibility for violent catharsis.

"Engaging with the moment vs. the man cutting onions." I know what I was doing when I wrote that title down, obviously: I was slicing a red onion that we bought from a roadside stand earlier this afternoon. It smelled delicious, and of course my eyes were stinging. Tears began to pool on them, but I once read somewhere that blinking only makes it worse when you're cutting onions. So I let the tears form over my eyes and blur my vision a little, and I kept on cutting the onion. Physically, it felt like I was crying. Emotionally, of course, I felt fine, except that I was listening to the title track from the Junior Boys' Last Exit. This kind of complicates matters a little.