Nicole Verto
Birthday Boogaloo: Burger Boogaloo 2019
Nicole Verto
July 31, 2019
Words by: Nicole Verto Photos by: Workhorse Studios I’m supposed to be starting this with some glorious cliche about how Burger Boogaloo is “bigger and better” as it celebrates ten years of weird punk fun but I can’t because it wasn’t those things. related content: The De-Evolution of Burger Boogaloo First of all, it was held in the same space but a smaller portion of it. This year, the festival downgraded from two stages to one and closed off access to the amphitheater. Rumors swirled on rays of sunlight. “It’s probably because of low attendance. That’s the only reason it could be, right?” “I heard it was so they wouldn’t displace folks living here.” Whatever the reason, there was one stage and some people did not love that. I am not one of those people — the stage was positioned such that you could hear and see from everywhere. This enabled groups to hunker down in one spot all day and it made the festival seem more intimate — from more conversations to strangers to feeling like you were always close to the music. Basically, for their tenth birthday, the folks behind Boogaloo chose to quietly pull the crowd in
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Punx Not Dead in Petaluma – Home Sick 2 at the Pheonix Theater
Nicole Verto
January 30, 2019
“Is punk dead?” I’ve typically found this refrain loathsome and lazy. Despite my ongoing aversion to the utterance, it was front and center in my own (traitor) brain during the week leading up to Home Sick 2. You see, after almost forty years, the punk institution known as Maximum Rocknroll announced that the zine would cease printing in 2019. The notion hit me hard. I recalled being fourteen and seeing MRR for the first time as a young teenager and traced from there to the first time I saw the rows and rows of green-taped records myself. It felt like a death. I went to three other shows in the days between the announcement and attending Home Sick 2 but HS2 was the one that really shook me out of my cynicism. Of course punk is not dead. Of course the community is still growing and reaching folks of all ages. Even better: those of us already in too deep seem to be better than ever at welcoming other sounds into our spaces. The curators behind Home Sick (none other than headliners Ceremony) managed to again create a space both familiar and refreshingly representative of this constant evolution happening within
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