QUIT MUMBLING: The Dream Syndicate was described to me as L.A.’s version of The Velvet Underground from the 80?s.  Say no more- I’m in.  The band formed in ’81, played a show in Hollywood, made a basement 4-song demo, and overnight grabbed the attention of the L.A. music scene.  In ’82 The Dream Syndicate released The Days of Wine and Roses, an album that could have easily doubled for a VU bootleg, only with a bit more noise and dynamic shifts.  “Halloween” is a gem from the album, utilizing pretty wonderful guitar feedback as a dense surrounding for the dried […]

WKDVR At least seven people were arrested in downtown Denver during a confrontation between Denver Police and Occupy Denver protesters Saturday afternoon. A police spokesman says the confrontation began when some Occupy Denver protesters tried to “occupy” the state capitol, which is illegal. “I saw the police become brutal for no reason,” said a woman who was at the protest. “I saw them choke a guy, I saw people get tear gassed who weren’t violent.” Witnesses say some in the crowd were throwing objects at police, and that a police officer patrolling the protest on a motorcycle was pushed off […]

#OccupyMelbourne, Melbourne, Australia 10:41 PM RELATED: I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? And as last week’s inane “What Do They Want?” meme morphs into this week’s craven “They Want Your Stuff” meme, I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it […]

Legendary social justice activist Angela Davis will be addressing #OccupPhilly at 9:15 PM tonight at Dilworth Plaza. All are welcome. WIKIPEDIA: Angela Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis was most politically active during the late 1960s through the 1970s and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of “Critical Resistance“, an organization working to abolish the “prison-industrial complex“. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the […]

NEW YORK POST: In his heyday, he lived at 783 Bel Air Road, a four-bedroom, 5,432-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion that once belonged to John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. The Tudor-style house was tricked out in his signature funky black, white and red color scheme. Shag carpet. Tiffany lamps in every room. A round water bed in the master bedroom. There were parties where Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Miles Davis would drop by, where Etta James would break into “At Last” by the bar. Just four years ago, he resided in a Napa Valley house […]

BY ZIVIT SHLANK Medeski, Martin & Wood have been labeled everything from a jam band to an acid jazz trio to bunch of play-that-funky-music white boys. However, ask the boys of Medeski Martin & Wood how they’d characterize their sonic experiments and they’d say their wide open. Together now for two decades, the innovative sonic laboratory known as MMW continues to circumvent genre boundaries and invent a few new ones in the process. Infamous for their charismatic virtuosity and their infectiously evolving sound, several albums and countless tours, however you want to define them this much is certain: They play […]

NEW YORK TIMES: “Urbanized,” the latest design documentary by Gary Hustwit, is the final in an accidental trilogy that includes “Helvetica” (about the ubiquitous typeface) and “Objectified” (about the impact of industrial and product design on commerce and the environment). “Urbanized,” as its title suggests, is about the design of cities. Although other films have surveyed the topic through a longer lens, Hustwit’s is about immediate problems — and some viable solutions. It is a beautifully photographed film, which has the unintended consequence of making the slums of India and the favelas of Brazil appear picturesque. Although we learn that […]

FRESH AIR David Carr joins Terry Gross on Fresh Air to discuss his Twitter usage, the future of newspapers, error correction, his own media consumption, religion and the accountability of social media. He says that he thinks of Twitter as a personalized “human-enabled RSS [feed]” that allows him to follow what his friends are reading and thinking about at any given moment. “It serves to edit what’s going on in the world, and it puts a human curation on this huge fire hose of data that’s washing over us all,” he says. “The question becomes where to look, and it’s […]

BY TONY ABRAHAM While the band name (don’t say it too fast!) and the title of their self-released debut LP (the faptastic Get Out The Lotion) aims lowbrow and hits the target every time (the cover art features a middle age Jersey diner waitress whose off-duty activities shall remain a mystery best left unsolved), Low Cut Connie is more than the raunchy sum of their downmarket puns — much more. They are, in fact, hella fun and you can’t put a price on that — although they invariably will. Thanks to killa-dilla debut and well-earned hyping in the pages of […]