VANITY FAIR: Champion of the heartland, Farm Aid founder, and accomplished Americana musician, John Mellencamp has been covertly pulling double-duty as a visual artist for more than 20 years. But with his first art museum exhibition at Youngstown, Ohio’s Butler Institute of American Art in progress, the spotlight is now shining brightly on 40 of his original oil paintings. Inspired largely by German artists Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, Mellencamp’s work is emotional and progressive, in keeping with his award-winning music. For Mellencamp, who began his painting career by training with the Art Students League in New York in […]
WORTH REPEATING: I Got High With David Brooks
Artwork via DRIFTGLASS DAVID BROOKS: For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships. […] But then we all sort of moved away from it.most of us developed higher pleasures. Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive. Most of us figured out early on that smoking weed doesn’t really make you funnier or more creative (academic studies more or less confirm this). We graduated to more […]
PIXIES: Blue Eyed Hexe
THE GUARDIAN: Pixies have unveiled Blue-Eyed Hexe, the lead song from a new recording entitled EP-2. The track, which is three minutes and 25 seconds of swaggering riffs and screeching vocals, is based on a tale from the northwestern part of the UK. “It’s a witch-woman kind of a song,” the band wrote in a statement. “That’s what a ‘hexe’ is, and ours is a blue-eyed hexe.” The four-track EP is the latest in a scheduled string of releases from the group, who told the New York Times in September 2013 that there would be a “series of mini-releases” over […]