tUnE-yArDs has confirmed a string of December dates including 4 intimate nights at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg on Dec. 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th and a performance LA’s Wiltern Theatre on Dec. 10th. Cibo Matto set to open all December dates. A limited ticket pre-sale will begin Tuesday, 10/7 at: http://tuneyards.com PREVIOUSLY: Merrill Garbus has this weird obsession with eating babies. It comes up a lot, and she doesn’t even try to hide it. For example, there’s a spoken-word track smack dab in the middle of the highly anticipated new tUnE-yArDs album, Nikki Nack (4AD), called “Why Must We […]
BLUE JEANS AND MOON BEAMS: The Early Word On Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice
WALL STREET JOURNAL: One film, two masters. That’s the easiest, most direct way to describe the power behind “Inherent Vice,” the much-anticipated stoner noir film that had its world premiere Saturday night as the centerpiece of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. The film is loaded with all sorts of familiar Hollywood faces, but the biggest stars of the project are its director and screenwriter, celebrated auteur Paul Thomas Anderson, and the author whose novel served as source material, great American novelist Thomas Pynchon. The two were the buzz of the red carpet Saturday night, even as the likes of stars Joaquin Phoenix, Josh […]
CINEMA: Gone, Daddy, Gone
GONE GIRL (2014, directed by David Fincher, 149 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC At the opening of director David Fincher’s new adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling thriller, Nick Dunne looks at his sleeping wife Amy while his voice-over wonders what’s going in in that noggin of hers. It takes us almost two-and-a-half hours to answer that question and although Gone Girl is a sometimes-diverting Hollywood thriller the questions that linger center on the once-rising career of Mr. Fincher. Is this sort of gussied-up Lifetime Network potboiler really worthy of one of Hollywood’s most-talented directors? With Gone Girl […]
Win Tix To See Bryan Ferry @ The Tower Theater!
Most people think Bryan Ferry is cool for founding and fronting ’70s art-rock avatars Roxy Music, which marks the beginnings of the Brian Eno we’ve all come to know and be awed by. Others think Bryan Ferry’s cool for the suave bolla style and velveteen crooning of his solo career, without which there would be no Duran Duran. Others just think he’s cool for shagging Jerry Hall and just about every smoking hot babe/model/socialite in the 1970’s. But we will always think he’s cool for his grace under pressure when a deranged man stormed the cockpit and attempted to […]
INCOMING: Loaded For Beard
DJ Bearbait, possibly the greatest DJ name in the history of great DJ names, is Pattern Is Movement mainman/Johnny Breanda’s booking agent Chris Ward. Details HERE.
FREE AGAIN: Talking Sex, Drugs & Kabbalah With Aaron Freeman, Formerly Known As Gene Ween
Photo by FRANCO VOGT BY CLAYTON RUSSELL It was a sad day when I learned that Aaron Freeman, AKA Gene Ween of the beloved experimental rock band Ween, had parted ways with his old bandmates. After many years of living the rock n’ roll party animal lifestyle, Aaron decided that something needed to change. He got sober and came to realize that the only way he was going to stay that way was working with sober people. Hence, Freeman, his new band, was born. They play a sold out show at Johnny Brenda’s in support of their wonderful self-titled debut […]
BASS DRUM OF DEATH: Bad Reputation
This is totally badass. They play The Barbary on Rocktober 9th. You have been warned.
Q&A w/ Photographer Joshua Scott Albert, Formerly The Most Dangerous Man In Philadelphia Dining
Photo by JEFF FUSCO BY N.A. POE F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life but he never saw the photographs of pariah-turned-photographer Joshua Scott Albert. A few years back, Albert became notorious for his muck-raking service-industry blog Staph Meal, now defunct, in which he posted sometimes dubious and nearly always salacious claims about local restaurant owners, and later public officials. Albert spent eight months in jail on trumped up charges after creating a “Kill Mitt Romney” Facebook page and is currently serving a term of probation. These days, Joshua is the staff photographer for the […]
Anonymous Declares War On Hong Kong Regime
WALL STREET JOURNAL: The cyber phase of the Hong Kong protests appears to be underway. At various times today the websites of the Hong Kong government, pro-Beijing group Silent Majority, pro-Beijing newspaper Wenweipo and the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (the city’s largest political party, also known as DAB) have been inaccessible. According to the website monitoring service Is It Down Right According to the website monitoring service Is It Down Right Now, all four websites are currently offline (see here, here, here and here.) The problems come after online news site News2Share published a […]
SURRENDER TO THE VOID: A Metaphysical Q&A With Sam Harris, International Man Of Reason
BY STEVE VOLK Sam Harris doesn’t much care for the term “atheism.” To him, the idea that he doesn’t believe in the old myths shouldn’t require any sort of marker. Once counted among the Four Horseman of the New Atheism, bringing death to religion, Harris seems to have outdistanced his pack. Christopher Hitchens is, sadly, gone. Philosopher Daniel Dennett doesn’t maintain the same dialogue with the larger, cultural conversation between books. And Richard Dawkins has come to epitomize the worst of the materialist creed—lobbing unwelcome and, dare we say, unreasonable hand grenades about ladies in elevators, child molestation and […]
STREET POET: Meet SEPTA’s Walt Whitman
Or maybe he’s the William Carlos Williams of SEPTA. Or the Carl Sandburg of SEPTA. Either way, his name is Mark Fuller and he gives mass transit rhyme and reason. From Scrapple TV, our partners in new media crime.
INCOMING: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Standby for a meaty excerpt from the oral history of Weezer I assembled for this month’s cover story. In the mean time, I’ll just leave this snippet from the cutting room floor for your consideration: ME: Rivers it’s unfortunate that I am getting you at this point in your career when you feel you’ve been burned by the press and are so guarded about what you say, because I really like your music and I like you, it would be great if you could just open up and really engage these questions, because I have come to praise you […]
Jack White’s Third Man Records Announces The Final Chapter Of The Paramount Records Story
On Nov 18th, Jack White’s Third Man Records, in partnership with John Fahey’s Revenant Records, will unlock the second and final chapter chronicling the curious tale of America’s most important record label with ‘The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Volume 2 (1928-1932).’ A stunning omnibus of words, music, art and design, ‘Volume 2’ picks up where the “spectacular” (New York Times) and “unprecedented” (Rolling Stone) ‘Volume 1’ left off. It documents the label’s final 5 year period between 1928-32, a stunning second act in which Paramount birthed the entire genre of Mississippi Delta blues and issued some of […]