Illustration by CHARLES BURNS DAVID BYRNE: What will life be like after the Internet? Thanks to the mass surveillance undertaken by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the general creepiness of companies like Google and Facebook, I’ve found myself considering this question. I mean, nothing lasts forever, right? There’s a broad tech backlash going on right now; I wonder just how deep the disillusionment runs. I get the feeling that there are folks out there who would relish putting the Internet behind us sooner rather than later. Imagine that: even the Internet could be a thing of the past one […]
BEING THERE: Gary Numan @ The Trocadero
Photo by PETE TROSHAK Gary Numan will always be best known for his 1979 hit “Cars,” but his blazing, 19-song set of electro-rock heaviosity at the Trocadero on Sunday night made it abundantly clear that he is not living in the past. Last year, Numan released Splinter, his 20th album and one of his best-received to date, and he is currently touring support of it following a buzz-generating performance at the SXSW 2014. The irony of a man best-known for pioneering electronic music strapping on a Les Paul — in a hail of blinding strobes and industrial bleeps and blips […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Bob Mankoff has been contributing cartoons to The New Yorker ever since 1977 and now, as cartoon editor, he evaluates more than 500 cartoons submitted to the magazine each week. Mankoff is proud of the many cartoons that have been published under his aegis. “Sometimes I take my aegis out of my drawer just to admire it,” he writes. His most well-known cartoon shows an executive looking at his desk calendar, saying to someone on the phone: “No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?” The idea came to him during a phone […]
LYKKE LI: Love Me Like I’m Not Made Of Stone
First track off her third album, I Never Learn, reportedly a collection of “power ballads for the broken,” due out May 5th. “I want to be my generation’s guilty pleasure,” she says. “I want to be the last song that plays at the disco for the outcasts. . . I’ve been really inspired by the great classics, the way one simple sentence can transcend generations. . . Songs like [Ben E. King and the Drifters’] ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ or even Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is.’ The whole record is me trying to live up […]
CINEMA: Satyricon
NYMPHOMANIAC VOLUME I & II (2014, dir. by Lars Von Trier, 241 minutes) DAVID EDELSTEIN: Lars von Trier’s latest provocation is an episodic sexual epic called Nymphomaniac, which comes in two two-hour parts, or “volumes,” though it’s basically one movie sliced in half. The thinking must have been, “Who wants four hours of hardcore sex and philosophizing?,” and if you say, “Me, me!,” I suggest seeing both back to back: It’s an art-house orgy! Should you see it at all? I recommend it guardedly. It’s dumb, but in a bold, ambitious way movies mostly aren’t these days, especially when […]
Win Tix To See Gary Numan At The Troc Sunday
Readers of a certain age will remember Gary Numan‘s “Cars” as easily the coolest song of 1979 — the nearest competition was The Knack’s “My Sharona,” and catchy as it was/is it was essentially retrograde, guitar-based power-pop. Nothing wrong with that, in fact some of my best friends are retrograde, guitar-based power-pop. But where “My Sharona” harkened back to the past, to some mythical coked-up episode of Shindig!, “Cars” was prophetic, a harbinger of things to come in the impending ’80s. And many of it’s quirky tropes remain the building blocks of pop culture: robotic anomie, cinematic synthesizer washes, […]
HUFF POST: Welcome To The Hotel Andersonia
HUFFINGTON POST: There are, I am increasingly convinced, but two kinds of people in this world: people who hate Wes Anderson films and human beings. Before we go further I should make it clear that I am of the opinion that Wes Anderson only makes two kinds of movies: great, and really great. That Wes Anderson is the two-word answer to the increasingly asked question: What good is a liberal arts education? There are times in this country’s history when we’ve had to take stock and ask ourselves: Do we really want to live in a world without English […]
tUnE yArDs: Water Fountain
From her new album, Nikki Nack (4AD), due out May 5th.
Win Tix To See Desert Blues Mystics Tinariwen
Illustration by ADRIA FRUTOS Tinariwen was founded by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who at age four witnessed the execution of his father (a Tuareg rebel) during a 1963 uprising in Mali. As a child he saw a western film in which a cowboy played a guitar. Ag Alhabib built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic pop tunes.[citation needed] Ag Alhabib first lived in Algeria in refugee camps near Bordj Badji Mokhtar and in the deserts around the southern city of Tamanrasset, where he received […]
KIM DEAL: The Root
Good to see her making music publicly again. PREVIOUSLY: The Guardian Hypes The Kim Deal News In Phawker Editor’s 7,000 Word Black Francis Q&A
INCOMING: Ornette Coleman
More than 50 years after Ornette Coleman changed the course of music with The Shape of Jazz to Come, the avant-garde patriarch remains an elusive genius whose work defies neat categories. While he coined the term “free jazz” with his classic 1960 double quartet album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, he’s a composer of expansive ambition whose tunes have become essential touchstones in the jazz canon. His melodic imagination often seems limitless, as he regularly introduces dozens of new tunes with slippery, careening singsong lines. And though he’s known as one of the most sophisticated and controversial innovators in […]
SMUS: There IS A Class War, And We’re Losing
Illustration by POASTERCHILD BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Question: Do you think it’s good for the American “democracy” to have 10% of its citizens own 75% (and growing more disparate by the minute) of its wealth? I’d prefer to direct this question to the leader of the Republican party, but of course there isn’t one. So far the selection process is only in the I-hate-everything-Obama-likes-more-than-you-do stage which still leaves that most pinnacled of all plutocratic dunce caps searching for a head. So, for the present I guess I’ll have to settle for addressing my query to all of those grand old dragons vying for the cone-shaped hat. Your phony “trickle ‘up’” economics and […]
EARLY WORD: Fargo, The TV Series
TIME: FX’s newest, longest trailer for its television sequel to the Coen brothers’ black comedy film classic, Fargo, teases all the right ingredients: an all-star cast, blunt force trauma to a bloody nose, deadpan shock, and muffed Minnesotans stalking corpses in the snow. Joel and Ethan Coen, both executive producers of the new series, were both hands-on in development of the show with FX. Fargo will pick up one morning after where the film’s absurd conspiracy left off, with several fatalities. Sherlock‘s Martin Freeman will replace William H. Macy, and Billy Bob Thornton will replace Steve Buscemi. Allison Tolman will […]