SAT 4/24 Things never seem to work out the way they’re planned. Roy DeCarava was studying painting and printmaking at the Harlem Art Center in New York in the 1940s when he began documenting his own art with a small camera. But after DeCarava turned his lens on his native Harlem, the young artist soon left behind his paints…
Hollywood loves to take characters out of their familiar environments and plop them somewhere strange and forbidding. Kooky fish-out-of-water films such as Splash and Pretty Woman often go for the obvious jokes, like the sight gag of a mermaid on Park Avenue or a flashy whore walking into New York’s Plaza Hotel. Braver filmmakers, though, sense that fresh exposure…
Thursday, April 22 We’ll admit it: Country music tries our patience like a cheating lover or an empty bottle. Instead of played-out themes and predictable song structures, we’d rather listen to fingernails on the hood of a pickup truck. That said, we’re cool with Deke Dickerson and the Ecco-Fonics. Dickerson mines his brand of music from the Western swing and…
Eric Drooker has a lot to say about society and politics. A poster artist and graphic novelist (he collaborated with the late Allen Ginsberg, creating the graphics for Illuminated Poems), he usually lets his work do the talking in message-laden posters, graphic novels and magazine covers. Drooker is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, but he says editors there…
The BFG As entertaining as it might be, The BFG isn’t about Badass Fearful Gangstas. The acronym stands for Big Friendly Ghost, the affable colossus who delivers dreams to children by blowing through their windows. In this children’s story by Roald Dahl, the BFG is a runt among the behemoths ruling the land, and if that doesn’t set him…
Amy Cutler The fanciful costumes and absurd situations depicted in Amy Cutler’s gouache paintings on white paper often draw comparisons to fairy-tale illustrations, but Cutler finds inspiration in a wide variety of sources: Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Audubon, childhood memories of her father’s pet store. For example, in “Dinner Party,” young women in elaborate ball gowns use their long braids…
On Sunday afternoons, the riders in the Upsetters Club meet at Scooter Fix, a mechanics’ shop in the all-ages El Torreon nightclub at 31st Street and Gillham. It’s one of many scooter clubs that have formed nationwide. (My favorite club name is the all-girl Secret Servix.) Back when the Upsetters Club first started, in 1998, it was made up…
Most compilation albums adhere to the Captain Planet rule, the gist of which suggests that the songs on a comp may falter individually, but their collective power makes a decent album. An album capable of battling whatever adversary stands in its way — Dr. Blight, Duke Nukem, Discerning Listener. Dandercroft Compilation is no different, though an apt alternative title could…
Unlike rock dads, who always grin proudly and write about missing their kids while on tour, rock moms (with exception of Courtney Love) put careers on hold. Mary Lou Lord, whose fame first stemmed from a feud with Love for the affections of Kurt Cobain, took a six-year pause between studio records to get to know her newborn daughter. Lord,…
For anyone who loved Jellyfish but wished they had explicated a political philosophy, allow me to present Bobby Conn’s The Homeland, a hyper-psych smashup of Howard Zinn and Diamond Dogs that manages to dazzle at least twice as often as it baffles. There’s always been a restlessness to Conn’s glam that serves him well as he takes on a public…
Is it wrong to want bands to stay broke? To wish that they would keep recording on shitty four-tracks and never upgrade? We Shall All Be Healed is good. We’ll give it that. John Darnielle is a talented lyricist and vocalist; all the fancy new equipment in the world won’t change that. In fact, we’ll be adding a handful of…
Forget the book club — Oprah needs to start a record club. That way, those who wear their estrogen on their sleeves like Melissa Etheridge would have a forum for their works, which are actually self-help books disguised as music. Etheridge’s last effort, 2001’s melodramatic Skin, offered a wrenching account of her split with longtime partner Julie Cypher. Skin ended…
Outkast caused a critical tidal wave with last year’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, but the real Dirty South masterpiece du jour is this left-field stunner from Cee-Lo. The former Goodie Mob mouthpiece has created an hour-long magic-carpet ride of shape-shifting sounds and sweat-dripping rhythms that rewrites the rap rule book. True to its title, Soul Machine invokes the spirit of James…
Striking a rare balance between ambitious instrumental experimentation and challenging yet recognizable melodic structures, Hot Cross and Ad Astra Per Aspera make accessible art rock that engages listeners on several levels. Hot Cross’ songs ebb and flow like the seratonin levels of a hyperhormonal teen, building to door-slamming outbursts before collapsing in silent shame. Ad Astra Per Aspera’s upcoming EP,…
Here it is at last: prom for everyone too gloomily cool to actually stoop to a prom. If it’s faint praise to laud Irishman Damien Rice as the finest wounded-heart singer-songwriter to sulk down the pike in recent memory, maybe we should look past the falsetto, the cellos and the air of swooning heartbreak and concentrate on the songwriting itself:…
Geoff Rickly has unabashedly declared his love for all things U2. And even though the singer and his band, Thursday, hail from Jersey, not Ireland, Rickly and his mates are working to cultivate a musical legacy with as much bombast and emotion as the pride of the Emerald Isle. Thursday first scorched the mainstream with 2001’s Full Collapse, then released…
Every punk has to grow up. Tattoos fade, piercings close and bad attitudes mellow. Unfortunately, the punk-rock highway is littered with the rusting remains of veteran outfits that refused to surrender their thrashy, fuck-all approach even after it had veered into the caricature lane. But New Jersey’s Bouncing Souls isn’t one of them. The group has spent the latter half…
Not too long ago, the Urge emerged from beneath that big old arch downriver, staking a keystone claim between Fishbone and Incubus. To its credit, the band accumulated much larger audiences than Fishbone (albeit much smaller than Incubus) and, with “Closer,” scored a perpetu-play on modern-rock radio. But after eight records, the band members had left themselves without room to…
During an epic interview last summer, Andrew WK discussed his then-upcoming album The Wolf as if it were the soundtrack to a Dionysian orgy. “It’s music made for the pleasure of listening to it itself,” he said. “It’s an absolute continuation of what the first album established — enjoying life and appreciating it and keeping it as hard and intense…
On an early morning in 1963 — too early for most bluesmen to be conscious, let alone to answer the phone — Buddy Guy took a call from his friend Muddy Waters. “Motherfucker,” Waters began, “I want you to come down here and play acoustic on this album we gonna make.” When Guy complained about lack of rehearsal, Waters retorted,…
Those looking to cook up some crystal meth will have to seek out alternative chemical pastures now that ephedrine has landed on the national no-no list. Fortunately for the rest of us, there’s still plenty of Crystal Method to be found. The Las Vegas-via-Los Angeles duo has been brewing its own brand of danceable electronica for more than a decade….
Mixing staggered-signature virtuosity with beefy, bouncy bass lines, The Planet The might be the most dance-friendly act in prog-rock’s choreography-defying history. Its throbbing rhythms and Rush-meets-breakbeats mash-up approach ensure that concertgoers won’t just stand there in the time-honored tradition of mountains that come out of the sky. The Hot Children make butts move in a more conventional fashion, using drum-machine…
Doing their part for diplomacy, Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin, the French duo Air, hired a pair of Texas sidemen and kicked off their current tour in the Lone Star state. The show was in Austin, but still. Air’s dreamy pop isn’t merely narcotic — it’s a certified coagulant — so leaving the house to check out its live show…
The Prairie Dogg finds the dirt on Slash, FABBA and the Pieta with Drew’s beau, drummer Fab Moretti of the Strokes. What is it about New York City that could cultivate the Strokes in a way that Wichita or Sheboygan couldn’t? I’m not saying anything bad about Wichita or Sheboygan, but there is an intensity and a pulse to the…
