It wasn’t until I was stretching as far as I could towards the ceiling, my hand inching towards the smoke detector, that I realized how high up I was. For many people, standing on a ladder, twelve feet above the ground, is no big deal. But for me, the boy who had almost failed out of Cub Scouts for not being able to climb half that high, it surely was. (More…)
Sometimes it’s easy to tell when a band will be worth seeing live. But the first time I saw Deerhunter, I wasn’t expecting much. While I had long enjoyed their albums, they seemed too dependent on a particular “processed” sound to translate to a concert venue. Was I ever wrong. When my friend suddenly took me by the hand and led me towards the stage, my critical distance disintegrated in seconds. (More…)
“I am just glad there isn’t a cactus on the cover.” Justin St. Germain is in the Tap Room of Tucson’s historic Hotel Congress, discussing his stunning new memoir Son of a Gun. At the time, I think he is simply expressing the saguaro fatigue that afflicts longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert. Images of the tree-sized cactus are stamped on everything imaginable. But when I drive through Tombstone a month later, I realize my mistake: (More…)
My patience was wearing thin. After two hours of sampling the new releases at one listening station after another, I was starting to wonder whether I’d ever find something that sounded fresh. And then an album caught my eye. Everything about it was out of sync with its surroundings: the bright, neo-psychedelic colors; the pedestrian sans-serif font; and, most of all, the name it spelled out: Bosnian Rainbows. (More…)
Danny Boyle’s Trance tells the story of a heist in order to perform one, taking advantage of moviegoers’ suggestible state of mind. When the story comes to an end, we find ourselves wondering what happened and to what degree we are responsible. The message we thought we were getting has vanished and a more troubling one has taken its place. (More…)
The Academy Awards had its share of surprises, but none more significant than the end of broadcast cutaway to the White House, where the First Lady helped presenter Jack Nicholson announce the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture. Like many of the media events sculpted for the Obama Presidency, this high-tech exchange stopped many viewers short. (More…)
Since its Christmas opening in the US, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained has generated an extraordinary amount of commentary. Some love it. Some hate it. Almost everyone who sees the film has strong opinions about it. But American fixations — use of the “N-word”, depictions of torture — have overshadowed its most prominent feature: the relationship between a German bounty hunter and his black protegé. (More…)
We live in the age of lists. The range of culture available to us is staggering, the cost of consuming it less than ever before. Confronted with such overwhelming abundance, we long for the means to impose order upon it. And that’s why we scour the Best-Ofs compiled by anyone with a trace of expertise for guidance. (More…)
“Not again,” I thought, looking over the new releases on display at the record store. The top shelf featured a 40th-anniversary reissue of Nuggets, the classic garage compilation, while the one below offered a 45th-anniversary version of The Velvet Underground and Nico. It annoyed me that I was being asked to buy music I already owned. (More…)
Pornography isn’t the only cinematic genre with a “money shot.” Historical reenactments like Ben Affleck’s new picture Argo are also keen to demonstrate their authenticity. Except that the proof comes, not in a milky stream of ejaculation, but in the details of a mise-en-scène painstakingly recreated from documentary evidence. (More…)
Late in Dave Eggers‘ moving new novel A Hologram for the King, his protagonist Alan Clay, a onetime corporate sales manager for Schwinn who is now tenuously self-employed as a consultant, is lying on his belly in a Saudi Arabian operating room, trying to think of something other than the tumor inside him. “I sold capitalism to the communists,” he thinks. (More…)
Recently declassified German government files confirmed what many had suspected: Palestinian terrorists who massacred Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics had the help of Neo-Nazis. They also reveal just how ineffectual the German security apparatus really was. In more ways than one, Black September was an inside job. My first reaction upon hearing this news? A profound sense of relief. (More…)