Port of Morrow is The Shins’ fourth album and the first on leading man James Mercer’s own label, Aural Apothecary, after satisfying their three-album Sub Pop quota. I gave numerous listens to their first two albums Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow including but not limited to: Continue reading
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)
This has been a long time coming…
Forward:
My story with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins began last spring. I had put hours into developing a book club for friends of mine. I raked through numerous accredited “Top” lists of the most important novels of the past century. From there I culled the cumulative list down to no more than one novel by each author, novels that were no more than 300 pages (so as not to scare casual readers away), at the same time making sure that there was novel representation from each decade and most genres. I ended up with 51 titles.
Books were chosen by the members, given a vote of three novels pulled from the list at random. This [sort of] worked for the club’s first two novels. When I saw membership/interest starting to dwindle, I opened the floor for member recommendations Continue reading
Let me preface this by saying that I did not go to this show in the best of spirits. I woke up at 7:30 on Tuesday morning with a “muscular” headache to a throttling jackhammer dismantling my sidewalk outside. Apparently the Albany OGS felt the bricks were getting a bit too uneven on the sidewalk. I’ll trip on them just the same. Tax dollars at work waking my ass up.
I committed the cardinal concert sin on the way to work and listened to the artist on the day of a live show: a bit of Easy Beat and Shame, Shame in the car. Work was busy as [fill in expletive] and I was forced to work through lunch in order to get out of there anytime close to 5 o’clock. Continue reading
Vanessa’s on a roll. Here’s another contribution…
First of all, I’m going to get the common “but, but, Taco Bell isn’t AUTHENTIC MEXICAN FOOD!!” cry out of the way. No shit. I lived in California for 22 years and have been to Mexico more times than I can count. I know it’s not “real” Mexican food, but that doesn’t stop it from being awesome. Jurassic Park isn’t a documentary about the time they actually cloned dinosaurs from DNA caught in tree sap and then created a dinosaur safari theme park that went awry. You should also know that isn’t the REAL Mickey Mouse in your family photos from Disneyland circa 1992. But those things are still good things, and Continue reading
submitted by Vanessa
About a month ago I saw a Time Out New York listing for a show at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) called Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design (on view February 7- August 12, 2012), which immediately intrigued me. I’ve always been a sucker for sculpture, probably due to my brief excursions into ceramic, glass, and stone as artistic mediums in my teens and early twenties, and combined with my interest in the artistic use of “alternative” and reclaimed materials (Garbage sculpture? Statue of Ulysses S. Grant made entirely of human hair? Elephant dung replica of ancient Rome? I’m all about it. Continue reading
The Magnetic Fields was founded by Stephin Merritt in Boston in 1990 where he and bandmate/high school friend, Claudia Gonson, were living at the time (check out the adorable photo-booth still of the two above).
I might as well get this out of the way right now…Stephin Merritt is getting inducted into the Indie Canon for being the songwriter, lead vocalist, producer and mutli-instrumentalist behind The Magnetic Fields as well as Continue reading
The Düsseldorf based avant-garde, post-techno duo of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma have been releasing music under the moniker Mouse on Mars for nigh two decades. 2012’s Parastrophics proves that Mouse on Mars, after six years of collective inactivity (there were a number of musical/production side projects in between), are sharp and still relevant.
Since 1994’s Vulvaland, Mouse on Mars has been an electronic chameleon of sorts. MoM collaborated with The Fall’s Mark E. Smith in 2007 as Von Südenfed which calls to mind John Peel’s famous description of The Fall: “They are always different, they are always the same.” The same could be said for Mouse on Mars whose latest album, Parastrophics, shows that St. Werner and Toma are Continue reading
I had been waiting for The Magnetic Fields to return to their sound on 1999’s 3-volume 69 Love Songs and with Love at the Bottom of the Sea thirteen years later they do just that…it’s just not nearly as good. After 69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields released i (which I liked to an extent), Distortion (which I was indifferent to and saw them just after the release of at NYC’s Town Hall venue) and Realism (which I didn’t like). i, Distortion and Realism departed from the synth-heavy pop of The Magnetic Fields’ pre-i works with Continue reading
American Double/Imperial Stout
Rating: A-
Poured from bottle to pint glass.
Opaque, dark chocolate (near black) in color with a thin, khaki head that Continue reading
First off, let me say that Northern Lights is and has always been a lackluster venue. When I was first seeing concerts there almost ten years ago, it was claustrophobic and the acoustics were shitty. Years later, the venue bought out the neighboring property, broke down a wall and now has twice the original square footage if not more. The acoustics are still usually shitty.
Secondly, midweek concerts drive me absolutely insane. It would be one thing if I lived in an actual metropolis, like say, New York City. Doors open at 9 on a Wednesday night in a satellite suburb of the God-knows-why capital of New York with three acts scheduled? I’m not happy that I’m a nine-to-fiver already; late, mid-week concerts are like a sack-tap from a chain mail glove.
Finally…February 29th. That wonderful day afforded to us only once every four years brought garbage weather. When I was leaving Albany Continue reading
the self-hating hipster 