6.26.2012

At the end of Love and Death, Woody Allen’s 1975 parody of Russian literature, sexy intellectual Sonia (Diane Keaton) counsels a friend on romance: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must...

“There’s an old joke, um, two elderly women are at a Catskill Mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know. And such small...

“New York was his town, and it always would be.” -Woody Allen, Manhattan, 1979 These iconic lines from perhaps Woody Allen’s most iconic movie will never cease to be true for him. The phrase itself...

1. Even after he recorded his landmark Look Sharp! debut in 1979, he was none too pleased with his singing voice. In retrospect, Jackson’s bratty, nasal bark—which caught the public’s ear via his...

I don’t know why I sent Jon Visger an email on some random Tuesday last October. As a fan of his earlier projects and a former Michigan resident (we’re kind of crazy about the guy’s music in his...

My wife doesn’t believe me when I say that covering E3 is work. She thinks it’s just a week of playing videogames during the day and drinking at night. How could getting paid to do two of my favorite...

There are persistent issues coming in and out of the light in Lera Lynn’s enchanting, emotionally hardscrabble songs. They’re present in silhouettes and profiles of people hanging halfway out of...

I live in Carrboro, N.C., a town of roughly 20,000 people adjacent to Chapel Hill, the home of the University of North Carolina. Durham is 15 minutes away, where you’ll find Duke University and a...

Ty Segall has been a busy man over the last few months. With Slaughterhouse, we see the second of what’s expected to be three full-length album releases tied to the San Francisco-based garage rocker...

Mindy Smith’s music—at its best—is like a papercut: painful to the point of making you wince, yet somehow so compellingly bracing, you can’t stop pressing it. “Come To Jesus” is as riveting a song as...

Attention, Earthlings: Exray’s frontman Jon Bernson has had enough of your kind. “Human life is not valued at all,” he told me recently. “We’re all competing against each other. I want to get out to a...

It’s admirable how blatantly the guys in A Place to Bury Strangers still wear their influences on their noise-soaked sleeves. Sure, you may think...

In terms of the grand musical historiography, a dB’s resurgence is around par with that Feelies reunion in terms of pure necessity. A mostly forgotten group of oddball innovators with two albums of...

For some reason Wintersleep have yet to gain the respect they deserve in America. These Canadians have put in the work to produce a solid discography over the past decade and their fifth full-length,...

The Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentarian behind This Film Is Not Yet Rated turns his lens on one of the United States military’s most shameful and best-kept secrets: rape. According to data reported...

Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter functions like a two-edged sword (or ax, to reference Honest Abe’s weapon of choice). For every...

The Woman in the Fifth is a tale of psychological unraveling and dread. This lovely, troubling new film from director Pawel Pawlikowski is loosely adapted from Douglas Kennedy’s novel of the same...

Have your Bic lighter ready: Hairspray’s Adam Shankman has pumped out yet another star-studded, musical-inspired flick with Rock of Ages, and it’s the nostalgic mix of classic ‘80s rock that largely...

Our pasts often come back to haunt us. It’s one of the many cliches that often prove true, even for fictional characters—or, perhaps in the case of True Blood, especially for fictional characters.It’s...

It seems like television in the last decade or so has decided to favor the downtrodden, quiet, unassuming characters looking for something more—those characters with a silent demeanor and an...

Matt Groening’s recent announcement that he has ended Life in Hell felt odd for a number of reasons, chief among them that Groening has never seemed like he wants any of his creations to end. The...

The most important thing Workaholics has taught me to date: hovercrafts are aphrodisiacs; they’re like the oysters of the sea. “To Kill a Chupacabraj” puts the guys in a small claims court after their...

For the first two episodes of Comedy Bang! Bang!, the show brought out some of the greatest comedians possible as guests, with Zach Galifianakis and Amy Poehler taking the couch next to Scott...

The stand-alone expansion to 2008’s acclaimed and intricate real-time strategy game takes Dan Crabtree back to middle school.When I was in the seventh...

Zombies are nowadays such a common trope in pop culture it’s hard to remember why they ever frightened us in the first place. What’s to fear from fodder we kill in videogames, or from heavies in badly...

DeVotchKa’s live shows are spectacles to behold, showcasing an alluring dynamic that feeds off their unique blend of worldly influences and lamenting romanticism. The Denver-based group has been known...

First impressions can often be deceiving, but take a look at Rubblebucket’s stage set-up and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what you’re in store for. Neon streamers decorate mic stands and shine...

JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound went viral last year with their lovingly raucous cover of Wilco’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.” That song appeared...

Baroness, a progressive metal band from Savannah, Ga., released a new video with more details about its upcoming album, Yellow & Green. Although the band continues with the color motif in a very...

Last year, Texas experienced one of the hottest summers in its history. When the heat combined with a lack of rain, several wildfires broke out across the state. Most notably, a fire in Bastrop, a...

Indie-pop husband-and-wife duo Mates of State has been around since 1997; they’ve released seven studio albums and a number of singles, EPs and more. Most recently, they collaborated with Spare the...

Dar Williams has been strumming out socially conscious folk music since the early ‘90’s, and her latest album In the Time of Gods—an exploration of current events through the lens of Greek...

The fun thing to do when listening to California’s The Henry Clay People is to imagine that this is the angriest they get. This is it—the needle slapping all the way to the right side of the scale,...