Music

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[Tue, 9.Feb.10]
Hot Chip: One Life Stand

Opening their hearts and streamlining their sound at the same time, Hot Chip make their most unabashed and colourful record, and maybe their best.

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The Go Find: Everybody Knows It's Gonna Happen Only Not Tonight

The Go Find somehow sounds familiar -- one more Europop band mining a bedroom indie pop sensibility -- and yet wholly distinct in a simultaneous space.

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Harvey Milk: Harvey Milk

The sludge greats' notorious debut album finally gets a proper release after nearly 17 years.

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Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts

The dyschronia one experiences listening to Oneohtrix Point Never is similar, but not completely reverent, to the hypnagogic/glo-fi/chillwave axis in that it is music that is strangely familiar and familiarly strange.

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Jack Splash: Heir to the Throne: Volume 1

The mastermind behind Alicia Keys' "Teenage Love Affair" and John Legend's "P.D.A." steps out form behind the curtain of songwriting and his Plant Life alias to prepare audiences for his upcoming album.

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John Mayall: Tough

This, his 57th studio album, is meat-and-potatoes Mayall -- a solid record, albeit a non-adventurous one, from a spirited veteran bluesman who still has things to say and songs to sing.

Short Takes
[Tue, 9.Feb.10]
:. Screaming Females: Singles
:. InLove: Stories
:. Matt Gigg and the Intellectuals:Planted

Events

[Tue, 9.Feb.10]
Anti-Flag: 27 January 2010 - Austin, TX
After the show, the band shakes hands, bumps fists and exchanges high-fives with numerous fans, demonstrating once again that Anti-Flag is most definitely a band for and of the people.

[Fri, 5.Feb.10]
Brother Ali: 27 October 2009 - Dallas, TX
Ali’s mantra of united love and acceptance is how he lives his life. He communicates this without irony or looking weak. That takes the sting out of an otherwise overdone concept.

Mixed Media

POPWIRE
News, Reviews and Commentary from the World of Popular Culture

[Tue, 9.Feb.10]
:. The once and future Sims
:. ‘The Phantom,’ ‘A Serious Man’ top list of latest Blu-ray releases
:. Leno’s prime-time send-off to be departure from tradition
:. Saints’ Super Bowl win nips ‘MASH’ finale for most-watched show ever
:. INTERVIEW:Larry Holmes and Joe Frazier recall when they were ‘Facing Ali’
:. Sony’s two-volume ‘Bad Girls of Film Noir’ sets bring them out of the shadows

[Mon, 8.Feb.10]
:. The ultimate ‘Survivor’ test: obscurity
:. 20 years of worst best-picture nominees
:. Werewolves are a hair different in ‘The Wolfman’
:. Blue whales singing in a lower key
:. ‘Heart-stopping’: Nik Wallenda walks the high wire
:. ‘The View’ gets political , and viewers love it (so does D.C.)
:. Over 50 years, Walk of Fame turned Hollywood into destination
:. Franken criticizes planned Comcast-NBC Universal merger

 
FEATURES
[9.Feb.10] :. “You’ve created a fetish around watching the commercials, and not going to the kitchen or the bathroom during the commercials. That’s a pretty amazing thing to have done,” says Turow. But is the phenomenon sustainable?

It’s Me, I’m Alive: A Conversation with Yoko Ono
By Thomas Britt
[8.Feb.10] :. PopMatters sits down with Yoko Ono to discuss her most recent artistic output along with the big ideas of life, death, and the Beatles.

COLUMNS
By Timothy Gabriele
[9.Feb.10] :. Deemed music that is “not real”, electronic sounds have come to occupy and permeate spaces focused on alterity, from the fringes of academia to the disposal heap of exotica.

Kickin' Up Dust: Willie Nelson in the Twilight Glow
By Steve Leftridge
[8.Feb.10] :. At 77, Willie's hair is now down to his tailbone, and you can see his trademark red locks fade to gray about midway up his back -- it's like examining the rings of a tree.

Books

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[Tue, 9.Feb.10]
:.
Black is the New White. A Memoir by Paul Mooney

It’s hard to mess up this type of vanity project, especially when your wagon’s so firmly hitched to a star as big as Richard Pryor. So how did Black is the New White go so wrong?

:.
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

Haunting and melancholy, furious and tender, The Unnamed is written with uncommon grace.

Multimedia / Comics

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Comics

[Tue, 9.Feb.10]
:.
Azrael #1-3

Scorsese-inspired and Petraeus-infused, Fabian Nicieza and Ramon Bachs' new Azrael is an incendiary powder keg, commenting one everything from the War on Terror to its title character's relevance to the very purpose of faith.

Multimedia

[Mon, 8.Feb.10]
:.
Torchlight

Once you've got the hang of it, you can play Torchlight while you're having a conversation or watching TV or eating dinner.

Film / TV

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Television

[Tue, 9.Feb.10]
:.
Independent Lens: P-Star Rising

Preternaturally patient with all the needy, flustered, and demanding adults around her, Priscilla Diaz is also childish (righteously) and astute (luckily).

Film

[Mon, 8.Feb.10]
:.
The Cove

The Cove comes to the truth by means illegal and exciting, elaborately faked and cunningly inventive.

DVDS

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[Tue, 9.Feb.10]
:.
Inglourious Basterds

The bad news is that the Weinsteins may have been right about trimming some of the fat; the good news is that even a flawed Tarantino is better than a perfect most anyone else.

:.
Drop Dead Rock

Drop Dead Rock is a 1995 cult comedy starring Adam Ant and Debbie Harry, in which a washed up punk rocker is held for ransom by a bumbling band of misfit musicians.

:.
In Search of Mozart

This is a film much more interested (as perhaps we should be) in the music that flowed out of this strange man than anything else.

MOVING CITATIONS

RECENT FEATURES

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J.D. Salinger’s Seymour, a Eulogy
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[5.Feb.10] :. Seymour is the presence you are sure you encountered before the door shut and he was gone; in this way, Seymour (not Holden) becomes the emblem for Salinger himself.

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[3.Feb.10] :. After years of being pop music's "best kept secret", the 88 are now breaking out with their theme song to the NBC show Community.

The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance: An Interview with Vampire Weekend
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[2.Feb.10] :. From championed blogosphere heroes to chart-topping rockers, Vampire Weekend talks about the supposed controversy over the band's sound, their new hit album and more.

Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Seen This Grammys Before
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[2.Feb.10] :. The Grammys seem like a festering boomer leftover, far removed from the present where major labels live in post-apocalyptic decline.

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By Rodger Jacobs
[5.Feb.10] :. “The chief proof of a man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues... a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself proof of nobility.”

The Rockist: Hollywood’s New Dimension: ‘Avatar’ in 3D
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[5.Feb.10] :. The Rockist visits James Cameron's Pandora in search of stone obelisks but finds only Ewoks.

Retro Remote: The Simpsons, ‘Radio Bart’ Part 1: Floyd Collins and Kathy Fiscus
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[4.Feb.10] :. 'Radio Bart' draws on 70 years of media history to position itself in that uneasy mix of altruism, morbid curiosity and callous self-interest.

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[4.Feb.10] :. Welcome to the new Soundscape Mixtape Series where we step beyond criticism. In the great tradition of the mixtape, we are going to present these explorations with their actual sound.

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[3.Feb.10] :. An economic survey of a decade of concert-going yields an average of positive returns for my dollar. Yeah, Bob Dylan was worth every penny and more.

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[3.Feb.10] :. My name is (insert name here) and I am a visual learner -- and other reasons why comics is a relevant subject for the college curriculum.

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[2.Feb.10] :. A game isn’t just its content or game design alone, but rather, the space created when all these pieces come together.

Read Only Memory: The Lives of Others
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[29.Jan.10] :. As innovative and eclectic as his music has been, Bowie’s means and methods of articulation also reveal an artist finely attuned to the subversive potential of humor.

The Rockist: Indie Ambition: Hold Steady
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[29.Jan.10] :. Can Craig Finn pull his bandmates with him and lift them up to his arena tour in the sky? The Rockist ponders the future of the Hold Steady.

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