Jason Anderson is a prolific singer/songwriter from New England who has now settled in Brooklyn. He runs around, wild-eyed, singing at the top of his lungs about not giving up, and life’s best moments, and being in love. …more
In June 1964 Hunter S. Thompson wrote a, for lack of a better word, gonzo letter to President Lyndon Johnson from the Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota …more
An Oral History of January 1, 1989: Circle Jerks Vs. Skinheads
Greg Hetson (guitar, Circle Jerks/Bad Religion): Recently my daughter asked me if any skinheads ever came to Circle Jerks shows. When I told her yes she said, “Don’t they know you’re Jews?” I guess they did, and so I told her this story… …more
“To me folk music is about storytelling, and opera is about storytelling, so there’s no contradiction at all.” …more
“Talent” is from the Greek for a certain weight of gold, because, I suppose, people who had a lot of it seemed to be metaphorically wealthy.
Here’s one example I encountered recently: …more
January: Kimya Dawson, Remember That I Love You (2006)
One route on the Metro-North railroad begins in New Haven and ends at Grand Central Station in New York City. …more
He picked me up at the Cold Spring train station: a tall, lone and gawky, slightly bent, grizzled, yet still unmistakable figure at the other end of the platform shading his blue eyes from the rain. …more
Johnny Cash’s late covers are superior to their original recordings, but are they traditional? …more
“They can’t make us wait in lines,” my friend said when we were told the doors weren’t open yet. “This is punk rock.” …more
“Why should only famous people be famous? Fuck that! Fame for all! Even if it’s just the tiniest bit (which turns out to be the perfect amount).” …more
In setting up Open Source Cinema, I was inspired by the open source software process – software that people can contribute to and change and collectively build. And I thought that idea applied really well to documentary film. I thought, why not set up something for collaboratively-produced truth? …more
Friday October 16, the New Yorker opened its annual weekend festival of readings, conversations, art tours and musical performances. This is my account of the events I attended, which included among others a talk with Malcolm Gladwell, readings by George Saunders, Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Franzen, a musical performance by Neko Case and a conversation with James Franco. …more
My first introduction to Le Loup’s debut album The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly came in isolation. This was an album to be listened to in private: the album’s arches and corridors providing a space in which a long-form writing project I was striving to complete could be realized. …more
Lovers of contemporary experimental music will likely remember the moment in the early eighties when John Cage, the godfather of minimalism and of most New York City experimental music, referred to Glenn Branca (he of the pieces for ensembles of multiple electric guitars) as having “fascist” qualities. …more
In popular music circles, these days, very good instrumental technique is often considered bad form. …more
One thing I’ve learned about Michael Mazochi, he doesn’t like a square box. He doesn’t fit into one, has no use for one and would probably be embarrassed if you handed him one. …more
There’s a story here, but it exists in illogical fragments, chaotic subtexts, and poverty economics cured in the meth-soaked algebra of need, greed and corruption. And eventually it all plays out in song. Folk songs, cowboy ballads and Narco-corridos. What you can’t see with your eyes you can feel in your heart. Hand me down my old guitar. …more
Viva Las Vegas’ saucy new memoir Magic Gardens is about stripping in Portland, Oregon during the 90’s when the “stripping as performance art” trend was taking hold and pro-porn feminism was a fledgling idea. …more
I think, like it or not, that everything we do as citizens, as human beings, is a statement about how we want the world to be. …more
“Get down with the Philly Sound!” I can’t remember when I heard that phrase for the first time, but I must have been very young, because my father’s voice shouting it is one of my first memories. …more
“I am, for better or worse, a bit of an over-sharer who tends to wear his heart on his sleeve, so for me songs come more naturally (much to the chagrin of my exes).” …more
The following is a record review in dialogue form conducted between this columnist and Michael Snediker (with whom I corresponded about Antony and the Johnsons a couple months back), the poet and literary critic. We were shooting for ten thousand words about the Size Queens, until Michael fell deeply in love and, simultaneously, started preparing for his fall classes back in Ontario. Apologies, therefore, for brevity. We each deal with a brace of songs from last year’s very effective and inspiring release from San Francisco’s own Size Queens, entitled Magic Dollar Shoppe, an album I urge you to seek out. More follows immediately. …more
“I was taken with the lyrics, the energy, and pure joy of the performance. So much so that I approached MC Lars to ask about interviewing him for The Rumpus. Which is when I realized he was one of my former students.” …more
Psychedelic Rock and the Continuing Rebirth/Death Spiral of New Orleans …more
These lines depend on your having a working knowledge of the New York City suburbs. So for those who are not from the Northeast, or who are not up on their regional suburbs, let me remind you that Westchester County is the first county beyond the edge of the Bronx …more
Pop Idol has been widely imitated throughout the world [American Idol here in the states] , but Afghanistan is possibly the only place where the mere existence of a televised, Western-style talent show amounts to a political statement. …more
The world is just going to continue to fragment, and that’s a great thing. We’ll be fine. Tiny Telephone will be fine. …more
So why does Eric Clapton sell a lot more records than Daniel Johnston? …more
Eric Leuschner has been active in Seattle’s creative underground for 15 years, as a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and advocate. …more
Mr. Beausoleil, who claimed from his jail cell that he was “not then, nor am I now a member of the Manson Family,” has developed a cult following of his own. What is showcased on this double LP is an exercise in San Francisco psych-rock far more “out there,” textured, and expansive than anything you may have heard. …more
Marie Daulne’s music reflects the story of her life.
Her father, a Belgium colonialist, was killed by child rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo shortly after impregnating her mother, Cyrille Daulne. After his death Cyrille emigrated to Belgium, where Marie was schooled and raised. …more
This week, the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival is in full swing, catch Paul Madonna at Sketch Tuesday, assuage the pain of your own coyote-ugly experiences at Bawdy Storytelling’s Too Close For Comfort reading, and celebrate your favorite ephemera on international Obscura Day!
Monday 3/15: Head down to Viz Cinema tonight for a screening of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest as a part of the 2010 San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. The festival, which began last Thursday, runs through the end of the week and features films from Asian and Asian-American artists that span the globe. Tickets $12, 9pm at 1746 Post Street. …more
This week in New York Keith Gessen and Elif Batuman talk, Guernica has a reading, Joanna Newsom sings and plays harp, Marcel Dzama appears, talks and signs books, The Moth has a Story Slam, Christopher Walken loses a hand and Zoe Kazan gives him one, and Atlas Obscura presents an international celebration of curious and obscure things.
MONDAY 3/15: Elif Batuman and Keith Gessen in conversation. Batuman’s pieces—for n+1, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation. In The Possessed, her latest work of non-fiction, Batuman investigates a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate, retraces Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus, and shows us why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying. McNally Jackson. 7:00pm. …more
“The reason I’m still around through all this is persistence. And the fact that I’ve always gone for myself, in that I’ve never hooked onto a trend, it was just me doing me.”
Henry Rollins talks Henry Rollins.
Gerald Busby’s music for ‘3 Women’ is so perfect I don’t know how to talk about it. – Robert Altman
Several years ago, a friend recommended I rent Three Women, not because of my interest in Robert Altman, but because of the film’s unusual score. Finally finding the film, I was floored by the music. The eerie, lurching score, with its atonal shifts jettisoned with jaunty, marching romps & perplexing virtuosic flute exercises, was a confounding revelation. I heard echoes of Stravinsky, but certain movements played out like a psychedelic chamber pop mutation. To paraphrase Altman, I don’t even begin to know how to talk about it. …more
The Rumpus: What’s wrong with hip hop?
Natasha Leggero: My brother (aka Nickname) is actually a talented rapper. I wrote that joke after hearing 9 different songs where they steal the entire chorus from another song and just yell over it. There are a lot of heated, misspelled arguments on the comment section of that video if you are interested. But essentially it’s just a joke. Some comics are able to just spout one liners off the top of their head but for me to write a joke something really terrible has to happen …more
The son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was due to take the stage any minute, and the venue was still half empty.
The bar remained fairly quiet until well past the posted show time of 8pm, and the crowd was mellower than most Noise Pop shows, bereft of plaid shirts, but full of men with ponytails and unironic facial hair. …more
“You basically built a band with very thin musical talent to begin with.”
Morning Coffee editor Dan Weiss, who is also the front man for The Yellow Dress, talks with SF Intercom about how to make it as an indie band.
This week, it’s Monthly Rumpus time again, Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass takes over at the Landmark Lumiere, learn about the San Francisco Panorama at San Francisco State University, and maybe go see some clowns.
Monday 3/8: Come down to The Makeout Room for Sleeping With Friends, the love child of The Rumpus and McSweeney’s, featuring Jesse Nathan, Jami Attenberg (who you can see later this week at Modern Times), Mark Morford, Gerard Jones, Chicken John, Nato Green, and K. Flay. $10 cheap as always, or buy a $15 ticket and get a copy of Panorama (that’s a ticket to the baddest party in town and a copy of Panorama for a dollar less than the newsstand price, for all of you mathematicians out there.) 21+, 7pm @ 3225 22nd Street. …more
This week in New York Sam Lipsyte reads from The Ask, David Shields reads from Reality Hunger, the Magnetic Fields perform, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks reads, Lore Segal and Tao Lin engage in a panel discussion about the novella, Stephen Elliott holds a writing class, Philip Gourevitch, Francine Prose and Lewis Lapham explore natural and man-made calamities and Light Industry presents the films of Jon Moritsugu.
MONDAY: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog, will be in conversation at 92Y. Her new play, The Book of Grace, premiers at the Public Theater this March. 92Y. Lexington Ave. @92nd St. 8:00pm. …more
This week our series on the renowned artists, writers and musicians who have lived, or currently live, in the Hotel Chelsea continues. Today’s Resident Bohemian is legendary punk rock musician Dee Dee Ramone by Jess Sauer. -RJ
In reality, Dee Dee Ramone fatally overdosed in Hollywood, California, in the summer of 2002. In fiction, he fatally overdosed in 1998, amid the ruins of the Chelsea Hotel. In reality, Dee Dee’s wife found him dead in their apartment. In fiction, well, in Dee Dee’s own words in his novel Chelsea Horror Hotel: “The heroin exploded into my brain. Then in an instant, I collapsed dead on the floor of the stage. And I sunk down into Hell as demons hovered over my body.” The stage is the one he’s sharing with an all-dead punk supergroup comprised of Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders, the Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators, and the New York Dolls’ Jerry Nolan. The demons—at least as far as Chelsea Horror Hotel is concerned—are literal. …more
THE POET AND THE LADY OF THE CANYON
In 1967, two young Canadian songwriters met at songwriter’s workshop at the Newport Folk Festival, and had a romance. They were both about to become very famous, thanks to Judy Collins, who had introduced them and who would bring their songs to the Billboard Charts. Collins had released her cover of “Suzanne” the previous year, would release “Both Sides Now” the following year, and “Chelsea Morning” the year after that. …more
He was a restless person and this was the kind of rest restless people needed when they got restless.
Sometimes he’d sit in his room, watching movies in his underpants. Once, while he was sitting like this, a key turned in the door and then a couple walked in. “It’s OK, buddy, you can stay,” said the guy. “We’ll just sleep over here.” As the woman went to use the bathroom, the man sat down beside him and began to watch the movie too. He was alarmed but also a little pleased. He would enjoy telling this story. It was a good story. The movie he was watching was a Western called The Ox-Bow Incident and after he finally convinced the couple to leave, he went back to watching it. …more
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