
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