When is retirement not really retirement? When you’re in band, of course. Just look at Cher’s farewell tour which stretched out for years ; the same can be said for the group Kiss, and let’s be honest as long as Gene Simmons thinks he can squeeze out one more penny from the band they will never go away. So when The Scorpions, by far Germany’s most successful musical export since…
Comedian Chris Gethard has led a pretty screwed life with an especially bizarre childhood. Thank God he had the presence of mind, and enough lack of pride, to remember it all and to put it on paper. A Bad Idea I’m About to Do is a collection of Gethard’s essays, mostly detailing his seemingly, (but clearly not) mundane upbringing in suburban New Jersey and his time at Rutgers University. As…
All that hand wringing about filling The Sopranos void on HBO is finally over and it just took one episode of the brilliant Boardwalk Empire. Created by Terrence Winter (a former writer and producer on The Sopranos) and starring Steve Bushemi (what do ya know, another Sopranos alum), the show is set in Atlantic City on the eve and shortly after Prohibition outlaws alcohol throughout the country. Buscemi plays Enoch…
Arrested Development, though admittedly an amazingly creative TV show that lasted a surprising three season on a network not exactly known for embracing originality, may have created far larger a hurdle for its stars that they ever could have imagine. Since the show went off the air, creator Mitch Hurwitz and his actors, separately and together, have failed to come up with a formula even remotely as successful as Arrested…
Add alligator trapper to the ever growing list of “Jobs We Never Knew Existed Before Realty TV”. The second season of the History Channel realty show Swamp People follows the lives of several Cajun families who hunt gators in the Louisiana swamps, and pretty much prove just how wussy the rest of us are. One scene in particular where a son has his mom remove bullet shrapnel from under his…
Two things become pretty clear within the first few minutes of the oft-talked about IFC sketch show Portlandia: Fred Armisen, the sometime musician and current cast member of Saturday Night Live, is far more funny than his network gig on SNL allows him to be and Carrie Brownstein, his partner on Portlandia better known as the singer/guitarist for Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag, is probably even funnier than Armisen. On paper,…
A couple of things are made perfectly clear in Ace Frehley’s memoir No Regret and neither have exactly been a secret up to this point. First, fellow Kiss member Gene Simmons is a complete asshole who cares about money and little else. No shock there to anyone who has ever heard him utter a word outside of his songs or read any of his interviews. Second, fellow Kiss member and…
Nineties alt rock heroes Smashing Pumpkins managed to come apparently out of nowhere, toss out two amazing records, create one of the biggest assholes in rock (and that is not a small feat), turn in a couple of weaker, though successful follow up records and implode (though still limp along creating lesser albums with fewer and fewer original members) all in the span of a decade. EMI has just released…
While not necessarily a horror movie, given the similarity between the financial thriller that is Margin Call and the real life Wall Street melt down in 2008 that remains smoldering today, a ghost story would likely be less scary. Centered on a fictional investment firm in the early stages of the real financial collapse, Margin Call shows the unraveling of the company discovered by a recently-fired risk analyst and his…
Funny that you have to go to Brooklyn to find one of the best Americana bands playing today. The New York band The Habit, with several singers brings to mind everyone from Gram Parsons and The Jayhawks to Whiskeytown and The Cowboy Junkies, on their fantastic debut Lincoln Has Won. Excelling at dirty rock (“Ballad Of,” “Don’t Grow Old Young Man”), beautiful indie rock (“Not Brooklyn”) and dusty Americana (“Blood…
It’s a miracle that Ozzy Osbourne is still alive. And yes, I realize exactly how much of a cliché that statement is, but it deserves to be repeated. And often. This guy did cereal bowls of cocaine for decades; was so blotto that he bit the head of a live dove (and bat) and was not aware of what he was doing; heard voices telling him to strangle his wife;…
By some fluke, Neil Diamond – the once cheese-tatstic singer that pretty much defined the 70’s, sequenced shirt and all – has managed to not only remain relevant more than four decades after his first record, but has gotten everyone from housewives to hipsters to look beyond the sideburns and Vegas-ready stage show and see him for what he really is: a damn great songwriter. As The Very Best of…
If you’ve been following the HBO series Big Love up to this point, you can’t help but blame most of the problems the polygamist Henrickson’s family is facing in the final season on anyone but the clan’s patriarch Bill (Bill Pullman). That doesn’t make the scenarios any less entertaining, just hair-tuggingly frustrating when he questions why God is testing them. Job was tested – Bill Henrickson was just idiotic in…
In perhaps the best casting in an indie film since Pulp Fiction, Hamish Linklater (as Jason) and Miranda July (as Sophie) are absolutely perfect as the quirky LA couple in The Future. The movie, also directed by July, follows a couple who pledge to quit their menial jobs and do whatever they’ve wanted to do for one month, while they wait for the convalescing injured cat they have rescued to…
Don’t feel too bad if you’ve never heard of Butch Walker. The musician/songwriter/producer and now author even admits himself that he will always be a mid-level entertainer, someone big enough to sell out clubs, but not a well known enough draw to pack stadiums. You have, whether you realize it or not likely heard his songs on the radio. If not his one alt rock hit with his former band…
Film maker Errol Morris (Fog of War, Thin Blue Line, etc.) has a knack for making documentaries that feel more like Hollywood dramas (that’s a compliment, by the way). His latest movie Tabloid is no exception. The documentary centers around an incident in the mid 70’s where a former beauty queen falls in love with a Mormon missionary and, depending on who’s telling the story, either kidnapped him for a…
The writers for The Simpsons clearly gave up any sense of relevancy years ago; Family Guy is essentially the same laugh-free joke week after week; and Fox’s new Jonah Hill-voiced series (which is so dull I can’t even be bothered to remember the name) is dead on arrival, leaving South Park as one of a few adult cartoons that still elicits a chuckle every now and then. But HBO’s brilliant…
Five seasons into it, if you’re not watching Robot Chicken by now, you probably never will. But for those who are fans, Season Five is a good reason why. The pop culture obsessed stop motion skit show done with old action figures manages to spoof some their old reliable targets like He-Man and the rest of the Masters of the Universe crew and Batman. There is also a particularly filthy…
There are bookshelves crammed with tomes about the origins of punk rock and just as many, if not more, about how hip-hop first began. It’s refreshing then that Will Hermes, a long time music critic, manages to cover both genres as well as disco, salsa, jazz and other aspects of the music world from his unique perspective growing up in New York in the mid 70’s. Love Goes to Buildings…
For decades, the follow up to The Beach Boys brilliant Pet Sounds was one of rock and roll’s best urban legends. Sure they eventually threw up their hands and released the so-so album Smiley Smile in 1967, but there was always talk of what was almost released. A sonically-layered masterpiece, bootlegs dripped out in the years that followed and in 1993, Brian Wilson finally released, a newly recorded version of…