Boom! Studios, a smaller big comic book publisher, launched their new Boom! Kids line earlier this year, which features comics based on the Disney-owned properties Pixar and The Muppets. Time will tell if this arrangement lasts now that Disney owns Marvel. Hopefully nothing will happen that affects the Muppet Show comics that cartoonist Roger Langridge […]
review
Posted inArts + Music
Cousins
Aaron Mangle has been playing solo under the name A Helpful Diagram for a couple years, but this summer he picked up a band and became Cousins. While the scrappy, low-fi aesthetic of A Helpful Diagram had its charms, Mangle’s songs develop into something more when fleshed out with a full band, foggy indie-rock with […]
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Arctic Monkeys
I wish I hadn’t read that Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) produced this album. It’s all I can hear. Every little hook, the guitar tone, even the nonchalance of the singing. Homme might as well have moved to Sheffield long enough to adopt the accent and started a new band. Actually…what has Queens […]
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Black Diamond Bay
When a friend first played me The Dears in the summer of 2000, I liked them but wanted everything to sound more like Radiohead’s OK Computer. This is the album I should have had that summer, which is not to say it’s dated, but rather a little bit Dears, a little bit haunting, a little […]
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Under This Unbroken Sky, Shandi Mitchell (Viking Canada)
In Depression-era northern Alberta, Theo Mykolayenko returns to the family homestead an almost-broken man. He was imprisoned for breaking bureaucratic regulations regarding his own wheat. (He’d similarly suffered under the Ukraine’s Stalinist regime.) Shandi Mitchell, a screenwriter and producer (see story on page 32), describes Theo’s slow movements, the family’s uneasy readjustment, with trimmed, precise […]
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Dinah Thorpe
Toronto’s Dinah Thorpe understands the line between fact and fiction. Her double disc Truths and Other Stories straddles this divide. Produced, mixed and mastered by the artist, Thorpe layers her ethereal vocals over club-worthy beats. (Imagine Dido if she were a dyke.) Academically minded, much of Thorpe’s material dives into queer theory and gender politics. […]
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Not-so Good Dick
Indie movie Good Dick (set in a video store? Check! Super-edgy title? Meh. Dick and Pecker did it adjective-free) starts by exploring a question most current/former video-store employees can relate to: what’s the best way to interact with porn-renters? Do you avoid eye contact? Amp up the politeness? Or, like Good Dick‘s hero (Jason Ritter), […]
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Tyvek
Anyone still wondering what all the buzz about garage rock is lately needs look no further than this record. After releasing a series of EPs and CD-Rs in its hometown of Detroit, Tyvek has built up a solid fan base across North America and Europe before its first full-length came out. This self-titled effort does […]
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Harmonics, Jesse Patrick Ferguson (Freehand Books)
Ferguson divides his poems into two parts, “Fundamental Tones” and “Overtones.” In the first part, Ferguson offers short, declarative lines in “Norval,” stating “Morrisseau’s paintings prove/there are no new pigments.” In part two, Ferguson extends line-lengths a little and lets images linger and resonate a little longer in “Shaman Traveler to Other Worlds For Blessings,” […]
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Tyson
“I attacked him…in front of these old decrepit white women…I just attacked him and stomped him,” shares Mike Tyson in Tyson, James Toback’s weirdly sympathetic documentary, told entirely in the boxer’s own words. Sure, the guy Tyson “stomped” is Don King. But the matter-of-fact way Tyson describes publicly beating a man before a host of […]
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Taking Woodstock fails to connect
When you’re living with the repercussions of baby boomer excess, it’s pretty hard to get excited for their halcyon nostalgia, which makes Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock hard to connect to in a meaningful way. If you are about to shoulder a generation’s enormous health care costs as they wither, do you really want to revel […]
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I.O.U.S.A.
Patrick Creadon’s last feature-length documentary was Wordplay—a zippy film that followed the math-inclined word-savants who love, create and competitively solve crossword puzzles. Apparently, Creadon decided it was a good idea to follow up Wordplay‘s low-stakes fun by scaring the crap out of people. Enter I.O.U.S.A., a terrifying look at the United States’ mountainous debt problems—most […]