Franklin Bruno

Rioting grrrlishly on singles like “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” and “Identity” (“When you see yourself/Does it make you scream?”) a generation before Kathleen Hanna uncapped her first Sharpie, were one of a handful of bands to turn English punk’s scouring negativity to feminist ends.

During a recent reading from The World As Phone Bill, his first collection of essays after several books of poetry, Stan Apps interrupted himself to explain something about the title piece: “This started with some good ideas and sophisticated language, but I kept dumbing it down and dumbing it down….So now it’s incomprehensible, but at least it’s really accessible.”

Back in January, while debating David Silverman (a soul-patched caricature of modern atheism), O’Reilly reasoned that “religion is not a scam” because “the tides go in, the tides go out, never a miscommunication… You can’t explain that.”

Last May, NBC’s Parks and Recreation ended its second season with a cliffhanger: Would the Parks Department of Pawnee, Indiana fall victim to draconian budget cuts administered by state auditors Adam Scott (Party Down’s Ben Wyatt) and Chris Trager (Rob Lowe, in the sharpest ‘80s-icon stunt casting this side of Wynona Ryder’s turn in The Black Swan)?

The last time I saw Of Montreal was over a decade ago, at a modest festival in St. Louis, Missouri. The music hasn’t stuck with me, beyond a general impression of a ‘90s version of the ‘60s version of the ’20s, but I recall that the show’s “theatrical” element was…

Even though the presence of outside lyricists pulls against the most obvious autobiographical readings, Dark Night of the Soul sometimes treats these concerns with a self-awareness and gallows humor it’s difficult not to trace back to Linkous himself, as when Iggy Pop himself, rock’s paradoxically indestructible cartoon hero of self-destructiveness, is employed to intone “pain, pain, pain, I’ll always be in pain.”

In the park, dead ends and doublings-back amplify the aimlessness of the dialogue, which ranges over immediate phenomena (“Do you like how backs of benches catch a glow from streetlamps?”), roommate stories, and wooly summaries of Aristotle’s and Wittgenstein’s views of language.

Ida Lupino’s on-screen career stretched from early’-30s ingénue roles in her native England to a 1977 Charlie’s Angels guest shot, so it’s inevitable that MOMA’s retrospective of her films (which begins today) is selective, even leaving out some defining performances (High Sierra, Out of the Fog) from her noir-centric 1940s peak at Warner Bros.

It isn’t a secret: Gene McDaniels, an unthreatening song stylist who scored several hits just before Beatlemania struck, and Eugene McDaniels, a Black Power militant who released two radicalized funk-soul albums in the early ‘70s, are one and the same. 

“Fembots are human too,” according to a retro-cyber standout track on Robyn’s new Body Talk Pt. 1, but you wouldn’t know it from the electropop bobblehead’s impeccably-paced show, which made Kelis’s look like a half-hearted promotional appearance.

To call Wavves’ King of the Beach (Fat Possum) a cleaner, more considered affair than the band’s first two albums is to say very little. 2008’s self-titled cassette-turned-CD and 2009’s Wavvves were the kinds of records it’s good to know that near-teenagers still make, whether one actually cares to listen to them or not…

Schuyler went many rounds with mental instability, variously diagnosed as schizophrenia and depression, from the 1950s on… While his suffering figured in his writing, it was not its creative wellspring; the poems are not visionary, and do not aim to blur the line between sanity and madness. Yet he is often written about as a somewhat saintly figure, especially in later years, a holy fool with an effortless connection to his art.

I’ve never quite understood how the term “art-damaged” became a rock-critical commonplace, but if I had to explain it, I might play my interlocutor Kevin Dunn’s “Nadine.” The 1979 seven-inch makes creased, crushed junk-sculpture out of a 1963 Chuck Berry song, with Dunn’s treated guitar and Tom Grey’s synths holding a blowtorch to the familiar boogie-barrelhouse interplay…

Musically, OK Go and Erykah Baduh have little in common; the artists’ core audiences, even less. But their recent, much-discussed videos are cut from the same cloth. As anyone with an open browser knows, OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” records an elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction, which unfolds in an unbroken sequence over the song’s four-minute length. What keeps you watching isn’t so much the mechanism’s can-do engineering as the knowledge that a single untripped wire or errant bowling ball would require starting from scratch.

Despite the LCD’s heft as a singles act and DFA’s traffic with remix culture, Murphy remains, generationally and even temperamentally, a believer in the album form – not as pop music’s “highest” form, but as one of several, each with their own potentials and constraints – and, in context, even the half-baked tracks here serve the honorable function of cleansing the palate for the more satisfying courses.

A narrator in a motorized wheelchair – played hilariously by Colleen Werthmann as a cross between The Church Lady and Kids in the Hall’s Cancer Boy – gamely offers historical context, until Jackson tires of having his story told by someone else and picks her off with his rifle. “Sometimes you’ve got to shoot the storyteller,” the ensemble sings. “Sometimes you’ve got to kill everyone.”