The title of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) has several pertinent meanings depending on the angle from which one observes it. Its most basic is as a reference to an… Read More
Jessie Ware’s solo career began back in 2012 with her thrilling debut, Devotion. The album was an enormous success, thrusting Ware into the limelight and finding her a top place in many end-of-year lists and even end of decade round-ups.… Read More
A month before Nevermind, Black Panther, one of China’s first rock bands, released its debut record in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The difference between the two records approximates the distance between the worlds that birthed the two acts. If 1991… Read More
It feels like several lifetimes ago that I was able to see live music. In reality, it’s only been a little over four months. But with no clear end in sight and an industry-wide catastrophe looming, I suppose I might… Read More
Luke Temple’s second album as Art Feynman, titled Half Price at 3:30, is grounded by the same qualities that made 2017’s Blast Off Through the Wicker such a tasty little indie-pop treat. I’m not implying that Temple is stagnating. The… Read More
Contemporary culture finds itself caught between two antagonistic poles: a fascination with nostalgia and an obsession with the new. Art, music, and literature are at once inundated with repurposed objects from the 20th century—the endless filmic remakes and call-backs to… Read More
Why are 12-year-olds running around singing about bastards and whores? And grown people paying up to $2k for tickets to see men in wigs sing and dance? Why is Abraham Lincoln no longer the most popular US president? Is this… Read More
Unlike many stories about family histories and long-ago slights, Hirokazu Koreeda’s (Kore-eda) The Truth (La vérité) does not invest much time playing around with just how bad a mother Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) was to her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche). Given… Read More
A pandemic can rearrange priorities. When the world was thrust into the COVID-19 pandemic, things suddenly looked and felt different. Our jobs, our schools, our hobbies and our relationships faced new obstacles. As we experienced revolutions in our usual routines,… Read More
20. 7 Seconds – “Fuck Your Amerika” 7 Seconds were a band of posicore crewsters that cruised back and forth across America in a beat-up van offering their drug free version of streamlined hardcore, but by the late 1980s they… Read More