Review

This… is BULL SHIT!!

Next time I am in a bad mood, remind me of tonight, when Cynic played the entirety of Focus, in sequence, a few feet away from me.

“Why did Red Hot Chili Peppers go ‘Under the Bridge’? There was a plate of shit there that they wanted to jack off into.” — Neil Hamburger

Last time I saw Faith No More, I didn’t know how to make a web site, and Limp Bizkit opened. Tonight’s was a better show for a better time.

Tonight's Futureheads setlist distribution: The Futureheads: 7, Area EP: 1, News and Tributes: 2, This Is Not the World: 3, The Chaos: 7.

The crowd here is reminding me of why it took me so long to bother checking out The National. — at House of Blues gowal.la/r/dNa

There are not enough dicks in the universe for House of Blues to suck.

Judas Priest toured through the summer of 2009, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the seminal metal album British Steel by playing it live in its entirety every night. Now fans can celebrate too by playing live versions of all nine tracks from the album in Rock Band!

Could Judas Priest’s landmark British Steel be the most metal album in history? Let us examine the facts. To begin with, the cover depicts either an ordinary man’s hand… See more →

Tonight, a handful of coworkers and I will lead a fully orchestrated Beatles sing-along with the Boston Pops. bso.org/bso/mods/perf_detail.…

"Sing onstage with the Boston Pops" has been added to the to-do list and checked off.

If it takes a Wednesday night metal show with five bands on the bill to prove I’m not really a grownup, so be it.

Has it really been twenty years already?

I still have that 90-minute cassette whose A-side contained my first copy of Megadeth’s Rust In Peace. Though I had already cut my teeth on other metal bands, I was wary of Megadeth at first. Their name alone seemed to embody everything that was supposed to be frightening and dangerous about heavy metal, and this particular 14-year-old Catholic boy was slightly less interested in rebellion than he was… See more →

Melt-Banana didn’t play the Devo song you loudly demanded throughout the show, but my only disappointment is that you’re still breathing.

Baroness was really great tonight, but they would have been better if I hadn’t started drinking at 3pm. They should work on that.

Having never seen any of the Saw films, I thought it would be a fun experiment to start with Saw VI, the most recent installation, and see what I could piece together of the previous five films based on my familiarity with other long-running horror franchises. This idea presupposed that the Saw series had the same general lack of serialization of, say, the Friday the 13th series, whose twelve installments were really bound together only… See more →

There were empty seats at the Múm show tonight. I wanted to fill them with people I care about.

Good conversation with @iamrumz and @jyllish. Good set from Besnard Lakes. Good night.

In this sixth and final Thin Man film, the party is over. None of the fun of the series’ early films remains. We could always count on Nick and Nora to gracefully navigate the mysteries that fell in their laps with wit and aplomb (and of course a healthy dose of liquor). Above all else, it was their surefootedness and levity that made them endearing. Song of the Thin Man abandons these traits, setting them… See more →

First stadium concert in a long time. I can’t believe there are people who experience live music exclusively this way.

AC/DC has disproved my theory that I couldn’t be thoroughly entertained by a band playing a quarter mile away. Sad we missed Anvil, though.

They Might Be Giants are great, but there’s not enough snark in the solar system to adequately describe their audience.

I owe Eric Pope a beer for convincing my tired ass to stick around for Peelander-Z. Holy hell, what a show.

Big sound problems for Crippled Black Phoenix tonight at Great Scott. To be fair, they’re probably not used to dealing with 8-piece bands.

Sad that the seven-foot-tall guy who obstructed my view of John Vanderslice will do the same for John Darnielle.

Most comic book movies that make a point of being slavishly devout to their source material either fail or are working from pages that are inherently more cinematic and less intellectually dense than Watchmen is. To shoehorn Watchmen into a decent feature film would require significant restructuring, and unfortunately, this film misses the forest for the trees, offering tediously superficial reproductions of panels that were designed to be printed on paper, not celluloid. If Zack… See more →

There is a great premise here, but not quite enough plot to fill out a feature. As a result, there’s some heavy padding, mostly in the form of a superfluous love story that films of its era unfortunately weren't allowed to go without. Edmond O’Brien gives a solid performance, smoothly alternating between manic and shrewd, but the rest of the cast is easily forgotten. Genre fans ought to give it a look; others might not… See more →

Morgan Spurlock is smart. If he called the movie Why Osama Bin Laden Is Irrelevant, which he certainly knew before he began, it would have garnered a lot less interest. And then his target audience would have missed out on some good conversations he had with people at all levels of society throughout the Middle East, which reveal that the world's real problems are poverty and the codependency of extremists and corrupt governments. As filmmaking,… See more →

At AS22 in Providence, where J Mascis is waiting in line for the bathroom and Earthless is boring me to death.

After his impossibly beautiful girlfriend dumps him, a slacker schlub takes a vacation in Hawaii where high jinks ensue, he somehow attracts yet another impossibly beautiful woman, and he comes to realize his amazing potential. Apatow devotees and detractors alike will find exactly what they’ve come to expect from anything bearing his name: A level of sophistication and cast of reasonably endearing characters that fall just short of saving this formulaic, broad comedy from itself.

Since the two series share subject matter, writers, producers, and many cast members, it’s impossible to talk about The Corner without mentioning its successor, The Wire. While The Wire explores the entire hierarchy of Baltimore’s failed war on drugs, The Corner focuses on one small community’s struggles with addiction and its baggage. The smaller scope gives this series a slower pace and a more easily managed narrative; at times, it almost feels like a stage… See more →

This final, extended episode of Extras follows the series template, but with less success than usual. The uncomfortable laughs are there, but they’re fewer and further between, and the tone in general is downright maudlin. None of the celebrity cameos is particularly funny, and Clive Owen’s is decidedly unfunny. Add an unhealthy dose of misplaced didacticism and you’ve got a disappointing finale to an otherwise outstanding show.

I never really got into superhero comics, and while Watchmen is quite a bit more sophisticated than most of the ones I've been exposed to, it indulges in enough of the genre's brash fantasy to keep me from being as excited about it as a lot of people are. That said, I did really enjoy it. Alan Moore's alternate 20th century is more interested in its (mostly) mortal heros' politics and relationships than their powers… See more →

Zadie Smith commissioned twenty-three reputable writers (including herself) to each "make someone up." Their stories were named after their characters and compiled into this book, published and sold for the benefit of 826NYC, a non-profit that gets kids into writing. It's a good enough idea, but unfortunately, most of these stories are instantly forgettable.

Some of the authors I've found to excel at short-form character studies before (like Dan Clowes and Miranda July) don't disappoint,… See more →

Preferable to the story's original form, this graphic adaptation is well-paced and beautifully illustrated (full disclosure: the illustrator is a good friend of mine), both preserving and enhancing Fitzgerald's winking, flowery prose. Kevin Cornell's loose lines and sepia watercolors strike a flexible tone that deftly manages the story's mood swings and evokes the era magnificently. The portraits marking Benjamin's progress in backward aging at the beginning of each chapter are an especially nice touch.

Part motivational pep talk, part memoir, and part chess instruction, How Life Imitates Chess shares insights accumulated through a lifetime on professional chess's world stage by the most accomplished player the game has ever known. Self-awareness is the main message, and Kasparov has a gift for making the steps to achieving it plain, if not easy. His points are well-illustrated by anecdotes from his chess and political careers as well as historic examples from the… See more →

Emperor X was so good tonight. Pretty much everyone I can think of would have enjoyed this show.

Wondering what motivates people to spend money to talk over a band.

Apparently I’m a sucker for a cute girl with an accordion.

Stupid shrieking girls have no place at any show that would entice me to buy a ticket. DMB ain’t on the bill tonight, ladies. Please go home.

Don't ask me why, but the Art Brut vocalist reminds me of a cross between @lloydi and @adactio. Guitarists: Gareth Keenan and Bob Dylan.

The Hold Steady's Craig Finn is like an unlikely, overjoyed hybrid of @joshualane and my friend Ashley. Best fucking show I've seen all year

I killed my own summer. I took on more work than I should have, and hopefully I suffered the consequences more than my clients did. The summer is drawing to a close, though, and with its end, my schedule is finally becoming kind of manageable again. Today was the first day in ages that I was able to leave the house for something that didn’t resemble work.

In the early afternoon, I took in the… See more →

This could be a great book if it bothered to go into any actual detail or offer any really compelling arguments for or against abiding by typographic principles. Instead, it offers two equally under-developed halves. The first half gives us the ten “commandments,” several of which are typographically context-specific, and each of which has barely a sentence of explanation or justification for why it should be followed. The second half of the book supposedly describes… See more →

It was the beginning of a new millennium. School was in my past, a magazine production job in Manhattan was in my future, and limbo consisted of waiting tables in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It may as well have been Mars. I knew no one, and my ghetto neighborhood, animosity for hostile Jersey traffic, and underdeveloped sense of direction prevented me from venturing out much (to say nothing of the dearth of places worth visiting).… See more →

I have a disappointing capacity for insufferable snobbery. I won’t deny it. But I’m not beyond accepting my comeuppance, however quietly self-administered it may be.

Last night, I attended a free screening of Thank You for Smoking, a new comedy which satirizes the tobacco legislation debate. It’s a film designed to hook mainstream audiences with simple, recognizable caricatures of the players on both sides of the issue, and an unfaltering confidence in its own cleverness.… See more →

UK designer/illustrator/animator Brian Taylor (best known for his epic Rustboy) has launched a new site called Candykiller, “a collection of illustrations, design ideas, and assorted visual ramblings.” His mastery of a wide variety of styles is pretty astonishing, and there is abundant influence evident from the toys and illustrations of Gary Baseman, the noir comics of Charles Burns, and plenty of yesteryear’s pulp and kitsch.

The only disappointment here is that Taylor’s incredible talent has… See more →

I have owned a few web sites in my day, and like anyone who makes their work available to the public, I like to know the whos, how manys, from wheres, and so on, of the people checking out my stuff. Luckily for me and my fellow narcissistic publishers, there are plenty of stats packages out there that can inform us how many hits our sites have gotten, where our visitors are coming from, what… See more →

Last week, the complete sixth season of “The Simpsons” was released on DVD. According to many geeks—myself included—this is possibly the single greatest season of the single greatest television program ever broadcast, so my anticipation for its release was tremendous.

Previous “Simpsons” DVD releases have taught me to expect certain shortcomings (usually dumbfounding interactive menu decisions, including custom animations that delay response time by minutes), but they never fail to deliver superbly in the most… See more →

For years now, pseudo-futurist designers have equated the emergence and explosive adoption rate of the web as a communication tool with the death of printed media, ignoring the irony that such a proclamation is very short-sighted. While I’m of the opinion that print’s centuries-old legacy speaks for itself, skeptics may need periodic reminders of print’s continued relevance and untapped potential. Enter Is Not Magazine. In its editors’ own words:

Is Not Magazine is a magazine… See more →

The Unofficial Apple Weblog was gushing itself dry yesterday over The ABkey Revolution, a new computer keyboard which promises to deliver us from the soul-sucking tyranny of the standard “QWERTY” keyboard layout once and for all. As I am apparently a brain-dead boob who didn’t even know he needed to be saved, ABkey has provoked a critique from me.

For my critique to be valid, I must be careful not to confuse my criticism of… See more →

Late last year, my friend Scott added a Philadelphia-based band called Chromelodeon to the roster on his Bloodlink record label. The band initially piqued my interest with a nine-song EP called The Dark Sword of Chaos, which was dedicated exclusively to the music from Ninja Gaiden II, the second installment in the greatest video game series of all time. It was clear that these guys shared my enthusiasm for the game, and they brought its… See more →

In light of the fact that—especially when it comes to Star Wars—opinions truly are like assholes, I’ll keep this relatively brief, but since my filmgoing has been shamefully infrequent so far this year, I thought I’d be remiss not to weigh in on what certainly must be, for better or worse, the cinematic event of the year.

My experiences with Star Wars have been, I’m sure, unremarkably similar to those of most Westerners in… See more →

A musical baton has been passed to me by Stan and Ethan. Who am I to refuse them?

Total Volume of Music Files on My Computer

• 74.79 Gb

The Last CD I Bought Was

• Big Bear: Big Bear
  Throat-shredding shrieks and mathy metal guitar chugging that somehow owes more to Slint than the Dillinger Escape Plan. Amidst all the starts and stops and time changes, it still manages to swing. Refreshing stuff.

(See an up-to-date… See more →

The weather of late indicates that Spring is finally making a gesture of commitment to Philadelphia, and with it, my annual resolve is reborn to get the hell out of the house and find things to be excited about. I’ve been both busy and lazy these last couple of months (a paradoxical combination at which I excel), which, along with the temperature, has caused me to miss the first half of this year’s Philadelphia Film… See more →

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal survives in Philadelphia, thanks to the majesty of Wastoid, whose performance Saturday night at the Pontiac Grille made me feel like I was 13 again. The love of leather and swords and dazzling guitar heroics never left me, but this was a sublime rediscovery all the same.