Like that computerized gadget you just bought, so much electronic-based music is obsessively entertaining—at least for a time. If your fickle ears are anxiously awaiting the next innovation in computer-based song engineering, Trans Am’s new album might be just the ticket. On Sex Change, the band’s sonic innovations stick in your head, leaving you craving … Read more
What’s the easy way to identify the smartest country music stars? They cover Patty Griffin songs. The redheaded singer/songwriter has a knack for stories about troubled hearts laid bare, set to wistful melodies drawing on traditional folk and country music. She’s also capable of tossing in bursts of three-minute rock ’n’ roll. Her songs have … Read more
An amazement. James Longley’s brave and beautiful documentary is filmed without judgment and bookended with the voices of children aged beyond their years. The first in a triptych of stories is a Sunni boy straight out of Dickens, an apprentice to a cruel mechanic who lost his father and struggles to survive while his city … Read more
In 1944, the French government recruited more than a hundred thousand Algerian men—almost all Muslims—to defend France against the Nazi onslaught. Of course, most of these unfortunates had never set foot in France. Unlike Clint Eastwood’s uninsightful Letters From Iwo Jima, Days of Glory, written and directed by a Frenchman of Algerian origin, is already … Read more
Jan Svankmajer could be the weirdest filmmaker in the world, an artist whose troubled subconscious seems to dictate his every move. His latest, Lunacy, is loosely based on two Edgar Allan Poe short stories and “inspired” by the Marquis de Sade. It’s the story of a poor fellow who, upon returning from his mother’s funeral, … Read more
Mix the rich color cinematography of Douglas Sirk with the gushing violence of Sam Peckinpah, fold in the kind of Thai melodrama that has all but vanished from the international movie landscape, and you’ve got Tears of the Black Tiger, a film that moves with the force of a hurricane blasting apart a great marzipan … Read more
Other Electricities, Ander Monson’s 2005 debut collection, introduced one of the freshest and most interesting new voices in years. The interrelated stories, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the bleakest midwinter, represent a sort of inventory of loss, complete with obituaries, obsessive weather minutiae, electrical charts, and an elegiac style that drifts again and again … Read more
As Minnesota Public Radio’s alterna-juggernaut, The Current has delivered a reliable slate of programming and special events, but it’s really stumbled on an inspired idea with the Fakebook series. The basic idea is to pair an author—usually somebody copasetic with the station’s mission—with a band, and put the two on stage with host and Current … Read more
Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip has been a strangely enduring cult phenomenon. First published in 1973, Lesy’s indescribable marriage of photographs and text, alternately chilling and hilarious, chronicled a late-nineteenth-century epidemic of madness and mayhem in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. A photographic historian, Lesy has kept busy since then, producing a batch of books that, … Read more
Edna Stevens Talton was but a wee Liberian seven-year-old when her family transplanted itself to the States in 1981. Once here, she quickly picked up on echoes of traditional African dance in the new African-American styles she was discovering. A couple of decades later, long after she’d forged a successful career as an MTV backup … Read more