Film Review: Tree of Life
(07/01/11 12:10am)
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It’s typically tough to describe electronic music using the pop vernacular, but Four Tet has always been a unique avant artist whose music palatably synthesizes the best qualities of rock and electronic music.
10. The Lonely Island "Jizz in My Pants"
Brian Contratto took some time to talk to Christian comedy duo God's Pottery, asking them for their advice on hypotheticals (for his first interview, click here). God’s Pottery will be advice on the pressing issues young people face in college and beyond, this Saturday at Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill.
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead will play the Cat's Cradle Sept. 15 with Secret Machines. Check out the interview with Conrad Keely.
Supposedly, art imitates life, but among the aspects of human drama captured by television's best programs, few manage to capture the quotidian existence of Middle America quite like Friday Night Lights. The delicate balance of life and art that Peter Berg has honed in his masterwork somehow lacks the populist appeal and continues to struggle to survive as it enters its third season on NBC. A contracting deal with DirecTV managed to save the show after abysmal second season ratings and an untimely writers' strike that cut the show short at 15 episodes in 2007. After the original DirecTV airing this past fall, NBC picks up Friday Night Lights for season three, which premiered January 16.
I skipped over the Obama and Romney circles when I cast my ballot last week. Ironically, while placing me at the heart of the election season morass, my move to the District of Columbia after graduation actually detracted from the impact of my vote. In a district where Obama most resoundingly trumped his opponent with 91 percent support, it’s hard to feel the sense of civic affirmation that accompanied the ballot I cast in North Carolina in 2008.
In Spring 2009, a dumbly named Vancouver band released a track called “Young Hearts Spark Fire.” Duke University and I were not on friendly terms during this particular season and the song was perfectly attuned to my golden youth in Southern California, where everything was bear hugs and wrestling in the sand. Japandroids, with their inarticulate lyrics, double-digit word counts and call-and-response vocals, hit the nail on the head of something precious and urgent. It was genuine “lust for life” territory.
When Jacob Tobia posted on his Facebook that President Richard Brodhead had complimented his high heels, more than 300 people “liked” it.
“Hey Jane,” the first proper track on Sweet Heart Sweet Light, starts in the fast lane and cruises for a solid nine minutes. Jason Pierce has been in and out of hospitals battling a degenerative liver disease with experimental chemotherapy. He’s come out alive and (mostly) well, sounding like a guy with too much bottled up angst to tell his story with a graceful build-up.
Home starts off familiar and comfortable—a bit more charming and enjoyable too, like a college vacation spent at home. Not insignificantly, Midtown Dickens’ third long-player, released Tuesday, starts with a song called “Home All Ways” and ends with “This is My Home.”
Excluding maybe the partisan pundits, This American Life host Ira Glass is public radio’s biggest personality. In preparation for his talk this Saturday at the Durham Performing Arts Center, Recess’ Brian Contratto chatted with Mr. Glass about story-telling and being a grown-up.
Here’s the thing: Stephin Merritt does whatever he wants, and doesn’t seem to care what we—or even his own band for that matter—think.
From the top of the rust-and-white-paint water tower fixed to the roof of the Liggett & Myers building, I saw a few wisps of white smoke rise above East Campus, then morph into a threatening black billow. Could make out dancing fingers of yellow-orange lightglow, maybe actual flames, maybe their reflections in the nearby building windows. I kissed the person sharing my cold, precarious stoop. The moment was romantic and obvious.
A quick audience scan at PlayMakers Repertory Company’s Tuesday night rendition of Henry V: largely polarized between the 50-plus and college-aged crowds.
bcontrat: Hey classy girl. Let’s talk about f****ing romance. And not be annoying about it. But hang some of our angsty dirty lingerie out to air, ya dig?
Alexander Calder’s is an art that speaks back, if you’re lucky enough to see it in person. If not by name, anyone who’s seen a hanging mobile knows Calder. Marcel Duchamp first used the term to designate Calder’s earliest hanging works of art, now an indelible form. But even more than ornaments spinning above a child’s cradle, Calder’s work is interactive at its best.
“We just want to emote ‘til we’re dead.” This epitaph-to-be has become a pretty accurate M.O. for Kevin Barnes’ work during the past half-decade. His band Of Montreal has been a vessel for his theater of the absurd, sometimes to dazzling effect. At his best, Kevin Barnes wrote and produced with the musical gymnastics of a hypothetical David Bowie/T. Rex/Brian Eno collaboration. But Paralytic Stalks, continuing the dizzying trajectory of the band’s past few albums, is annoyingly cerebral, never charming or resonant.
Fredric Jameson,William A. Lane Jr. professor of comparative literature and romance studies, is one of today’s preminent voices on literary theory and Marxian cultural analysis as well as author of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In an office with a typewriter, no computer and floor-to-ceiling books in at least five different languages, Towerview’s Brian Contratto sat down with the professor to talk about trends in philosophy, Duke and Ke$ha.
Saxapahaw—emphasis on the first syllable—is one of those towns with an apparently comprehensive single website. The kind a realtor probably made, that advertises its quaint farmer’s markets and “cottages for rent.” The River Mill Village, a complex beautifully converted to commercial and residential use, sticks out from its one-horse town surroundings with an eerie, Lynchian aura—the building looks lifted from the set of Twin Peaks.