At least the animals had time to pack when God flooded the world. That was not the case when missile shells fell upon Feldman Ecopark, a roughly 350-acre landscape park containing more than 5,000 animals, and the setting of the touching yet tense documentary film, Checkpoint Zoo. Located in the northern Kharkiv region of Ukraine,
Pop Culture
Ahead of the 2025 festival, Nathaniel Rateliff was announced as Newport Folk Festival Steward, a role previously held by the late, great Pete Seeger. The communiqué noted that Rateliff helped curate the three-day festival. Separately, the fest shared he would have an early slot on Friday, helping to draw in an audience for some of
Unlike the Spaghetti Westerns, the Red Westerns produced beyond the Iron Curtain are largely neglected by film researchers, and virtually unknown to American viewers. The East German and Romanian film industries adopted and adapted this classic American film genre to their ideological and national contexts during the Cold War. The Westward expansion has been mythologized
The Birthday Party immediately commands our attention with its moody and even haunting cinematography. It’s the dead of night, and a luxurious, if not decadent, island villa is besieged by a storm. The opening scene’s genuine, moody, or haunting presence is not due to the darkness, thunder, and lightning, but rather the heartbreaking sound of
It’s November 1947, and in a corner of a department store in lower Manhattan, a real-life married couple is about to make television history without knowing it. The set consists of three walls borrowed from the furniture displays downstairs. One camera operator is switching between two angles, and Johnny Stearns has written a 15-minute script
100. Gnarls Barkley – St. Elsewhere [Downtown] It begins with the click of a film reel. Then, it explodes into a manic gospel circus fronted by a multi-octave ringmaster. Two minutes later, 2006’s most infectious single cuts through the cacophony. In case you slept through 2006, that album isSt. Elsewhere,and that song is “Crazy” by
The frightening ubiquity of artificial intelligence can be enough to concern any artist who possesses even a modicum of creative dignity. However, acclaimed Canadian composer Andrew Staniland offers a refreshing deployment of innovations; one that, in the words of a recent press release, “emphasizes rather than approximates humanity”. In collaboration with the Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research
Out of the gates, Wolf Alice were poised to make it big with a dynamic sound that straddled alternative and indie. Lead singer Ellie Roswell delivered intensity and beauty in equal measure, which set them apart from their peers. If they brandished a distinctly 1990s tendency toward loud-soft-loud, that was by intention. This approach continued
As you may be aware, America’s right-wing, fundamentalist Christians continue to work to not just cross, but eliminate, the long-established, constitutional division between church and state. This can be problematic for at least a couple of reasons. Most obviously, this divide protects both the state and religions from dominating or even taking the other over.
Sometimes referred to as the Breitbart Doctrine, far-right commentator Andrew Breitbart argues that politics flows downstream from culture. He has acolytes, including Steve Bannon, who recognize and advocate for cultural change as a prerequisite for political transformation. Considering that country music has functioned as a political bellwether in the US for over 100 years, could
There’s a phrase that captures a generalized Russian identity and its practically congenital suffering (and consequent gallows humor): “We thought we had hit rock bottom, and then someone knocked from below.” Originating in Soviet-era Poland, that little proverb could serve as a two-act logline for Julia Loktev‘s epic documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I –
The myth of America’s past is a strong and compelling one. A person doesn’t need to be a MAGA believer to feel seduced by the history of the United States as a golden age. Who doesn’t weep a metaphorical nostalgic tear when thinking of diesel-powered trains, cowboy heroes, baseball as the national pastime, black and
Calendar Year, the new album from Chicago-based psychedelic folk songwriter and musician Jessica Risker, evokes a timeless, dreamy vibe that sounds like it could have come from this year or maybe even 1972. The songs are impeccable, but the arrangements have an indefinable quality that is both comforting and mysterious. Coming off a seven-year hiatus
Mosquitoes (Le bambine) is a movie full of youth’s yearning for freedom and the desire to play, as well as the impetuous and cheeky attitude that childhood is riddled with. We are also reminded that adults can be quirky, wild, and dysfunctional, and children sometimes survive adolescence because of, or in spite of, their parents.
Self-producing an album wasn’t something that Sunny Sweeney spent much time pondering – until it happened. Rhinestone Requiem is the pinnacle of her taking charge, hoeing her own bean row, and flexing her self-determining vigor. It’s just the latest from an artist committed to exploring her imaginative energies on her terms. “I’m happy with what
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You Ethel Cain Daughters of Cain 8 August 2025 Ethel Cain is nothing if not ambitious. Before coming to music, she wanted to make movies, only to realize that sketching out atmospheric music on four-tracks, iPhones, and DAWs was far more accessible for a poor young trans girl living in
In my many years as a reader and writer, there are only a few books to which I can endlessly return. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is one (though some sections now tire me, mostly when hobbits are absent). James Clavell’s Shōgun is another. I hope you caught FX’s Shōgun series; it was
Ask a jazz fan to name the greatest players of the bebop/hard-bop/post-bop era of the 1950s and 1960s, and they might list a dozen or two dozen names. However, the odds are above even that Kenny Dorham won’t be among them. Narrow the focus to trumpet players of the same era, and Miles Davis is
In 2020’s Tickets to My Downfall, the rapper MGK (formerly Machine Gun Kelly), born Colson Baker, transformed into a pop-punk prodigy, recruiting Blink 182’s Travis Barker as a producer. In a 2022 interview with Billboard, looking back on that album’s number one debut, Baker said, “I know it kills certain bands in the [rock] community
Fritz Lang’s career as a filmmaker is strewn with crime melodramas that stand as iconic examples of film noir. His vision is dark and fatalistic as he specializes in characters caught in what he called “nets of circumstance”. A 1953 masterpiece of brutality called The Big Heat is probably his most hard-hitting work in terms
A Matter of Time Laufey Vingolf Recordings / AWAL 22 August 2025 One might be excused for thinking Laufey has become disillusioned with the glamorous life. The 14 tracks on her latest album, A Matter of Time, suggest that neither love nor money, fame nor beauty, are what they seem. The singer’s persona accepts these
The moment I’d been dreading for months arrived on Friday night of Montreal’s Osheaga festival. A dozen years ago, dashing gleefully from stage to stage across the vast grounds of Parc Jean-Drapeau with youthful enthusiasm, in pursuit of seeing as many artists as I could, felt easy. Back to the present day, the desire to
On 19 December 2024, inside Moscow’s cavernous Gostiny Dvor hall in a moment that oddly mirrors Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Vladimir Putin paused mid-answer at his annual press conference, tilted toward the cameras and issued a dare: “We’re ready for an experiment – let the West choose a target, surround it with its best defenses,
James Ketchum and Leon Hu reside in different parts of the world – Pamplona, Spain, and Davis, California, respectively – but recording under the name Mondo Lava, the duo create a sound that’s wonderfully cohesive and uniquely trippy. Following Parrot Head Cartridge (2014) and Ogre Heights (2018), they’re back with Utero Dei, another journey into
In keeping with the albums he’s released recently under his given name (following nine full-length albums under various project names), Fletcher Tucker continues to “explore rationality – aural and poetic expressions of his ever deepening relationships to place, ancestors, ceremonial practice, and kinfolk (human and more-than-human)” on his latest album, Kin, according to the press
After seeing a cut of Legend of the Happy Worker, executive producer David Lynch told its director and his longtime friend and collaborator, Duwayne Dunham, “It’s Disney on acid.” This moment will go down in lore among the other memorable Lynch anecdotes, like the one on the set of Blue Velvet, when actor Dennis Hopper
Songs in the Key of Yikes Superchunk Merge 22 August 2025 Superchunk’s return has been one of the most rewarding second acts in rock. The Chapel Hill indie group have outlasted many of their peers and haven’t lost a step in terms of quality. Since their return with Majesty Shredding in 2010, they have released
New Radiations Marissa Nadler Sacred Bones / Bella Union 15 August 2025 Since signing to Sacred Bones a little over a decade ago, Marissa Nadler’s records have grown increasingly lush and grandiose, her heartbreakingly pure soprano and delicate acoustic guitar shining and resplendent against a backdrop of layered guitars, heavy drums, synth, pedal steel guitar,
It’s a common sentiment among moviegoers that it’s more upsetting to watch a non-human animal in pain than to watch an adult human suffer or die. There’s even a website, Does the Dog Die, which indexes films that contain animal deaths to provide trigger warnings for prospective audiences. Perhaps that explains the scarcity of war
With a new record calledSongs in the Key of Yikesthat is populated with songs called “No Hope”, “Everybody Dies”, and “Train on Fire”, it is a reasonable question to ask: What is giving indie rock institution Superchunk hope these days? “I have never had any hope. I was the oldest five-year-old. I was not a