Best of '11 on Spotify
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Click the link below to hear tracks from our 25 favorite albums of the year:WEEKEND Best of 2011
159 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Click the link below to hear tracks from our 25 favorite albums of the year:WEEKEND Best of 2011
WEEKEND's best TV shows of the year
WEEKEND's absolute best albums of the year
WEEKEND's top picks for the best movies of the year.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Vlad Tepes. Aäkon Këëtrëh. Deathspell Omega. Peste Noire. Alcest. If there’s one thing that can be said about French black metal, it’s that it pushes boundaries.Blut Aus Nord has been leading the movement’s bizarrist assault from Normandy since 1995’s “Ultima Thulée,” and the trio’s output continues to polarize.“777 — The Desanctification” follows April’s “777 — Sect(s)” down Blut Aus Nord’s long, winding road away from anything resembling conventional black metal. Mainman Vindsval builds riffs that both submit to and override concurrent riffs, creating the most convincing descent-into-madness sound in the genre since Deathspell Omega’s terrifying “Fas — Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum.”And yet, somehow, “The Desanctification” is a crossover record, with acclaim coming in equal measure from dyed-in-the-wool metalheads and open-minded hipsters. Vindsval almost certainly doesn’t care, and it probably doesn’t deserve the distinction, but his ninth full-length could be his most well-received yet.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The timing of the release of “50 Words for Snow,” the latest album by English art-rock stalwart Kate Bush, is rather convenient. Not only is it a brilliant album coming out dangerously close to year-end critics’ list season, it’s also the purest possible evocation of the winter months shy of full-on Christmas music. This woman shoots straight for the heart.Bush has spent much of her career in the shadow of her contemporaries. After scoring her lone No. 1 hit at the age of 19 with 1978’s blustery “Wuthering Heights,” the singer has toiled in relative obscurity, especially stateside. But after nearly a decade of silence from fellow scene luminaries David Bowie and Peter Gabriel, “50 Words for Snow” marks Bush’s time to shine alone. With seven sprawling tracks that rival the best material of her early classics, she has stumbled upon a late-career masterpiece.The songs are at their best when Bush invites someone along for the ride. On the gorgeous opening track, “Snowflake,” her 13-year-old son contributes soaring soprano notes reminiscent of the ones that made his mom famous. On “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” Elton John plays the role of Bush’s lover as the two are heartbreakingly reincarnated together during the fall of Rome, World War II and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The title track sees comedian Stephen Fry dryly sharing his anglicized take on that famed Inuit vocabulary. The lyrics are unabashedly on-the-nose — “Misty” is a song about making love to a snowman and waking up to find she “Can’t find him/The sheets are soaking” — but they mostly work. Bush has always been a storyteller, and more than 30 years of songwriting has taught her precisely how to make even a first-person account of a snowflake falling from a cloud, a sympathetic voice on a hunt for the Abominable Snowman, and, yes, snowman sex, work for her.That the average song length on the record is nearly 10 minutes is hardly a demerit. “50 Words for Snow” is the sound of Kate Bush breaking out of the constraints of the pop song format, running headlong from convention like the yeti protagonist of “Wild Man” runs from his assailants.Quite fittingly, the album is an icy breath of fresh air.
The Wii has always been a console with enormous potential, but rarely has a game that exists for more than novelty truly used its strengths to its advantage.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Exploitation movies are as well-known for their lurid subject matter as they are for their endless array of microscopic subgenres. If it can possibly be exploited for cinematic shock value, there’s probably a thriving scene with the –ploitation suffix. Here’s a look at a few of the key genres.Blaxploitation Originally produced mostly for an urban, black audience, films in this subgenre typically pits badass African-American heroes against antagonistic whites. More modern examples like “Black Dynamite” have more universal appeal.Best flick “Shaft,” 1971, directed by Gordon ParksSexploitationThis is the porn soft-core enough to show in grindhouse theaters, the kind of stuff Travis Bickle might sit through in “Taxi Driver.” Plot is more prominent than in the amateur stuff that dominates adult bookstores these days, but it’s still secondary to sex.Best flick"Scum of the Earth!,” 1963, directed by Herschell Gordon LewisMexploitation This genre’s continued relevance in America after exploitation cinema’s 1970s Golden Age is somewhat surprising considering the relatively narrow scope of its subject matter. Think blaxploitation but with Mexicans. It’s reductive, but so is grindhouse cinema.Best flick“Machete,” 2010, directed by Robert RodriguezNunsploitationThese films’ scope makes Mexploitation seem like a cash cow blockbuster genre. Taking place in convents and dealing with themes of sexual repression and religious oppression, these Catholic-bashing films have big cult audiences in Italy and Japan.Best flick“Images in a Convent,” 1979, directed by Joe D’AmatoCannibal films The nature of these exploitations of tribal cultures has led them to cross into genuine snuff from time to time, especially with regards to onscreen slaughter of animals. This makes the parts that are fake seem all the more real.Best flick“Cannibal Holocaust,” 1980, directed by Ruggero Deodato
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I’m typing this just a few hours after getting off a plane back to Indianapolis from New York, where I recently watched Toronto hardcore punk sextet Fucked Up plow through “David Comes to Life,” the band’s monolithic rock opera and arguably the best record of 2011.As a hopeless music obsessive since before my thirteenth birthday, I’m no stranger to traveling long distances and making questionable life choices in the pursuit of bearing witness to triumphant displays of rock ’n’ roll. I feigned interest in attending the University of Toronto so I could see Iron Maiden on the first leg of the Somewhere Back in Time World Tour in 2008 and still have my absence excused as a college visit. I’ve had more mornings than I can count where I’ve rolled back into Bloomington at 7:30 a.m. after seeing some show in Chicago or Cleveland or Columbus, Ohio. I’ve had stretches of four days in a row with an ear-shattering concert each night.Even considering all that, flying to New York to see Fucked Up is still the craziest thing I’ve ever done for a show, and it was totally worth it.In fact, it was probably the best show I’ve ever seen. Fucked Up blasted through the entirety of “David Comes to Life,” plus a three-song encore of older material, and the Jersey dudes in opening act Titus Andronicus held their own with a high-energy set drawing mostly from 2010’s masterful “The Monitor.”But this isn’t really a column about that show, as easy as that column would be to write. It’s a column about obsession.Both Fucked Up and Titus Andronicus are relatively well known — Pitchfork Best New Music recipients who have dented the Billboard charts — but compared against the well-documented Beatles, Zeppelin and Grateful Dead obsessions of older generations, the dedication to these acts reflected in the crowd at their show represents a glimmer of hope for underground music.The majority of the sold-out crowd at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan shouted every word of the two bands’ sets.Everyone from crusty old-school punks to nowadays Brooklyn hipsters felt blessed to be in the presence of these two great acts, and they paid their adoration in throat-ripping screams.It’s unfairly reductive to say this is a cult phenomenon. There’s been cult music as long as there’s been pop music. Cult bands, for all their other idiosyncrasies, universally appeal to small, specific audiences. That wasn’t happening at Le Poisson Rouge.We now live in a world where obsession doesn’t mean collecting concert bootlegs and reading unauthorized biographies but simply going to shows, engaging with the material and having as good a time with the music as the band. By that definition, just about everyone watching Fucked Up and Titus Andronicus was obsessed, and we loved every minute of it.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>To anyone familiar with David Lynch’s auteurist filmography, his first full-length release as a solo musician should feel familiar.Like the director’s work on such surrealist masterpieces as “Blue Velvet” and “Inland Empire,” “Crazy Clown Time” is at once dreamlike and terrifyingly real, its narrators unreliable and its themes esoteric.Also like much of his work as a filmmaker, Lynch’s performances on the album operate just on the fringe of the mainstream. Just as “Twin Peaks” became a primetime phenomenon in 1990, it’s easy to imagine a dance club (perhaps even Lynch’s own Club Silencio in Paris) pulsing with the 1980s-inspired strains of “Good Day Today” or the Karen O-fronted weirdness of “Pinky’s Dream.”Lynch also shines when he breaks out of the pop music mold altogether. The robotic voice that contemplates the link between dental health and mental health on “Strange and Unproductive Thinking” and the innocent youth describing a birthday party gone wrong on the genre-bending title track are just as effective as the album’s more conventional moments.It’s a testament to Lynch’s flexibility as a songwriter and singer that this is true, and after 40 years of contributing to his own film soundtracks, it’s nice to finally have one cohesive musical work from him — however cohesive a David Lynch work can actually be.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Presumably, if you follow this space, you’re interested in discovering new music for yourself and not having it merely spoon-fed to you. If you were in the spoon-feeding business, you’d probably have an iPod full of Arcade Fire and Bon Iver, and that would be that.Despite (or perhaps because of) this present landscape of Internet ubiquity, it can be difficult to know where to look for underground music, and more importantly, to be able to discern the good stuff from the crap, of which there is far more.Thankfully, the Internet has also brought us infinite tools for doing just that kind of sifting. It’s also made actually hearing that music easier than ever — even without the aid of illegal piracy.One of my favorite places to find new music is NPR Music’s First Listen. The excellent website hosts streams of a few massive releases (Tom Waits, Björk, Tori Amos) but is mostly populated by music that would forever go unheard by most of the people who visit the site if it weren’t posted there.First Listen also features an enormous range of genres. In the past two weeks alone, I’ve used it to hear Hammers of Misfortune’s “17th Street,” a top contender for my personal year-end list and one of the best traditional metal albums of the last 10 years, and Lila Downs’ “Pecados Y Milagros,” a sprawling, Mexican culture-heavy masterwork by a staunchly traditionalist Mexican-American singer.Few places aside from First Listen would let those two albums sit comfortably next to one another, but that’s what the folks at NPR have cultivated. With three to four new streams going up every week and plenty of great music writing and multimedia to accompany them, there are few better places to find new jams than npr.org/music.Another excellent tool that has already begun to change the way music is consumed is Spotify. The free streaming service legitimately hosts a seemingly endless array of full albums. It also offers a wide range of ways to find music. Unlike the now-archaic Pandora, which forces you to build radio stations based on artists and songs you already like, or Grooveshark, which has always sucked horribly, Spotify lets you share your musical destiny with your friends or, if you like, the whole world.If Facebook took the general college social experience online for the first time, then Spotify is doing the same thing for music. Five years ago, if you wanted your friend to listen to something, you’d either burn him a CD or, if you were really cutting-edge, put the mp3s on a thumb drive and have him transfer them to his computer.Now, you need only make a public Spotify playlist, share it on Facebook or Twitter, and everyone in your network will be able to click on it and listen immediately. If you get tired of just listening to your friends’ recommendations (or if they have lousy taste), plenty of publications and musicians are lending professional credence to playlists of their own. First Listen and Spotify are my two favorite music-finding tools, but don’t rule out the old guard methods of combing through music publications and the advertisements they sell. There’s really no wrong way to stumble upon hidden gems.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The tone of Christmas-themed horror features has long been one of campy excess. Films like “Silent Night, Deadly Night” and “Santa’s Slay” depicted St. Nick as the kind of lunatic who kills people with icicles and can successfully be portrayed by Bill Goldberg.“Rare Exports” is a Finnish take on the Evil Santa myth that attempts to be more serious than its predecessors and mostly succeeds. Here, Father Christmas isn’t a homicidal maniac but an ancient supernatural being who uses his omniscience to punish the naughty. It’s a premise that could be goofy in the wrong hands, but “Rare Exports” handles it masterfully with deliberate pacing and unwinking performances. There are moments of comedy because, at the end of the day, this is still a movie about excavating and destroying Santa Claus. But these moments are handled with the utmost care by director Jalmari Helander.The film is too slickly produced to ever attain the cult status of some of its holiday horror counterparts, but it’s a truly singular achievement. Santa’s been scary before, but he’s never been quite like this.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Instrumental rock bands seem to run into self-plagiarism problems earlier in their careers than their vocal counterparts.“Empros,” the fourth Russian Circles LP since 2006, brings several new elements to the band’s sound — the rumbling bass line that stretches through the entirety of opener “309,” the acoustic guitars that characterize the 10-minute “Batu,” the vocals (!) on closing track “Praise Be Man” — but still mostly feels like ground that’s been covered before.The Chicago trio’s first two albums, “Enter” and “Station,” were somewhat genre-defying, like a logical midpoint between Explosions in the Sky and Isis with more groove than either. If the problem with third full-length “Geneva” was that it was too note-perfect an imitation of those records, “Empros”’s shortcomings are its ill-advised forays outside.The aforementioned aggressively distorted bass, acoustic guitar and singing are all present, but Russian Circles never convinces us they need to be. Like nearly all of the band’s post-“Station” output, the cuts on “Empros” feel unnecessary.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“The Rum Diary” is a mess of a film that attempts to be a slicker sibling to “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” but winds up falling completely flat.Johnny Depp plays Paul Kemp, a less drug-addled, more alcoholic Raoul Duke who travels to Puerto Rico to freelance for an English language newspaper. Whereas Terry Gilliam’s film let Depp’s Hunter S. Thompson surrogate explore the outer bounds of personal depravity, Bruce Robinson’s inserts him into increasingly implausible situations beyond his control and forces him to play a hero role that’s clearly ill-fitting of him.These situations unfold in such a scatterbrained way that the film completely bypasses its director’s attempt to create a picaresque feel before settling on total incoherence. Some scenes last barely a minute, lend no greater meaning to the movie and appear totally out of any logical sequence. Yet, Robinson gives cues that they matter to the grander plot, which is ostensibly about a failing newspaper making one last great stand against corruption.Needless to say, that sincerity feels misplaced and ultimately rings hollow in such a muddled film. The movie doesn’t saddle actions with consequences — one reporter at the newspaper regularly listens to Hitler speeches on vinyl and never shows up for work, yet the crusty editor-in-chief (Richard Jenkins) doesn’t fire him. Suggesting that this ragtag group would suddenly band together because the new freelancer said so doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.But then, nothing in this film does. A scene in its final third sees Kemp and roommate Sala (Michael Rispoli) taking a government-grade hallucinogen in the form of eye drops. They start, believe it or not, hallucinating, and suddenly “The Rum Diary” becomes a very different kind of film. For about five minutes, anyway. Then it stops being that kind of film and bounces on to another.It’s this lack of focus — along with a dialed-in lead performance by Depp and lazy cinematography that shows the beauty of Puerto Rico’s coast and little else — that keeps “The Rum Diary” from being much more than a two-hour diversion. It’s barely even that.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The legend has been repeated so many times that it’s practically in the same canon of American folklore as Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed.The down-on-his-luck blues singer Robert Johnson, as the story goes, went down to the crossroads at midnight sometime in 1933 to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for otherworldly guitar-playing abilities. Jacobs School of Music Professor and rock historian Andy Hollinden doesn’t buy it.“It’s a very racist story,” Hollinden said. “Johnson was a musical genius, but the idea that a black guy could be that good made it easier for people to imagine that voodoo was involved.”Indeed, the Johnson legend didn’t arise until quite some time after his death in 1938. A lesser-known bluesman named Son House told the story to Pete Welding, who reported it as a serious belief in a 1966 edition of Down Beat magazine. Since then, the legend has outgrown the truth, which is considerably darker.“There’s not even any mention in the song ‘Cross Road Blues’ of the devil,” Hollinden said. “It’s a song about a black person who needs to get out of a sundown town — a town where it was made obvious, sometimes with signs, that black people weren’t welcome there after dark.”Racist undertones aside, Johnson’s alleged Faustian bargain wasn’t the first and certainly not the last appearance of the Christian conceptualization of Satan in musical mythology. The link between music and some grinning red guy with a pointy tail and horns extends long before the dawn of Delta blues.The Hardanger fiddle, an instrument popularized in Norway in the 17th and 18th centuries, marks perhaps the first documented appearance of devil lore in popular music. The violin would often have a dragon carved into its wood and could be played in the sinister-sounding “troll tuning.” Legend has it this unconventional tuning was passed down to players by Satan himself. In a country as overwhelmingly Christian as Norway, using it was tantamount to damnation. Fully aware of the devilish implications of the Hardanger fiddle, black metal stalwart Ihsahn (formerly of Emperor, a band whose songs have titles such as “Opus a Satana” and “The Loss and Curse of Reverence”), released an album called “Grimen” with the name Hardingrock. The album combined black metal song structure with the traditional instrument to create a new canon of vaguely satanic hymns. A century after the introduction of the Hardanger fiddle, one very specific violinist drew the ire of the religious community. Nicolo Paganini was in many ways the precursor to Robert Johnson, albeit one with far fewer racist barbs thrown his way. The Italian’s brilliance with a violin made him a revered figure, but also a feared one. European audiences accused Paganini of the same Faustian deal-making that would eventually plague Johnson. Michael Young, a graduate student of ethnomusicology, said both religious fervor and personal grudges were responsible for the accusations against Paganini.“When you see something so amazing and virtuosic, sometimes it seems like there’s no other explanation for it,” Young said. “There was this level of superstition, but there’s another level. People didn’t like Paganini.”Like a whole continent of Salieris watching Mozart compose his best symphonies, Europe couldn’t wrap its head around Paganini’s playing. The jealousy led to grudges. The grudges led to accusations. The accusations led to Paganini being shackled in chains when he arrived in certain cities on tour. For all the racism that led to the claims of Johnson’s deal with the devil, he likely never faced the kind of widespread fear that Paganini inspired.Young said the origin of devil myths in music can be traced to the convictions of popular Christianity.“In church, it’s God’s music — music to glorify him,” Young said. “But the other places you hear music is at bars and dances where people aren’t being super-Christian. They’re drinking and swearing, and maybe they’re going home and having sexual intercourse out of wedlock.”It was this Jesus-fueled fear of the unknown that made any music played outside the church walls dangerous and anything that worked young people into a frenzy (Paganini’s shredding performances, for example) more dangerous still.“When you had people getting together and having a good time, and it wasn’t mediated by the church, it was for the devil,” Young said.At some point, though, long after Paganini’s chained performances and Robert Johnson’s revolutionizing of the blues, evil undertones in music stopped being dangerous and started being cool. In 1969, psychedelic rockers Coven released the devil-hailing “Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls.” A year later, Black Sabbath invented heavy metal with a handful of detuned guitar riffs and lyrics such as “Satan’s sitting there, he’s smiling/Watches those flames get higher and higher.” In 1971, kids were playing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backward to find hidden passages allegedly proclaiming the band’s allegiance to the Dark One. By 1972, even English pomp-rockers Genesis were playing with infernal fire, painting the Battle of Armageddon in the 23-minute epic “Supper’s Ready,” which included the line “666 is no longer alone/He’s getting out the marrow in your backbone.”Clearly, the game had changed.Hollinden chalks the shift up to a new paradigm in counterculture that the 1960s brought, which was subsequently crushed by Vietnam and Watergate. “I think it’s safe to say bands came along and used the darkness to be anti-authority,” Hollinden said. “You can still shock people with the concept of Satan.”Of course, it took three centuries for music to reach the sort of spooky, semi-ironic embrace of satanic motifs that came with the end of the hippie era. It only took another decade or so for a cluster of metal bands to take it a lot further.Mike Lang, a graduate student in telecommunications researching metal, said he sees the rapidly snowballing extremeness of the metal genre as a reason for the true satanism that would pervade it by the early 1990s.“You have Black Sabbath and Slayer’s Satan stuff that basically says, ‘Let’s have fun with this,’” Lang said. “But with the continual extremity and bands constantly pushing the boundaries, you’ve pushed the genre to the extreme so much that it becomes a viable avenue for satanists.”Metal became so viable for the devil, in fact, that theistic satanists started becoming key players in major regional scenes. In Florida’s swampy death metal scene, Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth ate worms on stage, and Deicide’s Glen Benton branded an inverted cross on his forehead. In Norway, members of black metal’s inner circle, such as Mayhem’s Euronymous and Emperor’s Faust, began burning churches and committing murders in addition to singing Beelzebub’s praises.Hollinden said some Norwegian acts, such as Burzum and Enslaved, felt even satanism was too mild a rejection of Christianity since it implicitly recognized its legitimacy. These bands instead embraced the old Viking gods of the Scandinavian Peninsula.After the dust raised by the Norwegian black metal satanists settled, the paradigm for the devil in music shifted yet again. Today, mainstream-leaning acts, such as hip-hop crew Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All and surf-punk project Wavves, openly use inverted crosses and pentagrams in their album art and T-shirt designs. Not surprisingly, metal is still the genre pushing satanism’s place in music to the next level. Swedish black metal quintet Watain is composed entirely of dyed-in-the-wool devil worshipers, and their stage show involving animal sacrifices and satanic invocations has raised plenty of eyebrows.Lang said religious people voicing their opposition of Watain’s live performances are hypocritical.“If you’re okay with Abraham killing the goat for God, you have to be okay with Watain killing the goat for Satan,” he said.Amen.
Far beyond the Monster Mash
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Believe it or not, there are more varieties of wine beyond “boxed” and “bottled.” If the endless sea of reds, whites, pinks and yellows in the aisles at your favorite booze dispensary seems impenetrable, have a look at this easy guide to six delicious, accessible wine styles, complete with food pairings and affordable, local examples.ShirazA typical but very hearty, dry, red wine, best paired with stews and meats like steak and wild game.Aussie Red, Cedar Creek Winery, $12.15MerlotA good introduction for people new to red wine thanks to its smoothness and ability to pair with damn near anything.Oliver Merlot, Oliver Winery, $18Rosé An umbrella term for any pink wine. Dry varieties go well with cheese-centric main dishes and sweeter blush versions go well with fruit and desserts.Vista Rosé Wine, Brown County Winery, $7.97ChardonnayRich, citrus flavors characterize this popular white wine, which is best served alongside fish and poultry.2009 Butler Winery Chardonel, Butler Winery, $13.95Pinot GrigioA more versatile white wine when it comes to pairings, this one is notable for its distinct, acidic bite.Oliver Pinot Grigio, Oliver Winery, $12.50MeadA wine that is made with honey instead of grapes and was drunk by the Vikings. Mead wines tend to pair well with breads and cheeses.Camelot Mead, Oliver Winery, $7.50
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Musical paradigms have been shifting for as long as there has been music, but perhaps no single figure earned the distinction of being truly avant-garde before Erik Satie. Born in Honfleur, France, in 1866 and a crucial figure in Montmartre’s pre-WWI “Banquet Years,” Satie stared down the classical music of his era and saw superfluous frills and pretension staring back. So, he started cutting. What resulted was the immediate precursor to Dada, neoclassicism and minimalism, and the very early roots of post-rock (ironically, 50 years before the dawn of rock) and ambient music. The beautiful “So Long, Lonesome” from Explosions in the Sky’s 2007 opus “All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone” owes far more to Satie’s “Gnossiennes” suite than to any rock song, and Aphex Twin mastermind Richard David James cites the French composer as one of the biggest influences on his nightmarish electronic ambiance. Satie’s influence today resonates in a way that is arguably more important than that of even Mozart and Beethoven. Where Mozart gave music a then-unparalleled technical flair and Beethoven brought in the full range of human emotion in a more profound way than anyone who came before him, Satie made it acceptable (albeit not immediately) to tear everything down and start over when it becomes necessary to do so. His patently gorgeous but often challenging piano compositions spiral through scales with a feel that occasionally recalls the early works of Bach, but they have an undeniably modern twist, and listening to his masterpiece “Gymnopedies” is as fresh and exciting in 2011 as it must have been when he wrote the first part in 1888. Notwithstanding the excellent modern artists who openly cite Satie as an influence — the aforementioned Explosions in the Sky and Aphex Twin, Frank Zappa, Gary Numan and Brian Eno, among others — the composer has indirectly been responsible for most of what sounds radical and new, especially in genres that lean on atmosphere and minimalism.This summer, I spent a weekend in Paris and stayed in Montmartre, Erik Satie’s old stomping grounds. On a nondescript side street, nestled between overpriced wine bars and kitschy cafés near the Sacré Coeur basilica, you can see Satie’s last Paris apartment. It has ostensibly been transformed into a museum, if a series of 30-word blurbs on sketchy travel websites are to be believed, but there’s no apparent evidence of that apart from a tiny placard above the door that reads “Erik Satie — Compositeur de Musique a vécu dans cette maison de 1890 á 1898.” Inquisitive soul that I am, I decided to defy the gendarmes and go into the apartment building to have a look around. In the lobby there were eight mailboxes with names on them. None of them said “Museé-Placard d’Erik Satie” as they should have. They just belonged to people’s homes. The most important French composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had apparently had the museum which was created in his honor rented out to some random Parisian. I climbed the stairs and no evidence of any museum was up there, either. I left the apartment feeling a bit dejected, took one last look at the placard and walked back to the Metro stop.Then it hit me that I shouldn’t feel bad at all. Satie’s apartment is just like his music. Its importance is subtly nodded to today, but it’s been built around and renovated and dug up and recontextualized. And given his approach to composition, it’s easy to imagine that Satie would be furious if things had gone any other way. Music, to him, was not about lingering on the past or holding the old greats in reverence. It was about the march of time and the constant demand for progress. He’d likely be flattered that current musicians cite him as an influence, but more impressed yet that they’ve taken up his mantle and moved it in a number of completely disparate directions. So, while it’s disappointing as a student of cultural history that there’s apparently no shrine to Satie’s greatness in a prominent, touristy part of Paris, it makes perfect sense. In death, as in life, his disdain for reverence is refreshing.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It’s somewhat surprising more bands aren’t from Woodstock, N.Y., considering how much music and drug culture is associated with the town’s name. A band that has made a lasting imprint on the town’s musical legacy is 3, a progressive rock act that formed about 20 years ago and played at Woodstock ’94. The quartet finally released its masterpiece with 2007’s “The End Is Begun,” and the reward was a set of high-profile tours supporting Porcupine Tree, Scorpions and Dream Theater.“The Ghost You Gave to Me” is the disappointing follow-up to that album. It seems that chief songwriter Joey Eppard exhausted the best bits of his notebook on the last record. His trademark flamenco slap guitar is still the focal point of most of the songs here, but what surrounds those passages is rarely interesting.To Eppard’s credit, “React” is perhaps the best song 3 has ever made — a densely layered pop song with gorgeous vocal melodies and enough twists and turns to earn its “progressive” tag with ease. But it remains a shining moment on an album with few others.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The 1980s and ’90s in Brazil were characterized by crime, poverty and social unrest. In that darkness, Ayrton Senna represented a small beacon of hope.The recent ESPN Films documentary about the life and death of the three-time world champion Formula One driver illustrates this beautifully. Constructed entirely of archive footage and voice-over, its simple presentation belies the complexities of its title hero. Senna was a virtuoso behind the wheel of an F1 car, and his rivalry with French driver Alain Prost takes on more than a little of the tone of “Amadeus.”Senna is the whimsical, boundary-defying Mozart, and Prost is the calculating, jealous Salieri. Tragically, the parallels extend to the bitter end, with Senna sensing his impending death and staring it down anyway, finally succumbing to a head injury at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. “Senna” captures the weight of his death with a dogged minimalism that persists to the last frame. When the last title card fades, sports — and life itself — seem to matter a little bit more.