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"Fagriculture," "Bootierobics," and "Wig Rescue" are some of the tamer workshops at the Black Rock City–oriented gay man day camp Queericulum. Nontame offerings include "Men's Naked Yoga" and "Dr. Bitch Sir's Buttfucking Class." (Who knew we'd be able to hear Tim Pawlenty having a heart attack all the way from here?) With impressive aplomb, the organizers of this innovative event keep the... More >>
The Motown label celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, and one of its most crucial artists is still making beautiful music. Starting at the tender age of 20, Smokey Robinson primed the pumps of the once-unstoppable hit-making factory, scoring the company’s first number one R&B hit, “Shop Around,” in 1960 with his band, the Miracles. He went on to have several more hits and... More >>
Gordon Edgar’s memoir Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge is essential reading for city eaters. First, it details the goings-on at Rainbow Grocery, a place that reveals strange wonders upon every visit, from the unwashed man buying a king's ransom in organic fruit to the frenzied crowds on the Yellow Pages coupon days (check your phone book!). Second: It’s written by a punk rock cheese... More >>
The Australian band Beaches isn't an all-woman supergroup, although its five members play in other bands and a few perceptive fans might recognize guitarist Antonia Sellbach from the trio Love of Diagrams, which was briefly signed to Matador. Considering the complicated reach of music exposure online these days, though, Beaches could make a real impact with its first Stateside tour. The... More >>
In Mark Growden's music, emotions feel like climate zones: they're intemperate areas that impact us physically as well as psychologically, tangible spaces that one must move through to get to the other side. For example, listen to "Undertaker," the opening track of Growden's new Saint Judas album: the narrator sings about how he is "down on my knees at the riverside" as we hear the instruments... More >>
In Mark Growden's music, emotions feel like climate zones: they're intemperate areas that impact us physically as well as psychologically, tangible spaces that one must move through to get to the other side. For example, listen to "Undertaker," the opening track of Growden's new Saint Judas album: the narrator sings about how he is "down on my knees at the riverside" as we hear the instruments... More >>
A collaboration between Whysp's Josh Alper and Skygreen Leopards' Glenn Donaldson, the Art Museums have cited early Style Council as a primary influence. And yet the San Francisco band alights on various shades of classic indie rock and twee on its debut mini-album, Rough Frame. Threaded with the most frayed hooks imaginable, the songs mingle such choice antecedents as early Magnetic Fields... More >>
Next to their Swedish counterparts, Danish bands have been underrepresented in the recent outpouring of Scandinavian music into the world at large. But then Efterklang got signed by 4AD late last year, so there may be hope yet. Named for a Danish word roughly translating as “reverberation,” the Copenhagen group is at its core a quartet and yet tours as at least an eight-piece. That... More >>
Israel-to-NYC émigrés Ori Kaplan (sax) and Tamir Muskat (drums, programming) founded Balkan Beat Box, an ensemble dedicated to intermingling traditional sounds of the Balkans and Middle East regions with rock, hip-hop, and techno. While Arab and Jewish cultures are often at odds politically, they have much in common musically, such as sinuous modal expression and melismatic... More >>
Gil Scott-Heron's voice has been reverberating for 40 years. He burst onto the scene in 1970 with the spoken- word album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, which contained the rallying cry "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." The vox-and-bongos song took aim at such hallowed bastions of pop and politics as The Beverly Hillbillies and President Richard Nixon, a practice of name-checking that has... More >>
From the Great Mistakes file: Chris McCaw was trying to do something involving long photographic exposures, but he spaced out. Thinking his now super-long exposure had ruined the image, he instead found that the sun, while burning the paper, had also made an interesting shape. The images in "Sunburned" are the result of repeating and tinkering with the process, which he now totally owns. Shot... More >>
Some guys got all the luck: Richard Aoki grew up in the Topaz, Utah internment camp in the early 1940s, was forcibly relocated to West Oakland, and served in Vietnam. Thus, you can't blame the guy for being angry, or for owning a lot of guns. It's also not surprising that he'd get Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-Tung. The astonishing part of this American biography is that Aoki essentially... More >>
The more European version of U.S. brodown party-hearty holiday behavior is brass-band "gypsy" culture. Encouraged binge drinking, shouting men dancing, and loud music is what St. Patrick's Day is all about, right? So Vagabondage brings all this together. Singing to us from inside an inebriated accordion, the duo slurs sea chanties, murder ballads, and, well, to be honest, drinking songs. Grand... More >>
Next to food carts and Sunset growhouses, one of the most welcome recent trends in the city has been going to museums at night, and then drinking. Previously, you went to a museum in the harsh light of 1 p.m. and tried to hit all the rooms before Dad’s blood sugar collapsed. Now, at places like the de Young, we stand around lobbies, drinking, listening to bands, or watching performances,... More >>
Mali’s Bassekou Kouyate isn’t content to play background music, so he attached a guitar strap to his ngoni, or “spike lute” — the banjo’s distant cousin — and proudly solos center stage with his talented ensemble, Ngoni Ba. The bandleader is determined to modernize traditional songcraft, enlisting young Malian blues guitarist Vieux Farka Touré and kora... More >>
Klezmer party music has been surprising hipsters around here for the past couple of years — it&'s so … cool, in a way that traditional music traditionally is not. Biggish-band klezmer jazz sounds such as those made by Zoyres Eastern European Wild Ferment are routinely referred to as "dance music," with good reason; saxophones, clarinets, tuba, trombones, and the drums to take them... More >>
If you’ve attended any Earl Dax–produced events, then your fear of performance art has disappeared. You love it! His fine curatorial skills have led him to present work from such luminaries as former Miss Lower East Side, Dynasty Handbag (she looks like she went mano a mano with a snowblower and won), the personal-risk-taking Taylor Mac, and many more. Simply put, Dax gives those of... More >>
