Super Troopers 2 Whether you like it or not, you gotta admire the underdog nature of Super Troopers. It’s a comedy that’s aged surprisingly well that fortunately never fell victim to many of the popular comedies of today. It’s not dependent of cameos for its performances but focuses on writing. Instead of relying on a “remember them?” neuron firing when we see an actor on screen, it instead focuses on its script actually being funny on the page...
Oh Sees ORC (Castle Face) Show me someone who doesn’t appreciate Thee Oh Sees and I’ll show you a damned fool. Same with all the other name incarnations of the band: The Oh Sees, Oh Sees, and OCS. It’s almost like band head honcho John Dwyer doesn’t want his steps to be traced back. Or maybe he’s divvying up the band’s output under slightly different namesakes so that listeners can distinguish them. OCS definitely was a different approach to the...
The Blueberry Tour with Joe Pera, Dan Licata, Jo Firestone, and Connor O’Malley If you’re a comedy fan and you haven’t heard of the participants in the Blueberry Tour, you just aren’t paying attention. Connor O’Malley’s bizarre comedy has been gracing YouTube and the Seth Meyers show for years (even now that he’s not working there anymore), Jo Firestone, a standup in her own right is a writer on the Tonight show, even though I keep seeing her pop up...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the The Old New Me / Times Like This 2LP reissue by Slim Dunlap. Of course, after the collapse, crash and burn of The Replacements in 1991, it was almost instantly hoped that somebody in the band would begin producing more music but nobody looked at Slim Dunlap to be the first one out of the gate. Dunlap was, after all, the replacement guitarist in The Replacements – that was the joke...
Ooooooooh! What’s this? Well, it’s your favorite Back to School guide, THAT’S WHAT! Dear readers, year after year, we’ve been giving the most in-depth coverage of all the articles we think you’re gonna want for the next school year and this time around it’s no different. How is it that we can sort through all the noise to bring you just the creme of the crop out of the slew of pretend-swag out there? We don’t know. We must have...
David Sedaris Calypso I’ll tell you, the hardest thing I’ve had to do at this point in my life is buying a house. Stressful doesn’t quite begin to describe it, and that’s considering that I had it pretty easy. I was so green going into it and the process moved so quickly that I was constantly playing catchup, feeling like I was missing some important details or new obstacle kept presenting themselves. We need a what now? How much is...
M.F. DOOM Mm..Food (Vinyl Me Please edition) You have to respect DOOM, OK? You just have to. I only needed a few listens of his latest album Born Like This to realize the man was doing something different. Something interesting. Something worthwhile. Working my way through his catalog, I spent my sweet time with Mm..Food and I can honestly say it was time well spent. After having properly digested the album, you’ve got to give it to the man for...
October Song by Paul Le Blanc (Haymarket Books) I’ve read a lot of books on the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik victory, good and bad, and it’s about time a book like this came along. October Song is essentially a detailed account of how the events after the October revolution led to the totalitarian and authoritative state of the Stalinist era. Be forewarned: this book feels longer than it is because of the dense subject matter, so it’s not for...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Flaming Lips’ Greatest Hits Volume 1 LP. As a general rule, I must confess that Best-Of compilations seldom thrill me. While the odd set does prove to be the rule’s exception (like Nirvana’s black album, the set that Morphine released several years ago, ChangesoneBowie, Hot Rocks and All For Nothing/Nothing For All turned out to all be great sets) and which does present the band in question at its best, most...
Mission Impossible Anthology Say what you will about Tom Cruise (go ahead, say it), but the man knows his way around an action movie. And he’s known for decades. Yes, he’s fallen from grace in the mainstream over the years, but that phenomenon is probably just American. It makes sense that when Paul F Tompkins met him, he referred to him as “the most famous person in the world.” And whether the movie script is garbage or...