Midwest power pop worth flying in for will be taking place in the suburbs of Chicago on Saturday, May 4. Shoes was one of the first groups ever to appear on MTV, and their basement-made debut, Black Vinyl Shoes, was dubbed by no less an expert than Ira Robbins “one of the finest home-brewed Read More
Michael Pollan’s new book, Cooked, has just been published, and to celebrate, the rangy, brilliant food writer hosted 100 friends at the Morgan Lehmann Gallery underneath the High Line on West 22nd Street. Why there? So that his guests could be surrounded by the stunning paintings of Judith Belzer—his wife—whose electrifying depictions of cities Read More
As The Observer—and every other news outlet—has been scrambling to report in detail, the city is abuzz over the high-profile indictment and arrests of figures in an art-world money laundering scheme involving seven-figure card games, international sports betting rings and mixed martial arts fighters who played the Rocky Balboa role of debt collector. Read More
You know how you’re supposed to be suicidal when someone refers to Robert De Niro as “Bobby” because you know you’ll never be that intimate with someone so vitally important to the cultural life of the city? Well, the same is true of Robert Redford, who was called to the stage by Sony Pictures honcho Tom Read More
Tim Ferriss is the kind of guy who’d be easy to hate—speaks five languages, won a national kickboxing title, ranked seventh on Newsweek’s Digital 100 Power Index for 2012, everything he touches sells a million copies, does it all working just a few hours a week, and he’s great-looking to boot—if he weren’t so damn Read More
VICE debuts a new documentary produced by Erin Carr about the way 3D printing—and specifically its potential to create firearms and other weapons—is changing the nature of the debate about gun control and even about intellectual property and creativity. With a great title—Click. Print. Gun.—and a red-hot subject matter, the film is certain to be a Read More
The story of Passover includes four children, one who is wise, one wicked, one foolish, and one who does not even know how to ask questions. Any large family is bound to have a few of each, but a couple weeks ago, the Bronfman family came together to celebrate a truly lovely new Haggadah, the Read More
I’ve been a fan of this newspaper for more than 20 years and its editor for less than three months. One of the things that people keep asking from me—demanding, actually—is that most noxious of modern conventions, “the elevator pitch.” Any idea that requires more than 30 seconds to explain is anathema in our 140-character Read More
One of the reasons I don’t see live music much anymore (in addition to all the reasons that come with being a grumpy old tossup, such as “it’s too damn loud”) is that the era of smartphones has undone the very reason live performance exists. The notion of a small, sweaty room devoting its full Read More
Bob Mould is the Ben Franklin of indie pop. Founding member and driving force of ’80s punk trio Hüsker Dü (whose influence resonates today through Foo Fighters and Ryan Adams), Mould has succeeded at everything he’s tried, and he’s tried a lot. Credits include the post-Hüsker band Sugar (classic record Copper Blue), solo hits including Read More
