Best Salsa
Readers’ Choice: Rosario’s
BYE BYE BLUES
Psychotherapist Suzanne Davis Thomas jokes that in the months following the birth of her first child, she and her husband resembled characters in the movie Dumb and Dumber: “He’d say, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Then I’d say, ‘I don’t know. What’s wrong with me?’ Then he’d say, ‘I don’t know. What’s wrong with you?’ and…
LIBERALS IN THE LONE STAR STATE
For the uninitiated, newly arrived, or Gen-Xer Texan, the notion of Texas liberalism sweeping across the state like a brushfire seems an absurd one — or perhaps just the improbable patter of a burnt-out Lone Star longhair. From the stifling political rigidity today, it’s hard to imagine how this state’s social order (institutional conservatism, latent…
CAMERA OBSERVANT
Murder and mayhem! Drunkenness and lust! Wild animals run amok! Even in its infancy, the cinema knew what it did best. The Movies Begin, a five-DVD box set from Kino International, sends the viewer back a century to witness the birth of motion picture technology; in this age of increasing technical complexity in the movies,…
CITIZEN BOGDANOVICH
Long after her involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army, Patricia Hearst continued to tarnish the family name. In a 1996 novel called Murder at San Simeon, she portrayed her own grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, as a killer. In that book, Hearst, homicidally jealous of anyone else’s interest in his mistress, actress Marion Davies, slays a…
A HOBO’S LIFE
Not long after the birth of the railroad, a new kind of wanderer was born. Vagrants have been around for as long as other people have stayed in one place and called it “home,” but the speed of the locomotive meant that a freight train hopper could shake the St. Louis dust off his feet…
Video & DVD
Digging through the gems in this set, you might be struck by certain parallels between the life of Gumby and the genesis of the movies themselves (as discussed in this week’s culture feature). The first films here, after all, send Gumby on a trip to the Moon that is an overt allusion to Georges Méliès’…
New Reviews
Crush “Entirely implausible” Dir. John McKay; writ. John McKay; feat. Andie MacDowell, Imelda Staunton, Anna Chancellor, Kenny Doughty, Bill Paterson, Caroline Holdaway, Josh Cole, Gary Powell (R) It’s not fair to pick on John McKay, writer/director of the new chick flick Crush, just because he’s a guy. After all, not only have men like George…
Still Playing
A Beautiful Mind “Pity, fear, and cognitive reverie” Dir. Ron Howard; writ. Akiva Goldsman, based on biography by Sylvia Nasar; feat. Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Vivien Cardone, Adam Goldberg, Judd Hirsch, Christopher Plummer (PG-13) Big Bad Love “A bluesy, blowzy ode to failure” Dir. Arliss Howard; writ. Arliss Howard and Jim…
Food & Drink Reviews
Before visiting Do¯¯ Brazillia, my only experience with a churrasco (Brazilian barbecue) was at a friend’s family reunion, where everyone casually sat on the beach and ate loads of meat, sweets, and potato salad off plastic plates. We each had our own sturdy knives, used to cut personal portions from the hunks of meat sizzling…
TRIBUTE: THE AVALANCHES
Very few records in the history of records have included, in a single album, samples from Madonna, Mama Cass, X-rated rapper Blowfly, an entire assortment of ship sounds, and a beat-boxing parrot. Okay, make that no records. Until now. Welcome to the wonderful, weird world of the Avalanches, a Melbourne, Australia, unit whose dance-based debut…
TWO TURNTABLES AND STUFF
Samplerific records — that is, discs that rely in a heavy and obvious way on clips from other albums — present listeners with an unusual accreditation problem. Listen to the Rolling Stones, and you know who played that riff on “Satisfaction,” but think back to the first time you heard, say, Beck’s Odelay (or the…
CD Reviews
Orchestra Baobab Pirates Choice (CD, Nonesuch/World Circuit) Over the last decade, lots of us have been introduced to some exciting African performers — people like Ali Farka Toure and Youssou ‘Dour, and most recently Cheikh Lô, whose indigenous musical styles are colored by Western music as much as ours were, a century ago, by theirs.…
THE UGLY AMERICAN
“They hate what America stands for. They despise freedom. They now know we love freedom, and we will defend our freedom with all our might.” — George W. Bush, March 28 You didn’t have to blink to miss it. Let the record show that President George W. Bush, reconstituted Cold Warrior and self-proclaimed defender of…
