The Adventures Of Miss Flitt: Q&A With Designer Beth Hahn

By Chelsea Spear

In the late 2000s, knitwear designer Beth Hahn took the knitting world by storm with her series, The Adventures of Miss Flitt. Blending steampunk-friendly Victorian style, elegant knitwear designs, and an addictive narrative, the series follows the adventures of Emma Flitt as she traverses 19th century Brooklyn to find her sister. Her travels take her to seedy vaudeville theaters, pickpockets’ dens, and—in the most recent edition—to a most spooky séance. Ever the master storyteller, Hahn weaves her story through a series of simple-yet-gorgeous and thoroughly wearable cardigans, berets, overskirts, and other accessories.

On a chilly weekend in early January, I took virtual tea with Beth Hahn to find out more about her knitting endeavors.
(more…)

Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide To Punks On Film

By Less Lee Moore

Any marginalized subculture bristles at being misinterpreted on film. Then again, the punk subculture is by now so fragmented and unrecognizable, one hesitates to even attempt to define it, much less depict it on the screen.

Yet best friends Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly spent five years documenting each and every appearance of punks on film. They were inspired to undertake this monumental task after re-watching Penelope Spheeris’s quasi documentary Suburbia and then shortly thereafter, seeing Joysticks, a video arcade comedy from 1983, for the first time.
(more…)

Girl Talk, All Day

By Janet Brusselbach

It feels really good to be listening to free music that’s not only intended to be free, but that’s also really good.
(more…)

Pop Music: The Balkans

By Jim R. Clark

There has been quite a bit of interest in Balkan music lately due to the popularity of such bands as Gogol Bordello and Balkan Beat Box. If you’re one of those music nuts who’s heard everything, then hopefully this article can introduce you to something new. Here is a taste of some of the great musical offerings popular in the Balkans today. Maybe you will get hooked and want to start your own Manele band!
(more…)

Let’s Have Fun With Shonen Knife: A Video Interview

By Matt Keeley

I have been listening to Shonen Knife for literally half my life. I’m 30 now, so do the math! That being said, I’ve only been able to see them live twice: once on the Gokigen Tour in 2005, and recently for the new album Free Time. There’ve been line-up changes since the first time, but the sound is the same and just as good as it always was.

I was so thrilled to interview Shonen Knife before their show at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle—the first stop on the new US tour. I got to talk to all of them and ask Naoko Yamano about her songwriting, finding records in Japan when she was growing up, Japanese vs. English, writing about animals and food, and more, including the band’s recent experience playing in China. She even tells a scary story, seeing as it is the Halloween issue and all!
(more…)

It Came From Korea: My Super-Quick Intro To Korean Horror Films

By Jim R. Clark

Korean Horror Films, or K-Horror, are horror films made in South Korea. Not North Korea!

NOT THIS KOREA, THE OTHER ONE!

K-Horror films have enjoyed a surge in popularity starting around 1998, and subsequently winning worldwide acclaim in international film festivals and among horror film fans.
(more…)

Les Oraliens, Or How I Found The Scariest YouTube Video Ever

By Emily Carney

Obviously, I am more than familiar with what scares me the most in my real life; in my attempts to look for “scary” videos for this issue of Popshifter, I stumbled across a lot of scenes from horror films, bad attempts at karaoke, videos of methamphetamine addicts doing their “thing,” clips of “actor”/mess Paz de la Huerta, and of course Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video (which I never watched until I was in my twenties. . . no kidding).

However, I can’t say that any of these actually frightened me; at most, they were mildly amusing. So, I became blocked on what to do for this article. . . that is, until last night, when I discovered a masterpiece of an absolutely terrifying kids’ show.
(more…)

Black Sabbath: The Secret History Of Black-Jewish Relations

By Hanna

The goal of Black Sabbath: The Secret History of Black-Jewish Relations, a compilation released by the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation, was to “gather the US history of Black-Jewish relations into a selective pop musical guide.” While a lot has been published about black and Jewish musical influences, there hasn’t been an actual musical guide to Jewish music by black artists, and this is what the Society set out to accomplish.

Of course, it’s slightly less universalist in its approach than that; Black Sabbath focuses on the ’30s through the ’60s, a time of enormous racial oppression for both groups, and also a time when the cultural exchange between the two was especially great. This really shines through in this compilation; for all that it’s only one CD. It is an amazing effort and even more amazing in that it succeeds.
(more…)

À La Recherche du Brooding Perdu

By AJ Wood

When I was 20, I was crazy to get out of Los Angeles, the Valley, and all I had grown up with. Being a French and English major at college, I honed in on an escape available to me: enrolling in a program for university students to teach English to French school children in France. Applications were made in stuttering French, time was spent wondering, and then, I got my escape: I went to France, to the smallest town I had ever been in (where cows outnumbered people) to teach French. But: I was 20, and an English Major, which means I was a navel-gazer and I brooded. And I certainly did that too: I brooded in pidgin French: Je brood, tu broodes, nous avons broodé souvent.
(more…)

Bob Dylan’s “Wilderness Years”

By John Lane

“Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd. . . threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, ‘I gotta pick that up.’ So I picked up the cross and I put it in my pocket. . . And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona. . . I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. I said, ‘Well, I need something tonight.’ I didn’t know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said, ‘I need something tonight that I didn’t have before.’ And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross.”
—1979 Bob Dylan interview, from Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, by Clinton Heylin

(more…)