// Category Archive for: Issues

It’s a Mod Mod World

By Noreen Sobczyk

I’ve always had a tradition of becoming obsessed with something. Not obsessed in the peeping-around-in-someone’s-bushes way, nor by writing famous people letters, or boiling some guy’s bunny, but becoming deeply engrossed in one particular thing. Be it music, film, or a book, there’s always something that strikes me and becomes my most prized form of entertainment.

When VCRs were first released I would rent the same videos over and over, never tiring of them. One of the first movies I watched ad nauseum was The Who documentary, The Kids Are Alright. Something about the movie had me hooked, and I particularly enjoyed the early clips, fast forwarding through the fringed Woodstock period.

One word kept getting tossed about: Mods.
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Cinema Wasteland Movie And Memorabilia Expo 2009: Cleveland

By Julie Finley

Cinema Wasteland Movie And Memorabilia Expo is a bi-annual film convention that typically takes place during April and October in the Cleveland, Ohio Metro area. It’s put on by Cinema Wasteland, a mail order video service. The event started in 2000 as a response to the banality of most film conventions and trade shows. The idea was to combine the more interesting elements of this niche circuit, which would be: film screenings (mainly horror, indie, B-movie, or newer and older cult films); industry “special guests” (typically actors and crew from various films); and vendors selling films and memorabilia. It also has a masquerade element to it (as in, costumes are definitely encouraged). The idea was to be more engaging than just table after table of people selling crap.
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Squirrel Nut Zippers, Lost At Sea

By J Howell

Live records can be dicey propositions. All too often, in attempting to capture the exhilaration of “being there,” live albums fall flat, sounding muddy, noisy, and altogether bad. There are the rare exceptions, though, and while it’s not quite perfect, Squirrel Nut Zippers’ live return from a nine-year hiatus is one of the better live records in recent memory.
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Star Wars: The Story Of Ben Kenobi

By Christian Lipski

My pride has had terrible consequences for the galaxy.
—Obi-Wan Kenobi, Return of the Jedi

The Star Wars saga was designed by George Lucas to have the two comical droids, C-3PO and R2-D2, act as consistent observers through the years that make up the tale. Having a constant thread run through the movies gives the audience a known framework through which to consider the story. The saga also depicts a story of good versus evil, the Empire against the Republic. Perhaps most famously, it’s the story of Darth Vader’s rise and eventual defeat by his son Luke Skywalker.

But there’s another story thread running through the six movies that gets overlooked, and that’s the journey of Ben Kenobi, which in some ways is equally as epic as any of the others.
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Purl Britannia

By Chelsea Spear

For a land-locked American knitter, London seems like a fairyland of the fiber arts. Enterprising crafters hold impromptu knitting circles at pubs, on the Tube, and even at special cinema matinées where theatre owners keep the lights on for them (a practice poo-pooh’d by Alison Goldfrapp in a recent issue of Bust). Waggish knit-bloggers post self-written patterns for unusual objects from slices of cake to hand grenades to (blush) anatomically correct genitalia. While the cost of a round-trip plane ticket to Old Blighty could keep one in cashmere for a year, many of England’s finest yarn manufacturers make their products available to crafty Yanks with an Anglophilic streak.
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These Freaks We’re Talking About: Pulp

By Less Lee Moore

While many music fans were taking sides in the media-fabricated battle of the bands between Blur and Oasis in the early ’90s, there was one band who would eventually turn that war into a stalemate: Pulp.
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Air, Love 2

By Emily Carney

Gainsbourg (both Papa Serge and daughter Charlotte), Brel, Françoise Hardy, Jane Birkin, Dalida: these are all various names in French Pop that have made a massive impact even in the Anglo-Saxon world of music. Unfortunately in the United States, most French music is consigned to the “World Music” bin in record stores, guaranteeing that most of the record-buying populace won’t hear of it.

One notable exception is the French duo Air, comprised of Nicholas Godin and Jean-Benôit Dunckel (whose side project called Darkel yielded the lovely 2006 song, “At the End of the Sky”). This band has truly earned its place in the canon of French Pop.
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Not M-Miss M-M-Mitford: Brideshead Revisited, Revisited

By Hanna

When it came out in 1981, the Brideshead Revisited TV series starring Jeremy Irons was an event, and something remembered like a significant date in history by a lot of people who were alive then. Its greater cultural importance lay in the fact that it set the standard for all eccentric and twee undergraduate behavior, eventually becoming a staple for undergrad language students in the UK.

The TV series’ cult status arose from a situation that sounds like an urban legend, because it seems strange that people took it seriously at any point, and even stranger that they would try to copy a lifestyle that is presented as, at best, ambiguous in both the book and the series. But it’s true, and especially in the ’80s and ’90s, students took the TV series as a model for their lifestyles, co-opting with enthusiasm a philosophy of life that would most likely have excluded them from it on the basis of their origins, had it been real.
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Otis Redding, The Best: See & Hear

By Adam McIntyre

A new release of a refreshingly different kind, Otis Redding: Respect Live 1967 is the bonus DVD accompanying Shout Factory’s new best-of Otis Redding CD. Despite being presented sort of strangely, the DVD of a pair of performances from 1967 is mandatory viewing for a vast cross-section of music lovers.
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Electric Six “Rocks Ass” At Dante’s

Dick Valentine

By Christian Lipski
Photos by Deborah Lipski

Dante’s, Portland OR
November 13, 2009
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