Today In Pop Culture: The Birth, Fall, And Rise Of The American Turntable

By Jeffery X Martin

This could be one of the most important days in pop culture history. Maybe, you should sit down and get something to drink. It is that monumental.

On this date in 1878, Thomas Edison, long may his name spoken before the gods, patented the phonograph. The world was never the same. That’s not hyberbole. That is a fact.

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Music Review: Santigold, 99¢

By Melissa Bratcher

Santigold’s follow up to 2012s dark Master Of My Make-Believe, is 99¢, a brighter, single-packed outing. She’s joined by a passel of new collaborators, including Rostam Batmanglij, Zeds Dead, Haze Banga, and Sam Dew. Her new tracks are inventive and fresh, exploring the current commercial nature of our culture. “We have no illusion that we don’t live in this world where everything is packaged. People’s lives, persona, everything, is deliberate, and mediated. It can be dark and haunting and tricky, and freak us out, but it can be also be silly and fun and we can learn to play with it,” she says.

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Retro Review: The Zombies, Odessey and Oracle

By Lenny Kaye

An Odessey in more ways than one, beyond the Y. These days the answer to that questioning why? is apparent, the oracular pronouncement of a classic album regarded as a touchstone for thoughtful, intelligent pop, as much a part of the last century’s sixties’ meritocracy as anything by their more famous peers. The irony is that by the time the Zombies made the album that is their crowning achievement, working in an Abbey Road Studio just recently vacated by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Pink Floyd’s mercurial Piper, and saw its last-gasp single suddenly break worldwide, the group had already begun to part ways, moving into the seventies on their own solo missions without the refraction of each other.

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Today In Pop Culture: When Cows Fly

By Jeffery X Martin

Sometimes you ask someone to do something and they scoff and say, “I’ll do that when cows fly!” And then you say, “Cows? I thought that was pigs. You’ll do that when pigs fly.” And the person says, “Pigs fly, cows come home. And I’m still not going to do that thing you want me to do, because of your poorly worded adynaton.” Then they take some of the Atomic Fireballs out of the shallow glass dish on your desk, and that’s not cool. You brought that candy from home.

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TV Review: The X-Files Episode 5, “Babylon”

By Jeffery X Martin

This week’s episode of The X-Files: The College Years gives us hope, but in the totally wrong way, leaving the viewer just as confused about the diretion and meaning of the entire series as Mulder and Scully are about the existence of God. Where the hell did this brilliant episode come from? Compared with everything else we’ve gotten from the reboot, this episode is as unexpected as hearing your toddler recite the Iliad in the original Latin while loading her diaper up during Yom Kippur.

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Today In Pop Culture: America Meets Modern Art And Hates It

By Jeffery X Martin

Art has never been easy to define. America spent a lot of time viewing art under the Classical model. Everything looks as it should. Humans look like humans, dogs look like dogs. It’s an almost prim way of looking at art. It has its place. It’s rational, realistic and relatively normal. Everything is what you expect it to be.

On this date in 1913, all that changed.

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Blu-Ray Review: Pieces

By Jeffery X Martin

Horror fans have known for decades that there is no other movie quite as delightfully crazy banana-pants as Pieces. With the infamous tagline, “You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre,” Pieces honestly attempts to be a straight-ahead horror film. It’s not.

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TV Review: Outsiders S1 E02, “Doomsayer”

By Laury Scarbro

The second episode of Outsiders, “Doomsayer,” continues to lay the groundwork for what we know will escalate into the violence and bloodshed we’ve come to expect from those living on the fringe butting heads with law enforcement agencies. Art imitates life after all. This episode has several points of interest, including our first look at the Circle of Elders, a “pitfight,” the beginnings of a love triangle, racism masquerading as innocence, corporate scheming, evidence tampering, and what appeared to be an oath of revenge.

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Retro Review: American Psycho

By Jeffery X Martin

Toronto residents! If you haven’t seen American Psycho in a while or if you’ve never seen it on the big screen, you’ll get your chance February 17 at the Carlton, where The MUFF Society is putting on a screening of the film at 9:00 p.m.

The quirky genius of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner’s film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial novel, American Psycho, lies in the generic nature of its characters and its excoriation of the wretched Yuppie movement of the 1980s. The movie is infused with comedy as dark as motor oil, and social commentary so sharp that watching the movie could cut your retinas. For a certain level of society, this is the definitive Eighties flick, even more cynical and astute than Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.

There is also an extended scene with a chainsaw, so that’s an automatic win.

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Music Review: The Westies, Six On The Out

By Tyler Hodg

The Westies’ sophomore album, Six on the Out, eclipses their previous work to set a new precedent, which prior to its release, seemed impossible. The Chicago husband and wife duo builds off of their folk-rock sound and successfully balances a grounded, yet expansive style–both musically and lyrically.

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