California
Beautiful Boy review - well-acted but a slogFriday, 18 January 2019
The tortuous road to addiction and back again – or maybe not – makes for a faintly tedious experience in Beautiful Boy, notwithstanding the committed performances of an A-list cast. On the road to his second consecutive Oscar... Read more... |
CD: Aloe Blacc - Christmas FunkWednesday, 12 December 2018
Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III – Aloe Blacc – is one shrewd dude. He's extremely adept at reaching out beyond the confines of his natural beat of funk and soul, whether that's credible (covering The Velvet Underground's “Femme Fatale”) on his... Read more... |
Michael Connelly: Dark Sacred Night review - a pairing of loner detectivesSunday, 04 November 2018
The master of the Southern California police procedural is back. In Dark Sacred Night Michael Connelly puts centre stage his oldest creation, the Vietnam veteran turned original, ethical policeman who marches to his own moralities, Hieronymous – aka... Read more... |
David Crosby & Friends, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, review - still spine-tingling at 77Wednesday, 19 September 2018
“This, quite possibly, could be a really good night,” declared David Crosby. He’s a couple of songs into this show, one of only two UK dates on the tour promoting his current album Sky Trails. Looking trim, beaming and in impeccable voice, the 77-... Read more... |
CD: Tanukichan - SundaysSunday, 22 July 2018
Shoegaze was only a moment really, a scene that flared briefly as the Eighties drew to a close. The music press – the “inkies” - used the term to describe bands, usually flop-fringed with lazy posture, whose heads would hang as they played gigs,... Read more... |
CD: DevilDriver - Outlaws 'Til the End Vol 1Sunday, 01 July 2018
The heartland of America burns a special candle for two genres in particular: country music and heavy metal. What’s curious, then, is that there’s not been more cross-breeding between the styles. On a cartoon level, this can be attributed to one... Read more... |
10 Questions for Artist Brett GoodroadFriday, 06 April 2018
Brett Goodroad (b. 1979) is an artist and painter based in San Francisco. Born and raised in rural Montana, in 2012 he received the Tournesol Award, overseen by Sausalito’s Headland Center for the Arts. The Award recognises one Bay Area painter each... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Chris HillmanSunday, 04 February 2018
In 1976, when his first solo album Slippin’ Away was released, Chris Hillman could look back on being a founder member of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, two of America’s most important bands. He had also played alongside former members... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Complete Monterey Pop FestivalFriday, 22 December 2017
The Monterey Pop Festival in California in mid-June 1967 was a key event in the history of festival culture. There had been music festivals before in the US – Newport Folk springs to mind – but Monterey marked the point where the whimsical trend for... Read more... |
Jaron Lanier: Dawn of the New Everything review - pioneer of virtual reality tells his storySunday, 17 December 2017
Jaron Lanier has quite a story to tell. From a teenage flute-playing goat-herd in New Mexico to an “intense dreamer”, and a maths student capable of arguing, about films for example, with “supremacist. Borgesian flair”, then onwards and upwards,... Read more... |
Blue Planet II, BBC One review - just how fragile?Monday, 11 December 2017
The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter... Read more... |
DVD: The WorkSaturday, 02 December 2017
“Doing work” is the phrase that inmates of California’s New Folsom Prison have adopted to describe the group psychotherapy sessions that have been run there for more than 15 years now. Given that Folsom is a Level-4 penitentiary, in which murder is... Read more... |
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