Music Stories The Know’s barroom half is a ramshackle container for cheap beer. Its restrooms appear to idolize CBGB’s storied stalls. The adjoining show space might as well be a basement. The club’s ro   More

Music THE ELEVEN BEST ALBUMS (MORE OR LESS) OF THE YEAR In alphabetical order after number one... 1. Something Fierce, Don’t Be So Cruel (Dirtnap)
I wanted to keep this year-end business strictly alphabetical, but 2011 happened to have a clear winner, and of course Portland’s Dirtnap released it. I listened to Don’t Be So Cruel more than any other al...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories 1. Michael Shannon, Take ShelterMichael Shannon comes to us from another realm, a dark corner of the universe we’d do well to leave alone. His face, a likeness of which will be carved into the s   More

Music USE YOUR ILLUSION I:
I saw Guns N’ Roses for the first time in July of 1991, in Mountain View, California. I’d just turned eleven. Use Your Illusion was still a few months away. My mom took me. I don’t mean that my long-suffering mother begrudgingly accompanied her Guns-loving eldest to a big rock show as a parental duty. No, she was the cock rock fan in the family, the one who dug Warr...   More

Music 2011 was such a strong year for punk sounds that I’ve decided to devote every column this month to picking its corpse clean. I’m kicking off this retrospective stretch with lists from the guys behind three of my favorite record labels: Ken Cheppaikode (Dirtnap), Mike Crow (Inimical) and David Rose (Bulkhead). They put out some of the best punk music of 2011, and I’ve devoted column space to each in the past few months. I expect to spill still more music geek drool on their stuff before the year’s over. And with that, I will turn it over to Ken, Mike and David and their perspectives on 2011’s best records.
   More

Music Cynical I may be, but I’m highly suggestible too, so I was not all that surprised to wake up on Black Friday with a hankering to buy some shit I really didn’t need. I do believe I’d fallen asleep to CNN’s non-stop cheerleading for post-Thanksgiving gluttony. But I don’t know. I was probably just looking for any excuse to hit up Best Buy for a Blu-Ray player that could stream Hulu. I alre...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Lars von Trier’s restless formal experimentation makes him difficult to pin down, but the Dane responsible for Dancer in the Dark and Dogville tends toward an obsession with wretchedness. The result   More

Music “They must think I’m a waste
Who cares
No I don’t care
Cause it feels so fucking incredible to be alive”
—Screeching Weasel, “Good Morning” It’s a slow holiday week, a time to get your cockles hot with friends and family or your rocks off with whatever lonely soul you can find to distract you from the cold misery that even now is inching ever closer to the dead ro...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Martin Scorsese’s decision to helm the 3-D adaptation of Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret seemed an odd and possibly addled one at first blush. But look at Sco   More

Music Gnarcotics Unanimous, the latest release from local cassette collective Gnar Tapes, is one gnasty mother: 34 bands from all over the damn place trot out 34 gnew gnumbers in gninety gnoisy minutes. Ugh. Gnope, gnot gonna be able to keep that gnonsense up. Plain-ish English (mostly) then: this gnation-spanning (last one, I swear!) compilation is a monster, and it just so happens that my favorite...   More