End of Silence

You can skip listening to the new Metallica stuff. This picture pretty much says how it sounds. They can claim to have taken Rick Rubin’s advice and tried to get back to the mindset they had in the mid-eighties, but I don’t think shopping at Armani in flip flops is going to do it.

Scott Heim’s third novel, We Disappear, will be released this Tuesday. I met Scott at KGB in NYC just after his first novel, Mysterious Skin was published and we’ve kept up a correspondence over the years. His novels have always included some autobiographical elements, but We Disappear, a novel he’s been working on for the [...]

I’m a pretty big Coen brothers fan.  I haven’t liked all of their movies, but I consider Millers Crossing, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, Blood Simple, and Fargo to be some of the greatest films made in the last 25 years. No Country for Old Men shares more in common with Fargo and Blood Simple [...]

A childhood friend of mine, Carl Greenblatt, who’s worked on Spongebob Squarepants and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, has a new show premiering tonight on Cartoon Network
at 6:30pm CDT. It’ll re-run again at 8:30pm as well. If you like either of those shows, you should check this one out. Carl also created and [...]

I just read that drummer Max Roach died last night in New York at the age of 83. It’s been nearly 20 years to the day since I saw him at the Caravan of Dreams in Ft. Worth. I’ll never forget that performance. He was still impressive then at the age of 63. He outlasted [...]

I can’t let today pass without acknowledging it, since, like so many of my contemporaries, the premiere of Star Wars was a defining moment of my childhood.
When Star Wars was released on May 25th, 1977, I was 5 and a half years old. I can’t remember if we saw it opening day, but it was [...]

You’ve by now become aware of the media shit storm over Don Imus’s comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team and how they got him canned not only from his MSNBC simulcast, but got him booted from his long running radio show. Harvey Fierstein has a op-ed in the NY Times today. RudePundit echoes some [...]

The Internets are full of acknowledgments of the death of Kurt Vonnegut who died last night from complications of a fall he recently took. He did seem a bit frail and out of it the last time he was on The Daily Show to promote his last publication, a collection of essays called A Man [...]

There’s news this past week that both Slint and Shellac may have new albums out this year. Actually, Shellac’s new one, Excellent Italian Greyhound, will be released on June 5th according to Pitchfork.
According to SuicideGirls, Slint is working on new material and looking to release it on Touch N Go. They appropriately point out that [...]

Box office numbers for this past weekend:
#1 “Wild Hogs” ($38 million)
#2 “Zodiac” ($13.1 million)
#3 “Ghost Rider” ($11.5 million)
#4 “Bridge to Terabithia” ($8.5 million)
#5 “The Number 23″ ($7 million)
I don’t get out to very many movies these days and, as usual, the options are pretty piss poor to begin with, but the fact that Wild Hogs [...]