Music lost a pioneering force today with the death of Malcolm McLaren, the British musician, promoter and manager most famous as the mastermind behind the Sex Pistols. A life-long Londoner, McLaren got his start with a little shop called SEX along with partner Vivienne Westwood. Located in the fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, SEX (later Seditionaries) became the official HQ of ... Read More »
Stick your nose into a copy of our “Music + Travel Worldwide: Touring the Globe Through Sounds and Scenes” and you’ll find at least a dozen global destinations, each of them home to a particular strain of music, a subculture supported by a localized cluster of clubs, record stores, venues, and hangouts. But though places like Melborne’s Pony club ... Read More »
So, it was not without some measure of child-like excitement that we flipped through the recently released shots of the soon-to-open Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at the Universal Orlando Resort in Florida. There’s just something about J.K. Rowling’s creation—the books, the movies, the toy wands—that turns even skeptical muggle adults into wide-eyed kiddies. Certainly, the pictures of ... Read More »
At London’s Barbican, zebra finches play guitar for the pleasure of museum goers—play “Freebird”, dudes! (Guardian UK) Only 33 years after its last use, France has opened a museum dedicated to their favorite method of capital punishment, the guillotine. (Guardian) If you’re liable to blush or giggle at the sight of giant wooden weewees and whowhodillys, you ... Read More »
Long the king of Manhattan-based comedy movies, Woody Allen returned to his native island for last year’s “Whatever Works” after a five-film, five-year stand shooting films in England and Spain. Alas few of the New Yorkers who usually turn out for the Brooklyn-born director’s real-estate-porn and upper-class-ennui smirkfests bought tickets to the critically panned “Whatever Works”, leaving it with ... Read More »
If you wanted to check out Polish artist Miroslaw Balka’s massive “How It Is” installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern but can’t make it to London… well… there’s an app for that. (SlamXHype) 10,000 music fans re-enacted AC/DC videos, sang, danced, and generally had a good ol’ time as they choked the streets of Melbourne late ... Read More »
South African artist Pieter Hugo gives us a somewhat disturbing tour of Nollywood—that’s the Nigerian version of Hollywood for all you Nollywood novices out there. (Vulture) Turns out that both Matt Damon and Jake Gyllenhaal turned down the lead role in “Avatar”, most likely because they read the script. (SlashFilm) If you need to get to Oakland ... Read More »
No sooner did we mention the fact that record-company giant EMI is reacting to several quarters of low returns by putting the legendary Abbey Road Studios on the market than a group of interested parties left a notice about a grassroots effort to buy and preserve the place where most of the Beatles’ catalog and dozens of other genre-changing ... Read More »
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