In with the new, on with the show

Top talents across the musical spectrum will heat up concert halls across the country this weekend. For some, a New Year’s gig will be a homecoming, a chance to reconnect with fans who were present at the creation. Some will parlay a good time with a good cause. But they’ll all be out in force in the service of Auld Lang Syne. MSN surveys the field

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Photo: Cage the Elephant: © Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage, via MSN

L.A.: Joe Bodolai dead at 63

The comedy writer who wrote for NBC’s Saturday Night Live in its infancy, and who was a producer of the successful Canadian comedy series The Kids in the Hall, was found dead on Monday in a hotel room, an apparent suicide. CBC News reports

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Globe and Mail: “Helped by the wide circulation of the remarkable last post Bodolai left on his blog, his death has emerged as an object lesson about life in an impossible profession.” Read the appreciation

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Photo: Via The Globe and Mail

Late night with ... the candidates

Used to be presidential hopefuls made the obligatory pilgrimage to the Sunday-morning politics talk shows to get their points across. Used to be. Now, candidates are heading for the younger audiences (and generally friendlier confines) of the late-night talk shows. Scott Collins of the Los Angeles Times reports. In Television

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Short Sharp Shock: Jon Huntsman, still rockin’ after all these years

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Photo: CBS/Worldwide Pants

‘The Muslims Are Coming’

In post-9/11 America, “Muslim” is too often perceived as a dirty word, with Islam’s adherents often subject to slurs, discrimination, or worse in the wake of that terrorist attack and the two wars that followed. But four Muslim comedians touring the Deep South are working to promote cultural understanding with open minds, courage and the ultimate weapon: self-deprecating and enlightening comedy from the standup stage. NBC’s Harry Smith reports:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Photo: Dean Obeidallah, from "Rock Center With Brian Williams" © 2011 NBC News

New Orleans: Hall of fame, hall of time

726 St. Peter Street: It’s survived the turbulence of two centuries, the musical tastes of a fickle and indifferent public, and even Hurricane Katrina. And Preservation Hall, now celebrating its golden anniversary year, persists in keeping traditional jazz — Dixieland, ragtime and the blues — very much alive. Tom Sancton reports for Vanity Fair. See Music

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Photo: © 2010 Preservation Hall Jazz Band

Edinburgh: Scotland brandishes its identity in a renovated national gallery

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Clothes that go beyond the leopard print

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Etta James terminally ill

Reuters: The live-in physician for the three-time Grammy-winning R&B singer said in a California newspaper interview this week that James, 73, is terminally ill with leukemia, dementia and kidney disease, among other illnesses. Her most recent album, The Dreamer, was released in November. More from Reuters here

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Photo: Reuters/Fred Prouser

Christopher Hitchens dies

The rapier literary and conversational wit, masterful political critic, relentless all-night party animal and perhaps the greatest essayist of our time, died on Thursday in Houston, Texas, of complications of esophageal cancer. He was 62. In a career of sterling essays, books, editorials and TV appearances, Hitchens called a multitude of emperors on the absence of their clothes, from British monarchs to Henry Kissinger, from Bill Clinton to God.

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To Wiliam Grimes of The New York Times, Hitchens was “a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell” and “a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.” More in Word

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The Daily Beast: Andrew Sullivan recalls his best memory of Hitchens

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Vanity Fair: His last essay

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Photo: Hitchens 2007: Mark Mahaney for The New York Times

Pop-ups: Get ‘em before they’re gone

From a Manhattanized version of a downhome general store to a computer kiosk at a major airport, from express versions of high-volume retailers like Toys R Us and Target to quirky craftsman boutiques, holiday-only “pop-up” stores are becoming a big part of the retail landscape. At MSN, Maureen Sullivan offers a national survey of the ultimate holiday limited edition -- the temporary store. 

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Photo: Jeff Schear/Men's Journal

NYC: Bearden’s centennial

The bold, visionary artist Romare Bearden was born 100 years ago, and the U.S. art world is marking the occasion. But institutions in the city, from the Schomburg to the Met, are celebrating the collagist’s centenary with vibrant retrospectives. “In Bearden’s embracing art all borders are down — between personal and universal, town and country, history and myth,” writes Holland Cotter in The New York Times. “Africa, Europe and the Americas too are borderless. Bearden is artist in chief of the modern cosmopolis, griot in residence of the global village. All hail.” More in Art

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Photo: via WFAE.org

Occupy the comics!

Writer Alan Moore and artist David Lloyd, creators of the anti-totalitarian comic classic V for Vendetta, are backing the global Occupy movement, the mass phenomenon that’s drawn spiritual and iconographic inspiration from the comic they first published in 1982. For Moore, the Occupiers represent a chance to refresh last century’s spirit of activism — a spirit he’s happy to help revive. Scott Thill of Wired reports. See Word

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Photo: Alan Moore: Gavin Wallace/Hoax

Seattle: Christmas with attitude

Three wise men, babe in a manger, blah blah blah. The holiday season always unleashes the usual tales of the Nativity. The creators of Wisemen would beg to differ. The musical, staged at ACT Theatre, puts a wild contemporary comic gloss on the story we know. “The tone ranges from witty to substantive to crass, always with the intent to skewer the commercialization of Christmas,” says Margaret Friedman in Seattle Weekly. More in Stage

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Photo: wisemenmusical.com

Rediscovering Georges Méliès

The movie special effects we take for granted today had their origins with a wildly inventive filmmaker, magician and visionary around the dawn of the 20th century. The director of more than 500 fanciful films, Méliès didn’t push the envelope on movie magic; he invented it. Thanks to Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s new and widely hailed 3-D family film, children of all ages are being awakened to the work of a true pioneer. Susan King of the Los Angeles Times reports. See Movies

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Image from A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune) (1902) by Georges Méliès. Scope of copyright (author’s life plus 70 years) expired in 2008; image is now in the public domain in the United States

‘Tis the CD season

If you’re one of the 152 million early adopters of holiday shopping expected in stores or online this weekend, you know the countdown’s on for the Perfect Gift. For the music lover(s) on your list, the classic CD box set may be just the ticket (assuming your giftee hasn’t fully converted to the dark side of music as ones and zeroes). CNet blogger Steve Guttenberg surveys holiday-timed box sets from Pearl Jam, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix and more at The Audiophiliac

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Pearl Jam vs. and Vitalogy box set: Legacy Recordings

DeLillo’s uneasy overview

Writing in his signature intense, compact style, Don DeLillo has always seen the spaces we ignore, the interstitials that knit together our anxious, fractious modern world. Now the celebrated author, whom New York Times Book Review critic Liesl Schillinger calls “a master transmitter of American zeitgeist anxiety, even in times when there was less to be anxious about,” is back with his latest. The Angel Esmeralda, a collection of nine stories written over 32 years, reveals how DeLillo stays current — cataloging what Schillinger calls “the enduring adaptability of human insecurities.” See Word

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Photo: © Joyce Ravid

Paul Motian dies at 80

One of the greatest drummers of the modern jazz era died Wednesday in Manhattan, after suffering from a blood and bone-marrow disease. A contemporary of Bill Evans, Motian had a career whose span encompassed work with musicians from Stan Getz to Keith Jarrett, from Lee Konitz to Greg Osby. Ben Ratliff surveys the life and career of a musician who was, Osby said, “an economist: every note and phrase and utterance counted.” More in Music

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Photo: © T. Bruce Wittet (via drummerworld.com)

Beijing: Weiwei targeted again

Ai Weiwei, considered China’s most celebrated artist, is once again the victim of government harassment as Chinese officials ratchet up a new campaign to silence a man known for speaking his mind. CBS News’ Celia Hatton reports:

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NYC: Opposites attract, and repel

Kim Cattrall shines with style and sass in a revival of Private Lives, Noël Coward’s 1930 comedy of marital love and combat. For Ben Brantley of The New York Times, the production just opened at the Music Box Theater “convincingly stakes a claim not only for Ms. Cattrall as a skillfully pliable actress but also for the bubbly pleasures forever on tap” in this romantic classic. In Stage

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Photo: Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Some Stones

Fifty years?!? Hard to believe the Rolling Stones, the band we love (or, for some, love to hate) are looking toward their golden anniversary next year. But facing a milestone birthday that suggests more candles than cake, the Stones are looking forward and back at the same time. A reissue of the 1978 classic Some Girls is out next week. There’s even talk of a tour. Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times sits down with Mick and Keith. More in Music

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Spinner: Keith Richards celebrates his reinvention as a writer, and weighs the future of the Rolling Stones — maybe with old hands (Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor) coming along.

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Photo: via Spinner

AU/NZ: Big Day Out sets 2012 lineup

Noel Gallagher, Bassnectar, Das Racist and The Vaccines are just some of the acts announced Wednesday in the second big reveal for the next (somewhat downsized) BDO concerts, set to begin in Auckland, New Zealand on Jan. 20, with later shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, through Feb. 5. Other acts previously announced include Soundgarden, Kanye West, Kasabian, Foster the People, Battles and My Chemical Romance. The BDO site has more details.

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Logo: Big Day Out

L.A.: Heavy D dies at 44

Heavy D (Dwight Errington Myers), the hip hop legend whose hits with Heavy D & the Boyz helped redefine the genre in the late 1980s and early 90’s, died Tuesday in Los Angeles, at the painfully young age of 44. No cause of death was immediately determined. Alvin Blanco, writing in The Root, recalls the style and career triumphs of “the rapper you could bring home to Mama.” More in Music

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See the video, from last month’s BET Awards show, to see Hev in full flow, at his lady-killing best, at the top of his game.

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Photo: From BET Awards 2011

Lou Reed + Metallica = WTF?

Lulu, the insanely long (87-minute), two-disc collaboration by two masters of metal machine music, is a fascinating thing by virtue of its creators alone. For The Stranger’s Sean Nelson, this mashup doesn’t make a lick of frickin’ sense. “But simply to call the record poor is both too easy and weirdly beside the point. Its utter unlikeliness puts it well beyond the reach of critical judgment and into the realm of fascination, simply because it exists.” See Music

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Photo: Anton Corbijn

Joan Didion’s Blue Period

Perhaps our most incisive chronicler of the power and agonies of the family life, Joan Didion has also brought an unsparing eye to her own life and times. Her new memoir, Blue Nights (out today), examines the life and death of her daughter, Quintana. For Susan Cheever, writing in The Daily Beast, the book is “a tragic story that is compelling as a thriller.” And it almost didn’t see the light of day. Below, Didion in her own words:

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Read part of the Cheever interview in Word

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Photo: Blue Nights cover: Alfred Knopf

R.E.M.: Every goodbye ain’t quite gone

Five weeks after announcing their breakup after a 31-year career, the trailblazing band from Athens, Ga., is releasing Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage, a retrospective spanning the band’s days as a darling of college dorm dwellers in the indie era and its time in arena mode, as one of the biggest bands in the world (It’s available for preorder through Amazon). More than just a random collection of odds and sods, the two-CD set is a righteous sampling of their most popular tracks, some we’d frankly forgotten, and three new tracks recorded this summer with Jacknife Lee at the boards. Check the video below. 

They’re gone five weeks and we miss ‘em already.

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Photo: R.E.M./Athens Ltd.

We, the Living

Colson Whitehead’s new novel Zone One pits humans against zombies in a harrowing future New York City. With its wry perspective and beautifully-wrought prose, it’s also Whitehead's love letter to the city of his birth, a place beloved “even with her eyes blackened and her teeth knocked out.” Paul Constant of The Stranger reviews the author's latest. See Word

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Photo: Erin Patrice O'Brien

Spielberg on the high dive

The three-time Oscar-winning director who once observed that “I was born a nervous wreck” is at the helm of not one but two big holiday films. Writing in The New York Times, Michael Cieply finds they're  movies whose creator and characters have at least one thing in common: Fear. See Movies

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Photo: Andrew Cooper/DreamWorks Pictures

Fear & loathing with HST

Johnny Depp recalls his first encounter with Hunter S. Thompson: “...I see the door spring open, and I see sparks! I realized there was a large-ish, three-foot cattle prod and a Taser gun, and the sea began to part — people were leaping and hurling themselves out of the path of the mayhem that was approaching ...” The actor stars in the film of Thompson’s The Rum Diary, opening Friday. Writing in The Daily Beast, he opens up about his time with the Gonzo firebrand, “the very definition of a Southern gentleman.” See Word

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Photo: Hunter Thompson, June 2003: Getty Images via Yahoo! Sports

UK: Bard wars

The Roland Emmerich film Anonymous (starring Rhys Ifans and Vanessa Redgrave) opens on Friday; it’s sure to further the long debate over whether William Shakespeare ever really wrote the plays he’s credited for. In England, towns and Bard scholars have been protesting the film’s revisionist storyline in various ways. More at BBC News

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Have we all been played?

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Anonymous opens in theaters Friday

Moscow: An American in Russia

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov famously went in the other direction, of course — from Russia to the West. But on Nov. 4, South Dakota native and most recently New Yorker David Hallberg, breaks in with the celebrated Bolshoi Ballet as its first foreign principal dancer. More in Stage

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Photo: Still from BBC News video

Pardon the disappearance

When in the course of human events it’s necessary to take a break … you take one. A long one. To tend to family business. To recharge the batteries. To think about how to make this thing better. We’re back, and hoping you will be too.

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Nick Ashford dies at 69

The distinctively soulful singer, and half of the Ashford & Simpson singer-songwriter tandem whose songs and recordings constitute many strands of the DNA of classic R&B, died late Monday at a hospital in New York, of throat cancer. Steve Jones of USA Today reports. In Music

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Photo: Via TheRoot.com

Frances Bean Cobain, in vivo

As observances of the 20th anniversary of Nirvana are set for Seattle and elsewhere next month, amid a rush of 90’s revivalism, the scion of grunge icons Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love “has formally arrived as major part of the cultural dialogue,” Rolling Stone’s Colleen Nika reports. “As confirmation, two of the most admired photographers in fashion ostensibly presaged (and ratified) the occasion.” See Fashion

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Photo: © 2011 Rocky Schenck/rockyschenck.com

China’s soft power, on the screen

“China is keen on promoting its soft power,” one observer said of the new move by the world’s most populous nation to cultivate its clout in the world of movies. Sino-American film productions are increasing, the better to serve a homegrown market that’s adding more than 1,400 cinema screens a year. Frederik Balfour and Ronald Grover of Bloomberg.com report. See Movies

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Taxing nightlife in Seattle

Pay to play: A recently imposed tax on any nightclubs with a dance floor could well put some of the city’s more established and popular businesses out of business. Cienna Madrid of The Stranger reports. See Music

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Photo: The Stranger

Pukkelpop: The aftermath

BBC News documents the eyewitness reports of people at the Pukkelpop Festival in Belgium, where five people died after a stage collapse caused by a freak storm. Read the reports here; below, a video on the disaster from Guardian UK: 

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A statement from festival organizers, announcing the end of the 2011 festival

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Image: Guardian UK via YouTube

NYC: Pushing up on black style

For Travis Gumbs and Joshua Kissi, African American style isn’t what it used to be. The New York bloggers and entrepreneurs are pushing back against the hegemonic impact of hiphop fashion with what Jon Caramanica of The New York Times calls “a return to style as a source of dignity.” More in Fashion

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Photo: Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

L.A.: Eisa Davis’ double life

The Pulitzer-finalist playwright, Obie-winning actress and (soon-to-be) fixture on prime-time television brings her life experiences to a range of roles as well as a fascination with communication and language. Jasmine Elist reports for the Los Angeles Times. More in Stage

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Photo: Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times

Boston/Cambridge, Poetry Cities

From now until Aug. 13, Beantown and neighboring Cambridge lay claim to being the capitals of the poetry world as the National Poetry Slam begins, back in the area for the first time since 1992. More than 300 poets have arrived for the five-day festival celebrating poetic expression; they’re set to hold forth at various locations, from Harvard to a lounge in Cambridge, from the Berklee School of Music to MIT. All hail the spoken painting.

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Boston.com calendar of events and ticket information

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An overview of the scene from the Boston Herald

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Photo: Iyeoka Okoawo: Boston Herald

Spike Lee 25 years on

She’s Gotta Have It, his brash, unconventional first feature, was released on Aug. 8, 1986, establishing the director as a new and maverick voice in American filmmaking. A quarter century later, Spike Lee still maintains the outsider’s perspective despite being a master of the inside game. Michael E. Ross looks at what was and what’s next. See Movies

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Salamisha Tillet of The Root on She’s Gotta Have It as the first warning shot of a revolution in black American film

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Photo: David Shankbone, republished under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license