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....

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 Globe and Mail: “Helped by...

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...

‘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...

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...

Edinburgh: Scotland brandishes its identity in a renovated national gallery Clothes that go beyond the leopard print...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

‘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...

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...

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...

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: ...

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....

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...

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,...

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,...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 to...

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....

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...

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...

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 MusicPhoto: The Stran...

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:  A statement from festival organizers,...

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...

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...

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...

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...