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...