Checking in with Tate Pray

"I just started a series of paintings. They’re shape paintings based on the negative space shapes of Sol LeWitt’s sculptures—they’re just shapes. Conceptually, I think I started cutting them out and putting them in my notebook maybe about a year ago. I’m basically just living with it to see if I want to move forward. I think it’s in keeping with what I’ve been doing, basically trying to find an avenue into painting through sculpture."

The DNA of Blues

Martin Scorsese once said that the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré’s music constituted “the DNA of blues.” That puts Vieux Farka Touré next in line, not only as Ali’s son, but as the heir to a musical tradition that reintroduced the American blues to its West African origins.  Vieux Farka Touré’s latest album, The Secret, […]

Where art thou?

Its ending reportedly tampered with since Sundance, the indie-scented dysfunctional-family comedy Our Idiot Brother winds up flattering its complacent middle-class audience, but not for any real reason—there’s no medicine going down with this sugar. To try and imagine what the Weinstein Company might have worried about is to find oneself quoting the movie’s own doofus parolee hero: “You know what? You know what? Wow.”

Boldly Going

“Star Trek: The Next Generation”  Friday 8am-8pm, Saturday 1-6am, SyFy It’s Labor Day weekend, which means two things: Summer is officially over, and there’s nothing on TV until the new season starts next week. So why not spend the holiday simultaneously going to the past and the future with this “Next Generation” marathon. “Next” originally […]

Definitely less

By modern movie standards, the polite action comedy of bumbling criminals seems awfully quaint. Might some refreshment be had from the rude slacker comedy of utterly imbecilic criminals? Aziz Anasari (left) and Jesse Eisenberg star in the chuckle-worthy bank heist flick 30 Minutes or Less. Not from this one. Given the actual 2003 incident in […]

The king of dusty corners

When Stephen Steinbrink thinks of Charlottesville, he thinks of a trip to a swimming hole in torrential downpour, and how “drunk” locals are on the good shows that come to town. After a string of tour dates was canceled in 2009, the Arizona songwriter lingered here for a few days and played in some of […]

The end is nigh

“Buried Treasure” Wednesday 8pm, Fox You may have noticed that our country’s not doing so hot at the moment. We’ve got a $14.5 trillion national debt. We just finished that whole debt-ceiling drama and had the resulting drop in credit rating. And unemployment is around 9.1 percent nationwide. The average American family is hurting, and […]

Put it out, take it back

“The Hour” Wednesday 10pm, BBC America Likely encouraged by the critical and ratings success of AMC’s “Mad Men,” the period drama has seen a major re-emergence in the past couple of years. You’ve got “Boardwalk Empire” on HBO, “Pan Am” and “The Playboy Club” set to debut this fall, and this new British spy thriller […]

For starters

As a title, Beginners sounds a note of humility, albeit self-consciously. Certainly that makes it the right name for writer-director Mike Mills’ touching, autobiographical new film. In it, a commitment-phobic graphic artist is supportive but bewildered when his father comes out of the closet at 75—just in time to face a terminal illness.

Checking in with Sarah White

When I’m writing I usually pull lyrics from proverbs. I also scribble a lot in notebooks and journals. I might show the recording to the guys in the band and we’ll rock on it for a while.