Beastie Boys Duo recall Adam Yauch's creative spirit: "Yauch was great at lacking fear" Beastie Boys Michael "Mike D" Diamond and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz expressed their immense grief over the loss of bandmate Adam "MCA" Yauch in online statements days after the musician and filmmaker's death on May 4, but the surviving members of the group have shared more specific memories of living and working with their friend of three decades in the new issue of Rolling Stone. Asked to explain where Yauch, who died at age 47 after a three-year fight with salivary gland cancer, fit into their creative process, both men say MCA was the force that challenged them to experiment and see things from different perspectives. "Like the cover of Paul's Boutique: ... Continue reading →
Sometimes, late at night, I Google Latrell Sprewell. I don’t really know why. Some vague longing. It’s been going on since he slipped out of the N.B.A., and the public eye, in 2005. At first, I was looking for news of his return. After a while, I was looking for any news at all. One would have thought that the recent first-round matchup between the Heat and the Knicks would have been the occasion for an update, but this was not the case. Sprewell’s playing days ended abruptly. The cause was a self-inflicted wound. He broke his hand under mysterious circumstances while he was a Knick, but this was more symbolic and therefore more damaging: he blithely turned down a three-year contract of twenty-one million ... Continue reading →
The Playoff Eclipse ChroniclesThe Sports Guy lived to tell the tale of six playoff games in 74 hours, with a street-closing bike race thrown in for good measureBy Bill Simmons on May 22, 2012"You're gonna write about this, right?" Someone asked me that during halftime of Sunday night's Clippers-Spurs game. We were in the home stretch at that point: In the previous 74 hours, the same spot in downtown Los Angeles had somehow hosted six playoff games, two elimination games, two doubleheaders and an allegedly important cycling race. If that wasn't enough, we also witnessed a solar eclipse and Antonio Cromartie's controversial halftime orgy with the Clippers dance squad. I only made one of those things up. "Absolutely," I said. "I'm definitely writing about this." ... Continue reading →
Facebook may not make you rich, but will it make you a narcissist? It can feel that way, when your usually-shy self is posting personal status updates, tagging yourself in photos and amassing more friends than you probably need. Recent studies have found that avid users exhibit narcissistic traits and that people with high levels of narcissism were more likely to spend more than an hour a day on the social-media site and tended to post digitally enhanced photos that made them look good. More related to this story But the relationship is still not fully understood. As New York Times writer Tara Parker-Pope points out, “What the research doesn’t answer is whether Facebook attracts narcissists or turns us into them.” She suggests another recent ... Continue reading →
If you've taken a look at the lineup for the 2012 edition of Detroit's Movement festival, you'll know that it's a typically strong lineup with some of the most intriguing names in electronic music both local and international. But the festival is only a week away, and by this point it's a weekend-long celebration as much as about the plentiful afterparties as it is about the festival. Events this year rival the festival itself in terms of star-studded lineups and knockout parties, and if you're impatient for the festival to start there's even a whole round of 'em on the Friday night before Movement comes to life on Saturday afternoon. There's so many parties, in fact, that if you try to figure it out once ... Continue reading →
There was a tremendous punk rock scene happening then. Plug In Gallery had just started up in the Old Market Square area -The Lithium Cafe - there was this great collision taking place between underground music and this new kind of post modern art that was coming up.—Kevin Mutch, author of "Fantastic Life" So - you've picked up the latest edition of The Best American Comics and the setting of one of the excerpts seems a little familiar.The characters are drinking Old Stock and O.V. - in stubbies no less - and legendary Winnipeg punk band Personality Crisis is performing on a stage in a cafe.Wait a second - that's the Blue Note Cafe.What's that former peg city hipster institution doing in the pages of ... Continue reading →
Image credit: Phillip Toledano Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow ... Continue reading →
