Written By Matthew Caron Conducted at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn NY Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is the songwriter behind Liturgy, a Brooklyn-based black metal group that doesn’t much resemble what most people think of when they think of black metal, if they are aware of the genre at all. This is because Liturgy are forging new ground in a mode Hunter refers to as Transcendental Black Metal, which dispenses with the nihilism and free-floating hate of Scandinavian black metal in favor […]
Reviewed: Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia
By Matthew Caron Whether you know it or not, Cambodian rock n’ roll from the 60s and 70s is some of the finest musical stuff on earth. A new CD compilation called Electric Cambodia is out on the market as we speak, and I have mixed feelings about it, but before I share those feelings I’m going to lay down a brief history lesson and explain why I think this music from decades ago in a little country you don’t […]
Reviewed: Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box By Jacques Boyreau
Fantagraphics Books, 200 p. Reviewed by Matthew Caron “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” So said Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, to a 1982 congressional panel investigating the legal quandaries presented by the VCR machine and the Record button in particular. The movie industry’s fear of VCR was soon proved baseless as home video […]
Reviewed: Not Quite Hollywood, Directed by Mark Hartley
Reviewed by Matthew Caron Released by Magnolia Pictures Just released to DVD this week is Not Quite Hollywood, a documentary examining Australia’s so-called Ozploitation flicks by director Mark Hartley. Not Quite Hollywood relates the story of filmmaking in Australia from its surprisingly late birth in the grindhouses and drive-ins at the tail end of the 1960s. Australia produced nothing at the beginning of that decade, but as international productions increasingly began to use the country as a location and employed […]
Roman Polanski: Unwanted & Undesirable
By Matthew Caron Roman Polanski was arrested yesterday in Switzerland and faces a likely extradition back to the United States after fleeing from sentencing at the conclusion of a rape trial in Los Angeles that lasted from the spring of’77 into February of ‘79. Initially charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious acts upon a child under 14 and furnishing a controlled substance – methaqualones, i.e. the ‘ludes he slipped into her champagne – to […]
Reviewed: Boston Noir, Edited by Dennis Lehane
Akashic Books, 207 Pages by Matthew Caron Boston Noir is the most recent entry in the expansive Akashic Noir Series, which anthologizes regional crime fiction by bundling together short works from best-selling authors with lesser-knowns and setting each story in a different neighborhood, helpfully plotted out on a map in the opening pages. Akashic Noir has so far covered points from Los Angeles to Wall Street to Trinidad with future editions dedicated to locales as diverse as Lagos and Orange […]
The World Is Josh Harris’s Toilet, Especially The Internet Or: Thoughts that are freaking me out after viewing We Live In Public, a new film by Ondi Timoner
By Matthew Caron We Live In Public, the new documentary feature by Ondi Timoner, is a downright worrisome piece of work that will have you consider its implications long after you’ve left the theater. Here is the story of dotcom entrepreneur Joshua Harris, a man once worth $80 million who now resides in Ethiopia, safely removed from the American Express people who would very much like to discuss his outstanding credit card balance. Long before his exile in Africa, Harris […]
Reviewed: In Heaven Everything Is Fine by Josh Frank with Charlie Buckholtz
Free Press, Reviewed by Matthew Caron In Heaven Everything Is Fine examines the “unsolved life” of Peter Ivers, a man who was seemingly many things to many people and who managed to be at the center of several major scenes without managing to become a star in his own right. Although the book’s subtitle reads as The Unsolved Life Of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theater, Ivers is correctly identified early on as being best remembered […]