"Musically speaking, I'm borderline-obsessed with Grizzly Bear's Yellow House and the new El Perro del Mar album. The Grizzly Bear CD melds together elements of folk, prog rock, and avant-garde composition to create a series of completely unique and gratifyingly dense songs. El Perro del Mar's Sarah Assbring references a Phil Specter girl-group sound throughout her eponymous album, but the Swedish singer-songwriter's melancholy voice and childlike lyrics ("All the feelings you've got for me/Just like for a dog") take everything into a different realm. As far as contemporary art goes, the recent Rosemarie Trockel show at Barbara Gladstone was a real stunner. And finally, Shortbus—a movie I resisted seeing only because I couldn't help being cynical about its highly publicized use of explicit sex—won me over in about 30 seconds. Suffused with humanism, it has to be the most optimistic film of the year, and John Cameron Mitchell deserves a medal for single-handedly shifting a paradigm about how sexuality can, and should be, represented in movies."
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Tod Lippy is the publisher of Esopus Magazine.
Photograph by Chris Ramirez
"Musically speaking, I'm borderline-obsessed with Grizzly Bear's Yellow House and the new El Perro del Mar album. The Grizzly Bear CD melds together elements of folk, prog rock, and avant-garde composition to create a series of completely unique and gratifyingly dense songs. El Perro del Mar's Sarah Assbring references a Phil Specter girl-group sound throughout her eponymous album, but…"