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Columbine Commentary Meets Cliche Thriller Formula in Kalamity
Three male buddies barely out of their teens—one sad (Nick Stahl), one mad (Jonathan Jackson), and one weird (Christopher M. Clark)—reconvene in their Northern Virginia hometown to chew over their troubles with women. It would ruin things if I told you which one of their girls was the madonna and which the whore, but anyway, […]
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Recalling A Wilder City In NYC Vigilantes Series
Was New York City in its debt-saddled, under-patrolled, crime-capital days ever really this Stygian? The wish-fulfillment appeal of vigilantism certainly isn’t the same in our current hyper-chaperoned metropolis, but don’t forget that militant citizens-on-patrol like Curtis Sliwa and Bernie Goetz really did once capture the city’s attention. The prototypical urban-vigilante film—as distinct from cinematic Wild […]
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Robert Forster’s Long Goodbye
The first go-round for Australia’s Go-Betweens lasted six albums and nearly a dozen years—call it the ’80s with a running start. And though band founders Robert Forster and Grant McLennan professed harder-edged influences like the Saints and the Velvet Underground, their resulting partnered sound emanated with a harmonious polish, like a more optimistic version of […]
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Life During Peacetime
One Go-Betweens myth I’ve never bought is that it’s a grave global injustice they never had their chart moment (and at this stage never will). Andrew Mueller’s liner notes to the reissued Spring Hill Fair call them “bizarrely and scandalously underrated,” and most writing on the band concurs. This is partly frustrated journo foot-stamping, and […]
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Hysterical Displacement Activities
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Renée Zellweger’s breasts are as plump and white as pillows in a baby’s crib. The breasts, although unmistakably real (silicone does not jiggle in so eye-catching a fashion), are only an aberration. As anyone who has leafed through an entertainment or fashion magazine in the past two months already knows, they […]
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Music
Send Me Three Lullabies Bowery Ballroom, November 25: When these old rock-and-roll friends are in town, you make time. Opening for Yo La Tengo and newly drummerless (the young man from Hamburg who gamely lurched through their thrilling CMJ set quit days earlier), the Go-Betweens—Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, with Adele Pickvance on functional bass […]
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A Long Short Story
Eleven years after they finally attained major-label status with their sixth and formerly final album, 16 Lovers Lane, the Go-Betweens’ The Friends of Rachel Worth arrives bearing Robert Vickers’s arty, economically self-sufficient Jetset brand. Yet in America, where their cult was always less substantial than in Europe or their home continent, Australia, chances are excellent […]
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Just Between Friends
At their second New York appearance together since the Go-Betweens’ breakup, Grant McLennan and Robert Forster played to a packed Merc June 8 with no backup, little patter, and the bemused geniality of former allies in a lost cause. In the postpunk ’80s, the Go-Betweens were like farmers battling cowboys over homesteads in Nebraska. They […]
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The Go-Betweens
This is us as a Seventies band,” Robert Forster writes in the liner notes for the Go-Betweens’ 78 ’til 79 The Lost Album, a collection of early studio and home recordings. What he means, to be exact, is an ingenuous, bare-bones ’70s pop band—a surprisingly flattering guise, as it turns out, for these often oblique […]