Jim Henson’s Time Piece

Last night, I joined hundreds of nostalgic 30-somethings at a 30th anniversary screening of The Muppet Movie in Brooklyn. Seeing it on the big screen was pure delight, and proved the lasting genius of Jim Henson and co. Everything holds up: the snappy dialogue (Man in Swamp: “You, you with the banjo, can [...]

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Multi-talented Giamatti

Paul Giamatti is an award-winning actor, a graduate of Yale, a member of Skull and Bones, and… a soul singer?! The last one surprised us too when we rediscovered his performance in Duets (2000) – about karaoke singers. Kurt got the chance to chat with oh-so-modest Giamatti recently, who [...]

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Merce Cunningham: 1919 – 2009

We were saddened by the news this morning that Merce Cunningham has died. Cunningham was a giant of American modern dance and choreography – and an astoundingly talented dancer, who started his career dancing for Martha Graham, and appeared in his own company’s performances into his 70s.
We had the good fortune at [...]

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Snapshots from the Muslim-Punk Underground

This week on Studio 360, Nick Heling talks to Muslim punk rockers The Kominas about taqwacore, the movement inspired by novelist Michael Muhammad Knight’s 2002 novel The Taqwacores. Photographer Kim Badawi met Knight shortly after Taqwacores was published, and in 2006 began tagging along on tours with taqwa bands The Kominas and Secret Trial Five, [...]

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Celebrity Pet Peeves

If you’re ever in a room with They Might Be Giants, one thing’s for sure, watch what you say! At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Kurt got the chance to talk to band members John Flansburgh, John Linnell, and Marty Beller about their hilarious list of phrases that “nobody in the band is allowed to say.” [...]

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They Might Be Puppets

On July 4th, Kurt caught up with They Might Be Giants‘ John Flansburgh, John Linnell, and Marty Beller at the Aspen Ideas Festival and found out why the sun really shines. (The special show airs on Studio 360 this weekend.) Not in attendance were John and John’s sock puppet alter egos – the delightfully orange [...]

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A Day in Swag

Oh, recession. What was once a swag deluge is now a trickle. Gone are the fat and happy days of bands promoting albums with faux airplane barf bags.
But there was a hopeful glimmer the swag economy was picking up when this gem arrived last week. A sturdy cotton tote featuring SNL vet Chris Kattan seductively [...]

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Compendious philological volumes

Forsooth, the next item on our reference-book most-wanted list this fall is going to be the new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, due out in October. Forty-four years in the making, this puppy’s got 800,000 words (“almost every word,” they claim, from Old English to the present)–that’s more than double the size of [...]

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Chimamanda!

Remember Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? Kurt sat down with the up-and-coming Nigerian writer last December – on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart – to ask how it felt being called the “21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe.” Her answer? Pretty good. Now Adichie’s come out with a wonderful new collection of short [...]

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Thao’s Story

Ever since we ran this piece about Thao Nguyen, we’ve been hooked on her music–”Bag of Hammers” is so catchy! Our reporter went to visit Thao at her mother’s Laundromat in Virginia, where she grew up practicing guitar and making change.
Earlier this week, the folks at the Rumpus posted a short memoir that Thao wrote [...]

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