360 Staff Pick: Mogwai Live

Special Moves Mogwai This new live album from post-rock darlings Mogwai might sound better than their studio records. The effects-laden guitar melodies tower a bit higher, but the inevitable crash of drums and strums is more deafening than ever. Special Moves is a collection of great songs spanning the band’s entire career, accompanied by a [...]

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V.V. Brown Comes to Your Town

V.V. Brown virtually exploded onto the music scene this summer – and followed up her popularity in the charts and online by touring with Owl City, doing the rounds on talk shows, and lending her songs to commercials and TV shows. So even if you don’t think you know her music, you probably do. The [...]

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This Week in Swag

Swag is supposed to impress people.  Right, Soulja Boy?  That’s why I was a little surprised by the Independent Film Channel’s promotional offering for their new series The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.  These folders are sure to make you look unimpressive in the eyes of your co-workers: Sarcastic filing accessories, at long last!  [...]

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Getting Lost with Hand Drawn Maps

I like to collect old road maps, and when the need arises for me to draw a map for a visiting friend or relative, I’ll admit I fancy myself a pretty good cartographer. But sometimes I find myself the artist of a bizarrely scaled and oddly detailed map which names all the trees, statues, and [...]

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Lost Jazz Finds a Home in Harlem

Before yesterday, I had never heard of Bill Savory.  For this, I’m thankful: If I had known about Savory, I would have wasted a lot of time and energy being very upset with him.  As a sound engineer in the 1930s, he made nearly 1,000 unique recordings of seminal jazz musicians — and refused to [...]

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360 Staff Pick: House of the Devil

House of the Devil Directed by Ti West House of the Devil uses a familiar horror movie plot of a babysitting gig gone horribly wrong and turns it into something surprising. Samantha has no idea that her employers are raving Satanists — but before the night is over, she’ll become painfully aware. Rather than confuse [...]

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Don’t Forget Us: Photographing the Oil Spill

The biggest piece of bad news of the last 4 months seems to be getting less bad: the Deepwater Horizon oil well is plugged, and the spill is disappearing from the surface of the Gulf fast.  As the catastrophe fades the photographer Zoe Strauss is doing her part to keep our focus on the disaster – and [...]

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From Apple II to the Big Screen: The Oregon Trail

Sure, YouTube is great for kitten videos, but one of its most consistent sweet spots is fake movie trailers.  Viral video fans take note — the western epic The Oregon Trail is “coming soon” to a theater near you: To the delight of millions of American twenty- and thirty-somethings, this trailer parodies the computer game [...]

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360 Staff Pick: Memory Wall

Memory Wall: Stories Anthony Doerr An Alzheimer’s patient in South Africa gets addicted to a machine that reboots lost memories. A dying woman’s seizures force her to relive the time she spent at an orphanage in Nazi Germany. These stories and more make up Memory Wall, a collection of short fiction by Anthony Doerr. Doerr [...]

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Radio City Gets Spiritualized

Last Friday, at Radio City Music Hall, space-rock band Spiritualized gave a rare – and, they said, final — performance of their 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, all 70 minutes of it.  I was lucky enough to attend. Spiritualized seldom plays songs off the album in concert, because they require [...]

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