W hat do David Bowie , Skrillex and Hanson have in common with Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy and Kanye West? All of them have sampled music that was spotlighted on the Ultimate Breaks & Beats series, a collection of 25 vinyl albums featuring songs with unforgettable funky rhythms. The series launched…

Will rape culture derail one of America’s most successful rock festivals? T he Vans Warped Tour has become an American institution. But like many American institutions, it has a problem. That problem is one of sexual violence. Every summer for the past 21 years, the Vans Warped Tour, universally…

Rex Sorgatz: How the Daily Show used technology and how technology made the Daily Show: https://t.co/LKlN11qlt0 http://t.co/nzzyxlYc59

From star-studded guest lists to an audible influence on several generations of bands, Radiohead’s fan base has always included quite a few of their fellow rock stars. We polled dozens of notable musicians about their favorite Radiohead songs, and this is how they responded. Ed Droste (Grizzly Bear)…

The young woman sitting in a Parisian cafe could be meeting a friend for lunch. Her figure-hugging purple top sets off her dark hair and intelligent eyes, and her hands are heavy with rings. Every so often she glances out of the window, but she is not checking whether her friend has arrived: She is…

For the better part of the last decade, as independent label mainstays have been closing up their doors, going on hiatus, or reconfiguring their audience, Mello Music Group has secured a foundation. The Tucson, Arizona-based label has cultivated new voices, redeveloped lyrical legends, and built an…

I t’s Thursday night in January in Las Vegas, Day 2 of the Adult Video News Awards–Adult Entertainment Expo weekend, and I’m at the door of a private hotel suite in the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, waiting for Best New Starlet nominee Carter Cruise to help me get past the burly security detail. Cruise…

The weeklong trial has featured pop singer Robin Thicke sidling up to a piano to play songs by U2 , the Beatles and Michael Jackson . Superstar producer Pharrell Williams attempted under oath to parse the difference between vibe and theft. Testimony in the Los Angeles federal court proceeding…

Music Industry Published on March 9th, 2015 | by Alan Cross Are You Following the “Blurred Lines” Trial? You Should Be. Here’s Why. At the LA County Courthouse, a jury will be asked to determine if Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke blatantly ripped off Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” to write the…

In the shadow of 9/11, an unconventional hip-hop sound was brewing beneath New York City A B-Boy’s Alpha Once the year 2000 arrived, fears of the Y2K bug and the end of days had quelled. We had successfully broken through to the other side of the new millennium and America felt invincible. Above the…

Published in the September 1999 issue I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third like he's…

Donal “Sully” O’Sullivan unlocks the door to his gleaming black Lincoln town car, a majestic vehicle that stands out in a row of smaller, dusty economy cars. The new-car smell wafts throughout the limo, with its leather seats and complimentary water bottles for passengers. Sully climbs into the…

In between the rare maps and historical stacks, fishing out fornicators and nixing narcotics transactions are all in a day’s work for one of Portland’s finest. Illustrations by Alex Nallis M aking the rounds at the Portland Public Library means sporadically checking inside the bathroom. It’s not…

The Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Photograph by Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Just after midnight on Friday, Boris Nemtsov, a fifty-five-year-old Russian opposition politician, was gunned down as he walked across a bridge just outside the Kremlin walls. A car drove past, shots rang out, and…

As John Boorman points out, feature films have been around for just over a century, and he’s been making them for half that span. Queen And Country , a sequel to his 1987 masterpiece Hope And Glory , will supposedly be his last—here’s hoping Boorman’s recently announced retirement is as porous as…

I n July, the American pharmaceutical giant AbbVie, maker of the world’s top-selling drug – the arthritis treatment Humira – reached a blockbuster deal to acquire European rival Shire, best known for the attention-deficit medication Adderall. The merger was cheered by Wall Street, not for what the…

Michael Friberg John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak. On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of the machine flashed, signaling a…

In Memoriam 1942 – 2013 “Roger Ebert loved movies.” RogerEbert.com Reviews Great Movies Chaz's Journal Blogs Far Flungers Channels Contributors Slender Man Nothing is scarier than bad filmmaking. Skate Kitchen A solid hangout movie as well as a band-of-buddies film. Other Reviews BlacKkKlansman A…

O n December 5, 2014, musician Childish Gambino was nominated for two Grammys, for his album Because the Internet (Best Rap Album) and song “3005” (Best Rap Performance). One week later, on December 12, FX ordered a pilot for actor Donald Glover’s comedy Atlanta . A month later, on January 13, the…

Business Insider/Mike Nudelman On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message. "Bro." The message had been sent by someone who wasn't his friend on the social network, someone using the alias "Anthony.*" It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread. Minutes later, the traffic on his…

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as…

If writing is rewriting, then editing your feature film is really the final rewrite. The editing process is simply an extension of the writing process, only now with visuals and sound (and a lot more technical tools to help, or hinder, the work). Personally, I need some distance from the material to…

America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by…

Marrakech, 2001 or 2002, maybe, and Errol Morris wants camels. Real, spontaneous camels — the kind you see wandering across the desert in children’s books. In his documentaries, Morris is known for staging and re-creation, for artifice. But in this case, he’s shooting an ad, and in his ads, he has…

“ House of Cards ” Season 3 has only been available in full for a week now, but many have already gulped down the latest adventures of duplicitous politician Frank Underwood ( Kevin Spacey ) and wife Claire ( Robin Wright ) via Netflix. But Beau Willimon doesn’t mind if you don’t binge… At least,…

Last week, Adi Shankar, producer of Dredd and The Grey , released a short film, online, directed by Joseph Kahn, called Power/Rangers . It was, in Kahn’s words, a “de-boot” of the popular 1990s kids’ show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers . It blew up. Saban Entertainment, which owns the Power Rangers…

It’s hard to overstate what a central role Howard Stern’s marriage played in making his shtick palatable to a national audience in the early days of his career. Remove Stern’s oft-discussed association with a smart, serious social worker who deserves sainthood for her ability to put up with her…

As a journalistic essayist, the filmmaker Errol Morris has taken on, among other things, basic matters of truth: Do images lie? And if so, what can we learn from the lie? These are timeless questions that also happen to be timely. The world spent the end of last week, for instance, debating the…

Arm’s length: 45% of Japanese women aged 16-24 are ‘not interested in or despise sexual contact’. More than a quarter of men feel the same way. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner A i Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first…

If my research of Kickstarter campaigns for film and video taught me anything, I learned the final days of most successful campaigns are wild rides. The Kickstarter for my upcoming feature film CENTS was no exception. Near the end of our Kickstarter, I shared lessons learned from the 15 story beats…

A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The…

For over three weeks, I have been fully immersed in one of the best adventures of my filmmaking career: the Kickstarter campaign for my first feature film, CENTS . Running this Kickstarter has been a full-time job with so many unexpected twists and turns, you wonder who exactly is writing this…

Ida Film Still.Photograph: PR R ecently, someone from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles asked Ewa Puszczynska , Ida’s Polish producer, to send them the script of our film so they could deposit it in their core library collection. Ewa rang me, worried: what exactly should…

At 35, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, a $20 billion industry that produces more than double the number of adult films that America does. The only problem: He's part of an endangered species—1 of only 70 (maybe just 30, by some estimates) male actors in a business that churns out thousands of…