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Born in Grand Prairie, Texas, and named after “Dreaming of You” singer Selena, the Wizards of Waverly Place and Spring Breakers actress Selena Gomez has scored four top-10 LPs and gone four times platinum with “Love You Like a Love Song,” all before turning 22. This year’s “Come & Get It,” the lead single from the chart-topping Stars Dance, meanwhile,... Read more about this event >>
Savages are an all-female English foursome who approach post-punk with a ferocious feminism that rivals the wildness of the riot grrrl movement. Fairly new on the scene, they only formed at the end of 2011 but have already won plenty of accolades from both fans and press. Expect ceaseless roiling guitar and scream-sung lyrics with deeply political and poetic intent. Read more about this event >>
In the last couple years, this Brooklyn quartet has brought its keenly designed tumult to plenty of stages, scrutinizing their music's nooks and crannies, beveling its sharp edges, and refining its flow. That’s one reason the new Shadow Man is so impressivethe newfound group chemistry is eloquent enough to make the saxophonist/composer’s most hurtling passages wax graceful... Read more about this event >>
If 2013 goes down as the year of Rick Rubin’s resurgence, with pundits and list-compilers pointing to his work on Kanye’s Yeezus and Eminem’s “Bezerk,” the Band Perry’s Pioneer will be the one that got away, a record that the Def Jam founder was initially going to produce but which ended up in the hands of Nashville go-to guy Dann Huff. The Band Perry, an... Read more about this event >>
Though this performance commemorates its 20-year existence, Black Moon’s canonical boom-bap rap album, Enta Da Stage, shouldn’t be regarded as a reliquary for the dry bones of styles bygone. Producers Da Beatminerz assembled the original 14 tracks like verdant terrariums, each with a micro-architecture of soiled grooves and tendrilous jazz loops, to be fully inhabited by the... Read more about this event >>
Schoolboy Q should not be written off as just a Kendrick Lamar affiliate, as he's far more than merely a name in the Black Hippy crew. 2012's Habits & Contradictions jittered and skittered through samples and beats cribbed from artists like Kid Cudi and Menomena and paired them with Q's stop-and-go flow,a fierce combination. Darkly funny, moody, and passionately explicit, Schoolboy Q is... Read more about this event >>
When Surfer Blood's Astro Coast hit in 2010, the record felt like Weezer-style grunge rock was having a second coming. What started out as the college musical project of John Paul Pitts turned into one of the indie scene's most promising surf punk bands of the last few years. Though the release of this year's Pythons was marred by Pitts' arrest for domestic battery, he was never charged, and... Read more about this event >>
Not long after Alison Bechdel wrote a letter to her parents telling them she was a lesbian, her father, Bruce, was struck and killed by a Sunbeam Bread truck. But, she wonders in her bestselling 2006 graphic memoir, Fun Home, could it have been a suicide? Returning to her childhood, she tells of growing up with her funeral-director dad, a closeted homosexual who maintained a tyrannical rule... Read more about this event >>
If you've never been inside the magnificent Church of St. Paul the Apostle, the artist collective Openings is giving you a fun incentive to drop by. Their new show, 1) All of the Above—The Big Question Answered?, which will be held at the historic church, features the works of 37 artists in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photographer, collage, and... Read more about this event >>
David Dorfman’s long career has focused on human relations: the dance company as family or community; the stage as playing field, battlefield, town square. Making its third appearance in the Next Wave Festival with Come, and Back Again, David Dorfman Dance once again uses period mood music—this time by the ’90s underground band Smoke—to undergird the... Read more about this event >>
Innovative classical composer Nico Muhly's opera Two Boys has its U.S. premiere this month at the Met, but here he takes time to pay homage to one of his key influences, British Neoclassical composer Benjamin Britten. As part of the Britten centennial celebration, Muhly leads a cadre of classical luminaries in performance of excerpts from Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cabaret... Read more about this event >>
Essentially a supergroup composed of Alex Bleeker (Alex Bleeker & The Freaks), Matthew Mondanile (Ducktails), Martin Courtney (Titus Andronicus), and Etienne Duguay (Predator Vision), Real Estate makes lackadaisical synth pop, but they do it so well that instead of feeling lazy, the slowness itself becomes gripping. Although their last album, Days came out in 2011, even two years later it... Read more about this event >>
A pioneer of the ’80s Neo-Geo movement (short for neo-geometric conceptualism), along with Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton suddenly dropped out of the East Village scene in 1993 and moved to Bali, where he remains two decades later. His latest show, and his fourth solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, is a new series of portraits of women that begins not with... Read more about this event >>
This year, she transformed Santigold into a tentacular, voracious beast covered in “spores that emit polluting smoke like factory chimneys”—among other unlikely feats. Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu works in video and large-scale collage to explore gender, race, and consumption, particularly in the context of the black female body, which she often represents as a gangly... Read more about this event >>
Mechanical mediation is nothing new. Just as we now methodically alienate ourselves from the real world with the help of phones, tablets, and glasses, Reuben Garrett Lucius “Rube” Goldberg conceived of even more amusing and complicated ways to do simple things in a series of cartoons he created between 1915 and ’35. For Goldberg’s Variations, clarinetist Andy Biskin... Read more about this event >>
In a recent interview with The New York Times, real-life married couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz seemed as happy as could be: She thinks he’s a great cook, they love to go on luxury vacations, and they relish opportunities to work together. In other words, when they break each other’s hearts as the less-than-happy husband and wife in Harold Pinter’s 1978 masterwork,... Read more about this event >>
They’ve got magic to do, just for you. Also tumbling, contortion, acrobatics, trapeze, and silk work. In Diane Paulus’s reimagining of Stephen Schwartz’s echt-‘70s musical, young Pippin (Matthew James Thomas) wanders around a medieval French landscape that looks a lot like a circus bigtop, with Patina Miller as ringmaster. Read more about this event >>
A couple of seasons ago, we attended a ThreeASFOUR presentation in a West Village loft that resembled an underground party more than a Fashion Week event. Designers Gabriel Asfour, Adi Gil, and Angela Donhauser have long remained true to their aesthetic, and they rarely present their shows in a typical runway setting because they see their avant-garde pieces as art, not as clothes meant for a... Read more about this event >>
With his array of gaudy tattoos, bling, and the accentuated visuals of his videos, Houston rapper Riff Raff might remind you of the colorful fruit-flavored sodas, quarter waters, and cheap candy so characteristic of childhood in the Southern hoods of the U.S., where young people grow up in a world in which striking blends of high fructose corn syrup and food coloring often end up discarded... Read more about this event >>
The Dismemberment Plan were the standard bearers of indie rock during the period between the implosion of Pavement in 1999 and the emergence of the Strokes and the White Stripes in 2001. As rock seemed to be on its last legs, the D.C.-based band stumbled upon a sound that funneled their post-hardcore roots into a late-Pavement-like languor with chord progressions that sounded like Sting at... Read more about this event >>
Former Fleet Foxes drummer Josh Tilllman has been touring the bejezus out of 2011's terrific Jonathan Wilson–produced Fear Fun. But there's new material on the way, and this is a solo version, so there will probably be even more amusing banter than usual in-between this ersatz guru-stripper's gimlet-eyed musical observations draped in vintage Laurel Canyon arrangements. Read more about this event >>
The career of Bristol electronic duo Fuck Buttons has been an odd one. Out of the gate, they swung with a haphazard, noisy approach that was almost hardcore in nature, while on their next outing, they glommed fast to beats. By the 2012 Olympics opening ceremonies and Slow Focus, issued earlier this year, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power had sorted out how to marry both approaches into a... Read more about this event >>
Eric Prydz? Nearly a decade ago, the Swedish DJ’s chart-topping “Call on Me” just about invented EDM, but soaring tracks like “Allein” and his so-called “Private Remix” of M83’s “Midnight City” keep him at the top of festival bills to this day. Tonight’s Hammerstein gig marks the American debut of the show he debuted two years... Read more about this event >>
Fans of the pianist’s vivid imagination have been waiting for his solo move, and the impressionistic vibe of the new Arborescence is a sizable payoff. In a recital that stresses a commitment to mood over a show of chops, each of the pieces in his suite-like program are brimming with a sense of place. Boasting a bit of drama, a folkish ambiance, and an provocative sort of reflection,... Read more about this event >>
At first glance, Dorothea Rockburne’s works look like straightforward lines on a wall, but they are far from simplistic. They are mathematical solutions. Rockburne has said that “drawing is the bones of thought,” and has applied her studies in math and astronomy to her work since the late ’60s. “Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself,” an exhibition... Read more about this event >>
The New York Botanical Garden, located far uptown but within walking distance of the 2, 4/5, D, and Metro-North trains, is beautiful in the spring and summer, when the flowers are in full bloom and the leaves are at their fullest. But really, it might be best in the fall, when the toughest of those flowers are hanging on while the first of those leaves begin to fall. This week, take the train... Read more about this event >>
In a recent interview with The New York Times, real-life married couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz seemed as happy as could be: She thinks he’s a great cook, they love to go on luxury vacations, and they relish opportunities to work together. In other words, when they break each other’s hearts as the less-than-happy husband and wife in Harold Pinter’s 1978 masterwork,... Read more about this event >>
If you missed the sold-out run of the Foundry Theatre's revival of Bertolt Brecht's Good Person of Szechwan at La MaMa earlier this year, you're in luck. The production, which reunites the entire original cast and creative team, now comes to the Public Theater for five weeks. The perfectly cast Taylor Mac stars as Shen Tei, the kind, generous, cross-dressing prostitute who must disguise... Read more about this event >>
Vegetarians, be warned: The glorious smell of bacon wafting out of the Bell House this afternoon may instantly convert you to omnivorousness. The fifth annual Brooklyn Bacon Takedown is a chance for home cooks to get creative with one of the best-tasting foods on earth. According to host Matt Timms, “Apparently anything can be infused, filled, wrapped, and garnished with bacon, and it... Read more about this event >>
What does this year’s CMJ have in common with those of recent years? The best parties are the unofficial ones. Today, none are better than Exploding in Sound Records’s Unofficial Birthday Party Spectacular, the afternoon-into-late-night event featuring 11 bands, four of which we can confirm are really good. Headliners Speedy Ortiz, for instance, are riding on the much deserved... Read more about this event >>
As one of the revolutionaries in the New York art movement of the 1940s, Robert Motherwell started a gang of sorts that included other abstract or “automatic” artists, as he called them, like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, William Baziotes, and Willem de Kooning. And the leader of the gang, or at least the person who could actually sell their work, was Peggy Guggenheim, who gave... Read more about this event >>
The late Mike Kelley was renowned for his ability to work in every conceivable medium—collage, drawing, performance art, video, copulating sock monkeys—and for appearing on a Sonic Youth album cover (1992’s Dirty). Today, MOMA PS1 presents the largest exhibition of the L.A. pop artist’s work to date, which occupies the entire museum with 200 culture-obliterating works... Read more about this event >>
When graffiti first began popping up all over New York more than four decades ago, no one could have guessed that the urban art form, which originated in Philadelphia in the ’60s, would eventually spread around the world. Remembering the heyday of subway pieces and beyond, Write of Passage is a new exhibition that explores the impact of modern American graffiti on global culture and the... Read more about this event >>
Broadway sees a lot of jazz hands, but not much actual jazz. But the Main Stem should sound a lot more syncopated with this new musical, which features the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Loosely based on Duke Ellington’s stint at the legendary Cotton Club, it features the likes of Babyface, Toni Braxton, and k.d. lang. Read more about this event >>
What do you think puts more of a strain on the typical marriage: engaging in polyamory or co-writing a play about it? Justine Lambert and Kenneth Nowell may well find out when their “modern-day fairy tale about open marriage” plays at the Looking Glass Theatre. Alice Jankell directs the nuptial roundelay. Read more about this event >>
Formed in 2001, Terakaft is literally related to Tinariwen, the oldest and most respected of the Tamashek-speaking Tuareg bands of northern Mali. Original Tinariwen songwriter Liya Ag Ablil (a/k/a Diara) joined his nephew, guitarist Sanou Ag Ahmed and Kedou Ag Ossad in 2006. Like Tinariwen, Terakaft plays what they call "assouf," although you may know it as Mali's desert blues. It's still a... Read more about this event >>
Looking for a great day outdoors? Join the Make-A-Wish Walk and 5K Run and move at your own pace through the three-mile course winding through Liberty State Park, enjoying the lower Manhattan skyline and the very near Statue of Liberty. (Runners: The course is now USATF certified.) Registration begins at 9 a.m., the run starts at 10 a.m., and the walk five minutes later. There is also a fair... Read more about this event >>
One of South Indian classical (Carnatic) music's deepest devotional singers, Jayashri is also the composer and performer of "Pi's Lullaby," from Life of Pi. Beside being immersed in the classical tradition, she was also a renowned Bollywood "playback" singer and has collaborated with Finland's Avanti orchestra. She'll perform here accompanied by violin, mridgangam drum, and ghatam pot, so... Read more about this event >>
The year’s most exciting West African music comes from Niger, the largest regioin in the nation. Based in the capital city of Niamey, Tal National, making its New York debut in a stripped-down sextet configuration, was formed in 2000 by guitarist Hamadal “Almeida” Moumine, who still performs with the band when not engaged in his duties as teacher and municipal judge.... Read more about this event >>
If you've never been inside the magnificent Church of St. Paul the Apostle, the artist collective Openings is giving you a fun incentive to drop by. Their new show, 1) All of the Above—The Big Question Answered?, which will be held at the historic church, features the works of 37 artists in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photographer, collage, and... Read more about this event >>
If our current way of life were to be suddenly wiped out, what traditions from the past would survivors hold on to? Playwright Anne Washburn explores this scenario in Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, which imagines that, of all things, Bart Simpson would become a vital part of the new society’s mythology. Steve Cosson directs the Playwrights Horizons production, with music by Michael... Read more about this event >>
Last year, Hurricane Sandy put a major damper on the Halloween festivities, which resulted in the cancellation of the Halloween Parade. This year, however, the Soho Arthouse is bringing the excitement back to Halloween with The Funhouse, which will help fund the Halloween Parade. Artist Allison Goldenstein will present what is being described as a “colossal world of thrilling color,... Read more about this event >>
When singer-songwriters Fiona Apple and Blake Mills announced this tour, which they’ve dubbed Anything We Want, they said in a typically verbose missive (at least for Apple) that they had “26 percent of an idea of what the fuck we will be playing for you.” Of course, the prospects are endless. The only trait they seem to share is understatement. On her most... Read more about this event >>
Rock of Ages, the celebrated hymn based on First Corinthians, will not appear in this Broadway musical. Instead expect the hits of Foreigner, Styx, Pat Benatar, and Journey. The nominal plot centers on a romance conducted in the unsalubrious environs of the Sunset Strip circa 1987. Read more about this event >>
Last year, mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile won a MacArthur fellowship for his ongoing attempts to fuse bluegrass with classical music. If you aren't already familiar with those efforts, you should drop everything immediately and listen to "The Blind Leaving The Blind," the awe-inspiring four-movement suite he wrote for his band Punch Brothers as a way of coping with his 2003 divorce. The piece... Read more about this event >>
Boys Noize is the performing name of German-born Alexander Ridha, a DJ and electronic music producer who also runs and curates the label Boysnoize Records. Blending everything from disco and hip-hop to French electro and house, Ridha has done produced and remixed for artists like Snoop Dogg, the Scissor Sisters, and Spank Rock. His DJ sets are constantly praised for being jam-packed with... Read more about this event >>
After several years away from the stage, Mary-Louise Parker finally returns in Manhattan Theatre Club and MCC Theater’s co-production of Sharr White’s The Snow Geese. Here, she stars as Elizabeth Gaesling, who gathers her family together for their annual shooting party in upstate New York after the death of her husband. But it’s not exactly a happy time, as her eldest son is... Read more about this event >>
Here’s an unusual case of Svengali and Trilby live in person: Monheit studied with Eldridge before launching her hotshot vocal career, and he’s continued his work with New York Voices. He also writes songs, which makes it likely that in this reunion they’ll do a ditty or two of his, along with whatever else they plan to grace with their irresistible stylings. It’ll all... Read more about this event >>