Category Archives: art/books/film

“Echotone” is a Documentary About the Austin Music Scene (Video)

In conjunction with October’s Rumble — which will highlight Echotone, a new documentary about the Austin, TX music scene — we are pleased to post the official Echotone trailer. The film follows a range of indie bands and their culture over a two-year period, spotlighting everything from the musicians to the venues, promoters, and city itself. According to the filmmakers, Echotone is best described as “a cultural portrait of the modern American city examined through the lyrics and lens of its creative class.”

The October Rumble in San Diego (more on that later) will feature two bands from the film, as well as a sneak preview of the documentary itself. Enjoy!

Poetic Memory: Parlour Steps (List)

Parlour Steps are a self-described electro-pop/motown band hailing from Vancouver. The group’s engaging sound would fit nicely between The Decemberists and The New Pornographers in your record collection.

In 2009, Parlour Steps released a catchy gem of an album, The Hidden Names!, and have been touring in support of it ever since. In a rare offstage moment, front man Caleb Stull recently compiled a list of his favorite music-related movies for us. His Poetic Memory is below. Continue reading…

Califone’s Tim Rutili Lends Support to Song+Stories Project, You Should Too

Independent radio artists Elizabeth Meister and Dan Collison are working with acclaimed Califone songwriter Tim Rutili on a documentary called Journey of the Asian Carp.

For the uninitiated, the Asian carp is a destructive non-native fish that has wreaked havoc on Midwestern waterways by crowding out native fish and uprooting plants. Notorious for their jumping ability, they also pose a physical danger to fishermen and their feeding habits make them hard to capture.

Meister and Collison hope to weave the documentary with Rutili’s music to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. Rutili’s music will supplement the documentary’s narrative as it follows the invasive carp’s slow migration from the American south “to the brink of Lake Michigan, focusing specifically on communities along the Illinois River that already have been invaded.”

If all goes well (more on that later), Meister and Collison will visit some of the small American communities that depend on their waterways and native fish but have been devastated by the Asian carp’s invasion.
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Comic-Con 2010: Gettin’ Stabby With It

Ah, Comic-Con. This year’s inexplicably hyphenated gathering of geeks and gawkers has come to an end, leaving San Diegans feeling hungover, used, and sore in strange places. This was my first crack at the convention, and I went (almost) all in. Continue reading…

Interview: Charles Yu

Owl and Bear met with up-and-coming author Charles Yu, who braved 8-foot Pikachus and zombie brides at Comic-Con International 2010 to talk with us about his new book, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon Books), due in stores September 7, 2010.

At first blush, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe is a classic science fiction comedy complete with a sobbing, suicidal time machine operating system and an ontologically ambiguous robot dog. But surrounding the dark humor of the protagonist, a lonely repairman of chronogrammatical vehicles with temporolinguistic architecture (read: time machines), is a small, sad universe that challenges the polarity of science and art through a unique narrative “technology.”

“I was trying to explore a fake science of storytelling,” Yu said, when asked about how his book collapses the barrier between science and language. “Reading a book itself is definitely a pretty advanced form of time travel, one we’ve had for a long time… I wasn’t so much trying to rigorously work through any kind of science about it, but just the idea that this is a really amazing technology we already have.” Continue reading…