(The Yes List)
Sounds
Billy Bragg & Wilco: The Third Act of an Alt-Country Classic
On the two original volumes of Mermaid Avenue (1998 and 2000), Billy Bragg and Wilco set Woody Guthrie's unrecorded lyrics to music. Now, in addition to those pillars of the alt-country canon, we get 17 heretofore unreleased tracks, as well as Man in the Sand, the engaging 1999 documentary about the collaboration, in the must-have box set Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions, out now.
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The Yes List
An Iconic Nineties Novelist Returns
After a 14-year career detour, Mark Leyner, the prince of nineties metafiction (David Foster Wallace called his 1990 book My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist "the biggest thing for campus hipsters since The Fountainhead"), is back with a new novel.
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The Yes List
Tarantino's Got Nothing On This Nonstop Action Ballet
You may think you've seen everything when it comes to movie violence, but you've never seen anything like The Raid: Redemption.
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The Yes List
Earth as Canvas: An Anti-Pop Art Retrospective
Beginning in the 1960s, a group of artists, many seeking to escape the commercialism of Pop Art, adopted a new canvas: the earth. Some, like Richard Long and Patricia Johanson, designed minimalist landscape interventions, while others, like Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, used backhoes to sculpt land into monuments that rival Mayan ruins in grandeur.
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The Yes List
Trend We Dig: Girls Gone Wild(er)
Groups of women have acted badly onscreen for years (see Heathers, Mean Girls), but Bridesmaids upped the ante for outrageous female-ensemble comedy. Now a fresh crop of girl cliques are taking things further still: In Whit Stillman's new movie Damsels in Distress, a posse of pert coeds mount a bizarre crusade to better their unhygienic male classmates, while in Lena Dunham's laugh-out-loud HBO series Girls, four friends in New York City masturbate, miss abortion appointments, and taunt unworthy suitors.
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The Yes List
A Last Prediction From Dark Prophet J.G. Ballard
British science-fiction author J.G. Ballard, who died in 2009, was known for imagining seemingly unlikely scenarios that would later prove ominously prescient. In his final novel, Kingdom Come (Norton, $25), an unemployed ad exec with a ruined marriage investigates the death of his father—brought down by a lunatic gunman at a mall—and uncovers a political conspiracy that has enlisted countless bored suburbanites. Like so much of Ballard's work, it takes an outlandish story line and makes it alarmingly plausible. In fact, the book's plot bears obvious similarities to the birth of the Tea Party. Out March 5. —Timothy Hodler Also
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The Yes List
John Chamberlain's Scrap Metal Treasure
When he first welded discarded car parts into sculpture more than 50 years ago, John Chamberlain ignited one of the most distinctive careers in postwar American art. A retrospective at the Guggenheim also serves as a fitting memorial tribute; the artist died this past December at 84. February 24-May 13; guggenheim.org Also on Details.com: How the Art Scene Replaced the Nightclub Celebrity Photos by Mark Abrahams Art Collecting Goes Online: 3 Members-Only Websites
The Yes List
Genesis P-Orridge's Love Story With Plastic Surgery
In 2003, industrial-rocker Genesis P-Orridge (right), of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and partner Lady Jaye (left) attempted to surgically transform themselves into the same "pandrogynous" being. Marie Losier's movie The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye chronicles the odd couple's life, as well as Lady Jaye's death in 2007 from cancer, after which Genesis felt—with good reason—he'd lost a piece of himself. Out now. Also on Details.com: Best Non-Gag-Inducing Romantic Comedies Best and Worst Fashion Statements in This Year's Sundance Films Object of Desire: the 2012 Porsche 911 Luxury Sportscar
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The Daily Details Continues
