Blog: Frontier Psychiatrist

BY KAREN SIEGEL Since being booted from Malaysia 50 years ago, Singapore has reshaped its identity as an efficient, clean, and corruption-free place to do international business. Yet culturally, Singapore is a small town of a country. There are no internationally known writers or musicians or visual artists. Thanks to strict laws curtailing freedom of speech, there is no public discussion of politics or ethnic tensions. Instead, the nation’s passion seems to be focused on food. In a country where 16% of the long-term population is millionaires (excluding the hordes of wealthy business travelers), it’s no [...]

Josh Rouse's The Happiness Waltz He may dance the happiness waltz, but he’s pretty moody. Or so says Nebraska-born, Jeff Tweedy-esque roots pop singer/songwriter Josh Rouse, who just released his tenth studio album (entitled, yes, The Happiness Waltz ) and is on the dreaded tour cycle again. A prolific, worldly songwriter, Rouse didn’t have very much fun playing Chicago's City Winery on Thursday (with Field Report ), but when we chatted before his Friday show at the same venue, he was optimistic. Rouse has spent the last eight years living in Valencia, [...]

BY ANDREW HERTZBERG Two superficially different new novels -one a long realist Third World narrative and the other a short surrealist First World story-share a common theme of circularity. The heroine of Americanah goes on a global journey that starts and ends in Nigeria. Buria l is less about death than about the implied cycle of life. The former explores temporary absences; the latter examines the most permanent absence of all. Like many great existential works of fiction from Sartre's Nausea to Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of [...]

The Black Dahlia Murder's Everblack BY JORDAN MAINZER 2013: The year that metal broke. Or so they say. From noise rock bordering on punk metal (e.g. KEN Mode’s Entrench ) to black metal bordering on shoegaze (Deafheaven’s Sunbather ), the lines in 2013 have blurred between all types of “heavy” music. At the same time, it seems that some of this year’s intense punk and metal acts have stopped taking themselves so seriously and blindly and self-seriously adhering to punk and metal ideals; instead, they’re doing [...]

Jamon pintxos in San Sebastian I recently had the great pleasure of spending two full weeks in Spain (with a brief foray into southern France and a long enough layover in London to have a solid English fry-up).  They were two very wonderful weeks, filled with some of the best food I’ve had in recent (or not-so-recent) memory. I find that, for newcomers, Spanish food can be challenging to love.  Vegetarians are usually unhappy to find that ham graces the presence of every vegetable.  Cautious eaters are often turned off by the cured ham [...]

BY ANDREW HERTZBERG In April 2010, singer-songwriter Shawn Rosenblatt gave up his apartment, his job, and an essentially comfortable life to live permanently on the road in his band-turned-solo-act Netherfriends. We may have crossed paths at Columbia College Chicago, but didn’t officially meet until I interviewed him at Café Mustache in Logan Square for Chicago music blog Windy City Rock while he was in the middle of his massive songwriting project later dubbed as 50 Songs 50 States . For the project, Rosenblatt gave himself three formal constraints: 1) Play a show, write [...]

Nelsonville Music Festival, 2013 BY PETER LILLIS I’ll admit, I’m down on Ohio. My entirely biased distaste for the state is founded on one exorbitant speeding ticket, a few exceptionally long drives from the East Coast to the Midwest, several national stories of debaucherous destruction of property (including an Underground Railroad Memorial) courtesy of the Miami (OH) University Greek system and the disastrous (for Miami (FL) Hurricanes fans, such as myself) 2003 Fiesta Bowl. I’ve all but removed its star from my flag. That was until the ninth annual Nelsonville [...]

Nelsonville Music Festival, 2013 BY PETER LILLIS I’ll admit, I’m down on Ohio. My entirely biased distaste for the state is founded on one exorbitant speeding ticket, a few exceptionally long drives from the East Coast to the Midwest, several national stories of debaucherous destruction of property (including an Underground Railroad Memorial) courtesy of the Miami (OH) University Greek system and the disastrous (for Miami (FL) Hurricanes fans, such as myself) 2003 Fiesta Bowl . I’ve all but removed its star from my flag. That was until the [...]

BY JOHN NICOSIA In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls , Peter Biskind’s seminal work on Hollywood in the 1970s, William Friedkin was the closest thing to a villain.  According to one producer, Friedkin, the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, “didn’t give a fuck about anybody else that walked the face of the earth.” In his fascinating new memoir, The Friedkin Connection , the director cops to that accusation with a refreshing honesty.  Friedkin also cops to a whole assortment of other crimes and misdemeanors, [...]

BY KEITH MEATTO Tara DePorte has been an Eco Geek since she founded her elementary school's first environmental club. Now, she's working to protect the environment on a local, national, and global level: caring for trees with disabled adults in her Brooklyn neighborhood; campaigning city business owners to save energy; working with locals in in Latin America, Europe, and Africa; and rubbing elbows with Al Gore, Ban Ki Moon, and Rene Zellweiger. Tonight, in honor of World Environment Day , her non-profit organization, Human Impacts Institute , is hosting a public symposium at the [...]

Nicholas Payton BY DANIEL BEAUREGARD Nicolas Payton began playing trumpet at age four. By nine he was sitting in with local bands in his hometown of New Orleans. And before he even finished high school he was hailed as a virtuoso. In his early 20s, Payton made his major-label recording debut as a leader with From This Moment (Verve). As a leader he’s recorded 10 albums and collaborated with the likes of Ray Charles, Dr. John, Elvin Jones, Herbie Hancock, Roy [...]

BY KEITH MEATTO Seeing two new documentary films about wild animals at Lincoln Center this weekend reminded me that my childhood was not so animal friendly. Neither my mother nor father had owned pets as kids, so we did not either, aside from my brother’s fish tank and two rabbits caged in the garage. That was fine by me. I still prefer museums to zoos, still get jumpy around  my friends’ dogs and cats, and once even wrote a short story about a guy who accidentally kills a dog. Still my attitude toward animals has shifted. I now [...]

Boris, live in Chicago May is a time when bands get quick runs out across the country before the non-compete clauses of festival season take effect. With Lollapalooza and Pitchfork soon upon us in Chicago, and Governors Ball and others in New York, we were excited to get out for 26 shows over the last 30 days. This brings our coverage for the year to 75 shows thus far, not including festival appearances. This month had plenty for the highlight reel. 5/2 – GOAT @ Empty Bottle, Ukrainian Village, Chicago [...]

Boris, live in Chicago May is a time when bands get quick runs out across the country before the non-compete clauses of festival season take effect. With Lollapalooza and Pitchfork soon upon us in Chicago, and Governors Ball, the Northside Festival, and others in New York, we were excited to catch 26 shows over the last 30 days. This brings our coverage for the year to 75 shows so far, not including festivals. And in a year of stellar shows, May had plenty for the highlight reel. 5/2 – [...]

Laura Stevenson BY JORDAN MAINZER Even when Laura Stevenson is writing about a “journey to the center of the earth,” she’s still a Long Islander at heart. On the heels of Wheel , her third and best overall studio album, second for emerging label Don Giovanni, and first under her own name and not her band’s name (The Cans), the 29-year-old singer songwriter n played to a packed crowd at Chicago’s Beat Kitchen on May 18. Her rollicking folk-punk was complemented by her sweet, endearingly [...]

BY KEITH MEATTO While New York is home to many sports teams, it's not exactly known as a soccer city. Far fewer people follow the local Red Bulls than the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers or Islanders –and many are unaware that the team even exists. To the average New Yorker, the phrase “Chelsea-Man City” might sound like shorthand for one of Manhattan’s prominent gay neighborhoods, not a match between two of England’s top soccer clubs. So when Chelsea FC and Manchester City FC played an exhibition at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, [...]

BY FRANKLIN P. LAVIOLA  The abbey at Mont-Saint Michel, nicknamed “La Merveille” (“The Wonder”), stands tall, pointing to the heavens, above the surrounding coast at Normandy.  The tides might roll in and recede rapidly, blocking access to its island home, but this majestic structure, a fortress in ancient times, remains fixed and unchanged.  Both the inspiration for the title and the central image of To the Wonder , Terrence Malick’s latest mystical reverie, Mont-Saint Michel is a metaphor for the enduring power of love as both divine and human wonder. In his [...]

Due out from Soho Press on June 18. BY GINA MYERS In his debut novel, Matt Bell delivers a poetic fairy tale, but not one of the happily-ever-after variety. At turns violent, haunting, and stunning, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods propels itself forward through a series of unexpected twists.  The dramatis personae includes a foundling, a fingerling, a bear, and a squid. These animals-and the titular dirt and the moon-seem to exert more control over the world [...]

Jan St. Werner of Mouse On Mars BY JORDAN MAINZER While the two French robots in Daft Punk are getting plenty of hype for their comeback album, an older Euro pair has quietly been making noise for the past twenty years. Although "German electronic duo Mouse On Mars" may sound like a premise for an SNL skit , Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma are into some serious shit. This isn't to say that St. Werner takes himself seriously-in our conversation on May 18, St. Werner waxed [...]

BY JAMIE CARR While taking naps in my closest female friends’ beds, play-fighting with them in Manhattan’s parks, and romping together on subway platforms are as familiar to me as breathing, there was something both inspiring and frustrating about watching such scenes in Noah Baumbach’s latest film: Frances Ha . On one hand, Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, who plays the title character, deliver a story that still goes largely unsung: a complex female character in a story about female friendship. But the film also begs the question about why such “love stories” between [...]