Blog: Frontier Psychiatrist

[The fourth in a series of essays from China , New York , and Israel] Click to view slideshow. Thanks to the generosity of Taglit-Birthright which pays for young American Jews to travel to Israel for the first time, I spent 10 days in the Motherland, with stops in Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, the desert, and the Dead Sea. While an organized tour was a change from the weeks of independent travel in China and New York, it did give me [...]

Andrew Bird In addition to being one of the most talented pop musicians of his or any generation, Andrew Bird is a damn hard worker. As a solo artist, he has completed at least 10 releases since 2003’s Weather Systems , including instrumental albums, live compilations and EPs on top of five full-lengths. His loop-based compositions are a sight and sound to behold, and Birdman has built an impressive reputation as one of the most imaginative and original performers of the genre formerly known as indie rock. Not content to rest on his laurels, Birdman [...]

Dr. John Seriously, three cheers for the old guys. In an era where hype machine blog year-end top ten lists are often chock-full of buzz band debut albums, let us not forget that Rolling Stone is sometimes right. 2012 has seen great albums from the likes of baby boomer mainstays Dr. John, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Jimmy Cliff. Despite their age, these artists have somehow managed to adapt their style to the contemporary music world while still creating a product that is very much their own. [...]

[The third is a series of essays from China , New York, and Israel] Hurricane Sandy hit and shut down New York before we had a chance to publish the following article about my trip [...]

I’m not prepared to make any sort of official election statement on behalf of FP, nor will I attempt to do so. Despite regularly sharing our ideas on topics as diverse as punk rock existentialism to radical anti-communist visual artists to Ben Affleck’s beard to Jeopardy heartthrobs to unloved vegetables —and just about everything in between—we tend to keep away from political statements, and that’s stance worth preserving as much as we can. That being said, several takeaways from Tuesday’s results excite me personally as an open-minded young citizen, a writer [...]

I hear yoga works for some people.  But for me, when real life gets to be too much, I turn to baking to literally sweeten my mood.  There’s something about the mathematical straightforwardness of it that allows my mind to drift from hurricanes and power outages, as it were, to the wonderful world of teaspoons and tablespoons and parchment paper (oh my!).  I will not dwell on the circumstances of Superstorm Sandy, as I recognize fully well that I have not suffered as deeply as many, but that bitch of a storm did throw me [...]

Bearded Boston Bro Ben Affleck in "Argo" At first glance, Argo seems like a decently entertaining movie tailor-made for Oscar: Ben Affleck, a high-profile, left-leaning director makes a movie with an all-star cast about a tumultuous period in U.S.-Iran relations (ring any bells?) about an amazing story that was only declassified during President Clinton’s administration. The brilliance of Argo , however, lies in its unpretentious self-assurance as a Hollywood movie about a fake Hollywood movie. The plot of Argo is “based [...]

[The third is a series of essays from China , New York, and Israel] Click to view slideshow. Hurricane Sandy hit and shut down New York before we had a chance to publish the following article about my trip to the city in mid-October. Since then, I've been witness to a barrage of coverage about the devastation, from photos to death totals, and it seems insensitive to run a piece about my trip without comment on the storm and its aftermath. The majority of what I've seen [...]

Junot Diaz, This is How You Lose Her After missing Junot Diaz's performance at Book Court in Brooklyn on Tuesday , I consoled myself by reflecting on his new short story collection. Before I cracked the spine, the odds were long that Diaz could meet the high standard of his debut collection Drown , or his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , or his recent MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, which even super fans conceded was belated and perhaps gratuitous. And after being inspired by  Drown to [...]

Junot Diaz Junot Diaz is perhaps the best fiction writer in America, having won the hearts and minds of readers over nearly two decades with his three books: the short story collection Drown , the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and his new story collection This is How You Lose Her , a series of linked short stories, mostly about infidelity, mostly narrated by Diaz’s ghetto geek alter ego Yunior, and set in the three places the author has called home: the Dominican Republic, [...]

Click to view slideshow. I've known photographer Dan Farnum since pre-school in Saginaw, Michigan. We grew up sharing many of the same experiences, and in college we both turned to artistic pursuits. And although we hadn’t always remained super close throughout the years, we’ve kept in touch, mostly meeting up with friends back in town for the holidays. After seeing his photographs on his website, I realized that he was wrestling with many of the same issues that I was in my poetry: the American experience, landscape, and culture, especially as viewed through the [...]

Titus Androniucs - Local Business “Okay, I think by now we’ve established that everything is inherently worthless, and there is nothing in the universe with any kind of objective purpose.” Thus opens Local Business , the newest record from New Jersey punk band Titus Andronicus, out today on XL Records. The record picks up where The Monitor —their flawless Ken Burns-esque Civil War concept record—left off: a nation/central character ravaged by the polarized nature of the contemporary world finally comes to terms with it’s elemental duality, only to be faced with the next daunting [...]

[The second in a series of travel essays from China, New York, and Israel] While it was raining when my plane landed in Beijing, it was in the 70s and sunny most of the next two weeks. I was staying on the 24 th floor of an apartment building and could see the surrounding mountains nearly every day. The haze that the city has become known for wasn’t completely absent, but was generally never an issue. But with good weather combined with the National Day and Golden Week that followed, areas [...]

Wicker Park in Autumn Something clicked in October, and I found myself at eight shows in just 16 days, likely due to a mix of early onset Seasonal Affective Disorder and rise in tours before the end of the year. It’s a lot of music to consume, and while I’m still digesting it all, I’m already planning for more. Below are the eight shows I saw in the last two weeks. Below that are the 9 shows I plan to see before the end of the month. Care to join? [...]

Sometimes I feel like the official spokesperson for unloved vegetables.  I implore you to adopt this lonely kohlrabi!  And please find a dish for that suffering daikon radish.  But I can’t help myself, and there’s yet another vegetable that deserves your undivided attention, and that vegetable is okra.  BRING. IT. ON. Okra has something of an acquired taste.  And if poorly prepared it is not tasty.  But when cooked right, this stuff is damn good.  For those unfamiliar, it is the shape and size of a small jalapeno, but a little fuzzy [...]

Graham Foust For many American readers, In Time’s Rift will be the first introduction to the German poet Ernst Meister. Published by Wave Books, the collection consists of short, concise poems that “at once entice and irritate the mouth and mind,” as translators Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick write in their introduction. Staff writer Gina Myers recently sat down with Foust, who is the author of several collections of poetry, to discuss the new book of translations. Frontier Psychiatrist: How did this project come about? Did you have experience prior to this [...]

P.T. Anderson's The Master Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, The Master , cannot separate itself from the looming shadow of his previous film, his magnum opus, There Will Be Blood . Anderson seems to love “loose adaptations.” His films somehow avoid historical pastiche as he strikes the delicate balance between zeitgeist and psychology. Blood was “loosely based” on Upton Sinclair’s Oil! , while The Master is “loosely based,” no matter how much Anderson or anyone else involved in the film may deny it, the history of Scientology and its [...]

[The first in a series of travel essays from China, New York, and Israel] Click to view slideshow. The Airport Express elevated train flies past the stagnant Tuesday evening traffic and I’m welcomed to the city by the corporate offices of Mercedes, Caterpillar, and Microsoft. Through the haze and rain shine the bright yellow lights of an Ikea. Did I take the wrong plane? Nope. I’m in Beijing, back in China for the first time since I studied for a semester in Shanghai over three years ago. [...]

Click to view slideshow. Back in June, we saw an intimate Brooklyn screening of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry , a powerful documentary about the Chinese artist and activist, and concluded that Ai could teach contemporary artists a few things . The movie has since played theaters nationally and enjoyed wide critical acclaim. After a recent screening of the film in Providence, FP’s Jordan Mainzer interviewed director Alison Klayman via phone to discuss the film and Ai's profound influence. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry explores [...]

Ty Segall's 2012, from left to right: Hair , Slaughterhouse , Twins Ty Segall knows how to save the best for last. Twins —out this week on Chicago’s Drag City Records —is the third Segall-related release of the year, and his solo follow-up to last year’s breakout Goodbye Bread . The most enigmatic and schizophrenic rocker this side of Jack White, Segall has delivered a piece that flawlessly combines his stoner heavy blues jams with his British Invasion psych-pop gems with his punk ragers. [...]