Archive for February 25th, 2007

Thanks to BlakeWallington who sent us this awesome footage of Pillow Fight NYC:

M!stakes.

Never heard of ‘em? Now you have. Never listened to ‘em? Go. Listen. Now. Before it’s too late, go listen to the greatest Brooklyn band that no one’s ever heard of, so you can say you knew them way back when they lived in an apartment one floor down from your brother’s apartment in the way-out-freakin’-east coast of Bushwick like I do.

Well, maybe not just like I do, just. Just listen to them. Now. Take a break from this review, and come back, I’ll still be here.

See? Wow.

M!stakes aren’t revolutionary, they’re just good. Fantastically good without being too inaccessable. And difficult to describe. That too. Perhaps because they’ve found a way to emulate some of the best aspects of just-slightly-above-the-public-radar rock, new-wave, grunge, pop and punk music from the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s. (Ed: This decade is known as the aught’s. It’s 2007 people, we need to decide on a name here, and The Aughts was good enough a hundred years ago, it’s got some classy charm, and it sounds good. There. It’s decided)

Some of the first bands that come to mind to describe M!stakes would be are The Clash, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, with slight streaks from the grunge era like Stone Temple Pilots and perhaps a dash of Soundgarden, but with compositions that you may expect from Radiohead, just without their level of weirdness and alienation. There. That describes it. I think.

M!stakes, are understandably often misspelled as Mistakes, and improperly prefaced with “The” (They’re not The M!stakes, they’re M!stakes) which may make them harder to find than other bands, but when spelled right, they’re easy to Google.

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Drama adds a bit of excitement to Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, NYC). Like a sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes’s painting Children with a Cart (1778) was hijacked last November when it was en route to the art museum. The FBI stepped in to investigate, and the painting was safely returned to the Guggenheim on February 21. From now until March 28, you can stand before this and 134 other diverse paintings from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. General admission to the museum is $18, though every Friday from 5:45 – 7:15 PM you can pay what you wish. All visitors receive complimentary audio tours, and there are free tours by docents daily at noon and 2:00.

Beyond the stolen Goya painting, Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso raises some eyebrows for breaking from traditional art history constraints of what constitutes Spanish painting. The Guggenheim explains:

Until recently art historians bracketed Spanish painting between El Greco and Goya, maintaining that 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Surrealism—both of which were pioneered by artists of Spanish origin—broke completely with the traditions that preceded them. Today we have sufficient historical perspective to see that, despite their revolutionary aesthetic leaps, the great artists of the early twentieth century were nourished by traditional models that were, furthermore, local in character.

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