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Umphrey’s McGee Key Club, West Hollywood, California 10.21.04 Umphrey’s McGee play what they want for as long as they want, and a live setting is a great showcase for their free-flowing musical jams that have more in common with progressive rock than the Grateful Dead. The sold-out show at the …

Last night we watched a jewel of the TV Christmas show crown, 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, with its search for the meaning of Christmas amidst commercialized children (some gleefully, some reluctantly so) and innocence lost, most pointedly symbolized by a garish Christmas tree lot filled with neon-colored aluminum trees, …

Is that sweeping enough for you?

Our mutating legend Bob Dylan, the folk-singing bluesman rock ‘n’ roller, poet visionary gigolo materialist mystic Christian Jew, who has swabbed us with the impassioned dew of youth, stroked us with the dry calm of age, cooed angelic honeyed melodies, and seethed with a “voice like sand and glue.” Dylan …

I have always considered myself a liberal, and while I remain a staunch social liberal, I have become a defense hawk and economic moderate. After the usual heated election rhetoric, including from the New Republic, which painted Bush as a frothing deranged militarist and base incompetent, I am deeply gratified …

Though nominally an anti-abortion party, the Republicans are as deceptive as they are smart on this exceptionally touchy subject. The Republicans know that they can speak the anti-abortion rhetoric to appease their most religious adherents — and help drum up social conservative voter turnout — as long as they don’t …

The fact that soldiers who die in Iraq are called heroes may bug Ted Rall, but no matter how you look at it, they died for their country. Whether we like what the country is - or has become - is the real question.

In the jazz and blues recording industry, there could hardly be bigger news if Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis returned from the dead and put on a free show in Central Park. Concord Records and Fantasy announced yesterday that Concord has completed its acquisition …

For years on his Pee Wee’s Playhouse TV show, and most concentratedly in Tim Burton’s classic Pee Wee’s Big Adventure film, Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) walked the razor’s edge between innocence and decadence, willfully ignoring the implications of his determined naivete while the audience howled knowingly at the innuendo …

A recent discussion on Blogcritics along with this New York Times article about the separation of church and state in Italy have prompted the following thoughts. I live in Brooklyn, the Borough of Churches. There’s practically a church on every block, and where there isn’t a church, there’s a synagogue …