The Best TV Theme Music
The little ditties that open TV shows keep growing littler and dittier, almost disappearing into Lost’s single sustained chord. The assumption may be that we’re just going to fast-forward through them anyway, but part of the charm of shows like Cheers, M*A*S*H and Sanford and Son was the musical intro. Fortunately, not everyone has given up on the theme song. Here are 10 current shows with tunes that make us put down the remote.... read more
The Booky Man: Children’s Accursed Literature
The first book that ever made me cry told the story of an egg-sucking, ringwormy male with one ear chewed off. Did I mention he was yellow? And I was six?... read more
Best of What's Next: The Shaky Hands
At the intersection of The Shins' faux-British Invasion jingle-jangle and The Allman Brothers' raggedy Southern-fried boogie... read more
Start Press: The Spirit of Radio
The story is already legend. On October 30th, 1938, listeners who tuned in to hear CBS Radio’s regular broadcast of Mercury Theatre on the Air were whipped into a frenzy by a series of increasingly calamitous news bulletins chronicling a Martian invasion of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. At that moment in history when Orson Welles staged his now-infamous radio drama War of the Worlds, the run-up to World War II was already in motion. The American public might as well have been collectively listening to the cadence of a wooden roller coaster clack-clacking inexorably toward the first of many stomach-turning... read more
Catching Up With... Wale
Things finally seem to be falling into place for Wale... read more
Catching Up With... Sam Rockwell
With over a dozen films to his credit since 2007, Sam Rockwell is currently garnering Oscar buzz for his performance(s) in Moon. He discussed the role with Paste as well as his dual portrayal in the just-released Gentlemen Broncos which was helmed by Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess.... read more
High Definition: After 3 Seasons, Mad Men Is Just Getting Started
I was born a couple years after the 1960s ended, but the decade’s shadow loomed with import over the ones I first encountered. It was the second half of the decade I always heard about, though—Viet Nam, the moon landing, the summer of drugs. So one of my favorite things about AMC’s Mad Men is watching the forgotten beginnings of the ’60s, before John, Paul, George and Ringo touched down in an airport that had recently been named for the just-assassinated president John F. Kennedy.... read more
Getting to Know... Old Canes
Old Canes is a labor of love, borne out of necessity and a lack of amplifiers... read more
Carolina De Robertis: Where The Magic Happens
Hometown: Oakland, Calif. Book: The Invisible MountainFor Fans Of: Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, Roberto Bolaño, HomerThe name of Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, literally means “I see a mountain” in Spanish. The moniker was given by one of the first European sailors to lay eyes on the verdant land. But it’s really little more than “a mountain the shape of a huge fried egg,” Carolina De Robertis writes in her stunning debut novel, The Invisible Mountain, named for the obscured landform.... read more
Catching Up With... Jared Hess
Director Jared Hess loves science fiction. If you wanted to talk to him for hours on end about rocket ships, space rangers and David Lynch's Dune, he would happily oblige. The dead-pan visionary behind Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre loves the genre so much, that he projected some 16-odd years of mechanical beasts and galactic intrigue into his quirk masterpiece, Gentlemen Broncos. "I had drawings of Battle Stags in my Trapper Keeper," Hess recalls. "That was the kind of crap that I drew when I was 14. It was fun to be able to bring those bad boys to life."... read more
Listen Up: Mariah, Hootie & My Golden Hour
I turned 11 years old in November 1995, let me just say that up front.... read more
Best of What's Next: Clare and The Reasons
Clare Manchon embraces idiosyncrasies... read more
The Best Albums, Movies, TV & More From the 2000s
When this decade began, Paste’s website was barely a year old, and the magazine was still a twinkle in its daddies’ eyes. So looking back over the first 10 years of the 2000s feels like looking back over our own history. There hasn’t been a new album, film, TV show, video game or book Paste has covered that wasn’t eligible for our “Best of the Decade” consideration. We had dozens of critics vote in each of these five categories, and then we argued some more until we’d focused our spotlight onto the very best pop culture created during the aughts—whether... read more
Film Friday: A Weekend of Pushing Buttons
This weekend at your local Big Screen, the movies are about pushing buttons. In The Box, directed by Donnie Darko creator Richard Kelly, a mysterious man in a long coat who appears to have been slapped in the face on more than one occasion shows up at the home of Cameron Diaz and James Marsden to ask if this attractive, cash-strapped couple wants to see what’s in his box. Spoiler: it’s a button. Push it and you get a million dollars, but when you do someone on the other side of the earth whom you do not know will be... read more
Catching Up With... The Men Who Stare at Goats Author Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson knows his way around weird. The author and documentary filmmaker has spent his career tracking down some of the most wildly weird people on the planet to bring their stories to us normal folk. His bestseller, Them: Adventures with Extremists, chronicled the tales of wannabe global dominators like Islamic fundamentalists and neo-Nazi Ku Klux Klansmen. But it’s his book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, that’s putting his name on the map—in part thanks to George Clooney. The book, about the secret army unit of soldiers with psychic power called the First Earth Battalion, was just made into... read more
Salute Your Shorts: Dan Harmon's Channel 101 Shows
Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.For any longtime fans of Dan Harmon’s work, Community is a surprise. Not the fact that it’s good, no, that’s something that we could all be pretty sure of. It’s that the show, a relatively conventional sitcom, could come from the avant-garde co-founder of Channel 101, whose prior claim to fame involves shows such as Computerman and Laser Fart. He’s long been a superstar for a relatively niche group of Los Angeles filmmakers and comedians,... read more
American Casino Doc Sees Banks As Economy-Wrecking Gamblers
You want a villain, a bad guy you can blame for the financial crisis that’s torn a hole in the American economy? The gripping new documentary American Casino—just released on DVD like to nominate Phil Gramm.... read more
Best of What's Next: Moneybrother
Anders Wendin makes music as Moneybrother, but he's first and foremost a tourist... read more
The Booky Man: Maus... or There's No Place Like Home for the Holocaust
Comic books in their most familiar form—tales of super-heroes and adventurers—sprang from pulp novel potboilers of the 1930s and ‘40s. They were often lurid, licentious, shocking. In fact, by the 1950s, as America focused on the Red Scare and those dirty Commies tunneling like termites under our American way of life, ‘seditious’ comic books grew so popular among impressionable young people that authorities passed laws banning comics… and even burned them.... read more
Catching Up With... Tegan Quin
When Tegan and Sara Quin speak of devotion, they do not speak of its most traditional sense. read more
The 20 Best Gadgets of the Decade…
The 20 Best Live Acts of the…
The 17 Best Romantic Comedies This Decade
The 25 Best Movie Performances of the…
Kim Taylor - Days Like this
Blind Pilot - The Story I Heard
B.O.B. - Put Me On
Punch Brothers - Punch Brothers at CMJ
Elvis Perkins in Dearland - Stay Zombie…
David Bazan - Hard To Be
Anya Marina - Whatever You Like
