Word: avante
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...Lizard Lounge has a devoted, dreadlocked Cantabridgian following, but few Harvard types are cool enough to know about this avant-garde nest of musical experimentation. The lounge is 1920s Paris underground jumpstarted by a few decades, air-conditioned and in English. "Club d'Elf" performs mind-expanding electronica on Thursdays while Sundays see one of the best poetry jams in town, accompanied by the smooth Jeff Robinson Trio. Anyone can have a go: the atmosphere is hip yet forgiving...
...downtown club, sleepy, music throbbing, your third drink drained. A stranger starts whispering gruff poetry into your ear. That's Tricky, the prince of trip-hop, and a dues-paying member of the musical avant-garde. In his mesmerizing new album he collaborates with hip-hoppers DJ Muggs (of Cypress Hill) and Grease. They help bring his almost perversely abstract compositions back down to the street, grounding them with raw raps and blunt beats. Tricky remains endearingly elusive, delivering almost all his vocals sotto voce, winding his way through the shadows of his songs...
...suggest that what is mildly amusing as a four-minute skit on Saturday Night Live is needlessly painful as a 90-minute movie. Nevertheless, it was announced last week that MIKE MYERS will get $20 million to write and star in Sprockets, a feature film based on the forbiddingly avant-garde German talk-show host Dieter that he played on SNL. Of course, Myers will have some backup. Reportedly, one version of the script for Sprockets had a role for Baywatch mastermind David Hasselhoff as a villain who, on tour in Germany, kidnaps Dieter's monkey...
Listening to this avant-rock band's new album is like arriving late to a mystery movie. You wonder, "Have I missed something?" In the case of Terror Twilight, you haven't. About a third of the songs on this album lack musical coherence, substituting aimless dissonance and artless artiness for melody and emotion. On a few tracks, however, Pavement lives up to its cerebral reputation; these boast a smart mix of studied elegance and ethereal sweetness. Still, this is a band that needs to replace indulgence with consistency...
...Avant-garde writer and culture impresario Gertrude Stein was a stolid, heavy presence, monolithic, unladylike. She liked to gossip and had a great laugh. She boxed with welterweights for exercise. Art expert Bernard Berenson described her as looking "like a statue from Ur of the Chaldees." Alice B. Toklas was a chain smoker with a slight mustache, given to exotic dress, Gypsy earrings and manicured nails. They met in Paris in 1907. Alice, 29, found Gertrude, 33, "a golden brown presence." Gertrude insisted that Alice had heard bells heralding Stein's "greatness." Alice said Gertrude was simply struck by love...