Mariecar Mendoza The diploma, the tassel, the Hefty Bag gown – give it to a more eager soul. As far as I’m concerned, I graduated May 19, the day Cal Poly tripped on its own incompetence and cancelled my music…
The Beach Boy sheds some light
The Art Beat: How was your experience with the Katrina Donation Challenge? You raised over $210,000 for charity and you made hundreds of personal thank-you calls. Brian Wilson: It was a wonderful experience for me. It was filled with love.…
'God Only Knows' what's possible
Mariecar Mendoza Editors Note: In the first part of this story, Stacey Anderson convinced her father to donate to Brian Wilson’s Hurricane Relief Challenge and talk to his favorite musician. In part two, after weeks of hopefulness and an angry…
How Brian Wilson saved my father
Mariecar Mendoza “I don’t give a goddamn about the Beach Boys!” It was 1963, and the generational gap had never yawned wider. My grandfather, the principal of Lennox High School in Hawthorne, Calif., had suffered a particularly bad day; two…
Bloc Party gets 'Super-Boffy'
Mariecar Mendoza Bloc Party doesn’t need no education, yet the thoroughly schooled Essex rockers are still changing the face of modern art-rock. “Silent Alarm,” their 2005 debut, was voted by NME as the album of the year and broke through…
Coachella: scenes from the cultural oasis
Paul Bittick I was somewhere around Indio, in the apex of the desert, when Tommy Lee kicked in. As I walked through the manicured grass, happily eating corn on the cob, the thin and dust-caked Motley Crue drummer ran up…
What's Italian for 'Deerhoof'?
Mariecar Mendoza Intricate, disparate, sing-song articulate – Deerhoof deserves to be called much more than just the standby “experimental.” The San Francisco art-rock quartet has deftly evolved from ephemeral noise to catchier pop since their 1996 inception, and had seen…
The state of the reunion
Mariecar Mendoza On Easter Sunday, he was risen. The lanky and shirtless man, glowing behind his mass of flowing dark hair and vicious laceration scars, lifted his hands to the world that had awaited him and bestowed an omniscient smile…
Sinatra explains it all
Mariecar Mendoza When the levee starts breaking, when the crowd stops screaming, the Chairman was right – you just gotta loosen up and swing. In the 1940s, Frank Sinatra was the best game in town. His deep bobbysox ballads and…
How I learned the '60s are over
Dan Watson The theatre is dark, but Reno dark, which means it’s permeated with the vague threat of cheap neon. The sound kicks in – a swell of sweeping orchestration, luridly grandiose, like a carmelized medley of the worst of…
Ten Ruminations Upon Watching MTV's 10 Spot
Mariecar Mendoza 1. The brains-in-a-vat behind MTV’s prime-time programming emphasize modern ambiguity tenfold over actual comprehension. The 10 Spot intro, once the destination site for “Daria” clips and off-color jokes, held a brief flirtation with actual music videos last year.…