Topic: Karl

THE JULIANA HATFIELD THREE perform live for the first time in over 20 years, including my fave, "My Sister."  Get Off My Lawn. That's yourThree-fer Tuesday.

TALKING HEADS, Live at the Stardust Ballroom, 1979.

MENACE BEACH advance streams Menace Beach. 

THE SIDEKICKS advance stream Runners In The Nerved World.

MARILYN MANSON is advance streaming The Pale Emperor, which is largely not my bag, but why judge.

ANDY KIM (ft. KEVIN DREW) drop a reworked version of Kim's 1968 single “Shoot ’Em Up, Baby," ahead of their collaborative LP, It’s Decided.

NICK HESSLER beats Guillain–Barré Syndrome and returns with the oh-so-jangly "Hearts, Repeating," ahead of Soft Connections.

DJANGO DJANGO drop “First Light" as a single.

WAXAHATCHEE drops "Air" ahead of Ivy Tripp.

THE MAMAS & PAPAS lip-synced "California Dreaming" really well o­n Hullaballoo, but not showing you the go-go dancers, who are worth the wait.

SLEATER-KINNEY gets a meaty cover feature from Pitchfork.

MARK RONSON gives The Guardian a track-by-track tour of the new LP, but good luck getting the albums stream to work in the States.

SAHSHA FRERE-JONES, the longtime pop music critic for The New Yorker, has left the magazine to join Genius, a website mounting an ambitious expansion after starting as a forum for annotated rap lyrics online.

VAN HALEN settles their lawsuit against Alex’s ex-wife, Kelly Van Halen.

GARY OLDMAN and fourth wife Alexandra Edenborough are getting divorced.

USHER is engaged to his longtime girlfriend and business partner Grace Miguel.

TOPHER GRACE popped the question last week to actress Ashley Hinshaw.

THE GOLDEN GLOBES had to make do without air conditioning, poor things.

BRIAN WILLIAMS watched his daughter's outre sex scene on HBO's Girls.

GONE GIRL author Gillian Flynn says she plans to make a sequel to her award nominated movie.

THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON has a new trailer online.

CENTCOM's Twitter and YouTube accountswe re hacked...while Pres. Obama gave a seech on cybersecurity.

FRANCE: Wednesday's edition of Charlie Hebdo will ‘naturally’ contain cartoons of Prophet Mohammed, the magazine's lawyer has announced.  Up to six terror cell members may still be at large after the Paris attacks in which 17 people were murdered, French police have warned.

NIGERIA: Why did the world ignore Boko Haram's Baga attacks?

SYRIA: New intelligence suggests that Bashar al-Assad is still trying to build the bomb. And he may be getting help from North Korea and Iran.

IRAQ: In the eyes of most Iraqis, their country's best ally in the war against the Islamic State group is not the United States and the coalition air campaign against the militants. It's Iran, which is credited with stopping the extremists' march on Baghdad. Iraq may need three years to rebuild and restructure its military, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday.

A HORNY ELEPHANT vents his frustration on an automobile.

A MALE CAMEL in rut trampled two people to death at the Camel Kisses farm in north Texas, KFDX television station reported on Sunday.

A FLAMING CAT sparked a two-alarm fire in the Bronx.

A MICRO-PIG is now the size of a polar bear.

FOXYGEN blows away Letterman with their TV debut, a hot, big band version of "How Can You Really."

SLEATER-KINNEY advance streams No Cities To Love.

BELLE & SEBASTIAN advance streams Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance.

VIET CONG advance streams their self-titled full-length debut.

SHARON JONES & THE DAP-KINGS drop a new song, "Little Boys With Shiny Toys," and oh yes.

NICK CAVE covers Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche,” for Starz’s Black Sails.

JENS LEKMAN drops his weekly "Postcard No. 2."

RYLEY WALKER drops "Primrose Green", the title track from his upcoming second album, which rolls out several guitar styles at once.

KIM GORDON's book tour will feature interviews conducted by Carrie Brownstein, Jon Wurster, Aimee Mann,Bruce Pavitt, and more.

SLY STONE: The Original Rhythm King.

NEIL PEART talked Gene Krupa, Keith Moon and more during NPR's Beat Week.

BAND REUNIONS Glide wants to see.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: Taken 3 tops the chart with 40 million, well ahead of its 30 million tracking number. It will comeclose to beakeneven domestically, and likely clean up world wide (foreign receipts are already 51 million).  Selma places with 11 million, and will likely do well on the MLK Jr Day weekend.  And if it becomes an awards darling--as seems likely--could end up profitable.  Into The Woods shows with 9.8 million and is close to beakeven in worldwide receipts.  The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies takes the fourth slot with 9.4 million on s steep 57 percent drop --but it already has 781.8 million in the bank.  Unbroken rounds out the Top 5 with 8.4 million on a 54 percent drop, but it's approaching breakeven as it rolls out overseas.  Below the fold, The Imitation Game creeps into the sixth slot on a 2 percent drop: some Golden Globes would be a boost for the biopic.

INHERENT VICE, I'm sorry to report, may be my least favorite Paul Thomas Anderson film.  This adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel looked to be a cross bewtween The Big Lebowski andThe Big Sleep, and ends up being as confusing as the latter with much less charm than the former.  In fact, reading the reviews (after forming my opinion), the good reviews essentially advise people to ignore the plot, presumably because it's not completely comprehensible and goes on for about 2 1/2 hours.  That sort of advice might cut it if the characters were particularly compelling, but they're not, even though Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin and Katherine Waterston in particular give fine performances.   But the actors can only work with the script they have, which gives us little about them in which to invest.  Instea, PTA serves up a seriocomic look at California the early 1970, with some side shots at the conventions of film noir--both of which have beenn done better in other movies.

THE GOLDEN GLOBES went to these folks.

JIMMY FALLON could've dated Nicole Kidman, but he blew it.

BILL COSBY joked openly about the rape allegations against him.

JEFF GOLDBLUM and his wife, contortionist and aerialist Emilie Livingston, are expecting their first child.

BRADGELINA were officially husband and wife long before they tied the knot last summer, she recently revealed to Italian magazine Io Donna.

WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER is headed to Netflix as a miniseries featuring the original cast.

TAYLOR NEGRON, comedian and actor (and cousin of Three Dog Night's Chuck Negron), dies at 57 from cancer.

FRANCE: Hundreds of thousands of people joined world leaders on the streets of Paris on Sunday for a rally and march under extraordinary security after a series of terrorist attacks in the city. Among the world leaders to attend the rally in Paris on Sunday were the prime ministers of Britain, Denmark, Poland and Spain; US Ambassador Hartley was the only high-ranking American official to participate in the Paris rally.  French law enforcement officers have been told to erase their social media presence and to carry their weapons at all times because terror sleeper cells have been activated over the last 24 hours in the country.  French security services are likely to face intense pressure to explain how known militants — including one trained by an al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen — faced no apparent scrutiny before they launched this week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, including the daytime assault on a a satirical newspaper, a long-declared Islamist target.

GERMANY: A German tabloid that paid tribute to those killed at Charlie Hebdo by reprinting cartoons from the French satirical paper mocking the Prophet Mohammed was firebombed Sunday, police said.

SAUDIA ARABIA: A blogger has been publicly flogged after being convicted of cybercrime and insulting Islam, reports say.

EGYPT's president opened the new year with a dramatic call for a "revolution" in Islam to reform interpretations of the faith entrenched for hundreds of years, which he said have made the Muslim world a source of "destruction" and pitted it against the rest of the world.

NIGERIA: Boko Haram killed as many as 2000 people in five days in the town of Baga. The terror group's territory now rivals that held by the Islamic State.

PRIMATE vs CANINE: Who you got?

A BALD EAGLE rescued by a nature photographer from central Illinois has recovered and been released to the wild, but the man credited with saving him faces misdemeanor charges of interfering with wildlife.

CAMELS how have lycra racing outfits.

THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE:

...with ECHO and the BUNNYMEN!  Live at the Royal Albert Hall, circa July 1983.  Your setlist includes: "Going Up," "With A Hip" and "All That Jazz"; "All My Colours (Zimbo)" and "Silver"; "The Cutter" and "The Killing Moon"; "Rescue" and "Never Stop"; and "Over the Wall." Your encores are "Crocodiles" and "Do It Clean."

NILS LOFGREN stopped by WFUV's Studio A for a chat and unplugged mini-set, including my favorite Nils track, "No Mercy."

IL SOGNO DEL MARINAIO, featuring Mike Watt, drops by World Cafe for a chat and mini-set.

IRON & WINE drops “Everyone’s Summer of ’95,” part of an archival record.

SCREAMING FEMALES drop “Criminal Image” ahead of Rose Mountain.

YO LA TENGO drops  “Suspirica” as part of an album of 50 songs that are 50 seconds long.

UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA unveils "SB-02," a 17-minute instrumental, ahead of their next LP.

ALL SONGS CONSIDERED: The debut episode is back online.

LEWIS: Another "lost" album surfaces online.

JON PRATT: The Claude Pate frontman plays "The Living" for an entry in NPR's Tiny Desk Contest.

PANDA BEAR talks to SPIN about his upcoming LP and middle age.

SILVER JEWS: Don't call it a comeback?

NICK CAVE now brands a new...skateboard.

LED ZEPPELIN is reissuing Physical Graffiti, with bonus tracks. Shocka. It comes out 40 years to the day of its original release. Get Off My Lawn.

ICYMI: Yesterday would have been the birthday of Elvis Presley, and was the birthday of David Bowie.

NOW SHOWING: Taken 3 opens wide, scoring 21 percent on the ol' Tomatometer.  Selma expands wide at 100 percent. Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice expands to 645 screens at 71 percent.

BILL COSBY's TV wife, Phylicia Rashad, "clarified" her comments about the controversies swirling around the comic. Shocka.

JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT is pregnant and expecting her second child with her husband Brian Hallisay.

GIADA DE LAURENTIS is hitting back at a despicable new tabloid cover story that alleges she may have betrayed her husband Todd Thompson with a number of celebrities, including John Mayer, Matt Lauer and Bobby Flay.

ANGELINA JOLIE hosted a special screening of her movie Unbroken at the Vatican.

CHRIS EVANS assisted BETTY WHITE at the People's Choice Awards.

ROD TAYLOR, the suave Australian native who came to Hollywood and starred in such films as The Birds and The Time Machine, has died. He was two days shy of turning 85.

FRANCE: A writer for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo says ‘stupidity will not win’ as Google pledges to donate €250,000 to support the publication following this week's Islamic terror attack.

SYRIA: An estimated 670,000 children in Syria are being deprived of education after the Islamic State extremist group ordered the closure of schools until the curriculum is made to conform with its medieval reading of the Islamic Sharia, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said Tuesday.

IRAQ: Suspected Islamic State fighters launched a major assault on pro-government tribal forces in Anbar just one day after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi called for a “tribal revolution” against the extremist group.

DOLPHINS play peek-a-boo.

RHESUS MONKEYS were trained to recognize themselves in a mirror...so they immediately checked out heir butts.

LIZARD PENISES Evolve at Super Speed. Click.

SNAKE in a TOILET:  Two women in San Diego discovered quite a surprise in their downtown office building Tuesday: a 5 1/2-foot long Columbian Rainbow Boa in the toilet.

THE WAR ON DRUGS played “An Ocean In Between The Waves" for Fallon.

LITTLE BRUTES stream their Desire EP.

BRANDI CARLILE stopped by The Current for a chat and mini-set.

FLY GOLDEN EAGLE stpped by World Cafe for a chat and mini-set.

BELLE & SEBASTIAN drops “The Cat With The Cream” ahead of Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance.

OF MONTEAL drops “Empyrean Abattoir,” ahead of Aureate Gloom.

SWERVEDRIVER drops “Setting Sun” ahead of I Wasn’t Born To Lose You, the band's first studio recording since 1998.

THE DODOS drop “Retriever” ahead of Individ.

THE FIVE AMERICANS: "I See The Light."

ROBIN GUTHRIE talks to PopMatters about the Cocteau Twins and the future.

JOHN LURIE talks to Aquarium Drunkard about his internet radio show.

THE MOST ANTICIPATED RELEASES of 2015, according to Pitchfork.

30 ESSENTIAL POST-ROCK SONGS, compiled by Stereogum.

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH  and his fiancée Sophie Hunter are expecting their first child together.

BLAKE LIVELY talks motherhood at People.

BILL COSBY's TV wife, Phylicia Rashad, defends the comic against serial accusations of misconduct.

MERYL STREEP & JESSICA CHASTAIN respond to  Russell Crowe's commentsin an Australian magazine interview about not believing that there is ageism in Hollywood, particularly for actresses.

BRADGELINA are off to meet the Pope.

JOHN TRAVOLTA is returning to television in FX's highly anticipated American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson.

STEVE KROFT gets his own expose.

FRANCE: The police organized an enormous manhunt across the Paris region on Wednesday for three suspects they said were involved in a brazen and methodical midday slaughter at a satirical newspaper that had lampooned Islam. The terrorist attack by masked gunmen on the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, left 12 people dead — including the top editor, prominent cartoonists and police officers — and was among the deadliest in postwar France. Officials said late Wednesday that the suspects had been identified and that two were brothers. One of the police officials said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network, and Cedric Le Bechec, a witness who encountered the escaping gunmen, quoted the attackers as saying: "You can tell the media that it's al-Qaida in Yemen."Other sources report both returned from Syria this summer.  Many news outlets shied away from publishing the controversial images of the paper's satirical cartoons of Mohammed.

A FOX pinpoints field mice buried deep beneath the snow.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: A Whale With One-Tone Testicles.

RUSSIA's MEDICINAL LEECHES: Grown on the world's largest leech farm, slimy parasites treat a host of ailments, taking a bite out of health problems.

DOZENS OF PUPPIES have been snatched from the jaws of death in a grim South Korean farm where dogs were crammed into tiny cages and killed for their meat aged just one year old.

SPOON debuted a new song, "Satellite," in Houston.

MIKE PACE & THE CHILD ACTORS advance stream Best Boy.

FAIRPORT CONVENTION, at the 1970 Philadelphia Folk Festival.

ALL SONGS CONSIDERED features new tracks from The Go! Team, Panda Bear, Chadwick Stokes and more.

RESERVOIR advance streams Cicurina Vol. 1.

KING KHAN & THE BBQ SHOW drop "Alone Again" ahead of Invisible Girl.

THE CYRKLE: "Red Rubber Ball," co-written by Paul Simon (of Simon and Garfunkel) and Bruce Woodley (of The Seekers).

SLEATER-KINNEY talks about their reunion at The New York Times.

BELLE & SEBASTIAN talks to The 405 about Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance (Part 1) (Thx, Frank Yang).

BLONDIE's NEW YORK: A Place That Can't Exist Again.

COURTNEY LOVE Sings Opera.

CHARLIE SHEEN: Not a fan of Kim Kardashian.

BILL COSBY now faces three defamation claims from some of his accusers.

NICK LACHEY & VANESSA MINILLO welcomed their second child.

KATY PERRY & JOHN MAYER: Together again?

MARIAH CAREY is about to sign a deal for a residency at Caesars Palace.

NICHOLAS SPARKS and his wife have separated.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN talks to THR about his inspirations, thoughts on working with actors, his take on criticisms that his films are “cold,” his objectives for Interstellar, and his hopes for the future and much more.

ANT-MAN has a teaser trailer online.

KUWAIT: A legislator has come under fire by Islamists for his appeal to lift bans on dancing and alcohol consumption, calling the oil-rich Persian Gulf state "a country with no joy."

THE ISLAMIC STATE: Pentagon leaders agree to a person that the U.S. war against ISIS is succeeding. The problem is, no one can actually prove it.

SYRIA: Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State in Kobane, northern Syria, have seized a key district and now control 80 percent of the town, activists say.

HEZBOLLAH  has lifted the veil on “major infiltrations” by foreign intelligence agencies, implicitly confirming that the commander in charge of striking Israeli targets was himself recruited by Israel.

BAO BAO's first snow day at the National Zoo.

THE SQUIRREL THREAT: What makes them go Ninja?

MYSTERIOUS BEASTS were spotted by Arizona highway patrol camera.

DUMPLING SQUID  spend hours making love and ignoring predators.