By now it should be abundantly clear that Terry Gilliam has never made a deal with the devil. The many obstacles the man has famously encountered during his decades of writing and directing films are unparalleled in magnitude, and his path has been anything but charmed. Ranging from the absurd—the combination of a lead actor’s herniated disc and a flood that decimated the set of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 1999—to the heart-breaking—the shocking and untimely death of 28-year-old luminary Heath Ledger during the filming of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus—his production struggles are the stuff of Hollywood legend. Yet the visionary 69-year-old director has not only endured, but triumphed, having forged a brilliant body of work that pits tragedy against comedy, modernity against antiquity, and vulgarity against virtue, sometimes all in the course of a single scene. He describes himself as “mad” and “obsessed,” but comes across as equal parts good-humored and compassionate, and speaks with a mix 
of baritone confidence and uncalculated humility.

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Julian Casablancas doesn’t so much walk but bound through the doorway. He is wide-eyed, muss-haired and slightly gawky as he scans the bar and slides into our booth, apologizing profusely for being 30 minutes late—embarrassed in a way that people who’ve sold millions of records typically aren’t. His initial anxiety is palpable, but as he leans into his publicist, his eyes focus. Before his explanation even ends, a wry smile cracks across his face and he leans back. His eyes narrow, and as he seems to both plead and hate the sentiment, announces, “My future is in your hands.”  
 

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When it comes to scoring epic surf, the road less traveled is a risky venture. But when on a mission to find empty waves in an obscure tropical locale, sometimes there’s no choice but to set out on your own for parts unknown. That’s what pro surfer Rob Machado does in The Drifter, the tale of a harried, um, pro surfer who escapes to Indonesia to leave the buzz behind. Motoring down a dusty trail that serves as an Indo expressway, he takes his last contact with the outside world—his cell phone—and flings it in the dirt. It’s a symbolic cutting of the umbilical cord that keeps him connected with the draining demands of the agents and publicists so eager to keep him on top of the pro surf heap so they can continue to reap their percentages back in cubicle land. Eschewing the last vestiges of civilization, he immerses himself in the Indonesian landscape and seeks surf enlightenment along a Zen-like path.

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Sometime in the late ’80s, a boy stands in the imposing shadow of his parents’ bookcase. He has not yet learned how to read, but clutches his father’s weathered paperback edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy anyway, marveling at its beaten orange surface with the picture of a peculiar British gentleman. Next, he reaches up high to pull his mother’s copy of The Vegetarian Epicure from a shelf, poring over the earthy, ’70s-era design of the classic health food cookbook. This boy is still some 20 years away from singing and playing guitar in a band called Vampire Weekend (or, for that matter, knowing who Laurence Sterne even was), and is yet is unable to understand the irony of his youthful fascination with book covers.

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The literary work of Roald Dahl has long been held as one of the world’s most beloved rollicking romps both through and for the childhood imagination. Dahl, the exceedingly tall, unconventional Welshman, was both a calculator of the fantastic and fantastically calculated. He created many of his stories in the private writing hut he built behind Gipsy House, his 19th-century farmhouse nestled in the British countryside, by regimentally slipping into his favorite armchair at 10 each morning and writing feverishly until noon. His outrageous plots and unforgettable character-driven tales are a film producer’s dream, and before his death in 1990, Dahl saw several of his 17-something children’s novels made into feature films (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; The BFG; The Witches; Danny, the Champion of the World); another handful have been made in the years since. So, it came as no surprise when it was announced several years ago that the next Dahl book coming to the silver screen would be Fantastic Mr. Fox-, the underdog tale of a family of foxes who outsmart and wreak havoc on a trio of nasty farmers. The cause for heightened celebration, however, may have come when it was declared that the director attached to the project was none other than Wes Anderson, the auteur behind Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and other rollicking romps of new cinema imagination.

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On those rainy Sunday afternoons, in between the roar of football announcers and evangelical pleadings and NASCAR screechings and infomercial sales pitches, suddenly the endless clicks from the channel changer cease and, faintly, from another room, you can hear them start to lose it. It starts softly, with a gasp of surprised elation, and then a giggle, perhaps, or maybe even a quick, one-off snicker. You listen closely, catching a familiar quip from the television speakers: “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges.” Your mind backflips and you drop your basket of laundry or geometry textbook or can of Coors and race downstairs, bounding into the living room just in time to join your entire family in rolling on the Oriental rug, wiping tears from their eyes, slapping the floor and unapologetically echoing zingers like “Excuse me while I whip this out,” “Candygram for Mongo!” and, of course, “Where the white women at?” You lose your breath. Your dad is breathing into a paper bag. You forget your own name, you’re laughing so hard.

Mel Brooks has struck again.

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Crackling and popping through a phone line anchored somewhere near the North Sea, Anne Lilia Berge-Strand’s voice sounds like it’s from the mouth of a metallic ice pixie. The words seem partly made from fairy dust and bubbles, partly wrought from steel.

The odd juxtaposition may come as no surprise from a girl who originates from both underground and mainstream pop, having lost her original music partner and boyfriend, Erot (Tore Andreas Kroknes), to an untimely death just as they put their names on the map 10 years ago with “The Greatest Hit.” A siren not in the classic sense of the term, the Norwegian pop princess is as hot as she is shy, aloof as she is completely candid. There’s always been a twist of depth and darkness with Annie’s otherwise candy-like sound, making her one of the more unlikely saviors of pop music today.
 

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Up towards the top corner of America, just across the Hudson River from New York City, sits Hoboken, New Jersey. Dubbed the “Mile Square City” because of its tidy, tiny size, it’s a place different enough from the looming island of concrete next door that The New York Times once ran the headline, “Hoboken, a 10-Minute Ride to Far Away.”  It’s a quiet, clean, relatively affordable place that, if it could talk, would say, “Sure, I guess New York is alright; it’s just not for me.”

Yo La Tengo is a Hoboken band. Composed of husband-and-wife-duo Ira Kaplan (guitar/vocals) and Georgia Hubley (drums), who founded the group in 1984, and bassist James McNew, who came on in the early ‘90s, YLT’s dedication to itself and its idiosyncratic indie rock is unmistakably reminiscent of the city in which it resides. Specifically, both entities are seemingly impervious to the trends that come and go like flu seasons within spitting range of their respective borders. Hoboken, for instance, remains largely graffiti-free, unlike its famous neighbor, the birthplace of hip-hop. And for its part in the parallel, over the past quarter century, YLT has produced rock music genre-bending enough that describing it as “indie” isn’t so much a perfect categorization as it is a necessity – “shoegaze, post-punk, noise-pop, garage music” just doesn’t have the same ring.

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A common generalization is that comics are for kids. Sure, they can be, but the most successful strips entertain all ages while inhabiting a space largely known as a safe zone for children: the Sunday newspaper comics page. Classic strips like Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side and Doonesbury come to mind, as do contemporary strips like The Knight Life or Liberty Meadows, but perhaps no comic strip personified that four-color space more so than Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County and its sequel strips Outland and Opus (1980-2000). The adventures of Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat may have sated a kid’s thirst for funny-looking cartoon animals, but adults led a vicarious life through characters like the one-time “Mister America,” Steve Dallas.

Given his success on the Sunday comics page, it should be no surprise that Berkeley Breathed found a second career as an author and illustrator of several well-received children’s books. Breathed’s illustrated books deal with situations not often found in children’s literature, like losing a parent (in 2007’s Mars Needs Moms! the main character’s mother sacrifices herself to save her son, though the publisher balked at the pivotal scene – “I found a new publisher [and] Disney will release the movie [Christmas 2010],” says Breathed). His newest, Flawed Dogs The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster, is set for release in September and is already making waves as it asks readers to contemplate animal abuse amid the ode to the love shared between a girl and her dachshund.

Filter traded missives with the busy Breathed, who graciously opined on his start in comics, the “new preciousness” in children’s literature and his favorite Bloom County storyline - just in time for IDW Publishing’s fall release of the first volume of The Bloom County Library, a definitive collection of the strip for, as Breathed says, “the seriously whacked fan boys.” Needless to say, we’ve placed our order.

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"If you flirt with fame, don't be surprised when it offers you sex," Marketa Irglova once told her bandmate Glen Hansard. Nobody could have predicted that the unlikely pair who comprises The Swell Season-classically trained Czech pianist Irglova and The Frames frontman Hansard-would be transformed into international celebrities after winning an Academy Award for Best Song for "Falling Slowly," the slow, lovelorn ballad that wooed audiences of the low-budget film Once. But these days, it's far too late to go back, and Hansard and Irglova are keeping themselves grounded even as they're obliged to balance between candidness and self-protection. Popularity might be overwhelming (just imagine the entire English-speaking world feeling entitled to the details of your love life), but listening to The Swell Season is still an intimate affair.
 

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