Paste

6 days ago | pastemagazine.com | Grace Robins-Somerville

About two months ago, the Midwest’s most beloved DIY music festival got into some unexpected and extremely stupid legal trouble. Conor Alan, member of the emo band American Spirits and co-founder of Summit Shack, a live music collective and former house venue, received a cease-and-desist from the good people at AEG Presents, the purveyors of—among many other live events, the Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival.

1 week ago | pastemagazine.com | Luke Hicks

Ang Lee is one of film history’s most exceptional cases of career acrobatics.

1 week ago | pastemagazine.com | Leah Weinstein

My hometown is always on the precipice of completion, and the people there hold their cards quite close to their chest. I went home for the holidays this past winter, and as I passed by the remnants of the now defunct Sam Ash I grew up across the street from—the one that Mike Kinsella recalls to have purchased his first guitar at—I thought of how many remarkable things come from being surrounded by what feels inherently unremarkable.

1 week ago | pastemagazine.com | Oktay Ege Kozak

Trailblazing, controversial and an essential filmmaking voice, Spike Lee’s movies are mainly known as “issue” films, confronting race relations in America, implicating each audience member in problems we’re most likely too uncomfortable (or worse) to face head on. That description, of course, diminishes Lee’s influence over the technical and narrative language of filmmaking during the last four decades of his versatile career.

1 week ago | pastemagazine.com | Andy Crump

Call it moon gardening, agricultural astrology, or, if you prefer your pseudoscience complemented by an Appalachian drawl, planting by the signs. No matter what you name it, the practice of sowing crops according to the lunar phases remains in scientific method limbo. The likelihood is low that S.G. Goodman, an essential fixture in contemporary Americana, will sway opinions in either one direction or another on the subject. (Ancient Mesopotamia, however, would like a word).