Articles by Vincent Tolentino

MNR

12:14 p.m. “The biggest pyramid in the world? With a church on top?” The ad is for Mexico. The station is Bridgeport. I’ve spent the first quarter of this train ride staring out the...
Spring Fling Survey

Re: Spring Fling 2013!

This is embarrassing. Brown’s lineup is historically good, and it’s likely that we have as much or even more money. Macklemore is fine, whatever, but we can do so much better. Brown booked Dirty Projectors and...

83. BEST ALL NIGHTER SOUNDTRACK

Definitely not the fluorescent hum at G-Heav. Rather: someone stretched out Beethoven’s 9th without distorting pitch so that it’s 24 hours long. This is the secret. Get deep inside the mind of a real...
(Vincent Tolentino/YH Staff)

Sitting down with Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur is one of our nation’s finest living poets. Last spring, Yale awarded him an honorary degree—his latest distinction in a long list that includes the title of U.S. Poet Laureate, two Pulitzers,...
Dearcorp. (Wikimedia Commons)
GrizzlyBearColor

HIT LIST: Grizzly Bear

It’s more or less certain that Grizzly Bear can do no wrong. Remember? they seem to say with every move on Shields opener “Sleeping Ute,” which rips and clatters, thundering, out of the gates....
Grizzly Bear's Shields (Wikimedia Commons)

Barking at sea lions

This happened one night whilst barking at sea lions: La Jolla, California—my friend Kat, Richard Duardo the printmaker, and I were in La Jolla for an art show opening, but now that that was...
Cover

Up to the farm

Farmers. That’s what they’re called. Overalls, pitchforks, tractors, and all. This is the age-old conception. This is how city folk like me were raised to think of farms and the folks on them, E-I-E-I-O....

Movie: We Need to Talk about Kevin

We Need to Talk about Kevin is profoundly fucked up. Not just because it’s about a young psychopath, the “family” around him, and the high school massacre he orchestrates. It’s fucked up because director...
with football photo (saved by sally)

BREAKING: Witt had no choice, NYT reports

Several days before Patrick J. Witt, JE ’12, announced that he had withdrawn his Rhodes scholarship application, the Rhodes Trust had suspended his candidacy, the New York Times reported today. The Trust learned “through...

Music: My Brightest Diamond

Listen. This is just great music. People need to know about it. You need to know about it. My Brightest Diamond is quality music—by professional classical musicians, no less. You could call it a...

music review: Angles, the Strokes

This is what the press will tell you about Angles: It’s “the return of rock and roll,” a long-awaited triumph for everyone’s favorite Lower East Siders, and the best album since 2001’s Is This...
RoyalBaths

Music Review: royal baths, litanies

Royal Baths sound like the kind of band you’d hear in a damp little Haight-Street basement at 2 a.m. Something about the sweat and the naked incandescent bulbs just fits with the chainsaw vibrations...

Music Review: The Witmark Demos

Coffee, typewriter, wine, four—maybe five—packs of cigarettes. These, the implements of the poet, are the still-life foreground on the album’s cover. Bob Dylan hunches at his manuscript. No instruments in sight. He’s writing. This...
Come to our show this Saturday or the wax guy gets it. (Courtesy Myspace)
warpaint-the-fool

Music Review: warpaint, the fool

It’s sensual, not sexual. And it’s dark and dooming and always descending. The Fool, released this Monday, is the first full-length album from the Los Angeles hipster damsels of Warpaint. It’s a round, atmospheric...
Courtesy Sufjan Stevens