If it’s difficult for Americans to talk about life on the ground in Iran, imagine how difficult it is for Iranians to. The dialogue about Iran in the States is so omnipresent and overwhelming that personal stories have to find outlets outside of the news to get their version of the events out to the public.

No One Knows About Persian Cats, by renowned Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, is a good solution. The film effectively blurs the line between documentary film making and fictional story. →

Treasure Island Music Festival – San Francisco, CA
Live Review: 10/17 – 10/18/09
***
Treasure Island, not only a book by Robert Louis Stevenson, is a bizarre little spit of fill in between San Francisco and Oakland, next to the anchor point for the Bay Bridge. A former naval base built out of soil dragged out of the Bay, it’s the legacy of an overfunded Army Corps of Engineers, who, if they had their way, would probably filled in the entire San Francisco Bay. Now students and government workers mostly live in the post-war tract housing that used to house Navy officers. It’s a little slice of suburban wilderness in the middle of a bay of commuters. →

Photo by Alicia J. Rose

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson – “Shake a Shot”

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Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson has been singing for some time, but he entered into the music world with his self-titled debut record in 2008. His second album in as many years is Summer of Fear (out on Saddle Creek), a yearning and robust affair about a particularly down summer. He sent us a dispatch over email about dealing with the press, living on the road and working with Kyp Malone. →

Photo by Eric Martin

Kyp Malone has had a pretty busy hiatus so far. Since TV On the Radio announced they were taking a year off in early September at Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco, Kyp has released a solo album under the handle Rain Machine (on Anti- Records and is already halfway through a national tour with his new band. He spoke to Evil Monito over the phone about his new band, rawer songs, and politics. →

Cymbals Eat Guitars
Self-Released
(2009)

Cymbals Eat Guitars set out a tough dynamic for themselves to play, and while Why There Are Mountains, their debut album, has its successes, it doesn’t really come together as the grand statement of a renewed indie rock tradition that some in the music community have made it out to be. Instead of going the way of Broken Social Scene (another band that covers a lot of musical influence), who split their vast and disparate interests into discrete statements that then bleed into one another, Cymbals Eat Guitars is all bleed →

Photo by Kenneth Lu, Licensed under Creative Commons.

The Fox Theater – Oakland, CA
Live Review: 9/10/09
***
The Fox Theater in Oakland is one of the more interesting restoration projects of late in an area full of them. It was a movie theater earlier in the century, one that really did justice to the “theater” part of the phrase, belonging to an era where movie-going was still a glamorous affair. The acoustics aren’t great, and the interior frequently errs on the side of tacky. So it’s appropriate that two very theatrical bands should come and try to give the place back some of its grandeur. →