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Album Review: Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two
Slap this on in the car, turn it up to 11 and you're likely to find yourself back in the summer of 1989 with the window down, a sunburnt arm, and a sore throat from rapping along.

Album Review: Howe Gelb / A Band of Gypsies, Alegrias
The enormously prolific Howe Gelb is behind the Tucson band Giant Sand (from which Calexico became a more commercially successful split-off) and has also recorded a dozen albums under his own name.

Book Review: <i>Caribou Island</i>
The disintegration of American dreams into nightmares is the leitmotiv of this first novel. Its narrative punches you from the first paragraph: "I'm ten years old ... I opened our front door and found my mother hanging from the rafters..."

Movie Review: Hook, Line and Sinker
The first feature outing under the banner of the small, self-sustaining Wellington collective Torchlight Films was Taking the Waewae Express, a small and gutsy effort that took us into the lives of several young men.

Album Review: Beastwars
Like a mongrel mix of Kyuss, Neurosis, and the mighty Godflesh, Beastwars bring together pummelling intensity, beautiful brutality, and sonic paranoia to create a sound all of their own.

Comedy Review: The Big Show, Comedy Chamber, Town Hall
A boozy Saturday night crowd wants easy gags. Thankfully Gordon Southern, the host of The Big Show - one of the more glamorous daily events at the festival - was full of them.

Book Review: <i>Bird Cloud</i>
There are memoirs that are about a personal life lived, and then there are memoirs about a specific subject on which an author wishes to ruminate at length. Annie Proulx's non-fiction Bird Cloud very much falls into the latter.