The brilliance of Lookout! Records

Posted by Jason Diamond I really don’t think I can come up with one punk label that had as huge an effect on me as Lookout! Records did when I was a teenager.  While my tastes would change as I got older, there was hardly anything as thrilling to a 14-year-old kid in the suburbs than to receive a Lookout! poster/catalog in the mail, then checking off nearly every release that I wanted to buy. As you may or may not have […]

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Bites: The last days of a punk poet, King Dork banned?, the Dickens Question, Chicago Olympics, Park Slope protest, more

The New York Times on the last days of Jim Carroll. Lit. Frank Portman’s King Dork: future banned book? Every now and then, we just have to re-bring up the question “Why are we still reading Dickens?” (The Rumpus reminded us that The Guardian reminded us a few weeks ago.)  Answer: good characters, good stories, social, historical, amusing, etc….  I’m glad we keep ending at the same conclusion. Famous novelists spies.  Very cool.  Tolkien, Greene, Maugham, Fleming… The Millions on […]

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Conversation: Frank Portman

By Jason Diamond Dr. Frank wrote the love songs of my youth.  As I spent countless hours making mixtapes for girls I liked, it was always a point to put a song by his band, Mr. T Experience on there somewhere.  I guess in a twist on the Minutemen song “History Lesson, Pt. 2”, punk rock changed my life, but it was guys like Dr. Frank and many of his contemporaries who did it by writing smart, sensitive, and often […]

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Bites: Frank Portman’s playlist, Roger’s monograms, Michael Pollan, indie bookselling as football, and (maybe) one last mention of Inherent Vice .

Frank Portman, of one of my favorite pop-punk bands, Mr. T Experience, has a new book out called Andromeda Klein, and he gives Largehearted Boy a great playlist for Book Notes. N+1: Not so into zombies/alien films, but likes District 9. Indichik put up an MP3 of Beach Fossils last week.  I forgot to mention it, but it’s well worth mentioning considering this guy is putting out some of the best stuff I’ve heard all year. New York Times Book […]

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Bites: Frank Portman’s playlist, Roger’s monograms, Michael Pollan, indie bookselling as football, and (maybe) one last mention of Inherent Vice

Frank Portman, of one of my favorite pop-punk bands, Mr. T Experience, has a new book out called Andromeda Klein.  He gives Largehearted Boy a great playlist for Book Notes. N+1: Not so into zombies/alien films, but likes District 9. Indichik put up an MP3 of Beach Fossils last week.  I forgot to mention it, but it’s well worth mentioning considering this guy is putting out some of the best stuff I’ve heard all year. New York Times Book Review […]

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