Online Exclusives
Interview: Harold Ramis
Drew Fortune :: Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 11:00 am
Yep, that’s Egon. If you don’t know already, Harold Ramis is one of the titans of comedy. He’s the man behind Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Vacation, and and the list goes on.
D+T contributing writer Drew Fortune was one of the lucky attendees at last week’s 50th Anniversary gala celebration of Second City, the Chicago institution that brought us everyone from Ramis and Bill Murray to Steve Carell and Eugene Levy. He was tenacious enough to badger Ramis into an exclusive interview for D+T.
Follow the jump for Fortune’s reportage from Second City and his interview with Harold Ramis.
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Issue 22, Magazine
Sufjan Stevens on His Orchestral Project, The BQE
Drew Fortune :: Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 4:50 pm
For a man who has never shied away from grand ambition, Sufjan Stevens’s latest project, The BQE, a cinematic suite inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, appears to have gotten the better of him—a project with a scope and feeling too large to fully capture. A sprawling undertaking, incorporating an orchestra of over thirty people, companion comic book, 16mm cinematography and choreographed Hula –Hoopers, the two-year endeavor is finally being released as a dual CD/DVD package on Asthmatic Kitty. Upon release, Stevens, the man who famously announced plans to release an album for each of the fifty states, is finally ready to take a step away from the epic and learn to appreciate the modest. Call it Stevens’s Apocalypse Now or Fitzcarraldo, the project may have been a vision impossible to realize, but the Detroit native is not beaten and, like his hometown, is slowly learning to rebuild from the ground up.
Speaking with Stevens from his home in Brooklyn, the boy who grew up playing too many instruments is enjoying some much-needed downtime. MORE »
Issue 21, Magazine
Japandroids “Just The Two Of Us”
Drew Fortune :: Thursday, September 10th, 2009 5:07 pm
The Japandroids are somewhere outside of Ontario, on a dark, lonely stretch of road, and the bottle rockets are starting to fly. I’m on the phone with guitarist/vocalist Brian King, and I can hear the bottle rockets zinging out the car window and exploding in the night sky. The two-piece garage rock revisionists are on the road following a high-profile gig at the Ottawa Blues Fest and spirits are high. And why shouldn’t they be? Brian King survived a near death experience at the beginning of the year, a perforated ulcer which demanded a six week re-cooperation, resulting in the band postponing their first major tour. MORE »
