Anyone who has ever had a botched sex-change operation or any connection to the Berlin Wall may have emotional ties to a rock musical coming to town. And hopefully, those ties will be one angry inch long.

"Hedwig and the Angry Inch" is coming to Club Congress this weekend, bringing with it the lounge act/rock show/multimedia presentation that is the Hedwig experience.

"Hedwig and the Angry Inch" originally opened off-Broadway in 1998 and spawned a movie in 2001. [Read article]

"He sat naked and drunk in a room of summer night, running the blade of the knife under his fingernails, smiling, thinking of all the letters he had received telling him that the way he lived and wrote about that - it had kept them going when all seemed truly hopeless."

Words like that could come from none other than the mind of the late great Charles Bukowski: poet, loving father, alcoholic. [Read article]

The main topic of water cooler conversation in every corner of the world has been, "Can Will Ferrell successfully hold an entire movie on his shoulders without the cushion of the holidays?" The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

The main premise of the movie "Anchorman" is that men in the 1970s were pigs. Of course this is not new information. The new element is that it can be quite funny.

Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) and his news team are presented with the sad fact that a woman, Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), has been given an opportunity to read the news alongside them. Sigh! Gasp! And the walls came crashing down! [Read article]

Metallica - Some Kind of Monster
1 out of 5 stars

"Monstrous" has always been an apt word to describe how Metallica goes about the business of making music. And for Metallica it is very much a business.

The boys in Metallica – at least the current ones – have always had three-piece suits under their black leather pants. Sure, back in the day the hard-drinking rockers earned themselves the nickname "Alcoholica," but such is the business of rock and roll. Such is the way a mostly mediocre band accumulates oh-so-ephemeral rock and roll cred. [Read article]

Thee Shams - Please Yourself
2 out of 5 stars

Sounds Like: A derivative album deriving from a derivative album

See Also: The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Rolling Stones

Yeah, Thee Shams fucking rock. And, yeah, that's a topless girl on the cover of the album. So what gives, music reviewer? Why only two stars?

Initially Please Yourself sounded like a fabulous album. In fact it was evocative of some of my most treasured memories: hanging out in rowdy juke joints in Mississippi, playing harmonica on the front porch, arguing about the virtues of Howlin' Wolf over Muddy Waters with the other guys at the mill. [Read article]