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MUSIC Unable to resist a siren song with dark underpinnings, hanging low with heartbreak then taking you higher? Let Chairlift co-founder Caroline Polachek love you down when it comes to "Take It Out on Me," off her Brooklyn band's second album, Something (Kanine/Sony).Read more »

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FILM You gotta love a guy who is willing to poke fun at his man handles. But the consistency with which Will Ferrell is willing to drop trou has had even Terry Gross wondering, what's with the vast expanses of exposed carne asada, dude?

Ferrell's new Casa de mi Padre — a Spanish-language jab at telenovelas, spaghetti-burrito westerns, and just plain low-budget moviemaking, circa the early 1970s — is no exception. It, er, climaxes with a sweet, sweet love scene, complete with close-ups on rumps.Read more »

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MUSIC How does one trace the warp and woof of Bay Area indie rock's silky, sick, multihued tapestry — with ticket stubs to long-ago shows, holey concert T's, or grainy snapshots of sweat-swathed guitar players, red eyes gleaming in a haze of smoke machine emissions? Perhaps one way is to chart SF indie's course from the first Noise Pop to the latest 20th anniversary edition, teasing out the tenuous connections between the first fest's headliner Overwhelming Colorfast, reunited this year, and newish local poobah Young Prisms.Read more »

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MUSIC Musical genius, human rights activist, cultural legend, African icon — late Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti encompassed multitudes, but to his 1980s-era guitarist Soji Odukogbe, he provided not only inspiration but a way into his music.Read more »

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Year in Music "Here in my car / I feel safest of all / I can lock all my doors / It's the only way to live in cars." — Gary Numan, "Cars"

Are friends electric? In 2011, synthpop sounded like a safe vehicle with which to whirl forward, one wheel in the quickly receding past and the other in the fast-coming future.

FILM With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist.Read more »

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MUSIC It's tough to pin down a busy bee like Chris Taylor — Grizzly Bear's bassist, an in-demand producer, and now the leader of his own pack called CANT — but once you manage to, he's as disarmingly engaging as his new dispatch from a darkling, excruciatingly personal plain, Dreams Come True, released on his own Terrible Records.Read more »

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MUSIC I didn't mean to bring the earthquake to Eleanor Friedberger's Brooklyn — it just felt that way when I rang a few weeks ago, minutes after her 'hood shivered and shook like it was attempting a weak imitation of, well, San Francisco. "Actually it sounded like someone was stomping on my roof," she says wryly, phasing in and out over the line as if spirited away by unexplained forces.Read more »