For some musicians, performing is work. For others, it’s just a big party. For Tulsa’s Fiawna Forté, it’s therapy. “I was a very shy child, and had a pretty rough childhood. I buried everything,” she said of her intense performance style. “Onstage, I’m taking every bad thing in my life and throwing it up, mentally […]
download
Posted inMusic
Youth group
Most people play in their first band sometime in high school. But recent high school graduate Scottie Noonan — chief songwriter, singer and guitarist of Enid acoustic-pop act The Fossil Youth — is already an old pro, with half a decade of experience behind him. “It’s helped me progress a lot quicker. A lot of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
ParaNorman
But while Coraline sustained a masterful level of Grimm-like creepiness, ParaNorman is only fitfully brilliant. The premise is promising. Eleven-year-old Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee, Let Me In) has a familiar problem: He sees dead people. Lots of ’em, actually, which makes him something of a pariah in the hamlet of Blithe Hollow, Mass. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Headhunters
Compared to the continent of Europe, the rate of death by guns in America is six times higher. You wouldn’t know it based on the current wave of crime films from that half of the globe. Arguably kicked off by the worldwide success of Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, the movies of […]
Posted inMusic
Foreign Home — How Strange the Night
From the sounds of it, that’s a place where Tulsa outfit Foreign Home would like to call home. Its debut album, How Strange the Night, is big, layered, engrossing and just enough offbeat to not reside firmly in the mainstream. That can be a death trap for some bands who drown in that wall of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Elena
Moral bankruptcy looms over Elena, a noir-ish Russian-language drama that screens Thursday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, but director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return) would have us withhold judgment of the dreary, compromised characters he presents. In lengthy, often static shots, Zvyagintsev urges his audience to study every inch of the bleak […]
Posted inMusic
Vetting process
Allen has had a long career in the music business. Before moving to Oklahoma, he worked in Nashville, Tenn., managing music royalties. In the ’90s, he played open-mic nights at local venues and coffee shops, sometimes in a band and sometimes solo. But these early experiences aren’t the only that inspire Allen today. Instead, the […]
Posted inMusic
Getting a leg up
Indie-rock trio Limber Limbs was having a bit of a Googleability problem before it switched its name from People, People. “We realized that people couldn’t find us on the Internet,” singer and guitarist Ben Bowlware said. “There’s a million results with people in it.” Added bassist Derek Moore, “It’s the comma that killed us.” “There […]
Posted inMusic
Still got it
Photo: Wesley Hamilton Next Wednesday’s show at the University of Oklahoma marks the third there for Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. Based in Springfield, Mo., the indie-pop band with the exhaustively long name hopes the third time will be the charm. “The first time we played was during finals week. The next time, we […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ruby Sparks
This changes when, at the urging of his shrink (Elliott Gould), Calvin writes about the young woman who wanders in and out of his slumber. The girl of his dreams literally becomes the girl of his dreams when she appears in his waking life, in his kitchen, as if they’re already a devoted couple. Her […]