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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 »

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MUSIC What's so funny about sweetness and light? Bright, explosive jolts of jubilance and snappy uplift? Everything and nothing, Givers might say. The Lafayette, La., band embraces an ecstatic fun-for-all aesthetic on its debut, In Light (Glassnote) — though sultry-voiced vocalist-percussionist Tiffany Lamson still feels a need to defend her group's rollicking, bubbling bliss bombs.Read more »

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FILM Why do romantic comedies get such a bad rap? Blame it on the lame set-up, the contrived hurdles artificially buttressed by the obligatory chorus of BFFs, the superficial something-for-every-demographic-with-ADD multinarrative, and the implausible resolutions topped by something as simple as a kiss or as conventional as marriage, but often no deeper, more crafted, or heartfelt than an application of lip gloss.Read more »

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Dreams and drawings, cats and fantasies, ambition and aimlessness, and the mild-mannered yet mortifying games people play, all wind their way into Miranda July's The Future. The future's a scary place, as many of us fully realize, even if you hide from it well into your 30s, losing yourself in the everyday. But you can't duck July's collection of moments, objects, and small gestures transformed into something strangely slanted and enchanted, both weird and terrifying, when viewed through July's looking glass.Read more »