Don't make Gollum come over here. Is 2010 the year that Treasure Island's indie rock programming skews "precious, precious," playing to our staider, more subdued selves, in search of sure things and still uncertain that we've recovered from that doozy of a Great Recession hangover?Read more »

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MUSIC One of the singular ironies among the speedy online dissemination of sounds has to be the rediscovery of so many 1960s- and '70s-era women singer-songwriters who came, sang, and seemingly disappeared in the wake of Joni, Judy, and Joan. Singular among Judee Sill, Vashti Bunyan, Karen Dalton, and those other ladies of the canyon is Linda Perhacs, the maker of Parallelograms, an achingly beautiful ode to nature and an all-too-brief testament to one young woman's life, first released on Kapp in 1970 and most recently re-released in 2008 by Sunbeam. Read more »

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FILM Take the sex out of a teen sex comedy and hone in on the heard-it-yesterday info overload of the highly social-networked '00s, and you get Easy A, a whip-smart striver looking to give a whole new definition to fast fiction. Read more »

Don't ask synthesizer inventor and electronic instrument designer Don Buchla (appearing Thu/9 as part of the 11th Annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival) for a CD of his music. He's more interested in following his curious muse — in this case, through the oft-uncharted territory of performance — than documenting his many experiments.Read more »

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FILM Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007's Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: "I have a bipolar personality ... I have devils inside that fight me. And I'm my own worst enemy ... I would say I'm probably relatively insane."Read more »

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FALL ARTS/MUSIC When I last looked at the state of all-female bands in 2006, Sleater-Kinney, Destiny's Child, and Le Tigre had hung up their guitars, mics, and samplers. Since then, the Bay Area has produced a motherlode of female-dominated rock outfits — including Grass Widow, the Splinters, Brilliant Colors, the Twinks, the Sandwitches, the Sarees, the Glassines, and Shannon and the Clams — while frontperson Dee Dee (née Kristin Gundred) of the Dum Dum Girls has moved back to SF, where she grew up.Read more »

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MUSIC As summer fades, the Bay grows warmer, and full-fledged adult music circuses — a mixture of marquee names, garlic fries, sideshow stilt-walkers, and questionable street art — begin to arrive, it's time to ask: how does one go about building a better festival?Read more »

If it left here tomorrow, would you still remember redneck rock? In the 20-tweens, you might hear it rushing through the purple veins of Southern gothic TV: within Jace Everett's growling poster-boy blues, "Bad Things," which opens True Blood, and Gangstagrass' hip-hop-drenched banjo-and-fiddle hillbilly vamp, "Long Hard Times to Come," the theme to the trigger-happy Justified.Read more »

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MUSIC What might Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's status be? Casual but committed, relaxed yet extremely productive sounds about right for the Alps music-maker, Root Strata label head, On Land festival organizer, and now the third leg of the recently formed Moholy-Nagy.Read more »