RiYL

With this episode, Marc Maron becomes RiYL’s first-ever repeat guest (forgetting for a moment, the last-minute double-header from Dave Hill ), and it’s appropriate, really. Last time felt rushed. Granted, there’s no shortage of places to catch the comedian these days, but a 15 minute time limit just doesn’t feel sufficient. IFC gave us a bit more time to spread out, this go-round, though I had a f...

Ben and Ellen Harper are in New York for a few days ahead of a trip to Europe. It’s a tour the former had scheduled for some time now, 17 “acoustic evenings” beginning in England, through Belgium, the Netherlands, then onto Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France. With the dates kicking off a week prior to the release of his new record, however, it only made sense to bring the album’s collaborator...

Chris Hayes arrives carrying a sandwich in a brown paper bag. When I make some offhanded joke about the host of a primetime cable news show having to get his own lunch, he thinks nothing of it, just appreciating the chance to get away for a moment. Not that he doesn’t love his job, of course. It takes a very specific sort to host a show like All In five days a week, a few if any are as perfectly s...

“She Loves the Sunset” from 2008’s Blame it on Gravity is a peppy little number about love and loss. It’s a good song from a good record, but hardly a standout in the Old 97’s catalog. What makes the track so fascinating is its origin story, and while I’m generally one to wince at the prospect of discussing 9/11 three minutes into an interview with the front man of an alt-country band, the events...

In April of last year, Image Comics published Maximum Minimum Wage, a hardcover compilation of Bob Fingereman’s long-running Fantagraphics series. To this day, Minimum Wage and the subsequent collection Beg The Question remain the cartoonist’s best known work, telling the close-to-home tale of an artist struggling with work, love and life in New York in the 90s. After a 15 year hiatus spent on var...

When 3D Systems CEO Avi Reichental swung by the city to address the Inside 3D Printing conference in Manhattan, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to discuss the technology. The company has been at the forefront of the space since 1986, when co-founder Chuck Hull invented the process of stereolithography, which gave rise to the world of industrial additive manufacturing. The company’s been a p...

I can’t think of a single cartoonist whose work I’ve watched progress from such an early stage. And it was no doubt that exact drive to put his stuff out in the world that helped Box Brown improve by leaps and bounds, culminating with the forthcoming release of his first full-length book, Andre the Giant: Life and Legend, which examines the man behind one of professional wrestling’s largest legend...

My knowledge of sabermetrics is elementary, at best. I know that it’s utterly transformed baseball analysis and helped get a lot of plush clubhouse jobs for an army of number crunching math geeks. I know that it involves a close examination of traditionally undervalued statistics like on-base percentage and foul balls. I know it’s caused writers and managers to rethink the amount of emphasis put o...

Molly jokingly noted recent online accusations that this so-called “Crabapple” person was actually a collective of people posing as a single person, and it’s easy to see why. She’s been plenty busy as of late, between art exhibitions, murals, illustrations and an increasing interest in social justice, which recently led Rolling Stone to call her “Occupy [Wall Street]’s greatest artist.” It’s a fas...

I met Shlomo last week at New York's City Winery, just before settling into another RiYL interview. The 6'4 mustachioed Israeli was making sure everything was all right with the the Old 97s' Rhett Miller, ahead of his show that night. Fascinated by meeting my first real life Shlomo (surprising, perhaps, given my own ethnic makeup), I Googled the venue's booker the following day, stumbling upon a W...

From Guided By Voices to Nada Surf, if you can think of a seminal indie rock band from the past 20 years, there's a pretty decent chance Doug Gillard's put in time among their ranks at some point or other. The journeyman guitar player also has a accomplished solo career, with his latest, Parade On, due out in a few weeks. Fittingly, the song's every bit as diverse as one would expect from an artis...

Come spend 45 minutes in the Red Hook living room shared by Hospitality's singer and percussionist a day after the launch of their sophomore record. The expectations are elevated this time out, after the healthy amount of buzz generated by the band's self-titled indie-pop debut. You wouldn't know it from outward appearances, however. All is calm in the Brooklyn band's apartment. Dinner is on the s...

Colin Spoelman quite literally wrote the book on home whiskey distillation. Is a subject he knows a thing or two about, having transformed the output of a single internet-purchased pot still into a major microdistillery -- New York City's longest running, no less, at the ripe old age of four. It's a terrific book -- though it did firmly crush any fantasies I had of running my own apartment-based d...

Over the past 30 years, Rodney Anonymous has become a sort of Philadelphia landmark like Ben Franklin's house or that big cracked bell. If you get a chance to visit him during your time in the city, it's the sort of thing you won't soon forget. I met the once and future Dead Milkmen frontman at Philly's top goth/industry record store, at which point we adjourned to a nearby tea shop, so at not to...

When the next generation finds itself knee-deep in an occult revival, who better to call that Jason Louv. My two-time former roommate swung by New York City a while back to teach the kids in Bushwick a thing or two about magic. Louv has written a number books on the subject, including 2005's Generation Hex for Disinfo. His most recent volume explores his newfound fascination with the genetically m...

Strange to think, more than twenty years after Maus became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer, the concept of comics as academic pursuit still seems a foreign one. Standing in front of Columbia's impressive collection of bound sequential art, however, the day when comics are widely regarded as some of the finest literature and art available doesn't seem too far off after all. When Karen Gre...

Join The Onion's former Features Editor and current Adult Swim employee for a frank discussion about buying Firehose records on eBay after a dream told him to do so. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every show can't be a skafest -- unless, of course, you're Dan Potthast. We swung by the MU330 frontman's Santa Cruz apartment, and happened to catch Skankin Pickle / Chinkees singer Mike "Bruce Lee" Park. That means you get two third-wave ska legends for the price of one. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Cope is a professor emeritus at the University of California and a pioneer in the world of computer created music, having worked to perfect classical compositions on machines since the days of punch cards. He's also exactly the sort of person you'd like to sit down with for an hour to discuss the rules governing music, math, art and the universe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mo...

The Boing Boing / Make Magazine / Cool Tools editor and I found the quietest corner we could at the recent Engadget Expand event in New York to discuss the importance of curation in the digital age, the lost art of print media, podcasting and the magic of Art Bell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marie Javins is a comics writer, world traveler, art school professor and friend to Daniel Johnston. She ventured into the city to discuss all of the above and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded at Java Joe's in Athens, GA, the editor of the Atomic Elbow zine gives us a long overdue lesson about the world of professional wrestling. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Still aching for some hot Dave Hill action after that last hour-long interview? Good news: we squeeze another half hour out of the comedian on hearing the news that he would be taking over the Tuesday night slot on WFMU from Tom Scharpling's beloved Best Show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Come, sit down and enjoy some light jazz trumpet at a Greenwich Village coffee shop with Dave Hill. The Tasteful Nudes author joins us for what turns out to be the first of a two-part interview. We'll be following up with the comedian soon to discuss his upcoming WFMU show. In the meantime, we talk suits, cable talk shows and piloting a pedicab through the streets of New York. Hosted on Acast. See...

We pulled up a lawn chair in the Will Cullen Hart's cat-infested backyard in Athens, GA to discuss the Circulatory System / Olivia Tremor Control frontman's two upcoming records, the recent loss of his lifelong friend and songwriting partner Bill Doss and his on-going battle with MS. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.