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David Bowie appears practically back from the dead today with The Next Day, his 24th album — first in a decade — and latest release since suffering a heart attack in 2004. Mostly retired to New York and London with Iman, his supermodel wife, and Alexandria, his 12-year-old daughter, Bowie, 66, has kept a low profile and his rocking new album arrives with a buzz. Ben Kaplan asks a coterie of experts to explain the Space Oddity star’s enduring appeal: natpo.st/12Mep70
[Illustration by Kagan McLeod]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/157239b1e1a3c4eb90e49c2ab3b4b8ed/tumblr_mjk8ilGsYa1r59dcio1_1280.jpg)
David Bowie appears practically back from the dead today with The Next Day, his 24th album — first in a decade — and latest release since suffering a heart attack in 2004. Mostly retired to New York and London with Iman, his supermodel wife, and Alexandria, his 12-year-old daughter, Bowie, 66, has kept a low profile and his rocking new album arrives with a buzz. Ben Kaplan asks a coterie of experts to explain the Space Oddity star’s enduring appeal: natpo.st/12Mep70
[Illustration by Kagan McLeod]
Did you know that there are 14 novels in Frank Baum’s Oz series? To celebrate the release of “Oz the Great and Powerful” the National Post’s Steve Murray has illustrated 276 of them. Click through for annotations on who all of them are!
Illustration by Steve Murray. So how is the new Spider-Man movie? It feels pretty recycled says Chris Knight. Read the full review here.
Davy Jones, former lead singer of the 1960s made-for-television pop band The Monkees, died on Wednesday after suffering a heart attack in Florida, according to his longtime publicist. He was 66.
Holiday TV: May the force be with you this Christmas
It is that time of year when families gather around the warming hearth, by which I mean the television, to enjoy the traditional favourites. Charlie Brown and his little tree. Rudolph and the misfit toys. Itchy the Wookiee and his eroticized dream featuring Diahann Carroll.
No dice on that last one? Your family does not roast up some chestnuts and settle down for a seasonal viewing of The Star Wars Holiday Special? That’s understandable, since it only aired once: in 1978. I missed it the first time around, possibly because I was five years old and not on top of the TV listings, but the Internet being the world’s depository of strange detritus that it is, one can now easily view the two-hour extravaganza in its entirety.
Concert Review: Judas Priest says goodbye to Toronto
The word retirement has lost almost all meaning in the rock ‘n’ roll lexicon. It gets trotted out for multiple KISS-style “last” tours, but it rarely sticks. No one really expects it to, either. Rock music has taught us to expect that big bands will constantly tour the world’s arenas, while smaller bands will drift from casino to casino in perpetuity. A band crying “retirement” is going to receive slightly less attention than a boy crying wolf.
Even so, when a massive heavy metal juggernaut like Judas Priest embarks on a farewell tour of sorts (the band will continue to make albums, and singer Rob Halford has suggested that they might attempt small-scale tours in the future), there are bound to be expectations. While few are likely to expect that this is an end point of any sort, fans of the band’s elaborate live shows are probably going to want them to go out with some sort of bang.
IKEA’s epic Swedish fontroversy: Why company’s font switch from Futura to Verdana mattered:
At the end of August 2009, an unusual thing happened in the world: IKEA changed its typeface. This wasn’t so strange in itself — big companies like to stay looking fresh, and this is often the easiest way to do it — but the odd thing was that people noticed.
OMG HARRY POTTER! REUTERS/Lucas Jackson Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows Part2 has already broken box office records for midnight screenings. Read more on Harry Potter.
The National Post’s Arts & Life section takes a look ahead at the month of June.
Turn on, tune it, thaw out: The best of spring arts & culture
Mildred Pierce, Chester Brown and The Strokes share top billing on Mike Doherty’s opinionated list of the best culture headed this way.
