Norwegian documentary maker Joshua Oppenheimer hooked up with the leader of a notorious Indonesian death squad, who led the murder of hundreds and thousands of ethnic Chinese and purported Communists in the mid-1960s. The gangster, now a white-haired senior, struggles to reconcile his bloody past by recreating it in bizarre historical reenactment scenes for Oppenheimer. A film within a film if you will, the gangster and his buddies play themselves in a campy Bu**y Berkeley-style musical, complete with drag scenes and dancing girls. It was an Oscar nom for best doc. Too bad it didn’t win.

An old quasi-boss of mine turned me on to this band, a six-piece from Alabama trying to recreate the Southern soul sounds of the 1960s, a la Otis Redding and Tina Turner. The singer, Paul Janeway, does some world-class wailing. Apparently they recorded their entire EP live to tape at Muscle Shoals in just a few takes, which is always impressive in our synthetic age of Auto-Tune and extreme digital manipulation.

This app slows down any song without dragging down the pitch. I was first introduced to it as a download for desktop over a decade ago when I was playing bluegrass banjo. Banjo is played blazingly fast, so it was nice to be able to slow down famous recordings and play along. I still use it all the time to dec***truct songs for the keyboard.

Maybe because I have no game, I’ve always been fascinated with those who do. This new book on the psychological underpinnings of coercive relati***hips including religious cults, Ponzi schemes, and even battered woman syndrome is incredibly readable and **art. It’s like the anti-guru handbook.

I have a three-year-old, and we do a lot of coloring. I recently discovered a gnarly trove of weird coloring books on Amazon, and picked up this one, which faithfully represents great old-school rappers from the ’90s. Biggie, 50 Cent, Nas, etc., are all there in line-drawing form. Good stuff!