This Week's Voice: BLK JKS, Pearl Jam, Brooklyn Book Festival, Bright Star, The Informant!, Will Ryman, and More

Vinyl Life: Not just hitting the space bar. Photo by David Herron.

​In this week's Village Voice, Rob Harvilla spends an evening at S.O.B.'s with BLK JKS and returns, a bit overwhelmed: "No band on the planet right now is overplaying with the titanic, fearless, stupendously excessive gusto of South African art-rockers BLK JKS, an alternately gorgeous and grating jazz-prog-dub-metal behemoth that makes the Mars Volta look like austere, timid minimalists."

Michael Hoinksi cobbles together a defense of the newly Target-cosigned Pearl Jam and their "half-awesome, half-blah ninth studio album," Backspacer.

Richard Bienstock on the resurrection of Christian metal's Stryper.

Dennis Romero profiles NYC threesome Vinyl Life.

In Books, yr correspondent's Lit Seen visits the Brooklyn Book Festival, where Mary Gaitskill covered Das Racist as a bemused Jonathan Lethem looked on.

In Film, J. Hoberman reviews Jane Campion's Keats ode Bright Star and John Huston's late-career smash Fat City.

Robert Wilonsky on Steven Soderbergh's overamped, under-developed The Informant!.

Melissa Anderson at Clair Denis' 35 Shots of Ruin.

Plus reviews of Disgrace, Paris, Jennifer's Body, and more.

In Art, Jed Lipinski talks with the petal-pushing sculptor scion Will Ryman.

In Theater, Michael Feingold on The Retributionists at Playwrights Horizons and Is Life Worth Living at the Mint.

Alexis Soloski at Governors Island's New Island Festival.

Plus Michael Musto on Daniel Craig showing up at a gay club, Free Will Astrology, and more.