So what do you do when you’re an Oscar-winning actor with a penchant for activism and the board of your own theater company says that due to the recession, “we can no longer afford to produce theater,” as “it would be less expensive to do nothing”? Tim Robbins is “not very good at doing nothing,” as he says, and so he grabbed his iPod instead and started booking musical, comedic, and other acts to perform over the next two months at the tiny Actors Gang theater in Culver City, CA.

Upcoming musical acts set to perform for 100 lucky ticket holders are Tenacious D (this Sat.!), Jackson Browne, System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, John Doe, Jill Sobule, Tom Morello, Jenny Lewis & friends, and Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard.

Actually, Gibbard is also cryptically listed as appearing with “friends,” which makes makes me wonder if his new wife, She & Him’s Zooey Deschanel, might show up for a little indie Sonny and Cher affair.

“I have all these artists on my iPod and most of them on vinyl,” Robbins told Flavorwire in a recent Q&A. “I admire them all as great songwriters.” What else is on his iPod? “Everything from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Rufus Wainwright to the Dead Kennedys to X to Neutral Milk Hotel,” he added.

How ‘bout giving Neutral Milk Hotel a ring, Mr. Robbins? For tix and the full WTF?! Festival calendar go thataway.

Sorry to bombard everyone with tour date news today, but this one’s too cool to pass up. Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Son Volt’s Jay Farrar are taking their upcoming batch of Jack Kerouac-inspired songs, One Fast Move or I’m Gone, on a brief road (plane) trip for four gigs in LA, New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago later this month, PlugInMusic reports.

What’s more, their backup band will include Death Cab bassist Nick Harmer, Son Volt’s Mark Spencer, and Jon Wurster of Mountain Goats and Superchunk. Tickets for these concerts supposedly already went on sale, but I can only find a link for the LA concert here. Based on our first listen from the album, I’d say these gigs will be epic.

Check out the Gibbard/Farrar pseudo supergroup’s 4-city trek below:

10/23 - El Rey Theatre - Los Angeles, CA
10/24 - Bimbo’s 365 Club - San Francisco, CA
10/26 - Lincoln Hall - Chicago, IL
10/28 - Webster Hall - New York, NY

One Fast Move or I’m Gone, the Jack Kerouac-inspired album from Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Son Volt’s Jay Farrar, will finally hit shelves late next month after a couple years in the making. The collaboration started back in ‘07 when the pair contributed songs to a soundtrack project for the documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, but then they “both wound up in the studio together, just sort of decided to take a step further and record a whole batch of songs,” Farrar said. “It’s kind of evolved into a real project.”

Oh, it’s definitely a real project now. So what does it sound like? We already heard a song with Farrar on vocals, but now NPR has an exclusive first listen to the Gibbard-sung track “These Roads Don’t Move” and it sounds exactly as you might expect: alt-country meets Death Cab. Stream the song at NPR here.

The future of the Postal Service may be uncertain, as Ben Gibbard said recently that it isn’t really a priority and could end up being the indie Chinese Democracy, but it looks like we’ll be getting a different Death Cab for Cutie side project this fall. Son Volt’s Jay Farrar has revealed that a short session with Gibbard turned into a larger project that will possibly be announced later this year.

“I did work with Ben on this recording project, which started out as each of us contributing songs to a documentary about Jack Kerouac,” Farrar told Riverfront Times’ Annie Zaleski. “We both wound up in the studio together, just sort of decided to take a step further and record a whole batch of songs. It’s kind of evolved into a real project. I guess there aren’t a whole lot of details about it yet, but it’s in the works, and it could possibly come out in the fall, like around October — which I think is a Jack Kerouac anniversary of sorts.”

Photos from the recording sessions for the documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur can be seen on the film’s official site here, including the publicist’s claim that “Farrar and Gibbard’s partnership seems to have been ordained.” Tom Waits and Sage Francis also contributed to the documentary, which makes me kind of wish they had joined the Gibbard/Farrar collaboration as well, giving all these supergroups of late a run for their money.

Ben Gibbard’s engagement to Zooey Deschanel was the real-life indie nerd equivalent of Brian Krakow dating Angela Chase on My So-Called Life. So it’s no wonder Gibbard and fellow Death Cab for Cutie member Nick Harmer are seizing the moment to talk some trash about Angela’s ex Jordan Catalano. I mean, Jared Leto.

“Jared Leto and his band 30 Seconds to Mars — he’s acting the part,” Harmer told The Big Takeover (via Spinner). Then Ben Gibbard chimed in with more specifics: “He’s a professional actor in music; so there’s no way to feel any sincerity about his position as a musician.”

Gibbard went on to say that Leto’s schtick as the guyliner-donning frontman of 30 Second to Mars could be boiled down to simply “acting what you think a rock star should act like.” Harmer adds that Leto’s fans then believe the stunt, saying to themselves, “Oh, that’s what rock stars do: they wear eyeliner.”

Don’t they realize that real rock stars ride their bicycles in circles and take pictures for the yearbook? Nick Harmer does end the rant with some praise for their pasty indie brethren: “I think Jack White — he’s savvy as all get out with the media. But he also just has this magic around him. Conor Oberst is another one for me. They’re able to kind of be one inside of the other.”

Anyway, at least a new Death Cab video/song dropped today amid these squabbles.