ASSOCIATED PRESS: U.S. authorities declined to pursue a case against an “al Qaeda sympathizer” accused of plotting to bomb police stations and post offices in the New York area because they believed he was mentally unstable and incapable of pulling it off, two law enforcement officials said Monday. New York Police Department investigators sought to get the FBI involved at least twice as their undercover investigation of Jose Pimentel unfolded, the officials said. Both times, the FBI concluded that he wasn’t a serious threat, they said. The FBI concluded that Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do […]

BY ZIVIT SHLANK JAZZ CORRESPONDENT Composer/drummer/bandleader/educator John Hollenbeck is a musician of indefinable mystique. He embodies the spirit of, say, a Dave Brubeck insofar as his ability to revive the jazz idiom with a creative, eclectic yet accessible approach all his own. His ingenuity and versatility, having worked in a myriad of styles and settings, are on prominent display through his most prolific baby to date, The Claudia Quintet, an ensemble that goes above and beyond the confines of the standard jazz quintet sound. Don’t bother trying to pin them down; just listen close and surrender to the beauty. Saturday’s […]

[illustration by NOWHERE MAN11] The long awaited release of the session tapes of Brian Wilson and Beach Boys never-completed masterpiece, SMiLE, is finally here. With the full participation of original Beach Boys Al Jardine, Mike Love, and Brian Wilson, Capitol/EMI has, for the first time, collected and compiled the band’s legendary 1966-’67 sessions for the SMiLE Seesions 5-CD box set. In several sessions between the summer of 1966 and early 1967, The Beach Boys recorded a bounty of songs and drafts for an album with the working title Dumb Angel that was intended as a follow-up to the band’s 1966 […]

The just-published Post-It Note Diaries: 20 Stories Of Youthful, Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps and Everyday Adventure is the book version of a wildly popular Brooklyn-based spoken word series hosted by comic duo Arthur Jones and Starlee Kine, of This American Life and the Hulu series Starlee and Arthur Review fame. Some of the most auspicious, young-ish storytellers of the modern age were invited to share the glorious misadventures that are invariably the stock and trade of the young and/or misbegotten. John Hodgman tells us how he got his patented cobra-headed cane; Chuck Klosterman tells us about the first time he got […]

For 10 years, Liz Spikol wrote The Trouble With Spikol — a plucky, often-humorous, first-person newspaper column/blog documenting the trials and tribulations of coping with mental illness — for the Philadelphia Weekly. Her writing has garnered numerous awards from the Society for Professional Journalists and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, as well as the Mental Health America and the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society. She received an Access Achievement Award from the Mayor’s Commission on People With Disabilities for her efforts to de-stigmatize mental illness. She has been featured on National Public Radio and the Discovery Channel, and in the New York Times. […]

RELATED: It must take a mighty, mighty big man to get all armored up, while surrounded by reinforcements, and spray a U.S. citizen with mace for exercising their inalienable rights. Never mind whether said citizen is female or not. The police state isn’t coming, it’s already here. This is what a police state looks like. MORE RELATED: This Is Also What A Police State Looks Like RELATED: So Is This RELATED: Excellent Pictures Of 11/17 Protests RELATED: The right-wing Daily Caller website has been anything but kind to Occupy Wall Street, even going so far as to condemn the protest […]

Retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis was arrested in New York City during the Occupy Wall Street protest on Thursday. According to the New York Observer, Lewis joined the Occupy movement on Tuesday. Philadelphia Police Department has confirmed Lewis’ arrest, Fox 29 News reported. FOX 29: First news of the arrest was broadcast over Twitter around 9:15 a.m. by the protest group on its @OccupyWallStNYC account, stating, “Philly Police Captain (Retired) has just been ARRESTED! #N17 #ows.” The group then tweeted, “The arrested retired police captain’s name is Captain Ray Lewis. Immense cheers and music as he is taken away. […]

BY ZIVIT SHLANK JAZZ CORRESPONDENT Wizardly guitarist/composer Marc Ribot defies classification. By his own admission, he’s spent his entire career trying to fit into one box or another but always failed miserably. He’s played with the likes of Chuck Berry, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Medeski Martin & Wood, The Black Keys and Philadelphia’s own McCoy Tyner,  among countless others. Ribot’s own recorded works have explored the nether regions of Afro-Cuban jazz, noir blues, abstract rock, sweet soul, prickly post-punk, and exotic world styles — to which he brings his incandescent improvisatory six-string magic. You may have heard his otherworldly guitar […]

FRESH AIR Though he’s directed only five feature films, Alexander Payne has built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers. His movies find comedy in the crises of his flawed protagonists — among them Matthew Broderick as a high school teacher in Election, Jack Nicholson as a widower in About Schmidt and Paul Giamatti as a struggling author and wine snob in Sideways, for which Payne shared an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Payne’s latest film is The Descendants, which is set in Hawaii and stars George Clooney. He plays a Honolulu lawyer named Matt who stands to […]

BBC: Singer Amy Winehouse had been planning to record material with a “supergroup” before she died, music producer Salaam Remi has revealed. Remi said the singer had planned a jazz album with Questlove, of The Roots, and saxophone player Soweto Kinch. “There were a bunch of other names bouncing around,” he said, at a press playback for her posthumous album. Remi has worked on all three Winehouse albums, including Lioness: Hidden Treasures, which is out next month. The producer said he knew of Winehouse’s “super group” plans because “she had written down everything she wanted to do”. Questlove features several […]