Do NOT watch this if you don’t care much for laughing. You have been warned.

  LAURIE ANDERSON: Lou was sick for the last couple of years, first from treatments of interferon, a vile but sometimes effective series of injections that treats hepatitis C and comes with lots of nasty side effects. Then he developed liver cancer, topped off with advancing diabetes. We got good at hospitals. He learned everything about the diseases, and treatments. He kept doing tai chi every day for two hours, plus photography, books, recordings, his radio show with Hal Willner and many other projects. He loved his friends, and called, texted, e-mailed when he couldn’t be with them. We tried […]

  THE ATLANTIC: consider these ways in which our current “national-security complex” is more dangerous to democratic survival, and more difficult for President Obama to roll back, than in times past: 1. The national-security complex was charged after 9-11 with this credo: “Never Again.” This is a mission so absolute that it permits no cost-benefit analysis of any kind. 2. Throughout the Cold War we understood that the enemy was roughly as afraid of being wiped out by nuclear weapons as we were—hence the “mutually assured destruction” doctrine … Deterrence does not work well against terrorists. 3. The War on […]

  The Drive-By Truckers write songs about the dirty South, where life is hard and folks die soft and squishy and often emphysemic, dirty deeds get done dirt cheap, and everyone goes to church but nobody really goes to heaven. Their songs are like the weeds in the cracks of the trailer park, or the pile of broken beer bottles in the woods, or the lipstick traces on the stubbed-out Kools overflowing the ashtray. Oh, the things they have seen. The Truckers have two main singer-songwriter-guitarists these days: Patterson Hood, burly and bearded, whose voice sounds alternately like an angry […]

  BY JONATHAN VALANIA As historian/authors go, there are basically two species. Guys like Robert Caro who spend decades-long hermitages writing and researching exhaustive, Bible-thick multi-volume Hi-Def portraits of his subjects. And then there’s guys (and gals) like Robert Dallek, prolific generalists who keep circling back to the corpus delecti like eagle-eyed birds of prey to peck at some new fascinating and/or instructive morsel of the remains of the Kennedy/ FDR/Johnson/Reagan legacies. Dallek’s latest book, Camelot’s Court, his 19th book in 45 years, is his third examination of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. In it he argues that JFK’s dream team […]

  BY STEVE VOLK RESIDENT BOWIE SCHOLAR After nearly a decade of near total silence, the legacy of heart trouble that ended his 2004 world tour, the single arrived with no greater fanfare than someone, somewhere, clicking “publish” on a new posting to David Bowie’s web site.. Bowie sang. “Where are we now?” The song bled from millions of computers, languid and beautiful, as Bowie reappeared, suddenly, in a melancholy video supporting a mesmerizing single, on his 66th birthday.  And fans, critics and entertainment wags wondered at the return of the Greta Garbo of rock n’ roll. After such a […]

  PATTI SMITH: I met Lou at Max’s Kansas City in 1970. The Velvet Underground played two sets a night for several weeks that summer. The critic and scholar Donald Lyons was shocked that I had never seen them, and he escorted me upstairs for the second set of their first night. I loved to dance, and you could dance for hours to the music of the Velvet Underground. A dissonant surf doo-wop drone allowing you to move very fast or very slow. It was my late and revelatory introduction to “Sister Ray.” Within a few years, in that same […]

  But we’ve been burned before:  William Penn Foundation, we are looking at you. Not sure what to make of this or where it’s gonna go or how it ends, but we definitely like how it begins. MORE PREVIOUSLY:  Inquirer Ownership Feud Crosses The Line Between Tragedy And Screwball Comedy PREVIOUSLY:  Tierney Fired From $25K/month ‘Consulting’ Gig @ Inky After It Was Revealed That The Man Who Bankrupted The Paper Was Being Paid $25K/month For His Newspapering Wisdom

Maximum-R&B-garage-punk-shake-bamalama from this tender-aged (15-17) Irish four piece will remind you why you still love rock n’ roll. Their debut EP our January 21st on Photo Finish Records. The kids are alright. The kids are definitely alright. MORE

  INQUIRER: The young men had been summoned to the ornate room in City Hall because police had determined that they were the ones most likely to shoot or be shot. After months of intelligence huddles, police and prosecutors had identified the 45 South Philadelphia corner boys who shuffled into the courtroom that spring morning as “impact players” – possible triggermen – in violent street crews. Flanking the lectern were neighbors, outreach workers, and city and federal law enforcement officials, including Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey and District Attorney Seth Williams. They had rehearsed their message as part of a […]