From this week’s issue of the New Yorker.
MAZZY STAR: California
New album, their first in 17 years, due out September 24th. SLATE: Alt-rock radio listeners of a certain age have heard Mazzy Star’s 1993 hit “Fade Into You,” from the duo’s second album, So Tonight That I Might See, roughly 8 million times (and not unhappily). Fans of the group, which features Hope Sandoval’s vocals and the guitar stylings of David Roback, have been hoping for years now that the band would write a follow-up to that album’s follow-up, Among My Swan. MORE
ARTSY: Race, War & Propaganda
RELATED: A new exhibit created by a University of Pennsylvania professor and host of a popular public television show examines how wartime propaganda has been used to motivate oppressed populations to risk their lives for homelands that considered them second-class citizens. “Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster,” opens Sunday and continues until March 2 at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Lectures, film screenings and other programming will be rolled out over the course of the exhibit’s run. The exhibit’s 33 posters, dating from the Civil War to both World Wars and […]
RIP: T-Model Ford, Last Of The Authentic Badass Delta Bluesmen, Dead At Either 89 Or 94
Photo by SCOTT BARRETTA SPIN: Born James Lewis Carter Ford, he grew up with an abusive father, got married six times and supposedly fathered 26 children (his current wife, Estella, was by his side when he passed). Over his nine or so decades, he’d been shot, poisoned by a woman, stabbed by a wife, saw another spouse leave him for his dad, and served two years on a chain gang for stabbing a man to death in a bar fight. He picked up the guitar at 58 when his fifth wife gave him one — on the night she left […]
BOOKS: Why George Zimmerman Was Never Going To Serve A Day In Jail For Killing Trayvon Martin
NEW YORK TIMES: Anyone who has commuted to a Fort Lauderdale beach will be familiar with the journey T. D. Allman describes in “Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State.”Because drawbridges that lead to the ocean’s edge are raised to allow large boats up the inland waterways, highway passengers are almost invariably subjected to long waits. This imposition — and the fact that the people behind steering wheels don’t protest — drives Allman to distraction. “Not one person demands to know: Why is it that the people with boats take precedence over us?” he writes. The Florida […]
BEING THERE: Interstellar Overdrive
Flaming Lips, Wallingford, CT, last night. PREVIOUSLY: We’d been traversing the spine of Tornado Alley for the last two hours when the stewardess announced that we would be landing in Oklahoma City in a few minutes, and that we should fasten our seatbelts and return our minds to the upright position, when the drugs took hold. We are, as the saying goes, off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Odd—or, if you prefer, the Wizard of OK, a.k.a. Wayne Coyne, frizzy-brained mainman of the Flaming Lips, the P.T. Barnum Of The Stoned, a.k.a. The Man Who Had A […]
WORTH REPEATING: Boredom, The Final Frontier
NEW YORK TIMES: Besides multistage rockets to propel a spacecraft out of Earth’s atmosphere, years of planning and precise calculations and massive amounts of fuel, traveling the tens of millions of miles to Mars will take a tremendous amount of time. With current technology, the journey takes more than eight months each way. Which means that astronauts will get bored. In fact, a number of scientists say that — of all things — boredom is one of the biggest threats to a manned Mars mission, despite the thrill inherent in visiting another planet. And so, attention is being paid […]
This Is Why You Need An Edward Snowden
NEW YORK TIMES: “If the government intends to use or disclose information obtained or derived from” surveillance authorized by the 2008 law “in judicial or administrative proceedings, it must provide advance notice of its intent, and the affected person may challenge the lawfulness of the acquisition.” (Again, note the phrase “derived from.”) What has happened since then in actual criminal prosecutions? The opposite of what [Obama administration] Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli told the Supreme Court. Federal prosecutors, apparently unaware of his representations, have refused to make the promised disclosures. […] By insisting that they need not disclose whether […]
DAVID BOWIE: Valentine’s Day
This spare, coolly elegant performance video is Bowie at his most David Byrne-iest, which makes sense now that both have gracefully aged into the elder statesmen of pop artifice. Best song on The Next Day. Hands down. I only wish he were holding a cooler guitar. But that’s my issue to work through, not his. PREVIOUSLY: The Thin White Duke goes nuclear on Catholicism — not that it didn’t have it coming — with help from Gary Oldman and Marion Cotillard. Sort of a Station To Stations of the cross. The song is pretty funk to funky. Warning: some bloody […]
BEING THERE: Savages @ Union Transfer
Photo by PETE TROSHAK UK post-punk priestesses the Savages have been a band for less than two years and released their debut album just two months ago. In that short window they have been so relentlessly hyped as “the next big thing” that the inevitable “they aren’t THAT good” backlash has already begun. Sunday night at Union Transfer Savages proved, to this reviewer anyway, that they are more steak than sizzle. They took the stage stealthily, clad in ninja-like black outfits and opened with the Siouxsie-ian roar of “I Am Here.” Message: Get used to it. Gemma Thompson throttled her […]
Kathleen Kane Continues To Kick Ass, Take Names
INQUIRER: In a bitter and secret legal fight, state Attorney General Kathleen Kane has succeeded in ousting the judge who has long overseen corruption investigations in Pennsylvania, The Inquirer has learned. After a conflict that had been roiling since she took office in January, Kane took the unusual step of asking the state Supreme Court to remove Judge Barry F. Feudale as the supervising grand jury judge in Harrisburg. Kane told the high court in April in sealed papers that the judge was no longer fit to run a grand jury. Among other concerns, she cited an episode in […]
DENY THE DENIERS: Louis CK On Climate Change
WARNING: Adult language and opinions that stray from the fossil fuel lobby’s pre-approvedtalking points. RELATED: Louis C.K. is the perfect comic for right now, for the Age of Lessness, when the economy is as clinically depressed as the national psyche is tortured, and the imperial hubris of American exceptionalism turns out to be just another Sarah Palin fever dream for people high on Fox News. He is a prophet of white male failure in the time when aging caucasian alpha dogs are losing their lock on entitlement as society is increasingly bred to be more inclusive and egalitarian. He channels […]
INJUSTICE DEPARTMENT: A Ghost Is Born
The ghost of justice denied is history’s judgement. And that’s as inescapable as it is unforgiving and without end. George Zimmerman may have avoided life in a cage, but he’ll never be free, he’ll always feel like a hunted animal no matter where he goes, especially in his own heart in those rare moments when he has the moral courage to look there without blinking.