If armies run on their stomachs, blogs run on their big fucking mouths. We’re no exception. But we’d like to think that, on a good day, we put all that hot air to good use when interrogating visiting dignitaries in advance of their triumphant arrival into the City Of Brotherly Love. We’ve never pretended to have all the answers but we do know all the right questions. And we’ve never settled for easy answers to hard questions. Sometimes feelings get hurt and sometimes new connections are made. Sometimes painful truths emerge and sometimes we actually learn something. And sometimes we […]
SMUS: A Confederacy Of Thieves And Whores
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY You pretty much know that morality, ethics, and even the faintest of hopes for universal fairness in this country are on ventilators when one of our most “respected” newspapers becomes willingly complicit in (a) the final auction gavel on the American electoral system, and (b) facilitating a national financial crisis so cataclysmic as to make the last one look like a rent check overdraft. How interesting it is that the Boston Globe should feel that getting an omnibus spending bill passed — ANY kind of omnibus spending bill — is worth caving in to the treacherous, money-grubbing interests of America’s premier purveyors of […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Television @ The TLA
Television are/were legendary ’70s art-punk avatars who staged dead French symboliste poets society seances at CBGBs and scored the metaphysical proceedings with blazing epics of six-string sorcery. As one half of the Television’s incandescent guitar duality, Tom Verlaine wielded his Fender Jazzmaster like a sculptor’s carving tool, chiseling Venus de Milos of sound out of thin air. Second guitarist Richard Lloyd would then knock the arms off. Together they constructed ringing spires of guitar incandescence, erecting a chiming cathedral of sound in the church of the clustered overtone. And they called it Marquee Moon. Unto to the world a […]
TONITE: Sunshine Bores The Daylights Outta Me
Tonight at the Boot & Saddle, The Jesse Lundy Band (featuring @WXPNDanReed on lead vox) will perform Some Girls from beginning to end The North Lawrence Midnight Singers will perform select tracks from Exile On Main Street and Jay Medley’s Brown Sugar will play deep cuts as well as classics from the Stones’ sticky-fingered canon. Show starts at 7 PM sharp.
The Eyes Of Margaret Keane Are Always Upon You
BIG EYES (2014 Directed by Tim Burton; 105 minutes, U.S.) BY ZACHARY SHEVICH FILM CRITIC Big Eyes chronicles the strange but true story of the origin and rise to cultural prominence of Margaret Keane’s distinctive wide-eyed paintings and the ensuing controversy about their authorship that pitted Margaret against Walter Keane in a court of law vying for credit. Big Eyes is a stripped down, smaller budget film far more in the spirit of director Tim Burton’s early work than his more recent ventures into CGI-heavy, gaudily gothic, and, frankly, less interesting output. The film, starring Not Helena Bonham Carter […]
TERRY GILLIAM: The Christmas Card
This originally aired in 1968 on the British kids show, Do Not Adjust Your Set. A Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR Sarah Koenig didn’t expect her new podcast, Serial, to get so much press, but she says the attention helped keep her on her toes: “It was just a constant reminder of how careful we needed to be,” Koenig tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. Serial is Koenig’s reinvestigation of the murder of Hae Min Lee, a Maryland high school student who was strangled in 1999. Her body was discovered buried in a park in Baltimore. Her schoolmate and ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed was convicted of the murder and is serving a life sentence. Nearly 16 years later, he continues to […]
THE HORROR: “200 Million Or 500 Million, It Does Not Matter To Us, We Will Kill Them All.” — ISIS
THE INDEPENDENT: The first Western journalist in the world to be allowed extensive access to Isis territories in Syria and Iraq has returned from the region with a warning: the group is “much stronger and much more dangerous” than anyone in the West realises. Jürgen Todenhöfer, 74, is a renowned German journalist and publicist who travelled through Turkey to Mosul, the largest city occupied by Isis, after months of negotiations with the group’s leaders. Once within Isis territory, Todenhöfer said his strongest impression was “that Isis is much stronger than we think here”. He said it now has “dimensions […]
NICK LOWE: Christmas At The Airport
FRESH AIR: When Nick Lowe was approached by his label to make a holiday album, he says he was “slightly appalled, really — we think it’s all a bit vulgar, you know, cashing in on Christmas.” Ultimately, Lowe says he took it as a challenge: Quality Street came out of that effort. It includes some traditional songs, such as “Silent Night,” as well as British Christmas favorites and some originals, such as “Christmas At The Airport.” Lowe recently visited the Fresh Air studio to talk with Terry Gross and perform songs from the album. MORE
WORTH REPEATING: Making The Fat Man Sing
SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST
CINEMA: The Battle Of Nevermore
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (2014, directed by Peter Jackson, 144 minutes, New Zealand, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Like Frodo drunk with the power of The Ring, Peter Jackson could not resist his greedy plan of making a near eight hour version of The Hobbit. Now in its concluding chapter, The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies is an oddly affectless spectacle, emotionally inert, barren of thrills and in the end downright dull. The goodwill Jackson accrued from his wildly successful Lord Of The Rings trilogy has allowed The Hobbit‘s gaping flaws to be […]
HOT DOC: When Castro Wrote A Fan Letter To FDR
MOTHER JONES: The letter from the now 88-year-old Castro (who was 14 when he wrote it, not 12 as he wrote) now resides in the National Archives. FDR probably never saw the letter. Castro did receive a response—but no cash—from the US Embassy in Havana. The polite snub officially marks the first exchange between Castro and the United States—and the beginning of a long, acrimonious relationship that may be about to thaw. Text of the letter (errors and all): Mr Franklin Roosvelt, President of the United States. My good friend Roosvelt I don’t know very English, but I know […]
THE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO SERIAL: Episode 12
BY MOLLY KASSEL The final episode Serial was largely devoted to revisiting old facts with fresh eyes. One piece of hard evidence against Adnan was a call made from his phone, to a girl he was flirting with at the time, named Neesha. The call is two minutes long and took place at 3:30pm on the day that Hae went missing. This call connects Adnan with his cell phone at a time when he says he did not have it. It also puts Adnan and Jay together that afternoon, given that Jay did not know Neesha and would not […]