FRESH AIR After nine years, Stephen Colbert is retiring the character he created for The Colbert Report, the conservative, self-important blowhard who opines about the news and the media. The final episode airs Thursday. Colbert will take over as host for The Late Show, replacing the retiring David Letterman. Since The Colbert Report began, Colbert has seldom appeared in the media out of character. He got his start satirizing the news as a correspondent on The Daily Show, which he joined in 1997 when Craig Kilborn was hosting. Jon Stewart took over two years later. In 2005, Colbert left […]
ARTSY: For They Shall Inherit The Earth
Photo by LEE JEFFRIES LIGHT BOX: In 2008, accountant and amateur photographer Lee Jeffries was in London to run a marathon. On the day before the race, Jeffries thought he would wander the city to take pictures. Near Leicester Square, he trained his 5D camera with a long, 70-200 lens on a young, homeless woman who was huddled in a sleeping bag among Chinese food containers. “She spotted me and started shouting, drawing the attention of passersby,” Jeffries says. “I could have just walked away in an embarrassed state, or I could have gone over and apologized to her.” He […]
GUNS N’ ROSES: Viva La Normalización!
Artwork by SHEPARD FAIREY NEW YORK TIMES: Alan Gross was the obstacle that would not be moved — the American contractor whose imprisonment in Cuba kept relations between the United States and Cuba locked in place, as paralyzed as a seized transmission. Now, in both Washington and Havana, the obstacle has been removed as the rusty gears of Cold War diplomacy have begun to move. Mr. Gross’s release on Wednesday, in conjunction with the release of three convicted Cuban spies held in the United States, amounts to a collective break from more than 50 years of distrust, anger and inertia. […]
#TORTUREREPORT: What If The Boot Of Oppression Were On The Other Foot?
By @JENSORENSEN Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in the shoes of others. The absence of empathy is the primary characteristic of a psychopath.
WORTH REPEATING: Everybody Must Get Stoned
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong. […] History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
Illustration by TERRY WOLFINGER FRESH AIR Performing live comedy is like “a series of little scientific experiments,” says John Cleese. “When you do comedy in front of an audience, they are the ones who tell you whether it’s funny or not,” he tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies, and each subsequent night on stage is an experiment in making jokes land better than the night before. Cleese — who co-founded the Monty Python comedy troupe, and co-wrote and co-starred in Fawlty Towers, Life of Bryan, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life — has just written a […]
DR. DOG: Heart It Races
The clip features the Dog in a beautifully raucous live setting performing their cover of Architecture In Helsinki’s “Heart It Races.” The track is featured on Dr. Dog’s forthcoming live album entitled Live at a Flamingo Hotel which arrives this January 13th. With Live at a Flamingo Hotel, Dr. Dog has captured the essence of their legendary live show; no matter the venue or town, the medium is the message. “That’s the point of a Dr. Dog show,” says bassist/vocalist Toby Leaman. “Transporting you in some way, whether it’s a shit basement in Texas or an amphitheater in Philadelphia, it […]
WORTH REPEATING: Oral History Of Boogie Nights
Illustration by ALEX WELLS GRANTLAND: Boogie Nights began as a teenage boy’s wet dream. Nearly a decade before its 1997 release, it was a fantasy to chase. The year was 1988. The boy was a precocious, plotting 17-year-old named Paul Thomas Anderson. He was growing up in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, obsessed with the studios all around him. He wanted in and hustled plenty — sneaking onto sets, working a Betamax camera from the age of 12, filming everything — but he also gained entrée from his father, Ernie, who was famous from his voice-over work for ABC on […]
CINEMA: Black Men Dream
#Blackmendream from Shikeith on Vimeo. NPR: Nine men sit turned away from the camera; their faces are never shown. Many are shirtless or naked. They answer questions like: When did you become a black man? Do you cry? How were you raised to deal with your emotions? This short film, called #Blackmendream, is the latest piece by Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist Shikeith Cathey. His work centers around the social, cultural and political misconceptions about black men in America, and the new film explores the emotional experience of black men, born out of those misconceptions. The men seem both vulnerable and powerful […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: The Benjamin
Artwork by WORKBYKNIGHT BY WILLIAM C. HENRY On November 18th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the complete destruction of the home of the Palestinian man who on October 22nd had driven a car into an Israeli crowd resulting in two people dead and several injured. None of the man’s surviving family members who occupied the house were in any way suspected of involvement in the attack. Who knows, maybe Elohim privately beseeched the “Minister” to add a bit of crushed brick and mortar now and then to offset all the calf and lamb fat. Too profane for your palate? Somehow I doubt the surviving family […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Electric Warrior
THE GUARDIAN: Indeed, he was so good at it that it sometimes feels as if his image overshadows his music. In the popular imagination, his career is condensed into the astonishing run of hit singles that began with Ride a White Swan and ended with 20th Century Boy; thereafter there was irreversible decline, an embarrassing failure to match the achievements of his friend and rival David Bowie. As The Vinyl Collection box makes clear, it was a bit more complicated than that. It picks up the story in 1970, missing out the years when he tried his best to […]
CINEMA: The Reincarnation Of Alvy Singer
TOP FIVE (2014, directed by Chris Rock, 102 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There is a pretty wide swath of agreement that Chris Rock is one of the funniest guys alive, so why has it taken him so long to produce a decent movie vehicle for himself? Since stealing scenes from Eddie Murphy in 1987’s Beverly Hills Cop II, Rock been a fixture on movie screens but almost never in something worthy of his talents. (The one exception was his turn with Julie Delpy in 2012’s 2 Days in New York. And maybe Pootie-Tang.). Rock’s best vehicle […]
THE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO SERIAL: Episode 11
BY MOLLY KASSEL This week on Serial, Sarah Koenig addresses the pack of rumors about Adnan that have circulated online and spread like a virus across the vectors of social media, and like an armchair virologist she attempts to trace the seemingly substantive ones back to their points of origin. Most of the rumors are started by people who claim to know Adnan through his mosque and arrive on Koenig’s doorstep via anonymous texts, emails, and phone calls. These tipsters insist on maintaining their anonymity because, they say, in their small, insular mosque community, gossip spreads quickly and nobody […]