CHANGE.ORG: Bill Cosby, alleged rapist of at least 15 women, including a former Temple University employee, continues to be a trustee of Temple University. He spoke at the 2014 Temple University commencement. As recently as August of this year, he was honored by Temple. It’s time for Temple to recognize that continuing its relationship with Bill Cosby is damaging to its own reputation, as well as its students, employees and alumni. It’s time for Temple University to sever its ties with this man. Temple should not be the last organization to end its relationship with Bill Cosby – it should […]
LAW & DISORDER: Ferguson Burns
RELATED: The Full Grand Jury Report NEW YORK TIMES: A St. Louis County grand jury decided on Monday not to bring criminal charges against Darren Wilson, a white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, more than three months ago in nearby Ferguson, Mo. Unraveling how the grand jury came to its decision remains something of a mystery – the jury’s deliberations were confidential – but in thousands of pages of testimony and forensic evidence, clues emerge. Officer Wilson’s testimony, in particular, stands out both for what he says, and how he describes what happened. Officer […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
Artwork by JACK RACKAM SOUND OPINIONS: Robert Plant is arguably one of the most famous names and faces in music history—amazing considering he started his career in the Welsh borderlands of England, or as he says, the Black Country. There he was inspired by sounds from across the pond including the Blues and singers like Little Richard and Smokey Robinson & The Miracles. Plant went on to found Band of Joy and later Led Zeppelin with his friend, drummer John Bonham, and the two ruled the rock airwaves in the 1970’s. Bonham died in 1980, and with him Led Zeppelin. […]
BEING THERE: Dylan @ The Academy Of Music
Artist’s rendering The Academy of Music opera house in Philadelphia opened in 1857, which, if memory serves, is where and when Bob Dylan first went electric — much to the consternation of the stovepipe-hatted folkies in attendance, who felt he was selling out the purity of old-timey steam-powered protest anthems. It is said that Stephen A. Douglas was so incensed he attempted to chop the cable supplying power to the Academy stage with an axe and had to be wrestled to the ground by none other than Abraham Lincoln, who “licked him,” as Huckleberry Finn used to say. Historic records […]
CINEMA: The Fox In The Madhouse
FOXCATCHER (2014, directed by Bennett Miller, 130 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK It’s hard to live in the state of Delaware and not say the name “DuPont” every day or two. Highways, hospitals, chemical plants and state parks all carry the name. In fact, the DuPonts own their home state in a way that few old money families can claim. Residents of Delaware have made peace living in the shadow of these modern day Dukes and Duchesses but there was something unnerving to discover in 1986 that the DuPont name had been affixed to homicide. The news broke that […]
BEING THERE: The New Pornographers @ UT
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Ten minutes before arriving at Union Transfer to see the New Pornographers, I was dumped. Denied. Kicked to the curb. Or whatever you want to call it. Not to worry, “we can still be friends” I was told. Great. That’s just great. Having taken a crash course in the New Pornographers greatest hits and misses shortly before my arrival, I knew the show was going to feel like getting slapped upside the head with a happy stick. Great. That’s just great. But enough of me feeling sorry for myself, there were more important things to […]
How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love Bob Dylan
Artwork by JOSHUA BUDICH BY MIKE WALSH Let me make this clear up front: I’m not a Dylan-head, Dylan-ite, Dylan-phile, Dylan-ologist, or any other kind of extreme Dylan fan. In fact, I never bought a Dylan record or CD until just a few years ago. I never saw the need. Growing up in the ’60s, Dylan was on the radio all the time —“Blowing in the Wind,“ “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right,“ “The Times They Are a Changin’,“ “All I Really Want to Do,“ “It Ain’t Me Babe, “Mr. Tambourine Man,“ etc., etc. Plus, many other bands had hits […]
The Night Bob Dylan Got The Beatles High On
At the very moment a race riot is breaking out in North Philadelphia, the Beatles are camped at the Hotel Delmonico in New York for a two-day run at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. Something is happening in the hotel room that, had he found out, would have given Rizzo apoplexy: Bob Dylan is passing a joint to John Lennon. This act of stoner generosity will almost single-handedly light the fuse of the psychedelic ’60s. Dylan just assumed the Fab Four were all seasoned pot smokers, having mistaken the “I can’t hide” line in “I Want to Hold Your Hand” […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist David Kinney, Author Of The Dylanologists
EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally posted on July 17th 2014 BY JONATHAN VALANIA Sometimes I think Dylanology — the obsessive study and consumption of all things Bob — is the new (and improved) Scientology. Think about it: Both are non-denominational pop cults formed in the latter half of the 20th Century that rally around a charismatic leader and rake in boatloads of believer money. Both have celebrity acolytes and promise extraordinary insight. But there is one vast and crucial difference, as vast and crucial as the difference between The Old Testament and The New Testament: L. Ron Hubbard wrote Battlefield Earth […]
DYLANOLOGY: Ballad Of Bob’s Dylan’s Bag Man
Bob Dylan & Victor Maymudes in Philadelphia 1964. Photo by DANIEL KRAMER/STALEY-WISE GALLERY NEW YORK TIMES: The most vivid passages go back further — to 1964, the pivotal year when Mr. Dylan broke out of the East Coast folkie bubble and made a cross-country journey. Victor took the wheel of a blue Ford station wagon, also joined by the folk musician Paul Clayton and the journalist Peter Karman. “It was a group of friends, all in the know, a nucleus of hip in America,” Mr. Wilentz said of the 1964 tour. “It was something special. The civil rights movement was […]
WORTH REPEATING: How Dylan Got His Weird On
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: You have to start by disregarding the well-told narrative: The soi-disant vagabond’s rise through folk music to a place of utter domination at the highest level of literate, passionate, and difficult pop and rock music, all by 1966; a retreat and Gethsemane until 1974, when he came back, roaring and vengeful, more passionately focused than before, adding a remarkable personal dimension to his ’60s work. After that, depending on how generously you view his career, there has been either a long decline or decades of remarkable and kaleidoscopic creativity, culminating in the triumphs, late in life, […]
RIP: Mike Nichols, Creator Of Much Of The Greatest Cinema, Theater & Comedy Of The 20th Century
NEW YORK TIMES: Mike Nichols, one of America’s most celebrated directors, whose long, protean résumé of critic- and crowd-pleasing work earned him adulation both on Broadway and in Hollywood, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 83. Dryly urbane, Mr. Nichols had a gift for communicating with actors and a keen comic timing, which he honed early in his career as half of the popular sketch-comedy team Nichols and May. An immigrant whose work was marked by trenchant perceptions of American culture, he achieved — in films like “The Graduate,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Carnal Knowledge” and […]
WORTH REPEATING: ‘No One Wanted to Talk About Bill Cosby’s Alleged Crimes Because He Made White America Feel Good About Race’
THE NEW REPUBLIC: the possibility that this extremely rich man lambasting poor people for everything from stealing pound cake to wearing low-slung pants to how they named their children—might have drugged and raped more than a dozen women would have made our heads pop off. It would have made us question every single good, reassuring, optimistic thing that Bill Cosby ever made us think about ourselves and our country. It might have made us rethink the way he had held up wealthy people as model feminists, and about exactly how screwed up it was that that his progressive cheerful […]