Eddie Izzard brings his high heels, his kaleidoscopic mind and one false eyelash to the Forest Theater for a three-night run that starts tonight. Tickets are still available.
BEING THERE: Slint @ Union Transfer
Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA The really cool kids found out about Slint back in 1989. I found out about them in 1993 (hey, I was stationed at the Antarctic weather station of my own lameness at the time, and the record store there refused to carry Touch & Go shit, OK?!?). In all seriousness, Slint did not make it easy for uncool kids like me. They were always an enigma wrapped in a riddle. They were named after the one dude’s pet fish — Slint isn’t even a real word. They hated every picture ever taken of them and let […]
CINEMA: What A Drag It Is Never Getting Old
Artwork by GRACE O’CONNOR ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 123 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Adam and Eve, as played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, channel a sweet strain of sublime melancholy as the aging couple in director Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. To describe this beautiful pair as an aging couple is not quite right; actually as vampires their bodies aren’t aging at all but together they possess a world-weariness born of observing centuries of man’s foolhardy ways. The two exist in a beautiful stasis, a state that Jarmusch milks for […]
JACKSON & TIMBERLAKE: Love Never Felt So Good
Vibes pre-Thriller, back before it all went so very, very wrong. When he wasn’t yet a superfreak, just Off The Wall.
THE BOTH: Q&A w/ Aimee Mann & Ted Leo
Photo by CHRISTIAN LANTRY BY JONATHAN VALANIA Aimee Mann and Ted Leo started out as friends a decade ago, and then more recently they became tour mates. One day on tour Mann walked into Leo’s hotel room and heard him playing “Honesty Is No Excuse.” They got to talking about sounds and songwriting, and they quickly worked up a cover version they began performing on tour. This led to them discussing the prospect of pursuing a long-distance collaborative effort (she lives in L.A., he lives in Brooklyn) when they got back home. “We were just like ‘Fuck it, let’s push […]
MAY DAY MAY DAY: Today Is The Day We Start Kicking The Pimps And Whores Out Of Washington
WASHINGTON POST: Everyone knows the ubiquity of big money in politics undermines democracy. But the mechanics of the money chase now warps daily political life so thoroughly that it would seem funny if it weren’t so shocking. New legislators are told by party leaders to spend no less than four hours a day “dialing for dollars” for reelection. That’s twice the time they’re expected to spend on committee work, floor votes or meeting with constituents. And it doesn’t count the fundraisers they attend in their “free time.” “Members routinely duck out of the House office buildings, where they are […]
INCOMING: Jesus Is Coming, Everybody Look Busy!
Best-selling author and religion scholar Reza Aslan will join Drexel University on Wednesday, May 7, as the fourth lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Lecture Series. Previous lecturers in the series include neuroscientist David Eagleman, acclaimed author Sir Salman Rushdie and media maven Arianna Huffington. In a talk based on his number one New York Times bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Aslan will sift through centuries of mythmaking to shed new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters, Jesus Christ. Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the […]
RIP: Al Feldstein, Mad’s Hatter, Dead At 88
NEW YORK TIMES: He hired many of the writers and artists whose work became Mad trademarks. Among them were Don Martin, whose cartoons featuring bizarre human figures and distinctive sound effects — Katoong! Sklortch! Zazik! — immortalized the eccentric and the screwy; Antonio Prohias, whose “Spy vs. Spy” was a sendup of the international politics of the Cold War; Dave Berg, whose “The Lighter Side of …” made gentle, arch fun of middlebrow behavior; Mort Drucker, whose caricatures satirized movies like Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” (“Henna and Her Sickos” in Mad’s retelling). […] In his second issue, […]
VIA CHICAGO: Q&A w/ Wilco Guitarist Nels Cline
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Wizardly Wilco axeman Nels Cline plays Johnny Brenda’s on Friday (May 2nd) with The Nels Cline Singers in support of the new Macroscope, as part of an Ars Nova joint. Widely regarded as one of the 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time, Cline has performed on more than 70 albums — with the Geraldine Fibbers, with Wilco, with the Nels Cline Singers and a host of collaborators, including Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Willie Nelson and drummer Alex Cline, his identical twin brother — over the course of an auspicious 34-year career. Last week we got him […]
FIGHT THE POWER: Libertarian City Council Candidate N.A. Poe Announces Anti-PPA Rally
Boot the PPA May 9th at the Philadelphia Parking Authority at 913 Filbert St., at 3 PM. PREVIOUSLY: Q&A: N.A. Poe Interviews Nikki Allen Poe, Candidate For Philly City Council At-Large Seat PREVIOUSLY: Nikki Allen Poe Kicks Off His Pro-Pot/Anti-PPA City Council Candidacy With Presser At The Rocky Statue PREVIOUSLY: ENDORSEMENT: Nikki Allen Poe For City Council
THE CLEAN: Anything Could Happen
RELATED: Anthology serves as a celebration of The Clean, a band whose influence extends so far beyond their New Zealand home that even if you have never heard of The Clean before, you have surely heard of some of the bands (Pavement, Yo La Tengo, and Superchunk, to name a few) who have been influenced by their unique blend of homemade garage rock, hook-filled melodies, and psychedelic experimentalism. The album is a compilation of songs from across The Clean’s legendary musical career, which began in 1981 and continues today. Merge originally released the 2-CD Anthology in 2003, but in celebration […]
IRAQ DISPATCH: The Never War
Click HERE to enlarge THE NEW YORKER: When the last American soldiers left Iraq, at the end of 2011, the bloody civil war between the country’s Sunni and Shiite sects had been stifled but not resolved. Now the sectarian violence had returned, with terrifying intensity. For more than a year, thousands of Iraqis, nearly all of them members of the Sunni Arab minority, had been gathering to rail against Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government. Although the protests were mostly peaceful, security forces responded harshly, detaining thousands of Sunni men without charges and, in one encampment, touching off a spasm of violence that […]
MONKEY BUSINESS: Can A Chimp Sue Its Owner?
NEW YORK TIMES: It has been only in the last 30 years or so that a distinct field of animal law — that is laws and legal theory expressly for and about nonhuman animals — has emerged. When Steven Wise taught his first animal-law class in 1990 at Vermont Law School, he knew of only two others of its kind in the country. Today there are well over a hundred. Yet while animal-welfare laws and endangered-species statutes now abound, the primary thrust of such legislation remains the regulation of our various uses and abuses of animals, including food production, […]