ON ASSIGNMENT: No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn II

  It’s like deja vu all over again. Gotta go up to the BK and drink beer with these guys — I know, I know, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. So posting will be light today. In the mean time, curl up with this 2008 interview with Black Francis wherein the erstwhile Pixies mainman and I bury the hatchet after a simmering feud stretching back to the Doolittle tour when I was a starstruck cub reporter getting to interview my numero uno favoritest band in the whole wide world and Black Francis still had hair. […]

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REPLAY: Burying The Hatchet w/ Black Francis

Illustration by ALEX FINE EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published in 2008. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Set the Wayback Machine to 1988. I’m a college radio DJ stranded in the middle of Pennsyltucky. Entranced by the naked boob on the cover of Surfer Rosa, I slap it on the turntable and…the Pixies had me by the first 10 seconds of “Where Is My Mind?” and never really let go. Shortly thereafter I got a gig working for a Pennsyltucky daily. They asked me one day if I wanted to interview some guy named Black Francis from the Pixies. Would I? Man, […]

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SNOWDEN SPEAKS: Russian Spies Don’t Have To Sleep On The Floor Of The Transit Lounge At Moscow International For 40 Days And 40 Nights

Artwork by POASTERCHILD NEW YORKER: Snowden, in a rare interview that he conducted by encrypted means from Moscow, denied the allegations outright, stressing that he “clearly and unambiguously acted alone, with no assistance from anyone, much less a government.” He added, “It won’t stick…. Because it’s clearly false, and the American people are smarter than politicians think they are.” If he was a Russian spy, Snowden asked, “Why Hong Kong?” And why, then, was he “stuck in the airport forever” when he reached Moscow? (He spent forty days in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo International Airport.) “Spies get treated better […]

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TONIGHT: The Man Who Wasn’t There

  PBS: THIRTEEN’s American Masters launches its 28th season with the series’ 200th episode: the exclusive director’s cut of Shane Salerno’s documentary, Salinger, premiering nationally Tuesday, January 21, 9-11:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings) with 15 minutes of new material not seen in theaters. Featuring never-before-seen photographs, personal stories and moments from J.D. Salinger’s (Jan. 1, 1919 – Jan. 27, 2010) life and harrowing service in World War II, Salerno’s new director’s cut expands his intimate portrait of the enigmatic author of The Catcher in the Rye. Salerno’s 10-year journey culminates in the first work to get beyond the […]

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CINEMA: The Catcher And The Why

  SALINGER (2013, directed by Shane Salerno, 129 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s a little hard to fathom the critical animosity this absorbing documentary on legendary writer J.D. Salinger has received, except to conclude that writers still feel the need to protect lonely old Holden Caufield. The notoriously reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye and Franny & Zooey didn’t leave behind a whole lot of evidence of his private life, but Salerno puts together the pieces to present the trajectory of a great fiction writer but he also paints an unflattering picture of a man whose […]

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BEING THERE: Street Fighting Man

Independence Square, downtown Kiev, Ukraine, 12:25 PM by DEN DIDENKO KYIV POST: Fisticuffs, beatings, shootings, fires, vandalism, tear gas, Molotov cocktails and smoke bombs have all featured in EuroMaidan, the anti-government protests that seek to dislodge Ukraine’s top officials. But these incidents do not add up to a nation that has descended into chaos or civil war. To the contrary, the radical aggressors of EuroMaidan respect public order for the most part and calibrate their actions to keep the focus on their mission: ousting President Viktor Yanukovych’s regime. That means that while the activists are happy to seize a police […]

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J. Edgar Hoover Met The Enemy, And It Was Us

  FRESH AIR Four years after Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tim Weiner published Legacy of Ashes, his detailed history of the CIA, he received a call from a lawyer in Washington, D.C. “He said, ‘I’ve just gotten my hands on a Freedom of Information Act request that’s 26 years old for [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover’s intelligence files. Would you like them?’ ” Weiner tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “And after a stunned silence, I said, ‘Yes, yes.’ ” Weiner went to the lawyer’s office and collected four boxes containing Hoover’s personal files on intelligence operations between 1945 and 1972. […] […]

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Let Us Never Forget Which Side The FBI Was On

  CHURCH COMMMITTEE REPORT: From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “neutralize” him as an effective civil rights leader. In the words of the man in charge of the FBI’s “war” against Dr. King: No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business. The FBI collected information about Dr. King’s plans and activities through […]

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