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 […]
BLUE JEANS AND MOON BEAMS: The Early Word On Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice
WALL STREET JOURNAL: One film, two masters. That’s the easiest, most direct way to describe the power behind “Inherent Vice,” the much-anticipated stoner noir film that had its world premiere Saturday night as the centerpiece of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. The film is loaded with all sorts of familiar Hollywood faces, but the biggest stars of the project are its director and screenwriter, celebrated auteur Paul Thomas Anderson, and the author whose novel served as source material, great American novelist Thomas Pynchon. The two were the buzz of the red carpet Saturday night, even as the likes of stars Joaquin Phoenix, Josh […]
BOOKS: Tied To The Whipping Post
BY ED KING ROCK EXPERT What makes a band a band and not just a group of musicians who play music together? Jazz musicians often play together, but they rarely form bands. Supporting musicians flow in and out behind a clear band leader, the way they did behind Miles Davis, helping to drive his many stylistic permutations. What’s the value of a band, why do people bother? In rock ‘n roll, countless collections of musicians undeniably exist as a band despite barely qualifying as musicians. Alan Paul’s oral history of the Allman Brothers Band, One Way Out, is a […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Joel Selvin, Author Of HERE COMES THE NIGHT: The Dark Soul Of Bert Berns & The Dirty Business Of Rhythm & Blues
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Bert Berns, the greatest songwriter/producer you never heard of, was not long for this world. Born with a congenital heart defect, he was told he would not live to see 21, and though he defied prevailing medical opinion, he was dead before he turned 39. Berns [PICTURED, ABOVE RIGHT didn’t start working in the music business until he was 30, but over the course of the next eight years he wrote and/or produced some of the greatest singles of all time: The Isley Brothers’ “Twist And Shout,” The Drifters’ “Under The Boardwalk,” Solomon Burke [PICTURED, ABOVE […]
EXCERPT: Brothers In Harms
\ MOTHER JONES: After eight years at MIT and a consulting firm, Charles returned to Wichita to learn the intricacies of the family business. Together, he and David would build their father’s Midwestern company, which as of 1967 had $250 millionin yearly sales and 650 employees, into a corporate Goliath with $115 billion in annual revenues and a presence in 60 countries. Under their leadership, Koch Industries grew into the second-largest private corporation in the United States (only the Minneapolis-based agribusiness giant Cargill is bigger). Bill, meanwhile, would become best known for his flamboyant escapades: as a collector of fine […]
CHILDREN BY THE MILLION: Talking Alex Chilton Blues With Rock Biographer Holly George-Warren
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Alex Chilton remains a forbidding totem of American music with a formidable pedigree: white soul prodigy, progenitor of power-pop purity, pill-addled punk, swampy garage blooze and, in the final decades of his life, indie’s aging princeling of noble white failure. He was a musician’s musician, and each entry on his resume has spun off countless imitators and innovators. Forever to be known as the guiding light in Big Star’s twinkling constellation of pure pop, Alex Chilton would probably have it any other way. Even during the reunion/reactivation of Big Star in the last two decades of […]
CRIME & PUNISHMENT: Talking Drones, Snowden, O.J. And How To Solve The Israeli-Palestinian Riddle With Super-Lawyer Alan Dershowitz
Illustration by ALEX FINE,/font> BY JONATHAN VALANIA Famed criminal defense lawyer, retired Harvard Law School professor and cable news gadfly Alan Dershowitz will be at the National Constitution Center tomorrow to debate the legality and ethics of drone strikes on American citizens. In advance of tomorrow’s debate, we got Mr. Dershowitz on the horn. DISCUSSED: When it’s OK for the President of the United States to order the assassination of an American citizen; his theory of a “Continuum Of Civilianality; why he is advocating for the court-supervised use of torture in so-called ticking time bomb situations; Zionism and how to […]
THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS: Q&A With Erik Prince, Founder & Former CEO Of Blackwater
Illustration by ALEX FINE BY JONATHAN VALANIA Blackwater founder Erik Prince will be speaking at the Free Library on Friday to promote his new book, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story Of Blackwater & The Unsung Heroes Of The War On Terror, his compelling counter-narrative about the rise and fall of Blackwater. Not surprisingly, in Prince’s telling Blackwater is essentially blameless for any and all murder and mayhem that has occurred on its watch. Yesterday we got Prince on the phone and asked who, in the final accounting, will have to answer for all that murder and mayhem. Turns out nobody […]
BOOKS: The Importance Of Being Morrissey
THE TELEGRAPH: Morrissey, former lead singer of The Smiths, has made a career from warbling about how woeful his life is. His autobiography, published today, bizarrely as a Penguin Classic, continues in this vein. Here are 13 of the most Morrisseyesque bits in Morrissey’s life story. On being born: “Naturally my birth almost kills my mother.” On being taught to swim: “I was lifted up and thrown into the water in an act that, these days, would count as extreme physical and psychological assault.” On school dinners: “Putrid smells reduce me to a pitiful pile, and none are more […]
BOOKS: The Horror, The Horror
AMAZON: Hidden far from sight, deep in the thick underbrush of the North Florida woods are the ghostly graves of more than thirty unidentified bodies, some of which are thought to be children who were beaten to death at the old Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna. It is suspected that many more bodies will be found in the fields and swamplands surrounding the institution. Investigations into the unmarked graves have compelled many grown men to come forward and share their stories of the abuses they endured and the atrocities they witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s at […]
BOOKS: Why George Zimmerman Was Never Going To Serve A Day In Jail For Killing Trayvon Martin
NEW YORK TIMES: Anyone who has commuted to a Fort Lauderdale beach will be familiar with the journey T. D. Allman describes in “Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State.”Because drawbridges that lead to the ocean’s edge are raised to allow large boats up the inland waterways, highway passengers are almost invariably subjected to long waits. This imposition — and the fact that the people behind steering wheels don’t protest — drives Allman to distraction. “Not one person demands to know: Why is it that the people with boats take precedence over us?” he writes. The Florida […]
BOOKS: Being David Sedaris
FRESH AIR: David Sedaris writes personal stories, funny tales about his life growing up in a Greek family outside of Raleigh, N.C., about in Santa’s workshop at Christmastime, and about living abroad with his longtime partner, Hugh. The stories have appeared on This American Life and in The New Yorker, and have now filled seven essay collections, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and now — his latest collection — Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls. Because Sedaris’ writing relies so heavily on his own life, it’s not surprising that many of […]
BOOKS: Between The Bars
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Perhaps you’ve seen Stewart Ebersole [PICTURED BELOW, RIGHT] bike messenger-ing around town over the years. He no longer lives in Philadelphia but for many years he cut a pretty dashing profile, a tall drink of water with the gift of gab and miles of style, always changing up his look, sometimes a mod, sometimes a rocker, sometimes shaggy-haired, bearded and Rapsutin-like, but always a punk. Always. Black Flag is his brand, having cut his punk rock teeth back in the early ’80s as a mohawked college radio DJ, and he’s a lifer. He’s got the Black […]