Death is real. It took Phil Elverum’s wife as he held her in his arms in the back bedroom of their home in Anacortes, Washington. French Canadian artist and musician, Geneviéve Castrée, died of pancreatic cancer on the morning of July 9, 2015, a year and a half after giving birth to her and Elverum’s daughter. The window open, Elverum shared the vibration of his love’s death rattle, and it enveloped him in the dissociative fog of trauma. Mount Eerie’s new album A Crow Looked At Me follows Elverum in the months after her death, as he waded through […]
HIGH TREASON: The FBI Is Investigating The President Of The United States & His Cronies For Collusion With The Russians During The Campaign
LOS ANGELES TIMES: After more than five hours of testimony by FBI Director James B. Comey and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers to a House committee investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, we can point to five key takeaways. Most of it is bad news for the Trump administration. 1) Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that not only was the FBI investigating Russian interference in the campaign but he also dropped this bombshell: FBI agents are probing potential “coordination” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This investigation could lead to criminal charges. Comey’s exact […]
INCOMING: Something Wicked This Way Comes
PREVIOUSLY: WRECKLESS ERIC: A Q&A With Eric Wareham, Philly Homeboy & Exactly One Half Of Tim & Eric
THE TAKEAWAY: Shit Just Hit The Fans
Forget all the deceptive Spicer spin and perjured @Potus misdirection, this is all you need to know.
SPOON: Never Let Me Down
Title track from the 1987 David Bowie album.
RIP: Chuck Berry, Founding Father Of Rock N’ Roll
NEW YORKER: Berry, who died Saturday, at the age of ninety, was a proud and difficult man. He was also a genius. As a player, as a songwriter, and as a performer, he was a master of invention, transforming the rolling rhythms of Louis Jordan and the guitar figures of T-Bone Walker into the rhythmic foundation of half the rock songs you’ve ever heard. Rooted in the blues and with an ear for American country music, Berry blew things up and out with his first hits; he helped to create another form. Chuck Berry was to rock music what […]
HEZEKIAH JONES: If You Harden On The Inside
Hezekiah Jones is A) a promising but as-of-yet untested freshman wide receiver for Texas A&M B) a prehistoric b-side cut by Bob Dylan sometime prior to the Kennedy assassination, composed and arranged the by proto-Beat hipster be-bop preacher/comedian Screamin’ Lord Buckley, based on a poem called “Black Cross” written by (swear I’m not making this up) Paul Newman’s grandfather, about the lynching of a poor black dirt farmer in Arkansas for the high crime of atheism C) the alter ego of Philly-based singer/songwriter Raphael Cutrufello backed by a rotating collective of inscrutable bedroom folklorists, which, together or alone, has […]
TELEVISION: Netflix’s Iron Fist
BY RICHARD SUPLEE Friday marks the debut of Iron Fist, Netflix’s latest foray into the Marvel universe, which, unless you’re a total comic book nerd, begs the question “who the hell is Iron Fist?” Lucky for you I am just such a nerd. The short answer to your blunt question is that Iron Fist, aka Danny Rand (played by Game of Thrones’ Finn Jones), is a billionaire kid who was stranded in the wilderness after his parents were murdered by their business partner Harold Meachum ( David Wenham, Lord of the Ring and 300). Danny was rescued by archers […]
ALBUM REVIEW: Conor Oberst’s Salutations
Bored out of my mind growing up in the suburbs, girl-crazy to the nth degree, and sensitive to the point of Woody Allen neuroticism, I found Bright Eyes in seventh grade, and it was a match made in heaven. Anesthetized by the Levittown bubble I grew up in, my mind’s eye turned inwards and fixed its gaze on my own emotional turbulence. My whims and emotional tides were infinitely more real to me than the sea of housing developments and strip malls that surrounded me in every direction. Scribbling poems about how many feelings I felt in the dimly […]
#RESIST: Replacing Obamacare With ‘Don’t Care’
Bring the noise. Locate or register Indivisible groups, group meetings, or actions in your area. Come prepared to make plans for action and meet others who are working to resist Trump’s agenda. We’ll be planning next steps to encourage our Members of Congress in Senate and House to represent us, not Trump. If we stand together, indivisible, we will win. Welcome to the resistance! MORE
LOST & FOUND: Never Before Seen Photos Of VU
NEW YORK TIMES: But on this night at the club — described in The New York Times then as “the temporary cinema-discotheque that Andy Warhol, the apostle of Pop Culture, has installed at 23 St. Marks Place” — it was all so new. Attendees, Marylin Bender wrote, could “grope their way to the dance floor in blackness that is broken only by hallucinatory flashes of multicolored lights in order to wriggle, writhe and tremble to the music of the Velvet Undergrounds, a four-piece band whose chanteuse is a fashion model answering only to the name of Nico.” The group […]
WORTH REPEATING: Play Misty For Me
NEW YORK TIMES: To focus on the songs, Mr. Tillman, a merry libertine, gave up booze, drugs, cigarettes and meat. “I needed all my wits about me if I was going to take on these issues. Music is chaos. When I write songs, I’m opening the door to madness.” Judging from the tequila-and-soda in front of him and the pack of American Spirits in the pocket of his gray, slim-fit overcoat, he’s now abstaining from abstinence. “I didn’t like it,” he said with a theatrical shrug. “Not for me. When the ledgers of history are drawn up, I’ll be […]
TODAY IS PI DAY: Happy Birthday Albert Einstein!
Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879. TIME: He was the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Albert Einstein’s shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound — the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed. Even now scientists marvel at the daring of general relativity (“I still […]