IRRESISTIBLE (directed by Jon Stewart, 101 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Irresistible, written and directed by ex-Daily Show darling Jon Stewart, is a scathing political satire, but it’s one with a heart, that has Stewart commenting on a post Obama world and what’s next for the Democratic party.The films delivers a hilariously hard to swallow pill: a reminder that what really matters isn’t ideologies or agendas, it’s people. The film stars Steve Carell as Gary Zimmer, a democratic strategist/Hillary campaign survivor still reeling from 2016, who’s looking for a way into the hearts and minds of that […]
NY TIMES: How The Philadelphia Police Department Waged Chemical Warfare On Peaceful Protesters
NEW YORK TIMES: On June 1, SWAT teams turned a protest march in Philadelphia into chaos. We went to the site, interviewed witnesses and analyzed dozens of videos to reconstruct what happened. MORE PREVIOUSLY: I was at the George Floyd protest yesterday that ended on the Vine Street Expressway in a melee with the police, both as a participant and a witness documenting the events with my camera. This is what I saw: MORE
HERE’S TO THE QUITTERS: We Couldn’t Have Gotten To 122K Covid-19 Deaths Without You!
Photo by Salvatore Laporta/KONTROLAB/LightRocket via Getty Images via PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE Here’s to the COVID quitters, who have grown bored with this lethal pandemic, who are done with Netflix binging, mac ’n’ cheese and Zoom sex, who have places to go, things to buy, crowds to join, haircuts to get. Here’s to the quitters, who have fearlessly cast off the dystopian chains of medical science, epidemiology and other big words, who are striking a blow for freedom where it is currently making its last stand: at the nail salon and the Red Lobster. Here’s to […]
MICHAEL STIPE: No Time For Love Like Now
Written by Michael Stipe and Aaron Dessner, produced by Aaron Dessner, with orchestration by Bryce Dessner, and lyrics by Michael Stipe, “No Time For Love Like Now” is accompanied by a video directed by longtime Eaux Claires, The National and Bon Iver collaborator Michael Brown. “No Time For Love Like Now” is the first song from Big Red Machine since the release of their critically acclaimed self-titled debut in 2018. Big Red Machine began as a collaboration between Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon in 2008, and has grown into a multi-artist collective. Michael Stipe has designed a “No Time For […]
WORTH REPEATING: Sympathy For The Devil
“Depiction Of Satan” (1866) by Gustave Dore BBC: Milton’s Paradise Lost is rarely read today. But this epic poem, at over 350 years old, remains a work of unparalleled imaginative genius that shapes English literature even now. In more than 10,000 lines of blank verse, it tells the story of the war for heaven and of man’s expulsion from Eden. Its dozen sections are an ambitious attempt to comprehend the loss of paradise – from the perspectives of the fallen angel Satan and of man, fallen from grace. Even to readers in a secular age, the poem is a powerful […]
WATCH: The Greatest Anti-Trump Ad Ever Made
Please don't retweet this sequel to my first Trump/Biden "ramp video". Because Trump spent 10 whole minutes defending his West Point walk at his rally today. Telling him he's a whiny b*tch might send him over the edge.@realDonaldTrump @JoeBiden #VoteTrumpOut pic.twitter.com/R0tE6F4iUE — fact (@FindAClearTruth) June 21, 2020
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: People who have been taking antidepressants for several years sometimes hit a wall, a point when that treatment no longer seems to ease their symptoms. Psychiatrist Julie Holland says that’s where psychedelic drugs could help. Holland was in charge of Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric emergency room on the weekends from 1996 until 2005, and currently has a private psychotherapy practice in Manhattan. She’s a medical monitor on the MAPS studies, which involve, in part, developing psychedelics into prescription medication. Her new book, Good Chemistry, explores how she thinks psychedelic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and marijuana, might be […]
ALBUM REVIEW: Phoebe Bridgers Punisher
Phoebe Bridgers makes the kind of music best suited for sad self-indulgence, satiating a near-masochistic craving for loneliness. The soft-spoken specificity of her 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps charmed its listeners with eerie emo-folk tales of inescapable blueness. Now, with her 2020 follow-up Punisher, Bridgers casts the same spell with new lyrics, crafting a fresh sense of isolation that cuts deep in quarantine. The album comes a day earlier than expected. Originally scheduled to arrive on June 19th, Bridgers shared a link to the new songs on Twitter with the words “I’m not pushing the record until things go […]
MIKE POLIZZE: CheeWawa
VIA BANDCAMP: Long Lost Solace Find — the first Mike Polizze solo release for Paradise of Bachelors, due out July 31st — finds the Purling Hiss frontman and Birds of Maya shredder stepping out from behind the wall of guitar noise into the bright sunshine. Performed entirely by Polizze with longtime friend Kurt Vile and recorded by War on Drugs engineer Jeff Zeigler, this intimate Philadelphia affair clarifies the bittersweet earworm melodicism of Dizzy Polizzy’s songwriting, revealing bona fide folk-pop chops. Long Lost Solace Find finally harvests the wild local honey from the buzzing hive of Hiss. “Cheewawa,” the second […]
WORTH REPEATING: The End Of History
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: A central feature of Trump’s practice of malign minimalism is the erasure of American history. It is not just that his own ignorance (exposed, for example, in his suggestion in February 2017 that Frederick Douglass was still alive) seems almost total. It is that Trump is obsessed with a pseudo-history in which the past exists only as prelude to his own greatness and to the unique evil of his enemies. In the days after George Floyd’s death, Trump tweeted repeatedly about history: “The Greatest Political Crime In the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt”; […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
Artwork by Shepard Fairey RADIOLAB: If former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s case for the death of George Floyd goes to trial, there will be this one, controversial legal principle looming over the proceedings: The reasonable officer. In this episode, we explore the origin of the reasonable officer standard, with the case that sent two Charlotte lawyers on a quest for true objectivity, and changed the face of policing in the US. MORE
CINEMA: Casualties Of War
DA 5 Bloods (directed by Spike Lee, 154 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Films often take years, even decades to come to fruition, so it’s rare when a filmmaker manages to make a movie that is perfectly timed to comment on a moment. Spike Lee has done just that with his latest, Da Five Bloods, which is also his most ambitious since Malcom X. Illuminating as it is entertaining, the film is supercharged by our current sociopolitical climate as it dissects Trump, race, family and war. I found it reminiscent of The Irishman in that it’s a […]
CINEMA: The Mad King
THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND (dir. by Judd Apatow, 136 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC In The King of Staten Island, now streaming on VOD, director Judd Apatow returns to the formula that worked so well with Trainwreck : creating a vehicle around a comedian’s perceived public persona. This time around he’s chosen SNL’s resident bad boy Pete Davidson, who’s been going through a bit of a rough patch recently. After a very public and messy relationship/separation from Ariana Grande, he then went on to bite the hand that feeds by publicly criticizing SNL during a sit-down […]