NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t

  FRESH AIR: Ever since he was a kid, director Mike Mills has yearned to understand his mother. Mills, who was born in the ’60s, describes his mother as a “secretive soul” who was different from all the other moms he knew.  “She was 40 when she had me, [and] she really did sort of walk and talk like Amelia Earhart and Humphrey Bogart put together,” Mills tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “I was always trying to figure out what her deal was.” Mills’ latest film, 20th Century Women, is inspired by that yearning. Set in Santa Barbara in 1979, […]

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HAMILTON ELECTORS: This Land Is Your Land

Here inside the #Colorado state capitol—I'm in overflow because there's so many here. Singing songs and hoping for #Hamiltonelectors. . . .#electoralcollege #thisispatriotism #patriotism #notmypresident #dumptrump #denver #denverartist #thisisactivism #activism A video posted by Daisy Patton (@daisy_patton) on Dec 19, 2016 at 11:30am PST Or it used to be.

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WORTH REPEATING: This Is How Rome Ends

  NEW YORK TIMES: I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell. Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade. On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rules. Here’s what Adrian Goldsworthy’s “In the Name of Rome” says: “However important it was for an individual to win fame and […]

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CINEMA: Camelot In La La Land

  LA LA LAND (2016, directed by Damien Chazelle, 128 minutes, U.S.) JACKIE (2016, directed by Pablo Larain, 99 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Trepidation preceded me sitting down for director Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to the award-winning hit Whiplash, a film that admittedly irked me in a most personal way. For those lucky enough to have missed it, Whiplash was a musical drama proposing that the best way to craft a new generation of jazz geniuses was to abuse them like a crazed drill sergeant in a house-of-horrors-come-classroom where never is heard an encouraging word. Driven by a […]

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REVIEW: Vengeance Is Mine

The ’90s were a helluva drug. You really had to be there, kid, but suffice it to say it was 10 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity, a pot in every chicken, 2.5 SUVs in every garage, a Clinton was president and Donald Trump ran beauty contests instead of the free world. In the ’90s, the Internet went public and we all become tech stock billionaires overnight — all of us — selling dog bones over the World Wide Web, which was what we called the Interwebs back then, as was the style of the day. Good. Times. Music was […]

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SANDY HOOK: How Far We Have Not Come

Artwork by SHEPARD FAIREY EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay originally appeared on the Huffington Post on 1/8/13. HOW TO DISARM THE NRA: All You Need Is Love And $38 Million BY JONATHAN VALANIA It is a sad testament to the depth of our national indifference that it took the massacre of 20 six year olds in their first grade classroom to finally trigger a united and sustained public outcry for an end to the madness. After 62 mass murders and counting since 1982, we have, it would appear, finally reached the tipping point. On this we can all agree: Never again. […]

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INCOMING: Season Of The Witch

  Kristin Hersh is most recognized as the front person for the influential art-punk band, Throwing Muses, which she founded when she was 14.  Wyatt is the third release in the ground-breaking book-CD format that Hersh began with her previous solo album Crooked and Throwing Muses’ 2013 release Purgatory/Paradise.  Since sharing essays and tour diaries on her own website, she has published the critically acclaimed Rat Girl, a children’s book Toby Snax, and Don’t Suck, Don’t Die, a personal account of her long friendship with the late Vic Chesnutt, that earned her rave reviews. Wyatt is a collection of true stories […]

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FROM THE VAULT: Q&A With Dean Wareham

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Back in the ’60s, Andy Warhol’s Factory — his studio-cum-playpen situated in a brick-walled walk-up on 47th Street in Manhattan — was the epicenter of all things edgy, artsy and, ultimately, profoundly influential. Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Nico, and The Velvet Underground all came and went, and most sat for one of Warhol’s screen tests — a three-minute black and white stare-down between the camera and subject. There are some 500 of them in the Warhol archives. Recently the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh commissioned ex-Galaxie 500/Luna mainman Dean Wareham — whose cred as […]

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WORTH REPEATING: The Book Of The Dead

  THE OXFORD AMERICAN: I was three years old when the Killer Floods hit West Virginia. We were spared, my family and I. My parents had recently bought a stone cottage in a hilly Charleston neighborhood with great schools. Dad had just graduated from law school. We lost nothing, while thousands of our neighbors were ejected from their homes into the icy November waters that claimed sixty-two lives; the 1985 storms still sit on the short list of the most costly in U.S. history. In the aftermath, newspapers accumulated the miracles and spectacles. An organ caked with mud, drying before a […]

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