Third party candidates want to be serious contenders, so John Oliver considers them seriously as potential presidents.
CINEMA: Bye Bye Miss American Pie
AMERICAN HONEY (2016, directed by Andrea Arnold, 163 minutes, U.K./U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Writer/director Andrea (Fish Tank) Arnold’s perspective is apparent from the first frame of her immersive youth epic American Honey. Being a British director shooting in the U.S. for the first time, you might imagine that Arnold’s instinct would be to use the widescreen frame to capture those endless horizons of the American Midwest. But no, Arnold uses an unusually boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio to tell her story, a story of young characters enjoying a rambling freedom but not necessarily endless possibilities. The film laces us […]
OPPO: The Hands Of Donald Trump
…are,like God’s eyes, always upon us. Unless you’re an uggo.
HOW DOES IT FEEL: Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize
NEW YORKER: Then came the news, early this morning, that Bob Dylan, one of the best among us, a glory of the country and of the language, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ring them bells! What an astonishing and unambiguously wonderful thing! There are novelists who still should win (yes, Mr. Roth, that list begins with you), and there are many others who should have won (Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Auden, Levi, Achebe, Borges, Baldwin . . . where to stop?), but, for all the foibles of the prize and its selection committee, can we just […]
THIS JUST IN: Leonard Cohen Is Ready To Die
Illustration by LIEZLS NEW YORKER: There is probably no more touring ahead. What is on Cohen’s mind now is family, friends, and the work at hand. “I’ve had a family to support, so there’s no sense of virtue attached to it,” he said. “I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out. Now it’s a habit. And there’s the element of time, which is powerful, with its incentive to finish up. Now I haven’t gotten […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: America has a long and storied history with marijuana. Once grown by American colonists to make hemp rope, by 1970, it was classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic. Possession of it was — and is — a federal crime, despite the fact that in recent years 25 states have legalized medical marijuana and four states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis for recreational use. Author John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, traces the history of America’s laws and attitudes toward cannabis in his new book, Marijuana: A Short History. He tells Fresh […]
CAPTAIN’S LOG: A Fanboy Q&A w/ William Shatner
Artwork by PIERRE-LUC FAUBERT BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR PHILLY.COM Pretend, for the length of this introduction, you are me. Your earliest television memory is Star Trek, back when you thought you could talk to the people on TV simply by yelling at the screen. In the ‘70s, Star Trek reruns ran in seeming perpetuity. You watched every episode many times over, your thirst for the show was unquenchable and you became the ultimate fanboy — an obsessive, jock-mocked, girl-repellent Trekkie. You still have your copy of the Star Fleet Technical Manual you bought at the mall with your paper route […]
Lin-Manuel Miranda Slays The Howling Hate Beast Of Trumpism With The Righteous Sword Of Love
PAJIBA: Taking place in a phone booth in the middle a corn field — an image that evokes both the loneliness and the vulnerability of the immigrant experience — Miranda plays a Latino immigrant who uses a calling card to phone home to talk to his mother. He speaks in Spanish, except when referring to the huge, bizarre wonders of North Dakota — the marshmallow salad, Little Debbie snacks, big mounds of yellow and orange foods — and he tells his mom about the friend he made working as a dishwasher. Preston. He’s the QB of his high school football […]
OPPO: Those Were The Days
OPPO is our new agitprop wing. Full names is OPPO: The League Of Opposition Research. Our first video takes a hard look at the good old days, back when America was great the first time. Try it, it’s only one minute and three seconds of your life.
CINEMA: ReBirth Of A Nation
BIRTH OF A NATION (2016, directed by Nate Parker, 120 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I’m surprised how often I’ve heard critics and commentators sigh about, “another Hollywood film about slavery.” Has Hollywood really exhausted the subject? The 1975’s potboiler Mandingo, Spielberg’s overly-stately Amistad, Jonathan Demme’s mishandled adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tarantino’s leering Django Unchained and Steve McQueen’s 2013 Academy Award-winner 12 Years a Slave; I’d say that is five major efforts over the last forty years. Like the Jewish Holocaust, the era is ripe with raw emotions and dramatic possibilities, but like the American genocide of […]
BEING THERE: Project Pabst @ The E-Factory
Photo by JOHN VETTESE courtesy of THE KEY “If you book them, they will come,” said the weird naked Indian in that one scene in Wayne’s World 2. This, apparently, was the mentality Project Pabst had when booking bands for the stacked Philly festival held at the Electric Factory yesterday. Project Pabst — which was supposed to be staged in the Electric Factory’s parking lot but was moved inside because of Hurricane Matthew — booked a variety of star-studded indie bands that put the Hollywood Walk of Fame to shame. And boy did the people come. Hop Along. Beach Slang. […]
WIND IN THE WILLOWS: Q&A w/ Julianna Barwick
BY MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Julianna Barwick’s music is reminiscent of her childhood, which was spent singing in and listening to Louisiana church choirs. These days, she recreates a similar sound using a synthesizer and vocal loops to create massive choirs of her voice. The result is a grand, ethereal sound with an obvious tinge of isolation. Most of her songs begin with a single vocal loop, setting the foundation for layers of lyrics intentionally concealed by waves of synthesized instrumentation. Her music vibes like a sonic dissection of natural environments, whether that’s magnifying the hum of the wind in […]