INDIE WIRE: Spike Lee, an avowed Bernie Sanders supporter, has made his endorsement of the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign even more official than it already was with a new ad starring Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, Rosario Dawson, Alan Cumming and others. The five-minute piece comes a few days ahead of Tuesday’s primary in New York, which is among the most significant contests remaining in the ongoing race between Sanders and Hillary Clinton. MORE
CINEMA: Being Miles Davis
NEW YORKER: Davis’s life, in his own telling, is a trouble-filled adventure, in which racism and drugs, hedonism and violence, artistic vision and brute desire are intertwined. The hardest thing for an artistic biography to accomplish is to associate the art with the life without reducing the pure artistic drive to psychological and sociological determinism. Even though “Miles Ahead” fails in this regard, I have sympathy for Cheadle’s odd uses of some of Davis’s greatest music. For instance, Davis’s violent fight with Taylor is depicted as occurring while the other four members of Davis’s superb “second quintet” are rehearsing […]
MITSKI: Your Best American Girl
She’s plays Boot & Saddle on June 16th with Japanese Breakfast and Jay Som.
BEING THERE: The Melvins @ Underground Arts
Photo by DAN LONG Three distinctive variations of “loud” were amply demonstrated last night at Underground Arts during the Philly stop of the Savage Imperial Death March Tour, featuring the wildly animated Melt-Banana, the seminal distorto-ooze of The Melvins, and break-neck intensity of Napalm Death. Playing to a sold-out crowd — a kinetic mash of beards, denim, and flannel — each band tested earplug limits and garnered high-contact physical responses, with bodies continually thrashing about for the show’s duration. Preceded by a series of droid’ish bleeps and swaths of grinding guitar sound, Melt-Banana’s set was delivered with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed as […]
BECAUSE REALITY HAS A LIBERAL BIAS: Q&A w/ Comedian & ex-Totally Biased Host W. Kamau Bell
Illustration by GARY TAXALI© BY JONATHAN VALANIA Comedian W. Kamau Bell has been fighting the good fight in the stand-up comedy trenches of San Francisco since the phat pants ’90s. It was there that Chris Rock discovered him and eventually brokered a deal with FX for Bell to have his own TV show. In 2012, Totally Biased, a much-buzzed-about late night sketch comedy show starring Bell and produced by Rock, debuted to strong reviews and a big enough viewership to justify a second season until its ill-advised migration from FX to FXX, subsequent plummet in audience share and ensuing cancellation […]
The Time That Ted Cruz Argued In Court Against Your Constitutional Right To Masturbate @ Home
NEW YORK POST: As Texas’ solicitor general in 2007, Cruz wrote a 76-page briefing against dildos and other sex toys — taking a hard stance against “any alleged right associated with obscene devices,” according to Mother Jones. “There is no substantive due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship,” Cruz’s team wrote in the lengthy court document filed in 2007. He implored the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth District to uphold a Texas law that banned the sale of dildos, artificial vaginas and other sex devices to uphold […]
WORTH REPEATING: DC Hardcore, For The Lulz
BANDWIDTH.FM: Any dead-serious subculture becomes ripe for satire at some point, and if the success of The Hard Times is any indication, hardcore punk was long overdue for derision. And the punks themselves, it seems, craved it more than they realized. In a little more than a year, the website — with its insider jokes about scene clichés, browbeating frontmen, mosh pit faux pas, austere lifestyles and so on — has become a hit, racking up pageviews and earning guffaws from people who instantly find humor in headlines like “Ted Nugent Begrudgingly Inducted Into Straight Edge Hall of Fame” or “Henry […]
The Only Donald Trump Explainer You’ll Ever Need
This explains the entire Trump phenomenon with a precision and accuracy that continues to elude the bloviating cable news commentariat even after 7000 TV hours of gassing on about Donald Trump. Because corporate media wants it that way.The most they are allowed to say is “he says the darnedest things, people are so angry, who can say why they’re angry, we’ll probably never know.” And just look where we are now.
CINEMA: I’ll Just Leave This Here
Anybody who’s never seen Convoy is unwittingly living a life of diminished expectations. Anybody’s who’s seen it knows what diminished expectations feels like. It’s kind of a lose-lose where everybody wins!
LISTEN LIKE THIEVES: The Jazz Messenger
Phawker film critic Dan Buskirk moonlights as an esteemed jazz authority on WPRB. Not just jazz with good taste, but jazz that also tastes good! See for yourself.
A DAY THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY: When Jackie Robinson Came To Town We Let Progress Down
PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS: Whatever degradation Jackie Robinson faced during the 1947 season – and it was immense – few teams treated him as disgracefully as the Phillies. To Jackie Robinson back in the spring of 1947, Philadelphia was far what it purports to be: “The City of Brotherly Love.” Before the Dodgers came to town for the first time, Herb Pennock [pictured, below right], the Phils’ general manager, telephoned his Brooklyn counterpart, Branch Rickey, and told Rickey he just could not “bring that nigger here with the rest of your team.” “We are just not ready for that sort of […]
BEING THERE: The Cult @ The Electric Factory
The Cult, Electric Factory, Friday April 8th by DAN LONG DAN LONG: Joining The Cult — it’s a father and son thing, you wouldn’t understand. Or maybe you would. I can’t remember the exact moment it started – probably on a car ride with The Cult blasting over the shitty Subaru speakers and Dylan, my nine year old son, digging them. The next few years would be spent becoming semi-superfans, as my son and I built a tight Cult-centric bond. During our second show together, on a Wednesday night at The Trocadero back in 2006, my son became a bit […]
FICTION: 25 Minutes To Go
“Johnny Cash – Folsom Prison Blues” by JON LANGFORD By Charlie Taylor Well they’re building a gallows outside my cell And I’ve got 25 minutes to go. 25 minutes left in my life. Shooting pain, then nothing. Every second is so precious, I spit out a tear in remembrance. In the end, your thoughts just travel, from childhood to this very instant, stopping in to see certain memories. Voices whip by your ears, followed by smiles, then yells, then quiet. I look up and there are the bars. The only hell is guarded, not by fire, but by cold metal, […]