Illustration by VICTOR JUHASZ BY CHARLIE C. Yoo hoo. This is Charlie C., and I am currently live-blogging the Republican debate. The Grand Old Party. Alright, so tune in as I give my political thoughts and opinions on mostly Trump’s hair. 8:04- I’m waiting…. I didn’t sit on my couch to watch Reince Priebus ramble on and on about whatever the heck he rambles on about. What kind of name is Reince anyways? 8:08- I find it humorous to hear people say the name ‘Rand Paul.’ There is just something in the name that makes me laugh. 8:10- Did you […]
BOOKS: All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Illustrations by SHEPARD FAIREY BY MEGAN MATUZAK Patti Smith is a world renowned poet, painter and musician — the high priestess of punk, to be exact — but lately she’s been making her bones as a highly regarded memoirist. Her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, a coming-of-age chronicle of her time in New York City with artist Robert Mapplethorpe in the ‘60s and ‘70s, sold more than a half million copies and won a National Book Award. Her latest, M Train, is one part memoir, one part benediction and one part Homeric odyssey cataloging Smith’s “vagabondia,” a term of art for […]
TRAILER: Crying In A Sweater
Trailer from the imaginary indie weeper/Kimmel show bit Crying In A Sweater, starring the always awesome Kristen Wiig.
SMELL THE GLOVE: A Slightly Combative Q&A With Justin Hawkins Of The Darkness
BY TOM BECK The Darkness makes the kind of music I have always despised — cheesy ’80s-style poodle-haired glam metal, complete with ludicrously flamboyant clothing and obnoxious tongue-wagging guitar solos. But for some reason, when The Darkness played their brand of anachronistic rock and roll, I learned to dig it. I got a kick out of the irreverent absurdity of the lyrics and the painstaking attention to the aesthetic details of their performance and the undeniable fact that these dudes could shred. Also the novelty of front man Justin Hawkins’s singing voice, which sounded like a toddler huffing a helium balloon. […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
Artwork courtesy of THE RECONSTRUCTIONISTS FRESH AIR Gloria Steinem is 81 — a fact that the iconic women’s movement leader describes as “quite bizarre.” “Eighty-one is an age that I think is someone else’s age,” Steinem tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “I stop people on the street and tell them how old I am, because I’m trying to make myself believe it.” But Steinem isn’t unhappy about aging. The co-founder of Ms. magazine says that as she approached 60, she felt like she entered a new phase in life, free of the “demands of gender” that she faced from adolescence […]
WORTH REPEATING: Terry Gross, Psychonaut
NEW YORK TIMES: As a freshman at SUNY Buffalo, Gross wanted to write. But she was worried she wasn’t good enough to be great, and she struggled to find a subject. At the same time, she was shedding her ‘‘good girl’’ identity. She tried being a hippie — ‘‘I was too inhibited to be very convincing at it. And too Sheepshead Bay, probably’’ — and she tried drugs. One of the first times she dropped LSD, she determinedly brought along paper and pen: ‘‘I’m going to have a subject,’’ she recalls thinking. ‘‘All of my writerly inhibitions are going […]
CINEMA: Shareef Don’t Like It
ROCK THE KASBAH (2015, directed by Barry Levinson, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Barry Levinson has unleashed what must be in the running for the worst-reviewed film of his career, a wartime Afghanistan romp with the Clash-inspired title Rock the Kasbah, starring Bill Murray as a washed-up rock tour manager sent to Afghanistan. You can see what drew excitement for the project; a chance for Levinson to tap into themes from his previous hits Good Morning Vietnam and Wag the Dog, a chance for Murray to poke fun at the military like in Stripes and a […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Peaches @ The Troc
If Peaches never existed, she surely would have invented herself. In fact, that’s exactly how Merrill Beth Nisker, a 46-year-old former drama teacher from Ontario, transformed into Peaches, electroclash’s preeminent erotic provocateur/party animal. For the last 10 years, she has been transgressing the boundaries of good taste and common decency with album titles such as Impeach My Bush and trashy retrofitted ’80s dance music that advocates fornication as the palliative cure for the pain and boredom of modern existence. In the process, she has built a swelling cult of gender freaks, hipster geeks, and hypersexual misfits, all of whom […]
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: Q&A With Author, Essayist & New Yorker Staff Writer Adam Gopnik
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally posted on November 17th 2011, upon the publication of Adam Gopnik’s book The Table Comes First: Family, France & The Meaning Of Food. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Longtime New Yorker staff writer, author, essayist, children’s novelist and Philly homeboy Adam Gopnik will be delivering the keynote lecture of the Philadelphia Museum Of Art’s Object Lessons: New Thinking about Still Life symposium at 6:30 pm tonight — his talk is called Things that Mean Things: Objects and Inventory in American Art. Back in 2011, we got Gopnik on the horn and we discussed writing, food, crime and punishment, […]
HISTORY IS STRANGER THAN FICTION: The Curious Case Of The Nazi Spy Pastor From Philly
BY COLE NOWLIN They say truth is stranger than fiction, and if there is a more perfect validation of that statement than the story of Carl Krepper, I haven’t come across it yet. Krepper was a Lutheran Pastor turned Nazi spy who found himself embroiled in a plot of subterfuge and sabotage against America during World War II. In his meticulously crafted new book, The Nazi Spy Pastor: Carl Krepper and the War in America (Praeger), local historian and author J. Francis Watson [pictured, below right] details Krepper’s transformation from pastor to secret agent. Watson presents the reader with […]
COMMENTARY: Bushwhacking Benghazi
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY I just heard the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi state that in no way had the committee targeted Hillary Clinton intentionally or otherwise, “They’ve simply been determined to do their job and hold someone accountable for the senseless death of an American ambassador.” Folks, if you truly believe that, I’ve got a well traveled New York bridge that can be yours for mere pocket change. OF COURSE that’s their sole intent. And once they get Hillary’s noose properly sized they’re going to go directly into hearings concerning the blatant lies and flagrant […]
Q&A With Babes In Toyland’s Kat Bjelland
Illustration by LOUISE ZERGAENG POMEROY BY MEGAN MATUZAK The phone crackles, as Kat Bjelland, lead singer of 90’s all-girl grunge stalwarts Babes In Toyland, clears her throat and says “Hello” from her home in Minneapolis. She has a cold but is in good spirits, she says, because just before the interview, Bjelland got her hands on a 1947 National Tube Amp. “It’s tweed, at a good price and is teeny tiny,” Bjelland says in a baby voice and laughs. Unable to contain her excitement, she gushes over her rare new toy and can’t wait to break in. “I have never […]
Joyeux Anniversaire d’Arthur Rimbaud
NEW YORKER: On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by […]