I could have listened to Jon Oliver dig into Donald Trump for the “blood coming of her wherever” crack over and over, much like a six year old’s insatiable desire to ride “It’s Small World” in Disneyland over and over and over again. But we all have to grow up sometime. So, too, the Republican party. (But I’m not holding my breath. Let’s face it, in 2015 the only people who still hurl on-the-rag insults at women are 13 year old boys and Donald Trump, who currently leads the field of Republican candidates for the presidency of the United States. […]
THE BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE
BY COLE NOWLIN John Kennedy Toole’s picaresque classic, A Confederacy of Dunces, is an absurdist-comic masterstroke of a novel. It is the story of Ignatius Reilly, an educated, layabout medieval scholar, living in New Orleans with his mother. Ignatius is an obese, petulant, eloquent man-elephant who belches Boethius and hot dog gas while promenading around New Orleans’ French Quarter. A Confederacy of Dunces meanders through Ignatius’s stumblings around the Big Easy allowing ample room for comic digression and development of other characters. Toole does a masterful job of capturing the slang and patois of the denizens of the French […]
CINEMA: Craptastic 4
FANTASTIC FOUR (2015, directed by Josh Trank, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Thirty years ago, the now long-gone Orion Pictures released Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Right in the title, we were informed that this mediocre action film was born to be a franchise, based on a popular series of pulp paperbacks about a mercenary called “The Destroyer.” Well, the adventure began and ended there because the movie just wasn’t that good and audiences never showed up. Today, the fact that 20th Century Fox is expecting a franchise out of their third go-around for the Marvel super […]
EARL SWEATSHIRT: Off Top
Day-am!This is easily the greatest thing to come out of the (admit it, vastly overrated when you compare hype to memorable output) OFWGKTA orbit — fuck Tyler, indeed, and tha police, too, while yer at it — not called Frank Ocean. Earl Sweatshirt plays the TLA September 5th. He is no longer fucking around. Finally.
Donald Trump Is The Best Thing To Happen To The Democratic Party Since Pat Buchanan’s Culture War Speech At The 1992 Republican Convention
POLITICO: Democrats have reveled at the unsettling effect Trump has had on the GOP field, and sought to equate his views with those of the Republican Party. So it was perhaps not surprising that more than a third of the Democrats who are POLITICO Caucus participants named him as the winner of the debate, noting that he was the center of attention in every respect— given his rank in the polls, he even stood at the center podium. “This was supposed to be the debate where the Trump was pushed out, instead he got more air time, more often […]
TONITE: Goodnight And Good Luck, America
Illustration by CHARLES WALTMIRE “The show gained its power not just from Jon and not just from the writers of the show, but also the time frame in which it occurred. He would turn out every day and do something that would provide people a certain amount of insulation from the madness we’re bombarded with from the moment we wake up. Whether someone is bombing this place or someone is shooting someone, or some senator said something so profoundly beyond human comprehension that one would consider it fictional if one didn’t know this was a real person. But laughter? Laughter […]
Win Tix To See The Devil’s Backbone Midnight Sat.
In the run up to the August 21st theatrical release of SINISTER 2, the much-anticipated sequel to 2012’s SINISTER, the people that hype these things are holding special “SINISTER SATURDAYS” midnight screenings at the PFS Roxy Theater of the films that inspired SINISTER 2. This weekend’s midnight offering is a special screening of 2001’s THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE directed by the impish master of creepy Guillermo del Toro, and Saturday, 8/15’s feature presentation will be the original SINISTER. Each screening will feature exclusive content from the makers of SINISTER 2. Sounds like a perfect date movie for people who think […]
COMMENTARY: The GOP’s Theater Of Cruelty
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY One could write a library on the subject of Republican dastardliness — the stock-in-trade of a bunch of tiny-minded, antebellum, bible-babbling, Stone Agers who represent the intolerance, selfishness and sanctimony of an American lineage that has refused to “integrate” itself into a civilized union ever since the stars and bars were raised over Montgomery — but I’ll spare you much of the agony. My plan is to merely “uncomfort” you a bit by highlighting a few of the more acridly odious activities radiating from the Right-Wing latrine. First and certainly foremost (in as much as it […]
ARTSY: The Greatest ‘Pope Francis In Philly’ Commemorative Memorabilia Story Ever Told
Artwork by FRED LAMMERS EDITOR’S NOTE: Todd Kimmel’s legend looms large in the annals of proto-bohemian Philadelphia. He was cool before it was even possible. TODD KIMMEL: We’ve created a series of large format prints featuring Pope Francis in general, and his visit to Philly in particular. I dreamed up this project, and now these prints are selling like crazy to Catholic and utterly non Catholic people alike. I like the guy, and what he represents to all the entrenched, doomed naysayers who are now being dragged into the light as just that. Francis throws down this love bomb thing, […]
TAMMY WYNETTE: Stand By Your Man
NEW YORK TIMES: Country record producer and songwriter Billy Sherrill, who helped create the smooth “countrypolitan” sound of the 1960s and 1970s, has died. He was 78. Sherrill’s son-in-law, George Lale, said he died Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee. Sherrill’s production style incorporated over-dubbing, strings and background vocals into country music to encourage crossover success for artists like Tammy Wynette, George Jones and Charlie Rich. He produced hits such as “Stand By Your Man,” which he co-wrote with Wynette, “The Most Beautiful Girl,” ”Behind Closed Doors,” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Born in Phil Campbell, Alabama, the son of an […]
TONIGHT: Walk Don’t Run
_________________ LORD OF THE STRINGS: Q&A With Dick Dale BY JONATHAN VALANIA Surf music? Dick Dale invented the stuff. Pure mainlined adrenaline, it is. Like a pocketful of white lightning. Nitroglycerin on hot wax. Surely you’ve seen the opening moments of Pulp Fiction. Easily the most thrilling marriage of profanity, felony and surf music in the history of American cinema. Rock guitar? He re-invented it. He is more or less the bridge between Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. He worked closely with Leo Fender — godfather creator of the essential machinery of rock, […]
SOUND OPINIONS: Come Hear Uncle John’s Band
SOUND OPINIONS: The Grateful Dead celebrated its 50th anniversary in July with a series of farewell shows at Soldier Field in Chicago. We’re using that as an opportunity to reexamine the legacy of the controversial band. The Dead formed in the Bay Area in the 1960s and featured a core membership of guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, keyboardist Ron“Pigpen”McKernan, bassist Phil Lesh, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, with important contributions from lyricist Robert Hunter. Though it was the prototypical “jam band,” The Dead’s sound was much more eclectic and harder to pin down than that sometimes derisive term […]
70 Years Ago This Week The United States Of America Became The Only Nation On Earth To Unleash Nuclear Bombs On Civilian Populations
ASSOCIATED PRESS: An atomic bomb, hailed as the most terrible destructive force in history and as the greatest achievement of organized science, has been loosed upon Japan. President (Harry) Truman disclosed in a White House statement at 11 a.m. Eastern War Time, today that the first use of the bomb — containing more power than 20,000 tons of TNT and producing more than 2,000 times the blast of the most powerful bomb ever dropped before — was made 16 hours earlier on Hiroshima, a Japanese army base. (Tokyo Radio announced that Hiroshima was raided at 8:20 a.m. Monday (7:20 […]