Deeply weird and Kubrick-ian. Directed by Grant Singer. Why are we not surprised that he’s got a screenshot from The Shining on his Twitter page. As for the song, it is easily the best thing the Magnetic Fields have ever done. RELATED: Last Tuesday, Ariel Pink, the Los Angeles musician known for pop songs that are catchy and inscrutable in equal measure, jumped into an S.U.V. outside his Williamsburg hotel and plugged in his iPhone as he headed to Staten Island for a gig. He directed his attention to Twitter, where he had become a sudden target of vitriol. An […]
BECKYONCE: Single Loser (Put A Beck On It)
This is pretty great.
RIP: Lesley Gore, Proto-Feminist Queen Of Teen ’63
NEW YORK TIMES: Lesley Gore, who was a teenager in the 1960s when she recorded hit songs about heartbreak and resilience that went on to become feminist touchstones, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 68. Lois Sasson, her partner of 33 years, said Ms. Gore died of lung cancer at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. With songs like “It’s My Party,” “Judy’s Turn to Cry” and the indelibly defiant 1964 single “You Don’t Own Me” — all recorded before she was 18 — Ms. Gore made herself the voice of teenage girls aggrieved by fickle boyfriends, moving quickly from tearful self-pity to […]
THE ATLANTIC: ISIS Is Not ‘Un-Islamic’
THE ATLANTIC: Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s […]
COMMENTARY: Bibi’s Got A Boehner
Illustration by DONKEY HOTEY BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Having accepted “Rabbi” John Boehner’s invitation, Benjamin Netanyahu (the Israeli “state’s” senior Representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, né Prime Minister of Israel) has decided to stand by his scheduled address to the huddled faithful on March 3rd. So, aside from the fact that said speech is opposed by many top-level Israelis both here and in Israel as well as by the President of the United States, what’s really wrong with his giving it? Allow me to count the ways: 1) John Boehner isn’t tasked with initiating or carrying out the foreign policy of the United States, the President is; 2) it […]
RIP: Goodnight Mr. Carr Wherever You Are
DAVID CARR: “I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon.” NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Carr collapsed in the Times newsroom, where he was found shortly before 9 p.m. He was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. MORE DAVID CARR ON BRIAN WILLIAMS: We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it,” he wrote on Monday in the wake […]
INCOMING: Let The Wild Rumpus Begin!
CNN: Philadelphia will host the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, a source with knowledge of the selection process tells CNN. The Democratic National Committee confirmed Philadelphia’s selection Thursday morning, shortly after the news broke, using a Facebook video of chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz pulling a cheesesteak out of a refrigerator to announce the decision. New York and Columbus, Ohio, were the two other cities vying for the right to host the Democratic convention. The event is scheduled for the week of July 25, 2016. Democrats’ decision to nominate the party’s presidential nominee in Philadelphia is a major win for […]
CINEMA: Island Of Lost Souls
LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY’S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (2014, directed by David Gregory, 97 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Shot like an expansive DVD extra, director David (Plague Town) Gregory’s unassuming documentary Lost Souls: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau overcomes its generic visual style by having a whopper of a tale to tell. Stanley was a South African-born director who made a pair of stylish low budget genre films (1990’s Hardware and 1992’s Dust Devil) that made him a favorite of the Fangoria crowd. Before procuring the novel’s rights, […]
EXCERPT: The Hunting Of Billie Holiday
The following is an excerpt from CHASING THE SCREAM: The First And Last Days Of The War On Drugs by Johann Hari, via POLITICO: From his first day in office in 1930, Harry Anslinger had a problem, and everybody knew it. He had just been appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—a tiny agency, buried in the gray bowels of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.—and it seemed to be on the brink of being abolished. This was the old Department of Prohibition, but prohibition had been abolished and his men needed a new role, fast. As he […]
STRANGE FRUIT: From 1877–1968 The Public Lynching Of Blacks Was American Spectator Sport
ABOVE: In Duluth, Minnesota, on June 15, 1920, three young African-American traveling circus workers were lynched after having been accused of having raped a white woman and jailed pending a grand jury hearing. This image was sold as a souvenir postcard. A physician’s subsequent examination of the woman found no evidence of rape or assault. The alleged “motive” and action by a mob were consistent with the “community policing” model. The book, The Lynchings in Duluth (2000) by Michael Fedo has documented the events.[36] NEW YORK TIMES: It is important to remember that the hangings, burnings and dismemberments of […]
ABOUT LAST NIGHT: Better Call Saul Premiere, Pt. 2
Artwork by YESCABRITA BY NOLE COWLIN What a lawyer. Not many attorneys could get their clients off with merely pulverized kneecaps — a slap on the wrist compared to the threatened Colombian Necktie. In part two of the two-part/two-night debut of Better Call Saul, we meet a deeply moral Saul, one who will haggle with a homicidal maniac drug dealer in a desert on his client’s behalf, a tireless public defender who runs on nothing but vending machine coffee. Gone was the scheming, small-time shyster we were introduced to in part one, and in his place is a guy trying […]
MAN MAN: When Oscar Wilde Met Walt Whitman
Artwork by DAVID RICE WIKIPEDIA: Oscar Wilde: Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882 and wrote to the homosexual-rights activist George Cecil Ives that there was “no doubt” about the great American poet’s sexual orientation—”I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips”, he boasted.[133 THE TOAST: Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in […]
LET IT BE: The Replacements Announce ‘Back By Unpopular Demand’ Tour, Play Festival Pier May 9th
PASTE: The Replacements had seemingly played their last show together on July 4, 1991 at Chicago’s Grant Park. It wasn’t until 2013 that the band would get back together to play Riot Fest and then Coachella, as well as other festivals the following year. Now the group has announced the “Back By Unpopular Demand” tour, their first full U.S. tour in more than two decades. The shows primarily take place in smaller venues as opposed to the festival settings that the punk rockers have played the past couple years. After the U.S. dates, there will be a few shows in […]