BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
Search Results for: "david foster wallace"
CINEMA: Apocalypto
2012 (2009, directed by Roland Emmerich, 158 minutes, U.S.) BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN (2009, directed by John Krasinski, 80 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Roland Emmerich has spent an estimated quarter of a billion dollars to wreck the world one more time in 2012, a film that has drawn audible sneers whenever it and its calamity-rich trailer rear their head. Emmerich has souped-up ideas from his past hits Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow to bring us his biggest and baddest apocalypse yet, only to drive home the fact that the end of the world somehow […]
Q&A: With Jesse Thorn, America’s Radio Sweetheart
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Jessie Thorn has been dubbed “America’s radio sweetheart” by, well, Jessie Thorn. It started as a joke, but each week it comes closer to self-fulfilling prophecy courtesy of the thoughtful and illuminating interviews Thorn conducts with underground rappers, indie-rockers, and edgy comedians as part of The Sound Of Young America, the nationally-syndicated public radio talk show Thorn tapes in the spare bedroom of his apartment in Los Angeles. Heard locally on WHYY Friday nights at 9PM, The Sound Of Young America has morphed in recent years from an unpaid hobby dating back to Thorn’s college years into […]
INFINITE SUMMER: Let’s All Make Love In Jest
[“Butterfly Suicide II” by DoNotAttempt] BY DAVE ALLEN News of “Infinite Summer,” the just-launched group-read of David Foster Wallace’s massive and masterful tome Infinite Jest in just over three months — or roughly 75 pages a week — spread at a near-viral pace, at least in the literary world. The initiative, sort of an invisible national book club, launched on June 21st with both an official site and Facebook group recruiting “endurance bibliophiles.” If that sounds like you, get a move on because according to the web site: Infinite Summer is 9% complete. I’m not participating, in part because I […]
NEWS CLUES: Like The Medical Marijuana Of Truth
TIMES A-CHANGIN’: Obama Halts Fed Medical Marijuana Raids Supporters of programs to provide legal marijuana to patients with painful medical conditions are celebrating Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement this week that the Drug Enforcement Administration would end its raids on state-approved marijuana dispensaries. Federal raids on medical marijuana distributors continued at least into the second week of Barack Obama’s presidency, when federal agents shut down at least two dispensaries in California on Feb. 3. Holder was asked about those raids Wednesday in Santa Ana, Calif., at a news conference that was called to announce the arrests of 755 people in […]
WORD: A Beautiful Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste
[Illustration by SARAHATLEE] A.O. SCOTT: What’s true of writers’ lives is also, surely, true of their deaths. The temptation to regard Mr. Wallace’s suicide last weekend as anything other than a private tragedy must be resisted. But the strength of the temptation should nonetheless be acknowledged. […] The moods that Mr. Wallace distilled so vividly on the page — the gradations of sadness and madness embedded in the obsessive, recursive, exhausting prose style that characterized both his journalism and his fiction — crystallized an unhappy collective consciousness. And it came through most vividly in his voice. Hyperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Acclaimed novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, 46, was found dead in his home Sept. 12; reports attribute his death to suicide. His 1996 novel Infinite Jest was a critical and popular success, while in recent years he has written short-stories and nonfiction. And he wrote a celebrated Rolling Stone profile of John McCain in 2000; it was revised and this year as McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope. Wallace was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1997. Fresh Air remembers him with an […]
BEING THERE: A Star-Studded Interview With I Am Trying To Break Your Heart Director Sam Jones
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In honor of you-know-who playing the Tower tonight (look for pix tomorrow, and an Inquirer review up Monday) and the Oscars on Sunday, I give you this Q&A with Sam Jones, the director of I Am Trying To Break Your Heart and photographer to the stars. Sam recently called out of the blue to tell me how excited he was about this band he was working with from Chambersburg, PA, called The Shackeltons. I told him I would check out these Shackeltons if he would sit for an interview, because that’s the way show biz works, Sammy. […]
MEDIA: The Atlantic Tears Down The Pay Wall
BY JEFF DEENEY A major piece of recent news (in nerd circles, at least) is that the Atlantic Monthly has gone the way of the Grey Lady and torn down the pay wall standing between non-subscribers and the magazine’s online content. Now the magazine’s archives dating all the way back to 1857 are yours to search, post about on your blog and link friends to favorite articles you might have read a long time ago but almost totally forgot about. It’s not Alycia Lane, I know, but different things make different people’s hearts go pitter patter. A cursory search for […]