Photo by TYLER HICKS/NEW YORK TIMES FRESH AIR A few days after winning a Pulitzer Prize for his photos of a 2013 terrorist attack in a Nairobi mall, Tyler Hicks received an email. It was from one of the women he’d photographed that day — sheltering her two young children on the floor of a cafe. She had heard about the Pulitzer and seen her photo on The New York Times website. “It’s very rare to have access to people in chaotic scenes like this,” Hicks tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “You take someone’s picture, it’s this amazing scene and […]
NEIL YOUNG: Needle Of Death
ROLLING STONE: From A Letter Home – which features acoustic renditions of Bob Dylan’s “Girl From The North Country,” Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” and many other classics – was recorded at Third Man Records on a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth. “Imagine a very simple recording studio not much larger than a phone booth and you’ll get the idea,” reads a press release. “Recorded live to track to one-track, mono, the album has an inherent warm, primitive feel of a vintage Folkways recording.” MORE
CINEMA: It’s Tricky
TRICK BABY (1972, directed by Larry Yust, 89 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC This Thursday at 8:00pm Exhumed Films and the Cinedelphia Film Festival present one of the gems of the 1970s blaxploitation era, Larry Yust’s 1972 film Trick Baby. Shot extensively on the gritty streets of Philadelphia, Trick Baby doesn’t traffic in the exaggerated “super spade” clichés of the genre but instead functions as an exceptionally thoughtful street-level crime film following a pair of con men as their luck runs out. Based on Iceberg Slim’s second book, the follow-up to his black fiction classic “Pimp: The […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Seth Meyers already had his dream job — as the host of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, “I sort of had already accomplished the job I never thought I would accomplish,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. He joined the cast in 2001 and was there for 12 years. But in one of the recent rounds of musical chairs/desks in the late night talk show scene, Meyers landed Late Night. Lorne Michaels, executive producer of Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show and Late Night, encouraged Meyers to host the soon-to-be-vacated 12:30 a.m. spot and make it his […]
LONDON CALLING: Q&A With M.I.A.
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of her show at the Tower on Friday April, 25th in support of her latest album, Matangi, we got Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.) on the horn from her home in London — and given that she undoubtedly is on the NSA’s watch/listen list given her father’s well-publicized Tamil Tiger affiliation combined with the fact that any U.S. citizen who calls a foreigner on the NSA watch list is then also added to The List, well, that’s a pretty high price to pay for plugging a friggin’ rapper/EDM artist’s Tower Theater show. But we’ve […]
TONIGHT: Big Daddy Kane
One of the most fascinating figures in cinema history, Orson Welles is also one of the strangest. While his career as an auteur has been endlessly studied, the downright weird period of his work as a pitchman, narrator and celebrity-cameo-par-excellence has been sorely neglected. The Late Orson Welles focuses on his career from 1970 until his death in 1985, showcasing the wide range of animation, documentary, experimental and industrial films and videos to which he lent his indomitable, girthy talents. Legendarily accepting virtually any paying role as a means to fund his laundry list of pet projects, Welles landed […]
JOURNALISM ? CRIME: Free Simon Ostrovsky!
NPR: Pro-Russian gunmen in eastern Ukraine admitted on Wednesday that they are holding an American journalist who has not been since early Tuesday. Simon Ostrovsky, a journalist for Vice News, has been covering the crisis in Ukraine for weeks and was reporting about groups of masked gunmen seizing government buildings in one eastern Ukrainian city after another. Pro-Russia insurgents who have been occupying police stations and other public buildings in eastern Ukraine for more than a week are defying the accords that Russia and Ukraine signed last week, urging on all parties in Ukraine to lay down the arms […]
GET THE LED OUT: Zep Unveil ’69 Paris Concert Recordings As Part Of Forthcoming ‘Deluxe’ Editions
ROLLING STONE: Two years after Jimmy Page teased Led Zeppelin fans with promises of bonus material on the forthcoming deluxe editions of the band’s catalog, the band has just shared a first glimpse of what it has in store. A one-minute video includes snippets of “Good Times Bad Times” and “Communication Breakdown,” recorded at the Paris venue L’Olympia in October 1969, which will appear on the June 3rd reissue of Led Zeppelin. MORE BBC: Legendary rock group Led Zeppelin have unveiled two previously unheard recordings ahead of the reissue of the band’s first three albums in June.The two tracks – […]
NOW PLAYING: The Great New Old 97s Album
Early praise for ‘Most Messed Up’: “Airtight songs celebrating life-as-sublime-train-wreck” – Rolling Stone “Blistered, blasted, and brilliant” – New Yorker “Instant classic…. a killing machine from start to finish” – Salon “Awww, f*ck yeah!” – PHAWKER.COM
Main Line Schocked To Learn School Kids Buy Marijuana; In Colorado Marijuana Buys Schools
INQUIRER: Scott, 25, of Haverford, and Brooks, 18, of Villanova, were accused Monday of being the leaders of a drug trafficking ring that sought to corner the trade across some of the western suburbs’ most prominent public schools. Brooks even branded the effort, allegedly describing it as “the main line take over project.” Authorities said the pair enlisted student dealers and customers at their alma mater, the Haverford School, and at Lower Merion, Harriton, Conestoga, and Radnor High Schools – all considered among the state’s elite. The network also allegedly sold drugs at a few colleges. Six other men […]
THIS JUST IN: Bryan Ferry @ The Tower 10/4
Illustration by BOWIEMANIAC Tickets go on sale HERE Friday, April 2th at 10 AM. ALL MUSIC GUIDE: While his tenure as the frontman for the legendary Roxy Music remained his towering achievement, singer Bryan Ferry also carved out a successful solo career that continued in the lush, sophisticated manner perfected on the group’s final records. Born September 26, 1945, in Washington, England, Ferry, the son of a coal miner, began his musical career as a singer with the rock outfit the Banshees while studying art at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne under pop conceptualist Richard Hamilton. He later joined […]
BEING THERE: Mac DeMarco @ Underground Arts
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ The unfinished basement of a venue that is Underground Arts is the perfect venue to see psych-pop prankster Mac DeMarco, an unfinished basement of a man. Friday night, I found myself packed into a sold-out UA crowd of towering 6ft.-something fan boys and drunken kissy-faced couples. Both seem to be his core demographic. Not that I was really surprised given that DeMarco’s songs are almost entirely about life as a grizzly dude, or about loving his sweetie. Sometimes they are about both at the same time. Looking unkempt as ever with a mane of scraggly, […]