Artwork via DRIFTGLASS DAVID BROOKS: For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships. […] But then we all sort of moved away from it.most of us developed higher pleasures. Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive. Most of us figured out early on that smoking weed doesn’t really make you funnier or more creative (academic studies more or less confirm this). We graduated to more […]
PIXIES: Blue Eyed Hexe
THE GUARDIAN: Pixies have unveiled Blue-Eyed Hexe, the lead song from a new recording entitled EP-2. The track, which is three minutes and 25 seconds of swaggering riffs and screeching vocals, is based on a tale from the northwestern part of the UK. “It’s a witch-woman kind of a song,” the band wrote in a statement. “That’s what a ‘hexe’ is, and ours is a blue-eyed hexe.” The four-track EP is the latest in a scheduled string of releases from the group, who told the New York Times in September 2013 that there would be a “series of mini-releases” over […]
THIS IS OUR MUSIC: Our Favorite Albums Of 2013
In the immortal words of the Chairman Of The Board, it was a very good year. So was last year, and the one before that and the one before that and so on. Why? Mostly, we can thank the disruptive, game-eating power of the Internet. The best thing that ever happened to music was the web-abetted collapse of the music industry’s one-size-fit-most paradigm and the death of radio as the prime determinant of what people like. Now people find music everywhere, it literally rains out of everything with an electric pulse, which has triggered a radical re-calibration of the […]
Twin Suicide Bombings Rock Russia Killing 30
THE TELEGRAPH: A female suicide bomber attacked a train station in a southern Russia city on Sunday, authorities said, killing at least 13 people in the deadliest such blast outside the volatile North Caucasus region in nearly three years. MORE WASHINGTON POST: A blast that tore through an electric bus in the southern Russian city of Volgograd during Monday’s morning rush hour, killing 14, was probably carried out by suicide bombers from the same organization behind a railway explosion a day earlier, officials said. Together more than 30 people were killed in the explosions, putting the city of one […]
Everything You Need To Know About Benghazi But Are Too Blinded By Racist Obama-Rage To Ask
NEW YORK TIMES: A boyish-looking American diplomat was meeting for the first time with the Islamist leaders of eastern Libya’s most formidable militias. It was Sept. 9, 2012. Gathered on folding chairs in a banquet hall by the Mediterranean, the Libyans warned of rising threats against Americans from extremists in Benghazi. One militia leader, with a long beard and mismatched military fatigues, mentioned time in exile in Afghanistan. An American guard discreetly touched his gun. “Since Benghazi isn’t safe, it is better for you to leave now,” Mohamed al-Gharabi, the leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade, later recalled telling […]
FLAMING LIPS: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
From rehearsals for their New Year’s Eve show in Aspen. Cover charge: $165.
WORTH REPEATING: Lewis Is The New Black
Illustration by DAN NOLAN Dear Jonathan, Call me old-fashioned but I believe that elections should be decided by how many votes you can win, not how many voters you can keep away from the polling booth. And yet, all across the country, new voter suppression laws are popping up seemingly every day. These laws are stupid and dangerous because they take aim at America’s most vulnerable voters – people of color, the poor, the elderly, students and the disabled. It’s just wrong. I’ve had enough and I’m fighting back with everything I’ve got. That’s why I’ve signed on to work […]
CINEMA: The Trouble With Llewyn Davis
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: There’s the subliminal hint given by Llewyn’s Welsh name, in addition to his blank-slate personality. Maybe the Coens really wanted to make an early-Dylan biopic but couldn’t—it would probably be impossible, at least right now, for a variety of reasons—and front-loaded the picture with Van Ronkiana to blur the traces. And perhaps it is this matter of cross purposes that leaves the movie feeling aimless. The story is no more than a rambling anecdote, Llewyn’s character undergoes no change for all that he experiences and endures, and to the extent that the picture has […]
Q&A w/ David Johansen, Gutter Punk, Glam Queen, Lounge Lizard, Protean Bluesman, Living Legend
Illustration by DANIEL ZEPPO David Johansen was cool before your grandparents even thought about making your parents — and 40-plus years later he shows no signs of becoming uncool any time soon. He prefigured glam and punk with the cross-dressing garage-squawk of The New York Dolls in the ’70s. He prefigured the age of kitsch and retro-chic with pompadoured lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the ’80s. And he prefigured the enduring fascination with the fossilized forms of music that prefigured rock n’ roll — what Greil Marcus famously dubbed “the old, weird America” — with the Harry Smiths at the […]
A Christmas Message From Edward Snowden
Go tell it on the mountain. LOS ANGELES TIMES: In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee, named for its chairman, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), made shocking and still-relevant findings. It found that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI spied on hundreds of thousands of Americans who dissented against government policy, on the pretext that they were part of a Kremlin-controlled plot. […] The Church Committee also investigated NSA surveillance and its relationship to its “customer” agencies and their activities. From 1967 until 1973, the committee said, the NSA targeted the international communications of some 1,200 Americans on a “watch list” of names, submitted […]
Merry Christmas To You And Yours From All Of Us
For our money, nothing sums up the legacy of Reaganism like this image. Like smoking, people once thought Reaganism was harmless, possibly even good for you. Thirty years later, look around. He was selling cancer. Think about it.