BROOKLYN VEGAN: Redd Kross‘ upcoming album, Beyond the Door (August 28th, MERGE), closes with a cover of Sparks’ 1994 single, “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way,” which they transform from glittering synthpop disco into a triumphant rock anthem. It also comes with the creators’ approval. “Redd Kross has always been one of my favorite bands and that opinion was cemented when I heard their amazing version of our ‘When Do I Get To Sing ‘My Way,’” says Sparks’ Ron Mael. “To do a version of that song with a completely different musical approach from the original while keeping […]
RIP: Gar Joseph, Legendary Daily News Editor
THE INQUIRER: The first few times Gar Joseph applied for a reporting job at the Philadelphia Daily News, the editors turned him down. On paper, he was a solid candidate, a whip-smart 30-something assistant metro editor at the Wilmington News Journal. But there was some disagreement over whether he was too buttoned-up for the tabloid, which proudly wore its irreverent heart on its sleeve. What was clear to the paper’s editors was that Mr. Joseph didn’t give up easily, even if the odds weren’t in his favor. He kept on telling them he belonged at the Daily News, as simple […]
THE CROZ: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Photo by MICHAEL OCHS via TUMBLR BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of his headlining appearance at the 2019 Philadelphia Folk Festival next week, and upon the release of Cameron Crowe’s acclaimed documentary, David Crosby: Remember My Name (now playing @ Ritz 5), we got Mr. Crosby (The Byrds, Crosby Stills, Nash & Young) on the horn. DISCUSSED: Choice chapeaus, kool capes, walrus mustaches, marijuana, Cameron Crowe, Monterey Pop, Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, that badass hat he’s wearing in the “Eight Miles High” video, The Wrecking Crew, Terry Melcher, seeing John Coltrane blow mad horn in a men’s in Chicago while […]
TRAILER: New David Bowie Documentary
ROLLING STONE: The film, Finding Fame, directed by Francis Whately (who previously worked on David Bowie: Five Years), will premiere Friday at 9 p.m. ET and PT. It focuses on the period in Bowie’s life from the late Sixties through the emergence of his Ziggy Stardust character. In the middle of that period was the release of his breakthrough single, “Space Oddity,” in 1969. In addition to archival interviews with Bowie, the film also features commentary from the singer’s collaborators in the early days. Some of these people include members of Bowie’s early backing group, the Lower Third, his school […]
CINEMA: Dog’s Life
THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN (Dir. by Simon Curtis, 109 min., USA, 2019) BY JASMIN ALVAREZ Garth Stein’s philosophical, tear-jerk 2008 novel starts at its end. The senile narrator, a dog named Enzo (named after Ferrari founder, Enzo Ferrari), reexamines his own life as he lies in a puddle of his own urine and awaits the arrival of his owner and his own inevitable euthanization. He proceeds by playing back, in a series of heartfelt vignettes, both the most crucial and endearingly mundane moments of his life, which was spent with a family that considered him as […]
THE BYRDS: Eight Miles High
The Byrds were the coolest looking band of the ’60s. In this video, David Crosby is wearing the coolest hat anyone ever wore in the ’60s. This is also one of the coolest songs of the ’60s. This is non-negotiable.
REST IN POWER: Author Toni Morrison, ‘Towering Novelist Of The Black Experience’, Dead At 88
Illustration by Alexandra Compain-Tissier NEW YORK TIMES: In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Ms. Morrison animated that reality in a style resembling that of no other writer in English. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act. Her narratives mingle the voices of […]
CINEMA: The Beloved
THE PIECES I AM (Dir. Timothy Greenfield Sanders, 119 min., USA, 2019) BY JASMIN ALVAREZ Few authors have succeeded in capturing, with incomparable eloquence, the most poignant and heart-rending episodes of black history the way that acclaimed author Toni Morrison has in her haunting and deeply humane novels, for which she has been awarded both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. “If there’s life on Mars, they’re reading Toni Morrison to learn what it means to be human,” muses Columbia University professor Farah Griffin in The Pieces I Am, an intimate and deeply-affecting tribute documentary honoring Morrison’s life and literary […]
TELEVISION: Mind Games
Have you ever opened Facebook and swore that it was eavesdropping on your conversation? Either you see an ad for something you were just talking about or, even creepier, just thinking about? Well that is just one example of targeted advertisements, which illustrates just how accurate data mining has become today. Online retailers can now predict a consumer’s purchasing plans based on google searches and web traffic. It’s what Wiliam Gibson dubbed pattern recognition. One of the break out docs at Sundance this year The Great Hack just hit Netflix and in our interconnected world it could be one […]
CINEMA: Q&A W/ Director M. Night Shyamalan
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Philly loves an underdog. Rocky, Gritty, The Phillies, The Eagles et al. Add to the list our own M. Night Shyamalan. Like all good underdog stories, after a promising start he hit a bit of a rough patch (The Happening, Avatar the Last Airbender) but eventually reconnected with audiences by returning to his low budget genre roots with his stealth sequel to Unbreakable, Split. The Sixth Sense, the film that originally introduced us to the world of auteur M. Night, turns 20 years old this week, and in the course of the last two […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Democrat Disneyland
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Beam me up Bernie … and Elizabeth and Kamala and Kirsten and about a dozen other Democrat candidates! In what other-worldly universe, parallel or otherwise, does the following sound like a winning strategy? “Medicare For ALL, period, whether or not you like the private coverage you currently have OR might prefer to purchase instead;” “Open borders;” “Free healthcare and college educations for every American citizen AND everyone who enters this country legally or ILLEGALLY;” Did I mention COMPLETE sustenance as well? Oh, and yes, we’ll STILL maintain our military might! ALL of it fully paid […]
THE DEVIL’S BIZNESS: Q&A With Philadelphia Lawyer & Rock N’ Roll Evolutionist James A. Cosby
BY JONATHAN VALANIA By day he’s a mild-mannered Philadelphia lawyer, but by night James A. Cosby is a rock philosopher-cum-theoretician mapping out grand unifying theories about the origin mythos of rock n’ roll. Turns out it’s a lot more complicated than ‘the blues had a baby and they called it rock n’ roll’ and there is far more nuance in the grey zone between heaven and hell than is dreamt of in your Birth Of Rock Spotify playlist, Virginia. His 2016 book Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers And Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth To Rock N’ Roll ties together the […]
CINEMA: Born To Run
From trailblazing, Emmy-winning writer Lena Waithe (Netflix’s Master of None) and Melina Matsoukas, the visionary director of some of this generation’s most powerful pop-culture experiences, including Beyonce’s “Formation” and the Nike “Equality” campaign, comes Makeready’s unflinching new drama, Queen & Slim. While on a forgettable first date together in Ohio, a black man (Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya) and a black woman (Jodie Turner-Smith, in her first starring feature-film role), are pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. The situation escalates, with sudden and tragic results, when the man kills the police officer in self-defense. Terrified and in fear for […]