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[Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA] FRESH AIR When filmmaker David Fincher asked Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and his songwriting partner Atticus Ross to compose the music for his U.S. film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Fincher had one request: for the music to sound ‘textural.’ So Reznor and Ross, who won an Oscar for their score of Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network, experimented with sounds created by stretched-out bell tones, piano beds filled with nails and clothespins, and mixes of distorted instruments played imperfectly. “We wanted to create the sound of coldness — emotionally and also […]

Independence Mall, 9:23 PM last night. By JONATHAN VALANIA

ANCIENT PROVERB: It is never wise to speak ill of the dead, unless he was an asshole.

Sportswriter Bill Conlin of the Philadelphia Daily News speaks after being honored with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for Journalists for his more than 45 years of baseball coverage at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, July 23, 2011. REUTERS/Mike Segar UPDATE: Three women and a man say they were molested as children by Bill Conlin, a Hall of Fame baseball writer and Philadelphia Daily News columnist. In vivid accounts, the four say Conlin groped and fondled them, and touched their genitals, in assaults in the 1970s, when they were from ages 7 to 12. “This […]

NEW YORK TIMES: You could be forgiven for not knowing about the artist Mart Meyer, who lives in Dallas and photographs what he sees almost moment by moment. Or for not having heard of the Chinese artist Ju Hu, who created a large-scale work examining the “malleable flow of time” as he camped out in an autumnal forest and tried to tape every fallen leaf back onto its tree. Almost certainly, you’re not acquainted with the art made by Rosalie Starr, who died in 1969 but whose sculptures were recently discovered in the attic of a Georgia boardinghouse, or the […]

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The preview sketches the film’s themes and conflict without ever spelling out the plot. SPOILER ALERT! The trailer begins with a boy launching into the national anthem at a football game. It’s a flourish that signals the beginning of a high-stakes game — and a drama about the current state of the union. As “The Star Spangled Banner” plays, we hear some dialogue about replacing Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) — he’s a “war hero” in a time of peace. And in perhaps the trailer’s most loaded moment (not counting the various beats of gunplay), we see Anne Hathaway’s […]

[Photography by GRAHAM TOLBERT] The War On Drugs really like Bob Dylan. They also like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and the Grateful Dead. If you’ve seen any of those acts live (personally, I’ve seen Dylan, Springsteen, and Dark Star Orchestra), then you know that can’t be a bad thing. Philly’s own W.O.D. played a 105-minute show Saturday night that lit up Union Transfer with the spirit of the aforementioned American rock originals, playing fifteen songs, mostly from their latest LP Slave Ambient and a few from the first Wagonwheel Blues. Like a jam band show, a constant, pleasant vibe resonated […]

SALON: This is how the average day proceeded: I’d arrive in the morning around 9-ish. The phone would soon start ringing—with calls for Hitchens. I’d tell the callers he was not yet available, and they would leave messages: “Tell him, that was a wonderful dinner last night.” Or, “Mick was so pleased to meet him.” Or, “We may all get together again this evening.” Within an hour or so, the nature of the messages would shift to cover plans for lunch that day: “Tell Christopher we’re all meeting at the Spanish place.” About this time, Hitchens would saunter in. He’d […]

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s mercurial and enigmatic leader, has died. He was 69. Kim’s death was announced Monday by state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media. The leader, reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine, was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease. The news came as North Korea prepared for a hereditary […]

So, I walked into a.k.a. Music, and grabbed a copy of the new two CD re-issue of Some Girls by The Rolling Stones. My first thought was of the time I bought the original release 33 years ago at Third Street Jazz, which was located just one block away from a.k.a. Secondly, I recalled that when the Stones went into the studio to make Some Girls, and how they ended up recording nearly 70 songs, the bulk of which formed the nucleus of the albums that would come after, namely Emotional Rescue in 1980 and Tattoo You in 1981. I […]

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