SMILE EVEN THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING: A Very Brief Q&A With Brian Wilson

[illustration by NOWHERE MAN11] The long awaited release of the session tapes of Brian Wilson and Beach Boys never-completed masterpiece, SMiLE, is finally here. With the full participation of original Beach Boys Al Jardine, Mike Love, and Brian Wilson, Capitol/EMI has, for the first time, collected and compiled the band’s legendary 1966-’67 sessions for the SMiLE Seesions 5-CD box set. In several sessions between the summer of 1966 and early 1967, The Beach Boys recorded a bounty of songs and drafts for an album with the working title Dumb Angel that was intended as a follow-up to the band’s 1966 […]

EARLY WORD: The (Young And) Dumb Diaries

The just-published Post-It Note Diaries: 20 Stories Of Youthful, Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps and Everyday Adventure is the book version of a wildly popular Brooklyn-based spoken word series hosted by comic duo Arthur Jones and Starlee Kine, of This American Life and the Hulu series Starlee and Arthur Review fame. Some of the most auspicious, young-ish storytellers of the modern age were invited to share the glorious misadventures that are invariably the stock and trade of the young and/or misbegotten. John Hodgman tells us how he got his patented cobra-headed cane; Chuck Klosterman tells us about the first time he got […]

TONITE: Sex In The (Old) City

For 10 years, Liz Spikol wrote The Trouble With Spikol — a plucky, often-humorous, first-person newspaper column/blog documenting the trials and tribulations of coping with mental illness — for the Philadelphia Weekly. Her writing has garnered numerous awards from the Society for Professional Journalists and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, as well as the Mental Health America and the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society. She received an Access Achievement Award from the Mayor’s Commission on People With Disabilities for her efforts to de-stigmatize mental illness. She has been featured on National Public Radio and the Discovery Channel, and in the New York Times. […]

SERIOUSLY: ‘This Is What A Police State Looks Like’

RELATED: It must take a mighty, mighty big man to get all armored up, while surrounded by reinforcements, and spray a U.S. citizen with mace for exercising their inalienable rights. Never mind whether said citizen is female or not. The police state isn’t coming, it’s already here. This is what a police state looks like. MORE RELATED: This Is Also What A Police State Looks Like RELATED: So Is This RELATED: Excellent Pictures Of 11/17 Protests RELATED: The right-wing Daily Caller website has been anything but kind to Occupy Wall Street, even going so far as to condemn the protest […]

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET: Ex-Philly Police Captain Getting Arrested Outside NY Stock Exchange

Retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis was arrested in New York City during the Occupy Wall Street protest on Thursday. According to the New York Observer, Lewis joined the Occupy movement on Tuesday. Philadelphia Police Department has confirmed Lewis’ arrest, Fox 29 News reported. FOX 29: First news of the arrest was broadcast over Twitter around 9:15 a.m. by the protest group on its @OccupyWallStNYC account, stating, “Philly Police Captain (Retired) has just been ARRESTED! #N17 #ows.” The group then tweeted, “The arrested retired police captain’s name is Captain Ray Lewis. Immense cheers and music as he is taken away. […]

JAZZER: Q&A With Marc Ribot, Guitar Alchemist

BY ZIVIT SHLANK JAZZ CORRESPONDENT Wizardly guitarist/composer Marc Ribot defies classification. By his own admission, he’s spent his entire career trying to fit into one box or another but always failed miserably. He’s played with the likes of Chuck Berry, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Medeski Martin & Wood, The Black Keys and Philadelphia’s own McCoy Tyner,  among countless others. Ribot’s own recorded works have explored the nether regions of Afro-Cuban jazz, noir blues, abstract rock, sweet soul, prickly post-punk, and exotic world styles — to which he brings his incandescent improvisatory six-string magic. You may have heard his otherworldly guitar […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t

FRESH AIR Though he’s directed only five feature films, Alexander Payne has built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers. His movies find comedy in the crises of his flawed protagonists — among them Matthew Broderick as a high school teacher in Election, Jack Nicholson as a widower in About Schmidt and Paul Giamatti as a struggling author and wine snob in Sideways, for which Payne shared an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Payne’s latest film is The Descendants, which is set in Hawaii and stars George Clooney. He plays a Honolulu lawyer named Matt who stands to […]

BBC: Amy Winehouse Was Planning Jazz Super Group With ?uestlove Of The Roots

BBC: Singer Amy Winehouse had been planning to record material with a “supergroup” before she died, music producer Salaam Remi has revealed. Remi said the singer had planned a jazz album with Questlove, of The Roots, and saxophone player Soweto Kinch. “There were a bunch of other names bouncing around,” he said, at a press playback for her posthumous album. Remi has worked on all three Winehouse albums, including Lioness: Hidden Treasures, which is out next month. The producer said he knew of Winehouse’s “super group” plans because “she had written down everything she wanted to do”. Questlove features several […]

WORTH REPEATING: Let It Bleed

CHARLIE PIERCE: There will now be a decade or more of criminal trials, and perhaps a quarter-century or more of civil actions, as a result of what went on at Penn State. These things cannot be prayed away. Let us hear nothing about “closure” or about “moving on.” And God help us, let us not hear a single mumbling word about how football can help the university “heal.” (Lord, let the Alamo Bowl be an instrument of your peace.) This wound should be left open and gaping and raw until the very last of the children that Jerry Sandusky is […]

A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: Q&A With Adam Gopnik

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Longtime New Yorker staff writer, author, essayist, children’s novelist and Philly homeboy Adam Gopnik will be at the Free Library tonight to promote his new book The Table Comes First: Family, France & The Meaning Of Food. Earlier this week, I got Gopnik on the horn and we discussed writing, food, crime and punishment, the necessity of factory farming, the slow dissolve of print into the digital ether, the uncertain future of the New Yorker, the secret world of children’s literature, the enduring power of Tolkien, seeing Hendrix and the Incredible String Band at the Electric Factory, […]

TONITE: The Human Fly

THE WEIRD WORLD OF BLOWFLY (2010, directed by Jonathan Furmansky, 89 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC First time director Jonathan Furmanski deserves kudos for shining a dirty light on the weird world of the lascivious 1970s proto-rapper Blowfly in a new documentary so deep it peripherally captures something important about the weird world in which we all live. Nobody could be Blowfly all the time. The costumed sex fiend’s secret identity is Clarence Reid, a cornerstone player of the dance music hit machine that came out of Miami in the early 1970s. Reid wrote tunes and acted as […]