BY WARREN LIPKA Green party Presidential candidate Jill Stein marched with protest groups outside of the Democratic National Convention last night. The 66-year-old physician’s pace was impressive considering it was 100 degrees and she was in a full suit. While some elements of the protesters chanted at cops and burned flags (both Israeli and American), Ms. Stein conducted interviews and shook hands. She was almost omnipresent as she bounced in between Black Lives Matter, Code Pink, and reporters, trying to tell anyone who would listen, why both political parties are “obsolete.” PHAWKER: Jill what are you doing here? DR. JILL […]
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Bizarre Internet-Breaking New Kanye West Video Recreates Infamous Painting By Acclaimed American Realist & PAFA Instructor Vincent Desiderio
VANITY FAIR: I’m watching a video of 12 of the most famous people on the planet naked in bed together. The material is being guarded so closely that the people in possession of it have refused to send me a link in case it gets hacked. Instead I’m looking at it via Skype, with the person on the other end of the line pointing the camera at a laptop screen on which the footage is playing. You can understand the desire for secrecy. As the camera’s ghostly night-vision lens pans slowly, hypnotically over the mostly sleeping bodies, their identities are […]
Q&A With Guitarist Marc Ribot, American Master
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE DAILY NEWS In the course of Marc Ribot’s critically acclaimed four-decade career, the chameleonic guitarist has mapped a steady path from edgy lower Gotham upstart to Zen-like American master. Long a fixture of New York’s downtown improv scene, Ribot is probably best known as Tom Waits’ longtime side-man, having played on seven Waits albums and corresponding tours since 1985’s Rain Dogs. He has lent his six-string sorcery to recordings by Elvis Costello, Robert Plant, the Black Keys, John Zorn, Philadelphia-born soul legend Solomon Burke, and the late, great beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The 22 […]
Q&A With Nick Spitzer, Professor Of American Boogie & Host Of NPR’s American Routes
Illustration by ALEX FINE EDITOR’S NOTE: Like many of you, we were deeply disappointed to learn that WHYY-FM has elected to drop American Routes from their weekend programming, where it has been a fixture for more than a decade. (Boo-stink!) But fear not local lovers of Americana, WXPN has stepped in and offered American Routes a home on its airwaves. American Routes will air on Sundays from 3-5 pm starting Sunday June 19th. (Hooray!) To celebrate, we are re-running our in-depth 2009 interview with American Routes host Nick Spitzer. Enjoy!) BY JONATHAN VALANIA Nick Spitzer is a folkorist, ethnographer, professor […]
CINEMA: Make Captain America Great Again
BY JAMES M. DAVIS “Enhanced Individuals,” we hear in a newscast at the beginning of Captain America: Civil War, need to be brought into check. At first glance this phrase does what is intended, it deprives superheroes of being both “super” and “heroes.” This is a world where masked super-people have (accidentally) killed innocent people in operations unapproved by any governmental body. Through this phrase we are brought into a world where the Avengers are being asked to sign an accord with the UN which would essentially turn them into a peacekeeping force at the beck and call of […]
‘America Has Never Been So Ripe For Tyranny’
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: When a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment. He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He […]
RIP: Merle Haggard, American Badass, Dead @ 79
NEW YORK TIMES: Few country artists have been as popular and widely admired as Mr. Haggard. Thirty-eight of his singles, including “Workin’ Man Blues” and the 1973 recession-era lament “If We Make It Through December,” reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart from 1966 to 1987. He released 71 Top 10 country hits in all, 34 in a row from 1967 to 1977. Seven of his singles crossed over to the pop charts. Mr. Haggard had an immense influence on other performers — not just other country singers but also ’60s rock bands like the Byrds and the […]
WORTH REPEATING: An American Horror Story
THE NEW YORKER: It was all so funny once. For a long time, Trump, with his twenty-four-karat skyscrapers, his interesting hair, and his extra-classy airline, was a leading feature of the New York egoscape. The editors of the satirical monthly Spy covered him with the same obsessive attention that Field & Stream pays to the rainbow trout. Trump never failed to provide; he was everywhere, commandeering a corner at a professional wrestling match, buying the Miss Universe franchise and vowing smaller bathing suits and higher heels. You could watch him humiliate supplicants on “The Apprentice” and hear him on […]
CRITICAL CONDITION: An In-Depth Q&A With New York Times Senior Film Critic A.O. Scott
Artwork via collageOrama BY JONATHAN VALANIA A.O. “Tony” Scott has been the New York Times resident film critic for going on 16 years. He has a razor-sharp intellect, unimpeachable taste, the chops to formulate persuasive, deep-end-of-the-pool aesthetic arguments and advance them in elegant and indelible prose — no matter what Samuel L. Jackson says. His new book, Better Living Through Criticism, mounts a robust defense of the necessity of professional arbiters in the age of Yelp and Metacritic. In advance of his reading/signing at the Free Library tonight, we got Mr. Scott on the horn in Seattle during a rare […]
TONITE: Goodnight And Good Luck, America
Illustration by CHARLES WALTMIRE “The show gained its power not just from Jon and not just from the writers of the show, but also the time frame in which it occurred. He would turn out every day and do something that would provide people a certain amount of insulation from the madness we’re bombarded with from the moment we wake up. Whether someone is bombing this place or someone is shooting someone, or some senator said something so profoundly beyond human comprehension that one would consider it fictional if one didn’t know this was a real person. But laughter? Laughter […]
70 Years Ago This Week The United States Of America Became The Only Nation On Earth To Unleash Nuclear Bombs On Civilian Populations
ASSOCIATED PRESS: An atomic bomb, hailed as the most terrible destructive force in history and as the greatest achievement of organized science, has been loosed upon Japan. President (Harry) Truman disclosed in a White House statement at 11 a.m. Eastern War Time, today that the first use of the bomb — containing more power than 20,000 tons of TNT and producing more than 2,000 times the blast of the most powerful bomb ever dropped before — was made 16 hours earlier on Hiroshima, a Japanese army base. (Tokyo Radio announced that Hiroshima was raided at 8:20 a.m. Monday (7:20 […]
WORTH REPEATING: An American Horror Story
HIGHLINE: Jamie, whose mother was addicted to crack cocaine, was adopted when she was 3. At high school, she fell in with a wayward crowd and started drinking and smoking weed. Since she didn’t always get along with her adoptive mom, she lived with a close family friend from her church whom she referred to as her sister. One fall day in 2011, they got into a bad fight over their living arrangements. The friend told police that Jamie threw a brick at her, hitting her in the chest, and then banged the brick so hard on the front […]
HEEMS: Sometimes
NOISEY: There’s a lot of cutting social commentary on race and societal perceptions of skin color in Heems’ new video for “Sometimes.” And it’s all important and significant to the conversation. …But at the same time, nearly a fourth of the video is devoted to a staredown between Hannibal Buress and a whitefaced Eric Andre that we cannot stop laughing at. Buress has those dead comedy eyes that allow him to do absolutely nothing and still be the funniest man on Earth. Maybe not to Bill Cosby, but to everyone else. And Andre… well, Andre is in whiteface. So go […]