BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Taking into account, 1) the death toll is now nearing 200,000 and, 2) we have Trump on tape admitting he KNEW early on about the severity of the Coronavirus and, 3) he admits he KNEW it was an AIRBORNE virus and, 4) he didn’t so much as “request” or even “suggest” that Americans wear face masks or, god forbid, set an example by wearing one HIMSELF and, 5) he decided it would be more beneficial to his re-election prospects if he made wearing them a partisan, divisive, POLITICAL choice rather than a humane one, it’s […]
CINEMA: Let’s Do The Time Warp Again
TENET (Directed by Christopher Nolan, 150 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC After months of delays,Tenet, the latest epic from blockbuster auteur Christopher Nolan finally hits theaters this week.The film that many hoped would kickstart theaters after the pandemic has been up until this point shrouded in secrecy. I was given the chance to review it for Phawker, but only if I viewed it in a theater, of course. Nolan is all about the theatrical experience and like the rest of his catalog, this film benefits from being projected as loud and big as humanly possible. While I […]
CINEMA: The Dudes Still Abide
BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC (directed by Dean Parisot, 91 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Shrouded in rumor, and two decades of production delays, many fans feared Bill & Ted Face The Music was going to be a lot like the epic disaster that was Guns and Roses’ Chinese Democracy, when it finally hit screens. With word trickling out every once in a while, praising the concept or the script, touting it as a worthy successor to the series, which for the third film in a franchise is basically unheard of; the longer we waited the […]
EUREKA: New Covid-19 Study Is A Game Changer
ELEMENTAL: Earlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process — which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations — still took more than a week. When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a “eureka moment.” The computer had revealed a new theory […]
BOOKS: America Agonistes
NEW YORK TIMES: Once upon a time, there was a nation that saw itself as a beacon to the world. It would lead, as John Quincy Adams put it, by the gentle power of its example. If it all sounds a bit grandiose to us now, it did, too, to Graham Greene, the English author of the 1955 spy novel “The Quiet American.” Greene liked to complain that Yankees were “plump, smug, sentimental, ready for the easy tear and the hearty laugh and the fraternity yell.” He was particularly galled by American pretensions to purity in foreign affairs. “Innocence,” […]
CINEMA: The Stranger
TINY TIM: KING FOR A DAY (dir. by Johan von Sydow, 78 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Growing up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, situated just a stone’s throw from the Mason Dixon line, we didn’t get a lot of celebrities coming through our neck of the woods. In fact, in the ten plus years I lived there, the closest we got was an extra from 12 Monkeys — and Tiny Tim, who came through one year with the traveling circus. I was probably eight or nine at the time and I remember two things […]
FROM THE VAULTS: Bill Bruford’s Landmark New Yorker Profile Of Lucinda Williams Turns 20
NEW YORKER: The musician David Byrne once compared the intuitive writing of Bill Buford to the work of the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. Since 1995, Buford has contributed nearly fifty pieces to The New Yorker. He has written about a wide array of subjects, including his butchery apprenticeship in Tuscany, the connoisseurs who seek the perfect dark chocolate, and the art of breadmaking in Lyon, France. The New Yorker’s former fiction editor, he has also published three books, including “Among the Thugs” and “Heat.” One of my favorite pieces by Buford is “Delta Nights,” a ruminative Profile of the country-blues […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: CNN correspondent Brian Stelter says President Trump’s “cozy” relationship with Fox News is “like nothing we’ve seen in American history.” In his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Stelter describes the president as a “shadow producer” to Fox News host Sean Hannity — who, in turn, acts as a “shadow chief of staff” for Trump. “This is a relationship that is extraordinary, because Trump shapes Hannity’s show [and] Hannity advises the president on policy and personnel,” Stelter says. “And then at 9 o’clock sharp, the president is watching Hannity deliver […]
CINEMA: Beyond The Grassy Knoll
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC On the surface PizzaGate sounds like one of those grotesque conspiracy theories scraped from the bowels of 4Chan. In this alt-right fairytale propagated in the darkest reaches of Facebook and Twitter, Hilary Clinton and the democratic party were running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria. In 2017, this was the catalyst that drove Edgar Maddison Welch, to travel from North Carolina to Washington DC with three automatic weapons in an attempt to free the imaginary enslaved children, shooting up the pizzeria in the process. Director John Valley has […]
WIRE FROM THE BUNKER: Meet The New Dylans
BY JONATHAN HOULON FOLK MUSIC EDITOR Bruce Springsteen is certainly the most famous artist to have been saddled with the “New Dylan” tag at the beginning of his career and, indeed, in a stamp-sized photo on the back cover of his first LP, the Boss looks like he coulda been Bob’s greaser cousin from Joisey. His blue work shirt, in particular, calls to mind Bob’s working stiff appearance on the front cover of his own Times They Are A-Changing release from 1963, a good decade before Springsteen’s emergence on Greetings From Asbury Park in ’73. But, musically, Bruce never […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: That’s the sound of an immigration raid getting underway in the new six-part documentary series “Immigration Nation” now streaming on Netflix. Our guests today are the series’ co-directors and co-executive producers, Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz. They spent three years filming immigration enforcement actions and their effects after President Trump took office, and they had remarkable access to agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. As you’ll hear, the filmmakers’ relationship with ICE deteriorated sharply after the agency saw rough drafts of the planned episodes. The series follows ICE agents, their supervisors and spokesmen, activists, immigrants and […]
When Fascism Comes To America It Will Have A Combover And Carry A Bible He’s Never Read
THE ATLANTIC: President Donald Trump’s open admission yesterday that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage. Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the […]