BY AARON STELLA This weekend, six actors from Brat Productions performed looped interpretations of Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano for 24 hours without breaks. Curtains opened 8pm last Friday and closed 8pm the following Saturday in the Annenberg Center for Performing Arts and Sciences. Coffee was served through each roaring hour, but some patrons guzzled PBRs in the interim. It was apparent that the more rowdy pockets of audience had been camping out in the theater for most the day, if not the since the night before. I stayed for three performances; I could have stayed for more. […]
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NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR It was in 1967, on her first day in New York, that 20-year-old aspiring poet Patti Smith met fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Their friendship, romance and creative collaboration began on that day and lasted until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. Both children of religious upbringings and influenced by ideas of outsider culture, the pair would stay up painting and listening to records in their Brooklyn apartment before Mapplethorpe eventually moved to San Francisco. In the course of their friendship, Smith would become a punk icon and Mapplethorpe a famed photographer. Smith’s new memoir, Just Kids, tells the story of […]
Q&A: With Fleet Foxes Drummer J. Tillman
BY JAMIE DAVIS J. Tillman, or Josh as he prefers to be called, is most widely known as the drummer for popular indie-folk rockers the Fleet Foxes. However, since 2005, Tillman has been steadily releasing a steady stream of solo albums that traffic in the same kind of woodsy, peaceful easy feeling that has made the Foxes so beloved by the skinny jeans crowd. He has released six albums in four years, and is currently touring his most recent release, Year in the Kingdom — yet another gorgeously somber acoustic affair, with heartbreaking lyrics and immensely sad instrumentation and arrangements. […]
SEX IN THE CITY: Men I Have Dated
BY GLORIA MARIS Really, I’m not in the habit of bringing home men from bars. I’ll recount two of them here. Keep in mind that the tales may not be too accurate, since they originated in bars. And furthermore, who knows how true are the tales men spin to me in bars? How true are the tales I spin in bars to men about myself? One of my bar dates told me he was a world-class soccer player. He had been selected to play for the U.S. in the World Cup, but suffered some horrible back injury and could no […]
TELEVISION: Monty Python’s Circus To Fly Again
NEW YORK TIMES: The show has had a surprisingly durable afterlife in this country, giving rise to second and third generations of fans who watch it on DVD and on YouTube, where it’s so popular it now has its own dedicated channel. Mr. Cleese said recently that in England he is far better known these days as Basil Fawlty, the title character in his post-Python series “Fawlty Towers,” than for his role in “Flying Circus.” But even in American middle schools now, there’s often a smart aleck or two who can do Mr. Cleese’s Silly Walk and know the Dead […]
BOOKS: Glorious Bastard
ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH: The compact biography deftly recreates the scenes of Barney Ross’s life, of a striver “intoxicated by the clouds of cigar smoke hovering over the men in fedoras; the fists mummified in billiard cloth and tape; the mineral jelly smeared on gashed eyebrows; the tattoo of leather on leather….” Century moves from Ross’s early years in Chicago to his place in the history of Jewish prizefighting. More interesting to me, though, was the author’s ability to convey a life defined by strife, one that seemed to embody that of a generation. From the very beginning, “Life was a […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and […]
RAWK TAWK: Q&A With Rock Critic Jim Derogatis
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Jim Derogatis is the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, co-host of public radio’s rock talk show Sound Opinions, the definitive Lester Bangs biographer and author of five books, including the just-published and altogether beautiful The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side. Derogatis got his start in the rock crit biz back in 1982 when Lester Bangs agreed to sit for an interview to satisfy Derogatis’ high school journalism class assignment requiring him to interview one of his heroes. Two weeks later, Bangs was dead at the ripe old age […]
RIP: Pop Songstress Extraordinaire Ellie Greenwich
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Ellie Greenwich emerged as a songwriter when America itself was on the cusp of everything, a whole set of conventions unspooling under the power of rock ‘n’ roll, the civil rights movement and the incipient counterculture. Her American polyglot upbringing prepared Greenwich, who died today at age 68 of a heart attack, for what she became: one of the great sound alchemists who turned the ambiguities of youth into the essence of American pop. Able to sing, arrange and produce as well as pen indelible hits, Greenwich found her artistic home within New York’s Brill Building, where […]
DEAD MAN TALKING: Q&A With Tom Moon, Author Of 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA Full disclosure: Tom Moon got me into the business, hiring me on as a freelance music writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he served as pop music critic par excellence from 1988 to 2004. During that time he was also a regular contributor to GQ, Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, Esquire and he is currently a music critic for NPR’s All Things Considered. Three and a half years ago he began work on a frighteningly ambitious record buyer’s guide called 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die, published by Workman Publishing in late 2008. […]
The First Time I Got High…
BY AARON STELLA My sheltered, cloistered-in-Christianity upbringing left many teenage temptations unbeknownst to me, particularly the culture of ganja. Had I not seen an episode Ghost Writer, I doubt I would have ever been able to recognize a joint. That is, until I smoked one. Needless to say, my lack of worldly exposure left me with no narcotic outlets (although in retrospect, those cathartic pubescent jerk-off sessions were so intense at times that they easily rivaled the sedation concomitant with the mightiest of bong rips. So life without marijuana was still peaceful—even with a chafed dick). Fast forward to the […]
PAPERBOY: Slow Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
EARLY WORD: Book ‘Em, Danno
The Free Library Festival—a burst of books, music, and inspiration on the Parkway—will take place Saturday and Sunday, April 18 and 19, 2009. Join us at the Parkway Central Library for two days full of stimulating talks by award-winning writers, live music, children’s entertainment, and a bustling literary marketplace thronged with booklovers and booksellers. A fun, free way to spend the day, the Free Library Festival connects booklovers from throughout the mid-Atlantic region with the culture makers of the literary world. MORE And look for an exclusive Phawker Q&A with the mighty Joe Queenan later this week! Joe Queenan | […]