BY KYLE WEINSTEIN Well-known for his role as the wizardly guitarist of Wilco, Nels Cline has accrued an impressive discography and a heaping sum of musical projects and collaborations spanning the early ‘80s to present-day. Cline has collaborated with countless musicians, including Thurston Moore, Elliott Sharp, Zach Hill, Julius Hemphill, and many more, encompassing a diverse range of genres such as free-jazz, noise-rock, funk-rock, and so on. In 2016, Blue Note Records released Nels Cline’s Lovers, a romantic concept album of instrumental renditions of classic love songs. Last year, Ars Nova Workshop founder and Artistic Director Mark Christman commissioned […]
CINEMA: A Confederacy Of Dunces
EDITOR’S NOTE: Warren Lipka was a Phawker intern in 2015. BY DAVID EDELSTEIN FRESH AIR FILM CRITIC The heist movie American Animals opens with a cutesy title. This is not based on a true story. Then the words not based on disappear, leaving — this is a true story. I doubt any fiction writer could have dreamed up a heist so dumb, stealing the original of Audubon’s multivolume “Birds Of America” from the library of Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky. The movie is funny in spots, but it’s not a comedy. The British writer-director Bart Layton has set out to […]
BEING THERE: Primus @ Festival Pier
Photo by ALEX BUSCHIAZZO courtesy of 215Music It was late last year that Primus released The Desaturating Seven, a concept album based off of Ul de Rico’s The Rainbow Goblins, a children’s book about a group of goblins who consume the colors of the world, “desaturating” it of our precious ROY G BIV. Primus mastermind and bassist Les Claypool used to read the story to his children, and, as with Willy Wonka, was musically inspired by its content. Their current tour is focused on music from their new album, naturally, and features a rainbow-through-tree-silhouettes backdrop. The sky was looking iffy […]
CINEMA: The Terminator
Upgrade is a high concept, low budget techno thriller written and directed by Australian filmmaker Leigh Whannell, who is probably best known for his writing credits on the Saw and Insidious franchises. After making his directorial debut with the solid supernatural sequel Insidious: Chapter 3, Whannel is now tackling an original script that vibes like a William Gibson-penned ‘80s action film. The film stars Logan Marshall-Green, doing his best Tom Hardy impersonation as noted technophone Grey Trace who, during the course of a violent robbery that takes the life of his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo), is rendered a quadriplegic. […]
BEING THERE: Pond @ Union Transfer
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Truth be told, my first impression of POND was that they’re some sort of alternate-universe MGMT if something were to have gone cringefully wrong early in their career. To me, they were missing something – the hyper-catchy melodies and stellar chord phrases that I’ve come to expect from the latter. I just could not shake this toxic point of view. But last night, the Perth-based Tame Impala offshoot blew me away. What was going on inside Union Transfer that I hadn’t been hearing on POND’s records? For starters, front man Nick Allbrook was glittered up like […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: From intestinal distress to family dysfunction, writer David Sedaris has spent decades sharing some of the most intimate aspects of his life. Still, there are some topics that make him uncomfortable.”Nothing makes me more self-conscious writing in my diary than if I’m writing about something good,” he says. Cataloging achievements or compliments doesn’t sit well with him: “I just think, ‘God, if anyone were to find this diary, I would look so bad, congratulating myself here,’ ” he says. Instead, Sedaris prefers to write about “bad behavior” — both his own and others’. “Is it my fault […]
DEMOLITION MAN: Q&A W/ Mark Everett Of Eels
BY SOPHIE BURKHOLDER Twenty-two years after his breakout debut Beautiful Freak, Mark Oliver Everett (a.k.a. Eels, a.k.a. E) released his twelfth studio album, The Deconstruction. This new album comes after a four-year hiatus from the group, over the course of which E got married, divorced, and became a first-time father. Much like the other work from Eels, the songs of this new album have dark themes, but perhaps this time with a more therapeutic focus, as E used the hiatus to re-examine music as a coping mechanism for depression. Eels will be at Union Transfer on June 10 in […]
BEING THERE: This Is The Kit @ Johnny Brenda’s
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER From the floor of Johnny Brenda’s on Saturday night, Kate Stables watched every second of the opening set from Landlady’s Adam Schatz, before taking the stage with an ensemble that included Schatz on keys and brass. This is the current iteration of Stables’ project, This Is The Kit, which still sounds bright and new, even at fifteen years and four full-length albums deep. Standing confidently with her green Hofner hollow-body, Stables presents distinctive Bristol-based folk-rock with a unique paradox. Her music often evokes that of Joni Mitchell or Nick Drake, or very early 70s era-defining harmonies […]
CINEMA: When Han Went Solo
SOLO: A Star Wars Story (Directed by Ron Howard, 135 minutes, USA, 2018) BY JON SOLOMON & MAGGIE SOLOMON-SCHELLER It was 1978. Maybe 1979. I was sitting in my chair at Johnson Park Elementary School looking at my full name written on a piece of paper. Suddenly, I gasped quietly. ??Born Jonathan Solomon, and fully immersed in the orbit of Star Wars for at least a year by this point, I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t noticed it sooner.?? I put a finger on my left hand over all but the last three letters of my first name. ??I put […]
Every Star Wars Movie Ranked Worst To Best
IN LEIA WE TRUST: Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart BY JON SOLOMON JEDI CORRESPONDENT Always in motion is the future. So too, to a lesser extent, are my rankings of the Star Wars films. They seemingly fluctuate slightly based on mood, time elapsed since last viewing or what my daughter wants to watch when home sick from school. As of press time, having yet to see the soon-to-be-released Solo: A Star Wars Story (SEE ABOVE), I’d go with the following, adding two caveats: There is a steep, precarious drop in quality between the bottom three films and the top six films. […]
RIP: Tom Wolfe, The Godfather Of New Journalism
Tom Wolfe photographed by Irving Penn, 1966 NEW YORK TIMES: Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88. His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962. […]
BOOKS: This Is Your Book On Drugs
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Bantam, 1968, reprinted 1999) BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC You’re either on the bus, or off the bus, Ken Kesey chants. On the bus. Off the bus. With the Merry Pranksters. Or with the squares. On the bus. Off the bus. This phrase — a meaty reality bite all by itself, repeated like a mantra throughout the book — marks the metaphysical divide that is at the center of Tom Wolfe’s raw account of the psychedelic counterculture in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the legendary New Journalism chronicle of Ken Kesey (author of One Flew […]
THE MAN WHO PUT WORDS IN OBAMA’S MOUTH: Q&A With Jon Lovett, White House Speechwriter, Comedian, Screenwriter & Podcaster Extraordinaire
Former Obama administration speechwriter/screenwriter/comedian Jon Lovett brings his popular Lovett Or Leave It podcast to the Merriam Theater on Sunday for a live taping, with local guests Franchesca Ramsey and Dylan Marron on the panel and actor Ezra Miller’s band Sons of an Illustrious Father on hand to play the theme song. We got Lovett on the phone earlier this week to talk about happier times in Obama White House, coping with the darkness of Trump, rookie mistakes in Hollywood, how you explain to your parents that upon graduating college with a math degree you plan to become a […]