BY JONATHAN VALANIA Fuck Buttons is an electronic music duo from Bristol England that make mesmerizing, prismatic soundscapes out of children’s toys and low-rent thrift store electronics. Since 2008 they have released three critically acclaimed albums. They play Underground Arts on Saturday June 14th in support of last year’s Slow Focus. Recently we got Benjamin Power and Andrew Hungon the horn to find out what the hell they are on, how they get the sounds they get, and how you explain to your family around the table over Christmas dinner that you’ve decided to devote your life to something […]
NOVOCAINE FOR THE SOUL: Q&A w/ Eels
BY JONATHAN VALANIA It’s hard to believe there’s been 10 albums since 1996’s Beautiful Freak and the song “Novocaine For The Soul” — a three minute and eight second fever dream for the ears — that started it all. (Key line: “Life is white and I am black/Jesus and his lawyer are coming back”) And yet here we are. For the uninitiated, Eels is essentially Mark Everett’s one-man band of joy. Comfort and joy. And Beefheart-ian electro-shock pop. Think of it as mental dance music for the heavily medicated and Mark Everett is the white-suited John Travolta of the […]
THE BOTH: Q&A w/ Aimee Mann & Ted Leo
Photo by CHRISTIAN LANTRY BY JONATHAN VALANIA Aimee Mann and Ted Leo started out as friends a decade ago, and then more recently they became tour mates. One day on tour Mann walked into Leo’s hotel room and heard him playing “Honesty Is No Excuse.” They got to talking about sounds and songwriting, and they quickly worked up a cover version they began performing on tour. This led to them discussing the prospect of pursuing a long-distance collaborative effort (she lives in L.A., he lives in Brooklyn) when they got back home. “We were just like ‘Fuck it, let’s push […]
VIA CHICAGO: Q&A w/ Wilco Guitarist Nels Cline
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Wizardly Wilco axeman Nels Cline plays Johnny Brenda’s on Friday (May 2nd) with The Nels Cline Singers in support of the new Macroscope, as part of an Ars Nova joint. Widely regarded as one of the 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time, Cline has performed on more than 70 albums — with the Geraldine Fibbers, with Wilco, with the Nels Cline Singers and a host of collaborators, including Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Willie Nelson and drummer Alex Cline, his identical twin brother — over the course of an auspicious 34-year career. Last week we got him […]
LONDON CALLING: Q&A With M.I.A.
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of her show at the Tower on Friday April, 25th in support of her latest album, Matangi, we got Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.) on the horn from her home in London — and given that she undoubtedly is on the NSA’s watch/listen list given her father’s well-publicized Tamil Tiger affiliation combined with the fact that any U.S. citizen who calls a foreigner on the NSA watch list is then also added to The List, well, that’s a pretty high price to pay for plugging a friggin’ rapper/EDM artist’s Tower Theater show. But we’ve […]
Q&A: With Documentary Filmmaker Sam Green, Inventor Of The Love Song Of Buckminster Fuller
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Since 1997, filmmaker Sam Green has been making thought-provoking, rigorously reported and eminently entertaining documentaries about, in his words, “the outer contours of human experience.” Be it the rainbow-wigged, Bible-thumping kidnapper (currently serving three life sentences) of 1997’s The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 or the utopian dreamers turned bomb-throwing revolutionaries by the murderous insanity of the Vietnam War in The Weather Underground, or the miraculous Guinness Book human oddities living lives of quiet desperation in 2014’s The Measure Of All Things. The Love Song Of R. Buckminster Fuller, which gets its Philly premiere tonight during two sold […]
JOKERMAN: Q&A With Comedian Rob Delaney
BY JONATHAN VALANIA “I first got drunk at age twelve,” comedian Rob Delaney wrote in a piece for the November 2013 issue of Esquire. “Someone finally put me to bed when I was deemed too fucked up to hang out anymore. I’m aware now that it was an empirically terrible night, but the feeling alcohol gave me was so magical that it outweighed the night’s lousier aspects and I really looked forward to doing it again; I wanted that shit in me. As a lot of drunks report, introducing alcohol into my body just felt like ‘Ooh, there we […]
CRIME & PUNISHMENT: Talking Drones, Snowden, O.J. And How To Solve The Israeli-Palestinian Riddle With Super-Lawyer Alan Dershowitz
Illustration by ALEX FINE,/font> BY JONATHAN VALANIA Famed criminal defense lawyer, retired Harvard Law School professor and cable news gadfly Alan Dershowitz will be at the National Constitution Center tomorrow to debate the legality and ethics of drone strikes on American citizens. In advance of tomorrow’s debate, we got Mr. Dershowitz on the horn. DISCUSSED: When it’s OK for the President of the United States to order the assassination of an American citizen; his theory of a “Continuum Of Civilianality; why he is advocating for the court-supervised use of torture in so-called ticking time bomb situations; Zionism and how to […]
Q&A: John & Bonnie Raines, Burglars For The Citizen’s Commission To Investigate The FBI
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Back in 1971, John Raines, a religion professor at Temple, and his wife, Bonnie, [pictured, below right, with their children circa 1968] were part of an eight-member group of anti-Vietnam War protesters who dubbed themselves The Citizens’ Commission To Investigate The FBI and broke into the FBI office in Media, PA, and left with 1,000 documents that revealed, for the first time, the details of a massive domestic FBI spying operation known as COINTELPRO. Thus setting in motion a chain of events, not the least of them the death of J. Edgar Hoover, that lead to […]
Q&A: Dissecting Doolittle With Black Francis
“Saint Francis” by WALT LINDEVELD BY JONATHAN VALANIA A word of warning: This is gonna be one of those pieces where I go on and on about my little monkey shines with famous alt-rock personalities. Millions of people love it when I do that, but others seem to get very, very angry about it, stomp their feet and write mean letters that hurt my feelings. If that sounds like you, stop reading right now. I’m serious. I don’t want to even see you in the second paragraph. Set the Wayback Machine to 1988. I’m a college DJ stranded in the […]
Q&A w/ David Johansen, Gutter Punk, Glam Queen, Lounge Lizard, Protean Bluesman, Living Legend
Illustration by DANIEL ZEPPO David Johansen was cool before your grandparents even thought about making your parents — and 40-plus years later he shows no signs of becoming uncool any time soon. He prefigured glam and punk with the cross-dressing garage-squawk of The New York Dolls in the ’70s. He prefigured the age of kitsch and retro-chic with pompadoured lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the ’80s. And he prefigured the enduring fascination with the fossilized forms of music that prefigured rock n’ roll — what Greil Marcus famously dubbed “the old, weird America” — with the Harry Smiths at the […]
THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS: Q&A With Erik Prince, Founder & Former CEO Of Blackwater
Illustration by ALEX FINE BY JONATHAN VALANIA Blackwater founder Erik Prince will be speaking at the Free Library on Friday to promote his new book, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story Of Blackwater & The Unsung Heroes Of The War On Terror, his compelling counter-narrative about the rise and fall of Blackwater. Not surprisingly, in Prince’s telling Blackwater is essentially blameless for any and all murder and mayhem that has occurred on its watch. Yesterday we got Prince on the phone and asked who, in the final accounting, will have to answer for all that murder and mayhem. Turns out nobody […]
STRIP STRIP HOORAY: Q&A With Dita Von Teese
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Of all the reasons that Dita Von Teese is cool — and make no mistake, she is very effing cool — the fact that she takes her clothes off for a living isn’t even in the Top 10. First she’s smarter than the average bear — and not just ‘smart for a stripper.’ She was invited to speak at Oxford. Do you know who else was invited to speak at Oxford? Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Tony Blair, and Anna Wintour. Second, her craft. The period clothes, the period hair, the pre-porn striptease routines, the ornate stage pieces, […]