BY JONATHAN VALANIA Earlier this spring, Portlandian indie-folk antiquarian Laura Gibson released La Grande, a mesmerizing collection of otherworldly torch songs, ghostly Americana and haunted folk/blues. La Grande is Gibson’s third album and features cameos from Joey Burns of Calexico, members of The Dodos and fellow Portlandians The Decemberists, is currently topping our favorite albums of 2012 list. We are not alone — Mojo, Uncut and Q gave it rave four star reviews. Recently we got Laura on the horn to discuss love, death, math, folk music, cataclysmic genocidal tsunamis, the secret to being the state high jump champion and […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Daily Show Writer Kevin Bleyer, Fearless Re-Framer Of The U.S. Constitution
BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Constitution may be a remarkable schematic of human rights in a liberal democracy but it’s a terrible piece of comedy. Seriously, I didn’t laugh once. And what the world needs now, besides love-sweet-love, is funny. Kevin Bleyer has a pretty impressive resume in The Funny: humorous commentaries on NPR’s All Things considered; staff writer for Bill Maher and Dennis Miller; joke writer for President Obama’s White House Correspondence Dinner speeches; three Emmys and more than a 1000 broadcast hours of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart under his belt as a staff writer. One day he […]
Q&A w/ Jad Abumrad, Co-Host Of WNYC’s Radiolab
BY JONATHAN VALANIA If you are not already down with the broadcast brilliance that is WNYC’s Radiolab you are doing your life wrong. Every week co-hosts Jad Abumrad [pictured, below left] and Robert Krulwich [pictured, below right] create cinema between your ears. Each episode explores a big-picture topic — time, space, sleep, identity — and comes at it from four or five different angles, co-mingling seemingly disconnected sub-narratives into a lattice of cognition, uncannily mirroring the through lines of consciousness itself. It’s a show about understanding, that, when it works, and it pretty much always does, triggers understanding. Which is […]
MURDER IS MY BUSINESS: Q&A w/ Joe Kaczmarek
Photo by Jeff Fusco, all other photos by Joe Kaczmarek BY JONATHAN VALANIA As a kid, Joe Kaczmarek started scheming to get on the other side of the yellow police crime scene tape the way party people scheme to get on the other side of the velvet rope. He was born into it. His ‘nana’ listened to the police scanner like people listen to the radio. Soon he had his own police scanner and every night he went to sleep with the hiss, crackle and pop of police dispatchers calling all cars ringing in his ears. To Kaczmarek it was […]
DON’T KVETCH WITH TEXAS: A Q&A With Kinky Friedman, The Last Of The Jewish Cowboys
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Kinky Friedman has worn a lot of hats over the years, both literally and figuratively: Satirical cowboy songwriter (“They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Get Your Biscuits In The Kitchen And Your Buns In The Bedroom”) serial detective fiction novelist, friend to animals, purveyor of fine tequila/salsa/cigars, and failed gubernatorial candidate from the great state of Texas. In advance of his appearance at The Sellersville Theater on 6/14 and World Cafe Live on 6/15 we got Kinky on the horn to explain himself. Discussed: the crimes of Michael Vick; the sexual orientation of Rick […]
Q&A: M. Doughty, Former Soul Coughing Frontman, Ex-Junkie, Acclaimed Author & Recovering Genius
Photo by Deborah Lopez BY JONATHAN VALANIA “If heroin still made me feel like I did the first time, and kept making me that way forever — kept working — I might’ve quite happily accepted a desolate, marginal life and death,” writes Mike Doughty, aka M. Doughty, former frontman for the dearly departed Soul Coughing, in the introduction to The Book of Drugs, his wickedly funny recently-published memoir. Although he is loathe to admit it, Soul Coughing was easily the most fascinating, innovative and sonically-subversive American band to come along since Devo. Future generations of scientists may well conclude that […]
INTERVIEW: Q&A With The Mayor Of Portlandia
[Artwork by DAOGREER EARTH WORKS] BY JONATHAN VALANIA No, not Kyle MacLachlan on a Pilates ball working on his ‘core’ — the REAL mayor of Portland Sam Adams (who actually plays MacLachlan’s assistant on Portlandia). He followed us on Twitter, we followed him back. Told him we were gonna be out in Portland working on a cover story about The Shins for a for a national indie-rock magazine and could we get an interview? Sure, he says, he actually has all the Shins albums on his iPhone! How cool is that? At least as cool as our mayor doing “Rapper’s […]
THE DREAM POLICE: Q&A With Ray Lewis, Retired Philadelphia Police Captain & OWS Protester
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally ran back in December. We are re-running it today on the occasion of Captain Ray Lewis speaking today at a noontime OccupyPhilly rally at Independence Mall. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia Police captain with 24 years of service under his belt, created some of the most iconic imagery of the Occupy Wall Street protests by showing up at Zuccotti Park in his uniform with a sign that read: NYPD, WATCH ‘INSIDE JOB,’ JOIN US. Footage of his high profile arrest outside the New York Stock Exchange went viral, and he quickly became […]
Q&A: With Online Privacy Expert Lori Andrews
The take away from I Know Who You Are And Saw What You Did is this: As an Internet user your rights are exactly none. Actually, that’s not true, you do have the right not to use it. But assuming you have waived that right, know that you are being watched, probed and profiled, your footprints are being tracked from your front door to the furthest reaches of the digital ether and back. They know who you are and what you did. Somewhere there is a file being kept on you. They know a thousand things about you. Preferences, locations, […]
REWIND 2011: BEST OF Q&A: The Year In Questions And Answers
THE TESTIFIER [Illustrations by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of her recent reading at the Free Library to promote her new book Reimagining Equality: Stories Of Race, Gender And Finding A Home, we present a conversation with Anita Hill, professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University. Discussed: The fantasia of a Post-Racial America; the mendacity, narcissism and hypocrisy of Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain; the right wing’s racializing the blame for the 2008 financial crisis; how she passed the lie detector test Clarence Thomas refused to take; the emancipation of her grandfather from slavery; […]
THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE: Q&A w/ Wendell Potter, Healthcare Executive Turned Whistleblower
[Photo by ROBIN ODLAND] PART II BY JONATHAN VALANIA This is the second installment of a massive, 30,000 word, three-part Q&A with Philadelphian Wendell Potter*, former mild-mannered Cigna health insurance executive turned whistle-blowing superman standing up for truth, justice and the American way. (You can read Part I HERE.) You may have seen Mr. Potter testifying before Congress or talking about the ills of the health insurance industrial complex on CNN or MSNBC or PBS, or in the pages of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Time magazine, to name but a few. Last year he published […]
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED MAN: A Q&A With Cartoonist Dan Clowes
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the occasion of yet another swell New Yorker cover by Mr. Clowes, we are re-running our interview with him from last spring. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Daniel Clowes’ 30-plus-year career as a cartoonist/graphic novelist/screenwriter has seen some remarkable reversals of fortune. Back in the mid-80s, when Clowes was fresh out of Pratt and looking to take the graphic design/illustration world by storm, he couldn’t get art directors to return his phone calls. These days, post-Ghost World, the New Yorker and The New York Times plead with him to return their calls. When not busy cranking out […]
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: Q&A With Adam Gopnik
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Longtime New Yorker staff writer, author, essayist, children’s novelist and Philly homeboy Adam Gopnik will be at the Free Library tonight to promote his new book The Table Comes First: Family, France & The Meaning Of Food. Earlier this week, I got Gopnik on the horn and we discussed writing, food, crime and punishment, the necessity of factory farming, the slow dissolve of print into the digital ether, the uncertain future of the New Yorker, the secret world of children’s literature, the enduring power of Tolkien, seeing Hendrix and the Incredible String Band at the Electric Factory, […]