PENNSYLVANIA BURIAL COMPANY: Upon realizing that his medications would never involve tequila, Kurt William Wunder acquiesced and peacefully surrendered his battle with glioblastoma and leptomeningeal disease on August 10th, 2019. He was the loving son of Dolores and the late William, youngest brother to Robert and William. Kurt was the devoted husband of Margo and adoring father to Georgia and Spencer. He is also survived by his faithful pets Shiloh and Parumpapumpum, as well as a hefty collection of sinks. Captain and founder of the Hatboro Horsham High School ice hockey team, Kurt imparted his great passion for the sport […]
RIP: Gar Joseph, Legendary Daily News Editor
THE INQUIRER: The first few times Gar Joseph applied for a reporting job at the Philadelphia Daily News, the editors turned him down. On paper, he was a solid candidate, a whip-smart 30-something assistant metro editor at the Wilmington News Journal. But there was some disagreement over whether he was too buttoned-up for the tabloid, which proudly wore its irreverent heart on its sleeve. What was clear to the paper’s editors was that Mr. Joseph didn’t give up easily, even if the odds weren’t in his favor. He kept on telling them he belonged at the Daily News, as simple […]
REST IN POWER: Author Toni Morrison, ‘Towering Novelist Of The Black Experience’, Dead At 88
Illustration by Alexandra Compain-Tissier NEW YORK TIMES: In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Ms. Morrison animated that reality in a style resembling that of no other writer in English. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act. Her narratives mingle the voices of […]
CINEMA: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
THE BEACH BUM (Directed by Harmony Korine, 95 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Everyone I know seems to have a Harmony Korine story. From the friend who once told me about how an applicant at the video store he used to work at listed the director as a reference — and how they called the number only to have Korine pick up. To another friend in whom Korine confided that he once lost almost 70 never-produced scripts in a bizarre house fire. Like the director himself, The Beach Bum is a study in larger-than-life chaotic personae that […]
RIP: Goodnight Laverne Defazio Wherever You Are
NEW YORK TIMES: She made her film debut in “The Savage Seven,” a 1968 biker-gang drama, and had a small part the same year in “How Sweet It Is!,” a romantic comedy starring Debbie Reynolds and James Garner. Ms. Marshall continued acting, mostly playing guest roles on television series, until she got her big break in 1971, when she was cast in the recurring part of Jack Klugman’s gloomy secretary, Myrna Turner, on the ABC sitcom “The Odd Couple.” Her brother, a producer of the show, got her the job, but nepotism had nothing to do with it when […]
RIP: Ricky Jay, Master Magician, Scholar, Raconteur, Author, Prose Stylist & Debunker Of Fraud Masquerading As The Supernatural, Dead @ 70
NEW YORK TIMES: As a teenager, Mr. Jay ran away to work in Lake George, the upstate New York resort area. He was later booked at the Electric Circus, the East Village hippie-era temple, doing his act between Ike and Tina Turner’s music and Timothy Leary’s lectures on LSD. Eventually he enrolled in five different colleges but by his account never advanced past freshman status at any of them. “Early on, I knew I didn’t want to do the kind of magic other people were doing,” he said in the New Yorker profile. “So I started buying old books” […]
THE QUEEN IS DEAD: Aretha Franklin Dead @ 76
FRESH AIR: Aretha Franklin was more than a woman, more than a diva and more than an entertainer. Aretha Franklin was an American institution. Aretha Franklin died Thursday in her home city of Detroit after battling pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type. Her death was confirmed by her publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn. She was 76. Franklin has received plenty of honors over her decades-spanning career — so much so that the chalice of accolades runneth over. She was the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s […]
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. […]
CINEMA: The Bare, Ruined Choirs Of John Mahoney
AV CLUB: There’s a similarly loose resemblance between Mahoney’s character, a floridly boozy Southern author named W.P. Mayhew, and William Faulkner. Ethan Coen has acknowledged that discovering Faulkner had once worked on a wrestling picture starring Wallace Beery (Whaddaya need, a road map?) gave the brothers their way in on Barton Fink—the concept of an eminently serious author debasing themselves in order to, as Mayhew puts it to Barton, “make their way out here to the Great Salt Lick.” Like Faulkner, Mayhew is also a heavy drinker—Barton first discovers him puking in the bathroom—and he speaks in a casually baroque […]
IN MEMORIAM: Mark E. Smith Of The Fall
BY BRIAN W. MURRAY By the time I came to The Fall they were already well established as (post-) punk iconoclasts, their unique brand of contrarian, literate sonic terrorism already highly regarded by musos-in-the-know, of whom I knew virtually none. They surfaced late-night in my bland suburban adolescent realm in the form of the new video for “New Big Prinz,” an immediate classic amidst their dizzyingly vast output. I remember it being, well, orange. Steve Hanley’s throbbing, pulverizing bass line heralded their trademark relentlessness. Over the piledriver rhythm, Craig Scanlon’s jagged, cascading guitar somehow meshed with Brix Smith’s incongruous […]
RIP: South African Trumpeter Hugh Masekela, The Man Who Blew Freedom’s Horn, Dead At 78
NEW YORK TIMES: The next year he joined Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand) and four other upstart instrumentalists in the Jazz Epistles, South Africa’s first bebop band of note. With a heavy, driving pulse and warm, arcing melodies, their music was distinctly South African, even as its swing rhythms and flittering improvisations reflected affinities with American jazz. “There had never been a group like the Epistles in South Africa,” Mr. Masekela said in his 2004 autobiography, “Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela,” written with D. Michael Cheers. “Our tireless energy, complex arrangements, tight ensemble play, languid […]
IN MEMORIAM: David Bowie Will Never Die
EDITOR’S NOTE: This euology originally published in the wake of David Bowie’s death on January 10th 2016. We are re-posting it today on the occasion of his birthday and the kick-off of Philly Loves Bowie Week. BY JONATHAN VALANIA The year is 1980 and 14-year-old me drops the needle on Changesonebowie in my bedroom, with the door locked because this is serious business, while staring at the album cover, trying to figure out how all these startling and seemingly disconnected musics — space-age psych folk, white plastic soul, zooming Brechtian glam, bloozy garage-punk, coked-up funk, Teutonic trance-rock, proto-electronica — […]
REST IN PIECES: Charles Manson Dead @ 83
ROCK SNOB ENCYCLOPEDIA: Manson, Charles: aka Charlie, aka The Wizard. Known aliases: Jesus H. Christ and The Devil Himself. Manson was sort of the Hannibal Lecter of the flower-power era: witty and charismatic; disarmingly charming when he wanted to be; and supremely, psychopathically evil. He remains a cultural bogeyman, and in the minds of most, the most despicable super-criminal since Hitler. And even though the body count ascribed to him has been overshadowed by a long list of serial killers, terrorists and dictators, it is Manson’s gory hippie-Armageddon myth that still resonates the loudest. He is an enduring totem […]