from SPIN

Swans Leader M. Gira: Say No to Society, Record Labels, Touring With Your Spouse

by Kory Grow

“I don’t know how Kim and Thurston did it for so long.”

Over the past three decades, Michael Gira has established himself as underground rock’s ace of debasement. From the brutal, self-pugilistic caterwauls of sludgy art-rockers Swans to the brittle, American Gothic doom-folk he recorded with Angels of Light, he strips music down to its harrowing, bare-bones essentials. It’s no wonder, then, that his acidic bellowing and post-blues licks resound in the works of industro-rockers like Godflesh and heady metallers like Neurosis as much as experimental folk artists like James Blackshaw and Wooden Wand. Since 1990, he’s applied the same principles to running his home-brewed record label Young God, launching the careers of freaky folks like Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family; running his business with a cutthroat, do-it-yourself attitude a good decade before the rest of the internet followed suit. He is an iconoclast’s iconoclast, so, we asked him to explain his outlook on life on the eve of the release of Swans’ 12th album, the relentless, cinematic, two-hour bludgeon The Seer

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from The Chicago Sun-Times

Editorial: America should shoot for the stars again

The moment Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, he became slightly other­worldly in our eyes, cloaked in a golden aura that did not sit easily with his shy and private ways.

But Armstrong understood the power of that aura and used it, sparingly, over the years for a cause he believed in fully: human space exploration. One of his last high-profile public appearances, in 2010, was to testify before a Congressional committee against the Obama administration’s plan to redirect NASA’s efforts away from human exploration of space and toward more basic long-term science research.

That, Armstrong said, would be “devastating.”

NASA’s first priority, he said with a touch of the same poetry he brought to his first step on the moon, should be “learning to sail on this new ocean.”

[ click to continue reading at The Chicago Sun-Times ]

from Grantland

You Either Smoke or You Get Smoked

An oral history of White Men Can’t Jump

COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX

By Thomas Golianopoulos

White Men Can’t Jump begins with a 19-minute sequence that features a version of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” by the Venice Beach Boys, more rat-a-tat “yo momma” jokes than a season’s worth of BET’s ComicView and, of course, some pickup basketball. Director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, Tin Cup) wanted to establish that his actors — a ragtag cast that included a burgeoning movie star, a fifth-lead sitcom actor, former NBA players, Division-I washouts, weekend warriors, and Kadeem Hardison in a goofy hat — really had game. So when the film’s stars, Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, step to the top of the key for a best-of-five shooting contest, Shelton doesn’t cut away to the basket. No camera tricks, no editing, no ringers. There was just one problem: His actors couldn’t stop chucking up bricks.

“We were looking at our watches like, ‘When are these guys gonna make one?'” says actor Ernest Harden Jr., who looked on during the six-hour shoot. One day on set, Harden uttered what became the film’s mantra: That word action is a motherfucker. “You could be prepared,” Harden says. “And then you hear ‘action’ and everything goes wrong.”

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from The Guardian

Pussy riot trial: ‘We are representatives of our generation’

As three members of the Russian punk band await a verdict, we examine how they managed to find themselves in the dock

By Miriam Elder in Moscow

They have targeted some of Moscow’s most well-secured sites with their flash concerts – the metro, a jail, Red Square – but it was a 40-second performance inside Russia‘s official church that proved a step too far for a system increasingly intolerant of dissent.

“We are representatives of our generation,” Maria Alyokhina told the court in an opening statement that reads like a manifesto, as Pussy Riot went on trial on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. “It is important for me to understand whether the church is growing along with society or whether it remains a conservative institution. In the search for an answer, I did not expect a repressive and inquisition-like reaction.”

Pussy Riot formed as an anonymous feminist punk collective in October 2010, in the weeks after Putin’s declaration that he would return to the presidency after four years as prime minister. He had stepped down because the constitution did not allow more than two consecutive terms as president. His formal return, although expected, sent a wave of anger through segments of Russian society. Some began to refer to him as Tsar; others used the word “authoritarian”.

The women of Pussy Riot, students and graduates of some of Moscow’s most prestigious schools, were among that number.

“A lot of us couldn’t sleep after this announcement,” a member of the band, who identified herself as Tyurya, told the Guardian during a rare interview early this year. “We felt such anger because of this rudeness, this arrogance towards citizens. So we decided, damn it, we need to do something.”

[ click to read full article at The Guardian ]

from The San Jose Mercury News

Steve Jobs home burglary suspect accused of stealing wallet, driver’s license, special computers with house key

By Mike Rosenberg and Jason Green / Staff writers / © Copyright 2012, Bay Area News Group

PALO ALTO — Detectives say Kariem McFarlin told them he was desperate for easy cash when he saw the Palo Alto home being renovated, hopped over the fence, found a spare key and went inside. No lights, no alarm, no one home. Then he discovered what hallowed ground he was on: the home of the iconic late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs.

Alone and with free rein of a house belonging to one of the richest and most secretive families on the planet, McFarlin made off with some of the legendary gadgets Jobs helped create, police said in a report released Tuesday, one month after a break-in just now being publicized. He grabbed iPhones, iPads, Macs and iPods, then found Jobs’ wallet — with a single dollar inside — and, perhaps most shockingly of all, took his driver’s license.

Police said he also snatched $60,000 worth of Tiffany & Co. jewelry and Cristal Champagne, and even took a soda-maker and kitchen blender.

[ click to continue reading at The SJ Merc ]

from The New York Times

Ron Palillo Dies at 63; Played Horshack on TV

ABC, via Photofest

By PAUL VITELLO

Ron Palillo, who portrayed the goofy high school underachiever Arnold Horshack in the hit 1970s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter” with such definitive oddballness that he had trouble for years afterward finding work as an actor, died on Tuesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 63.

“I know him, love what he does, not right for the part,” Mr. Palillo said in a 1997 newspaper interview, repeating what he said was the mantra of every casting director he met after his years on “Kotter,” which was on ABC from 1975 to 1979. “Everybody thought of me as Arnold Horshack. I resented Horshack for so many years.”

Welcome Back, Kotter” starred Gabe Kaplan as a high school teacher returning to his alma mater in Brooklyn to take over an unruly class of remedial students known collectively as the Sweathogs (because their top-floor classroom was always hot). The Sweathogs were Vinnie Barbarino (played by John Travolta), Freddie Washington (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), Juan Epstein (Robert Hegyes) and Horshack, to whom Mr. Palillo imparted two trademarks: a braying laugh that sounded like a DisposAll with a utensil caught in it, and a wild waving of his hand to answer Mr. Kotter (usually wrongly) while grunting: “Ooh, ooh, Mista Kahta! Mista Kahta!”

[ click to read full obit at NYTimes.com ]

from The Wall Street Journal

Cosmo Editor Helen Gurley Brown Dies

By Ray A. Smith

Getty Images

Helen Gurley Brown, the iconic editor in chief of fashion magazine Cosmopolitan whose frank, modern attitudes about women and sex brought her fans and simultaneously made her a lightning rod, died Monday after a brief hospitalization in New York, according to a press release issued by Hearst Corporation. She was 90.

With her landmark 1962 bestseller “Sex and the Single Girl” and her stewardship of “Cosmopolitan,” from 1965 to 1997, she opened up conversations about sexuality at a time when female empowerment was a growing topic of discussion and debate. The magazine offered style tips as well as sex tips that were far from coy.

The magazine wasn’t shy about showing skin. One of its most famous photo spreads featured a nude Burt Reynolds with his privates strategically covered.

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from The Wrap

Marvin Hamlisch, Composed ‘The Way We Were,’ Dies at 68

Composer and conductor Marvin Hamlisch, best known for the torch song “The Way We Were,” died Monday. He was 68 years old.

In a career that spanned over four decades, Hamlisch won virtually every major award: three Oscars, four Grammys, four Emmys, a Tony, and three Golden Globes.

Hamlisch composed more than forty motion picture scores, including his Oscar-winning score and song for “The Way We Were,” and his adaptation of Scott Joplin’s ragtime music for “The Sting,” for which he received a third Oscar.

Hamlisch’s musical scores, though intricately conceived, never drew attention to themselves. They served to compliment the on-screen action, not overwhelm it — enhancing each gesture, each glance, each moment of drama. That subtle approach allowed him to be something of a musical chameleon, easily gliding from searing dramas to off-beat comedies and making him a close collaborator to a diverse group of directors such as Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh and Alan J. Pakula.

[ click to continue reading at The Wrap ]