[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 […]
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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; […]
CONCERT REVIEW: War On Drugs @ UT
[Photography by GRAHAM TOLBERT] The War On Drugs really like Bob Dylan. They also like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and the Grateful Dead. If you’ve seen any of those acts live (personally, I’ve seen Dylan, Springsteen, and Dark Star Orchestra), then you know that can’t be a bad thing. Philly’s own W.O.D. played a 105-minute show Saturday night that lit up Union Transfer with the spirit of the aforementioned American rock originals, playing fifteen songs, mostly from their latest LP Slave Ambient and a few from the first Wagonwheel Blues. Like a jam band show, a constant, pleasant vibe resonated […]
EARLY WORD: ‘We’re All Scott Olsen Now’
RELATED: The incidents in Oakland last week have only emboldened Occupiers in major cities around the country. Last Tuesday, police drove occupiers out of their encampment in the Bay Area at 5 a.m., sending thousands scattering around town, with nowhere to go, but plenty to shout about. The next phase of this rude awakening was a city-wide scourge in which demonstrators allegedly threw bottles and splashed paint on police officers and officers in return fired 37mm tear gas containers into the crowd, wounding young Iraq war veteran. OccupyOakland responded by calling for a citywide strike today. In solidarity, OccupyPhilly is […]
AUTHOR AUTHOR: First Rule About Interviewing Chuck Palahniuk Is Don’t Talk About Fight Club!
[Illustrations by ALEX FINE] BY ALEX POTTER Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk has just published his 11th novel, Damned, the first installment of a trilogy that documents a few days in the afterlife of Madison Spencer, the dearly departed daughter of a filthy rich film producer father and narcissistic movie star mother. Madison dies on her 13th birthday in a freak accident that wouldn’t be out of place in the apocalyptic imagination of Tyler Durden. Palahniuk’s luridly cinematic rendering of hell—think screenplay by Milton, based on the novel by Dante and directed by John Hughes—is littered with sticky-sweet Halloween candy […]
CINEMA: Highway 61 Revisited
BY ALEX POTTER Two-Lane Blacktop, starring a pre-fame James Taylor and a post-fame Dennis Wilson, has been called the quintessential road movie. The mysterious, stoic and taciturn Driver (the progenitor of Ryan Gosling’s The Driver character in Drive?) is played by Taylor and his equally mysterious and stoic sidekick, The Mechanic, is played by Wilson. Director Monte Hellman, who went on to co-produce such celebrated indie films such as Reservoir Dogs and Buffalo ’66, deliberately selected non-actors to portray the Driver and the Mechanic. Robert de Niro, Al Pacino and James Caan were all interested in the role that the […]
GASLANDIA: Q&A w/ Fracked Author Seamus McGraw
BY ALEX POTTER Seamus McGraw recently published The End of Country, a heart-breaking expose of the unexpected/unintended consequences of hydraulic fracturing, or, “fracking,” on the lives of the people in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania who have lived off the land for generations. As the book points out, it is both a curse and a blessing that they live on top of the Marcellus Shale, the world’s second largest subterranean deposit of natural gas. Four years ago, McGraw knew nothing about natural gas or the controversial techniques for extracting it from the ground. Amidst financial turmoil, McGraw and his family agreed […]
Q&A With Rolling Stone Photographer Baron Wolman
BY ALEX POTTER Baron Wolman was the chief photographer for Rolling Stone magazine for the first three years of its existence. He just published a book of his iconic work for the magazine called Every Picture Tells a Story…The Rolling Stone Years. Equipped with nothing more than a Nikon and a warm demeanor that made his subjects feel unusually comfortable, Wolman got up close and personal with just about every 60’s rock god you can think of, and then some. In the words of former Rolling Stone Art Director Tony Lane, Wolman’s oeuvre “is heroic; it is a Greek God […]
MASTERPIECE THEATER: Beyond Good And Evil
BY ALEX POTTER With the new Midnight in Paris enjoying generous commercial and critical success, many critics are looking back on Woody Allen’s career and asking themselves when Allen last executed something so well. Crimes and Misdemeanors, originally released in 1989, appears to be the consensus. Crimes is two stories that have nothing but the theme of adultery and a blind rabbi in common. Martin Landau plays Judah, a successful ophthalmologist, and Allen, the unsuccessful filmmaker, Cliff. Both men have reached breaking points in their marriages. Many people may find that the two narratives, which could stand alone as two […]
Only YOU Can Stop Fraud, Corruption And Abuse
BY ALEX POTTER Philadelphians for Ethical Leadership, a non-profit group headed by Ben Mannes, a former Washington, D.C. police officer who now lives in Port Richmond, held a meeting last night at the Central Library they called “A Citywide Forum on Public Integrity” hoping “to give citizens a better understanding on what behavior constitutes public corruption, what the contributing factors to public corruption are, who investigate the different types of public integrity issues, and how best to report it.” A panel of two men with pedigrees in rooting out corruption at various levels of government was present to discuss ways […]
CINEMA: There Will Be Blood
BY ALEX POTTER Terrence Malick averages about one film every seven years, but it’s always worth the wait — he is widely regarded as a director’s director and A-List actors wait in line to work with him. He has not made a film that critics don’t consider great. His new one, Tree Of Life is no exception. If you like that, you’ll like Badlands, Malik’s bleak, beautiful 1973 directorial debut, starring a young and very James Dean-esque Martin Sheen and the always-great Sissy Spacek as young lovers on a killing spree across the American prairie. Set in the Badlands of […]
CINEMA: Night Moves
NIGHTCRAWLER (2014, directed by Dan Gilroy, 117 minutes, U.S.) THE GUEST (2014, directed by Adam Wingard, 99 minutes, U.S.) BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP (2014, directed by Rowan Joffe, 92 minutes, U.K.) HORNS (2013, directed by Alexandre Aja, 120 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A new financial reality has hit Hollywood as the range of films they once made has seemingly tightened. Of course we know they’re funding gargantuan super hero films and CGI-driven blockbusters but further down the budget ladder are modest action films with middle-aged stars, relatively inexpensive youth comedies and low budget horror films. […]
#OCCUPYPHILLY: Home Of The Brave
[Photo by MEREDITH KLEIBER] BY ALEXANDER POTTER “This is what democracy looks like!” was the collective cry Saturday afternoon as hundreds of people marched from Dilworth Plaza at City Hall to Independence Hall and back. Mayor Michael Nutter had met with many Occupiers the day before to express support, remind everyone to remain peaceful and, let’s face it, score political points. Although they were extremely loud and disruptive, drawing shop clerks out of their stores and onto Market Street, picking up stragglers and passersby on the sidewalks as they went along, they obeyed Nutter’s only wish and made their point […]