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If The Felice Brothers are kinda/sorta the Second Coming of The Band, then Simone Felice is kinda/sorta the new Levon Helm (God rest his soul). Given that Helm spent the entirety of his post-Band existence not speaking to Robbie Robertson, it’s probably all for the best that Simone left the Felice Brothers and went solo in 2009. He plays First Unitarian on June 1st in support of his swell, just-released solo debut. A hymn-like collection of achingly beautiful downbeat Americana, Simone’s solo debut should be filed somewhere in between Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago and the last Low Anthem album.  We have a pair of tickets to give away to the first Phawker reader to email us at FEED@PHAWKER.COM and tell us the name of Simone’s debut novel. Please include a mobile number for confirmation. Good luck and godspeed.

SIMONE FELICE: I am on a ferryboat from Hollyhead to Dublin when I get the news from home: Levon has passed away.  First thing I do is turn my head to the window and find the cold blue sea beyond, the waves like a living, dancing quilt rolling out to meet the sky.  Could it have been little more than a month back that I sat on a wooden bench not five feet from his drum-riser as he played and sang Ophelia with the grace of a veteran dancer, the spirit of a country preacher, at once lithe, weather-worn, fiery, weary, imperishable.  It is true there was a gleam in his eye. Like a school-boy skipping classes all afternoon to while away the hours with friends down by the river’s edge, elemental wonders, overjoyed just to live within earshot of the sound of music. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: Impersonating the Band hasn’t been a decent-paying gig since Scorsese filmed The Last Waltz in 1976, but judging by the full-up crowd at the Trocadero Thursday night, the Felice Brothers seem to be on their way. Actually, impersonating sounds a little too dismissive and I like these guys, so let’s go with evoking or carrying on the old, weird Americana tradition of the Band. Besides, the brothers have the pedigree (they hail from the Hudson River valley), they’ve paid their dues (busking in the subways of New York, going acoustic at the Newport Folk Festival, woodshedding at Levon Helm’s Barn Burner), and, more important, they are naturals, having just released Yonder Is the Clock, their fifth casually brilliant album of the aforementioned old, weird Americana. Of the five Felice Brothers standing onstage at the Troc, only two were actual blood brothers named Felice: waifish singer/guitarist Ian Felice, who looked like Dylan ’63 and sang like Dylan ’68, and bearlike keyboard/accordionist James Felice, who looked like a young Hank Williams Jr. in his beard and Zorro hat. The third blood Felice Brother, drummer Simone, has elected not to tour this time out, and was replaced by Jeremy Backofen, who, in tandem with snake-fingered bass player Christmas Clapton, gave the band’s two-hour set the requisite chugging heft. Fiddler/washboard-picker Greg Farley seemed vested with the responsibility of maintaining the band’s rowdy live rep as he flailed around the stage like a gorilla on roller skates and intermittently bashed the drummer’s cymbals with his washboard. A large part of the charm of the Felice Brothers’ live show is that you get the distinct impression they would be having this much fun even if nobody showed up. There is something about the way they all smile when they play, as if they shared some wonderful private joke that you want in on – kind of like The Basement Tapes. Much like the albums, Thursday night’s show alternated between barn-burning hoedowns in the Poguesian tradition of everyone-grab-an-instrument-and-make-a-joyous-noise (a stomping “Chicken Wire” and a howl-at-the-moon “Memphis Flu”) and sweetly downer folkadelic introspection (a Wilcoesque “The Big Surprise,” a stately “Cooperstown”). Especially noteworthy was a ripping spin through the subterranean homesick blues of “Penn Station” and a positively grand and otherworldly “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which is one of those unforgettable songs where you know something’s happening, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones? – JONATHAN VALANIA, 2009

[Artwork by MEATHEAD]

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Mayor Cory Booker to the long list of political stand-ins for both President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney who’ve veered wildly off message in a presidential contest notable for its attention-grabbing gaffes. An Obama backer, Booker forced the president’s campaign into damage-control mode over the weekend when he called its attack on Romney’s tenure at a private equity firm “nauseating.” It didn’t take long for Republicans to highlight the comment and for the Democratic mayor to try to clean up the mess he caused by releasing a YouTube video in which he said it was fair for Obama to make Romney’s business record a campaign issue. MORE

RELATED: The GOP’s I Stand With Cory web site/petition

THINK PROGRESS: A ThinkProgress examination of New Jersey campaign finance records for Booker’s first run for Mayor — back in 2002 — suggests a possible reason for his unease with attacks on Bain Capital and venture capital. They were among his earliest and most generous backers. Contributions to his 2002 campaign from venture capitalists, investors, and big Wall Street bankers brought him more than $115,000 for his 2002 campaign. Among those contributing to his campaign were John Connaughton ($2,000), Steve Pagliuca ($2,200), Jonathan Lavine ($1,000) — all of Bain Capital. While the forms are not totally clear, it appears the campaign raised less than $800,000 total, making this a significant percentage. He and his slate also jointly raised funds for the “Booker Team for Newark” joint committee. They received more than $450,000 for the 2002 campaign from the sector — including a pair of $15,400 contributions from Bain Capital Managing Directors Joshua Bekenstein and Mark Nunnelly. It appears that for the initial campaign and runoff, the slate raised less than $4 million — again making this a sizable chunk. In all — just in his first Mayoral run — Booker’s committees received more than $565,000 from the people he was defending. At least $36,000 of that came from folks at Romney’s old firm. MORE

JEFF DEENEY: He’s always been a neolib technocrat (like Obama, ironically), and ultimately at the end of the day he’s a proud Stanford Man, which means Wall Street is comprised of his former classmates and they see the world through the same lens, applied to different sectors.  He was always this way, that’s why he was such a hard sell for Newark and was beaten in his first election by a machine politician of Marion Barry-esque epic corruption; he wasn’t passing the smell test with the neighborhood oldheads.  He always figured he would bring them around when the saw what elite education and connections can do for a poor city. Results are mixed, but at this point, having paid dues, he’s thinking senate, eventually President, which is more in line with his own estimation of himself, anyway. Nutter isn’t very different; a Wharton guy at the end of the day. Better than Street, perhaps, but would Street have plugged a bomb in the school system and handed the fragments over to corporate privatizers?  Would love to hear what Nutter thinks about private equity; I suspect the same as Booker. Despite the fact that Wall Street nearly willfully annihilated itself, creating even more massive inequality in doing so, and this should defacto discredit the entire neoliberal experiment, most persistent in the assumption that marker forces applied in every sector is the way to a better world.

WIKIPEDIA: The Master is an upcoming drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It was given the green-light in May 2011, and began filming in June. The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, and Laura Dern. The plot involves a religion called “The Cause” which has been compared to Scientology. A charismatic intellectual (Hoffman) launches a religious organization following World War II. A drifter (Phoenix) becomes his right-hand man but as the faith begins to gain a fervent following, the drifter finds himself questioning the belief system and his mentor. Score by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood. The Master is scheduled for release on October 12, 2012. MORE

NEW YORK TIMES: With “The Master” Mr. Anderson will tell a dual tale. The first is that of a boozy Navy veteran, played by Mr. Phoenix, who shares what Mr. Anderson’s associates say are accidental similarities with the filmmaker’s father, who died in 1997. The elder Anderson was a Navy vet who served in the Pacific during World War II, and, like Quell, was born about 90 years ago. The second story is that of Lancaster Dodd, who is eerily referred to in a screenplay Mr. Anderson initially wrote for Universal Pictures only as “The Master” or “Master of Ceremonies.” Played by Mr. Hoffman, he is the red-haired, round-faced, charismatic founder of that most Californian of phenomena, a psychologically sophisticated, and manipulative, cult.

Dodd was inspired by — though not entirely modeled on — Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard. “TRUST ME, IT’S NOT ABOUT Scientology,” Mr. Hoffman told the journalist Jeffrey Wells, when asked about “The Master” at a party last September. In a strict sense that is certainly true. The first Church of Scientology was incorporated in December 1953. Mr. Anderson’s story takes place in the preceding years, as Dodd spreads a philosophy that resembles Dianetics, which Hubbard developed before his church was formally founded.

As “The Master” took shape, Mr. Anderson, its writer and director, delved into the personalities behind cults and religious and pop psychology movements with roots in California. Those have included Aimee Semple McPherson, who used radio to evangelize in the 1920s; Werner Erhard, whose est movement swept California in the 1970s; and Jim Jones of San Francisco, whose followers drank the cyanide-laced Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid) in 1978.

But a glance through the many photographs of Hubbard in the early ’50s — perched in western wear on a fence in Palm Springs, demonstrating his Electro-psychometer to a prone, high-heeled woman — reveals a telling likeness to Mr. Hoffman, who shares the same soft features, light hair and innate theatricality. In a version of the script that circulated as Mr. Anderson sought financing, Lancaster Dodd is described as being in his mid-40s; Hubbard was in his early 40s during the matching years. Both share a love of boats, and a near-paranoid suspicion of the American Medical Association. Hubbard’s followers hope to become “clear”; the Master’s followers work toward “optimum.” Psychological exploration by and with either involves ruthless interrogation. Both wrote their ultimate secrets in a book that is said to kill its readers or drive them mad. They are obsessed with motorcycles. Their tantrums are monumental. Each has a wife named Mary Sue. MORE

RED VINES & CIGARETTES: A cryptic note from P.T. Anderson

PREVIOUSLY: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Scientology But Were Afraid To Ask

RAW STORY: A New Jersey General Assembly panel approved on Monday a bill that would lower the penalty for possessing a small amount of marijuana to a mere $150 fine for first-time offenders, essentially decriminalizing the drug by making possession a non-arrest offense. But Gov. Chris Christie (R), who’s supported drug reforms in the past, has refused to take a position on it, with an aide telling Raw Story on Monday that he won’t be commenting on the proposal any time soon. Current New Jersey law requires a fine of $1,000 and up to six months in jail for individuals charged with minor marijuana possession. Under the bill approved for consideration by the full Assembly on Monday, getting caught with up to 15 grams of pot would be more akin to receiving a traffic ticket, with second and third offenses triggering escalating fines but no arrest. Sponsored by Assemblyman and deputy majority leader Reed Gusciora (D), the bill represents the most viable push toward sentencing reform the state has seen in a generation. “This bill would put us in line with neighboring states like Connecticut and New York, which recently decriminalized marijuana possession,” Gusciora said in a statement. “The bill recognizes the realities of our current drug laws, which are overly punitive for marijuana and taxing on our criminal justice system.” Still, it’s not clear if the bill will make it out of a debate by the full assembly. But with Democrats in command of majorities in both the state’s general assembly and senate, it could pass without even a single vote of support from Republicans — except Gov. Christie, that is, whose veto would condemn the decriminalization bill to failure. There is hope that he will listen, however. MORE

RELATED: Andy Caffrey, a candidate for Congress in California, has made a rather unusual campaign promise: If he wins, he’ll smoke a joint — right on the steps of Capitol Hill. The 54-year-old is running on a seven-step platform that prioritizes battling the climate crisis, but the casual manner in which puffs pot on the campaign trail — including twice just last week — is what has captivated local media covering the Second Congressional District House race. And Caffrey admits that this is precisely what he’s aiming for. “I’m willing to get arrested to fight for our rights, to defend our rights as Californians to consume medicine,” Caffrey, a registered Democrat, said in an interview. “If I have to do it, I’ll smoke a joint on the Capitol steps and get arrested to draw national attention to what’s going on.” Although he doesn’t smoke every day, Caffrey says he’s been smoking cannabis with a doctor’s approval for about six or seven years, and always carries a physician’s note in case he’s questioned by law enforcement officials. MORE

[Artwork by ELI BRUMBAUGH]

We have a pair of tix to see everyone’s favorite Windy City weird-beard math-pop indie rockers Maps & Atlases at Union Transfer tomorrow night along with The Big Sleep and Sister Crayon. Because we like you we’re gonna make this super easy. First listener to email us at FEED@PHAWKER.COM with the words MAPS & ATLASES in the subject line wins. Please include a mobile number for confirmation. Good luck and godspeed!

THE NEW REPUBLIC: Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff–like callousness by the world’s fisheries. Beginning in the 1950s, as their operations became increasingly industrialized–with onboard refrigeration, acoustic fish-finders, and, later, GPS–they first depleted stocks of cod, hake, flounder, sole, and halibut in the Northern Hemisphere. As those stocks disappeared, the fleets moved southward, to the coasts of developing nations and, ultimately, all the way to the shores of Antarctica, searching for icefishes and rockcods, and, more recently, for small, shrimplike krill. As the bounty of coastal waters dropped, fisheries moved further offshore, to deeper waters. And, finally, as the larger fish began to disappear, boats began to catch fish that were smaller and uglier–fish never before considered fit for human consumption. Many were renamed so that they could be marketed: The suspicious slimehead became the delicious orange roughy, while the worrisome Patagonian toothfish became the wholesome Chilean seabass. Others, like the homely hoki, were cut up so they could be sold sight-unseen as fish sticks and filets in fast-food restaurants and the frozen-food aisle.

The scheme was carried out by nothing less than a fishing-industrial complex–an alliance of corporate fishing fleets, lobbyists, parliamentary representatives, and fisheries economists. By hiding behind the romantic image of the small-scale, independent fisherman, they secured political influence and government subsidies far in excess of what would be expected, given their minuscule contribution to the GDP of advanced economies–in the United States, even less than that of the hair salon industry. In Japan, for example, huge, vertically integrated conglomerates, such as Taiyo or the better-known Mitsubishi, lobby their friends in the Japanese Fisheries Agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them gain access to the few remaining plentiful stocks of tuna, like those in the waters surrounding South Pacific countries. Beginning in the early 1980s, the United States, which had not traditionally been much of a fishing country, began heavily subsidizing U.S. fleets, producing its own fishing-industrial complex, dominated by large processors and retail chains. Today, governments provide nearly $30 billion in subsidies each year–about one-third of the value of the global catch–that keep fisheries going, even when they have overexploited their resource base. As a result, there are between two and four times as many boats as the annual catch requires, and yet, the funds to “build capacity” keep coming. The jig, however, is nearly up. In 1950, the newly constituted Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimated that, globally, we were catching about 20 million metric tons of fish (cod, mackerel, tuna, etc.) and invertebrates (lobster, squid, clams, etc.). That catch peaked at 90 million tons per year in the late 1980s, and it has been declining ever since.

THE WONK BLOG: Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted. Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, has dubbed this situation “The End of Fish.” He points out that in the past 50 years, the populations of many large commercial fish such as bluefin tuna and cod have utterly collapsed, in some cases shrinking more than 90 percent (see the chart to the right). (WWF, Living Planet Report 2012) Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich. MORE

BY JONATHAN VALANIA To rock boys coming of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the brothers Gibb were known primarily as the fey, toothy, Members Only-jacketed target of the Disco Sucks backlash that greeted the blockbuster sales and grating ubiquity of their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

But unbeknownst to many, the Bee Gees also had an amazing career in the ’60s, creating deathless psychedelic-pop singles and ambitious album-length statements that explored complex themes and experimented with all manner of instrumentation and orchestral arrangements.

Even back then, it was their harmonizing – as rich and distinct as the Beach Boys or the Beatles at their best – that put them over. In the wake of the mega-success of the Bee Gees’ disco years, the ’60s sides were relegated to the dustbin of oldies radio, and strangely disconnected from their image as dance-floor hitmakers.

Likewise, the band’s ’60s catalog had been neglected – held in limbo by messy legal disputes and lawsuits – and mostly chopped into one bargain-priced Best-Of after another, which only served to decontextualize the hits from the albums they came from and confuse the narrative arc of their pre-disco career.These days, the Bee Gees’ hipster cachet looms larger than ever, especially with the kind of people who savor Wes Anderson films for their impeccably curated soundtracks. Any number of alt-rock luminaries – from the Flaming Lips to the Shins, the Arcade Fire to Belle & Sebastian – sing the trio’s praises and crib liberally from its ’60s psych-pop palette.

And thanks to a new deal with Warner Bros., the Bee Gees’ back catalog is being remastered, repackaged and reissued.

The reissues series began in 2006 with The Studio Albums 1967-1968, an expansive six-disc collection that includes three studio albums – Bee Gees’ 1st, Horizontal and Idea, in both mono and stereo mixes – plus three discs of alternate takes and unreleased tracks from the albums’ recording sessions (including a pair of cloying Coke commercials). It’s an embarrassment of riches for anyone who likes their pop dreamy, heart-shaped and swimming in reverb.

There’s an oft-told tale about how the Gibb brothers found their calling in showbiz. As schoolboys in Manchester, England, in the early 1950s, the brothers were supposed to lip-sync to a record in a talent contest. On the way there, Maurice dropped the record and it shattered. So they actually sang the song instead, and the rousing audience response convinced them they were meant for the stage.

Around this time, the Gibb family relocated to Australia, where the brothers served a long apprenticeship on the teen pop circuit, honing their harmonies and their musical chops, and learning their way around a recording studio. In 1966, they decided to return to England, specifically swinging London, which had become the epicenter of all things pop, mod and psychedelic.
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They’d sent ahead some demo tapes. Robert Stigwood, about to become one of the major British rock impresarios of the ’60s and ’70s, liked what he heard. He signed the group to a five-year deal, and spared no expense promoting it. When a single from their Aussie days tanked on the charts, the brothers regrouped, soaked up the sights and sounds of Carnaby Street, and signed on drummer Colin Petersen and guitarist Vince Melouney.

They began writing and recording in an accessible-but-ambitious style that seemed to pick up where the Beatles’ Revolver left off – with baroque, experimental, lushly orchestrated arrangements augmenting harmony-drenched guitar pop. Bee Gees’ 1st, in 1967, yielded what is arguably one of the oddest breakout debut singles in pop – “New York Mining Disaster 1941.” It was followed by the the sublime single and beloved pop song “To Love Somebody,” which was written by the Gibbs for Otis Redding to sing, but the soul legend died before he had a chance.

When the band went back into the studio months later to record Horizontal, it began producing itself, experimenting with a tougher, late-’60s rock sound (witness the trippy organ and pealing guitar riff on the wonderful “World”), though the folk-rock of “Massachusetts,” the album’s major hit, was buoyed by shimmering strings and glimmering glockenspiel.

Idea, originally released in 1968, splits the difference between the swooning psychedelia of the band’s debut and the fuzz-tone rock of contemporaries like Cream and the Yardbirds and the sunbeam harmonies of the its debut, yielding yet another hit with “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.”

Swelling egos and sibling rivalries would put an end to this fertile and modern-sounding phase of the band’s career. An argument over which song to release as a single from 1969′s Odessa – next on Rhino’s reissue list – resulted in Robin’s leaving the band and releasing, ahem, Robin’s Reign, while Maurice and Barry carried on as the Bee Gees for one final album, the unfortunately titled Cucumber Castle, which may well have been the inspiration for Spinal Tap’s “Lick My Love Pump.”

No matter, the first days of disco would soon be upon us.

RELATED: RobinGibb.com

THE DICTATOR (2012, directed by Larry Charles, 83 minutes, U.S.)
GOD BLESS AMERICA (2011. directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, 100 minutes, U.S.)

BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC In Hollywood, no talent is too immense to be dragged to its knees for some mundane, sure-fire junk. After watching Ricky Gervais follow-up his classic TV work to labor in some distressingly formulaic comedies, we now have the immensely-gifted Sasha Baron Cohen starring in…a rom-com? After the genre-expanding fictional docu-comedies Borat and Bruno, Cohen’s fully-scripted new feature The Dictator finds the comic slipping from culture-jamming satirist to mere goofball comedian. The distance from The Dictator to Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is closer than any of his fans would have hoped.

Before being brought to the big screen, the characters of Ali G., Borat, and Bruno, all had time to be introduced in Cohen’s TV shows. With this feature Cohen debuts his creation Haffaz Alladeen, the ruthless, clueless ruler of the imaginary oil-rich country of Waadeya. Alladeen is unrepentant in his desire to build nuclear weapons and finds himself kidnapped while en route to address the world council of the U.N. Shaved of his trademark Castro-esque beard, Alladeen is unrecognizable as he escapes his captors and stumbles around modern day Brooklyn. He is adopted by the kind-hearted proprietor of a food co-op (Anna Faris), who teaches him love and masturbation while he conspires to avenge his kidnapping and take back Waadeya from his evil brother (Ben Kingsley) who is ruling with the help Alladeen’s idiot body double.

Not that there aren’t laughs to be had, Cohen is much too skilled to not find some laughs here and there. His Alladeen is clueless about the world because whenever someone contradicts him he listens politely and then draws his index finger across his throat, signaling the fate of his subject. But for every joke that works there are obvious, stretched out gags that fall terribly flat, including the long piece in a restaurant where Alladeen disguises himself by adapting pseudonyms based on the signs around his table. It’s a gag Sid Caesar would have tossed from Your Show of Shows for being too corny.

There is something messier than just bad comedy at work in The Dictator, in both form and content. In past films, one could excuse Cohen for his ethnic and homophobic caricatures because the joke seemed to be on his unsuspecting subjects, whose assumed prejudices would lead to accept such ludicrous caricatures as real people. That extra dimension is missing here, as Cohen drags out every ancient stereotype about Middle Easterners being blood-thirsty killers and rapists, who hate woman and make love to goats. As our wars in the Middle East stretch out for over a decade now, his Alladeeen character draws uncomfortable parallels to the mean-spirited Japanese caricatures Hollywood specialized in during World War II.

Not that the film itself has much love for women; overlooking the rape gags and a particularly demeaning joke at Megan Fox’s expense, the film saves some of its cruelest pot shots for Anna Faris’ character. The film pokes fun at her for not being “feminine” enough and for her Leftist political ideals, and then shows a character so simple-minded that she quickly dumps her moral stance to run away with the misogynist Alladeen. And for a comic so willing to test boundaries, it is disheartening when you realize that the film is going to wrap things up in the stereotypical happy ending where love, power and glory is restored to our lead, murderous dictator or not. At the closing, Alladeen delivers a short speech that compares our waning democracy to his dream dictatorship. It’s a fleeting moment of bite in a film that is far too willing to appeal to its audience’s laziest assumptions and prejudices.

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Former stand-up, Bobcat Goldthwait takes his own shot at the distressing state of American culture in his entertaining muddle God Bless America. As Goldthwait’s stand-up career crashed around the new millennium, he has re-invented himself as a writer/director of surprisingly human comedies that show ordinary folks flirting with social taboos. His latest takes aim, literally, at the stars of reality TV, those outwardly beautiful people who are always ready to exhibit the ugliest of human behavior.

We see this world through the eyes of Frank (Mad Men‘s Joel Murray), a divorced middle-aged office worker fired from his job for showing benign but unwanted attention to a co-worker. Frank has the gun in his mouth when he spots a teenager on TV, furious that her parents have gotten her the wrong luxury car for her sixteenth birthday. He decides it is the lack of kindness in today’s world that really needs killing, and so he begins a cross-country trek to shoot down the meanest of today’s TV stars.
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Norah Jones, World Cafe Live, 1:25 PM by AMY SALIT

PREVIOUSLY: It’s another lazy Sunday morning coming down. You are awakened by the sunshine streaming through the open windows and the sound of the Brooklyn streets outside coming alive. Oddly, Danger Mouse is laying next to you, on his back, looking up at the ceiling, languidly strumming an elegiac guitar. He acts like you aren’t there. If you listen closely, you can hear a tinkling, Eno-esque piano arpeggio out of the corner of your ear. It sounds, and more importantly feels, like raindrops falling on your head. You roll over and there’s Norah Jones — beautiful, kind, classy incarnate Norah Jones — her little hands plinking the keys of a toy piano. Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands, you think to yourself, absently quoting e.e. cummings.

Oddly she seems to have cut her hair since you went to sleep last night, but she somehow looks even more beautiful shorn of her trademark long inky locks, which is odd because you always prefer long hair. Always. She gives you that pensive, other-shoe-about-to-drop look that always spells trouble or that unexpected change has already become operational. You hate change. She starts singing, “Good morning, my thoughts on leaving, are back on the table, I thought you should know,” like you’re in one of those musicals where all the dialogue is sung instead of spoken. It is at this moment that you are reminded why you hate musicals.

Welcome to beginning of Little Broken Hearts, which, despite the fact that it’s a down-the-middle collaboration with Danger Mouse, will be credited as the fifth album and latest album by Norah Jones, the holy madonna of modern MOR. It is easily her best album to date, it is also a fairly radical departure from everything album that precedes it, a heart-shaped-box sampler of poison pills and bloody valentines, pop noir shot through with magic and loss, spooky-sexy analog keyboard textures, echoey vocal washes and tremolo power chords, knotty Krautrockian bass lines, and the shimmering jangle of guitars. It is, in fact, such a complete break from her past that it may well cost her as many old fans as it gains her new ones. Not that she’s sweating it. She’s used to having millions of people who’s she’s never met making snap judgements about her, some in the name of love, and others not so much. Such is life in the business that is show. MORE

Just announced, Guided By Voices (the classic line-up) @ The Troc July 6th!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Stay tuned for some VERY exciting news involving us, GBV and [WHISPERING] the White House. Can’t talk about it yet so…Shhhh!

PREVIOUSLY: Employing the same Buckeye ingenuity that keeps the Goodyear blimp afloat, Robert Pollard can polish a turd with Budweiser until it shines with 24-carat radiance, transmuting a tossed-off, six-pack idea into a classic rock artifact or at the very least a beguiling no-fi curio. As captain of the drunken boat that is Guided By Voices, Pollard built a cottage industry by churning out cheap, miniature melodic masterpieces with all the fidelity of a ham radio broadcast. He does it with volume — by which I mean quantity not loudness. As such, the discography remains daunting if only for its sheer scope — upwards of 40 albums when you include solo albums and one-off side projects — but GBV beginners are well advised to begin with Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes and work forward. Philadelphia has smiled on Guided By Voices ever since the band broke from the twilight obscurity of Dayton some 17 years ago, packing the Khyber time and again to watch Pollard baptize himself with Budweiser and belch out the greatest songs never heard — and for one beery moment everything still seemed possible. Which is why tonight will invariably remind us why we fell in love with the mythology of scissor-kicking, wind-milling, power-chording, beer-pounding, ex-teacher old schoolers building four-track masterpieces in the basements of the Midwest all those years ago. – JONATHAN VALANIA

GUIDED BY VOICES: GAME OF PRICKS

“I’ve gone up on your house, weep to water the trees, and when you come calling me down I put on my disease.”– Robert Pollard

INQUIRER: In his new book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, urbanist Alan Ehrenhalt argues that “we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the 20th century is coming to an end.” In other words, rich white people are moving to city centers not just in Philadelphia, but also in Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix, and plenty of other cities. But as Ehrenhalt’s chapter on Philadelphia (“Uneasy Coexistence”) convincingly shows, it takes more than a few – or even a bunch of – rich white people moving downtown to save a city. Philadelphia’s core, he writes, “is a fashionable center surrounded on two of its four sides by a periphery of seemingly endless poverty.” Philadelphia, he says, occupies a strange space between Chicago and Boston on the one hand, and Detroit on the other: a city both glamorous and exciting, and so blighted and dangerous many would shun it. And for every good demographic indicator (such as the reversal or ebbing of white flight), another is deeply troubling (such as the sharp decline in the city’s African American middle class). In Ehrenhalt’s view, Philadelphia’s liabilities – namely the blight, violence, and taxes – are so extreme they will ultimately put a halt to Center City’s growth. MORE

DAILY NEWS: According to new estimates being released Thursday, Philadelphia saw a slight jump in the number of whites living here from April 1, 2010, to July 1, 2011. The estimates show the city gained 3,980 whites, or a 0.7 percent increase, for a total of 569,215 whites in July. Whites make up 37 percent of the city’s total population, as they did in 2010. At the height of Philadelphia’s population, in 1950, the city had a population of 2.1 million people, 1,692,637 of whom were labeled as white. Whites then most likely included people of Hispanic and other origin. In that census, people were labeled “white” or “nonwhite.” It wasn’t until 1980 that the census included a non-Hispanic white category. MORE

MAN ON CAMEL: “The March of Abraham” by József Molnár

RELIGION DISPATCHES: Well, it’s been quite a whirlwind week for same-sex marriage, from North Carolina to Obama to Colorado—and, of course, to the many outraged conservatives concerned with preserving traditional marriage, i.e., the time-honored sacred bond between one man and one woman. Why, just last week, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said that marriage has meant just that for over five thousand years. Huh? Time to break out your Bible, Mr. Perkins! Abraham had two wives, Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar. King Solomon had 700 wives, plus 300 concubines and slaves. Jacob, the patriarch who gives Israel its name, had two wives and two concubines. In a humanist vein, Exodus 21:10 warns that when men take additional wives, they must still provide for their previous one. (Exodus 21:16 adds that if a man seduces a virgin and has sex with her, he has to marry her, too.) But that’s not all. In biblical society, when you conquered another city, tribe, or nation, the victorious men would “win” their defeated foes’ wives as part of the spoils. It also commanded levirate marriage, the system wherein, if a man died, his younger brother would have to marry his widow and produce heirs with her who would be considered the older brother’s descendants. Later Islamic and Jewish sources, unclear on these parameters (the prophet Muhammad, of course, had several wives), debated whether it is permissible for a man to marry a three- or four-year-old girl. Now that’s traditional marriage! MORE

PHILLY.COM: A railroad worker was killed today when he was crushed by an 1,800-pound roll of newsprint at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News Schuylkill Printing Plant in Upper Merion. Mark Block, a spokesman for Philadelphia Media Network, the newspapers’ parent company, said the roll apparently had shifted in its boxcar during shipment and fell out about 9:30 a.m. when the train’s engineer opened the door. “Unfortunately it crushed the individual who was right there,” he said. MORE