Phawker

Illustration by POASTERCHILD

BY DUSTIN SLAUGHTER ORWELLIAN DYSTOPIA CORRESPONDENT It is a crisp Saturday morning in late November, and the University of Pennsylvania’s campus is just barely stirring, as I walk into the Silverman building and head towards Room 147, excited about this morning’s roundtable discussion: Spying and the Judiciary: FISA and Other Special Courts. The event is one of seven moderated discussions included in the university’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conference, On the Very Idea of Secret Laws: Transparency and Publicity in Deliberative Democracy. I’m not the only geek fired-up either: a portly man in a suit and tie walks up next to me as we briskly move towards the meeting room. “We’re in for a treat this morning!” he says, his mouth cracked with a grin and his eyes alight. Only one of us would end up attending, however – and it had nothing to do with my lacking a tie.

After taking a seat (and catching out of the corner of my eye NSA’s deputy director John “Chris” Inglis drift into the room, among others), a wiry CERL staffer named Ilya Rudyak walks over and asks for my name. I introduce myself and offer my press badge. “You’re going to have to leave,” he says with a nervous smile. After escorting me out into the hallway, another CERL representative, Claire Finkelstein, says I can stop back in towards the end of the lunch break to ask her some questions.

In other words, this morning’s moderated discussion on secret courts, secret laws, and a rampaging surveillance apparatus is strangely, well, secret.

In fact, every event during this two day conference – with the exception of Chris Inglis’ keynote speech before a packed auditorium the night before – is listed on the university’s law department website, yet completely shielded from press and public scrutiny. Furthermore, none of the event listings even have a full roster of attendees. I find a 14-page list of participant bios outside the room. The packet is chock full of representatives from the defense industry, intelligence community, academia, and think tanks such as the CATO Institute. I return near the end of the attendees’ lunch break and quickly find CERL’s head staff member, Claire Finkelstein. She seems dismayed that I’m actually taking up her earlier invitation. “Is there classified information being discussed here?” I ask Finkelstein.

“No, no classified information, but sensitive topics.”

If there’s no classified information being disclosed here, why is it closed to the public?
(more…)

FRESH AIR


Alexander Payne directed and co-wrote the films Election, About Schmidt, Sideways and The Descendants. He’s directed Jack Nicholson and George Clooney in starring roles and has won two Oscars for best adapted screenplay. His new film, Nebraska, stars Bruce Dern, who won the best actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his performance. Nebraska also just received six Independent Spirit Award nominations, including best feature and best director. In it, Dern plays an old man who is beginning to show signs of dementia — which is maybe why he falls for one of those junk-mail sweepstakes scams and actually believes that he’s won $1 million. He’s convinced that all he needs to do to collect his money is show up at the Lincoln, Neb., address that’s mentioned on the mailing. That won’t be easy because he lives in Billings, Mont., and can no longer drive — so he starts walking. Payne tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that even with a story like Nebraska, he’s always looking for a film’s comic potential. “I approach them all as comedies,” he says. “… When I was reading the script [for Nebraska], I read it as a comedy … but then with moments of gravity or realism to anchor it in our world.” MORE

Possibly the greatest song title ever made. Filmed on location in Hawaii by Antony Crook. From the Rave Tapes box set, out January 21st on Sub Pop. Mogwai plays Union Transfer on May 8th. You have been warned.

THE CATO INSTITUTE: Nearly 40 years ago, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Americans got an unprecedented look behind the cloak of secrecy shielding government surveillance — and what they saw was chilling. A Senate committee headed by Sen. Frank Church uncovered a train of abuses by intelligence agencies stretching back decades, under presidents of both parties. Employing illegal break-ins, mail-opening programs, concealed bugs, bulk interception of telegrams, and telephone wiretaps, these agencies had gathered information about domestic political dissidents, journalists, labor leaders, and even members of Congress and Supreme Court justices. Perhaps most notoriously, the Church Committee revealed that J. Edgar Hoover had conducted a 10-year campaign to destroy and discredit Martin Luther King Jr., seeking to blackmail him into retirement or suicide with illegal recordings of the civil rights leader’s extramarital liaisons. This summer, Americans got the most comprehensive look at the government’s massive surveillance machinery since the Church Committee, by way of leaked documents provided to the press by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden — as well as the government’s own grudging disclosures. As the “Summer of Snowden” stretches into autumn, Americans trying to make sense of the continuing deluge of new revelations may feel as inundated as the analysts who complain that trying to sort through the vast quantities of data flowing through that machine is like “drinking from a firehose.” Fortunately, you don’t need the NSA’s supercomputers to keep track of all the government spying. Here are the most significant programs we’ve learned about to date. Together, they reveal a surveillance machine vastly more powerful than anything Hoover could have dreamed of. MORE

These days, Patti Smith would trade a wheelbarrow full of National Book Awards to be able to write a song this droll and catchy and cool. She plays Boot N’ Saddle on February 20th.

JONATHAN VALANIA: Guitarist John Fahey — drifter, hermit, sorcerer — does for the blues, folk and other American primitive idioms what Duchamp did for nudes descending staircases: His sonic portraits never rely on blurry lines to illustrate the concentric circles of motion and being, managing to suggest the ancient, immediate and infinite all at once. Pretty heady stuff, and if the latter half of his 30-plus recordings sounds a little new age-y, well, you can’t blame him for the watery derivations his disciples managed to popularize. Though heralded as one of the great fingerstyle guitarists of the 20th century, Fahey’s itinerant 40 years of music-making bears the bite marks of as many hellhounds on his trail as any Delta bluesman. Rising iconoclastically out of the ’60s acoustic scene after having already recorded his touchstone works, 1959′s Blind Joe Death and 1963′s Death Chants, Breakdowns, And Military Waltzes, Fahey would alternately soar and stumble into a decades-long hermitage of bourbon, welfare and disease, his seclusion only adding to his mystique. In the ’90s, he emerged a wizened Buddha; a hipster Santa in his dark shades, white beard and pot belly, offering knee rides to a whole new generation of guitar scientists combing through the secret history of elder avant fingertsylists and obliging them with rare gifts from his Revenant label. MORE

THE GUARDIAN: Both John Fahey and Richard Brautigan were makers of mischief as well as myths, who played around with form and tradition. Both seemed to belong to an older era – on the Picador book cover of Trout Fishing In America, Brautigan looks like he would have been quite at home hanging with the Band at Big Pink. In many ways, they were artists in thrall to what Greil Marcus famously called “the old weird America”, the traces of which remained only in folk stories and ballads, in the oldest, most primitive-sounding versions of folk, bluesand country. But they were also, in their different ways, modernists negotiating their way mischievously and not altogether reverently into new forms, new languages. As I found out much later, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death was a title intended to confuse. Likewise the strange overblown sleeve notes – “A disgusting, degenerate, insipid young folklorist from the Croat & Isaiah Nettles Foundation for Ethnological Research meandered mesmerically midst marble mansions in Mattapon, Massachusetts …” Fahey was having his own kind of fun at the expense of blues and folk music collectors, of which, ironically, he was one. The music, though, was something else: intricate, intriguing, multi-layered, resonant. It has stayed with me ever since, becoming, over the years, a constant.

That music is, in the main, solo and acoustic, played on a steel-stringed guitar. I distinctly remember my younger self being somewhat wary of buying an entire album of acoustic guitar instrumentals, but the more I listened to The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death playing in the background as I browsed the racks of a now long-gone second-hand record shop in Camden Town, the more it cast its spell. In Fahey’s hands, a single song can carry echoes of all the older musics he was drawn to – traditional folk ballads, blues, bluegrass, gospel, spirituals – but simultaneously sound somehow new and utterly unique. When he interprets an old song like John Henry or even Bicycle Built for Two, he reinvigorate it with the restless imagination of his playing. On Old Southern Medley, from The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, he even lists the musicians he is evoking: the great American songwriter Stephen Foster, Fahey’s beloved Charley Patton as well as Daniel Decatur Emmett, a self-taught songwriter and musician who founded the first blackface minstrel troupe in 1843.

Fahey’s tastes tended towards the old and overlooked, the strange and the primitive, and his guitar playing seems to summon up the spirits of long-dead blues and ragtime pioneers. More so than anyone apart from maybe the Bob Dylan of The Basement Tapes, he is perhaps the pivotal link between the various, almost-lost folk musics of another, older America and the singers and the contemporary musicians loosely grouped under the rubric of Americana. In a new documentary on Fahey, In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey, which has is doing the rounds of indie film festivals and will be shown by BBC4 in December, the musicologist Rob Bowman, notes: “It’s hard to imagine what contemporary music would be like if people like John Fahey had not been obsessively fascinated with roots American music from the 1920s and 30s. That’s the secret of a whole swathe of modern rock’n'roll. It was his sense of collage, soundscape and dissonance that influence people like [Pete] Townshend, Thurston Moore and Beck.” MORE

RELATED: In Search Of Blind Joe Death

RELATED: Blood On The Frets

GLENN GREENWALD: The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target’s credibility, reputation and authority. The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT” — or signals intelligence, the interception of communications — “assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues. Among the vulnerabilities listed by the NSA that can be effectively exploited are “viewing sexually explicit material online” and “using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls.” The Director of the National Security Agency — described as “DIRNSA” — is listed as the “originator” of the document. Beyond the NSA itself, the listed recipients include officials with the Departments of Justice and Commerce and the Drug Enforcement Administration. MORE

RELATED: GOODSEX: normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman; all else is sexcrime.

DIGBY: One of the things we must understand about all this is the fact that if any part of the US Government dragnet turns up what they think is evidence of a crime, they can pass it on to other agencies. So basically, if they are monitoring all of us,which they are, that means all of our private information can theoretically be used by the government if they can find some connection to a potential crime. All police agencies, whether it’s the DEA or the FBI or Homeland Security (or the Commerce department!) can use such evidence to squeeze possible witnesses, set up stings, infiltrate what they believe to be criminal associations, create informants and otherwise use people who they believe might have something to hide in order to make a case. It’s done all the time. But until now there was no central database available to go fishing in for blackmail material. (And keep in mind that we now know they routinely go back and dummy up the paper trail so the court and the suspect never knows where the original “tip” came from, a practice that might be understandable if it only pertained to confidential informants, but apparently is also used to cover up government surveillance.) These programs create a huge, global matrix of associations (and associations of associations) and a massive record of information about individuals, all of which could be accessed to provide the government with private and intimate details that people might not want the world to see and which could be used to discredit them or get them to cooperate. I think we know where this sort of thing can easily lead. It’s not just “terrorism” at stake here. We have an entire police state apparatus that could use this information and no way of knowing how or why they might be allowed to do it. MORE

ACLU: “This report is an unwelcome reminder of what it means to give an intelligence agency unfettered access to individuals’ most sensitive information. One ordinarily associates these kinds of tactics with the secret police services of authoritarian governments. That these tactics have been adopted by the world’s leading democracy – and the world’s most powerful intelligence agency – is truly chilling.”

RELATED: J. Edgar Hoover had decided to destroy the civil rights movement as it was considered a threat to the status quo. As a result the FBI conducted surveillance on King looking for dirt to destroy his credibility. The FBI had a divide and conquer campaign within the civil rights movement and tried to sow division by false flag operations and anonymous communications to bring terror and paranoia to the activists. The letter was accompanied by FBI recordings of King having extramarital sexual encounters. The FBI’s logic seems to have been that King would rather commit suicide than face the shame of being exposed as an adulterer. MORE

KING,

In view of your low grade… I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII…

King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God… Clearly you don’t believe in any personal moral principles.

King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done.

No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself… I repeat — no person can argue successfully against facts… Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness… King you are done.

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping — Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation. MORE

ROLLING STONE: He doesn’t look how he used to look, of course, all resplendent in buckskin fringe, sometimes sporting an ascot or the Technicolor patchwork vest sewn by his girls, with his suave goatee and his mad Rasputin eyes and his fantastical ability to lunge out of his seat at the judge presiding over his trial, pencil at the ready to jam into the old guy’s throat, before being subdued and thereby helping to cement a guilty verdict. Those days are gone. He’s 79 years old. He’s an old man with a nice head of gray hair but bad hearing, bad lungs, and chipped-and-fractured, prison-dispensed bad dentures. He walks with a cane and lifts it now, in greeting to his visitors, one of whom is a slender, dark-haired woman he calls Star.

“Star!” he says. “She’s not a woman. She’s a star in the Milky Way!”

He shuffles toward her, opening his arms, grinning, and she kind of drifts in his direction.

From a raised platform in the room’s center, two guards armed with pepper spray and truncheons keep an eye on the couple. Star is 25 years old, comes from a town on the Mississippi River, was raised a Baptist, keeps a tidy home, is a prim dresser, has a fun sense of humor. Charlie is probably the most infamous convicted killer of all time. He’s been called the devil for the way he influenced friends to murder on his behalf. He’s spent the past 44 years in prison and nearly 60 years incarcerated altogether, meaning he has spent less than two decades of his life as a free man. He will never get out. For her part, Star has been living in Corcoran for the past seven years, since she was 19. It wasn’t Charlie’s murderous reputation that drew her here but his pro-Earth environmental stance, known as ATWA, standing for air, trees, water and animals. She has stuck around to become his most ardent defender, to run various give-Charlie-a-chance websites (mansondirect.com, atwaearth.com, a Facebook page, a Tumblr page) and to visit him every Saturday and Sunday, up to five hours a day, assuming he’s not in solitary or otherwise being hassled by the Man. “Yeah, well, people can think I’m crazy,” she likes to say. “But they don’t know. This is what’s right for me. This is what I was born for.”

Visiting-room rules allow them a kiss at the beginning and end of each visit. They do this now, a standard peck and hug, then sit across from each other at a table. The first thing you notice about Manson is the X (later changed to a swastika) he carved into his forehead during his trial, to protest his treatment at the hands of the law, an act that was soon copied by his co-defendants – and, all these years later, by the girl sitting across from him, Star, who recently cut an X into her forehead, too. The second thing is how nicely turned out he is. Despite his age, there’s none of that gross old-man stuff about him, no ear hair, no nose hair, no gunk collecting in the corners of his mouth, and his prison-approved blue shirt has not a wrinkle or a food stain on it. He looks pretty great. The third is how softly he speaks, so different from how he was in TV interviews during the Eighties and Nineties, when, for instance, he angled in on Diane Sawyer in her black turtleneck and pretty earrings, roaring, “I’m a gangster, woman. I take money!”

He stands up and looks around. “I thought we’d have some popcorn,” he says, making his way to a cabinet where inmates sometimes stash food. He bends down, looks inside, moves things and heaves up a great sigh of disappointment.

“Well,” he says. “The popcorn’s all gone.”

“I think we ate it all last time,” Star says.

Charlie sighs and takes a seat, seeming lost and befuddled. But then, before I know it, he’s reached out and bounced one of his fingers off the tip of my nose, fast as a frog’s tongue, dart and recoil.

He leans forward. I can feel his breath in my ear.

“I’ve touched everybody on the nose, man,” he says, quietly. “There ain’t nobody I can’t touch on the nose.” He tilts to one side and says, “I know what you’re thinking. Just relax.” A while later, he says, “If I can touch you, I can kill you.”

He puts his hand on my arm and starts rubbing it. An hour after that, we’re talking about sex at the ranch in the old days, what it was like, all those girls hanging around, a few guys, too, the group-sex scene. “It was all this,” he says, putting his hand on my arm again, sliding it up into the crook of my elbow and down. “That’s what it was like. We all went with that. There’s no saying no. If I slide up, you’ve got to go with the flow. You were with anyone anyone wants.” I nod, because for a moment, with his hand on my skin, sliding up, I can see how it was. It feels OK. It feels unexpectedly good to go with the flow, even if it is Charlie Manson’s flow and even if, since he’s touching me, he can kill me, which is probably how it was way back when, too. MORE

RELATED: The Life And Times Of Charles Manson

“Amerikan Hypocrisy” by SAINT_ISACARIOT

THE ATLANTIC: After years in the political wilderness, marijuana lobbyists find themselves in a strange position as 2014 approaches: Suddenly their power and support are growing, lawmakers are courting them, and the prospects look brighter to build on major progress the movement made in 2012. Last year, voters in Colorado and Washington legalized recreational use of marijuana, the first states to do so. Those victories have bestowed new legitimacy on the cannabis community, giving it a better field on which to fight. By engaging in political-money games, endorsing candidates, confederating cannabis-related businesses, and old-fashioned lobbying, the pot movement is working to expand the playing field to more states and confront the federal government’s long-standing and entrenched opposition to marijuana infrastructure head on.[...]

Cannabis advocates view 2014 as an important year. Colorado and Washington’s adult-use laws take effect January 1, and it’s the first year that those states can generate tax revenue from the legalized drug. Research by the ArcView Group, an advisory firm that connects cannabis-industry entrepreneurs, found that legalized marijuana is one of the fastest growing markets in the U.S., with profits expected to soar by 64 percent to $2.34 billion next year. Legalization supporters hope that once states and legislatures see how much state income is to be had, more lawmakers will be swayed to follow suit. And with 2014 bringing midterm elections, marijuana lobbyists are hoping that more state ballot initiatives for legalization—like the one poised for Alaska—will pass.

Unlike the marriage-equality movement, which struggled to scope and focus its efforts in its early days, experts say the marijuana lobby is learning more quickly from its mistakes and successes. Brookings’ Hudak said the movement is “becoming a lot politically savvier” and learning to choose battles in states where it has a better chance of winning. But cannabis groups remain splintered, and have arguably failed to harvest the leverage they could gain by working more together more closely. In some states, there are campaigns pushing legalization through both legislation and referenda—perhaps an unnecessary overlap of resources. Currently campaigners are pushing bills to legalize in state legislatures in Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. In Oregon, there is both a legislative push and an attempt to put legalization on the ballot—despite a similar bill failing by nearly 7 points in 2012. MORE

RELATED: Buzzkill

NATION OF CHANGE: The few rich men who control the Capitol have successfully managed to consolidate the majority of the nation’s wealth into their hands. The Capitol has taken away food stamps from hungry families and given it to their rich benefactors in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and other forms of corporate welfare. Career politicians are even smashing up the possessions of homeless people with a sledgehammer with impunity, while wearing designer clothes.

These rich men also control the news broadcasted on the Capitol’s airwaves that brainwashes the impoverished masses into believing their suffering is their own fault, that they’re only starving because they don’t know how to work hard, and that those who control all the resources must somehow deserve it because their status makes them more worthy. However, the rich men still aren’t satisfied. They’re already trying to force through a trade deal kept secret from the public that would subvert what remains of democracy and install global corporate rule.

When the poor and oppressed dare to speak out against the injustice of the ruling class, the Capitol’s peacekeeping forces suppress their protests with extraordinary brutality. When the people try to vote out their corrupt leaders in the electoral process, the ruling class simply drowns out the democratic process by dumping truckloads of money into incumbents’ pockets. Meanwhile, the impoverished masses are constantly told to be thankful for their freedom, and are given mindless distractions to keep their minds off of what their real problems are.

I’m not talking about The Hunger Games. I’m talking about our present situation.

Instead of creating jobs, these companies are using these tax breaks to buy back their own stock, like Walmart does to the tune of $7.6 billion per year. As the progressive think tank Demos discovered, Walmart could instead use the money dedicated to stock buybacks, which only enrich a small handful of corporate executives, to instead pay their hourly employees $14.89 an hour, without raising their prices by even a cent. This billion-dollar corporation even has the balls to tell the customers already buying their stuff that they should also donate food to Walmart employees who make poverty wages so they can have a Thanksgiving dinner.

McDonald’s has gone even lower in their greedy quest for ever-increasing profits. Even though the fast food company makes $24 billion in annual revenue, which is enough money to be ranked as the world’s 90th largest economy, they refuse to pay their employees a living wage, instead asking them to make outlandish sacrifices. McDonald’s recently put up a website encouraging their employees to cut their food into smaller portions to make it last longer, sell their Christmas gifts online to have enough money to pay bills, and to quit complaining.

Tom Corbett and other right-wing governors across the United States, put in office through this flooding of corporate cash into elections, are obediently following their orders from their corporate benefactors. Their role is to streamline laws written by corporate lobbyists behind closed doors (ALEC), passed down an assembly line from posh resorts to statehouses. These laws are designed to systematically bilk the poor out of the remaining scraps they cling to and redistribute them upward to the ruling class. These laws are also designed to strip public resources of tax dollars while enriching corporations with hefty corporate welfare packages.

As Senator Bernie Sanders has said, 1 percent of the population in the US owns 38 percent of all wealth. At the same time, the bottom 60% of Americans owns just 2.3% of the wealth. And this small number of wealthy Americans have been allowed to purchase influence in government both through the lobbying process and through unlimited political contributions. The ruling class have bought the government of the United States, which is currently the greatest empire in the history of the world,occupying over 130 countries. Thus, the plutocracy not only controls the distribution of resources in our country, but all over the world.

Just 9 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, which is relatively proportional to the percentage of Americans who aren’t living in poverty or one paycheck away from it. The United States ranks 4th out of all nations in income inequality. But the US isn’t a poor country. Rather, its rich owners have amassed such a glacier of wealth and kept it to themselves that this wealth gap will only increase without interference from Congress. And because Congress is comprised mainly of millionaires, and merely running for Congress requires amassing millions of dollars, anyone who wants to get elected has to swear allegiance to the ruling class to even have a chance of winning. MORE

RELATED: For the first time ever, according to Forbes magazine, the 400 richest Americans have more than $2 trillion in combined wealth. And, a fifth of that amount is held by just 10 individuals. Of those top 10 richest Americans, six hail from two families—the Kochs and the Waltons—who are destroying our economy and corrupting our politics. We all should be outraged. Arguably, the two most urgent tasks in this country are to transform our economy and to clean up our politics, and these two families stand in the way of both. Our economy is marked by stagnating wages, which have sunk to poverty levels for millions of workers. The key driver of our low-wage economy is Walmart, with its 11,000 stores worldwide that pay so little that many of its workers get by on food stamps. The four main heirs to Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton, rank numbers six, seven, eight, and nine on the billionaires list. Three sit on the Walmart board, including Rob Walton, the board chair. The problem is, of course, not just economics. It’s the way that economics interacts with politics. The Waltons—experts at tax avoidance—exercise a subtler, but equally corrosive, influence of our politics through their continued role in the world’s largest global corporation, Walmart. Here is an example of how they operate. A year ago, Walmart announced it wanted to build six stores in Washington, D.C. This past summer, after a spirited community campaign, the D.C. City Council passed a resolution that would have required giant big box stores to pay a living wage. The day before the vote, Walmart very publicly announced that it would not build three of the stores if the resolution became law. The threat worked. The D.C. mayor vetoed the living wage bill. MORE

A short film by Wes Anderson, funded by Prada and starring Jason Schwartzman as a hapless race car driver in Italy circa 1955 who literally crashes into his ancestral homeland. Ciao, baby.

RELATED: Because you can never have too much Wes Anderson in your life, American Laundromat Records will pay homage to the beloved director next year by releasing a tribute album featuring covers of songs from his past films. [...] Anderson is known for putting together exceptional soundtracks for his movies that fans have begun look forward to almost as much as the movie itself. The tribute album will most likely come sometime before the release of Anderson’s latest film The Grand Budapest Hotel (starring Ralph Fiennes, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and more), out March 7, 2014. MORE

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first published in issue #104 of MAGNET MAGAZINE.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA How’s this sound for a dream job description:

Sit around all day rolling doobies with Wes Anderson, reading script pages as he pecks them out on a vintage Smith-Corona and then firing up your iPod for the perfect vintage Kinks b-side/deep-cut mid-60’s Stones track/David Bowie song sung in Portuguese to go with each scene. Must have and impeccable ear, a kaleidoscopic mind and an encyclopedic record collection epic in its scope and unknowable vastness. Some time travel required.

The bit about smoking doobies and the typewriter is just my personal fantasia, but the rest of it pretty much describes music supervisor extraordinaire Randall Poster’s actual day job. He first broke into the biz back in 1995 working with Harmony Korine on his career-making debut, Kids. He’s been the music supervisor on every Wes Anderson film since Rushmore. To date he has more than 98 film and TV credits, working with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, David Fincher,  Richard Linklater, Todd Hayne, and Sam Mendes.

His current project is Volume 2 of the Boardwalk Empire soundtrack, featuring vintage Prohibition-era tunes sung by people like Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and Neko Case. Which was a good excuse to get him on the phone and ask him the question everyone wants to ask him: How do I get your job?

MAGNET: Many people reading this, present company included, will be wondering how do you get this dream job?

RANDALL POSTER: It all started all pretty organically. I met Harmony when they were starting to make Kids and I was really impressed with script. The title page of Kids read, “Kids: By The World Famous Writer Harmony Korine”. He was all of 19 years old at the time. I just had to meet him  With Wes, somebody introduced us while he was making Bottle Rocket and I was so impressed with the film and so impressed with his point of view that I just basically made it an oath to stand by him for the rest of our lives. That’s how we maintained our relationship over the course of eight movies.

MAGNET: What advice would you offer to other people who would be interested in pursing this line of work?

RANDALL POSTER: My advice would be to throw in with your contemporaries who want to make movies and find the person you want to be the director and find the person you want to be the cinematographer and make something. I think that’s the best way to do it.

MAGNET: How many records do you own?

RANDALL POSTER: Tens of thousands. Mostly CDs. I used have great vinyl collection that I took across the country a couple of times and unfortunately I moved into a house, and I’ve never lived in a house before, and I kept the boxes in the garage and I didn’t know that garages could flood.

MAGNET: How many records do you think you lost in that incident?

RANDALL POSTER: 5,000 to 7,500 records, basically all my vinyl. I’m old enough that I was collecting records before there were CDs.

MAGNET: You mentioned you were old enough that vinyl was your primary form of music, so how old are you?

RANDALL POSTER: I don’t want to say.

MAGNET: Because?

RANDAL POST: I’d rather not.

MAGNET: Let’s talk about Boardwalk Empire. One question that I always wanted to ask someone involved in the project is that most of the music involved seems very period-appropriate, but the opening credits is a Brian Jonestown Massacre song. I know they’ve been around a long time, but I’m pretty sure they haven’t been around since Prohibition.

RANDALL POSTER: I think that’s where HBO and people who are savvier than I am at brining a broader audience to the show, I think they saw that as a key attraction. I think at some point it dawned on people that having something contemporary at the top of the show was a better strategy than something from the 1920′s.

MAGNET: Let’s talk about the process of making Volume 2 of the Boardwalk Empire soundtrack. The window of time we’re talking about here is roughly 1920-1923, is that about right?

RANDALL POSTER: In season four it’s 1924, but we started in 1920. In the 20’s what’s really happening is that ragtime is becoming jazz in 1920. Then in ’24, the most revolutionary moment that is happening is that Louis Armstrong joins Fletcher Henderson’s band in 1924. So you come to see Armstrong’s solo capabilities and his unique sound as far as adapting the arrangements to suit Armstrong’s particular sound and skills and jazz is never the same.

MAGNET: I’m guessing Steve Buscemi is a big music head? Do you guys talk about music a lot?

RANDALL POSTER: We talk about it a little bit. Steve’s grandfather played with Jimmy Durante and Jimmy Durante is just emerging around the period that Boardwalk Empire is set in. God willing we’re into another year and another season and we’ll get to Jimmy Durante.

MAGNET: So in Volume 2 you have David Johansen, Elvis Costello, Loudon and Rufus Wainright, Neko Case, Patti Smith, St. Vincent, among others. What’s the criterion for selecting singers to participate?

RANDALL POSTER: These songs are really hard to sing. This material is not easy. We incline ourselves toward singers we feel have an appreciation and a grounding in the repertoire.

MAGNET: Right now you are finishing up post-production work on Wes Anderson’s new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. What can you tell me about it?

RANDALL POSTER: I can tell you that you’re going to love it.

MAGNET: Is it true that The Royal Tenenbaums started with a sentence that Wes Anderson wrote down on a piece of paper that said: Richie Tenenbaum steps out holding his tennis bag, wearing a Bjorn Borg head band.

RANDALL POSTER: I still have that piece of paper. Basically, after he wrote that down, in no time we knew 80% of the songs were were going to use before there was even a script.

MAGNET: How did you arrive at the idea of using David Bowie songs sung in Portuguese for Life Aquatic.

RANDALL POSTER: The story I tell is that when Wes was writing The Life Aquatic we used to meet on Sundays and I’d read the new pages, and this went on for a couple of months. One afternoon we got together and I was reading the pages and the one scene was Pele comes on deck and plays a David Bowie song in Portuguese. And that was it. Then by the lord’s grace we found Seu Jorge and we knew by virtue of his audition that he could sing, but we had no idea how brilliant he was. Subsequently before Wes started to shoot the movie we made a list of 13 David Bowie songs and over the course of shooting or in the latter parts of pre-production I went over a couple of times and recorded Jorge doing all these songs. He had to basically create them because he was not familiar with the David Bowie canon. He basically, through alchemy, transformed these pieces into bass nova. That’s how it came to be. Once we had them and they were so wonderful, that at the end of almost of every location shot, we’d bring in Jorge and do another one on camera.

MAGNET: What was Bowie’s reaction?

RANDALL POSTER: He loved it.

MAGNET:  How could he not? What are you listening to now that’s currently blowing your mind? Are you still able to listen to music for pleasure?

RANDALL POSTER: Yeah, I am. That’s one of the great gifts I’ve been given. I can still listen like a civilian. Let’s see, the new Washed Out record, I’m listening to these re-mixes by these guys Boys Noize, I’ve been listening to the new Kendrick Lamar, I’ve been listening to Dog Blood, which is a Skrillex thing.

MAGNET: Is there a form of music that you see no redeeming value in?

RANDALL POSTER: No. I wouldn’t say that, but I would say it’s taken me longer… classical music was never really my music of choice, so that’s been the music that I’ve been slowly coming to appreciate as I’ve gotten older.

MAGNET: If you could go back and music supervise any film from that last 50 years or so, what would it be?

RANDALL POSTER: American Graffiti.

MAGNET: And what would you do differently?

RANDALL POSTER: I wouldn’t do anything differently.

FRESH AIR

Americans remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the president who led the country through the Great Depression and World War II. He bolstered the nation’s spirits with his confidence, strength and optimism, despite being crippled by polio, a disability that’s largely invisible in photographs and newsreels of his presidency. But historian James Tobin says, despite misimpressions to the contrary, Americans of Roosevelt’s day were well aware of his disability. In fact, Tobin says, Roosevelt’s struggle to overcome his affliction was an important part of the personal narrative that fueled his political career. Tobin tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies, “[Roosevelt] only discovered who he really was through the ordeal of polio. … It gave him a kind of confidence in his own strength that perhaps no one can have until you’re tested.” Roosevelt contracted polio at the age of 39, and Tobin’s new book explores his battle with the illness and the ways it molded his character and influenced his rise in the Democratic Party. Tobin has written previous books about the Wright brothers and war correspondent Ernie Pyle. His new book is The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio To Win The Presidency. MORE

RELATED: In the early ’60s, Dave Van Ronk, still in his 20s, had become the grand honcho of the Washington Square folk scene in New York. He never managed to get as far beyond that role as he deserved. (His autobiography, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, helped inspire Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie, Inside Llewyn Davis.) Perhaps the fine new anthology Down in Washington Square will give Van Ronk, who died in 2002, a long-needed boost. Van Ronk was not a rambler like Woody Guthrie or even a New York City outsider like Bob Dylan, so it’s understandable that he would see the folk-music-revival movement as his favorite neighborhood phenomenon. Besides, he never considered himself strictly a folk performer: His first love was traditional jazz tunes. Down in Washington Square does a particularly fine job of presenting Van Ronk as a conveyer, an apostle even, of diverse modes of old music. It enables him to be black, white, male, female, young, old, a murderer and a martyr. MORE