andrewromano:

He heard voices, did drugs and fell apart. Can the Beach Boys’ reunion help put Brian Wilson back together again?

To answer that question, I spent weeks observing rehearsals, interviewing the band, attending concerts, and listening to the forthcoming album. My feature story appears in this week’s Newsweek. Here’s how it begins: 

Brian Wilson, the lumbering savant who wrote, produced and sang an outlandish number of immortal pop songs back in the 1960s with his band, the Beach Boys, is swiveling in a chair, belly out, arms dangling, next to his faux-grand piano at the cavernous Burbank, Calif. studio where he and the rest of the group’s surviving members are rehearsing for their much-ballyhooed 50th Anniversary reunion tour, which is set to start in three days. At 24, Wilson shelved what would have been his most avant-garde album, Smile, and retreated for decades into a dusky haze of drug abuse and mental illness; now, 45 years later, he has reemerged, stable but still somewhat screwy, to give the whole sun-and-surf thing a final go.

Before that can happen, though, the reconstituted Beach Boys must learn how to sing “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the first new A-side that Wilson has written for the band since 1980. They are not entirely happy about this. Earlier, I heard keyboardist Bruce Johnston, who replaced Wilson on the road in 1965, talking to the group’s tour manager about an upcoming satellite-radio gig. “Just so you know,” the manager said, “Sirius wants you to perform ‘That’s Why God Made the Radio’ tomorrow night.”

“Oh really?” Johnston responded. “And how are we going to do that when we don’t know it?”

And so the band has gathered, once again, around Wilson’s piano. I’d like to imagine that this is how it was when they first accustomed their vocal cords to, say, “California Girls.” Except it’s not, exactly: back then, in 1965, Wilson was the maestro, conducting each singer as his falsetto floated skyward and his fingers pecked out the accompaniment. Now he stares at a teleprompter and sings when he’s told to sing, ceding his bench to one member of the 10-man backing band that will buffer the Beach Boys in concert and looking on while another orchestrates the harmonies and handles the loftier notes. At first, the blend is rough: Wilson strains to hit the high point of the hook; frontman Mike Love and guitarist Al Jardine miss their cues. But after eight or nine passes the stray voices begin to mesh. They begin to sound like the Beach Boys. Close your eyes, shutting out Wilson’s swoosh of silver hair and Love’s four golden rings, and 1965 isn’t such a stretch.

Or it isn’t until someone’s iPhone rings. Jardine’s. He turns away from the piano and presses the device to his ear. “I’m going to have to call you back, because—wait, what?” He hangs up, shaking his head. “Dick Clark just passed away,” he says. The room begins to murmur; the makeup lady covers her mouth with her hand.

Over the next few minutes, I watch as each Beach Boy absorbs the news. Love makes light of it, pretending to strangle Jardine behind his back. “You’re next, Al,” he purrs. Johnston, a former A&R man at Columbia, pitches Clark’s death as an angle for my story. “It’s kind of ironic to have our television hero in music pass away while we’re doing this next big move,” he explains

And then there’s Wilson—always the conduit, the live wire, the pulsing limbic system of the Beach Boys. As his biographer David Leaf once put it, “Brian Wilson’s special magic in the early and mid-1960s was that he was at one with his audience … Brian had a teenage heart, until it was broken.” At first, Wilson says nothing. Then I overhear him talking to Jardine.

“We’re 70 fucking years old,” he says. “You’ll be 70 in September. I’ll be 70 in June. I’m worried about being 70.”

“It’s still a few months off,” Jardine says.

“That’s true,” Wilson mutters. He pauses for a few seconds, looking away from his bandmate. “I want to know how did we get here?” he finally says. “How did we ever fucking get here? That’s what I want to know.”

Read the rest here. 

Photo: Brian in his Bel Air home studio, circa 1970-71.

Got your #longread for the week.

amyohconnor:

!!!!!

Awwwwwwwww yeeeeeeeeeeeah.

joepompeo:

“I worked at Newsweek for five years. Reporters would write stories with a whole bunch of ‘tk’s so a fact checker could go do it. What kind of accountability is that? $100,000-a-year people depending on someone making $25,000 to get their story right.”

— He has a good point here. But still?

tk tk tk tkt tk tk tumblr intern fill in response here. 

“At poolside Marilyn took off her blue bathrobe, hiding her body as she slid into the water. A few moments later, when she raised herself from the water, I could see that her panties were gone. She’d done it! And she was having a lot of fun.”

[Text excerpted from Marilyn & Me: A Photographer’s Memories (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday). Photo by Lawrence Schiller. More here.]

picturedept:

The Cataracts by Andrew McConnell

Here in The Cataracts, Irish photographer Andrew McConnell braves the rapids of the Congo River to document the amazing Wagenia fishermen going about their daily catch—a livelihood that goes back centuries. Andrew takes the viewer into the midst of this drama: he is literally in the churning water, and in some pictures captures the perspective of the fish being caught.

For some of the shots I used a waterproof housing so that I could get low in the water and get a different perspective. I didn’t use the housing when I was on the tolimos because it made shooting very difficult. And after a while I didn’t use it in the pirogues (wooden canoes) either because, even though we were navigating some heavy white water, I found that the fishermen were so skillful at steering through the rapids that I never felt worried about capsizing—in fact, I barely got wet. Much to my astonishment a fisherman would sometimes dive into a raging torrent and just as I’d be thinking, my God we’ll never see that guy again, he would pop up beside a pirogue 30 yards away.

Andrew has traveled extensively, and his work covers a range of subjects. His enigmatic portraits, called The Last Colony,” document Sahrawi refugees and won the World Press Photo award for Portraits in 2011. Surf’s Up in Gaza ran in Newsweek International and won the Society of Publication Designers award in the category for Feature: News/Reportage.

For Andrew’s full account of shooting “The Cataracts,” read an interview here. And visit our Tumblr’s page to watch a wonderful short film he made about this project.

This is so awesome. Tumblr exclusives, you guys! Do click that short film he made about the project. We love when photographers really take us inside the production process and tip their hand a tad. 

meredithbklyn:

fullcredit:

Remember what I said about Jill Biden? I take it back. 

(h/t Meredith)

ETA: It’s a parody account, apparently. Whatever. It’s still amazing, and I like to think it has Jill’s blessing. 

consistently one of the funniest in my twitterverse

Well, it has our blessing. And we’re the mainstream media! So that counts for something, right?

In which our Pinterest boards get a Poynter shoutout. We’re coming for you, USA Today.

blakegopnik:

DAILY PIC: We tend to know one thing about Lucio Fontana, the pioneer of post-war Italian abstraction: He broke through the fetish of the pristine rectangular canvas, art’s ideal neutral support, by slicing into it with a knife. A huge Fontana retrospective at Gagosian Gallery in New York – the subject of this whole week of Daily Pics – shows that there’s much, much more we need to know. For instance, that the slicing wasn’t always done with the razor-sharp, James Bond elegance we imagine. Today’s Daily Pic, titled “Concetto Spaziale, New York 10,” from 1962, has a Jack the Ripper visciousness. Fontana takes his knife to large sheets of resistant copper, and the result evokes can-openers more than scalpels. And by cutting into polished metal rather than canvas, Fontana’s gesture seems to pull him back all the way to the gold grounds of medieval icons. His gesture is so bold it has a whiff of sacrilege, not just of art-world rebellion.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the  Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

think-progress:

There are only two countries that have child poverty rates over 20%: Romania and the United States.

Wow. Let’s take care of our kids, you guys.