Tag Archives: interview

Behind the Scenes With CDZA, the YouTube Musical-Comedy Stars

by John Bui Posted on July 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Whenever we sit down to write our stuff, we always say, ‘Man, this is the stupidest shit’—but then when it all comes together, it works!” On that note, Michael Thurber ends his break and heads back into Terminus Recording Studios, which is something of a landmark in the Manhattan Theater District. Paul McCartney and Liza Minnelli have recorded here. It’s in the same building where Tupac Shakur was shot five times.

It’s also where Thurber’s crew, CDZA (Collective Cadenza), creates musical videos with a meta twist. “The Beatles Argument,” for instance, features a lovers’ quarrel sung almost entirely in Beatles lyrics.

“Hip Hop Shopping Spree,” a three-minute rap medley, is accompanied by a calculation of the cumulative retail value of the songs’ product placements—almost $57 million. One video samples the history of misheard lyrics, from Carl Orff to Pink. Another chronicles the history of wooing and seducing men in song, ranging from Aretha Franklin (“A Natural Woman,” 1967) to Riskay (“Smell Yo Dick,” 2008).

And another takes the theme song from the ’90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and translates it into foreign languages and then back to English using Google Translate; the broken lyrics are performed to violins and a rhythm section.

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Behind the Scenes With CDZA, the YouTube Musical-Comedy Stars

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Cook Your Berries. Drink Dark-Roast Coffee Instead of Light. Let Your Garlic Sit.

by elvys303 Posted on July 20, 2013

Mother Jones

Normally I ignore the latest diet craze. But I can’t resist the message of Jo Robinson’s new book Eating on the Wild Side. In it, Robinson argues that humanity’s 10,000-year-old fixation on agriculture has stripped our most commonly eaten foods of most of their phytonutrients, which are plant-based chemical compounds that keep us healthy. Her recent New York Times op-ed on the topic inspired me to pen a paean to edible weeds. But you don’t need to go feral to boost your phytonutrient intake, Robinson shows. She gives tips on how to navigate the supermarket produce shelf and the farmers market to find phytonutrient-dense foods not very far off from what our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived on. After a phone conversation recently, I hung up with the urge to crack open a hoppy beer—and not out of stress.

Mother Jones: What exactly is a phytonutrient?

Jo Robinson: The technical term for phytonutrients is polyphenols. They are substances produced by plants, a lot of them for self-defense. Twenty-five thousand different ones have been identified. Vitamins E, C, and beta-carotene are examples. Many of them are potent antioxidants, while some don’t have antioxidant activity but boost our own antioxidant defense system. Others are involved in communication between cells, many affect gene expression, and others have detoxifying functions.

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Cook Your Berries. Drink Dark-Roast Coffee Instead of Light. Let Your Garlic Sit.

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Caught on Film: The Dark World of Truck Stop Sex Workers

by Laura Brown Posted on July 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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“The truth is, making the movie was a really traumatic experience. I suspect I may have developed some mild PTSD.” This is how filmmaker Alexander Perlman describes shooting Lot Lizard, his hypnotic new documentary about truck stop prostitution. While his claim might sound hyperbolic—or like a canny bit of marketing—it rings true: He logged thousands of miles and hundreds of hours to make the film, braving roach motels, crack highs, and homicidal pimps. Indeed, what Perlman captures in Lot Lizard is visceral and harrowing.

The film’s three protagonists—Betty, Monica, and Jennifer—work on the fringes of the trucking industry. America’s Independent Truckers’ Association estimates there are nearly 5,000 truck stops across the country, and although many offer nondescript places to sleep, eat, or shower, many others host a bustling shadow economy of sex and drugs. Lurk on truckers’ online message boards long enough and you’ll likely come across what amounts to a guide to interstate sex, replete with lurid tall tales (see here, here, and here).

A police intervention program in Texas that works?

Life on the road, they say, is lonely. To quote one trucker in Lot Lizard: “These walls close in on you. Being in this truck can actually make you crazy.” As Perlman discovered, however, the women—and, occasionally, men—who cater to this loneliness don’t fare much better. Betty and Monica are addicted to crack, Monica is homeless when she’s not crashing with friends or sympathetic drivers, and both are entangled in dysfunctional relationships. “I can feel money,” Betty says, a kind of human divining rod, and yet she spends most of the film desperately searching for just that.

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Caught on Film: The Dark World of Truck Stop Sex Workers

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What If Your High School History Teacher Had Been Totally Wasted?

by colord8609 Posted on July 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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“History is written by the victors—but told best by the shit-faced.”

So reads a title card in an episode of Drunk History, the incredibly funny new Comedy Central show adapted from the eponymous web series. The premise is simple: Comedians, writers, and barflies are fed copious amounts of booze and then asked to narrate key scenes from American history, as costumed actors such as Jack Black and Zooey Deschanel fill in with lip-synched reenactments. The TV version—whose eight-episode first season premieres Tuesday, July 9, at 10 p.m. on both coasts—includes comedian Bob Odenkirk as Richard Nixon. And one of the web episodes is a fantastic account of the friendship between Abraham Lincoln (Will Ferrell) and Frederick Douglass (Oscar-nominated actor Don Cheadle). Watch:

So can we trust these sodden accounts of our national heritage?

“All stories are 100 percent fact-checked in advance,” promises Derek Waters, the show’s creator, executive producer, and featured actor. Each narrator is given notes to ensure a loosely tethered historical accuracy. Once the person has internalized these morsels of the past, he or she is bar-tended to in excess, and then they’re off. “We let them say whatever they want, but we don’t want anything that’s wrong,” Waters continues. “After all, we’re learning history here.” Actually, the casual flubs provide some of the show’s most amusing moments. One soused narrator substitutes soul icon James Brown for abolitionist John Brown. And in the clip above, the narrator briefly misidentifies Frederick Douglass as actor Richard Dreyfuss, and Abe Lincoln as Bill Clinton.

The whole idea for Drunk History was born of—what else?—liberal alcohol consumption. Out on the town one night, Waters and his friend Jake Johnson (Nick on the Fox comedy New Girl) began riffing about the singer Otis Redding and the circumstances of his 1967 death in a plane crash. Johnson started drunkenly reciting an urban legend about how Redding knew he was going to die before he boarded his doomed flight.

“He kept insisting that Otis said to his girlfriend, ‘No, I’m serious, you take care of yourself!’ before he got on the plane, and I was thinking ‘Oh, this is such bullshit,'” Waters recalls. “He was having so much trouble telling a story he truly believed was true, and I just started picturing this reenactment in which Otis Redding is staring at the camera being all like, ‘Shut the fuck up, this never happened.'”

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What If Your High School History Teacher Had Been Totally Wasted?

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"The Bling Ring": An Artful, Fun Examination of Why Hating America Is Often Completely Justified

by testdonekAQW Posted on June 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Bling Ring
A24
87 minutes

Emma Watson is developing a habit of robbing the homes of Hollywood celebrities. Earlier this month, ensemble comedy This Is the End (sort of a Left Behind for potheads) hit theaters. That film, set in Los Angeles during the Rapture, features Watson brandishing a gigantic ax and angrily stealing food from James Franco‘s house. In The Bling Ring, Watson assumes a similar role, burglarizing the homes of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson, and Audrina Patridge.

Watson plays Nicki, one-fifth of the “Bling Ring,” a group of disaffected, bored, fashionista teenagers who decide to rob the houses of famous people. (The rest of the crew is played—with commendable Valspeak dedication—by Katie Chang, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, and Israel Broussard.) Their months-long crime spree snags them a small fortune in jewels, clothing, booze, and designer bags.

As you might have heard, this film is based on actual events. Writer/director Sofia Coppola adapted journalist Nancy Jo Sales‘ amazing 2010 Vanity Fair article (now a 268-page book) profiling the Bling Ring, a.k.a. the “Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch.” And Coppola did so in a way that emphasizes blunt sentiment and sly commentary over exploitative cinematic impulses. “Sofia and I met several times over the year she was writing the script,” Sales writes in an email. “I was a fan of the director’s and knowing her work there’s no way it could have turned into an exploitation flick…It’s a dark story, a cautionary tale.”

A predictable avalanche of infamy and giddy public fascination followed the arrests of the real-life Bling Ringers. “Think of a major news organization and they were at the Bling Ring hearings,” Sales says. “The New York Times put it on the cover of the Sunday Styles section.” What followed the requisite press coverage was a cyclone of ill-gotten, reality-TV-abetted fame that wasn’t so much a train wreck as it was a heaving paroxysm of America’s worst voyeuristic and material tendencies. (To understand exactly what I mean, watch this psychotic slice of television.)

Sofia Coppola wanted to do everything she could to avoid further fueling the stardom of the real-life Bling Ring—hence her script’s heavy fictionalization and the name changes. For the same reason, I’m declining to print the Bling Ring members’ real names, and will not delve into their post-arraignment exploits. Instead, I will direct you to Sales’ riveting Vanity Fair story and encourage you to watch the film’s insane trailer here:

The movie is artful and wickedly fun, and pulled off with a welcome maturity. To get her actors into character, Coppola had them stage a mock home invasion. “I believe it was her sister-in-law’s house,” The Bling Ring star Israel Broussard tells me. “She gave us a detailed list, by brand name, color, designer of the cloths we needed to get in the closet, shoes, handbags…Sofia gave us an address, the list, and told us to hop in the minivan and go!” The scene in which the Bling Ring raids Paris Hilton’s house was filmed on-site—the socialite opened up her Beverly Hills mansion for the cast and crew to recreate the robbery. Hilton’s home is located in a mega-wealthy gated community where film crews aren’t permitted. So Coppola and company had to sneak in, shoot the sequences, and get the hell out of Dodge. “Paris was very gracious,” Broussard says. They then made their swift getaway—an exit befitting the story of the adolescent gang they unlovingly portray.

The Bling Ring gets released on Friday, June 21. The film is rated R for teen drug and alcohol use, and for language including some brief sexual references. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin cohosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

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"The Bling Ring": An Artful, Fun Examination of Why Hating America Is Often Completely Justified

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"Veep" Creator Armando Iannucci on Why He’d Never, Ever Allow Joe Biden on The Show

by Edbre23ne Posted on June 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Armando Iannucci, the acclaimed satirist and creator of the HBO comedy Veep, is a self-described longtime politics geek. When he was growing up in a Scottish-Italian household in Glasgow, he stayed up late to watch American election results—the first US presidential election he watched with a budding fascination was in 1976, when Carter trumped Ford. His childhood attraction to observing UK and US politics evidently carried over into adulthood. The 49-year-old writer/director has a number of well-regarded political satires under his belt, and he’s influenced such comic darlings as Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Ricky Gervais.

Since the mid-1990s, Iannucci has been noted for a patented mold of rollicking commentary—a brand of comedy that takes mischievous deromanticization of political elites, and filters it through his rapid-fire sardonicism. (Prime examples are his work in British television including The Day Today and The Thick of It, and the latter’s brilliant 2009 spin-off film In the Loop.) Many of his scripts are famous for their blitzes of carefully constructed, linguistically acrobatic profanity that’s acidic enough to qualify as minor human rights abuses.

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"Veep" Creator Armando Iannucci on Why He’d Never, Ever Allow Joe Biden on The Show

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Republicans Want to Ban Abortions After 20 Weeks. Here’s How One Group Is Fighting Back

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on June 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based nonprofit, is at the center of the key legal battles over abortion and contraception.

CRR filed the lawsuit that forced the Obama administration to drop its effort to restrict access to Plan B One-Step—a brand of what is popularly known as the morning-after pill—this week, making emergency contraception available over-the-counter to everyone. The group is also leading the legal fight against bans on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which a dozen states have passed in the last three years. And next week, the Supreme Court is expected to announce whether or not it will hear Oklahoma’s appeal of court decisions CRR won blocking both a mandatory sonogram law and a ban on medication abortion in that state.

CRR’s president and CEO, Nancy Northup, was in Washington this week to talk to legislators about what’s happening in the states and to promote her group’s proposal for a Bill of Reproductive Rights. Launched last year, the effort calls on federal legislators to pass protections for abortion and other reproductive health care at the federal level. The GOP-led House, however, was moving in the opposite direction this week, with the judiciary committee debating Rep. Trent Franks’ (R-Ariz.) bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks nationwide. Mother Jones spoke to Northup during her visit.

Mother Jones: The DOJ’s latest offer is that the FDA will make Plan B One-Step available over-the-counter for everyone, but the appeals court’s ruling last week said that it needed to make all types of two-pill EC available. So the administration’s response didn’t actually answer the court’s ruling. What’s next?

Northup: We’re going to back to the court saying, “Enough with the gamesmanship.” It’s safe and effective. All these pills are safe and effective for use by all ages and they should all be over the counter. And that the generic option, which is less expensive, should be available. They’re $10-20 cheaper.

Mother Jones: Another issue CRR has been involved in is the 20-week abortion bans in the states. You recently won a lawsuit against Arizona’s in court. But at this point, 12 states have passed this type of law. What’s next on that front?

Northup: There are some states with no providers who offer abortions up to 20 weeks. So we’re not challenging those, because we have no standing to challenge them. That again shows how much of a political and messaging campaign this is by people who want to restrict access. Why are they are passing 20 week bans in states where doctors don’t even provide those services? Everywhere that they have been challenged, they have been, to date, enjoined. In Georgia there’s a preliminary injunction in place. Arizona has an injunction after the 9th Circuit decision. Idaho’s decision came down that it was unconstitutional. What we’re now looking at is fighting the 12-week ban in Arkansas, and we will be filing in North Dakota against the six-week ban. We challenge them where it’s meaningful to challenge them.

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Republicans Want to Ban Abortions After 20 Weeks. Here’s How One Group Is Fighting Back

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What Really Drives a Whistleblower Like Edward Snowden?

by bvds34dfsg Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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After Edward Snowden went public as the man who leaked the NSA’s secret surveillance system to the country via a 12 minute video interview with the Guardian, questions immediately sprang up around his motivation for whistleblowing, his personal life, and whether his background is what he claims it to be.

Why is suspicion and distrust the natural reaction? Because a lot rests on whether Snowden is telling the truth, yes, but also because most of us (perhaps nearly everyone but whistleblowers themselves) have trouble understanding exactly what motivates a whistleblower. As University of Maryland political psychology professor C. Frederick Alford notes, humans are tribal beings, and even though society considers whistleblowers brave in theory, in practice there tends to be a sense of discomfort with those who break from the tribe.

Alford has spent over a decade asking why some people reveal government secrets in the name of public good, while most don’t; asking what makes Edward Snowden Edward Snowden, and not one of the many other Booz Allen analysts who presumably saw the same information that Snowden did but kept quiet about it. Alford’s 2001 book, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, examines the psychology of whistleblowing based on the extensive time he spent with people who’ve done it—some to much fanfare, others to very little. He says he’s received a phone call or an email from a whistleblower about every month since the book came out 12 years ago, and in many cases has kept up with those who reach out for years. He spoke with Mother Jones about the Edward Snowden-Daniel Ellsberg parallel, why whistleblowers tend to have big egos, and what Snowden might face in the coming weeks and months.

Mother Jones: Based on what we know about Edward Snowden so far, does he remind you of other whistleblowers you’ve spent time with or studied over the years?

C. Frederick Alford: Daniel Ellsberg, overwhelmingly. I don’t think Bradley Manning: Bradley Manning committed a data dump. He just released tons of information and I don’t think he understood all the information he was releasing. I don’t think anyone could have understood it all.

Ellsberg, who worked at the RAND Corporation at the time and had this contract to analyze the Vietnam War, but realized at a point long before the war had ended that the government knew they were never going to win it, and realized that this information should be part of the public debate, and decided in a very self-conscious way to make this information part of the public debate. Snowden reminded me so much of Ellsberg. Not in his personality, but in the reflective way he decided to be.

If we take the Guardian at its word, and we take Snowden at his word, he released information that would not endanger active agents or reveal the location of CIA stations. So I think Ellsberg is an obvious comparison. And I think the significance of all this is going to end up being comparable to the significance of the Pentagon papers.

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What Really Drives a Whistleblower Like Edward Snowden?

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The Trough and Crest of Rogue Wave

by Betty Miller Posted on June 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Rogue Wave frontman Zach Rogue (a.k.a. Zach Schwartz) is feeling optimistic about the summer to come. Well, relatively so: “I feel like the forces of nature have tried to kill this band,” he tells me, “but they haven’t succeeded yet.”

He’s referring to the seemingly neverending series of tragedies that has plagued Rogue Wave over the years. Drummer Pat Spurgeon nearly died of kidney failure during the band’s 2006 tour—which became the subject of the PBS documentary D Tour—and the band’s former bassist was killed in a house fire in 2008. Most recently, Zach’s father passed away.

And the band played on. Rogue Wave’s fifth album, Nightingale Floors, which comes out this week, packs more of the rattling, inertia-filled pop songs that characterized the band’s early work; the sorts of songs we heard in abundance on late-2000’s episodes of The O.C., One Tree Hill, and Friday Night Lights. But the music stands out, thanks in no small part to Rogue Wave’s mission: to produce straightforward yet memorable songs that they would want to listen to, songs lacking pretension but not emotion, and using what Rogue calls an “inclusive” approach to songwriting.

Hours before the Rogue Wave’s recent 1 a.m. performance for a packed house at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill—their first official concert in two years—I sat down with Rogue and Spurgeon on the venue’s outdoor patio. Zach lamented the passing of the in-house cat, while Pat grabbed a pint and pulled up his jacket to proudly show off his perfectly worn-in Oakland A’s t-shirt. They were positively giddy for their comeback and eager to talk about their change in direction since their last album, 2010’s Permalight.

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The Trough and Crest of Rogue Wave

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How Jesse Eisenberg Disappeared Into His Latest Role

by anjunonstennyao Posted on May 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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Jesse Eisenberg prepares for his roles the same way just about any other responsible actor would: He does his research.

In 2007’s The Hunting Party, Eisenberg played a TV news reporter and wannabe war correspondent. The film, also starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, is loosely based on an Esquire article from October 2000 that tells the true story of how three American and two European journalists accidentally set off an international incident after drunkenly deciding to hunt for a fugitive Serbian war criminal hiding out in Bosnia. To prepare for this role, Eisenberg hung out with members of the real-life “party,” which included author and war correspondent Sebastian Junger (whom Eisenberg calls a “total badass”).

In 2010’s The Social Network, Eisenberg played Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a role that earned him his first Oscar nomination. To prepare, Eisenberg “read everything he possibly could” on Zuckerberg and activated a phony account on Facebook—a website he claims he had never seen before gearing up to play Zuckerberg.

His latest film, released on Friday, is action director Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me (Summit Entertainment, 116 minutes). Eisenberg plays J. Daniel Atlas, a cocky Vegas illusionist who steals from the wealthy and wicked and then literally showers the money onto his working-class audiences. Eisenberg teams up with Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco as a band of Robin Hood-like criminals who routinely outsmart and mystify an FBI agent played by Mark Ruffalo and an Interpol officer played by Mélanie Laurent.

To prep for this “intense character,” as he put it, the 29-year-old actor became an amateur magician.

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How Jesse Eisenberg Disappeared Into His Latest Role

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