THIS JUST IN: Radiohead Is Coming To Town

[Artwork by STEPHEN LORENZO WALKES] 06/13/12  at the Susquehanna Bank Center in scenic Camden.  Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10 AM. RELATED: The strange mime-meets-epilepsy dance that bowler-topped Thom Yorke does in the video for “Lotus Flower” exemplifies the oblique dichotomies that King Of Limbs occupies: the twilight zone between funny and serious, between form and shape, between hue and color, between agony and ecstasy. Like so much of the music Radiohead has made in the 21st century, it sounds like it was made by paranoid androids — one part chimerical electronica, one part rock noir, one part accident […]

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CINEMA: Dumb And Dumberer

CITY PAPER: Just about every bodily liquid and its corresponding sound effect is given screen time. So are a lot of the tics familiar to fans of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!: cringeable minor roles filled by odd-looking old people, repetitious dialogue, glitchy editing tricks, sudden earnestness, sudden shirtlessness, computer graphics from bygone times, infomercial-ish asides, uncomfortable yelling and mugging and hugging and breathing all over each other. If you don’t like that stuff, your disgust will delight those who do. This movie needs to exist, serving the same sociological purpose as 2 Girls 1 Cup, a post-mod […]

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NY TIMES: How Saint Rick Got His Sanctimony On

[Illustration via VETERANS TODAY] NEW YORK TIMES: The Santorums’ beliefs are reflected in a succession of lifestyle decisions, including eschewing birth control, home schooling their younger children and sending the older boys to a private academy affiliated with Opus Dei, an influential Catholic movement that emphasizes spiritual holiness. As members of St. Catherine of Siena, a parish here in the wealthy Northern Virginia suburb of Great Falls, the Santorums are immersed in a community where large families are not uncommon and many mothers leave behind careers to dedicate themselves to child-rearing, as Mrs. Santorum has. Mr. Santorum has been on […]

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THERE BE MONSTERS: The Dark Side Of Sendak

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Where The Wild Things Are creator Maurice Sendak is, in many ways, the dark side Doppelganger of Dr. Seuss and taken together they represent the twin titans of 20th Century children’s literature. If Dr. Seuss’ work vibes like a drug-free acid trip for children aged 8 to 80, then Sendak’s oeuvre is, to extend the metaphor, like Vicodin for the soul, numbing tender-aged psyches from the pain of growing up in a desultory world of de-saturated colors and unrelieved melancholia where adults do monstrous things to each other, and sometimes to children, too. There were two formative […]

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PASS THE WAVY GRAVY: The Grateful Dead’s $10,000 Technicolor Dream Dinner At Le Bec Fin

GRUBB STREET: There’s never been a shortage of Le Bec-Fin war stories thrown around by those who served in her trenches and ate in her dining rooms over the last 42 years. And with the fine dining institution’s closing imminent, those tales have been getting increasingly hairier. Still, none are as juicy or as insane as the one about the time the Grateful Dead and its entourage rolled up on the restaurant one night in the ’80s and fully unfurled its freak flag. MORE

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CINEMA: Who’s Afraid Of Dr. Seuss?

MOTHER JONES: What to make of the far-left agenda of Illumination Entertainment‘s adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax? For starters, the new animated film promotes a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and private industry. Economic growth is maligned as a force for evil, while those so-called Truffula trees are put on a fluffly, polychromatic pedestal. Successful businessmen are demonized as Orwellian overlords and planet destroyers. And the movie even has the gall to glorify—gasp!—single moms. These are some of the ways in which the inevitable conservative freak-out will manifest. Lou Dobbs on Fox Business has already started being a […]

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ARTSY: Subterranean Homesick Blues

The Woodmere Art Museum is now exhibiting A Force Of Nature which documents a Philadelphia born-and-raised movement in contemporary visual art. The extensive retrospective focuses on Elaine Kurtz (1928-2003), who first debuted at Philadelphia Art Alliance, Gross McCleaf Gallery and Locks Gallery in the 1970s. The museum smartly deconstructs Kurtz into her elements.  Visitors first pass through an anteroom where her geometric and color studies demonstrate a highly analytical mindset. Some of these works are reminiscent of Gestalt images in that they trick the viewer. For instance, diametrically opposed spectrums of color create blind spots along their center, where entire […]

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REPORT: Endless War Is A Major Job Killer

HUFFINGTON POST: Defense spending has boomed in the post-9/11 era, creating new jobs and programs to support American military operations around the world. But a new report released last week by the Institute for Economics and Peacesays that war expenditures create as much of a bubble as the housing or stock markets, providing short-term gains while creating massive long-term problems. The report compared the economic conditions for every major U.S. war since World War II. In each case, it said, “the positive effects of increased military spending were outweighed by longer term unintended negative macroeconomic consequences.” While the authors, including […]

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INCOMING: Q&A With Stephin Merritt

[Illustration by ALEX FINE] In advance of The Magnetic Fields concert at Union Transfer next Wednesday, we got Mr. Merritt on the horn for a follow-up to our 2008 Q&A. Look for it Monday on  a Phawker near you. PREVIOUSLY: If there’s anything missing from Stephin Merritt’s encyclopedic oeuvre — a kitchen-sink catchall that includes everything from wry country twang and sincere synth pop to tortured torch songs and prancing show tunes — it’s Stephin Merritt. A remarkably dexterous stylistic quick-change artist — for my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll pull the Human League out of Cole Porter’s top […]

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NPR FOR THE DEF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t

FRESH AIR Media suppression, corruption and the murder of political rivals have marked the regime of Vladimir Putin, who is running for his third term as president in Russia’s election next week. Despite mass demonstrations, he’s expected to win. How Putin rose to power is spelled out in Russian journalist Masha Gessen‘s new book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She says Putin, a KGB operative with little government experience before he was first elected in 1999, was specifically selected by the elite cohort that surrounded former President Boris Yeltsin. Over the years, Putin has […]

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