“Somehow the fake-brother-and-sister/ex-husband-and-wife duo of John Anthony Gillis and Megan Martha White, aka Jack and Meg White, has managed to transmute gimmick into mystique, to create a shimmering garage mirage out of little more than trashcan drums, greasy geetar and a natty tricolor fashion palette, and sell it to 4 million people. Having proven time and again that less is more, the White Stripes remain adamantly reductionist about everything, from their music to the truth about their lives. They are masters of illusion via subtraction. And the less they give us, the more we want.” — Jonathan Valania, A Long […]
HEAR YE: Spoon Ga Ga Ga
NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO The new songs sound of a piece with the recent old: a boom-boom-THWACK drumbeat, some White Album-style piano chords, and a spare, hypnotic guitar chug not heard since the “Peter Gunn Theme,” singer Britt Daniel’s husky Lennon-esque bleat, and all manner of bubble-gum hand-claps, Josie & The Pussycats tambourine slaps and gang vocal sha-la-las. A typical Spoon song is usually one part ’60s AM radio nugget, one part ’80s British art-punk artifact and one part musique concrete wall of sound. Mmmm. That’s good cracker! [JONATHAN VALANIA]
Welcome To Dallas, Mr. President
The Zapruder film.
TEXAS OBSERVER: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Chasing Assassins Bobby Kennedy died believing his brother’s killers had not been found by Matthew Stevenson/THE TEXAS OBSERVER Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years By David Talbot Simon & Schuster 478 pages, $28 When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas in November 1963, his younger brother Robert, then the U.S. attorney general, was having lunch at his home in northern Virginia. As recounted in Brothers, David Talbot’s stirring and troubling history of Bobby’s descent into the underworlds of conspiracy, word of the shooting reached him when J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, telephoned. In […]
JFK: A View Of The Sun God
J.F.K.: A View of the Sun God From Inside the Television Set by John David Ebert John F. Kennedy was a man who spent his entire life, from first to last, living inside a television set. If we want to understand that life, then we must, like Alice through the looking glass, crawl up into the radiant, pixilated landscape of television ourselves, and learn to make our way about its contoured rows of ordered electrons, all carefully aligned on a grid and pulsing with life, like huge glowing radioactive eggs. We must tread carefully across this soft and spongy landscape, […]
Originally published in Esquire, December 1968, under the title, “So Here You Are, Clay Shaw, Twenty Months and Thousands of Dollars After Being Charged with Conspiracy in the Worst Crime of the Century. What Are You Doing About It? Surviving.”
BY JAMES KIRKWOOD Now I sit in my hotel room in the French Quarter of New Orleans, trying, and nowhere near succeeding, to ignore the insistent laser-beam razzmatazz of an army of Dixieland combos blasting out from Bourbon Street. I sit practically on top of the wheezing, gently vibrating air conditioner because it’s hot and muggy and my eyes are giving me hell for making them read, in one day, all 491 pages of the Preliminary Hearing of the State of Louisiana against Clay L. Shaw. Shaw had been charged with criminal conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, a […]
CRANDALL MINE RESCUE: ‘It’s Over’
HUNTINGTON, UTAH — The rescue effort that began with hope and prayers Aug. 6 for six men trapped in the collapsed Crandall Canyon mine ended Friday with the realization that no one could have survived the disaster and its aftermath. Friday at 5:30 p.m., officials of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration announced to the families of the missing men that the mission – which with each passing day seemed more like a recovery than a rescue — had been suspended indefinitely. “They are done. It’s finished,” said Colin King, a Salt Lake City-based attorney who represents the families […]
CHUPACABRA: Mythical Fanged Goat-Sucker Found?
CUERO, Texas — Phylis Canion lived in Africa for four years. She’s been a hunter all her life and has the mounted heads of a zebra and other exotic animals in her house to prove it. But the roadkill she found last month outside her ranch was a new one even for her, worth putting in a freezer hidden from curious onlookers: Canion believes she may have the head of the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra. “It is one ugly creature,” Canion said, holding the head of the mammal, which has big ears, large fanged teeth and grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin. Canion […]
KILLADELPHIA: 4 More Dead Since U Went To Bed
Four more persons were killed early today in separate and apparently unrelated shootings on the streets of Philadelphia. Two of the shootings occurred in West Philadelphia, one in 3800 block of Haverford Avenue and the other in the 6100 block of Callowhill Street. Another shooting took place near 31st and Norris in Strawberry Mansion and yet another was in the 600 block of E. Wishart Street in Kensington. The incidents occurred between approximately 3 and 4:30 a.m. There were no immediate arrests and homicide detectives continued to investigate. [via INQUIRER]
PREVIEW: THE DARJEELING LIMITED
New Wes Anderson film, starring Owen Wilson, comes out out November 23rd.