Novelist Robert Stone Discusses Prime Green: Remembering The 60’s On Today’s Fresh Air FROM PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: It’s a long, strange trip that’s navigated in this engaging memoir. Novelist Stone (A Hall of Mirrors) recounts his salad days from a stint in the navy in the late 1950s to a desultory trip to Vietnam as a correspondent during the disastrous 1971 invasion of Laos. Stone largely sat out the civil rights and antiwar movements and cops to no ideology beyond “ordinary decency.” His bailiwick was the relatively apolitical counterculture, which dawned for him when he took in Coltrane, Lenny Bruce and […]
FOX AMERICANA: When You Just Need To Go Some Place Warm And Get Away From Stone Cold Reality For A While
In another incident that month, interrogators wrapped a bearded prisoner’s head in duct tape “because he would not stop quoting the Koran,” according to an FBI agent, the documents show. The agent, whose account was corroborated by a colleague, said that a civilian contractor laughed about the treatment and was eager to show it off. The reports amount to new and separate allegations of religiously oriented tactics used against Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. After an erroneous report of Koran abuse prompted deadly protests overseas in 2005, the U.S. military conducted an investigation that confirmed five incidents of intentional and […]
ALL POLITICS IS LOCO: Perzel Gets Punk’d In Soft Palace Coup
Suddenly, swiftly, without warning, the veteran Northeast Philly lawmaker is positioned to impact reforms in Harrisburg, kids with disabilities and the relationship between his city and his state. Thanks to a strange cascade of events, O’Brien, a 30-year Republican incumbent first elected to the House at age 23, now runs it. Even though the House is Democratic. And his election came outta nowhere. In an unprecedented political turn of the screw, he became House speaker yesterday by a 105-97 vote, ousting the wily John Perzel, a fellow Northeast Republican with whom he’s had an arm’s-length relationship for years. He ascends […]
DUBIOUS ACHIEVMENT Of 2006: Men With Nokias & Free Wireless At Baghdad Starbucks Make Saddam A Bigger Celeb In Death Than He Ever Was In Life, From Hoosegow Obscurity To YouTube Snuff Stardom
CITIZEN MOM REPORTS: I saw most of the video — CNN froze it at the moment the platform dropped — as it broke Friday night. I remember feeling glad that even Saddam, the despicable and murderous, had someone urging dignity at his moment of death. When a group of men in the crowd taunted the condemned man by chanting the name of Muqtada al-Sadr, an Iraqi prosecutor spoke up, pleading for some respect for the dead (or the about to be). Never was there a more made-for-al Jazeera moment: Justice meets vengeance meets brutality. This was very much NOT a […]
THIS JUST IN: The PHAWKER Cancels Plans To NOT Accept Time Magazine’s PERSON OF THE YEAR Award
Well, why not? We MySpace as much as the next horny guy. We are a blog — a blog with an mp3 player and a FLICKR account, to be exact. But even cooler than that being named Time’s Person Of The Year (which is, somewhat surprisingly, not nearly as exultant as you always imagined it would be) is something we can actually use in this modern world: Time linked to Phawker’s Dead President post! No big deal for the big dawgs, maybe, but we weren’t even born three months ago. Three cheers for us! TIME: Meet The Phawker!
BREAKING: Philadelphia Inquirer BEGINS LAYOFFS JOANN LOVIGLIO Associated Press – The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday began a round of long-expected layoffs amid a drop in circulation and ad revenue. Several reporters at the Inquirer, Pennsylvania’s largest newspaper, said they were told Tuesday morning that their jobs were being eliminated. The employees said that they were told to meet with personnel officials on Wednesday to discuss details of their severance pay and health benefits. In all, 68 [71, according to a just-released Guild memo] newsroom employees were expected to be laid off, company spokesman Jay Devine said. All the affected workers […]
REWIND 2006: THE YEAR IN MUSIC
WELCOME TO THE FIRST ANNUAL PHAWKER JAZZ AND POP POLL The critics have spoken, the ballots have been cast, all chads undangled, and fed into a mainframe computer the size of an Olympic swimming pool, to be crunched with the hard calculus of SUCKS/DOES NOT SUCK and arranged in impenetrably dense type on a spreadsheet that stretches from your house to mine. Hey, who we kiddin’? We don’t even have a mainframe the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Yet. And 30,000 CDs are released every year and fuck you if you think we’re gonna listen to all of them […]
We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It
PAGING MOLLY RINGWALD: The Psychedelic Furs, Trocadero, December 29th 2006 BY SIMONE SECCI, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT In this time of wild 80s revival, it’s nice to see the real thing. Well, kind of. Unfortunately the Psychedelic Furs that left a definitive trace through rock music was already dead in 1983. It’s no longer existing and never will. The Furs of today are a great pop band that does the job in the best way, but no longer as a new wave icon. All this, to be honest, didn’t prevent me from jumping on my chair and dancing with the entire theatre […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
WHYY: I HAVE TRIED, IN MY OWN WAY, TO BE FREE
DEATH OF A SALESPERSON: All Things Must Pass
BY SARA SHERR The Tower Records at Broad and Chestnut was scheduled to close on Friday, Dec. 22. Instead, the doors shut late Wednesday night after an independent Virginia record retailer bought up the last of the remaining stock, which really wasn’t much by then. Two similar mass purchases had occurred earlier in the week, one from a New Jersey record store owner who bought up a bunch of major label stuff (which means a lot of Daniel Powter and Ashley Parker Angel, and returns for credit! Smart cookie!) The other was an unknown company which volunteered to take the […]
OS MUTANTES Bread And Circuses
Os Mutantes now playing on Phawker Radio. From Perfect Sound Forever: Tropicalia Glossary – Who’s Who, What’s What. AI5 – Acto Instution #5. The 1968 military clampdown on Brazil. Temporarily ended free speech in Brazilian media. 5 days after the passing of AI5 two of the Tropicalistas, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, were arrested, shaved and exiled to freezing England. Tropicalia – The more Brazilian style of Psychedelia. Not only features pop music, but visual art, literature and performance type arts and artists. Arnaldo Baptista – Bass and keys. Took drugs. Went nuts after Rita dumped him. Recorded a half […]