BY CHRIS SATULLO INQUIRER COLUMNIST We’re living inside a Gutenberg moment. The advent of the Internet is a watershed in human history no less epochal than Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. Nowadays, the changes cascade far more rapidly than they did back when producing books stopped being the province of cloistered monks. It’s no wonder that, beneath such a cascade, so many feel drenched and disoriented. That the Internet is a big deal is not exactly breaking news. But a flurry of items in the New York Times’ Business Today put into high relief the scope of the changes […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
[Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA] FRESH AIR Love, violence, death and America have always been themes for Australian-born singer-composer Nick Cave — Murder Ballads and Abbatoir Blues are just two of his album titles — so he was perhaps a natural to compose the soundtrack for last year’s epically paranoid Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Cave also wrote the screenplay and soundtrack for the Australian epic The Proposition, which Roger Ebert described as “pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence that it is a record of those things we pray to be […]
CINEMA: Requiem For A Jerk
CHAPTER 27 (2007, directed by J.P. Schaefer, 84 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Just when you think only the most crassly commercial equations account for what films get made, you’re stuck trying to explain the appearance of a new film on rock villain Mark David Chapman. Could any public figure be less of a box-office draw? Everyone’s least favorite “Fifth Beatle” Chapman was the mentally ill assassin who vacillated between thinking he was Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye and John Lennon, a delusion that ended with Chapman shooting down the rock icon in front […]
ELECTORAL TSUNAMI: One Million New Dem Voters
WASHINGTON POST: The past seven states to hold primaries registered more than 1 million new Democratic voters; Republican numbers mainly ebbed or stagnated. North Carolina and Indiana, which will hold their presidential primaries on May 6, are reporting a swell of new Democrats that triples the surge in registrations before the 2004 primary. The contest between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has engaged enough new voters to change the political makeup of the country, experts say. The next several months — and the general election in November — will reveal the extent of the shift. Is it a […]
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: The Trouble With Miley
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Miley Cyrus is taking issue with a photo of herself that’s going around, and it’s not another amateur, truth-or-dare Internet snapshot — it’s the handiwork of Annie Leibovitz. “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” Cyrus said Sunday in a statement through her publicist. “I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.” The photos, appearing in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, were taken by Leibovitz, […]
HEAR YE: Portishead Third
Now playing on Phawker Radio! Why? Because we love you! (cover art after the jump)
RAW FOOTAGE: Our Man In Afghanistan
KABUL (AFP) — Afghanistan was Monday investigating how militants could get within 500 metres of President Hamid Karzai and other top leaders to carry out a brazen attack that left three Afghans dead. The insurgent Taliban movement said it launched Sunday’s attack to show it had the power to strike even the nation’s biggest annual military parade.The event, which was supposed to showcase the Afghan army’s growing strength after getting new training and equipment, mainly from the United States, had been weeks in the making with stepped-up patrols and roadblocks around Kabul. MORE
SICKO: Father Imprisons, Rapes Daughter For 24 Years
[Click HERE to learn the story behind this picture] VIENNA, Austria – Police have found a woman missing since 1984, who told authorities that her father had kept her in a cellar for almost 24 years and that she had given birth to at least six children after being repeatedly raped by him. The 73-year-old father (pictured, left) was taken into custody, said Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, on Sunday. Authorities found the woman [NOT pictured, above] Saturday evening in the town of Amstetten following a tip, Lower Austria police said in a statement. […]
HEAR YE: Madonna Hard Candy
Now playing on Phawker Radio! Why? Because we still wanna ‘do’ her, ya big dummy! NEW YORK TIMES: Alongside whatever she has offered her audience through the years — sex, glamour, dancing, defiance, blasphemy, spirituality — Madonna has never pretended to be anything but diligent. She’s disciplined, hard-working and determined to sell. For Madonna as a pop archetype, the truest pleasure isn’t momentary physical ecstasy or divine rapture but success. She labeled that impulse too in an early tour: “Blonde Ambition.” Presenting herself not only as an object of desire but as a material girl with her eye on the […]
KILLADELPHIA: 5 More Dead Since U Went To Bed
DAILY NEWS: Amid a busy weekend bustling with criminal activity, including four killings in about 12 hours, two stabbings and two shootings, police arrested two people accused of two of the crimes. Nicole Wilson, 26, was arrested yesterday after police said she beat a 66-year-old man to death at a Sunoco gas station in Logan. Police said Wilson beat the man after an argument over a cigarette about 4 a.m. on Broad Street near Windrim Avenue. The unidentified man was pronounced dead at Albert Einstein Medical Center at 5:23 a.m. Derrick Whitfield, 23, was arrested yesterday. Police said he shot […]
CINEMA: The Second Coming Of Harmony Korine
NEW YORK TIMES: HARMONY KORINE catapulted to fame as an enfant terrible, and for a few years he played the part to perfection. He was the young skateboarder turned wunderkind screenwriter behind Larry Clark’s 1995 sensation, “Kids.” At 24 he directed “Gummo” (1997), about glue-sniffing, cat-killing teenagers in a Rust Belt backwater. Most critics hated its junkyard, freak-show aesthetic, but it spawned an instant cult, with devotees including Werner Herzog, who became a mentor and collaborator, and Gus Van Sant. Mr. Korine’s next film, “Julien Donkey-Boy” (1999), inspired by his schizophrenic uncle, continued the gutter-punk provocations. But after that he […]
DOUBLE STANDARD: The Wrath Of Farrakhan
HUFFINGTON POST: At last Tuesday’s Democratic debate, Sen. Hillary Clinton drew out her objections to Sen. Barack Obama‘s relationship with his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying that what troubled her was not just Wright’s incendiary language, but his past praise for Louis Farrakhan, the controversial head of the Nation of Islam. “It is clear that, as leaders, we have a choice who we associate with and who we apparently give some kind of seal of approval to,” said Clinton. “And I think that it wasn’t only the specific remarks but some of the relationships with Reverend Farrakhan, with giving […]
