Keren Ann, The Philly-Paris Lockdown, PIFA, Kimmel Center, 8:12 PM last night by JEFF FUSCO PREVIOUSLY: Back in 2010, ?uestlove was commissioned by PIFA to assemble a collaborative performance piece with the French musicians of his choice that honored the festival’s somewhat amorphous and esoteric premise, i.e. channeling the modernist cultural vibe of Paris circa 1910 to 1920 and connecting it somehow to the modern day cultural fabric of Philadelphia, the Roots drummer said during a hastily called press conference/sneak preview on Thursday. He said he then went down the wish list of present day French musos, including Air and […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Those Who Forget The Lesson Of Vietnam Are Doomed To Repeat It In Afghanistan
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY This just in, folks: America is now spending $2,000,000,000 a f _ _ _ _ _ g* WEEK in Afghanistan! Wouldn’t you think that that might finally be enough to make even the bloodthirstiest of Washington’s fiscal phonies cry out for SOME sense of sanity, reason, or rationality, or, at the VERY least, a tiny smidgen of f _ _ _ _ _ g HUMANITY on the subject. Of course not. There’s not so much as a single SYLLABLE in ANYONE’S budget proposal devoted to reducing, or even ACKNOWLEDGING, the pissed away BILLIONS (345 SO FAR!) and […]
THE WRITING ON THE WALL: Robot Journalist Defeats Human Sports Writer In A Writing Contest
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: A while back, All Things Considered brought you the story of a breakthrough technology: the robot journalist. Okay, so it’s not really a robot. It’s actually a software program. You feed it data, it processes that data, and it spits out a news story putting those numbers you gave it into context — just like you’d see in your local newspaper. In the beginning, it was used exclusively for sports stories and a lot of people were skeptical — namely, real-life sports journalists. “I always imagine kind of the robot you imagined in the third grade with […]
DEAD ZONE: The Nuclear Ghost Towns Of Japan
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Futaba, once home to 7,000 residents, is one of eight towns forced to evacuate the day after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged the nuclear plant. In the following days, tens of thousands of residents living within 12 miles of the damaged reactors fled. Last Monday, the Japanese government expanded the mandatory evacuation zone to encompass more towns. Futaba Mayor Katsutaka Idogawa, meanwhile, said it will be “years” before the residents of his town can return. The utility on Friday said it would begin initial compensation payments of up to ¥1 million, or about $12,000, to […]
EARLY WORD: The Philly-Paris Lockdown At PIFA
?uestlove explaining The Paris Lockdown at Thursday’s press conference. [photo by JEFF FUSCO] BY JONATHAN VALANIA Back in 2010, ?uestlove was commissioned by PIFA to assemble a collaborative performance piece with the French musicians of his choice that honored the festival’s somewhat amorphous and esoteric premise, i.e. channeling the modernist cultural vibe of Paris circa 1910 to 1920 and connecting it somehow to the modern day cultural fabric of Philadelphia, the Roots drummer said during a hastily called press conference/sneak preview on Thursday. He said he then went down the wish list of present day French musos, including Air and […]
For All The F*cked Up Children Of This World, We Give You A Q&A With Sonic Boom/Peter Kember
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In the beginning, before there was Spiritualized or Spectrum, there was Spacemen 3. If you came of age in 80s, in the dreary grey flannel age of Reagan/Thatcher, when drug war hysteria was reaching a feverish pitch, Spacemen 3 was hands down the most persuasive and rewarding argument for the ingestion of mind-expanding substances since Pink met Floyd. In August of 1984, Jason Pierce (a.k.a. Jason Spaceman) received a government grant to attend Rugby Art College — which he promptly misused to purchase an electric guitar and amplifier. It was at Rugby Art College that Pierce […]
CINEMA: But How Was The Play, Mrs. Lincoln?
THE CONSPIRATOR (2010, directed by Robert Redford, 123 minutes, U.S.) IN A BETTER WORLD (2010, directed by Susanne Bier, 113 minutes, Denmark) POTICHE (2010, directed by Francois Ozon, 103 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Even though he never appears on-screen, it’s hard not to think about The Conspirator‘s director, Robert Redford, while his new film unspools. Besides playing nothing but earnest, handsome heroes in his career, he is admired by many for his Liberal activism and founding of the Sundance Film Festival, a festival lauded for its support of independent film. Yes, the man’s philanthropy and good intentions […]
THE DECEMBERISTS: Why We Fight
PREVIOUSLY: Amongst people who like that sort of thing, Colin Meloy — ringleader of the Portland-based folk-pop collective The Decemberists – is the most satisfyingly literary songwriter to emerge from the most recent crop of indie-rock luminaries. Others find his tune-smithing to be cloying and contrived, like an English class apple-shiner who always makes sure his essay question answers always incorporate alliteration and onomatopoeia, and at least three examples of simile and metaphor, just because he can. A bookish, blocky man with an owlish countenance and the physique of chatroom habitue, Meloy writes songs that could best be described as […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See GBV At Penn’s Landing
Guided By Voices perform Friday June 17th at Penns Landing w/ Wavves. Tickets go sale Saturday (April 16th) at noon. We have a pair of tickets to give away to the first Phawker reader that can answer the following trivia question: In the mid-90s, Guided By Voices played a secret show Khyber Pass under what name? Email your answer to FEED@PHAWKER.COM with the phrase ‘GB Fucking V’ in subject line. Please include a day time phone number for confirmation. Good luck and Godspeed! UPDATE: We have a winner! Thanks all for playing and stay tuned for more groovy concert ticket […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Kelly Reichardt‘s frontier drama Meek’s Cutoff opens in the year 1845, on the wide-open plains of Oregon, where a wagon team of three families has set out on a journey along the Oregon Trail. After their guide, a suspicious man named Stephen Meek, tells them about a shortcut across the Oregon desert, the settlers, led by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano, become lost. Reichardt and Williams join Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross for a discussion about the film, a dusty Western with long, sweeping shots of the landscape and virtually no dialogue. Reichardt, known for her naturalistic films, says […]
EARLY WORD: Get A Grip
BY BARRY GUTMAN Let me be the first to wish you a very merry Record Store Day! For those not in the know, it’s happening this Saturday, so get in front of it before it gets behind you. Now that we’ve sorted that out, the question is where should you go after scoring all of that sweet, sweet limited edition vinyl booty? Take a tip from Little Steven Van Zandt, and head over to World Café Live Upstairs for a 10:30 p.m. set by Highland Park, NJ’s finest, The Grip Weeds. “We like to mix it up in Jersey, and […]
STYLE COUNCIL: Wearing Your Heart On Your Sleeve
Penn’s 4:20 Club has unveiled this year’s T-shirt design for 4/20, which has become something like the one day Mardi Gras of marijuana. You don’t have to be an Ivy League stoner dress like one. You can order one HERE. RELATED: Gov. Brian Schweitzer vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have repealed the state’s voter-approved medical marijuana law. Mr. Schweitzer, a Democrat, vetoed the Republican-backed measure along with several others he called “frivolous, unconstitutional or in direct contradiction to the expressed will of the people of Montana.” MORE RELATED: Arizona’s medical-marijuana law takes effect today, but patients already have […]
Obama ’08 Travels Forward Through Time To Eviscerate The Republican’s 2012 Budget Plan
PRESIDENT OBAMA: A serious plan doesn’t require us to balance our budget overnight – in fact, economists think that with the economy just starting to grow again, we will need a phased-in approach – but it does require tough decisions and support from leaders in both parties. And above all, it will require us to choose a vision of the America we want to see five and ten and twenty years down the road. One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. It’s a plan that aims to […]