FATHER JOHN MISTY PLAYS UNION TRANSFER ON SATURDAY RELATED: Father John Misty lives in a red-clay adobe pueblo on top of a low mountain in Echo Park. Good luck trying to find it without GPS and a helicopter. Down below the cloud line, the hazy glittering grid of Greater Los Angeles recedes into the infinite. From the vantage point of this fairly Olympian perch, the City of Angels looks like flecks of diamond embedded in a filthy sidewalk. Like most wise men atop mountains, Father John Misty’s possessions are few: his beard, his acoustic guitar, his vinyl copy of On […]
ARTSY: Win Tix To See The Excellent Outsider Art Exhibit At The Philadelphia Museum Of Art
Outsider Art describes the DIY folk-art of artists with no formal academic training, connection to the artworld/gallery scene or expectation of fame or fortune. Often naive, crude and profoundly inspired, Outsider Art is invariably the provenance of the terminally-obsessive, the clinically-insane or the feverishly religious — or some combination of all three. GREAT AND MIGHTY THINGS, now in its final week at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a great introduction to the genre and we three pairs of tickets to give away to the lucky Phawker readers that can answer this question. Howard Finster is the most high-profile […]
THEATER REVIEW: We Could Be Heroes
BY BRANDON LAFVING THEATER CRITIC The basic facts about Lantern Theater’s new play, Heroes, make it seem like a play you do not want to see. For one thing, the stage never changes. Wait, that is a half-lie. On a couple of occasions, the characters do move the stone statue of a dog. And it is thrilling. Playwright Tom Stoppard adapted the play from Gérald Sibleyras, Le Vent des Peupliers (Wind in the Poplars), so you also might expect erudite philosophical discourse on time and space (as in his famous play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). Or, looking at […]
RISE: The Idiot’s Guide To The Turkish Rebellion
Photo by Thorsten Strasas CNN: What started as a peaceful sit-in over plans to demolish a park in central Istanbul has grown to become the biggest protest movement against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan since he was elected more than 10 years ago. What prompted the protests? Gezi Park sits in Istanbul’s main commercial district and is the last green space in the city center. So, it didn’t go down well with many residents when authorities announced they want to raze the park and put in its place a replica of 19th Century Ottoman barracks — containing a shopping […]
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: Diane Young
Kinda like The Last Supper with ski masks and firecrackers, which is, curiously enough, how we always pictured it. Directed by Primo Khan with lotsa cameos from indie-rock luminaries. Won’t spoil the surprises. Oh, and Modern Vampires Of The City is to date ALBUM OF THE YEAR for those keeping track at home. I believe we pointed out that the first time we heard it reminded us of the feelings we got the first time we heard YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT — that we were hearing something that would have a profound cultural impact that would resonate for years and years. […]
ARTSY: David Lynch Announces New Album Due Out July 16th And Unveils Duet With Lykke Li
Photo by LYKKE LI Legendary multimedia artist David Lynch returns this summer with the follow-up to Crazy Clown Time, his acclaimed 2011 solo debut. THE BIG DREAM will be released July 15 in Europe on Sunday Best Recordings – the British label that signed Lynch two years ago. The album will be released the next day, July 16, in the U.S. by Sacred Bones, which will distribute THE BIG DREAM in America. The new album sees Lynch returning to primary songwriting and performance duties, writing 11 out of the album’s 12 tracks. Also included in the lineup is Lynch’s signature […]
SMUS: Apple Is Rotten And Spoiling The Barrel
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY As you’ve no doubt already heard, Apple, Inc.’s CEO Tim Crook — oops, I mean Cook — appeared before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to be grilled as to why the company screwed the U.S. Treasury out of some $12.5 billion in federal corporate income tax over the passed two years. Guess who won? Turns out it wasn’t even close. Tim “The Skim” wowed ’em, cowed ’em, and put ’em down for the count! Hell, by the time it was over, the old Crookster — there I go again, Cookster — had them eating […]
CINEMA: We Steal Secrets
Opens Friday at The Ritz @ The Bourse. Bradley Manning is on trial right now. RELATED: The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, “Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual […]
REEFER MADNESS: Marijuana Chills Out A White Teen Terrorist While Turning A Black High Schooler Into A Raging Bull That Had To Be Put Down
TIME: Aside from having regularly smoked marijuana, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Trayvon Martin share little in common. Tsarnaev, of course, is the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings and Martin was the unarmed black teenager shot to death in Florida in 2012 by a man who claims he felt threatened by him. But differences in the way the media have covered their cannabis use portend a major shift in public attitudes about the drug, as well as a troubling reminder of the racism that still largely prevents us from seeing drugs as a health issue. This week, the judge […]
BEING THERE: The Roots Picnic 2013
Photos by PETE TROSHAK For going on six years, The Roots Picnic has been kicking off summer in the city with a diverse eleven hour bonanza of music in blazing 90 degree heat. This year was no different. Hot as hell? Check. Diverse? As with previous years, the line up was all over the place and everywhere at once. Which is to say, double-check. The mainstage crowd was warmed up by Jennah Bell’s rootsy rock and Sonnymoon’s carnal electronic music. Philly’s own Lushlife jumpstarted the second stage tent with an intense, sweaty one-man-and-a-laptop psychedelic hip-hop throwdown. The Robert Glaser Experiment […]
WORTH REPEATING: Misty Mountain Hop
Misty Mountain Hop If Father John Misty’s life was a Hollywood movie, it would be a metaphysical jail-break thriller about a wrongly convicted man escaping the prison of belief thanks to the liberating power of rock ‘n’ roll and psychedelic drugs. MAGNET goes to the mountain to help write the script. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Father John Misty lives in a red-clay adobe pueblo on top of a low mountain in Echo Park. Good luck trying to find it without GPS and a helicopter. Down below the cloud line, the hazy glittering grid of Greater Los Angeles recedes into the […]
EARLY WORD: Black Pus At PhilaMOCA
Black Pus is the solo guise of Brian Chippendale, the drummer of Providence noise-rock heroes Lightning Bolt. Brian creates chaotic noise-pop using an oscillator, vocals, a vast array of pedals, and of course his signature drumming style that gained him the respect of Bjork, The Flaming Lips and Andrew WK, who have all hand picked Brian to collaborate with them. Black Plus plays Philly MOCA tomorrow night with Baby Aspirin DVD and Joint Chiefs of Math.