Brother JT – Sweatpants from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo. THRILL JOCKEY: While we all know our brothers and sisters in Philadelphia are fond of their sweatpants (or so says Time Magazine), it has taken the Brother JT to turn that passion into the most warped psych-funk hit of Spring. Earlier today Spin premiered a new video for “Sweatpants”, animated and directed by the Brother himself, taken from The Svelteness of Boogietude, which is out tomorrow on Thrill Jockey. “Sweatpants” is a slow burner, a heavy hitter, and one of the finest tributes to the world’s most comfortable item of […]
THE HUNGER GAMES: Gitmo Prisoner Force-Feeding Standard Operating Procedural Leaked
AL JAZEERA: Hunger striking Guantanamo prisoners who are force-fed a liquid nutritional supplement undergo a brutal and dehumanizing medical procedure that requires them to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours. The prisoners remain this way, with a 61cm tube – or longer – snaked through their nostril until a chest X-Ray, or test dose of water, confirms it has reached their stomach. At the end of the feeding, the prisoner is removed from the restraint chair and placed into a “dry cell” with no running water. […]
COMMANDER CHRIS HADFIELD: “Space Oddity”
Incredible. This guy is our hero. If you haven’t been following along on Twitter or YouTube, know that astronaut Chris Hadfield is the coolest Canadian space cadet since Neil Young lit up in the 60s. For the last few months he’s been tweeting amazing low Earth orbit photos (including this shot of Philadelphia from space), answering questions from Earthlings about space travel with demonstrations on YouTube (How do you brush your teeth in space? Can you cry in space?), singing songs of love like an interstellar Hurdy Gurdy Man and in the process accomplishing something no American astronaut has done […]
BEING THERE: Bela Lugosi Is Still Dead
Photo by PETE TROSHAK The scary monsters and super creeps were out in full force at the Trocadero Thursday night to see former Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy perform his old band’s gravest hits. The leather-clad godfather of goth had slithered into town to celebrate 35 years of Bauhaus, a band formed in 1978 concurrent with the rise of the roiling U.K. punk scene but never quite of it. Bauhaus trafficked in sinister guitar atmospherics stretched across a minimalist rock band configuration and narrated by Murphy’s velveteen voice-of-doom croon. Murphy was in top form Thursday, stalking the stage like a creature […]
CINEMA: Crass Luhrmann
THE GREAT GATSBY (2013, directed by Baz Luhrmann, 143 minutes, Australia/U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It is with no pleasure that I stand over the corpse of the long-promised Great Gatsby, extravagantly pieced together from parts of once-living things by the mad scientist/filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. I can’t say I ever had much faith that this enterprise was meant for greatness, but there at least seemed to be some excitement possible if the director could just get the beast off the operating table. But no, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a stillborn Frankenstein; stare as you may, there […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: While his Office character always took himself seriously, actor Rainn Wilson seems to be all about the laughs. For the entirety of the series, Wilson has played beet-farming, archery-loving middle-management kook Dwight Schrute on the NBC hit television series. While working on The Office, Wilson explored film opportunities as well. In the 2008 film The Rocker, Wilson played a failed hair-metal musician. After he’s kicked out of his band, the group goes on to achieve great success. But when he joins his nephew’s garage band, he gets a second chance at fame. Wilson made his breakthrough as […]
ALL THIS HAPPENED WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
Everyone’s got a guilty pleasure, right? Nose picking. Ben & Jerry’s. Serial killing. Different strokes for different folks. Mine is going on #Benghazi on Twitter and trying to break the fever. A fool’s errand, I know, but one for which I am uniquely qualified. I don’t even have to pick a fight, just tweeting a few scientifically-provable facts at them is like kicking the hornets nest. Not surprisingly they don’t have much more than Fox News talking points and when you press them on the underlying premises those talking points are based on, they crumble pretty quick, either reverting […]
SWEET SANITY: Colorado Becomes First State In The Union To Levy Taxes On Recreational Marijuana Sales
NPR: Colorado is set to become the first U.S. state to regulate and tax sales of recreational marijuana, after lawmakers approved several bills that set business standards and rules. Legislators expect enforcement of the rules to be paid for by two taxes on marijuana — a 15 percent excise tax, and a 10 percent sales tax. Other measures included in the package set limits on how much marijuana visitors to Colorado can buy (a quarter of an ounce), as well as a limit on how many cannabis plants a private citizen can grow (six). Gov. John Hickenlooper has indicated […]
CORPORATISM: Comcast, Wal-Mart & The New Fascism
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILLY POST On the morning of March 27th, the corporations finally won their war on the people. A little after 10 a.m., before hearing oral arguments on a same-sex marriage lawsuit that burned up all the media oxygen that day, Justice Antonin Scalia announced that the Supreme Court was throwing out an anti-trust class action lawsuit brought against Comcast by two million cable subscribers. It was the other shoe dropping in a pair of decisions that will have a profoundly debilitating effect on the the average citizen’s capacity to seek judicial remedies for the […]
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: Diane Young
THE GUARDIAN: Those searching for evidence that, even in a world shrunk by the internet, culture from across the Atlantic can still seem beguilingly exotic to a British audience, might consider the case of Vampire Weekend. They arrived in 2008, a riot of preppy clothes, neat hair, African-inspired guitars and songs that suggested Ivy League backgrounds: replete with titles like Campus and Diplomat’s Son, with lyrical references to punctuation, 17th-century architecture and “good schools and friends with pools”. The band have protested about the detrimental effect all this had on the way they were perceived by those who didn’t grasp […]
BEING THERE: ‘Til Death Do Us Part
Photo by TASLIMA AKHTER TIME: Many powerful photographs have been made in the aftermath of the devastating collapse of a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. But one photo, by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, has emerged as the most heart wrenching, capturing an entire country’s grief in a single image. Shahidul Alam, Bangladeshi photographer, writer and founder of Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, said of the photo: “This image, while deeply disturbing, is also hauntingly beautiful. An embrace in death, its tenderness rises above the rubble to touch us where we are most vulnerable. By making […]
BIG BRUTHA: Obama’s Plan To Wiretap The Internet
PHILLY POST: President Obama wants your favorite websites—Facebook and Google, and more —to revamp their systems so that government agents can easily plug into them via a backdoor and monitor your IMs, your DMs, your emails, and all the other communication you use on the Internet. Basically: He wants the Internet rebuilt, piece by piece, so the government can more easily spy on you. Charlie Savage outlines the proposal in today’s New York Times: The new proposal focuses on strengthening wiretap orders issued by judges. Currently, such orders instruct recipients to provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, leaving […]
SIDEWALKING: Shooting Horses
Franklin Square, 3:14 pm yesterday by JEFF FUSCO