NOBEL-PRIZE WINNING ECONOMISTS: End The Drug War Now, It’s Caused Nothing But Violence, Repression & Disease On A Global Scale

  HUFFINGTON POST: The decades-long global war on drugs has failed and it’s time to shift the focus from mass incarceration to public health and human rights, according to a new report endorsed by five Nobel Prize-winning economists. The report, titled “Ending the Drug Wars” and put together by the London School of Economics’ IDEAS center, looks at the high costs and unintended consequences of drug prohibitions on public health and safety, national security and law enforcement. “The pursuit of a militarized and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage,” says the 82-page […]

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BACK IN BLACK: Q&A With Mobb Deep’s Prodigy

  BY BRIEN EDWARDS It’s been nearly two decades since Mobb Deep’s East Coast hardcore lodestar The Infamous was released for public consumption.  To mark said milestone, the straight-outta-Queens duo has re-released the album  — this time as a double album titled The Infamous Mobb Deep that includes 17 bonus tracks featuring the likes of Snoop Dogg, Bun B, Juicy J, and Nas. Even better, Havoc and Prodigy have reunited for a summer-long tour in support of the new album that stops at the TLA on May 8th.  Recently, Phawker sat down with Albert “Prodigy” Johnson to discuss Mobb Deep’s […]

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BEING THERE: Phantogram @ The Piazza

Photo by PETE TROSHAK> On Saturday, Chvrches and Phantogram rocked a gigantic sun-drenched Piazza crowd that included a tsunami-like wave of crowd surfers, a wedding party and two-time Olympic gold medal winning snowboarder Shaun White. The crowd surfers landed safely, the wedding party rocked out on one side of the stage and White was there to catch some good music and to see his his girlfriend, Phantogram singer Sarah Barthel. Those that couldn’t fit in the square took in the show from adjacent building roofs or apartment balconies. Scotland’s Chvrches took the stage first, kicking off their set of sweet-sounding-but-venomous […]

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BEING THERE: Slint @ Union Transfer

Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA The really cool kids found out about Slint back in 1989. I found out about them in 1993 (hey, I was stationed at the Antarctic weather station of my own lameness at the time, and the record store there refused to carry Touch & Go shit, OK?!?). In all seriousness, Slint did not make it easy for uncool kids like me. They were always an enigma wrapped in a riddle. They were named after the one dude’s pet fish — Slint isn’t even a real word. They hated every picture ever taken of them and let […]

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CINEMA: What A Drag It Is Never Getting Old

Artwork by GRACE O’CONNOR ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 123 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Adam and Eve, as played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, channel a sweet strain of sublime melancholy as the aging couple in director Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. To describe this beautiful pair as an aging couple is not quite right; actually as vampires their bodies aren’t aging at all but together they possess a world-weariness born of observing centuries of man’s foolhardy ways. The two exist in a beautiful stasis, a state that Jarmusch milks for […]

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THE BOTH: Q&A w/ Aimee Mann & Ted Leo

Photo by CHRISTIAN LANTRY BY JONATHAN VALANIA Aimee Mann and Ted Leo started out as friends a decade ago, and then more recently they became tour mates. One day on tour Mann walked into Leo’s hotel room and heard him playing “Honesty Is No Excuse.” They got to talking about sounds and songwriting, and they quickly worked up a cover version they began performing on tour. This led to them discussing the prospect of pursuing a long-distance collaborative effort (she lives in L.A., he lives in Brooklyn) when they got back home. “We were just like ‘Fuck it, let’s push […]

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MAY DAY MAY DAY: Today Is The Day We Start Kicking The Pimps And Whores Out Of Washington

  WASHINGTON POST: Everyone knows the ubiquity of big money in politics undermines democracy. But the mechanics of the money chase now warps daily political life so thoroughly that it would seem funny if it weren’t so shocking. New legislators are told by party leaders to spend no less than four hours a day “dialing for dollars” for reelection. That’s twice the time they’re expected to spend on committee work, floor votes or meeting with constituents. And it doesn’t count the fundraisers they attend in their “free time.” “Members routinely duck out of the House office buildings, where they are […]

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INCOMING: Jesus Is Coming, Everybody Look Busy!

  Best-selling author and religion scholar Reza Aslan will join Drexel University on Wednesday, May 7, as the fourth lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Lecture Series. Previous lecturers in the series include neuroscientist David Eagleman, acclaimed author Sir Salman Rushdie and media maven Arianna Huffington. In a talk based on his number one New York Times bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Aslan will sift through centuries of mythmaking to shed new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters, Jesus Christ. Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the […]

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RIP: Al Feldstein, Mad’s Hatter, Dead At 88

  NEW YORK TIMES: He hired many of the writers and artists whose work became Mad trademarks. Among them were Don Martin, whose cartoons featuring bizarre human figures and distinctive sound effects — Katoong! Sklortch! Zazik! — immortalized the eccentric and the screwy; Antonio Prohias, whose “Spy vs. Spy” was a sendup of the international politics of the Cold War; Dave Berg, whose “The Lighter Side of …” made gentle, arch fun of middlebrow behavior; Mort Drucker, whose caricatures satirized movies like Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” (“Henna and Her Sickos” in Mad’s retelling). […] In his second issue, […]

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VIA CHICAGO: Q&A w/ Wilco Guitarist Nels Cline

  BY JONATHAN VALANIA Wizardly Wilco axeman Nels Cline plays Johnny Brenda’s on Friday (May 2nd) with The Nels Cline Singers in support of the new Macroscope, as part of an Ars Nova joint. Widely regarded as one of the 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time, Cline has performed on more than 70 albums  — with the Geraldine Fibbers, with Wilco, with the Nels Cline Singers and a host of collaborators, including Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Willie Nelson and drummer Alex Cline, his identical twin brother — over the course of an auspicious 34-year career. Last week we got him […]

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