FRESH AIR From the self-checkout aisle of the grocery store to the sports section of the newspaper, robots and computer software are increasingly taking the place of humans in the workforce. Silicon Valley executive Martin Ford says that robots, once thought of as a threat to only manufacturing jobs, are poised to replace humans as teachers, journalists, lawyers and others in the service sector. “There’s already a hardware store [in California] that has a customer service robot that, for example, is capable of leading customers to the proper place on the shelves in order to find an item,” Ford […]
CEREMONY: The Separation/The Understanding
Ceremony marks, by my reckoning, the second great Joy Division tribute band on the Matador roster. No matter, originality is highly overrated. Just ask, well, everyone except Devo, John Cage and the Sugarhill Gang. They play Union Transfer on 6/27 in support of The L Shaped Man (Matador), which drops tomorrow.
BEING THERE: Jane’s Addiction @ The E-Factory
Photo by DYLAN LONG Jane’s Addiction is plumbing its history — and the latent demon of nostalgia — by touring the nation, playing each and every track of its first studio album “Nothing’s Shocking,” the 1988 album that helped the band graduate from L.A. scenesters to legitimate international alternative stars. It’d be easy to say that Jane’s, at least this incarnation, has aged about as gracefully as the music industry itself, but that’d be a lie. What transpired on Saturday night at the Electric Factory was, in fact, a snapshot of a band — its historical record firmly rooted — […]
CINEMA: Apocalypse Wow
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015, directed by George Miller, 120 minutes, Australia) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Seconds into the heavily-lauded Mad Max reboot my heart slowly started to sink. Staring over the desert landscape Max nonchalantly stomps on an animated Geico-like gekko and pops him into his mouth. Despite all the advance press declaring the fourth in this series was going to be an old-school, live stunt-driven film it quickly becomes apparent that just like George Lucas, George Miller had found irresistible the possibility of controlling every inch of the frame with CGI. This layer of artifice is […]
BEING THERE: Faith No More @ E-Factory
Photo by DAN LONG Last night, I stood in the uncomfortable throng of enthusiastic attendees at the Electric Factory’s sold out Faith No More gig, the room alive with an ear-crippling volume from both the band and the voices around me. Faith No More, the alt-metal superstars whose appreciation and influence peaked in the early to mid-90s, were gracious and thankful for the positive reception from the crowd. Following an impressive and highly entertaining performance from the opening band, Le Butcherettes, (whose wildly charismatic DEVO-meets-Grace Slick frontwoman Teri Geri Bender who abandoned the stage at one point to shimmy, shuffle, […]
BEING THERE: Lightning Bolt @ First Unitarian
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Skulking into the basement of the First Unitarian Church last night to see the sold-out show of noise-rock duo Lightning Bolt felt like more of a “Boys Only” club than most concerts usually do for me. Unsurprisingly, the guy to gal ratio was at an unhealthy 10:1, and that’s counting the begrudgingly-dragged-along girlfriends. Regardless, I can only assume that everyone there was a loyal and willing fan, seeing no issue with having his or her face violently torn off by Lightning Bolt’s signature machine-gun-meets-outer-space vortex of sound. Getting the appropriately themed lightning bolt-shaped marks on […]
Win Tix To See Jane’s Addiction @ The E-Factory
It may be hard to remember now but there was a time when Jane’s Addiction was the Guns N’ Roses of alt-rock, or maybe Guns N’ Roses were the Jane’s Addiction of metal. Either way, the Berlin wall between alternative and metal came tumbling down and there was no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Jane’s made it safe to wed soulful weirdness with total heaviosity and for a time — let’s say 1987, the year Nothing’s Shocking came out, to 1994, the year Kurt Cobain crucified himself with a shotgun — all seemed somehow right in the world. […]
Q&A w/ Comedian John Mulaney, Ex-SNL Writer, Stefon Co-Creator, Couldbe TV Sitcom Star
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published back in September of 2013, in advance of his appearance at Oddball Fest. Mr. Mulaney will be performing at the Merriam on Saturday, hence this encore presentation. Enjoy, and check back tomorrow when we will be giving away a pair of tix for the show. Why? Because we love you! BY JONATHAN VALANIA As co-creator of the ever-popular Stefon (‘New York’s hottest club is…’) sketch on SNL, comedian John Mulaney is probably better-known for his work behind the camera than in front of it, but that will change soon. Last Friday we got Mulaney […]
CINEMA: Killing Drake
Very impressive NYU student film about a college dude so obsessed with Drake that he goes Mark David Chapman on his idol to save him the ignominy of impending mediocrity. It’s a lot funnier than it sounds on paper. THE FADER: The premise of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a short film about an obsessive Drake fan, is cribbed from a Biggie track off of Life After Death, but also from a long legacy of fans-turned-killers: “It’s almost like you’re nobody until somebody kills you,” the film’s unnamed protagonist paraphrases, before preparing a plan to murder Drake so […]
Win Tix To See Serial On Ice At The Merriam
Serial is/was like the Innocence Project meets Murder She Wrote for the McSweeney’s set, it is/was also the most popular podcast in the known universe. Now that season one has wrapped and the smoke has cleared and a Peabody has been won and the courts have been shamed into investigating the possibility that an innocent man was sentenced to life for a crime he may not have committed, co-producers/creators Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder have embarked on a victory lap/listening tour, that stops at The Merriam on tomorrow night, wherein they will discuss with bespectacled superfans what it was […]
CINEMA: Fear Of A Robot Planet
BY EMMA BAILEY What does it mean to be “human”? What is it that separates our consciousness from all the other creatures of Earth? Is human consciousness quantifiably superior to the beasts of the field? We could go back and forth on this topic all day, but you don’t see birds debating Derrida or solving long division problems, and yet there is something exquisite about the Zen-like simplicity of their existence. Why do humans insist on complicating things? In a blink of time’s eye, the dinosaurs became extinct, mammals came down from the trees, and mankind developed a unique […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Ministry @ The TLA
Here’s a chance to re-live your gloriously misspent goth youth. Ministry, decadent avatars of the Skinny Puppy/NIN/Front Line Assembly school of bummer EDM for bad people, play the TLA tomorrow night with Laibach and we have a coupla pair of tix to giveaway to some lucky recovering goth/Phawker reader. To win, all you have to do is send us an email at FEED@PHAWKER.COM and share some mildly embarrassing personal factoid (Example: “I actually liked the first Ministry album, back when they still sounded like pussies”) or anecdote (“The jocks at school used to call me ‘Flock Of Seagulls’ and […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Photographer Sally Mann is fascinated by bodies. In the early 1990s, she became famous — or notorious — for her book Immediate Family, which featured photographs of her young children naked. Critics claimed Mann’s work eroticized the children, but Mann says the photos were misinterpreted. “I was surprised by the vehemence, I guess, of the letters and the dead certainty that so many people had that they understood … my motivations and feelings and who my children were,” Mann tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “People feel like they understand the children just by virtue of looking at […]