BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Two weeks ago, the U.N. Security Council voted down a Palestinian resolution granting it statehood status. Somewhat remarkably, the resolution was only one vote short of the nine required for passage. Guess who voted against it? “We voted against this resolution not because we are comfortable with the status quo,” said UN Ambassador Samantha Power. “We voted against it because … peace must come from hard compromises that occur at the negotiating table.” And thus did a dehumanized Palestinian mission once again take it up the ass from us and the rest of our ilk at the United Nations. […]
REWIND 2014: Movie Of The Year
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, directed by Wes Anderson, 99 minutes, USA) BY JONATHAN VALANIA Wes Anderson is the two-word answer to the increasingly asked question: What good is a liberal arts education? Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, Moonrise Kingdom, that’s what.There have been times in this country’s history when we’ve had to take stock, look into our hearts and ask ourselves: Do we really want to live in a world without English majors? And this is one of those times. Which only makes The Grand Budapest Hotel, director Wes Anderson’s eighth full-length feature, all the more […]
THERE WILL BE BLOOD: Q&A w/ Natalie Mering
BY MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Weyes Blood is the appropriately creepy band name of Natalie Mering, former touring member of spacey-folk collective Jackie-O Motherfucker and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti during the Mature Themes era. On the surface, I have a lot more in common with her than I could have predicted: we’re both former choir girls from Bucks County, and the only understanding our parents have of our music taste is that it’s not what sweet girls from the suburbs ought to listen to. Noticeable differences between us include the fact that only one of us has pursued music making […]
REWIND 2014: The Year In Movies
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC If the state of the world tends to shade your personal mood, it is pretty easy to consider 2014 a year of epic trauma and bad vibes. I was thinking it was an off year for film too but when I went over my notes it turns out there was a lot to be enthusiastic about, although we again seem to be thirsting for truly original American cinema this year. Here’s a baker’s dozen films that took me to new places, many of them seeming like they could be made in no other time […]
Win Tix To See Patton Oswalt @ The Tower Theater
Christmas in January continues at Phawker this week with, get this, tickets to see Patton Friggin’ Oswalt tomorrow night at the Tower!. This came together very last minute at the behest of Mr. Oswalt, who, like PT Anderson, personally donated tix to Phawker for giving away to our readers. What can we say? We’re flattered, and excited that two of you lucky ducks is going to Upper Darby tomorrow night! Time is short so let’s cut to the quick. To keep this interesting were gonna make this hinge on a trivia question. What is the name of the Pacific […]
THERE WILL BE WEED: Win Tix To Inherent Vice
Chances are that if you are reading this you are a fan of the work of director Paul Thomas Anderson, who, a reasonable argument could be made, is the Gen. X equivalent of Scorsese/Kubrick. Chances are also good that you are a fan of the work of novelist Thomas Pynchon, ludicrously long-winded hermetic hippy oracle. By now you’ve no doubt heard the amazing news that Anderson has attempted the cinematic impossible — transmuting one of Pynchon’s dense mystical doorstops of a novel, specifically 2009’s Inherent Vice — into an epic cosmic stoner slapstick starring the Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, […]
ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Supernova Ray LaMontagne
RAY LAMONTAGNE Supernova (RCA) This was the sound of my summer, the soundtrack for playing hooky with my honey and sneaking down the shore the back way on Mondays in July, wearing wreaths of Jersey sweet corn and tomatoes and a halo of mosquitoes, the sound of moonlit drives thru the Pine Barrens, and marveling at the incandescent twinkling of the Big Dipper under magic milkshake stand skies. This album is rife with all that bygone-but-still-here-stuff — drive-in movies, purple sunshine, tape delay, lavender skies, S.E. Hinton novels, Syd Barrett nursery rhymes, the power of a reverb-drenched electric guitar, […]
SONG OF THE YEAR: Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”
BY ED KING ROCK EXPERT This is the story of how I learned to stop worrying and love Taylor Swift. The year just passed was one of the most challenging to date for me personally and professionally, but there was one song that got me through it. Let’s back up. One February evening I came home, announced I needed time alone, then lay on the floor to contemplate my ever-diminishing future. The company where I’d worked for the last 10 years, with core colleagues stretching back an additional 10 years, had been sold to a UK company. The unrest […]
THIS IS OUR MUSIC: Our Favorite Albums Of 2014
We said it before and we’ll say it again: Quoth the Chairman Of The Board, it was a very good year. So was last year, and the one before that and the one before that and so on. Why? Mostly, we can thank the disruptive, game-eating power of the Internet. The best thing that ever happened to music was the web-abetted collapse of the music industry’s one-size-fit-most paradigm and the death of radio as the prime determinant of what people like. Now people find music everywhere, it literally rains out of everything with an electric pulse, which has triggered […]
REWIND 2014: The Year In Questions And Answers
If armies run on their stomachs, blogs run on their big fucking mouths. We’re no exception. But we’d like to think that, on a good day, we put all that hot air to good use when interrogating visiting dignitaries in advance of their triumphant arrival into the City Of Brotherly Love. We’ve never pretended to have all the answers but we do know all the right questions. And we’ve never settled for easy answers to hard questions. Sometimes feelings get hurt and sometimes new connections are made. Sometimes painful truths emerge and sometimes we actually learn something. And sometimes we […]
SMUS: A Confederacy Of Thieves And Whores
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY You pretty much know that morality, ethics, and even the faintest of hopes for universal fairness in this country are on ventilators when one of our most “respected” newspapers becomes willingly complicit in (a) the final auction gavel on the American electoral system, and (b) facilitating a national financial crisis so cataclysmic as to make the last one look like a rent check overdraft. How interesting it is that the Boston Globe should feel that getting an omnibus spending bill passed — ANY kind of omnibus spending bill — is worth caving in to the treacherous, money-grubbing interests of America’s premier purveyors of […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Television @ The TLA
Television are/were legendary ’70s art-punk avatars who staged dead French symboliste poets society seances at CBGBs and scored the metaphysical proceedings with blazing epics of six-string sorcery. As one half of the Television’s incandescent guitar duality, Tom Verlaine wielded his Fender Jazzmaster like a sculptor’s carving tool, chiseling Venus de Milos of sound out of thin air. Second guitarist Richard Lloyd would then knock the arms off. Together they constructed ringing spires of guitar incandescence, erecting a chiming cathedral of sound in the church of the clustered overtone. And they called it Marquee Moon. Unto to the world a […]