THE GUARIDAN: Mopping up that spilled organic, fair trade coffee with a Brawny kitchen roll? Off to yoga in your Lycra shorts? Serving your kids kale chips on a Dixie paper plate? Did you know you were lining the pockets of the Charles and David Koch, billionaire bankrollers of the extreme right? Well, soon there’ll be an app for that. A former tech head turned politician is developing an app that will allow shoppers to avoid products made by the Kochs or other billionaires currently spending fortunes backing rightwing candidates and policies. Details of the project were first revealed on […]
SIGUR ROS: Svefn-g-englar
Featuring Reykjavik’s Perlan Theater Group. Incredible.
TRUTH DIGGER: Q&A With Christopher Hedges, Author, Journalist, American Who Tells The Truth
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.[1] His most recent book, which he wrote with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, is “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012). Hedges and Sacco, who illustrated the book, reported from the poorest pockets in the United States including the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, Camden, New Jersey, the coal fields of southern West Virginia, the nation’s produce fields and in the last chapter from the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park.[2] Hedges is also known as […]
RIP: Encyclopedia Brown Creator Donald J. Sobol
WIRED: Donald Sobol, the creator of the best-selling Encyclopedia Brown series of mysteries, has passed away at the age of 87. The news of his death was made public this morning; Sobol died last week of natural causes in Miami, according to reports. Sobol’s famous chronicles of 10-year-old Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown launched nearly 50 years ago with Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective in 1963. Encyclopedia Brown was a proto-hacker, a bad-ass in the style of Buckaroo Banzai and MacGyver, who could sleuth a complicated crime, break it down, and solve it in the span of three pages. In addition to […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Best Coast @ Union Transfer
Photo by PETE TROSHAK BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER There are two kinds of bands in this life: the ones that write all kinds of songs, some great, some good, some not so much. Think the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac. And then there are the bands that write the same song over and over again, but we are willing to overlook that fact because it’s a great song. Think the Ramones or the Jesus and Mary Chain or Metallica. Best Coast, the blogger-beloved Cali fuzz-pop duo fronted by former indie-rock It Girl Bethany Consentino, fits into […]
JACK WHITE: Freedom At 21
NEW YORK TIMES: In an industrial section of south-central Nashville, stuck between a homeless shelter and some railroad tracks, sits a little primary-colored Lego-block of a building with a Tesla tower on top. The inside holds all manner of curiosities and wonders — secret passageways, trompe l’oeil floors, the mounted heads of various exotic ungulates (a bison, a giraffe, a Himalayan tahr) as well as a sign on the wall that says photography is prohibited. This is the home of Third Man Records: the headquarters of Jack White’s various musical enterprises, and the center of his carefully curated world. “When […]
WORTH REPEATING: What Is This Man Hiding?
BUSINESSWEEK: As George Will and many others have noted, there must be something truly damaging in Romney’s pre-2010 tax returns for him to willingly endure the criticism and scrutiny that has accompanied his refusal to release them — a refusal he reiterated on Friday, even as the issue, and the matter of his departure date from Bain Capital, have engulfed the campaign. “The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” Will said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” So what could it be that Romney is […]
She’ll Be Riding Six White Horses When She Comes: Q&A With Spectral Indie Folkie Laura Gibson
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Earlier this spring, Portlandian indie-folk antiquarian Laura Gibson released La Grande, a mesmerizing collection of otherworldly torch songs, ghostly Americana and haunted folk/blues. La Grande is Gibson’s third album and features cameos from Joey Burns of Calexico, members of The Dodos and fellow Portlandians The Decemberists, is currently topping our favorite albums of 2012 list. We are not alone — Mojo, Uncut and Q gave it rave four star reviews. Recently we got Laura on the horn to discuss love, death, math, folk music, cataclysmic genocidal tsunamis, the secret to being the state high jump champion and […]
Sarah Silverman Offers To Rub Uglies With Sheldon Adelson If He Will Drop Romney And Back Obama
The things a gal has to do to save America. RELATED: Scissor Sheldon RELATED: A decade ago gambling magnate and leading Republican donor Sheldon Adelson looked at a desolate spit of land in Macau and imagined a glittering strip of casinos, hotels and malls. Where competitors saw obstacles, including Macau’s hostility to outsiders and historic links to Chinese organized crime, Adelson envisaged a chance to make billions. Adelson pushed his chips to the center of the table, keeping his nerve even as his company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in late 2008. The Macau bet paid off, propelling Adelson […]
LORD OF THE STRINGS: Q&A With Dick Dale
Surf music? Dick Dale invented the stuff. Pure mainlined adrenaline, it is. Like a pocketful of white lightning. Nitroglycerin on hot wax. Surely you’ve seen the opening moments of Pulp Fiction. Easily the most thrilling marriage of profanity, felony and surf music in the history of American cinema. Rock guitar? He re-invented it. He is more or less the bridge between Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. He worked closely with Leo Fender — godfather creator of the essential machinery of rock, the Fender guitar and the Fender amp — to advance the power […]
BEST COAST: When I’m With You
Surprised this hasn’t been vaporized by the cease-and-desist ray of the McDonalds Death Star. Hilarious. She plays a sold out show at Union Transfer tonight.
VULTURE CAPITALISM: Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital Routinely Privatized Profits And Socialized Losses
BLOOMBERG NEWS: In 1992, Bain Capital bought American Pad & Paper by financing 87 percent of the purchase price. In the next three years, Ampad borrowed to make acquisitions, repay existing debt and pay Bain Capital and its investors $60 million in dividends. As a result, the company’s debt swelled from $11 million in 1993 to $444 million by 1995. The $14 million in annual interest expense on this debt dwarfed the company’s $4.7 million operating cash flow. The proceeds of an initial public offering in July 1996 were used to pay Bain Capital $48 million for part of […]
GEEK SQUAD: 23 Things We Learned At Comic-Con
BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT The four-day geek high holiday that is San Diego Comic-Con has just come and gone, leaving behind an endless amount of juicy news about upcoming video games, movies, TV shows, and of course comics. To avoid writing my graduate thesis early, I am just going to give bullet points about everything that geeks who couldn’t afford (or didn’t plan the year and a half in advance it takes) to attend North America’s biggest comic con need to know. Iron Man 3 (May 3, 2013) will feature Iron Man controlling his armor with just […]