THE HAUNTED WINDCHIMES Honey-Moonshine Blank Tape Records Maybe I was just bored, or perhaps it was an instinctual lust for alcohol, but the old-timey drawing of a jug of moonshine on the Haunted Windchime’s debut, Honey-Moonshine, drew me right in. Society tells me: don’t’ judge a book by its cove, but fuck ‘em. It looked awesome, so I gave it a spin. The Haunted Windchimes, I soon discovered, are a rootsy folk band that raise the hairs on my arms with their bewitching harmonies. Sassy female timbres blur into male-led verses, creating a sound that sways from the holy to […]
THE FUGS: Kill For Peace
NEW YORK TIMES: The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.” They were also perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the graduate seminar (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem by William Blake); all were played with a ramshackle glee that anticipated punk rock. With songs like “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs also established themselves as aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist theater. The band […]
SIDEWALKING: The Big Bambino
Italian Market, 12:37 PM by JEFF FUSCO PREV: The Phantom Plot To Blow Up The Liberty Bell BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY In the spring of 1969, four activists from the Philadelphia chapter of the Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) were arrested for plotting to blow up the Liberty Bell after the police found bomb-making materials in the refrigerator of their West Philly apartment. According to the police, the planned destruction of the Liberty Bell was part of a larger plot hatched by a network of student radicals to destroy national landmarks across the country. The shocking […]
THE PHAROAHS OF AMERICA: The Secret Tomb Of The Gilded Age Discovered In Elkins Park
WASHINGTON POST: ELKINS PARK, Pa. — Lynnewood Hall, a century-old stunner of a building just outside Philadelphia, silently, almost invisibly, languishes 200 feet beyond a two-lane blacktop road like a crumbling little Versailles. The graceful fountain that welcomed hundreds of well-heeled visitors, President Franklin Roosevelt among them, was dismantled and sold years ago. Its once meticulously sculpted French gardens are overgrown with weeds and vines. The classical Indiana limestone facade may have lost its luster but its poise still remains – at least from the other side of rusted wrought iron gates that keep the curious at bay. Like other […]
PENTAGON PAPERS: Wikileaks Releases 92,000 Classified Afghan War Documents To The NY Times
NEW YORK TIMES: The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001. As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst […]
TONITE: It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World
JAMES WOLCOTT: It’s 1964, LBJ is in the White House, America is on the marching move, the Beatles land at Idlewild and appear on Ed Sullivan–the cymbal clash that signals that the Sixties have truly begun, heralded by the simultaneous mass climax of millions of screaming girls whose joy and delirium explodes like a bomb from the depths of Pandora’s Box. The lid is off and it’s Pop goes the weasel for a whole generation. How satisfyingly smooth is Mad Men able to slip into its groove now, no longer obliged to tick off the mores and reference points of […]
TONITE: I Can’t Believe It’s Non-Classical!
BY DAVE ALLEN Let’s get this out of the way: Gabriel Prokofiev is the grandson of the great Russian composer. It was all that the articles about him could talk about after he launched Non-Classical, a London-based label and monthly club night, in 2004. Quite apart from his lineage, though, the DJ, composer and expert in African music is worthy of attention. Both his label and club night pair classical music—well, not Mozart and Beethoven, but they’d recognize the instruments—with DJ’d sets of dance music and remixes of the classical-styled source material. Prokofiev writes in traditional genres – the string […]
EXIT INTERVIEW: The Photon Band’s Art DiFuria
[Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA] As you may have heard, Philly music legend/art professor Art DiFuria, Ph.D., is leaving town for greener pastures — specifically a professorship at Savannah School Of Art And Design. In advance of his farewell show with the Photon Band at Johnny Brendas on Saturday, Phawker conducted an exit interview with Dr. DiFuria. For newbies to the glories of the Photon Band, check out the exhaustive bio down below. PHAWKER: Our first question is fill in the blank: I first came to Philadelphia because ______ but wound up staying because _____. ART DIFURIA: I first came to […]
RIP: Big Star Bassist Andy Hummel Dead At 59
MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL: The legendary Memphis pop band Big Star has lost another member, as founding bassist Andy Hummel died Monday afternoon at his home in the Fort Worth, Texas, area after a long battle with cancer. He was 59. Hummel had been receiving treatment for the past couple of years, but recently went in for a hip operation and was informed that the cancer had spread and that his condition was terminal. “At that point,” said Hummel’s friend, Ardent Studios owner and Big Star producer John Fry, “Andy elected to accept hospice care and spent the last couple weeks […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
[Portrait of Robert Duvall by SUPERSAL001] FRESH AIR In the new film Get Low, Robert Duvall plays Felix Bush, a secretive recluse who eschews almost all human contact and lives alone in the woods, fueling rumors among townspeople that he’s hiding some terrible deed in his past. One day, Bush comes out of the woods and announces to his town that he wants to stage a public, living funeral — complete with mule, hearse and coffin — before he actually dies. And as it turns out, Bush does in fact harbor a deep secret — one that sent him into […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
GRUMPY OLD MEN: Q&A With A Man Called Francis
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview first ran on October 18th, 2006. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Welcome to the second installment of our Grumpy Old Men series, wherein we learn from our elders and soak up their salty yarns like Bounty Quicker Picker-Upper. Yesterday we had Robert Christgau, today Francis Davis. Tomorrow? The Pope. What’s that you say? You never heard of Francis Davis. Oh buddy, it’s good thing you found us! Check out his CV: He has written about music, film, and other aspects of popular culture for The Atlantic since 1984 and was appointed lead jazz critic for the Voice in […]
Q&A: This American Life Host Ira Glass
BY JONATHAN VALANIA For nearly half a century television has had to bear the “barren wasteland” rap. But even a cursory, static-smeared twist of the radio dial reveals a largely fallow garden. Corporate consolidation and play-it-safe programmers have conspired to increase the emphasis on the obvious, the ordinary and the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t have to be like this. “When correctly harnessed, radio can be as emotional, as funny and as satisfying as the best motion pictures and television shows,” says Ira Glass, host of public radio’s This American Life. “But sadly, few radio programmers even shoot for that.” […]