Mercury Music Prize winner ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS KESWICK THEATRE MON., FEB. 2, 8 PM In their first area appearance since 2005, ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS will perform their internationally-acclaimed blend of highly dramatic, emotional and lyrical chamber cabaret at Glenside’s Keswick Theatre on Mon. Feb. 2 @ 8 PM .ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS will be touring in support of their highly-anticipated January 2009 release, The Crying Light. Their last full-length album, 2005’s I am a Bird Now, won the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize for the best album of 2005 over rival nominees the Kaiser Chiefs, and was greeted with […]
BOOK EXCERPT: Tear Down This Myth
EDITOR’S NOTE: Phawker is proud to bring you this excerpt from Daily News scribe/Attytood blogger-in-chief Will Bunch’s soon-to-publish Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics And Haunts Our Future, a meaty, pointed dissection of the dream factory mythologizing of Ronald Reagan’s presidency — how this is being done, why, and the impact such historical revisionism has on our current political landscape. The short answer to all the above can be found the following quote from George Orwell, which kicks off the book: ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls […]
PAPERBOY: ‘We’re All Polar Bears Now’ Edition
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 […]
OBJECTION: Today’s Inky Homeless Story
BY JEFF DEENEY This morning’s Inquirer story on Camden’s tent city strikes me as a step backwards in the paper’s coverage of the homelessness issue. Last year Inky reporter Jennifer Lin made incredible strides towards covering the region’s homelessness problem the way it should be covered. Chronic street homelessness is a mental health and addictions crisis. There are professionals in the field who are applying new methods of attacking the problem, which has resulted in precipitous drops of people living on the streets in cities around the country. This new method of attacking homelessness is called “housing first” and it […]
HEAR YE: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Now playing on PHAWKER RADIO! Why? Because it’s GREAT! That’s why. Of all the bands to come out of the Elephant 6 collective — that loose-knit cross-country cabal of weedy bus-station transcendentalists and grass-stained pranksters — Neutral Milk Hotel was the least beholden to classic psych-rock templates, yet somehow managed to evoke and advance them all at once. On 1998’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Jeff Mangum’s mewling sunshine Superman melodies are colored by bare, ruined choirs of singing saw, fuzz bass, mariachi horns, bowed banjo, accordion, home organ and Salvation Army marching band brass. Produced by the Apples […]
BURN AFTER READING: CIA’s Algerian Station Chief Accused Of Drugging And Raping Two Muslim Women
ABC NEWS: The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News. The suspect in the case is identified as Andrew Warren in an affidavit for a search warrant filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. by an investigator for the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service. Officials say the 41-year old Warren, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October […]
Google Launches Diagnostic Tools That Allow Users To Determine If Your ISP Is Rationing Your Web Access
PC MAGAZINE: Is your ISP throttling your Internet connection or is it just time to get a new computer? How much bandwidth are you actually using? Are you getting the Internet speeds promised by your provider? These may seem like basic questions, but they are not easily answered. At the root of last year’s Comcast network management debacle was whether or not the cable provider was blocking access to file-sharing Web sites. Comcast said no, the Federal Communications Commission said yes, but we never got a clear answer. Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a new open platform announced Wednesday, is looking to […]
SEE NO EVIL: Judge Dismisses Graffiti Beatdown
DAILY NEWS: A Common Pleas judge — like another judge before him — dismissed all charges yesterday against two former Philadelphia police officers accused of punching and kicking a graffiti vandal in Feltonville two years ago. After an 80-minute hearing involving two new witnesses, plenty of objections by high-profile defense attorneys, and impassioned arguments, Judge Frank Palumbo ended the case by announcing: “Discharged.” The two ex-cops, Sheldon Fitzgerald and Howard Hill III, both 30, then left the courtroom and were congratulated by their former colleagues. The two declined comment. Fortunato “Fred” Perri Jr., who represented the men with his partner […]
USELESS INFORMATION: Heavy Metal Etymology
[via COMICVSAUDIENCE; click chart to enlarge]
GUNS & ROSES: 7 Dead In Cali Mass Murder-Suicide
MERCURY NEWS: LOS ANGELES — Police officers stood at the front of a crowded church on Tuesday night, offering what few answers they could to explain why a father would kill his wife and five children before turning the gun on himself. But residents of the suburban community of Wilmington have heard of such violence before. The Lupoe family, whose seven bodies were discovered shot to death Tuesday morning in their home, represents the fifth mass death of a Southern California family by murder or suicide in a year. This time, residents wanted more than updates to another murder investigation. They […]
PHAWKER TAWK: Q&A With Tim and Eric
BY SCOTT COLAN With hack ventriloquist Jeff Dunham and his quasi-racist puppets scoring unprecedented ratings on Comedy Central, you could assume that the state of comedy in America is in as bad a shape as the national economy. Fear not, Philadelphia’s own Tim & Eric and their show “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” provides respite from the mouth breathers and the ankle biters. Their dark comedic surrealism puts them among the latest in a lineage that stretches from Monty Python to SCTV to Kids in the Hall to Bob and David. And now the torch has been passed […]
RABBIT AT REST: John Updike Dead At 76
NEW YORK TIMES: John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to earn him comparisons with Henry James and Edmund Wilson among American men of letters, died today at a hospice outside Boston. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass. The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. Where James and Wilson focused largely on elite Americans in a European context, Mr. Updike wrote of ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings. His best-known […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR In his new book, We Can Have Peace In The Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work, former President Jimmy Carter presents his strategy to end fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. The 39th president of the United States, Carter is the author of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and the founder of The Carter Center, an organization that promotes conflict resolution and peace. ALSO, Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, has written about the Arab-Israeli conflict for more than 25 years. Recently, he has been covering the conflict in Gaza. In a Jan. 24 […]