Guided By Voices, Troc, 10:34 PM last night BY AMY SALIT
GUNCRAZY: It’s Always Gunny In Killadelphia
Photo by GTXTOM INQUIRER: The day started out stellar but was marred by three shootings, one by police, about 9:20 p.m. blocks from the celebration. Police grazed a 16-year-old male in the chest after he wounded at least one person, possibly two, then aimed his gun at officers near 17th and JFK Boulevard, police said. Authorities believe that the teenager had fired on a 17-year-old male and struck him in the leg. They believe the alleged shooter next shot a 19-year-old man in the left leg. “The officer saw him shoot the other person, and he ordered him to drop […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Daily Show Writer Kevin Bleyer, Fearless Re-Framer Of The U.S. Constitution
BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Constitution may be a remarkable schematic of human rights in a liberal democracy but it’s a terrible piece of comedy. Seriously, I didn’t laugh once. And what the world needs now, besides love-sweet-love, is funny. Kevin Bleyer has a pretty impressive resume in The Funny: humorous commentaries on NPR’s All Things considered; staff writer for Bill Maher and Dennis Miller; joke writer for President Obama’s White House Correspondence Dinner speeches; three Emmys and more than a 1000 broadcast hours of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart under his belt as a staff writer. One day he […]
ARTSY: Zoe Strauss Nominated For Membership In The Illustrious Magnum Photo Cooperative
THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Zoe Strauss, Jerome Sessini and Bieke Depoorter are Magnum’s newest nominees. Strauss is particularly known for The Billboard Project, a series of photos displayed on 54 separate billboards, traversing dozens of neighbours in Philadelphia. Strauss took the images during her travels around the US, including Grand Isle Beach in the Gulf of Mexico, Venice Beach in California, Rosedale, Mississippi, and Fairbanks, Alaska. MORE RELATED: Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices located in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. According to co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Magnum is a community of […]
When Nora Ephron Interviewed Bob Dylan In 1965
Q: How do you work? A:Most of the time I work at night. I don’t really like to think of it as work. I don’t know how important it is. It’s not important to the average cat who works eight hours a day. What does he care? The world can get along very well without it. I’m hip to that. Q: Sure, but the world can get along without any number of things. A:I’ll give you a comparison. Rudy Vallee. Now that was a lie, that was a downright lie. Rudy Vallee being popular. What kind of people could […]
CONTEST: Win Tix For Norah Jones @ The Mann
(We have two pairs of tickets to see Norah Jones at the Mann on Thursday to give away to the first two lucky Phawker readers to email us at FEED@PHAWKER.COM that can tell us the name of her father. Put NORAH in the subject line. Include your name and mobile number for confirmation. Good luck and godspeed!) BY JONATHAN VALANIA It’s another lazy Sunday morning coming down. You are awakened by the sunshine streaming through the open windows and the sound of the Brooklyn streets outside coming alive. Oddly, Danger Mouse is laying next to you, on his […]
DEENEY: The Antivirals Of Violence
BY JEFF DEENEY FOR THE NATION CeaseFire works through aggressive peer-led street outreach by ex-offenders with deep ties to the community, who gather intelligence on gangs in order to spot potential conflicts. Such conflicts are then mediated by the program’s famed violence “Interrupters.” At its peak, CeaseFire Chicago employed fifty outreach workers and fifty Interrupters, chosen from pools of candidates screened by professional and community panels to ensure they’d left the hustling life. Statisticians analyze the data gathered by outreach teams alongside data tracking violence collected by law enforcement, identifying up-to-the-moment crime hot spots, and focusing the program’s resources […]
CINEMA: This Time It’s Personal
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER (2012, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, 105 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I guess we all had a chuckle back in 2010, when we heard the title Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith’s follow-up to his previous literary re-fashioning, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Sustaining that chuckle through a summer blockbuster is a tall order, even for the statuesque rail-splitter from Illinois. While the great man was able to heal the nation, sadly Lincoln can’t bring together this surprisingly straight-faced mash-up of historical fact and fantasy fiction. We all know part of the story: […]
CONCERT REVIEW: The Hives @ The E-Factory
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER The Hives aren’t an arena rock band, they just play one on stage. All faux-bluster, comic petulance and winking self-aggrandizement, they evoke the high dudgeon of Diver Down-era Van Halen upon having learned that the brown M&Ms have not been exiled from the backstage banquet. But unlike Van Halen, they play it strictly for laughs. The prime driver of these immensely entertaining delusions of grandeur is the band’s sassy, boyish front man, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, a born entertainer with lungs of leather, a certain Jagger-ian grace, and large expressive eyes that could have […]
Win Tix To See Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy @ The Troc
Will Oldham remains an elusive figure, but the show is a gentle reminder of why he is often cited as one of the finest singer-songwriters in contemporary American music. Oldham was a student of music history, clearly, but he never sounded studious. He had an eerie, strangulated voice, half wild and half broken. And he sang vivid and peculiar songs, which sometimes sounded like old standards rewritten as fever dreams or, occasionally, as inscrutable dirty jokes. These days, he calls himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and his music is a little bit easier to love and a lot harder to […]
Suddenly Bobby Clarke Is A Rob Zombie Fan
DEADLINE: Rob Zombie will write, direct and produce Broad Street Bullies, a film about the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team that evolved from a cellar-dwelling expansion team into a team that racked up victories and penalty minutes in equal measure during the 1970s. Zombie, known for his head-banging music before transitioning to genre films like House Of 1000 Corpses and Halloween, is making a departure with this film, sort of, because the Flyers’ brutal style of play is genre-worthy and has the makings for a hockey film on the order of the 1977 sports film classic Slap Shot. […] Zombie […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Sharon Van Etten @ UT
Who doesn’t like Sharon Van Etten? I’ll tell you who: Dicks. That’s who. Since we know for a verifiable fact that no dicks read Phawker (I can’t talk about this too much because the Patriot Act blah, blah, blah but when you click on Phawker your permanent record comes up and it is instantaneously vetted for dickish behavior, like driving around with your dog on your roof, eating a man’s face off, defending Jerry Sandusky in the court of law, that kind of thing) it is safe to assume you would be interested in two tickets to see Sharon Van […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Neil Hamburger @ JBs
[Artwork by AYE JAY!] Gregg Turkington, AKA Neil Hamburger, is not a terrible comedian, he just plays one on stage and screen. With more than a dozen albums and EPs stretching back to the mid-90s, Turkington has put a lot of time and effort into maintaining his status as The Least Funny Man In America, Possibly The World. Consider his 2010 performance at The Reading Music Festival in the UK: His entire set was booed and derided by the capacity crowd, with chants of “You’re shit and you know you are!”. As the set progressed bottles and other projectiles were […]