BY JON HOULON Indie rock. I never understood that. Independent of what? Commerce? I doubt it. Your Drag City is the Capitol of a state called Filthy Lucre. Songs? Yea, could be. I heard Tom Russell – one of the finest #OKboomer songwriters still plying his trade – say that the trouble with indie kids is that they don’t write songs but, rather, “soundscapes.” Ever try playing a Pavement ditty around a campfire? It falls flat. And, lord knows, don’t sing DCB over roasted marshmallows unless you want your pals propelled into a fiery furnace. My best guess is […]
EXCERPT: Postcard From The Edge
VULTURE: [Carrie] caused deep worry that was somehow hidden by the movie crews’ obsession with John’s addiction rather than her own. Carrie—younger than the others—was intensely fragile. She was generous, brilliant, witty, charismatic, caring—and deeply vulnerable: friends could see that. When they all got to the Belushis’ Vineyard house, “my brother was most concerned about her. He had to carry her limp body from room to room. I guess she was conscious enough that he didn’t call an ambulance, but he had a strong sense that she was really out of it.” It was during that spate of days on the […]
WORTH REPEATING: How I Became A Weirdo
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following essay by Phawker almnus Elizabeth Fiend [pictured below] about her early days as a weirdo punk rocker/comic strip artist is included in THE BOOK OF WEIRDO just published by Last Gasp. Legendary in alt-comic book circles, Weirdo was a comics anthology created by R. Crumb in 1981 and ran until 1993. THE BOOK OF WEIRDO includes a comprehensive history of the publication, interviews with its three editors — R.Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Peter Bagge (of Hate fame) — and testimonials from artists that contributed over the years, including Miss Fiend, hence this essay. Robert Aline […]
REST IN POWER: Author Toni Morrison, ‘Towering Novelist Of The Black Experience’, Dead At 88
Illustration by Alexandra Compain-Tissier NEW YORK TIMES: In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Ms. Morrison animated that reality in a style resembling that of no other writer in English. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act. Her narratives mingle the voices of […]
Win Tix 2 Freakonomics Radio Live @ Kimmel Ctr
Photo by AUDREY BERNSTEIN Freakonomics Radio, one of the ten most popular podcasts in the country, is hosting a live show at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia on June 6th and we have a pair of tickets to give away to some lucky Phawker reader. What’s that you say? “What is this *makes sarcastic air quotes* freakin’ nomix thing you speak of?” Oh brother, where art thou?!? Time to get your freak on. Here’s a brief history of time as it applies to Freakonomics from their web site: It began when New York journalist and author Stephen J. Dubner [pictured] […]
BOOKS: The Great Gritsby
PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: Gritty is only four months old, but in that time he’s shown up everywhere. On wedding cakes, on Jimmy Fallon, on Christmas ornaments, on a fake (hopeful?) cover of Time magazine. So consider us highly un-shocked to discover that our favorite orange fur-ball made an appearance on some more fake covers: This time of the literary variety, thanks to a series of mock-ups by local indie publisher Quirk Books. MORE
BOOKS: The Importance Of Being Edward Gorey
THE ATLANTIC: When the war was over, Gorey went to Harvard, where he set about the business of—as Dery puts it—“becoming Gorey.” His assistant dean found him to be a “queer looking egg.” But his best buddy was the poet Frank O’Hara, so who cares? There began the long coats, the many rings, the weary supremacy. He had crushes on other men. No sex, though, as far as Dery can ascertain, and no long-term companionship. Sedulous bachelorhood became the MO. Morrissey again: The hills are alive with celibate cries. Gorey moved to Manhattan in 1953 and churned out book […]
INCOMING: Massacre At Duffy’s Cut Book Signing
BY JONATHAN VALANIA There is an old saying that goes: under every mile of railroad track is a dead Irishman. Locally speaking this is almost literally true. Back in the 19th Century, the Main Line was built on the blood, sweat and tears of Irish Catholic immigrants, who back then commanded about as much respect as Mexican migrant workers command today. Out near Malvern, under mile 59 of what was then the Pennsylvania Railroad and is today SEPTA’s R-5 line, beneath a stretch of track known as Duffy’s Cut, lies the bodies of 57 Irish railroad workers. What killed […]
BOOKS: Fear & Loathing In Trumplandia
THE NATION: It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson—it was the gonzo journalist’s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell’s Angels […]
BOOKS: Perchance To Dream
Photo by SANDRO via NEW YORK MAGAZINE THE GUARDIAN: David Lynch works from a studio on a slope above one of three adjacent homes he owns in the Hollywood Hills, just a stone’s throw from Mulholland Drive. He is reclusive and seldom leaves this little realm, let alone grants audiences to journalists – but he is prepared to now, on the eve of publishing an unconventional memoir-cum-biography, Room To Dream. An assistant escorts me through the house (sleek concrete walls and surfaces, floor-to-ceiling shelves of VHS cassettes and CDs) and up through the garden to the studio. A snake slithered […]
BOOKS: This Is Your Book On Drugs
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Bantam, 1968, reprinted 1999) BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC You’re either on the bus, or off the bus, Ken Kesey chants. On the bus. Off the bus. With the Merry Pranksters. Or with the squares. On the bus. Off the bus. This phrase — a meaty reality bite all by itself, repeated like a mantra throughout the book — marks the metaphysical divide that is at the center of Tom Wolfe’s raw account of the psychedelic counterculture in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the legendary New Journalism chronicle of Ken Kesey (author of One Flew […]
Q&A: With Hampton Sides Author Of “Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the International Hunt for His Assassin”
Hampton Sides is an acclaimed bestselling author and a National Magazine Award nominated journalist. He won the PEN USA Award for nonfiction and the 2002 Discover Award from Barnes and Noble for Ghost Soldiers, a historical narrative following the rescue of WWII Bataan Death March survivors that was later adapted into the Miramax feature film The Great Raid. His next book, Blood and Thunder, was adapted into an episode of the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Experience series. Hellhound On His Trail, is a taut and thrilling account of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the 65-day manhunt […]
Q&A With New York Magazine Film Critic Matt Zoller Seitz, Author Of The Wes Anderson Collection
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published on March 14, 2014 Matt Zoller Seitz is the TV critic for New York magazine and Vulture.com and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. A Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker, Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image and The L Magazine, among other outlets. His five part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was later spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. Seitz is the founder and […]