No, this isn’t another one of Chaka Fattah’s highbrow schemes for ending gridlock. A picture of people floating across the city on giant tomes can only mean one thing: It’s time for Philadelphia’s annual book burning fest! Standby for for our Philadelphia Book Festival preview, including a Q&A with Absurdistan author Gary Shteygnart and more…
FILM FEST PICKS & PANS: Dante’s Inferno; Wicked Flowers; Book Of The Dead; Severance
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Heading into its last weekend, the 2007 Philadelphia Film Festival unleashes the big celebrity guns, giving us this year’s American Independent Award winner, Dermot Mulroney. I spent a few minutes this week trying to stoke a friend’s memory on exactly who the very recognizable Mulroney is, and finally had to give up. His specialty in nearly 20 years of film acting has been in supporting roles, often playing ingratiating nice guys who are romance-bait for the female lead. He’s worked with Altman on Kansas City, with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding and most […]
Kurt Vonnegut lived in a modest-sized townhouse on the east side of Manhattan, in a neighborhood inexplicably referred to as Turtle Bay. I know this because I followed him home one day.
BY MICHAEL WEINREB I cannot say what it was, exactly, that possessed me to do this — I had never stalked a celebrity before then, and have not since. It was an act of free will, but at the same time, seemed predestined. This was several years ago, not long after I first moved to New York. I had reached a nadir, tumbled into one of those angst-ridden quarter-life crises which are unavoidable for a man in his 20s. Of course, there were colossally stupid decisions made: I fell in love with a woman who lived with another man; worked […]
KURT VONNEGUT RIP: ‘Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt’ — Epitaph From Slaughterhouse Five
NEW YORK — Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” died Wednesday. He was 84. Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz. The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured […]
SIDEWALKING: The Naked And The Def
A MAN IN FULL: Norman Mailer, The Free Library Of Philadelphia, Tuesday Night BY EVA LIAO Full disclosure: I have never read a Norman Mailer book from cover to cover. And the perfunctory excerpts thrown into the textbooks of my contemporary lit college courses don’t really count. I do know, however, that after writing 45 books and providing decades of titillating fodder for the media — co-founder of the Village Voice, winner of multiple Pulitzer Prizes and devotee of Marilyn Monroe, not to mention the whole wife-stabbing incident — the guy has a reputation. He’s kind of like an older, […]
All Of This Happened While You Were Sleeping
THE MAN COMES AROUND: Norman Mailer, The Free Library, Last Night [Photo by Eva Liao]
REVIEW: 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 […]
THE EARLY WORD: Sam I Am
WHO: Kindergarten through Grade 4 students from Thomas M. Peirce School WHAT: Will enjoy a reading of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham by National Constitution Center staff, as part of Read Across Philadelphia Day, which is in line with the nationwide event, Read Across America Day, celebrates the birthday and legacy of Theodore Guisel, better know as Dr. Seuss. March 2, 2007 will mark the author’s 103rd birthday. WHEN: Thursday, March 1, 9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. WHERE: Thomas M. Peirce School 2300 W. Cambria Street Philadelphia, PA 19132
INTERVIEW: How Devil Girl Became Mrs. Natural
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Almost everyone knows R. Crumb‘s work whether they realize it or not. Keep On Truckin‘? You’re soaking in it. Cheap Thrills? You betcha. Big butts? He invented them. Devil doll glamazons offering piggyback rides to nebbishy four-eyed horn dogs? Sweet Jesus! Giddyup! (If none of this rings a bell, you would do well by renting Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary, Crumb.) Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his wife of 35 years, is not quite the household word her husband is, but that may well change, depending on how hip the household. Aline has been cartooning as long as her husband has, […]
BOOK REVIEW: Blonde On Blonde
The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski (St. Martin’s Minotaur. $23.95) BY MAVIS LINNEMANN From the opening line of Duane Swierczynski’s crime novel, The Blonde, you know you’re in for a wild ride. “I poisoned your drink,” says the titular blonde to Jack Eisley, a print journalist in Philadelphia to sign his divorce papers. Kelly White — The Blonde in question — has been infected with a deadly new technology, nanomachines, which have been designed to make privacy virtually obsolete. If there isn’t someone within 10 feet of Kelly at all times, she will die. Even more unnerving is that these nanomachines […]
COMING ATTRACTION: Mr. & Mrs. au Naturale
On Friday, look for Phawker’s exclusive interview with the R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb: Big butts, bigger boots, LSD, weird sex, piggyback rides, meeting the Beatles, leaving America, and growing up in Philadelphia…newly hired PHAWKER BOOK CRITIC Mavis Linneman‘s review of City Paper Editor Duane Swierczynski‘s The Blonde…FILM CRITIC DAN BUSKIRK‘s review of the hilarious hipster comedy of manners that is Mutual Appreciation. Plus, the new ARCADE FIRE on PHAWKER RADIO, NPR FOR THE DEAF, PhillyHistory Write-A-Caption contest, and, invariably, some wry riposte on the latest and seemingly regularly-scheduled snuffing of a human life by a gun. Damn.
SIDEWALKING: Laugh Clown! Laugh! [tickle, tickle]
MR. NATURAL: R. Crumb, New York Public Library, Valentine’s Day [FLICKR] Please standby for Phawker’s exclusive interview with the Robert and Aline Kominsky-Crumb: Big butts, LSD, weird sex, meeting the Beatles, leaving America, and growing up in Philadelphia… [PHOTO BY JONATHAN VALANIA]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR WITH TERRY GROSS Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was elected to Congress at the age of 29 and served in the House of Representatives for eight years. He just began his second term as a Senator. He is a member of the Senate Democratic Leadership team, and sits on the Senate Finance Committee; the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; and the Judiciary Committee. His new book is Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family At a Time. ALSO Before being elected into the U.S. Senate in 1994 Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) served in the U.S. […]