Talk is cheap, especially on the Internet, but at Phawker it’s totally free, baby — at least for you, dear reader. Trolling through the vast and dusty Phawker archives, we have dug up fat sack of conversations from the past year that are worth re-visiting: Dick Dale, King Of The Surf Guitar; graphic novelist Charles Burns, the Edgar Allan Poe of right now; photographer Joe Kazcmarek, who tirelessly chronicles the murder-scarred backstreets of North and West Philly; Jim Reid, lead singer of The Jesus And Mary Chain; Anton Newcombe, cult leader of The Brian Jonestown Massacre; Hardball host Chris Matthews; […]
BOOKS: Lord Of The Zings
Back in the day, when rock critics weren’t just zoo-kept follow-fashion monkeys pounding out corporate press releases for peanuts, Meltzer was the 800-pound gorilla at the backstage meet-and-greet. Meltzer, together with Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches, formed a terrible triumvirate of rowdy rock scribblers, angel-headed gutterpunks who wrote like Milton’s satanic majesty and rocked like Keith Richards’ liver. Check out A Whore Just Like the Rest, a compendium of his feverish rock crit musings, if you want to truly understand how the wild horses of rock were tamed into a corporate pony ride. With the winter of his discontent looming […]
BOOKS: Q&A With John Waters, Lord Of The Trash
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] This conversation with celluloid-transgressor-turned-authority-on-all-things-wicked John Waters originally ran back in 2010 upon the publication of his book Role Models. We are re-running on the occasion of Waters bringing his one-man Christmas show of shows to the Troc on Thursday. Stay tuned, we will be giving away a couple pairs of tickets. As for the the interview, we talked about LSD, outsider porn, fuzzy sweaters, uptight gay bars, Charlie Manson, Johnny Mathis, censorship, why the Chipmunks are far superior to the Beatles, and why he hasn’t made a film in year. *** PHAWKER: Before we get started, I […]
NPR FOR THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
Illustration by ROBERLAN FRESH AIR What did Jesus look like? The many different depictions of Christ tell a story about race and religion in America. Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey explore that history in their new book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. The book traces how different races and ethnic groups claimed Christ as their own — and how depictions of Jesus have both inspired civil rights crusades, and been used to justify the violence of white supremacists. The Ku Klux Klan could not rely on Christian doctrine to […]
WORTH REPEATING: Lee Atwater’s Infamous Last Words
THE NATION: It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re […]
The Sins Of Gen. Petraeus & The Military-Media Complex
Illustration by WILLIAM BANZAI7 EDITOR’S NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM A JUST-PUBLISHED BUZZFEED PIECE BY MICHAEL HASTINGS, THE NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER WHO WROTE THE RUNAWAY GENERAL, THE ROLLING STONE PIECE THAT TOOK DOWN GENERAL STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL BUZZFEED: The warning signs about Petreaus’s core dishonesty have been around for years. A brief summary: we can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or, that in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. […]
BOOKS: A Q&A With Punk-Noir Surrealist Charles Burns, The Edgar Allan Poe Of Right Now
Illustration by ALEX FINE EDITOR’S NOTE: Cartoonist/illustrator Charles Burns, master of the punk-noir macabre, will be discussing his work at the Free Library tonight. To mark the occasion, we sent him some questions about The Hive (Random House), the just-published second installment of his new graphic novel trilogy, his first major work since 2005’s Black Hole. However, before we get to the Q&A, there are 10 things you should know about Charles Burns. They are.. 1. Though born and bred in the high rainyland of the Pacific Northwest, Charles Burns has resided in Philadelphia — Northern Liberties, to be exact […]
BOOKS: The Kids Are Not Alright
CBS NEWS: Photographer Richard Ross captured images of over 1,000 juvenile inmates housed in over 200 detention centers and correctional facilities throughout the U.S. and Canada. According to his website, the “Juvenile in Justice” project explores the “treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them. The hope is that by seeing these images, people will have a better understanding of the conditions that exist,” he writes on his website. The following images contain excerpts from interviews conducted by Ross with several young inmates. The photos were shot between 2005 […]
BOOKS: Willie Nelson To Release Memoir With The Greatest Title In The History Of Reading And Writing
HARPER COLLINS: In Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, Willie Nelson muses about his greatest influences and the things that are most important to him, and celebrates the family, friends, and colleagues who have blessed his remarkable journey. Willie riffs on everything: music, wives, Texas, politics, horses, religion, marijuana, children, the environment, poker, hogs, Nashville, karma, and more. He shares the outlaw wisdom he has acquired over eight decades, along with favorite jokes and insights from friends and others close to him. Rare family pictures, beautiful artwork created by his son Micah Nelson, and lyrics to […]
BOOKS: Get Yer Gatsby On
Via FROM ME TO YOU “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”- – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
BOOKS: Mark Twain Vs. The Book Of Mormon
THE NEW YORKER: Scholarly opinion on {Mormonism founder Joseph] Smith now tends to divide between those who think that he knew he was making it up and those who think that he sincerely believed in his own visions—though the truth is that, as Melville’s “Confidence Man” reminds us, the line between the seer and the scamster wasn’t clearly marked in early-nineteenth-century America. Mark Twain read the Book of Mormon and, knowing what Smith would have read, not to mention knowing about frontier fakery, came to conclusions about both the sources of its prose and the sequence of its composition. MORE […]
BOOKS: Q&A w/ Jim Knipfel, Ex-Slackjawed Local
BY MIKE WALSH Jim Knipfel came to Philadelphia in the late 80s with no job prospects, little ambition, and zero professional writing experience. But he did have a wicked sense of humor and a mocking distaste for everything held sacred in modern day America, and he soon found a way to leverage that nihilism into a column he wrote for six years for the now-defunct Welcomat (which morphed into the Philadelphia Weekly) called Slackjaw. By the early 90s he’d moved to the Big Apple and the column started running the New York Press and it would continue to do […]
TRUTH DIGGER: Q&A With Christopher Hedges, Author, Journalist, American Who Tells The Truth
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.[1] His most recent book, which he wrote with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, is “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012). Hedges and Sacco, who illustrated the book, reported from the poorest pockets in the United States including the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, Camden, New Jersey, the coal fields of southern West Virginia, the nation’s produce fields and in the last chapter from the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park.[2] Hedges is also known as […]