Photo by CRAIG MCDEAN via Interview EDITOR’S NOTE: A shortened version of this interview first appeared on VICE’s NOISEY website on February 3, 2016 BY JONATHAN VALANIA In 1982, VU architect John Cale recorded Music For A New Society, an album of wrenching, emotionally-shattered torch songs that prophesied a denatured dystopia, somewhere between Blade Runner and Metropolis, looming ominously on the horizon, full of vintage violence and hysterical laughter, homicidal mothers and greedy angels with broken wings exfoliating the crawling skin of God. Thirty-four years later, we may not quite be there yet, but you can see it from here. […]
BEING THERE: Victor DeLorenzo & Rainn Wilson
NINETEEN THIRTEEN, feat. Victor DeLorenzo & Janet Schiff warm up the crowd for Rainn Wilson’s reading from his new memoir “The Bassoon King” @ Pabst Theater, Milwaukee, November 12th 7:09 PM CST by KAY COLLINS PREVIOUSLY: Q&A w/ Victor DeLorenzo, Singer, Actor, Songwriter, Drummer, Recovering Violent Femme
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: Q&A With Author, Essayist & New Yorker Staff Writer Adam Gopnik
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally posted on November 17th 2011, upon the publication of Adam Gopnik’s book The Table Comes First: Family, France & The Meaning Of Food. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Longtime New Yorker staff writer, author, essayist, children’s novelist and Philly homeboy Adam Gopnik will be delivering the keynote lecture of the Philadelphia Museum Of Art’s Object Lessons: New Thinking about Still Life symposium at 6:30 pm tonight — his talk is called Things that Mean Things: Objects and Inventory in American Art. Back in 2011, we got Gopnik on the horn and we discussed writing, food, crime and punishment, […]
DEATH IN THE CLASSROOM: Phawker Interns Weigh In On Campus Shootings, Ben Carson, Self-Defense, Gun Control & Gun Madness
EDITOR’S NOTE: At one point in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic, aging playboy oceanographer Steve Zissou, aka Bill Murray, asks aloud, “Do the interns get Glocks?” Not at Phawker, Steve. But they do get the microphone and a chance to voice their opinion from time to time — this being one of them. In the wake of the unspeakable slaughter of nine college students in Roseburg 12 days ago, and presidential candidate Ben Carson’s remark afterwards that the students should have rushed the gunman (“I wouldn’t have just stood there,” he said.), I asked the interns — Temple students one […]
UNFORGIVEN: Chris Kyle’s American Horror Story
BRADLEY COOPER ON FRESH AIR TODAY: “The fact that [the fact that American Sniper is] inciting a discussion that has nothing to do with vets — and it’s more about the Iraq war and what we did not do to indict those who decide to go to the war — every conversation in those terms is moving farther and farther away from what our soldiers go through, and the fact that 22 vets commit suicide each day,” Cooper says. “The amount of people that come home is so much greater because of medical advancement and … we need […]
REWIND 2014: The Year In Questions And Answers
If armies run on their stomachs, blogs run on their big fucking mouths. We’re no exception. But we’d like to think that, on a good day, we put all that hot air to good use when interrogating visiting dignitaries in advance of their triumphant arrival into the City Of Brotherly Love. We’ve never pretended to have all the answers but we do know all the right questions. And we’ve never settled for easy answers to hard questions. Sometimes feelings get hurt and sometimes new connections are made. Sometimes painful truths emerge and sometimes we actually learn something. And sometimes we […]
How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love Bob Dylan
Artwork by JOSHUA BUDICH BY MIKE WALSH Let me make this clear up front: I’m not a Dylan-head, Dylan-ite, Dylan-phile, Dylan-ologist, or any other kind of extreme Dylan fan. In fact, I never bought a Dylan record or CD until just a few years ago. I never saw the need. Growing up in the ’60s, Dylan was on the radio all the time —“Blowing in the Wind,“ “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right,“ “The Times They Are a Changin’,“ “All I Really Want to Do,“ “It Ain’t Me Babe, “Mr. Tambourine Man,“ etc., etc. Plus, many other bands had hits […]
Win Tix To See Ira Glass @ The Merriam Saturday!
A long time ago in a public radio galaxy far, far away called 1995, the median listener age was 87, nobody ever said um or like on the air, all stories ran just one way — front to back — and were narrated with the plummy-voiced elocution of the Founding Fathers, and semiotics was just one more thing Medicare refused to cover. Nineteen years, five Peabody Awards and 500-plus episodes of This American Life later, all that has changed, thanks to the post-post-modern vision, wry melancholia and casually precise broadcasting style of the show’s host/founder, who, back when he […]
Q&A: Ira Glass, Host Of This American Life
Photo by STUART MULLENBERG BY JONATHAN VALANIA A long time ago in a public radio galaxy far, far away called 1995, the median listener age was 87, nobody ever said um or like on the air, all stories ran just one way — front to back — and were narrated with the plummy-voiced elocution of the Founding Fathers, and semiotics was just one more thing Medicare refused to cover. Nineteen years, five Peabody Awards and 500-plus episodes of This American Life later, all that has changed, thanks to the post-post-modern vision, wry melancholia and casually precise broadcasting style of the […]
THE NAKED TRUTH: Sexytime Q&A With Stripped Stories Hostesses Margot Leitman & Giula Rozzi
Photo by ANYA GARRETT Stripped Stories Margot Leitman (as seen on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Comedy Central) and Giulia Rozzi (as seen on MTV, VH1, Chelsea Lately) come billed as storytelling’s sexiest duo, baring full-frontal id, ego and libido for howling horndog audiences from coast to coast. Stripped Stories has earned kudos from Time Out NY, Time Out LA, The Village Voice, and Playgirl lauds their “juiciest, jaw-dropping tales.” They come to Underground Arts on Saturday as part of the First Person Arts Festival. So we got Giula and Margot on the horn for a game of truth or […]
Win Tix To First Person Arts’ Grand Story Slam!
First Person Arts is a Philadelphia nonprofit organization that celebrates the power of the personal. Their storytelling, social impact, and festival programs reinforce their mission: everyone has a story to tell, and sharing these stories connects us with each other and the world. For 13 years they have been hosting StorySlams around the city, wherein local storytellers got head to head in front of a live audience and a panel of celebrity judges (full disclosure, we judged one of these suckers) for a chance to proceed to the next round. On Thursday at the Prince Music theater Winners of […]
STREET POET: Meet SEPTA’s Walt Whitman
Or maybe he’s the William Carlos Williams of SEPTA. Or the Carl Sandburg of SEPTA. Either way, his name is Mark Fuller and he gives mass transit rhyme and reason. From Scrapple TV, our partners in new media crime.
FROM THE VAULT: A Hard Night’s Day
Hy Lit and the Beatles, Convention Hall, Philadelphia, 1964 BY JONATHAN VALANIA It is precisely 9:36 p.m. in West Philadelphia on the second splendidly summery September night of 1964, and exactly six minutes ago everything suddenly changed. For teenage Philadelphia, the calendar just flipped, along with everyone’s wig, to a new era. It will be years before anyone fully understands all the far-reaching implications, but this much is indisputably true: The hazy, crazy 1960s have officially begun. OMIGOD, THEY’RE HERE! THEY’RE REALLY REALLY HERE! For months, their songs have blared from the tinny speakers of transistor radios, and they’ve stared […]
