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; […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See A John Waters Christmas
John Waters needs no introduction, and if you have to ask, well, this probably isn’t your kind of thing. We have a pair of tickets to give away and to qualify all you have to do is sign up for our mailing list (to the right of this post, at the bottom of the masthead). Trust us, you want to do this. Signing up to our mailing list gets you special content alerts and early warnings about special promotions and concert ticket giveaways. And rest assured your email address will never be sold or shared with anyone, we promise […]
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: In Defense Of Mr. Mojo Rising
Artwork courtesy of the RICHARD GOODMAN GALLERY “Check out Jim’s new spoken poetry with Manzarek overdubs album, An American Prayer, the best recitative sluice of American literature on LP since Call Me Burroughs, and hell, even Burroughs never had the sheer nerve to lead with “All join now and lament the death of my cock.” In a way Jim was really the end of the Masculine Mystique as celebrated American culture up to and through rock ‘n’ roll, because unlike clowns like John Kay or indeed any of his progeny, he was a master of the sly inflectional turn, so […]
INTERVIEW WITH A FRINGE DWELLER: Q&A With Nick Stuccio, Producing Director Of The Live Arts Festival And Philly Fringe
Illustration by GRAHAM SMITH BY BRANDON LAFVING ARTS CORRESPONDENT Nick Stuccio has been the producing director of the Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe Festival from the very beginning. This year marks the 16th time that performance artists from Philadelphia and across the globe will showcase their work, communicate new and sometimes radical ideas, collaborate, brainstorm, party and, in some cases, get naked — not necessarily in that order. Before Mr. Stuccio became a presenter of the performing arts, he danced for the Pennsylvania Ballet and started the AIDS fundraising program Shut Up and Dance in the mid-1990s. Now, he […]
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 […]
SIDEWALKING: Sweet Jane
Cleveland, November 3rd, 1970, by Cleveland Police Dept. RELATED: The actress had just finished working on Klute – hence her distinctive haircut – when she was arrested at an airport in Cleveland on November 3, 1970. The customs officers wrongly accused Fonda of drug smuggling after finding vitamins labelled b, l and d (breakfast, lunch and dinner) in her bag. Known for her political activism, her arrest over something so innocent as vitamins was a sign of the paranoia of the time. At the time, the actress was on her way back from speaking at an anti-Vietnam war fundraiser in […]
THERE BE MONSTERS: The Dark Side Of Sendak
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Where The Wild Things Are creator Maurice Sendak is, in many ways, the dark side Doppelganger of Dr. Seuss and taken together they represent the twin titans of 20th Century children’s literature. If Dr. Seuss’ work vibes like a drug-free acid trip for children aged 8 to 80, then Sendak’s oeuvre is, to extend the metaphor, like Vicodin for the soul, numbing tender-aged psyches from the pain of growing up in a desultory world of de-saturated colors and unrelieved melancholia where adults do monstrous things to each other, and sometimes to children, too. There were two formative […]
BOOKS: Interview With The Vampire Chronicler
[Artwork by ANITA KUNZ] BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of Anne Rice‘s reading at the Free Library tomorrow night to promote the publication of Wolf Gift, her 33rd novel, we got the doyenne of high goth on the horn for an in-depth Q&A. Discussed: Why her mother named her Howard; How to kill a werewolf. Why she regrets ever using the word ‘vampire’; the interior lives of zombies. Why she returned to the Catholic Church after years of ardent atheism. Why she then turned her back on the Catholic Church and Christianity itself, but still believes in God. The future […]
ARTSY: Mayhem Is My Business; Business Is Good
BY MIKE WALSH If you enjoy Weegee’s famous crime and disaster scene photos from the 1930s and 1940s (as who doesn’t?), get yourself to the International Center of Photography (ICP) in Manhattan where Murder is My Business, an exhibition of Weegee’s most famous photos recently opened. Weegee’s photos are fun, trashy, insensitive, and full of suffering and blood. What’s not to like? The great thing about this exhibition is that it includes wall plaques of information about the specific car crashes, tenement fires, suicide, and gangland murders depicted in the photos. It does not leave you speculating about why the […]
Q&A: With Online Privacy Expert Lori Andrews
The take away from I Know Who You Are And Saw What You Did is this: As an Internet user your rights are exactly none. Actually, that’s not true, you do have the right not to use it. But assuming you have waived that right, know that you are being watched, probed and profiled, your footprints are being tracked from your front door to the furthest reaches of the digital ether and back. They know who you are and what you did. Somewhere there is a file being kept on you. They know a thousand things about you. Preferences, locations, […]
Flyers Fans Brutalize Purple Heart Medalist For Wearing Rangers Jersey In Line At Genos
INQUIRER: Wearing a No. 24 Ryan Callahan Rangers jersey, Neal Auricchio [NOT pictured, above, that’s Bobby Clark in the 70s] stands surrounded by Flyers fans. He appears as a small man with his hands out, as if trying to play peacemaker. A man who looks to have about a one-foot height advantage on him removes his dark coat with white fur trim, uncovering his No. 28 Claude Giroux Flyers jersey. He shoves Auricchio, who still has his hands out, and then throws a punch. Auricchio throws back, punching up, but is quickly overwhelmed when a man in a No. 68 […]
LIFE LESSONS: A Pep Talk For OccupyPhilly
AP TICKER: I’m getting lots of letters about why I haven’t shown my face at any of the Occupy Philly protests. I wholeheartedly, endorse and support their endeavors and while I talk a good game about revolution and overthrow of this plutocracy, the sad truth of the matter is……..I’m a very very lazy man. As I have said many times before, my favorite hobbies are as follows, lying on my couch and being very very quiet. I and my couch bound brethren, represent a subset of The Greatest Generation that I have coined “The Lazy Generation” This true silent majority […]