THE FLAMING LIPS new digital release, FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON is live now in digital form. Designed as an immersive companion piece to the original 1973 album, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, listeners are encouraged to listen to the new LIPS album while listening to DARK SIDE at the same time. FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON was also carefully crafted to sync up perfectly with the 1939 film, THE WIZARD OF OZ. For ideal listening conditions, fans are encouraged to seek out the original Alan Parsons’ engineered quadraphonic LP mix of DARK SIDE, but it will work with the album on any format. Available now through all participating digital outlets. […]
BEING THERE: All That You Can’t Leave Behind
U2, Roof of 30 Rockefeller, Tonight Show, by JONATHAN COHEN BILLBOARD: Fallon welcomes to the couch his new regime’s first musical guest (“who you saw earlier”), U2. “Have you ever performed higher?” he jokes … of the band having just played 70 stories up. Fallon asserts that activist Bono could give a speech about anything. “Can you do a speech about … this coffee mug?” he challenges. “It’s not a cup,” Bono begins, easily rising to the task. “It’s a container that demands to be filled … by love.” The Roots join in with appropriately emotional backing music. Fallon congratulates […]
Sign Petition, Help Netflix Find Its Spine & Stop The Internet From Becoming Another Cable TV Rip-Off
In an open letter to investors, Netflix warned that if broadband providers started charging tolls for US Internet subscribers and slowing down video, it would encourage its 34 million American customers to join them in demanding an open Internet — and ditching ISPs who don’t follow them. This is an amazing first step, and an amazing ally to win in the war for a better Internet. But if we want to succeed, we need to make sure Netflix uses action, not just words. Please, join us in thanking CEO Reed Hastings and CFO Davids Wells and encouraging them to […]
WORTH REPEATING: I Got High With David Brooks
Artwork via DRIFTGLASS DAVID BROOKS: For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships. […] But then we all sort of moved away from it.most of us developed higher pleasures. Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive. Most of us figured out early on that smoking weed doesn’t really make you funnier or more creative (academic studies more or less confirm this). We graduated to more […]
The FBI Labeled It’s A Wonderful Life Communist Propaganda Because It Makes The Rich Look Bad
The Communism begins at the 3:14 mark when all the people of Bedford Falls rally to help George Bailey — who sacrificed all his hopes and dreams to protect the working class of Bedford Falls from the from the Capitalist predations of vampire squids like Mr. Potter — in his hour of need because he was there for each and every one of them in their darkest hours. Sick, isn’t it? Like we always say, when you’re children ask you who the Tea Party Republicans are, tell them they are the people who root for Mr. Potter when they watch […]
MEDIA: The Least Trusted Name In News
Psyched to see our former colleague and Scrapple News anchorman AP Ticker, aka Frank Baker, on the cover of PW this week. AP Ticker is, among other things, The Second Most Interesting Man In The World (after the Dos Equis guy). PW: Sounds like Ticker is quite the unsung pioneer of television news. “He actually coined the phrase, ‘We’ll be right back,’” continues Baker. “Until then, it had been very awkward for anchormen. Because they would say, ‘We’re going to be here, but we’re going to a commercial now, but we’re not actually going to leave.’ It was very long. […]
ASK A WIZARD: Backstage w/ Wayne Coyne
In conjunction Scrapple TV, our partner in New Media crime, Phawker sat down with Flaming Lips mainman Wayne Coyne on his tour bus a few hours before their performance at the Festival Pier last month and rolled film. DISCUSSED: Sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, why the new Lips album is so goddamned dark, why he has Nick Cave’s blood, the story behind the Wayne Coyne Hand Grenade Incident, how he got Erykah Badu naked and covered in cum and glitter, and if he wasn’t the lead singer of the Flaming Lips what would have he done with his life. The […]
EXTRA!: This Is The Kind Of Journalism That Will Die With Newspapers, And Then We’re All F*cked
DAILY NEWS: IN THE ANNALS of Philadelphia crime, the name Nafis Pinkney rings no bells amid the high-profile murderers, mobsters, corrupt cops and politicians. But in 2009, with a high-school diploma, a steady job as a baggage handler at Philadelphia International Airport and no criminal convictions, Pinkney, then 20, found himself beneath the bright light of a criminal interrogation. In a 24-hour span, he went from neighborhood witness to prime suspect, accused of murdering his friend since day-care days, Jonathan Pitts, 21, and Pitts’ girlfriend, Nakeisha Finks, 20. Steadfastly maintaining his innocence, Pinkney spent the next four years in […]
BANKSY: Syrian Rebels Shoot Down Dumbo
NEW YORK TIMES: The British street artist Banksy is apparently among the millions watching Syria’s war from afar, through glimpses of the fighting recorded on video and posted on YouTube. His latest video work is a brief parody of one of those clips released on Sunday as part of a series of works produced during a monthlong residency in New York that started last week. An excerpt from the video, showing actors dressed like Syrian rebels aiming a shoulder-fired missile at the sky, was uploaded to that Instagram account on Sunday, with a note reading: “I’m not posting any pictures […]
BEING THERE: Exile On South Street
South Street, 5:31 pm yesterday, by Dave Brown PREVIOUSLY: Forty years ago, South Street was doomed, left for dead by city planners who had scheduled the street for demolition to make way for a proposed Crosstown Expressway that would connect I-95 to I-76. South Street then was nothing like South Street now — a funky post-hippie/post-punk/post-cool amalgam of shops, bars and fooderies, aka Philly’s Haight-Ashbury, a land-locked asphalt boardwalk where teenagers from across the tri-state area flock to see and be seen (and stage the occasional flash mob). Back then, South Street was hardly a jewel in the city’s crown; […]
EXCERPT: A Confederacy Of Dunces
Artwork via CARGO COLLECTIVE PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: Reader commenting on Philly.com has also been around since the late ’90s, but it wasn’t until 2008, following years of internal deliberations and successive regime changes, that the site went all-in and began allowing readers to talk back at the bottom of every article. “Journalism had been a one-way conversation for too long,” says one Philly.com staffer. “It was a good idea to open the door and allow the public to start commenting on our work.” Well, on paper, maybe. In practice? Not so much. There was some recognition from the get-go that there […]
RAWK TAWK: Life According To Brother JT
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Garage-punk savant, drone-rock wizard, acid-dazed psychonaut, human ouija board, holy fool of the Internet — Brother JT is a man of many hats. He’s been a puppet, a poet, a pirate, a pawn and king. He’s been up and down and over and out — and he still really likes the LSD thing. (SEE Trippin’ Balls With Brother JT, his lysergic talk show on Scrapple TV) He’s come to tell us all that the emperor has no clothes, the sky is falling, God is great, we’re already dead, and yet despite all that life is beautiful. He’s […]
RADIOHEAD: Q&A w/ Wiretap‘s Jonathan Goldstein
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Jonathan Goldstein is the creator and host of public radio’s Wiretap, which The (Montreal) Gazette aptly described as “something between borscht-belt comedy and Franz Kafka,” heard locally on Thursday nights at 9 pm on 90.9 FM WHYY. Goldstein is sort of the Woody Allen of the Airwaves — if Woody Allen was an aging Canadian Gen Xer with a punk pedigree and sociopathic-yet-loveable friends. Either way, he’s hilarious and Wiretap is a gas, gas, gas. He’ll be at the Free Library tonight to promote his new book, I’LL SEIZE THE DAY TOMORROW which is kinda like […]