Well, well, well. The bitch is back. Not sure what we mean by that, but it sure sounds like a badass opening. First a few words about our boy Jeff Fusco — hardest working family man in show business, great big grizzly of a man, but a real Gentle Ben. Always a gentleman and a scholar. He always gets The Shot, too. Although for reasons that elude us, PW elected NOT to use one for this week’s The Year In Photos cover. Why the hell didn’t they use that Obama money shot and plug into the zeitgeist for a second? […]
Company Gives List To Guild, Guild Names Names
What follows is a list of the 71 Guild members at the Philadelphia Inquirer who have been notified that they will be laid off. This list was created by the Company and sent to the Guild on January 3rd. Guild representatives are in the process of comparing the Company’s information on hire dates and job categories with the Guild’s records and will also meet with Company representatives on Friday to discuss bumping rights and other layoff related issues.
NPR FOR THE DEF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FROM ROLLING STONE After the screening, Borat returns to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to shower and transform back into Sacha Baron Cohen: mild-mannered Londoner, fiance of actress Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers), reluctant sometime resident of Los Angeles. I wait outside the restaurant Asiate for him to appear. I’d met Baron Cohen once before, three years ago, when he was recording his first series of Da Ali G Show for HBO, interviewing a panel of leading scientists as pseudo hip-hop youth talk-show host Ali G. (“Let’s talk about when technology goes horribly wrong: Could there be another Nintendo 64?”) At the […]
GUILD MEMO: 71 Inquirer Employees Given Pink Slips
By now you know the very sad news that the Company laid off 71 of our colleagues from the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom earlier today.The Company met with most of the victims of its layoff. Those who were laid off also met with consultants who described their pension and health benefits as well as a job counseling service hired by the company. In the immediate future the Guild is seeking more people who will volunteer to be laid off. Volunteers who are accepted by the Company are entitled to full severance, accrued vacation and personal and holiday time. Their health coverage […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
Novelist Robert Stone Discusses Prime Green: Remembering The 60’s On Today’s Fresh Air FROM PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: It’s a long, strange trip that’s navigated in this engaging memoir. Novelist Stone (A Hall of Mirrors) recounts his salad days from a stint in the navy in the late 1950s to a desultory trip to Vietnam as a correspondent during the disastrous 1971 invasion of Laos. Stone largely sat out the civil rights and antiwar movements and cops to no ideology beyond “ordinary decency.” His bailiwick was the relatively apolitical counterculture, which dawned for him when he took in Coltrane, Lenny Bruce and […]
THIS JUST IN: The PHAWKER Cancels Plans To NOT Accept Time Magazine’s PERSON OF THE YEAR Award
Well, why not? We MySpace as much as the next horny guy. We are a blog — a blog with an mp3 player and a FLICKR account, to be exact. But even cooler than that being named Time’s Person Of The Year (which is, somewhat surprisingly, not nearly as exultant as you always imagined it would be) is something we can actually use in this modern world: Time linked to Phawker’s Dead President post! No big deal for the big dawgs, maybe, but we weren’t even born three months ago. Three cheers for us! TIME: Meet The Phawker!
REWIND 2006: THE YEAR IN MUSIC
WELCOME TO THE FIRST ANNUAL PHAWKER JAZZ AND POP POLL The critics have spoken, the ballots have been cast, all chads undangled, and fed into a mainframe computer the size of an Olympic swimming pool, to be crunched with the hard calculus of SUCKS/DOES NOT SUCK and arranged in impenetrably dense type on a spreadsheet that stretches from your house to mine. Hey, who we kiddin’? We don’t even have a mainframe the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Yet. And 30,000 CDs are released every year and fuck you if you think we’re gonna listen to all of them […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
WHYY: I HAVE TRIED, IN MY OWN WAY, TO BE FREE
DEATH OF A SALESPERSON: All Things Must Pass
BY SARA SHERR The Tower Records at Broad and Chestnut was scheduled to close on Friday, Dec. 22. Instead, the doors shut late Wednesday night after an independent Virginia record retailer bought up the last of the remaining stock, which really wasn’t much by then. Two similar mass purchases had occurred earlier in the week, one from a New Jersey record store owner who bought up a bunch of major label stuff (which means a lot of Daniel Powter and Ashley Parker Angel, and returns for credit! Smart cookie!) The other was an unknown company which volunteered to take the […]
COMMENT: Bloggerati Killed The Alt-Weekly Rock Stars
Our hugumbus YEAR IN MUSIC Omnibus is about to drop, but while we’re finishing up polishing this turd, chew on this from our pal JOE WARMINSKY in WASHINGTON CITY PAPER: Don?t get me wrong?I fully embrace what the blogosphere does provide. It’s essentially a broad, asymmetric rebellion against the SoundScan regime and the stodgy business plans of the major record labels. Blogs offer what good fanzines used to offer: stylistic detours, obsessive detail, contrarian viewpoints, and a secondary economy that allows overlooked musicians to flourish, at least on a small scale. There isn?t much money in it, and it’s mostly […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
IGGY POP Live Manchester Apollo 1977. FRESH AIR: Moe Of The Stooges Still Worth A Million In Prizes, PLUS Andre 3000