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
REWIND 2006: THE YEAR IN FILM
BEST PICTURE OF 2006: Because it held a cracked mirror up to the thing that is killing us all: ignorance and all its byproducts — fear, hate, superstition. Because fuddy-duddies may complain “Borat” is mean or crass or contrived, but the fact is nothing is made up, everything is true, sad to say, just exaggerated with industrial-strength absurdity for potent comedic effect. Because Sartre said ‘hell is other people’ and “Borat” is full of ‘other people.’ Because Borat played the MSM like a violin, with the wacky Khazhakstani becoming a constant ghost in the news machine for months before and […]
APOCALYPSE WOW: Why Do My Favorite Films Of 2006 Make Me Hate Myself And Want To Die?
BY DAN BUSKIRK, FILM CRITIC APOCALYPTO (2006, directed by Mel Gibson) CASINO ROYALE (2006, directed by Martin Campbell) DEATH OF LAZARESCU (2005, directed by Christi Puiu, Romania) DELIVER US FROM EVIL (2006, directed by Amy Berg) THE DEVIL & DANIEL JOHNSTON (2006, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig) I AM A SEX ADDICT (2006, directed by Caveh Zahedi) THE KING (2006, directed by James Marsh) LITTLE CHILDREN (2006, directed by Todd Field) MUTUAL APPRECIATION (2006, directed by Andrew Bujalski) WASSUP ROCKERS (2006, directed by Larry Clark) Is not gloom in the very air we breathe, or am I seeing the world through […]
Cover Wars: Whose Artfag Kung-Fu Is Stronger?
Last week CP struck a decisive blow against the tyranny of PW’s seemingly unbreakable Cover Wars winning streak. But this week the Empire has struck back. Hard. So jump down, turn around and pick a bail of cotton, City Paper, because PW is the master now. What’s that you say? ‘Only a master of evil, Darth’? Perhaps, Rabbit. Perhaps. Still, all this is good news for people who STILL read alt-weeklies. Hands down the most singularly disturbing alt-weekly cover of the year, PW’s music issue rocks the dumbly-named Man, Man on the cover, dubbing them Band Of The Year and […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
ON FRESH AIR TODAY: Thom Yorke is the lead singer and songwriter of the band Radiohead which has released six critically acclaimed records and explored the boundaries between rock and electronic music. Spin,magazine named Radiohead’s OK Computer the number one album of the past twenty years. Thom Yorke’s new solo CD The Eraser is his first release without the band. This interview originally aired on Jul. 12, 2006. ALSO: Singer and songwriter Stuart Murdoch is the front man of the indie pop band from Scotland, Belle & Sebastian. The seven-member band includes a guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, violinist, cellist, drummer and […]
SMELLS LIKE JOURNALISM: Daily News Puts Boots On The Ground In Drug Trade, Gets To Know Name Behind Faceless Statistic And The Awful Truth Therein
DRESSED IN A black Dickies suit and black Timberlands, the chubby-faced 17-year-old crack dealer paced around the desolate lot working another graveyard shift. In the darkness, a steady stream of addicts ambled toward him to make a buy. Then he saw a familiar face: his close friend’s mom. “I need a nick,” she mumbled to him. Without hesitation, he sold her a nickel bag — $5 worth of crack. “I was surprised that she was a smoker,” Mikey recalled, months after that night. Today he calls it “the deal I will never forget.” “I was thinking that a real friend […]