“Mick ‘Rock N’ Roll Circus’” by MICHAEL HOUGHTON TIME: Stories sometimes have a way of making themselves true. The notion of The Rolling Stones as the “bad boys” of British ’60s rock, for instance, may have had a basis in reality and personality, but it also originated as a term of marketing and media shorthand. As Brett Morgen’s new HBO documentary Crossfire Hurricane (premieres tonight, Nov. 15) notes early on, as the Stones began to break out after The Beatles’ success, the press framed their narrative as the villains to the Beatles’ nice guys, the satisfaction-getters vs. the hand-holders. It […]
WORTH REPEATING: Guy F*cked Day
Image via TUMBLR NEW YORK TIMES: GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations? Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC […]
JUST ANNOUNCED: Wyatt Cenac @ The Troc
Daily Show funnyman Wyatt Cenac will rock The Troc January 18th. Tickets go on sale HERE Friday at noon. WIKIPEDIA: Cenac was born in New York City and raised in Dallas, Texas. He attended high school in Texas at the Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas.[3] He is of West Indian descent.[4][5] While in elementary school, he became friends with comic book writer Brian K. Vaughn,[6] who also introduced him to comic books. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before moving to Los Angeles to further his career. Having previously worked for three years as a […]
The Sins Of Gen. Petraeus & The Military-Media Complex
Illustration by WILLIAM BANZAI7 EDITOR’S NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM A JUST-PUBLISHED BUZZFEED PIECE BY MICHAEL HASTINGS, THE NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER WHO WROTE THE RUNAWAY GENERAL, THE ROLLING STONE PIECE THAT TOOK DOWN GENERAL STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL BUZZFEED: The warning signs about Petreaus’s core dishonesty have been around for years. A brief summary: we can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or, that in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. […]
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES: ‘Don’t Get All Potted Up’
These assclowns have never let not knowing what they are talking about stop them from doing so at length. Every day. Day after day. Here’s some pearls of wisdom on the news that Colorado voters passed a referendum last Tuesday that legalizes recreational marijuana use.
CRUEL & USUAL: The Obscene Living Conditions Inside Philadelphia’s House Of Corrections And The Inquirer Series That Helped Make It That Way
Painting by Fernando Botero BY JEFF DEENEY Recently I had a rare opportunity to go inside Philadelphia’s House of Corrections, the oldest jail in the Philadelphia Prison System, and see the conditions inmates live in. I was there in my capacity as a social worker and not as a writer and frankly I had no intention of writing about the experience. But as I walked the block prisoners implored me to, perhaps thinking I was a reporter, so I feel I must report on their behalf. “Tell them out there about this overcrowding you seen here!” “Put it in the […]
WORTH REPEATING: The New Yorker Endorsement
Photo by PLATON THE NEW YORKER: Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is […]
DEAR TERRY GROSS: Enough With The Gershwins!
Artwork by ANDY WARHOL Terry, we love, ya. We listen every day. The best in the biz, etc. We plug the show all the time and happy to do it. You name-checking us is our ringtone, fer chrissakes! But enough with the friggin’ Gershwins already! Especially when there is so much awesome music going on these days and so little of it finds its way onto Fresh Air. A Google search combining “Fresh Air” and “Gershwin” yields 430,000 results! We just had one of those LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE-style meltdowns, but with GERSHWIN instead of BRITNEY — and we’re not even […]
How To Tell Tea Party Assclowns To Shut Their Pie Holes
Why does it take the prime minister of Ireland to speak truth to douchebag? Right wing/Tea Party talk radio gasbag Michael Graham gets a smackdown of common sense from the Prime Minister of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins. Why is it that Ireland gets elected officials like Mr. Higgins and we get asshats like THIS? RELATED: The President of Ireland Michael D Higgins has become a celebrity on YouTube over a two year-old broadcast debate that resurfaced in which he eviscerates ardent US Republican radio broadcaster Michael Graham over issues like healthcare and foreign policy. The recording is hurtling towards 500,000 […]
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 […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Daily Show Writer Kevin Bleyer, Fearless Re-Framer Of The U.S. Constitution
BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Constitution may be a remarkable schematic of human rights in a liberal democracy but it’s a terrible piece of comedy. Seriously, I didn’t laugh once. And what the world needs now, besides love-sweet-love, is funny. Kevin Bleyer has a pretty impressive resume in The Funny: humorous commentaries on NPR’s All Things considered; staff writer for Bill Maher and Dennis Miller; joke writer for President Obama’s White House Correspondence Dinner speeches; three Emmys and more than a 1000 broadcast hours of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart under his belt as a staff writer. One day he […]
Q&A w/ Jad Abumrad, Co-Host Of WNYC’s Radiolab
BY JONATHAN VALANIA If you are not already down with the broadcast brilliance that is WNYC’s Radiolab you are doing your life wrong. Every week co-hosts Jad Abumrad [pictured, below left] and Robert Krulwich [pictured, below right] create cinema between your ears. Each episode explores a big-picture topic — time, space, sleep, identity — and comes at it from four or five different angles, co-mingling seemingly disconnected sub-narratives into a lattice of cognition, uncannily mirroring the through lines of consciousness itself. It’s a show about understanding, that, when it works, and it pretty much always does, triggers understanding. Which is […]
EXTRA! EXTRA!: Mr. Phawker Goes To Washington
DAILY NEWS: We’re surprised he cleared Secret Service security, but Phawker.com editor Jonathan Valania was at the White House on Friday interviewing President Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, about his love of indie-rock veterans Guided By Voices. The interview is to appear in the October issue of Magnet. Like the local music magazine, which had been on hiatus, Guided By Voices is also back, after more than five years apart, and plays the Trocadero (1003 Arch) on July 6. Carney revealed his affinity for the Ohio-based Robert Pollard and his GBV cohorts last year. The interview was rescheduled a […]