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 […]
Is Alex Jones A False Flag Planted By The Gummint To Discredit Paranoid Gun Nuts? ‘Cuz It’s Working!
DAILY BANTER: Let’s take a ride down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, shall we? Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings when an InfoWars stooge crashed several law enforcement press conferences, I was speaking with The Daily Banter founder Ben Cohen about Alex Jones. We were joking about circulating a rumor that Jones was actually a government covert operative manufactured and trained to infiltrate the fringe conspiracy theory groups on the far-right. Ben and I speculated that perhaps the government had instructed “Special Agent Jones” to invent a roster of crazy over-the-top theories meant to deliberately distract conspiracy theorists from real-life […]
THE FLAMING LIPS: Look…The Sun Is Rising
From Letterman the other night. Possibly the coolest/weirdest iteration of live rock music on network television since, well, ever. Let the buyer be weird.
SCRAPPLE NEWS: With A.P. TIcker
On the subway psycho and guns gone wild!
REWIND 2012: The Year In Phawker Interviews
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; […]
THE SOPRANO: Q&A With Writer/Director David Chase
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Last week we sat down with Sopranos creator David Chase to talk about his new movie, Not Fade Away, a weedy coming-of-age dramedy about being young, horny and trying to be the Rolling Stones in the teenage wasteland of suburban New Jersey in the mid-’60s. There’s sex. There’s drugs. There’s rock n’ roll, in the form of an impeccably-curated soundtrack and convincing scenes of the band trying to kick out the jams in garages and basements. There’s James Gandolfini as the hey-you-kids-get-off-of-my-lawn father, shaking his fist at the longhairs from the wrong side of the generation […]
THE AP TICKER TRIO: Winter Wonderland
Season’s greetings from The Least Trusted Name In News. And a Happy New Year!
NRA Totally Wastes Nation’s Time With Same Old John Wayne Fantasies, Gets Punked By Code Pink Patriot
ABC NEWS: The National Rifle Association stood its ground today in arguing that the answer to gun violence in schools is an armed security force that can protect students, while blaming the media and violent entertainment and video games for recent deadly shootings. “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said in presenting the NRA’s first comments about the Connecticut school shooting since it occurred a week ago today. LaPierre offered no olive branch to gun-control advocates who have called for tougher […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Real ‘Cop Killer’
Artwork by Bunnyack “It was specifically designed for use by counterterrorism teams because it fires a very small but very high-velocity bullet that will penetrate body armor — what people call ballistic vests or bulletproof vests. When FN first manufactured this gun, they recognized how dangerous it would be on a civilian market and they claimed they would never sell it to civilians, that it would only be for police and counterterrorism units. In fact, it’s become a very popular gun on the American civilian market and is exported to Mexico, where it’s called the mata policia, or police killer, […]