VOX: Sanitizer might feel like a modern-day, scientific, and more clinical upgrade to soap. But I’m here to tell you that soap — all sorts of it: liquid, solid, honeysuckle-scented, the versions inexplicably only marketed to men or women — is a badass, and even more routinely effective than hand sanitizer. We should be excited to use it, as much as possible. That’s because when you wash your hands with soap and water, you’re not just wiping viruses off your hands and sending them down the drain. You’re actually annihilating the viruses, rendering them harmless. Soap “is almost like a […]
DISPATCHES: My Life Under Quarantine
EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve asked Phawker contributors to send in dispatches describing their lives under quarantine. Enjoy. BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC So, for my day job, I do IT. Luckily it’s something you can do from almost anywhere. I work for a successful local non-essential retailer whose home offices are based in Center City. Our stores may be closed for the time being, but retail life is all about planning ahead — since it can sometimes take 3 to 6 months to get a product in stores. So currently all of corporate is working from home, pulling normal 8 hour […]
WORTH REPEATING: Jared Kushner Will Kill Us All
Artwork by @Noid68 NEW YORK TIMES: The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006. Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, […]
RIP: Fountains Of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, Novelistic Pop Auteur, Killed By Covid19 Pandemic
NEW YORK TIMES: Adam Schlesinger, an acclaimed singer-songwriter for the bands Fountains of Wayne and Ivy who had an award-winning second career writing songs for film, theater and television, died on Wednesday in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 52. The cause was complications of the coronavirus, his family said. In Fountains of Wayne, which was started in 1995, Mr. Schlesinger [pictured above, second from right] and Chris Collingwood perfected a novelistic form of hummable pop-rock in a style derived from the Kinks and from 1970s groups like Big Star and the Cars. They chose northern New Jersey and boroughs outside Manhattan […]
REQUIEM: Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima
NEW YORK TIMES: Krzysztof Penderecki, a Polish composer and conductor whose modernist works jumped from the concert hall to popular culture, turning up in soundtracks for films like “The Exorcist” and “The Shining” and influencing a generation of edgy rock musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Krakow. He was 86. Mr. Penderecki was regarded as Poland’s pre-eminent composer for more than half a century, and in all those years he never seemed to sit still. Beginning in the 1960s with radical ideas that placed him firmly in the avant-garde. […] It was compositions from the wild first decade […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
HEAR & NOW: Winning the Cold War, Bacevich says, led average Americans and policymakers to believe “the future was ours to define.” Instead, he found it led to folly and delusion. American leaders in 1989 had a “simplistic” view of the Cold War and concluded that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a “wonderful,” future-defining event, he says. The post-Cold War presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are defined by the belief that the Cold War positioned the U.S. to determine the future, he says. Bacevich finds the problem with these presidents was not with […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Deplorables Are Us
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Hi, we’re Bubba and Bubbette and we’re rootin’ tootin’ card carryin’ Republican rallyin’ MAGA KAG kinda folks and we’d like to take a few words to explain to you flamin’ Dem Libs why we like this Trump guy so much. First off, he tells it like it is. He doesn’t need fancy long words to get his point across. He makes us feel like he’s one of us. Always makes us feel like he’s talking straight to us hard working white folks. With Mr. Trump we never feel like there’s any shading of the truth. […]
OP-ED: The New Abnormal
EDITOR’S NOTE: Gonna be doing a weekly OpEd for Philly Mag until this shit show is over and I can go back to my day job. Whatever that is. Here’s the first one. PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: At a press conference back in 1986, President Ronald Reagan famously declared “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’” setting into motion the austere neoliberal in-free-markets-we-trust, get-a-job-you-bum zeitgeist that held sway for the next 34 years. That is until the COVID-19 pandemic finally breached the walls of fortress America and quickly metastasized into […]
DISPATCHES: My Life Under Quarantine
EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve asked Phawker contributors to send in dispatches describing their lives under quarantine. Our first one is from our intern, who, like all of our interns, is a student at Temple. BY RACHEL TESON It started with cleaning. I went into work where I am a hostess, and they gave me a red bucket and gloves. Since the restaurant is a high volume one by City Hall, our bosses wanted to try to combat the spread by cleaning as much as possible. I had to wipe down the revolving door and the hostess stand every half hour, and […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: Apocalyptic novelist Max Brooks is something of an expert on planning for pandemics and other disasters. The author, whose books include World War Z, Germ Warfare and the forthcoming Devolution, has toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has reviewed government response plans related to various emergency situations — all in the course of research. “We have a network in place that we as taxpayers have been funding to get us ready for something just like this,” Brooks says of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But, he adds, “we have been disastrously slow and […]
THE DREAM SYNDICATE: The Longing
? When The Dream Syndicate emerged in the early ’80s, front man Steve Wynn declared, “We’re playing music we want to hear because nobody else is doing it.” He added, “I’ll compromise on what I eat or where I sleep, but I won’t compromise on what music I play.” Both were true, and although their template of Velvet Underground meets Crazy Horse may seem commonplace today (and let’s not forget, the Syndicate spawned many imitators), their raw twin guitar, bass and drums approach was not common during an era when slick, polished MTV bands ruled. Thirty years later The Dream […]
CINEMA: In Werner Herzog We Trust
NEW YORK TIMES: You’ve talked in the past about your desire for your documentaries to convey ecstatic truth3 — or deeper truth — rather than what you’ve called “the truth of accountants.” Does anything about the need for ecstatic truth feel different now, at a time when even factual truth feels destabilized? WERNER HERZOG: I’ll make it very simple. My witness is Michelangelo, who did the statue of the Pietà. When you look at Jesus taken down from the cross, it’s the tormented face of a 33-year-old man. You look at the face of his mother: His mother is 17. […]
THE RENTALS: Invasion Night
Today, the Los Angeles-based production house American Primitive debuted “Invasion Night,” the official music video for The Rentals’ newish single. Created by former Buddyhead founder Travis Keller and his partners at American Primitive, including cinematographer/editor Jacob Mendel, “Invasion Night” is a fantastical slice of Armageddon-inspired science fiction. The short film takes place just moments after a vengeful alien adversary instantly and effortlessly brings near total annihilation to our unsuspecting, naive planet. In the aftermath of this global apocalypse, a connection forms between the last two living beings on Earth, a lone woman and a small dog… “Invasion Night” is their story. “Shortly after Travis and […]