HUFFPO: While the media and political elites debate the future of the GOP, rank and file Republicans see see no need to deviate from the party’s current path. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, a plurality of Republican voters think the party has grown too moderate over the past eight years, and a majority think the party should become more like controversial Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. MORE GUARDIAN: Alaska governor Sarah Palin opened a political action committee yesterday, a move that may not outright confirm her intentions of running for US president in 2012 but indicates she intends to remain […]
KILLADELPHIA: 15-Year-Old Boy Charged With Killing 73-Year-Old Man In Christmas Eve Hit And Run
DAILY NEWS: Police arrested a 15-year-old boy who they say was behind the wheel of his parents’ Ford Expedition on Christmas Eve when he plowed it into 73-year-old William Wrigley, killing him, and then kept driving. Police said that he turned himself in yesterday after an arrest warrant was issued more than a week ago. Authorities have not released the identity of the teen suspect, pending whether he’s charged as an adult when he appears in a court hearing today, a police source said. About 9:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Wrigley, of Frankford Avenue near Sedgely, was crossing the intersection […]
BEST SUPERBOWL AD: ‘If You Hate Your Job…’
GAWKER: We Have Our Head Up Our Asses When It Comes To Superbowl Ads PROWL PUBLIC RELATIONS: We Just Have Our Head Up Our Asses
BUZZ KILL: Now Can We Have A Grown-Up Conversation About Marijuana? Of Course, NOT!
NEWS OF THE WORLD: This is the astonishing picture which could destroy the career of the greatest competitor in Olympic history. In our exclusive photo Michael Phelps, who won a record EIGHT gold medals for swimming at the Beijing games last summer, draws from a bong. The glass pipes are generally used to smoke cannabis. And after sporting chiefs announced laws which mean four-year bans for drug-taking, Phelps’ dreams of adding to his overall 14 gold medal tally at the 2012 games in London could already be OVER. Those dreams seemed the last thing on his mind when he puffed […]
We Know It’s Only Avant Garde Noise But We Like It
HOWL: Thurston Moore, International House, Last Night [Photos: JONATHAN VALANIA] BY DAVE ALLEN I counted about a dozen walkouts from Thurston Moore and Mats Gustafsson’s performance at International House last night. The duo’s aggressive and experimental playing on guitar and saxophone, respectively, tested the limits of what two instruments, with but six strings and one strip of wood between them, could do, but it also tested the audience’s patience and tolerance of noise. During quieter moments, the duo’s playing resembled a static-smeared AM radio receiver rapidly cycling between stations, and during the louder moments they sounded like dueling atom smashers. […]
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE COMMERCIALIZED: Q&A With NYT’s Consumed Columnist Rob Walker
BY ELIZABETH FLYNN Rob Walker wants you to think before you sink your money into another superficial purchase. Walker — who writes the Consumed column for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and author of Buying In, a highly-readable dissection of the dark art of branding — began his career focusing on advertising and media campaigns in 2000, writing the Moneybox column and other contributions for the online magazine Slate. Through his research into corporate strategies to incite a buying frenzy in consumers, he started asking some questions: If consumers had become, as many studies proclaimed “hyperaware” and “immune” to […]
WEEKEND UPDATE: The Good News Flower Hour
The Good News Flower Hour #7 The latest edition of our five-minute week-in-review, wherein I’m a flower that reads the news. This is by far the best one yet. Hats off to our partners in crime at Collateral News and Woodshop Films.
HEAR YE: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Now playing on PHAWKER RADIO! Why? Because it’s GREAT! That’s why.
Inky/DN Seeking $10 Million Bailout From State
NEWSBUSTERS: We all wondered if it would happen. NB readers said it would very soon. NB author Tom Blumer even predicted this would be the year for it. Now the largest newspaper in Philadelphia is requesting a bailout. In a perfectly ironic fashion it took a lawsuit for the public to learn that the Philadelphia Inquirer is seeking $10 million dollars from the state of Pennsylvania. The bailout request was revealed after the school filed suit against the paper for a series of articles questioning the school’s use of government funds.Now, according to an interview between the Philadelphia Bulletin and […]
CINEMA: Dancing In The Dark
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008, directed by Ari Folman, 90 minutes, Israel) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Like last years’ Persepolis, the true-life mystery Waltz With Bashir delivers the West some much-needed Middle Eastern history in an easy-to-digest cartoon format. Make that “easier-to-digest” format, because even when told with this expressionist mix of flash and hand-drawn animation this difficult-to-shake tale of the toll of war lures us to stare at some truly grueling memories that would be unbearable on film. With interviews collected as documentary then sculpted and rendered in animation, filmmaker Ari Folman presents the stories of his comrades from […]
EARLY WORD: Velvet Goldmine
Mercury Music Prize winner ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS KESWICK THEATRE MON., FEB. 2, 8 PM In their first area appearance since 2005, ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS will perform their internationally-acclaimed blend of highly dramatic, emotional and lyrical chamber cabaret at Glenside’s Keswick Theatre on Mon. Feb. 2 @ 8 PM .ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS will be touring in support of their highly-anticipated January 2009 release, The Crying Light. Their last full-length album, 2005’s I am a Bird Now, won the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize for the best album of 2005 over rival nominees the Kaiser Chiefs, and was greeted with […]
BOOK EXCERPT: Tear Down This Myth
EDITOR’S NOTE: Phawker is proud to bring you this excerpt from Daily News scribe/Attytood blogger-in-chief Will Bunch’s soon-to-publish Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics And Haunts Our Future, a meaty, pointed dissection of the dream factory mythologizing of Ronald Reagan’s presidency — how this is being done, why, and the impact such historical revisionism has on our current political landscape. The short answer to all the above can be found the following quote from George Orwell, which kicks off the book: ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls […]
PAPERBOY: ‘We’re All Polar Bears Now’ Edition
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]