UNDER THE SKIN (2013, directed by Jonathan Glazer, 108 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There’s a moment early on in Jonathan Glazer’s hallucinatory new film Under the Skin where Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed character plucks an ant from a lifeless body and inspects it indifferently. The fleeting scene sets the tone for this grimly hypnotizing little mood piece, as it invites us to study the young woman as she moves through her surreal rituals like a bug collecting its prey. Long on process and short on explanation, Under the Skin pulls us into its spell by eschewing formula […]
UPCOMING: Record Store Day, Shop ‘Til You Drop
Record Story Day is Saturday. We urge you to support the dead-enders the defenders of the brick-and-mortar-mom-and-pop-cool-indie-record-store-with-the-smug-hipster-clerks faith. Might we suggest you pick up the Flaming Lips’ Seven Skies H3 [PICTURED, ABOVE], a handsome vinyl LP of containing the highlights of their infamous 24-hour song. With liner notes (SEE BELOW) by yours truly: Thus sprach John F. Kennedy, “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” He was talking about the race to land a man on the moon but he may well have been talking the race to write and record the […]
SWANS: Oxygen (To Be Kind)
Eye-opening teaser track — sounds like John Coltrane in a canoe during a typhoon with a saxophone for a paddle — from the new album, To Be Kind, out May 13th via Young God Records/Mute. They play Union Transfer Thursday May 15th. PREVIOUSLY: Swans”No Words No Thoughts” PREVIOUSLY: Concert Review: Swans @ Union Transfer 10/13/12 PREVIOUSLY: This Awful Bliss
Q&A: N.A. Poe Interviews Nikki Allen Poe, Candidate For Philly City Council At-Large Seat
PREVIOUSLY: Phawker Endorses Nikki Allen Poe For City Council PREVIOUSLY: Nikki Allen Poe Kicks Off His Pro-Pot/Anti-PPA City Council Candidacy With Presser At The Rocky Statue RELATED: Libertarian Party Picks Pro-Pot City Council Candidate RELATED: Libertarian City Council Candidate Facing New Federal Drug Troubles RELATED: Statement Regarding Mr. Poe’s Probation and “Drug Troubles”
Win Tix To See Cloud Cult @ The Prince Friday!
We have a pair of tix to see panoramic sunny pop experimentalists Cloud Cult — think Arcade Fire, but less disco and Grammy-winning and more Eno Another Green World/Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and Midwestern Burning Man pagan-folk-baroque — at the Prince Music Theater on Friday April 18th. To qualify, all you have to do is sign up for our mailing list (see right, below the masthead). Trust us, this is something you want to do. In addition to breaking news alerts and Phawker updates, you also get advanced warning about groovy concert ticket giveaways and other free swag […]
LIKE TURKEYS VOTING FOR THANKSGIVING: The Koch Suckers At Americans For Prosperity Convince Tennessee Lawmakers To Ban Rapid Public Transit
WIRED: Tennessee lawmakers overwhelmingly voted in favor a bill that bans the construction of bus rapid transit (BRT) in two counties, one of which includes the city of Nashville. The impetus for the vote was a proposal to build a $174 million BRT system in Nashville called The Amp, which would’ve ran on a 7.1 mile route and served rapidly growing neighborhoods across the city. There’s a more detailed summary of the project over at The Tennessean. Although BRT has been shown to revitalize economies and reduce congestion, opponents of The Amp voiced concerns about the safety of unloading […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has revealed some of the group’s most carefully guarded secrets. The reporting on the documents he leaked won the Washington Post and The Guardian Pulitzer prizes, announced on Monday. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about Snowden himself — and his motivation. In a new article in Vanity Fair, Bryan Burrough, Suzanna Andrews and Sarah Ellison take a closer look at Snowden in an effort to explain how a high school drop-out, a “seemingly aimless geeky kid from the Maryland suburbs,” came to possess and expose secret NSA […]
GIRL TALK & FREEWAY: Tolerated
Song is meh, but video is pretty funny. Looks like it was shot on the mean sidewalks of LA. WARNING: Some cartoonish gore and an old lady gets tuned up, but she clearly had it coming.
SMUS: This Land Is Your Land
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Can anyone give me an update on how the native Americans are making out in their negotiations with the federal government on getting their original land holdings returned? Yeah, that’s what I figured — about as well as today’s Palestinians are progressing with getting THEIRS back. But I guess that’s how it goes when the land in question was originally doled out to the ancestors of its present occupiers by no less a grantor than Jehovah himself. One could almost be forgiven for thinking all of this is simply a bad dream were it not, in fact, such a completely despicable […]
The Curious Life & Death Of An ‘American Jihadist’
This story does NOT reflect well on the FBI, the State Department, the media or the Federal prosecutor’s office of Virginia and the judge that initiated and perpetuated this travesty of justice. None of whom ever offered a word of apology. Shame on them all. VICE: This past January, I asked Eric if he wanted to tell his story. It had been a year since he fired the RPG and about four months since he’d been released from jail, where he’d been in solitary confinement for six months. He’d signed a sealed plea bargain that gave him his freedom … […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Tao Of Albert
EDITOR’S NOTE: The article excerpted below, Everybody Should Have An Albert by Paul Slansky Paul Slansky, was first published in The Village Voice in March 1979 DAILY BEAST: When [his comedian father], died in 1958, 11-year-old Albert [Brooks], who had grown up around Hollywood comedians, already had a reputation among them as a budding comic genius. A few years later, when Johnny Carson asked Carl Reiner to name the funniest men he knew, Mel Brooks and a high school kid named Albert [Brooks] were the two that he mentioned. He did his first Tonight Show in mid-1972, and quickly […]
SIDEWALKING: The Walls Have Ears
New Banksy, Cheltenham, U.K., near GCHQ, earlier today via the BBC BBC: The artwork, which appeared in Cheltenham on Sunday, depicts three men wearing sunglasses and using listening devices to “snoop” on a telephone box. The piece has already attracted hundreds of visitors. Banksy has not yet claimed the work but it bears his hallmarks, say experts. Cheltenham street artist Dice67 claimed he had been told the artwork, which appeared on the corner of Fairview Road and Hewlett Road on Sunday morning, is indeed by Bristol artist Banksy. “It’s been all over the art forums. He’s tipped off a couple […]
EXCLUSIVE: The PA State Police Has Purchased Controversial Cellphone Spying Technology And Would Prefer That You Didn’t Know About It
BY DUSTIN SLAUGHTER A recent Pew poll indicates that more than 70% of Americans oppose the National Security Administration’s bulk collection of cellphone metadata. For Pennsylvanians, the threat to security and privacy of your cellphone communications just hit a little closer to home. Phawker has learned that Pennsylvania State Police has recently purchased a controversial type of cell phone surveillance technology, known as HailStorm. Hailstorm has the ability to “trick” cell phones into connecting to the device by posing as a cell tower, enabling it to scoop up phone serial data within a targeted radius and track the user’s location. […]