JOJO RABBIT (directed by Taika Waititi, 108 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR Jojo Rabbit is the answer to the unasked question: what if Wes Anderson decided to make a whimsical, black comedic satire about Nazis? Based on Christine Leunens’s book Caging Skies and set at the tail end of World War II, Jojo Rabbit is the story of 10 year-old Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), who lives in Germany with his single mother (Scarlett Johansson) and his imaginary best friend, a cartoonish version of Adolph Hitler played by the film’s director Taika Waititi (Thor Ragnarok, Hunt for the Wilderpeople). […]
THE BREEDERS: Walking With A Killer
Strange new video for this pretty/creepy Breeders track from last year’s All Nerve LP, their first in 25 years with the classic Last Splash era line-up. If Night Of The Living Dead had been shot in Dayton instead of Pittsburgh. Happy Halloween! PREVIOUSLY: Our 2015 Q&A W/ Kelley Deal (DISCUSSED: Sewing, heroin, cats, the head shops of Murray, Kentucky, R. Ring, Guided By Voices, The Hollywood Bowl, the long awaited new album by The Breeders, CBGBs, Big Cartel, The Pixies, vaping, resentment, the two Daytons, Codeine, 12-stepping, juvenile delinquency and Cincinnati) PREVIOUSLY: Q&A W/ Kelley Deal Re: Her Fight To […]
REVIEW: Tegan & Sara Hey, I’m Just Like You
Canadian indie-rock duo Tegan and Sara—aka out-lesbian twin sisters Tegan Rain Quin and Sara Keirsten Quin—recently released their ninth studio album, Hey, I’m Just Like You (2019), as an accompaniment to their new coming-of-age memoir titled High School. Fittingly, the album consists of 12 re-recorded songs that the girls originally conceived as adolescents. The lyrics, derived from the girls’ high school journals, echo the adolescent stations of the cross one would expect to permeate the headspace of any high-schooler: jealousy, anger, chagrin and despondent self-doubt. “We Don’t Have Fun When We’re Together Anymore” tackles peer pressure (“Have another drink, […]
THOM YORKE: Last I Heard
This if f*cking INCREDIBLE! Arguably the greatest music video since “This Is America.” The 5-minute short film, made at the Brooklyn-based experimental studio Art Camp, is set in a dream world inspired by fragments of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood’s imagination and made up of over 3000 hand-illustrated frames. […] Art Camp commented on their process interpreting the latest track from Thom’s current album ANIMA: “Our first and last goal was to serve the feelings of the song and the record. Thom shared a list of visions with us, disconnected images from his dreams, and we expanded on it with […]
Win Tix To See Roseanne Cash & Ry Cooder Perform The Songs Of Johnny Cash @ The Met On Sunday
Not sure what I can tell you about Johnny Cash that Joaquin Phoenix hasn’t already taught you. Presumably, at this late date, there is no need to run down The Man In Black’s CV — walked the line, shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, swallowed enough trucker speed to stay five feet high and rising for the better part of the 20th Century, fell into a burning ring of fire, woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold his head that didn’t hurt, etc. — but let us be clear: Johnny Cash remains a […]
Deadspin Is At Its Best When It Uses Sports As An Excuse To Talk About Shit That Actually Matters
DEADSPIN 2014: What we have in Gamergate is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center. What we’re seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved. Tomorrow’s Lee Atwater will work through sock puppets on IRC. Tomorrow’s Sister Souljah will get shouted down with rape threats. Tomorrow’s Tipper Gore will make an inexplicably popular YouTube video. Tomorrow’s Willie Horton ad […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: Dan Piepenbring was a 29-year-old editor of the literary magazine The Paris Review in 2016 when he met Prince for the first time — and agreed to help the musical icon pen a memoir. It was the assignment of a lifetime for a writer who had not yet published a book, but Prince wanted someone he could open up to — and Piepenbring fit the bill. “If there was any advantage to the kind of guilelessness that I brought to our conversations, it was that it let me listen to him very openly and without judgment,” Piepenbring […]
TAYLOR HAWKINS: Middle Child
From Get The Money, due out November 8th on Shanabelle/RCA Records.
BEING THERE: Sleater-Kinney @ The Fillmore
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER Dressed in black, Sleater-Kinney kicked off their set at the Fillmore last night with the slow futuristic dirge of “The Center Won’t Hold,” the title track of their latest album. Here was the new, layered, and organized sound of Sleater-Kinney, sweethearts of the 90’s riot grrrl movement, almost 25 years after their debut. The songs from The Center Won’t Hold aren’t bad by any means, but next to the electric charge of Dig Me Out or The Hot Rock, they sound sort of tame and jaded — at least on the studio versions. After the ominous […]
CINEMA: Moby Dicks
THE LIGHTHOUSE (directed by Robert Eggers, 109 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Robert Eggers The Witch was nothing short of a masterpiece, a complex cinematic meditation on feminism and coming of age using witchcraft as a metaphorical framework that is unveiled in a slow burn narrative. So I’ve been eagerly anticipating Robert Eggers’ follow-up and when it was finally unveiled that it would be starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, I was all-in. While some will never forgive Pattinson for his wooden acting in the Twilight movies, let the record show he’s used the celebrity that […]
NEO SOUL SURVIVOR: Q&A W/ Macy Gray
Photo by GIULIANO BEKOR BY LARA MICKLE It’s been 18 years since she won a Grammy for “I Try,” but Macy Gray is a neo soul survivor. Over the course of the last two decades, Gray has released 10 studio albums, embarked on countless world tours and racked up dozens of film, television and video game credits. Concurrently, she has weathered multiple micro-controversies, all of which have proven, in the fullness of time, to be proverbial tempests in a TMZ teapot. Through it all, one thing has remained above reproach: that voice. Like honey on sandpaper, Gray’s voice signals both […]
WORTH REPEATING: How I Became A Weirdo
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following essay by Phawker almnus Elizabeth Fiend [pictured below] about her early days as a weirdo punk rocker/comic strip artist is included in THE BOOK OF WEIRDO just published by Last Gasp. Legendary in alt-comic book circles, Weirdo was a comics anthology created by R. Crumb in 1981 and ran until 1993. THE BOOK OF WEIRDO includes a comprehensive history of the publication, interviews with its three editors — R.Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Peter Bagge (of Hate fame) — and testimonials from artists that contributed over the years, including Miss Fiend, hence this essay. Robert Aline […]
IMPEACHMENT NOW: Time To Take Out The Trash
Either we are a nation of laws or we are a lawless banana republic — a gangster state.