Television are/were legendary ’70s art-punk avatars who staged dead French symboliste poets society seances at CBGBs and scored the metaphysical proceedings with blazing epics of six-string sorcery. As one half of the Television’s incandescent guitar duality, Tom Verlaine wielded his Fender Jazzmaster like a sculptor’s carving tool, chiseling Venus de Milos of sound out of thin air. Second guitarist Richard Lloyd would then knock the arms off. Together they constructed ringing spires of guitar incandescence, erecting a chiming cathedral of sound in the church of the clustered overtone. And they called it Marquee Moon. Unto to the world a […]
Search Results for: valley of the shadow
INCOMING: The Deerhoof Hunter
No one asked to dance (Deerhoof) by Deerhoof When we first meet Bernard Jaffe, the Beatle-wigged “existential detective” played by Dustin Hoffman in David O. Russell’s 2004 impenetrable enigma of a black comedy I Heart Huckabees, he’s standing in front of a blackboard riddled with a Jackson Pollock-like splatter of chalk-drawn squares and rectangles. What, pray tell, do they add up to? Not much, as it turns out. Like life, they form an interconnected lattice of unrelated coincidences, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. But hey, they look really cool when Hoffman leans against the blackboard and the […]
BEING THERE: Neutral Milk Hotel @ The Tower
In 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel released an album of hallucinatory folk-rock called In The Aeroplane Over The Sea that is, it can be said without fear of exaggeration, nothing short of a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, it is lightning caught in a bottle, one of those rare perfect albums that come along maybe once a decade. Or once a lifetime. In 1999, Jeff Mangum — Neutral Milk’s singer, songwriter and primary guitarist — disappeared from public life without explanation, declining all entreaties to perform or discuss the album or record a follow-up. Over […]
DUFFY’S CUT: Dead Men Will Tell No More Tales
ASSOCIATED PRESS: The location of the mass grave remained elusive until recent weeks. A radar survey of the land beneath the stone monument a few years ago yielded nothing, so the Watsons assumed the marker was inaccurate. But geophysicist Tim Bechtel recently used more sophisticated techniques, including electrical imaging and seismic surveys, to conclude the ossuary is likely near the monument after all — but 30 feet below the surface. It’s also on Amtrak property. The rail company will not permit any digging because of its proximity to the tracks, spokeswoman Danelle Hunter said. “I don’t blame them for not […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Deerhoof At WCL
For going on two decades, these artful dodgers have been getting their shit together somewhere in the outer limits of the noise-rock fringe, with conceptual song cycles about desperate milkmen pied-pipering children into pastures of cellophane flowers and marmalade skies, or cuddly pandas wandering through the valley of the shadow of death. The personnel have shifted over the course of 11 albums, but these days Deerhoof are anchored by drummer/singer Greg Saunier’s deep kick and light voice, the twin-guitar abstract expressionism of John Deiterich and Ed Rodriguez, and the naif anime vocals of bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, whose helium-pitched pipes have […]
TONITE: Dead Men DO Tell Tales
Phawker Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Valania will be on News Radio 77WABC in NYC tonight from 9 PM — 11 PM to discuss his Duffy’s Cut PW cover story with host John Batchelor. UPDATE: The interview was recorded moments ago, but will not air until Friday, some time between 9 PM — 11 PM. We will add a download link to this post as soon as it becomes available. THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH: Exhuming The Old-Timey Mass Murder Mystery At Duffy’s Cut “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” —William Faulkner BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA […]
ALBUM REVIEW: Deerhoof vs. Evil
First, the album cover: a mushroom cloud partially eclipsed by a black heart. The band wasn’t fucking around when they titled the album Deerhoof vs. Evil—they are taking on the heart of darkness with Catalan lyrics, kittenish mischief and bird-like coos in this rampantly eclectic, almost entirely self-recorded album. This is the eleventh full-length release from these seasoned demigods of art-pop-noise, and—though membership has shifted somewhat over the years — it marks the bands sixteenth year of existence. The songs on Deerhoof vs. Evil ecstatically juxtapose disparate — sometimes even disagreeable — sounds and genres with schizophrenic enthusiasm; the result […]
EARLY WORD: Duffy’s Cut Live
[Illustration by TIM DURNING] Dead Men Do Tell Tales Wed. October 13 8 PM Pen & Pencil Club 1522 Latimer St. Philadelphia, PA 215-731-9909 FREE There is an old saying that goes: under every mile of railroad track is a dead Irishman. Locally speaking this is almost literally true. Out near Malvern, under mile 59 of what was then the Pennsylvania Railroad and is today SEPTA’s R-5 line, lie the bodies of 57 Irish railroad workers. What killed them remains mystery that — 178 years later — appears to be on the verge of being solved. The official record says […]
METAPHYSCIAL GRAFFITI: I Tag, Therefore I Am
[Photos by JONATHAN VALANIA] BY JEFF DEENEY It’s been a while since I took a look at what’s going on with the many graffiti walls around town, so here’s a quick update. The most recent addition to the graffiti wall scene in North Philly is on the lower edge of the Badlands at 4th and Susquehanna; the center piece of this small collection of modest mural pieces is a portrait of Mumia Abu-Jamal just psychedelic enough to be confused for George Clinton from a distance. As recent as last summer these walls were bare so it’s nice to see some […]
GREATEST HITS: Today I Saw Revisited
BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a pile of teddy bears arranged like a pyramid around the thin trunk of a young tree planted in the sidewalk near the corner of 13th and Parrish Streets. The tree was on a block of two-story Section 8 homes that looked still new, almost like suburban tract plots complete with small squares of green front lawn, driveways and little back yards big enough to fit a kiddie pool and a wash line. I was walking down this same block about a week earlier on a warm afternoon thinking that it didn’t look like […]
KILLADELPHIA: The Guns And The Damage Done
EDITOR’S NOTE: In today’s edition of the Daily News, Dana DiFilippo takes an in-depth look at the shadowy world of illegal gun-trading, how weapons get in the hands of the young and the reckless and the damage done. One of the names that figures in the story is Nazir Gary, aka ‘Nazzy,’ who was gunned down in 2007 and subsequently became one of the subjects of Jeff Deeney’s VALLEY OF THE SHADOW series on Phawker. The following is an excerpt from DiFilippo’s must-read story and the installment of VOS that ran back in 2007. DAILY NEWS: In the life of […]
EVERY TUESDAY: The Afterlife Of A Statistic
The Valley of the Shadow is an ongoing series documenting how those in Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods publicly mourn and commemorate their dead. Jeff Deeney, the man who brought you Today I Saw, knows these neighborhoods well from his days as a social worker. The hope is to shine a light on the city’s untouchables, brighten the darkest corners and gather-and-share ultra-vivid and all-too-real stories of loss, grief and remembrance. Look for it every Tuesday on Phawker! Why? Because we love you! [Photo by JUSTIN ROMAN]
TODAY I SAW: Jeff Deeney In The Metro
RELATED: The Valley of The Shadow RELATED: Today I Saw