Conor Oberst @ The Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall November 18th. Tickets go on sale Friday at 10 AM. PREVIOUSLY: The biggest cliche about Bright Eyes — aka 24-year-old 34-year-old indie-pop pinup boy Conor Oberst — is that he’s emerged as the latest “new Dylan,” a Mr. Tambourine Man for the O.C. Nation. Like all cliches, this one’s been worn meaningless by overuse. And yet, like any good cliche it’s essentially true. Heck, Oberst already got props from the last “new Dylan” who amounted to anything: Bruce Springsteen. Like Dylan in his prime, Oberst writes long, elliptical narratives–weaving word-clotted threads of […]
SIGUR ROS: “Fjögur Píanó”
WARNING: There is full-frontal nudity of actor Shia LaBeouf in this video. If you or your boss/co-workers are frightened or disgusted or shocked or offended by the human anatomy you should seek professional help might want to skip this one or save it for the privacy of your own home. Sigur Rós are delighted to reveal the third film in their Mystery Film Experiment series, which has seen a dozen filmmakers receiving the same modest budget to create whatever comes into their head when listening to songs from the band’s new U.S. and UK top 10 album Valtari. The third film sees acclaimed director Alma […]
REVIEW: Eternal Sunshine For The Spotless Mind
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER If the Dallas Cowboys are America’s team, then the Beach Boys — who are marking 50 years of fun, fun, fun with a new album and a tour that brought them to the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden on Saturday — are America’s band. Granted, they have been more or less a movable oldies jukebox for the last 30 years, at least, but that does not diminish the deathlessness of their songbook or erase the fact that they have provided the aspirational soundtrack for American life, the grand illusion of an eternal summer […]
PRODUCT PLACEMENT: If Bon Iver Was A Sneaker
It would look just like this. RELATED: We are very pleased to announce our upcoming collaboration with one of our favorite bands, Bon Iver. Designed by Justin Vernon and using our trademark Ramos silhouette, the Keep + Bon Iver shoefeatures herringbone accents, a black fishbone detail across the toe, and a canvas upper custom dyed to a perfect pale salmon. Rooted in a shared love of animals, Keep + Bon Iver proudly support the Best Friends Animal Society, an animal advocacy group which operates the nation’s largest sanctuary for abused and abandoned animals. As many of our fans know, […]
CINEMA: The Dark Side Of The Moon?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Last week I took issue with a judgement call that Phawker film critic Dan Buskirk made about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of a scene in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and voiced my disagreement in an editor’s note attached to Dan’s review. In the interest of fairness and equal time, I am running his response here. But first the passage in question from Dan’s review followed by the editor’s note I attached to it at the end. Here is the segment of Dan’s Moonrise Kindgom review in question: Through all this gorgeously whimsical design, there’s one niggling fact, […]
SECOND OPINION: Moonrise Kingdom Revisited
BY DAVID CORBO I don’t know that Wes Anderson has really captured me since The Royal Tenenbaums, that is until Moonrise Kingdom, his seventh and latest effort. Directed by Anderson and co-written with Roman Coppola, this alluring film makes broad statements about our modern day social and cultural dilemmas all the while charming us with a whimsical childhood tale of young and innocent love. Anderson’s microscopic, plodding approach to the dynamics of sibling rivalry in The Darjeeling Limited (also co-penned by Coppola) reflected more pain than gain to this viewer and left me feeling vacuous and unfulfilled, especially after experiencing […]
DUMB ANGEL: Brian Wilson’s Smile Sessions
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Teenage symphonies to God. That’s the phrase Beach Boys auteur Brian Wilson used to describe the a heartbreaking works of staggering genius he was creating in the mid-’60s, when his compositional powers were achieving miraculous states of beauty and innovation even as his fevered faculties skirted the fringes of madness. With the 1966 release of Pet Sounds, The Beach Boy’s orchestral-pop opus of ocean-blue melancholia, Brian clinched his status as teen America’s Mozart-on-the-beach in the cosmology of modern pop music. Less than a year later, he would fall off the edge of his mind, abandoning his […]
FROM THE VAULTS: Black Mirror On The Wall
Snow White and the Huntsman may be unusual among the many Snow White retellings in that the huntsman appears as a major character. You might recall that the huntsman, who appears for just a few sentences in the classic Brothers Grimm tale, risks his life by refusing to kill Snow White and instead brings the heart of a boar to the queen. The entire story hinges on that fateful decision. But the number one grossing movie in the country is not the first Snow White rendition to feature the huntsman. That distinction goes to Phawker contributor, Mike Walsh, whose Oberman […]
SIDEWALKING: This Is What You Get
Thom Yorke, Camden, New Jersey, last night BY JONATHAN VALANIA DELUCA: British art-rock band Radiohead closed out its American tour on Wednesday night at the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden. The Thom Yorke fronted sextet played for just over two hours, opening with “Bloom” from last year’s The King Of Limbs and closing it out with “Everything In Its Right Place” from their career shifting 2002 album Kid A. The light show, featuring a wall of bulbs built from 14000 recycled plastic bottles, was spectaculaly sharp, and the band sounded pretty darn good as well. The set list is below. […]
TONIGHT: Karma Police State
[Artwork by STEPHEN LORENZO WALKES] Radiohead plays The Susquehanna Bank Center tonight. Astonishingly, tickets are still available. This despite the fact they have been on sale since February. This despite the fact that every other tour date — including shows as far off as November — have long since sold out. Shame on us all. RELATED: The strange mime-meets-epilepsy dance that bowler-topped Thom Yorke does in the video for “Lotus Flower” exemplifies the oblique dichotomies that King Of Limbs occupies: the twilight zone between funny and serious, between form and shape, between hue and color, between agony and ecstasy. Like […]
WORTH REPEATING: It’s The Middle Class, Stupid
ROBERT REICH: The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe’s debt crisis. It’s not Japan’s tsumami. It’s not Wall Street’s continuing excesses. It’s not, as right-wing economists tell us, because taxes are too high on corporations and the rich, and safety nets are too generous to the needy. It’s not even, as some liberals contend, because the Obama administration hasn’t spent enough on a temporary Keynesian stimulus. The answer is in front of our faces. It’s because American consumers, whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity, don’t have the dough to buy enough to boost […]
DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS: Catholic Church Continues Its Groundbreaking Work In Advancing The Civil Rights Of Predatory Pedophiles
DAILY NEWS: Parents and Packer Park community members are incensed with a parish decision to include a photograph of a smiling defrocked priest in the last Holy Spirit yearbook — next to a 1965 photograph of the eighth-grade graduating class. David C. Sicoli was featured prominently in the 2005 grand-jury report, accused of molesting several boys during his 33-year ministry. Sicoli served as pastor at Holy Spirit Church before he was defrocked in 2008 after the Archdiocese logged 11 credible abuse claims against him dating back to 1977. He was never charged criminally, but many parents and residents in the […]
SIDEWALKING: Blue Sky Blue
Comcast Tower by MEREDITH KLEIBER