EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend Phawker has not just one, but two, of its best correspondents on the ground at Bonnaroo. All weekend, assistant editor EVA LIAO and her trusty sidekick, book critic MAVIS LINNEMANN, will be blogging photos and scene reports straight from the primeval muck of Bonnaroo to your mind’s eye. Hope you appreciate that these chicks are living in a stifling tent and sweating their tits off so you don’t have to. I sure do. EVA SAYS: Here we are in Manchester, Tennessee, roasting in 95 degree weather under our makeshift tent (we didn’t exactly know how to […]
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BOOKS: Q&A With Ant Farmer Simon Rich
BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC All too often reviewers say a book is “laugh-out-loud funny,” but when you finally read it, it’s about as funny as child abuse. That’s not the case with Simon Rich‘s Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations. The book’s super-short vignettes and mini-dialogues had me howling in my subway seat, much to the consternation of the other morning commuters. Only 22-years-old and freshly graduated from Harvard, Rich (son of New York Times columnist Frank Rich) will no doubt be tickling the short-attention span funny bones of Generations Y & Z for years to come. Recently he […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR On the Set with Garry Shandling Garry Shandling parodied TV talk shows on The Larry Sanders Show, which ran on HBO from 1992 to 1998 and is now out in a four-DVD box set. It’s called Not Just the Best of “The Larry Sanders Show” — in part because it features eight hours of extras, including essentially unedited conversations with stars who made guest appearances on the Larry Sanders sofa. Patti Smith, All Covered Up Since she began her recording career in the ’70s, Patti Smith has never been shy about recording covers of her favorite songs, such […]
AUTHOR AUTHOR: Q&A W/ Nathan Englander
BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Eight years after the critically-acclaimed short story collection The Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander’s first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, finally hit bookstores on May 1. This harrowing novel takes place during Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983), during which the junta government “disappeared” somewhere between 9,000 and 30,000 suspected dissidents and subversives, mostly students and liberals. Kaddish Poznan, hijo de puta (son of a whore) and outcast in the Jewish community, makes his living by erasing the names of wanton Jewish ancestors (pimps, whores and gangsters) from their gravestones on requests from more respectable […]
AUTHOR, AUTHOR: Q&A W/ GARY SHTEYNGART
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Gary Shteyngart’s second novel, Absurdistan, is a biting comical ride in the adventures of Misha Vainberg, the 325 lb. son of the 1,239th richest man in Russia. After attending Accidental College, USA, and living in the South Bronx with his hot Latina girlfriend, Misha must return to Russia to see his father. When his father kills an Oklahoma businessman, Misha can no longer obtain a visa from the INS. Misha’s love for New York and multiculturalism take him to the little-known country of Absurdistan, were he’s supposed to get a Belgian […]
REVIEW: This Is Your Book On Drugs
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Bantam, 1968, reprinted 1999) BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC “You’re either on the bus, or off the bus,” Ken Kesey chants. On the bus. Off the bus. With the Merry Pranksters. Or with the squares. On the bus. Off the bus. This phrase — a meaty reality bite all by itself, repeated like a mantra throughout the book — marks the metaphysical divide that is at the center of Tom Wolfe’s raw account of the psychedelic counterculture in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the legendary New Journalism chronicle of Ken Kesey (author of “One […]
BOOK REVIEW: Blonde On Blonde
The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski (St. Martin’s Minotaur. $23.95) BY MAVIS LINNEMANN From the opening line of Duane Swierczynski’s crime novel, The Blonde, you know you’re in for a wild ride. “I poisoned your drink,” says the titular blonde to Jack Eisley, a print journalist in Philadelphia to sign his divorce papers. Kelly White — The Blonde in question — has been infected with a deadly new technology, nanomachines, which have been designed to make privacy virtually obsolete. If there isn’t someone within 10 feet of Kelly at all times, she will die. Even more unnerving is that these nanomachines […]
COMING ATTRACTION: Mr. & Mrs. au Naturale
On Friday, look for Phawker’s exclusive interview with the R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb: Big butts, bigger boots, LSD, weird sex, piggyback rides, meeting the Beatles, leaving America, and growing up in Philadelphia…newly hired PHAWKER BOOK CRITIC Mavis Linneman‘s review of City Paper Editor Duane Swierczynski‘s The Blonde…FILM CRITIC DAN BUSKIRK‘s review of the hilarious hipster comedy of manners that is Mutual Appreciation. Plus, the new ARCADE FIRE on PHAWKER RADIO, NPR FOR THE DEAF, PhillyHistory Write-A-Caption contest, and, invariably, some wry riposte on the latest and seemingly regularly-scheduled snuffing of a human life by a gun. Damn.