Click to enlarge, read and live. RELATED: As the crisis at the power plant entered its sixth night, the situation appeared to be deteriorating. One sign was that the Japanese government increased the maximum radiation dose that workers could be exposed to from 100 millisieverts to 250 millisieverts, describing the move as “unavoidable due to the circumstances.” The workers are all wearing full protective gear and working only in short shifts, but they are still believed to be exposed to significant doses of radiation. All of the workers were pulled out of the plant for nearly an hour Wednesday when […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Timely Death Of Anti-Gonzo & The False Equivalence Between Left And Right
DRIFTGLASS: While there were many, many things David Broder loved — centrism, politics, bi-partisanship, equidistanthood, divarication, bisect-uality, decussation — one thing he really hated was hippies. Those those damn, dirty, disrespectful fucking hippies. He especially hate those fucking imaginary hippies: they were the sawdust and breadcrumb filler he kept heaping into his increasingly inedible journalistic meatloaf; the thumb he pressed down ever harder on the scales of his funny little rambles about America during his declining years (which encompassed all of the 21st Century and a big chunk of the end of the 20th) to artificially “balance out” the clear […]
WORTH REPEATING: Welcome To The Fragmentation
NPR: Stop by one of the 200 or so Borders stores that soon will be closing, and you can pick through the rubble. Under the Everything Must Go signs, you will find the building blocks of the last half-century of popular culture — in discounted disarray. Here are the self-help books that promise to make us better people. There are the novels — by Tom Clancy and Janet Evanovich — that make us think about the world we’ve created. Over there are history tomes and workout tapes and compilation CDs and bright boxes containing the do-it-yourself language course Rosetta Stone. […]
CHANOLOGY: 4chan Founder Goes Semi-Legit
TECH CRUNCH: According to an SEC filing, 4chan founder Christopher “Moot” Poole has raised $625,000 in funding for a stealth startup called Canvas Networks. We’ve emailed Poole to confirm the funding. 4chan is an online bulletin board where anyone can post comments, expound on topics and share images. Poole was featured as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world last year. As of March, 4chan was receiving around 8.2 million unique visitors per month. Poole told the New York Times’ Nick Bilton that the site receives an average of 800,000 new posts a day. MORE NEW […]
AMERICAN IDIOT: Clueless UCLA Coed’s Anti-Asian Rant Goes Viral, Offends Entire Internet
DAILY BRUIN: A UCLA student has received multiple death threats in response to her video “Asians in the Library,” which was posted Friday. In the video, third-year political science student Alexandra Wallace makes a number of disparaging comments about Asian students. “The problem is these hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every single year,” Wallace said in the video. She described her annoyance at Asian students talking noisily in the library, and imitated one student with the phrase, “Ohhhh. Ching chong ling long ting tong.” The video quickly went viral and, despite being removed by Wallace […]
RIP: Owsley, Legendary Acid Alchemist, Dead At 76
NEW YORK TIMES: Owsley Stanley, the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s, died on Sunday in a car accident in Australia. He was 76 and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland. Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. Once renowned as an artisan of acid, Mr. Stanley turned out LSD said to be purer and finer […]
APOCALYPSE NOW: Japanese Reactor Goes Chernobyl
NEW YORK TIMES: After an emergency cabinet meeting, the Japanese government told people living within about 20 miles of the Daiichi plant to stay indoors, keep their windows closed and stop using air conditioning. Mr. Kan, whose government was extraordinarily weak before the sequence of calamities struck the nation, told the Japanese people that “although this incident is of great concern, I ask you to react very calmly.” And in fact, there seemed to be little panic, but huge apprehension in a country where radioactivity brings up memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the haunting images of post-war Japan. The two […]
RAWK TAWK: Q&A With Robyn Hitchcock
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Joe Boyd is a most intriguing fellow to rock snobs or anyone with a working knowledge of the cultural history of the latter half of the 20th century. An American ex-pat (south Jersey represent!) living in Britain most of his life, Boyd not only had a front row seat for some of the most important albums, bands and events of the psychedelic 60s — events that would, in many ways, define rock history moving forward — he was often their chief enabler. Boyd produced “Arnold Layne,” Pink Floyd’s first single, along with albums by Nick Drake, Fairport […]
STYLE COUNCIL: Ballad Of A Thin Man
STEREOGUM: In a photo spread titled “Ballad Of A Thin Man” and subtitled “Godfathers Of Glam” and basically boiling down to “Someone Old, Something New,” this Sunday’s T Mag juxtaposed the exquisitely preserved mortal coils of a few elder rock gods with some very fancy, very NEW designer threads. There’s Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Dave Gahan, Michael Stipe, Ray Davies, David Johansen, and John Doe. MORE PREVIOUSLY: The Devil And Old Saint Nick
Anonymous Dumps Damning Bank Of America Emails
BUSINESS INSIDER: Hacker group Anonymous (aka OperationLeaks on Twitter) just released what they say is a trove of damning documents on Bank of America. You can find them here: bankofamericasuck.com Remember, at this point, we can’t verify whether they are legitimate or not, but Gawker’s Adrien Chen, who has sources within Anonymous, suggest there’s something real to the leaks. Anonymous says the emails deal with BofA’s mortgage practices, but the source is not an employee of Bank of America proper — the source is a former employee from Balboa Insurance, a firm which used to be owned by BofA. As […]
COMING ATTRACTION: Q&A With Robyn Hitchcock
In advance of his joint appearance with Joe Boyd, the Zelig of the psychedelic 60s, at World Cafe Live on Monday, we rang up Mr. Hitchcock and discussed acid, Eno, Hendrix, Syd Barrett and Dylan’s Basement Tapes among other things. Look for it tomorrow on a Phawker near you! RELATED: While hardly a household name, Joe Boyd made vital contributions that are noted in the fine print on many an important British rock, folk and world-music recording from the late ’60s forward. He was producer of Pink Floyd’s first single (“Arnold Layne”), as well as the early and best albums […]
CINEMA: When Worlds Collide
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC One of the most memorable moments in Super Bowl commercial history came in 1996, when we watched a spaceship blow up the White House in an ad for the forthcoming summer blockbuster, Independence Day. The commercial caused quite a stir; we had imagined an impregnable wall around the U.S. and it was deeply shocking to see that wall breached. That was 15 years ago, and although we are engaged in at least two wars, the only sustained attack on the U.S. we can imagine is the fantasy scenario that monsters could come from outer space […]
Massive Earthquake & Tsunami Rocks Japan
NEW YORK TIMES: The Japanese government declared an “atomic power emergency” and evacuated thousands of residents living close to a nuclear plant in northern Japan after a major earthquake. Japan relies heavily on nuclear power, and it generates just over a third of the country’s total electricity. The facilities are designed to withstand earthquakes, which are common in Japan, but experts have long expressed concerns about safety standards at the plants, particularly about the impact a major quake could have if it hit close to a reactor. At least two other Japanese nuclear plants also reported trouble, but there was […]