BY DAVE ALLEN We’ll start with the names. “Buke”: say it the way it looks. “Gass” rhymes with “face,” not “ass.” They’re the names of the instruments that Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez play; in an avant-garde tradition that stretches back to Ben Franklin and his glass armonica and through Californian avant-garde visionaries like Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, Dyer and Sanchez have built custom instruments perfectly suited to the type of music they want to create. Dyer plays an electric baritone ukulele — a buke; Sanchez wields a six-string equipped with three strings from a bass guitar and three from […]
MUST SEE TV: Wikileaks Saga Told In Wacky Cartoon
RELATED: The Definitive Guide To All The State Department Cables Leaked So Far And The Shit They Stirred Up [HIGHLY RECOMMENDED]
MY LIFE IN THE GHOST OF BUSH: Chapter 14
[“Screaming Pope” by FRANCIS BACON] BY AARON STELLA About a year and a half ago, I began chronicling my stranger-than-fiction life story here on Phawker. Admittedly, much of it is hard to believe, but let me assure you that everything I have shared thus far really did happen. Since almost all of these events occurred during the presidency of G.W. Bush, I am calling this MY LIFE IN THE GHOST OF BUSH, a play on the David Byrne/Brian Eno album MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS. This is the 14th chapter, and for the benefit of newcomers, here’s a […]
Criminally Insane Du Pont Heir Dies In Prison
ACTION NEWS: Du Pont was serving a 13 to 30 year sentence for 3rd degree murder in the January 26, 1996 shooting death of David Schultz. Schultz was a 1984 Olympic gold medalist who was killed outside his home, which was on Du Pont’s estate, Foxcatcher Farm in Newtown Square, Delaware County. Du Pont fancied himself a patron to wrestlers and built a world-class training facility at his estate. For two days, Du Pont barricaded himself inside his mansion. MORE DELCO TIMES: Du Pont would talk of his meetings with Henry Kissinger, Truman Capote and Anwar Sadat. Glazier said he […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR In 1979, producer Sylvia Robinson heard hip-hop music at a birthday party in Harlem and had a hunch that it would be commercially successful. She called her son, Joey Robinson Jr., and asked him to gather a group of musicians who could perform like the rappers she saw in Harlem. She then held makeshift auditions for a rap group outside a pizza parlor in Englewood, N.J. “She put these three guys together who had never met each other before, had the backing track all ready and created a record in a matter of minutes,” says Dan Charnas, a […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Justin Jones & Badly Drawn Boy
BY PELLE GUNTHER So cold. Hands numb. Lights dimming. And then Justin Jones came out and let us know that he, too, was in fact freezing his ass off in the First Unitarian Church Tuesday night. His first song “The Gutter”, off his new release The Little Fox EP, felt fitting in these frigid temperatures of the sanctuary. The lyrics are steeped in a darkened past, that Jones seems to have left behind with happier songs like “Little Fox”. Regardless of what he was singing though, Justin Jones [pictured, above] wielded a mighty voice, beautiful rich tenor with a slight […]
30 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Day The Music Died
John Winston Ono Lennon (October 9, 1940 – December 8, 1980)
Philly Mobile Payment Firm Xipwire Will Process Wikileaks Donations After PayPal & MasterCard Caved
RAW STORY: “We do think people should be able to make their own decisions as to who they donate to,” Xipwire co-founder Sibyl Lindsay told Raw Story during a Tuesday afternoon telephone interview. “The fact that people can’t donate to where they’d like to and make that decision for themselves does bother us.” The company has set up a page where WikiLeaks supporters can donate, saying it will waive all related fees. “Our motivation is really simple,” Xipwire founder Sharif Aleandre explained in an email. “While people may or may not agree with WikiLeaks and the documents it has released, […]
TONITE: I Am Legend
Legendary musician, poet, artist and activist Patti Smith will be at the Free Library tonight reading from her new book, Just Kids — a memoir about coming of age and becoming an artist in New York in the 1960’s and 70’s with her former lover and lifelong friend, the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe — which won the National Book Award for Non-fiction. Just Kids has maintained its perch in the upper reaches of the New York Times bestseller list since publication. Just Kids is beautiful and gritty, the ultimate story of New York grime and glamour told through the impassioned […]
KITCHEN BITCH: Christmas Cookie Monster Mash-Up
BY MAVIS LINNEMANN Last year, my best friend Laura and I threw our first annual ladies-only holiday bash. We decorated my little apartment like it was the North Pole, made more appetizers than we could ever eat, baked a million cookies for our guests to decorate, and whipped up about 15 different colors of icing to top both the cookies and homemade gingerbread houses. Needless to say, we were exhausted by the end of the day, but the party was a huge success and we vowed to learn from our mistakes when we planned our holiday extravaganza the next year. […]
DEENEY: Breaking The Silence Of The Lambs
“Out here it’s not living, it’s existing” from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo. THE DAILY BEAST: A fresh wave of fear chilled Philadelphia’s Kensington Avenue over the weekend, when 22-year-old Allison Edwards was found strangled in an apartment in the nearby Juniata Park neighborhood. The police have yet to confirm a connection between Edwards’ death and those of confirmed Kensington Avenue Strangler victims Nicole Piacentini and Elaine Goldberg, but the similarities are enough to rekindle concerns of a serial killer stalking women in North Philadelphia. The victims are far from random: They are the cocaine and heroin addicts who […]
RIP: Goodnight Mrs. Edwards Wherever You Are
NEW YORK TIMES: Mrs. Edwards was born Mary Elizabeth Anania on July 3, 1949, in Jacksonville, Fla., the daughter of Vincent J. and Elizabeth Thweatt Anania. Her father was a Navy pilot, and the family moved often in America and abroad. She attended Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va., then transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned a bachelor’s degree in English. She enrolled in the university’s law school, where in 1974 she met Mr. Edwards, four years her junior and the son of a textile worker. After graduating, they were married in July 1977 […]