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 […]
Search Results for: tower records
GHOST OF D.B. COOPER: On The Verge Of Financial Collapse, Man Fakes Death In Spectacular Plane Crash
NEW YORK TIMES: A financial adviser from Indiana disappeared into the Alabama woods early Monday after faking a distress call and parachuting from a small plane that crashed in Florida. The police in three states were looking for the pilot, identified as Marcus Schrenker, 38. No one was hurt in the crash. According to the police in Santa Rosa County in the Florida Panhandle, where the plane went down, Mr. Schrenker turned up safely about 220 miles north of there. And there is evidence that Mr. Schrenker was an experienced pilot who might have been trying to fake his own […]
UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES: You Are Being Watched
TEXAS OBSERVER: Allen Hamilton kept his files secret until his death in 2005, long after his retirement as campus police chief for the University of Texas at Austin. His son discovered them while cleaning out his father’s office. The boxes of documents and photos from the 1960s included records of the most horrific event in Chief Hamilton’s tenure—the August day in 1966 when Charles Whitman perched atop the UT Tower with a high-powered rifle, killing 15 and wounding 33. Graphic photos from the Whitman archives were made available to newspapers to mark the 40th anniversary of that bloody day. But […]
GAYDAR: A Family Of Strangers
BY AARON STELLA Welcome back happy campers to another edition of my so-called ‘you-wouldn’t-believe-it-if-I-told-you’ life story. Last time around, I mentioned that I was developing a relationship with a family with ulterior motives unbeknownst to me. I also mentioned that they would eventually become my family. Things get kind of wild from here on out folks, so hold on to your hats! The year is 2001. I’m a sophomore at the Catholic high school in Cullman, AL, practically friendless, and in thrall to a feeling of powerlessness among my peers and family members. Giovanni, the German exchange student that had […]
WORTH REPEATING: Hey, Mr. Spaceman*
*First appeared in the December 2001 issue of Magnet. Spiritualized play at the TLA tonight. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Somewhere Over The North Atlantic, Sept . 25, 2001 Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space—35,000 feet above the Earth, to be exact. We’re on our way to Ireland to tag along on a Spiritualized tour. It’s gonna be fun, but there are some risks involved. As Americans, we’re traveling under the threat of death from Osama bin Laden, The Evil One, who lives in a cave. During the course of our trip, you might feel a little like Salman Rushdie […]
PHAWKER EXCLUSIVE: The Man Who Howled Wolf
BY JON MICHALS The reason for my weekend trip to Columbus, Ohio was twofold; one to give Ohio a purple nurple for its role in recent elections, two to see Tom Waits. Both missions accomplished. Boo Ya! I made the 7 hour drive out with my friend Mike and this little Chihuahua named Carlos who had some sort of skin disease (don’t ask). Tom came into Columbus, Ohio and literally took over the town for the night. Every bar you went to was playing Tom songs. Every dude in town was a bearded thirty something that you knew was […]
DEVOLUTION FOR DUMMIES: Q&A With Mark Mothersbaugh, Composer, Painter, DEVO-lutionist
[As told to JONATHAN VALANIA/Illustration by Alex Fine] Phawker: Let’s start with ancient history, I want to know about the evolution of the Devo idea, I’ve read conflicting things — that it was started sort of as a joke in the late 60s and then the shootings at Kent State radicalized you guys, tell me about that whole time. Mark Mothersbaugh: OK, I don’t know what you read, but I’m sure there’s plenty of people putting false information out there and this is the true story: The band happened, when I met Gerald Casale at Kent State, we were both […]
BEING THERE: A Star-Studded Interview With I Am Trying To Break Your Heart Director Sam Jones
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In honor of you-know-who playing the Tower tonight (look for pix tomorrow, and an Inquirer review up Monday) and the Oscars on Sunday, I give you this Q&A with Sam Jones, the director of I Am Trying To Break Your Heart and photographer to the stars. Sam recently called out of the blue to tell me how excited he was about this band he was working with from Chambersburg, PA, called The Shackeltons. I told him I would check out these Shackeltons if he would sit for an interview, because that’s the way show biz works, Sammy. […]
EARLY WORD: Pennsyltucky Indie Boys Make Good
THE SHACKELTONS GET 4/5 STARS IN A REVIEW IN THE FEBRUARY EDITION OF SPIN “Scruffy, emotional indie boys you can actually believe in. Palpable desperation is one of rock -n- rolls most valuable commodities, because it’s impossible to fake. What makes bands like Pixies, Fugazi, and Les Savy Fav so exciting — and what makes the Shackeltons, from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, similarly thrilling — is a breathlessness, a creeping sense that crouched behind the towering melodies and heard-‘em before razor guitars (think Television, in addition to the aforementioned bands), there’s complete breakdown. A half-dozen times on their debut, the Shackeltons sound […]
THESE ARE A FEW OF OUR FAVORITE THINGS 2007
PUNK ROCK MOMENT OF THE YEAR The Monks Of Burma Rise Up * ALBUMS WE LOVED Radiohead In Rainbows As fine a Radiohead album as I have ever heard. The devoted will be immensely gratified, and new converts will be drawn in by all the buzz and what proves to be bewitchingly ethereal, yet altogether visceral, rock music. The 10-song In Rainbows collapses into one tidy package all the Radioheads we have come to know: folk-rock Radiohead, electronica Radiohead, alt-rock Radiohead, prog-rock Radiohead. Not only does the band seem to nail the shifting ways those genres contribute to each song, […]
WE KNOW IT’S ONLY ROCK N’ ROLL BUT WE LIKE IT
GOD + WEEN + SATAN = THE ONENESS: Ween, Tower Theater, Last Night BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER They say actors are the ultimate existential heroes because they get to live multiple lives, while the rest of us have to settle for just one. Similarly, there is something heroic about Ween’s 23-year quest for the ultimate buzz, musical or otherwise, and their Zelig-like ability to utterly inhabit any genre they choose — shit-kicker country, dirtball metal, gold chain disco, hobbit-hole psychedelia, even fern-bar kool jazz — while simultaneously satirizing it for your protection. The new La Cucaracha, the 11th […]
REWIND 2006: THE YEAR IN MUSIC
WELCOME TO THE FIRST ANNUAL PHAWKER JAZZ AND POP POLL The critics have spoken, the ballots have been cast, all chads undangled, and fed into a mainframe computer the size of an Olympic swimming pool, to be crunched with the hard calculus of SUCKS/DOES NOT SUCK and arranged in impenetrably dense type on a spreadsheet that stretches from your house to mine. Hey, who we kiddin’? We don’t even have a mainframe the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Yet. And 30,000 CDs are released every year and fuck you if you think we’re gonna listen to all of them […]