BY JONATHAN VALANIA Brad Beesley has been the Flaming Lips in-house documentarian and videographer since the mid-’90s. Just about any Flaming Lips video you have seen was made by Brad Beesley. He is also the director of Fearless Freaks, the excellent Lips documentary released a few years back, culled from literally hundreds of hours of interviews and performance footage that Beesley shot over the course of the last 10-plus years. Concurrent with his work on Fearless Freaks, Beesley also served as cinematographer for Christmas On Mars, the just-released low-rent sci-fi thriller the Lips made in Wayne Coyne’s garage. Back in […]
THE CHANGELING: Q&A With Christopher Buckley
Christopher Taylor Buckley is an American political satirist and accomplished novelist. His books include God Is My Broker, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, The White House Mess, No Way to Treat a First Lady, Wet Work, Florence of Arabia, Boomsday, and, most recently, Supreme Courtship. Tom Wolfe calls him “one of the funniest writers in the English language.” Recently, he made headlines when he publicly endorsed Senator Barack Obama for President. In advance of his appearance at the Philadelphia Free Library on November 5th, we spoke with the son of conservative movement standard-bearer William F. Buckley about his […]
TONITE: John Hodgman To Rock 215 Fest
215 FEST: We are proud and pleased to announce that the festival starts off this year with an arched, eyeglass-vaulting eyebrow on TONIGHT, when the one and only Mr. John Hodgman, the mild-countenanced, somewhat disturbed author of /The Areas of My Expertise/, and /More Information Than You Needed to Know/, and world-renowned expert on the little-known history of mole men gambols upon the hallowed, tastefully weathered boards of the Latvian Society. Mr. Hodgman will be joined by his friends, among them the incomparable *David Rees,* creator of the famed clip-art comic /Get Your War On/, and the world’s first blogger to […]
Q&A: The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA If there’s anything missing from Stephin Merritt’s encyclopedic oeuvre — a kitchen-sink catchall that includes everything from wry country twang and sincere synth pop to tortured torch songs and prancing show tunes — it’s Stephin Merritt. A remarkably dexterous stylistic quick-change artist — for my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll pull the Human League out of Cole Porter’s top hat — he’s a master illustrator of character sketches, meticulously cross-hatching two-minute melodramas out of the delicacies and detritus of 20th-century popular song. But for all their rapier-like wit and chameleonic genre-hopping, Merritt’s […]
SITAR HERO: Phawker Tawks With Anoushka Shankar
WIKIPEDIA: Anoushka Shankar (Hindi: ??????? ????), b. June 9, 1981, is a sitar player and composer in the United Kingdom. She is the daughter of Ravi Shankar, Indian sitar player, and Sukanya Shankar. Through her father, she is the half-sister of Grammy Award winner Norah Jones. Anoushka was born in London. When she was eight years old, her father began training her in the sitar. She gave a public performance at the age of thirteen; since then she has become a world famous sitar artist. The Indian Television Academy, Asmi, and India Times chose her as one of four Women […]
WORTH REPEATING: Lust For Life
LUST FOR LIFE: Iggy & The Stooges, Electric Factory, Last Night [FLICKR] BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Thanks to the many miracles of our modern affluent society, today’s super-rockers are kicking out the jams longer and harder than ever before. (Think about it: For the better part of the ’70s, the smart money would have been on Keith Richards’ dad snorting his son’s ashes, not vice versa.) As Iggy Pop (aka, James Osterberg), who turns 60 next week, proved Wednesday night at the Electric Factory, men well-acquainted with the business end of a sigmoidoscope are still capable of rocking […]
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 […]
Q&A: It’s Too Late To Fall In Love With Sharon Tate
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Meet Roza Frykowska, 26, a recent emigre from Lodz, Poland. She is a barista at Cafe Ole in Old City. She is also an up and coming photographer, and recently started shooting for Suicide Girls. All of that would make her interview-worthy in and of itself in our book, but wait, it gets better, or worse, actually. Roza’s grandfather, the filmmaker Wojtech Frykowski, came to America in the late ’60s to establish a career in Hollywood, at the behest of his dear friend, Roman Polanski. Wojtech and his then-girlfriend, Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune, […]
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. […]
Q&A: 12 Useful Facts About Juno‘s Kimya Dawson
[As told to JONATHAN VALANIA/Illustration by ALEX FINE] 1. Kimya Malaika Dawson‘s name means ‘Quiet Angel’ in Swahili. She is not, however, Swahili. It was all her parents idea. Obviously. 2. Miss Dawson’s 18-month-old daughter is named Panda Delilah Dawson. “There was no second choice, it was certain from the beginning that it was gonna be ‘Panda Delilah’ whether it was a boy or a girl,” says Miss Dawson, explaining that Tom Jones was playing when she went into labor. Not in concert, on the stereo. Obviously. 3. All of Miss Dawson’s songs on the Juno soundtrack were originally written […]
Q&A: Meet The Real Mr. Burns
[As Told To JONATHAN VALANIA] 1. Though born and bred in the high rainy land of the Pacific Northwest, Charles Burns has resided in Philadelphia — Northern Liberties, to be exact — for the past 21 years. “Well, the view out my studio window has changed a bit,” he says, when asked how the ‘hood has evolved over the years. “It used to be homeless guys pushing shopping carts, now it’s mothers pushing strollers.” 2. Mr. Burns is probably the most important graphic novelist of his time. He we would never agree to this, so don’t bring it up if […]
REWIND 2007: THE YEAR IN PHAWKER TALK
* UPDATE: We have since determined that there was nothing wrong with our camera equipment and that the only reasonable explanation for the ‘funny-ness’ is that the Mayor-elect chomped down two, possibly three buttons of peyote shortly before our interview this morning. If true, this is the kind of bold, visionary leadership we have been praying for. Truly, a ‘new day’ has dawned in Philadelphia. CLICK HERE TO SEE FOR YOURSELF. * Q&A With The Stooges’ Ron Asheton PHAWKER: Do you recall the first time you met Iggy — legend has it he saw you and your brother standing […]
COMING ATTRACTION: 13 THINGS EVEN KAREN HELLER DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT DAVID DYE
Look for it later this week…