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 there for the show. Oh, the people were hungry for some PEHDTSCKJMBA and PEHDTSCKJMBA is exactly what they got (at least the “C” in PEHDTSCKJMBA). Making the trek to Columbus made the show that much more of an adventure. The whole thing would not have been as eventful had Tom decided to play at the Tower or the Beacon Theater. He knows that people will drive from Cape Cod to see this show. You get the sense that he delights in knowing that he is creating an adventure for his passionate fan base.

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The show was at the majestic Ohio Theatre. This was the perfect venue for him; a painted dome ceiling with intricate molding patterns created the ideal back drop for his absurdist vaudeville-like live show. Tom strolled onto the stage gliding around like a contortionist, often stretching and wiggling his fingers toward the audience as if to cast a spell on the eager crowd. By the end of the show, the jacket and vest combo he was wearing was covered in back sweat. Tom is a guy who puts it all on the table when he performs. Twisting his face muscles, stomping his feet, there were times it appeared as if he was he is speaking in tongues. During “Eyeball Kid” he casually put a glittery, Disco Ball hat on his head. The lights shone down on him and he started spinning around, sending reflections off the Disco Ball hat out into the audience. Then just as casually he took off the hat, as if this is a common thing people do all the time.

Tom played songs from through out his career with a focus on material from his recent albums Real Gone and Mule Variations. Often the songs were tweaked just enough to confuse the crowd for a few moments before people recognized the song. He performed a trippy Elvis/Nick Cave like version of “Lie to Me” with a cadence that made it seem like he had Tourette’s and the band swelling in and of the song. He even added a beat box break down to the song. Classic! He sent chills through my spine with a rendition of “The House Where Nobody Lives”. You could hear a pin drop as he explained “without love, it ain’t nothin’ but a house… a house where nobody lives”.

But it wasn’t all fun and games, Tom was there to educate. “We were just in Oklahoma” he told the crowd, “Oklahoma’s weird. They have some weird laws in Oklahoma.” He then gave a primer on Oklahoma law, for example, did you know in Oklahoma…

It’s illegal to eat in a restaurant, that’s also on fire.

It’s illegal to get a fish drunk.

It’s illegal to photograph rabbits during the week.

You learn something new everyday I guess. On the ride back, we pulled over to the side of the road. I located Ohio’s tit and gave the state a rather hard purple nurple. I issued a stern warning that if the state were to mess up another election, I would come back and upgrade the titty twister to a bitch slap. I apologized for being so crass, but that’s the way it has to be. Out of the corner on my eyes I could see PEHDTSCKJMBA moving onward across the highway.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jon Michals is a local filmmaker/producer whose work has been featured in Sundance and various festivals around the country. He recently produced and directed the video for the Bitter, Bitter Weeks song “Hanna.” Photographer Michael T. Regan is the staff photographer for the Philadelphia City Paper.

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“There’s a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast. It’s like a common disjointed identity crisis. It’s the dark, warm narcotic American night I just hope I’m able to touch that feeling before I find myself one of these days parked on Easy Street.” –TOM WAITS, 1976

BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Astro is a broken-down, drunk motel located about an hour north of San Francisco in Santa Rosa, near the arid, wine-growing region of the Sonoma Valley. It’s Tom Waits country - he lives somewhere around here, although exactly where remains a closely guarded secret. MAGNET booked a room at the Astro because the price is right, but upon closer inspection, it’s the ideal setting to await an audience with the man who elevates the down and out in song. The bard of boardinghouse madrigals. The man who reads the lines in people’s faces like a palmist, uttering the stories behind the wheelchair smiles and motel miles that map the crazy countenances of the characters that haunt his songs. Our room, as Waits puts it in the song “Ninth And Hennepin,” is “filled with bitters and blue ruin.” It’s a stomped-out cigarette butt of a place. The ventilator is broken, and it’s clear the oxygen has left this room years ago. There’s mold on the ceiling and a hint of urine in the air. A brick holds up the short leg of the bed, which is dotted with cigarette burns and mysterious stains. The faucet won’t stop dripping, and there’s a pubic hair clinging to the rim of the bathtub like a garnish. The swimming pool is filled with dirt and weeds. There is, however, free HBO.

The only other guest amenity is the comfort of knowing that the woman who checks you in also minds the cash register at the liquor store around back. It’s 10 a.m. and the residents are getting an early start, stocking up on their daily allotment of vodka, brandy and cigarettes. A little girl stands out front mimicking the happy-hour wobble of a drunk ambling down the sunstroked street “He bumped into a wall and now he’s skipping,” she says to nobody in particular. There are two kinds of guests at the Astro: those who are only staying for an hour and those who will never leave.

File our stay under “Accidental Tourism,” a random touchstone to Waits’ boozy, flophouse residency at the Tropicana Motel(1) in the endless, doomed summer of Los Angeles in the ’70s. It was a simpler time then. A piano served as furniture, and down the hall lived Waits’ partner in grime, Chuck E. Weiss, “the kind of guy that would sell you a rat’s ass for a wedding ring,” joked Waits to an interviewer at the time. Weiss brought around Rickie Lee Jones, with whom Waits shared a brief creative and romantic dalliance. It was at the Tropicana that Waits forged the image that would stick with him through the years: a rumpled, bourbon-fed balladeer, holding up a drunk piano, eyes-closed, 80-proof chords dancing the tarantella with his bullfrog croak of a voice, pirouetting in the halo of smoke and stubble ringing the low-slung, tweed dude cap. Between regular tours opening for acts like Frank Zappa and the Rolling Stones, Waits would record the seven albums that would mark his early incarnation as a crushed romantic huffing the last remaining fumes of the Beat and jazz eras. On albums like The Heart Of Saturday Night, Small Change and Nighthawks At The Diner, Waits hung his weary, gonna-drink-the-lights-out persona on a dancing skeleton of upright bass and plaintive piano chords. It was a Tin Pan Alley full of hoboes and drifters, dancing girls and desperate characters, barroom wit and gutter poetry. Waits was the guy playing piano in the corner of the coffee shop in Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks. Unfortunately, it’s the corner that you can’t see.

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We sent photographer Michael T. Regan out to Columbus, Ohio, to shoot a concert by our old pal Tom Waits. Sadly, Columbus was the closest the tour comes to Philadelphia. Lucky for you, we will have a complete report and a killer slide show, please standby…

NEW YORK TIMES: HUNTER S. THOMPSON, who has been lionized in two feature films, served as the model for a running character in “Doonesbury” and is the subject of enough doctoral dissertations to build a bonfire, now has a documentary devoted to him, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” by Alex Gibney. Thompson, who always seemed to keep one drug-crazed eye on posterity behind his ever-present shades, would surely be pleased but not surprised.

But how to freshly document the life of a man who was his own Boswell, whose books and articles slavishly documented his own every tic, whoop and hallucination? A journalist who announced his arrival in American letters by riding with the Hells Angels and in the end choreographed a memorial from the grave that made the Burning Man bacchanal seem chaste? Few writers have commodified narcissism so completely — his participatory style of journalism became its own genre and gives the film its title — but still we are invited to sit in the dark of the theater and have a flashback about his flashbacks. When the film opens on July 4, why will people, as Thompson would say, buy the ticket, take the ride?

The documentary by Mr. Gibney, who also made “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” does not attempt to work around Thompson’s endless self-consciousness but uses it as leverage instead. Produced by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and narrated by the actor Johnny Depp, “Gonzo” mirrors the subjectivity and immersion of the journalism Thompson and his trusty arsenal of psychoactive agents perpetrated in Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Mr. Gibney eschews narrative conventions and switches point of view on a dime, creating a prism of interviews and episodes that gradually assembles into a compelling portrait.

In his long-running fever dream about America and its abundant pathologies, the bald man, with the tumbler of whiskey and head full of Schedule 1 narcotics, captured not only a mood — your government is not your friend — but many realities of civic life, most notably that if candidates were willing to do what it takes to get elected, they would probably arrive in office corrupted beyond hope. Thompson, whose defects of character could occupy a separate ZIP code, was not just an original, he was also a patriot and a romantic. Working from the far reaches of the culture and often lucidity, Thompson, who died in 2005 at 67, changed the way that much of America thought about itself, in part because his version of journalism threw a grenade at the bland convention of formal balance and straight reporting. MORE

WORTH REPEATING: Home On The Strange — A Dispatch From Woody Creek.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA First a note of justification. I’m about to say a few words about Hunter S. Thompson, the writer, in what is ostensibly a column about music because: a) HST was rock ‘n’ roll incarnate; we’re talking balls the size of cantaloupes. b) Despite the pharmacopia of substances controlled and otherwise he ritually pickled his gray matter in, he was in possession of one of the sharpest minds of the 20th century, possibly even up until he personally disconnected it with a gun to his head. c) I just happen to be hiking in the Rockies.

Which is why I’m writing this from a patio table at the Woody Creek Tavern. Located a stone’s throw from HST’s Owl Farm, this was Thompson’s semiprivate watering hole, and I’m knocking back a few too many Flying Dogs, a tangy local microbrew with quite literally eye-popping label art by HST illustrator Ralph Steadman. As the sun drops behind the purple mountains, Christmas tree lights twinkle into incandescence on the umbrellas overhead and a folksinger warbles harmlessly over in the corner.

HST’s widow is sitting at the next table. She discusses Dylan selling Live at the Gaslight at Starbucks with her dinner companion. I apologize for the intrusion and tell her I just wanted to let her know I’ve come from Philadelphia to pay my respects. She seems a little gunshy … er, poor word choice. Nonetheless, she’s gracious, grateful and probably younger than I am. So we leave it at that, and I go off in search of the signed affidavit wherein HST promises the proprietors of the Woody Creek Tavern to never again set off a smoke bomb in the bar. It’s supposedly hanging on one of the walls, somewhere in the dense mosaic of HST paraphernalia and tippling snapshots of less famous habitues.

On the night of HST’s funereal moonshot, at the moment of ignition, they played “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but they should have played Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” because the man clearly earned his stripes. He was a lot of things, most of them genius or at least ingeniously funny, or true in their lies, and all of them dangerous — often to himself, sometimes to others, but always to the status quo. Chaos was the ace up his sleeve, the reason God made fire extinguishers.

But above all things, he was a great American. He was part of the Great Days — before the wave broke and rolled back. A time already long past when Jack Nicholson declared in Easy Rider, “You know, this used to be a helluva good country.” And if HST couldn’t quite remember that time after years of unbuttoning his peyote mind, he could at least envision it. And he would light his hair on fire and bray to the moon every day it ceased to exist — up to a point. Eventually you just say, “Fuck it. Let’s go to the bar.”

The final years were sodden and fallow, save for a fairly exhaustive closet cleaning, wracked with infirmity after the better part of 67 years of abuse. With his great red shark of a legend burnished and looming, he seemed aware for some time his best work was behind him, that he was a man for his season, and that season had passed. He went out in a blaze of self-inflicted glory, his atomized DNA snowing down on pastures where the buffalo roam. I never did find that affidavit, but nowhere was heard a discouraging word as the crescent moon set on the ridge like a smile over Woody Creek.

JOCKO HOMO: Devo, Festival Pier, Last Night

1. Prophets are easily mistaken for jesters or fools, or worse. Understood by a precious few in their day, and largely dismissed as a novelty act by the general public, even by many who bought their records, Devo’s core message was in fact deadly serious: It’s the end of the world as we know it. And we laughed. Thirty years later, Al Gore said the same thing and they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.

2. Waiting for Devo to come on Saturday night, a friend asked why they were on tour now, after all these years. To say, ‘I told you so’? I offered. To get the big picture view of Devo’s legacy — to connect the dots on Devo’s kicky, kooky new wave singles, bizarro costuming, and iconoclastic conceptualizing — watch Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s dystopian farce of a future collapsing into a New Dark Age under the weight of corporate venality and the sheep-like obeisance of the consumerist masses.

3. Time waits for no man and despite their protests to the contrary — Q: Are we not men? A: We are Devo – beneath those flowerpot hats and hazmat suits are men, no less immune to the ravages of time than any other homo sapien bi-ped: thinning pates, thickening waistbands, corrective lenses. Still, if the music’s makers have aged, the music has not. What once sounded radical, if not altogether ridiculous, now sounds modern, and eminently reasonable in a world grown darker and weirder in the interim.

4. Likewise, Devo’s capacity to deliver this strange new music with an intensity and alacrity largely associated with men half their age remains undiminished. In short, Devo ROCKED!

5. History tends to mark the Manson murders or the assassinations of RFK and MLK as the de facto end of the 60’s. I would submit that the 60’s officially ended in 1970 at Kent State with 10 soldiers and Nixon coming. The shootings would shut down the campus for days, leaving Kent State art students Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale with too much free time. They say idle hands are the Devil’s playthings, but sometimes our better angels find a few good men with nothing but time on their hands and invests them with a greater purpose even they don’t fully understand all these years later. What does that have to do with now, you ask? Look around. The rest is Devolution.

PHOTOS & TEXT BY JONATHAN VALANIA

Hold Steady pix & review after the jump…

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AFP: A fashion model from Kazakhstan has fallen from her New York City balcony and plunged nine stories to her death in what police called an apparent suicide, New York newspapers said. Ruslana Korshunova, who was to turn 21 on July 2, was known for her long chestnut locks and a “fairytale” face which graced the covers of Russian Vogue and French Elle magazines.

“I turned around just as she was about three feet (one metre) off the ground and then, boom, she hit,” witness Ahmed Saad, 22, who was manning a nearby halal food cart, told the New York Daily News. Investigators found no signs of a struggle inside Korshunova’s apartment on Water Street in Manhattan’s downtown Financial District.

She had returned to her one-bedroom apartment in the early hours of Saturday morning, reportedly giving no sign of the tragedy that would ensue in mid-afternoon. “She came in this morning, she smiled, no sense of depression,” doorman Mahmud Nakeeb, 45, told the Daily News. “She was a very sweet girl, always smiling, never depressed-looking.” Former boyfriend, Artem Perchenok, 24, told the New York Post he dropped her off at her apartment after they had watched the Demi Moore movie “Ghost.” MORE

NEW YORK POST: “My dream is to fly. Oh, my rainbow it is too high,” she wrote in a March note.

FYI: They go on at 6 PM at the Festival Pier today; Devo goes on at 9:30 

FINE PRINT: Times New Viking, JB’s Last Night [Photo by TIFFANY YOON]

BY SIMONE SECCI FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT I have to admit that I was suckered at this one. Fooled as many people by a fake press release, that displayed Times New Viking as a supergroup including former Pavement bass player Mark Ibold, I went to Johnny Brenda’s thinking that I would find a bunch of aged indie rockers in front of me. Instead I found this heterogeneous trio of twenty somethings from Columbus, Ohio.

But Let’s start from the beginning: First on stage Fnu Ronnies local band I believe, devoted to a punk-wave revival that automatically make you jump back to 1979. They score some points with a dark and obsessive baritone vocals (let’s say Bauhaus, Chrome) supported by a metallic and angular guitar sound, but that’s pretty much it. The band and especially the rhythmic section, often look not fully able to deal with the live act or in other words a little inexperienced. After a long (too long) waiting for the re-setting of the stage it’s time for New Jersey (they repeated where they were from a bunch of times during the show) 6 pieces combo, Titus Andronicus. The thing that immediately struck me about them was that they are actually better live than on recording! Due to a definitively energetic and extraordinary played live show, they stole the highlights of the night, from their more famous tour buddies TNV. You will rarely find a band that is able to convey the sound of 4 guitars, into a well arranged guitar ensemble rather than a wall of white noise and without losing a good punk attitude. Even without having strong singing capabilities on their side, they pulled it off well, with a good dose of synth to give the right melodic spin.

After a still too long technical joint venture to set the stage again, finally at 11.20 we are able to see Times New Viking. Frankly I have to admit a slight disappointment about their live performance. Not that their unable to be absolutely entertaining and draw the crowd where they want to but without their skittering and loud lo-fi appeal, their songs lose a bit. Maybe a more consistent attention on creating the right climax and working on the dynamics, instead of a straight ahead Ramones-like attitude will do them good. Very amazing guitar sound though takes you back to the J Mascis era 85-88, primitive energy, good vibes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Simone is from Italy, and as such English is his second language. While he doesn’t always use it the ‘right’ way, he usually gets where he wants to go. Perhaps he reminds you of the lovable Roberto Benigni in Down By Law. As a service to our English-speaking readers, we will run his reviews in larger type to simulate talking LOUD…AND…SLOWLY.

FRESH AIR

The American Film Institute recently listed its picks for the Top 10 American films in 10 popular genres. From unforgettable sci-fi to classic Westerns, the lists include some of the most influential works in American cinema. Fresh Air continues a series reflecting on some of those great films.Today, archival interviews with an actor, a director, a writer and a producer whose work is among the best of the best:

• Director Martin Scorsese received two nods on the AFI’s lists. Scorsese has been nominated for seven Academy Awards and won the Oscar in 2007 for The Departed. His 1980 boxing film Raging Bull was named the best film in the sports genre, and his mob movie Goodfellas was the second-ranked gangster film.
• Goodfellas gave Michael Imperioli his breakthrough role. His character, Spider, was the man gratuitously killed by ruthless mobster Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci. Imperioli went on to star in the popular television show The Sopranos.
• The Godfather beat Goodfellas for the honor of best gangster film. Author and screenwriter Mario Puzo wrote the original novel and then adapted it for the silver screen. Puzo also wrote the screenplays for The Godfather II — for which he won an Oscar — and The Godfather III. He died in 1999.
• Toy Story (No. 5 on the Best Animation list) revolutionized animation through its use of computer-generated imagery. Animator John Lasseter created the film and won a special-achievement Oscar for doing so. His other films include Cars, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and Ratatouille. Most recently, he was executive producer of Pixar’s Wall-E, which opened in theaters today — to near-universal acclaim.
• Film historian Rudy Behlmer will also be commenting on one of the AFI’s greatest fantasy films: King Kong (No. 5). Behlmer is the editor of Memo from David O. Selznick, a collection of the producer’s private letters, telegrams and memos. The making of many film classics is documented in a revealing look at the movie business in its early years.

Due to health issues, Public Record has cancelled. Doors and DJ’s at 9, Novenas on at 11, Rarebirds on at 11:45. Cover is now just $5.

[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 in the Fine Arts department. We were protesting the war in Cambodia, ’cause there was evidence we had been invading Cambodia, and then all hell broke loose and they killed a bunch of kids and closed down our school.

Phawker: Were you there that day?

MM: Yeah we were there, spring of 1970, the school got closed down, so Gerry came to my place and we wrote music together. At the time, he was playing bass in a blues band at the time and I had kind of a trippy Soft Machine electronics band. And we got to talking about the world and what we saw surrounding us and decided that it wasn�t evolution that we were seeing happening — and not just referring to Kent State, but to everything. We were trying to put a name on the phenomena that was going on. We thought that Devolution fit it better. Anyway, we started writing music together and thought of ourselves as Fred Flintstone meets George Jetson, kind of, because at that time the artists that were influencing us were Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol — so we were influenced by a mixture of commercial art and fine art. We were purveyors of lowbrow and highbrow colliding, you know those Venus De Milo statues with a clock in the stomach? That kinda stuff. You didn’t even have to go that far, you could just walk through a K-Mart at the time and it was even funkier then than it is now. I remember seeing this beautiful airbrushed photo of Chi Chi Rodriguez, with his head over a golf ball, and it kind of mimicked an astronaut’s head in front of the moon. But it was this golfer’s head over a golf ball, and they used that logo on a line of products that were manufactured in China. So I bought it, ’cause it was the cheapest thing you could buy, golf tees with a little hanging bag, with Chi Chi Rodriguez�s head in front of a golf ball. And we later ended up using that as the inspiration for our first album cover.

The only guys we could find to play the music we were writing were our younger brothers. At one point the band was Bob Mothersbaugh, Jim Mothersbaugh, Mark Mothersbaugh, and Gerry. Then it was Gerry Casale, Bob Casale, Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh, and then Jim was in the band for awhile, then he became obsessed with inventing the first electronic drum machine. We kept pushing him to make drums sound like V2 rockets and mortar blasts, and he started working on that. That’s where Devo started — we had a sense of humor, but we were very serious about the things we were joking about.

Phawker: It was humor with a serious intent.

MM: Yeah. Ironically enough, a lot of our image problems came not from inside us but were generated by our record company, who I think was just flummoxed about what we were about, who we were, and what we were doing. And instead of taking us seriously, they chose to call us as Nazi weirdos or Nazi clowns or just, wacky, zany, goof balls. Because that was what they could understand in a world of people they spent their lives building and marketing things like Rod Stewart albums and Madonna albums. Devo had to be wacky and zany, we just couldn’t be talking about anything serious.

Phawker: It was totally questioning all of the premises that those artists were based on, correct?

MM: Yes. From the very beginning, when we were going on stage we looked for the most anti-rock and roll outfits we could find, we didn’t want to look like those people, let alone sound like them. So Gerry worked for a janitorial supply company, he did graphic work for them, and I was a maintenance man for an apartment building, and so we had these janitorial supply catalogues and we’d look through and we’d lust over things like 1-inch thick ruby silicon sheets [that were] 3 feet by 8 feet. You would use them to put on a floor when you were working in a kitchen, an industrial kitchen or in an automotive place. But we would think about the materials they had available and think of how to use them in creative ways. We came across these hazardous waste cleanup outfits, for cleaning up liquid hazardous waste. They were these two-piece, plastic coated paper outfits and we adopted them as our own. We figured, that kind of described our jobs in life; we didn’t think of ourselves as musicians, certainly not as rock ‘n rollers, we thought of ourselves as musical reporters, reporting the good news in devolution. Our experiences in Ohio were to be greeted with anger and we were kind of a lightning rod for hostility back in those days.

Phawker: I can imagine.

MM: I understand where it came from, that was not a surprise. People who [at] my age, or a year or two older, or a year or two younger, went off to Vietnam, came back, and expected to get the same jobs their fathers had, and their grandfathers had, working in a rubber factory. Because rubber was the life of Akron, Ohio when I grew up. Akron, between World War I and World War II became the rubber capitol of the world, actually. More tires and products that would get shipped up to Detroit and all over the world came out of Akron. Everybody, even if you had a doughnut factory, everybody worked for the companies, and you worked for rubber.

DEVO: Uncontrollable Urge

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NBC10: Philadelphia is famous for its mural arts program. But some groups said that some specific murals need to be scrubbed out. Philly’s “Mural Arts Program” has painted 2,700 murals. But while most of the murals are about life, energy and color, some murals in Fishtown are all about malt liquor, Colt 45. Pabst Beer paid local businesses for some of their wall space. But the city said the quasi-murals are illegal because a permit is needed. NBC 10 called Pabst and they are not commenting on the issue. The city is still trying to see if any local advertising agencies helped them out.The city is warning business owners that they need permission before they allow Colt 45 to put up billboards like these in the first place. The city has sent a letter to Pabst, and they are now issuing citations to businesses with the billboards, saying they must paint over them. MORE

BLOOMBERG NEWS: Today, successful brands know better than to order some quick copy about the New Best Thing, splash a half-naked girl next to it and count on millions to happily open their wallets. Instead, they skip overt marketing altogether and engage in “murketing,” says Rob Walker in his revealing new book, “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.” Companies like American Apparel, Apple, Pabst, Timberland and Red Bull have done remarkably well over the past decade by trading on our desire for authenticity and our reluctance to seem like easy marks.

A “do little, sell more” approach worked like a charm for Pabst Brewing Co. Sales of its flagship product, Pabst Blue Ribbon, rose in 2002, reversing a decades-long trend of declining consumption. The company had no idea why. It turns out the beer was suddenly being embraced by young urban hipsters who appreciated the dollar-a-can promotion in certain bars and who, more to the point, liked the beer’s underground, undersold image. So to keep these new buyers, Pabst did almost nothing. It refused to take out ads or court the media and instead funded low-key “bike polo” matches between rowdy bike messengers in Portland, Oregon. Sales continued to grow. The unbranded beer is Pabst’s brand. MORE

THE INDEPENDENT: It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year. The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

“From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water,” said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado. If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above.

Each summer the sea ice melts before reforming again during the long Arctic winter but the loss of sea ice last year was so extensive that much of the Arctic Ocean became open water, with the water-ice boundary coming just 700 miles away from the North Pole. This meant that about 70 per cent of the sea ice present this spring was single-year ice formed over last winter. Scientists predict that at least 70 per cent of this single-year ice – and perhaps all of it – will melt completely this summer, Dr Serreze said. MORE