Tom Waits has become the secret handshake of cool — either you know it or you don’t, and after 20 albums, if you still have to ask you’ll most likely never know. Me? I’m a lifer. True story: Back in college I borrowed 1985’s Rain Dogs from the public library and got so lost in its lurid tales of the depraved, the derelict and the dispossessed camping on the wrong side of the tracks in Reagan’s Morning in America that I didn’t return it for a year and a half. When I finally brought it back, I was banned for […]
REWIND 2011: BEST OF Q&A: The Year In Questions And Answers
THE TESTIFIER [Illustrations by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of her recent reading at the Free Library to promote her new book Reimagining Equality: Stories Of Race, Gender And Finding A Home, we present a conversation with Anita Hill, professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University. Discussed: The fantasia of a Post-Racial America; the mendacity, narcissism and hypocrisy of Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain; the right wing’s racializing the blame for the 2008 financial crisis; how she passed the lie detector test Clarence Thomas refused to take; the emancipation of her grandfather from slavery; […]
DEAR READER: We Wish You A Merry Christmas
From all of us here at Phawker to you and yours.
THAT’S COMCASTIC: Meet Federal Government Inc.
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini RELATED: THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD: How Comcast Gets To Do Pretty Much Whatever The F*ck They Want To Do RELATED: WEASELS IN THE HENHOUSE: FCC Chairman Quits To Lobby For Comcast, Her Reward For Fastracking The Mega Merger With NBC With Minimal Restrictions RELATED: DEMOCRACY FOR SALE: Everything Must Go!
CONLINGATE: Deadspin’s A.J. Daulerio Comes Clean On Backchannel Advice To Disgraced Scribe
UPDATE: Another woman has come forward to say that Bill Conlin, the Hall of Fame baseball writer and former Philadelphia Daily News columnist, sexually assaulted her when she was a child. The woman, who asked not to be identified, said Conlin repeatedly abused her when she was about 7 and lived in the Whitman Square section of Washington Township, Gloucester County. She was a childhood friend of Conlin’s son, Peter, and often spent time at his house nearby. It was there, she said, that Conlin molested her. She is the fifth person to tell The Inquirer that Conlin assaulted her. […]
CINEMA: Slaying The Beast
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011, directed by David Fincher, 158 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The U.S. version of Stieg Larsson’s international best-selling thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has arrived, a little more stylish and pumped up, yet containing much of the same problematic structure that dogged its previous adaptation and the source novel itself. Like the Harry Potter series, this film adaptation has ballooned to a jumbo length of more than two and a half hours to capture the many details of the novel, whether it makes for energetic storytelling or not. In […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
[Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA] FRESH AIR When filmmaker David Fincher asked Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and his songwriting partner Atticus Ross to compose the music for his U.S. film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Fincher had one request: for the music to sound ‘textural.’ So Reznor and Ross, who won an Oscar for their score of Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network, experimented with sounds created by stretched-out bell tones, piano beds filled with nails and clothespins, and mixes of distorted instruments played imperfectly. “We wanted to create the sound of coldness — emotionally and also […]
BOOKS: Hedy Lamarr Vs. The Nazi U-Boats
[Illustraton by Illustration by David Plunkert] THE NEW YORK TIMES: That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined […]
SIDEWALKING: Interstellar Overdrive
Independence Mall, 9:23 PM last night. By JONATHAN VALANIA
AP TICKER: ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’
ANCIENT PROVERB: It is never wise to speak ill of the dead, unless he was an asshole.
BREAKING: Legendary Daily News Sports Scribe Bill Conlin Resigns Amidst Child Molestation Allegations
Sportswriter Bill Conlin of the Philadelphia Daily News speaks after being honored with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for Journalists for his more than 45 years of baseball coverage at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, July 23, 2011. REUTERS/Mike Segar UPDATE: Three women and a man say they were molested as children by Bill Conlin, a Hall of Fame baseball writer and Philadelphia Daily News columnist. In vivid accounts, the four say Conlin groped and fondled them, and touched their genitals, in assaults in the 1970s, when they were from ages 7 to 12. “This […]
ART: Shea Hembrey’s One Man Biennial Of The Mind
NEW YORK TIMES: You could be forgiven for not knowing about the artist Mart Meyer, who lives in Dallas and photographs what he sees almost moment by moment. Or for not having heard of the Chinese artist Ju Hu, who created a large-scale work examining the “malleable flow of time” as he camped out in an autumnal forest and tried to tape every fallen leaf back onto its tree. Almost certainly, you’re not acquainted with the art made by Rosalie Starr, who died in 1969 but whose sculptures were recently discovered in the attic of a Georgia boardinghouse, or the […]