ON MAGNOLIA MOUNTAIN: Ryan Adams, Fillmore at the TLA, Last Night BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER For all intents and purposes, Ryan Adams is the Paris Hilton of indie rock — you just can’t bring yourself to not look, or more accurately, listen. As such, the messy-haired alt-country heartthrob has become a polarizing figure. THE CASE AGAINST: Hoo-boy. Adams came to fame, or some variation of it, on the heels of the messy collapse of his first band, the insurgent country pioneers Whiskeytown. With the exception of his breakthrough solo debut, Heartbreaker, Adams? recorded output has been both maddeningly […]
KILLADELPHIA: Meet The Commish
“In today’s policing environment, Johnson made a mistake. He hung around too long. You can’t do that anymore. “What went wrong?” asked Gibbons. “Loyalty.” Johnson, Gibbons said, is too loyal to Mayor Street, who insiders say keeps Johnson as a buffer between his two-term administration and negative publicity over crime. Those closest to Johnson hold several more theories: “He creates a lot of controversy,” said C.B. Kimmins, an anti-drug activist and Johnson friend. “It is not for something he is doing. It is for something he is not doing. He is not demonstrative. He is not bravado. People say, ‘He […]
CINEMA: Die Free Or Live Hard
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (2007, directed by Len Wiseman, 130 minutes, U.S.) ANGEL-A (2005, directed by Luc Besson, 91 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK, FILM CRITIC Making the phrase “Yippie-Ki-Yay, Motherfucker” safe for the PG-13 world, aging smart-aleck Bruce Willis returns after a 12 year hiatus from the franchise that made him a movie star with Live Free Or Die Hard (or Die Hard 4, but who’s counting?). Unlike Stallone with last year’s Rocky Balboa, Willis doesn’t seem quite as desperate to claw his way back to megaplex screens yet before he disappears into a career as a funny […]
REVIEW: Lord Help The Polyphonic Spree
BY ED KING ROCK SNOB I’m finding that one unexpected part of the aging process is reliving every half-decent pop culture trend of my youth. Musically, I feel stuck in some prepubescent summer of ’74 pool jukebox rut of pleasant mediocrity. It makes sense. This is the era when major-label releases of surprisingly interesting material could fly under the radar, get tossed into the cheapest bins at used record stores — you know, the ones that sit on a table in the sun, dog-eared covers and missing inner sleeves be damned — and await the adoption of a hopeful, budget-conscious […]
GAYBO EXTRA: It’s OK To Be Gay
Fabulously awful, with love from TOMMY ZANE. Happy Pride, y’all.
TODAY I SAW…
[photo by JONATHAN VALANIA] BY JEFF DEENEY “Today I saw…” is a series of nonfiction shorts based on my experiences as a caseworker serving formerly homeless families now living in North and West Philadelphia. I decided not long after starting the job that I was seeing so many fascinating and disturbing things in the city’s poorest neighborhoods that I needed to start cataloging them. I hope this bi-weekly column serves as a record of a side of the city that many Philadelphians don’t come in contact with on a daily basis. I want to capture moments not frequently covered by […]
AMUSE BOUCHE: Means ‘Fun For The Mouth’
BY AMY Z. QUINN I’m crediting the locally-grown young plants we installed in May, but this week we harvested the first tomatoes from the backyard garden — not huge, but warm and burnished to a ruby red thanks to this weather. Just a handful now, but hopefully a harbinger of love apples to come. The first one was brought along on a play date to the home of our friend Lil’Z and his moms, Miz B, a woman who understands that the season’s first tomato and a bowl of egg salad are the best kind of hostess gifts. We ate […]
THIS JUST IN: Mayor Third In Line For iPhone
KYW is reporting that Mayor John Street is third in line at the AT&T store on 16th just south of Market. He has been waiting on line since 3:30 a.m., despite heavy downpours, and will remain so until 6 p.m. when the Dave Matthews tickets heavily-hyped iPhone finally becomes available for purchase. His aides will be bringing all paperwork to him to sign in line, he says. He has a few events today, he says, and somebody will be holding his place in line while he attends. And then it’s back in line. “Mr. Mayor, with all due respect,” says […]
CINEMA: That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick!
(SiCKO, Directed by Michael Moore, 113 min. USA) BY JONATHAN VALANIA EDITOR As Michael Moore declares over the kind of gallows-humored opening montage that has since become his trademark, SiCKO, his invasive procedural on the American health care system, is not about the 50 million uninsured people in the richest country in the world, or the estimated 18,000 who die each year because they can’t afford to seek care. Nor is this film about the fact that the United States’ health care system is the 37th best in the world (woo-hoo!), right behind Slovenia. No, this film is about the […]
CENSUS: We’re Number Six! We’re Number Six!
New Census figures show Philadelphia has dropped to the sixth-largest city in America. It’s official: “Philadelphia is now the sixth-largest city in the US. It declined by about 8,000 people from 2005 to 2006.” Census Bureau Demographer Greg Harper says after measuring births and deaths and people moving in and out, Phoenix has moved to the number-five city with 1.5 million residents ahead of Philadelphia’s 1.4 million. What’s it all mean? Not much, says Temple University geography professor David Bartelt, who says people don’t judge a city by how big it is: “That’s not really the telling concern. Most people […]
PAPERBOY: American Apparel Ad Envy, Much?
BY AMY Z. QUINN Uhh, remember what I said last week in this space about how the summer doldrums would be setting into the weekly newsrooms aaaaany second now? Well, faster than you can say “Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack,” both weeklies launch a soft parade of warm fuzzy this week. Inside and out, they’re well-stocked with feel-good features (some of which taste good, too), but let’s start, as always, by judging the alt-weeklies by their covers: OUT FRONT Over at Philadelphia Weekly, my bud DMac not only gets the cover with a piece on the Phils’ inexorable march […]