TLA to be renamed Fillmore.
KILLADELPHIA: Sixth Borough Reprazent!*
BY SIMON WEICHSELBAUM OF THE DAILY NEWS NEW YORK CITY police were crowing this week over the latest murder statistics from the five boroughs. The sprawling metropolis clocked in at 84 homicides — as of Sunday — compared to 117 over the same period last year, a nearly 30 percent drop. Meanwhile, 90 miles south in Philadelphia, the statistics for the same period tell a far grimmer tale. As of last night 97 today 100 people had been murdered here, up 18 percent from this date last year — in a city that is just one-sixth the size of the […]
We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It
Tokyo Police Club + Cold War Kids, First Unitarian, Last Night [FLICKR] BY AMY Z. QUINN You will not find a more potent, unadulterated rock moment than standing in a crowded church basement while a sweaty band of angst-y young manboys, most just a peach-fuzz mustache away from high school geekdom, makes you a little more deaf — and somehow you don’t mind. Such moments are the thermostat of the state of rock music — and judging by last night, somebody’s been paying the heating bill. Openers Tokyo Police Club (pictured, above), a Canadian four-piece and blogrock buzz band, were […]
NPR FOR THE DEF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FROM ROLLING STONE After the screening, Borat returns to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to shower and transform back into Sacha Baron Cohen: mild-mannered Londoner, fiance of actress Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers), reluctant sometime resident of Los Angeles. I wait outside the restaurant Asiate for him to appear. I’d met Baron Cohen once before, three years ago, when he was recording his first series of Da Ali G Show for HBO, interviewing a panel of leading scientists as pseudo hip-hop youth talk-show host Ali G. (“Let’s talk about when technology goes horribly wrong: Could there be another Nintendo 64?”) At the […]
JOLIE HOLLAND: Amen
She’s freewheelin’ here, completely improvising and re-arranging this gorgeous lullabye from Escondido into a loping Velvets vamp and, as such, it’s a hair overlong, but WOW! Breaks our motherfuckin’ heart, she does.
HIZZONER ’07: Following The Money
The Inquirer requested copies of five years of federal income tax returns from Philadelphia’s five major Democratic mayoral candidates. Here is a summary of their responses: U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah yesterday declined, citing his wife’s privacy wishes. He previously cited her confidentiality agreement with NBC10, where she is an anchorwoman. The station has waived that agreement, but Renee Chenault-Fattah says she wants her salary kept private. State Rep. Dwight Evans gave copies of three years of tax returns to The Inquirer yesterday. They show his legislative salary – $86,521 in 2005, reflecting his status as ranking Democrat on the House […]
TODAY I SAW…
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 the local media, which […]
GUNCRAZY: Number 97 Goes To Heaven
INQUIRER: Early Thursday morning, a 37-year-old man died of a gunshot wound in the 4600 block of North Penn Street. He was the city’s 97th homicide victim this year. He was found inside a home at 1:19 a.m., and was pronounced dead there less than 20 minutes later, police said. His name was being withheld pending notification of family. No suspects or motives were known to police this morning.
ZOOPHILIA: Orangutans Set To Do Nasty
PHILADELPHIA — Tua, the Philadelphia Zoo’s female Sumatran orangutan, is getting a companion: Sugriwa (Sue-GREE-wuh), a male Sumatran orangutan. Sugi arrived in Philadelphia from the St. Louis Zoo in December. Since then, he has gone through the zoo’s routine quarantine period for new animals, then was slowly introduced to Tua and to the zoo’s male and female gibbons, Mercury and Solstice. ASSOCIATED PRESS: Hot Monkey Love!
SIDEWALKING: The Naked And The Def
A MAN IN FULL: Norman Mailer, The Free Library Of Philadelphia, Tuesday Night BY EVA LIAO Full disclosure: I have never read a Norman Mailer book from cover to cover. And the perfunctory excerpts thrown into the textbooks of my contemporary lit college courses don’t really count. I do know, however, that after writing 45 books and providing decades of titillating fodder for the media — co-founder of the Village Voice, winner of multiple Pulitzer Prizes and devotee of Marilyn Monroe, not to mention the whole wife-stabbing incident — the guy has a reputation. He’s kind of like an older, […]