Closing Requiem Concert: Igni Natura Renovatur Integra The Artistic Legacy of Jennifer Bates On Saturday, December 1, 2007, six esteemed Philadelphia musicians will gather at Germ Books and Gallery to ritually close the current art show of our founder, the late Jennifer Bates. At approximately 3PM, David E. Williams — Germ’s owner and Bates’ widower — will open the performance on synthesizer with a plaintive melody from one of Jennifer’s own compositions. From there, the other musicians will join in an improvised performance of electronic drones, noises and other psychonautic sounds that evoke Jennifer’s spirit on the day before many […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR A MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, Peter Gleick runs one of the nation’s leading water-conservation assessment centers. The institute’s biennial report, The World’s Water, surveys global water trends and issues, including the links between water and terrorism and the growing risk of flood and drought. PLUS, n Tamara Jenkins’ new film The Savages, two 40-something siblings have to put their lives on hold while they learn how to deal with their elderly father, who’s slipping slowly into dementia. The film — it’s a comedy — stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, plus Broadway veteran […]
EDITORIAL: Ivy League Murder, GED Justice
BY AMY Z. QUINN The dead wife of Penn Professor Rafael Robb has been abused in death by Bruce Castor as badly as she was in life by her husband. He bludgeoned his wife to death with a metal bar in cold blood. By ANY objective analysis he appears to have gotten away with murder Despite evidence that Robb, a PhD and expert on game theory, had been a controlling, abusive husband who couldn’t stand that the wife he despised was daring to divorce him and was planning to take their daughter away on a trip, the Montgomery County District […]
GUNCRAZY: Five-Year-Old Shot In The Ass
A five-year-old boy was shot at his family’s home in the 600 block of West Huntingdon Street in Philadelphia’s West Kensington neighborhood around 1am on Tuesday. The young boy was under treatment late in the morning at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children where he was listed in stable condition with a gunshot wound of his buttocks. Police later found handguns in a nearby car and at the young victim’s house but had not immediately determined whether either of those weapons had been fired. Investigators initially said they were not sure if the shooting was deliberate or accidental, having received conflicting stories from various family […]
LIFE & DEATH: Redskin Dies, Veep Lives
MIAMI (AP) — Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor died early Tuesday, a day after he was shot at home by what police say was an intruder. He was 24. Family friend Richard Sharpstein said Taylor’s father told him the news around 5:30 a.m. “His father called and said he was with Christ and he cried and thanked me,” said Sharpstein, Taylor’s former lawyer. He said Taylor died early Tuesday at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where he had been airlifted after the shooting early Monday. Doctors had been encouraged late Monday when Taylor squeezed a nurse’s hand, according to Vinny […]
WHY BEING TIME’S ‘PERSON OF THE YEAR’ MAKES YOU A HERO TO MOST BUT DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME
The sad, slow self-inflicted deflation of Time’s Joe Klein: Thus, for now, I just want to ask that everyone ponder the extreme lack of professionalism and corruption required for someone like Klein to write the article that he did accusing Democrats of wanting to give Terrorists the same rights as Americans (therefore showing, as always, that Democrats can’t be trusted on national security), and then — once he is exposed for having spewed outright falsehoods — he announces that he really isn’t interested in bothering to find out (and isn’t even capable of determining) if anything he wrote was accurate. […]
HOT DOC: The Free Press Needs Your John Hancock
FROM ATTYTOOD: The cool graphic comes from a Web site urging that Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer Bilal Hussein, detained by U.S. forces in Iraq for 19 months, be released unless he can be charged and tried under American standards of criminal justice. The site is called FreeBilal.org, and you can sign a petition calling for Bilal’s release. I have signed it, and I urge anyone else who cares about a free press that is keeping Americans informed, and about the applying the rule of law to all people, to sign it as well. The head of the Associated Press, Tom […]
NEWS CLUES: It’s Like Adderall For Your Eyeballs
LOLLAPALOOKAVILLE: Texans Bail On Belmont, Please Touch Say ‘Please Don’t’ The Austin, Texas, outfit that proposed a three-day pop festival for Belmont Plateau in August has withdrawn the bid and is pursuing alternative plans, park officials said today. A competing proposal from Larry Magid’s Electric Factory Concerts has not been withdrawn, Magid said late today, although he added that he had strong reservations about the site. Magid said today that a scaled-down, two-day event in and around the Mann Music Center might be more appropriate. And in a letter to the park last week, he suggested that June might be […]
THE VELS: Look My Way
Chris Larkin played keyboards for the most prominent line-up of Kenn Kweder’s Secret Kidds in the late 1970s (the one that recorded the “Man on the Moon” 45), was in a short-lived jazz fusion group called Snow, played in a duo with Kweder as “Tom & Jim,” did some producing (including Kweder’s 2nd 7″, and some tracks by The Impossible Years), was a keyboardist, singer and songwriter for electropop trio The Vels, who recorded for Mercury Records, and in the late 1980s played bass for Mikey Wild and the Mess. Chris passed away due to complications from pneumonia & liver […]
Public Service Announcement: The Naked & The Dead
CLICK TO ENLARGE, if you dare.
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Investigative reporter Mark Schapiro explains in a new book that toxic chemicals exist in many of the products we handle every day — agents that can cause cancer, genetic damage and birth defects, lacing everything from our gadgets to our toys to our beauty products. And unlike the European Union, the U.S. doesn’t require businesses to minimize them — or even to list them, so consumers can evaluate the risks. Schapiro argues that that policy isn’t just bad for public health: In an increasingly green economy, he says, American businesses stand to get shut out of a huge […]
STUDY: 17 War Vets Commit Suicide EVERY Day
Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone — and remember, this is just in 45 states — there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of […]
BREAKING: Trent Lott To Resign From Congress
THE POLITICO: The announcement took Capitol Hill by surprise because Lott, the former majority leader, seemed to be relishing his job as minority whip, the second-ranking GOP leadership job. He had regained a post in leadership after he resigned following racially insensitive remarks at a birthday party for the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). A Lott friend said part of the reason, and a factor in the timing, is a new lobbying regulation, signed by President Bush in September, extending the existing lobbying ban for former members of Congress from one to two years. The lobbying ban takes effect at […]