Welcome to Yuba City Pig Iron Theatre Company Theater, 75 minutes BY LINDSAY HARRIS-FRIEL FRINGE CORRESPONDENT Damn you, Pig Iron. You magnificent bastards have done it again; created theatre so joyfully compelling it takes everyone who sees it far outside their selves and turns every theatre artist outside your realm emerald green with envy. Come on down to Yuba City. You’ll travel down a stretch of highway so lonely you’re grateful for the broken fluorescent sign with an arrow pointing the way to the diner, and the glaring streetlamp bordering the parking lot. Set designer Mimi Lien and lighting designer James […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
UNCANNY: Madonna’s Daughter Looks Just Like Mom
DAILY MAIL: Trussed up in white wedding dress and veil, Madonna’s daughter Lourdes recreates her mother’s famous wedding dress pose in the Eighties hit song Like A Virgin. The 12-year-old wears lashings of red lipstick and has the iconic beauty spot painted above her lip. It is taken from what is believed to be a second version of Madge’s Celebration video, which will include fans dancing to the song, to be released next week. MORE
BOOKS: Q&A With Methland Author Nick Reding
BY JEFF DEENEY The heartland as detailed by Nick Reding in his new book, Methland, is not your father’s heartland. Stripped of any means of getting ahead by multinational agribusiness conglomerates, many residents of Smalltown, USA are using crystal meth to cope with endless low-wage packing plant shifts and the despair that comes with poverty and social decay. Mexican drug trafficking organizations have capitalized on Big Agriculture’s need for a steady stream of illegal immigrant workers by flooding cornfields with high purity meth made in sprawling superlabs and carried across the border by the same workers who slaughter America’s pigs […]
Ringleader Of Broad St. Flash Mob Riot To Stand Trial
INQUIRER: A West Philadelphia man was ordered held for trial today on riot, assault, theft and other charges for allegedly participating in the May 30 “flash mob” on South Broad Street that left one man seriously injured and a local convenience store looted of thousands in merchandise. Stephen Lyde, 21, was ordered held for trial by Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Bradley K. Moss in the late-night rampage by more than 100 teens and young adults on South Broad between South and Bainbridge Streets. According to testimony during this morning’s preliminary hearing, the mob converged on South Broad after apparently being […]
SCIENCE: How White People Were Invented
LIVE SCIENCE: Humans come in a rainbow of hues, from dark chocolate browns to nearly translucent whites. This full kaleidoscope of skin colors was a relatively recent evolutionary development, according to biologists, occurring alongside the migration of modern humans out of Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. The consensus among scientists has always been that lower levels of vitamin D at higher latitudes — where the sun is less intense — caused the lightening effect when modern humans, who began darker-skinned, first migrated north. But other factors might be at work, a new study suggests. From the varying effects […]
USELESS INFORMATION: Father Knows Best
SHITMYDADSAYS: “What are you listening to?…I know who Hall & Oates are god dammit. It’s the mustache guy and the gay man.” MORE SHITMYDADSAYS: I’m 28. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says. MORE RELATED: You can follow Phawker’s Twitter stream HERE
Incendiary 9/11-On-Steroids Ad Widely Condemned; Philly International Joins ‘Trusted Traveler’ Program
[Click HERE to enlarge] NEW YORK TIMES: The World Wildlife Fund on Tuesday condemned an unauthorized advertisement that depicted dozens of planes heading into Lower Manhattan, with a tag line reading, “The Tsunami Killed 100 Times More People Than 9/11.” The ad had been pitched to the Brazilian branch of the World Wildlife Fund by an advertising agency and rejected, said Steve Ertel, a spokesman for the group. “It was a concept to our office in Brazil and it was rejected. From that point, we have not been able to get a hold of the agency to find out how […]
ARTSY: Get Your Fringe On
BY LINDSAY HARRIS-FRIEL FRINGE CORRESPONDENT The Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe Festival has been a local institution for long enough, loudly and proudly enough, that we almost take it for granted. In the past 12 years it’s grown from a few blocks in Old City to a festival encompassing the city, all genres of live performance and performers from all over the world. Shows in the past have been so diverse and varied that the word “Fringe” has become synonymous with the strangest and most alienating of performance art. However, the Festival itself is one of the most welcoming […]
HELP WANTED: Mob Looking For A Few Bad Men
GEORGE ANASTASIA: Decimated by a 20-year onslaught of federal prosecutions, bloody internecine power struggles, and turncoat testimony, the local branch of La Cosa Nostra — which in the 1980s had roughly 80 members — now has a base of about 20 “soldiers.” And nine of them are in prison. Simply put, the Philadelphia Mafia has fallen on hard times. It is no longer the dominant player in the underworld, and is dwarfed in size by some of the area’s more violent drug gangs. MORE PREVIOUSLY: Where Have All The Gangsters Gone?
EARLY WORD: Making Time Aquatic
? The Making Time Pool Party… The Sequel… The Movie or “Hot Dog the Movie, Part III” from Klip Collective on Vimeo. Sunday September 6th, 2009 @ Bamboo Bar 927 Delaware Ave (below Frankford/around the corner from The Barbary) Philadelphia, PA 4pm-2am (more details HERE)
DEA: One Third Of All Seized Cocaine Is Tainted
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Nearly a third of all cocaine seized in the United States is laced with a dangerous veterinary medicine — a livestock de-worming drug that might enhance cocaine’s effects but has been blamed in at least three deaths and scores of serious illnesses. The medication called levamisole has killed at least three people in the U.S. and Canada and sickened more than 100 others. It can be used in humans to treat colorectal cancer, but it severely weakens the body’s immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to fatal infections. Scientific studies suggest levamisole might give cocaine a more intense high, […]