FRESH AIR Colin Firth has played Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary, but it’s his role as a gay British professor in Tom Ford’s A Single Man that may have Firth seeing Oscar gold. Firth was nominated Feb. 2 for the Best Actor trophy for his role as George Falconer, a professor struggling to survive after the accidental death of his longtime partner, played by Matthew Goode. Set in 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the movie follows George over a single day as he contemplates his […]
HOT DOC: A Love Letter From Black Francis
I finally came into possession of an old guitar someone had given me at a nightclub in San Francisco awhile back; Eric Drew Feldman had been holding it for me there on Haight Street. He convinced me that it looked cool (it was black) and had been given in the spirit of benevolence. Every time I picked it up a nice chord came out and so I lovingly cleaned it with red wine in the dressing room the following night and began to write. I told the tour manager that we would drive in my Cadillac directly to a recording […]
VALANIA: Last Night I Sneaked Into The Tea Party
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY A word of warning: The story you are about to read is neither fair nor balanced; just true. The other night I snuck into the Tea Party, like a spy in the House of Glenn Beck Love, and nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. You know about the Tea Party movement, right? The populist jihad—sponsored by Fox News, FreedomWorks, the Taliban wing of the Republican Party and the rest of the Dick Armey—that’s putting the RIOT back in PATRIOT. They’re white as hell and they’re not gonna take the 2008 presidential election anymore. […]
PRICE IS RIGHT: Bob Barker Donates $1 Million To The Movement To Stop Pennsyltucky Pigeon Shoots
Dead pigeon, 20th & Springarden, October 1st, 2008 [photo by RAY SKWIRE] DAILY NEWS: Animal-rights activists, buoyed by the donation of $1 million to their cause by former game-show host Bob Barker, say that the money will go to help fight a Bucks County gun club known for its live pigeon shoots. The Philadelphia Gun Club, located on the Delaware River, in Bensalem Township, is “secretive” about the shoots, and protesters don’t know when the next shoot will be but plan to be there to voice displeasure, Steve Hindi, founder of an anti-cruelty group called SHARK, said late last week. […]
THE MAN WHO OWED TOO MUCH: Top Parking Scofflaw Owes PPA $40,580 In Unpaid Tickets
Yesterday the Philadelphia Parking Authority released a list of the names of th top 25 scofflaws in the hopes of shaming them into coughing up the combined $308,000 they owe in unpaid parking tickets. They are as follows: Faraco Knife Grinding Services, Pennsburg, Pa., $40.580 Sergio M. Claudio, Philadelphia, $21,444 Sharwin L. Coates, Philadelphia, $18,812 Alberto Galue, Philadelphia $18,398 New Century Travel Inc., Philadelphia, $16,320 Sharonda Everett, Philadelphia, $15,972.70 Anthony G. Dowd, Philadelphia, $14,477.25 Willians Nafis, Philadelphia, $13,408.75 James P. Fiscaro, Philadelphia $12,972 Faith Brown, Philadelphia, $12,473 Kenneth Brockington, Philadelphia, $11,991.40 Lafayette Outen, Philadelphia, $11,149.20v Christopher Harden, Philadelphia, $11,106.65 Frederick […]
PHOTOGRAFIKA: The One Time Dick Cheney Smiled
[Photo via BUZZFEED] Happened in 1976, miraculously a photographer captured the moment. And then the men in black took him away, never to be heard from again.
ARTSY: A New Festival Grows In Philly
BY TIFFANY YOON This morning Phawker joined many familiar faces of Philadelphia media at the Kimmel Center for the announcement of a new Philly-based arts festival. The festival, entitled Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA), is scheduled to begin on April 7th, 2011, and it will run for three weeks until May 1st, 2011. It’s quite a way’s away, but with a grant of $10 million from the late Leonore Annenburg, PIFA certainly has the resources to make a splash. This morning’s press conference didn’t shed much light on the specifics of PIFA’s line up of events or venues, […]
EARLY WORD: Rock For Haiti
RELATED: The hasty remake of REM’s classic “Everybody Hurts” hits the airwaves and Interwebs today as part of a campaign to raise cash for Haiti. Produced by American Idol’s Simon Cowell, the tune includes vocals by Leona Lewis, Mariah Carey, Jon Bon Jovi, Robbie Williams, Kylie, Rod Stewart, Alexandra Burke, Miley Cyrus, Take That, Joe McElderry, Cheryl Cole, JLS, Mika, Michael Bublé, James Blunt, James Morrison, Susan Boyle, and Westlife.
ACADEMY AWARDS: Who Didn’t See This Coming?
Best director nominees included James Cameron for “Avatar” and Kathryn Bigelow for “The Hurt Locker”; best actor nominees included George Clooney (“Up in the Air”) and Jeff Bridges (“Crazy Heart”); and best actress nominees included Sandra Bullock (“The Blind Side”) and Meryl Streep (“Julie & Julia”). FRESH AIR The singer, songwriter and producer T-Bone Burnett says his approach to making music is simple: “Just listen until it sounds right.” Burnett has been getting it right for a long time, and his latest project is the critically acclaimed film Crazy Heart, for which he wrote several songs for the main character […]
SHADOW OF A DOUBT: Six More Weeks Of Winter?
CNN: Punxsutawney Phil, America’s most famous rodent prognosticator, saw his shadow Tuesday, signaling six more weeks of winter. Phil emerged from his ceremonial tree stump at Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, to a cheering crowd that had waited in the cold for his annual prediction. It is the 99th time that Phil — in his various incarnations — has seen his shadow, according to groundhog.org, the official Web site of the groundhog club in Punxsutawney, about 75 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, in western Pennsylvania. Not seeing a shadow — something that has happened just 15 times in Phil’s history, according to the […]
GOING VOGUE: Sarah Palin’s PAC Spent $63,000 Buying Sarah Palin’s Book & $8,000 On Bookmarks
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] ABC NEWS: Sarah Palin has been using her political action committee to buy up thousands of copies of her book, “Going Rogue,” in order to mail copies of the memoir to her donors, newly filed campaign records show. The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate had her political organization spend more than $63,000 on what her reports describe as “books for fundraising donor fulfillment.” The payments went to Harper Collins, her publisher, and in some instances to HSP Direct, a Virginia-based direct mail fundraising firm that serves a number of well-known conservative politicians […]
SHOOTING THE MESSENGER: Don’t Hate Jonathan Safran Foer Because He’s Got A Beautiful Mind
BY RITA BOOKE* If Jonathan Safran Foer pisses you off, it’s not him. It’s you. The release of Eating Animals had critics screaming louder than a stuck pig. Rather than critique the content of the book they shoot the messenger, it’s Safran Foer himself who gets the critiqued: He’s an arrogant, condescending, pampered, overeducated urbanite who’s not like us. You know, real people out there in flyover country. It was like Rush Limbaugh had infiltrated the Sunday paper’s arts section. In Eating Animals, Safran Foer presents eating animals as largely a moral dilemma. He was on-and-off vegetarian since at age […]
RAW FOOTAGE: Traffic Reporter’s Cessna Makes Emergency Landing On NJ Turnpike
ASSOCIATED PRESS: A traffic reporter in a small plane put himself in the thick of a rush-hour tie-up when his aircraft had to make an emergency landing Monday on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was a little before 7 a.m., before the morning rush in the Philadelphia suburbs gets going, when a low oil pressure indicator came on in the Cessna owned by Wilmington, Del.-based Out of the Blue, Inc. The pilot, flying with traffic reporter Mike Lankford for Metro Networks, which was providing traffic reports for a number of TV and radio stations, put the plane down on the […]