[Paintings by ART BY DOC] Jack Kerouac /Allen Ginsberg: The Letters Edited by Bill Morgan & David Stanford Hardcover: 528 pages Publisher: Viking Adult $35.00 BY PAUL MAHER JR. BOOKS EDITOR Is there a point “reviewing” a collection of private letters that were never meant for publication? When the letters are written by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, twin avatars of all things Beat, who saw the best minds of their generation destroyed madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging them through the negro streets at dawn, angel-headed hipsters that burned for the starry dynamo in the machinery of night — well, […]
BIG BLACK: The Day The Oil Stood Still
NEW YORK TIMES: The hemorrhaging well that has spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico remained capped for a second day Friday, providing some hope of a long-term solution to the environmental disaster. Live video from the seabed Friday morning showed that all was quiet around the top of the well, suggesting the test assessing the integrity of the well was continuing. Earlier in the week, Kent Wells, a senior vice president for BP, had said that the longer the test continued the better, because it would indicate that the pressure inside the well was holding. […]
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 […]
Superman Comes To Town, Gets It Wrong
COMICBOOK RESOURCES: After the short prologue in last month’s “Superman” #700, the J. Michael Straczynski-penned “Grounded” begins this week with Superman beginning his walk across America by stopping in Philadelphia. The idea of “Grounded” has divided a lot of fans between those that want Superman to have big, exciting adventures and those that prefer the quieter, more introspective stories. While I fall in the latter camp, it’s hard not to find parts of “Superman” #701 laughable in its cheesiness, right down to a premise that brings to mind “Forrest Gump,” complete with Superman’s lack of explanation, stating that he’s walking […]
REM’s Fables Of The Reconstruction 25 Years Later
POP MATTERS: Recording outside of the American South for the first time, R.E.M. imbued Fables of the Reconstruction with the spirit of its place of origin. What largely set early alt-rock bands like R.E.M. apart from the punk and post-punk movements with which they coexisted was how they rebelled against the present by signifying sounds and iconography from the pre-punk past, albeit in a recontexualized, postmodern fashion. In R.E.M.’s case, this tendency had been manifested in its early work by Peter Buck’s Byrdsian guitar jangle and in the band’s vague rural mystique, one that was provincial without being cliché. Fables […]
CINEMA: Through The Glass Darkly
AMER (2009, directed by Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, 90 minutes, Belgium) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A beautiful woman alone in a spooky estate. A straight razor. The creaking sounds of black leather. All the elements of a giallo, the violent Italian crime thrillers of the seventies, are present in Amer,a homage to the form made by Belgian directors Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani. But it is merely the elements that are present because this experimental film leaves much of the form missing. Originally, directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento popularized the genre by featuring these foreboding elements […]
SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: With AP Ticker
AP says ‘good riddance’ to the Ducks, the Gulf spill and Mel G. Plus, the auspicious debut of our new sportscaster, Hot Carl!
THE HARSHEST MELLOW: New Jersey’s Medical Marijuana Law Will Be The Strictest In The Land — Assuming It Ever Actually Goes Into Effect
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY Of all the shitty ways to die, ALS is arguably the shittiest. Also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and in short it is slow death brought on by the steady and methodical withering of the nerves that control your muscles. First, you can’t button your shirt. Then, you can’t walk and eventually, you can’t breathe. The cruelest irony is that the disease does not affect higher brain function, and so even at the very end, you are a fully present mind trapped in […]
CINEMA: Saints And Sinners
GONE WITH THE POPE (2010, directed by Duke Mitchell, 83 minutes, U.S.) THE TEMPTATION OF ST. TONY (2009, directed by Veiko Õunpuu, 110 minutes, Estonia) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Monday night’s screening of Gone With The Pope lived up to all its perverse promise. Where does one begin? The film was shot in 1976 but never assembled into a final cut by its director Duke Mitchell. Duke’s infamy began when he was the Dean Martin part of a pair of Martin and Lewis imitators known as “Mitchell and Petrillo” (their astonishing act can be seen in the 1952 film […]
BREAKING: George Steinbrenner Is Dead
NEW YORK TIMES: George Steinbrenner, who bought a declining Yankees team in 1973, promised to stay out of its daily affairs and then, in an often tumultuous reign, placed his formidable stamp on 7 World Series championship teams, 11 pennant winners and a sporting world powerhouse valued at perhaps $1.6 billion, died Tuesday morning. He was 80 and lived in Tampa, Fla. The Yankees announced the death without giving a cause. Mr. Steinbrenner’s death came eight months after the Yankees won their first World Series title since 2000, clinching their six-game victory over the Philadelphia Phillies at his new Yankee […]
THE END IS NEAR: Wall Street Hedges The Apocalypse
DAILY FINANCE: The patron saint of the Wall Street apocalypse society may be Barton Biggs. The leader of Traxis Partners, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund, Biggs has gained a reputation for his dire predictions, particularly those of his much-quoted 2008 analysis of World War II, Wealth, War and Wisdom. At the end of the book, Biggs offers his conclusions from his brief study of history, suggesting the likelihood of a future era in which “People with wealth” will face “another time of cholera when the Four Horsemen will ride again and the barbarians unexpectedly will be at their gate.” Biggs offers […]
RIP: Harvey Pekar, Professional Everyman, Dead At 70
NEW YORK TIMES: Harvey Pekar, the irascible writer who spun the mundane details of his own life and the quotidian existences of his fellow Cleveland residents into comic-book narratives, and who showed that the comic-book panel could include everyday feelings of anxiety and disappointment as easily as it does the adventures of costumed heroes, has died, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland reported. He was 70. Mr. Pekar was best known for his on-again, off-again comics series “American Splendor,” whose title deliberately contrasted with the everyday people it documented (often the author himself). A wide range of illustrators contributed to its […]
GREATEST HITS: Q&A With Author Rick Moody
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] EDITOR’S NOTE: Rick Moody will be speaking at the Free Library on July 29th. The following interview ran back in 2007, upon the release of Right Livelihoods. BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Rick Moody tackles the hallucinatory pathologies of American paranoia in Right Livelihoods, a collection of three thematically-connected novellas. Each story centers on a paranoid protagonist who serves as unreliable narrator and as a result, the reader spends an awful lot of time wondering just what the hell is going on — which only adds to the ultra-vivid realism and disconcerting familiarity of it all. […]