FRESH AIR For the past four seasons, Chloe Sevigny has played Nicolette “Nicki” Grant on the HBO series Big Love. Nicki is the second of polygamist Bill Henrickson’s three wives — a modest woman suspicious of the outside world, while keeping several secrets of her own. Sevigny tells Terry Gross that she prepared for the role by immersing herself in the polygamist culture of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — a polygamous offshoot of the Mormon church, or LDS. “I read as much literature as I could find … just trying to wrap my head […]
Vampire Weekend & Run DMC Headline Roots Picnic
BILLBOARD: Vampire Weekend will headline the third annual Roots Picnic, which will also feature a performance by the Philadelphia-based Roots plus two associated side projects from drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and rapper Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter. The event will be held June 5 at Philadelphia’s Festival Pier; tickets go on sale Friday (March 5) via LiveNation.com. Also on the bill are Clipse, Mayer Hawthorne, Nneka, the Very Best, Tuneyards, Das Racist, Bajah and the Dry Eye Crew and Pattern Is Movement. In addition, Questlove will play a set with fellow Philadelphia native DJ Jazzy Jeff, while Black Thought will perform […]
THE GRINCH WHO STOLE CONGRESS: Ex-Phils Pitcher Jim Bunning Is GOP’s Senator No #1
WASHINGTON POST: In his 17 years pitching in the big leagues, Jim Bunning was known for his graceful curveball, his rising slider and his sidearm fastball. Now 78 years old and about to retire from the Senate, the Republican of Kentucky is apparently down to only one pitch: the screwball. For four days, he has been on a one-man campaign to cut off unemployment benefits, kick the unemployed off of health insurance, cut Medicare payments to doctors, deny satellite TV to rural Americans, shut down federal flood insurance and highway projects, and furlough thousands of federal workers. Democrats can hardly […]
MUST SEE TV: Catch This While You Can
DESIGN OBSERVER: We learn to live with the encroachment of branding into daily life; like the weather, we just accept it as part of everyday living. But the more we become inured to the bludgeoning intrusiveness of commercial lapel-grabbing, the more the brand owners — and the designers who work for them — ramp up their efforts to attract our attention.A world colonized by brands is the theme of a new film by French designers and filmmakers H5. Logorama is a slick 17-minute-long animated movie that appears to lampoon both the Hollywood blockbuster — violent, crude and adrenalized — and the world […]
HISTORY OF VIOLENCE: Beaten, Bullet-Riddled Corpses Of Couple Dug Up In Camden Backyard
INQUIRER: On a Sunday afternoon just over a week ago, Muriah Ashley Huff bumped into two friends on the platform of NJ Transit’s River Line station in Palmyra. Huff, 18, longed to get her driving permit, and was bound for Camden to see her boyfriend, Mike, recalled Nicole Bass and Vivian Richardson. That was the last the two saw of the bubbly cosmetology student. Four days later, on Thursday, Huff’s beaten and strangled body was found buried in the backyard of a South Camden home, said the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office. The body of Michael Hawkins, who was dating Huff, […]
NEVER LEAVE A MAN BEHIND: Thieves Steal $50,000 Worth Of Jewelry, Leave Behind 4-Year-Old Son
INQUIRER: John Benson and Sheakia Stubbs wanted to look like legitimate shoppers last weekend when they walked into a South Street jewelry store they planned to rob, police said. They decided the best way to complete the ruse was to bring along their 4-year-old son. But with $50,000 in stolen rings stuffed into a shopping bag, and the store owner and an employee giving chase, police said, the couple abandoned their child to make their escape. When police caught up with the suspects at a Roosevelt Boulevard motel just after midnight, Benson and Stubbs didn’t seem too concerned about the […]
Brady Bunch Reunion Cancelled Over Gay Flap
THE ADVOCATE: A planned reunion of the cast of The Brady Bunch has been canceled due to animosity between Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb, possibly relating to a rumor about a sexual relationship between the two actresses, reports RadarOnline. The six actors who played the Brady children in the iconic 1970s sitcom were scheduled to appear together Wednesday on the Today show, but plans for the televised reunion quickly fell apart when McCormick and Plumb each learned the other would be participating. Plumb reportedly still harbors resentment toward McCormick, suggesting she implied there was a slight lesbian relationship between the […]
THIS JUST IN: Pavement At The Mann Sept. 17th
After years of speculation, the most important American band of the Nineties is returning to the stage with the lineup of Mark Ibold, Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich and Steve West reuniting for dates around the world in 2010. Please be advised this tour is not a prelude to additional jaunts and/or a permanent reunion. Described in their own Wikipedia entry as having experienced “moderate commercial success,” Pavement’s catalog for the Matador, Domino, Drag City and Treble Kicker imprints has come to define in the eyes of many the blueprint for independent rock over the past generation. […]
SUICIDE GIRLS: Authorities Say Suburban Teens Killed By Self-Inflicted Train Crash
INQUIRER: Schocking news from the suburbs. The two teenage girls struck and killed by a high-speed Amtrak train in the Philadelphia suburb of Norwood last week stepped onto the tracks deliberately, meeting their deaths together in a suicide pact, according to authorities. Gina Gentile, 16, and Vanessa Dorwart, 15, were killed instantly when an Acela Express racing from Boston to Washington sped through Norwood at 10:28 a.m. last Thursday. An examination of their e-mail and text messages showed dark thoughts and fatalistic moods, Police Chief Mark DelVecchio said. In the days before they stepped into the path of the train, […]
WORTH REPEATING: All Religion Is Loco
[SOURCE: The Onion] BILL MAHER: People are always debating, is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy: it’s a religion. You’re a religion if you do something as weird as when the Buddhist monks scrutinize two-year-olds to find the reincarnation of the dude who just died, and then choose one of the toddlers as the sacred Lama: “His poop is royal!” Sorry, but thinking you can look at a babbling, barely-housebroken, uneducated being and say, “That’s our leader” doesn’t make you enlightened. It makes you a Sarah Palin supporter. MORE
CONCERT REVIEW: Flogging Molly At The E-Factory
BY JAMIE DAVIS Flogging molly have been around for a while, so they know how to put on a show. Their shows are like a worship service to Ireland, drinking, and punk rock, and the crowd are there exactly for that. You have never known happiness unless you have cheered on the girl who just took a break from moshing to stand in the middle of a circle and do a jig. Friday night at the way sold-out Electric Factory, Flogging Moly played an epic two hour long set, that covered everything from songs they wrote back in the early […]
I, GAMER: Bioschock 2
BY ADAM BONANNI Playing the first Bioshock was a bit of a painful experience. I liken a playthrough of it to the plight of an English teacher grading the term paper of a promising student; to see a piece of work come so close to achieving what it set out to do, only to dock it for the little mistakes along the way really makes one meditate on what could have been. Unfortunately, you might have to flunk it anyway. The promise of discovering and unearthing the secrets of Rapture, an envisioned paradise of free thought and free will, built […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR This week, a new Johnny Cash album — American Recordings VI: Ain’t No Grave — was released to coincide with what would have been the music icon’s 78th birthday. Today, we take a look back at the Man in Black, who spoke with Terry Gross in 1997. Cash began recording albums and performing in the 1950s. His long romance with wife June Carter Cash, celebrated in the 2005 biopic Walk the Line, spanned five decades — from their early touring days to their rise as one of America’s most popular country-music couples. Cash recorded over 1,500 songs in […]