Summer Fiction is the new nom-de-rock for South Philly bedroom pop autuer Bill Ricchini who has recently returned from a five year hermitage of domesticity, home-improvement and crock pottery with a self-titled debut full of rumors and sighs and fallen lovers outlined in lipstick traces. Breezy, bright and eminently tuneful, Summer Fiction picks up where Ricchini’s previous releases — 2002’s Ordinary Time and 2005’s Tonight I Burn Brightly — left off. Lush with deftly-turned nods to Burt Bachrach, Brian Wilson and Ray Davies, Summer Fiction is pure pop for the kind of now people who sleep with copies of Village […]
STYLE COUNCIL: What’s A Ball Girl To Wear?
Glitter, catwalk runways and celebrity judges — sounds like your average Phillies promotional event right? Erm, maybe not. But Thursday evening local apparel designers and Phillies’ Ballgirls teamed up in a fashion show to mark the finale of the week long “Painting the Town Red” build up to yesterday’s opening game. Although, apparent to anyone that has ever been to a Philadelphia sports event, these are fans that need no pumping to get Phanatical about the home team, the Phillies’ promotional team ran events all week to get fans hyped for the home opener against the Houston Astros — and […]
Goober Preacher Burns Koran, Afghans Go Ballistic Storm U.N. Compound And Kill 12 Relief Workers
NEW YORK TIMES: Thousands of protesters, enraged by the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, overran a United Nations compound in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday, killing at least 12 people. The incident that so enraged Afghans, the burning of a Koran after a mock trial in a small Florida church on March 20, was barely noticed in the United States but widely reported in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The presidents of both countries have called on the United States to arrest Terry Jones, the pastor of the church. Mr. Jones presided over the “International Judge the […]
Phawker Presents The 10th Installment Of BLOTTO
BY LANCE DOILY Since the main office we work out of is located right in the middle of a gritty industrial area on the outskirts of Paterson, most of the guys spend their down time meandering through the lawless concrete ruins behind the Tropicana warehouse up the block. So we took it upon ourselves to meet with a few of their Tropicana workers and started a baseball league. The warm-up games alone separated the men from the boys as they were played entirely on a hard slab of concrete, but from the beginning a decision was made to take a […]
OP-ED: Time For Queen Arlene To Vacate The Throne
AP Ticker reads this week’s Phawker Op-Ed TIME FOR QUEEN ARLENE TO VACATE THE THRONE, written in response to the Inquirer’s must-read seven-part series on out of control violence in the Philadelphia schools system entitled ASSAULT ON LEARNING. PREVIOUSLY: TIME FOR QUEEN ARLENE TO VACATE THE THRONE
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR This season of Mad Men has been a transformative one, to say the least, for lead character Don Draper, the star partner at ad firm Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. His wife, Betty, has left him, having learned that he stole a fellow soldier’s identity during the Korean War. He’s been striking out at pitch meetings. He’s become what Jon Hamm, the actor who created the previously bulletproof character, calls a “less-functioning alcoholic,” living a bachelor life in Greenwich Village but grappling with both profound loneliness and a shattering personal loss. “Don is losing touch with not only his […]
CINEMA: You Only Live Twice
SOURCE CODE (2011, directed by Duncan Jones, 93 minutes, U.S.) CERTIFIED COPY (2010, directed by Abbas Kiarostami, 106 minutes, France/Italy) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I thought I knew who Duncan Jones was. His biography fit the story so well, of course the son of David Bowie, once known as “Zowie Bowie,” would reveal himself to be a science fiction director distracted by ideas of identity, much like his father who so famously shifted between personas. His 2009 debut Moon, was the quintessential “promising debut;” a low-budget throwback to a science fiction of ideas and not mere spectacle, telling the […]
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 […]
CINEMA: Let It Rainn
SALON: Gunn has described “Super” as an adaptation of William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” complete with superhero costumes and comic violence, and he’s not kidding about that nearly as much as you’d think. Another way of translating it might be to say that Gunn has taken the loser-hipster characters from “Ghost World” and transported them into the splatterific, grade-C genre universe of Troma Films. “Super” stars Rainn Wilson (best known as Dwight from TV’s “The Office”) as Frank, a hapless fry cook in some nameless, R. Crumb-style Middle American city. […] [A] divine intervention leads Frank to buy […]
ANNIVERSARY: YouTube Turns 100!
Man, time flies. Seems like it was just yesterday that YouTube started but here we are 100 years later.