[Photo by DEREK BRAD] BY PELLE GUNTHER Last night at the Mann Music Center, fans swooned with the irrational, hormone-driven throws of young love over Ben Gibbard’s Seattle-based, cranium-baby Death Cab for Cutie. Over the last decade, DCFC has filled airwaves, iPods and the occasional CD player with their melancholic but hopeful melodies, endlessly creating beautiful alt-rock songs. Gibbard’s tunes never fail to blast from every girl’s speakers—mine included—from pre-tweens to soccer moms. His soothing vocal texture is made to be wrapped gently around the dulcet chords of an acoustic guitar—but as his audience grows larger (to my distaste), the […]

LEGACY.COM: A short stint with the Spokane City garbage collection squad was followed by a similarly-short hitch, ‘cold-canvassing’ for one of Spokane’s leading predatory roofing and siding contractors. That invaluable vocational experience was followed by six years employment at an industrial transformer manufacturing plant – which failed to lead to tenure, as the company moved its facility to North Carolina to take advantage of a lower-wage environment. In late 1980, Mr. Treecraft joined the Spokane Unitarian Church, whose very active singles group had a surplus of women 10 to 20 years his senior. This was truly a golden era for […]

BY MEREDITH KLEIBER Philly, it’s time to get on your good foot, because Austin’s Black Joe Lewis and The Honeybears are coming to the TLA tomorrow night and bringing the party. Expect a booty-shaking onslaught of screaming horns, bump-and-grind bass, stomping beats and raw, sweaty blues-inflected rock n’ roll animated by the gravelly, soul-powered vocals of frontman Black Joe Lewis. Phawker got Joe on the phone shortly before the Honeybears’ Detroit gig last night to get the 411. PHAWKER: Why Black Joe Lewis? Isn’t calling yourself Black Joe Lewis like Eddie Vedder calling himself White Eddie Vedder or Yo Yo […]

THE ECONOMIST: In America, for example, in 1987 the top 1% of taxpayers received 12.3% of all pre-tax income. Twenty years later their share, at 23.5%, was nearly twice as large. The bottom half’s share fell from 15.6% to 12.2% over the same period. Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending […]

Click HERE for details.

WPVI: The sand on the sides of the trench collapsed on him suddenly while the others in his group were nearby playing bocce ball, he told The Associated Press. As the sand pressed down on him, he wiggled his head to get a small pocket of air but then began to panic and lost consciousness after a few minutes. He realized no one could see what had happened because he had been hidden from view by the depth of the trench. “It was really scary. I thought I’d just die,” said Mina, who lives in Free Union, Va. “I didn’t […]

 THE ATLANTIC: A mysterious company funneled $1 million into a Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney and then dissolved just months later, reports NBC News’s Michael Isikoff.  The contribution represented one of the largest donations of this election cycle and, according to Isikoff, “provides a vivid example of how secret campaign cash is being funneled in ever more circuitous ways into the political system.” The firm W Spann LLC, formed by Boston estate tax lawyer Cameron Casey, dissolved in July after being formed in March. In between that period it made a $1 million contribution to the Super PAC Restore Our […]

THE GUARDIAN: A top-secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian. The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK’s role in torture and rendition – instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer. It was operated by the British government for almost a decade. […] The document seen by the Guardian […]

[Click to enlarge] WHITE HOUSE BLOG:  Myth: President Obama caved. Fact: President Obama laid out key priorities that had to be part of any deal. Those priorities are reflected in this compromise. First, we avoided default which would have plunged the economy into a deep recession, imperiling the well-being of millions of Americans. Second, the initial down payment on deficit reductions does not cut low-income and safety-net programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Third, we set up a path forward that will put pressure on Congress to adopt a balanced approach. And finally, we raised the debt ceiling […]

?uestlove, Gary Clark Jr., Abstract Verses, LTC and Voss at The Blockley Pourhouse last night. Photos by MEREDITH KLEIBER.