Lucinda Williams is still  the beloved revolutionary sweetheart of the alt-country rodeo. All of us literate roots-rock boys still daydream about her the same way we used to daydream about Liz Phair. We know all about her because we read The New Yorker. We know about her father’s literary standing and her mother’s madness; we know about her dead boyfriends and her Southern pedigree. We know about her open-armed embrace of all the humid folkloric strangeness the region holds: the sweaty danger of juke joints, the satanic deals at the crossroads, the Pentecostal hellfire and brimstone, and the taking up […]

RADIO TIMES EMILIO ESTEVEZ has written and directed a new film about walking the medieval Christian pilgrimage route, El Camino de Santiago, or The Way of St. James. “The Way” stars MARTIN SHEEN, about a widowed father who treks the historic path through France and Spain, picking up where his world-traveler son (Estevez), was killed in a storm at the beginning of the son’s pilgrimage. As he walks the 500 mile path he originally feels he’s doing for his son, the father meets fellow travelers in search of their own personal reconciliations and dreams. “The Way” is partly based on […]

BY TONY ABRAHAM I used to want to be Bob Dylan. In fact, I used to think I could channel him. It seemed to make sense at the time. We have the same middle name. His last name in Hebrew is my last name. So I tried to write songs like him; romantic, imagistic epics like “Visions of Johanna” and hilarious surrealistic ramblings like “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” I played the shit out of Blonde on Blonde and Bringing It All Back Home. I read as much Beat literature as I could, kept myself awake at night just to see […]

THE AUSTRALIAN: Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry is under pressure to explain why his family’s hunting retreat was called Niggerhead and why the racially offensive name remained painted on a giant stone there for years. The Washington Post reported that the word was painted on a flat rock standing upright at the gated entrance of the secluded Perry family hunting refuge in Texas. The 430-hectare parcel, used for hunting and fishing retreats, was the venue of getaways hosted for decades by Perry, who entertained fellow politicians, friends and supporters there, the report said. The Post said the getaway was given […]

PW: Close to 400 people turned up at the United Methodist Church at Broad and Arch streets last night for the first meeting of Occupy Philly—a planned demonstration/camp-in and show of solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan over the past two weeks that’s been garnering increasing media attention and spawning similar groups in dozens of cities throughout the U.S. While the Occupy movement—a “leaderless” movement chiefly organized via Facebook and Twitter and inspired by the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere—so far hasn’t presented an absolute, unified message or clear-cut demands, activists camping out […]

CBS: A flurry of Twitter jabs between two Philadelphia Eagles beat writers escalated into real-life fisticuffs Wednesday, with one writer allegedly punching his newspaper adversary in the head at the team’s practice facility. According to Howard Eskin of SportsRadio 94WIP, the spat started when Jeff McLane of the Philadelphia Inquirer called Les Bowen of the Philadelphia Daily News an “old hack that hasn’t broken a story in years.” The two sent initial jabs in 140-character form on the social media site Tuesday over the injury status of Eagles quarterback Michael Vick, CBS Philadelphia reports. McLane reported that Vick would definitely […]

NEW YORKER: Anwar al-Awlaki is dead, according to Administration officials. Does everyone feel safer? There are benefits, of course, to not having someone on the streets or hills of Yemen who wants to kill his fellow Americans—and Awlaki was an American, born in New Mexico. He was killed in a drone strike to his convoy, in an operation run by the C.I.A. and the Joint Special Operations Command.  But there are a couple of points here that should make anyone wary: first, that the President of the United States could order the killing of an American citizen with no judicial […]

The corner of Somewhere and Everywhere, right now, BY ANONYMOUS

NEW YORK TIMES: Just last week, Léo Apotheker was shown the door after a tumultuous 11-month run atop Hewlett-Packard. His reward? $13.2 million in cash and stock severance, in addition to a sign-on package worth about $10 million, according to a corporate filing on Thursday. At the end of August, Robert P. Kelly was handed severance worth $17.2 million in cash and stock when he was ousted as chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon after clashing with board members and senior managers. A few days later, Carol A. Bartz took home nearly $10 million from Yahoo after being […]