CNN: Kaz and MacMillan co-founded GunCrisis.org to help curb gun violence plaguing what is supposed to be the City of Brotherly Love. “I want to put the audience out there in the streets,” Kaz said. “I want them to see what I’m seeing every night in this city: The children watching crime scene investigations night after night, day after day. Anything to disrupt this, marginally disrupt this, we consider a success.” After the July 20 shooting massacre in Aurora, Colorado, GunCrisis estimates there have been at least 55 gunshot victims in Philadelphia, and that number is rising. In March, photojournalist […]

Wow. Intense video for the gorgeous title track Anthony & The Johnsons’ new live album, Cut The World, starring Wilem Dafoe and Carice van Houten (Melisandre in “Game of Thrones”) as a corporate executive and his secretary. Won’t spoil the shocking plot twist, but let the viewer beware, not for the faint of heart. Or the 1%. PREVIOUSLY: If Antony Hegarty didn’t exist, Lou Reed would have surely invented him. It would be in a song called “Antony Says”, an elegantly twinkling ballad wrapped up in fishnet, mascara and doom, about an anguished androgyne with a canary-in-the-coal-mine voice that makes […]

  BY DAVID CORBO If you weren’t at 40th Street Park in University City on Saturday night, July 28th, you missed some of the best jazz on the planet earth as Philadelphia’s own Sun Ra Arkestra invited all willing travelers on a free trip to the intergalactic cosmic spaceways with a tour de force performance as part of the University City District’s 40th Street Summer Series.  The Arkestra, under the spiritual and musical direction of saxophonist Marshall Allen, proved its mettle as they churned out a set that covered everything from Allen’s swinging nod to Fletcher Henderson, “Dreams Come True,” […]

RELATED: Top PA Election Official Admits Under Oath She Doesn’t Know What The New Voter ID Law Says RELATED: State Admits Voter ID Is A Law In Search Of A Crime RELATED:  New GOP-Sponsored Voter ID Law Could Disenfranchise 758,000 PA Voters RELATED: Oompa Loompa-esque PA House Republican Majority Leader Mike Turzai Says Voter ID Law Will Supress The Minority Vote And ‘Allow Governor Romney To Win The State Of Pennsylvania

Artwork by TIM DOYLE BY DAVID CORBO 1965 was an interesting year in the United States.  President Lyndon Johnson introduced the social reforms of his “Great Society”, the first American combat troops landed in South Vietnam, and Martin Luther King marched 25,000 civil rights protesters from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, The Watts Riots began in LA, and the Beatles played the first rock and roll stadium concert at Shea Stadium.  In the midst of all of this, and true to the questioning nature of the times, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in his […]

  TG DAILY: A third human species lived alongside Homo erectus and Homo habilis in East Africa as long as two million years ago. New fossils discovered east of Lake Turkana include a face, a near-complete lower jaw and part of a second lower jaw, and appear to confirm the tentative discovery of a new species some 40 years ago. In 1972, scientists discovered the fossil known as KNM-ER 1470 – 1470 for short – leading to a debate about just how many different species of early Homo lived during the Pleistocene epoch. Some said the skull’s large brain size […]

  CBS PHILADELPHIA: An Occupy Easton protester faces an attempted bank robbery charge following an arrest at an organized event at a bank – during which the “Occupier” was holding a sign that reportedly read “You’re being robbed.” According The Express-Times, Dave Gorczynski allegedly held cardboard signs outside a Wells Fargo Branch that read, “You’re being robbed,” while the other said, “Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.” Occupy Easton reports on their Facebook page that Gorczynski “was at the bank protesting the theft of our […]

Esquire‘s September issue, on newsstands August 13th, ranks American cities by their late night eats offerings and guess who’s number one? Look in the mirror Philadelphia. You are the new ‘Late Night Capital Of The United States.’ Just don’t look at the scale. “Once referred to as the ‘workshop of the world,’ the great factory city of Philadelphia still has a third-shift appetite:  It gets hungry after midnight.  And it doesn’t hurt that the local love for microbrewing, dating to the late 1600s, shows up on beer lists so intricately compiled they’d be described as curated in more pretentious cities. […]

  THE ONION: In response to the shooting death of six Sikh worshippers at a temple in Oak Creek, WI yesterday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) offered a public expression of her thankfulness that no Americans had been killed in the rampage. “It’s a relief and a blessing that not a single American died in this event,” Bachmann said of the incident that claimed the lives of six Americans who practice the Sikh faith. “All of us can be grateful for that. Had the gunman targeted a church or synagogue, this violent act could have been much, much worse. There’s no […]

  STEVE VOLK: I could tell you about the surreal sleeplessness. We are lucky, right now, to get two-and-a-half hours of sleep in any 24-hour cycle. If that rest came in one restorative stretch, we might be doing all right. But for the most part we are grabbing sleep in 30- and 45-minute increments throughout the day. As a result, our emotions are close to the surface. I’ve burst into tears in front of pretty much all my co-workers, several cab drivers and a couple of cashiers by now, among other intimates. And being reduced like this, so quickly, has […]

  Hard to remember now but there was a time when the Jesus & Mary Chain, who play Union Transfer on September 8th, divided the population of planet Earth into two camps: Those who were sure they were the Second Coming and those who thought they were the end of Western Civilization. Fresh Air/Entertainment Weekly music critic Ken Tucker used to write for the Inquirer back in the day and we recently happened upon his two-thumbs-down review of the JAMC’s 1986 show at the Trocadero in support of their polarizing debut Psychocandy, which has since been judged a seminal and […]