HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Philadelphia’s two major newspapers may soon go up for auction again after creditors failed to close on their $139 million purchase by Tuesday’s deadline. An afternoon bankruptcy court hearing was scheduled to discuss the status of the company that operates The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. “The deal did not close. The asset purchase agreement has expired,” company lawyer Larry McMichael told The Associated Press after the noon deadline. “Exactly what’s going to happen is still up in the air.” The company nonetheless has enough money to fund normal operations and continue publishing the newspapers until a […]

[Photo by BILL HEBERT] BY DAVE ALLEN Spending 10 waking hours in the same space is nothing; to me, it’s a Saturday night bartending shift. A ten-hour long concert, though, was a new experience for me and, thanks to the New York-based composer-performer collective Bang on a Can and their first-ever Philadelphia Marathon, held Sunday at World Café Life, not one I’ll soon forget. The day belonged to groove – percussion-driven ones in particular – but the most thrilling moments came when steady beats skipped and patterns were thrown for a loop. Throughout the day, the moment everything threatened to […]

WASHINGTON POST: For his second annual back-to-school speech, President Obama chose as his backdrop an elite, selective public school in this city that is a far cry from the turnaround-success stories his administration is seeking to promote. Obama, in a Tuesday afternoon speech, urged the nation’s students to “dream big” and “stay focused” on education in an address that aides described as a nonpolitical event. But students at Philadelphia’s Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School probably are already heeding that advice. The school, with about 1,200 students from grades 5 through 12, draws the city’s academic cream through competitive […]

BY MATTHEW HENGEVELD Album of the Year, Black Milk’s fourth full-length solo album, is the much-anticipated follow-up to 2008’s acclaimed Tronic. With Tronic we saw a matured Black Milk, who sought to experiment with his sound. This resulted in a plastic-sounding album shot through with whirling electronics and squiggling synths. I applauded that shit— it sounded new, ambitious and weird, but it never escaped the realms of Detroit. That ambition hasn’t left Black Milk. Album of the Year features some of the most oddball and inventive beats ever to come from Detroit. I’ll start with the most obvious improvement: Drums. […]

Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, co-editors of The Exile, a subversive English-language newspaper based in Moscow, whose decadelong run came to an abrupt end in 2008. Inset: A Boris Yeltsin cover accompanied by a typical Exile headline. By Martin von den Driesch (Taibbi and Ames) VANITY FAIR: Chronic contempt may have been a sane take on turn-of-the-millennium Moscow, but in life, generally, it’s an unsustainable one, and eventually, inevitably, Ames and Taibbi came to hate each other. Oddly, the Wines incident seemed to mark the apex of their volatile collaboration and the beginning of its decline. By that point the […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author [pictured above right] is in the midst of  a two year hitch in the Peace Corps doing health counseling in rural Paraguay.  BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH The thing that surprised me most was how long it took for it to die. The squealing had already started when I got there. Teofilo had collared his 4-month-old-pig with an old piece of cord, and was in the process of pinioning it to the ground with Ramon, my floppy-haired, 19-year-old neighbor. He probably would have kept if for longer, but it has started eating his chickens’ broods, and really, […]

INQUIRER: The sale of The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News seemed on the verge of collapse Monday, with the prospective new owner reporting no progress in reaching an accord with the company’s drivers over their pension benefits. The new owner, Philadelphia Media Network Inc., has a noon Tuesday deadline to close on its purchase of the newspapers and the website Philly.com. The deadline was imposed by Chief Bankruptcy Judge Stephen Raslavich, who has overseen the company’s bankruptcy case. Without a contract agreement with the drivers, there will be no sale, according to Gregory Osberg, chief executive officer of Philadelphia […]

Bubba & Blair, National Constitution Center, 2:45 PM by JEFF FUSCO

INQUIRER: Police are trying to identify a woman who was found dead on a bed inside an illegal massage parlor in Center City. Officers went to 813 Sansom St. about 9:30 p.m. Sunday after Delaware County’s 911 center received a call from a phone booth in the county reporting a problem at the Philadelphia address, police said. MORE PHILLY CONFIDENTIAL: The Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office has yet to release the cause and manner of death of a woman found inside a Center City message parlor Sunday night, according to police. An anonymous caller dialed 911 from a Delaware County phone booth to […]

Dudes in metal suits playing “Iron Man” while getting zapped by a Tesla Coil. Seriously.

THE GUARDIAN: Funny and sad, reclusive and ubiquitous, the star of Lost In Translation and the star of Garfield: A Tail Of Two Kitties. Bill Murray has spent most of his adult life being several things at once. But soon Bill Murray will turn 60 and, to mark this important milestone, the Guardian has uncovered 60 fascinating Bill Murray facts. So hHappy birthday, Bill Murray: just don’t expect another of these when you’re 70 …1 Bill Murray was born William James Murray on 21 September 1950, which isn’t really that interesting. These get better, promise. 2 Bill Murray had originally […]