COUNTDOWN TO ZERO (2010, directed by Lucy Walker, 91 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Growing up in the seventies and eighties, primary school students were no longer ducking and covering yet the idea of nuclear annihilation from Russia still lingered as an imaginable possibility. That anxiety seemed to build to a fever pitch sometime around Reagan’s bluster and the 1983 broadcast of the ABC TV movie The Day After, then dissipated as the cold war came to a close. In recent years I’ve taught film appreciation to middle and high school students, where we’ve watched Matthew Broderick in […]
TONIGHT’S FORECAST: Hot And Moody
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] EDITOR’S NOTE: Rick Moody will be discussing/reading from his new book Four Fingers Of Death at the Free Library tonight. The following interview ran back in 2007, upon the release of Right Livelihoods. BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Rick Moody tackles the hallucinatory pathologies of American paranoia in Right Livelihoods, a collection of three thematically-connected novellas. Each story centers on a paranoid protagonist who serves as unreliable narrator and as a result, the reader spends an awful lot of time wondering just what the hell is going on — which only adds to the ultra-vivid realism […]
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 […]
WORTH REPEATING: Gulf Eco Damage Overstated?
TIME: Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the birds killed by the Exxon Valdez. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but, so far, wildlife response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of any mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And, yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but, so […]
WORTH REPEATING: Time To Drop DROP?
INQUIRER: The Deferred Retirement Option Plan is the program that pays city employees six-figure cash bonuses when they retire – on top of their regular salaries, pensions, and five years of free health insurance. Rather than get rid of it, city officials have raised property taxes 10 percent and passed budget cuts that will shut down firehouses, whack millions of dollars in police overtime, and shelve plans to hire 200 new cops.In the past 11 years, 6,638 employees have walked out the door with DROP bonuses worth an average of $109,277, costing the city $725 million, records show. Another 2,107 […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Adler’s Appetite For Destruction
BY BRENDAN SKWIRE Last night I went to go see Adler’s Appetite, a band led by original Guns and Roses drummer Steven Adler, backed by members of similarly washed up hair metal acts, including Quiet Riot, Faster Pussycat and Enuff Z’Nuff. Adler, who has battled drug addiction for a long time and has suffered two strokes, is not only touring GnR’s legendary debut LP Appetite for Destruction, he’s pushing his similarly-titled autobiography, My Appetite for Destruction. So what we’re talking about is essentially a live VH1 Behind The Music: “Steve Adler was sitting on top of the world…until drugs brought […]
CONTEST: Win Tix For Arcade Fire At The Mann
We have two tickets to giveaway for the Arcade Fire/Spoon show at the Mann Music Center on Monday! First person to email us at FEED@PHAWKER.COM with the answer to the following question wins: What charity did Arcade Fire donate its licensing fees from the NFL for use of the song “Wake Up” during the 2010 Super Bowl? Please include a contact phone number. Good luck! RELATED: Despite its size, the Quebec concert was just part of a warm-up tour for “The Suburbs,” which is scheduled to be released on Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday the band is due in New […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Case Against Bottled Water
[via TERM LIFE INSURANCE]
Breitbart Brings Tea Party Minstrel Show To Town
[Click image to enlarge] PHILLY IMC: Andrew Breitbart said he wanted to discredit the NAACP’s claims of racism within the Tea Party campaigns. So he smeared a black woman to do it. Tea Partiers coming to Independence Hall on July 31 want to show that the NAACP is wrong about the racism within their campaigns. And they have invited Andrew Breitbart to speak. The Tea Party Federation is the organization that ousted a racist from their ranks last week after a racist mock letter to Abraham Lincoln. They are also the organization that is sponsoring what they have called a […]
TONITE: Baltimore Rock City!
[Illustrations by ALEX FINE] J Roddy Walston and The Business are everything a Rock and Roll band should be. No gimmicks, no effects, just four guys who play straight forward music that you can’t help but enjoy. Baltimore is better-known for mellow indie rockers like Beach House and the Celebration, but that will soon change. Lucky for us, J Roddy and his Business moved here from Tennessee five years ago, bringing along their unique blend of Southern Rock guitar riffs and Queen-style vocal harmonies and the capacity to put on a live show that will leave you wanting 10 encores. […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR WikiLeaks‘ release of more than 90,000 military intelligence reports to The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Speigel revealed many new insights long suspected but never corroborated about the war in Afghanistan. Among the biggest revelations from the leaked material was the level of detail about Pakistan’s spy service and it’s level of involvement supporting the Taliban insurgency while taking billions of dollars in U.S. aid. Mark Mazzetti was one of several reporters from The New York Times who sifted through and analyzed the documents leaked by WikiLeaks. In a conversation on Fresh Air, he details what […]
HIGH DIVE: McKenna’s In Fairmount
BY JEN ANTONIC I suppose I can’t tell you anything worthwhile about booze without first explaining why I’m here. I moved to Philadelphia from a city out west after a mid-mid-life crisis and the realization that I always wanted to live in a big, cramped, East Coast city with tall buildings, subways, and neighborhoods. As recently as three years ago, I was somewhat clueless that big east cost cities came in different packages; all I knew was that Philadelphia was close to New York, and it had tall buildings, some subways, and some neighborhoods. If someone would have mentioned the […]