BY ED KING Almost forget about your anniversary and need to get your woman something fast? You won’t go wrong with this album. You know what they say about all the great singers: “So-and-so could sing the phone book and make it sound good!” On Lay It Down, Al Green’s continued return to secular recording, the reverend has ?uestlove and James Poyser behind the board and in the band — and it’s not exactly the phone book that he sings with such mastery but Hallmark-worthy inspirational platitudes. Be that as it may, the considerable strengths of this collection, which also […]
EARLY WORD: The Past Isn’t Dead, It Isn’t Even Past
When the smoke cleared after the hardcore punk wars of the ’80s — fought fiercely in the all-ages basements of West Philly and the early ’90s Jäger-fueled grunge matches at the Khyber — for a brief and shining moment Caterpillar had its turn in the sun. Consisting of three natty indie types and a gray-haired dude, the band rocked quite righteously — not quite punk, not quite grunge, but born of both — in a way that can only be described as Delawarean. Standing in the center of a local rock moment is a fleeting thing, of course, and in […]
We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It
THE SUMMER OF SHOVE: No Age, First Unitarian, Last Night PHOTO & TEXT BY TIFFANY YOON A young, near-capacity crowd squeezed into the church basement like it was a pair of skinny jeans that no longer fit comfortably, it was sweatbox-hot, and nearly everyone was drunk and hormonal. In other words, I haven’t had this much fun at a show in a long time. Sadly, I missed Abe Vigoda open the show, but I did catch some of High Places set, but found it somewhat disappointing. They just weren’t very exciting to watch. Danceable music, definitely, but I just wanted […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Zooey Deschanel has always been an anachronistic sort of gal. At age 8, when she wrote her first song, she was “really into the early 1900s.” “I think it was called ‘I’m Having Fun at the Fair,’” she tells NPR’s Alex Cohen, her big blue eyes peering out beneath bangs that have inspired fashion columns. “Did it have words?” asks the other half of She & Him. M. (short for Matt) Ward is sitting next to her at the Vista theater in Hollywood, where they’ll perform that night. “Yeah, it was very ‘Meet Me in St. Louis,’” she […]
KILLADELPHIA: One More Dead Since U Went To Bed
INQUIRER: A 24-year-old man, shot last night inside a Northeast apartment building, died this morning, according to Philadelphia police. Matthew Smith, 24, was shot in the chest and shoulder shortly before 11:30 p.m. inside the Brookmont Apartments at 600 Red Lion Road in Bustleton. Smith, who lived there, was taken to Frankford Torresdale Hospital, but was pronounced dead at 4:29 a.m. The shooting took place in a stairwell or hallway near the entrance, police said. Homicide detectives were at the scene this morning, asking neighbors for help in piecing together what happened.
PANIC: Fed Mulls Takeover To Avoid Meltdown
NEW YORK TIMES: Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the beleaguered mortgage finance companies, plummeted again on Friday as the Bush administration sought to allay market fears. Following a report that the administration was considering a plan to take over one or both of the companies and place them in a conservatorship if their problems grow, Fannie Mae stock was down 25 percent in midday trading compared with Thursday’s closing price; Freddie Mac stock was down 21 percent. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been hit hard by the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Their shares are plummeting and their borrowing […]
LESSNESS: The Plummeting Value Of American Life
ASSOCIATED PRESS: It’s not just the American dollar that’s losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn’t worth what it used to be. The “value of a statistical life” is $6.9 million in today’s dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May — a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago. The Associated Press discovered the change after a review of cost-benefit analyses over more than a dozen years. Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences. When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on […]
EXODUS: We Are The Fastest-Losing City In America
INQUIRER: Continuing a long-running downward trend, Philadelphia lost more residents between 2000 and 2007 than any U.S. city except hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, newly released estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show. Population in the city decreased from 1,517,550 to 1,449,634 in the seven years, a loss of nearly 68,000 people, according to Greg Harper, a demographer for the bureau. That drop of 4.5 percent represents the largest percentage loss in population of a top-25 U.S. city between 2000 and 2007, figures show. Viewed more broadly, the population of the Philadelphia region as a whole has grown even as the number […]
WACKO JACKO: We Are Family
DAILY MAIL: Pictured on a visit to a toy and book shop near his current home in Las Vegas, the singer was slumped in a wheelchair wearing pyjamas, a dreadlocked wig, a surgeon’s mask, a baseball cap and sunglasses. Such theatre was presumably designed to prevent shoppers from discovering his true identity. The irony is of course that Jackson is now better known for wearing such ludicrous disguises than not. Indeed he would have stood a much better chance of not being noticed had he strode into the shop without any disguise — and had not pulled up in four […]
SECOND LIFE: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was originally written back in the fall of 2007 for the Image section of the Sunday Inquirer. For reasons that remain unclear, the piece never ran. Today on Philly.Com, they posted what is basically the same story with different people — eight months later! On top of that, they cluelessly characterize Second Life as a video game, which is sorta like calling the Internet ‘a series of pipes.’ Sorry, just venting my frustration with the institutional arrogance of slow-brained bureaucracies. The accompanying video piece, however, is an excellent example of how newspapers can use the web’s […]
This Is Why We Love Al Franken
RELATED: A 2005 study by Public Citizen found that 43% of Senators and Representatives who left office since 1998 went on to become lobbyists. [via CROOKS AND LIARS]
HOT DOC: NY Mag Has The New Tarantino Script
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: The script is 165 pages long and follows a squad of American soldiers called the Bastards — a guerrillalike force who travel behind German lines in 1944, striking terror into the hearts of Nazi soldiers. The Bastards are headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine — the role we’d imagine Tarantino is hoping to land Brad Pitt for — described by the script as a “hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee,” who has around his neck a scar from where he survived a lynching. (“The scar will never once be mentioned,” Tarantino writes.) In a parallel story, Inglorious Bastards […]
ROBERT PLANT & ALISON KRAUSS: Killing The Blues
Officially OUR FAVORITE SONG OF 2007. Written by Rowland Salley, this version from Raising Sand just fucking slays us every time. And speaking as former teenage Zepheads, it does our heart good to hear Robert Plant doing something we can both be proud of at our advanced age. Seriously, this is as timelessly classic as anything Led Zepellin ever did. And Alison Krauss is a force of nature. Mark Ribot’s guitar sounds like underwater moonlight piercing the spectral murk of T-Bone Burnett’s elegantly antiqued production. Like butter, it is. Because there was no official video for this song, we went […]