[Video: 6 year old Melissa Lynn sings “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” on Al Alberts Showcase – November 1985] INQUIRER: Mr. Alberts rose to fame in the 1950s as one of The Four Aces, whose hits included “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,” “Stranger in Paradise” and the Jule Styne number “Three Coins in a Fountain.” But generations of Philadelphians knew him as “Uncle Al,” a tuxedoed fatherly figure with a white pompadour, blinding smile and infinite patience, as he gave screen time to young singers, hoofers, and comedians on Saturdays. The program started on Channel 48 in 1968 […]
ALBUM REVIEW: Weezer Raditude
BY JAMIE DAVIS Weezer are a great band. Everyone knows it, and has ever since they heard “The Sweater Song” for the first time. Back then Weezer was good and nerdy, with awkward haircuts, blocky glasses, and just a general sense of being on the same side as your average teenage outcast. However, on their second-to-latest album The Red Album they abandoned their old geekdom completely, with songs like “The Greatest Man on Earth” and “Troublemaker” which may have been amazingly subtle skewering of hip-hop’s self-congratulatory lyric style, but I’m pretty sure they were just about how great frontman Rivers […]
TONITE: Get Your Freak Folk On
[Artwork by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA It all started, for me anyway, at Brooke Sietinsons‘ walk-up loft/hobbit hole on Second Street, somewhere in that OK Corral-esque strip between the Standard Tap and the 700 Club. Even though she no longer lives there, the exact location will have to remain a secret because, technically speaking, L&I could still fine her for dispensing the Morning Glory seeds of Philly freak-folkdom without a permit. But the select initiates invited to these hash-pipe hootenannies — culled from some of the most remote and impenetrable redoubts of local bohemia — know where I’m talking […]
GLITTER AND DOOM: Phawker Photographer’s Work Included In The New Tom Waits Live Album
Yesterday, TOM WAITS released Glitter and Doom Live, a collection of outstanding live tracks from his 2008 sold out US and European tour. The two CD set contains 17 live recordings from ten nights along the tour including, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Tulsa, Knoxville, Atlanta, Paris, Milan, Jacksonville, Dublin and Columbus. The second CD entitled Tom Tales holds nearly 40 minutes of Waits quixotic ruminations on topics ranging from romantic spiders to injured vultures. The CD will also come with a booklet of live photos. One of those photos was snapped by Phawker contributing photographer Michael T. Regan, who we sent, along […]
KILLADELPHIA: The Hits Just Keep Comin’
DAILY NEWS: Episodes of violence in the city this weekend struck people at their homes, their jobs and even within their own families. On Friday alone, a man killed his mother with his bare hands, two home invasions resulted in slayings and a feud between two barbers ended with fatal gunfire, according to police. In separate incidents on Saturday, two babies, neither of whom was a full year into life, were taken to area hospitals with serious and suspicious injuries. One of the children did not survive, police said. In that case, the father, whose name was not released, is […]
GREATEST HITS: Today I Saw Revisited
BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a monger scoop up a prostitute under the El at the corner of Monmouth Street, a block north of Cambria. It was 8 am on the dot; the rising sun in the east softly illuminated the transaction as a pale, freckled and deathly skinny white girl with waist length bright orange hair looked both ways for patrol cars before running out from the doorway where she waited for a John. Her faded jeans rode real low, revealing the red g-string panties she wore underneath. She ducked her head in the open passenger side window […]
SPORTO: About Last Night
BY MIKE WOLVERTON SPORTS GUY Yes, the Eagles won the game. But no one will claim that Sunday night’s win over the Bears was “the night the Birds turned their season around.” It was a game the Eagles could easily have lost, to a crummy Bears team with a lost quarterback. For those who knock Donovan, admit he throws a hell of a deep ball. The pass to DeSean Jackson in the third quarter Sunday night wasn’t in-stride perfect, but it was good enough that Jackson only had to alter his stride a bit, without slowing up and letting the […]
30 YEARS AFTER THREE MILE ISLAND: Pay No Attention To That China Syndrome Behind The Curtain
[Photo by THE BMAG] FOX43: Emergency Management Agency officials reported low levels of radiation were measured on monitors at Three Mile Island Reactor Unit 1 at about 4 p.m. on Saturday, prompting about 150 workers to be removed from the reactor building. According to Exelon, the energy company operating TMI, all the workers were checked for exposure, but none of them approached or exceeded any exposure limits. An official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said about 20 workers were exposed to levels of radiation so low they did not fall under NRC limits. Exelon spokesman Ralph DeSantis said there was […]
PROTESTERS: Bring Us The Head Of The Fed
BY GREG ADOMAITIS There were a lot of angry white males — as well as a few angry white females and a ticked off kid or two — demonstrating on the west side of City Hall Sunday morning. About 200 gathered to demand an end to the Federal Reserve and the general disrespect the government has treated its citizens with recently. Rob Pepe, a primary organizer of the rally and member of the Montgomery County school board, has been at work in this realm of politics for 26 years. “I hope today creates more awareness about the criminal cabal that […]
WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE: The Khyber Pass, The Bionic Woman & The Clash Of Civilizations
[Photo by SYNDPROD] WASHINGTON POST: NEW DELHI – Police in India suspect that David Coleman Headley, a man with Philadelphia ties recently arrested in Chicago on terrorism charges, conducted scouting missions of the targets in last November’s attacks in Mumbai, including the city’s main train station, the popular Leopold Cafe, and the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower and the Oberoi Trident hotels. Hotel records show that Headley stayed in both hotels in 2007, authorities said. He also allegedly posed as a Jew to visit one of the other eventual targets, Chabad House, home to an ultra-Orthodox Jewish center, said a […]
TERROR ON TWO WHEELS: Can’t We All Get Along?
BY ASHLEY MYERS For the last day or two bicycling has consumed Philadelphia media. Yesterday the Philadelphia Bike Coalition’s Education Department met with Captain Wilson from the Philadelphia Police 9th District (one of Center City’s departments) to discuss enforcing the city’s bike laws. The meeting determined that as of today bike laws will tighten and a new education campaign about bicycling in the city will begin. After two recent deaths involving careless biking, police are going to enforce traffic rules that prohibit cyclists from riding on sidewalks, blowing through red lights and stop signs, and riding the wrong way on […]
WTF: Coatesville Arsonist Set Free After Copping Plea
INQUIRER: A former assistant fire chief accused in two Coatesville arsons this year walked into the Chester County Courthouse yesterday in shackles and exited without them, free to go home. Under a plea bargain that surprised the judge, Robert F. Tracey Jr., 37, of Coatesville, received a sentence of 242 days — the time he had served — to 23 months in prison followed by eight years’ probation. Tracey admitted that shortly before midnight March 20, he set fire to a front-porch swing cushion at an occupied home in the 600 block of Madison Street before walking three blocks to […]
CINEMA: 40 Years At Alice’s Restaurant
ALICE’S RESTAURANT (1969, directed by Arthur Penn, 111 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Curiously, there is a a dearth of songs to sing around the Thanksgiving dinner table, despite being based on ideas of gratitude and family — I blame those uptight Pilgrims. Well, there is Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” the eighteen-minute talking blues song by the then nineteen year old son of folk legend Woody Guthrie. The song chronicles a post-Thanksgiving dinner trip to the dump which results in a charge of littering that ultimately renders the young Guthrie unfit to serve in the war in […]