[Photo Courtesy of PhillyHistory.org] The City of Philadelphia’s photo archive contains over 2 million images that date back as far as the late 1800s, i.e. the last time a Republican won in this town. In all seriousness, this is an INCREDIBLE visual record of the city’s evolution and a relatively new web site, PhillyHistory.org, is making it available for online consumption and purchase. To date, some 22,000 images have been digitally scanned, at a rate of roughly 2,000 images a month. So, if you’ve been wondering why the line at Kinko’s is so goddamned SLOW, well, now you know. Phawker […]
WHAT I DID ON MY X-MAS VACAY
BY EVA LIAO This Christmas, my friend Emma got the new MacBook Pro, Adam scored a new skateboard, Nicole took a ski trip to Colorado and I got an enema. It’s not what you think, you perv. You see, this year I decided to forego the holidays, which was the easy part, and join my mom in holistic rehab, which was the difficult part. You see, my severely bi-polar mother has suffered from ever-worsening alcoholism for about 10 years now and so, oddly enough, rehabs hold a special place in my heart. For years they served as the backdrop for […]
GAYBO: WHEN GAYS GET PISSED
BY TOMMY ZANE There are a lot of things that can put a queen in a mood. The right to not marry, Red Cross’ homophobic ban on blood-donating by ALL gay men, still in effect since the eighties, and dumbasses that ask you about the “Iggles game” in the elevator at work, assuming you give a damn. Just to name a few. This week, I experienced three of my favorites: Gaybo’s Pet Peeve #1: Let’s start with pets — dogs to be exact. Dear Straight Friend Colette and her hunky husband Cliff live down in Old City. (They bought a […]
JUNK SCIENCE: Attack Of The Clones
BY ELIZABETH FIEND In 1952, a special tadpole was born. It was the first animal ever cloned. After that breakthrough, scientists spent many years and many millions of dollars on unsuccessful cloning attempts. Then, in 1997, it was ‘Hello, Dolly,’ when the test-tube sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Since Dolly’s celebrated birth, scientists have cloned many different animals including goats, cows, horses, pigs, rabbits and mice. A guar (an exotic ox native to India) named Noah was the first endangered animal to be cloned, but unfortunately he lived only 48 hours. There’s also been a big push to […]
MILESTONE: Academy of Music Turns 150, Considering Chin Tuck And Getting Eyes ‘Done’
The academy had a grand ball on January 26th, 1857, and after America’s first opera house premiered Verdi’s ?Il Trovatore? that same year, it has been in continuous use ever since.The “open horseshoe” shape design has offered more visibility than most opera houses to the audience seated on both sides of the balconies, surrounding a 5,000 pound crystal chandelier, which was loaded with gas burners, until it was electrified in 1900. Legendary singers have performed there from Maria Callas to Enrico Caruso. The world renowned Philadelphia Orchestra spent more than 100 seasons in the academy, until it moved down the […]
EARLY WORD: SUGAR, SUGAR
Phawker headquarters itself in a secure undisclosed location on the mean cobblestoned streets of the O.C. and not a day goes by on the nearby stretch of North Third when we don’t find ourselves accosted, albeit pleasantly so, by a pack of suburban Jersey coeds, dressed to the nines in their best approximation of season four Sex In The City. Usually, they are being skippered by a hip mom in a furry bucket hat and she’s the one that usually asks, “excuse me can you tell me where…” and we always finish their sentences for them: “Let me guess, […]
THANK YOU FOR SMOKING: Angry Torch Wielding Villagers Demand End Of Smoking Ban, Bar & Restaurant Owners Claim Biz Down Nearly 50%
CHICAGO — Orland Park’s restaurants and pubs claim sales have plunged by half because of a two-week-old smoking ban. Now the mayor is considering changes. Dan McLaughlin, responding to a standing-room-only crowd of irate bar owners, wait staff, liquor distributors and residents at this week’s village board meeting, will suggest modifying a ban that has pushed customers to neighboring towns and left local businesses reeling. The pronouncement came after about 100 ban opponents packed village hall Monday. “We’re slighted by this ordinance,” said Brian Wojak, owner of Koppermill Bar and Grill in the south suburb. Wojak said his restaurant’s revenue […]
AMUSE BOUCHE: Means ‘Fun For The Mouth’
BY AMY Z. QUINN This morning, “Good Morning America” featured segments from a sit-down Diane Sawyer did with the U.S. Senate’s so-called “Sweet 16,” or its entire female membership. In case you failed math the way I did, that’s a paltry 16 percent of the Senate’s membership, a fact not even vaguely “sweet.” To make it worse, ABC undercut Sawyer’s entire effort by including the obligatory “Can women senators handle job and work” poll. Still, either I’m getting old, or my sense of what matters is waaay off, because I came away from the piece bothered not so much by […]
ARTSY: Nice Cock!
Eric Fausnacht’s chickens and roosters at Muse Gallery are birds of a different feather. In a way, his paintings and prints that seem to be reproductions of his paintings, make the case for chickens as dandies and grandees. Their plumage is spectacular, at least as Fausnacht paints feathers. And the cockscombs are baroque, looking more like the velvety flower of the same name than like my personal image of a cockscomb. ARTBLOG: Taking Fartsy Out Of Artsy Since At Least 10 Minutes Ago
Why Do We Have To Go To England To Read Joe Queenan’s Definitive Critique Of the Rocky Franchise?
Throughout the saga, Balboa has been lionized by the cowed American press as the champion of working stiffs everywhere, a lovable lummox with a particularly strong psychic connection to blue-collar Philadelphians. Philadelphia, in fact, is a city whose population is roughly 50 per cent African-American, the vast majority of whom are working-class. I cannot recall the last time any film critic went out and asked black residents of the City of Brotherly Love what psychic connection they felt with a fictional thug from a section of a city not widely known for its affection toward minorities. It’s worth noting that […]
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: 9/11 Mysteries
The day after 9/11 we went to the Khyber where an acquaintance assured us over beers that it was an ‘inside job.’ We told him that we were no stranger to conspiracy theories — that the official explanations of assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK are riddled with black holes of impossibility and trapdoors of doubt that lead to the sub-basements of the Dark Side of the American psyche — but to say that our own government had a hand in the wholesale slaughter of thousands of its own citizens is cheap insult to the dead. Now, we’re not so […]
GAYBO: HIPSTERS, TRAMPS AND SLEAZE, MORRISSEY DOES EUROVISION? NO FUMAR y NO ESTACIONAR & THREESOME OF THE WEEK
BY TOMMY ZANE Aging Granddaddy of all hipsters and ambivalent sex-God Morrissey is rumored to have jumped in the race to write and/or perform this year’s U.K. entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, to be held May 12 in Helsinki, Finland. The 52 year-old contest counts ABBA and Olivia Newton-John among its discoveries (the Aussie warbler lost out to the ABBA’s “Waterloo” in the 1974 go-round) but Eurovision is mostly known for its high camp and lousy pop songs with flashy Solid Gold-esque choreography. If Morrissey does indeed sign up to represent the U.K., I can only imagine a domino […]
ARTSY: Grand Dame Of 60s Op-Art Still Hip at 90
BY AMY S. ROSENBERG INQUIRER STAFF WRITER In the ’60s, she was making art that was part of the psychedelic fabric of its day, mind-blowing optical trickery, paintings that vibrated and moved, art that anticipated a digital medium few had imagined. But Edna Andrade was no hippie, no part of the like-wow drug culture that embraced the op art movement of the 1960s. She was middle-aged, living on her own on Carlisle Street in Center City, her architect husband having left her, isolated from the New York or European art scene, no starving waitress thing for her, no East Village […]