BY ELIZABETH FIEND When dragonflies head south, they like to ride the tailwinds generated by cold fronts. But when they go north, they prefer to buzz home on warm winds. We know this because scientists attached radio transmitters to the insects along with a single-wire antenna, powered by a super-tiny battery, running down the length of their abdomen. Video may have killed the radio star at the tail end of the 20th Century, but radio is back, big time in the 21st. Radio Frequency Identification tags and chips are here. RFID, as it’s called, is an identification system that allows […]
GAYBO: Zane Insane For 2007! Sal’s On 12th Goes Way Gay! Dreamgirls Is Gay All Day! Hooray For Gay!
BY TOMMY ZANE Weeks have just flown by and I’ve been oh, so silent. But that just means more chat to share with you, my pets! Ah, The Holidaze — finally over. Yeesh. No hospitalizations or friendships ended in a fury of expletives, thank Goddess. After listening to James Brown for nearly two hours, New Years Eve I was wasted on champagne and vodka — a deadly combination. Frolicking in a makeshift Stevie Nicks-style skirt, spinning in circles to the sounds of Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” nearly made me barf. Other New Year’s hotspots: Robert Drake and company held court at […]
NOW PLAYING: At The Philadelphia Museum Of Art
A few moments later, the doors opened, and visitors began to pour in – a woman with a cane, a woman in a wheelchair, a man with a cane, a young man with an earring, a mother with toddler – all focused intently on the huge painting. This was the moment, the culmination of an intense campaign to raise a record amount of money to keep this iconic painting in the city. There were so many people crowding in and pointing and looking that the gallery and the crowded hall outside were enveloped with a blockbuster aura. Hundreds streamed by […]
COMMENT: Bloggerati Killed The Alt-Weekly Rock Stars
Our hugumbus YEAR IN MUSIC Omnibus is about to drop, but while we’re finishing up polishing this turd, chew on this from our pal JOE WARMINSKY in WASHINGTON CITY PAPER: Don?t get me wrong?I fully embrace what the blogosphere does provide. It’s essentially a broad, asymmetric rebellion against the SoundScan regime and the stodgy business plans of the major record labels. Blogs offer what good fanzines used to offer: stylistic detours, obsessive detail, contrarian viewpoints, and a secondary economy that allows overlooked musicians to flourish, at least on a small scale. There isn?t much money in it, and it’s mostly […]
SHADES OF JACK AND THE BEANSTALK: You Mean $68 Million Clams Coulda Bought All This Stuff Instead?
FROM ATTYTOOD: 68,000,000: Dollars that could hire 170 new Philadelphia police officers for five years, or 850 officers for one year, based on official estimates of $80,000 a cop for salary, benefits and training. 68,000,000: Dollars that could almost completely close the current yawning budget gap currently faced by the Philadelphia School District, estimated now at $73.3 million. The gap has led to a series of painful cutbacks, such as the elimination of 175 administrative jobs. 68,000,000: Dollars that could hire roughly 124 new social workers for 10 years in city’s Department of Human Services (based on average city salary […]
Junk Science: THE SELLING of SICKNESS
ELIZABETH FIEND REPORTS: Pharmaceutical corporations hire PR firms to sell disease like they do sneakers. “Just do it” becomes “just take it” — the little purple pill, that is. Do you have a going problem, or is it a growing problem? One pill (Viagra) makes you larger and one pill (Avodart) makes you small. But the question remains, do they do anything at all? Go ask Alice. Alice went to sleep one night feeling perfectly fine. The next day she woke up to learn she had high blood pressure! Absolutely nothing about her changed, her numbers were exactly the same. […]
It Was 50 Years Ago Today, Allen Ginsberg Taught The Sheep To Stray, He’s Been Going In And Out Of Style But He’s Guaranteed To Raise A SMILE
THE BEAT PAGE: Howl CITY LIGHTS: 50 Years Ago They Wanted To Send Bookstore Owners To Jail On Obscenity Charges For Selling A Book We Now Celebrate On Public Radio, It’s Called Progress RADIO TIMES: We celebrate the 50th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” We talk with ANNE WALDMAN, a friend and colleague of Allen Ginsberg and JASON SHINDER editor of “The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later.”
THE BLOGS ARE COMING, THE BLOGS ARE COMING, RUN! Media Criticism Doesn’t HAVE To Be This Clueless
Or compromised. Unless your name is Ted Beitchman, and you are still — STILL, after four years — trying to punch a hole in the Philly mediascape with that glossy money-pit/inept score-settler/high-priced coupon flyer known as REALPHILLY — and getting about as far as a renegade spermatazoan trying to break on thru a Trojan Extra Thick. Hat tip to reader Philly Guy for the heads up. He reads it so we don’t have to. But check this sad swing at wannabe 215 Murdoch-ism. We just happen to speak Beitchman, so let us translate: Pay no mind to that moonbat slander […]
TRIBUTE: Nobody Will Love You Like Robert Altman Loved You
BY DAN BUSKIRK Last year I was teaching a summer film appreciation class to a bunch of middle-schoolers. You know what it\’s like if you?’re trying to pick out a film for any group, it’s impossible to come up with anything that somebody in the crowd isn’t going to roll their eyes at, but I’ve been doing this for a few years and I’ve come up with a batch of movies that really seem to work with kids. Still, I always want to try out something I haven’t shown before so last summer I decided to try out Robert Altman’s […]
There Ain’t No Starving Artists In The Afterlife: JEFF SELLS EAKINS PAINTING TO WAL-MART FOR $68 MILLION CLAMS; Natives Grow Restless And Unimpressed, Say Deal Shoulda Been Done With Legal Tender, Not Shellfish
At least twice in the 1970s and 1980s, deep-pocketed buyers came knocking on the doors of Thomas Jefferson University seeking to purchase Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic. On both occasions, administrators consulted the alumni organization – which gave the world-renowned painting to the medical school in 1878 – about what to do. And in both cases, the alumni said no to millions of dollars, according to several members of the university community. Absolutely not. No sale. The painting, a monumental portrayal of renowned Jefferson surgeon Samuel D. Gross demonstrating a bloody leg operation, is considered inextricably bound to the university […]
EARLY WORD: A Festival Grows In Old City
Festival-goers will begin their Old City experience at the newly renovated F.U.E.L. Collection, formerly The Real World House, located at the corner of 3rd and Arch Streets, where businesses will provide a sneak peak of their services. There, they’ll pick up a map which will have a schedule of events going on throughout the neighborhood. There will also be performances by the School of Rock, information about Old City businesses, and free gift bags for Festival goers. About Cities and Towns: Old City Fall Festival Details Old City District: More
Dead Flowers: Syd, Arthur & The Acid-Minded Professor
Chalk it up to karmic coincidence that the deaths of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Love’s Arthur Lee—two of ’60s psychedelia’s most beloved and drug-damaged souls—should bookend the recent publication of Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: A Biography. Though Leary has been dead 10 years, Greenfield wakes his trippy ghost and, à la A Christmas Carol, forces it to confront the damning facts of his past: his reckless acid-for-all advocacy (Leary never really bothered to point out that, um, maybe children and the mentally unstable should not take LSD); his snake-oil charm and countercultural carpetbagging (from stoner Harvard prof to gun-toting […]