BY ALEX POTTER With the new Midnight in Paris enjoying generous commercial and critical success, many critics are looking back on Woody Allen’s career and asking themselves when Allen last executed something so well. Crimes and Misdemeanors, originally released in 1989, appears to be the consensus. Crimes is two stories that have nothing but the theme of adultery and a blind rabbi in common. Martin Landau plays Judah, a successful ophthalmologist, and Allen, the unsuccessful filmmaker, Cliff. Both men have reached breaking points in their marriages. Many people may find that the two narratives, which could stand alone as two […]

Wildwood, NJ, last week by SCOTT COLAN

Here’s longtime friend of Phawker, Philly Mag staff writer and noted author Steve Volk promoting his new book Fringe-Ology on Dylan Ratigan’s show last week. Steve has been working on a long term enterprise reporting project for Phawker that we will be unveiling on August 24th. More on this later, but in the mean time, let’s all bask in the reflected glory of Steve Volk getting Ratigan sorted. You go, Steve-O! [He hates when we call him that] STEVE VOLK: Ratigan is MSNBC’s outspoken moderate, and no, that’s not an oxymoron when it comes to him. He is a Seinfeld-styled […]

[Photo by AL IN PHILADELPHIA] INQUIRER: The economic and social core of the city will be off-limits to minors after 9 p.m. on weekends after Mayor Nutter announced Monday that he was expanding the city’s curfew in response to “flash mobs” of marauding teenagers. The early curfew will apply to anyone under 18 in Center City and University City, where police officers on foot, bike, and horseback will continue to be deployed in force. Nutter also said 20 of the city’s largest recreation centers would be open until 10 Friday and Saturday nights as the city searches for more “long-term, […]

NEW YORK TIMES: The rioting and looting that convulsed poorer sections of London over the weekend spread Monday and early Tuesday to at least eight new districts in the metropolitan area and broke out for the first time in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, in what was developing into the worst outbreak of social unrest in Britain in 25 years. Police officers in riot gear tried to block a road near a burning car in the northern district of Hackney, in London, where rioting continued for a third night. Unrest was also reported by the police in several other cities, including […]

[Illustraton by AVIDOR] NEW YORKER: In 1976, like many other fundamentalist Christians, the Bachmanns supported Jimmy Carter, a born-again Baptist. The Bachmanns attended Carter’s Inauguration, in January, 1977. Later that year, they experienced a second life-altering event: they watched a series of films by the evangelist and theologian Francis Schaeffer called “How Should We Then Live?” Schaeffer, who ran a mission in the Swiss Alps known as L’Abri (“the shelter”), opposed liberal trends in theology. One of the most influential evangelical thinkers of the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, he has been credited with getting a generation of Christians involved in […]

From Ween’s Lollapalooza appearance.

NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Hatfield served in the Senate from 1967 to 1997, spending eight years as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. But he came out against the war even earlier, while serving his second term as governor of Oregon. At a meeting of the National Governors Association on July 28, 1965, as his colleagues rallied behind President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Hatfield said, “I cannot support the president on what he has done so far.” He complained that Mr. Johnson’s escalation of the war had American troops taking over South Vietnam’s responsibility “to win or lose.” Citing “the deaths […]

Donn T, TLA, Saturday night by MEREDITH KLEIBER RELATED: Q&A With Black Joe Lewis

[Illustration by ZINA SAUNDERS] AMERICAN SPECTATOR: Perhaps 50 voters showed up Saturday for a campaign event held in a barn on a dirt road amid cornfields near Roland, about 20 miles north of Ames. While a few dozen voters isn’t much of a crowd by Republican presidential campaign standards, the audience inside the barn was enlarged — and enlivened — by the presence of scores of children, the offspring of several Christian homeschooling families in attendance. One family brought eight kids, another brought nine, and the hosts, Scott and Susan Hurd, have seven of their own, as did the guest […]

[Photo by DEREK BRAD] BY PELLE GUNTHER Last night at the Mann Music Center, fans swooned with the irrational, hormone-driven throws of young love over Ben Gibbard’s Seattle-based, cranium-baby Death Cab for Cutie. Over the last decade, DCFC has filled airwaves, iPods and the occasional CD player with their melancholic but hopeful melodies, endlessly creating beautiful alt-rock songs. Gibbard’s tunes never fail to blast from every girl’s speakers—mine included—from pre-tweens to soccer moms. His soothing vocal texture is made to be wrapped gently around the dulcet chords of an acoustic guitar—but as his audience grows larger (to my distaste), the […]

LEGACY.COM: A short stint with the Spokane City garbage collection squad was followed by a similarly-short hitch, ‘cold-canvassing’ for one of Spokane’s leading predatory roofing and siding contractors. That invaluable vocational experience was followed by six years employment at an industrial transformer manufacturing plant – which failed to lead to tenure, as the company moved its facility to North Carolina to take advantage of a lower-wage environment. In late 1980, Mr. Treecraft joined the Spokane Unitarian Church, whose very active singles group had a surplus of women 10 to 20 years his senior. This was truly a golden era for […]