CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: The Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik writes in a manifesto that he acquired some 8,000 e-mail addresses of “cultural conservatives” not just across Europe but North America, Australia, South Africa, Armenia, Israel, and India – ensuring scrutiny of anti-Muslim groups far beyond Europe. Mr. Breivik’s primary goal is to remove Muslims from Europe. But his manifesto invites the possibility for cooperation with Jewish groups in Israel, Buddhists in China, and Hindu nationalist groups in India to contain Islam. “It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as […]
CONCERT REVIEW: WXPN’s XPoNential Festival
[Photos by MEREDITH KLEIBER] BY MEREDITH KLEIBER Yes, the heat was nearly unbearable. Yes, we were all sweating until Rorshach patterns formed on our clothes. But the 2011 XPoNential Music Festival was more than worth it. Having hosted music festivals for the past eighteen years, WXPN has certainly honed their ability to please their festival-goers. There were misting stations posted around the park so that their event didn’t end up like the Warped Tour’s Camden stop. If your preferred cool-down method was in the form of an ice-cold beer, there was plenty of reasonably priced local Flying Fish to go around. […]
HEATASTROPHE:Common Sense Is The First Casualty
INQUIRER: Police say a Southwest Philadelphia man found one way to beat the heat over the weekend – he stole his next-door neighbor’s air conditioner. […] Police could not say what the temperature was in the district holding cell where Kershaw and his accomplice, Roy Nelson, 50, spent the night, both charged with burglary for the attempted air conditioner heist. MORE RELATED: The longest and most-intense heat wave of the season has claimed at least six lives in Philadelphia, the Health Department said this morning. The bodies of four men and two women were found Saturday, and their deaths were […]
PLUTOCRACY NOW: A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
FRESH AIR: Republican legislators picked up 680 seats in state House and Senate chambers in the 2010 elections. “They now hold more state legislative seats than at any time since 1928, the year that Herbert Hoover came to the presidency,” says reporter John Nichols. “They control 25 states [with] both houses of the legislature. There are also 21 states where Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. And in the backroom of politics, that’s what people really want. If you’ve got governor, state House and state Senate, you can pretty much roll through whatever legislation you want.” […]
Amy Winehouse, Lady Who Sang The Blues, Dead At 27
NEW YORK TIMES: With a husky, tart voice and a style that drew equally from the sounds of Motown and the stark storytelling of rap, Ms. Winehouse became one of the most acclaimed young singers of the past decade, selling millions of albums, winning five Grammy Awards and starting a British retro-R&B trend that continues today. Yet, almost from the moment she arrived on the international pop scene in early 2007, Ms. Winehouse appeared to flirt with self-destruction. She sang of an alcohol-soaked demimonde in songs like “Rehab” — whose refrain, “They tried to make me go to rehab/I said, […]
HELTER SKELTER: A One Man 9/11 In Reverse
REUTERS: Police said they were seeking several missing people and the toll could rise to 98, in the worst case. Breivik hated “cultural marxists,” wanted a “crusade” against the spread of Islam and liked guns and weightlifting, web postings, acquaintances and officials said. A video posted to the YouTube website showed several pictures of Breivik, including one of him in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon. “Before we can start our crusade we must do our duty by decimating cultural marxism,” said a caption under the video called “Knights Templar 2083” on the YouTube website, […]
SIDEWALKING: This Wheel’s On Fire
Ocean City 9 PM last night by JEFF FUSCO
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: The Abortion Of Justice
[Illustration by IMJUST80] BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” is one thing — not guilty “because I didn’t actually see it happen” is an entirely different matter. More on that later. First, a little background. Why do we seem to be more interested in seating ignorant, uninformed, malleable juries, than in arriving at reasoned, rational verdicts. Why does our criminal justice system place such a premium on seating jurors who know little or nothing about what’s taking place in the world around them? Why does a system that claims to place “fairness” and “equality” on such a […]
CINEMA: Meat The Press
TABLOID (2010, directed by Errol Morris, 88 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Documentary master Errol Morris’ last couple features were such dark tales that the timing seems right for the good-natured naughtiness of his new film, Tabloid. The still-evolving scandal around Rupert Murdoch and the News of the World threatens to give this film a contemporary resonance but no, Tabloid‘s tale of true love gone criminally awry doesn’t reflect on the the doings of the rabid press. Instead, Morris uses his all-powerful Interrotron to examine Joyce McKinney, the one-time sex pot at the center of the 1977 sex […]
EARLY WORD: The Pot Republic
Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE. FRONTLINE’s primetime monthly newsmagazine returns with three new stories, leading with a timely report from the frontlines of marijuana legalization in California. The bulk of the marijuana consumed in the United States used to come across the border from Mexico, Canada and elsewhere. Now, more than half of it is believed to be home grown in California, where an enormous black market has emerged under the cover of the state’s medical marijuana law. With more than a third of all states now experimenting with some form of legalization and decriminalization — and several […]
RIP: Lucian Freud, Searing Portraitist, Dead At 88
[“Francis Bacon” by LUCIAN FREUD] NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art. In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. […]
EARLY WORD: XpoNentialFestivalidocious
[Photo by DAVID SIMCHOCK] BY MEREDITH KLEIBER The only thing that promises to be more scorching than the weather for the 18th annual XPoNential Music Festival this weekend is the music being played there. WXPN, University of Pennsylvania’s public radio station and home to the beloved World Cafe, will be hosting the three-day festival for a seventh consecutive year at Camden’s Wiggins Park. Festival-goers will enjoy panoramic views of the Philly skyline, particularly breathtaking at sunset, while dancing to musical acts performing on the River Stage. In between River Stage sets, lay your blanket out on the lush grass and […]
SIDEWALKING: Hot Town Summer In The City 2
Cambria Street 11:44 AM yesterday by JEFF FUSCO