Richard Lloyd & The Sufi-Monkey Trio play Johnny Brenda’s TONIGHT! BY ED KING I owe the Philadelphia Free Library (Cottman Avenue branch, to be exact) an apology. And some money. I used to transfer SEPTA buses to and from school at that spot. There was a pretty cool record store next to the library with punk and new wave records. A couple days a week I’d stop in the store and marvel at the records, posters, and buttons. It was at this store I’d buy the latest copy of Trouser Press, which was tapping me into a way out of […]
SECOND AMENDMENT: The Right To Bear Harms?
NEW YORK TIMES: Where were their parents? That was the thought I couldn’t shake ten years ago as news broke from Littleton, Colo., and all cameras were aimed at Columbine High School. It was my first national tragedy as a parent, and my perspective took me by surprise. A few years earlier I would have put myself in the shoes of the terrified students, huddled in classrooms, hiding under tables in the library. But on April 20, 1999, I felt for the parents. Racing toward the school building, stopped by police tape and SWAT teams, learning their kids were safe […]
TORTURE MEMO: Prisoner Waterboarded 183 Times
NEW YORK TIMES: Waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, was used by C.I.A. interrogators 183 times on one prisoner from Al Qaeda and 83 times on another, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and efficacy of interrogation methods that the Bush administration Justice Department declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture. A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, had told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 […]
RIP: Author J.G. Ballard Dead At 78
THE GUARDIAN: The novelist JG Ballard, who conjured up a bleak vision of modern life in a series of powerful novels and short stories published over more than 50 years, has died after a long battle with cancer. MORE THE TIMES ONLINE: Pinteresque, Dickensian, Shakespearean. Not many writers are so distinctive and influential that their name becomes an adjective in its own right. J.G. Ballard, who died yesterday morning after a long battle with cancer at the age of 78, was one of them. “Ballardian” is defined in the Collins English Dictionary as: “adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (born […]
CONCERT REVIEW: The Felice Brothers @ The Troc
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Impersonating The Band hasn’t been a decently-paying gig since Scorsese filmed The Last Waltz in 1976, but judging by the full-up crowd at the Trocadero Thursday night The Felice Brothers seem to be on their way. Actually, ‘impersonating’ sounds a little too dismissive and I like these guys, so let’s go with ‘evoking’ or ‘carrying on the old, weird Americana tradition’ of the Band instead. Besides, they have the pedigree (hail from upstate New York, sons of a carpenter) they’ve paid their dues (busked in the subways of New York; went acoustic at the […]
BOOKS: Joe Queenan, Maximum Q&A
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Oscar Wilde famously postulated that all of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Writer Joe Queenan wasn’t born in the gutter — actually it was somewhere near the false bottom of the Irish Catholic working class of Philadelphia circa 1950 — but you could see it from there. His father was a study in boozy failure and casual brutality whose self-inflicted setbacks would drag the family Queenan — Joe, three suffering sisters and an emotionally-remote, enabling mother — down to the ranks of the lower class for a four-year […]
ONE MILLION TWITS CAN’T BE WRONG: Can They?
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Ashton Kutcher has beaten off rivals to be the first member of the twitterati to secure one million followers. The 31-year-old actor had been in a race with news network CNN to be the first ‘twitterer’ to reach the milestone. And shortly before midnight Thursday he achieved his goal. MORE CNN: As of Wednesday afternoon, Kutcher’s Twitter account had 896,947 followers, putting him in third place in the number of followers. Britney Spears was in second with about 905,640 followers, and CNN’s breaking news account was watched by 937,787 people on the site. No single Twitter account has […]
CINEMA: Triple Play!
STATE OF PLAY (2009, directed by Kevin McDonald, 127 minutes, U.S.) IN A DREAM (2008, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, 80 minutes, U.S.) AMARCORD (1973, directed by Federico Fellini, 127 minutes, Italy) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Russell Crowe is the gladiator of the fictional Washington Globe in State of Play, a new thriller based on the BBC miniseries of the same name. From the bustling newsroom we glide through in the film’s opening to the montage of headlines going to press at the close, this unimaginative yet sturdy whodunit seems almost quaint in the face of the collapse of print […]
EXORCISM: Obama Releases More CIA Torture Memos
GUARDIAN: In the first of the memos, dated 1 August 2002, the justice department gave the go-ahead to John Rizzo, then acting general counsel to the CIA, for operatives to move to the “increased pressure phase” in interrogating an al-Qaida suspect. Ten techniques are approved, listed as: attention grasp, walling (in which the suspect could be pushed into a wall), a facial hold, a facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box (the suspect had a fear of insects) and the waterboard. In the latter, “the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, […]
GAYDAR: Dumpsta Players’ Under The Sea
BY AARON STELLA It was bizarro prom night last night at Bob and Barbara’s, when the Dumpsta Players, those madcap mavericks of bar-based drag theater, put on Prom-Trash: Under the Sea. Instead of their unusual brand of kitschy melodrama, which traditionally consists of skits and lip-syncing that parody the current zeitgeist, contestants battled for the title of trashiest prom-queen of 2009—with a little song and dance, courtesy of the DPs, on the side. This year, prospective contestants were encouraged to fashion their starlet alter ego with the sea in mind. Hence, the lineup of decadent divas included such personae like […]
City Council Outlaws Driving-While-Cellphoning
INQUIRER: City Council voted 17-0 this morning to ban using handheld cell phones while driving. Handheld use is also outlawed for skateboarders, bicyclists, in-line skaters and scooter riders. City Councilman Bill Green, Councilmen William K. Greenlee and Frank Rizzo were behind the measure, and Mayor Nutter is expected to sign it. Enforcement would begin immediately. MORE
PAPERBOY: Slow Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
I TWITTER, THEREFORE I AM: Meet Jeff Tweeney
Hey folks, Jeff Deeney here to let you know how this new Twitter project we’re rolling out will work. From now until Philadelphia no longer needs me for cannon fodder in the trenches of the War On Poverty, I will be posting the little overheard snippets of unintentional brilliance and frequently unhinged insanity that comprise the background noise of my work day. Think of it as Today I Saw for the ADD set; I will bring you the streets in 140 characters or less. All dialogue 100% overheard. You’re already a couple days behind, so start following the Phawker […]