THIS JUST IN: The Sad & Lonesome Death Of Tritone

FOOBOOZ: The local music scene got a bit of bad news over the weekend when word began trickling out that Tritone, the small music venue/neighborhood bar at 1508 South Street, was set to close. The club debuted in 2001, when current owner Dave Rogers (a veteran of Fergie’s), and his late partner, music promoter and bartender Rick Dombrowolski (who understandably went by “Rick D.”), joined forces. While a bartender at neighboring Bob & Barbara’s, Dombrowolski, who died of a heart attack in 2007, invented what has become known throughout the city as the “Citywide Special,” a can of Pabst and […]

OCCUPY NEWSROOMS: Like Rats On A Sinking Ship

DAVID CARR: If you were looking for bonus excess despite miserable operations, the best recent example I can think of is Gannett, which owns USA Today. The week before the editorial ran, Craig A. Dubow resigned as Gannett’s chief executive. His short six-year tenure was, by most accounts, a disaster. Gannett’s stock price declined to about $10 a share from a high of $75 the day after he took over; the number of employees at Gannett plummeted to 32,000 from about 52,000, resulting in a remarkable diminution in journalistic boots on the ground at the 82 newspapers the company owns. […]

THEATER REVIEW: Lantern Theater Co.’s New Jerusalem

BY BRANDON LAFVING As the name suggests,Lantern Theater Company’s New Jerusalem, The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, transports the audience to a 17th Century trial setting. You might also be able to guess that Spinoza, a rationalist philosopher, is both the protagonist and the defendant. And you may also know how it ends: he will be excommunicated. Sorry if I ruined that for you, but, honestly, a good friend would have done their job and told you. It only makes the play more interesting. Lantern’s rendition of this dramatic David Ives screenplay […]

CONCERT REVIEW: Gillian Welch At Union Transfer

BY PETE MARSHALL This past summer my big brother Tom told me that if there is one show that I absolutely should not miss, it’s Gillian Welch.  “Pay special attention to Gillians’ partner David Rawlings.” Tom says,  “His harmonies are strange and beautiful.” Living on opposite coasts, Tom and I don’t talk a whole lot.  But when we do get the chance, we often talk music.  It’s one thing we usually agree on.  Growing up in central Ohio, just beyond the foothills of Appalachia, I think the love of traditional bluegrass, country and folk music just became part of our […]

BREAKING: Eric Cantor Is A Pussy

[Poster by Inspirato Design] DOWNLOAD: Hi Res Version UPDATE: U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the U.S. House, canceled his scheduled speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business because it was going to be open to the first 300 people who showed up. Given that hundreds of Occupy Philadelphia protesters were planning to march from City Hall to the campus to protest the speech, that could have been lively audience. MORE UPDATE II: Daily Pennsylvanian has posted a transcript of the speech Cantor was to deliver LOS ANGELES TIMES: On Tuesday night’s episode of […]

CINEMA: Philadelphia Film Festival Opening Weekend

BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The Philadelphia Film Festival is celebrating its 20th Anniversary with a festival of over 150 films running through November 3rd. This is the first weekend of the festival and there will be screenings Saturday and Sunday of major new works from The Duplas Brothers, (Jeff, Who Lives at Home with Jason Siegel and Susan Sarandon), the Dardenne Brothers (The Kid with the Bike), David Cronenberg (Viggo Mortensen as Freud in A Dangerous Method), Lar von Trier’s sci-fi apocalypse film Melancholia (with Kirsten Dunst), and Wim Wenders’ new 3-D dance documentary (Pima), plus revivals of the […]

EARLY WORD: The Nightmare Of Ecstacy

ED WOOD’S SLEAZE PAPERBACKS   CURATED BY MICHAEL DALEY AND JOHAN KUGELBERG EXHIBIT OPEN EVERYDAY 11AM-6PM Wed, Nov 2nd to Thu Dec 1st. Boo-Hooray Gallery 265 Canal St, #601, New York, NY 10013 The antiquarian mystique surrounding Edward Davis Wood Jr.’s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is legend. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, books were published and re-published under different titles, and occasionally under different author names. Multiple authors would share the same pseudonym, and the companies that published the titles weren’t the kind of operations that kept any kind of records, nor paid royalties, […]

BREAKING: Iraq War Is Over

NPR: A few minutes ago, President Obama announced that the war in Iraq was over. “After nearly nine years, the long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year,” the president said. President Obama said he talked to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier today and they were both in complete agreement about how to proceed. Obama said that “as promised” by the end of the year all troops will withdraw from the country. He said that this means the relationship between Iraq and the United States will now be a normal one “between […]

Barry Feinstein, Iconic Rock Photographer, Dead At 80

NEW YORK TIMES: Barry Feinstein, a photographer who chronicled the lives of seminal rock ’n’ roll stars of the 1960s, and who was perhaps best known for the stark portrait of Bob Dylan on the cover of the 1964 album “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” died on Thursday in a hospital near his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 80. Besides his work with Mr. Dylan, Mr. Feinstein established his reputation as one of rock’s semiofficial official chroniclers with two 1970 photographs: one of Janis Joplin, taken the day before she died, which appeared on the cover of her final […]

EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Stormtroopers Crush #OccupyMelbourne In Brutal Crackdown

WASHINGTON POST: Riot police in Australia’s second-largest city broke up a demonstration linked to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement Friday, after a group of around 100 people protesting corporate greed defied an order to vacate a plaza. Between 15 and 20 members of the “Occupy Melbourne” group were arrested and around 20 people, including two police officers, suffered minor injuries in the scuffle, Victoria state Police Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana said. Several demonstrators screamed and cried as police dragged and carried them away from the city square, where protesters had been camped out for nearly a week. Around 100 “Occupy” […]

VICE PRESIDENTIAL BLUES: How I Tried To Change National Drug Policy & All I Got Was A Parking Ticket

BY TONY ABRAHAM I usually try to avoid talking about politics altogether and have more or less done so for most of my 21 years on Earth. But every once in a while, a political development will pique my interest. Such was the case when the boss called me up and asked me to cover Vice President Joe Biden’s jobs bill speech at Penn on Tuesday. Turns out Biden was bringing along Gil Kerlikowske, Obama’s director of White House drug policy (formerly known as the Drug Czar, and since he still behaves like one despite the name change, we’re gonna […]