VANITY FAIR: Millions of Americans hoped President Obama would nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the consumer financial watchdog agency she had created. Instead, she was pushed aside. As Warren kicks off her run for Scott Brown’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, Suzanna Andrews charts the Harvard professor’s emergence as a champion of the beleaguered middle class, and her fight against a powerful alliance of bankers, lobbyists, and politicians. MORE RELATED: When the C.F.P.B. was first proposed to Congress, in early 2009, the Chamber of Commerce, the leading business lobbying group in the country, announced that it would “spend whatever it takes” […]
#OCCUPY PHILLY: Corporate Media Still Sucks
NBC PHILADELPHIA: The folks outside City Hall protesting corporate greed and political systems that support it could actually be costing taxpayers thousands. The Occupy Philadelphia demonstration against corporate influence on politics has a growing cost to the city. In the first five days since Occupy Philly began last week the Philadelphia Police Department spent $164,000 in overtime costs and $237,000 in regular time, according to Mayor Michael Nutter’s Press Office. The protests use about $80,000 total in police costs daily — of which about $33,000 a day is being paid towards police overtime. MORE MYFOXPHILLY: The section of City Hall taken over by the […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Langhorne Slim Tonite!
Time is short so let’s just cut to the chase. You know you want ’em, we know we got ’em. Let’s do this thing. First three readers to email us at FEED@PHAWKER with FOGHORN LANGHORNE in the subject line win a pair of tickets to see Langhorne Slim tonight at Union Transfer. Good luck and godspeed! RELATED: Langhorne Slim is an American singer-songwriter, (born Sean Scolnick on August 20, 1980 in Langhorne, Pennsylvania). Scolnick attended high school at Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College, part of the SUNY system. MORE […]
CONCERT REVIEW: tUnE-yArDs @ uNiOn tRaNsFer
[Photo by JUSTIN BANK via YOUTELLCONCERTS.COM] BY MIKE WALSH MUSIC CRITIC The first time I heard a tUnE-yArDs song, I wondered how Merrill Garbus, the singer and songwriter who essentially is the band, could perform such a unique style in a live setting. With the many layers of her voice and sounds on her CD whokill, I assumed she’d need a large band with backing singers to pull it off. But I was wrong about that, as I discovered on Sunday night at Union Transfer. Garbus uses live looping techniques so expertly, she made her and her bass player sound […]
#OCCUPYPHILLY: Home Of The Brave
[Photo by MEREDITH KLEIBER] BY ALEXANDER POTTER “This is what democracy looks like!” was the collective cry Saturday afternoon as hundreds of people marched from Dilworth Plaza at City Hall to Independence Hall and back. Mayor Michael Nutter had met with many Occupiers the day before to express support, remind everyone to remain peaceful and, let’s face it, score political points. Although they were extremely loud and disruptive, drawing shop clerks out of their stores and onto Market Street, picking up stragglers and passersby on the sidewalks as they went along, they obeyed Nutter’s only wish and made their point […]
HENRY ROLLINS TO #OCCUPYPHILLY: ‘Obama Dropped The Ball And The People Picked It Up’
Ex-Black Flag human cannonball/author/publisher/lifter-of-weights/caller-of-bullshit Henry Rollins was promoting his new book Occupants at Repo Records last night and offered strong words of encouragement for #OccupyPhilly. RELATED: That Henry Rollins, the burly, tattooed ballistic behind Black Flag, has attempted to distill a decade worth of experiences wandering through the worst parts of the developing world into a photo-heavy coffee table book doesn’t undermine his rebel credibility as much as the new book’s contents, which show that, in extremis, the aging punk is less than extreme. Occupants is collection of disconcertingly concrete images paired with impressionistic passages of writing in which Rollins […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
RADIO TIMES Where do convicted sex offenders live after they’re paroled? Laws vary within the United States and the states themselves, and Miami-Dade County made news the last several years as its ordinance banned registered sex offenders at least 2,500 feet from children, pre-empting the Florida law of 1,000 feet. In 2007 news of paroled offenders making a temporary home without heat and indoor plumbing under the infamous Julia Tuttle Causeway started making headlines. This squalid colony has since been disbanded, leaving many of the former residents homeless and in legal limbo. Novelist RUSSELL BANKS, who lives part-time in Miami, […]
EARLY WORD: Dylanology
KELLY WRITER’S HOUSE: Nine Dylanists each talk about – and briefly play – one favorite Dylan song. It’s Thursday, October 20, at 6 PM, to help celebrate Dylan’s 70th birthday. We’ve got quite a line-up. Cecilia Corrigan on “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat”; Anthony DeCurtis on “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”; Greg Djanikian on “Señor”; Al Filreis on “Series of Dreams”; John Giannotti on “Bob Dylan’s Dream”; Jessy Ginsberg on “Up to Me”; Alan Light on “Where Are You Tonight”; Ralph Rosen on “Idiot Wind”; Nina Wolpow on “Don’t Think Twice.” And Jessy Pepi Ginsberg will perform her […]
WORTH REPEATING: ‘Chart That’ll Get Obama Fired’
(Pam Tobey/Washington Post) EZRA KLEIN: I worry that some of you missed Sunday’s mammoth exploration of whether the economy could have been in a substantially different place today. If that’s the case, read it. As an enticement, here’s the graph from the piece, which updates the chart that the administration released as part of its sales job for the stimulus. Henry Blodget of Business Insider calls it “the chart that will get Obama fired.” MORE
NIGHT OF THE LONG BATONS: Cops Move On #OccupyBoston, #OccupyDallas & #OccupySeattle
Reports are coming in that the Boston Police Department — wielding night sticks and not afraid to use them — has arrested 100 protesters at #OccupyBoston and torn down and carted away one of the encampments. #OccupyBoston’s official media team Tweeted it live. You can follow it HERE. ASSOCIATED PRESS: Boston police have arrested more than 50 protesters from the Occupy Boston movement after they ignored warnings to move from a site near their official encampment. Police spokesman Jamie Kenneally said the arrests began about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday and were mostly for trespassing. The protesters, part of the national Occupy […]
KILLADELPHIA: Is The Police Department Cooking The Books On The City’s Annual Murder Rate?
[Photo via multi.lectical.net] GOP mayoral candidate Karen Brown made a startling accusation today on Radio Times, claiming the murder rate is in fact much higher than the figures cited by Mayor Nutter. Seizing on Nutter’s remarks during his inauguration that if he did not reduce the murder rate by at least 30% he should not be re-elected (in fact, he did call for a reduction of the murder rate by 30% to 50% in the next three to five years, but never said he shouldn’t be re-elected if he doesn’t) Brown claims that the Philadelphia Police Department has been using […]
ARTSY: The Architecture Of Madness
Asylum: Inside The World Of Closed State Mental Hosptials, a photographic exhibition of some of America’s most infamous mental health institutions, will haunt Drexel’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery through October 29th. Photographer Christopher Payne’s outsized pictures, some of which have been blown up to be over a meter tall, pull back the curtain on the forbidding and largely hidden world of what used to be called ‘insane asylums.’ Still, appearances can be deceiving. “Once I got inside, they really weren’t that creepy,” Payne told Phawker. Once inside, Payne, who has a masters’ degree in architecture, explores the everyday use of rooms, […]
CLASS WARFARE: The Rich Don’t Get Parking Tickets
They just sit in the back of their limousines passing the Grey Poupon back and forth. No, the people who get parking tickets are the people that can least afford it — the poor and the working class. As such, we think it’s an unfair, onerous and regressive tax on the proverbial ‘little guy‘ — and as the Founding Fathers were fond of saying: Taxation without representation is tyranny! And what do we get for it? Best we can tell, an ever-growing fleet of shiny new PPA vehicles and money to fix up the city’s dilapidated school infrastructure a fancy […]