DAILY NEWS: WHEN THE KING of ultraviolent wrestling suffered severed arteries during a match, he wanted to keep fighting while blood shot from his armpit like a small geyser. “Just wrap it,” Nick “F’n” Gage told the people screaming “Call 9-1-1.” Gage [pictured, above right, smashing fluorescent light bulb over back of his opponent], a berserker whose brutal brand of wrestling has made him a legend in the Philadelphia-based Combat Zone Wrestling, has been set on fire, hit with chairs, tables and worse, and has seen his blood spilled all around the world. The only thing that could stop Gage […]
SPORTO: After The Fall
[Photo by pimpdisclosure] BY MIKE WOLVERTON SPORTS GUY You can’t say the Eagles deserved to win that game. You can certainly say they had chances to win. I thought the best chance was the short pass to DeSean Jackson on the opening play of the final drive. He’s magic, I really thought he might go all the way. And if Desmond Bishop hadn’t caught him by the shoestrings, he just might have taken it to the house instead of just 29 yards. Then four plays later it was all over. Did the Eagles shoot themselves in the foot? Would anyone […]
KITCHEN BITCH: The Savoy Truffle
[Photo by bewarenerd] BY MAVIS LINNEMANN When Doug announced to me that Treasure Island, a local high-end grocery store, was selling a limited number of black truffles —the diamonds of the culinary world—I couldn’t get the idea of buying one out of my head. Truffles are tuber-like fungi (think mushroom) that grow underground on the roots of particular oak trees in Italy, France, Spain, and in some other areas of Europe. Because truffles can’t be seen, specially trained truffle dogs and pigs hunt them out for farmers during the truffle’s very short growing season, which lasts from early December through […]
TOMBSTONE BLUES: The End Of Palinism?
NEW YORKER: For the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. Instead of “soft on defense,” one routinely hears the words “treason” and “traitor.” The President isn’t a big-government liberal—he’s a socialist who wants to impose tyranny. He’s also, according to a minority of Republicans, including elected officials, an impostor. Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Alan Lomax spent more than a half-century recording folk music and customs around the world, and now he is the subject of a new book by John Szwed called Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. In 1990, Lomax, who died in 2002, spoke to Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross about the decades he spent compiling sound recordings from around the world. In the 1930s and ’40s, Lomax and his father, John, were the first folklorists to travel around the American South documenting songs on portable recording machines. They both contributed thousands of field recordings to the Library […]
ARTSY: Pleased To Meat Me
BY CAROLINE SCHMIDT Photographer Dominic Episcopo’s latest show, “Meat America,” opens tonight at Bambi Gallery. Episcopo—who leads a double life as a well-respected commercial photographer—has taken pounds upon pounds of raw meat, and carved it into a bracing series of photographs depicting the carnivorous cultural landscape of America. Out of rib eye steaks, pork chops, lamb and gator—even caribou—he has butchered and sculpted the shapes of all 50 states, along with cultural icons and historical figures: from Benjamin Franklin to Bob Dylan, from Betsy Ross to Elvis. Out of ground beef he has made a series of photographed still lifes […]
CINEMA: Romeo Void
DAVID EDELSTEIN: Gone are the days when filmmakers kept a respectful distance from their characters. In Blue Valentine, writer and director Derek Cianfrance is obsessive in how he uses the hand-held camera to get in his actors’ faces. Yet there’s something in those faces to see — something momentous, angry, desperate, unmanageable. The film is a rough ride with the shock absorbers removed. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a married couple, Dean and Cindy, with a little daughter named Frankie. Dean paints houses and Cindy is a nurse. The movie’s opening is as ominous as any horror film. The […]
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 […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Man Who Knew Too Much
[Illustration by Abode of Chaos] VANITY FAIR: The partnership between The Guardian and WikiLeaks brought together two desperately ambitious organizations that happen to be diametric opposites in their approach to reporting the news. One of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards, joined up with one of the newest in a breed of online muckrakers, with no standards at all except fealty to an ideal of “transparency”—that is, dumping raw material into the public square for people to pick over as they will. It is very likely that neither Alan Rusbridger nor Julian Assange fully […]
EARLY WORD: Father, Son & Holy Ghost
JOHNNY BRENDAS: On their debut album, Acoustic Sessions, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger (Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl) show their love of quirky and whimsical ’60s folk pop, reminiscent at times of Syd Barrett, Incredible String Band and Simon & Garfunkel. Though stripped-down to spotlight their idiom juggling and intriguing wordplay, the sparse arrangements are adventurous and playful, anchored by the beautiful blend of Sean and Charlotte’s voices, acoustic guitar and a smattering of other instruments – a vibraphone here, a banjo there. TGOASTT weaves narratives around a metaphysical geography of their own devising, finding a surrealist […]
TOUGH LOVE: Uncle Beats Nephew With A Belt For Gang-Banging, Makes Him Post Video Online
WARNING: Strong language, controversial parenting techniques.
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR After working together on Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, actor Mark Wahlberg and director David O. Russell collaborated for the third time on their new film The Fighter, based on the true story of the Massachusetts boxer “Irish” Micky Ward. Ward, best known for his three fights against Arturo Gatti, won the Light Welterweight Championship in 2000, when his older half-brother, Dicky, convinced him to re-enter the ring after several years on hiatus. Dicky, portrayed by Christian Bale in the film, was a former pro boxer whose career ended after he became addicted to crack cocaine. Wahlberg […]
The Sad, Strange Final Hours Of John P. Wheeler III
INQUIRER: As more becomes publicly known of the final days and hours of John P. Wheeler 3d, an image is emerging of a man coming unglued. Less than 48 hours before the respected former Pentagon aide turned up dead last week in a Delaware landfill, Wheeler limped into a Wilmington parking garage. Coatless and confused, one of his shoes in hand, he bizarrely inquired about the location of his car, then declined offers of help, witnesses said. A day later, police said Wednesday, surveillance video captured Wheeler in downtown Wilmington again – this time looking “confused” inside the Nemours Building […]