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[Artwork by BEN HEINE] DAN DELUCA: At the Wells Fargo Center, Gaga costumed herself as a nun in a see-through dress in “Love Game.” She was outfitted to appear like a cross between a lampshade and Cousin It in “Monster.” She writhed around on the ground covered in fake blood and screamed “Jesus loves everbody!” She stripped down to her skivvies on multiple occasions, including the gay pride celebration “Boys Boys Boys,” in which she marched down the runway accompanied by a phalanx of similarly scantily clad male dancers.  On “You and I,” a power ballad from her forthcoming album […]

She plays the Electric Factory tonight with Of Montreal.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS: There is something just basically WRONG about the whole interview format. Someone sticks a mike in your face and says, “Mr. Page, would you care to talk about your interest in occult practices? Would you describe yourself as a believer in this sort of thing?” Even an intelligent mike-in-the-face question tends to evoke a guarded mike-in-the-face answer. As soon as Jimmy Page walked into my loft downtown, I saw that it wasn’t going to be that way. We started talking over a cup of tea and found we have friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated […]

HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Philadelphia’s two major newspapers may soon go up for auction again after creditors failed to close on their $139 million purchase by Tuesday’s deadline. An afternoon bankruptcy court hearing was scheduled to discuss the status of the company that operates The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. “The deal did not close. The asset purchase agreement has expired,” company lawyer Larry McMichael told The Associated Press after the noon deadline. “Exactly what’s going to happen is still up in the air.” The company nonetheless has enough money to fund normal operations and continue publishing the newspapers until a […]

[Photo by BILL HEBERT] BY DAVE ALLEN Spending 10 waking hours in the same space is nothing; to me, it’s a Saturday night bartending shift. A ten-hour long concert, though, was a new experience for me and, thanks to the New York-based composer-performer collective Bang on a Can and their first-ever Philadelphia Marathon, held Sunday at World Café Life, not one I’ll soon forget. The day belonged to groove – percussion-driven ones in particular – but the most thrilling moments came when steady beats skipped and patterns were thrown for a loop. Throughout the day, the moment everything threatened to […]

WASHINGTON POST: For his second annual back-to-school speech, President Obama chose as his backdrop an elite, selective public school in this city that is a far cry from the turnaround-success stories his administration is seeking to promote. Obama, in a Tuesday afternoon speech, urged the nation’s students to “dream big” and “stay focused” on education in an address that aides described as a nonpolitical event. But students at Philadelphia’s Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School probably are already heeding that advice. The school, with about 1,200 students from grades 5 through 12, draws the city’s academic cream through competitive […]

BY MATTHEW HENGEVELD Album of the Year, Black Milk’s fourth full-length solo album, is the much-anticipated follow-up to 2008’s acclaimed Tronic. With Tronic we saw a matured Black Milk, who sought to experiment with his sound. This resulted in a plastic-sounding album shot through with whirling electronics and squiggling synths. I applauded that shit— it sounded new, ambitious and weird, but it never escaped the realms of Detroit. That ambition hasn’t left Black Milk. Album of the Year features some of the most oddball and inventive beats ever to come from Detroit. I’ll start with the most obvious improvement: Drums. […]

Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, co-editors of The Exile, a subversive English-language newspaper based in Moscow, whose decadelong run came to an abrupt end in 2008. Inset: A Boris Yeltsin cover accompanied by a typical Exile headline. By Martin von den Driesch (Taibbi and Ames) VANITY FAIR: Chronic contempt may have been a sane take on turn-of-the-millennium Moscow, but in life, generally, it’s an unsustainable one, and eventually, inevitably, Ames and Taibbi came to hate each other. Oddly, the Wines incident seemed to mark the apex of their volatile collaboration and the beginning of its decline. By that point the […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author [pictured above right] is in the midst of  a two year hitch in the Peace Corps doing health counseling in rural Paraguay.  BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH The thing that surprised me most was how long it took for it to die. The squealing had already started when I got there. Teofilo had collared his 4-month-old-pig with an old piece of cord, and was in the process of pinioning it to the ground with Ramon, my floppy-haired, 19-year-old neighbor. He probably would have kept if for longer, but it has started eating his chickens’ broods, and really, […]

INQUIRER: The sale of The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News seemed on the verge of collapse Monday, with the prospective new owner reporting no progress in reaching an accord with the company’s drivers over their pension benefits. The new owner, Philadelphia Media Network Inc., has a noon Tuesday deadline to close on its purchase of the newspapers and the website Philly.com. The deadline was imposed by Chief Bankruptcy Judge Stephen Raslavich, who has overseen the company’s bankruptcy case. Without a contract agreement with the drivers, there will be no sale, according to Gregory Osberg, chief executive officer of Philadelphia […]

Bubba & Blair, National Constitution Center, 2:45 PM by JEFF FUSCO