STILL WALKING (2008, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, 114 minutes, Japan) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Holed up at the end of the night in his parents guestroom, forty-ish Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) tries unsuccessfully to wheedle a secret out of his wife Yukari (Yui Natsukawa). Giving up he tells her, “Women are scary”. “”People are scary, she corrects, “All people.” The most seemingly benign folks can be scary, especially when you’re related to them. In what appears to be his most conventional film yet Japanese minimalist Hirokazu Koreeda (director of Afterlife and Nobody Knows), the lionized modern master bring his acclaimed […]
COOKIE MONSTER: Theme From Shaft
[H/t to Camille]
NEW WORLD ORDER: Welcome To Pittsburgh
[Photo by CORY.COUSINS] REUTERS: The Group of 20 is set to become the premier coordinating body on global economic issues, reflecting a new world economic order in which emerging market countries like China are much more relevant, according to a draft communique. Leaders of the G20 developed and developing nations also agreed to make the International Monetary Fund more representative by increasing the voting power of countries that have long been under-represented in the world financial body, said the draft G20 communique obtained by Reuters. MORE TIME: The anarchist march had started at 2:30 p.m. in a park in the […]
Q&A: With Sonny Rollins, Living Legend Of Jazz
BY DAN BUSKIRK It seems slightly improbable that Sonny Rollins would be around making music in the year of 2009. Not that there aren’t other musicians around at the age of 79, it’s just that all of the jazz men of Rollins’ elevated stature have long ago passed away, most of them decades ago. Rollins exploded on the New York jazz scene straight out of high school and by the early fifties his dazzling intelligence and sheer athleticism on the tenor sax left many to dub him as “The New Bird” in tribute to bebop pioneer Charlie Parker. Rollins played […]
I SEE A DARKNESS: Feds Nab Three Jihadist Bombers In One Week; Census Worker Lynched In Kentucky
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Two men who professed devotion to Al Qaeda — one a convert to Islam, the other a Jordanian native — were charged Thursday with plotting to blow up buildings in Illinois and Texas. In both cases, the men thought they were working with Al Qaeda operatives when they were really working with undercover federal agents. One man, according to authorities, planted what he thought was an explosive outside a Dallas skyscraper, while the other parked a van, supposedly armed with a bomb, outside a federal courthouse in Springfield, Ill. The devices were fakes. Neither case is related […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Truth Is Out There
BOB CESCA: There’s a growing conventional wisdom in the press alleging that both sides of the political spectrum are equally guilty of wackaloon attacks and conspiracy theories. Granted there might be one or two very fringe exceptions but this is otherwise a false equivalency written by the establishment media as part of their self-conscious effort to seem balanced. The distinction is that any “fringe” attacks from the left during the Bush years weren’t mainstreamed and legitimized the way the wingnut attacks are today, even though the fringe attacks from the left turned out to be mostly accurate. On the right, […]
NEWSPAPER DEATH WATCH: No News Is Good News
Budget help from Mint.com
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: GOP Senators Move To Obstruct FCC-Enforced Net Neutrality
RAW STORY: Six Republican senators have introduced an amendment that would block the Federal Communications Commission from implementing its recently announced Net neutrality policy. Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced the amendment to an appropriations bill. It would prevent the FCC from getting funding for any initiative to uphold Net neutrality. According to The Hill, the co-sponsors are Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA). The move appears to be an attempt to pre-empt the FCC’s expected new policy to ensure that Internet service providers […]
EARLY WORD: The Dude Abides
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SEX IN THE CITY: Men I Have Dated
BY GLORIA MARIS For much of my first year of law school, I was dating a guy who lived out toward Valley Forge. He hated driving into the city, but both his other girlfriend and myself lived here in town. He was almost literally twice as big as I am, and continued to gain weight while we were dating. He detested lawyers, but my law school plans were in place when we started dating, and his other girlfriend was an attorney. He preferred his other girlfriend to me and didn’t tend to hesitate to tell me so. We dated for […]
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 […]
CRUEL & UNUSUAL: Reward Offered For Info Leading To Conviction Of The Bastard Who Duct Taped Cat
SMOKING GUN: What kind of a person duct tapes a cat head to toe? Philadelphia police are searching for the misfit who abandoned the animal after wrapping it with the gray industrial-strength tape (the female cat was discovered in a yard yesterday by Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals workers). Bound by the tape, the feline–pictured below and on succeeding pages in evidence photos–was not able to walk and was apparently left to die. SPCA workers successfully removed the tape from the cat, who has been nicknamed “Sticky” by rescue workers. As police probe the animal abuse case, […]