RELATED: Phawker Tawks With Get Your War On Creator David Rees
TONGUE IN CHIC: Q&A With Nico Muhly
BY DAVE ALLEN Nico Muhly is a thoroughly modern composer. His pieces are larded with innately contemporary textures, wherein classical elements — harpsichord, violin, celesta — bump up against vocalists rapidly-intoning lists over the sound of scraping knives and burbling synthesizers. In just a few short years, he’s earned just as much cred in the pop music world (collaborations with Antony and the Johnsons, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Bjork) as he has in the hallowed halls of classical (commissions from the Boston Pops, Chicago Symphony, and NYC avant-garde venue The Kitchen) while maintaining an astonishing level of productivity. He’s already […]
THE EARLY WORD: Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing
The Friggs [pictured above, wrasslin’ at the Khyber circa 1990-something] reunite Saturday at Tritone. Details after the jump…
BREAKING: Casinos Considering New Sites
PHILLY CLOUT: Gov. Rendell and Mayor Nutter today announced that the developers of Foxwoods, a casino proposed for the Delaware riverfront in South Philly, are considering different locations for the project. Rendell said the developers did not say where those new locations might be, other than that they’re inside the city limits, not on the riverfront and not within 10 miles of casinos already open in Bensalem and Chester. Rendell cautioned that the new locations are only being considered. “This should not be considered definitive,” Rendell said. “There is nothing that is sure or certain here.” MORE
DRUG TEST: ‘Massive’ Drug Sweep Nets Paltry Yield
OK, time for another edition of DRUG TEST wherein we vet the media’s reportage on the so-called War On Drugs, separating the seeds and stems of law enforcement press release hyperbole from the sober, reality-based facts. Today we check out this article posted on Philly.com by the Inquirer’s Sam Wood. Let us say up front that we think Sam is a damn good journo, not to mention a damn good Joe, so understand that nothing we are about to say is personal. Anyway, onward and upward — forward, never straight! Heh-heh… In a series of drug raids yesterday, Philadelphia police […]
PAPERBOY: Special ‘Miss Me, Bitches?’ Edition
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 […]
DOUBLE DOS: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
The Colbert Report after the jump. Enjoy.
WORTH REPEATING: John McCain Can’t Remember How Many Homes He Owns, How About You?
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] PHILADELPHIA — This morning, Barack Obama’s Campaign for Change launched a statewide search to find Pennsylvanians who, like John McCain, have so many homes that they just can’t keep track of the number. Our new media team will be at Love Park in Philadelphia beginning at 1:00 PM and volunteers and field staff will be calling voters throughout the day in an attempt to uncover even just one person who doesn’t know how many homes he or she owns. Yesterday, McCain was asked how many homes he owns. Clearly uncertain, he responded, “I think — I’ll […]
EXCERPT: How I Got To Starbucks
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] A Teenage Memoir Of Midlife Crisis BY COLLEEN REESE By the time it was over, high school finally made sense to me: Clean lines were drawn between the extraordinaires bound for leafy private colleges and the Joe Regulars headed to state schools; between the part-timers headed to community college and the free spirit do-gooders who would travel the world and eventually settle down for a little missionary work in Uganda or whatnot; and let us not forget the sons of working class shlubs doomed to endless summer apprenticeships with their neighbor’s landscaping companies. And, as predicted, […]
FAUX NEWS: Why Whitey Can’t Hope
[236.com: Fox News’ Obama Documentary in a Minute] 23/6: Monday night, Fox News Channel aired the first of two presidential candidate documentaries called “Character and Conduct.” First up: Barack Obama, whose documentary pretends really hard that it’s not full of stereotypes and insinuations! Couldn’t stomach it Monday evening? We’ve got it for you in a minute. MORE PREVIOUSLY: Fox News Is Lying To America!
CINEMA: Un-American Activities
TRUMBO (2007, directed by Peter Askin, 96 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC When Elia Kazan won his honorary Oscar back in 1999 there were some who voiced surprise that Sean Penn (among others) refused to applaud for the eighty-nine year old director. If one needs to understand why someone could be holding a grudge over Hollywood’s Communist witch hunts of the 1950’s, the life of its most famous victim, Academy Award winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, is a fine place to start. Peter Askin’s new documentary gives an intimate look at a how the blacklist effected one man and […]
BREAKING & EXITING: Why I’m Leaving Fishtown
BY STEWART EBERSOLE I woke up at 3am to the sound of something crashing downstairs. My roommate Rob is a night owl, so I assumed it was him making all that noise and rooting loudly through my toolbox. When my alarm finally woke me up at 7 a.m., it occurred to me for the first time that Rob actually had not been home that night, and that those noises were of a different ilk than the using late night roommate rattle and hum. And then I saw that the hallway window, the window that leads onto the back porch roof, […]
Glen Campbell Will Not Save You From Yourself
BY JOE WARMINSKY The best song on Jenny Lewis’s Rabbit Fur Coat was her Traveling Wilburys cover; she turned “Handle With Care” — with assists from indie worker-bees Oberst, Ward and Gibbard — into a post-millennial service economy lament. (In the hands of Lynne/Petty/Harrison/Orbison/Dylan, I saw it more as a rumination on suburban boomer anomie.) But more importantly, Lewis refreshed a fusty, shopworn hit by simply taking it seriously. Jenny one, FM rock zero. In that same way, Glen Campbell’s new album racks up a score of at least 3-0. With its 10 showy covers of alt-rock familiarities and AOR […]