BIGGLEE: Talk about oddball Bat-items! Here is the cover and some interior samples from a 1966 tome called FUNNIEST FAN LETTERS TO BATMAN! Created at the height of the ’66 BATMAN TV-show craze, this book collects the zaniest letters written to Batman, Robin, or the comics and TV crews that whip up his wild adventures! The best letters are from kids, of course, asking ol’ Batman for money, a weekend visit, advice, or even the use of the Batmobile! Several similar-themed books were done at the time, including KID’S LETERS TO PRESIDENT KENNEDY, KID’S LETTERS TO THE FBI, and LOVE […]
A GIANT STEPS ON: RIP Mickey Roker, Jazz Legend
BY BILL HANGLEY JR. The 20th century took another blow today with the passing of a Philly jazz giant, Mickey Roker. A master of the drums and a mentor to generations, Roker was a link to an age when people paid big bucks in Tokyo or Hamburg to see what any Philloid could still see for free. His death was reported today by Temple Univerity’s WRTI, which will be featuring his music all day; no cause of death has been announced so far. He was 84. Roker was both a global ambassador and a local institution. Like countless others I […]
RIP: Chuck Berry, Founding Father Of Rock N’ Roll
NEW YORKER: Berry, who died Saturday, at the age of ninety, was a proud and difficult man. He was also a genius. As a player, as a songwriter, and as a performer, he was a master of invention, transforming the rolling rhythms of Louis Jordan and the guitar figures of T-Bone Walker into the rhythmic foundation of half the rock songs you’ve ever heard. Rooted in the blues and with an ear for American country music, Berry blew things up and out with his first hits; he helped to create another form. Chuck Berry was to rock music what […]
RIP: Wayne Barrett, The Voice’s ‘Fierce Muckraker’ & Truth-Telling Trump Nemesis, Dead At 71
NEW YORK TIMES: Wayne Barrett, the muckraking Village Voice columnist who carved out a four-decade career tilting at developers, landlords and politicians, among them Donald J. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71. Mr. Barrett’s voluminous background files from the Trump biography, and his professional courtesy, made his Brooklyn home a mecca for investigative reporters during the recent presidential campaign. “There may be no journalist in the nation who knows more about Trump than Barrett,” Jennifer Gonnerman wrote in The New Yorker just after the election. Timothy O’Brien, who was research assistant on the […]
RIP: Leonard Cohen Is Dead
Leonard Cohen on bended knee, Academy of Music, 5/12/09 by MICHAEL T. REGAN EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the sad but not unexpected passing of Leonard Cohen we present this reprise edition of our review of his concert at the Academy Of Music on May 13th 2009. Even back then it felt like a eulogy. The Great Man glides onstage in black pinstripes and a fedora like a gangster cantor, double-breasted and tie-less, his crisp creamy blue shirt buttoned-up to the neck David Lynch-style. He seems to walk on air. He was born like that, he had no choice, he was […]
RIP: Goodbye Gawker, Our First And Best Frenemy
BY JONATHAN VALANIA So, the sad, but not entirely unexpected, official news that Gawker will cease to exist came down today. Like most every right-thinking netizen with an abiding belief in the cause of journalism and weaponized wit, we are appalled by Peter Thiel’s grim determination to choke-out the First Amendment with his bazillion dollar money belt while furiously stroking his revenge boner even if A) we think he has good reason to hate Gawker and want it dead (forcibly outing anyone who is not a hypocritical closeted politician who actively demagogues/legislates against the LGBT communities was an unforgivable […]
OH CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!: Captain Noah RIP
6ABC: We lost a dear friend and TV legend today. Captain Noah truly was magical, and he helped shape the foundation of what Channel 6 is today. What we remember about Carter was he loved to make children smile, and he maintained a deep faith in the human spirit. For three decades, Carter and his wife Pat delighted viewers in Philadelphia, and across America. “Captain Noah and His Magical Ark” was produced here at 6abc, and syndicated to more than 20 television markets. At its peak, Captain Noah was one of the most watched Children’s television shows in America.Our […]
RIP: Alan Vega, The Voice Of Suicide, Dead @ 78
NEW YORK TIMES: Alan Vega, the singer in the minimalist, proto-punk, proto-electro, proto-industrial two-man band Suicide and a prolific musician and visual artist on his own, died on Saturday. He was 78. Suicide, particularly in its early years, was as much a provocation as a concert act. Formed in 1970, it was one of the first bands to bill themselves as “punk music.” With Martin Rev playing loud, insistently repetitive riffs on keyboards and drum machines and Mr. Vega crooning, chanting, muttering and howling his lyrics about insanity, mayhem and death, Suicide fiercely polarized its audiences. “We almost got […]
RIP: Scotty Moore, Bitterly Estranged Elvis Guitarist & Architect Of The Rockabilly Sound, Dead @ 84
NEW YORK TIMES: Scotty Moore, a guitarist whose terse, bluesy licks on Elvis Presley’s early hits virtually created the rockabilly guitar style and established the guitar as a lead instrument in rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday at his home outside Nashville. He was 84. In 1954, Mr. Moore was performing with a country group, Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers, and recording at Sun Records in Memphis when Sam Phillips, the label’s owner, asked him to audition a young singer that his secretary kept mentioning. On July 4, Presley showed up at Mr. Moore’s house. Bill Black, the bass […]
RIP: Buddy Ryan, Eagles Coach Who Never Let The Fact That He Didn’t Have Having Anything Nice To Say Stop Him From Saying It, Is Dead At 85
NEW YORK TIMES: Buddy Ryan, pro football’s famously combative defensive innovator who helped propel the Jets and the Chicago Bears to Super Bowl championships, died on Tuesday in Kentucky. Although listed as 82 in some accounts, he was 85 at his death, according to his son Rex in a memoir. In his seven years as a head coach, with the Philadelphia Eagles and Arizona Cardinals, Ryan never won a playoff game. But he had already solidified his legacy as an assistant coach with his shifting and blitzing defensive alignments, which confused and clobbered opposing quarterbacks. His bruising “46” defense, […]
RIP: Dr. Ralph Stanley, Man Of Constant Sorrow
NEW YORK TIMES: Though widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of bluegrass, Mr. Stanley said on numerous occasions that he did not believe his music was representative of the genre. “Old-time mountain style, that’s what I like to call it,” he explained in a 2001 interview with the online music magazine SonicNet. “When I think of bluegrass, I think of Bill Monroe.” Mr. Stanley, Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times in 2009, “is one of the last, and surely the purest, of traditional country musicians.” “He’s such a stickler that he has no use for the […]
RIP: The Death Of Greatness
FRESH AIR: What a loss to suffer, even if for years you knew it was coming. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-four, was the most fantastical American figure of his era, a self-invented character of such physical wit, political defiance, global fame, and sheer originality that no novelist you might name would dare conceive him. Born Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, he was a skinny, quick-witted kid, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner, who learned to box at the age of twelve to avenge the indignity of […]
RIP: Prince 1958-2016
Artwork by GARY CARD NEW YORK TIMES: Prince recorded the great majority of his music entirely on his own, playing every instrument and singing every vocal line. Then, performing those songs onstage, he worked as a bandleader in the polished, athletic, ecstatic tradition of James Brown, at once spontaneous and utterly precise, riveting enough to open a Grammy Awards telecast and play the Super Bowl halftime show. Often, Prince would follow a full-tilt arena concert with a late-night club show, pouring out even more music. In Prince’s biggest hits, he sang passionately, affectionately and playfully about sex and seduction. With […]