SAD: Rip Torn For Arrested For Breaking Into A Bank With A Loaded Revolver While Loaded

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Actor Rip Torn, 79, was arrested Friday night on charges of burglary and criminal trespassing after officials allegedly found him carrying a loaded revolver inside a bank in Salisbury, Conn., according to the Register Citizen newspaper. A police report published on TMZ.com states that Torn used “forced entry” to get inside the bank and was “highly intoxicated” when taken into custody. The actor is being held on a $100,000 cash bond and is set to appear in court on Feb. 1. A rep for Torn did not immediately respond to requests for comment. MORE NEW HAVEN REGISTER: Torn, a Salisbury resident, is […]

TONITE: The Tintinnabulation Of The Bells

Named after Edgar Allan Poe’s best poem not called “The Raven”, Bells Bells Bells are set to release A Ghost Could Live Here, a well-crafted follow-up ’07’s Throw Down Your Anchor, which brought them, if not quite riches and fame, then psych-folk darlings status. At least around my house, anyway. The album opens with the epic “Laika, An Astronaut”, which conjures the final thoughts of the doomed Russian astro-dog who braved space ‘50s, only to die in orbit. With its dreamy reverb and eerie organ chords, compliments of keyboard maven Kat Paffett, the song sounds like a cosmic funerary hymn […]

‘Legalize It’ Ballot Measure Gets 700,000 Signatures

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Proponents of an initiative to make California the first state to legalize marijuana have collected about 693,800 signatures, virtually guaranteeing that the measure will appear on a crowded November ballot.  “This is a historic first step toward ending cannabis prohibition,” said Richard Lee, the measure’s main backer.  Advocates, trailed by television cameras and photographers, dropped off petitions with elections officials in the state’s largest counties, including Los Angeles, where organizers said 143,105 voters signed. Lee, a successful Oakland marijuana entrepreneur, bankrolled a professional signature-gathering effort that circulated the petition in every county except Alpine, which only has […]

ARTSY: Physical Grafitti

[Artwork by SUE COE] PHILAGRAFIKA: Involving more than 300 artists at more than 80 venues throughout the city, Philagrafika 2010 will be one of the largest art events in the United States and the world’s most important print-related exposition. Prominent museums and cultural institutions across Philadelphia are participating in Philagrafika 2010, offering regional, national and international audiences the opportunity to see contemporary art that references printmaking in dynamic, unexpected ways and to experience the rich cultural life of the city in the process.  The Philagrafika 2010 festival is the result of more than five years of planning by a group […]

THIS JUST IN: Facebook Is The New Fight Club

INQUIRER: A fistfight between two gangs of girls that had been organized on Facebook erupted in gunfire last night outside a Southwest Philadelphia High School, leaving two young men and a 17-year-old girl wounded, police said. The men, ages 19 and 22, were shot in the back and were reported in critical condition at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania this morning. The girl was treated at the hospital for a bullet wound to the buttock and released. Lt. John Walker of Southwest Detectives said about 40 people, most of them teenage girls, had gathered outside Bartram High School […]

PHAWKER TAWK: How To Get To Carnegie Hall

The PRISM Quartet performs tonight at Art After 5 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, starting at 5:45 p.m. BY DAVE ALLEN The saxophone, that iconic American instrument, is perhaps more freighted with artistic significance here in Philadelphia, where John Coltrane spent formative years and where other formidable, if less iconic, reedmen have launched their careers. In the Germantown section of the city, not all that far from where Sun Ra’s legendary Arkestra set up shop and where Arkestra saxophonist Marshall Allen still lives and sometimes assembles the group, another musical summit — […]

RIP: J.D. Salinger, ‘Hermit Crab Of American Letters’

TIME: Take the austere little paperbacks down from the shelf and you can hold the collected works of J.D. Salinger — one novel, three volumes of stories — in the palm of one hand. Like some of his favorite writers — like Sappho, whom we know only from ancient fragments, or the Japanese poets who crafted 17-syllable haikus — Salinger was an author whose large reputation pivots on very little. The first of his published stories that he thought were good enough to preserve between covers appeared in the New Yorker in 1948. Sixteen years later he placed one last […]

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 […]

RIP: Howard Zinn, Man Who Challenged The Rule That ‘History Is The Consensus Of The Empowered’

HOWARD ZINN: “Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and the other side was evil …… we did not have to think any more. Then we could commit unspeakable acts and it was all right.” NEW YORK TIMES:  Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist ”A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87. Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, ”A People’s History” […]

SIDEWALKING: Diary Of A Madman

Ozzy, Borders, Market & Chestnut, 6 PM by JEFF FUSCO TARA MURTHA: Thick as a bible, I Am Ozzy is a lightning-read account of one man’s journey into and out of the sludgy bowels of the rock and roll beast. Pensive now at 61, I Am Ozzy is a (mostly) sober account of a very drunk and deluded time fueled by the time-honored collision course of inflatable egos and endless cocaine (back in the day, Black Sabbath didn’t even know who was paying for or sending the unmarked vans stacked with tidy boxes of wax-capped vials of medical grade powder).  […]