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 […]

BREAKING: Senior Lenders Outbid Local Investors, Purchase Inky/DN for $139 Million; Tierney Out

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Publisher Brian Tierney says creditors have won the auction for Philadelphia newspapers with a $139 million bid. Tierney says he won’t fight the bankruptcy confirmation of the bid for the company that operates The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. The company is expected to emerge from the bitterly fought bankruptcy at the end of June after 14 months. MORE PHILLY.COM:  Brian P. Tierney, CEO of Philadelphia Newspapers L.L.C., announced Wednesday afternoon that the company that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News has been sold to its senior lenders for $135 million. That includes $105 million in […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR Writer Hampton Sides was a 6-year-old living in Memphis when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. “I remember the tension,” he says. “I remember seeing tanks, and I remember feeling that our city was ripping apart.” Four decades later, Sides, an editor-at-large for Outside magazine and the author of the historical books Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, has returned to the subject of King’s assassination. In his new book, Hellhound on His Trail, Sides carefully weaves the movements of King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, with those of King, who had traveled to Memphis […]

LIVE FREE PA: Shoot First, Get A Clue Later

SALON: Gun nuts are the folks sponsoring “LiveFreePA,” a fun-filled gathering May 8 where participants can shoot their guns at old cars that represent bad liberal ideas like gun control, healthcare reform and property taxes, as well as taxes and regulations on tobacco and alcohol (h/t BuzzFlash). “It’s just a unique way to say we’re against these policies — shooting them down,” organizer Nate Benefield told a Lancaster paper. “I don’t really know where we came up with it, but it seemed appropriate.” “Appropriate” isn’t the word I’d choose, but hey, it’s a free country. Apparently, Ted Nugent headlined the […]

TECH: It’s Steve Jobs World, We Just Download It

[Artwork by DYLAN ROSCOVER] NEWSWEEK:  Apple does not explain its strategy. But my interpretation of what it’s thinking goes as follows: The first two decades of the World Wide Web have been a huge mistake. The Internet is not a philosophy. It’s a distribution mechanism. The laws of physics did not change when the airplane was invented, nor have the laws of economics changed because the Internet exists. You make money on the Internet the same way you do everywhere else—by having something that people want and forcing them to pay for it. There is a reason a circus takes […]

A MAN IN FULL: Clint Eastwood At 80

JOE QUEENAN: Because he started out as an actor, and very quickly became an actor that a large segment of the population positively adored, in the same way that they adored Jimmy Cagney and Cary Grant and both Hepburns, Eastwood has long benefited from a personal relationship with the American people that no other living director can even dream of. (In my lifetime, only Alfred Hitchcock, who came into everyone’s living room once a week to deliver his weird, deadpan introductions to his creepy TV series, has enjoyed this sort of ongoing, intimate rapport with the American people. But little […]

IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR: Philly Newspaper Auction Begins After 17 Hours Of Wrangling, No Winner Yet

INQUIRER: Bidding for Philadelphia Media Holdings, which owns the Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com, began at 3:45 a.m. today, nearly 17 hours after three groups vying to own the media company first gathered in a law office in midtown Manhattan. As of 5 a.m., no decision had been made as to which bid was in the lead, although all three bids had been gone through by the group. MORE KAREN HELLER: For the third time in four years, Philadelphia’s two major daily newspapers are facing potential change in ownership. The lead-up to this week’s auction included a whiplash switch […]

Local Alpha Birther To Lead March On Washington

WASHINGTON POST: The long-rumored “birth certificate march on Washington” — a project of the original birther attorney, Phil Berg — will happen on Saturday, May 29. Berg is beckoning supporters to the 82-acre President’s Park, right across from the White House. MORE PREVIOUSLY: In the soft twilight of the first Saturday of August, a gray-bearded man in a dark suit stood on the grassy knoll in front of Independence Hall and declared for the benefit of a film crew on hand that we are, as a nation, through the looking glass, people. Black is white, up is down, cats are […]

BLUE NOTE: Ortlieb’s Jazz Haus 86’d

Ortlieb’s 6/9/04 by JEFF FUSCO CITY PAPER: It’s never cheerful when musicians booked to play a gig are forced to scramble because the venue has a licensing problem/water main break/some other mellow-harsher. But early last night when the word came down that Ortlieb’s — the nearly 24-year-old jazzhaus in Northern Liberties — had closed over the weekend it truly stung, leaving the likes of Bobby Zankel and Nick Millevoi to find new digs for their end-of-April gigs. MORE PREVIOUSLY: Over at Ortlieb’s, which has been at its current location on North Third Street since Northern Liberties was cool the first […]

WORTH REPEATING: Love Hurts

PITCHFORK: In the years since, Love has become less a savior than a punchline, an egomaniacal eccentric who seems to invite tabloid bullshit: the incoherent twittering, the inexplicable brawls (squabbling with Lily Allen about who gets to wear a dress?), the bizarre Facebook apology to Billy Corgan. Sadly, Love’s public persona has colored her music for just about everyone– especially since her celebrity has been so pivotal (and purposeful) in the promotion of her work. Part of Love’s appeal is her bravado, and she does her savvy best to substantiate it for us. That she fails, that we cringe, or that […]

MIA: Born Free

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo. WARNING: Some nudity, drug use and violence against redheads.  NEW YORK TIMES: Within a day of its splashy and widely discussed debut on the Web, the video for M.I.A.’s song “Born Free” has been pulled from YouTube on the American and British versions of the site, BBC News reported. The video, made for the first single of M.I.A.’s coming album and directed by Romain Gavras, the son of Costa-Gavras, depicts an unspecified military force, with some members wearing American flags on their uniforms, rounding up red-headed men from an apartment complex and taking them […]