18th & Walnut, 2:51 PM by JEFF FUSCO
COMING ATTRACTION: Q&A With Bert Jansch
“As much of a great guitar player as Jimi [Hendrix] was, Bert Jansch is the same thing for acoustic guitar…and my favourite” – Neil Young Legendary folk guitarist Bert Jansch opens for Neil Young at the Tower on Saturday and Sunday. We recently got him on the horn to discuss Nick Drake, skiffle, The Libertines, Pentangle, Anne Briggs, Devendra Banhart, heroin, Lead Belly and getting ripped off by Led Zeppelin. Look for it tomorrow on a Phawker near you. *** RELATED: Huddie Ledbetter was the world’s greatest cotton picker, railroad track liner, lover, and drinker as well as guitar player. […]
Man Released From Graterford After Serving Nearly 20 Years For Crimes He Did Not Commit
TRIBUNE: This week, after spending almost twenty years in prison, Muhammad Don Ray Adams Jr. walked out of Graterford Prison a free man, once again able to live a life that most people who have never been incarcerated take for granted. Adams spent 19 years and six months behind bars for two murders that he maintained from the beginning that he didn’t commit. Though convicted in 1991 of the December 22, 1990 killings of Darryl Patterson and Thomas Winn, Adams was not sentenced to death — he was sent to prison for life, instead. Then, just this past Monday, April […]
Franz Kafka Said There Would Be Days Like This
THE GUARDIAN: The most saddening thing was the descriptions of completely innocent old men and young boys who were shipped off to Guantánamo for no very good reason, except they were rounded up in a dragnet. There’s an 89-year-old Afghan villager, who was picked up merely because there was a list of suspicious phone numbers in a satellite phone found near his compound, shipped off to Guantánamo, where they discover he’s not only very, very old and doesn’t know anything, but he’s also suffering from dementia and probably can’t even remember what day of the week it is. Similarly, a […]
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 […]
WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION: Philadelphia School District To Layoff Nearly 4,000 Employees
INQUIRER: Facing an “unprecedented” fiscal crisis, the Philadelphia School District could shed 3,820 employees – 16 percent of its workforce – and is planning for more painful cuts, including losing full-day kindergarten, officials said Wednesday. At a hearing on the district’s $2.7 billion budget, Chief Financial Officer Michael Masch told the School Reform Commission (SRC) that to close a $629 million gap, the district must also make painful trims in areas ranging from gifted and alternative education to transportation and counselors. Class sizes will go up; individual school budgets will go down. A still-soft economy, flat city revenues, and sharp […]
SIDEWALKING: It’s Comcastic!
Comcast Center, 1701 JFK Blvd., 3:46 PM Tuesday BY RAY SKWIRE RELATED: DEAR COMCAST, Why Can’t I Watch The Flyers? RELATED: Free speech online has come under withering attack from the astroturf lobby — corporate front groups that are determined to hand control of the Internet to companies like AT&T and Comcast. They’ve joined the forces of the Tea Party with pro-corporate attack groups like Americans for Prosperity to urge weak members of Congress to betray the public interest by voting to strip the Federal Communications Commission of its ability to protect our basic freedom to access an open Internet. […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Bradley Manning Is A Hero
EDITOR’S NOTE: William C. Henry is better known to me as ‘Uncle Bill.’ I’ve invited him to weigh in from time to time on whatever is getting his goat at the moment. BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Once upon a time in a far off land a society’s leadership came to the realization it was going to have to come up with a somewhat less “lethal” means of ensuring its hold on power, because constantly riling up the citizenry with displays of naked brutality could be bad for a regime’s longevity. (SEE Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, etc.) Over time that means came […]
ARTSY: Set Phasers For ‘Stunning’
This is the first overview of the lifework of a major American 20th century artistic polyglot. Angus MacLise was an American artist, poet, percussionist, and composer active in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Kathmandu from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Best known as the original drummer of the Velvet Underground, MacLise’s lifework included music, calligraphy, performance art, poetry, drawings, plays, and limited edition artist’s books. A suitcase of Angus MacLise’s artwork, publications, and manuscript as well as more than 100 hours of recorded music was left with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela for safe-keeping thirty years ago. […]
SIDEWALKING: God Is My Co-Pilot
I-76 and I-476 Interchange, 10:14 AM by JEFF FUSCO
PA Medical Mary Jane Bill Back On The Table
NORML: A bill to legalize the use of medical marijuana for qualifying patients and to create a statewide system of “Compassion Centers” has been introduced in the Keystone State. Senator Daylin Leach brought SB 1003 forward on April 25th with Senators Larry Farnese, James Ferlo and Wayne Fontana as the initial co-sponsors. The legislation has been referred to the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee. The language is essentially a re-introduction of a bill that was active in 2009-10 in both houses of the General Assembly. The bill includes provisions for home cultivation and collects the state sales tax on […]
Obama Releases Birth Certificate, Turns Out He’s Legit
DOWNLOAD: President Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate (PDF) POTUS: As many of you have been briefed, we provided additional information today about the site of my birth. Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now. I think it started during the campaign. And I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement, I’ve been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going. We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR JOHN POWERS: Writers love to grumble about the popularity of self-help books, yet they, like everyone else, are always looking for someone who will teach them how to live. Just think of all those guys who learned their masculinity from Hemingway or those classy-sounding books with titles like How Proust Can Change Your Life or How To Live: A Life of Montaigne. One who seemed to know life’s secret was David Foster Wallace, whose suicide, oddly enough, only enhanced his stature as a sage. Whether or not he was the most important American writer of his era, he’s […]