While I Was Away
Gone a week and look what happens:
The New York Times spends some quality time in the gritty "go-to destination" called Northern Liberties, and finds sea urchin, The Cramps and $20 hanger steaks with purple mashers.
Rocky still gets no respect. An LA Times piece wraps up the low blows about the sixth flick planned around the now-decrepit South Philly fighter. Quotes Letterman: "Constantly says 'Yo, Adrian, got my Lipitor?' "
Philadelphia gets a theater blog. By NY playwright/critic George Hunka.
PhillyCrime wrestles the whole city's incident reports onto a Google map. They started with West Philadelphia, which made the pattern of thefts around Penn troubling. Now one can see the most recent 300 crimes across the city. Glitchy still. Date says 1999.
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Open Source Media slips back into Pajamas Media. I prefer the old name anyway. Better to wear an insult proudly.
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A Central Pennsylvania lawmaker acts to prohibit "upskirt" and "downblouse" photos snapped by cell phone. Cumberland County's State Sen. Patricia Vance describes the stealthy shooting of unmentionables as mostly a Philadelphia thing, or so her colleagues tell her. She'd never heard of the voyeuristic sport. She says there are more perverts in our neck of the woods.
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Not only do we get to see the Cira Centre every time we look up, wherever in Center City we happen to be. Now we get to hear it, too. String Theory, a Los Angeles group will turn the city's newest building into a 28-story harp for this week's opening. They've strung up musical halls and skyscrapers before. They will literally play the building.
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The alleged secret plan to blow up Al-Jazeera? News to me. Just because the report comes from London's The Daily Mirror doesn't mean it should be laughed off. "Conspiracy theory," Tony Blair replies. UPDATE: Don't Bomb Us, the Al-Jazeera blog.
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Three's a trend. Philadelphia police officer blogs: Rainstorms, who also posts at Domelights. Wyatt Earp and BadKarma at The Deep End.
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Craigslist, having done a pretty good job taking away classicalfied ads from newspapers, is looking to report news next. "The White House press corps don't speak the truth to power -- they are frightened to lose access they don't have anyway," founder Craig Newmark complains at Oxford. This will be a bottom-up, reader-generated citizen journalism effort. Somewhere my old coffee- and tobacco-stained city editor is throwing something at someone.
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Still trying to justify owning my third copy of Born to Run. On the 30th anniversary of the Bruce Springsteen classic, Amazon puts up a free video of the title track from the Boss's first trip to London, from Hammersmith Odeon. Pimp hats! NYTimes shows "She's the One" from the same 1975 concert. Want more? How about a podcast in seven parts of the making of born to run from the Wings For Wheels DVD?
As long as we're walking down musical memory lane, how about Jon Landau's 1974 article for The Real Paper, in which he famously tells how "I saw rock and roll future and it's name is Bruce Springsteen?" As many times as I'd read this quote from the writer who would become Springsteen's manager, I'd never seen in context. Here's the whole piece. It's been a while since I've read rock writing like this, this sort of autobiographical, hungry hearted soul-searching piece. Landau began:
It's four in the morning and raining. I'm 27 today, feeling old, listening to my records, and remembering that things were different a decade ago. In 1964, I was a freshman at Brandeis University, playing guitar and banjo five hours a day, listening to records most of the rest of the time, jamming with friends during the late-night hours, working out the harmonies to Beach Boys' and Beatles' songs.
Reads kind of bloggy. Especially this line:
It's five o'clock now -- I write columns like this as fast as I can for fear I'll chicken out.
It takes him 16 paragraphs to get to his lede, as we say in the biz. We read about his favorite discs (note to self: investigate Valerie Simpson's "Exposed."), how he could stomach Moby Grape, but not the rest of the San Francisco sound, how music became his drug of choice, but how he had become detached from it lately. And then ...
When his two-hour set ended I could only think, can anyone really be this good; can anyone say this much to me, can rock'n'roll still speak with this kind of power and glory? And then I felt the sores on my thighs where I had been pounding my hands in time for the entire concert and knew that the answer was yes.
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I'm not going to say anything bad about Black Friday, about why people would people line up outside a big-box store in the cold, dark, middle of the night when they should be sleeping off a long day of football, feasting and relatives who wouldn't leave. Won't mention the countless, breathless newspaper stories, the Wall Street Journal's read about shopping-til-you-drop Holiday-Sales News Tracker, or trot out the little secret of why we cover holiday shopping so obsessively (but please patronize our advertisers, God bless them all). I just wanted to give a shout-out to that over-stuffed muffin in a Nissan Mallfinder who nearly ran into us as we were returning from Massachusetts because she was on the cell phone while turning into the Best Buy in Willow Grove. I'm hoping she was buying a hands-free phone.
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We were coming back from Sharon. The plan had been to head for Virginia to see my wife's family, then I'd fly to Florida and help my parents dig out from Hurricane Wilma. My dad was to have laparoscopic surgery to remove his gallbladder - a drive-through, he expected.
But things got complicated - there was an infection, then spasms that doubled him over in agony, and so we went we went north instead, and spent a few days in my boyhood home, lending support to my mom, distracting my dad.
Time slowed, I'd haunt the closet and bookshelves, and something drew me to a knotty pine door in the far corner of the basement, where I found a long-ignored bunch of old baseball bats leaning up against the water meter - Louisville sluggers etched with the names of sluggers like Harmon Killebrew and Roger Maris. I found my grandfather's old mambo lps. Photos of my old hockey team. (We all had our own teeth.) Paged through my 9th grade yearbook, signed by one friend, Peter Weisman - "to a great kid" - who was at a wedding a few years later when a troubled Vietnam vet swung at someone with a chair. Only Peter stepped in to be the peacemaker, and the chair hit him in the head. Killed him instantly. I think about that every time we pass his mother's house.
After Thanksgiving, my sister, her husband, my wife and I took the dog for a walk, and once again I was drawn to the street behind our house where my life changed. It was ninth grade, again, and I was walking with a handful of record albums to a friend's house. Coming down the street was a guy in my class named Elvis, and another guy in a Sharon High School football uniform. 'Hey, Elvis,' I called. He didn't answer. His friend did with a right. Never saw it coming. The blow landed on my cheek and sent my records spinning into the woods. "What did you do that for?" I asked, but they were already walking away, laughing.
His name was Frank Salemme. I'd seen him once before, on the football field. He was in the backfield. I was a linebacker. It was a running play and as I moved toward the ball, Frankie threw a punishing block that blind-sided me. On the sidelines a man standing with a German Shepard cheered. That was Cadillac Frank Salemme, his father.
I never told my parents what happened. The next day, I was creeping along the edge of the hallway when Frank spotted me again. This time, a roundhouse caught me on the jaw. I had no idea why he picked me. Still don't. The next year, I happily shipped off to boarding school, and got the opportunity to start over again.
Frank? I saw him once in the town square a few years later. I had grown, finally. But not much tougher. I let it go. Frank got his. He died under federal indictment, the one fish netted in an organized crime sting. Frankie's father was a pretty big fish himself, the head of the Patriarca family. When I read about Frankie's charges I called the Boston Globe and offered to help the reporter put together the biography of a shit. On the record, I told him. My father wondered if that was so smart.
Yeah, I told him. I was done being afraid.
Frank died before we could get anywhere. Leukemia, was the cause the family gave.
I recalled this story to my brother-in-law as we were walking off Thanksgiving dinner. "Sometimes that anger stays with you," he said. I agreed. A little therapy probably wouldn't have hurt me, but we never considered it. Who would have known that writing about him would feel so good?
Two things: I will NEVER pay $8.50 for a potato pierogi (re: NY Times'"review") especially in Northern Liberties. And somebody PAH-LEEZE remind Rocky reviewers that most of the first movie's "neighborhood" scenes were shot up the Avenue in Kensington, where you could get a pierogi for $1.50 without having to look at all those tacky hipsters.
"Craigslist, having done a pretty good job taking away classiCAL ads from newspapers, is looking to report news next. "The White House press corps don't speak the truth to power -- they ... "
the above Cut'nPaste has been modified
with CAL being CAPITALIZED for EMPHASIS ...
what happened to CLASSIfied ads ???
is it that FOND memories of them has turned them into classiCAL abrvtnZ ?
__________________________
... thinking of newsprint &
fond memories ...
Do any newspapers still print BULLDOG edtions ??
thank you for reading carefully. the bulldog was buried a while ago. I was trying to find the word origin. came upon this: "The term may have "evolved when New York City's Herald, World and Journal introduced early editions and `fought like bulldogs for circulation.'" This from Encyclopedia of Advertising, Fairchild Publishing, 1952. The term first appears in print in 1926." From http://www.takeourword.com/arc_logi.html
Damn, Dan, if you keep giving us such articulate, poignant glimpses into your personal world, they're going to take away your Jaded Journalist card. On the other hand, you'll win even more Most Transcendent Blog awards -- which is far better.
About phillycrime.org: Unfortunately, its not a glitch. The site only shows city-wide crime data for 1999, because the PPD does not publicly release its contemporary digital crime reports. Signing the petition will help with that. Phillycrime.org does, however, show contemporary crime data for much of West Philly.
Dan - Thank you so much for the mention! Now, if you can just ask the Commish to promote some detectives . . .