Accidents and Disasters

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Two sides to Guy

Boston Phoenix letters, June 25, 2010
I’m a delegate at the state Democratic convention and I didn’t vote for Guy Glodis for auditor.
By BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS | June 24, 2010

Teach the controversy

Idiot Box
An Iranian cleric says immodest women are the cause of earthquakes
By MATT BORS | June 16, 2010

Say what?

Obama should forget the feel-good and seize the opportunity in the Gulf
Barack Obama is much more of an establishment-style president than the public generally realizes.
By EDITORIAL | June 22, 2010

BP’s latest eco-crime; City Council Pres. Mike Ross does the right thing; Scott Brown disappoints
It is not enough that British Petroleum’s wounded oil well in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico continues to bleed millions of gallons of viscous crude oil, killing marshes that could offer protection from future hurricanes, destroying habitats for migrating birds, fouling coastal commercial-fishing grounds.
By EDITORIAL | May 26, 2010

Physics lesson for Diamon

Letters to the Portland editor, May 21, 2010
Newton’s laws of gravity and motion are universally understood laws, not subject to anyone’s opinion.
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | May 20, 2010

The high cost of free markets

A lack of regulation invites oil spills and financial collapse
Free markets are not free. They always carry a cost.
By EDITORIAL | May 19, 2010

Still life

Disfarmer at the ICA
Nobody knew very much about Mike Disfarmer. Even his name was a fabrication.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | May 18, 2010

At the Cable Car: The wind-lashed and sea-worn

Surf’s Up
On a recent Sunday, the usual grad school crowd at the Cable Car Cinema in Providence gave way to something different — the wind-lashed faces and sea-worn hands of Rhode Island’s oft-ignored surfing community.
By ABIGAIL CROCKER | May 12, 2010

The race is on

Running through Acorn’s 24-Hour Play Festival
Around 7 pm last Saturday at the St. Lawrence, a sealed envelope was sliced open and its contents, handwritten on three slips of paper, were revealed to a full house: “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 05, 2010

After Fort Thunder, the zine lives

Media
Last week, friends of the zine Taffy Hips gathered at Ada Books on Westminster Street to celebrate the sixth issue: robot comics, prints of giant tsunami waves, and an interview with Chicago-based cartoonist Anya Davidson.
By ABIGAIL CROCKER | February 03, 2010

Karen Schmeer: 1970-2010

In Memoriam
Karen Schmeer, the brilliant local film editor whose work on Errol Morris's documentary The Fog of War helped win it the Best Documentary Oscar in 2004, died January 29 in a tragic accident, struck by a getaway car as she was crossing a street in Manhattan. She would have turned 40 on February 20.
By PETER KEOUGH | February 02, 2010

Department of conjecture

Letters to the Portland Editor, January 29, 2010
The Haiti disaster will not serve to turn a state from toss-up to safely Republican as the George W. Bush Administration's calculated response to Hurricane Katrina did in Louisiana.
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | January 27, 2010

Covering a tragedy

How does a small local paper cover the world's biggest story?
The earthquake that ravaged Haiti on January 12 posed a major challenge for the Boston Haitian Reporter , the lone English-language outlet focused on Boston's sizable Haitian community. The quake and its aftermath were of vital interest to the Reporter 's core audience, but local, national, and international media were already tackling the story with resources that the Reporter simply didn't have.
By ADAM REILLY | January 20, 2010

Aftershock

More than 1500 miles from the epicenter of the Haitian quake, its effects rippled through Boston's teeming Haitian community
From the second that the Richter scale registered at 7.0 in Haiti, a desperate grief rippled through Hyde Park, Dorchester, and other corners of this region, which is home to the third-largest Haitian population in America.
By CHRIS FARAONE | January 20, 2010

Robert Wyatt | Box Set

Domino (2009)
Emerging from the progressive cradle of Soft Machine and the late 1960s Canterbury scene, Robert Wyatt began his career as a solo artist after a freak accident left him paralyzed from the waist down in 1973.
By JONATHAN DONALDSON | December 09, 2009

Water, benign and fierce

Sailing photos at Moses Brown, Katrina’s aftermath at Brown
In Onne van der Wal's sailing photos, it seems the weather is always balmy and the golden sun always setting. The Jamestown resident's exhibit at Moses Brown School's Krause Gallery (250 Lloyd Avenue, Providence, through October 2) depicts a world that's forever at its endless summer, can't-get-any-better-than-this peak.
By GREG COOK | September 15, 2009

Looking back to climb forward

Katrina's aftermath
It's been four years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Its causes and ramifications, though, extend much farther into both the past and the future. So say Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman, Brooklyn-based spoken-word and multimedia artists known together as Climbing Poetree.
By DEIRDRE FULTON | September 09, 2009

Quake and Shake

Company One meshes Murakami; Orfeo compacts the Bard
A tenderhearted yarn spinner tells an anxious little girl a story about a talking bear hawking honey. A nerdy young debt collector comes home to find a six-foot amphibian bent on recruiting him to save Tokyo from a natural disaster. Both scenarios emanate from the brain of award-winning Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
By CAROLYN CLAY | July 22, 2009

The crash course

What to do when you have your next bike accident
It was a sunny but brisk Friday afternoon in March when my bike was hit.
By CAITLIN E. CURRAN | May 06, 2009

Review: Mine

Watch, animal lovers, and be stupefied.
Early in Geralyn Pezanoski's documentary, a news clip shows George Bush proclaiming, "The world saw this tidal wave of disaster descend upon the Gulf Coast, and now they're gonna see a tidal wave of compassion."
By BRETT MICHEL | April 15, 2009

Review: Crude

Quietly compelling
Joe Berlinger returns with a documentary that follows through on the promise of 1992's Brother's Keeper .
By BRETT MICHEL | August 10, 2009

11. Bobby Jindal

PAGE BOY
In delivering the Republican response to Barack Obama’s first joint-houses speech as president in February, the governor of Louisiana and erstwhile 2012 presidential hopeful was deemed a resounding flop — by members of his own party. His lack of charisma and gee-whiz oratory (as well as his dorkiness) quickly drew unfavorable comparisons to Kenneth the Page from NBC’s 30 Rock , whose political career now seems to have a higher trajectory than Jindal’s. Bonus hurricane-chutzpah points for bringing up Katrina in his speech criticizing government-funded economic-relief programs, for which his state took in billions of federal dough.
By Boston Phoenix Staff | March 24, 2009

26. Vince Offer

SCAM WOW
Vince’s face is a throwback to the movie stars of yesteryear — mainly Stripe from Gremlins . This beady-eyed pitchman, born Vincent Offer Schlomi, is more schlemiel than sales genius, and that Britney headset he wears when he’s yapping about the Sham Wow looks like that full-head retainer your mom made you wear in the ’80s. Lately, he’s been seen on television offering stay-at-home MILFs the worst pickup line ever: “You’re gonna love my nuts.” But his pitchman schtick may be nearing its end. The Smoking Gun just dug up a police report from last month in which Vince admitted to punching a woman he'd paid $1000 for sex. According to his arrest report, Vince told cops that after forking over a grand in $20 bills to one Sasha Harris, she "bit his tongue and would not let go," whereupon Vince "began to strike [Harris] numerous times in the face area."
By Boston Phoenix Staff | March 30, 2009

Sports blotter: Steamrolled again

Brian Bosworth gets leveled by John Law, and Marshawn Lynch hops on the Chris Henry express
Brian Bosworth gets a DUI; Marshawn Lynch pleads guilty to a gun charge
By MATT TAIBBI | March 12, 2009

Year in Film: Risky business

Films whose aspirations are more than Academic
Every year the studios hold back their best until the end of the year, but this year they let us down.
By PETER KEOUGH | December 24, 2008

Review: Ciao

A most gentle and civil gay film
The set-up in Yen Tan's most gentle and civil of gay films is that Dallas twentysomething Mark dies in a car accident just as his year-long Italian e-mail flirtation, Andrea (Alessandro Calza), is due to visit him from Genoa.
By GERALD PEARY | December 16, 2008

On street level

As Katrina hit New Orleans, filmmakers went to work
It is impossible not to wonder how Louisiana might have fared after Hurricane Katrina, had Barack Obama been in office a term sooner. There are so many questions about what went wrong and how it could have been handled differently, which have gone unanswered for more than three years.
By SONYA TOMLINSON | November 19, 2008

Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains

A redundant, overlong documentary
The story has been told already, and vividly, in Piers Paul Read's Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors .
By GERALD PEARY | November 11, 2008

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

An uninspired sit-com packed with Hollywood stars
It’s a light entertainment that can cash in with election-weary audiences.
By BRETT MICHEL | November 05, 2008

Brief fling

Carole Lombard’s nine years of stardom
Carole Lombard rose to stardom in 1934 and was dead by 1942, killed in a plane crash on her way back from selling war bonds; her last picture, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be , was released posthumously.
By STEVE VINEBERG | October 08, 2008