Derf (aka John Backderf) gets ideas for his cartoon through cultural osmosis. As he wanders around the city, he stumbles across all kinds of material. His award-winning cartoon, The City, is carried by alternative weeklies across the country. This is the 25th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
According to an article on AVN (Adult Video News) Online, the San Francisco-based adult tabloid closed largely because of "growing competition for sexual advertising from several local freebie papers such as the Bay Guardian, SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, as well as similar ads on the Internet." Spectator originally formed as an offshoot of the Berkeley Barb, an underground newspaper founded in 1967. Needless to say, this link may be NSFW.
U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay probably rues the day that Andrew Wheat first laid hands on a spreadsheet. Wheat's research at the liberal think tank Texans for Public Justice informs the political columns he writes for The Texas Observer. His award-winning columns followed the money corporations donated to a political action committee to places it perhaps ought not to have been going. This is the 18th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
On Monday, Moyers' remarks from a Sept. 30 party for the Observer were made available on The Huffington Post. Moyers covers highlights from the Observer's 50-year history as well as his own experiences in Texas. He then moves on to problems with the current administration, saying, "not a day passes that I don't wish we could clone The Texas Observer, plant it smack dab in the center of the nation's capital, and loose the spirit of Thomas Paine."
Celeste Fraser Delgado was arrested on Nov. 20, 2003 while covering protests during the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial meetings in downtown Miami. On Thursday--the two-year anniversary of the event--the ACLU filed three lawsuits, including one on Delgado's behalf, charging that police officers had used excessive force to intimidate and unlawfully arrest innocent bystanders and protesters. Delgado, who wrote a 2700-word article about her experience, is no longer with Miami New Times.
With its New York literary milieu and occasional references to Voice co-founder Norman Mailer, Noah Baumbach's new film is stuffed so full of Village Voice-ness that Voice film critic J. Hoberman was compelled to attach the following disclosure to the end of his review: "If I hadn't liked The Squid and the Whale so much, I might have begged off reviewing. For, while I have only the slightest personal acquaintance with the filmmaker, I do know his brother, his father, and particularly, his mother, former Voice movie critic Georgia Brown." Despite his lineage, however, Baumbach didn't show much concern for the Voice's brand reputation: The only time the paper appears in the movie, it is being read by Jeff Daniels' Bernard Berkman character, which is the family-satire equivalent of a product endorsement by Hannibal Lecter.
