Greg Mitchell had a silver screen moment when he parlayed his long hair into a photo shoot for the 1977 low-budget film "Between the Lines." Set in Boston at a fictitious alt-weekly, the Back Bay Mainline was obviously modeled on the two Boston papers then in a fight to the death, the Phoenix and The Real Paper. Jeff Goldblum went on to become a star after playing the Mainline's "scuzzy rock critic."
How does a country on the edge of war look? Four partiers board a subway wearing fatigues and gas masks. Frustration mounts at an anti-war protest meeting. New York City is theoretically divided into hot, warm, and cold zones of chemical contamination. Graduate journalism students at Columbia University record their observations as a series of vignettes for The Local Planet Weekly "It's the same approach we used for 'Seven Days at Ground Zero,'" which won a 2002 Alternative Newsweekly Award for feature writing, says Planet Editor Tom Grant, who is also a Columbia graduate.
Responding to Michael Ryan's "It's Not Norman Mailer's Village Voice Anymore," which uses the anti-trust investigation of the New Times-Village Voice deal as a platform to excoriate alternative newspapers, AAN Executive Director Richard Karpel says, "The Village Voice and New Times are for-profit companies subject to the same economic rules as every other business: Their papers need to make money so they can pay employees and vendors, and if they don't they have to shut down."
Seattle is home to 800 nonhuman primates, but the University of Washington won't let anyone see them. Seattle Weekly's Philip Dawdy reveals why, in the cold war over animal rights, the University of Washington's primate research program is a major target. Activists are outraged over the treatment of these intelligent animals, one-third of whom die from the experimentation. Researchers say without such research medicine could not advance.
Texas boxer Valerie Mahfood has had the crap kicked out of her by bar bouncers for looking too much like a man. She's had the crap kicked out of her by inmates at a maximum-security prison. Most recently, she's had the crap kicked out of her -- on national TV, no less -- by ring prodigy Laila Ali. But, encouraged by her tough-talking, cigar-smoking father, Mahfood takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Dallas Observer staff writer Rose Farley talks to "A Girl Named Suicide," who may just change the face of women's boxing.
