CityPaper: In iPod He Trusts:

Porter knows music. For the past seven years he’s been spinning vinyl at clubs and lounges around town as DJ Botany 500. Over the last five, he’s helped run Cue Records, the Fourth and South shop known for its extensive hip-hop and electronic selection. As a DJ, he’s learned to read the mood of a room and find the appropriate groove. And with Cue’s impressive stock — plus Porter’s own expansive archives — at his disposal, chances are he can find just the track he’s looking for.

The trick is somehow turning Porter’s knowledge and collection into a more efficient and transportable entity, rather than having him spin at a restaurant day and night.

That’s where technology comes in. Armed with a small fleet of iPods, Porter’s embarking on a one-of-a-kind business venture: filling the little mp3 players with a specially created musical catalog and renting them out to area businesses. “Instead of going in with my vinyl and DJing for four hours, I can DJ for them for the whole month.” As far as he knows, he’s the first to come up with this particular business model.

Very, very cool. via More Boom In The Room.

A bad title. A very bad title. Deep within this story lies a few paragraphs that are very important:

Welcome to Fishtown – deeply rooted in tradition, slow to change. There was once a time when there were a score of Philly neighborhoods exactly like this one – anchored by the Catholic Church, fraternal lodges, the corner bar, the local athletic club and a factory.

But the roots of Fishtown, a stone’s throw from the busy Delaware River, with Center City still in its rearview mirror, are planted more deeply than most. Anthony Palmer founded a plantation here in 1730, and the cemetery that bears his name is a local landmark, a green mark penned in by a wall of rowhouses. The place has been called Fishtown since the 1800s, when the smell of the day’s catch from the Delaware filled the narrow streets.

Maybe that history is part of why the great social upheavals of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s didn’t deliver a knockout punch the way they hit some nearby neighborhoods. Home to a number of cops and firefighters, Fishtown was mostly as solid as the red brick of its homes. There have been racial tensions here, but not as strongly as in some other sections of Philadelphia. Although Fishtown remains predominantly white, there are also substantial Latino and black communities, as well as a recent tide of immigrants from Armenia and elsewhere.

Read he rest in the Daily News.

The killing of Jason Sweeney should not be an indictment of the entire neighborhood. To judge Fishtown in it’s entirety based on this terrible story would be wrong and closed minded. I’ve lived all over Philly, and I gotta tell you – like all of its neighborhoods – Fishtown can’t be described in just a few words or be summarized by a single event, even one as horrific as this. As Elizabeth Murawski, neighbor to the Sweeney family says “If it could happen to Jason, it could happen to anyone.” And let me add – anywhere. Drugs are the true poison in all of this. It’s reach is far, and it’s effects are always terrible.

My prayers go out to him, his family and all those touched by this.

Head on over to The Pennsylvania Gazette for some interesting local skyscrapper news.