Glitter

During the '70s, David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Bryan Ferry made pop's boldest moves - electronic soundscapes, tart rock, Euro-disco, and soulful cabaret with lyrics that reeked of Dada and Beat imagery. They strutted in glitter and dyed hair when denim was the currency. Now, Bowie and Iggy, both 52, and Ferry, 54, are VH1 fare, and they're finding that it's tricky to grow old when you're odd and your greatest innovations are years behind you. The response: three former glam guys singing September songs in the autumn of their years.

Glitter, the eagerly awaited, twice-postponed A Star Is Born revamp featuring Mariah Carey in her film debut, is so bad that you can write its epitaph. A star is stillborn. It's not entirely a failure of the story. This yarn about a backup singer who soars to the top while her famous discoverer and lover watches his career plummet has always worked before, for Janet Gaynor and, spectacularly, for Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. It's not entirely a failure of direction.

It's nearly summer, and the great chandelier that has hung in the Academy of Music for a century and a half is going on a nice, long trip - a cure, really - to the south of France. Yesterday, it was lowered from its high perch near the golden, richly colored mural on the Academy's ceiling, and workers quickly began to disassemble it. In a few days it will be shipped by sea to the town of Gargas, in Provence, to the Mathieu Lustrerie workshop, where it will be the object of a dramatic restoration.

The little indie "Tennessee" squeezes super-celeb diva Mariah Carey into the humble role of Texas truck stop waitress. It's a fairly meaty role (pardon the pun - she added weight for the part) and Carey does some surprisingly subtle work. She doesn't pick up a guitar and croon until the end of the movie, and even then, it's not the same gal you saw in "Glitter. " Carey plays Krystal, stuck in a dead-end job and oppressive marriage, who decides to skip town with a couple of brothers on their way to Nashville, where she'd like to start over as a singer.

In art, there is good camp and bad camp. Bad camp is a Disneyfied Las Vegas and Madonna buddying up to Rupert Everett. Bad camp has no irony, no psychic absorption, no iconography. Good camp is Aaron Spelling, the increased value of Warhol paintings, and, from the look and sound of Saturday's sold-out First Union show, Cher. Why was Cher great? Because she made distance and exaggeration work by staying cool singing schmaltzy grand-eloquent pop ("The Way of Love") and flamenco house tunes ("Dove L'Amour")

No amount of 11th-hour public-relations alchemy can save Martha Stewart from herself. The flogging she has endured - financial, social and judicial - is nothing compared with the self-mutilation inflicted on her professional and personal reputation. Unable to deflect an unwelcome spotlight, Stewart has committed the ultimate PR faux pas: She insists she is being prosecuted, or perhaps persecuted, because she is a powerful and successful woman. As usual, Stewart, among the more famous of New Jersey natives, has surrounded herself with advisers who merely echo her. Stewart's tunnel vision is as amusing as it is alarming.

Sit through "Glitter" and you too may feel like checking yourself into a hospital for "exhaustion. " Mariah Carey follows in the dubious footsteps of a pathetic plethora of pop stars who believe their life force is so bedazzling they just simply must belong in the movies with this hackneyed, inconsequential yarn of the rags-to-riches rise of a virtuous young singer who has taken the worst life can dish out and still yada yada yada. The most perplexing aspect of this relentlessly humdrum vanity project is how flat and lugubrious it all is. Obviously, Carey would've been better served in a featherweight romantic comedy rather than the shallow, wearying sturm und drang smeared across the screen here.

The streets glitter in parts of Center City, but the sparkle comes from shattered glass - not gold. A pavement scattered with broken glass often represents a motorist's encounter with one of the worst irritants of urban life - smash-and-grab thefts from parked cars. The persistence of so-called "ventbusters," detailed by staff writer Thomas Ferrick Jr., is a serious challenge to a city that's trying to attract visitors. Whether it's 20 break-ins a day, as reported this year, or several times that number, as some police estimate, the problem is real.

Millions of Americans may have watched sultry Mariah Carey on Friday night's star-studded America: A Tribute to Heroes, but they didn't follow her into movie theaters. Carey's eagerly awaited film debut, Glitter, didn't even break into the North American box-office top 10 over the weekend, as ticket sales plunged on the lowest-grossing weekend so far this year. Glitter, the tale of a pop diva on the rise, wobbled in at No. 11, grossing just $2.5 million, according to studio estimates collected by Reuters.

Anyone who has ever trudged through the Wissahickon woods after a heavy snowstorm has seen Kate Bright's paintings. Never mind that Bright is British and lives in London, or that the paintings are based on photographs probably taken elsewhere (her catalog cites Wales, British Columbia and Michigan as three sources) and sprinkled with glitter - they will immediately remind Philadelphians of their own sublime backyard, and in more ways than one. Beneath their sparkly surfaces, Bright's cropped, slightly disorienting views of branches echo the work of three Philadelphians: painter Emily Brown and photographers Ray Metzker and Diane Burko, who is better known as a painter.

Doug Collins was looking back across the hilly landscape of the 76ers' 2011-12 experience and searched for a way to describe the team's fast start to the season, the 20-9 beginning that reinvigorated the fan base, raised the expectation level for the team, and influenced the coach to keep heading down the same trail longer than he might have otherwise. "Fool's gold," Collins said. "Our 20-9 start was a little bit of fool's gold. We got off to a great start, were able to keep the same starting lineup, had a very soft schedule and we took care of our business at home.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI decried the increasing commercialization of Christmas as he celebrated Christmas Eve Mass, urging the faithful to look beyond the holiday's "superficial glitter" to discover its true meaning. Benedict, 84, presided over the Saturday night service in a packed St. Peter's Basilica, kicking off an intense two weeks of Christmas-related public appearances that will test his stamina amid signs that fatigue is starting to slow him down. The Christmas Eve Mass was moved up to 10 p.m. from midnight several years ago to spare the pope a late night that is followed by an important Christmas Day speech.

(This story has been changed; the corrected text is below.) Gold recently soared to $1,475 an ounce, and silver reached near $40 an ounce. With some precious metals' prices hitting record highs, we thought it would be helpful to warn investors about getting caught up in scams involving commodities: gold, silver, and other metals, futures, and options, even cotton and sugar. So, with whom should you check before handing your money over to someone who trades commodities?

The flash of satin, sequins, spandex, and precision step dancing that is Michael Flatley   comes at you in stereo vision in Lord of the Dance 3D, an insistent spectacle blending Las Vegas razzmatazz with World Wrestling Entertainment showmanship. Opening on St. Patrick's Day for a one-week run, the new film is a state-of-the-art version of the show first staged and performed by Flatley at Dublin's Point Theatre in 1996 (the version recorded in a 1997 video). Tricked out with laser lights, Jumbotrons, and stereoscopic cameras, LOTD 3D was filmed at the same Dublin venue, rechristened the 02 theater, in 2010.

With Johnny Weir, it's easy to forget. The boas and bangles, the easy charm and wince-provoking candor, the elegance and egotism, the Russian obsession and the reality show, the over-the-top theatricality and the understated grace, they all combine to obscure the reality that deep down - admittedly a little deeper than usual - the Chester County-born figure skater is an athlete. Weir has the fire. He loves to compete. And no grizzled hockey player likes winning any better.

When I was 10, I asked my mother if I could wear a Michael Jackson-style Jheri curl. All my friends had one. "No way!" she said of the greasy, spiral tresses. No matter. Summer turned into fall, and after much pleading, my grandmother bought me a zippered, red pleather jacket, a replica of the one Michael wore in his "Beat It" video. I wasn't the only one who looked odd pairing the jacket with my Catholic school uniform. We all did it. I can't fathom a world without Michael Jackson.

The little indie "Tennessee" squeezes super-celeb diva Mariah Carey into the humble role of Texas truck stop waitress. It's a fairly meaty role (pardon the pun - she added weight for the part) and Carey does some surprisingly subtle work. She doesn't pick up a guitar and croon until the end of the movie, and even then, it's not the same gal you saw in "Glitter. " Carey plays Krystal, stuck in a dead-end job and oppressive marriage, who decides to skip town with a couple of brothers on their way to Nashville, where she'd like to start over as a singer.

Yesterday morning, eight hours before the 76ers tipped off against the Chicago Bulls for the final game played at the Wachovia Spectrum, Julius Erving, a veteran of hundreds of Spectrum games, delivered the perfect analogy for the difference between a venue such as the Wachovia Spectrum, marked for extermination, and its evolved complement across the street, the Wachovia Center. "This building was definitely a coach flight," Erving said about the Spectrum, then he motioned across the parking lot. "And that one across the street is a first-class flight.

Ordinarily, Philadelphia jeweler Matthew Sulby said, he'd be "feeling butterflies" about now, laying in inventory ahead of the exciting Christmas season that for decades made his cash register overflow. Not so this year. "I'm going to have a poor Christmas and I know it. Twenty years, and I never said that before. Christmas was always gravy for me. Now I need Christmas just to bail me out," said Sulby, 48, whose shop, Unclaimed Diamonds, glitters on Eighth Street near Sansom.

Anyone who has ever trudged through the Wissahickon woods after a heavy snowstorm has seen Kate Bright's paintings. Never mind that Bright is British and lives in London, or that the paintings are based on photographs probably taken elsewhere (her catalog cites Wales, British Columbia and Michigan as three sources) and sprinkled with glitter - they will immediately remind Philadelphians of their own sublime backyard, and in more ways than one. Beneath their sparkly surfaces, Bright's cropped, slightly disorienting views of branches echo the work of three Philadelphians: painter Emily Brown and photographers Ray Metzker and Diane Burko, who is better known as a painter.