Pulp

PULP. With opening act The Drag at TLA, 334 South St., 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $10:50 in advance, $12.50 the day of the show. Info: 215-922-1011. As an opening act last year for Blur, they watched the blokes from Manchester go down in flames - constantly (and often unfavorably) compared to that other big British band of the hour, Oasis. Now the worm's turned and that opening act (from nearby Sheffield) is headlining their first U.S. tour. They're trying their hardest to avoid being the next big thing that lasts a lunchtime.

Max Payne is a junkyard dog of a film that is true to its video-game roots even as it transcends them. Irish director John Moore ( The Omen ) has fashioned an atmosphere darker than noir. His New York (a transformed Toronto) is a hellhole of back alleys, not boulevards; of deserted subway platforms, not teeming sidewalks; a place where ashy snow drifts down like endless regrets. In this bleak warren, Max Payne stews. Dressed in black and packing a firearm heftier than Dirty Harry's, he's the Ahab of the police department.

Ladies and gentlemen, the new British Invasion has finally found its showman, and his name is Jarvis Cocker. Pulp, the Sheffield, England, band led by the 6-foot-4 stickman with the foppish 'do, completed its first U.S. tour on Sunday with a sold-out show at the Theater of Living Arts. For 90 minutes, Cocker was everything his immobile countrymen in Oasis - the band Pulp deserves to follow to a mass-audience breakthrough - aren't. As his Bowiesque croon soared on one terrific post-disco pop tune after the next, Cocker pumped his pelvis, kicked like a Rockette, and acted out the lyrics with theatrical flair.

One of the least prolific and most interesting of American indie filmmakers, Victor Nunez, ably adapted a John D. MacDonald thriller, A Flash of Green, in 1984. He made Ruby in Paradise, a keenly observed tale of a woman's voyage of self-discovery - introducing Ashley Judd to audiences in 1993. Four years later, Peter Fonda got an Oscar nomination for his performance in Nunez's Ulee's Gold. Like those films, Nunez's latest, Coastlines, is set in Florida - in the flat, scruffy panhandle where the beaches remain relatively undeveloped and the culture of the South hangs heavy in the air. It's an area peopled by oystermen and shrimpers, car mechanics and cops, and Nunez - who has lived there most of his life - captures the hot, loping feel of the place with a documentarian's eye. Alas, Coastlines, which owes much of its plot, and its characters, to the kind of hard-boiled crime fiction of folks like MacDonald, isn't anywhere near as good as Nunez's earlier work.

The Philadelphia Regional Port Authority celebrated the eagerly-awaited sound of pile drivers finally sinking the foundation of a new "forest products" warehouse near Pier 78 at Delaware and Snyder avenues yesterday with a ceremony at the site. The state Legislature appropriated the money to build the warehouse six years ago, but it got stalled in lawsuits. The Legislature passed a special act last year to get the project moving. Forest products means paper, pulp and plywood - some 700,000 tons that was imported from Finland, Sweden and Great Britain last year through PRPA-owned terminals leased to Penn Trucking and Warehousing Co., according to John Brown Jr., Penn Trucking's vice president.

Once upon a time, according to Richard Greene, Americans read for entertainment. Apparently they liked it a lot, though that seems a little far- fetched in the Bart Simpson era of today. But Greene - who calls himself an archivist of American popular culture - has hard evidence of this bygone literacy: his collection of several thousand "pulp magazines. " The pulps were low-brow fiction digests that sold tens of millions of copies from the late 1800s through the early 1950s.

Jarvis Cocker realized he wanted to be a pop star when he was a wee lad growing up in Sheffield, England, in the '70s. "I knew from a very early age," says the 6-foot-4, 140-pound leader of Pulp, calling from London before the Brit-pop band of the moment plays the TLA on Sunday. "I remember watching the Osmonds' television show and Donny saying his favorite color was purple, which was the same as mine. I thought maybe I had it in me to be a pop star, too. " It took some time - Pulp was first formed in 1978 - but with Different Class (Island)

From the makers of Night of the Comet comes Jake Speed, a loopy, appealing B-movie that tickles the ribs, the fancy and the combined plots of The African Queen, Remo Williams and Romancing the Stone. It also might be the first picture in 60 years (since Son of the Sheik, anyway) in which saving a blonde from the clutches of white slavers is the hero's mission. Jake Speed (Wayne Crawford, who co-wrote the screenplay) is an engagingly earnest hero whose exploits on behalf of the underdog are the stuff of pulp fiction.

Scott Paper Co. said yesterday it will sell off assets valued about $1 billion, including its entire pulp and timberland operations. Albert Dunlap, Scott's chairman and chief executive, said the divestitures are part of Scott's transformation from a broad-based paper manufacturer to a consumer-products company focusing on its core tissue business. Scott, after several years of financial decline, is undergoing a major restructuring led by Dunlap, who joined the company in April.

Scott Paper Co. is considering a huge investment in a tree plantation in Indonesia's remote Irian Jaya province, Indonesia's Investment Coordinating Board said today. A spokesman for the board told Reuters that "serious discussions" took place last month when Scott officials visited Indonesia. He said a decision could come within a month or two. Reuters said "U.S. business sources" say the Philadelphia paper company is pondering a $600 million investment in a 495,000-acre plantation and pulp- making facility.

Max Payne is a junkyard dog of a film that is true to its video-game roots even as it transcends them. Irish director John Moore ( The Omen ) has fashioned an atmosphere darker than noir. His New York (a transformed Toronto) is a hellhole of back alleys, not boulevards; of deserted subway platforms, not teeming sidewalks; a place where ashy snow drifts down like endless regrets. In this bleak warren, Max Payne stews. Dressed in black and packing a firearm heftier than Dirty Harry's, he's the Ahab of the police department.

Of all the things to obsess about, toilet paper has never been at the top of my list. Or the bottom. Then I met Jeff Wells, a pleasant, earnest ornithologist who lives in Maine and was visiting Philly. Wells and a few environmental groups say I should buy paper products made from recycled paper - not trees. Now, Wells obsesses about birds, billions of which breed in Canada's boreal forest, which he also obsesses about because he's a scientist with the International Boreal Conservation Campaign.

When last we saw Tony Soprano, he was lying in a leather jacket on a bare mattress, clutching an automatic weapon like it was his last friend on the planet. All around him was whacking and chaos. Tony seemed small and vulnerable - sympathetic, even. It made us root for him to survive in tomorrow night's final episode of The Sopranos. And therein lies my problem with this unquestionably brilliant show: We like these people too much. The real Mafia - the sociopaths I grew up with in the crucible of the American Cosa Nostra in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn - are nowhere near as charming as James Gandolfini, who plays Tony.

It's a shockingly balmy day in January. Colorfully dressed revelers are streaming down South Street to celebrate with the Mummers. This is definitely not David Goodis' Philadelphia. In 18 books, most set in his hometown, this Temple graduate captured desperate men, usually on the wrong side of the law, trying to survive in a cold, grim and unforgiving Philadelphia. On this unseasonably warm weekend, a band of writers, readers, academics and collectors are burrowed in the Society Hill Playhouse to pay tribute to this tortured and talented native son 40 years after his death.

Joseph Stefano, 84, who after leaving Philadelphia as a young man to pursue a career in show business ended up writing the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and becoming a co-creator of television's seminal science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, died of lung cancer Friday at Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks, Calif. The youngest of eight children in a poor family, Mr. Stefano grew up in South Philadelphia during the Great Depression. His mother died when he was very young, his father was usually out of work, and the family moved 13 times because they couldn't pay the rent, always staying near 20th and Snyder.

WE ARE outraged by the July 20 "Nancy" comic strip. By making light of Nancy beating Sluggo to a pulp in a jealous rage, the strip trivializes relationship abuse and suggests that violence is an acceptable way to resolve personal disputes. Domestic violence should not be a punch line for a cheap joke. You and the strip's authors owe your readers an apology. Judy Kahan, Chief Executive Officer Center Against Domestic Violence Brooklyn, N.Y.

One of the least prolific and most interesting of American indie filmmakers, Victor Nunez, ably adapted a John D. MacDonald thriller, A Flash of Green, in 1984. He made Ruby in Paradise, a keenly observed tale of a woman's voyage of self-discovery - introducing Ashley Judd to audiences in 1993. Four years later, Peter Fonda got an Oscar nomination for his performance in Nunez's Ulee's Gold. Like those films, Nunez's latest, Coastlines, is set in Florida - in the flat, scruffy panhandle where the beaches remain relatively undeveloped and the culture of the South hangs heavy in the air. It's an area peopled by oystermen and shrimpers, car mechanics and cops, and Nunez - who has lived there most of his life - captures the hot, loping feel of the place with a documentarian's eye. Alas, Coastlines, which owes much of its plot, and its characters, to the kind of hard-boiled crime fiction of folks like MacDonald, isn't anywhere near as good as Nunez's earlier work.

A pharmaceutical consultant secretly commissions a novel about terrorists poisoning Americans with medicine from Canada, then backs out and inadvertently spawns a thriller pillorying his own industry. This is no pulp-fiction farce. Call it bookgate, an impossible-to-make-up public-relations disaster now dogging the pharmaceutical industry. Its real-life cast includes a deputy vice president of the country's drug lobby, a celebrity divorce lawyer, a tell-all book publisher, and even former New York Times fabricator Jayson Blair in a cameo.

Sin City is a technically dazzling, faithful-to-a-fault comic-book adaptation full of bodacious babes and buckets of blood that oozes with film-noir atmospherics and is really, really cool to look at. Shooting a cast that includes Rosario Dawson, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Bruce Willis, Brittany Murphy, Benicio Del Toro, Elijah Wood and Mickey Rourke in front of green screens and placing them in computer-generated backdrops, director Robert Rodriguez...

The persimmon species known as "Japanese" is actually grown in the United States. Two varieties are common in supermarkets and produce markets. The larger, the Hachiya, is shaped like a large acorn, with a distinct tip at the bottom, opposite the stem end. Hachiyas are typically orangey-red even when unripe, making skin color an unreliable gauge of ripeness. Hachiyas are exquisitely sweet and flavorful when fully ripe but unpleasantly astringent when unripe. The other Japanese persimmon variety, the Fuyu, can be eaten at any stage, even when firm.