BY REBECCA GOODACRE This week The King’s Speech won the Oscar for best picture, and, as is tradition critics set about analyzing the whys and wherefores of its success. Was it just another extension of America’s captivation with British royalty and all that palace and crown jewels malarkey? And how do us Brit’s feel about something so homegrown winning big? Upon seeing The King’s Speech my first reaction was just of ‘Thank fucking god Colin Firth isn’t playing yet another doddering nice-guy in a British rom-com.’ But after that initial relief, some deep-seated British guilt set in; shouldn’t this really […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR During his early-’70s heyday, shock-rock icon Alice Cooper dressed like a ghoul, with a gaunt face and mascara-streaked eyes, performing cartoonishly violent onstage stunts. His brand of rock was about breaking taboos and being decadent. He frequently, for example, took a hatchet to female mannequins and spit into the audience, often ending his performances inside a guillotine. As intentionally crude as his shows were, some of the songs — including “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy” — became big hits. And on March 14, Cooper and his band will be inducted into the Rock […]
COLORMUSIC: Tog (Feat. Wayne Coyne)
Colourmusic – Tog from Delo Creative on Vimeo. Welcome to the beautifully strange world of Colourmusic. Rounded out by bassist Colin Fleishacker, drummer Nicholas Ley, and guitarist Nick Turner, Colourmusic’s new material amounts to an ever-evolving mass of melancholic melodies, gauzy vocals, shifty beats, and monophonic musical structures. Not to mention glimpses of agnostic gospel grooves (“You For Leaving Me”), hip-shaking R&B (“Feels Good To Wear”), acid-drenched pop (“Tog”), and Bladerunner-inspired psych (“Pororoca,” which means — quite tellingly —“great destructive noise” in many parts of South America). And then there’s “The Little Death,” a five-part foray into the outer realm of sandblasted […]
SIDEWALKING: After The Fall
The Spectrum,Wednesday 3:45 PM by JEFF FUSCO
ARTSY: Our First Friday Picks
BY CAROLINE SCHMIDT Henry the Navigator was born on March 4th, in 1394. Charlie Chaplin was knighted on the same day, in 1975. Abraham Lincoln was sworn into office, in 1861. It was the last full day-in-the-life of Josef Stalin (d. March 5, 1953), as well as Patsy Cline (d. March 5, 1963). Here is a list of top-five gallery picks for the month of March in Philadelphia, some of them, but not all (!) opening on this momentous day, Friday March 4th. Desert Island, curated by Gabe Fowler–the owner of the Brooklyn based comic/art bookshop of the same name–opens this […]
STYLE COUNCIL: ?uestlove Unveils His Line Of Nikes
PRESS RELEASE: Once again turning to an icon of Nike’s design heritage, Nike Sportswear takes the Nike Dunk and puts it in the hands of one of the music industry’s most innovative creators of sound, ?uestlove. Releasing on March 4th, two Nike Dunks will hit the shelves as a pair of unlikely twins bearing a unique look that is arguably the first of its kind. One pair red and the other yellow, the Nike Dunk x ?uestlove is the product of an imagination that brings uncharacteristic embellishments to a classic. Inspired by mid 80’s era American television, ?uestlove draws from […]
WORTH REPEATING: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t ‘Fix’ It
NEW YORK TIMES: “We’re broke! We’re broke!” Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday. “We’re broke in this state,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said a few days ago. “New Jersey’s broke,” Gov. Chris Christie has said repeatedly. The United States faces a “looming bankruptcy,” Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan. And states have to balance their budgets. Though it […]
Phawker Presents The Sixth Installment Of Blotto
BY LANCE DOILY So it looks like Freddy got popped again. Depending on who you ask, it went from a routine traffic stop for a broken taillight to him taking a page out of Rex’s book and getting nailed going a buck-twenty on the wrong side of the Parkway. Either way, it ended with Freddy blowing a county record .48% and nearly paralyzing a state trooper with a perfectly executed atomic drop. After all the paperwork goes through this will end up being his 11th DUI, not bad considering he’s been consistently inebriated for the past 26 years (any break […]
SIDEWALKING: NASA, We Have A Problem
City Hall, 3:37 PM WednesdaY by JEFF FUSCO
INCOMING: George Washington’s Teeth Slept Here
Soon to be joining the plethora of exhibits that preserve Philadelphia’s status as the most historical city in the United States is the National Constitution Center’s summer exhibition Discover the Real George Washington: New Views from Mount Vernon. Running from July 1 to September 5 2011, courtesy of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, avid history-lovers and American patriots will marvel at the revelation of previously undisclosed facts about George Washington and his life as an entrepreneur and a Founding Father. As the sole preservers of Mount Vernon, Washington’s plantation home in Virginaia,, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association will be transporting […]
WORTH REPEATING: In Defense Of Bradley Manning
CBS NEWS: When Bradley Manning deployed to Iraq in October 2009, he thought that he’d be helping the Iraqi people build a free society after the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein. What he witnessed firsthand was quite another matter. He soon found himself helping the Iraqi authorities detain civilians for distributing “anti-Iraqi literature” — which turned out to be an investigative report into financial corruption in their own government entitled “Where does the money go?” The penalty for this “crime” in Iraq was not a slap on the wrist. Imprisonment and torture, as well as systematic abuse of prisoners, are […]
EPK: The Wilderness Of Manitoba
If you like Fleet Foxes or old Iron & Wine, you will probably dig The Wildnerness Of Manitoba.
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
ON THE COVER CP: Lots of nice stuff in the Music Issue, including nicely-drawn connections between hip-hop and poetry in a spot on Curly Castro. I’m drawn most to Patrick Rapa’s cover treatment of Kurt Vile, which manages to reveal new things about a subject who’s been covered extensively in recent years. Observe: His new album, Smoke Ring For My Halo, is due out next week on Matador. Where some of his earlier releases reveled in their mysterious, overcast sound, this new one’s noticeably crisper, with a few more mellow moments. Instead of charging out of the gate with a […]