The Knight Arts Challenge asked one simple question: What’s your best idea for the arts? There were only three rules for applying: 1) The idea must be about the arts; 2) The project must take place in or benefit Philadelphia; and 3) The grant recipients must find funds to match Knight’s commitment, within a year. Emerging from a field of 1,200 applicants, 43 projects received more than $2 million last night when the winners of the 2013 Knight Arts Challenge were announced. The announcement marks the final year of the three-year initiative, which has funded 114 projects. Knight Foundation, which has invested […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Johnny Marr @ The Troc
` Johnny Marr is the Zelig of alternative rock, consider the list of bands he’s played in, contributed to, guest-starred in or recorded/performed with in the last 30 years: the Talking Heads, the Pretenders, Modest Mouse, R.E.M., Beck, Oasis, Bryan Ferry, Pet Shop Boys, Billy Bragg, Black Grape, Electronic, Jane Birkin, Happy Mondays, The The, Chic, Dinosaur Jr, Pearl Jam, Crowded House, Tom Jones. And that’s not even counting The Smiths, the band he started with Morrissey back in early ’80s Manchester, the band that a recent NME readers poll deem the greatest British band of all time, beating out […]
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Willie Nelson Turns 80
From a 1975 appearance at the Country Music Awards, performing “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain,” arguably his greatest song.
EARLY WORD: Dame Arianna
Doyenne of the Dems, princess of the progressives, and the woman who plays Glenda The Good Witch to Sarah Palin’s Wicked Witch of the West in the Oz-like fantasia of cable news, Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post founder/namesake, will give a talk on the future of traditional media and how social media has changed journalism at Drexel tomorrow night. The event will be held in the Main Auditorium of our Main Building (32nd and Chestnut) on Tuesday, April 30 at 6pm. More info HERE. To reserve tickets, people can contact Jennifer Yusin at jyusin@drexel.edu to be put on the will-call list. […]
MEANWHILE IN WASH. WHERE THE WAR ON DRUGS WENT TO DIE: Judge Tells Cops To Return Man’s Marijuana Or Be Found In Contempt
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Police in Tacoma could soon be in real trouble over pot. The department could be found in contempt if they continue to refuse to return a small amount of marijuana seized from a man after a traffic stop. Municipal Court Judge Jack Emery repeated an order to police Thursday to return the drug to Joseph L. Robertson within seven days or they could be found in contempt. “Appeal or comply,” Emery told assistant city attorney John Walker. “Or next week, show up, and I would advise you to bring counsel.” MORE DENVER POST: A proposal that could […]
Steven Spielberg & Daniel Day Lewis On The Rigors Of Bringing ‘Obama’ To The Silver Screen
From last night’s White House Correspondents Association dinner. RELATED: Do you know who knows that the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner is a shameful display of whoredom that makes the “average American” vomit in disgust, or, more likely, simply continue to disregard the findings of any ostensibly neutral journalistic outlet in favor of their own ideology of choice, because they have a fully solidified belief that the “mainstream media” is little more than a bunch of ball-lapping lapdogs to whoever’s in power? Everyone. Everyone knows this. Even the members of the media who attend the White House Whores Despondence Dinner […]
WILLIAM TYLER: Impossible Truth (Album Teaser)
Beautiful, poetic cinematic meditation on the Dirty South circa then and now. Ironically, it reps an album of wordless guitar instrumentals — wordless yet operatic. Go figure. MERGE: Impossible Truth is William Tyler‘s debut album on Merge Records. Rooted in apocalyptic expectation and bittersweet nostalgia, Tyler describes the record as “my ’70s singer-songwriter record; it just doesn’t have any words.” 2010’s Behold the Spirit, William Tyler’s first album under his own name, was celebrated by Pitchfork as “the most vital, energized album by an American solo guitarist in a decade or more” and established him as a critical favorite. Impossible […]
RIP: George Jones, Hillbilly Sinatra, Dead @ 81
NEW YORK TIMES: George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, whose songs about heartbreak and hard drinking echoed his own life, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 81. Mr. Jones — nicknamed Possum for his close-set eyes and pointed nose and later No-Show Jones for the concerts he missed during drinking and drug binges — was universally respected and just as widely imitated. With a baritone voice that was as elastic as a steel-guitar string, he found vulnerability and doubt behind the cheerful drive of honky-tonk and brought suspense to every syllable, merging bluesy slides […]
MEDIA: The Daily Mail Web Site Draws Mega Traffic But Shockingly Little Social Media Play
The Mail Online, the web version of the Daily Mail, the snappy British tabloid with a trademark photo-heavy seeing-eye chart layout, just went public with their traffic numbers and the results are telling, although it’s unclear what exactly we’ve been told. With 12 million daily visitors, the Daily Mail is an 800 pound gorilla on the web but a 90 pound weakling on social media (Facebook and Twitter, at least). The Daily Mail’s second most tweeted story — Swedish cops find drugs and a stun gun on The Bieber’s tour bus! — earned a mere 25 tweets. The most […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR The sixth season of AMC’s Mad Men, which premiered April 7, jumps forward in time a few months from where the fifth season concluded. The first episode of the season comes to a close on New Year’s Day 1968. That date was designed to set the tone for the entire season. That year, says Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, is, “as far as I can tell, in the top two or three worst years in U.S. history.” “That’s what it was about for me,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “Let’s get to the destruction. Let’s get […]
SIDEWALKING: The Shadow Knows
Citzen’s Bank Park, 1:42 pm by JEFF FUSCO
IRON & WINE: Joy
Drop-dead gorgeous song and video. Iron & Wine play a sold out show at Union Transfer on May 15th.
BREAD & CIRCUSES: The Os Mutantes Movie
The year is high in the mid-’60s. The place: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a country chafing under a brutal dictatorship. The setting: a swingin’ ’60s nightclub au-go-go straight out of Austin Powers. Lights flash and the music throbs as the camera zooms in and out to the beat. The club is filled with the hip, the young and the privileged, all dressed in mod Carnaby Street finery. Os Mutantes, Brazil’s rough-translation answer to the psychedelic-period Beatles, are set to take the stage. Suddenly, the music cuts out and the lights come up as the room fills with government storm troopers. […]