FRESH AIR Janelle Monae, the 25-year-old singer, songwriter and performer from Kansas City, blends cabaret, soul, funk and rock ‘n roll in her music. Her 2007 debut album Metropolis: The Chase Suite featured a character named Cindi Mayweather, Monae’s android alter-ego from the year 2719. “Many Moons,” a single off the album, earned the singer a Grammy nomination, and helped Monae catch the ear of Sean “Diddy” Combs, who signed her to his Bad Boy roster and re-released the album. In 2005, Outkasts’s Big Boi included two of her songs on his compilation, Got Purp?, Vol. 2. Monae also performed […]
EARLY WORD: High Capitol Drug Years
Click flyer to activate Internet. New Capitol Years vid after the jump. ***
LIVE & DIRECT: Seinfeld Stand-Up Comedy Contest
[Photos by Evelyn Taylor] BY KYLEE MESSNER You know the kind of people who are funny just by talking about the ordinary, without really trying at all? Unfortunately, those are not the kind of people I witnessed at the Kimmel Center’s Seinfeld Stand-Up Comedy Contest last night. The Kimmel Center was packed with businessmen and women, twentysomethings, and a handful of high school students. I couldn’t help but wonder what separated the young from the old; who had seen the original show’s airing in 1989, and which fans simply caught a couple of classics on TBS’s never-ending airing of re-runs. […]
EARLY WORD: Like A Raisin In The Sun
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TONITE: Seinfeld Wars
WHAT: Kimmel Center hosts a stand-up comedy contest in the Kimmel Center’s Commonwealth Plaza to celebrate Jerry Seinfeld’s upcoming performances at the Academy of Music on June 19-20. WHEN: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 6pm-7:15pm (Sign-ups at 5:15pm) WHERE: Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Commonwealth Plaza, Broad & Spruce Streets, Philadelphia WHO: The first 75 people to sign up will take the stage to perform one minute of their favorite Seinfeld bit for the chance to win a prize.* Participants will be judged on dress, delivery, comedic timing and choice of material. *First Prize: Master of Your Domain: Four […]
RAWK TAWK: Q&A w/ Annabel Alpers of Bachelorette
“Quietly psychedelic, the quavery vocal harmonies, wheezy synthesisers and attic-salvaged stringed instruments are layered with a shy urgency, a breathtaking tangle of dreaminess and directness… slow oscillations between intimacy and abstraction…. Having understood the implications of technology – electricity having made us all angels, etcetera – Bachelorette fractured herself into a girl-group of one, clouds of ah-ah-ahs and shoo-wop shoo-wops both underscoring and distracting from her tales of gravitational and hormonal pull.” – Author Unknown
ENDANGERED SPECIES: Food Trucks
[Photo by AARON STELLA] DAILY NEWS: Food-cart operators around the city say that they are struggling to make ends meet. They’re caught in a situation where they’re facing higher food prices, lower turnout and an inability to raise prices for fear of losing even more business, they say. “Customers are [coming] sometimes more, or sometimes less,” Aurang Zeb Khan, who runs Zeb’s Lunch, at 7th and Market streets, said last week as he slid grilled chicken onto his griddle, then shredded it. “But because of the ingredients, even if people are [coming] the same, our profits are lower.”Khan, 19, has […]
BRENDAN CALLING: Open Letter To Arlen Specter
It’s me, Brendan Skwire. You know, Mr. Sunshine. I’ve called your office quite a few times regarding the need for a public option in health care reform, which I guess is about as good as it’s gonna get considering you and the rest of your colleagues on the Hill are too timid or too indebted to the death-by-spreadsheet health care industry to support real single payer universal health care. Sen. Specter, you of all people should be loudly proclaiming your support for single player health care. After all, wasn’t it the taxpayers who paid for your Hodgkin’s lymphoma treatment? I […]
ARTSY: The Graduates
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EARLY WORD: Nation Of Ulysses
The Rosenbach Museum & Library Celebrates 17th Annual BLOOMSDAY, June 16, Noon – 7 p.m. PHILADELPHIA — The Rosenbach Museum & Library will celebrate its 17th annual Bloomsday on Tuesday, June 16th from noon – 7 p.m. The Rosenbach, home of James Joyce’s original manuscript for Ulysses, holds this Philadelphia tradition every year on June 16th, drawing hundreds of friends, neighbors, Joyce enthusiasts, book-lovers, and curious passersby to Delancey Place. Along with other Bloomsday events during the month of June, the Rosenbach will also present Money Matters, a special exhibition exploring Ulysses and the economy. Bloomsday itself is free and open […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Eddie Vedder At The Tower
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Eddie Vedder is a golden god to that sector of the rock-audience demographic that loves sports as much as it loves music. On Thursday night, the first of a two-night sold-out solo stand at the Tower Theater, Vedder regaled the crowd with tales of soul-brother handshakes with Dr. J and bar-hopping during the NBA Finals with Sean Penn and Jack Nicholson (wherein a beautiful woman walks up to Jack and asks if he wants to dance, and Jack responds that she’s chosen the wrong verb to describe what he wants to do with her), […]
The First Time I Got High…
BY JAMES DOOLITTLE I was always the new kid. By the time I reached the 7th grade, I had lived in four states, gone to three different parochial schools and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe – which for the era, served me with kindling for conversation starters, so handy when it came to working my way through the bottom rungs of a new district’s social ladder. That was the thing about Bobby. He didn’t know Star Wars from Battle Beyond the Stars. He didn’t read comic books, didn’t collect baseball cards and sure as hell wasn’t interested in playing nice. I was […]
AMERICAN ASSHOLE: Q&A With Arthur Kade
BY AARON STELLA GAYDAR EDITOR Until my Internet-savvy roommate directed me to arthurkade.com—in particular, a post titled Eulogy — I had no idea who Arthur Kade was. Four sentences into the post, I got the picture: he’s a delusional, narcissistic bag-of-douche, a whore to glamor and slave to fashion, but most of all, an irrepressible and frighteningly charismatic advocate of all the ruinous aforesaid. Upon finishing (no small feat without throwing up a little bit in my mouth) I decided to peruse other posts (Drunk Girls, The Kade Scale, Relationships, etc.), when all the sudden, mid-Kade, I felt the journalist […]