BY CAROLINE SCHMIDT Friday April first we can celebrate the birthday of Milan Kundera, Otto von Bismarck, Method Man and Edgar Wallace. We can shed a tear for Marvin Gaye, who died, a day before his birthday. Here are our top five places to do this, in no particular order. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be romantically involved with Charles M. Shulz (okay, I hadn’t, until I heard about this show) look no farther. Space 1026‘s April event This is a Love Letter is a collection of nearly one hundred letters written by Shulz over […]
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 […]
ARTSY: First Friday Picks
[Yue Minjun, Woodcut 1 from The Grassland Series, 2008. Woodcut on paper.] BY CAROLINE SCHMIDT February 4th marks the birthday of Alice Cooper (1948), Rosa Parks (1913), and Fernand Léger (1881). It is also the day Neal Cassady died (1968), along with head of Soviet NKVD Nikolai Yezhov (1940). It is also first Friday in Philadelphia (2011). Here is a list of top five gallery picks, selected by yours truly, in no particular order. Post-Mao Dreaming: Chinese Contemporary Art (pictured above), the current exhibition at The University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Ross Gallery is well worth the trip to the wild […]
SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: With Your Host AP Ticker
This week, AP discusses explains how West Philly High School student Brandon Ford got invited to sit with the First Lady for the State of The Union address, the Gosnell abortion horror show, and the Onion coming to town. Also, he explains why the U.S. will not be able to indict or extradite Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and pays tribute to his old pal Don Kirshner of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert fame.
ARTSY: Pleased To Meat Me
BY CAROLINE SCHMIDT Photographer Dominic Episcopo’s latest show, “Meat America,” opens tonight at Bambi Gallery. Episcopo—who leads a double life as a well-respected commercial photographer—has taken pounds upon pounds of raw meat, and carved it into a bracing series of photographs depicting the carnivorous cultural landscape of America. Out of rib eye steaks, pork chops, lamb and gator—even caribou—he has butchered and sculpted the shapes of all 50 states, along with cultural icons and historical figures: from Benjamin Franklin to Bob Dylan, from Betsy Ross to Elvis. Out of ground beef he has made a series of photographed still lifes […]
SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: With Your Host AP Ticker
This week AP discusses the Upper Darby woman suing Disney because Donald Duck groped her, the mysterious sick-out at a church in Bucks County and the downright apocalyptic mass birdkill in Arkansas. Plus Hot Carl with sports.
REWIND 2010: The Year In Phawker Interviews
Talk is cheap on the Internet, but at Phawker it’s totally free, baby — at least for you, dear reader. Trolling through the vast and dusty Phawker archives, we have dug up fat sack of conversations worth re-visiting: the always prickish-but-worth-it Will Oldham on authenticity, Americana and his testicles; the inimitable Black Francis susses out Doolittle for us; graphic artiste extraordinaire Charles Burns on the darkness within; author Hampton Sides discusses the banality of Martin Luther King assassin James Earle Ray’s evil; Dave Bielanko discusses Marah’s last chance power try; folk/rock legend Richard Thompson discusses Fairport Convention and reuniting with […]
MERRY KICKSMAS: Feat. AP Ticker
Yes, that’s Scrapple TV News anchor AP Ticker as Santa huffing that sneaker in this Foot Locker ad.
SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: With Your Host AP Ticker
AP confuses actor Hal Holbrooke with diplomat Richard Holbrooke, but recovers like a pro; warns kids against the perils of ‘drifting’ and cusses out Japan for inventing it, then kinds loses it a little bit when he goes off on how flouride in the water is a communist conspiracy.
ARTSY: Yankee Doodler Foxtrot
David Jablow’s “Do it yourself Doodler” opens at Bambi Gallery tonight (6 PM-10 PM) and runs through January 2nd BY CAROLINE SCHMIDT Local artist David Jablow’s latest project, “Do It Yourself Doodler” was inspired by a friend’s gift: a vintage novelty doodle pad from the sixties that featured an incomplete drawing of a woman on each page. With ink, white out, and no small amount of resourcefulness, Jablow has filled all 38 pages of the tablet with intricate illustrations, placing the doodler lady in comedic, quirky, clever, and occasionally compromising positions. He plans to turn the collection into a book. […]
ARTSY: ‘American Kills’
DESIGN BOOM: ‘when I first found the overall statistics summed the 304 suicides by US soldiers during 2009, I was shocked. I tried to find a number to compare that statistic. to my surprise the suicide statistic doubled the total of 149 US soldiers that had died in the iraq war during 2009 and equaled the number of soldiers killed in afghanistan.’ errazuriz’s first instinct was to post the statistic on facebook, dumbfounded by the lack of response and interest, he bought can of black paint and decided to ‘post’ the news in the real world on his own wall […]
EARLY WORD: Jack In The Box
Photo by Justin Bernhaut BY DAVE ALLEN Forget what you know about madness in music. Forget Syd Barrett and the recent struggle of Courtney Love; forget Robert Schumann and other composers who contracted syphilis and experienced hallucinations. Thanks to an unlikely collaboration between composer Gregory Spears and Dr. Morris Schimmel, director of the Buttonwood Hospital, a short-term psychiatric health facility in Mount Holly, New Jersey, there’s a new way of understanding music’s connection to the unsettled human mind. “For six weeks earlier this year, Spears was an artist-in-residence at Buttonwood, which involved performing both for the patients and alongside […]
ARTSY: Roy Lichtenstein Painting Sells For $42 Million
BBC: A painting by Roy Lichtenstein has sold at auction for $42.6m – a new record for the US ‘pop artist’. The cartoon-style painting, sold to an anonymous telephone bidder at Christie’s in New York, features a woman on the phone with a speech bubble containing the title. The Lichtenstein sale smashed a previous record for the artist set in 2005, when his work In the Car fetched $16.2m. In a statement, Christie’s said Ohhh…Alright… – painted in 1964 – “characterises Lichtenstein’s captivation and inspiration with techniques of commercial printing and reproduction.” MORE