Sad news: Don Ho, the Velvet Foghorn of Tiki Culture, dead at 76. Here he is performing Peter Gabriel’s “Shock The Monkey.”
POPPED! FEST BAND LIBS: KMASS, PONY PANTS
[Photo by Paul Castoral] Kmass * 1. We are called Kenneth Masters & Cramske (The Premium Underground) because we’re under the radar, make niche music for no one in particular, and don’t really take ourselves as serious as those statements imply. 2. No, that is not a stupid name for a band and it is generously awesome, slightly rad, although a little presumptuous of you to say that. 3. We are a band because we had “gasoline dreams” and delusions of making music, getting rich, and wasting our days as we saw fit. But reality sank in and we just […]
LEONARD COHEN: Suzanne
Isle of Wight, 1970
FILM FEST PICKS & PANS: Dante’s Inferno; Wicked Flowers; Book Of The Dead; Severance
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Heading into its last weekend, the 2007 Philadelphia Film Festival unleashes the big celebrity guns, giving us this year’s American Independent Award winner, Dermot Mulroney. I spent a few minutes this week trying to stoke a friend’s memory on exactly who the very recognizable Mulroney is, and finally had to give up. His specialty in nearly 20 years of film acting has been in supporting roles, often playing ingratiating nice guys who are romance-bait for the female lead. He’s worked with Altman on Kansas City, with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding and most […]
POP IN TAPE: Open A Can Of ‘Shh’ & Keep It On The DL
BY MICHAEL FICHMAN Props to the Popped Festival — a massive undertaking that has gone reasonably well thus far. To see the back-porch house show cats making moves and slinging in-kind donated energy drink, it makes you feel proud. We’ve crawled from the mud-caked basements and now we are basking in the light for all to see in our hirsute, road biking glory. Shit, even though there’s a one-to-one musician/promoter/DJ/photographer/blogger to fan ratio, it still feels like a bona-fide event rather than a rearrangement of furniture. But in an ironic twist, as the Popped Festival protrudes its proud, puffed-out chest and […]
POPPED! FEST REVIEW: The Low Budgets
HELP, IT’S BITING ME! GET IT OFF MY NECK!: The Low Budgets, Popped! Fest Night 3, Mill Creek Tavern [FLICKR] EVA SAYS: I’ve only been to the Millcreek Tavern once before and I remember it struck me as too damn clean for a bar. Not the type of place I’d expect to hold a Popped! show, either, but in a way that was supposed to be part of the appeal I guess. However, what I was expecting was a better turnout. I mean as a city that prides itself on its DIY creative art scene you’d think people would […]
THE EARLY WORD: Somebody Bring Imus
1915’s “Birth of a Nation” was the film that simultaneously launched the modern movie industry and gave the Ku Klux Klan a foothold in the 20th Century. Friday night is the Philly premiere of a film project that DJ Spooky calls “a digital exorcism” .. taking the original 1915 footage and doing a live 3-screen video/audio remix that turns the tables on the original.. It all goes down this Friday night 4/13 at the Gordon Theater, Rutgers-Camden.. DJ Spooky will be there at 6pm for a FREE roundtable discussion with the RU-C departments of film and African-American studies.. More info […]
POPPED! FEST BAND LIBS: Golden Ball
Golden Ball 1. We are called Golden Ball because i read still life with woodpecker. 2. No, that is not a stupid name for a band and it is predictably self-absorbed of you to say that. 3. We are a band because it is fun being a band. 4. If we were not a band, we would be two or three bands. 5. People say we sound like all these bands they never heard. 6. But really we sound like pine. 7. If the cops searched our van, they would find other cops searching our van. 8. One band that […]
POPPED! PICKS: THE NOTEKILLERS & THE LOW BUDGETS & NORTHERN LIBERTIES (The Band)
NOTE: All this week we will be running our Popped! Fest Band Libs. Northern Liberties 1. We are called Northern Liberties because we are a noospheric oratory rite, transmitting holographic emblems, resonating neural linguistic imprinting, brazenly eulogizing radiant terrestrial imagined entities, stridently. 2. No, that is not a stupid name for a band and it is unenlightened of you to say that. 3. We are a band because we received the command, and it is a way for us to partially reveal our plan. 4. If we were not a band, we would be a pigeon, a beehive, or a […]
BREAKING: House Of Cash Burns Down
NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) – The Tennessee home of late country icon Johnny Cash burned down on Tuesday as renovations were under way for its new owner, Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, a local newspaper reported. Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, lived together in the three-story, wooden lakeside house in Hendersonville, Tennessee, about 20 miles north of Nashville, from 1968 until they died within months of each other in 2003. The Hendersonville Star News quoted a fire official as saying the blaze probably started when fumes from a wood preservative used in the renovations were ignited by a […]