Artwork via JEREMYBINNS.COM BY WARREN LIPKA As you may have heard, the pope met in secret with Kim Davis some time before he came to Philly. Jesus H. Christ! That’s like the pope meeting with the bus driver that told Rosa Parks to stand up or get off the bus. What’s next, the pope met with George Zimmerman? We are not but three days out from all the peace, love and understanding of #popeadelphia and now I’m picturing Kim Davis, red-faced, crying her eyes out, mouth open fish-like, holding hands with the pope. Jesus Chysler! I just threw up in […]
Win Tix To See Franz Ferdinand + Sparks @ E. F.
What happens when you combine smarty/dancey-pants Glaswegian art-punks Franz Ferdinand with arch, synth-y post-glam/post-New Wave/post-whatever Los Angeleno art-rockers Sparks? The not-very-imaginatively-named FFS, a once-secret long-running collaboration that’s resulted in the eponymously-titled debut FFS, released by the way-cool Domino label back in June. (Rule of thumb, if it’s on Domino it’s worth hearing.) What’s it sound like? Arch, dance-y, cerebral, post-glam, post-New Wave, post-whatever art-rock. If that’s your idea of a good time have we got a deal for you. FFS are currently on a tour for the album that brings them to the Electric Factory on Saturday and we […]
THE BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE
BY BEN LEHMAN Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time is one of the most celebrated pieces of literature in history. First published in 1913, the story spans across seven volumes, over four thousand pages, and includes some two thousand characters. It chronicles the life of a fictionalized Proust — seen through the subjective lens of his own memories — the novel explores facets of life such as love, society, sexuality, and jealousy. A novelist and critic, Proust was born to a wealthy family in Auteuil, France in 1871. He was a frail, sickly child, and his ill health […]
MOBY: The Light Is Clear In My Eyes
STEREOGUM: Moby is up to something. Publicists for the veteran dance-music producer have been sending around a new track called “The Light Is Clear In My Eyes” with basically no information. It’s credited to Moby & The Void Pacific Choir, and it’s merely being accompanied by the photo above and a quote from D.H. Lawrence: “California is a queer place — in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific.” The song is a driving postpunk number, and its video is a VHS pileup of cryptic images. MORE SPIN: A guitar-screeching, scorched-earth […]
JOHN OLIVER WATCH: Fear & Loathing In The EU
BY MEGAN MATUZAK Unless you live under a rock, you know that a mass exodus out of the war-torn hellhole that is present day Syria is under way and refugee camps are overflowing in Europe. While some countries like Germany welcome the Middle Eastern refugees with cheery, clapping citizens, the migration policies of many European countries are cruel and flat-out racist. Take the legislator from Poland for example, who, in an official televised address to the rest of his government colleagues, called the refugees — most of whom literally walked two thousand miles to find sanctuary from the butchers […]
PILGRIM’S PROGRESS: 3 Interns Wander Into The Immaculate Heart Of Popegeddon And Live To Tell
Photo by DAN LONG EDITOR’S NOTE: I sent my interns — three Temple students with contrasting religious perspectives and zero reporting experience — to cover Pope Francis’ visit with the following instructions: Go have an adventure then come back and tell me about it. The good. The bad. And the ugly. Wade into the crowd and get your hands dirty. Talk to people. Take in the mass. Feel the love. Drink the Kool-Aid. Or don’t. Just be honest with the reader. And above all, have fun with it, you will be a part of history in the making.
BEING THERE: Come On Get Happy
Pope Francis, 5th & Ranstead, 4:22 pm Saturday by DAN LONG
CINEMA: Win Tix To See A Special VIP Advance Screening Of Ridley Scott’s THE MARTIAN
Just a little reality check: This Pope sh*t ain’t gonna last forever, Joy Boy. Then what are you gonna do with your life? Here’s one option, go see a special VIP advanced screening of the THE MARTIAN, starring Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney, mistakenly left for dead on Mars by his crew mates. But in fact, he is not dead. It will take four years for a NASA rescue mission to reach him and he only has enough food and oxygen to last a month. Solution? “I’m gonna have to science the sh*t out of this,” says Watney. […]
MUST SEE: The Ballad Of The Blue Jean Committee
VULTURE: Something happened midway through the first season of Documentary Now!, which wrapped up last night on IFC. The show started off — and was praised for — taking pitch-perfect documentary parodies and pushing them in absurd directions: twisting Grey Gardens into a horror movie, for example, or turning Nanook Revisited, a documentary about the documentary Nanook of the North, into a bizarre tale of an Inuit who pioneered most modern-film techniques. But over the course of six “documentaries” (which included the two-part finale), it also grew increasingly humane. While the precision was still there, the goal felt like […]
WHAT A DIFFERENCE 170 YEARS MAKES: The Bloody Philadelphia Anti-Catholic Riots Of 1844
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GREATER PHILADELPHIA: In May and July 1844, Philadelphia suffered some of the bloodiest rioting of the antebellum period, as anti-immigrant mobs attacked Irish-American homes and Roman Catholic churches before being suppressed by the militia. The violence was part of a wave of riots that convulsed American cities starting in the 1830s. Yet even amid this tumult, they stand out for their duration, itself a product of nativist determination to use xenophobia for political gain. In the aftermath of the riots, shocked Philadelphians began debating new methods of maintaining order, a discussion that contributed to the consolidation […]
BEING THERE: A$AP Rocky & Tyler The Creator @ Festival Pier
Photo by DYLAN LONG What do you get when you take one of the most vulgar and provocative rappers in the last 10 years and put him on a bill with one of the biggest and baddest members of Harlem’s hip hop collective A$AP Mob? The answer is quite simple: The Rocky and Tyler Tour. Several thousand fans from far and wide descended upon Philly’s Festival Pier last night to witness a mixture of well-crafted versifying, Tyler The Creator dancing like a man covered in honey and fire ants and A$AP Rocky effortlessly wooing every female in the house with […]
REALITY CHECK: Pope Francis Is Not Nearly As Liberal Or Metal As You & George Will Think He Is
Artwork via PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE FRESH AIR Noted Pope-ologist Paul Vallely, formerly the editor of the UK’s Independent and author of UNTYING THE KNOTS: The Struggle For The Soul Of Catholicism, discusses the ambiguities of Pope Francis’ atypically Jesus-like papacy: comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, dropping science about climate change (he is trained as a chemist) and reminding the rich that it is easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle than it is for them to get into heaven. Also discussed: Moving the control of the church away from Europe/America, birth control (same as it ever […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR Nearly 50 years ago, in 1966, a group of six black men in Oakland, Calif., came together in an effort to curb police brutality against African-Americans in the city. Because of a quirk in California law, the men were able to carry loaded weapons openly. The Black Panthers, as they became known, would follow the police around, jumping out of their cars with guns drawn if the police made a stop.” They would observe the police and make sure that no brutality occurred,” filmmaker Stanley Nelson tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “What they were really doing was […]