The Art After 5 concert series at the Philadelphia Art Museum offers a varied program of international music to help take the edge off the harried anxieties of a busy work week. Friday night found local jazz band The Swinging Foxes enshrined in the cavernous Great Stair Hall as a nice sized crowd gathered amongst the tapestries to chill to their brand of vocal driven jazz favorites culled from the blues based big band show tunes of the Swing Era. With the classy, blond Amber Rae fronting the band on vocals, and the beautiful Ellen Houle taking the throne […]
RIP: David Rakoff, Gen. X’s Oscar Wilde, Dead @ 47
Photo by DAVID DENTON NEW YORK TIMES: Born in Montreal and raised in Toronto, Mr. Rakoff worked in the New York book publishing industry after studying at Columbia University. He wrote for numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, and in the early 1990s connected with fellow humorist David Sedaris, whose essay about the yuletide trials and tribulations of playing Crumpet the elf at Macy’s he had heard him read on the radio. Mr. Sedaris and Ira Glass, the future host and producer of “This American Life,” encouraged Mr. Rakoff to produce and perform more of his material, leading […]
CINEMA: The Man Who Wasn’t There
SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN (2012, directed by Malilk Bendjelloul, Sweden/U.K.) HOPE SPRINGS (2012, directed by David Frankel, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I remember the first time I heard “Sugar Man,” the signature song by 60’s missing link/Latino Donovan doppelganger Rodriguez. I was in a record store about five years ago, and Rodriguez’s plaintive, pleading voice singing the title over the Spanish guitar stopped me in my tracks. This song didn’t sound like a mere hit, it sounded like a classic, and the album it comes from, 1970’s Cold Fact shows a fully-developed artist in mid-flight. […]
BOOKS: Mark Twain Vs. The Book Of Mormon
THE NEW YORKER: Scholarly opinion on {Mormonism founder Joseph] Smith now tends to divide between those who think that he knew he was making it up and those who think that he sincerely believed in his own visions—though the truth is that, as Melville’s “Confidence Man” reminds us, the line between the seer and the scamster wasn’t clearly marked in early-nineteenth-century America. Mark Twain read the Book of Mormon and, knowing what Smith would have read, not to mention knowing about frontier fakery, came to conclusions about both the sources of its prose and the sequence of its composition. MORE […]
KILLADEPHIA: CNN Rolls With Kaz & Mac
CNN: Kaz and MacMillan co-founded GunCrisis.org to help curb gun violence plaguing what is supposed to be the City of Brotherly Love. “I want to put the audience out there in the streets,” Kaz said. “I want them to see what I’m seeing every night in this city: The children watching crime scene investigations night after night, day after day. Anything to disrupt this, marginally disrupt this, we consider a success.” After the July 20 shooting massacre in Aurora, Colorado, GunCrisis estimates there have been at least 55 gunshot victims in Philadelphia, and that number is rising. In March, photojournalist […]
ANTHONY & THE JOHNSONS: Cut The World
Wow. Intense video for the gorgeous title track Anthony & The Johnsons’ new live album, Cut The World, starring Wilem Dafoe and Carice van Houten (Melisandre in “Game of Thrones”) as a corporate executive and his secretary. Won’t spoil the shocking plot twist, but let the viewer beware, not for the faint of heart. Or the 1%. PREVIOUSLY: If Antony Hegarty didn’t exist, Lou Reed would have surely invented him. It would be in a song called “Antony Says”, an elegantly twinkling ballad wrapped up in fishnet, mascara and doom, about an anguished androgyne with a canary-in-the-coal-mine voice that makes […]
JAZZER: Space Is Still The Place
BY DAVID CORBO If you weren’t at 40th Street Park in University City on Saturday night, July 28th, you missed some of the best jazz on the planet earth as Philadelphia’s own Sun Ra Arkestra invited all willing travelers on a free trip to the intergalactic cosmic spaceways with a tour de force performance as part of the University City District’s 40th Street Summer Series. The Arkestra, under the spiritual and musical direction of saxophonist Marshall Allen, proved its mettle as they churned out a set that covered everything from Allen’s swinging nod to Fletcher Henderson, “Dreams Come True,” […]
FACT CHECK: The Fraudulent Fox Voter Fraud Unit
RELATED: Top PA Election Official Admits Under Oath She Doesn’t Know What The New Voter ID Law Says RELATED: State Admits Voter ID Is A Law In Search Of A Crime RELATED: New GOP-Sponsored Voter ID Law Could Disenfranchise 758,000 PA Voters RELATED: Oompa Loompa-esque PA House Republican Majority Leader Mike Turzai Says Voter ID Law Will Supress The Minority Vote And ‘Allow Governor Romney To Win The State Of Pennsylvania
BOOK REVIEW: God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
Artwork by TIM DOYLE BY DAVID CORBO 1965 was an interesting year in the United States. President Lyndon Johnson introduced the social reforms of his “Great Society”, the first American combat troops landed in South Vietnam, and Martin Luther King marched 25,000 civil rights protesters from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, The Watts Riots began in LA, and the Beatles played the first rock and roll stadium concert at Shea Stadium. In the midst of all of this, and true to the questioning nature of the times, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in his […]
CINEMA: Girl Trouble
CARNY (1980, dir. by Robert Kaylor, 107 minutes U.S.) GIRL ON THE RUN (1953, dir. by Arthur J. Beckhard & Joseph Lee, 64 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK Step Right Up! The summer is here and what better time to savor this duo of films, both taking us deep inside the American traveling carnival tradition. With their lurid theatricality, carnivals are such perfect cinematic settings it is surprising the “Carny Film” isn’t more of a full-blown genre (though let’s give a shout-out to such carny classics as the unmentionable Freaks, Nightmare Alley – Tyrone Power, forced to bite the head […]
WE WERE NOT ALONE: Fossils Prove That A Third Species Coexisted With Homo Erectus & Habilis
TG DAILY: A third human species lived alongside Homo erectus and Homo habilis in East Africa as long as two million years ago. New fossils discovered east of Lake Turkana include a face, a near-complete lower jaw and part of a second lower jaw, and appear to confirm the tentative discovery of a new species some 40 years ago. In 1972, scientists discovered the fossil known as KNM-ER 1470 – 1470 for short – leading to a debate about just how many different species of early Homo lived during the Pleistocene epoch. Some said the skull’s large brain size […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Comedy Bang Bang Live!
If you like to laugh — and, hey, some people just don’t and that’s just fine, that means more laughs for us and less sharing — but if you enjoy the laughter, even just half a laugh on a warm day, we got you covered: A pair of tickets to see Comedy Bang Bang Live at the Troc tomorrow night. Hosted by Scott Aukerman (of Mr. Show fame and co-creator of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis) and featuring Tim Heidecker (of Tim & Eric fame, duh) and uncanny impressionist James Adomian (Vincent Price, Lewis Black, Orson Welles, Jesse […]
PLUTOCRACY NOW: Keystone Cops Arrest Easton Man For Pointing Out Banker Robbery In Progress
CBS PHILADELPHIA: An Occupy Easton protester faces an attempted bank robbery charge following an arrest at an organized event at a bank – during which the “Occupier” was holding a sign that reportedly read “You’re being robbed.” According The Express-Times, Dave Gorczynski allegedly held cardboard signs outside a Wells Fargo Branch that read, “You’re being robbed,” while the other said, “Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.” Occupy Easton reports on their Facebook page that Gorczynski “was at the bank protesting the theft of our […]