PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: A few nights after the Tritone show, Hayes is hanging out where he’s been every Monday night all year: hosting open-mike night at the Grape Room in Manayunk. He’s off tonight, but decided to pop in to say goodbye to the staff and the regulars. If the show at Tritone was an introduction to the new Stephan, tonight is a goodbye, in a way, to the old Steph. In a few days, he’ll undergo a mastectomy and recovery will take a full month. “It’s a bilateral mastectomy, double incision,” he explains, fingers sweeping across the front of his […]
REVIEW: Phonte’s Charity Starts At Home
BY MATTHEW HENGEVELD My boy Phonte, aka Tigallo of Little Brother fame, has finally gone solo and it couldn’t have come soon enough. Charity Starts at Home is the perfect reminder of why your favorite rapper (see Kanye) is simply a clone of my favorite rapper. Yes, Phonte Coleman is my favorite rapper, and I’m not afraid to say that he might be the best of all time. And it’s definitely safe to say that after a hiatus from the rap game, Tay stays winnin’. A little background info for those sitting in the dark: Little Brother was a hip-hop […]
SHOCK DOCTRINE: Hoax Or Horrible Truth?
DAILY MAIL: He astonished BBC viewers [Monday] by describing his hopes of profiting from a recession, adding: ‘The governments don’t rule the world – Goldman Sachs rules the world.’ MORE DAILY SABOTAGE: Invited onto the BBC to discuss the Greek debt crisis Rastani (identified only as an ‘independent trader’) sat in a satellite studio with an image of Canary Wharf behind him and pretended that he was our friend. He told us that the financial crisis was going to get worse, that we should protect our assets and (worst of all) that if we knew how to play the markets […]
THE COLONEL REMEMBERS: Nirvana At JC Dobbs
Twenty years ago, Colonel Tom Sheehy was the house publicist for JC Dobbs. He was there on the first day of October 1991, when a scruffy, little-known band from Seattle walked through the door on their way to the center of everything. He remembers it all and even has the guest list to prove it. Look for it tomorrow on a Phawker near you!
RADIOHEAD: The National Anthem
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Exclusive – Radiohead – “The National Anthem” www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive From last night’s Colbert Report.
LOOPY FIASCO: Or Why This Popped! Music Festival Review Is So F*cking Late & My Boss Wants To Kill Me
BY PELLE GUNTHER Firstly I’d like to apologize for being a total fuck up. My tales of this past weekend’s misadventures should have made their way to the Phawker days ago, but you see me and my incompetent self found ourselves stranded in Philly for a few days after the festival in a mess of drunk college pricks, without wheels, cash or even a cell phone to contact the world, let alone a computer to record my thoughts on Popped, or even a moment of silence to collect them. The self-defeating decision-making really started about two years ago when I […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To The Felice Brothers Tonight
Impersonating The Band hasn’t been a decently-paying gig since Scorsese filmed The Last Waltz in 1976, but judging by the full-up crowd at the Trocadero Thursday night The Felice Brothers seem to be on their way. Actually, ‘impersonating’ sounds a little too dismissive and I like these guys, so let’s go with ‘evoking’ or ‘carrying on the old, weird Americana tradition’ of the Band instead. Besides, they have the pedigree (hail from upstate New York, sons of a carpenter) they’ve paid their dues (busked in the subways of New York; went acoustic at the Newport Folk Festival; woodshedd-ed at Levon […]
ROSS ASSHAT: Troy Davis Would’ve Been Even More F*cked If Not For The Mercy Of The Death Penalty
New York Times’ token conservative apologist Ross Douhat is cut a lot of slack by people left of the Hard Right and often tagged as a ‘reasonable’ conservative and usually we are inclined to agree — hell, he’s a HUGE step up from the bloodthirsty jingoistic asshattery of Bill Kristol, whom he replaced. But it is times like this that we have our doubts about just how compatible the word ‘reasonable’ is with the word ‘conservative.’ In his Sunday column in the Times, Douthat twists logic to the breaking point with his head-scratching defense of the death penalty in the […]
BEST OF: #Occupy Wall Street
WARNING: The soundtrack is HORRIBLE. PREVIOUSLY: U SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: Occupy Wall St.
The Silver Lining In The Cloud Over MLK High
INQUIRER: There is no shortage of awful, terrible Philadelphia stories to be told following last week’s release of the report by the city’s chief integrity officer, Joan Markman, on the Martin Luther King High School fiasco. You have the sordid details of backroom bullying, with an esteemed chair of the school board and a veteran legislator taking turns explaining to out-of-town charter-school operator Mosaica that things are different in Philadelphia and maybe he’d be better off leaving town. There’s the meteoric descent of Dwight Evans, a once-inspiring figure who has turned in a few short years into an all-too-common entitlement-addled […]
MUST SEE TV: Earthquake Weather
Pretty terrifying security cam footage released by the National Parks Service yesterday of panicked tourists at the top of the Washington Monument scrambling down the stairs when the earthquake hit. The shaking goes on for a LONG time. Yikes. Hats off to to the ranger for remaining at her post until the last tourist was down the stairs. RELATED: The National Park Service announced Monday that experts have completed an interior assessment of the monument and found it to be structurally sound. “The heaviest damage appears to be concentrated at the very top of the monument, in what is called […]
FRINGE REVIEW: The Bacchae
BY BRANDON LAFVING The Theater Collective entered a new, modern translation of Euripides’ The Bacchae, into the record. They pulled on a number of events and artifacts from recent history to connect Philly audiences to the masterpiece. The troupe is the brain-baby of one of the most prestigious authorial couples of Philadlephia, the eminent Lili Bita, poetess, actress, author, and Robert Zaller, author and professor of history at Drexel University. Zaller translated and adapted The Bacchae, while Bita plays the deranged/bereaved Agave, bewitched murderer of her own child. Original author of the script, Euripides, was one of the most prolific […]