Amanda Palmer is a singer, writer, pianist, activist and blogger who simultaneously embraces and explodes traditional frameworks of music, theatre, community and art. She first came to prominence as one half of the Boston-based punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, earning global applause for their wide-ranging theatricality and inventive songcraft. Her solo career has proven equally brave and boundless, including such groundbreaking works as the fan-funded THEATRE IS EVIL, which made a top 10 debut on the SoundScan/Billboard 200 upon its 2012 release and remains the top-funded music project on Kickstarter. In 2013 she presented The Art of Asking at the […]
CINEMA: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
THE BEACH BUM (Directed by Harmony Korine, 95 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Everyone I know seems to have a Harmony Korine story. From the friend who once told me about how an applicant at the video store he used to work at listed the director as a reference — and how they called the number only to have Korine pick up. To another friend in whom Korine confided that he once lost almost 70 never-produced scripts in a bizarre house fire. Like the director himself, The Beach Bum is a study in larger-than-life chaotic personae that […]
GEEK SQUAD: Shazam! Reviewed!
BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT Shazam! is hands down DC’s best movie since The Dark Knight trilogy. Filmed in Toronto but set in Philly, Shazam! is an old fashioned feel good film that is perfect for a character first created in 1939 (under the name Captain Marvel, which is a story for another time). The film begins when Billy Batson (Asher Angel) arrives at a new foster home with five other children. He quickly hits the superpower lottery when a wizard grants him the powers of Shazam. By invoking the magic word SHAZAM! Billy Batson is transformed into […]
UNNMASKED: Tucker Carlson’s Fake Populism
This is a pretty devastating unmasking of Tucker Carlson’s fake populist pose and how he employs it to keep the peasants at each other’s throats instead of storming the palaces of the rich elites who oppress and exploit them. Well done Vox.
Q&A w/ Nick Lowe, Elder Statesman Of Pure Pop
Photo by Dan Burn-Forti EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published on April 28th, 2012. To mark the auspicious occasion of Nick Lowe, backed by Los Straight Jackets, playing a SOLD OUT show at Ardmore Music Hall on Tuesday April 9th, we reprising it here. Enjoy. BY ED KING ROCK EXPERT Nick Lowe’s nearly-half-century-long career as a singer-songwriter, record producer, and all-around musical instigator is a one-man Village Green Preservation Society, to quote the Kinks’ 1968 mission statement. After brief spell in a Cream-influenced psychedelic rock band, Kippington Lodge, Lowe and his fellow UK mates, including future standouts in the late-’70s […]
ZOMBIE BIRDHOUSE: The Horror Of Jim Jarmusch
VICE: Last week, Focus Features announced that director Jim Jarmusch’s truly bonkers zombie movie, The Dead Don’t Die, is dropping this summer, and that it’ll star just about every extremely cool person you’ve ever heard of. Now, just a few days later, the film’s first trailer is here—and good lord, this one is going to be an incredible, star-studded bloodbath. Are you ready to watch the reanimated corpse of Iggy Pop feast on the flesh of some unsuspecting mortals? Or Bill Murray unload a shotgun into a crowd of the undead? Or Adam Driver go to town with a […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Socialism For Dummies
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY I promised you a rant regarding Trump’s raging against the horrors of Democrat SOCIALISM and vowing he will NEVER allow America to become a SOCIALIST country. So, here it is: According to one Donald J. Trump, president of the United States of America, the Democrat party is dead set on forcing wholesale SOCIALISM down the country’s collective throat beginning in 2020, and he is the only politician alive who can prevent them from doing so. Oh my, all I can say is thank God we’ve got someone sufficiently au fait with the nation’s past 85 […]
BEING THERE: Avey Tare @ PhilaMOCA
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER David Portner – a.k.a. Avey Tare – is best known for being one of the founding members of freak folk/noise rock/experimental pop outfit Animal Collective. He met his Animal brethren in high school, and has since laid down some of the most otherworldly recordings this side of the Milky Way – although, to be honest, I have my suspicions that they may have come from someplace much farther out. And while his music takes on such extraterrestrial qualities in both his contributions to Animal Collective and in his eponymous solo project, his diverse instrumentation and melodies […]
BEING THERE: Bon Iver @ The Met
Photo by STEVE GARFINKEL I am old enough to remember when Bon Iver was just a weird-beard folkie lumberjack with a broken heart and a bad liver haunting the woods of Wisconsin, cranking out subterranean heartsick blues in his dad’s hunting cabin like the Unabomber of Love. This was back before he went prog-rock at Newport and started a riot — that was way cray. I remember Father John Misty threatening to cut the power with an axe and the guys from Mumford & Sons had to wrestle him to the ground. Despite the confusion of the moment, when the […]
SEBADOH: Stunned
From Act Surprised, their first album in six years, out May 24th. They play Underground Arts on July 24th. MISSING PIECE: Act Surprised continues the soulful collaboration that’s defined the band since 1991’s Sebadoh III and 1994’s Bakesale. The new batch of songs reaffirms how vital the creative partnership is between members Lou Barlow, Jason Loewenstein, and Bob D’Amico. When Barlow recently moved back to his home state of Massachusetts following a series of personal changes, he pressed the restart button and, in time, felt the incentive to reach out to Jason and Bob again to reunite and start work on […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: After working for five years as a writer and producer on Saturday Night Live, comic John Mulaney thought he knew everything there was to know about the show. “I was like a busboy,” Mulaney says of his SNL tenure. “I was like, ‘I know all the secrets, and I know all the ins and outs, and I know how to sneak out of the kitchen and I know where we get the meat delivered from.’ ” Though Mulaney left SNL in 2012 to pursue other comedic projects, he returned in 2018 and again in 2019 — this […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Cruella DeVos
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY This just in: Betsy DeVos, in what is arguably the most unconscionable and cartoonishly evil proposed budget cut from this satanic administration, wants to cut the 18 MILLION dollar$ from her Department of Education budget earmarked for the 2020 Special Olympics. As Betsy so DeVosly stated it: “We had to make some difficult decisions.” She goes on to say that funding for the Special Olympics should come from private philanthropy. Capital idea! If DeVos sold just ONE of her 10 yachts — or if Trump personally covered the cost of just SIX of his golf+unlimited […]
BON IVER: 33 “God”
Bon Iver plays The Met tonight and tomorrow night.