The Good News Flower Hour #10 The week that was in just five minutes, read by a stoned daisy that sounds uncannily like me.
EARLY WORD: A Man Called Benjy
If there’s a middle ground somewhere between the arty scuzz of the White Stripes and the sunny, off-center pop of ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” D.C.-based artist Benjy Ferree has planted a flag in it and claimed it for himself. Come Back to the Five and Dime Bobby Dee Bobby Dee, Ferree’s second and most recent album, hops adeptly from style to style while keeping Ferree’s agile wail at the center and the guitar fuzz around the edges. Just when I thought the music would slip into some faux-soul a la Gavin DeGraw, it turns toward the dreamy, overstuffed style of […]
REVIEW: Golden Girls Gone Wild
BY AARON STELLA GAYDAR EDITOR The G-Girls were out in full force Thursday at Bob and Barbara’s. The devilishly mischievous drag troupe, The Dumpsta Players, thought that it was about time to pay an homage to the girls who put the gold in the golden years: the Golden Girls, in “Golden Girls Gone Wild!” The Dumpsta Players are Philly’s most notorious drag troupe, infamous for their shameless satire and lampooning of the joys and ills of modern society and pop culture (not to mention that the grist of politics is usually within hacking range of their trash picked hatchet). As […]
CINEMA: L’ Enfants Terrible
The Wild Child (1970, directed by Francois Truffaut, 83 minutes, France) The Class (2008, directed by Laurent Cantet, 128 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Francois Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1983, and at the time of his his death he was the most popularly beloved of the French New Wave directors. Since his death his reputation seems to have receded with the public, the formality of his storytelling upstaged by the more extreme stylistics of Godard. While he may lack Godard’s audacity, Truffaut’s wide-ranging curiosity produced an astonishing catalog of films; revenge dramas, black & white […]
LIKE A FOX: Internal External
Like A Fox play Johnny Brendas tonight with Asteroid #4. [Dir. by SCOTT COLAN]
PYROMANIA: Cops Nab 2nd Coatesville Fire-Starter
INQUIRER: For week upon week, Coatesville-area residents wondered who was doing this to them. Who was lighting the fires that made national news, left scores of people homeless, caused at least $3.5 million in damage, and left Coatesville afraid to sleep? Was it somebody they saw on the street, somebody who stood beside them in the convenience store? Authorities said yesterday that at least nine of the 24 fires set since Jan. 1 had been the work of a 19-year-old tech student from Downingtown — nine miles away. The suspect had no reported connection to the old steel town, 35 […]
HEAR YE: Neko Case Middle Cyclone
Now playing on PHAWKER RADIO! Comes out March 3rd. She plays the Keswick Theater on April 10th. PREVIOUSLY: As of 2005, Patsy Cline’s 12 Greatest Hits sold 10 million copies. Not bad for a ghost. She got on a plane to Kansas City in 1963 — just a couple years into her newfound fame as the sweetheart of the Nashville rodeo — and never came back, disappearing into the ether of immortality like Amelia Earhart in spurs. Her ghost has been haunting American music ever since, and any vaguely countryish thrush will have to suffer comparisons. Just ask KD Lang. […]
PAPERBOY: ‘Knocked Up & Lonely In Olney’ Edition
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
MONKEY SHINE: Please Don’t Feed The Animals
TIME: It might be hard to imagine that a chimpanzee — familiar from zoos, animal shows and slapstick comedies like Cannonball Run — could be capable of the kind of savage violence inflicted on Nash. Travis himself was reportedly a beloved figure around Stamford; he was recognizable from television commercials, could bathe and dress himself and use a computer — qualities that made him seem dangerously close to human. But adult chimpanzees might be better described as superhuman — a 200-lb. chimpanzee is five to seven times stronger than a person of the same size, especially in the upper body. […]
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS: Too Many Dicks
Flight of the Conchords performs two shows at the Tower on April 18th.
THE PSYCLONE RANGERS: Tilt-A-Whirl
Damn, that guy can sing! PREVIOUSLY: Ain’t Goin’ Down TANGENTIALLY RELATED: Touch and Go Records, a pillar of the Chicago music scene and independent music worldwide, announced Wednesday that it is drastically shrinking its business, cutting ties with 20 independent labels and laying off an unspecified number of employees. “The current state of the economy has reached the point where we can no longer afford” to provide manufacturing and distribution services for the labels, including stalwarts such as Chicago-based Drag City, All Natural, Overcoat. Flameshovel and Atavistic Records; Merge in North Carolina,; and Kill Rock Stars in the Pacific Northwest, […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Journalist Jane Mayer expects that an upcoming Supreme Court case will force the Obama administration to clarify its policy towards fighting terrorism — and to define its stance on preventative detention of suspected terrorists. In her article, “The Hard Cases”, which appears in the Feb. 23 issue of The New Yorker, Mayer details the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, an alleged Al Qaeda sleeper agent who has been held for more than five years in an isolation brig, despite the fact that he never stood trial or was convicted of a crime. Though Marri was seized and […]
GAYDAR: Golden Showers Make Nice Flowers
Madcap drag troupe The Dumpsta Players, are back this month with a geriatric extravaganza. This time around, it’s all about the gold—the golden years to be exact—and who better can throw their sassy wisdom and eye-sore pastel clothing around than the Floridian foursome: The Golden Girls, in, “Golden Girls Gone Wild!” Times are hard. The girls’ roof needs a-fixin’ but they don’t have the dough. They should’ve probably cut back on the cheesecake, huh. But since that’s not going to happen, the girls are forced to whore themselves out into the cheap and easy world of reality TV. Rose sets […]