Photo by PETE TROSHAK Let it be known that on Saturday afternoon a hearty band of settlers arrived in the parking lot of The Electric Factory under a dreary skies and occasional torrents of rain to protest much like their forefathers did back in 1773. It wasn’t the hatred of a tyrant king or anger over the price of tea that brought these people together, instead they gathered together for the 215 Block Party to protest the end of summer by drinking quality beer, eating from food trucks and catching some up and coming bands and a legendary New York […]
INCOMING: A Night At The Opera
Once the largest concert venue in the world, the Philadelphia Opera House was built a century ago in 1908 by Oscar Hammerstein and attracted some of the greatest entertainers of the 20th Century. But for that last 20 years it has stood silent and boarded up at the intersection of Poplar and North Broad, awaiting a seemingly-imminent demolition that mercifully never came. Thanks to a $56 million renovation project underwritten by a partnership between Live Nation and real estate developer Eric Blumenfeld, the long dormant venue will come alive with the sound of music in December.“This music venue will help […]
BEING THERE: Philly Naked Bike Ride 2018
Photos by JOSH PELTA-HELLER/click HERE to see the album When I arrived at Fairmount Park’s Glendinning Rock Garden, the starting point for Philly’s Naked Bike Ride, it looked like it was going to rain but despite that grim fact hundreds of people were still gathering— and stripping down. Heretofore, I had never seen so many breasts and flaccid dicks in my life at once. Photographers meandered around, drones hovered above, and passersby stopped to gawk. As I descended down the hill into the crowd, I saw two men who could have been brothers lying down on a mat in the […]
CINEMA: Paul Dano’s Directorial Debut Is FIRE
INDIEWIRE: IFC Films has released the first official trailer for “Wildife,” and it’s not hard to see why Paul Dano’s feature filmmaking debut is one of the most talked about films of the year. The 33-year-old actor, best known for masterful performances in films such as “There Will Be Blood,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” and “Prisoners,” has evidently learned a lot observing many of cinema’s greatest living auteurs. The family drama premiered to much acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and also screened as the opening night film in La Semaine de la Critique at the 2018 […]
INCOMING: Vengance Is Mine
RELATED: The 90s were a helluva drug. You really had to be there, kid, but suffice it to say it was 10 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity, a pot in every chicken, 2.5 SUVs in every garage, a Clinton was president and Donald Trump ran beauty contests instead of the free world. In the 90s, the Internet went public and we all become tech stock billionaires overnight — all of us — selling dog bones over the World Wide Web, which was what we called the Interwebs back then, as was the style of the day. Good. Times. […]
Win Tix 2 See Yeah Yeah Yeahs @ 215 Block Party!
Illustration by PAR4NOID Hey boys and girls, we have a couple pairs of tickets to giveaway to see reactivated neo-post-punk-no-wave-trash-rock nogoodniks The Yeah Yeah Yeahs @ the Goose Island Beer Company’s 215 Block Party outdoors at the Electric Factory on Saturday! To qualify to win, all you have to do is say nice things about us. Just kidding! That was just a sly Catch 22 allusion, which should go without saying to a hep cat such as yourself. No, you are going to have to do a little work to earn those Yeah Yeah Yeahs tickets, i.e. send us an […]
FLEET FOXES: I Am All That I Need
Fleet Foxes have released a stunning short film for their Crack-Up album opener “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar”. Directed by Sean Pecknold, with art direction and production design by Adi Goodrich, both of Sing-Sing, and choreography by Steve Reker. The film was shot entirely on 35mm film in southern California, creating a look that feels like an old technicolor movie, with everything hand-made and in-camera. It was made in partnership with WeTransfer who commissioned and helped produce the video. WeTransfer will be hosting the video on their editorial platform WePresent alongside a conversation […]
RACIAL JUSTICE: Just Do It
THE NEW YORKER: In July of 1988, Nike released the first of its ads under the slogan “Just Do It.” The spot featured Walt Stack, an eighty-year-old man, ebulliently trotting across the Golden Gate Bridge as part of his daily seventeen-mile run. “People ask me how I keep my teeth from chattering in the wintertime,” Stack says. “I leave them in my locker.” The same year, Nike released the first of a series of ads that paired the director Spike Lee with Michael Jordan, who was with the Chicago Bulls at the time. The wildly popular Spike-and-Mike ads didn’t […]
GOD LEVEL TROLLING: In Stringer Bell We Trust
via @JoshTerry RELATED: I’m Part Of The Resistance Inside The Trump Administration
BEING THERE: Mac DeMarco @ The Skyline Stage
Photo by MATT SHAVER Last night, every long-haired pothead in Philadelphia gathered at the Skyline Stage of the Mann Center to worship their ultimate idol. True to its name, the magnificent city skyline was visible from the top of the hill as the setting sun glittered against the metal skyscrapers in a golden wave. Millennial hippies in flowy maxi-skirts and Baja hoodies swayed to the soothingly unadorned acoustic soft rock of Uruguayan opener Juan Wauters. A Mac DeMarco concert is half music and half stoner stage antics. Living up to his reputation as indie rock’s goofball slacker, he paused between […]
ALL COMEDY IS LOCAL: Q&A W/ Jamie Kennedy
BY KEELY MCAVENEY Actor, comedian and native Philadelphian — straight outta Upper Darby! — Jamie Kennedy takes his cheesesteaks wiz wit and his comedy full force. Since he made the move to L.A. in his late teens, he’s done whatever it took to bring his comedy to the forefront, everything from living out of his car, to overcoming kidney failure, to inventing a fake screen agent persona to sell himself. If you were alive and not residing under a boulder in the late 90s, you will absolutely recognize him as Randy Meeks from the cult-classic Scream. After that, he […]
BEING THERE: Made In America
Photo by DYLAN LONG Philadelphia’s annual Made in America festival made its return to the Ben Franklin Parkway this past weekend. Many in Philadelphia and beyond were well aware that going into Labor Day weekend, the major event was on the tail end of a rather contentious few weeks in the press recently. A public spat between event founder Jay-Z and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney erupted in mid-July over the future of Made in America, an incident which was quickly mitigated by a promise from Kenney to keep Made in America on the parkway for years to come. In what […]
ALBUM REVIEW: The Gun Club Fire Of Love
THE GUN CLUB Fire Of Love (Superior Viaduct) On the night of August 16th, 1938, as Robert Johnson lay dying, poisoned by a jar of corn whiskey laced with strychnine by the jealous boyfriend of a pretty girl Johnson was flirting with at a country dance he was playing in Greenwood, MS, he had a brief and flickering vision — of a gaunt white man in a cowboy hat slumped in the backseat of a car motoring through the backwoods of West Virginia on New Year’s Day 1953. It was Hank Williams. Drifting in and out of consciousness as a […]