THURSDAY:
>>> I don’t know about you, but it somehow feels important that Kurt Vile (not pictured) is both opening up for Sonic Youth tonight at the Electric Factoryand thereby kicking off the holiday weekend for all who come within contact of his uniquely American, free-associating space blues. It’s like America’s third eye is telling us something about how it’d like to regenerate itself, how it regards itself, what we need to do, where we need to be moving ahead. Or maybe we’ve just listened to “Freeway” so many times now that it’s become a kind of mantra. Can you blame us? In anthem-less times, we’ve found one that is a portal into the best parts of America’s secret fuck-you psyche, the one that got us here, Fourth of July Weekend, 2009:
Because enough is too much. Can you blame us? Can you blame us?
>>> Meanwhile, The Dirty Boogie is back, over at 700, and this the drill: Cold gin. Saucy saxamaphones. Hard knocks. Durty socks.
>>> Speaking of boogies that are dirty: And The Moneynotes update the formula, but only just a little bit, at Johnny Brenda’s; Can’t Stop Won’t Stop with Strawberry Mansion at The Top Hat seems like the only sensible place to be in Old City tonight; and Casiotone For The Painfully Alone are your warm-weather cardigan at the First Unitarian Church Sanctuary.
FRIDAY:
>>> Strap on your orange Josh Wink goggles, get into your Scion, and make sure you’ve stocked up on energy bars: PEX Fest is down yonder way.
>>> Stuck in Philly like the rest of us? OK, good, now we can get down to business: Bob & Barbara’s/Tritone Third Annual BBQ starts at 1PM tomorrow, and you’ll probably be drunk even before that. We’ll say it for a second time today: America. Fuck yeah.
>>> Elsewhere: Sex Dwarf celebrates America the only way it knows how (with Soft Cell 12-inches) at Fluid; Jay Yo & DJ Dirty with Heidi (Berlin) dance on electro’s dirty grave at Silk City; and you can kick it all off by expanding your knowledge of Pennsylvania Dutch signography (not a real word) with Hex Yes at Art In The Age.
SATURDAY:
>>> My Philebrity Sync Stage tis-of-thee, rocking the motherfucking fuck out of Northern Liberties, of thee I sing: Black Landlord, TuPhace, The Tough Shits, The Capitol Years, BC Camplight, The Photon Band and Pink Skull. It’s free! For you and me! Like a purple mountain’s majesty. Of thee I sing.
>>> Then, The Roots and Fireworks and some skinny MILF lady up at the Art Museum. You brave soul, you. For it is you who are the heroes.
>>> However, if, after whatever you do in the day, you find yourself walled into your neighborhood by traffic, drunkards, and police, pick one: Intensified/Ten Commandments at The Barbary or Everything Goes at Vesuvio. Meanwhile, Jay Reatard is at JB’s, destroying his dressing room and channelling Andrew W.K. Happy birthday, America!
SUNDAY:
>>> Don’t worry if you were planning on going to the Neverland Ranch on Sunday for Jacko’s Memorial, only to find that the Jacksons have nixed it: The Sundae party will be saluting MJ at the Piazza, which is really the next best thing, when you think about it.
>>> If anyone has a generator they’re not using, get at me: I wanna dub it up in Penn Treaty Park. But that’s just me.
RECOMMENDED: You don’t necessarily think “period piece” when you think of director Michael Mann — who’s better known for making period pieces (like Miami Vice or Heat) which concern the period he’s in — but with Public Enemies, he’s made a movie about crime and punishment and the popular imagination in the first half of the 20th Century that stands as tall as The Untouchables (though probably not as tall as, say, Bonnie & Clyde). Johnny Depp, of course, plays John Dillinger, tailed by FBI agent Melvin Purvis (played by Christian Bale), in a time when the entire country’s imagination seems to have fallen in love with the outlaw/bank-robber myth. But with Purvis being tagged as both the bank-robber-catcher-du-jour and the future of the then-fledgling FBI, Public Enemies is just as much a portrait of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s earliest days as it is one of John Dillinger and the bank-robber/outlaw lifestyle in the 1930s. And it’s here that special kudos have to go out to Billy Crudup, who plays the most subtly creepy J. Edgar Hoover we’ve ever seen. In fact, Crudup’s metamorphosis is so complete that we had to look up who the hell it was that was playing Hoover. Crudup’s performance isn’t the only great one in Public Enemies, though — the movie is loaded with them, from Depp, whose long-lost light Kansas drawl and sense of style seems tailor-made for Dillinger, to Bale, who’s surprisingly good at playing a deeply worried lawman, to Marion Cotillard, as Dillinger’s true love Billie. (Kudos to whoever did the hair and make-up and costumes for Cotillard in particular.) Hell, even Stephen Dorff is good in this movie as one of Dillinger’s lackeys. This is, without a doubt, the best movie in the theaters right now, and should be seen in one. Do not delay.
ALSO NEW IN THEATERS:Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs, some by-the-numbers, celebrity-voiced (does it even matter which ones anymore), Pixar-lite crap that’ll make you and your kids dumber for having watched it; The Girl From Monaco, a lighthearted French sex farce that played well at the Philadelphia Cinefest earlier this year; and Moon, starring Sam Rockwell as a government contractor in the not-too-distant future, stranded and going mad, alone on the moon.
The Philadelphia Theater Company and improv comedy legends Second City are putting on a summer comedy series titled City of Nutterly Love: Funny as Bell. That title is so clever we can’t think of anyone crafty enough to sculpt a gem like that, except maybe Michael Nada himself. After all, he did steal the show in a recent GPTMC commercial, blowing a sweet kiss, accented with a little heart, to all of Philly’s prospective visitors. And now that he seems to be inserting himself into Philly tourism ads at every opportunity, The Dude could soon be Philly’s premier tourist attraction, whether you like it or not. (Real talk: We don’t.) All of that aside, City of Nutterly Love: Funny as Bell just might be as funny as it says it is. The Chicago based Second City was the comedy birthplace of Amy Sedaris, Steve Carell, Bill Murray, and Stephen Colbert, among others. And with lots of performances all month it shouldn’t be hard to find time to check them out. Hopefully it will funny be enough to ring, or even crack (sorry), your bell.
Just ask Gervase or Toastee: When you’re done smiling on reality/contest TV, the whole world is done smiling with or at you. And yeah, Philly native Justin Guarinihas done better than most in his uniquely modern predicament, but nothing will ever change the fact that the world is done with him now, he went Disney, it’s all karaoke gigs from here on out (or, at any rate, it should be) and American Idol is a scourge upon American music in the first place. We regard these facts as uncontroversial. So the clock ticking down on Guarini’s new web show, Sketched Out, would seem to invite anticipation where there is none whatsoever. Besides which, there’s nothing worse than somebody iChatting you to tell you what a web show is going to be about when you can just tell us by putting the damned show up on the web in the first place. Double-Besides Which, Sketched Out’s promised 12 minutes of comedy or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be is roughly nine minutes longer than any “web show” should ever be. Also an uncontroversial fact. Again, Guarini is trapped by a medium which only seeks to destroy him and he does not know. We almost feel bad for the guy.
We’ve often remarked on this site how, in so many ways, City Paper, bless its soul, is/has been/might always be irretrievably stuck in the 1990s. Now, a large portion of this is tied to the alt-weekly medium itself — few alt-weeklies nationwide have been successful in bringing themselves into The New Overwhelming (And Often Horrible) Now — but in the case of CP, it’s also a staffing/generational issue. We don’t say this today (as we definitely have in the past) necessarily to hurl some kind of out-of-touch epithet at the paper (Philadelphia Weekly will trump them on that shit any day of the week anyway), but more as a rubric for understanding the way CP’s hive mind works. And with the retro clock timed just right for us all to begin reconsidering “The Long Nineties” — coupled with the fact that, with so many of us out of work and just as screwed and listless as we were back in the 90s — it might just be that, by holding out so long, City Paper could get a second go-round on its cultural moment all over again. But that doesn’t make this email that went out to CP’s mailing list this morning any less funny: (more…)
City magazines: They’re the new newspapers! Hot off the news of the Boston magazine layoffs and the awkward insertion of PhillyMag editor Larry Platt (pictured) up there — awkward insertion is pretty much the name of the game at Herb Lipson’s Philadelphia and Boston magazines — there’s a big story in The Boston Globe today about how this is all pretty much foolish business. Obvious reveals: Platt doesn’t know dick about Boston, neither does Lipson (even though he’s owned the magazine since the 1970s) and we’re just gonna go ahead and guess that the new editor from Minnesota doesn’t know too much, either. As the story wears on, the Globe kinda lets Platt go, and spends a lot more time painting Lipson as a giant conservative asshole, but you know that because you’ve been (not) reading his dickbag editorials for years now. Here’s the irony, though: While Boston is just superfucked — and in the long term, PhillyMag probably is, too — the most recent issue of PhillyMag has a better “Summer Guide” (complete with Recession Fun!) than we’ve seen either of the alt-weeklies here do in forever, maybe ever, proving that every once in a while, these magazines can push something out that’s worth a damn, service-y or not. Go figure.
Because some of you have off on Friday and some of you have off on Monday and some have both and we know you only read us at work anyway (unless you’re unemployed, in which case, you should already be laying out somewhere) and we’ll be “working” all day on Saturday, Philebrity will be taking a four-day holiday weekend. (Weekend Picks and Film Sweat will go up later today.) During that time off, we might post a Readers Cameraphone or other quick, breaking info, but you know, that’s what’s up. Bubba burgers.
You know, I think everyone went to lunch. I could just get up and walk away from this right now, and go to Provincetown and open up that little bistro just like I always dreamed. [Gets up.] Oh, shit, I’m naked. I think someone’s coming. I better sit back down. Shit.
Can you hear something that The Thinker is trying to think about? Send it along to tips[at]philebrity[dot]com.
By now, you might have seen the story about how your friend and ours, The Philadelphia Parking Authority, has decided to hold off on raising parking meter rates from $2 to $3 per hour, as if the PPA was some kind of benevolent being that wants you to patronize businesses in the city and doesn’t want you to die and is not your mortal foe. But a closer reading of the story suggests that maybe — just maybe — the PPA might have put the brakes on the rate hike because it’s feeling a certain kind of heat that could stem from either people using parking lots more, or, as expected, people just not coming into Center City altogether. Look at this quote from the Philadelphia Business Journal:
“The most recent parking surveys confirmed that the rate adjustments implemented in January have achieved the goal of creating more parking opportunities,” PPA Executive Director Vince Fenerty said.
“More parking opportunities”? You betcha. We’ve gone into Center City on recent weeknights and found the place to be a ghost town, relative to what you might have seen a year or two ago. This fact, of course, has the overall economy woes tied to it, but also, anecdotally, we’ve been using parking lots (not City-owned ones, either) far more because, fuck it, paying $8 or more is still more convenient than fishing around for three fucking dollars in quarters. Could it be that the PPA’s earlier rate hike in January is beginning to bite both itself and local merchants in the ass? Probably. Elsewhere in this same story is the fact that the PPA is shuffling down to lower rates in the peripheries of Center City, and still, always, promising those credit card meters. Uh, thanks, PPA. One day, when your bone-headed agreement with the City of Philadelphia is up and all of your myriad crimes are exposed, we might all be able to laugh about this. Until then, Fuck You.
The American Revolution Center — a museum that will celebrate this country’s fight for independence in its all of its tri-cornered glory — has ditched plans to construct in Valley Forge and will instead develop at 3rd & Chestnut Sts. The folks behind the ARC argue that learning about America’s earliest days is as important now as it ever was. Pardon the tangent, but if you don’t believe them, you should check out Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech, a documentary currently airing on HBO. Shouting Fire looks back at some of the standout free speech cases of the last 50 years, but also goes into some depth about the founding fathers’ insistence on free speech in the U.S. Constitution, acknowledging that insistence as nothing short of “miraculous.” Indeed! Happy Birthday, America!
You know, for some of us, this whole recession thing is really, really working out: We’re reading more, we’re riding our bikes more, we’re getting familiar with all the stuff the city affords a broke person (like parks, people-watching and so on), and we’re just generally becoming more like actual people than we were when things like upward mobility were an actual possibility. Lemons, meet lemonade! Would you like me to refill your glass? According to new census information, the recession has even stopped white flight!
“The ability to afford a home in the suburbs, or at least get a loan for a home in the suburbs has been pretty much diminished. So a lot of people are staying put in the city and are finding that the city is a pretty good place to live.”
That’s right! Suck it, you bougie fucks! Only 1,200 of you were able to get outta dodge last year, because THE DREAM IS OVER. Philadelphia, get to know us. We promise you’ll like it, once you adjust your crappy worldview. It’s not like you have a choice.
>>> In case you were wondering, yes, we totally meant everything we said about The Church yesterday. At right, “Already Yesterday,” another deep cut from the 1986 Heyday album that we’ve been digging so much. Sigh. They’re at The Troc, in case you were wondering.
>>> Like deviled eggs? Like, do you like them a LOT? Read about the very strange but very awesome Deviled Egg Party at Supper on Phoodie.info.
>>> Or, watch Point Break again. We did this last night, and it was so awesome. It’s On Demand.
Even when my brains were eggs benedict, after they took me off the morphine, I recognized that that little pill they were giving me in moderation made me forget that my head had been cut open, my shoulder crushed and two vertebrae broken. In fact, I felt like I could do The Worm.
After the jump, yon Brian gives the Food & Drug Administration a little piece of his mind. The part that’s covered in hollandaise, we believe. (more…)
Tito, get us a tissue: Gamble & Huff have kicked their PR machine into high gear to jump all over the MJ story, promising the world some never-before-seen footage of Michael Jackson and family working with the legendary Philly producers. Which is kind of jive, but whatever. Above, The Jacksons (including fathermonster Joe) hang tough with Gamble & Huff, while Michael closes his eyes and dreams of a place somewhere off in the distant future where perhaps he could somehow replicate the childhood he wanted rather than the one he got. Publicists. Unfuckingbelievable.
HOLY SHIT. What originally started out as our stellar lineup for the 2nd Street Festival back on June 20 (but postponed due to rain) has now evolved into THEE FOURTH OF JULY PARTY THAT YOU NEED TO BE AT. New to the bill: Black Landlord, The Capitol Years and The Photon Band, performing the legendary Alone On The Moon EP, front to back. Check out philebrity.com/syncstage to check out the bands and other info!
You’ve seen the trailer. You’ve witnessed the over-the-top promotional stunts. You’ve heard all about the controversy. The buzz has now reached maximum volume. Admit it: Your inner tastemaker/cultural critic simply has to find out if Bruno lives up to the hype. Rest assured, Sacha Baron Cohen’s gay Austrian TV reporter character has grown increasingly outlandish since his inception on Da Ali G Show, making for even greater hilarity. The only thing that could be better than going to see Bruno is going to see an advance screening of Bruno for free, next Tuesday evening, courtesy of Philebrity. (Which, we are obligated by law to tell you, NO CELL PHONES, CAMERAS OR RECORDING DEVICES WILL BE ALLOWED IN THE SCREENING. Seriously. A lawyer is making me type this right now! Conor, HELP!) Don’t miss your chance to win tickets to experience Bruno in all his Velcro jumpsuit-clad glory. To enter to win, email ihopeiwin[at]philebrity[dot]com with “Bruno? BrunYES!” in the subject header. You’ll automatically be subscribed to the forthcoming new Philebrity Reader weekly newsletter and win chances for other exclusive free stuff. If you’re planning on drinking any beverages during the movie, be sure to wear your nose plug for the benefit of the audience members sitting in front of you.
Our buddy Mike Fleming just sent us this snap of The Thinker move-in-progress. Something about seeing this guy, deep in thought, next to a dumpster kinda brings it all together, doesn’t it?
If you listen to the wind, you can hear whole chunks of Port Richmond hoarding pills right now. Because yes, Virgina, it’s true: If the FDA heeds its own advice — and why wouldn’t it, unless pharmaceutical companies had like a huge Washington lobby to to chant it down, and that would never happen — Percocet and Vicodin could be banned in the U.S. FOREVER! HELLO MEXICO! Anyway, yeah. It’s gonna be a sad Christmas.
[A note about the image above: Actual t-shirt that was going around a few years back.]
THURSDAY:
SATURDAY:
Just ask Gervase or 
We’ve often remarked on this site how, in so many ways, City Paper, bless its soul, is/has been/might always be irretrievably stuck in the 1990s. Now, a large portion of this is tied to the alt-weekly medium itself — few alt-weeklies nationwide have been successful in bringing themselves into The New Overwhelming (And Often Horrible) Now — but in the case of CP, it’s also a staffing/generational issue. We don’t say this today (as we definitely have in the past) necessarily to hurl some kind of out-of-touch epithet at the paper (Philadelphia Weekly will trump them on that shit any day of the week anyway), but more as a rubric for understanding the way CP’s hive mind works. And with the retro clock timed just right for us all to begin
City magazines: They’re the new newspapers! Hot off 
Because some of you have off on Friday and some of you have off on Monday and some have both and we know you only read us at work anyway (unless you’re unemployed, in which case, you should already be laying out somewhere) and 
By now, you might have seen the story about how your friend and ours, The Philadelphia Parking Authority, 
You know, for some of us, this whole recession thing is really, really working out: We’re reading more, we’re riding our bikes more, we’re getting familiar with all the stuff the city affords a broke person (like parks, people-watching and so on), and we’re just generally becoming more like actual people than we were when things like upward mobility were an actual possibility. Lemons, meet lemonade! Would you like me to refill your glass? 
You’ve seen the 
