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Before we get going here, let’s pay condolences to the Tartaglia family of the Italian Market. Joe Brown Tartaglia, co-proprietor of Connie’s Ric Rac passed away after a long bout with brain cancer. He was a funny guy and will be deeply missed
View galleryWere The Breeders your favorite band of the ’90s? Well, maybe they should've been. In town to play their 1993 classic album Last Splash from start to finish, Kim Deal and co. reminded everybody they've got more gears than most of their old alt-rock (did I just write that?) peers. Fast, slow, loud, soft, pretty, brutal, precise, chaotic — these songs are an emotional tilt-a-whirl. In fact, while it was a solid thrill to hear "Cannonball" live once more, "Divine Hammer" and "I Just Wanna Get Along" rocked the crowd most thoroughly. The prettiest moment was surely "Do You Love Me Now" — just gorgeous as all hell.
We always get a ton of stuff that doesn't make it into the official agenda for one reason or another. Or sometimes it does! Anyway, this is some of the stuff that CP staffers are attempting to get to this weekend their own selves. You have no excuse for boredom.
FRIDAY 5/3
- This First Friday promises to be weirder than most with artists showcasing their obsessions with monsters, dough and the color black.
- Cheap, dirty rock 'n' roll at the Ric-Rac: Sinking Ocean Gods and Dead Tenors. $5.
- Film buffs have been wondering when Upstream Color, Shane Carruth's new flick (kinda) about parasite-assisted hypnosis, would make it to Philly. Well, it's finally arrived, and of all places, it's playing a limited engagement at the Franklin Institute.
- The Ladyfest ramp-up is on. Tonight, check out the art at Satellite Cafe.
- Grandchildren will run wild with their new album at Johnny Brenda's tonight.
SATURDAY 5/4
- Maybe you're sick of hearing about Lentil (this week's CP cover story subject) and maybe you don't want anything to do with the multi-day festival that carries his name, but you've gotta admit that the related event happening at The Fire has a respectable line-up (Mike Slomo Brenner will be playing, people).
- Not only is the Franklin Institute screening Upstream Color it's opening a new espionage exhibition meaning we might spend most of our weekend there. On display: Insectothopter (an insect-sized intelligence-gathering device), the actual ice ax that was used to kill Leon Trotsky and other things to make us wish we worked for the CIA.
- The Khyber Pass serves frozen mint juleps every day (that the slushy machine is working) but it's all preamble for their Kentucky Derby viewing party. Get drunk. Watch animals get spanked and run a race they don't know they're in.
SUNDAY 5/5
- The Breeders at the Troc is all sold out.
- Good seats are still available for the Shooting Wall film fest at PhilaMoca. Totally free.
Money by Time/Bank.
Although your head is probably ready to explode with all of the cool stuff happening on First Friday, there's a new event appealing to abstract thinkers or those generally unimpressed by art. From the folks who bring you the Fringe Arts Festival each year comes Proposition Tent, "a laboratory and social place of ideas on how to engage the existing world," which really means that this won't be your typical free booze/gallery schmoozing extravaganza, but something purportedly intellectual and discussion-based.
Happening every First Friday through July, four contributors – a local artist, an international artist, a local business/non-profit and a philosopher – will propose an idea or showcase a project related to a set theme. At tonight's event, CASH MONEY, film director/humorist Miranda July's project calls upon strangers to participate, the folks from Time Bank talk about their alternative currency and the South Philly Co-op tell us why their food distribution model actually matters. Proposition Tent's curators even convinced Antanas Makas, the former mayor of Bogota and respectable mathematician/philosopher, to submit a statement on economics. If the strangeness of this event isn't motivation enough to attend, there will be free pizza (although its source is unknown).
Fri., May 3, 7 p.m., free, North 11th and Carlton Streets (near Vox Populi), blog.fringearts.com
RELATED: For a curated list of tonight's best events, check out our First Friday Focus.
Before we start, give a laurel and hearty handshake of congratulations to one-time City Paper editors Brian Howard and Carolyn Huckabay for tying the knot last weekend, honeymooning in Mexico and making it back in time so that the prettier half of that coupling got to the 12-hour Knights Arts Challenge Awards ceremony for her job with Canary Promotions. Congrats goes too to those $2 million+ Knights grant awardees, some of whom have coupled with each other for what promises to be some seriously bizarre work, 43 projects to be exact. Like a $60,000 pairing of Pig Iron Theater and Dr. Dog for an indie-opera, and Stacey Wilson asking visual artists and DJs to collaborate. There are a few winners that are questionable — like curator Theresa Rose commissioning art projects at restaurants (doesn’t Starbucks and Dirty Franks do that without giving anyone a drink let alone money?) or giving the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia $50,000 to hire artists to paint bike racks (surely, biking artistes would do that out of love). I kid. Spend away. You can find all the winners at knightarts.org.
This is the KV video I wrote about here and posted pics of here. Click here to watch it.
In this week's cover story, CP editor Emily Guendelsberger writes about Lentil, a French bulldog born with a severely cleft palate who became an Internet sensation. His life-threatening deformity demands the full attention of sleep-deprived "Foster Mom" Lindsay Condefer but also makes for one undeniably adorable pooch. During a visit with the two, Guendelsberger shot video of Lentil doing nothing of significance, but does that matter? Puppy!
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: If She Stood
GENRE: Theater
GROUP: Painted Bride Art Center
ATTENDED: Fri., April 26, 8 p.m., Painted Bride Art Center
CLOSES: Sun., May 5
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: If She Stood considers a small band of women who used personal and collective action to upend their world.
WE THINK: Ain Gordon and Nadine Patterson’s If She Stood is an ambitious look at the founding of the 19th century abolition group the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, but one ultimately bogged down by experimental pretensions. Nonlinear and narrative-defying, the one-act play features four women musing on issues of racism, sexism and activism. Though inspired by a specific historical moment, If She Stood’s characters speak mostly in broad, poetic abstractions that render a clear understanding of the play’s context incredibly difficult. This difficulty is almost certainly intentional — perhaps meant to mimic the impossible situation faced by these courageous but marginalized women — but it’s more exhausting than it is effective. And metatheatrical moments like the fourth-wall-breaking acknowledgement of the room’s dimmed lights, or a character’s uttering of the line, “I hate realism,” feel like little more than self-consciously clever flourishes.
That being said, Janis Dardaris, Melanye Finister, Kim Martin-Cotton and Stacey Sargeant do offer admirably impassioned performances. Emotion is undeniably palpable throughout If She Stood, even if the cause of that emotion is often rendered inscrutable by the play’s challenging language.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: A blast from the South's past.
Normally, you’d say that we can’t truly miss somebody if they don’t go away. Luckily, it is Questlove/?uestlove we’re talking about — the ultimate Philadelphian whose re-location to Manhattan would seem final if he always here. (Take last month’s Fluid finale.)
But he’s got that a chicken-and-cupcake business with Stephen Starr at Chelsea Market.
He’s got that Tonight Show gig.
And now there are plans for a book tour to accompany his debut (you know they’ll be more) memoir, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove.
June 1’s Roots Picnic along the waterfront is a month away as of today.
Then there’s the confirmation of what’s been rumored for weeks: that Questlove will again join the entertainment ranks of chef and philanthropist Marc Vetri’s Great Chefs Event for Alex’s Lemonade Stand at the Urban Outfitters complex at the Philly Navy Yard, June 11. Quest will spin as part of the after-party entertainment at Vetri’s N. Broad Street hang, Alla Spinna, a gig whose live entertainment features the Joseph A. Ferko String Band. Out-dazzle the Mummers, Quest, I dare you. #Hashtag Media videographer, manager and producer Craig Kaplan helped set up Quest and Vetri two years ago and got the busy twosome together for this charitable bash again in 2013. Kaplan is currently shooting Vetri video stuff for GCE around town. Maybe Quest will slip in for his close up. Tix and info here.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Countdown to “BOOM” We All Fall Down
GENRE: Theater/Dance/Song
GROUP: Kariamu & Company: Traditions
ATTENDED: Sat., April 27, 1 p.m., Temple Performing Arts Center
CLOSED: Sat., April 27
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham Alabama on September 15, 1963 was an unprecedented act of “domestic terrorism” long before the term would ever be applied. Countdown to “BOOM” We All Fall Down captur[es] the music, the look, the feel and the movements of a Sunday morning in the South.
WE THINK: The highlight of Kariamu & Company’s Countdown to “BOOM" is a beautiful scene of four mothers preparing their daughters’ hair before church while struggling to explain why the world is such a cruel place. The production works best in this intimate little moment, as parents try to ready their children for the harsh realities of the world without draining them of hope. We are made to feel their reality, rather than just being shown it.
The production is disjointed and not concerned with linear narratives, which is confusing at first but works better as the scenes unfold. Countdown falters when it tries to convey the Civil Rights-era South with too heavy a hand. The montage of still photographs and newspaper clippings that accompany almost every scene can distract from the actual performers and lose their power due to overuse. But the dancing, which is less prominent than expected, is stunning.
–Jake Blumgart
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Their parents must be so proud: Kids sing about civil rights movement.
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