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Man Cave
Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
Saturday, I hopped across the river to see The Machine at Collingswood's Scottish Rite Theatre. The band's renditions of fan favorites are studio-sharp as ever, and their unique take on the more obscure tunes are fascinating — and suitably psychedelic. Here's the setlist:
"Welcome To the Machine" — The Machine plays this at every show; it's their calling card, and suitably so.
"Yet Another Movie" — One of the more obscure cuts from Floyd's catalog, but easily one of the best tracks of the post-Waters era.
"Breathe / Time" — These must-play staples showoff The Machines ability for pitch-perfect replication.
"Mother" — Frontman Joe Pascarell makes an eerie vocal leap ahead in time to this Roger Waters ballad. His spot-on Waters could be a party trick on its own, were there no music to accompany it.
"Shine On You Crazy Diamond" — A defining moment at any Machine show.
Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
Well, another Super Bowl has come and gone. The Giants have once again belly-flopped into the post-season, and promptly started practicing for their big game against the corporate fat-cat New England Patriots. Most Philadelphia Eagles fans didn't want to watch, because the thought of rooting for either the dishonest Patriots or the hated division rival Giants leaves a foul taste in the mouth. Still it's good to know Peyton is no longer the top Manning and that Tom Brady's not some Hercules half-god.
Madonna executed a ritual halftime performance complete with eye-popping light-show, fully-costumed backup dancers and random guest stars. She probably did a good job of keeping my Mom from channel-surfing, but most sports fans would probably agree that the Super Bowl's Research and Development department should reconsider utilizing aging pop-starlets at the halftime show next year.
The commercials were pretty run-of-the-mill. Nothing particularly stood out. We had our usual dogs fetching Bud Light and babies doing gymnastics for Doritos. A few winners sneaked by, including this Oikos yogurt commercial in which John Stamos gets head-butted, and the one where the green (of course) M&M strips at a party.
(ryan.carey@citypaper.net) (@slackerDIYtoday)
This was my first weekend without football in a long time, so I spent my time taking in a few new experiences. I took notes:
— I started playing Words With Friends, the iPhone app which got 30 Rock star Alec Baldwin kicked 
off an American Airlines Flight at LAX. I'm generally not that good at Scrabble, but I try to participate in mass hysteria whenever possible.
— I downloaded the Netflix app for iPhone and watched Norm McDonald's special Me Doing Standup. This app is the only reason I ever make it to the gym.
— I checked out a freaky documentary about DMT starring Fear Factor's Joe Rogan. Now there's some stuff I'll be staying away from. A good strong India pale ale is all I need, but God bless these folks who signed up for a clinical study on this psychedelic drug known as the Spirit Molecule. While the doc did a good job generating a serious conversation about the issue, it was always silly when the DMT-advocating Rogan showed his face on screen. What, Snoop Dogg wasn't available?
— I listened to the forthcoming album by Ben Kweller, which is full of catchy, toe-tappin' power-pop. Kweller's coming to Union Transfer on March 21. If you want to wait to see whether or not you're going to like the new album, it's clutch, get a ticket.
Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
Friday night, the freakadelic Brooklyn folk-rockers Akron/Family invaded The Blockley for a night of avant-garde sing- and dance-alongs. With frequent three-part harmonies and heavy electronics — including both blippy samples and heavy vocal modulation — these jazz folkers seemed to hop back and forth between yesteryear and the distant future. A very enthusiastic crowd was familiar with the music — I was very proud of my fellow Philly music fans for their appreciation of such challenging, and not widely distributed music. Akron/Family is truly blog-rock if I've ever heard it.
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Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
Tim Tebow's expected (but disappointing) collapse at the hands of Tom Brady aside, this was one 
of the most exciting playoff weekends in recent memory. But I had to find ways to kill time before and after the big games. I swung over to Tecmo Super Bowl Heaven where I downloaded the roms that allowed me to play the football games of my Nintendo-oriented youth on my laptop. More importantly, it allowed me to play as the modern teams, which means there was some revisionist history for Tebow in my Man Cave. If you have an emulator for NES or SNES, you can download Tecmo rosters from just about any year, and — if you have a high-speed internet connection — you can challenge opponents online at puretecmo.com.
We also broke out the old RISK board for some savage world domination. I'm realizing that the key to winning a bigger game (four players or more) is this: You have to control Australia. Everybody's gonna be scrambling for domination of the mid-sized continents, which is gonna be a drain on their resources and may not pay-out at all (especially for Europe, with boarders like Swiss cheese). But nobody's gonna attempt to challenge your ownership of Australia, which means you're gonna have a few extra fresh troops coming in every round, minus the bloody border wars that your fellow players are hemorrhaging resources into (look at our defecit since we've been in Iraq). And since people rarely attempt to dominate the whole continent of Africa early in the game, you're usually left with some poorly defended countries to pilfer slowly as you build up RISK cards quietly off the radar. Wolf Blitzer hardly notices ya!
Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
I consumed two films this weekend: Win Win (pictured) and Young Adult. The former starred Paul Giamatti at 
perhaps his Paul Giamattiest since Sideways. The lovable schlub played a small-time attorney struggling to keep his practice afloat. He sees an opportunity to survive off a wealthy older client with dementia, taking advantage of his need for at-home care. This semi-unethical maneuver helps him feed his family, but not without complications( i.e. the dude's teenage grandson shows up all wayward and pissed at mom-in-rehab and in need of some positive adult role-models). Giamatti — as a part-time wrestling coach — welcomes the kid into his home and onto his wrestling team, where he proceeds to beast his way through the competition.
All told, Win Win really amounts to a nice indie flick about making good on your commitments and doing right by your family. It wasn't particularly mind-blowing but rather a chill hangout with Giamatti, (The Office's) Amy Ryan and (Arrested Development's) Jeffrey Tambor. The wrestling subplot added just enough suspense to elevate this simple film to a level just above really exciting screensaver.
Young Adult, on the other-hand, was almost unbearable. This isn't to say it wasn't any good — all the performances were great. It was just a bit too uncomfortable for me to ever want to sit through again. Charlize Theron was Ka-RAZY! Patton Oswalt was effective as a chubby, loser-y, drunk nerd (true method acting if I ever saw it). And Patrick Wilson (A-Team, Little Children) played a great unwitting object of Theron's nostalgia-fueled romantic obsession. Young Adult reminds me of Black Swan if it were a bit funnier and had less-scary editing. Attractive lead actress lives in a complete fantasy world, and proceeds to suffer the most epic of meltdowns. It gets a bit frantic. I had to look away from the screen. Bat-shit crazy women are not exactly my comfort-zone, which is why this is art, not entertainment.
(ryan.carey@citypaper.net) (@slackerDIYtoday)
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Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
There's a gentleman here in the Philly area who LOVES Nickelback. His name is Paul Tsikitas 
(pronounced sick-EAT-us), and, yes, you read that right: he loves Nickelback.
Generally speaking, Tsikitas is an Arcade Fire-loving, craft-beer drinking, independent film-watching hipster. However, if there's one thing he loves without discrimination, it's rock music. And when it comes to his favorite rock bands, he holds no prejudice against throatiness from the north.
This Saturday night, I managed to witness Tsikitas — the former lead singer of South Jersey-based band Noringo — proclaim his love for Nickelback in a very public fashion. I will protect the name of the venue, due to the local unpopularity of Nickelback (but you can figure it out pretty easily). Tsikitas found a stage, a band and an audience with which to dramatically sing his love for Chad Kroeger.
Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
I rented Our Idiot Brother from one of those pharmacy Red Box DVD kiosks. Paul Rudd plays a Lebowski-esque family man, beloved to his sisters, mom and nephew. You can check out our review but I'd like to discuss the ensemble cast of hotties that populate the celluloid.
Zooey Dechanell: Enchanting as ever, the banged brunette plays a lesbian/sometimes bisexual who 
frequents spoken-word open mics. Perpetually rocking the hipster stewardess vibe, Zoey manages to refrain from singing in this one (which is neither here nor there, but I thought you'd like to know in case it comes up at quizzo).
Emily Banks: Blondie Magee fits in with her dark-haired family members by shelving her golden locks for a brunette wig. Normally, one of the most unilaterally smoking chicks in Hollywood, her unique character blend of phoniness and bitchiness in this flick earns her a rare (and temporary) banishment from my mental brothel.
Emily Mortimer: The intriguing beauty from Lars & The Real Girl plays the sheepish wife, unsure as to how to earn her distant hubby's affections, and desperate to be a good mom. Her befuddlement and lack of confidence fluctuates between off-putting and charming.
Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
Canadian indie-rock is, in my not-so-humble-opinion, one of the soundest bastions of creativity available 
to the alt-weekly consuming world. Even their big-label bands tend to embody the spirit of emotion-first, image-last musical whimsy (with one obvious, hilarious exception). Luckily for the savvy, many of Canada's best bands are simply not gimicky enough to have been "heard of" down here, so you can sometimes catch multiple Juno award-winning bands at small venues like the North Star Bar.
Sam Roberts Band — whose genre is basically classic rock — were there Friday to tour their new disc, Colider (which I reviewed back in September.) They gave North Star a thorough sampling of their best new cuts, as well as fan favorites from their previous three albums. The über-honest pop-rockers recently added a sax on some of the new cuts, giving their soaring ditties a boost of density. As always, they closed with the unmanageably epic "Mind Flood," their pysch-rock anthem which Roberts himself nicknamed "Mind Floyd."
I'd also like to mention their opening act, Zeus, a quartet that looked like a biker, a nerd, a joe six-pack and a hipster. Their music sounds suitably organic and disparate. It's rhythmic, marching, harmonic and catchy. With the exception of the drummer, they switch back and forth between guitar, bass and keyboard with almost total equity. Among their occasionally synthy, punk-inspired rock originals, they banged out an unexpectedly sweet cover of "It's Just a Shame That's All" by Genesis. Compelling movements, hooky choruses, short guitar solos and heartfelt wailing are just some of the things you can look forward to if they ever swing back through Philly.
Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
Parks and Recreation's Adam Scott (perhaps best known for his role as the über-successful jerk brother 
from Stepbrothers) was interviewed on WTF with Marc Maron. One of the topics they covered was Party Down, the 2009 Starz series that he starred in. They talked a lot about the show, so I decided to utilize my extended weekend to Netflix of season one. Scott plays a failed actor, the "straight man" amongst a dysfunctional catering service filled with Hollywood wannabes and has-beens. Like many critically acclaimed cable shows, the series is slow to get moving; the opening episodes are all premise. But once all the characters are in gear, laughs flow abundantly over the underlying context of the ultimate Hollywood nightmare.
Let's check out the rest of the ensemble:
Ken Marino as Ron Donald: This The State alum is the manager, working side-by-side with his L.A. catering misfits. He has perhaps the most modest life dream of all the crew: to open a soup and salad franchise — and even that's proving unlikely in modern Hollywood. He is all positive energy and customers-first. He is also the only person on the show who cares about the catering business.
Lizzy Caplan as Casey: You may have seen Caplan in Mean Girls, Cloverfield and True Blood. Here, she plays a frustrated standup comic who frequently complains about the not-very-funny side of show business and may or may not be an Adam Scott love interest.
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