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Arts
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Under normal circumstances, the announcement that Marjane Satrapi's acclaimed Iranian coming-of-age story Persepolis will be 2010's One Book, One Philadelphia would be nothing but good news. After all, it's the first time OBOP has featured a graphic novel, and the second time in its eight-year history that a female writer's taken center stage to discuss politics, family and other issues central to OBOP's mission.
From the press release, embargoed till this morning:
Originally published in France in two volumes, The Complete Persepolis is Satrapiâs poignant, humorous, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during a time of political revolution and repression. An outspoken and imaginative child, Satrapi grappled with understanding the ruling power in her country as she witnessed the overthrow of the Shahâs regime, the Islamic Revolutionâs triumph, and the chilling impact of war with Iraq. Detailed in black-and-white graphic images and accompanied by brief text, Satrapiâs story continues through her years as a young adult, as she finds her way as an expatriate student in Austria. Her first-person point of view presents readers with a unique glimpse into Iranâs political repression, the inner-workings of a family, and one womanâs experience as an outsider both at home and abroad.
But as we should all know by now, the Philadelphia library system is in great danger of shuttering -- and we hate to think what might happen to OBOP if, on October 2 (that's only a few weeks away, far before the January 2010 OBOP), no action is taken on the city's budget. We'll have to say goodbye to holds, loans, after-school programs for thousands of young Philadelphians and the amazing programming the Free Library books annually.
Some details from freelibrary.org:
Even as we remain hopeful that the State Legislature will act and pass the enabling funding legislation, we wanted to notify all of our customers of this very possible outcome. If you have any questions about impacts to Free Library services, call 215-686-5322, or visit the Free Library of Philadelphia website at www.freelibrary.org. If you have questions about changes to City services, or if you want to be kept informed about this situation, we encourage you to contact Philly 311 by calling 3-1-1 between the hours of 8am and 8 pm Monday-Friday, and 9am-5pm Saturdays, e-mail philly311@phila.gov, or visit the City of Philadelphia website at http://www.phila.gov.
In the meantime, pick up a City Paper on Thursday to read an interview with Satrapi, who will be at the Central Branch of the Free Library on Wednesday, September 23, to read from Persepolis. Go there — it might be the last chance you get for a while.
Persepolis reading/signing, Wed., Sept. 23, 7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.
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| livearts-fringe.org |
Another week, another Mike Daisey giveaway: We've got 10 (ten!) pairs of tickets to the Saturday, September 12, 8 p.m., showing of The Last Cargo Cult, Daisey's second Live Arts monologue.
Here's the scoop from the Live Arts/Fringe Web site:
Mike Daisey tells the true-life story of his time on a remote South Pacific island whose inhabitants worship America. There he lived with the cult, hunted feral pigs beneath the erupting volcano of Mount Yasur, and learned of the islanders' stories of belief, faith, and sympathetic magic. Part adventure story and part memoir, The Last Cargo Cult weaves these stories with a searing examination of the international financial crisis. From the belief in the infallibility of markets to the ultimate achievement in sympathetic magic —money —Daisey wrestles with what the collapse says about our deepest values. He uses each culture to illuminate the other to find —between the seemingly primitive and the achingly modern —a human answer.
To win tickets (worth $30 apiece), answer this trivia question:
What is the name of the tiny America-worshiping South Pacific island that Daisey visited before writing The Last Cargo Cult?
E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win! (Side note: Make sure you can attend the 9/12, 8 p.m., show before answering, and please include your mailing address for our records. Thanks!)
[Update, 5 p.m., Friday]: Thanks to everyone who wrote in with the correct answer (Tanna, part of Vanuatu) — this contest is now closed! Have a great weekend and enjoy the show.
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Nothing to do tonight? Don't worry, we've got you covered.
It's the perfect night to view a breezy outdoor art installation during your First Friday gallivanting, no? Dennis Ritter, who's studying at Tyler and working at the Clay Studio, has handmade more than 200 porcelain birds and hung them from a net 15 feet above Bird Park (Third and Arch, across the street from Starbucks). "Together, they create a swirling sculpture, over 15 feet high, reminiscent of a flock taking off into the air," says Amy Brisson, who gave us the heads-up about the exhibit which opens at 6 p.m. today with Ritter in attendance. The title "Emergence" is fitting — because of an illness that lost him his job three years ago, Ritter, 33, chose to follow his passion for ceramic arts instead, and from the looks of it, he made the right decision.
Fri., Sept. 4, 6 p.m., free, Bird Park, Third and Arch streets.
thanks for the kind words
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| livearts-fringe.org |
We're giving away a limited number of PAIRS of tickets to Mike Daisey's How Theater Failed America.
Here's what the guide has to say about the show:
From gorgeous new theaters standing empty as cathedrals, to "successfulâ working actors traveling like migrant farmhands, to an arts culture unwilling to speak or listen to its own nation, Daisey takes stock of the dystopian state of theater in America: a shrinking world with smaller audiences every year. Ship in freeze-dried actors from New York City? Certainly! Create generations of theater professors who have never worked in theater? Absolutely! Earn no pay and have no hope of a living wage? Sign us up! Daisey gives a darkly hilarious and truthful dissection of the art thatâs being made, the legacy we leave to the future, and just who it is the theater believes it's speaking to.
The whens and wheres and whatnots:
Saturday, Sept. 5
8 p.m.
Suzanne Roberts Theatre
480 S. Broad St.
These tickets run $30 a pop, so answering this theater trivia question is well worth your (and your plus-one's) while:
Which Philadelphia theater company produced a play in its 2008-09 season featuring the unlikely meeting of Sigmund Freud and Salvador DalÃ?
Hit me up at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win! Remember, you'll get two (2!) tickets to the Saturday night showing of How Theater Failed America if you can correctly answer the trivia question (and our tickets are limited, so be quick about it). Please include your name and mailing address with your answer.
[...] this page was mentioned by APS Museum (@aps_museum), avenueofthearts (@avenueofthearts), Megan Wendell (@canarymegan), LiveArtsFringe (@liveartsfringe), Philly City Paper (@citypaper) and others. [...]
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| livearts-fringe.org |
CP's Twitter (which you should be following if you aren't already) just announced a killer giveaway:
7 pairs of tix to KILL ME NOW (http://tr.im/xJb7) 9/6, 7 pm @ Arts Bank. E-mail CAROLYN.HUCKABAY@CITYPAPER.NET w/ name/address to WIN!
Hit me up directly for a chance to win, and follow us at twitter.com/citypaper for Fringe news, reviews links, giveaways and much more!
[UPDATE: 3 p.m.]: Contest is over! We have seven winners. Congrats to you all. And keep watching the Clog — we're giving away tons of tickets to Mike Daisey's How Theater Failed America today and tomorrow.
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| Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 291 pp., $25, Sept. 9 |
As promised, I'm back today with a Get Lit Wednesday special: I've got a shiny-new copy of Michelle Huneven's Blame, a novel about a woman's recovery from alcoholism, to give away to a faithful summer reader.
Entertainment Weekly gave Blame an A- this week. Here's a snippet of the review:
Patsy McLemoore is a newly minted college professor in Southern California with long legs, a Colgate smile, and seemingly limitless academic promise. She's also a blackout alcoholic. When the 29-year-old wakes up from one obliterated evening in county jail, she is met with sickening news: She has killed a young mother and daughter with her car, a brutal, irreversible crime that she can only hazily recall.
What follows is a chronicle of her imprisonment, and subsequent lifelong search for atonement — until a lightning-bolt revelation forces her to reassess nearly everything that came before. It's a plot that, in the kind of foil-embossed paperbacks you pick up at the airport newsstand, could easily turn hamfisted or hokey. But the award-winning Michelle Huneven unfurls her tale with unflagging emotional nuance: Patsy emerges as smart, self-aware, and very much flawed, neither a monster nor a redeemed angel.
To win a copy, answer me this:
According to official Alcoholics Anonymous data, how many people are members of AA worldwide?
E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.
[UPDATE, 1:20 p.m.]: Congratulations to Clog reader Jackie, who correctly responded that 2 million people around the world are members of Alcoholics Anonymous (in more than 180 countries, y'all).
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| Graywolf, 244 pp., $22, September |
I was too busy finishing The Kite Runner (finally) last week to give any books away, and that's just selfish. So watch the Clog tomorrow for an additional Get Lit trivia game (I'll be offering up a copy of Michelle Huneven's Blame).
In the meantime, there's this: Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries: A memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder, which explores the author's drug dependency/writer's block/obsession with a real-life murder case. Yesterday, CP news intern Morgan Davis reviewed the book for our A&E blog, Critical Mass, and was none too pleased:
The premise of the book is exciting — a murder mystery as written through the memoir of an unrelated man. Elliott approaches the book with a clear idea of what he wants. Heâs going to examine Reiser and Sturgeon and break apart the red herrings in the case (like Sturgeonâs outlandish murder confession), all while examining his own troubled life and making comparisons between the two. But the result, much like Elliottâs life, is more jumbled mess than brilliant exposé.
Throughout the book, Elliott feels unfocused on anything besides how miserable his life is. The story begins with Elliottâs childhood, setting the stage for turmoil with a tale about his lying, seemingly psychotic father. From there, the author jumps from mini-story to mini-story, telling about his troubled youth, his drug addictions, his self-destructive love life and lack of inspiration to write, all while occasionally throwing in something about Reiserâs trial. By the time you actually get to the play-by-play description of the trial, you feel like Elliottâs dragged you on a bad acid trip while watching his home movies.
Burn! But I think you should decide for yourselves.
Here's your trivia question:
What Arizona Cardinal received a four-game suspension as the result of using Adderall to enhance his performance?
E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. And remember, there's always tomorrow.
[UPDATE, 1 p.m.]: Congratulations to Clog reader Liza C., who correctly answered that Ben Patrick is the Adderall-addled Cardinal.
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Don't know what to do tonight? Don't worry, we've got you covered.
Lord knows Philly loves its gender-bending cabaret. (You've heard of Martha Graham Cracker and Cabaret Red Light, yah?) Tonight, you can add one more of these performances to the list Miss Cast 2: A Cabaret of Songs Sung by the Wrong People, which will benefit the local Mauckingbird Theatre Company. Jennie Eisenhower, that saucy, red-lipped lady on the left, will be hosting. And it's only a matter of hours until you see what she looks like gussied up like a man.
Mon., Aug. 17, 7:30 p.m., $25, Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-923-8909.
Don't know what to do tonight? Don't worry, we've got you covered.
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Philly just isn't the setting of enough short stories, books or movies. Sure, we've got It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Boy Meets World, Rocky but still, we could use more. To combat that, Josh McIlvain whipped up a collection of Philly-based short stories titled "Philly Fiction" in 2006. And now, the second edition of that series is out. They tackle appropriate topics like South Philly, the Shore and hoagies, but my favorite by far is on Northeast girls. A clip of Elise Juska's story:
Northeast Philly girls lived close. Their houses were close, clothes were tight, families crammed together on long city streets. On the corners, they stood clumps, girls with big hair and tight jeans and fringed leather pocketbooks. They held lipstick-wet cigarettes between two fingers and exchanged bubblegum, lighters, compact mirrors, all with smooth, pink sleight of hand. These girls had names I wanted Colleen, Eileen, Christing the long "ee" insisting on femininity. Their boyfriends were cool and wiry, dropping kisses on their cheeks or loose arms around their necks. At night, so I heard, the boys took them to the St. Lucy's parking lot where they pressed up close in warm backseats, and later, the girls emerged older, more knowing, having acquired fresh gossip and kissing bruises they'd display like badges of honor on the corner the next day.
Accurate, no? And now you know St. Lucy's is the Northeast's Kissing Point.
Wed., July 22, 7-9 p.m., free, Skylight 307, 307 Market St., 267-241-4798, phillyfiction.com.
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| Mail Online |
Fishtown is so endearingly weird. From the Frankford Avenue Arts blog:
We invited the Pennsylvania chapter of the Mutual UFO Network and Fistown's own GERM Books to host their annual Awareness Day on Frankford Ave. With a day full of speakers and presentations at GERM and the Caterpillar, you are guaranteed to get your dose of conspiracy theories and personal accounts of close encounters. MUFON directors will be on hand to answer questions and investigate sightings. Noted UFOlogist Peter Robbins will be speaking on the Rendelsham Forest UFO incident, a sort of British "Rosewell" encounter.
Not sure what the "Caterpillar" is? It's a cool outdoor installation that we spotted back in May. It looks like this:
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| Neal Santos |
Sun., July 19, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., free, the Caterpillar, 2205 Frankford Ave., 215-423-5002, germbooks.com.
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