Pennsylvania

Gonna tell my kids this is A Complete Unknown

Cusack is a pro who knows how to gracefully navigate insipid interview questions, and I’m sure he wouldn’t do it if it weren’t a decent payday, but it was still kinda hard to watch him endure a post-screening Q&A with a local corporate rock radio DJ and a theater full of middle-aged nostalgia freaks.

Steak is Quentin Dupieux’s first feature film, which I enjoyed more than I expected considering that I don’t remember much liking Rubber, the film he made after it, when I saw it some 15 years ago. Steak’s comic beats, bizarro world of Clockwork Orange-tinged perpetual high school, and bumping electronic soundtrack all cohere into a satisfyingly absurdist satire of conformity, reminiscent at times of Yorgos Lanthimos’s more accessible moments. And it’s perfectly paced:… See more →

I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical… See more →

How Peter Fonda is not best known for this starring role as a tomato-averse alien with explosive ejaculate is something I will never understand

I joked with some other folks in line about the event staff carding people at the door: Would anyone attending a Slowdive show in 2024 be under 40? I had momentarily forgotten that the kids on TikTok have in recent years made shoegaze far bigger than it’s ever been, and not only had the kids come out to pack this show, but they’d arrived early. I got there shortly after the start of Quannic’s opening… See more →

I adored Adam Elliot’s early shorts, up to and including his Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, but Memoir of a Snail, overloaded with schmaltz and details recycled from his previous films, seems to be methodically constructed to confirm any suspicion that he’s content to make a career of repeating himself and tugging shamelessly at shallow heartstrings.

The name of this tour, The Future Past, led me to believe it was one of those tours where Maiden would be sticking to the classic albums, which is all I really want to hear. If I had done any research at all, I would have learned that “Days of Future Past” is the name of a song on their 2021 album Senjutsu, and indeed, that album accounted for a full third of the setlist.… See more →

The Scariest Skeleton

Mali Elfman, Pete Scalzitti IV (USA)

Tennis, Oranges

Sean Pecknold (USA)

Martyr’s Guidebook

Maksymilian Rzontowski (Poland)

It Shouldn’t Rain Tomorrow

Maria Trigo Teixeira (Portugal, Germany)

Horse Portrait

Witold Giersz (Poland)

Beautiful Men

Nicolas Keppens (France, Belgium, Netherlands)

A Crab in the Pool

Alexandra Myotte, Jean-Sébastien Hamel (Canada)

Bug Diner

Phoebe Jane Hart (USA)

Wander to Wonder

Nina Gantz (Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK)

My fourth Greet Death show, and my first since singer/guitarist Harper transitioned, and it was nice to see her come out of her shell, playing more expressively in a way that maybe she felt she couldn’t before.

Like Fargeat’s debut, this is more successful as pulp than polemic, and its inevitably bombastic finale is a dud, but I can’t deny I enjoyed the ride, especially with an audience.

Marc Bolan doesn’t deserve this.

When it’s not succumbing to self-consciously unhinged improv exercise, this is something like a feature-length maximalist update of Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture for the reality TV age. The editor is unquestionably the MVP.

Soul Glo isn’t really my thing, but I’m not gonna tell you they didn’t burn the place down. Mannequin Pussy, not so much.

Frontwoman Marisa Dabice isn’t an especially clever lyricist, and it’s easy enough to get past when listening to the band’s records, whose sonics are more about feeling than thinking. But while the records are mercifully absent overt speechifying, this show sadly was not, and Mannequin Pussy’s emotion-to-intellect ratio is a poor fit… See more →

Last night I watched Anatomy of a Fall and tonight I watched this. Cinema is so much.

I made a Spotify playlist of the Love God soundtrack. Only a little over half of the songs in the film are available on Spotify, but it’s still 81 minutes of music!

On this, my third viewing, I realized that Sophie is funding her revenge activities with the cash her dad gave her so she could avoid eating on campus with the plebes.

I only found out about the Philadelphia Organ Festival the day before it started, and I’m so glad I did. I wish I could have attended more events, but if I could only make it to one, this one, “The Organ’s Modern Touch: Minimalism and Contemporary Works” was at the top of my list.

This festival being devoted to the organ, video screens were set up at either side of the sanctuary, one showing the… See more →

I’ll begin by briefly weighing in on five of the most prominent pieces of the 2023 zeitgeist, at least from where I was sitting. Some cynical vibes ahead, so feel free to skip past this part if you’re not in the mood for negative energy:

• Taylor Swift: Gen Z’s version of Beatlemania is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, since I find Taylor Swift’s music to be entirely unremarkable, but that didn’t stop her… See more →

@kevskinrug and I are here from 10–5 at @phillyzinefest, along with about a zillion other vendors! Come out and get all your holiday zine shopping done in one place!

Mitten Hall
1913 N Broad St

This is the most utterly baffling expression of human creativity I have ever seen.

Tobin Bell’s lucid stoicism, facile as its moralizing may be, has always been the Saw series’ biggest strength, and after nearly two decades of coolly calculated carnage, Saw X finally puts his Jigsaw front and center with the full antihero treatment. Taking place between the events of Saw and Saw II, this one is uncharacteristically patient and character-driven, and by the time the stage is set for the the latest round of mayhem, Jigsaw’s victims… See more →