Pennsylvania

At @thetrocadero for the last time. 😢

The Big Mess Cabaret’s endearingly sloppy mix of queer-friendly vaudeville, drag, and burlesque was the first act booked when Joanna Pang took over ownership of the Troc from her father in 1994, making it a fitting finale for the venue 25 years later.

Leah and I discovered, roughly seven years after the fact, that we were at the same Soul Coughing show in Philly in 1998, long before we met. This Mike Doughty show was a fun opportunity to kind of recreate that night as if we had actually spent it together.

Soul Coughing was perhaps the most unique band to find a larger audience during the permissive major-label alt-rock boom of the ’90s, and to my ears,… See more →

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

I love the Dieter Rams exhibit at @philamuseum, but presenting his work in a rarefied art context is disorienting. I wanna touch everything!

I can’t decide if its ideas are muddled or merely complex, but as a pure action movie, Incredibles 2 is a lot of fun. I’m disappointed that the filmmakers couldn’t find a way to avoid the strobing effects that exclude epileptic viewers. For a company as creatively industrious as Pixar, that struck me as a lazy choice.

As for the preceding short film, Bao, bravo to Pixar for stepping away from the Eurocentric boys’ club,… See more →

First time in the @philauu basement in a decade (to see @KINGTUFFY) and it feels as familiar as ever, like no time has passed at all.

Projects

Since 2011, working with A Book Apart was my way of contributing to the design community while my own direction as a designer was uncertain. Over the course of 2016, as my new job at ProPublica restored my enthusiasm for design, I wanted to get back to working on my own projects and sharing what I learned in the process. Making time for that meant something had to give, so after producing the paperback/PDF… See more →

Biopics are an almost universally boring and unnecessary category, but I, Tonya subverts that by a) relitigating a scandal and depicting as a hero someone long understood to be a villain, and b) being brutally entertaining. Its pitch-black comedy is reminiscent of The Wolf of Wall Street, with inferior style but a vastly more appealing and sympathetic protagonist. As Tonya Harding and her mother, Margot Robbie and Allison Janney own the film, and without performances… See more →

Call Me by Your Name strikes me as an important achievement, but one that doesn’t speak to me as much as I had hoped, at least not as much as Carol or Moonlight, the other recent queer crossover hits that are inevitably offered for comparison. The gulf between its adolescent protagonist’s cosmopolitan intellectualism and my own experiences as a teen may be a factor, and it doesn’t help that I am definitely not a fan… See more →

A sweet fairy tale, easily the best of the small handful of Guillermo del Toro films I’ve seen. My one gripe is that it relies so heavily on the (strong) appeal of Sally Hawkins’ and Richard Jenkins’ performances that the film sags when they’re not onscreen. Michael Shannon is a serviceable villain, but his contours aren’t nuanced or idiosyncratic enough to justify the amount of attention del Toro lavishes on him.

Reminder: this is tonight. Be kind to yourself for once and come on out to @johnnybrendas. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Hey Philly, I’m performing at the @usairguitar semifinal at @johnnybrendas on Saturday. Come. You need this. johnnybrendas.com/event/1482208-…

A Metallica concert in 2017 is pretty unnecessary but I went anyway and my main takeaway was that Lars’s drums were purple and sparkly.

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ambulance scene, an EMT says awkwardly to her charge, “I’m just gonna… check you.” She looks enough like Abbi Jacobson – a Philadelphia area native, like Split’s writer/director, M. Night Shyamalan – that it instantly becomes my favorite scene in the movie, a random cameo with Jacobson’s hapless Broad City character stumbling into an EMT job for which she is comically unqualified. But it’s not her. In her absence, the scene… See more →

A love letter to a city I do not love, La La Land nevertheless did an impressive job of disarming me with its vivid palette and dazzling setpieces. It managed to seize on my love of music while circumventing my distaste for musicals.

As I exit the train station and enter Philadelphia, the shuffle serves this up on my headphones. youtu.be/IrFzvCHihdE

Geico is now doing prop plane aerial advertising in Philadelphia, and I am going to find the persons responsible and remove their skin.

I really hope @Brownstein_Grp makes more of these great Philly signage prints. Lots of folks would love to have them. underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2…

Color me impressed that @ChamberMonster managed to keep a secret for 2+ months, and tonight we’re seeing Stephin Merritt!

Last month I described Birdman – unfavorably – as a “series of carefully scripted temper tantrums meant to embody the struggle of making capital ‘A’ Art.” I wouldn’t have guessed that a short time later, another film fitting that description would knock me on my ass.

Whiplash is a trenchant examination of greatness, approaching the idea not by deconstructing a success story, but instead by observing an integral moment in the life of someone who … See more →

A technically adroit series of carefully scripted temper tantrums meant to embody the struggle of making capital “A” Art, Birdman pays lip service to the nuance that accompanies authenticity, but it tends to make its points as loudly as possible. This is probably about as good as overwrought showbiz navel gazing gets, and it’s still pretty off-putting.

I saw dozens of great shows there over the years. My first: H2O, 1996. My last: Mission of Burma, 2008.

The era of @R5Productions shows in the First Unitarian Church basement in Philly is ending. r5productions.com/2014/09/17/our…

Okay, Philly. Head over to @johnnybrendas tonight, where I’m judging the final @usairguitar qualifier of the season. johnnybrendas.com/event/606865-u…