Awesome Entry on Flickr.
Ostensibly, Pleased to Meet You introduces three new members of the collectively run gallery Napoleon to Philadelphia art lovers. But with a gallery space so intimate and works so disparate, the show feels just as much like a meet-and-greet between foreign objects as it does a salutation to the larger world.
Matt Ziemke’s delicate sculptures stretch shyly off the wall. Fabricated from ceramic, vinyl and wood, his brightly lacquered forms strike an unexpected balance between the handmade and the industrial. Conglomerate No. 2 (2012) fans out in all directions, yet manages to stay poised atop two tiny platforms. Pooling black ceramic paired with orange construction material riffs on oil spills and sites of massive global development; tire-track patterns stamped onto clay; and matchstick-thin scaffolding recall the ground and the structures we build and then leave behind.
Through Aug. 31. Napoleon, 319 N. 11th St. napoleonnapoleon.com
Go See It This Weekend: Veteran Freshman, Better Than Ezra, Aloe Blacc, And Grace Period | Make Major Moves
Grace Period
PhilaMOCA hosts a variety night in their ’hood (the Eraserhood, Callowhill, whatever you wannna call it) with music, dance performances and booze. BodyFields Performance Collective is the dance project of independent choreographer and curator of physical theater, Mira Treatman. Her collective is a diverse group of musicians and dancers that aims to reveal the magnificence of life through quirky movements, gentle psyche tugs and ’70s French Riviera aesthetics. Also performing is 2nd Opinion, Joel Chartkoff’s seriously danceable band, and Liz and the Lost Boys, made up of Joel Sephy, Dane Galloway, Alex Nowak and Kirk Kubicek, who play accordion, piano, guitar, bass and kazoo during any given performance. -Abigail Bruley
7:30pm. $10. PhilaMOCA, 531 N. 12th St. philamoca.org
“Theater should be ephemeral,” says Mark Kennedy, director of the 2012 Philly Fringe showOthello, Desdemona, and Iago Walk into a Bar. “Shows happen and they’re gone but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make projects and learn from them. It has to be over for it to mean something.”
The ephemeral nature of performance underlies the ad hoc theater group—called [ad hoc theatre project]—that Mark has assembled to produce his contribution to this year’s Fringe. And what he hopes to learn is something about reconnecting the soul and body, by placing Othello in a go-go bar.
“[Actress] Meredith [Sonnen] named it. I asked, what would the punch line be? And that’s what we’re trying to figure out. The play is happening during happy hour—people can order food, it’s a go-go bar, and that’s included in the language of the play. It brings up the consideration of sex objects, black men in that space, the soul. There are a lot of ways that the space itself resonates,” Mark says.
Othello, Mark argues, “is about what happens when you hate yourself, and you can’t figure out how to love yourself. This interpretation says how he’s like that the whole time. I wanted to explore it in relation to the idea of the body and soul as separate.”
After the jump: Schroedinger’s rapist, the Trestle Inn, and ad hocing [ad hoc].
(via For This, For Theater: A Conversation with Mark Kennedy)
Trestle Inn: 339 N. 11th Street. Featuring burlesque dancers among other old-school entertainment, the recently revamped Trestle Inn is exactly the type of place one would expect to find canned beer, but the range and variety — from Avery Ellie’s Brown to Hell or High Watermelon Wheat — is strictly new school.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1
A lot of times developers will come in and just create boxes and insulate exterior walls, and, you know, that’s just not my vision for what loft apartments want to feel like. I mean, I feel like you have these beautiful exterior brick walls that need to be exposed. …there’s a vintage feeling that I get when I walk through the building.
(Develper Eric Blumenfeld, proving he understands the Divine Lorraine , via Divine Hope)
(Source: http://c.brightcove.com/)
We should welcome Philadelphia’s web of place-ness and the ever-present arguments it spawns as evidence of life. And in those arguments we’ll find stories of places that left behind boring names (the citizens of Flat Rock rejected Bridgewater and Udoravia before adopting the more colorful Manayunk). We’ll find names that simply disappeared, as did Rose of Bath, aka Bathtown, swallowed up by Northern Liberties. And then there were those places simply lost in the mists of time: Goat Hill, Good Intent, Goosetown and Grubtown. But the one thing we know for sure is that each and every one of these places had its following and had its day.
Which is why, when it comes to Philadelphia neighborhood names, we should welcome the idea that after the city’s 20th century decline, less can be more. And our honest embrace of that lesser,as is, Philadelphia is a rare and admirable thing. Which is why we should welcome the idea that the heavily-patinated, “nightmarish post-industrial landscape” along the streets defined by this map to the north of Center City, should be known as “The Eraserhood.”
Yum-Yum rehab underway on Flickr.
Our friends at Prohibition Taproom and Cafe Lift have started their rehab, in preparation for the opening of their new pizza venture, Bufad.