Arts and Culture : In The News

This month, Philadelphia GayFest! presents four GLBT-themed plays and a reading at the Shubin Theater, according to Passport Magazine.

August gets very gay in Philadelphia with the debut of GayFest!, a new GLBT theater festival presented by Quince Productions. With four plays running in repertory and a staged reading of a new gay play, the event promises to make the tiny Shubin Theatre a hotbed of gayness.

Source: Passport Magazine
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Teen networking site myYearbook is expected to stay in New Hope after being sold for $100 million to Latino social network Quepasa, according to Forbes.

An unknown person once said that high school is the mouse race to prepare you for the rat race. For the next generation of million dollar milennials, that race is off to an early start.

It was a simple and irresistibly practical idea from siblings Catherine and David Cook. In 2005, the 15- and 16-year-old duo decided to trade the paper version of the regular high school yearbook for the digital one. myYearbook was born, a social networking website that the brother and sister team worked with throughout high school. The founder of the site would be Geoff Cook, the other sibling to Catherine and David, who would work to hire over 100 employees with the company. myYearbook exploded in popularity and in just six years it could proudly boast $17 million raised in financing, over 20 million members, 1.2 billion monthly page views, and $20 million in revenue as reported by both MSNBC and Business Insider.

Source: Forbes

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The Los Angeles Times digs into the implications of last week's announcement by Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., publisher of The Inquirer and Daily News, which will offer deeply discounted Android tablets for reading news.

Philadelphia's two largest newspapers -- the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News -- are planning on launching a low-priced Android tablet for subscribers later this year.

Greg Osberg, chief executive of the Philadelphia Media Group, which is the company that oversees both papers and their joint website Philly.com, said in announcing the plan that the move to bundle tablets with content from a newspaper company will be the first of its kind.

Source: Los Angeles Times
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Philadelphia Science Leadership Academy principal Chris Lehmann is among those educators calling for a redefinition of how technology is used in education, according to TMCNet.

As Chris Lehmann closed the recent International Society for Technology in Education's annual conference, he implored the audience at his keynote address here to redraw the educational technology battle lines.

"No one is arguing we shouldn't use technology in education anymore," said Mr. Lehmann, the founding principal of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy, a public high school devoted to inquiry-based, project-driven learning. "The question is how." The call for redefining debate echoed throughout the formal sessions at the conference last month and at informal events at nearby hotels, restaurants, and bars, and even in casual conversations among the more than 20,000 estimated attendees. And, perhaps more important, it was expressed in data released by Project Tomorrow, the Software and Information Industry Association, and technology company CDW-G.

Source: TMCNet
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The Bowery Presents rock club group will open Union Transfer in Philadelphia in the former Spaghetti Warehouse building on Spring Garden Street, with help from local impresarios Sean Agnew and Avram Hornik, according to The New York Times.

The Bowery Presents empire of rock clubs and theaters has already expanded from the Lower East Side to New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maine, and now it is spreading to Pennsylvania.

Working with two local partners, the company is opening Union Transfer, a new performance space near Center City in Philadelphia with room for 600 people. The first show will be Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on Sept. 21, and other coming shows include Shellac on Sept. 29, Wild Flag on Oct. 19 and Boris on Oct. 28, according to an announcement on Tuesday by Bowery Presents. About 200 shows a year are planned for the space, which was once a train depot and more recently a Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant.

Source: The New York Times

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Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement has fast become a model for uplifting urban teens and will compete in a national competition this month, according to CNN.

Alana Gooden never thought she would live to see her 18th birthday.

Her brother died in a car accident when she was 12 years old and the emotional impact lingered in the family for years.

By the time Gooden had reached her junior year in high school, her world came crashing down. After a falling out with her mother, she moved in with a friend and her family in poverty-stricken North Philly.

After relentless urging by her creative writing teacher, Cait Minor, she joined the Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement (PYPM) near the end of her junior year in 2010.

Source: CNN
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The Philadelphia Horticultural Society's Pop-Up Garden at 20th and Market Streets is not so secret anymore, according to Off Manhattan.

Pop-ups appear in cities everywhere, but mostly selling European sneakers and street artwork. In Philadelphia, things are a bit more down to earth, literally. The Philadelphia Horticultural Society (PHS) recently teamed up with a variety of local businesses, star chefs, academics, artists and urban farmers to create the PHS Pops Up, a temporary garden carved out of a once-gritty vacant lot at the corner of Market and 20th streets.

The nearly 32,000 square-foot temporary oasis�unveiled on June 13th -- is home to a seasonal mix of herbs, vegetables, flowers, and grains, all planted in a pattern inspired by Piet Mondrian's geometric grid compositions. Arching over the entrance to the space is "�colibrium," an exhibit of sustainable greenery erected by Temple University Ambler for this year's Philadelphia International Flower Show. Visitors can check out the verdant spot every Wednesday and Thursday from noon to 2p.m., when the grounds will host tours, fitness classes (botanical bootcamp?), and workshops on topics like container gardening and edible landscapes.

Source: Off Manhattan
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Three time Grammy winning Philadelphia native Jill Scott's new album The Light of The Sun carries a powerful feminine message, according to the New York Times.

"Womanifesto," the title of a song-poem on Jill Scott's fourth studio album, "The Light of the Sun," could apply to her entire catalog. Ms. Scott's songs are proudly and forthrightly feminine, and they set out to persuade and motivate. "Grown woman, making decisions and choices," she calls herself, "Utilizing everything inside of me -- my soul, my heart, my mind, my voices."

The intimate and the instructive are never far apart for Ms. Scott; neither are lyrics and prose, melody and recitation. Although she started her career as a spoken-word performer, she's a flexible, blithely swinging singer. With her 2000 debut album, "Who is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1," she settled into neo-soul that harked back to the early-1970s sound of glimmering electric piano chords and trickling electric-guitar lines, steeped in Marvin Gaye and Al Green.

Source: The New York Times

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The Chicago Tribune marvels at Philly's outdoor art scene through a pair of tours showcasing the groundbreaking work of the Mural Arts program..

On my latest trip there, Philadelphia again stole my heart. But this time, instead of falling for Philly's red-bricked history, I fell for its outside art. Nicknamed the City of Murals, Philadelphia has more than 3,000 outdoor murals. The nonprofit City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (MAP) collection includes 1,700 painted walls.

Although founded to help eradicate graffiti in 1984, under Executive Director Jane Golden, MAP now connects artists with communities by creating art in public spaces. When travelers pay for a guided tour from MAP, it helps support Mural Arts' education and youth development, including the Restorative Justice Program, which teaches inmates, ex-offenders and juvenile delinquents how to paint murals.

Source: The Chicago Tribune
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Mummies of the World exhibit opens at The Franklin Institute, making its only East Coast stop in the U.S. on its worldwide tour, according to the Daily Mail.

The wraps are coming off a blockbuster exhibit this weekend at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

A haunting new exhibit entitled 'Mummies of the World' is set to open this Saturday. It will be the largest travelling exhibition ever assembled of mummies.

The exhibit will feature 45 mummies of humans and animals, ranging from 250 years old to nearly 6,500 years old.

Source: Daily Mail (UK)
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The New York Times realizes a rich artistic landscape in Philadelphia that came alive at the Friday opening of the Opera Company of Philadelphia's "Phaedra" American premiere.

And in the Perelman Theater, an intimate space at the Kimmel Center, just steps away from the Philadelphia Orchestra's dimly regarded home at Verizon Hall, the Opera Company of Philadelphia has scored a substantial artistic coup with the American premiere of "Phaedra," a compelling 2007 opera by Hans Werner Henze. Part of the company's growing contemporary chamber-opera initiative, a new production directed by Robert B. Driver, opened on Friday night.

That this opera, an 80-minute setting of a German libretto by Christian Lehnert, exists at all is something of a miracle. Mr. Henze had announced that his previous opera, "L'Upupa," or "The Hoopoe, and the Triumph of Filial Love" (2003), would be his last. Then, having completed most of the first act of "Phaedra" in 2005, Mr. Henze, already ailing, fell into a two-month coma, from which his recovery was uncertain.

Original source: The New York Times
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University of Pennsylvania urbanism professor Witold Rybczynski writes about New York City's elevated park, the High Line II, and talks about Philly's proposed Reading Viaduct park in a New York Times op-ed.

THE second section of the High Line, the park built atop an abandoned elevated rail trestle on the west side of Manhattan, is scheduled to open next month. Like a movie sequel, High Line II will have some things that are the same -- more of those neat high-tech concrete planks underfoot and "peel-up" benches -- as well as some things that are different: a "woodland flyover" of dense vegetation; a lawn; and a dramatic glass cutout exposing traffic on the street below. Food carts and something called a wine porch are promised, as well as a Renzo Piano-designed restaurant.

The second phase will undoubtedly receive as much news media hoopla and public enthusiasm as the first, which opened in 2009. But its designers want it to be even more, a model for a new sort of town planning, dubbed "landscape urbanism." Indeed, High Line-type projects are being discussed for Chicago (the Bloomingdale Trail), Philadelphia (the Reading Viaduct), Jersey City (the Sixth Street Embankment) and St. Louis (the Iron Horse Trestle).

Source: The New York Times
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Philly native Sean Kirkpatrick wins a movie contest for his low budget debut Cost of a Soul and gets a 50-theater distribution deal, according to the Huffington Post.

Sean Kirkpatrick's debut film Cost of a Soul is a heavy, dark drama about how crime and drugs make life difficult for two veterans (Chris Kerson, Will Blagrove) returning to north Philadelphia from Iraq. For the 28-year-old rookie director, however, fortune appears to smiling.

The micro-budgeted film opens May 20 on 50 AMC Theatre screens around the United States because Cost of a Soul won Rogue/Relativity Media's Big Break Movie Contest.

Source: The Huffington Post
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The Washington Post trumpets the Philadelphia Orchestra's proving its worth during a Kennedy Center performance on Friday.

Obviously no one expected the orchestra, which filed for bankruptcy protection in April, to take the stage in patched evening wear, with broken bows and dented brass, or to pass the hat at intermission. Members of the staff were, though, wearing buttons saying "Listen with your heart," the slogan of the ongoing fundraising campaign hoping to mitigate a structural deficit of $14.5 million.

Expectations went, if anything, the other way -- on the high side. The Philadelphia Orchestra is a regular guest in Washington, thanks to the Washington Performing Arts Society, whose president, Neale Perl, mentioned in his standard pre-concert remarks that this was the orchestra's 40th WPAS appearance. Those appearances are usually among the season's best orchestra concerts that the Washington audience gets to hear on its home turf.

No fear. Friday's concert was one of the best I've heard from the orchestra in years.

Source: The Washington Post
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Oliver Strand names six Philly coffee spots he loves as much as our sports, art and culture, according to the New York Times.

Philadelphia has plenty going for it: the best four-man rotation in baseball, art worth fighting over, a ruin so elegant and haunting it feels like Berlin. It also has superb coffee. Recently, I went on a coffee crawl that took me to a handful of shops where the baristas aren't just tremendously skilled, they're disarmingly sweet-natured. I found an energetic scene thriving outside the gravitational pull of the hometown giant La Colombe Torrefaction.

I was in Philadelphia to check out the local Thursday Night Throwdown --TNT to insiders -- a monthly cappuccino-off where 32 baristas compete for glory (the winner gets his or her initials embroidered on a strip of denim) and a decent-sized kitty (from the entrance fees). The evening was three hours of steaming milk in front of a crowd plied with pizza and beer. A news crew taped the throw-down, maybe because one of the judges was Winston Justice, offensive tackle for the Eagles and co-owner of Elixr Coffee, the host of the contest. Later, a good number of the competitors and spectators adjourned to a dive bar with a drag show -- the $7 cover included a can of beer and a shot of Jim Beam. Fun town.

Source: The New York Times
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