Consider the assaultive title just the tip of the big screwed-up iceberg that is Towelhead, Alan Ball's disturbing portrait of a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl's coming-of-age in a Texas suburb during the Gulf War.
Just in case someone forgot that he's a bad motherfucka, Samuel L. Jackson's New Years' resolution in 1998 was to "continue to kick ass." In the decade since, he's appeared in the quintessential badass role in basically every movie he could fit into: a fast-action FBI agent in Snakes on a Plane, a no-bullshit man of God in Black Snake Moan.
Neil Young
On The Beach
1974
After the critical and commercial successes of After The Gold Rush and Harvest, Young released a tense series of albums now referred to as the "Ditch Trilogy." On The Beach was the first of these albums and Rolling Stone branded it "despairing." The album was rawer than anything Young had released in the '70s.
Sugar & Spice
2001
I have a confession. I often find myself sucked into ABC Family's weekend movie marathons while channel surfing, and this weekend was no different.
Ghost Town follows Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais), the quintessential snide, cynical jerk who, after a glitch during a routine colonoscopy, dies for seven minutes.
Weepy, timeless love stories are what Nicholas Sparks does best, and the screen adaptation of his novel Nights in Rodanthe lives up to the writer's literary stylings.
The other day, I was sitting in my freshman seminar on the origins of music. I listened in awe as my professor explained the incredible complexity of the human brain's ability to process sound, the sensitivity of the tiny hairs within our ears and the countless combinations of neuron connections that take place and cause us to perceive waves of compressed air as sound.
Amidst the sometimes sweeping ambitions of the indie-dance scene, Fujiya & Miyagi seem content sticking with what they do best: creating extremely cool, understated electro-pop unabashedly influenced by a wide range of styles, from the Krautrock of Neu!
First Unitarian Church
2125 Chestnut St., All ages
In between songs this summer, a sweaty and shirtless Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) kept asking the crowd if they were okay.
Don’t tell anyone, but National Treasure is one of my favorite movies. I conveniently “forget” to mention it when asked to list my all-time favorites, and no evidence of my love for the historical-fiction-film-slash-action-movie-slash-crime-caper can be found amongst my possessions.
Day 1
Feel like I am in an episode of Entourage. It was hard to appreciate the enormity of this festival last night, when I was wandering through the central Palais, my head fuzzy with jetlag.
Johnny
Brenda's
1201 Frankford Avenue, 21+
Brought to you by the owners of Standard Tap, Johnny Brenda's is a classic Philadelphia gastropub and music venue located in Fishtown.
Whether a quest for complete dominance of your parents' attention or an attempt to prove which child is the better of the offspring, sibling rivalry isn't new.
Day 1
Feel like I am in an episode of Entourage. It was hard to appreciate the enormity of this festival last night, when I was wandering through the central Palais, my head fuzzy with jetlag.
Tonight:
GZA
Trocadero, All ages
9:00 p.m.
Legendary Wu-Tang wordsmith GZA continues the nostalgia-inspired tour that finds him performing his 1995 seminal classic Liquid Swords in full.