Music & More

The Living Room, 11/04/08 "Alone With My Troubles", Rockwood Music Hall, 2/15/09 [HD video on youtube sometimes streams slower than the player requires, so for smooth play pause it and let the stream get ahead of the player. Start the above song and read on.] This story begins on election night 2008 at the Living Room. The atmosphere was already electric with anticipation of the impending election of Barak Obama. I'd seen Chrissi several times before, first encountering her at Rockwood back in July of 2008. I knew she was good, but nothing prepared me for what was going to happen next. She began her set with "Alone With My Troubles" a song which she had just written earlier that day, literally just a few hours before the show. The power of this heart-wrenching blues, together with the slow, beautiful and incredibly compelling performance by Chrissi and her band, made time stand still and made the heart stop, and the intensity did not let up for the duration of h...

Cézanne - The Smoker I've never formally studied art history or art criticism, but as a photographer and as someone who enjoys art a great deal, I know what I like, and the Cézanne and Beyond exhibit, currently showing here in Philadelphia has an amazing number of awesome paintings on display. Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) has been a cash cow for the Philadelphia Museum over the years and it's easy to be cynical about why they might mount another exhibit with Cézanne as the marquee, but there is a good reason why Cézanne is such a draw and it has to do with the excellence of his work. This show's concept is to include fifty works by Cézanne alongside 100 works by eighteen other artists whose work he influenced. Most of the work represents his posthumous influence rather than the effect that he had on his contemporaries. Which is why you won't find works by Camille Pisarro (himself a stellar draw for the Philadelphia museum some years ago) in Cézanne and Beyond. There was an...

My new favorite band is the best band I found at SXSW that I didn't actually see at SXSW. Philadelphia's Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer has been on tour supporting The Pink Spiders since SXSW ended, the tour concluded tonight at The Khyber in Philadelphia with an early start all ages show. At SXSW in attempt to survey all possibilities, I carefully scanned the band list in alphabetical order. With close to 1,900 bands on the list this took weeks, and by the time I got to the end of the list and heard Zolof's "Death or Radio" they had already played their SXSW showcase. So stretching a little bit of SXSW back to Philadelphia was imperative. Listen to Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer - "Death or Radio" Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer consists primarily of Vince Ratti and Rachel Minton and live they add a drummer and I think there was a bass player tonight too who I could not see within the tight confines of The Khyber's upstairs venue, and ...