This morning, I found five (five!) St. Martin’s Press trade paperbacks in my mail slot. It’s my first instinct to toss these into our giveaway pile (because come on), but since PhilaSNOWmageddon 2.0 is bounding eastward at a rapid clip, I figure I should hunker down and actually read one of these books for once whilst buried by snow. BUT WHICH ONE?! It’s too hard to choose; I need your help.
Check out the descriptions below, and hit the comments to tell me which book I should read. I’ll follow orders, and report back on my findings post-storm.
WHAT AND WHO?Bound by Sin: A Cin Craven Novel, by Jenna Maclaine WHY? “She is a vampire, a witch, a warrior — and her story is one of legend.” HOW? “As the Civil War rages in America, Cin Craven is locked in an epic battle of her own — fighting the renegade vampires whose unquenchable appetites she knows all too well. At her side are the immortal warriors of the Righteous — among them her husband, her lover, her soulmate Michael. … Cin is drawn to the irresistible lure of dark magic to stop their enemies, while Michael staunchly opposes it — putting their love and loyalty to the ultimate test.” Also “a breathtaking saga of blood, magic, and desire that is bound to live forever.”
WHAT AND WHO? Knock Me for a Loop, by Heidi Betts
WHY? It’s “a funny, sexy yarn” (and yes, that is a pun)
HOW? “When it comes to relationships, talk show host Grace Fisher won’t stand for cheating — especially not from her fiancé, star hockey goalie Zack Hoolihan. Her weekly knitting group backs her up when she calls it off, but that doesn’t entirely ease the sting of betrayal. She won’t listen to Zack’s indignant explanations of innocence — she just wants to tie up loose ends and move on. Until he winds up injured, that is, and she finds herself playing nursemaid… Now he’s thrown for a loop. This time, he’ll do everything it takes to knit their relationship back together.” Click For More »
Twilight: Forks, OR. True Blood: Bon Temps, LA. The Vampire Diaries: Mystic Falls, VA. The current crop of pop culture vampires like to stick to small towns.
Not so for Tony Trov,Johnny Zito and Christine Larsen’s Philadelphia-set “LaMorte Sisters,” about Maddie, a new girl at LaMorte Home for Lost Girls run by sect of hardass nuns who take in little ladies affected by vampirism.
Drawn by Christine Larsen (who Molly Eichel liked so much, she Kaleidoscoped her), “LaMorte Sisters” debuted with an eight page run on October 16 of last year on Zuda Comics, DC Comics’ web division. Zuda named it an “instant classic,” and gave Trov, Zito and Larsen a contract with DC to do 52 more pages, at a rate of one new page per week. They’re currently at 24, with new pages debuting every Wednesday.
To the creators, it’s basic coming-of-age material, despite the supernatural aspects of the story,: “It’s really about growing up too fast in South Philly,” Zito says. Click For More »
Every parent lies to their child to keep them safe and sound. The legend that proliferated through Staten Island to keep the kiddies away from undesirable places (including an abandoned insane asylum and a TB ward) was Cropsey, an evil monster/human who stole children with varying degrees of savagery. Despite not knowing each other as children, filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio (who will be in attendance at this weekend’s screenings at the PUFF Movie House) both heard of Cropsey and assumed its urban legend status until Jennifer Schweiger, a pre-teen girl with Downs syndrome went missing…
When Schweiger’s body was eventually found, the circumstances were all to close to several other child disappearances on Staten Island. Evidence pointied to transient Andre Rand, a transient, former mental hospital employee with a face out of something from an Ed Wood movie. Cropsey focuses on Rand’s case and how it intertwines with Staten Island’s history and reputation as a dump, for both trash and unwanted people such as the mental patients. But it lacks focus. The Cropsey framing device wears thin, while the idea that Rand might be innocent or worked with others lacks any concrete, Thin Blue Line-like evidence. But I dig true crime stories and Rand’s case is especially fucked. It was like a carwreck on the side of the highway. I knew I shouldn’t look, I didn’t really want to look but I still couldn’t look away.
Cropsey. Fri.-Sat., Feb. 5-6, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 p.m. and midnight; Sun., Feb. 7, 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 p.m., $5, PUFF Movie House, Media Bureau, 725 N. Fourth St., 215-592-124, philadelphiaindependentfilmfestival.com.
Collectors of pretty things, take note: Every Friday, we’re rounding up a what’s-what of what we [heart], culled from the scores of design blogs, artist sites and Etsy treasuries we can’t help but stalk on the regular.
Valentine’s Day is just around the snowpocalyptic bend, so we thought it timely to point out a few gifts appropriate for sweethearts, honeys and steady crushes.
First up: Across the pond, self-described “U.K. design junkies” Rockett St. George host a huge line of V-Day-inspired goods, including these customizable Scrabble tile throw pillows. The covers and insides are made from 100 percent recyclable material, and they come in cream and black. If you’re made of money, go ahead and load up on you and your one-and-only’s monograms; then see what words you can spell. Hours of fun. (By the way, if anyone’s got a tip on a Stateside company that sells something similar, let us know.) $71 each (approximately), rockettstgeorge.co.uk. Spied first at Poppytalk.
Also: Because we’re bookish, we particularly adore Brookish’s collection of Pride & Prejudice (and not zombies) gifts. She’s got stylish black-and-white bangles and ornaments with typewritten Jane Austen quotes; a tea towel boasting that “There’s nothing like staying at home for real comfort”; and, most romantically, a Mr. Darcy proposal mug, on which the start of Darcy’s memorable, sorta-pathetic speech to Elizabeth Bennett is is handwritten: “In vain I have struggled. It will not do.” This applies to other struggles, too. Like cutting down on the coffee. $15, etsy.com/shop/Brookish.
And then: The economy still sucks, so grand gestures ought to be put on hold this year. Your lovely will understand. Instead, send off the smallest, and therefore most adorable, valentine ever: Leafcutter Designs‘ clever World’s Smallest Letters. Send them your message, and the address to which it should be sent, and they’ll transcribe your love note onto teeny 1.5-by-1-inch stationery. A magnifying glass is included with every order, so no squinting; they’ve also got a World’s Smallest Package, which comes with a hand-written note, tons of little buttons, and fits into the palm of your hand. Squee. $8-$10 plus shipping, leafcutterdesigns.com. Spied first at Design*Sponge.
Oh, P.S.: If you’re in the mood to spruce up your Twitter homepage, check out Ollibird’s free downloads. She’s got loads of heart-tastic backgrounds, plus less sicky-sweet ones that’d be pleasant all year round. Free, blog.ollibird.com. Spied first at How About Orange.
If you were planning on checking out Exhumed Films’ Ozploitation double feature this Saturday at iHouse, don’t bother. The Exhumed boys have postponed the show because of the expected snowstorm. UPDATE: The rescheduled screening is Friday, March 5.
For all of you who are all “WTF? Ozploitation? Wha?” lemme enlighten you: Exhumed was set to screen to films by Aussie director Richard Franklin, featuringRoad Games(1981, Australia, 101 min.), about a trucker (Stacy Keach) and a hot hitchhiker (Jamie Lee Curtis) versus a psychopath on the loose (pictured above) and Patrick (1978, Australia, 112 min.), about a comatose patient who can kill through telekinesis. We’ll update you on the re-scheduled date when we hear back from them but in the mean time enjoy some trailers:
Nothing but dog-whistle high notes and a flotilla of dancers to keep her company.
“Welcome to my living room,” Mariah Carey said to the audience at the Tower Theater on Monday night. Although she happened to be in the vicinity of a few pieces of furniture at the time, there was little intimate about the show. Dwarfed by a massive, curtained riser that ran the length of the stage, atop which her four-piece band — half rhythm section, half keyboard — perched in the background, Carey faced the audience with nothing but dog-whistle high notes and a flotilla of dancers to keep her company. From the look of it, this was a show meant for stadiums, or at least casino ballrooms, crammed into a much smaller venue. (At least, the stage was crammed: there were more than a few unsold seats in the house.)
Carey’s sole concession to the scaled-down venue was the casual attitude with which she addressed the audience in between songs. Peppering her speech with “like”s and “whatever”s, she solicited advice on one of her many dressed, called for adjustments to the center stage fan meant to kept her hair aloft (“like in the ‘Obsessed’ video”) and complained good-naturedly about the chatter in her earpiece about which song to play next. It was as if she were only a small piece in a larger machine, rather than its creator and chief operator. The lush and sometimes syrupy combination of live instruments and backing tracks threatened at times to swallow her whole.
Make no mistake: Carey was in control of all times. If the instrumentation build a formidable wall of sound, it was only because she has the voice to cut through it. She was loose between songs but tight during them: you had the feeling they would sound the same every night on tour, each note and each slur in its assigned place. Perhaps her living room is like that as well. Just keep your feet off the couch.
From Paris with Love didn’t screen in time for publication but I went anyway.
James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, so pretty, so bad at acting) is the by-the-book aide to the American ambassador to France, but yearns for tasks more dangerous than beating his clueless boss at chess. So he jumps at the opportunity to drive for “motherfucker”-spewing special agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta), an amalgamation of Travolta characters of yore: Face/Off’s Castor Troy, Broken Arrow’s Vic Deakins and Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega (with a little Jules Winnfield thrown in for good measure — it’s hard not to assume this part was originally meant for Samuel L. Jackson). Reece estimates that the cueball-headed Wax, who names his gun Mrs. Jones (because they’ve got a thing going on), averages one baddie kill per hour, but it seems higher than that, especially since the guy looks so cool doing it. As a former cinematographer, director Pierre Morel is a master of staging hand-to-hand combat. And unlike Morel’s last film, about an older dude disposing of villains as if they were lozenge wrappers (Taken), From Paris with Love has a devious sense of humor about itself, its genre and its players. (How could it not, with that scum ’stache Rhys Meyers sports throughout?) Morel’s skill behind the camera, alongside cinematographer Michel Abramowicz (who also shot Taken), is a boon here, considering the first half of the movie is simply designed for Travolta to remind people he’s more fun when he plays the badass. But then that pesky “plot” gets in the way and everything turns to shit. Forehead-slappingly bad moments are prominent and the story is altogether incomprehensible, but it’s a welcome entry into the mindless, fun-to-watch action canon (the second this week from Gallic film titan Luc Besson, the first being District 13: Ultimatum). Even if they do make a Royale with Cheese joke. Twice.
If you know anything about Channing Tatum, it’s probably 100 percent muscle and is a recognizable face these days in any movie calling for musclehead with a heart of gold — bonus points for break dancing (see: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, G.I. Joe). This time around, it’s Dear John (read Molly Eichel’s review), in which, Tatum plays John — a soldier who unexpectedly falls in love with Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) while he is on leave and she is home on spring break.
When Tatum enters the Four Seasons hotel room, he’s wrapping up an iPod in his hands. “What’s up, everyone?” he says. He then greets every reporter in the room, shaking their hand and saying, “Hey. I’m Chan.” His hair is slicked back like a high school prep and he sports a goatee.
Playing a soldier is familiar territory for Tatum, who has already taken on the role in Stop-Loss,G.I. Joe and the upcoming Eagle of the Ninth, in which he plays a Roman Centurion. “I joke that I think I had a shaved head and thick neck from playing football,” he says. “But, I’d like to think that I respect what they do so much. I hope they see how much I value what they do.”
He rubs the conference table with his thumbs and explains that he doesn’t know half of what it’s like to be a soldier and he would never say that he does. He just tries to “wear the suit right and sling the gun right.”
Dear John takes place in the Spring of 2001 and considering John’s line of work, the dateline foreshadows 9/11. John, at that moment, is stationed in an undisclosed location, doing what peacetime Green Berets do, while Savannah is at college. So, where was Channing? “I was actually in New York,” he says. “I was taking the transit in from New Brunswick where I was staying on somebody’s couch. I was taking the train in and you come around this bend coming into New York and you could see the skyline — you could see all the way to the Trade Center. And one of them was smoking and some peoples’ phones were going off and no one was calling me. I don’t know why. No one cares,” he says, laughing. “But I really didn’t think anything of it and I kept walking and at some point, I think I was around Union Square, maybe a little farther down and everyone now came out of the buildings — literally everyone was coming out into the street.
“Cars were stopping and people were getting out and looking up, and just like in the movies, you make your way to a cafe that has a TV on and you just try to watch it to see what’s going on. Nobody’s cell phones were working — there were lines down the block at every pay phone. It was just the most surreal experience. People weren’t panicked, and I didn’t really see anyone crying and everyone really just didn’t know what to do, you know? Everyone was just sort of looking around at each other and it was definitely an out of body experience, for sure.”
War and national tragedy are heady material for a personal melodrama like Dear John. Could the choice possibly have been wife/Step Up co-star Jenna Dewan? She didn’t have sway, Tatum says, before launching into a syrupy love-monologue to Dewan. At the end, he leans into the tape recorders and says, “Baby, if you are listening, you had a hand in it and you’re the whole reason!”
Dear John opens in area theaters this Friday. Check citypaper.net/showtimes for info and tickets.
VIP Room, 2010, by Virgil Marti, screen print on paper-backed Mylar, wood, faux fur,
trim and mirror ball, installation view, Moore College of Art & Design
Bringing you more Philagrafika 2010 coverage twice a week, at least.
On view at Moore College of Art & Design through April 11 (2000 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-965-4027, thegalleriesatmoore.org), Virgil Marti’s contribution to Philagrafika 2010’s core exhibit, “The Graphic Unconscious,” is all about perception. From a distance, the floor-to-ceiling display looks like flat floral wallpaper; but upon closer inspection, deeper, creepier meaning reveals itself.
The interview below, conducted in October by Millersville University fine arts student Lauren Nyeunder the tutelage of Millersville art history prof/Philagrafika steering committee memberChristine Filippone, explores Marti’s interest in the three-dimensionality of printmaking.
Courtesy Virgil Marti/Elizabeth Dee Gallery
Study for Untitled Wallpaper, 2010,
digital rendering for screenprint on
silver Mylar wallpaper
Lauren Nye: How do you see your work fitting into the Philagrafika theme “The Graphic Unconscious”?
Virgil Marti: I take the theme to mean that prints are so ubiquitous, we encounter them every day without really thinking about it. On that level, it is an interest of mine, because I want my work to look like something I didn’t make, something you could just come across every day. One of the things that really attracts me to printmaking is the idea of being able to reproduce something so if it gets lost or destroyed you can remake it. With a piece like my Beer Can Library wallpaper, I was consciously thinking that I have this big collection of beer cans that some day I will have to store. If I made an image of them it would be a way to condense the collection and make it smaller. Then I could give prints away to people, but I would still have it for myself. It’s a way to be able to let go of things but still be able to hold on to them at the same time, which I like.
LN: Do you think that print “lies at the heart of contemporary art”?
VM: I think it’s very true in many cases. Most collectors, when they begin collecting art, collect prints. I think that both printmaking and photography are things that contemporary artists utilize without even thinking of themselves as “printmakers” or “photographers” — it’s just a process they use.
LN: I think that a lot of people have come to printmaking in that way, by using a mixed-media approach. Do you think of yourself as a printmaker?
VM: I didn’t set out to be a printmaker, and I’m kind of uncomfortable being called a printmaker. I don’t think I’m really a printmaker in the way that somebody who has gone through a printmaking program, or apprenticed at Tamarind, is. I’m not that kind of printmaker. I think more like a painter, but I wouldn’t say I’m a painter because I’m not using paint. I guess I’m a sculptor because I make objects and three-dimensional things, but I’m also not comfortable with that because I was trained as a painter. I am more comfortable using whatever material and tool makes sense for the piece. Though I have done a lot of printing for other artists, and in that way I do think of myself as a screen-printer. In my work in general, I wouldn’t say I’m a printmaker. Click For More »
Gene Schmidt, a New York-based artist, is best known for measuring the width and length of his home city with 30,000 yard sticks. Pretty crazy. Well, dude wants to do something similar in Philly — his plan is to go from North Philly to the University of Pennsylvania, laying out square panels that each have one letter on them, which together spell out St. Paul’s texts on love. (Because, as Schmidt says, “Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love.”)
Problem is, he needs to raise about $13,000 in 38 days to do it (for supplies, a van, stuff and people to document it, and so on). You can donate to the fun cause, titled “Lovetown PA,” here, where you can also check out a vid of his plan.
Staff Blog
WHAT AND WHO? Bound by Sin: A Cin Craven Novel, by Jenna Maclaine
WHAT AND WHO? Knock Me for a Loop, by Heidi Betts
