Last weekend, the nonprofit Americans for the Arts held its 2008 convention in Philly. Cities vie to have AFTA bring hordes of distinguished guests to their cities, and for the first time in 25 years, Philly won. (Check out our coverage.) The convention featured talks on the state of public arts programs, boozing at the [...]
The broad mission of Philly’s incoming sustainability director
Last week, Mark Alan Hughes, who in May was appointed director of sustainability for Philadelphia, spoke to a packed auditorium at the Sustainable Philadelphia forum at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Beginning in July, Hughes will try to make good on Michael Nutter’s promises to improve recycling rates, [...]
From City Paper:
In 2005, National Geographic Traveler upped Philadelphia’s street cred by declaring it the Next Great City. This weekend, D.C.-based nonprofit Americans for the Arts (AFTA) will descend upon our town to further prove its mettle as more than 1,400 arts and civic leaders gather from around the country for AFTA’s annual convention. Titled [...]
The corner of 15th and Cecil B. Moore Streets is a node on the fault line that divides Temple University and blighted North Philadelphia. On the corner is a 7-11 with a triangular overhang, a popular shelter for beggars who stand outside the door and solicit shoppers for change. Most stand humbly upright before their [...]
Perhaps it’s one of the ultimate exercises of postmodernism: what you call a disability, I call a culture. To the deaf, the malfunctioning cochleae are the source of their language and unbreakable bond between one another. And as Josh Aronson’s documentary “Sound and Fury” shows, the culture strives for its own posterity as does any [...]
Eating is Sisyphean tedium, perfunctory and passionless. Boiling pasta, heating up sauce, straining the pasta, putting it on a plate, pouring the sauce over the pasta, carrying it over to the sofa and repeatedly sticking a fork wrapped in food in my mouth, only to have to endlessly repeat the process until death – I’d [...]