The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program manages information about hundreds of murals that have made Philadelphia famous.
Muralfarm.org is the site where information about the growing body of public art created by the Mural Arts Program has been planted. Pictures and detailed information about murals can be searched by artist, theme, date, location, neighborhood, and other key terms.
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posted by netbros
on Oct 7, 2011 -
12 comments
Blunt Assessment: The Need for Legal Weed in Philadelphia. To many inside the criminal justice and pro-legalization arenas, the racial disparity in Philadelphia's pot arrests is nothing short of an ongoing conspiracy. Offenders caught possessing 30 grams or less get to make a deal: Agree to pay a $200 fine and attend a three-hour treatment class and avoid going to trial and risking jail time.
posted by fixedgear
on Mar 4, 2011 -
61 comments
BRUCE ROSENBAUM and his wife, Melanie, cook their food on what looks like a cast-iron Victorian stove. But the stove, like many items in the Rosenbaums' kitchen, has been gutted and repurposed. There's a modern appliance inside that antique shell, a theme that repeats itself from the fridge to their water heater.
"We created this romantic Victorian feel to it," Bruce Rosenbaum said. "But everything works."
The Massachusetts couple have
steampunked their kitchen.
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posted by fixedgear
on Feb 28, 2011 -
113 comments
The Jungle. Made in 1967 and awarded a Documentary Film Award at the Festival de Popoli, Italy, The Jungle is a short film made in Philly by Harold Haskins and the 12 & Oxford Film Corp. Re-discovered a few years back through Temple University’s Urban Archives.
posted by fixedgear
on Jan 26, 2011 -
2 comments
The Complaints Choir phenomenon, started by the Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, has
spread all over the world since
last we paid it any attention, from
Birmingham to
Helsinki,
Hamburg,
St. Petersburg,
Poikkilaakso,
Bodø,
Penn State,
Canada,
Juneau,
Gabriola Island,
Sointula,
Jerusalem,
Melbourne,
Budapest,
Malmö,
Chicago,
Florence,
Copenhagen,
Vancouver (
2),
Philadelphia,
Sundbyberg,
Milano,
Åland,
Hong Kong,
Tokyo,
Rotterdam,
Basel,
Umeå,
Ljubljana,
Gdansk,
Arizona State University,
Washington, DC,
Horace Mann School,
Durham-Chapel Hill,
Auckland,
Toronto theatre students,
Kortrijk,
Cairo (
2),
St. Pölten,
Maribor,
Port Coquitlam,
Ústí nad Labem,
Columbus &
Kauhajoki (
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8). For more information, including a
9 step guide to forming your own complaints choir, go to the
Complaints Choir website. Finally, here's the
Singapore Complaints Choir, whose performance was banned by the Singapore government.
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 19, 2010 -
40 comments
Grand Theft Rowhome: A look into a seemingly-lucrative business of stealing deeds to Philadelphia houses armed with nothing more than pen, paper, and a forged notary stamp. The depressing take-home message? The city's bureaucracy can't get its act together enough to slow down the practice, and budget cuts are only making that worse...
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posted by supercres
on Oct 11, 2010 -
12 comments
Pay Up! "Got a blog that makes no money? The city (Philadelphia) wants $300, thank you very much." [...] "After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made."
posted by Fizz
on Aug 23, 2010 -
95 comments
Urban knitting, guerilla knitting, textile street art,
yarn bombing. Whatever you choose to call it, this artform takes everyday objects of the city — such as trees, lampposts, street signs, bike racks — and wraps them up in colorful knit cozies. You'll find these wonderful oddities all over the world, from
Manhattan to
Sydney to Edinburgh to
Philadelphia to Oakland to
Chicago to
Bisbane and back to
Manhattan again. People have
written books about it. It has inspired an
Irish cellphone commercial. Metafilter's own
ErikaB made a
tree sweater that was featured on
Metafilter and on the front cover of Seattle's
The Stranger. Magda Sayeg's blog
Knitta Please is a showcase for some of her delightful projects, including a
Smart car,
coffee shop sign, and
crutches. (
Also, previously.)
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posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Jun 25, 2010 -
37 comments
If you listen close enough you'll hear police sirens in the distance, water pipes humming, Chinese sweatshop workers listening to Chinese language radio programs and singing traditional Chinese sweatshop songs. And yes, even a barking dog somewhere in the distance. This is the sound that surrounds the sound of
Man Man, a cast of characters who rotate around one Ryan Kattner (a.k.a. Honus Honus), a grown fellow who was once
a military brat who missed the 1980s pop music of the United States.
Based in Philadelphia, but not part of the scene, the band mixes a lot of influences. Though (too) often likened to Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart, Honus said "
It's beyond flattering... but I just don't possess the same kinds of things those guys do." Their sound has also been likened to circus music,
Viking vaudeville and manic Gypsy jazz, but
the band has always insisted that what it plays is pop music. "Pop music has something catchy about it, whether it's a vocal or a rhythm or a keyboard line, whatever it is," said Pow Pow (real name Christopher Powell). Whatever their sound, they gained enough notoriety to
tour with Modest Mouse (who they called "a gateway drug to better music"), and they're still at it. But enough with the words, time for some music videos!
10lb Moustache and
Rabbit Habits are the two official videos, though Engrish Bwudd has
inspired a
number of
fan-made vids, and even
a belly dancing number. (More words and music inside)
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posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 18, 2010 -
23 comments
25 years after the siege at the MOVE house in Philadelphia ended with the police dropping a bomb on the house from a helicopter, killing 11 and destroying a city block, the Philadelphia Inquirer looks back on the events with contemporary footage and interviews with participants and those affected. The failure to rebuild adequately the houses that were devastated in the siege and fire remains an enduring scandal in Philadelphia.
posted by carter
on May 9, 2010 -
48 comments
The Dirtiest Player. Was it only last season that Marvin Harrison was still catching TD passes for Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts? Now, in the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight - many details of which are reported here for the first time - the man who holds the NFL record for most receptions in a season may yet find himself with a permanent record of a different sort. (SLGQ)
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posted by The Card Cheat
on Jan 16, 2010 -
37 comments
Legend has it that Phidippedes ran 26 miles to Athens from Marathon to announce the success of the Athenian army's surprise suicide attack against the far larger Persian army, starting a grand tradition:
Dying during marathons. [more inside]
posted by minimii
on Dec 26, 2009 -
21 comments
As part of what Mayor Michael Nutter has dubbed the "Plan C" budget, the
Free Library of Philadelphia (the Pennsylvania city's public library system), chartered in 1891, will
close all its branches and cease all services October 2, 2009, unless
measures to raise sales tax and delay some pension payments are approved by the State Legislature in Harrisburg. The closing could be a huge blow for a city whose most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin, founded
The Library Company of Philadelphia, the United States' first successful lending library, there in 1731.
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posted by ocherdraco
on Sep 11, 2009 -
99 comments
Rev. George Whitefield, an 18th century preacher much admired by Benjamin Franklin, was an astonishing orator. According to a contemporary source, he "could
make his audiences weep or tremble merely by varying his pronunciation of the word Mesopotamia. Garrick once said, 'I would give a hundred guineas if I could only say 'O!' like Mr. Whitefield.'"
posted by lolichka
on May 18, 2009 -
32 comments
Dr. John Rudoff is a cardiologist in Oregon, but before he entered medical school, he was the staff photographer at
The Main Point, a coffeehouse in Bryn Mawr, PA associated with the early 1960s folk revival in the Philadelphia area. His photographs of the Philadelphia folk scene include
unidentified local folkies, but also touring folk singers such as
Dave van Ronk and
John Hammond. Eventually, Rudoff got a press pass to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he took photos of
Mary Travers sharing a moment with Mimi and Dick Fariña and
Joan Baez with a pre-psychedelicized Chambers Brothers, but the most amazing discovery of all are the photos of
when Bob Dylan "went electric." And now you can see
Rudoff's whole collection, thanks to the magic of Flickr.
posted by jonp72
on May 7, 2009 -
13 comments
"This is the safest place these kids have," Mr. McMonigle explains. "No matter how crazy it gets here, no matter how bad the school is, it’s still better than what’s waiting for them out there when they leave. The irony is that after all the bitching and the moaning about how they don’t want to be here, at the end of the day you can’t get them to go home!" School of Hard Knocks is a heartbreaking 7-part series of articles about kids with behavioral problems in a Philadelpha high school. [
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7]
[via
mefi projects]
posted by dersins
on Jan 21, 2009 -
33 comments
"On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly agitated, but he soon recovered, walked twice or thrice along the coach house, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed 'Halloa old girl!' (his favorite expression) and died... The children seem rather glad of it. He bit their ankles, but that was play..." So wrote Charles Dickens, describing the death of his pet raven "Grip," in a letter to a friend.
Grip has an interesting legacy. Having served as an eponymous character in Dickens'
Barnaby Rudge [full text] and subsequently inspiring Edgar Allan Poe's
The Raven [full text], Grip has the distinction of being named a
literary landmark. His
taxidermied body is on display in the Rare Book Department at the Philadelphia Free Library.
posted by amyms
on Aug 13, 2008 -
19 comments
Sadfilter: The death of Danieal Kelly. Danieal was a 14-year-old Philadelphia girl, born with cerebral palsy, who was denied care and neglected by her mother until her death of starvation, thirst and bedsores, shut away in her bedroom from her siblings. What had social services done to help her? Nothing --
until she died, and a scramble to falsify documents began.
Nine people have now been indicted on various charges relating to her death and its investigation, including two case workers. The sight of one of her autopsy photos led the then mayor, John Street, to fire the acting commissioner of the DHS.
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posted by Countess Elena
on Aug 2, 2008 -
65 comments
"When we're running, you can't tell. When people look at us, they don't point and go, 'Yeah, he's homeless, she's not, she's educated.'"
Mahlum explained, "You look and say, 'Oh, look at the runners.' That's a positive association, because there's no separation."
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posted by stagewhisper
on Dec 21, 2007 -
8 comments
Reagan at Neshoba. Some time ago, a
blog post was authored at Mahablog which suggested that movement politics can best be understood when their rhetoric is viewed as a series of metaphors, with an allegory made to a spectacular episode of Stark Trek: The Next Generation featuring Paul Winfield titled
"Darmok".
Picard and crew stumble across an alien race that speaks only in metaphor. The alien captain, frustrated by the failure to communicate, transports Picard to the surface of a planet, where they must learn to communicate or die. The alien captain does finally reach Picard, but dies as a result of his injuries battling an invisible predator.
By way of comparison, examine Candidate Ronald Reagan's speech at Neshoba [
audio, 57MB,
via,
additional context here]. Some pundits are claiming that it is
an example of the Southern Strategy codified as dog-whistle politics, whilst
others view it as an honest mistake, and others still find an
inconvenient long sequence of other "honest mistakes".
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posted by rzklkng
on Nov 13, 2007 -
128 comments
