First Person Arts

Davy Rothbart, the…founder of Found Magazine, will perform at the First Person Festival on Friday November 14th from 7-8pm.  You can get tickets here.

If you’re a lover of Found items, we’ll have a box for you to share your stuff at the festival.  In the meantime, let us know what you’re finding.

Tracy chronicles her finds in a flickr set: shoes, hair, notes and a pretty nifty looking clock.

Here’s a collection of objects found in Malcolm X Park in West Philadelphia.

Katie’s a devotee of the blown out umbrella.

And here’s a shoe Vicki found on her way into work one day:

Affixed to the bottom was a note that read, in part, “Congratulations!  You picked up a piece of trash.  Clearly you are a person who cares about their world. [ed. note:  and pronoun-antecedent agreement!] You are 1/2 way there.  You have succeeded in cleaning.  Now succeed in beautifying.  Don’t just throw this shoe away.  Resurrect it….[something something something]…Your Brother in Resurrection.  T.O.R.R.”

Kind of snooty, right?

Whatever your motive for collecting Found items, it’s a habit common to many Philadelphians.  As part of Davy Rothbart’s appearance at the First Person Festival, we’ll have our very own Found Box to collect your stuff.  We’ll add them to our display and then submit them to Found Magazine for consideration.

Davy Rothbart and Found
Friday November 14th
Time:7-8pm
Cost: $10 (Buy Tix!)

Right after Kinky Gazpacho (Free!) and right before Swallow Your Pride ($10)

We told you about this Six-Word Memoir Contest a few weeks back.

Our friends over at SmithMag (and our mutual friends over at PhillyMag) picked the top three last week and revealed them at their reading on the 16th. Here are the winners of the “It all happened here in Philadelphia” six-word memoir contest:

Mom put Tastykakes in my lunchbag
.- Al Cummings, San Francisco

Because the fat elf deserved it.
— Tim Piroli, Philadelphia

(Ed. Note: In the off chance this one makes no sense to you: story here.)

I can’t leave for some reason.
— Dan McQuade, Philadelphia

(Yup, it’s THAT Dan McQuade…and it should be noted that this six word memoir is twice as long as the memoir he’s told for years: “Philadelphia will do”)

Over at Smith Magazine, they’re running a Six-Word Memoir competition with Philadelphia Magazine in advance of their appearances in Philly to promote the book. The winner gets a one year subscription to Philly Mag, a copy of “Not Quite What I Was Planning,” and, of course, the glory. The theme, appropriately enough, is “It All Happened Here in Philadelphia.” Enter as often as you like!

Don’t steal mine:

Happy makes a rowhouse party wall

Mt. Airy memoirist Lori Tharps just released a book—Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain, part travel essay and part love story—that recounts her sojourn from her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to the coast of southern Spain, where she would meet her husband. Lori will be reading and signing books in Chestnut Hill on April 10 and at Temple University on April 15.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you’re aware that the seventeenth annual Philadelphia Film Festival is now underway. Documentary pieces helmed by both veteran and up-and-coming local filmmakers are playing at locations throughout the city. Take, for instance, first-time director Katrina Bowen’s eye-opening doc Traces of the Trade, which unearths the history of her ancestors, the largest slave traders in the northern United States. (The film will screen at a special post-festival event at the National Constitution Center.)

Other Philly-related docs include Richie Ashburn: A Baseball Life, which follows the titular Phillies legend; Rocketman, an endearing portrait of the trials and tribulations of 70-year-old local folk singer Jerry Burrus; and Eleven Minutes, which follows “Project Runway” winner and Lehman, Pa.-native Jay McCarroll as he launches his first fashion line.

And don’t forget some of the festival docs we’ve already covered here on Found in Philly, including native Joe Barber’s Electile Dysfunction and Temple U instructor Eugene Martin’s Bloodlines Video Diary Project.

Kids say the darndest things; but more often than not, those things are decidedly perceptive. Just ask Zoe Greenberg, a 16-year-old student at Philadelphia’s Springside School, whose 11-minute documentary “Enough” features real students discussing and describing real social issues, like wealth, poverty, and class. Conceived and created as part of Greenberg’s bat mitzvah project, the documentary asks scores of students—black and white, rich and poor, male and female—questions like “What is poverty?” and “Why are people poor?” For her efforts, the high school junior was awarded the second-annual Princeton Prize for Race Relations. While the doc was screened this weekend during the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival’s Annual New Filmmakers Weekend, you can order a copy by visiting the film’s website.

Elsewhere: Philadelphia native Joe Barber will premiere his documentary, Electile Dysfunction, at the 17th annual Philadelphia Film Festival (which begins April 3 and runs through April 15). The film—which features interviews with senators Barack Obama and Arlen Specter as well as former vice-president Al Gore—focuses on how political candidates are commoditized and “sold” to voters. The doc screens on Wednesday, April 9, at the Prince Music Theatre.

Also at the Philly Film Festival: Temple University faculty member Eugene Martin trains his lens on two students from inner-city Philadelphia schools in the Bloodlines Video Diary Project. Following each student through a entire academic year at their respective high school, Martin—who also provided his two student-subjects with cameras to document the moments when the professor’s own film crew couldn’t be with them—weaves a “moving record”—albeit with a surprisingly “poetic aspect”—of twenty-first century life in Philadelphia’s urban core. The film debuts at the International House on April 5 with an additional screening on April 12 at the Black Box at the Prince.