Every once in a while someone hips me to some music that I am not all that familiar with (shout out to DJ Mental Feelings)  and I get all excited and fall in love with the Philadelphia indie music scene all over again. 

I’ve been pretty much floored by every single release that I’ve heard Meg Baird sing or play on and I am very excited to hear ‘Dear Companion’ her new record out on Drag City.  The Meg Baird 7″ single that Philly’s own Tequila Sunrise records released got a billion spins on my bedroom record player and I have no doubt that ‘Dear Companion’ will be a serious contender for the best record of the summer (and, most likely, best record of the year!) 

What’s more, indienerd hard-to-please tastemakers Pitchfork Media liked it! 

I seriously can’t wait to buy this!

Philadelphians can see Meg perform tomorrow night at the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery.   Proceed for the details…

Good news: Thursday evening marks the final exhibition of the season at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery. The show is Good Funky Miles, a curation a long time in coming, and we’re having a reception at the gallery from 6 until 8. Immediately following that there’s a bash from 8 until 11 at the Latvian Society of Philadelphia, a gem of a members’ club, just north of downtown, a nice walk on an early summer evening. The party is catered with transcendent southern barbecue, meat and veg, and the drinks are cheap or free and we have a one-off performance from Meg Baird at 9.30, not to mention Fleisher/Ollman’s dream DJ lineup, and you are all invited! Come celebrate a neat show; come celebrate a year of reluctant capitalism, strengthening aesthetics and emphatic friendship. All particulars below…

Good Funky Miles is a group show explicitly designed to sustain and embolden bored, wilting spirits through the grittiest hours of high summer in a city. It brings together the work of four men who do not know each other. Andrew Herman is an actuary whose flawless and total map drawings of entirely invented cities rendered in an unfussed, office-supply vocabulary-a practice in progress for over 25 years-will be exhibited for the first time. Dan Murphy is the co-founder of Megawords, an internationally lauded crucible for global eye-opening and community-building in print, audio and video, and will contribute a video compilation and installation of urban typologies, a young life’s work manifest in 4×6 drugstore prints. This is a first for a man whose bread and butter has until now been ‘zines and what we’ll loosely call street work. We are delighted to again show the tender, organic cardboard and sculptamold work of Thomas Vance, one of Philadelphia’s most industrious and sophisticated young sculptors, a serene soul and silently rigorous formalist. And delight don’t suffice to describe our new friendship with Michael Heath, a London-based cartoonist who sold his first ink drawings, reductive portraits of Bird and Monk, to the Melody Maker in 1953. His throbbing, black visions of contemporary London, best known from the pages of satirical stalwart Private Eye, have never before been exhibited in a fine art context.

Good funky miles are the ones that belong to you. Go on and embrace the global village-it’s rickety, it’s good, it’s an utterly romantic position-but remember there’s no way, none, to replace the route you built in your city, that line through the pigs, and the cranes, and the things everyone can afford, and the things no one should buy, and the alcoholics, and the animal-rights activists, and the monuments, and the golden, and the zealots, and the thick, and the over-refined, and the walking dead, and the never born, and the ruins, and the lovers, and the radio, and the robbers, and the evenings, and the sun. It gets funkier every day. How did you plot that line, man?
Make your way after the opening to the Latvian Society at 531 N 7th Street, just north of Spring Garden, where with the gracious help of Laris Kreslins we have been able to put a party together. It is free and open to the public, tho if it fills we will have to bounce. Come early. It starts at 8, and at 9.30 in the theater upstairs there will be a special solo performance from Meg Baird. Meg’s really excellent debut LP, Dear Companion, was released by Drag City Records on May 22nd, so this is a party for her, too. Spread the word, come raise a glass. Take it easy.