December 23-29, 2004

art

artsquicks

by Lori Hill

convention

Tweed jacket alert: About 8,000 English professor types descend on Philly next week for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, where word nerds gather to talk about God knows what or who (or would that be whom?). But while these conventioneers are holed up in meetings like "Edith Wharton and Secrets" or "Text as Spectacle, Spectacle as Text II," the general public can crash some of the cooler -- and often locally pegged -- discussions. Check out "Writing Philadelphia: Urban Circulations," "Philadelphia and Black Writers on Fire," "Recovering Spanish Philadelphia," "Benjamin Franklin and the Character of a Nation," among others. And at least one of the after-parties sounds like a blast: Milton and the Devils Party is a band founded by a couple of local English professors with some free time on their hands (enough, apparently, to write a song based on Book X of Paradise Lost). They'll perform at the Khyber Dec. 28 and Club 218 Dec. 30.

Dec. 27-30, Loews Philadelphia, Philadephia Marriott and the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Visit www.mla.org for more information.

dance

Need to get out of the house over the weekend? Far, far out of the house? You can't get much farther than the Land of the Sweets and much more fantastical than the Pennsylvania Ballet's treatment of George Balanchine's The Nutcracker. Tchiakovsky never sounds better than when accompanied by the dancing of PAB's crew and dozens of child performers as well as the Philadelphia Boys Choir. It's really up to you: the evil Mouse King or one more rerun of that creepy Rudolph special.

Through Jan. 2, $22-$99, Academy of Music, Broad and Spruce sts., 215-893-1999.

art

Don't care to leave the house over the weekend? Then sit your lazy, Christmas cookie-fattened butt in front of the computer and troll The Vacuum, a spiffy online-only gallery run by Matthew Sepielli and Samuel Yun. And since its new exhibit shares its name with a Raymond Carver story, it's even cooler. Through the (sometimes painfully slow) magic of QuickTime, "Where I'm Calling From" allows visitors to see movies on three different "floors" of the gallery. Hedwige Jacobs has the third floor to herself: Swimmers is a cute animation of identical ladies backstroking their way to nowhere, over and over, while Punnik is an action-thriller in which a piece of yarn fights with itself. Worth a stop, too: Alex Kiefer's Helpful Penguin is a funny penguin-as-mall-elevator-operator tale for the holidays.

Through March 30, www.40north3rd.org.