Agenda

Shopping Spree

Unfortunately for Avant, the R&B singer emerged at a time when the market was flooded with male voices. A couple of generations removed from jazz's last claim to the title of "popular music," it's inevitable that young musicians started out with something that had a chance of getting played on the radio. Maybe it's time to just retire the "Latin jazz" tag once and for all. Yes, Francisco Mela was born and raised in Cuba, and the island's rhythms inflect his drumming as naturally as its accent does his speech. A survivor of the local neo-soul movement, the fierce Jaguar Wright has been flicking ears ever since she showed up on an MTV stage with the Roots and Jay-Z. Emerging from a lengthy hiatus, semi-local trio S PRCSS no longer finds itself in an world where writers use nebulous descriptors like "angular" and people know exactly what they mean. When I heard Enucleation Records was putting out Peace, Love and Total Fucking Destruction on clear vinyl, I had my doubts. At three and a half minutes, "When I'm Gone," the first single from Everything Goes Wrong is more than a minute longer than eight of the 10 songs on Vivian Girls' deliciously bite-size debut.

Before he becomes king, Prince Hal gives his dear old dad a few headaches. He drinks, brawls and hangs out with all manner of slatterns and washerwomen. Buy a comic book, get a free beer. That's the deal from Duane Swierczynski, Philly pulp novelist, former City Paper editor in chief and veteran writer for Marvel Comics. The soul-crushing capitalist dystopia predicted in 1927's ber-canonized Metropolis didn't entirely come to pass. Abstraction is a rather, well, abstract concept on which to hang an exhibition, but Woodmere recognizes its position on the border between city and suburbs, offering a show that balances treasures for the initiated and hand-holding for the trepidatious.