July 2010

Words and Images: Benji Feldheim

Pitchfork Music Festival 2010

Day One:

Leave it to a Swedish pop singer to save the first day of the 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival from a numbing heat haze.

Wait, really? Yes. Her name is Robyn, and she can sing and dance globe-wide circles around most other dance-beat laden pop singers. Take some tips here Gaga.

With a scorching sun beating down on about 18,000 folks out of the estimated 54,000 expected to attend Pitchfork this weekend, Robyn put on a powerhouse set of electro dance, high register harmonies and a fiendish sexual energy that woke the crowd up.

“Is it always this hot Chicago?” Robyn said between songs.

With a live band tweaking synth knobs and playing both electric and no-plug drums, Robyn showed the difference between a pop singer who actually writes and enjoys her own music, as opposed to those on a record label leash. Straight ahead beats that suddenly shifted into faster paces, backed by a rolling array of clean synth bleeps and bloops and topped by Robyn’s crystal clear singing and energy made the set a gem.

READ ON for more from Benji on Day One of the P4K Festival…

HT’s Benji Feldheim will be representing us at the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago this weekend. While we wait for Benji to file his report from the meeting of the hipster

Live Nation held a meeting for the company’s investors at Irving Plaza in which the company tried to allay shareholder’s concerns about the sad state of the live music biz

As we are now into summer and things tend to slow down in the restaurant business here in NYC, sometimes it’s tough to come up with a story that hasn’t been written about by the big guys like Eater, Grub Street, The Feed Blog etc… so I thought I would share with you some of the smaller food blogs that I am currently following which offer as much foodie value to me as do “The Big Blogs.”

All of the blogs listed below are currently on my Google Reader’s RSS feeds. Some of these blogs you may have heard of, some you may not have. All of them provide me with unique, fun and informative food news I can use to try new restaurants, recipes and road trips.

Here we go:

89th & Broke – Another set of eyes, mouths and stomachs scoping out NYC food. They post cool stuff like Favorite Food Finds and restaurants not just in Manhattan. Here is their description of the site: “We’re young professionals residing in Murray Hill and Upper East Side who are always looking for something fun to do or the best place to grab a drink and dinner at an affordable price around the city.”

A Passion for Food – The subtitle to this blog is “One real purpose in life. Eat. Try Everything. Anything. Anywhere. In the end, we all want to be happy and good food makes me happy.” It is written by Kathy YL Chan. Another well connected foodie sharing their food experiences via words and pictures. Here is part of her bio from the site “Born & raised in Honolulu, Hawai’i, now calling the East Village of NYC home. It’s perfect here. I write the Sugar Rush column at Serious Eats.”

READ ON for more of Friday 4 the Foodies…

PBS is the place for the best music on TV this weekend. The second season of The Artists Den rolls on with Tori Amos, while a repeat of Austin City