ON SALE NOW: CURSIVE WITH MAN MAN to Rock The State May 4th

**UPDATE**
IN TODAY'S 3/26 DAILY COLLEGIAN THERE IS A COOL ARTICLE ABOUT THE CURSIVE WITH MAN MAN SHOW TO WHICH TICKETS ON SALE NOW!!!!!! CHECK THE ARTICLE OUT HERE!

May 4th not only marks the first day of finals week for students, but it also brings popular indie rock artists Cursive and Man Man to The State Theatre. Below you will info on both bands as well as videos for each:

CURSIVE:

Ever since Cursive burst onto the music scene with their 1997 debut album, the band has consistently and continually churned out heady albums heralded by critics and fans alike. Wrestling with life’s miseries and mysteries, Mama, I’m Swollen is an album brimming with the universal, questioning the human condition, social morality, and the ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ of grown men.

After the underground success of their third album, Cursive’s Domestica, in 2000, the band followed up with what would prove to be their breakthrough album, The Ugly Organ, in 2003. A self-aware conceptual record about artistic constraints (or lack thereof), relationships, sex, and the intersection of all three, it landed them on the Arts section cover of The New York Times and accolades from Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Blender, Magnet, Esquire, and Spin – as well as a place on many year-end best lists. Cursive spent the next year and a half touring the album relentlessly, headlining the Plea For Peace tour and playing Coachella before being handpicked by The Cure for their Curiosa tour in late 2004.

Conceived together in intermittent rehearsals as the band is now spread out across the west and Midwest (Kasher and Compton live in Los Angeles, CA; Maginn in Columbia, MO; and Stevens in Omaha, NE), they road-tested and refined the new material for Mama, I’m Swollen [Cursive's 2009 release] largely via a few shows this past spring and summer.

MAN MAN:

Man Man is an experimental band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their musical style has been described as Viking-vaudeville, manic Gypsy jazz.[1] Man Man is known for their exuberant live performances. When performing, the members of the band dress in white outfits and wear war paint. The band uses pseudonyms—the frontman is Honus Honus, and its other members are Sergei Sogay, Pow Pow, Critter Crat (formerly known as "Cougar"), and Chang Wang. Prior to settling on Man Man, the band was named Gamelon and briefly Magic Blood.

Man Man is known for their multi instrumental style that centers on the piano playing of lead singer Honus Honus accompanied by the singing and wide variety of other instruments played by the rest of the band. On recordings, Honus usually plays a honky tonk style piano but during the live shows he uses a Rhodes Piano. Other instruments played by the rest of the band include a clavinet, microKORG, sousaphone, saxophone, trumpet, French horn, flute, drum set, euphonium, Fender Jazz Bass, Danelectro guitar, xylophone, marimba, melodica and various percussive instruments including pots and pans and toy noise makers and horns.






Tickets ON SALE NOW for Cursive with Man Man's May 4th show at 8:00 PM! Don't miss your chance to see two critically acclaimed indie rock acts right here in State College. All tickets are going for $19 and are available for purchase both ONLINE and at The State Theatre Box Office. Keep checking back to The State Theatre Blog for more info on these show as we get closer to the event. Hope to see you there!

Two Lovers Now Playing at The State

Two Lover is now playing at The State and below you will find a synopsis as well as a trailer for the film:


Two Lovers is a romantic drama set in New York City. It tells the story of Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), an attractive but depressed young man who moves back in with his parents following a recent heartbreak. An aspiring photographer, Leonard works part-time at his father's dry-cleaners. His concerned parents try to set him up with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the sweet and caring daughter of a close family friend. A big family dinner serves as their introduction and Leonard arranges to see her again. Then late one night Leonard looks out his bedroom window and notices a ravishing young woman he's never seen before. Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) recently moved into an apartment in his family's building - an apartment paid for by the wealthy married man she's seeing.

Two Lovers is currently playing at The State through 4/16 everyday at 7:00 & 9:30 PM with an additional 4:00 PM show on Wednesday 4/15. Tickets are going for $8 for adults and $6 for students and seniors and are available for purchase both ONLINE and at The State Theatre Box Office. See you there!

The Class Now Playing at The State

The film The Class is now playing at The State through 4/30. Below you will find a trailer for The Class as well as a short plot summary:


François and his fellow teachers prepare for a new year at a high school in a tough neighborhood. Armed with the best intentions, they brace themselves to not let discouragement stop them from trying to give the best education to their students. Cultures and attitudes often clash in the classroom, a microcosm of contemporary France. As amusing and inspiring as the teen aged students can be, their difficult behavior can still jeopardize any teacher's enthusiasm for the low-paying job.

François insists on an atmosphere of respect and diligence. Neither stuffy nor severe, his extravagant frankness often takes the students by surprise. But his classroom ethics are put to the test when his students begin to challenge his methods...

The Class is now playing at The State with showtimes listed HERE. Tickets are going for $8 for adults and $6 for students and seniors and are available for purchase both ONLINE and at The State Theatre Box Office. See you there!

AMOS LEE to Perform at The State THIS WEDNESDAY April 29th!

Just announced earlier this week, Amos Lee will preforming at The State Theatre this April 29th at 8:00 PM. In case you don't know much about Amos Lee, just look below for a bio as well as some videos of him preforming:

Singer/songwriter Amos Lee draws inspiration from such soul and folk artists of the '70s as Bill Withers, John Prine, Neil Young, and James Taylor. The Philadelphia native first became serious about performing while attending the University of South Carolina during the mid-'90s. After graduating, the English major taught elementary school before deciding to pursue a music career full-time. A period of waiting tables and bartending followed as Lee honed his songwriting skills. Eventually, he landed some high-profile opening-slot gigs including an extended tour with pianist/vocalist Norah Jones. He released his eponymous debut album on Blue Note in 2005. Supply And Demand followed in 2006.






Tickets for Amos Lee's April 29th 8:00 PM show go on sale this Friday 3/20! Don't miss your chance to see a talented newcomer in the singer/songwriter genre right here in State College. Tickets are going for $20 for students and $25 for everyone else and are available for purchase both ONLINE and at The State Theatre Box Office. Keep checking back to The State Theatre Blog for more info on these show as we get closer to the event. Hope to see you there!

Saturday 4/18 at 7:00PM Come to The State for 'Rock Out For Reading'

This Saturday 4/18 at 7:00 PM The State is proud to welcome the benefit event entitled 'Rock Out For Reading.' Below you will find in depth info about the show in which tickets are only going for $7!

The students of English 202 Honors are proud to host a variety of local artists in the State Theatre’s attic to benefit CIU #10 Development Center for Adults. All proceeds will go towards their graduation ceremony in May, purchasing academic regalia and sponsoring scholarships for the graduates.

Paul Barsom
Paul Barsom is both a performer/songwriter and a composer of concert music. Barsom’s songs are rooted in pop and progressive rock and rely upon poetry, lyrical melody and multiple influences for their effect. At first a rock bassist, he began writing songs as a teenage band member. The discovery of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka in his grandmother’s record collection at age 15 led him to the world of classical concert music and his eventual profession as a university professor. After a twenty-year absence from songwriting, he wrote two dozen while on sabbatical leave and is currently arranging, performing and recording them.
As a classical composer, his music is performed throughout the United States and abroad. He holds graduate degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music and his composition teachers include Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Warren Benson, John Corigliano, Jacob Druckman, Robert Morris, Robert Muczynski and Samuel Adler. His composition output includes orchestral, choral and chamber music. He is the recipient of awards, grants and fellowships from such organizations as Meet the Composer, ASCAP, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The National Association of Composers USA, The American Music Center, Alea III and the Eastman School of Music. He teaches composition and electronic music at The Pennsylvania State University and his interests include all genres of popular and world music, which figure prominently in his composition and teaching. His works are published by Ringing Change Music and by Lyceum Press.

http://www.myspace.com/barsomusic

Joel Dobbins
Joel Dobbins is an eclectic artist who balances simple, substantial lyrics with catchy, well-crafted music, resulting in a fresh listening experience song after song. His most recent album "Unreal" from November 2008 is for sale online and wherever he happens to be playing, and his next album is due to be released digitally this month. His favorite instruments to perform with are his acoustic guitar and occasionally piano. Dobbins already has a repertoire of about 150 songs but his favorite part about being a musician isn’t writing songs but performing live.

http://www.joeldobbins.com

The Whatleys (acoustic)
Lead Guitar/Vocals: Eddie Fraud
Bass/Screams: Steve LP
Drums: Jim Whatley
Guitar/Vocals: TJ Fadehawk
Rhythm Guitar/Vocals: Hiro McWhatley

Ready to perform anywhere, The Whatleys leave the half-stacks at home and grab acoustic guitars for more intimate venues.
The Whatleys have created a fusion of hardcore and raucous punk rock that recalls the energy and simplicity of old school punk. The band has combined amped-up arrangements of traditional hardcore folk songs including ‘Nervous Breakdown (Black Flag)’ and ‘We’re Only Gonna Die (Bad Religion)’ with anthemic original compositions such as ‘Doug’s Not a Cop’ and ‘When You’re Gone' from their debut album “Re-Inventing Whatley Crue.” Their songs bristle with the power of overdriven electric guitars, the beauty of three part harmonies and the sparkle of broken guitars all layered on top of thumping drums and booming bass.

http://www.myspace.com/whatleyspunk


Tyler Wagner
http://www.myspace.com/boyandthebandwagner

'Rock Out For Rock' is this Saturday 4/18 at 7:00 PM and tickets are going for only $7, and are available for purchase both ONLINE and at The State Theatre Box Office. See you there!

Friday 4/17: Community Read 2009: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

This Friday 4/17 at 7:00 PM The State is offering a FREE reading with Author Marilynne Robinson. All the information about the reading is found below. Hope to see you there

Presented by the Penn State Center for American Literary Studies, in partnership with the English Department and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities

Following a number of discussion sessions of the novel throughout the spring semester, author Marilynne Robinson will give a public lecture about her award-winning novel Housekeeping. The story is set in Fingerbone, Idaho, sometime in the last 100 years. To say that it is about two weird sisters in a lake town only begins to suggest the novel's haunting, lyrical pleasures. In Housekeeping we see the movement of three generations of women in and around sod houses, glacial lakes, trains, and automobiles. The story has an unexpected brutalism, one that captures modernity's effects on the obscure corners of North America: individuals can too easily lose themselves, or become transient, in modern society.
The full calendar of events, including all discussion sessions leading up to "An Evening with Marilynne Robinson," can be found at http://www.cals.psu.edu/events/community-read-09.shtml. Please contact Hester Blum at hester.blum@psu.edu or 865-0011 for more information.


THIS IS A FREE EVENT AND TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE AT THE STATE THEATRE BOX OFFICE ONLY!

Waltz With Bashir Starts 3/27 at The State

Oscar-Nominated film Waltz With Bashir starts its run at The State Friday 3/27. Below you will find a trailer for Waltz With Bashir as well as a plot summary/review by The New York Times' A.O. Scott:

“Waltz With Bashir” is a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film. Directed by Ari Folman, an Israeli filmmaker whose struggle to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982 shapes its story, “Waltz” is by no means the world’s only animated documentary, a phrase that sounds at first like a cinematic oxymoron. Movies like Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and Brett Morgen’s “Chicago 10” have used animation to make reality seem more vivid and more strange, producing odd and fascinating experiments. Mr. Folman, crucially assisted by his art director, David Polonsky, and director of animation, Yoni Goodman, has adapted techniques often (if unfairly) dismissed as trivial into an intense and revealing meditation on a historical catastrophe and its aftermath. “Waltz With Bashir” will certainly enrich and complicate your understanding of its specific subject — the Lebanon War and, in particular, the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Phalangist fighters at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps — but it may also change the way you think about how movies can confront history. The core of “Waltz With Bashir” is a series of conversations between the director, depicted with graying hair and a thoughtful demeanor, and other middle-aged Israeli men who were in Lebanon in the summer of 1982, when the Israeli Defense Forces pushed up through the southern part of the country toward Beirut. Most of them were in the western part of that city from the 16th to the 18th of September, when Christian militiamen slaughtered as many as 3,000 civilians, ostensibly to avenge the death of Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s newly elected president, who had been assassinated a few days before. More than 20 years later, Mr. Folman confronts his interlocutors amid the trappings of their relatively calm daily lives. (All the interview subjects speak in their own voices except for two, whose dialogue has been dubbed.) The freedom afforded by animation — a realm where the prosaic standards of verisimilitude and the inconvenient laws of physics can be flouted at will — allows Mr. Folman to blend grimly literal images with surreal flights of fantasy, humor and horror. “Waltz With Bashir” is not, and could not be, the definitive account of the Lebanon war or the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Instead, it’s a collage and an inquiry. “Can’t a film be therapeutic?” one of Mr. Folman’s friends asks him early in the movie, and in a way everything that follows is an attempt to answer that question and interrogate its premise. It depends on what is meant by therapy, and on who is undergoing it [NYTIMES].


Waltz With Bashir starts at The State Friday 3/27 at 7:00 and 9:30 PM. The film continues it’s run from Monday 3/30 with a shows at 7:00 & 9:30 PM through Thursday 4/2 with shows everyday at 7:00 & 9:30 PM(with an additional showing at 4:00 PM on Wednesday 4/1). Tickets are going for $8 for adults and $6 for students and seniors and are available for purchase both ONLINE and at The State Theatre Box Office. See you there!

This April 14th The State Welcomes Jonatha Brooke

The State Theatre welcomes Jonatha Brooke, April 14th for an intimate solo performance. Known for her folk style, Brooke has been making music and touring for almost twenty years. For her performance at The State she will be performing an acoustic set that is aimed to please any music fan. Look below to find some more info on Jonatha Brooke as well as see some of her performances:

Singer/songwriter/guitarist Jonatha Brooke began issuing albums that merged folk and pop during the early 1990s, first as a member of a female duo named the Story and later as a solo artist. Brooke formed the Story (originally called "Jonatha & Jennifer" during the duo's early years) along with another vocalist, Jennifer Kimball, who attended Massachusette's Amherst College with Brooke in the early '80s. Despite playing regular local gigs during their college career, the girls never issued any recordings and took a break after graduation, during which time Brooke joined a dance troupe. But by the end of the '80s, the group had re-formed under a new moniker, the Story, and issued a demo called Over Oceans in 1989. The Story was promptly signed to the independent Green Linnet label, which issued the duo's debut album, Grace in Gravity, in 1991. It wasn't long before Elektra Records expressed interest in the band, in turn reissuing their debut the same year, as well as a sophomore effort, The Angel in the House, two years later.

By 1994, however, the Story had split up for good and Brooke began pursuing a solo career. Despite Kimball's absence, Brooke's 1995 solo debut, Plumb, was nevertheless credited to Jonatha Brooke & the Story. Brooke was the sole creditor beginning with 1997's 10 Cent Wings, which also marked a shift from her earlier folk-pop material to a more radio-friendly style. This shift continued with such additional releases as 1999's Live and 2001's Steady Pull, the latter of which was co-produced by Brooke and renowned studio man Bob Clearmountain (known for his work with Bryan Adams, the Rolling Stones, the Corrs, and Hall & Oates, among others). Beginning in the late '90s, Brooke's albums were issued via her very own record label, Bad Dog.

In 2002, Brooke performed a pair of songs on Disney's Return to Never Land soundtrack, contributing an original composition ("I'll Try") and a cover ("The Second Star to the Right"). Two years later, she performed a set of ten shows at the Public Theater in New York, the highlights of which were collected for the 2006 release of Live in New York, complete with a DVD of the concert. Careful What You Wish For followed in 2007, and Brooke subsequently delved into Woody Guthrie's lyric journals for her follow-up effort. Released in 2008, The Works paired her original music with Guthrie's previously unheard lyrics [source].






If you want to hear more music from Jonatha Brooke check out her MYSPACE PAGE.

Jonatha Brooke will be performing solo at The State this April 14th at 8:00 PM. All tickets are going for $23 and are available for purchase both ONLINE and at The State Theatre Box Office. Keep checking back to The State Theatre Blog for more info on these show as we get closer to the event. Hope to see you there!