Philadelphia, Meet Your Future

My Philadelphia night out with Joey Sweeney starts at his very cool pad in Bart Blatstein's NoLibs — that's Northern Liberties for those of you living under a rock — in the very room where the Philebrity magic happens, five days a week. Here's 33-year-old Joey, with his quintessentially Irish face, brown hair stylishly cut and stylishly faintly greasy, brown rectangular glasses making his brown eyes seem tiny. We're joined by his girlfriend Ruth Carpenter, 26, and their black mutt Charlie, who at the moment seems to be trying to steal a sip of my beer.

There's smoke in the air (what kind, you ask?), and it occurs to me now at this very moment that this does not feel very much like the newsroom of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The loft is filled haphazardly with books, hundreds of CDs, a poster of British drug-addict rock star Pete Doherty's band, and four rather standard-looking computers, all lit by a bank of windows extending up to the partially open second floor. An obscure Philly indie CD is playing in the background.

And yet, if Joey Sweeney — the co-founder and editor of Philebrity.com, the city's self-styled hippest blog, which aims to cover alternatively our arts, gossip and media scenes — is to be believed, far more Important People (read: 18-to-35-year-olds, the fastest growing and most financially carefree demographic in the New Cool Philly) read what he, Ruth, and an intern from Temple put together than read the Inquirer. Which according to Joey Sweeney, at the moment one of the most influential and at the same time obscurest Philebrities you've probably never heard of, is a nice little bit of "comeuppance."

"It's sort of like white flight," Sweeney says of the Inky's current troubles — ­sinking circulation, ownership turnover, lackluster quality, general irrelevance. "It's like what's happened to all the people who moved out of Philly in the white flight. And now they all wish they were a part of this" — Philebrity's subculture. He calls it "arrogance" that the paper in recent years reoriented itself away from its hometown and to the suburbs to appeal to the readers who fled the city during its more turbulent times. And now they all wish they were a part of this, Joey says, sweeping his hand through the air and metaphorically across Old City, and then up through NoLibs and on toward — can you even believe this? — Fishtown, where Joey grew up and which he recalls as a "white ghetto," the transformation now spreading north across Philadelphia in a giant, incandescent ripple of coolness.

It's that ripple that Joey's riding for a living, albeit not much of one. Dominating Philly news this week has been the controversy over the reinstallation of the Rocky statue outside the Art Museum. Sweeney, perhaps predictably, is not such a fan of the idea. Philebrity.com has come down hard in opposition, in a tone that often smacks of sanctimony and superciliousness — a kind of snarkiness that seems endemic in the blogging world. The statue, he's written, is "a giant piece of shit" and a "retarded monstrosity" and "a cloying embarrassment to this city's long and illustrious art history." As if that's not direct enough:

The Rocky statue is FUCKING UGLY and our city is run by UNSOPHISTICATED RUBES.