I noticed one student scribbling on a sign while, with his free hand, clutching a bottle of champagne. He wrote: “Hexter, nobody likes you but you,” and explained to me that “Hexter is a narcissist, who only cares about himself. All narcissists have their fall.”
Being a judge on American Idol, prime-time TV’s No. 1 show, is nice work if you can get it. And it looks like Jennifer Lopez won’t be. For weeks, she had been on the longlist of “names” — which, at various points, has included Elton John, Justin Timberlake, Bret Michaels, Harry Connick Jr., Chris Isaak, Howard Stern, Shania Twain, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler, my pet frog and my late grandmother…
Let me be clear. I am not talking about pleasure. Capitalism offers all sorts of pleasure. That is its promise: the pleasure of the hamburger, new shoes, leather interiors, better handling, a larger screen, the Big Gulp, sharper focus, pill induced sleep, the weekend, arugula. This is the genius of capitalism — it creates the desire and the gratification.
Putin’s talents are just limitless! Kind of like another beloved world leader, North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, who it has been claimed can predict the weather, has written several operas and is a golf expert to the tune of several holes-in-one per game. I can’t source this information, because I don’t think anyone on earth can actually prove it. But if it says so in his official biography, it has to be true, right? Right?
As usual, she’s redeemed herself (sort of) with her follow-up single, “Teenage Dream,” the title song from her new album. It’s a slightly more rock-flavored affair that kind of makes me want to fall in lust and hit the beach (though not necessarily in that order). That said, “Teenage Dream” is indicative of my overall problem with the 25-year-old rising star.
This is not your blockbuster, let’s get the bodies into the museum summer show; rather, it is a thought-provoking, intellectually engaging experience in contemplation, consideration, and connection. “Picasso Looks at Degas” is a magnificent exhibition…
Ofer Wolberger (b. 1976) is an artist living and working in New York City. In the following 2009 project, Life with Maggie, Wolberger puts together a collection of images documenting “a character lost in space and time.” The result is something beautiful, and eerie.
You mean to tell me that Tareq Salahi –– the husband in the famous White House crashing couple –– is actually the captain of the US Polo Team? Yeah right. Either you made up the team or you made up the title, I’m not giving you both. I saw him play polo –– badly –– and it was in a dirty field with 20 people watching. Does that strike you as terribly “Real”?
Music festivals are like the sickest buffet one could imagine consuming. There’s too much going on, you want it all, and if you don’t pace yourself you’re going to get hurt. Lollapalooza, with its summer heat, hundreds of bands and eight stages turns some fans into yearly pilgrims and others into victims in the name of music.
I guess some zany biologists did a kind of ‘comprehensive study’ that spanned “six biodiversity rich regions around the world” and concluded that climate change would destroy over a million species of plants and land animals by mid-century.
Eat, Pray, Love is a pop culture phenomenon. It was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for 57 weeks, so now, of course, it’s a movie. The film has three things that will kill with women: the beloved book; Julia Roberts; and the creator of Glee, Ryan Murphy, coming on to direct. But if it’s gonna make the big money and become a Hollywood smash, it’s going to have to play to men as well.
To me, it was like everyone around me suddenly went totally nuts. Here were all these people going to absurd jobs for 50, 60, 70 hours a week — just to make their rent. Nobody looked very happy. But they did look, well, possesed. I mean here, in San Francisco, everybody went from being a psychedelic artist slacker to all of a sudden talking about brand engagement, apps and back ends, driving traffic and conversion rates; everyone had a goddamn business plan and a crackberry.
At some point we moved to the roof of the apartment, where we leaned over the edge. We could see much of the city. We were drinking the ‘Ritalin water’ and talking a lot. Some time after the sun rose, I left the rooftop, but I was very confused and could not find the door to my friend’s apartment. I went back to the rooftop and asked where the apartment was. I could not understand what they were saying to me…
When I discovered the World Wide Web I started looking at porn online, and I think a lot of what I know about the types of guys I like, even the kind of sex I like, I learned from porn. Mom and dad weren’t going to show me the rainbow ropes, so to speak. So I had to learn from somewhere. Seeing a lot of porn taught me which sexual role I liked best (top or bottom).
Perhaps what makes Winter’s Bone so stunning is that it doesn’t try to be. Beneath the chilling circumstances that the lead character finds herself in is a chance for justice and peace, but neither horror nor its opposite are pushed on the audience. As in real life, the most moving moments are often the most subtle and unexpected.
So we, you know, vibe’d out at my house and we just kept bouncing ideas and we had all these references of these like renaissance paintings and baroque paintings, and I always had the dream of, like, re-creating the Sistine Chapel in a way…
“Fembots are human too,” according to a retro-cyber standout track on Robyn’s new Body Talk Pt. 1, but you wouldn’t know it from the electropop bobblehead’s impeccably-paced show, which made Kelis’s look like a half-hearted promotional appearance.
There is no reason to continue. Please quietly click away. (Note: I say to click because I would never expect you to walk away, it requires such an inordinate amount of energy. And really, where are you going to go? Walking is overrated. And judging by the way you have deteriorated since taking that desk job at that company, I worry about your heart.
Carefully groomed for diplomatic service – certainly talented at it, with an elegant, engaging manner, shrewd powers of observation and negotiation, and command of many languages – and favored by Pope Benedict XV and Pope Pius XI, Pacelli’s star rose until it outshone nearly all others. He became the most important Roman Catholic prelate in Germany, prior to his appointment as Vatican Secretary of State in 1930. Why, then, problems with the cause for his sainthood?
Sascha Naimann has a lot on her plate. The big thing is her mother’s death at the hands of her stepfather, Vadim, a murder witnessed not only by Sascha herself but also by her little brother, Anton, and her little sister, Alissa. Anton, now a broken boy, quiet and weak and delicate, is also prone to alarming behavior: once Sascha discovered him dissecting the bloody carcass of a guinea pig.
The metaphor is simple, but then so is the movie. Your “Cyrus” could be your girlfriend talking in her sleep all night, saying “I hate you”, or something; it could be your girlfriend spending all her time with her ex-boyfriend; it could be your chronic unemployment. It could probably be all of those things at once.
It’s not a revelation that stay-at-home moms are devalued socially and economically in American society, but it’s a problem that seems especially fraught right now, when money is an issue for many households, and a second income can make the difference. I know several women who took a year or more off to raise their children and who now seek to rejoin the workforce. But those doors are virtually closed to them.
Shaquille O’Neal not only knows how to use a computer, but also appears to have figured out the sequence of events required for using Twitter and, among other actions, retweeting and replying to tweets…
The federal government should have its own news voice — a newspaper, blog, TV and radio show. They can relate all the so-called news. This will put an end to the press conference and the news industry will have to actually find news, actually do some investigating, some thinking, some reporting.
Last week Kanye West found himself a new toy called Twitter and in the gleam of a diamond-studded mouth grill every other Twitter feed became history. In his first week, Kanye snagged just under 500,000 followers as of this writing and the number grows every second.
We were on the subway and someone standing near us threw their water bottle into the air and collapsed onto the floor of the train. The person started shaking. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The train stopped at a station and I remember looking frantically from the person shaking on the floor to somewhere outside the train.
One need consider only a handful of characters from Williams’s oeuvre – Amanda Wingfield, Stanley Kowalski, Blanche Dubois, Maggie, Big Daddy, all of whom are still very much alive in the lexicon of popular culture – to comprehend the scope of his contribution to the art world.
Despite the dependability and simple joy millions of people get from coffee, whether it’s homemade drip or a more expensive café-bought concoction, the industry is still looking for new ways to charm coffee-lovers and recruit new fans. Not surprisingly, the newest trends come with higher price tags than your corner deli cup.
Bon vivant, raconteur, dandy, and wit, William Somerset Maugham ( 1874- 1965), was probably the most prolific, certainly the most financially successful English writer of the twentieth century. Creator of the spy story in his Ashenden stories and chronicler of sojourns abroad in his travel essays, novelist of character and manners, Maugham dined out on his stories for years, always a sought-after guest for weekend house parties and formal dinners.
For the better part of the last year, bloggers have frantically attempted to wring every possible cent from keyword-rich stories covering Sarah Palin, Tiger woods (see above headline for proof), and a dozen other celebrity names coveted like gold in The Often Trifling Age of Pageview Journalism. It’s become a weekly, if not daily, ritual.
Sarah Palin heavily censors her Facebook wall comments, there is a monster that lives in the North Carolina sewer system, America is on the brink of civil war, Fox News is lying to America’s face, and the notorious street crime gang infamously known as the Juggalos has invaded the suburbs of Australia.
While swimming in the otherworldly turquoise waters, in the private beach near our hotel, my traveling companion and I were maliciously assaulted by jellyfish. She screamed. I screamed. “Pee on me!” she cried. “Pee on me!” I can only imagine what the other beachgoers must have thought. I thought about the jellyfish stinging me on my exposed penis.
Blake repeats this mantra so as to burn it into the minds of his underperforming sales force, reminding them that their failure to sell condos and time shares will only result in termination. It’s not so much a morale booster as it is a warning to those lacking the killer instinct required in sales. But on a grander scale, Blake is talking about selling — no matter the product, no matter the price.
To call Wavves’ King of the Beach (Fat Possum) a cleaner, more considered affair than the band’s first two albums is to say very little. 2008’s self-titled cassette-turned-CD and 2009’s Wavvves were the kinds of records it’s good to know that near-teenagers still make, whether one actually cares to listen to them or not…
A mere handful of novelists have attained nounhood. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch begat masochism. The Marquis de Sade lent his name to sadism. A humorous, four-line biographical verse, or clerihew, is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley. And if you are a promiscuous and unscrupulous lover like Giacomo Casanova, then you, sir, are a Casanova.
In case you didn’t know, Tumblr is a pretty big deal, according to an article in today’s New York Times. Such a big deal, in fact, that businesses are now infiltrating the hallowed dashboard in the hopes of making some deals of their own.
Surely readers of e-books are not scanning, as so many of us are wont to do online. But there have to be some differences between the electronic and the printed reading experience. The usability guru Jakob Nielsen conducted a study to find out.
At the same time, I was still affected by the idea that cocaine was something of an ‘older person’s drug,’ or something—a drug that was more classy, perhaps. Definitely ‘way more mature than weed.’
You know how you have a list of celebrities you’d sleep with if you ran into them just like that? Or what about how you begin every relationship by telling your new girlfriend or boyfriend, okay, listen, I think you’re totally awesome and everything, but see I have this list. A list of celebrities I want to sleep with. And, um, if I meet any of these people and they want to get with me, I kind of, um, have to go with it…
But Craisglist is so Web 1.0. It’s the Web 2.0 of online sex shopping that gets interesting. There are sites — MyRedbook and The Erotic Review are two of the better known ones — where not only do women advertise their services in templated format that lays out age, race, breast size, and status of pubic hair but where customers review said women in exacting detail.
The media speculated that the show’s half-hour, formerly occupied by “TRL,” was too early for most teenagers. But Chung’s analysis is probably more accurate: her humor was all wrong for the U.S. audience and the format of the show stank.
Sorry I Like To Party is shot entirely by VHS camera. Remember VHS? No? Those tape things that are ‘retro’ now? To date, the majority of Erik Stinson’s film work seems to have been taken with VHS, either because he never had enough money to get a real camera or… something else.
This month at Thought Catalog, we were definitely not on summer vacation. Tao Lin reviewed ten blogging platforms and told us about three movies he liked. For Bastille Day, Dan Hoffman did a piece on Breathless. Molly Young told us about one of her favorite books of the summer, and Brandon Scott Gorrell began to spill the beans on every drug he has ever taken.
Roads make cities, and cities make suburbs. It is “lying in a burned-out basement” somewhere in the aforementioned suburbs that Shakey – now adolescent and tentatively matured – gives us his state of the union address and the interpretational key to his entire oeuvre.
So what I look for first in such books is accurate philosophy. It is not easy to teach philosophy in the bite sizes necessitated by these short essays, and brevity can distort. Connecting philosophy up to popular culture also requires knowledge of and sensitivity towards the material. In reading this series, if I get something really insightful about the pop culture object of reflection — something that could be developed and published in a peer reviewed popular culture studies journal – I am delighted.
But—and this is a question that The Thieves of Manhattan repeatedly, tantalizingly brandishes—what is the truth, at least when it comes to writing? The answers implied by the narrative’s twists and turns are mostly disingenuous. Lies can be truths of sorts, Ian would have us belief; patent falsehoods can collapse into profundity, conceal something immensely significant.
Season Eight of Project Runway premiered last night on Lifetime, the network for women, and I learned two things. For the first time in the show’s history, Heidi Klum is not pregnant. Ta-daa! I don’t know how many babies Heidi has, all I know is that it seems likes she is preggers every season. Girl, give that uterus a break.
I have gone on terrible Internet dates so you don’t have to. Take these stories, friends, learn from them, and pass them on. The stigma from computer dating is gone now, nearly everyone has tried it. Perhaps you yourself are considering it right now. First, read these. You’re welcome.
Everything is crazy. There is a new oil spill in the Kalamazoo River that threatens to become “a tragedy of historic proportions,” says Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, if it reaches Lake Michigan…
… and behind this mask Herge; and behind this mask Roald Dahl; and behind this mask Terry Brooks; and behind this mask Ernest Hemingway; and behind this mask Ken Kesey; and behind this mask Homer; and behind this mask J.D. Salinger; and behind this mask Mark Twain…
