July 2012
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"Louie" S2
This one got dark, huh? Not all of it worked for me — the aunt episode seemed like a golden opportunity to spend a half-hour of television sitting in a car with whiny kids, which would’ve been a little braver than, well, what happens. The family stuff was confusing: in Season 1, we spend a lot of time with his mom and brother, and then this season invented multiple new sisters and...
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"Slumber Party Massacre"
’80s slasher movies are obviously both the best and the silliest, but this one is a total mess. It goes for the gratuitous nudity early and often, arguably doesn’t open with a kill, and shows you the killer’s face in the first reel! There are a handful of clever moments, including an incredible shot with a pizza guy, and an even more incredible stoner scene with the pizza a few...
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Boy Scouts of America / gay rights
My friend Tom was 15* when he came out. He told me over AOL Instant Messenger. I was sitting at my parents’ desktop computer, possibly downloading Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark” track-by-track from Napster — it took so long that I finally left it running overnight and hoped for the best. Tom wrote that he needed to tell me something; before he could type the next...
Track list for Ben Gibbard's solo debut, "Former...
1. New Girl
2. Dinner at Hugo’s
3. Blue Eyes
4. Hello, Giggles
5. I Will Possess Your Heart II
6. People Who Need People.com
7. I Ate An Entire Pizza
8. Siriously
9. Why Are You Leaving (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
10. Marathon
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The money trap
When you’re young, all you want is freedom. From parents, from school, from being broke, from anything that kept you from kissing someone at the townie bar after midnight on a Friday night. The tools start to present themselves: a car. College. An apartment. An internship, then a job. Fumbling steps toward a house, marriage, life insurance, a 401K, babies. Freedom starts to look a lot like...
Cord Jefferson just wrote probably the best-ever... →
Beyond real talk.
I think I had a similar experience driving through Arizona and Utah and Colorado and Kansas over the winter, even for just a few days. You remember that other places are real, and worthwhile, and you live in Los Angeles thanks to an accident of birth and school admissions and habit. And you realize that the sheer act of living in L.A. is like driving a Porsche, and you’re...
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Highlights from Freelancing: Year 1
Places I wrote for: GQ, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Out magazine, LA Weekly, MTV Buzzworthy, Billboard, Drowned in Sound, Vulture, eMusic, the Hollywood Reporter, the A.V. Club, the Los Angeles Times and very nearly a prominent New York publication you may have heard of that’s been sitting on a charming essay I wrote for six months.
Work-related joys: Finding a literary agent,...
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It's been five years since I lived in New York
Five years ago this month since I broke up with my college girlfriend. Five years, give or take the college paper, since I started get paid to do this for a living. Five years since the first time I went to a hipster party and felt too old for this shit and realized everything had changed. Five years since I wasn’t Hannah-from-Girls overweight. Five years since I wrote a whole album of...
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Ryan II
Goes without saying that despite the repetition, the performances on the Ryan box are revelatory. The best part of this set — and of his tour — is the re-contextualization of his work, free of individual album reception or critic/fan politics, as the songbook of one of our finest composers. “Stop,” “I See Monsters,” “Jacksonville Skyline,”...
