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That Day I Petitioned the White House

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September 16, 2013
America, Politics, Pop Culture
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It started on a Saturday afternoon watching college football. I was with a few friends enjoying some adult beverages when we started guffawing at foreign policy. In a Dr. Strangelove-esque turn of events, we started laughing at the thought of the United States putting in the incorrect coordinates for a nuclear attack. The destination of those incorrect coordinates? Antarctica. That’s right. A continent without any countries or human inhabitants that hate us. In the end, the ice caps melt due to this erroneous strike, and whole countries flood. We’ve turned this place into Waterworld, and we are no longer back-to-back any war champs. We are just all fighting for sand. The scenario was hilarious because of the implausibility of everything. Until I realized, in my drunken state, that I could petition the government, and I could get the wheels rolling on this thing with a plea for our government to do something about the one place that does not have a representative government or an established people. Hell, they don’t even have a flag, for crying out loud.

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The Aural Timeline of Mark Sanchez With the New York Jets

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September 15, 2013
Music, NFL, Pop Culture, Sports
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Courtesy of media.nj.com.

Courtesy of media.nj.com.

With this week’s conflicting reports of quarterback Mark Sanchez either being out for the season or, at the very least, being out for the foreseeable future, many Jets fans, myself included, have come to the conclusion that the rollercoaster of Sanchez’s time on the Jets has, for all intents and purposes, come to an end. What began with relatively high hopes and two straight AFC Championship Game appearances will most likely end with many CBS cutaways to Sanchez on the sidelines in a hat trying to look supportive of his apparent successor, Geno Smith. Flashes of his unkempt hair and seven o’clock shadow during timeouts will constitute the majority of the attention he receives here forth, and the announcers will perceive his happiness as having an inverse correlation with Smith’s success as the season progresses. Sanchez has taken the Jets and their fans to higher highs and seemingly bottomless valleys over the course of the last five years, and now that he seems to be on his way out of the city which had once been so keen to christen him as the long-awaited successor to Joe Namath, it is time to reminisce. Hopefully (I guess? Being a Jets fan is confusing, and not just for the idea of actually being a Jets fan), Sanchez will not make a Willis Reed-like return in the fading weeks of the season to bring the Jets to the brink of the playoffs and then go 5-21 with 4 interceptions and a lost fumble in Week 17. That would render this piece premature and really take some of the fun out of it. And yet, that would be a perfectly Mark Sanchez-with-the-Jets thing to do. In fact, it would simply be a perfect Jets thing to do, as this franchise loves to string its fans along with enough promise to keep the team interesting. Then, just when we think the team is ready to finally strangle the monkey on our back, the team realizes it is still the New York Jets, and we return to mediocrity under the most judgmental media magnifying glass in this country. With all that said, what follows is a look back at Sanchez’s span in New York, as told through the universal language that is pop music. Read More

This Land Is Your Land

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September 13, 2013
Hip-Hop, Music, Pop Culture
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Photo courtesy of Rolling Stone

Photo courtesy of Rolling Stone

After having gone through the PBR&B rabbit hole, and after many rotations of the mixtapes House of Balloons and Echoes of Silence, we have come to a point at which we know what to expect from the Canadian producer and singer Abel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd. His feelings seep through every word and coo, often reverberated heavily with tinges of extreme sadness. “Wicked Games,” in particular, became a YouTube sensation, hitting over 25,000,000 views and becoming the quintessential Weeknd song, complete with an eerie, hypnotic beat, heavily altered drum patterns and vibrato vocals full of fear, detachment and a longing for companionship. Since 2010, when Tesfaye began releasing songs to the Internet under his current pseudonym, he has become buddy-buddy with Drake and gotten signed to Universal Republic Records and, finally, released his first studio album. Read More

“They Have a Palooza for Everything Now”

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September 1, 2013
Pop Culture, Sports
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Many Saturdays ago (because I’m horrible at timely blog posts), Rory and I decided to take advantage of the great weather and venture forth into the greatest city in the world. Living in New York means that you’re never at a loss for something to do, so we hit up the Twitter Machine to see what adventure our day could be, and BOOM.

Pogopalooza.

Intrigued, we set off to Tompkins Square Park for what would prove to be an afternoon of pure bliss. We walked into the park to find . . . people doing tricks on Pogo sticks.  I don’t know what I expected, but somehow, the absurdity of the afternoon swept me up, and I was cheering my heart out for “Wacky Chad,” “the Man Child,” and some kid whose name I can’t remember but was never mentioned without also mentioning that he was “all the way from Saint Petersburg, Russia!” I’ve never been one for “X-TREME” sports (I prefer the slow, steady rhythm of a baseball game), but I was completely fascinated watching these young men who clearly trained for and were passionate about X-Pogo.

After the “Big Air” qualifiers, it was time to break some world records. Yes, we actually watched people break world records. Try it sometime. Even if it’s something as ridiculous as ten guys on pogo sticks doing a backflip at the same time, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of watching something that’s never been done before.

I didn’t feel qualified to write about this unless I tried pogo-ing myself, so I tried it. Note: It is very difficult, I was not very good, and I sustained some large bruises in strange places. But anyway, since the internet is an asker, and I’m a giver, here is a picture of me on a pogo stick:

Pogo

Orange Is The New Black: Litchfield’s Best Womances

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August 23, 2013
Pop Culture, Television
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OITNB

Let me start off with a simple sentiment: if you’re not watching Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black, you’re doing it all wrong. Netflix has been nailing it with their original programming and OITNB may be their best series yet. It’s dramatic, it’s hilarious, it has forbidden love, a guy named “Pornstache,” a theme song by Regina Spektor and a cast that is freakin’ adorable on Instagram… basically, everything it takes to make a show critically acclaimed and popularly successful.

It feels like everyone is talking about OITNB (or maybe I just feel that way because I’m talking about it all the time to anyone who will listen), and for good reason. There’s a ton of interesting discourse to be had regarding the criminal justice system, the prison system, the LGBT community, the dynamics between inmates and correctional officers in a women’s prison, et cetera, et cetera. But the real draw of this show is its characters. I could write odes to the adorable, lovesick CO John Bennett and rants about the psycho, Jesus-obsessed Pennsatucky and essays on the enigma that is Crazy Eyes. But what’s even more entertaining than the characters themselves is their relationships with one another. The show explores so many different facets of female relationships. There are romances, there are fuck buddies, but most of all there are some truly awesome besties in Litchfield Federal Prison. Here are some of OITNB’s most excellent womances (like a bromance, but for girls. Get it?):

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The Rule of Three

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August 19, 2013
Music, Pop Culture
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From top to bottom: CHVRCHES, London Grammar, and HAIM

This past summer, pop radio beat listeners to death with Daft Punk’s return from Studio 54, Robin Thicke’s perceived predatory tendencies, and Miley Cyrus’ problematic appropriation of black culture. But the heavy radio rotation of the aforementioned songs seemed to reveal that these were summer simmers rather than jams; a few mild tracks rather than ones that brought any real heat. Yet, in the background, three buzzworthy trios released hits that are the lead ins to their highly anticipated September debuts. CHVRCHES, London Grammar, and HAIM all have different pop stylistic approaches that use a semblance of electronic instrumentation to get there.

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The Weird, Southeastern State of Hip-Hop

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July 29, 2013
Hip-Hop, Music, Pop Culture
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“Did 2 Chainz already perform?” my friend asked as we pulled up to the amphitheater gates. He had just checked the time as we got off the bus – it was 9:30. We were worried that we had missed his set; hoping (but not necessarily happy) that we had just missed T.I.

“He just got off stage,” the amphitheater staff member told us. “Wayne’s ’bout to go on next.”

Our spirits sunk. We turned to the rest of our friends who were filing in behind us to tell them the bad news. The look on their faces was that of devastation. Forget the fact that we hadn’t missed the headliner – we missed 2 Chainz. And I think that’s about the point that I realized how weird the landscape of Hip-Hop has become.

Lil’ Tunechi

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Things I Learned At Taylor Swift’s RED Tour

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July 29, 2013
Music, Pop Culture
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I’ve been to a lot of shows in my day. Sometimes, they’ve been in tiny little local venues with not ten other people in the crowd. Sometimes, they’ve been in stadiums—like the Taylor Swift concert I went to on Saturday night at Gillette Stadium. Okay, I’ll give you a few minutes to judge me, musical elitists. But yes, I paid an obscene amount of money to dance and sing along in the pit at the show of America’s most beloved serial dater and I don’t regret it for a second.

A lot of people have a lot of opinions on Taylor Swift. Some of them are violently negative, some of them are violently… positive (actually, though—there are people out there doling out death threats to those that don’t like her, aren’t there?). There are some indisputable facts behind these opinions, like that her album Fearless is the most-awarded album in the history of country music, or that—if you’re into dudes—she’s probably dated your celebrity crush (and you kind of hate her for it #Haylor2012NeverForget). As someone who—reluctantly at first, and then wholeheartedly—enjoys Taylor Swift’s music but enjoys her as a person a bit less enthusiastically, I would like to go on record stating that Taylor Swift is the absolute best at what she does.

Now, I had thought I’d seen it all in terms of teenage hysteria when I saw One Direction at Jones Beach last month. But this was my first Taylor Swift concert, and I don’t know if it was because there was a much larger crowd, or Taylor’s been around a bit longer, but this was a whole different monster. In one group of girls, each had a cardboard letter around her neck and when they stood in order they spelled “T SWIFT,” and they walked in circles around Patriot Place for a solid hour before the stadium began admitting people, just screaming nonsense. There was one girl in a red semi-formal dress who took it upon herself to entertain us with karaoke versions of Taylor’s songs on the stairs next to CBS Scene. One girl literally painted her entire body red. There were parents, there were teenagers, there were young kids, there were girls dressed up as KISS (???), there were bros decked out in homemade TaySwift gear and there was even one creepy middle aged guy dressed as a king at the show alone (you bet we all kept an eye on him). I learned a lot about Taylor and her fans that evening. Here are some of those things:

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