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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A Night at the Opera – The EBC at Rucker Park

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August 21, 2013
Basketball, Sports
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“The first game you got in on this court right here and played like a bum, you was a bum.” – Richard ‘Pee-Wee’ Kirkland, from NBATV’s The Doctor

From its humble beginnings as a playground for New York City’s P.S. 156, Holcombe Rucker Park has become the singular epicenter of layman basketball, particularly streetball and its derivatives, as well as a proving ground for rising stars and established legends alike. Located at the corner of 155th St. and 3rd Ave. in East Harlem, Rucker Park grew from one man’s vision of getting kids off the streets when it was opened on February 23, 1956. When Holcombe Rucker established a basketball league for the neighborhood children when he worked as a playground director in the Parks & Recreation Department for the city, he could not have anticipated the symbolism which the park attached to it would eventually carry. Perhaps no single place on earth is more closely identified with a sport than Rucker Park is with basketball, and for good reason. The people there are more passionate about basketball than most political revolutionaries, and without the unnecessary violence. Mostly.  Read More

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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Purple Reign – I Would Die 4 U

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August 13, 2013
Soccer, Sports
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Marc Chagall, "On the Stretcher"

Marc Chagall, “On the Stretcher”

To be the absolute best at something, anything, in a city of eight million people takes a certain combination of skill, will, balance and, in most cases, luck. However minor that area of greatness is, once you are the best, that is it. The key piece of the puzzle seems to be that bit of luck. For an artist, it means having your works seen by a prominent critic and earning a prestigious exhibition at one of the better museums in Manhattan. For musicians, it means playing a great show in front of someone who matters, whether it be an agent, a producer, a club promoter or a famous bassist. For everyone else, it simply means working hard enough and being consistent enough to succeed in a given field. Health is a big part of consistency. More on that later. Read More

Clemson, Georgia and Beating a Dark Horse

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August 10, 2013
College Football, Sports
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Last year, Clemson and Georgia were both disappointed. They were both playing in non-BCS bowls and looking back at their schedules with questions of “what ifs” floating around all over the place. The Bulldogs were five yards away from the national championship game, while the Tigers were one night in September away from earning another ACC title and, consequently, another trip to the Orange Bowl. Both teams walked away from their lesser bowls with a win, top ten preseason rankings, a scheduled game on August 31st in Memorial Stadium and another “dark horse” label.

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Purple Reign – Take Me with U

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August 6, 2013
Soccer, Sports
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Egon Schiele - Agony

Egon Schiele – Agony

“You can’t win ’em all,” so the adage goes. While the application of this saying has extended to the subjects of romance, academic pursuit, flying standby at the airport and khaki sales at Kohl’s, it is safe to assume that the most practical sense in which someone can say this to a fellow human being occurs when engaging in sport. You hear it all the time, and no matter how diluted those words can become, they still retain truth, and the truth behind them is difficult to accept when you have spent the majority of an athletic season buffered by a sense of invincibility. Read More

Power Ranking the Best College Football Fan Reactions of 2012

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July 30, 2013
College Football, Sports
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With college football only a stones throw away (31 days to be exact!), power rankings and preseason polls are popping up all over the place. This is just lighter fluid to fuel the slow burning embers that are a result of summer sport fatigue. People go bat shit crazy about these polls and rankings as if they actually mean something. This crazy is only a primer for the reactions we can expect when foot meets ball (bear [Bryant] with me – oh, fuck these puns). These reactions serve as great supplements to good games, and sometimes they are talked about more than the match up itself. So I submit to you, deranged college football fanatics, the power rankings of some of the best reactions of the 2012 season.

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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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