The early 2000s were basically the exact same thing as we have now, except instead of dancing to shitty EDM at giant clubs while wasted on molly the kids danced in shitty LES dives at parties named after obscure Brit Pop songs on bad coke. Unfortunately there’s no recorded evidence of any of this happening because phones didn’t have cameras yet. Everyone had a mod haircut and wore denim tuxedos I seem to recall. Electro-clash and garage were a thing. Either way, we still have the music, which I’ve compiled in a handy playlist for you here.
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Back around the time of the Oscars when People magazine did this bit with the winners posing with younger versions of themselves we thought it was pretty cute. But for some reason this version of the same idea, in which they’ve done it with their “Most Beautiful” cover stars from over the years is kind of giving us the creeps. Plastic surgery is a hell of a drug kids. As a side note: these were the most beautiful people in the world at the time? Yikes. 80s Christina Applegate is still, however, our queen. See the rest here.
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The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who was not only one of the greatest authors in the Spanish language, but throughout the world, has died at the age of 87. Márquez was the author of such beloved and critically-adored novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, one of my favorite lines from which seems appropriate:
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
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Everyone knows all jokes about beards are hilarious and that talking about hipsters will never go out of style, but what about the beards themselves? Will we, someday soon perchance, collectively turn our backs on this brand new fashion trend wherein male humans allow the natural growth of hair on their faces as opposed to scraping it off every day with a meat hook like some sort of perverted butcher? Probably! At least according to a study done by a team of Australian researchers from the University of New South Wales.
As the study suggests, when there is a scarcity of beards among the population in general, men with beards tend to stand out, and their grooming choices make them seem more attractive to potential mates. When things start to shift and everyone has a beard, the abundance reduces our attraction. It’s an idea called negative frequency-dependent preferences.
The study explains:
We first showed participants a suite of faces, within which we manipulated the frequency of beard thicknesses and then measured preferences for four standard levels of beardedness. Women and men judged heavy stubble and full beards more attractive when presented in treatments where beards were rare than when they were common, with intermediate preferences when intermediate frequencies of beardedness were presented. Likewise, clean-shaven faces were least attractive when clean-shaven faces were most common and more attractive when rare. This pattern in preferences is consistent with negative frequency-dependent selection.
Do you want to suck on my face fur or not?
Either way, Brooks admits, no one really knows what the point of beards are in the first place.
“We still don’t really know the primary function of the beard,” Brooks said. “Some women are attracted to it, some are repelled. It is clear it is a sign of manliness, it makes men look older and also more aggressive. How much women like that depends, in a way, on how overtly masculine they like their men.”
At the very least we can all soon look forward to a new set of guidelines for our awesome hipster jokes. smh at these fricking hipsters with their smooth jowls. Only in Brooklyn am I right?
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No one makes heartbreak sound quite so appealing these days than Katie Goodman of La Sera. But the erstwhile Vivian Girls member is looking to have a little more fun on her third record Hour of the Dawn and first single “Running Wild” which premiered on Noisey.
“I wanted the new La Sera record to sound like Lesley Gore fronting Black Flag,” Goodman said in a press release. “I didn’t want it to be another record of me sad, alone in my room. I wanted to have fun playing music and writing songs with a band.” To back her nimble basslines and enchanting vocals, Goodman assembled a new band helmed by guitarist Todd Wisenbaker.
“Running Wild” fits the bill. It’s an uptempo, vibrant dash through a rush of emotions.
“We started playing faster, louder and more aggressively…I wanted to get that energy onto the album.”
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Reviews have been coming in for Anna D. Shapiro’s revival of “Of Mice and Men“, which opened this week in New York starring James Franco. Many of them, like this review from Variety, which called it ”emotionally devastating” and “flawless, beautifully acted” have been great. Others, like this one from the New York Times were…not so great:
Though Mr. Franco musters a single, perfect tear for the play’s tragic climax, I only came close to shedding one. That was in the first act, when a dog (a real one) is led offstage to be shot because it stinks. That dog seemed to have true fear and bewilderment in its eyes. It felt, well, human, in a way none of the people did, and my heart sank when I knew it wouldn’t be coming back.
Franco did not take kindly to the review, sharing his thoughts on Instagram in a post that has since been edited, but was screen-grabbed here via Vulture.
The “little bitch” comment was bad enough, but saying he should be working for Gawker? That’s just over the line.
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Do you want to look like Sky Ferreira? Of course you do, she’s on the blogs and magazines you read and that’s how entertainment and fashion works. It’s probably a lot harder than it sounds to pull off, although waking up hungover and tossing everything that comes in your path a big stink face is a pretty good place to start. The clothes, on the other hand, well you have to be some sort of rock star to find those, right? Not anymore! Her new video “I Blame Myself” lets you click through to a page on that has all of the styles she wears available for purchase on SSENSE, like a Givenchy black lambskin star patch bomber jacket, a Balmain woven mini skirt, and a Saint Laurent black leather zipper skirt. Music videos have always been commercials, but now that’s literally true. The future is weird!
Watch the video exclusively here.
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Sex is closely intertwined with death, as anyone who’s taken a basic psychology class can tell you. The parts they skipped over, and maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, is where puking up roses, making out with a lighter and a knife, dancing provocatively with a shot gun, and drowning yourself in white paint to the point that you turn into a statue come into play. That’s what you’re in store for with this brooding, romantic track from Toronto’s L3Mon.
We asked director Matt Adam to explain a little more about the method behind the madness.
“The video is purely conceptual. The overarching message is ‘Don’t let pop culture kill you.’ The model, a product of pop culture, is struggling with who she has become. The choices she made trying to set herself apart—the Louboutins, the breast augmentation, the fur coat—have had the opposite effect and turned her into everybody else. She lost herself, but now she’s fighting back. The lipstick is a metaphor for her bad habits; the wrong guy, the wrong drugs, the wrong exterior. Empowered, she chooses to cut and burn the lipstick to defy typical beauty standards – which is why her nails and lips are not done. The white paint is a metaphor for her renwewed sense of purity. She turns into a statue because the purity lives forever. This turning point represents the end of her choices, and ultimately the death of pop culture.”
Also, the model, Cass Flamini, is really hot. Is that a metaphor? Sorry, sorry, Adam explained more:
“The lyrics in the song reflect the same indulgent but destructive decisions. Whether it is the addiction to drugs, the addiction to love, or the addiction to lipstick, these behaviors have led to a breaking point, and she has one last chance to get it right. She can only hold on one more time.”
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The success of the recent Fox series Cosmos, in which Neil Degrasse Tyson explains the mysteries of the universe, has led to a predictable series of whines from creationists, saying they deserve equal time to have their views explained. Tyson, to his credit, has called bullshit on that. ”You don’t talk about the spherical earth with NASA and then say let’s give equal time to the flat-earthers,” he said.
But recognizing a demand when they see it — dumb people watch tv too, or, rather, dumb people watch tv especially, a new series called Creationist Cosmos has arrived to fill the void. The series, narrated by Timothy Simons, the sort of lovable idiot from Veep, explains things like “What do we know about black holes? What are they really?” in a way that readers of the Bible will feel comfortable with:
“They don’t exist.”
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“’1913′ is a young poet’s fantasy,” explains Steve Five of Brooklyn’s The Library is on Fire. “The idea was to fill the song with references to some favorite miscreants and decadent artists, to make a pop song out of obscure esoteric French literature and film.” The band does take its name from a line by French World War II poet, René Char after all.
“It’s not wholly historically accurate,” however, Five says. “Marienbad is referenced and it’s from the ’60′s, Alfred Jarry died well before 1913, etc. I liked the idea of creating a pop song using these obscure references,” he says.
I don’t think most people will mind the poetic license. You could dig deep into the allusions, or just enjoy it for the blast of fuzz pop joy that it is. Even better: both at once.
The Library is on Fire’s Halcyon and Surrounding Areas is out today.
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