Leon Crawl

This will be a great show!

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:29:02 -0400

This will be a great show!

Day of the Outlaw: why Parks & Recreation constantly irritates me despite its undeniable comedy chops

Mon, 07 May 2012 22:15:31 -0400

Day of the Outlaw: why Parks & Recreation constantly irritates me despite its undeniable comedy chops:

P

Parks & Recreation constantly irritates me, despite its undeniable comedy chops, because the character breakdown of the show goes pretty much like this, every week:

Leslie seems nutty and high-strung, but she’s really a sweetheart.

Ron seems like a principled loner who just wants to be left alone and eat breakfast meat, but he’s really a sweetheart.

Tom seems like a delusional pest and a poseur, but he’s really a sweetheart.

Chris seems creepily intense, but he’s really a sweetheart.

Andy seems like an idiot, but he’s really a sweetheart.

April seems like a sullen misanthrope, but she’s really a sweetheart.

Ben seems like an uptight dork, but he’s really a sweetheart.

Ann seems like a sweetheart, but she’s really a sweetheart.

——————————————————————————————————

This reversal stopped meaning anything a long time ago. AND COMEDY DOESN’T NEED TO BE SWEET.

This is all true

Young Randy Quaid looks more than a little like Eminem.

Sun, 06 May 2012 15:46:57 -0400

Young Randy Quaid looks more than a little like Eminem.

The Last Detail

Sun, 06 May 2012 15:30:00 -0400

— Don’t worry about a thing. I’m hustling this guy. I’ve got him where I want him.
— Maybe he’s hustling you.
— Maybe he is. But this is not the time to argue about it. If I don’t win, we don’t leave New York!

I may have been wrong about the random thing

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:43:36 -0400

I don’t know.

"This week’s episode ends with a scene unlike any I’ve seen on television before, or in any form,..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:05:00 -0400

“

This week’s episode ends with a scene unlike any I’ve seen on television before, or in any form, really. In it, Hannah returns home after a bad day, distraught. She’s been diagnosed with HPV and she’s discovered that her ex-boyfriend is gay. The guy she’s been sleeping with is an idiot and a liar. She’s alone, on her bed. And she does what we all do now: she goes online.

Specifically, she gets on Twitter, where she faces a box designed for a hundred and forty characters. She types: ‘You lose some, you lose some.’ Self-pity. But she doesn’t hit send. She starts over, this time more explicitly: ‘My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy.’ Again, she deletes; starts over. Finally, she taps out what amounts to a code: ‘All adventurous women do.’

No stranger who reads those words will know quite what they mean. They’re a credo, a pose—it’s a phrase she heard from a friend, who was repeating what another friend said, giving her a sophisticated attitude with which to face HPV. (Even in the offline world, we cut and paste.) And yet that phrase becomes more expansive than any reference to a medical diagnosis, because Hannah’s telling other people—and of course herself—that her worst experiences are not humiliations and stains: they’re adventures. (They’re material.) As she types, the music rises: Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own.’

When her roommate Marnie arrives in the doorway, Hannah tells her about her bad night; the women talk and laugh and dance together. There’s no clear transition in this scene between what’s online and what’s off—Hannah doesn’t have to choose, one leads to the other. She’s upset, and she’s saying so in public, but that online blurt is mediated, and it’s edited: a skill she’s learned through practice, because she’s grown up learning to do that. It’s a way of speaking that lies between writing and conversation, intimacy and theatre.

”

- -Emily Nussbaum on Twitter, Technology, and Girls, quoted on the New Yorker blog (via amyrebeccaklein)

I thought it was a very good detail that the music didn’t just “rise,” but switched to the Robyn song from something sad-sounding, because iTunes was on random. I like that everything that happened at the very end was thus also basically random. Who knows if it would have happened if iTunes had gone to something down-tempo and morose?

APRIL 25 // ALL ASIA BAR // CAMBRIDGE Thanks to Aurora for the...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 09:03:00 -0400

APRIL 25 // ALL ASIA BAR // CAMBRIDGE

Thanks to Aurora for the poster.

Audio

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:02:34 -0400

Anti-nuclear activists Francis Crowe, 93, of Northampton,...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:21:59 -0400

Anti-nuclear activists Francis Crowe, 93, of Northampton, center, and her friend Anneke Corbett are escorted off the property of the local corporate offices of Vermont Yankee owner Entergy Corp. on Thursday in Brattleboro, Vt., after being arrested for trespassing.

REFRESH // APRIL 25 // ALL ASIA BAR

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:07:12 -0400

stories by

GEOFF EDGERS

PETER GRAFF

PETE L’OFFICIAL

PENNIE TAYLOR

CHRISTINA XU

with musical guest JON CARTER

WEDNESDAY NIGHT!

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:09:28 -0500

WEDNESDAY NIGHT!

Photo

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:20:55 -0500

I wrote about the rise of PUNK STUDIES in the Globe

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 12:22:16 -0500

The story’s about why punk resists scholarly analysis more than other subjects. The basic answer is: the term has been associated with a dizzying range of values/ideas/styles over the years and no one can agree on what it even is.

One thing I didn’t get to say in the piece is that this isn’t just frustrating to academics, it’s frustrating to angry 13-year-olds too. I’m convinced that every rebellious kid who became a teenager after 1980 has been bewildered to realize that not even experienced punks seem to know definitively how a punk is supposed to live/act/dress/think.

When I was 13, I wrote a hit song about this for my three-piece band, Section 69, called “Punk Mentality.” The first verse went: “What the hell does ‘DIY’ mean? / and how about a ‘zine’? / This fucking punk mentality! / All these words I’ve seen…”

It’s the only honest punk song anyone ever wrote.

Since everyone loves this game, here are some academic papers I didn’t get to mention in the story:

“No Future No Longer: Pop-Punk and the Second-Wave Legacy “

“The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine”

“Haunted by the Spirit of ’77: Punk Studies and the Persistence of Politics”

“Is it Punk to Protest? Punk Rock’s Rhetorical Features”

“Never Mind the Scholar, Here’s the Old Punk: Identity, Community, and the Aging Music Fan”

“Living the Punk Life in Green Bay, Wisconsin: Exploring Contradiction in the Music of NOFX”

“More Than Music: Notes on ‘Staying Punk’ in the Church and in Theology”

my nephew Tima wrote a poem

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:05:08 -0400

I copied Joe’s paper,
And I got a big fat F.
I thought Joe’s a genius
But I mixed him up with Jeff.

“This canvas belongs to a group of pictures in which Degas...

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:25:42 -0400

“This canvas belongs to a group of pictures in which Degas painted women looking at art in museums. In reference to another work in the series, the perversely contradictory and impish Degas nonetheless remarked to British painter Walter Sickert that he wanted to ‘give the idea of that bored and respectfully crushed and impressed absence of sensation that women experience in front of paintings.’”

How come in the choreographed dance sequences in the video for “Super Bass” Nicki Minaj...

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:42:42 -0400

How come in the choreographed dance sequences in the video for “Super Bass” Nicki Minaj is one of six girls, rather than seven?

Seven would have meant there were three back-up dancers on either side of her. Six means she’s one of three to one side, instead of in the middle.

THIS IS HAPPENING ON FRIDAY AND IT IS THE MOST FUN YOU’LL...

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:58:18 -0400

THIS IS HAPPENING ON FRIDAY AND IT IS THE MOST FUN YOU’LL HAVE IN MONTHS. IT ALWAYS IS.

PLUS GOT SOME BOLT BUS JOKES COOKING FOR IN BETWEEN ACTS.

ON LUCIFER YOU MOURN; YOU BLASPHEME AND THEN YOU'RE PIOUS. BUT YOU'RE BROOKLYN'S FINEST WHEN YOU'RE PERFORMING SURGERY. AND YOU'RE BEST WITH A SCALPEL WHEN YOU'VE GOT A TEE TIME TO MAKE.

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:23:56 -0400

ON LUCIFER YOU MOURN; YOU BLASPHEME AND THEN YOU'RE PIOUS. BUT YOU'RE BROOKLYN'S FINEST WHEN YOU'RE PERFORMING SURGERY. AND YOU'RE BEST WITH A SCALPEL WHEN YOU'VE GOT A TEE TIME TO MAKE.

Thanks to Aurora Andrews for this rabbit. April 29th,...

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 10:52:37 -0400

Thanks to Aurora Andrews for this rabbit.

April 29th, don’t miss it.

REMINDER REMINDER REMINDER

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:21:03 -0400

Refresh #6, ft. Tom Socca, Keyholez, Juli Weiner, Alice Gregory and Molly Young, and Akiva Gottlieb takes place at Happy Ending on Friday, April 29th at 8pm.

A new poster by Aurora Andrews to mark the occasion coming this week!