Posted
by Lauren Beck
on Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 2:22 PM
There is a part of me that feels for this woman, who I assume has been shamed into removing the above "surprise wedding video" from YouTube (it no longer appears on the site), though only after she pimped it to the Huffington Post (in a tweet that's also since been removed)* and saw the comment section wreckage it incited. Because of that, there is another part of me that is so pleased someone made a bootlegged copy of it. After learning she's a proprietor of organic juices, that side has won out. And now here we are. Viewers should watch the video, shown at the leading lady's wedding as a gift to her husband, with caution (check out Buzzfeed for the full experience). Meanwhile, the organic-juice slinging woman who is very much in love should gently be reminded that, despite feeling she "just may have it all" as professed in the song, that's not necessarily the case.
Here are some things she doesn't have:
1. a good grasp as to how the Internet works 2. humility 3. the chance to see LCD Soundsystem perform live 4. notable vocal ability 5. a healthy relationship with her cat** 6. an understanding of appropriate places to drink macchiatos (i.e. not in the 'hood)
But, hey, don't sweat it, pretty lady in the video. Everything's okay-o when you're with Tadeo, and everything is better for the rest of us knowing we aren't the ones in this video. Happy weekend, world.
*Though this tweet still exists. **From the YouTube credits: "Hats off to our beautiful cat Balka."
Posted
by Jeff Klingman
on Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 2:16 PM
Never forget.
A week and a half ago, German lunatic/genius film director Werner Herzog filmed a Killers' concert in the American Express-funded "Unstaged" series. Preceding it, he filmed a six-minute mini documentary about the band and their roots. That sponsored web-content follows previous entries, in which a fairly popular band is paired with a respected auteur in sorta random, Secret Santa fashion. You could argue that Terry Gilliam's apocalyptic whimsy matched pretty well with Arcade Fire, or that Gary Oldman's grim-faced dedication to craft made him a kindred spirit to Jack White. But how to explain German alien Werner Herzog on a dream-date with self-considered "makers of very important American rock music" The Killers? Was he, as with Grizzly Man, there to document the dangerous delusions of a man dealing with a force beyond his ability to control? (I guess that would be Brandon Flowers trying to claim the Springsteen everyman mantle? Which wants to eat him?) Was he the only director inexplicable enough to be excited about the Killers in 2012???
The previous Unstaged broadcasts have been notable as live web events more than lasting documents, all about the thrill of being there, even over a laptop screen. Lingering chatter post-broadcast has been pretty non-existent. But I've been thinking about this Killers/Herzog thing for a week and a half! In blog posting terms, that's like graduate thesis study! So, I'm sorry, but we are going to have to break this thing down at length...
Posted
by Lauren Beck
on Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 11:59 AM
A rainy Friday in Brooklyn calls for a very specific kind of music. The vocal delicacy of Johanna and Klara Söderberg, the Swedish sisters behind First Aid Kit, wrapped in those earthy tones of theirs, hits the spot. If right this second you listen to them promise to "be your Emmylou or your June" on early 2012 single "Emmylou", it will make your day better. If their songs can bring Patti Smith to tears, who knows what they can do for you.
There's even more loveliness to come this weekend. The band will be stopping by Irving Plaza on Saturday and Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday, staking their claim in the millennial Fleet Foxes-Bon Iver craze with this year's record, The Lion's Roar. We checked in with Johanna and Klara on the road, as we've been known to do with bands on the road, to find out what five things have been helping them cope with the touring life.
Looper: After a lackluster four or five weeks at the box office, it seems to me that Rian Johnson's buzzed-about sci-fi thriller Looper might've done well to claim an August release date, District 9 style, rather than staking out the last-September-weekend sci-fi slot, Surrogates style—although probably lots of people involved would be ok if Looper matches that movie's $38 million gross. Actually, Johnson's limited-release track record means that he's poised to have one of those movies where it will probably make more money on its first day than his first two features grossed combined. Those movies, Brick and The Brothers Bloom, are two of my favorites of the past 10 years, so while I am rabidly, insanely, maddeningly anticipating Looper (which reunites Johnson with his Brick co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and then adds time travel and Emily Blunt), I'm also pretty secure in assuming I will like it very much. For me, a substantial part of the story here is the possible return of Bruce Willis, who—like so many stars of the late 80s and 90s—seems to be grappling with how to balance faded movie-star mojo with supporting parts.
AndrewAndrew at the 2011 Dumbo Arts Festival, Image courtesy Jane Kratochvil Photography [c] DAF, llc.
If there's one solid reason to go to the Dumbo Arts Festival this weekend, it's hosts and DJs AndrewAndrew. The co-identitied DJs can turn just about anything into a party, oozing one sample at a time from Richard Anthony to Rickshaw Dumplings. We asked them what we should be excited about.
Lucky for us, they might have some good material to work with here. On top of their open studio previews, the Andrews speak of food trucks and light sculptures, and their show at the VIP party alone should be well worth the trip. Additionally, an underground dance movement is mentioned. Could it be? Is flexing really the new vogueing? Is something culturally significant going to happen at the Dumbo Arts Festival? You can’t not be curious.
Frances Ha begins with snatches of dialogue, bits of conversations. Noah Baumbach, who directed the movie and co-wrote it with real-life paramour Greta Gerwig, has always enjoyed catching bits of talk, often decontextualized: Kicking and Screaming opens with a tracking shot that catches several choice lines ("I'll tell you the worst thing about losing a foot"), and his barely seen pseudonymous feature Highball brims over with brilliant half-heard conversations. But in Frances Ha—which marks a return to the twentysomething years after Baumbach graduated to the family dynamics of The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding, as well as the arrested-fortysomethingness of Greenberg—the conversational fragments are even more elusive, even less jokey, though still funny. Those cuts keep the pace snapping, even when Frances (Gerwig) isn't going much of anywhere.
The pattern has been set: every 10 years, Brian De Palma will do a one-for-me palate-cleanser to plainly and fully indulge his filmmaking obsessions, stylistic tics, and indulge his somewhat bonkers, fever-dreamy idea of what watching a thriller should be. In 1992, he shook off Bonfire of the Vanities with the cult-friendly Raising Cain; in 2002, he chased the mainstream space-adventure Mission to Mars with the movie-movieness of Femme Fatale; now, in 2012, he follows up his little-loved Redacted with the glossier Passion—or at least, he does in spirit, as the movie will probably not see actual release in 2012, but is playing the New York Film Festival this weekend.
Posted
by Lauren Beck
on Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 2:40 PM
James Franco, he of many things, introduced the world to Daddy last week, a musical collaboration with his RISD buddy Tim O'Keefe. Of course the band is influenced by Motown because the idea came together while Franco was filming The Wonderful Wizard of Oz prequel (called Oz) in Detroit. And of course the song that accompanied the announcement was "mostly spoken word" because Franco is nothing if not a mostly serious artist, you guys. With the band's second single now being offered up on SPIN.com, we thought it was time to see what Daddy has up its sleeves.
Posted
by Corinna Kirsch
on Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 12:01 PM
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Axl Rose is suing art writer and gallerist Mat Gleason. The Guns N’ Roses frontman and his lawyers issued a cease and desist letter to Gleason in advance of his gallery’s upcoming solo exhibition by photographer Laura London, Once Upon A Time...Axl Rose Was My Neighbor. What’s the fuss all about?
Posted
by Mike Conklin
on Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 12:00 PM
At the very beginning of the newly released video for "Luxury," off Azealia Banks' Fantasea mixtape, a title screen informs us that it is not in fact merely a music video like all the other music videos we've been watching for the past 30 years, but "a film by Clarence Fuller," which of course makes it more artistic and more important and just all around fancier and better and probably more expensive or whatever. Except in actual fact, it is just a plain old music video, and not even a particularly good one!
Posted
by Lauren Beck
on Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 11:40 AM
In today's edition of "5 Favorite Things," that recurring feature where we check in with bands en route to New York and ask what five things are helping them cope with life on the road, Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark renews her trademark winsome charm, concentrating on earthy elements rather than comforts from home. We bet she's really good at yoga too. The L.A.-based quartet's second proper album, Incorruptible Heart, comes from a similar place, waltzing through a field of country, folk and pop, surrendering to whatever emotion is at hand—weather it be melancholy ("Just Passing By") or hope ("There's Perfect Love for Me"). Listening to it here is the equivalent of a spiritual cleanse.
Once referred to by the Times as a "North American songbird," Stark leads the band to Glasslands on Saturday night (for those who missed them at Mercury Lounge yesterday), while birds fly above her head and squirrels play at her feet.
Posted
by Audrey Ference
on Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 9:30 AM
Shit's about to get WEIRD.
Duck sex is just beyond weird. It is unlike any other kind of animal sex, I feel pretty sure. While you're standing there like a chump, throwing breadcrumbs, a duck is contemplating when it's going to whip out its 15 inch, corkscrew-shaped, lymph-filled penis. Yes. Ducks often have dicks bigger than the rest of their bodies.
Their sex act also has to happen in a half-second, because the lymph that inflates that giant curly fry can't hold it taut for more than a second. Oh and, of course, female ducks have vaginas that corkscrew the OTHER WAY, so only the fittest males with the biggest and most maneuverable penises can jam them in there in the few moments they have for their lymph to do its thing. And all duck sex is a surprise to the lady duck, so guy ducks have to be expert at sneaking up, rapidly inflating, jabbing, and then presumably swimming off quickly before the surprised lady duck beats the shit out of them.
Do other waterfowl procreate this way? No, of course not. Can you imagine a swan with a giant curly dick? Ducks are just the total freaks of the natural sex kingdom. A duck sees you reading Fifty Shades of Grey and tweets "LOL humans smh,", right before ripping a massive curly boner. Don't even try to out-freak a duck.
Posted
by Audrey Ference
on Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:30 AM
Guardian UK
ICM, the company that brought you the .xxx top-level domain, is launching a .xxx-exclusive search engine this week. I spoke with Stuart Lawley, the chairman and CEO of ICM, about the search engine. Or, it was supposed to be an interview about the search engine, but it started off with him scolding me about my previous reporting. I, like many people, have been less-than-complimentary about .xxx in the past.
SOME people felt that ICM was being given an excuse to shake a bunch of companies down for money, because they would be forced to purchase the .xxx versions of their non-porn sites, to keep someone from opening up, say, disney.xxx and sullying their precious brand. Even lots of porn folks felt like they were being pushed into paying up for the .xxx versions of the .com sites they already owned. It's also slightly more expensive to buy a .xxx than a .com, though, as Stuart says, you'll "spend more on inkjet cartridges for your printer" than any single domain name in a year, no matter how much it cost.
What Stuart asked me to share with you is that there was an error in my reporting here. In fact, the nice people at ICM aren't going to charge non-porn people who own the .xxx versions of their sites an ADDITIONAL fee if they launch .porn, .sex, and .adult. They only had to pay that fee one time. Per url. Seems fair. Who doesn't want to pay to register a bunch of urls they'll never use? I hope we're clear now.
In any case, whatever your feelings about .xxx are conceptually, search.xxx is ICM's next step toward attempting to make the .xxx world a safe haven for the porn producer and consumer. All .xxx sites are going to be scanned daily for malware, and any site not up to snuff won't be indexed by the search engine. To me that seems like the most useful part of this product.
They're also saying it will be easier to block kids from seeing porn, which seems a bit silly. I don't think the .coms of porn are going anywhere any time soon. Search.xxx does have the ability to be customizable, which I think is interesting. You can set your sexuality (though of course the effectiveness of that is reliant on good metadata), and you can customize the look of the search page, which is sort of adorably dorky. I picture Steve Carrell lighting candles and turning around a picture of his mother before attempting to masturbate in The Forty Year Old Virgin.
I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know how good the actual search engine part is, but the other advantages he mentioned—that it won't leave embarrassing jack-off-related autocompletes in your google search box, that you don't have deal with non-porn search results in your quest for dirty videos—seem like not that big of a deal to serious consumers of porn. I think erasing recent history is pretty s.o.p. after a personal browsing session. And of course, you can easily filter a google search to only .xxx urls. Still, the concept of a dedicated browser for your porn needs isn't a bad one, and if they can get porn consumers to start using the .xxx-exclusive search, that would be a huge boon to smut peddlers on .xxx.
It does sound like search.xxx is just the first of several .xxx-exclusive products ICM is planning to roll out. Stuart also mentioned a universal payment system in the near future. That sounds exceedingly useful. I think a safe, one-click way to make the often-small payments porn sites require (without it showing up on your bank statement or paypal, especially), would really be key. Like I said before, it sounds like ICM is attempting to create a porn island in .xxx, and to ensure that the island conforms to best practices for users on both sides. We'll see how it goes.
Posted
by Lauren Beck
on Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 12:29 PM
Last week, noise enthusiasts Weekend released a rough mix of "Sirens," a new song from their as-yet-untitled 2013 album. While it continues along the path of their quite excellent debut Sports, it's much less a squall of sound and more of something lurking around the corner—dark, but with a faraway feel.
The also just moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn, which is far more important to our bruised egos after this Forbes debacle. Being able to include them in the catchall "Brooklyn music" description pleases us to no end. They're one of the good ones. See for yourself tonight at the band's first hometown show at Cameo Gallery—one that comes greatly recommended. Maybe bring them a housewarming gift. Maybe a couch? One free of bed bugs would be best. To get to know your new neighbors, we talked to frontman-bassist Shaun Durkan on reasons for the band's move, but also hipsters and rats.
Posted
by Zachary Gomes
on Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 11:50 AM
The author as a young(er) man
Park Slope native Ned Vizzini is the author of four books including It's Kind of a Funny Story, which was made into a movie starring Zach Galafianakis two years ago by the directors of Half Nelson. His latest novel, The Other Normals, about a role playing game made real (sort of), was released today by Balzer + Bray. He's also a writer for ABC's Last Resort and MTV's Teen Wolf. (He is also sometimes a contributor to this magazine.) We spoke to him on Gchat—just like the kids do these days!—about what percentage of his books are real and who writes the best hate mail.
lmag: Though you live on the West Coast, Brooklyn and New York City are still your settings of choice. How does your hometown inspire your writing process?
nedvizzini: I think you have to live in a city for more than two and a half years to set a story there. I also haven’t experienced growing up in Los Angeles—a particular experience that involves car accidents. One thing that I loved about growing up in Brooklyn was that once I could ride the subway, it was a world of strange possibilities. I could see people vomiting or making out at any time. That atmosphere of being amid the unexpected is good for a book.
Posted
by Corinna Kirsch
on Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 11:26 AM
If you read The L Magazine, chances are you like Brooklyn. Manhattan may have more art per square foot in Chelsea and the Lower East Side, but over the last several years, Brooklyn has cultivated its own art pockets. The Morgan L is a busy little section on that front, and this weekend, we went out there to bring you some gems. You like bright things? Dick pics? Playful sculptures? We found some art just like that.
The contested race between incumbent, reform candidate Lincoln Restler and Vito Lopez-backed candidate Chris Olechowski for Democratic District Leader in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area is still up in the air nearly two weeks after the election, with more recent counts showing Restler down by 31 votes.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:30 AM
Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro yesterday called Lady Gaga "a slut" during a press conference to launch a campaign at keeping teens away from drugs, NY1 reports. "To me, she's not an actress," the elected official said. "She is a slut in the pure word, in the pure meaning of the word."