Topic - The Awl

Beloved as half of the fantastic comedy duo "Gabe and Jenny" with Jenny Slate, Gabe Liedman co-created the amazing New York standup show Big Terrific with Slate and standup Max Silvestri. Though he now lives in LA, I caught up with him in Brooklyn before Big Terrific's fifth anniversary show to talk about his first ever televised standup and the benefit of doing a weekly show. So how was the taping? Awesome. It went perfectly. It was really fun and looking back, it just went perfectly. Can't ...

Kevin Patrick Shields turns 50 today. Remember a couple months back when everyone was all, OH MY GOD NEW BLOODY VALENTINE RECORD I'M GONNA DIE etc.? Do people still talk about it now here in the future? I'm actually asking, I don't get out much any more so I'm not sure what The Word On The Street These Days is. Anyway, many bloody returns.---See more posts by Alex Balk0 comments

I got an email from my friend Matt last night that said, "Well, you won't have Ray Manzarek to kick around anymore." This was a reference to an argument we had, Matt and I and another friend, Dave, very late at night this past New Year's Eve. We've known each since grade school, the three of us, and we got into music together in the way that lots of adolescent suburban boys do: classic-rock-first. We all loved the Doors as kids, I had a poster of Jim Morrison in my room in front of which I us...

The Mighty Boosh's Noel Fielding turns 40 today, so this seems appropriate. And also this.---See more posts by Alex Balk1 comments

Nicki likes Lip Gloss, Purses, Yoga, Pole Dancing, Uggs, Louboutins, Juice Cleanses, Iced coffee and Tattoos. @blingringmovie— Emma Watson (@EmWatson) May 2, 2012 Nancy Jo Sales published "The Suspects Wore Louboutins" in Vanity Fair in March of 2010. Sofia Coppola announced optioning the article by December of 2011; Emma Watson was cast by February of 2012; the resulting movie, The Bling Ring, opens in a month. But first! Tomorrow comes The Bling Ring—the book. Nancy Jo Sales started afresh....

Like most people who get tingles in the back of their heads, I didn't know this was a thing until recently. When I was a kid, it was a fleeting and rare experience, but so delightful. It would often happen when someone was explaining a new concept to me and it finally clicked — I thought of it as the physical feeling of being deeply interested in something. Then, a few months ago, I fell down one of those internet rabbit holes into the world of ASMR, or Autonomous sensory meridian response. I...

Tomorrow Matador Records is reissuing Come's "11:11." If you don't remember the 90s, and really why would you, it's one of the great rock records of... all time? Yup, absolutely. Come toured with Pavement and Nirvana, considered their major label options, and put out three more albums in the 90s, even as half the lineup left. And then... everyone sort of drifted away. Now the original four-some is on tour in Europe; they'll wend their way to America in mid-June. Over the weekend, we Skyped wi...

Trevor Tahiem "Busta Rhymes" Smith, Jr. occupies a singular place in hip-hop history. He is a super-good rapper, blessed with a flow as quick and nimble and flexible as any we've ever heard. He's never put together truly great songs, though, or albums you want to listen to all the way through. He's perhaps most famous for his guest appearances on other peoples' songs—beginning with his jaw-dropping verse on A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario" in 1991, he earned a reputation as the genre's great...

"An explosion caused by a meteoroid impact on the moon a couple of months ago was visible from Earth with the naked eye, according to Science@NASA. But don’t worry if you didn’t catch it — it was only noticeable for a moment." —Ugh, they are totally right about the way desensitization happens. It used to be that a simple video of the moon getting walloped by space would have kept me sated for days, but after years of poring over each and every frame of hot rock-on-moon action it barely regist...

In 2012, Hanksy was a street artist gaining a degree of notoriety for his street art depicting Tom Hanks as a Banksy rat. Since then, he has sold out multiple New York gallery shows, created a large and loyal band of internet supporters, energetic detractors, and is about to open his first show in Los Angeles, at Gallery 1988. Since my first interview with Hanksy, we have become good friends. I do not believe this infringes on my ability to ask questions about pun-based street art. EA: Hanksy...

"A recent news story claims that Tim Dog 'may be up to his biggest scam yet'—faking his own death. WREG in Memphis interviewed Esther Pilgrim, one of the women featured in this Dateline story back in June of last year, who had been one of many victims reportedly swindled out of money by the rapper, and she alleges that a death certificate for Timothy Blair (the Dog’s government name) has not been found by a private investigator she hired. The news station also did some diggin’ and supposedly ...

This being the day on which Erik Satie was born way back in 1866, let's take a couple moments to listen to a few of his compositions. If you're at work put on some headphones, and wherever you are free yourself of all distractions, and let these wash over you for a short while. You will feel calmed, refreshed and ready to face the rest of the day. And then? Weekend! Everybody wins. ---See more posts by Alex Balk0 comments

This One Playlist for Driving Around Seattle is brought to you by the all-new 2013 Buick Encore, the luxury crossover that's always the perfect fit. Learn more. It's been 22 years since Nirvana's Nevermind and Pearl Jam's Ten first catapulted what critics were then calling "the Seattle Sound" into the mainstream. And while Seattle's legacy will be forever linked to the image of the flannel-clad, generationally apathetic masses, the city's music scene has long been a source of era-defining mus...

Whether godless or godly, we all consult a private pantheon of authorities, living or dead, to gauge our comportment. We read ethics columns on subway trains and in cafes for vicarious solutions to our secret troubles. Since the days of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, the availability of emotional and behavioral self-help information has grown exponentially. In the digital age, now adrift in a wide, shallow sea of media outlets, wondering where to turn for advice only increases our anxiety. Cable ...

Once when I was driving on Route 80 in Pennsylvania, I passed a car being driven by a man holding a book open between his two hands on the steering wheel. It was a thick book, like a big novel, and he was reading it while driving 65 miles per hour on the highway. This seemed like one of the more dangerous things I had ever seen. So I hope Gunplay doesn't try to, like, look up any particular passages of scripture while he's rolling. But this is a great song.---See more posts by Dave Bry1 comments

Writer/performer Victoria Davey Spelling turns 40 today. All my copies of her work are at the library in the summer house, so instead of giving you some of the more poignant excerpts from Uncharted TerriTori ("Having it all isn’t always easy—especially when you’re a perfectionist—but with the help of her unconventional family and friends, an underwear-clad spiritual cleansing or two, and faith in herself, she’s learning to find her happy ending. Because when you’re Tori Spelling, every day br...

They have been live for one day and already the people at Previously.tv are making this a better world.---See more posts by Alex Balk0 comments

"Now the study is being done in public, using what the researchers say is a harmless chemical, already present in the city’s bouquet of gases." —Spoiler: the gas they're pushing out in the subway as a "terror test" is in the "perfluorocarbon family" but apparently that's all they'll tell us? Don't worry, your sterilization by "bouquet" will be painless. (By which I mean, your government-enforced sterility. Bloomberg's final revenge against the poors!)---See more posts by Choire Sicha0 comments

"He's a founder of Roxy Music, an architect of the Talking Heads' polyrhythmic funk and half of the production team responsible for turning U2's earnest Christian balladry into tolerable, sometimes adventurous stadium rock. In pop terms, his legacy is unassailable. As if that weren't enough, he practically invented ambient music; he's the Bill Monroe of the genre." That's how the New York Times described Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno nearly a decade ago; since then h...

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was published on this day in 1925. Set on a single day in London, in June of 1923, it tells the parallel stories of Clarissa Dalloway, who is throwing a party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked World War One veteran. A perfect high modernist work, here are some of the reasons why the book still matters. Woolf makes us care about a fancy middle-aged lady throwing a party. From the opening line of the book—"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers her...

Chanan is arguably the preeminent cat photography team in the country. The name "Chanan" is a roundabout abbreviation and concatenation of the husband-wife duo's first names, Richard and Nancy. Richard has been photographing cats as his primary occupation since 1976 (his entry into this improbable niche came by way of his mother, an avid cat breeder), and Nancy has assisted him for much of that time. Over the decades, Chanan have cultivated, and established themselves as the principal purveyo...

Happy 70th to John Symon Asher Bruce, bassist and songwriter extraordinaire. Cream was pretty inescapable when I was growing up, but I've always enjoyed this one.---See more posts by Alex Balk0 comments

Finally, our president has taken the battle home in our long war against birds. So long, eagles and hawks! Get stuffed! (If they can still stuff the twisted half-carcasses—more than half a million a year!—that remain after our wind turbines do their work.) MAKE LIKE THE BEES AND DROP DEAD. Oh man, this total environmental collapse is going to be awesome!---See more posts by Choire Sicha0 comments

"The psychological definition of loneliness hasn’t changed much since Fromm-Reichmann laid it out. 'Real loneliness,' as she called it, is not what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized as the 'shut-upness' and solitariness of the civilized. Nor is 'real loneliness' the happy solitude of the productive artist or the passing irritation of being cooped up with the flu while all your friends go off on some adventure. It’s not being dissatisfied with your companion of the moment—your fr...

I still can't figure out what this reminds me of, but whatever it is, I like it. [Via]---See more posts by Alex Balk0 comments

At this point we are pretty much all keeping our head out of the stove until the return of "Arrested Development," right? I am going to watch all those episodes so hard! In fact, I am not even watching this trailer, that is how fresh I would like to come to the show. But you may have a different way of doing things, in which case you should enjoy the trailer on your own time. In related "Arrested Development" news, did you know that Awl pal Will Leitch is the designated media expert on the sh...

I congratulate you, my dear Cornelia, on having acquired the valuable art of writing. How delightful to be enabled by it to converse with an absent friend, as if present! —Thomas Jefferson She hesitated, and then, impulsively, "I wonder if it would be too much to ask you for your autograph?"Ralph then attached the Telautograph to his Telephot while the girl did the same. When both instruments were connected he signed his name and he saw his signature appear simultaneously on the machine in Sw...

Recently I went to Carnegie Hall for, I believe, the second time in my life, to see Gabriel Kahane and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra perform Gabriel's "Guide to the 48 States." I went to college with Gabriel, where our closest contact was probably when I was an assistant stage manager on a musical he co-wrote. Since then he's established himself as a songwriter, singer and composer, one of the polymath hopes of classical music. The New York Times Magazine called him “a one-man cultural Cuisinart....

This is one of those stories where the most charitable thing you can say is that there are probably additional factors beyond the issue at hand that have contributed to its denouement, but regardless, nothing you see here could exactly be considered a good advertisement for the act of smoking or those who participate in that activity.---See more posts by Alex Balk0 comments

If you're like me, you've been waiting 26 years to find out what happens next in Lou Gramm's "Midnight Blue" video. What becomes of our hero, the oily gearhead bohunk in the black leather jacket, and his sexy paramour, the restless one who did not care that he was just a troubled boy looking for a double-dare? What of the next day? After they ride off under the moon in that gorgeous cherry-red convertible? What does this world have in store for them once the sun has risen and shined its light...

Here's the new video from one of our favorite young artists, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire. In it, the Brooklyn rapper raps two new songs, "Noble Drew Ali" and "The Cauldron." I don't know why he called the video "Nightfall at the Thames." But then, I went to school in New London, Connecticut, and there's a river there called the Thames. But it's pronounced with the "Th" sound like "the," and "ames" like it rhymes with "James." So who knows why anyone does anything the way they do it? Not me.---Se...

I had started to post the new video from stately Brooklyn art rockers The National here a moment ago. But then Pitchfork alerted me to the fact that the video was a remake of the one above—from '80s Russian band Zvuki Mu. And the original is better. So we'll go with that. The National have a new album, Trouble Will Find Me, coming out on the 20th, and this past weekend they played a single song for six hours straight at the MOMA PS1 museum in Queens. Here's the set list from that show.---See ...

"It's hard to remember now, but at one time, MTV really was watched just like commercial radio was listened to: you would turn it on and see what came around, and if you particularly liked a video, you'd wait a while and hope you heard it. That's what half the slumber parties of my adolescence were about: waiting for Michael Jackson or Duran Duran. We don't wait very much anymore. It's not just that this model of MTV largely went away, or that getting most of your music listening through the ...

They are really doubling down on that ugly-ass mosquito. [Via]---See more posts by Alex Balk0 comments

Highly educated Americans tell the world that young people are increasingly distracted or emotionally incompetent due to incessant pointer-clicking and unrelenting thumb-pressing. From the stuffed genre of airport-friendly socio-criticism, we’ve learned that networked technologies are making us lonely and small-minded. Apparently no one has ever sent Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, or Sherry Turkle, of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Te...

Green Day---See more posts by Dave Bry0 comments

Here is a reenactment of novelist Martin Amis getting upset because he has come to view the scene in Brooklyn, where he moved two years ago, as "terribly transactional" and "populated by conventional posers." [Via]---See more posts by Dave Bry0 comments

Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet finally gets the Criterion Collection treatment, and if, like me, you are one of those people who is still buying physical objects for your library in a world where everything will soon be streaming you should absolutely put this purchase at the top of your list. I haven't seen the entire movie in years, but just looking through the clips available online was enough to remind me of just how visceral, trying and true the thing is. Discussing the release, the New York...

It's just another manic Monday. With special guest stars Jonathan Ames, Ben Greenman and The Breeders. (Breeders tickets are currently starting at $41 on StubHub.) And yet: ---See more posts by Choire Sicha0 comments

I had never before heard the phrase "the cigarette community." But like so much of what comes out of the mouth of veteren Queens rapper Noreaga, I find it to be an irresistible mix of tough-guy ridiculousness, bizarro-world genius and huggable humanity. Talk about "no filter." The guy is just an amazing personality. UPDATE: Joe Budden responds!---See more posts by Dave Bry1 comments

Here is a new video from the hardest working man in showbiz and his two bandmates. Besides an album coming in June, a newly released book about heavy metal and a newly relaunched magazine, Awl pal, ego trip founder, Mass Appeal editorial director and White Mandingo Sacha Jenkins has just signed on to co-write a forthcoming Beastie Boys memoir—one that will deviate from the standard memoir format into what the Times' Ben Sisario describes as, "a pastiche of voices, images, irreverent humor and...

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would have been 63 today. Four years have passed since her death, but her absence is felt more, not less, with each. More than ever Sedgwick’s writing generates further writing and thinking from those who engage with it. Sedgwick once said about reading affect theorist Silvan Tomkins: "I often get tired when I’m learning a lot." Her writing has the same effect—calming and invigorating—generative and tireless even if also sometimes tiring. In her posthumous collection, Th...

Country musician Larry Wayne Gatlin turns 65 today, which is pretty much all the excuse I need to run this clip here. If you stick around long enough the Gatlin Brothers play "All The Gold In California," but I am mainly putting it up to remind (or inform) you that this is what America was once like, and there weren't a whole lot of other options if you weren't into it. It's a funny old world. (Younger readers who are completely baffled might find some clarity here, but it's not going to expl...

"Is it peculiar that she twerks in the mirror?" Janelle Monae asks in her new duet with Erykah Badu. The answer is that if I looked, sounded, danced, wrote music or made videos even a small fraction as awesomely as either of these two, I wouldn't do anything but twerk in the mirror all day every day for the rest of my life. There is no way to not love this.---See more posts by Dave Bry0 comments

"To millions of fans worldwide, he was the trend-setting, backwards-pants wearing one-half of Kriss Kross who loved making music. But to us, he was just Chris—the kind, generous and fun-loving life of the party. Though he was only with us a short time, we feel blessed to have been able to share some incredible moments with him. His legacy will live on through his music, and we will forever love him." —Donna Kelly Pratte eulogizes her son Chris, a.k.a. "Mack Daddy," who was found dead yesterda...

---See more posts by Dave Bry0 comments