New York City, May 19, 2013
[No stars] The newsprint said one thing, but the dark gray outside said something obviously worse. Doing anything nice would be impossible, and doing the necessities would be nasty. Waves of misty rain swept by, streaking the windows. Taking an umbrella or leaving it behind seemed equally futile. Two young men were out in badly-fitting ponchos, possibly made from clear trash bags. They were as well equipped as anyone. Water soaked up into shoes and leaked down through the scaffolding. People winced under their hoods or impeded others with their umbrellas. On the lone dry spot, against the wall of a bank, a busker sat with a guitar, singing a stiff-paced "Let It Be." In the course of seven blocks, the rain had gone from misting to driving. A Fairway worker mopped the floor inside the doors over and over again. Under an umbrella, a dressed-up woman huddled with a man in a pale blue mortarboard-and-gown set. The outboard shoulder of the gown was darkening. All day, the gray stayed, turing to a dirty yellow on its way into a soggy night.
Talking to Colin Quinn About His New One-Man Show, 'Tough Crowd', and Being the King of Twitter
There have been many chapters in Colin Quinn's career since he first appeared on MTV's Remote Control in 1987. The former SNL castmember went on to host the short-lived but brilliant Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn on Comedy Central; more recently, his unique Twitter persona caught the eye of the New York Times. Following on the success of his Broadway one-man show Colin Quinn: Long Story Short, his "history of the world in 75 minutes," Colin Quinn's new show, Unconstitutional, aims to tackle "226 years of American Constitutional calamities." I caught up with after a preview performance of his show to talk about constitutional conventions, comedy nerds, and how sincerity infuriates people.
What was it about the Constitution that made you want to do a show?
Well, it's because it annoys me [that] all this time, everyone's always talking about how brilliant the Constitution was, and I didn't get what was brilliant about it. How can I be so stupid that I don't get the Constitution? So I said I'm going to write a show about it. I wanted to do another show anyway, but I wasn't going to make it, like, "Oh I did world history, now I'm doing American history." Of course, that's what I did, but I wasn't planning that. I was planning to not do that, so people wouldn't go, “Look at this idiot, what a loser. Now he's gonna do a American history.” But that's what I am, and that's what I did. READ MORE
"Professional tennis players are among the world's most finely trained athletes, with bodies that are honed to laser precision to compete in multimillion-dollar matches. Why, then, are so many top-seeded tennis players falling victim to mononucleosis, or mono, the 'kissing disease'?"
23 Replacement Similes For Humans To Use Once All The Animals Are Dead And No One Knows What "Animals" Were
Now that we're well on into our planet's sixth mass extinction event, and with recent news that we're charging towards environmental catastrophe faster than ever, it's time we start thinking about contingencies not in terms of "if" but in terms of "when." Let's say, just for argument's sake, that the human species will survive. Some people, like Annalee Newitz, author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction, think we will! But even if she's right, certainly, there will be changes we'll have to get used to. Besides the hilarious "Great, I'll have beachfront property" jokes the wittier among us will continue to make, our lexicon is sure to change. For example, similes that use animal imagery—we'll need some new ones, since no one will no understand what most "animals" are (or were). Here's a start, with future generations in mind. READ MORE
If you are still grieving over the year's biggest tragedy thus far, here is some news that might briefly blot out the pain: you can catch the remaining episodes of "Don't Trust the B—- in Apt. 23" on Hulu and ABC.com and some other computer-related places.
Save Your Complaints About The Heat For A Bit
"Residents of Manhattan will not just sweat harder from rising temperatures in the future, says a new study; many may die."
The Tingle Whisperer
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 won't go into the details of what this terminology means, but go ahead and read the Wikipedia article.
Basically, what I discovered were hundreds of YouTube videos designed to give viewers the tingles. “Whisperers” speak quietly to the camera, sometimes tapping their nails on things or describing items like jewelry collections. The whisperers are usually young and female, although there are some men as well. Many of them also do “role play” videos, in which, for example, they pretend to give viewers haircuts or makeovers, or pretend to fill out their information in a doctor's office. So far, these videos haven't produced head fireworks for me, but they are mesmerizing to watch.
One of the most famous whisperers, and one of the whisperers recently featured on a This American Life segment, is Maria of the YouTube channel GentleWhispering. Her videos regularly have hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views. Maria is blond and charming, with a soft Russian accent, and when I contacted her to ask for an interview, she replied enthusiastically. When we spoke, she immediately put me at ease. READ MORE
"In a time when feelings of insecurity run high and people shy away, the selfie is an instant of boldness."
One Of The Best Rock Albums Of All Time Returns Tomorrow
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 with Come's Thalia Zedek about getting the band back together. She was in Berlin, getting lost; she also has a new album out herself, from the fine folks at Thrill Jockey.
I always think of you as a New Yorker, but you live in Boston. Do you… like Boston?
I do like Boston a lot. It’s a really cool town. It’s a very liveable town. I like New York too, but Boston is a little easier to be a musician in: places to play, clubs, rehearsing. I’ve never had a problem getting a show in New York living in Boston. I loved living in New York but I kind of didn’t have my shit together. It’s so competitive. So many people from everywhere trying to make it there.
It’s nicer now that we’re older.
I was kinda screwed up when I was there. But Boston’s actually a really cool town! I know a lot of people don’t see that. It’s a good small big city, tons of music, and it’s pretty and it’s pretty small in a sense. They say it’s the most European of American cities.
So would say Henry James. What’s it like going on off on a big tour again?
I’ve been touring with my solo band fairly consistently, it’s not like I haven’t toured in 20 years. It’s really cool. I would say that … none of us have really changed that much. It’s all coming back to me. Everyone’s changed a little bit but not actually that much.
In my make-believe mind about your world, I imagine you guys making this dark album and tearing each other apart the whole time.
I think we weren’t tearing each other apart. To us, it was what came out of us when we started playing with each other. I guess we’re all sort of, we had our separately—we’re a good combination of people. It didn’t come out of fighting, but it’s where our heads were at. We weren’t like 'we’re so depressing, why don’t we write something less depressing.' We'd all kind of met before in various ways. Chris used to be in the Barbecue Killers. They were insane, they had this singer Laura Carter that I went out with briefly, and they toured with me with Live Skull and we got in a lot of trouble. Arthur never got in trouble, he was a good boy. I was hanging out with a lot of Athens peole. And they both ended up in Boston, and I knew Chris from a mustual friend—when you live in New York, you have a visitor every weekend. So we'd all been through a little bit of stuff by that time. I was probably 27 or something. READ MORE
"So maybe 'hoping it doesn’t rain' isn’t the best business model for an outdoor food and wine festival in New York City?"
Busta Rhymes Is 40
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 greatest scene stealer. (Andre 3000 has since stolen that crown.) What Busta is, though, I think, is hip-hop's greatest video artist. He is the very definition of "animated" and his collaborations with Hype Williams in the late '90s set a new standard for rap video—showed how they could be something more than, better, beyond, the music they were set to. Busta turns 40 today.* Let's celebrate with five of his groundbreaking performances. READ MORE
"New research suggests chronic smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, and increasing age are all associated with increased oxidative damage to brain tissue."
—I am not sure what they're trying to say here, although that probably proves their point.
Terrible Combination In Your Mouth Explained
You know, if you gargle with bourbon none of this is ever a problem.
"If you like using online tools to hunt and gather your food, take note: Seamless and GrubHub, two of the better-known players in the mobile food-delivery business, announced today that they will be merging their services."
I Made $570K Last Year, But I Don't Feel Rich (In Fact, I Feel Worried)
Jake Smith is a name I've made up for the person who sent me this email:
I'm a physician in my early forties. I make $450-500K. I read a lot about finance and I know that technically I am in the 1%, but I don't feel rich at all. I don't know if it was the way I was raised or because for a time I was living paycheck to paycheck or if it's because I have three kids (and hence, eventually will have three tuitions to pay), but I don't feel wealthy yet. Maybe it's because I live in an affluent suburb of a big city and most of my neighbors seem to be doing really well. I don't know. Have you run across other folks like this?
I had not, personally. So we arranged to speak on the phone. READ MORE
I don't know what you did from Friday to Sunday, but I spent the weekend putting together the proposal for the book I have so long refused countless entreaties to write. Boo Hoo Hoo I'm Sad: A History Of Why I Suck is pitched as a memoir—because, really, that's the only way to sell anything these days; unless it happened to you (or, you know, "happened" to you) apparently it does not appeal to the only prurient interests that remain susceptible enough to manipulation in our post-literate society to entice the purchase of a piece of print carrying no perfume samples within its covers—but is less a recounting of all the terrible tragedy I've experienced in my life than it is an examination of why I feel everything so much more strongly than the rest of society, most of whose members seem perfectly capable of conducting the quotidian activities of existence blissfully unaware of the rampant anguish that comes at them from every corner. Why is it possible that almost everyone else needs not contend with the staggering wave of sorrow under which a simple stroll down the street submerges me? It can't simply be because my emotions are more finely calibrated or my empathy levels are much more attuned to the manifest misery humanity wears on its sleeve. I mean, yes, that's part of it, but it can't just be that; in the absence of some kind of higher power who has designated me as the back upon which the suffering of the world must be borne (although how much easier would things be if I could just blame God for everything? A lot! A lot easier!) an alternate explanation, probably involving my superior intelligence and considerably more powerful capacity for compassion, needs to be found. So the book will be an attempt to understand how it is that I am seemingly the only one who sees the sadness while the rest of you continue with your callous indifference and insensitivity to the agony all around. Again, this is not the work I wanted to write, but more and more it is clearly the work I have to write, particularly now that the new edition of The Big Book of Crazy is causing so much controversy. I mean, if we can piggyback off that I can totally retire and be sad from the comfort of some tropical island. Email me if you're interested.
Why A News Portal Snapped Up A James Deen Furry Cosplay Gif Site
Yahoo buying Tumblr is digital gentrification.
— Jason Chen (@diskopo) May 19, 2013
The question of the weekend is: "Why did Yahoo! spend one-third of their cash on hand to buy a company that by all accounts is about to run out of money?"
And here are some fairly sober answers, including: "if you were given 1.1 billion dollars, would you be able to build a service used by more than ten million people for more than an hour a month? You could not. That's a bigger audience than American Idol, or for that matter anything else (except Facebook or Twitter)." That's very attractive!
(I mean of course if you gave me $1.1 billion I'd be like "screw blogging, let's PUT SOME CATS ON THE MOON AND START CIVILIZATION OVER," but I suppose that's not really relevant.)
Also, counterpoint:
@djacobs @mike_ftw Clearly though you *can* build something the size of Tumblr for less than a billion dollars because Tumblr did it?
— Rusty Foster (@rustyk5) May 20, 2013
And here's Yahoo's CEO: "The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience." That is quite literally the money quote. But, AWESOME! Hooray, someone invented advertising that will enhance user experience finally! I cannot wait for it to be unleashed on the Internet at last!
Of course, and here's Tumblr's CEO: "Fuck yeah." Oh… well said, sir.
The real question before us: will Tumblr always be a safe space to put our complaints about the TSA opening our James Deen dildo boxes? Only time will tell, see you in 2017.
FLASHBACK: Picture it, February 2009. Tumblr's then-lead developer Marco Arment mocked talk of a Yahoo! purchase of Tumblr (rumored sale price: circa $50 million): "I hope they let me work on some of the many exciting projects at Yahoo! Who needs a high rank at a small company in New York? I want to move to California and get stuck in traffic every day on the way to my midlevel engineering job where I sit in a cubicle all day and can't make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking." Good stuff.
Moon Explosion Video Not Explodey Enough
"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 registers; I need something considerably more graphic and extended to excite me now.
Let's Talk About Books, Baby, Let's Talk About You And Me
Things to do include: Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman, Katha Pollitt on Muriel Rukeyser at McNally Jackson, and Gary Greenberg with Gideon Lewis-Kraus on the DSM at BookCourt.
Hanksy Makes Good: From Art Goof To Art Star
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, we meet again. The first time I interviewed you was in February of 2012. How much has your life changed since then?
Hanksy: Well damn, time flies. And so does my "art career" apparently. It's been hectic and nonstop. When we first chatted I had just wrapped up my first show and I was unsure what to do next.
EA: And now you're about to do your first west coast show at a new gallery.
Hanksy: Yeah! Crazy. I sadly moved away from exclusively mashing up my namesake with iconic Banksy images. And with this new work came new opportunities. I had a second sold-out NYC exhibition back in December of 2012 and now I'm out in LA, ready to give the West Coast some light-hearted pun in the sun.
EA: Can you talk about moving away from the solely Tom Hanks/Banksy image? What was the impetus?
Hanksy: Well after my first show, I was wondering how long or far I could take this whole pun thing. Like how many times could I beat the horse before it ceased to exist? So I made myself a deal: put up one round of work, all revolving around celebrity puns that did not involve my century's greatest thespian. And if the public or my lonely internet fans liked it, I'd keep going. And the response was great. Probably better than anything I had received previously. So I kept going and going. And here I am today. Killing the pun game, yo!
EA: Were you concerned about criticism that you were a one-trick pony? READ MORE
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