“’The Pretty One’ is intermittently charming, occasionally touching and entirely lacking in credibility. The script, in which self-consciously playful banter gives way to sudden floods of loud feeling, might have worked better as a string of emoji.”

High Maintenance // Matilda from Janky Clown Productions on Vimeo.

NBC has an exclusive deal in the States to show the Olympics. Right now, as I write this, the Olympic Opening Ceremonies are happening live in Sochi. I just learned that there is a country called Dominica, which is geographically close to but not the same as the Dominican Republic. Cool fact! But it’s the kind of cool fact I had to learn through a garbage bootleg BBC stream originating in Estonia or Mars or something because NBC is waiting another eight hours to show the Opening Ceremonies. (Right now, NBC is airing the Steve Harvey Show.) Anyway I was just told about this show High Maintenance, which is on the internet where anyone can see it anytime, and it’s very very funny, and you can watch it instead of the Steve Harvey Show right now. From Splitsider:

Created and written by husband and wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, executive produced by them and Sinclair’s manager, Russell Gregory, and brought to life by a stellar cast and crew,High Maintenance follows a cycling weed man as he makes his deliveries to different New Yorkers in their native habitats. Nuanced in its voyeurism and deft in its subtle comedic breaks, this is more than a funny show. It’s honest and true, unapologetically and consistently straight with no regard for Internet video conventions or goofy stoner genre norms. One might even call it “high art” (sorry, I had to).

There are only 12 shortish episodes, but so far they are all excellent. Enjoy them!

“Top designers are pouncing on the celebrity bonanza surrounding Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death by sending out photos of stars wearing their brands while paying their respects to the legendary actor.”

by Johannah King-Slutzky

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Key

1. Carlie Trosclair, Kowalsky Intervention: Room 1, 2012.

2.

This is the one hotel room @Sochi2014 have given us so far. Shambles. #cnnsochi pic.twitter.com/RTjEkmyan3

— Harry Reekie (@HarryCNN) February 4, 2014

3. Urs Fischer, You

4. Sochi (via Business Insider)

5. Jim Woodall, You Have To Keep Building To Make It Stand, 2013

6.

#sochi good news , I have Internet , bad news, it’s dangling from the ceiling in my room… pic.twitter.com/WPp560Nr5c

— Simon Stanleigh (@Stanleigh77) February 2, 2014

7. Julien Gardair, Cheick_&_Mat, 2014

8.

You had one job, Sochi — http://t.co/MgDCKh5FNY pic.twitter.com/ushbXhFg0R

— Sporting News (@sportingnews) February 5, 2014

9. GMN Projects, “Corporate Bathroom Interventions”

10.

Watch your step @Sochi2014 — I’ve noticed on walkway and on sidewalks that not all man holes are always covered. pic.twitter.com/a5Nv4wu5iA

— Jo-Ann Barnas (@JoAnnBarnas) February 1, 2014

11. Josh Kline, Share the Health (Assorted Probiotic Hand Gels), 2011

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Spa and fitness center at Gorki Grand hotel…you get in shape by putting it together? pic.twitter.com/jqqOCP9Wt5

— Chris Dufresne (@DufresneLATimes) February 5, 2014

13. Vlad Loariu, Pilot and Bombardier

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Wondered why my #sochi2014 hotel room had a fire hose. Safest #Olympics yet? http://t.co/B16J5MiF4l pic.twitter.com/Pi3pXZ0Xjw

— Kathy Lally (@LallyKathy) February 2, 2014

15. Gordon Matta-Clark, building cut

16. Félix González-Torres, Untitled (Public Opinion)

17. Yolanda Ceballos, Environmental Sculpture Study #6

18. Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements

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On the way to the media center. The street is not quite ready yet. #SochiProblems pic.twitter.com/5lA4tmGoNz

— Simon Rosner (@SimonRosner) February 6, 2014

Johannah King-Slutzky writes poems and blogs about TV here. Follow her on twitter @jjjjjjjjohannah. Photo copyrights belong to the artists and the journalist-photographers, who are, actually, also artists.

Twenty-five years ago today a nation still adjusting to the idea that Ronald Reagan was no longer its president saw the release of an album called As Nasty As They Wanna Be by a Miami hip-hop collective named 2 Live Crew. While the band’s arrest and subsequent trial for obscenity have justly received the lion’s share of historical coverage, it seems fitting on this anniversary that we recognize the important work the band did in raising awareness for and discussion of horniness in American society. It is difficult to comprehend (or remember, if you are of a certain age) just how heavy the proscriptions against the mere mention of horniness were back in 1989 — particularly living as we do in an era where apps are competing wildly to be your medium of choice in which to express your desire to do or accomplishment in having already been able to do sex in its many forms to people you know so that other people you know can read about it — but many Americans found it so difficult or shameful to even admit that they might be experiencing bouts of horniness that they were unable to use the euphemisms of the period to articulate such feelings (these were mostly metaphors relating to the plumbing and chimney-sweeping trades). If you were suddenly transported back to 1989 right now the first thing you would notice was how people were actually able to pay attention to anything for more than thirty seconds, but the second thing that would make a powerful impression on you is just how embarrassed and scandalized the everyday citizens of that time would be as soon as you mentioned horniness, which, as someone who lives here in 2014, you would do almost immediately, because why would we ever bother to have a feeling that we didn’t tell the whole goddamn world about? (At this point it is necessary to mention the unpleasant fact that some of the ethnic and racial characterizations set forth on the album are what the social theorists of the era would describe as “problematic,” but, without seeking to minimize those quite valid complaints, this is not the forum in which to debate those matters, plus you need to weigh the offset value of introducing a whole new generation to the work of Stanley Kubrick.) In any event, the importance of this record in regards to the public discourse surrounding horniness cannot be overstated. Today we celebrate an album that, as much as anything else in the time since its release, made us who we are: a nation that is indeed as nasty as we want to be.

“’There are recognizable patterns of each person’s body odor that remain steady….Therefore, every person has his/hers own odor and this would allow his/her identification within a group of people at an accurate rate higher than 85%. This result leads the way to improve personal identification that is less aggressive than other biometric techniques being used today.’ The system could eventually be installed in airport to ‘sniff’ passenger as they pass through.”

At the Scarborough Sea Life Sanctuary in the northeast of England (England, for the uninitiated, is a series of small wet rocks in the North Atlantic Ocean), penguins have been given anti-depressants because penguins are apparently pretty perceptive and are aware of the awful place in which they live. This winter has been the wettest on record in Scarborough, and while the Humboldt penguin (native to coastal Chile) is perfectly capable of dealing with brutal cold, these particular penguins are no match for the psyche-destroying sleet of an English winter. Hopefully they’ll be kept away from the knives.

Photo by Fruggo

“Here Are the Twitter Feeds Soledad O’Brien Finds Especially Helpful”

“That’s the great thing about baseball, you never know what’s going on.”
 — Hall of Famer and legendary Mets voice Ralph Kiner died yesterday. He was 91.