“Simon’s points are well-taken, but this article is pretty damn amazing to someone like me who was in junior high when Friends was at it’s peak. I won’t say I knew people who overtly coveted their lives, but the disconnect and bizarre implausibility of everything was not something that we were aware of. We had no perspective on what a 20-something should be doing or how they should behave and what their lives should look like. I never realized how unrealistic it was, what terrible gender stereotypes it promoted, how problematic the relationships were — they were just funny, charming, and good-looking. It makes a lot of sense now reading this, like all of the incongruous puzzle pieces fit now that the center piece has been placed.”

“It costs up to $67 a ticket for a ride to the top of the Empire State Building. But the view from the highest point in Brooklyn atop a sleek glass-and-aluminum apartment building is free — at least with purchase or rental of an apartment in Downtown Brooklyn’s newest tower. The new building, the first big condominium development in Downtown Brooklyn to come on the market since the financial crisis in 2008, is part of a second wave of residential development that is also bringing high-end groceries and retail stores to the borough’s once-faded central business district.”

Whatever crimes against music Stephen Ray Perry may have committed in his long career — and I am thinking, in particular, of the song that ended that show, you know what I’m talking about — he will always have this piece of work on the credit side of his ledger, which is more than so many of us can say about our own accomplishments. This is a pretty perfect song; I suspect it has something to do with the rising action in the chorus. It is also somewhat embarrassing to like, but that is true of so many things in life that we all secretly enjoy. Anyway, happy birthday Steve Perry. You are 65 today, and no one can take this away from you.

Canadian Prime Minister Singing ‘Hey Jude’ Like Something Out Of The Bible, And I Mean That Part At The End Where Everybody Dies

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s tight relationship with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been noted by many commentators as they observed the Canadian leader taking a large delegation on a state visit this week. Going beyond speeches and diplomatic policies, Mr. Harper showed another sign of this chumminess when he performed the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ at a state dinner in Jerusalem, while Mr. Netanyahu and his wife Sara beamed at their table,” and also I’m going back to bed and I recommend the rest of you do the same because nothing good can come out of the rest of this day.

Where are the plows @BilldeBlasio ??? @kallos ???? @newyorkpost No Plows uptown!

— MollyJongFast (@MollyJongFast) January 21, 2014

Yesterday afternoon, vicious short-sighted monsterpieces went howling to the worst piece of paper on the whole east coast, like the crazy petulant vampire-children they apparently are:

“I can’t believe de Blasio could do this. He is putting everyone in danger,” said Barbara Tamerin, who was using ski poles to get around 81st Street and Lexington Avenue.

“What is he thinking? We’re supposed to get up to a foot of snow and nobody on the Upper East Side is supposed to blink an eye? I can barely get around and I’m on snow shoes! All of the buses are stuck and can’t go anywhere. He’s crazy. We need Mayor Bloomberg back!”

First of all: LOL. It has to be read to be believed, but of course Molly Jong-Fast, who is still only 35, bless her, was a ringleader. These silly Lhota enthusiasts started banging their tin cans about class war early in the afternoon yesterday — at 12:41 p.m.! — when there was like maybe two inches of snow, about the total destruction faced by the Upper East Side yesterday. Except… here’s the funny thing.

The cross streets of the Upper East Side aren’t exactly the city’s most-important arteries. Why would they be? And so they got plowed in due time.

Are we seriously going to hear ignorant rich halfwits barking in the trashy pages of their house organ every time they don’t get what they want exactly when they want it for the next four years? That seems both torturous for all of us and also beneath them. Can’t you enjoy your power and wealth with a little more dignity and with more calculated backstabbing? If you want to set de Blasio up for ruin, surely you can hatch a more elaborate plot than griping on Twitter. Go watch “Revenge” or “Scandal” or whatever and scheme up a more captivating plot.

Why Do So Many Romcoms Use Songs By The Cure?

by Kristina Monllos

Have you ever wondered why The Cure is used to soundtrack so many romantic comedies? Have you ever stopped to think about what that implies, that this British deep-goth turned pop-rock band hits a particular sweet spot, like the meet-cute, for this dying movie genre? A few months ago, I went to go see About Time, a middling romcom by the same writer and director of Love Actually, and when I heard “Friday I’m in Love,” something in me snapped.

I couldn’t enjoy the montage. It was Rachel McAdams and a surprisingly alluring ginger man (Domhnall Gleeson) running around, changing from chic outfit to chic outfit, falling in love! But nope. Nothing. I’m no grinch. I have a soul. I can feel things. And most of the time, even though the genre has gone downhill (or Domhnall!), I love a good romcom. I love the ridiculous ways that people get together, the over-the-top gestures that would make a real person seem insane if they did them. I even love the fatuous feats they face to really be together.

But, hearing that song again, I was annoyed, and couldn’t help but think, really!?! This was the best you could do? By now, that’s a song usage that feels too right, too expected, too done. I couldn’t respect it. Of course, this floundering genre recycles the same storylines and tends to focus on white affluent couples and just how wacky a life of privilege can get when love is thwarted, but that’s besides the point and also a totally cuckoo rabbit hole that we shouldn’t go down. The audacity of the music recycling is what pissed me off (the audacity of the other and way more problematic stuff pisses me off too, but let’s talk about that another time). Do they — they being the movie industry puppeteers, natch — really think we don’t notice this pattern? And are they now trying to use songs by The Cure to condition us to have particular emotional responses to new romcoms based on past romcoms we’ve seen, even if the ones we’re seeing have progressively poorer writing and acting? Is Robert Smith involved? Could he even be behind it?

According to IMDb, one or more of The Cure’s songs has been featured in 19 films in the genre, of their 84 soundtrack credits — all since 1997, which was the band’s 21st year.

For good measure, I considered an equivalent British band, The Smiths. Since 1986, one or more of The Smith’s songs have appeared in just nine romcoms. Oh, and yes, they do overlap. In three movies, both of the bands are used. (See terrible diagram below; do note one of them is a parody but still hews to the conventions.)

When I considered the romcoms that use The Cure, more questions popped up: why are so many movies from the early 00s using songs from the 80s and early 90s? Does this say more about the writer/director/editor than the audience? Age-wise, according to IMDb data, the minds behind the romcoms sampled tend to be in the 30s to 60s range, which makes sense.

Of the 25 films sampled, 21 were directed by men and four were directed by women. As for the writing, 18 were written by men, three were written by women and four were written by men and women.

The movie industry is dominated by men. This is an unfortunate fact, but it’s a fact. Putting together the data I’d gathered, I found myself thinking of another cliche: the white male music nerd. Remember how Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character in (500) Days of Summer geeks out because Zooey Deschanel’s Summer sang along with The Smiths song he was rudely blasting from his oversized headphones in their shared elevator space?

Sure, (500) Days of Summer was about showing how wrong JGL’s nerd was in his expectations for his relationship with Summer. So then I wondered: who are we rooting for in romcoms? Have we been following the romcom’s music nerd all along?

There were certainly more male protagonists in this data bunch than female protagonists. But, looking over the films listed, the male characters aren’t necessarily all music nerds. (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, with the best soundtrack of them all, does feature the male protagonist becoming a music nerd, but that’s alright.) Almost all of the boys and men involved would be defined as nerds in some form or another (Jimmy Fallon’s Red Sox obsession in Fever Pitch, Jesse Eisenberg basically being himself in Adventureland).

Identifying the protagonist certainly helped point us in some direction regarding soundtracks, but it didn’t quite answer the question. We weren’t watching some variation of High Fidelity over and over again.

So what about… the endings? Could it be that using “Just Like Heaven” or “Pictures of You” or “Close to Me” or “In Between Days” or “Boys Don’t Cry “ or even “Love Song” (the movie industry sure does use a variety of songs by The Cure) points to a happy ending for the film’s lovebirds?

As with the larger sample of all romcoms, a vast majority of Cure-inflected romcoms end with our couple together. (Plus, (500) Days of Summer shouldn’t even count.) So maybe that’s it. Maybe a song by The Cure has become a marker that, even though we may cry a bit, we’ll leave the theater feeling all warm and hopeful. But which came first in this jumble of correlation and causation? What if The Cure, through repeated exposure to romcom plots, has come to symbolize such fuzziness? In either event, if both The Cure and romcoms themselves are engaged in a fight against cynicism, well, I might just be okay with that.

Kristina Monllos is a Rhode Island-bred, Brooklyn-based feminist and writer who has an unabashed love for romcoms and her dog.

★★★★ A pale gray ceiling of cloud blew away into blue sky. In the apartment lobby, a baby squawked while its plastic baby-cover was being zipped over its quilted baby-bag. Two women in full winter gear on the downtown 1 train were accompanied by a third in a knit dress and tights, sleeves just past her elbows, with no sign of a hat or coat in her possession. How had she gotten to the train in the first place? Shadows pointed up Seventh Avenue, and light deflected back and forth across the cross street, two bounces before it hit the ground. In the time it took to buy warm socks and new jeans, the downtown sky went from clear and dazzling to lumpy gray. Wind shoved the shopping bag around. Uptown, the river was a woodcut pattern of sunlit polygons and their shadowed counterparts, accented with whitecaps. In the time it took to salvage a braise that had baked dry and to convince the toddler to play ball at the playground instead of in the apartment, the sky had cleared out once more. There were little slicks of ice on the climber and crusts of salt in the open asphalt yard. The swings were freely available; there was a scrap of napkin in the coat pocket big enough for the runny nose. Little clouds were shooting past the building tops at high speed. The toddler turned numb and wind-ruddied, but did not want to leave. On the way back, a gust flung dirt up the avenue from where the new house of worship, having long since finished its own entrance, stopped even pretending to work on rebuilding the public sidewalk. Even with yards of advance notice, there was no way to keep the grit out of the mouth. Indoors, the toddler began to thaw out. Another blast of wind punched out one of the heavy panels on top of the rising apartment building, where the next floor would be poured, and tossed it upside-down. A layer of pink ink had been added to the design on the river.

★★ Cold but not burning cold. The sidewalks were busy; children off school were bundled up but not necessarily fastened. An approximation of brightness almost came through the thinnest part of the southern clouds. A napkin blew straight up over a subway grate. Surprising numbers of people were going hatless. The afternoon sun came out emphatically and unexpectedly, then went away just as emphatically.

I Went To A Disclosure Concert And All I Felt Was My Impending Mortality

by Jeva Lange

Sunday was my 7,738th* day on the planet. It was also my first Disclosure concert.

Disclosure — a British electronic duo made up of brothers Guy (8,277 days old at the time of publication) and Howard (a mere 7,195 days) Lawrence — had a pretty great 2013, releasing their debut album Settle with singles “White Noise” and “Latch” both going gold in the UK. Settle itself went to #1 on UK charts, and has been nominated for a Grammy. The boys, along with “Latch” vocalist Sam Smith, made their US TV debut on “Fallon” last night. They’re going places. It’s exciting. I’d wanted to see them on a small sliver on their journey upward, so I’d bought tickets for their final show at Terminal 5 in New York City.

Sting (22,757 days) was reportedly also at my Disclosure concert. Unfortunately, Sting — and everyone else of his age group — was nowhere to be found. By all appearances, most of the attendees had been alive for less than 6,000 days. (Mary J. Blige, who joined Disclosure on stage for a song, had released her first album before most of the audience was born.) I, approaching 8,000 days, felt old.

It was the first time I’ve really felt old, actually. There, in that converted warehouse, I was surrounded by rampant, unabashed selfies, boys awkwardly side-hugging their dates, girls doing that dance thing where they weave their arms around, flashing the Xs** on the backs of their hands. My own date (7,559 days) was also younger than me, so I was really, actually the oldest person in the room. Or so it felt.

The average American woman (which I am) lives 29,665 days. That means on the day of the Disclosure concert, my life was about 26.0846% over in an ideally average world. As my days chug along at a steady rate, I can’t help but feel — no, not irritation as the 6,000-day-old teens called for people in the balconies to pour beer down their not-yet-legal throats, no, not annoyance as these children lit cigarettes when the band came out because cigarettes are what’s edgy when you’re still two years away from 18 — but comfort in passing on the future, my future, our future, to the spirited youth of Disclosure concerts, and of the world.

*7,738 days works out to a little over 21 years. Let that make you feel as old, or as young, as you want/can handle.

**I, admittedly, also had Xs on the backs of my hands because when I was coming into Terminal 5, I showed the bouncer my very-legal ID card and he was like “okay cool” and marked my hands anyway.

“Juliana and her friends were desperate to get in because they would probably never have another chance: Sunday night’s event was 285 Kent’s last. Although the club has only been operating for two and a half years, it’s become New York’s most prominent D.I.Y. venue, a performance space run without institutional financial backing, a formally trained staff, or many of the necessary permits.”