All Our Little Lives
When it's #followateen, every teenager is a celebrity and a Tamagotchi at the same time
A Heaven of Hell
Punk was making up life for yourself, punk was inventing yourself, and punk was inventing the people around you, too, inflating them to the size of Gods or perhaps just cartoons. Punk was a scene and scenes are a form of myth-making.
Whips With Friends
BDSM dating sites try to bring light bwhere we enjoy darkness
We Will Never Get Away From The Sprawl
Rock and roll survives by reinventing, rather impossibly, over and over, that which isn’t permitted. For one more generation, for one more year, for one…
Intimacy as Text; Twitter as Toungue
“Internet socialization is far closer to a 19th century mode of intimacy than to a dystopian future of tragically disconnected robot prostitutes. There’s a Jane Austen-ish quality to online social life. The written word gains unmatched power and inarguable primacy.”
Heroine: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
A review of Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis
Open Secrets: Literature as Gossip in the Digital Age
It’s a great moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Todo Sobre Mi Madre: A transsexual woman stands on a stage and explains all the reconstructive and cosmetic…
Escapism and Art For Lonely People
On some level, probably the first and most immediate level, all art is fantasy.
"A State of Mathematical Grace" (How to Begin)
Rereading Enduring Love, I’m struck again by the simple perfection of its opening
And It Felt Like A Kiss: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Specter
Rock and roll has no morals. Of course, that’s much of what is and has always been attractive about it. But maybe there’s something legitimately chilling beyond where lawlessness and rebellion are sexy.
Orhan Pamuk and The National on Sadness
“Now, many years later, I understand that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. Patience and toil are not…
Lester Bangs and Rock Music As The Eternal High School Girlfriend
Did you ever want to kill what weaned you? Well, don’t try too hard. The next generation will not live for no burnout myth and…
Fringe Feminists
Creem Magazine, February 1976: Patti's heroes may be gone, but she is both with us and for us, so strongly that her music is something,…