I wrote somewhere in the range of 1000 blog posts and newspaper articles this year, and you probably never saw me post about any of them on Facebook or Twitter or on this site, so you likely didn't even have any idea I was up to anything at all. I apologize for that. It's pretty safe to say that the vast majority of them were mediocre to shitty at best, so I've picked out a few of my favorites from the things I wrote this year on music, drinking, politics, and how horrible everything is from PTSOTL, Bullett, the Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, Slate, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, Interview Magazine, Vice, Alternative Press, MTV Buzzworthy, and your mom's Facebook wall for you, the person that doesn't exist that would want such a thing. I know you're probably inundated with your typical Top 100 Things Luke O'Neil wrote this year from all of the other blogs, but this is the definitive one.
We have a few holiday traditions in the O'Neil family. We gather around the piano singing “I'll Be Home for Christmas.” My mother pesters me about when I'm going to give her some grandchildren (never mind that she has five). And then later, once all the other guests have gone, we sit around the kitchen table while my mother cries about the saddest moment of her life.
This year, out of the blue, we got to skip the nagging and the crying. My mother had gotten three new grandchildren all at once a few months before, when a long-lost older sister of mine—the subject of her annual tears—materialized in our lives like a plot contrivance. I know it’s a cliché to say that life feels like fiction, but what else do you call it when a mysterious stranger appears from your past? Slate
If it hasn't happened already, it's likely that somewhere down the line each of us will have been the mark of an attempted online scam of one kind or another. You may imagine some shadowy cabal of Nigerian gangsters targeting naïve senior citizens unschooled in Internet security, or anonymous-style hackers trolling for credit card information, and you probably wouldn't be too far off. But what does it mean when the face on the other end of the scam looks a bit more familiar? What if it's your own? Huffington Post
Kitty Pryde is Our New Favorite Tumblr-Wave Rapper
The third installment of ROFLCon just happened in Boston this past weekend. It's the festival where the memes we've laughed at all year crawl out of our computer screens and into the corporeal world on some Ringu shit. I interviewed a couple of them beforehand, and quite frankly, it was a little disorienting. There's an inherent problem in interacting with someone who's famous on the internet. You don't necessarily want a meme to become a person, because while a meme is funny, a person is just a dumb old human being.
This week's hot music meme, by the way, is , The Daytona Beach, Florida, rapper whose new track “Okay Cupid,” and the handful of songs she's put up on her BandCamp page in the last year, are the funnest, and funniest, rap tracks I've heard in recent memory. Vice
Music Writing Cliches That Need To Be Retired
Is there a field of writing more predictable and cliché than music journalism? Besides all of the other types of entertainment journalism, I mean. (And not so fast there regular news journalism.) Writing about music is so typically cliché-ridden (a phrasing itself that’s cliché), that it has its own cliché aphorism to describe its pointlessness that is in itself one of the most overused clichés when talking about how music writing is cliché. Harsh but true, but having been a music journalist myself for many years, it’s not racist when I say it. A lot of my best friends are music journalists, actually. Bullett
Why Supporting 'Buy Local' Campaigns Is More Conservative Than You Think
We can all agree that Black Friday is an unequivocal evil, right? Many of us spent a significant portion of the weekend chuckling at the Day of the Locusts-like stampede of porcine consumers doing flatscreen-judo on the killing floors of Walmarts throughout the country, all the while decrying mindless consumerism even as we echoed the mindless reactionary talking points on our corporate overlord Facebook. Go back and look in your social feeds for evidence of the pontificating outrage. Other, more stridently-political among us stumped for Buy Nothing Day. Huffington Post
From the mind of Morrissey: on celebrity worship, his new book, and Boston
When you're a veteran music journalist, especially one as miserable and jaded as I am, it takes a lot to get you excited for an interview. Then again, it's not every day you get to talk to the only musician you've ever really cared about, one who's played a huge role in shaping your worldview and identity over the years. That day still hasn't come, sadly, but, as consolation, I did manage to score an email interview with Morrissey, the legendary erstwhile Smiths frontman and solo artist whose current tour brings him to Boston October 5. Boston Phoenix Boston Phoenix
LA Weekly Names ’20 Worst Hipster Bands’, Is Bad at Their Job
This post from LA Weekly about the ’20 Worst Hipster Bands’ is making the rounds today, and for good reason; it’s remarkably prescient. A lot of these bands didn’t even exist back in 2005 when this must have been written, a time when the concept of hipster band jokes seemed fresh. Bullett
The NYT Explores the Meaning of Hipster Irony in 2012 Think Piece
“If irony is the ethos of our age — and it is — then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.” And if think pieces on hipster irony are the obsession of our age — and they are — then this New York Times essay is our archetype of infinitely recyclable nothingness.
In this lotioned-up piece “How to Live Without Irony”, Christy Wampole fists forth yet another investigation into the meaning of hipster detachment, coughing out clouds of dust like a serial masturbator on the day’s fifth go-round. Bullett
Prefix Mag, Amanda Palmer, and why your music and writing has no value
The two biggest music media controversies of the week come from the outrage over Amanda Palmer's asking for musicians to contribute to her tour for free (particularly egregious, critics say, after having such a successful Kickstarter campaign), and Prefix magazine's payment scale coming to light, an insult to the pure-hearted souls who labor daily over a hot mp3 stove to bring you people fresh content. PTSOTL
Who wants to read 15,000 words on Boston's cocktail history?
In today's Globe I've got a pretty big story in which I try to trace the evolution of the Boston cocktail revival back to its start, and a family tree style graphic that traces its path through the best bars today. Anyone who doesn't find that sort of thing interesting should promptly skip this post, because it's pretty nerdy and soooo long I can barely even process it. PTSOTL
Protect the innocent
I'd respect gun rights cowards more if they spent more time on the "security of a free state" than the tyranny of babies and mall shoppers. And stop trying to shift the focus of the issue to "mental health", unless you're talking about how insane it is to worship instruments of murder. I wrote this last year after the last worst tragedy in this country that no one could have ever possibly seen coming, and, surprisingly!, it's also still true, because nothing has changed. This part, in particular, is still relevant. PTSOTL
Scene Report: 22 Must Hear Bands From Boston
Hello there and welcome to Boston, or as we might say it in Boston, “fuck you.” You may be somewhat familiar with our city from our really-good-at-almost-winning-championships-but-not-quite-sports-teams, our army of ruggedly insufferable blue collar film dandies, or the biggest nerds from your hometowns who all go to school “near here.” Music fans will of course be familiar with our success stories, like Amanda Palmer, Soul Clap, and Passion Pit, and every other important indie band in the nineties that the kids these days are trying to sound like. But there’s a lot more to the city, like all the homespun, folksy racism. The truth is we really do have an insane wealth of musical talent here, partly from the onslaught of college kids too special to get real jobs after they graduate, and partly because many of us feel a community service obligation to atone for the elderly nutsack stain of Steven Tyler’s cumulative resume. Here are ten bands, some brand new, some longer in the tooth, that you’ll want to check out from the big Bean, as no one calls it. Bullett.
Yes, this is the time for gloating and rubbing it in
In the wake of the election you've probably seen multiple variations on the idea that it's now time to put aside partisan bickering and "come together," be it from friends on your social media feeds, or from politicians of both the losing, and winning side. Winners like Senator-elect Tim Kaine of Virginia, to pick one of many, who said something to the effect that "voters sent a message to Washington demanding 'cooperative government.'" Elsewhere grumpy scolds have been reminding us that "no one likes a poor sport" or a "gloating winner." To which I say: that sounds like a loser talking. PTSOTL
The RNC Wants to Take Away Your Porn. Maybe That's Not a Bad Idea?
Of all the alarming aspects of the Republican Party platform—and there are many, particularly if you're the owner of a vagina, or a brown vagina, or a poor vagina—there's one particular revelation contained therein that has got the internet's denizens paying attention. According to a press release earlier this week from Morality in Media, a "faith-based" "non-profit" Mitt Romney intends to make a war against porn a part of his presidency, if elected. Vice
Are These the Best 100 Opening Lines in Literature?
“‘What’s it going to be then, eh?” asked Luke O’Neil, handsome, clever, and not so rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad, who awoke one morning from uneasy dreams on a bright cold day in November when the clocks were striking thirteen, and decided that he would compose the blog himself today, saying, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is that it’s a truth universally acknowledged that all good listicles are alike; each bad listicle is bad in its own way..." BullettIf you must post Instagram pictures of every cocktail you order, at least make the pictures good
While many have complained at one point or another about friends posting photos of meals and cocktails on Instagram, the practice doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon, so we might as well try to get a little better at it. Here are a few tips for Instagramming like a pro, or at the very least, a slightly more interesting amateur. Boston Globe
Discovery: Mean Creek
While it goes against everything we believe in as music journalists—that stringing together a series of pivotal reference points for a young band is about as lazy as it gets—in the case of Mean Creek, their catch-all grocery list of inspiration goes a long way toward explaining why they're the band most likely to break out of the fertile field of Boston rock this year. It's meant as a testament to the vibrance of the four-piece, not a slight, when we say that there are echoes of everything from The Replacements to Echo and the Bunnymen, The Pixies, Buffalo Tom, The Talking Heads and Bruce Springsteen to be teased out of their just-released second record, Youth Companion, on Old Flame Records. Sorry to break the rules. Interview Magazine
Why Do We Fall Out of Love With an Artist or Band Once They’ve ‘Made It’?
There’s been a lot of attention given to Girls star and writer Lena Dunham’s publishing deal this week, a reported $3.5 million for her first book, Not That Kind of Girl. Much of that has come in the form of bitter griping, of course, as is the natural course for the internet; nevermind, ‘we hate it when our friends become successful,’ we hate it when anyone becomes successful. But one thing we do like is when someone seems like they’re going to be successful. That’s the thesis at the heart of this interesting piece on Slate today, “The Irrational Allure of the Next Big Thing.” Bullett
Should More Chefs Tell Customers to GFT on Social Media?
Everyone loves a good public meltdown, and this one from Boston’s French restaurant Pigalle is certainly a doozy. Responding to a displeased guest, who likened the pumpkin pie to vomit, the restaurant’s owner/chef Marc Orfaly unleashed a tirade of invective that would make, well, a chef blush. Bullett
Is America Finally Ready for an All EDM Radio Station?
Finally recognizing that this whole E.D.M. thing that the kids are fingering each other to in public isn’t going anyway anytime soon, the ground was broken on Thursday night for a radio station that the owners are calling “the first real E.D.M. station in the country.”
That’s great news on its face, if only because anything that wrests the country’s radio stations away from their Ms. Havisham-like vice-grip on nostalgia-fetishishism should be considered a step in the right direction. Bullett
Michelle and I went to Oaxaca, Mexico last week, the state where mezcal is produced. We got to tour the mountainous areas where the agave is grown, and stayed in Oaxaca city, a culinary destination with ancient buildings and cobblestone streets rich with history. In short it was gorgeous, and amazing, and educational, and in a lot of ways I feel like I'm still there, largely because I've been shitting my brains out every hour or so for the past few days.
Michelle and I went to Oaxaca, Mexico last week, the state where mezcal is produced. We got to tour the mountainous areas where the agave is grown, and stayed in Oaxaca city, a culinary destination with ancient buildings and cobblestone streets rich with history. In short it was gorgeous, and amazing, and educational, and in a lot of ways I feel like I'm still there, largely because I've been shitting my brains out every hour or so for the past few days.
Gawker: America’s #1 Sensationalist Photo-Shaming Blog
Gawker, the nation’s media conscience, has a post today criticizing the New York Post for running a photo on the cover of a man about to be murdered on the streets of New York City. “To paraphrase Marge Simpson,” Cord Jefferson writes, “the Post turned into a snuff film fanzine so gradually, I hardly even noticed.” Included along with the post is the photo in question. Bullett
Young London lead a new charge of Boston pop
In what’s likely to come as another blow to Boston’s traditionally grumpy rock purists still smarting over the success of Karmin, it turns out that we’ve only just scratched the surface of our homegrown pop potential. Electro-pop duo Young London, the surest bet for breakout national status this year, are so unabashedly pop they make the former duo look like Tom Waits moping through a piano dirge. Boston Globe
Jerome LOL’s Brilliant Edit of Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’ Is the Epitome of Contemporary Music Culture
I already don’t remember what it was I was so excited about with those other songs and mixes I posted about earlier this week, because this edit of Rihanna’s “Diamonds” by Jerome LOL is the only thing I want to listen to now. I fell asleep to it on repeat last night before bed feeling lonely and disconnected, and it was the first thing I wanted to hear when I woke up. Will I like it tomorrow? Who knows. Does that matter? I don’t think so. Bullett
I don't get down to the South Station area in Boston much on account of not being a finance douche or a guy who needs a dollar to catch the bus back to Springfield please, so I didn't see this piece of public art everyone is whinging about (from the Brazilian duo OS Gemeos) in person until yesterday. Turns out it does look like a boy in [some vaguely foreign costume]. The proper reaction to that fact, in case you were wondering, is this: oh, that's a nice/surprising/colorful piece of art breaking up the monotony of the dull neighborhood. I will now proceed to go about my day. PTSOTL
Discovery: Earthquake Party!
We're fully immersed in the age of EDM: each beat and synth riff pushing through the club speakers has been sequenced with the utmost precision, and there's very little left to chance in the music of the moment. Even the most glitchy, lo-fi productions are artfully calculated as such. Fortunately, there have always been artists who lean more toward the chaotic side of things—bands who don't always have a plan for how to get to the end of the song they've just launched into (never mind to tomorrow's gig). Earthquake Party! is one example: it's a band whose only sense of precision comes from the sharp turns of its careening noise-pop riffs and co-ed harmonized hooks on songs like "Pretty Little Hand." The Boston-based trio released that track earlier this year on their debut EP cassingle vs. Pizza, a quick-blast primer in the old-fashioned joys of punk entropy, and a return to the feedback-drenched indie of the pills-and-power-chords '90s. To steal a line from one of their new songs, it sounds a lot like "pretty pretty trash." Interview Magazine
A list of Boston restaurants that don't care about their employees' well-being
I was watching Kitchen Nightmares last night, which, oof on me, I know, but it was at a restaurant set in Boston, and fine, I am a big fan of Gordon Ramsey's awful TV shows. Predictably, the drama of the episode, set at Galleria 33 in the North End, came from a staff that didn't care about their job. In this case that happened to trickle downward from the dipshit owners who have no idea what they're doing, and don't seem to care at all. But a common refrain at the problematic restaurants on that show is owners who just can't figure out why their employees don't care as much as they do. PTSOTL
Think-Piecing Our Way Through What Trollwave Phenom Glass Popcorn ‘Means’
There was a mostly skippable essay in Tumblr-politics journal of record The New York Times last year (which people have been sharing again lately for some reason) in which a 28-year-old writer fumbled with her feelings of irrelevance in the face of Kreayshawn-wave internet rap... Bullett
Interview: Is Anyone Up?‘s Hunter Moore explains his decision to end the controversial site
When we last heard from Is Anyone Up? founder Hunter Moore—who’s either one of the Four Horsemen of the (Internet) Apocalypse or the coolest dude ever, depending on your perspective—he was affecting a typically brash pose in the face of his legion of critics. It was only a few weeks ago when the Village Voice published a feature which brought further scrutiny upon Moore's ethically (although, apparently, not legally) questionable online enterprise. He seemed characteristically unfazed. Alternative Press
ROFLCon brings a convention of Internet hit-makers to MIT
The idea behind ROFLCon is an ambitious one: to bring a swath of the Internet’s pop culture players and viral celebrities together under one roof. Every other year since 2008, the Rolling on the Floor Laughing Convention has done just that, and the third installment of the culture conference — to be held this Friday and Saturday at MIT — promises more. Think of it as an academic gathering where the subject matter includes Internet memes and all things viral. Boston Globe
Dude, where’s my cardigan? Some local lounges and restaurants are asking guys to dress up their attire
In Boston, where pulling on a clean Brady jersey counts as dressing up for a lot of guys, it’s no surprise that our sartorial reputation is regularly maligned. Last summer GQ magazine placed the city atop its worst-dressed list, dubbing Boston “America’s Bad-Taste Storm Sewer.” Things may be looking up, however, as this year Travel and Leisure ranked us 18th on its own worst-dressed list. Progress. Boston Globe
The Indisputable, Definitive 20 Best Songs of 2012 List
We filter through so many songs on any given day that it can be almost impossible to even remember what it is we were freaking out about yesterday, never mind 11 months ago. Did we even know each other in February? We were so young and innocent back then. In that way, year-end “Best Of!” lists are like a sped-up exercise in surprisingly proximate nostalgia, which is probably a metaphor of some sort. Or maybe they’re more like a bookmark tab for the infinitely expanding data dump that is the content folder we keep on our brain desktop in the space where useful information used to go? Maybe it’s just a click-bait post to trick you into visiting our website? Bullett
From time to time, we all end up saying something weird sincerely that doesn't go over well, right? Then you have to save face with a quick "JK JK" backtrack. The opposite holds true sometimes as well. You tell a lie that no one really gets, but instead of covering it up, you just say "Fuck it" and go all in out of spite. "This is my life now," you think, embarking on a new era of self-imposed masochistic irony, like driving one of those old-timey bikes or working your job as an ironic farmer. Being a waiter/blogger, say, or listening to really shitty pop music all the time with a straight face. Noisey
We’re All Lana Del Rey Now in Her New Video ‘Ride’
Lana Del Rey did something, so I looked at it and wrote about it, then you came here and looked at it, and that’s how things are probably going to go, back and forth, over and over, for the foreseeable future, so we might as well just accept it for what it is. That something in question is her new EPIC ten minute video for the song “Ride.” Bullett
The New Highway Hymnal Isn't Afraid To Freak (You) Out
That works as a description for the band's music too, as does the overarching sense of entropy and crumbling chaos embodied by their home. It's on display on their new single “Out With the Lights,” released this week on Boston's Vanya Records, their second release after February's Blackened Hands 7-inch. It's a horrific sprint through an isolated landscape, with guitars that roil and swarm like a kicked hornet's nest, punctuated by Stemp's tortured, soulful shrieks alternating with a J&MC leather-and-shades-posturing cool. Noisey
Remember all those hilarious one liners about TV tough guy, and supernaturally be-gingered ghost grandpa, Chuck Norris? "Chuck Norris doesn't sleep, he waits," for example. How we laughed at those! I remember that one actor's deft karate pantomimes from my childhood, we'd say.
We had him pegged with the wrong superlative it turns out. It should've been something more like Chuck Norris doesn't sleep, he drools in the corner wondering why the grandkids never call. Vice
Is It Ok That Jon Hamm Gets Away With Being A Fat Ass?
Jon Hamm is the luckiest bastard in the world. Not just because of all the fame, riches, talent, good looks, and all-around-good-guy affect he’s got going on over there, that’s all well established. It’s his choice of roles that makes him so dastardly brilliant. Bullett
How to Be an Alpha Male, According to the Internet
I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but somewhere along the way, I picked up a following among this weird class of neo-conservative man-bloggers, blogging man-ily about important issues facing today’s put-upon manful men. Maybe the poor little fellas followed me home from a certain “hipster racist” site I used to write for? Regardless, I feel like I’ve been walking around with a piece of aggro-toilet paper stuck to my shoe from an innocuous political poop I don’t remember taking. Bullett
How e-Readers Are Destroying Society As We Know It
You may have noticed a striking similarity in recent book cover designs. That is, if you’ve even noticed them at all. There are a number of a reasons for that, which The Atlantic looked into in this post Book Cover Clones: Why Do So Many Recent Novels Look Alike? It may be because of the proliferation of e-readers, they suggest. This pattern, book illustrator Duncan Long says in the piece, “results directly from the advent of the e-reader. Thanks to the small size and reduced resolution of e-reader screens, book jackets have become less complex in order to preserve the integrity of the cover art onscreen. Bullett
Booze 101 Intro to imbibing for the recently legal
Welcome back to Boston, college students! As a certified old person, I'd like to be one of the many people who will remind you this school year, and for many years to come, that you have no fucking idea what you're doing. That said, there are only two things in the world I'm close to an expert on: music — God knows there's no helping you kids with that — and drinking. So today, let's focus on the latter. Lesson one: you're doing it wrong. Many of you turned 21 over the summer or will soon, and you'll want to learn to drink like an actual adult, not a hormonal rage troll who mistakes the city streets and the B Line for a beer- and come-crusted frat-house futon. Here's how. Boston Phoenix
Bartender Bingo
A few weeks ago, my behind-the-bar colleague at Temple Bar Evan Kenney was messing around with a cocktail that called for both mezcal and Fernet-Branca, two ingredients that are reliably trendy among pretentious bar geeks — aka people like me. “That sounds gross,” I thought. “Get it right in my belly.” Then I started thinking about ways to push that recipe even further and make an amusing parody of a cocktail nerd’s order. (Think of it as “Shit Bartenders Say: The Cocktail!”) Stuff Magazine
Every culture has its traditional alcoholic beverage of choice, but it has little to do with taste. For the vast majority of recorded history, people simply drank what they had on hand; whatever crops were in abundance where they happened to live found their way into the still. For Colonial-era and early American settlers, that crop was apples.
By now you've probably at least heard of the apple brandy Laird's Applejack, that most American of spirits — how it was George Washington's tipple of choice, how William Laird first produced it in New Jersey in 1698, how his great-grandson Robert Laird secured America's first distilling license in 1780, or how it's used in the classic cocktail the Jack Rose, all of which has been thoroughly documented by spirits writers far and wide. Slightly lesser known is a variation sold today as Laird's Bottled in Bond Straight Apple Brandy, which has recently started to make its way onto the shelves of Boston bars. Boston Phoenix
Does Your Personal Brand Need a Little Work? Try These Steps to Success
I sent an idea for a book proposal to a pretty big publishing house a few months ago. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere, but the friendly editor who passed it up the chain for me came back yesterday with the news that her boss thought “it would be hard to launch a book like this and get it to move because you’re not enough of an established brand.” Bullett
The Worst Songs Nominated for Grammy Awards This Year
The Grammy nominations were announced last night providing, as usual, a pretty good encapsulation of the year in music, and further proof that everyone has awful taste. For real though, aside from like 75 of the nominations, there were some good picks in here. Hard to argue with lineup for Record of the Year anyway. Bullett
New Video: Fat Creeps, 'Daydreaming'
Remember the '90s? Probably not, but let me tell you, man everything was so great back then. Mostly because we were a lot younger and that makes everything better, but still. Massachusetts' Fat Creeps know what we're talking about, although maybe not literally. Gracie Jackson, Jim Leonard, and Mariam Saleh are all between 22 and 25 (breaks out calculator), so they probably weren't around when one of our favorite '90s videos of all time debuted -- "Cannonball" by the Breeders -- but they sure sound like they were in their new video for “Daydreaming.” MTV
Better boozing through chemistry: Molecular mixology shakes up Boston’s cocktail scene
The mixologist is dead. After a brief dalliance with that highfalutin job description, most of your better drink-makers have decided they’d rather just go back to being called bartenders. The term always carried a whiff of pretension anyway, they say, and failed to acknowledge a primary aspect of the job: hospitality. But that doesn’t mean that the practices of mixology aren’t still with us. In fact, things have only just started cooking. Literally. Stuff Magazine
Lists For No Reason: The Ten Most Skippable Smiths Songs
I woke up from a bad dream this morning, one of those intricately designed exercises in romantic world-building where you’ve imagined an entire life for yourself that doesn’t exist, and as you roll around in bed trying to piece it back together it slips slowly from your grasp. Naturally, the first thing I did once it wisped away into nothing was launch myself into a binge of The Smiths, because that’s how a grown man should spend his morning instead of working. Bullett
LA Times Implicates Shia LaBeouf in Worst Sentence of the Week
Despite her name, Amy Kaufman has never been a man, and is in fine respiratory health, (as far as we know). And despite the fact that this lede was written in the Los Angeles Times, one of the most important newspapers in the country, the story she wrote today is neither news, nor timely, nor important, unless you’re looking for evidence of bad writing, which, as someone who’s produced a lot of it over the years, happens to be my area of expertise. Gaze upon with me then, in wonder, the worst sentence you will read all week... Bullett
I wonder how many conservative Sandy victims are refusing federal goverment aid right now?
Hey New York and New Jersey conservatives. You know how helpless you feel right now? Like you just need someone to come give you a hand up out of the shit water, make sure you've got your power back on, and just help you get over the hump in general now that you're down? Millions of other not-you people feel that way all the time. Weird how that works. PTSOTL
Thought Catalog On the Real Meaning of #Sandy
Vast swaths of New York City and New Jersey are ruined. Millions of people are without power, and the structural damage is staggering. What does it all mean to us on a personal level as kewt 20-something though? And is there a way we can harness this storm to augment our own personal brands? Any, say, pointless navel gazing that we can do to make sure we find the twee angle in the rising deluge of shit water outside our front door? What about making out, can we still make out, or is that illegal now? PTSOTL
The Year’s Best/Worst Song and the End of Sincerity
Typically when an utterly laughable song enters our browsing orbit, and they do so at an exponentially higher rate than ever, we shuffle rapidly through the stages of grief on the way to reestablishing equilibrium in our larger cultural organism. Viral joke songs are like a parasite that takes a few days to digest before we expel it back into the meme-y evolutionary muck whence it flippered-forth, and then we never think about it again. Bullett
Passion Pit’s small-stage charm gets lost in big venue
WFNX, the taste-making alternative rock station, is being sold to Clear Channel, but Friday night at the Bank of America Pavilion offered one good example of how its legacy will live on. Boston’s Passion Pit, one of the many bands the station launched onto the national scene over the years, acknowledged the debt, with frontman Michael Angelakos saying, “We don't know if we’d be on this stage if it weren’t for them.” It was a feel-good moment for the local rock scene, and a mostly feel-good set from the homecoming heroes. Boston Globe
We Interviewed Swedish Electro Sensation, Alina Devecerski
Considering the way the internet works now, you kind of assume that when something is popular in one place, it's instantly popular everywhere else at the same time. So when I stumbled across "Flytta på dej" by Sweden's Alina Devecerski and instantly lost my shit over the electro-rave-pop track, I figured it was old news even though it had only come out about a month ago. Vice
The most New York Timesian Wedding Story of all time
It's times like these that I really wish I hadn't used up my allotment of Jodie Foster-meeting-the-aliens-in-Contact references over the years, because this wedding piece here is a brilliant, compressed-diamond of such overwhelming beauty that it defies words. I am humbled by it. I am hamstrung. I have nothing to add. I'm a joke hobo with an empty joke top hat whose lid flaps open like a soup can and whose joke pants keep falling down. ( did a pretty job riffing on it though.) PTSOTL
'How to date a writer' is the most Thought Catalogy piece I've ever read
Thought Catalog is putting up a good fight for the WORST WEB-SITE ON THE INTERNET crown. This piece today Things You Should Know Before You Date a Writer might be the most Thought Catalogy piece I've ever read: 1) it adds nothing of substance to any discussion of anything, and 2) it's so solipsistic that it not only sucks its own dick, it swallows its own load, then bites its own dick off and eats it, digests it, forms it into a compact little dick-shaped turd, then eats the turd. Forever. Ouroboros of shit. PTSOTL
I'm not racist, some of my best fictional friends are black
Much to no one's concern, I haven't weighed in yet on the most important issue of our blog times, the controversy over hipster racism, and whether or not that one HBO show I haven't seen is racist. (I've always been a fan of Barf's, by the way. Who hasn't?) The reason is I honestly don't know which ideological sports team I'm rooting for here. On the one hand Jezebel and friends really are a bunch of over-sensitive concern trolls spoiling for a reason to be outraged, but the other side, represented, I guess, by the place I used to "work" for, Street Carnage can be, uh, how do you say it, literally racist. Despite many other shitty points, Street Carnage makes some decent ones here, writing in character... PTSOTL
Refreshing Burn Cool down (or warm up) with a ginger cocktail
Ginger is one of the most versatile ingredients around. Depending on how it's used, the root can either soothe or heat things up—and sometimes do both at once. That adaptability makes ginger particularly well suited for cocktails in the finicky season that is spring. From cool, tall drinks that conjure the Caribbean to warming concoctions that lean on the dessert-like properties of ginger as it plays off molasses, cinnamon and nutmeg, here are three libations that showcase ginger's great range. Wall Street Journal
The single most ridiculous inclusion of the word hipster into a news story you will ever see
Stretching the already paper-thin conceit that jamming the word "hipster" into your headline will drive page views to its excruciatingly embarrassing conclusion, a Reuters article today about a gas shortage in Brooklyn in the wake of the hurricane has brought the concepts of both hipsters, and news reporting in general, to their internetty nadir.PTSOTL
What do you think has been the most buzzed-about indie style over the past few years? Electro-house? Dubstep? 9tz grunge? All worthy guesses, but look to the music of New York City duo Cults for a better answer. Their reverb-laden '60s Girl-Group-pop is one part sunny sheen of a hipstamatic California beach party, one part big-city crime noir. It sounds like roller skating down the boardwalk and tripping over a murdered wannabe Hollywood starlet, then falling in love with her anyway. Of course, the same can be said of everyone from Lykke Li to Best Coast to Vivian Girls to La Sera to Dum Dum Girls and every other indie bird with fierce bangs and a shoulder-sleeve tattoo making music now in a reactionary magical manic-pixie antithesis ideal. Boston Phoenix
NYT Review of Guy Fieri’s Restaurant is the Guy Fieri Restaurant of Reviews
This New York Times review by Pete Wells that a dozen people are sharing in your feed right now about Guy Fieri’s new Times Square restaurant is the Guy Fieri restaurant of reviews. It’s forced, ham-fisted, and obvious, I don’t want to finish anything it’s serving me, and I have no idea why it’s getting so much attention. Perhaps, like the Times Square locale of the restaurant in question, the only reason anyone is reading it is because they can find it on some well-trafficked real estate. PTSOTL
My Boston Phoenix colleague Chris Faraone, as for-realsy a hip hop writer as they come, was giving me and bloggers like me shit the other day for constantly throwing shine, as I think they say, at fake-ass "hip hop" on sites like this. "How would indie rock chumps like it if me and all my fellow hip-hop writers looked for the shittiest, least talented bands in order to endlessly and quasi-ironically applaud them for sub-mediocrity and inflate their artificial buzz bubble? No way they'd hate it as much as I hate neophyte critics who clearly didn't grow up on hip-hop but take pride in propping exploitative nu-rap garbage." PTSOTL
Deflecting feedback with the Dirty Dishes
As we're all well aware by now, the window of musical-temporal referencing has sped up at an alarming rate. The nostalgia snake hasn't quite managed to choke down its own historical tail yet, but it can almost taste it. No surprise then that it seems like only a few months ago that we were name-checking every '90s-era Boston band we could think of in our breathless fawning over Dirty Dishes here in the Phoenix; but on their new EP, The Most Tarnished Birds, they've already made it all the way up the rock timeline to Avril Lavigne. Boston Phoenix
It took me a few hours to get around to paying attention to this really important sports controversy from yesterday because I kept seeing the word "hockey" and passing out from boredom. But I'm sure glad I did, because it combines a few of my favorite things, sports, politics, and Tea Party buffoons embarrassing themselves in front of the entire country. Maybe. Maybe it did that last one. I haven't decided yet. PTSOTL
Southie’s GrandTen enters the craft-distilling game
With so many small distilleries opening lately, from Ipswich's Privateer to Boston's Bully Boy, it seems like it's never been easier to launch a spirits brand. But unlike, say, becoming an Internet rap star or a "journalist" who writes about booze, you can't simply wake up one morning and declare yourself a distiller. There's more to getting a bottle to market than the eureka moment when "I like to drink" meets "I like to make money." It takes patience and planning, says Spencer McMinn of South Boston's recently launched GrandTen Distilling. Boston Phoenix
Musician Jay-Z Rides Subway, Doesn’t Recognize Famous Brooklyn Artist
Jay-Z, a well known New York musician, rode the subway to his job, much like a regular asshole, such as, for example, i.e. you and me, and what a laugh it was, because he’s too rich for the subway. He even talked to people, like this white old lady Ellen Grossman, who happens to be an artist from Brooklyn well known for her topographical drawings and sculptures. Gawker thought it was cute that an old white lady didn’t know who Jay-Z was on sight, and was nice enough to treat her like a normal human being while the cameras were rolling filming a documentary with the express purpose of humanizing him. Bullett
'Supermodels without photoshop' absolves us of our grossness
In the newspaper and politics biz they used to say that every single letter to the editor or voter letter was an indication that roughly ten thousand (ish) times as many other people shared the same opinion. Now we all have our own electronic newspapers, and are each the governor of our own sad little constituencies of nothing, so that means whenever I see like four to seven people share a link on Facebook I assume everyone is talking about it. PTSOTL
Happy Hour is MURDER
With the opening of casinos in Massachusetts approaching in the near future, and with them the prospect of free alcoholic beverages, the Alcoholics Beverage Control Commission has been considering whether or not they should relax the restrictions against other bars in the state serving discounted drinks. As I've written about before here, and here, the drinking laws in Massachusetts are archaic and outdated. PTSOTL
What does it feel like to get a tooth extracted?
I got a tooth pulled out today, and just in time, because it had only been bothering me for about three years. A few years back I had two shitty teeth, and both of them were murdering me on a daily basis like eating a piece of boiling tin foil lava over and over again forever. Except the lava is also freezing cold. PTSOTL
If you woke up today feeling a strange sense of peace and harmony in the world, as if everything was happening exactly as it should, it's probably because Thought Catalog posted another insanely vapid, empty listicle devoid of anything even remotely approaching insight or actual information appealing to anyone besides a generation raised with highly attuned olfactory palates for the nuances of their own special snowflake excrement. Join me, won't you, in considering the stupidest introduction to the city of Boston I've read besides every single other time anyone else has ever written this exact same article. Except the time I did.This is the most Thought Catalogy piece I've ever seen since the last one. PTSOTL
Rhye Unveil Gorgeous New Cinematic Video For “The Fall”
I can probably count the number of times I’ve ever paused a music video and gone back to try to piece together what’s actually going on in the events of the narrative on one hand, and that’s with half that hand shoved up my own ass and three of the fingers chopped off. That’s why I’ve been momentarily taken aback by this gorgeous new track and accompanying cinematic piece from the vaguely Scandanavian Los Angeles duo Rhye, whose previous track “Open” we fell for last winter. Bullett
Secret Video Reveals Mitt Romney Doesn’t Care About 47% of America, Is Racist
In what we’re going to call breaking news, but come on, I think we all know this isn’t really news, Mother Jones has uncovered a secret video from a Mitt Romney fundraising event where he managed, in what is probably the first time on record, to actually say something that he believes: You are a piece of shit. Bullett
I went to Warped Tour. (65 pics)
I went to Warped Tour the other day. That's weird. "The format of the annual Vans Warped Tour presented show-goers with a particularly contemporary crush of overabundance. With some 80 musical acts to choose from on seven stages throughout the grounds, the sheer magnitude and scope were staggering -- you literally needed a map and a schedule to synchronize your day’s revelry here," I write in my review in the Globe today. Read the rest over there. PTSOTL
Lists for no reason: Top 17 Oasis songs ever
But oh man, Noel Gallagher! His "If I Had a Gun", I said, was probably the best song in recent memory, and an instant top ten all time Oasis-related classic. Naturally, the next question was, ok, but what is it up against? With that in mind here are the top 17 or so Oasis songs ever. It's a list for no reason, and lists for no reason are content.
I went to Texas for SXSW and all I got was this intensified disinterest in /disdain for music. Someone make that a t-shirt. Then roll that t-shirt up into a ball around your fist and punch me in the face with it a thousand times. Then blog about it. PTSOTL
Should Boston’s Mayor Be Allowed to Ban Chick-fil-A?
Earlier this week, Tom Menino, the mayor of the fine city of Boston, launched a fire storm of Facebookian, self-congratulatory image sharing, when a letter he wrote to Dan Cathy, the CEO of Christy fried-chicken slingers Chick-Fil-A, . It’s received nearly 150,000 likes since then. In the letter, Menino took Cathy’s anti-gay marriage position to task, saying “There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail, and no place for your company alongside it.” Bullett
Dirty tactics, disdain for the media, an over-reliance on white guys, and no longer the best. Is Bill Belichick the NFL's Karl Rove?
The framing of the piece reminded me of another pig-headed, bullish, arrogant blow hard with an eminently punchable face, albeit my own beloved pig-headed, bullish, arrogant blowhard with an eminently punchable face: Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots. PTSOTL
Starting to think Thought Catalog might not actually know what it is a writer does
At the risk of sounding like I'm harping on Thought Catalog too much lately, I think I finally figured out what the problem is over there. It's not that they're all bad writers, although many of them are, it's just that they're really bad at writing about being a writer. I think it's possible that some of them literally do not know what it is that a "writer" actually does. For many of these straw-people I'm inventing on the spot, a writer isn't someone who does, meaning a person who writes, it's a person who is, meaning, tits-around the world tilting at content mills, writerly. PTSOTL
A Quick Guide to Allston Christmas
Allston Christmas is here, a fact that you'll no doubt have heard from everyone who just learned about that term this year and is because it makes them sound privy to an in-joke.
It's that most magical of days in the city of Boston where tens of thousands of students arrive to clog up the streets with their dad's van, moving trucks get caught on the over pass on Storrow Drive, and, most importantly where everyone turns into dumpster diving freegans, aka dirty fucking bums. PTSOTL
Chick-fil-A and why the politically religious can't die off soon enough
Like every other asshole in the world, I've got an opinion on the Chick-fil-A "scandal." I wrote about it yesterday on Bullett in this piece Should Boston’s Mayor Be Allowed to Ban Chick-fil-A? Long story short, there's a difference between "banning" a bigoted company and the hypothetical reversal of a conservative mayor banning a progressive company, and that is that bigots need to be stamped out of culture and drown in shame. Fuck fair. You know what isn't fair? A few thousand years of treating people as subhuman because of who they love. There is no moral equivalency here. Bigoted companies need to be choked to death with a dose of their shit. Magic shit from the sky if it makes them feel more godly. PTSOTL
The only thing more boring than Nickelback...
Everyone still hates Nickelback. We're talking about this again this week because a nice fellow by the name of Josh Gross from the Boise Weekly in Idaho penned a humorous piece about the band to preview their date in town that week, and everyone has been sharing it all over the internet. SCOOP: NICKELBACK IS BAD. I kind of thought his preview was good fun, if not necessarily original, because god knows how soul-crushingly bleak it is trying to write arts and entertainment filler for a newspaper, and by god I mean me, another person who has had his job. But since there's nothing more I like than to yell at people about how what they think is funny isn't funny, it gives me a TIMELY NEWS HOOK to repost this old favorite about how boring making fun of Nickelback is below. PTSOTL
The cover song fame dilemma ft. Karmin, Neon Hitch, and The Weeknd
I've long felt an affinity for UK pop starlet in training Neon Hitch ever since way back five minutes ago when I got an email that reminded me that she existed and that I'd posted about her cover of Kreayshawn's "Gucci Gucci" over the summer. That might be because we both look a little old for our nose rings, and that we both have absolutely banging asses. Or is it simply how much she reminds me of my TV crush: PTSOTL
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run time.
There comes a time in every drinking career when the nuances of a well-made cocktail — the subtle botanical notes, for instance — just don't cut it anymore. You need a more intense experience. For me lately, that's come from the smokier spirits: peaty scotches and super-smoky mezcals, which, as luck would have it, are seasonally appropriate for fall. Love the smell of burning leaves or a campfire? Try putting it in a glass.
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