Music
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“You will become your most favorite color” is her idea of death (from After’s poignant “Sunday Shoes”), while disembodied descriptions like “You with the watercolor eyes, you who bares all your teeth in every smile” are distinctly whimsical and evocative of Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.
Nobody who had a VH1 subscription in the early 2000s was unaware of “Absolutely (Story of a Girl),” the one-and-only hit by Nine Days, a Long Island-based pop/rock group. To this day, if you play the track in a room full of twenty-somethings, every single person will know every single word.
Then there are reviews of entire shows, full histories of every song, and infographics detailing even the most obscure statistics, such as how often the band’s three songs which mention nipples have been played at the same show (the answer, by the way, is twice: 8/17/89 and 10/26/89).
Images
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Postcards from the Emerald Isle.
“Diving into a prismatic wonderland of pop culture and surrealism is like finding serenity in a madhouse.”
Profiles
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Anna Shaugnessy mentored young writers who went on to great success–Stanley Kunitz, MIlton Meltzer, Charles Olson, and Nicholas Gage. Every young writer should be lucky enough to come across an Anna Shaughnessy.
The clock ticked down and the final buzzer sounded. The Tufts University Men’s Lacrosse team, the Jumbos, had once again defeated the Salisbury University Sea Gulls to win the NCAA Division III championship. The team ran the traditional victory lap, led by 3-foot-10-inch 7-year-old Jacob Beranger, joyous at having been named MVT–most valuable teammate.
Culture
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With a head as big as Kanye’s and a discography to match, it’s hard not to appreciate his genius. He’s skilled in so many media, including poetry, producing, scowling, and fashion design.
At a baseball game, amid all the screaming, nail biting, and heart palpitations, there are moments when there is stillness in the crowd. The air hangs heavy with anxiety and anticipation as we collectively wait for the make-or-break moment. In that silence, I experience something holy and pure.
Contrary to movies and sappy novels, people do in fact fail you in the wee hours of the night when you need them the most. Yet never have your greasy door handles been locked, never has the exhausted waitress ignored the request for “just one menu, please.”
“Speak English,” he said. “You’re not in Mexico.”
The woman, seemingly ashamed, looked at her friend, lowered her voice and head, and continued to speak.
She wasn’t speaking to him.
She wasn’t even speaking Spanish.
1930s American invention. Scotch tape and the ballpoint pen first made then, along with our friend the chalky-sweet cig.
Books
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Clark draws on stories of unflappability from all over, from such diverse sources as a nuclear submarine officer who saved the world during the Cuban missile crisis, an emergency room surgeon at a major trauma center, and Laurence Olivier’s stage fright.
Poetry
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American means never holdin’ nuthin back …
[G]lobally, one in three women will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.
–From a report by UNIFEM, the women’s fund at the United Nations.
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Spring 2015
Music
Thomas Matthews
Comment
Spring 2015
Music
Thomas Matthews
Comment
Spring 2015
Music
Thomas Matthews
Comment
Spring 2015
Music
Thomas Matthews
Comment
Looking past the album’s national attention, more important, is the album’s ability to examine certain topics/ideas and to present them to people that wouldn’t necessarily think of such topics/ideas in the ways that the album demands. What might appear on the surface to be typical “pop”-punk songs, filled with catchy choruses and hooks, a closer examination reveals much more.
Spring 2015
Music
Thomas Matthews
Comment
Spring 2015
Music
Thomas Matthews
Comment