In Praise of Perfect Pop
by Matt Paley
I recently had the profound pleasure of spending a quiet evening at the normally wild and crazy Acme studios in Brooklyn with my dearest friend Rachel Trachtenburg, her mother Tina, and Acme’s brigadier general, Shawn Patrick. After a dinner and a movie of nachos and Sidney Lumet’s Network (try this as soon as you can), I was tasked with sharing a few of my favorite music videos. Most, unsurprisingly, were received well — Rihanna’s Spike Lee/Keith Herring/Warhol/Basquiat send-up Rude Boy and Beyonce as bored/scorned housewife/Marilyn Monroe in Why Don’t You Love Me? are both incredibly fun and really smart cultural homage — but my very favorite video of the year, Robyn’s pitch-perfect (as far as I’m concerned) Call Your Girlfriend, was roundly rejected. (more…)
Creation Myth 2.0
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Hi, yes, I’m back, and I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. I hope you’ve missed me because I’d like to do it right away.
The Social Network (2010), dir. David Fincher
“We lived in farms and then we lived in cities and now we’re going to live on the Internet,” says Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) towards the end of The Social Network. This is how history works, this is how progress works: once it moved westward for land and gold, now it moves westward towards a multitude of server space and Silicon Valley venture capital. (more…)