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Sex, Drugs, and More Drugs: Why Broad City is the Best Show on TV

by Derek Loh in Pop Culture | April 24, 2014

When measuring a television show’s success, it goes something like this: (1) ratings in the 18-49 demographic; (2) Emmys; (3) critical reception; (4) Christopher Meloni butt shots; (5) Golden Globes. But seeing that it’s April 2014, somewhere between numbers 3 and 4 there should be a number 3.5: a BuzzFeed “Which Character Are You?” quiz, because a show isn’t worth DVRing, let alone watching, unless BuzzFeed makes you part of the collective viewing process. Maybe it’s not the most telling metric, but the BuzzFeed quiz signifies a brighter than normal blip on the pop culture radar. It says, “at least two people watch this show, and they think it’s the greatest thing since Obamacare.”

So when my besties Brette and Nick sent me the “Which “Broad City” Character Are You?” quiz, I was comforted to know that my latest obsession had some traction, that perhaps there would be a Season 2, that spontaneously inserting a Broad City reference into conversation with a stranger might yield a beautiful, new friendship.

Broad City’s stars and creators, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, have a pedigree similar to recent successful comedy duos: after going to art school and NYU respectively, the two met at Upright Citizens Brigade, began collaborating, and then created a web series about two besties who live in New York City. The series caught the eye of comedic heavyweight Amy Poehler and eventually Comedy Central, which began airing thirty-minute episodes in January of this year.

If HBO’s Girls is about the neuroses that privileged young white girls develop in New York City, then Broad City is about the modi operandi that lead to those neuroses.

A Family of Acrobats

by Randolph Thomas in Memoir | April 23, 2014

My grandfather could walk down the stairs on his hands. My mother and aunts could do cartwheels on the front lawn, and my mother once walked across the high school gym floor on her hands. My mother reminds me of all this as we’re walking the Huckleberry. In her early eighties, she walks a stretch of the paved trail, a mile to the town library and back four or five times a week. She believes the walking keeps her fit, but she refuses to see a doctor; she hasn’t seen one in seven or eight years. She says she wants to wait and find a doctor when she moves to Roanoke, her hometown forty miles away. For years she’s talked about moving. She says she only lives in Blacksburg because my father wanted to live there, and now he’s left her where she doesn’t want to be. In fact, he left her there twenty-five years ago. The small, neglected house she lives in, where she’s lived for more than fifty years—where I grew up—is miles outside of town, on a rural road with few neighbors.

At other times, she admits she likes where she lives. No one to stick their nose in her business, she says, adding that if she won the lottery and was able to move, she’d probably keep her house, keep it and rent it out. I believe she’ll never leave the house until she dies or is forced into a nursing home. The latter is exactly what has happened to my father in the past year, and I believe my mother’s real reason for refusing to see a doctor is she’s afraid of what the doctor will say about her failing memory.

Despite my concerns about my mother’s forgetfulness—she gets lost driving around town and is having trouble keeping track of her bills—she seems healthy, probably due to a lifetime of physical activity. Standing at 4’10’’, she managed to excel playing basketball in high school, and later she was an active member of the Appalachian Trail Club. She worked hard in her vegetable garden until just a few years ago.

Heinous Fuckery Most Foul Ensues: A Review of Christopher Moore’s The Serpent of Venice

by Peter Nichols in Books | April 22, 2014

I read to laugh. Recently I had the exceptionally good fortune to read an advanced copy of Christopher Moore’s new novel, The Serpent of Venice, which made me laugh thirty-one times.

The first Moore book I read was Lust Lizard (L.L.). James Sallis praised Lust Lizard, saying that Moore’s novel provides “[like] all the best comic writing, something beyond jokes, caricature, spinning plates and crazy-tilt towers, something intangible that vanishes whenever we try to look directly at it: some sense, perhaps, that we’re still able to rescue from the ever-increasing detritus of our culture a decent, simple humanity.”

I read L.L. at a time in my life when I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to continue living. My amateur baseball career had amounted to nothing and I was trying to start an amateur ski career, but it was raining heavily in Maine for the week during my winter break that I’d convinced my godfather to let me sleep on his couch. Under normal circumstances I would’ve washed my sorrows away by bingeing on video games, but alas, my PS2 was in Ohio. Circumstances dire as they were, I sought out indoor analogue recreation and my godfather, knowingly or not, put an author before me that would, along with other serendipitous encounters, vaccinate me against the scourge of Existentialism and reaffirm my joie de vivre. That last phrase I pronounce like the good Midwesterner that I remain: joey’dee veeve-ray.

In the nearly ten years that have followed, I’ve read Moore’s thirteen other novels.

Serious Putty

by Eric Stolze in Famous Failures | April 21, 2014

Famous Failures takes us on a comprehensive tour of humankind’s most confident leaps in the wrong directions. The column examines history’s greatest worsts, and gives Lasik to our cultural hindsight. In today’s case file, child’s play becomes anything but when an attempt to recreate an accident inadvertently creates the most no-nonsense knickknack ever known.

Some examples of Famous Failures in history are, in fact, inspiring tales of reaching for the stars and winding up with a fistful of valuable space debris. The discovery of the beloved children’s toy Silly Putty has become a legendary accident, the result of experiments with silicon polymers in pursuit of a viable replacement for rubber. Though not as useful as rubber, Silly Putty could bounce, stretch, change shapes, and, if you put it on a cubicle desk, it would say, “I can be a lot of fun outside of this office.” Its unexpected financial success as a toy resulted in years of legal battles over the patent, culminating in the legendary trial “Crayola v. ‘I Meant to Do That.’”

As the plaything became a worldwide phenomenon, its copyright grew amorphous while stretching and warping across greedy corporate hands. Many young upstarts attempted to recreate its chemical properties on their own to capitalize on the popularity. Ian Wetlander, a renowned Scottish scientist, heard tell of Silly Putty’s success in America, and in 1967 he moved his wife and child from his castle in Glasgow to a two-car garage in Mooresville, Ohio. Years of deliberate attempts at failure thwarted the brilliant Dr. Wetlander as he repeatedly, successfully created useful synthetic rubber alternatives instead of Silly Putty. His final effort, which he called “Enjoyable Rubber,” cost him the respect of his family when he tried to bounce it off a wall and wound up knocking out all of Ian Jr.’s remaining baby teeth.

Dr. Wetlander sold the patent for his reviled substance to local accountant Benjamin Haley Hendless. Hendless, a lifelong bachelor and reclusive Quaker, developed an ambition as an inventor around 1962 when he designed the Hendless Professional, an iron that could make his shirt collars uncommonly stiff for months on end.

Flipping the Script on Hollywood: A Review of The Catcher in the Rye: A Spike Lee Joint

by Jeff Bender in Sleeper Celluloid: Real Reviews of Fake Movies | April 18, 2014

Director: Spike Lee; Cast: Spike Lee, Rosie Perez, Danny Aiello, Bill Nunn, Giancarlo Esposito, John Turturro, Steve Park, Joie Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Reggie Miller and Frankie Faison

Ever since Little, Brown published J.D. Salinger’s first novel The Catcher in the Rye, in 1951, die-hard fans have wavered over whether to root for its film adaptation.

Opponents say the novel is too cerebral, that Holden’s imagination can never be represented accurately on the big screen. Advocates argue the story transcends genre and that an adaptation of any sort will rival Citizen Kane as one of the great filmic achievements of our time.

At the turn of the millennium, the opponents held a commanding lead. Their loudest voice came, of course, from the author himself, who famously and vehemently refused to sell the movie rights. Many believe Salinger enlisted the help of his rakish main character, Holden Caulfield, to close the book on the issue as early as Chapter 1: “If there’s one thing I hate,” Holden says, “it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”

The issue took a turn, however, upon Salinger’s death, in 2010, when a close friend of the author’s, Jan Ashford, was given access to Salinger’s home office in Cornish, New Hampshire.

Instead of unearthing the literary windfall that so many expected, Ashford gathered a mere few fun facts about the recluse: he lifted twenty-pound dumbbells in his free time. He smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. He napped. He snacked on Triscuits. He owned the movie Legally Blonde. And he developed a late obsession with the early work of Spike Lee.

Sex, Drugs, and More Drugs: Why Broad City is the Best Show on TV

A Family of Acrobats

Heinous Fuckery Most Foul Ensues: A Review of Christopher Moore’s The Serpent of Venice

Serious Putty

Flipping the Script on Hollywood: A Review of The Catcher in the Rye: A Spike Lee Joint

April's Sweet Tooth

Sad(der) Men: “Time Zones”

Flotsam

Put It in the Pot: An Interview with Adam Wilson

Smart

Functionality from Dysfunction: A Review of Ariel Gore’s The End of Eve

Other People’s Mothers

The Tragedy of Modern Baseball’s Worst Team: A Review of Stuck Under the Cleetz

Blank Generation II: Some More Thoughts on the State of Music Criticism

You Don’t Look Like You’re From LA

A Vast Landscape Fills the Frame: An Interview with Richard T. Walker

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Ideas for Novels

Fiscal Responsibility

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