Any good marriage to live music demands the inevitable affair with Ticketmaster. Since 2021, I have been inching steadily closer to the milestone of 200 live musical performances, having personally attended shows ranging from King Crimson’s final tour, four Clairo concerts, 10 Phish concerts, two Tyler, The Creator concerts, and shamefully, Undertale LIVE and Machine Gun Kelly performances…
Recently, I watched The Blair Witch Project. I had very low expectations of the movie, because people who’ve watched it before often called it “boring” and said “nothing happens until the last 10 minutes.” While things do heat up at the end of the movie, I would never describe it as boring…
From 4th to 6th grade, I had the best teacher in the world: Ms. Carlson. She taught us about the corners of history that are too often left in the dust. From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, we learned about Ida B. Wells and Cesar Chavez, diving deep into their lives and the movements they fought for…
When it originally aired its first episode in April of 2020, Smiling Friends seemed like a breath of fresh air. A full first season from Adult Swim in January 2022 solidified the show as a hit, with a second season in 2024 and a third season premiering this fall…
When I die I want my headstone to say I was Team Conrad. I need my future lineage to know I stood on the right side of history when it came to The Summer I Turned Pretty…
This admiration for sad art has been present ever since my first memory of connecting to music when I was seven years old: I heard “Für Elise” playing on my mother’s music box, and gasped at how the simple melody tugged at my heartstrings. I felt a mix of emotions I didn’t even know the meaning of yet: gloominess, wistfulness, wonder, and angst…
One night of doom scrolling on TikTok led me to a clip of Cabaret from the 1993 West End Revival. Admittedly, the clip first caught my eye because of a young Alan Cumming, but my focus quickly shifted once I became aware that someone in a gorilla costume was alongside him. I watched the clip through and was struck by the end at the last line delivered…
A sitcom from 2004 might’ve helped a number of Nickelodeon-watchers survive junior high, but what about a survival guide to college? Post-grad? How about life? How about (as per Jaden Smith) – the socioeconomic state of the world right now!? This feels unfair, Ned! Where’s the survival guide for that…
I think it would be fair to say that most of us remember the groundbreaking controversy from a few years ago, when it was outed that actor Armie Hammer, best known for Call Me By Your Name and The Lone Ranger, was allegedly into cannibalism. However, with a multitude of media pieces in recent years centralizing cannibalism as a plot point, I dare to ask an emboldened question: Do we, as consumers, find cannibalism sexy?…