Editor of
Features Editor at Death & Taxes Magazine, contributor to The Week, Interview, and Vice Magazine.
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Ultimately, Ebert brought the ability to debate and talk about movies into the mainstream; his greatest legacy may in the long run not be the movie reviews themselves. It may simply be opening several generations to an idea that has been there all along: the discussion of art between two people can be a powerful thing, revealing sometimes more about the viewer than the piece itself.
I wrote a few hundred words on Roger.
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I wrote 1000 words about the new movie “Spring Breakers”:
The thing about Spring Breakers is that it highlights that schism between those with the youth and those who desire it: it shows what happens when you try to hold on to something as intangible as a great party and as momentary as age. These things weren’t meant to be held onto forever. Spring Breakers’ brilliant (I would go as far as to say revelatory) coup is that it shows what happens after the party in as stark and as hyper-real tone as the party itself.
Spring Breakers is a highly intelligent movie masquerading as a teenage sexual romp, and perhaps in that aspect the film is too intelligent for it’s own good. However, the takeaway is clear: no matter how great the party was, someone has to clean up the mess.
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Kurt Cobain vs Billy Corgan: Is It Better To Burn Out Than To Fade Away?
I wrote 1000 words on the major differences between Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan, answering, at least in their case, the question from Kurt’s suicide note - is it better to burn out or fade away?
On July 27th, 1993, a band by the name of The Smashing Pumpkins released their second album – Siamese Dream. It had cost over $250,000 to record over a period of four months. Frontman Billy Corgan played nearly every instrument on the album. During recording, he suffered a nervous breakdown and ultimately alienated his bandmates to the point where the Smashing Pumpkins as a group became little more than a live band, while Corgan manned all aspects of writing and recording. Siamese Dream sold over four million copies. David Brown, of Entertainment Weekly, hailed the band as “the next Nirvana.”
On September 13th of the same year, Nirvana themselves released In Utero. It was to be their last album. They recorded the album together, in one room, and worked diligently – it was recorded in just two weeks (from February 13th until the 28th) at Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota. Nobody suffered a nervous breakdown. Cobain later said that the recording process was “the easiest recording process we’ve ever done, hands down.” Studio fees cost around $25,000, about a tenth of what it cost to make Siamese Dream.
The two bands had never quite seen eye to eye. “Cherub Rock” – the lead single and first song on Siamese Dream – features the lyics “Who wants honey / as long as there’s money”, a dig at other musicians (and Nirvana producer Steve Albini) who compared the band to REO Speedwagon, saying they were “by, of and for the mainstream”. Meanwhile, Nirvana started In Utero with the line “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old” off of a song called “Serve The Servants” … the rest of the album included song titles such as “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” and “Rape Me” as digs at the recording industry as a whole. In Utero was and is a somewhat difficult album. Siamese Dream‘s hit single “Today” features the lyric “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known.” -
What if I were to tell you that love only lasts 12 months?I’m sitting in a coffee shop staring out of the window again and watching half of Brooklyn go by and I see someone, a woman, who catches my eye. She’s about 5’8″, brunette, with almond-shaped eyes. It’s close to Valentine’s Day, and I let my mind wander for a short while. I think about what might happen if she came into the coffee shop, ordered something, and happened to strike up conversation with me. I think about going on a first date, a second date, what she might look like in an old t-shirt of mine, all in the matter of twenty seconds or so. I snap out of it. I’m daydreaming.This happens a lot. Probably more than I’d care to admit. After all, being a staggeringly attractive and exceedingly humble freelance journalist like myself has its perks – I get to work from home, and more often than not, coffee shops. The mind tends to wander.
But let’s just say that the coffee shop girl and I DO end up talking today, start dating, and eventually settle down. What if we were to fall in love? What then?
When someone first falls in love, a protein molecule called NGF – nerve growth factor – spikes in the brain. These feelings of “being in love” wear off after about a year. Twelve months. After that, one can only hope that you’re compatible and that interests in companionship overwhelm the brain’s reliance on the “thrill” of NGF. What NGF does is light up the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus, two areas in the brain associated with reward, pleasure, and motivation. Ever feel like you can change the world when you’re newly in love? Much of it is due to the high levels of NGF. But NGF is just love’s initial rush, says neuroscientist Andrew Doan, MD, PhD, of Temecula, CA – “NGF is merely the hook that makes us want to get into a long term relationship. The human brain builds up a tolerance to NGF over time unless it’s stimulated by something new. People more susceptible to addiction are more likely than others to ‘fall in love’ – anything to get those NGF levels back up to where they were.”
It’s also worth mentioning is that “Love” – rather, the chemical reaction in the brain associated with it – reads much the same in brain scans as certain mental illnesses. In a 2006 study cited by National Geographic, researchers found that the brains of those heavily in love acted not dissimilarly than those of patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This is your brain telling you something: don’t fall in love. It may hurt you.
So, was Robert Palmer right? Should I might as well face it? Am I “Addicted To Love“?
“No,” said Andrew, “I don’t think you can be.” The brain, he says, has a tolerance for activity. “You have to do the same thing over and over to create pathways… and have to do more of it to get the same high.” Therefore, it’s not entirely possible to get “addicted to love” – merely the feeling of it.
“Love is so complex because there multiple highs associated with it,” he added. “Buying flowers, dinner, those kind of things all contribute to the overall high. Healthy love is a sense of satisfaction distributed amongst unlimited activities.” However, those with an unhealthy perception of love will create pathways in their brains which will get to NGF quicker than those with healthy perceptions of love. While the person with an unhealthy perception of love might ultimately recieve bigger hits of NGF in the short term, over the long term they’ll grow more tired of love faster and faster.
People who overuse these connections in their brain will start to switch those behaviors out for more and more drastic measures. This perfectly explains philanderers like congressman Anthony Weiner, he says. “He became so addicted to the high of being wanted by a woman that he became addicted to the immediate gratification of feeling accepted. Which is why he continued online relationships with scores of women.”
I try and describe to him the woman that had walked by earlier. Brunette, almond eyes, hips that you could set your watch to, hair like a caramel waterfall, the kind of face that would make a man want to learn French. Could that be love? Is there such a thing as love at first sight?
“Yes and no,” he says, “When you see a woman walk by and you start getting twitterpated, you’re tapping into memories that have been encoded your whole life.” Clearly, I must have some happy childhood memories involving brunettes with almond shaped, he says. “Your eyeballs contain 1.2 million nerves each. That’s a huge response system for your brain to handle and it does so in about .1 of a second. So when you see a pretty brunette girl walking down the street your mind has already sent 2.4 million neural impulses to the back of your brain to process her.” Much in the same way one can hear a song and immediately feel affected by it, such is what people call “love at first sight,” he explains.
This all seemed pretty intense. What I had assumed was a complex idea – romantic love – is a simple chemical reaction. What’s more, the “high” of the NGF protien wears off after about a year. After that, it really is just a matter of being compatible with someone. It seemed to make the process of falling in love quite dull.
“Is there hope for romantics? Can something like ‘The Notebook’ actually happen?” I ask him, citing the 2004 Gosling/McAdams cheeseball epic in which (spoiler alert) one elderly partner is brought back from the brink of dementia by being read their old romantic writings.“Yes,” he replies, “In Alzheimer’s patients, the first thing to go is short term memory. If the connection one has in their brain is old enough, though, it has a much harder time being forgotten.”
“So, nobody truly forgets their first love?” I ask him.
“Look at it this way,” he says, “Malcom Gladwell says that if you spend 10,000 hours practicing something, you can become an expert. You can learn something new in half an hour and master it in 10,000 hours. If you spend 10,000 hours loving someone – roughly a year – you can become a master at it and beat your brain’s predilection to NGF.”
“So you can beat your own brain chemistry?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
I thank him for his time. I hang up the phone and pack up my stuff, ready for a long walk back home from the coffee shop.
On my way out the door I hold it open to… interestingly… the girl from earlier. Brunette, almond eyes, hair like spilled root beer. She smiles. “Thanks,” she says.
Maybe she’s the one, I think.
Or maybe I’m just telling myself that.
I wrote about love for Valentines Day.
Hope you enjoyed it.
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I did some actual journalism and wrote an article about internet addiction for The Week magazine, and interviewed the head of an Internet Addiction Rehab. Here’s an excerpt.
Researchers have noted a rise in something called Digital Attention Disorder — the addiction to social networks and computers in general.
How does it work? More than 50 years ago, psychologist B.F. Skinner was experimenting on rats and pigeons, and noticed that the unpredictability of reward was a major motivator for animals. If a reward arrives either predictably or too infrequently, the animal eventually loses interest. But when there was anticipation of a reward that comes with just enoughfrequency, the animals’ brains would consistently release dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that (basically) regulates pleasure.
What does this have to do with the internet? Some researchers believe that intermittent reinforcement — in the form of texts, tweets, and various other social media — may be working on our brains the same way rewards did on Skinner’s rats.
“Internet addiction is the same as any other addiction — excessive release of dopamine,” says Hilarie Cash, executive director of the reStart program for internet addiction and recovery, a Seattle-area rehab program that helps wean people off the internet. “Addiction is addiction. Whether it’s gambling, cocaine, alcohol, or Facebook.”
And thus begins my contributions to The Week!
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You’re a Good Stalker, Charlie Brown.
I wrote this for Vice Magazine.
Charlie Brown the character is known for being entirely self loathing and somewhat creepy when it came to his obsession with a certain “redheaded girl,” a character based off of a girl from cartoonist Charles Shultz’s own life. Shultz dated a woman named Donna Mae Johnson for three years before proposing, and was devastated when she said no and promptly married a fireman. Shultz ended up writing about the “little red headed girl” for the rest of his life in the Peanuts comic book strip.Perhaps Peter Robbins’ obsession is another case of an actor (or artist, or what have you) getting too involved with their own character. Perhaps it ain’t. Perhaps it’s just another case of a creepy guy being creepy.
Quite a few performers end up taking their characters home with them. By no means am I correlating Robbins’ creepo factor with Heath Ledger’s marvelous acting, but Heath’s involvement in his Joker character (for 2008’sThe Dark Knight) was apparently a factor in his death. Plagued by insomnia after the movie, he began taking strong sleeping meds, along with his usual amount of regular recreational pills. Ledger was found dead with a sizable amount of Oxycontin, Valium, and Xanax in his system. While this is arguably a tragedy, it is also another case of someone taking their homework home with them and refusing to let it go.
Those who read the tabloids regularly are used to the tired ol’ story of a child actor flaming out like a roman candle with drugs and alcohol, perhaps in Peter Robbin’s case it just took an extra 45 years to manifest itself. Imagine being a child star. Now imagine portraying something as famous as the character of Charlie Brown. One can imagine that that sort of “woe is me,” self-deflating headspace that Robbins inhabited for 45 years since his childhood role as Brown may have fucked with him beyond belief. Not to add insult to injury, but has anyone heard from Snoopy since the Peanuts specials went off the air? No. Little dog stayed Joe Cool about the sitch and is unflappable.
Mind you, a lot of people can play a character and leave it be at the end of the day. And it should go without saying that there isn’t any excuse for making death threats or stalking or everything else Robbins (allegedly, although the evidence is overwhelmingly against him) did. To offer someone any sort of pass for what amounts to personally terrorizing someone would be remiss. But perhaps, maybe in some “TV movie of the week” capacity, we can understand just how fucked the inside of his head must have been from being lumped together with such in an iconic character all his life. It warped him.
Good grief, indeed.
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I wrote an article on Claire Danes being the whitest person of the year 2012 for the new Funny Or Die magazine “The Occasional” … which is out today!
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I interviewed pop starlet Sky Ferreira for Interview Magazine. Take a read here.
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Interview: Camilla Blackett, writer for The Newsroom.
I was lucky enough to interview Camilla Blackett, one of the writers for HBO’s The Newsroom. We talked a lot about the show, it’s quasi-rival Girls, what it’s like to work with Aaron Sorkin, and tea.
What I don’t understand is how HBO’s “Girls” was basically untouchable to criticism and “The Newsroom” was somehow cast in this wholly other light. I don’t really think that’s fair. One of the big points of criticism I’ve read about “The Newsroom” is that it’s painted too idealistically… I don’t think that’s true at all. If anything, “The West Wing” was painted “too idealistically” in how the executive office actually works. What I think people don’t get about “The Newsroom” is that… having gone through such a divisive last-four-years especially in news media… that people are jaded by any sort of idealism coming from it.
At the end of the day… it’s a TV show, and it’s escapism. If you want to watch the actual news you can watch the actual news. I work with a bunch of idealists, I work under a boss who is an idealist. A large part about it is that he really gives a shit. He cares about how the news is told and that fantasy of how awesome it would be if you could do the news your way. How wonderful it would be if we could have a completely well-informed public who are talking about real issues. Not, like, tragedy-porn like Nancy Grace. Of course it’s idealistic to think that. That’s what we want to give our audience. -
PONY BOY: YOU HAD ME AT FUGAZI.
I interviewed Pony Boy (aka the lovely and extremely talented Marchelle Banadini) for Vice. We talked about Fugazi, stalkers, and masturbation. Par for the course, really…
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Andrew Charles Kahn Has Three Names.
I interviewed Andrew for Vice Magazine. He picks the songs for Apple commercials, as well as various movies and TV shows. We got sufficiently wasted.
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So yeah, MySpace is getting another reboot. It pains us to say this, but … we might actually use this. Because it’s actually really freaking MOTHER OF GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY PULLED THIS OFF good. (BTW, play a game of “Where’s Justin” when watching this — Justin Timberlake is one of the investors in the site.)
DISCLOSURE: I’ve been helping out with the new site; its actually super cool what they’re doing with the brand/site. It ain’t at all what it used to be: it’s clean, easy to use, and fun. It combines the best parts of Tumblr and Facebook with an emphasis on music. And its super exciting to be involved in a project like this.
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Good news, everyone! You can now get both of my books for $8 each (Life’s Rich Pattern and Brother Louie) on the Amazon Kindle store.
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Jesus, VP Of Marketing At GodCo™
Jesus got off the flying disc. It was, after all, the only flying disc in existence, given to him by his father, Godfrey Cunningham — God for short. He checked his watch. It was 12:22 PM. His father had given him the watch, too. He had a lot of gifts from his father. Jesus often wondered why he didn’t see much of His Father. God had given a lot of presents to Jesus over the years but Jesus often wondered why God, being his Father and all, didn’t just hang out with him every once in a while. That’s all Jesus wanted. Just some recognition that he was God’s son and that he was doing a good job. That’s all anyone wants really, Jesus thought to himself. He was mostly right.
I wrote a short story for Thought Catalog.
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Interview: Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks | Death and Taxes
I interviewed Cenk Uygur. He is ridiculously smart.
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