What do The Day of the Locust, What Makes Sammy Run?, and now Matthew Specktor’s American Dream Machine have in common? Barred for Life is a pretty great name for a book about punk and Black Flag. Full Stop talks a little Jeanne Thornton. Fifty comedians you need to know about. The Dandies invade RISD. Women being rejected by Walt Disney Productions in the 1930s. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.
The Old Oxford: Dressing Up To Climb Mountains
Detroit-born designer John Varvatos is one of his hometown’s favorite sons, but the New York-based success story has never been afraid to wear his Midwestern roots on his tailored sleeve. The 2007 GQ Designer of the Year, who uses rock stars like Alice Cooper and Green Day for his promotional ads, has even been the face of one of the Motor City’s greatest companies, starring in commercials for Chrysler’s well-received “Imported From Detroit” campaign. Varvatos and the automotive company recently […]
Amanda Palmer Tries to Bring National Poetry Month to a Screeching Halt
On January 22nd, Alexandra Petri (who, according to her Twitter is a “Daily topical humor blogger”) claimed that “There are about six people who buy new poetry,” in her Washington Post piece, “Is Poetry Dead?” a day Richard Blanco read his poem, “One Today,” at the presidential inauguration. While Petri was supposedly trying to be funny, the 408 comments, and 5.7 thousand Facebook “Likes,” however, showed us people still have a good deal to say about poetry, and that calling the form dead was unfunny and unfounded.
A Guy Watching Mad Men: Young Hearts Be Free Tonight (S6/E4 “To Have and to Hold”)
For what it’s worth, the lives of the women on Mad Men tend to be more nuanced and interesting than the men on the show, and that’s especially noticeable when the powers that be do things like dedicate more time in each episode to them. We know Don is messed up in the head, we know Pete is a worm, and we know Roger has a lot of being honest with himself he has to do. Joan and Peggy are the two […]
Dead Moon Wisdom: It’s OK
The last real mixtape I ever received was titled “It’s O.K.” I say real, because people don’t make actual mixtapes anymore; they make Spotify playlists or send their friends bundles of MP3s, and might name the folder ‘Mixtape’ for sentimental or ironic reasons. The cassette, for the most part, is a dead format, but the mix lives on in a less personal way than it did when we were faced with listening to the songs we wanted on the tape […]
A Guy Watching Mad Men: This Affair Sucks (S6/E3 “The Collaborators)
The affairs on Mad Men used to be so much cleaner. Don used to enjoy the women he cheated on Betty with, filling some void in his twisted soul. Now we have this new Don, somehow a worse person than the guy we knew the last few seasons; colder and focused on…something. He’s sleeping with the neighbor, and unless Dr. Rosen suddenly says the couple is moving, I really don’t see how that will end well. Pete’s affairs, on the […]
The Old Oxford: Dreaming of the Golden Era of Travel
No matter what the season, whenever there’s a changeover from colder to warmer months (or vice versa), I start thinking of getting the heck out of town. My philosophy is a little James Murphy and Rosecrans Baldwin: New York I love you but you start to stink towards the middle or end of every season, and I need to get away.
Summer of Proust
I’m assuming this isn’t going to seem weird to some of you: I spent a good deal of time in libraries growing up. I would just sit there for hours after school, during breaks, or sometimes on Saturdays, totally avoiding the sun and just picking whatever random books seemed interesting on that particular day. I read anything I could get, but there were times I’d get more into books than others, and either check them out or hope they’d be […]