PicoBlog

If you've been reading Hmm for a while, you'll know that late last year I wrote about Vogue's piece on Lauren Sánchez and her fiancé, Jeff Bezos, which had the kind of photos and quotes a person can only dream or trip about. These two have, obviously, not gone anywhere, although their joint publicist seems to have taken a well-deserved rest after placing the Vogue piece. So when I saw the photos of the couple as guests at a White House's state dinner honoring Japan earlier this week, I had to take a quick little moment to myself.

Hi, Ari here - thanks for being a full subscriber to my newsletter! My new piece is about love… Give a gift subscription Republicans in Florida and Texas are passing laws to limit or ban how gender and sexuality are referenced in schools. While there can certainly be legitimate debates about how to tackle age-appropriate concepts in the classroom, many of these efforts are more political than pedagogical. They try to scare parents and find a “wedge” issue to crack down on what has been a march towards more understanding and acceptance of LGBTQ rights in general.

In my “(Don’t) Gimmie Indie Rock” essay from a few months ago, I talked about how Bomb the Music Industry! helped lay the groundwork for much of what we think of as the current DIY (or “fifth-wave emo,” although I believe that this might now be considered a dead meme?) scene, in terms of sonics, aesthetics, and ethics. But I think a much more under-sung band, in terms of music but especially in terms of intra-scene dialogue and addressing serious issues in an articulate way, is Latterman, and it’s a goddamn crime that I rarely seem to see them talked about these days, at least in this context (although in fairness this VICE article from Paul Blest definitely seems to “get it”).

This newsletter took a break last week for Memorial Day weekend (and, quite honestly, for me to meet a deadline for a big project). Maybe it’s the exhaustion, maybe it’s knowing that Paris Hilton is 40 years old, or maybe it’s my failed attempts this week to get into Olivia Rodrigo. Whatever it is, this week’s news is making me feel old, perhaps a little moldy, like that bread you should have frozen before you left your house for four nights over the long weekend.

If it’s the 14th of April it must mean it’s time for another installment of Pizzabout. We are two months into finding out where the best pizza in the 405 diningscape lives with pizza’s No. 1 groupie, Rob Crissinger. Our April dispatch reports from Edmond and downtown Oklahoma City with starkly contrasting styles. My quest to find love in pizza coincides with Rob’s quest to find a human connection as profound as the one he has with pizza.

By age 23, Donald Kinsey had already assured his place in music history, having played in the bands of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Albert King. His credits for 1976 alone include Peter Tosh’s Legalize It and Live and Dangerous albums, as well as Bob Marley’s Rastaman Vibration and Live at the Roxy. In short, Kinsey, master of the poignant guitar solo, has one of the most impressive blues and reggae resumes imaginable.

My students have told me I have “no chill.” At first I thought this was quite bad — as if I don’t have coolness or calmness. But no, they meant I don’t have much of a filter, which to them is quite good, mostly. I suspect the “no chill” claim results because of examples like the one that follows. The one I’m about to tell you makes them go “wtf?” and “can he really say that about an animated piece of entertainment?

One of the oddest - and perhaps least remembered - stories of the English Reformation involves Elizabeth Barton (d.1534), a wildly popular prophetess and nun known as “The Holy Maid of Kent.” When she was still a teenager, she had divine revelations in which she predicted the future. At first, most of her prophetic utterances were about healing and heresy — and many of the divinations came to pass. Most English Catholic authorities, including Thomas Wolsey and Sir Thomas More, supported her and found her popularity helpful in their quest to resist the spread of Protestantism among the masses.

When a resident of a far-flung hamlet opts to journey towards more civilized quarters, he cannot help but notice the status of the land as he travels it. As I and my woman forged south — over the river and through the woods, to grandmother's house indeed — I found myself marvelling at the total absence of Upstate New York's normally-infamous lake effect snow. From Massena to Utica, the entire state is snowless.