The appropriate response to Girls, a television show about a Cuban nightclub entertainer, his hapless wife, and the wacky couple downstairs, is to set yourself on fire outside of Leon Panetta's office. But any attempt to blunt the raw plenary power of the executive to kill with abandon is ultimately futile, and yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the U.S. release of Combat Rock, so here's a recap.
Hey girl, have you been on the set of Girls in the last two days? Well, if you have brown hair and are tallish, the only not-white guy is looking for you. So shuffle on off that Greenpoint sound stage—you're no extra in this love story.
The appropriate response to Girls, a television program about two sets of high school outcasts—the "freaks," who wear army fatigues and smoke cigarettes, and the "geeks," who like Monty Python—is to hold your children close and promise them you'll be home more. But today is Biggie Smalls' birthday, and Gotye's too, so here is a recap.
The appropriate response to Girls, a television program about a bachelor who pretends to be gay in order to live with two attractive female roommates without arousing the suspicions of his conservative landlord, is to turn off the TV and read Capitalism and Schizophrenia on the toilet. But it's David Byrne's birthday, so here is a recap.
The appropriate response to Girls, a television program about networked mobile digital displays, the nature of freedom, and millions of callow, navel-gazing shits on a halting, fumbling journey toward adulthood, is to press pause and use the bathroom. But today is the 51st birthday of Motörhead guitarist Philip Campbell, so here is a recap.
The appropriate response to Girls, a television program about whiteness, Twitter, and the irreducible sexual magnetism of abusive men, is to drown your mobile phone in the bathtub. But you need to call your mother, and today is the 21st anniversary of Nirvana signing to Geffen, so here's a recap.
Another week, another episode of Girls with no black people, another Gawker Media piece about why it's fucked up to not include black people in your show about New York, another article from angry neocons attacking Gawker Media. The dust Lena Dunham's new HBO show has managed to kick up thus far is remarkable in light of its relatively average ratings. But it's also noteworthy because far fewer people seemed to care when the crimes of which the show is accused happened before—many times. Though it's taken on different iterations throughout the years, the white-ified TV New York City has served as a backdrop for lots of America's most beloved programs, and there is no sign that that trend is slowing. Hate Girls all you want, but recognize that Dunham is following a precedent that started even before she was born.
In order to better address the needs of our fitness-obsessed readers, we are introducing this semi-regular column, "I of the Tiger," to take on the vital hardcore fitness issues of our time. Today: girl stuff. Dig it.
Was this video inevitable? Probably. Not unlike your drunk uncle Pete, the Internet has only so many jokes to tell. The only thing that really changes is the context within which those jokes are told.
In the week before the premiere of HBO's Girls an average of 23 articles were published about the show every day. Veep, the network's other new half-hour comedy, was the subject of an average of 3.1 articles per day. (Data via Google Trends.) And yet Veep drew 1.7 million viewers for its premiere, while Girls picked up 1.1 million.
This morning Andy Richter tweeted, "Possibly the most insulting thing ever" with a link to these shoes. For $525, you can show off your paint-splattered shoes without ever having to lift a brush. One of Richter's followers, Ivan Khatchatourian, countered with a slashed army t-shirt on sale for $1,137.50.
This week, on the internet, we are talking about 25-year-old prodigy Lena Dunham's new HBO show Girls and race. (Girls and gender was last week's topic. Keep up.) On Monday, after the show's premiere, Jenna Wortham wrote on the Hairpin about her disappointment in the show's overwhelming whiteness: "[T]hese girls... are beautiful, they are ballsy, they are trying to figure it out... I just wish I saw a little more of myself on screen, right alongside them."
Did you know that, a couple weeks ago, creator of Girls and voice of her or a generation Lena Dunham recounted to fashion wunderkind Tavi Gevinson's website, Rookie, the story of how she lost her virginity?
In making the unending publicity rounds for Girls, co-star Allison Williams has been peddling a YouTube discovery myth: Producer Judd Apatow, the tale goes, happened to come across a video of her singing a self-produced mash-up of the theme song to Mad Men in October 2010 and immediately knew that she was the actress to play Marnie, Lena Dunham's uptight girlfriend.
Today is Ian MacKaye's 50th birthday so I guess it's as good a time as any to realize you hate young people. Girls is a television program about the children of wealthy famous people and shitty music and Facebook and how hard it is to know who you are and Thought Catalog and sexually transmitted diseases and the exhaustion of ceaselessly dramatizing your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization. This is a recap of it.
Following last year's Tiny Furniture, indie darling Lena Dunham emerged as a break-out voice of a generation. Her new show Girls is a realistic, ballsy, awkward, humiliating, intimate, honest take on what it is to be a young Millenial, a 20-something female archetype living in New York City dealing with STDs, abortion, financial woes, orgasms, body issues and being stuck in the in-between space when you are "not a girl not yet a woman." It's unlike anything else on TV.
It's pretty well-known that hardcore has been awful basically ever since Earth Crisis jocks started ruining shows in the early 90s. But out of Australia comes its savior: eight-year-old Juliet, who loves slam-dancing, half-time breakdowns, and her dog Robert, and hates hypocrisy, frat boys, and the smell of her pet fish. Talk about "youth crew," am I right? "Youth crew"? Right? [via @Alex_Ogle]
Ooh boy. Here's a quote that speaks volumes, from Reuters' article about Iran's morality police "cracking down" on the sale of Barbie dolls, which is forbidden. Stores have been instructed to sell Iran's specially-designed, ultra-demure Sara and Dara dolls instead, to the disgust of the superficial girl tykes of Tehran:
