Bon Appétit: Nous Non Plus Makes a Mess in the Kitchen
If you happen to hang in dark corners of bars that still allow smoking, or in line at gourmet cheese shop counters, or in back of the few remaining couturier clothing shops in existence, you're likely to bump into more than a few Parisian expats. While they haven't necessarily etched out a turf of their own, like the Tokyo and Tel Aviv transplants on New York's St. Marks Place or the Aussies in Alphabet City, the French have a connection to almost every scene and industry. It might be for that reason that we take for granted the red wine-stained bistros down the block, the constant presence of Godard at art house cinemas, and the messy, sexy, bed-headed girls in short skirts, cigarettes dangling from lips, in our discotheques.
Get the whole story >>
"I'm personally anti-microwave. The Chinese say anything that heats up really fast must cool down at the same rate. I'm into slow and sensual. There is nothing less sexy than a microwave."–Céline Dijon
Sarah Haskins: So Quick to Get it And So Quick to Generate It
Sarah Haskins is one of those comics whom I can't stop watching. I don't even watch TV, but sometimes I come home from work and search for her on YouTube. Other times, I eat lunch at my desk and follow a Feministing link to one of her clips (even if it is a clip I've seen a million times, I know that on the millionth and first viewing, I will still laugh). Whether she is talking about birth control being marketed as period control or noting that the WE network's wedding shows "put the 'we' in wedding and the 'end' in feminism,"...

Get the whole story >>
Besties for Life
After reading about the Besties and listening to their music, I paid attention to their lyrics for a while, spent time with the record, and concluded quickly that it would be dismissive at best to call them "sweet, infectious pop." Surely, there's more of a punk element here, especially if you listen to their words and hear their story, how they got started, and what their new album Home Free actually means.

Get the whole story>>

"Yeah, I agree that it's a pop record and that we're a pop band. That's who we are, there's no way of getting around it. That's the kind of music we make. But it's a little bit defeating when you're writing these songs that are really personal; you're talking about these intense things like dead family members, really painful things...you record it and put it out there and people's reaction are like, 'Awwweeee, that's adorable.' We just got a comment the other day about one of our songs, "Bone Valley Deposit" like, 'The boy/girl lyrics are so cute; It's such a sweet song but it's a song about my dead dad. It's not meant to be cute. It takes the wind out of you a little bit." –Marisa Becquist