“1, 2, 3!” they chant, and slice into the ribbon with a satisfying snip. There’s cheers, Traci and Mikey kiss, long and drawn out, all tongue and injected lips. Their matching baseball caps emblazoned with the Slim logo knock against each other. Mikey grabs Traci’s ass, tight in yoga pants, ready to work out. The ribbon holders stand by awkwardly, smiling nervously to each other and waiting for them to stop, flaccid halves of ribbon dangling.
She’s talking about my sister and me—
roommates and where-did-their-mother-go-wrong
women sharing an apartment I wish
were a sexy British flat in early
2000s
Crumble reads the script aloud for herself. “I want to help students understand why they feel so lost. It’s just biology. The amygdala develops first in a teenager’s brain. It controls emotions and all the bad decisions that kids make.” She agrees with the sentiment. But she can’t reconcile the bad decisions she sees herself making in these visions.
FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / April 2021 / Gabriel Ricard
Gabe doesn’t learn anything from Film Twitter, but still goes all out for the Drunk Monkeys’ Pop Culture Issue in this month’s Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo.
Jon Sherman was in his early 20s in a building on Tujunga in Studio City, in office space used by the network, the day the news hit. But he wasn’t privy to all the details of the devastating death, as he was preoccupied with finishing his writing for MTV’s first original scripted live action drama series. “I don’t know what I’m doing exactly, I hope someone knows what they’re doing,” he remembers thinking. “And no one did. What am I doing here? How did I get here? How do I get out?” Two months later, “Dead At 21” premiered.
Blonde-in-a-bottle seeks showmance. Fundamentally unlovable due to deep-rooted distrust of anybody stupid enough to fall in love. Willing to engage in sexually gratifying relationship with minimal emotional engagement as long as it benefits me.
Too honest?
The issue at hand is that those who object to this track and its accompanying video cannot look past the mythology of the female body’s fertile soil. With ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, the Prodigy created a work of satire that exudes a belief system that opposes or blinds those who wrongly interpret its perception, whether lyrically or visually.
It isn’t like a mother to stumble. I must stumble
straighter, my Mom would say. Quickly to
the school drop-off, nubby nails strumming the
wheel. Grinding & releasing teeth like kitchen
drawers, their constant roll.
Some women pray
the roof will hold; wait for the storm to turn.
Some women strike out on their own,
bolts of lightning from an unforgiving sky.
let me in and we’ll watch reruns of Seinfeld
deep sea diving on the armchair, you can melt my otter-pop tongue
from the heat of your mouth. my fingertips are freezing out here, the air conditioning
feels like a Manhattan blizzard and i think the fake plants are judging me.
It was only when I began high school that I was no longer satisfied with the life I was living. The farm wasn’t enough for me, my parents weren’t enough. I felt sick with isolation, with alienation. My mother told me the things I was feeling were normal. I told her there was nothing normal about me, there never was. She turned from me and stared out the kitchen window, into the distant horizon. Her grey hair was piled into a bun on her head, looking as if she belonged to a century gone. Without a word she left the room and came back with a folded blanket held out before her.
“You were wrapped in this when we found you.”
From her place at the rear
she checks her hair.
It is a reflex familiar to her
as breathing, as dear as her name, Jennifer,
or the transcripts she memorized
by flashlight, under the covers, as a girl enthralled with flight.
But I’ve always had a special bond with birds. Years ago at Tenney Park in Madison when it wasn’t winter, I’d go listen to the ducks lampoon the world so often that they’d waddle up and sit with me, though I never fed them. One let me pet its emerald neck.
Originally elected by the cardinals as a compromise candidate that they thought would be easy to control Pious instead takes charge of the Catholic Church as a radical reactionary that seeks to bring brimstone and fire back to the Catholic church. He launches a campaign to teach the Catholic faithful that it takes suffering to find God, and will trample anyone inside the Vatican that stands in his way.
When Dillon offers his thanks for the scorpion-plucking, Mac responds with one word, “Anytime,” shaping it into a menacing whisper-growl, as cool as mist rising from ice. It’s the first indication that things may not be what they seem. Mac doesn’t trust Dillon – correctly, it turns out, as Dillon has, with typical CIA wiliness, brought this team to Central America on false pretenses. Later, when Dutch learns of the betrayal, he asks Dillon, “What happened to you?”
“I woke up,” Dillon says. “Why don’t you?”
Seeing the city in the rear-view mirror was a relief. A blessing. I’m no country boy. Don’t get me wrong on that score. But even a bona fide city-slicker like myself recognizes that the metropolitan life is a deviation from a healthy, natural existence. I mean, I enjoy it’s perks as well as the next man. For instance, who can count on a decent curry, some palatable sushi, in the country? Your not going to come across a classy cinema in the boondocks. And I do like me some classy cinema venues. Look, I’m no fashion guru, hell, I’m a bit of a slob…. but I do appreciate that my wardrobe isn’t limited to the town Super Target or the county Walmart.
Thank you for standing in that liminal space between child and adult and telling us we had no say in our bodies changing into women, but did have choices about what that meant, how that looked. That our futures must make space enough to hold our pasts.
Let the Charmed Ones keep fighting,
let the stars burn bright, you’re just
sitting there shelving books. We’re all
just sitting there shelving books.
FILM / I Waited 23 years to Watch Justin Timberlake Have Sex with a Black Woman and All I Got Was These Lousy Feelings / Ofelia Brooks
When Black women are erased from the cancellation conversation, our loss is also erased. And we stay losing. We were Janet then and are Wainwright now: mere casualties left in Timberlake’s wake.