way to go, hank.

buzzfeedanimals: We interviewed those affected by Yahoo’s...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:45:43 -0400

buzzfeedanimals:

We interviewed those affected by Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr, and they had a lot to say.

I MADE THIS.

a GIF of me dancing, for @nicolesheikh and everyone else who...

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:08:32 -0400

a GIF of me dancing, for @nicolesheikh and everyone else who said it couldn’t be done

Actual Break Up Song. Dedicated to anyone who doesn’t want...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 18:34:45 -0500

Actual Break Up Song. Dedicated to anyone who doesn’t want babies.

via buzzfeed

danchaon: Toothpaste For Dinner comic: the creative process

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:10:34 -0500

danchaon:

Toothpaste For Dinner comic: the creative process

First video I made for my new gig at BuzzFeed.

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:29:02 -0500

First video I made for my new gig at BuzzFeed.

yr an adult: NEW POST!!!!! An elegy for the weekend getaway bender

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:58:20 -0400

yr an adult: NEW POST!!!!! An elegy for the weekend getaway bender:

yranadult:

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a café in near my friend Cory Poolman’s house in Philadelphia. I’ve been hung over for days, I haven’t showered in approximately that same amount of time and having left my toothbrush at the hotel in DC, my breath is zombie rotten. This current trip I’m on…

via buzzfeed

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:57:40 -0400

via buzzfeed

egotripland: Rick Ross’ SECRET JEWISH MOMENTS Revealed. You...

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:09:08 -0400

egotripland:

Rick Ross’ SECRET JEWISH MOMENTS Revealed.

You can see them all and laugh over here: http://bit.ly/PAyXUf

yr an adult: NEW POST: 15 awesome bald dudes to make you feel better about losing your hair

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 23:04:55 -0400

yr an adult: NEW POST: 15 awesome bald dudes to make you feel better about losing your hair:

yranadult:

At the moment when a twenty-something man realizes that he will not live the rest of his life with his full head of hair, he will generally go into an immediate state of mourning for his hair before it is even gone. At least, that’s what happened to me, when, at 24, I noticed that my hairline was…

yranadult: All the logos for the latest Yr An Adult post, The...

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:54:03 -0400

yranadult:

All the logos for the latest Yr An Adult post, The reality TV shows YOU could be in (you know, if they existed).

If only they made reality tv about real twentysomethings.

Chris Lighty was a legendary figure in the business of hip-hop,...

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 11:40:28 -0400

Chris Lighty was a legendary figure in the business of hip-hop, who passed away yesterday.

egotripland:

R.I.P. to Mr. Chris Lighty.
Here’s a list that Roadmanager Chris contributed for our Book of Rap Lists…

yr an adult: NEW POST!!! The Seven Types of New Adults You Know

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:01:21 -0400

yr an adult: NEW POST!!! The Seven Types of New Adults You Know:

yranadult:

Writing about adults and adulthood, I’ve been especially interested in the general archetypes of young people that keep coming up. While every person is a unique snowflake and all that, I mostly find that as our generation comes of age, there are only a few different categories that people…

yr an adult: Here’s what happens when I go to friends weddings

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 21:37:59 -0400

yr an adult: Here’s what happens when I go to friends weddings:

yranadult:

If you’re like me, in your late-20s, your summers are probably tent-poled by the celebrations of your friends love-contracts, their fiestas of legally bound love, if you will. I had four last summer, three this summer, and god knows how many I’ll have next year. Just this week, I…

awesome video for Airtime that I helped produce with the homies...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:22:50 -0400

awesome video for Airtime that I helped produce with the homies @portala

A completely self-indulgent recap of all the awesome things that happened to me in Europe

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:42:36 -0400

The first time I went to Europe was a three-week trip sailing trip around the Mediterranean. The trip was financed by grandmother, who did the same for all of my cousins. She was an extremely well-read English teacher, who wanted her jumpstart her grandchildrens’ old world cultural educations. Little did she know that I’d spend most of my time on a boat, debating with my fellow travelers about what the best way for us to sneak away from our guardians/sailing instructors and get drunk. We never did. Before embarking, my grandmother gave me some very sound advice. “Keep a journal,” she said, so I’d have a document of my trip. Of course, I ignored her advice.

Well, I sort of followed it. In a performance of pure teenage pretention, I wound up keeping a running espresso-chronicle, where I reviewed every cup of espresso I had on my trip. Each port we stopped in, I went to a café and rated the espresso on the taste and the atmosphere of where I was drinking it, writing a paragraph with my thoughts on the subject. You know, because at 16, I was a fucking expert on coffee. What can I say? Teenagers are weirdos. Someday I will find it and post it on a blog and everyone will laugh.

Anyways, I just got back from Europe a few days ago, and even though I told myself that THIS trip I would keep a journal, I didn’t. I was too tired/lazy/absorbed in the moment to sit in a café every day or so to write down what happened while I spent two weeks exploring Barcelona and Paris with Nicole, my lovely, patient, far-better-human-being-than-me girlfriend. Which is dumb. The whole point of going to Europe used to be so you could sit in cafés and write down your profoundly unique thoughts. Now we just tweet observations and instagram the bars we’re in. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but I keep thinking that fifteen years from now, I might want to have a slightly more thorough document of this trip than just a handful of snarky tweets and pictures of me making faces in front of landmarks, so I decided to write a list of everything that I could think of that happened to me while abroad. So that’s what this is; a few key moments, sites and experiences from the trip that I hope to retain.

1) Picasso, man. Fucking Picasso. Went to the Picasso museum in Barcelona, where the collection begins with a room-by-room, year-by-year chronicle of Picasso’s early work. What’s amazing is you can see his evolution from a teenage art student, proficiently mimicking the styles of other artists to a young prodigy, developing his own groundbreaking vision. What’s doubly amazing is it happened in the matter of a few years. In the 1896 room (when Pablo was 15), the work is kind of boring. Same with 1897. Then, by 1898, it’s like, “Whoa, this is getting prettying interesting.” And by the time I got into 1899, Pablo was just killing it. Very cool way to get into the work of the best painter ever.

1a) Related. Walking through museums, I always like looking at the people looking at art as much as I like looking at the art itself. Anyways, there was this one American kid I kept seeing around the museum, a gawky-looking, pale, pimpled-ridden 14-year-old, deep in the throes of puberty. As he looked at each painting, he would audibly say “Hmmm…. Interesting!”, his voice cracking, wanting the world to know that, yeah, he gets it, just like adults do. I loved that kid.

2.) Antoni Gaudi, man. Fuck. Nicole kept on telling me that we needed to check out La Sagrada Familia, a still-in-construction cathedral which was designed by Barcelona’s reigning deity of modernista architecture, Antoni Gaudi. And I kept being like, “Really? A church. I get it. Churches in Europe are all the same.” I had no idea who Gaudi was, and no idea that Sagrada Familia looks nothing like the other churches in Europe. I was just being an asshole.

After the reading in the guidebook app that said if you go to one tourist spot in Barcelona, you should go to Sagrada Familia, I finally agreed to go, which rightly pissed Nicole off even more (“Oh, if the guidebook says you should go, then you’ll go?”) I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I should have just checked it out. Also, I should have done enough research in advance to know that Gaudi’s work is unlike that of any architect’s anywhere and worth spending days checking out. After being wowed by Sagrada Familia, we went to check out some his various houses in the city and the awesomely weird park he was commissioned to build, Park Guell. In-between sightseeing, I read a ton about him online and was wholly inspired.

In the future, I will a.) just go where my girlfriend wants to without being a sourpuss about it and b.) read about a place before I go.

3.) I discovered Gin. Our first night in Barcelona, we met up with Brian, a friend-of-a-friend who has been living in Barcelona for years, who promptly took us to one of the hot bars in the city, that specializes in gin, which is what I guess all the cool kids in Spain are drinking these days. Now, since high school, gin has always made my stomach turn, and I always associated it with old white ladies talking shit about their servants. However, according to Brian, the way Americans are presently obsessed with whiskey, whiskey bars and whiskey cocktails, that’s what’s going with Barcelonans and gin. The bar, Xixbar, had a cocktail menu completely comprised of gin drinks and something like 100 bottles of different gins (meanwhile, they had exactly 3 whiskeys). So, I took a when-in-Rome attitude and had a goblet-sized gin-and-tonic. And then I had another one. And then, I kept ordering them for the rest of the trip. And now, that’s another drink which I’m way into, which is exactly what I needed.

4.) I re-confirmed my belief that exclusive, high-end clubs are dumb. Out of pure curiosity to explore Barcelona’s nightlife, Nicole, our friend Mischa and I (ironically) went to a couple weird Barcelona clubs. First, we tried to use this VIP card we had to cut the line at OPIUM (that just sounds terrible, right?), but it obviously didn’t work. Then, we checked out the not-too-crowded Ice Bar, where you pay €15 to hang out in a room made of ice and then to club at the top of the W hotel, right before closing time. The people were all eurotrash, the drinks all expensive, the music whatever. It was fun because it was ridiculous, and I was drinking and being silly (see video below), but I wouldn’t recommend any of the places we went/looked at.

5.) We found the best club in Barcelona. The night we hung out with Brian, the ex-pat, I made sure to ask him how to find the kind of clubs that I like, where the cover is low, there’s no dress code (enforced or otherwise), and it’s just a bunch of sweaty kids dancing. I was thinking along the lines of the Knockout Room in San Francisco. Brian was quick to recommend Razzmatazz, in a weird part of the city, saying to go and stay late. What we found was nothing like the clubs I’m used to in America. Razzmattazz is a giant sprawling complex of a place, with a main room that fits about 1000 people and four other rooms, each with different music/vibes. It’s almost all electronic, though when we got there, the main room was playing 80s new wave (awesome). At 1:00am, the place was sparsely filled, as we explored it and found a room with agreeable beats/lasers. By 2:00 am, it was almost packed with a mix of thousands local hipsters, teenagers, study-abroad-students and tourists. The smoking area was choked with different languages and drunken, tripping, rolling humanity.

After a couple hours of dancing, we found ourselves on one of these smoking terraces, talking for 20 minutes with a couple guys from the US Army, stationed in Italy. Nice enough guys, but it reminded me that I don’t know ANYONE in the army, which says something about me/America. As they were about to wander off to find American girls, I thanked them for their service, which, if you’re like me, prone to sarcasm or speaking with ironic detachment, don’t ever do. It sounds weird/unsincere, no matter how much you try to make it sound like you mean it.

After Nicole and Mischa made fun of me for being weird, we said we were gonna check out the main room for a minute and then walk home. When we got to the main room, it was being thoroughly rocked by an Antwerpian DJ/drummer duo called SquarElectic, doing deconstructionist mashups of pop songs/BANGING on the drums. We danced till we could barely stand. Pretty amazing.

6.) The beach happened. One of the reasons why Barcelona is one of my new favorite cities in the world, beyond the awesome food/drinks, dinners that start at ten and the amazing architecture, is the fact that it’s on the Mediterranean. We only made it to the beach a couple times, but when we did, man, I was like, “FUCK SAN FRANCISCO.” A city with all this culture and vibrancy and natural beauty AND an awesome beach walking distance from the city center? Where else has that? Seriously. Because I want to go.

7.) We didn’t starve, I’ll tell you that. Without being too obnoxious about it here’s a quick rundown of only the best meals I had, in case you wind up in either Paris or Barcelona and want my recos:

Barcelona

• I ate canned-seafood based tapas at Quimet & Quimet, a standing room only tapas bar that’s been owned by the same family for generations. This was a Brian-recommendation, who said it would be kind of weird to eat all these dishes made up of on expensive cans of seafood, but it’s totally worth it. We splurge for the baby conch and it was just grand.

• We had what our Airbnb-host said was the “best Paella in Barcelona,” at Cherriff, this homey little rustic Spanish restaurant that reminded of an old school American-Italian spot. We were the only English-speakers in there.

• We had expensive, weird, gastro food at Comerc 24. Egg foam! A flight of olive oil! A single tiny cauliflower served on a rock! Ok, it sounds weird when you list out the weirdest stuff we had with exclamation points, but it was actually pretty amazing.

• We had Spanish-style burgers better than 90% of the burgers you can get in SF at Bacoa.

Paris

• We ate classic, cheap, brasserie food at L’Aubergeade in the 12^th. Again, we were the only English-speakers in there, which I always take to mean it’s authentic, which, I admit, is superficial of me.

• We had sweet euro-pizza (mine had cuban pork and plantains) at Pink Flamingo in the third arrondisement, a sweet little spot with it’s own beer, a great menu and a parked VW bus you can dine in, in lieu of the patio.

• We had one of the best French meals I’ve ever had at L’Office in Montmarte, no hyperbole. Seabass with speck and potatoes. Unfuckwithable.

• We had awesome ethnic food (pho & falafel), not to mention all kinds of bread, cheese and croissants. Man. Fuck. That was great.

8). We saw a decent amount of live music. First, we saw a really cool show by my friend Gabe’s band, DAD, at this sweet little Rue D’oberkampf venue called L’International, where they apparently have free live music every night of the week. We also saw Santigold play at Le Trianon, this gorgeous Belle Epoque-era cabaret theater. It was like seeing a show in the states, except the only beer available was Heineken and everyone there was French. Finally, we went to a weird Parisian night club to watch DJs from Los Angeles play experimental hiplectro (i.e. LA’s Brainfeeder/Proximal/Low End Theory beat scene). It was way too crowded to enjoy, so we left before Shlomo or Nosaj thing, but we saw a couple very convincing French DJs whose names I don’t know.

9.) We didn’t get super fucked up by the rain. It rained buckets one day in Barcelona and a bunch of days in Paris, which was a bummer, but for the most part, we were able to work around it. On one seemingly beautiful day, we rode Velib bikes east from our apartment in the third, out to Bois des Vincennes, a giant, beautiful, mostly deserted park outside of Paris’ city limits, and when it started to drizzle, we were able to cool out under a giant tree by a creek for 10 minutes until the clouds passed. Then, on the way home, as I got us lost, it started raining buckets, but we found shelter and were near enough a subway line that we were able to get home easily, only slightly drenched.

Another day, we found ourselves in this awesome little pho place right before the sky opened up and got to laugh into our soup as French people ran by, clutching newspapers to the tops of their heads. And then, when we were done, it was sunny again. All things considered, it could have been worse.

10.) I learned to love soccer. Well, not love it per se. I still don’t really give a fuck. But before this trip, I’d never sat down and watched an entire soccer game. But I like sports, and I recognized that being in Barcelona while Spain played in the final game of the European Championships meant something. So, after a quiet lunch, me and Nicole wandered into a baroque-themed bar to watch Spain thoroughly trounce Italy, and it was fun, even exciting, and I think I finally get why the games are interesting to people, which I’d never really taken the time to consider before. Afterwards, we walked down to Las Ramblas and watched the celebrating masses, which was massive.

And that’s it, an un-comprehensive document of this vacation which will eventually replace my own memories of the trip. My grandma would be proud.

A few things I thought about while watching ‘Moonrise Kingdom’

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 17:04:38 -0400

A few things I thought about while watching ‘Moonrise Kingdom’:

yranadult:

Last night, impromptu, I had myself a little date-night at the Kabuki Theater in Japantown. And what’s better for a date-night movie than the new Wes Anderson film, still in limited release? It’s positively quintessential! Now, I don’t like to review new movies here ar yr an adult, because there are already so many great places for quality new-release reviews, but I do like to the rundown all the weird, ADD-thoughts that run through my head when I’m watching a film in the theater. I will say that I liked the movie, as I like almost all Wes Anderson movies, and that I agree with the reviews that say this is one of his best.[1] I mean, he makes beautifully framed, nostalgic, funny films about the loneliness of growing up. That shit is obviously right up my alley. So I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts, and I hope you see the movie. Also, fear not spoilerphobes. There will be no spoilers.

The crowd for a Wes Anderson movie at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco is the most stereotypically Wes Anderson crowd in the whole world. The Kabuki is one my favorite movie theaters. It’s an expensively designed, Sundance-branded cinema that plays a mix of art films and blockbusters, you reserve your seat online in advance, they sell microbrews at a reasonable price and the affable guy who checks your id name-checks a movie that came out the year you were born (i.e. “1982, I saw Fast Times at Ridgemont High that year). The average age of the audience member was 27 years old. Everyone was either dressed like a tech person trying to dress like a creative or an actual creative trying to dress like a creative (read: skinny jeans, thoughtful sneakers, “cool” t-shirt/jacket combos, angular haircuts, etc…). It was a profoundly white, SF-crowd, filled with exactly who you’d imagine goes to see Wes Anderson movies in the theaters.

READ MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Galactic ft. Mystikal “Move Fast”. I love this this...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 15:10:47 -0400

Galactic ft. Mystikal “Move Fast”. I love this this song/video. Best couplet: “go mystikal go mystikal go/hold up, look i’m forty baby go slow/”

Fun fact: Mystikal SUPER deserved the 6 years of jail time he got.

Amazing low-budget clip for the Lushlife/Styles P track. Proof...

Mon, 21 May 2012 18:19:14 -0400

Amazing low-budget clip for the Lushlife/Styles P track. Proof that our music video directors are failing us.

"But back when the “Underground” was tagged in capital letters, the promise of an..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 18:14:56 -0400

“But back when the “Underground” was tagged in capital letters, the promise of an alternate subterranean grid seemed infinite. Fat Beats did booming business. Hip-hop culture mags cropped up to survey the soundbombing. Clinton was President. Gas was $1 per gallon. A Bellevue-certified eccentric like Kool Keith could get Doctor Octagon dough from Dreamworks to squander in and around the West Hollywood IHOP.
During that last spring of the 20th Century, Rawkus Records released Soundbombing II— an Underground Now That’s What I Call Music!— that banged incessantly in dorm rooms across America and England. It marked the first and only time Eminem and El-P shared space on wax. Yet it didn’t feel that weird at the time. People still used the phrase “on wax” and Shady had only recently signed to Interscope. To balance his quality time with Dr. Dre, Marshall Mathers also worked with people like Thirstin Howl III and Outsidaz.”

- A pretty much perfect summation of the era of hip-hop that raised me, from Jeff Weiss’ review of the new El-P album on Pitchfork.

1st fight scene in ‘Haywire’, where Gina Carano...

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:58:36 -0400

1st fight scene in ‘Haywire’, where Gina Carano beats the excrement out of Channing Tatum. #howhaseveryonenotseenHaywire?