We Partner With BARRR For an Important Competition / Pitchfork Reviews Cults' Debut Album / We Review MTV's Teen Wolf

We're pleased to be teaming up with BARRR and www.barrrheaven.com this week for a very important competition. BARRR is searching for a new ADD correspondent for his podcast (perhaps for "man on the street" interviews or perhaps something even hipper) and he's asked us to help judge the entries, which can be either short prose or Youtube submissions. As you might suspect, we're drawn to stuff that makes us laugh or gives us a boner (or both), but we're not averse to more serious ideas as well. Perhaps someone should go political on us and offer continuing reports on Brownback's follies, such as this tidbit we read in today's LJ-World:

"On Friday, Brownback appointed a new commission chair to replace one critical of Brownback."

Get in touch with BARRR via Twitter at @BARRR to inquire further about this exciting opportunity to help create local scenester culture. And of course we'll be submitting our own entries as well (Chip's idea: a series in which he conducts hard-hitting interviews with what he considers to be Larryville's hottest waitresses; Richard's idea: to spend the summer "shadowing" a few of Larryville's most prominent hipsters in an attempt to find out what goes on "behind the scenes" of local scenester culture).

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We're declaring today to be Hospital Ships Day in Larryville, and hopefully you're spinning the new record right now. But over at Pitchfork, all today's praise is directed at the self-titled debut album from Cults, which rates an 8.5:

"The 1960s girl-pop element of their sound is pretty evident on the surface... but what they've done with it is pure 21st century, cutting it with synths, guitars, and softly integrated samples. The samples, of cult leaders speaking to their followers, could have been a distraction had they chosen to make a big deal out of them, but they're woven tightly into the album's sonic fabric and processed to varying degrees of decipherability, which turns them into an effective textural element."

Chip: "I've been listening to this thing on repeat all morning and I have a major craving for Kool-Aid."
















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In today's culture, vampires have been co-opted by tween-agers (the Twilight series) and horny housewives and gay men (True Blood). And zombies are for scenesters and comic book geeks. We were hoping that werewolves might retain a kind of masculine cool, but MTV's re-imagining of the 80's comedy Teen Wolf seems determined to reduce our favorite monster to just another brooding tale of (hairy) teenage angst with a bad soundtrack. Did we watch the first episode? Of course we did.

As we first glimpse future "teen wolf" Scott, he is polishing his lacrosse equipment

Chip: "Is that a euphemism for masturbation?"

Sadly, no, it's quite literal. The focus has shifted from the basketball court of the 80's comedy to the lacrosse field, an unpromising start. While in the woods with best friend Stiles (not as hip as Liberty Hall's "Styles"), Scott experiences a wolf-attack and begins to notice the telltale signs of lycanthropy, which begin to exhibit while his class at school is reading The Metamorphosis (Chip: "Dude, that's symbolic as fuck!").

Verdict: one silver bullet(Coor's Lite) out of four, and somebody BETTER surf on top of a van within the next two episodes or we're done with this junk.