Max Hill
Album reviews: St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, and Phantogram
March 3, 2014Artist: St. Vincent Album: St. Vincent If there’s a trend in Annie Clark’s recording career as St. Vincent, it’s an attempt to better articulate herself. Instead of broadening her scope, Clark narrows the margins, tosses the inessential and keeps the bare essentials. This is what made Strange Mercy a better record than Actor — the former felt like the finished product to the latter’s rough draft. It’s also what made Love This Giant, Clark’s collaboration with Talking Heads’ David Byrne, such a bore. Their relentlessly rigid songs, like miniature structures unto themselves, left no room to breathe. Though St. Vincent is an improvement, it suffers from similar problems:…
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Pillow Talk
February 24, 2014Over the past few weeks, myself and a few of my fellow Peakies have collected anonymous stories from people, sharing their “first time.” Most are funny; others are awkward; a few are romantic; some are heartbreaking. The one thing they…
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Updating the Status
February 24, 2014Why do we need all these gender options, anyway? Because not everyone thinks of themselves as a man or a woman, and that’s okay. Most people tend to place themselves into one of these two categories, but there’s all sorts…
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Deconstructing Woody
February 10, 2014I’ve been a Woody Allen fan for as long as I can remember. My first Allen picture was Annie Hall, which I watched before I was old enough to understand any of its dense cultural references. From there, it was Manhattan,…
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Woohoo, Boohoo
February 9, 2014Woohoo: celebrating Philip Seymour Hoffman Last week we lost one of the best actors of his generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman, to drug addiction. After spending two decades of his life sober, Hoffman relapsed two years ago, eventually leading him to…
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A plea for responsible journalism
January 27, 2014Earlier this month, Grantland published a feature profile of Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, the reclusive and eccentric scientist behind a scientifically advanced golf putter named the Oracle GXI. At least, that’s how the story begins — by the end of…
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Inside Inside Llewyn Davis
January 27, 2014Llewyn Davis is an asshole. His friends know it, his manager knows it, and the orange tabby cat that follows him around knows it. Llewyn, played beautifully by newcomer Oscar Isaac, knows it too — and deep down, he knows…
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Putin’s Games
January 20, 2014It was -25 degrees Celsius on December 23, 2013 when Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the punk rock advocacy group Pussy Riot, was granted amnesty. She stepped out of the prison gate wearing a thin coat with no hat or…
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This modern love
January 20, 2014In Her, Spike Jonze’s latest film set in the not too distant future, the colour blue almost never appears. The men dress in 30’s style high-waisted pants with no belts, and no scenes take place in a car or within…
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Dating in the Internet Age
January 13, 2014Do use Yelp and other review aggregates to help plan a dinner date. Dinner and a movie might sound like a positively twentieth century approach to dating, but you’d be surprised how much intimacy can build between two people when…
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