Tavi
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Like anyone who spends the majority of her time trying to decide which fancy old art film to get soaked into on Netflix before giving up and watching the Arrested Development episode “Amigos” for the 40th time, I am counting down the seconds till the show’s fourth season premieres next month, a decade after the series originally aired. This week, Entertainment Weekly released three upcoming covers with members of the cast. Here are some photos from the set, too. Which quote do I even use right now? “Marry me?” Yeah, that’ll do. MARRY ME.

In Roger Ebert’s last blog post, he announced plans for the 15th annual Ebertfest, which took place last weekend—two weeks after he died from cancer—in his hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Each year the film festival brings famous directors and actors from around the world to the rural college town, which is something that just wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for Ebert. Last Friday, Tilda Swinton was there to talk about her movie Julia. Instead, she and Ebert’s wife, Chaz, led the audience in a Barry White dancealong in honor of Ebert, who was a big Swinton fan (among other praise for her, he said her performance in Julia was “amazing”). Knowing they had a special, supportive critic/outcast-actor relationship just makes this video, which circulated on the internet this week, that much more tearjerking and heartwarming. Like, you know he would have loved that she skipped the speech and decided to get everyone to celebrate his life instead. By the time Swinton shouts “Dancing with Roger!” at the end, you might love the world a little more.


Julianne

A dreamy pic of Teen.

Teen’s awesome new song, “Paradise,” is everything you’d ever want summer to be: propulsive, sweet, and breezy. (I’m still working out the lyrics, but I think it also might be a cautionary tale against conspicuous consumption.) The ladies in the band aren’t actual teens; it’s more likely they’re named after their leader, Teeny Lieberson, who used to be in Here We Go Magic. Lieberson formed Teen with her sisters Lizzie and Katherine and their pal Jane Herships, and their submerged, slightly off pop—with lovely harmonies dirtied up by grit and devil-may-care attitudes—is mostly about the wisdom of youth. “Paradise” is from their EP, Carolina, which is scheduled to come out in late May. In the meantime I recommend listening to their debut album, In Limbo, which is super dreamy and psychedelic and has a bunch of songs about moms.


Jessica

The cover of a long lost tape by the Replacements.

The cover of a long lost tape by the Replacements.

I grew up in Minnesota at the tail end of the era in which the Replacements, a legendarily drunken indie-rock boy band from Minneapolis, were American underground icons. Their riffs were sloppy and genius, and their lyrics were born of the sorts of sentiments you wished the person you liked would say to your face in a moment of vulnerability. (Instead, that person was more likely to just give you a mix tape with “Answering Machine” or any number of other Replacements songs on it and continue to hopelessly hover in the friend zone.) They were THAT band to a lot of people, and so it’s unsurprising that someone has recently dedicated him- or herself to building an exhaustive online archive of the Replacements’ live recordings. On Tuesday, the site posted a lost classic, The Shit Hits the Fans, a bootleg the band confiscated from a fan and then released in 1985 as a limited-edition tape. The recording is otherwise virtually impossible to find today. It’s also a personal favorite—the quintessential live document of a band that alternated between shows that either totally scorched or fell apart at the seams because they were too wasted to play.


Arabelle

This week NPR blogged about a Canadian astronaut’s experiment with water in space, which is the weirdest, coolest thing ever. You guys, it looks like a Jell-O tube! IT’S THE COOLEST. I wanted to be an astronaut ninja when I was a little kid, and this totally brings me back. OUTER SPACE IS STILL THE COOLEST.

Kim Gordon’s rap playlist for traumatic times is my finals-week jam. I’m gonna listen to this and pretend she’s my cool aunt who gives me her hand-me-down vintage clothes and listens to me talk about girls.


Lena

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Speaking of Kim Gordon, the “traumatic times” alluded to in her playlist are related to her much-discussed split in from her husband and decades-long Sonic Youth band mate, Thurston Moore. In an interview with Lizzy Goodman for Elle that was posted this week to the magazine’s website, Gordon goes into greater (though still blurry) detail than she ever has before, at least on record, about the reasons behind their 2011 separation. But as Paul Tucker at the Quietus points out, there was so much more to Goodman’s article, and to what Gordon had to say, than that. After the piece was posted, “music website after music website…reported on the Gordon-Moore breakup in…exclamatory tones, completely ignoring the fact that the article focused on Gordon as a modern feminist hero rather than an abandoned wife,” writes Tucker. Aside from Gordon’s pending divorce, the article talked about how she has been touring and collaborating with a handful of accomplished musicians, is exhibiting paintings in an upcoming gallery show, and designed a capsule collection for the label Surface to Air, to name a just a few of her recent projects. At this point, her separation from Moore is old news; that she’s as prolific an artist—and as truly cool—as ever is the best news.


Anaheed

Two students from Wilcox County High raising money for their prom. Photo by Brian Meltz for the New York Times.

Two students from Wilcox County High raising money for their prom. Photo by Brian Meltz for the New York Times.

I’m gonna have to disagree with Lena and say that the BEST news of 1952 is that some kids in Georgia have organized the first-ever racially integrated prom in their school’s history! WOOOO PROGRESS! Hold on, what’s that you’re saying? It’s not 1952? You’re telling me that people have to FIGHT for permission to DANCE WITH PEOPLE OF ANOTHER RACE in 2013? Oh my god!!!! A special shoutout to the parents who fought to block the integrated prom: haha dummies, you lost and now the whole world knows you’re racists. (The prom is TONIGHT: let’s all send those kids messages of love & support & “have as much fun as you can physically withstand.” If you’re on Twitter I think they’re using the hashtag #IntegratedProm.)

In case that story made you feel, as I did when I heard it, like we just cannot trust fully grown adults (myself included) to make correct decisions, here’s something to give you a little hope. It’s a speech that Christiane Taubira, the French minister of justice, gave to the National Assembly on Tuesday, right after the country passed a bill allowing same-sex couples to get married and adopt children.

It’s in French, but there’s an English translation here. This part jerked a tear from me eye: after touching on a spate of violence and hate speech that sprang up in protest of marriage equality in the weeks leading up to the vote, she said this to all you French teenagers out here:

Tonight, we would especially like to speak to the adolescents in our country—boys and girls—who have been hurt during this debate. We speak to those children who found themselves in the midst of deep and frightening chaos. They discovered a society where a wave of selfishness led many to loudly protest against the rights of others.

We simply want to tell these adolescents that they are at home in our society.

We recognize them in this society. We recognize their contradictions, talents, shortcomings, qualities, and fragility. These are the things that make each and every one of us unique…. That is the strength of our society…. So we tell these adolescents: if you find yourself losing hope, sweep all of those thoughts out of your minds. They are only words. One day they will float away. Stay with us and keep your heads high. You have nothing to be ashamed of. We say that loud and clear, with our all the strength in our voices. As Nietzsche said: Truth kills. And if you repress it, it will kill you.

OK so there are still good people in the world, not all adults are terrible, and if more and more parts of our world are recognizing that same-sex couples deserve equal rights under the law, it must be at least, what, 1960? (ZING, 2013! I GOT U) ♦