four more years

more Hairpin love!

Only now apparently all these guys want to move to Australia. THANKS A LOT OBAMA.

They know women have the vote here too, right?

dance me to the end of love

possibly the best thing ever:

are you trying to seduce me?

Well the internet has gifted us today, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt somehow bested his previous SNL opening monologue by bringing less clothes and more dancing, Magic Mike style. Turns out in 2012 we have an awful lot to thank Channing Tatum for (Vulture thinks so too). And for those of us outside North America (thanks for nothin', NBC), Jezebel has gifs for days.

Then there was the incomparable Anne Helen Petersen breaking down the timeless appeal of the Boss.

And because good things come in threes, Kat Dennings looking like a goddamn bombshell at the Emmys:

the half-life of love is forever

Earlier this year The Hairpin linked to an incredibly absorbing interview with Junot Díaz in the Boston Review - read here, read it! And then get his latest collection of short stories, because they're everything a follow-up to The Brief Wondrous Life (or more pertinently, the raw and beautiful Drown)ought to be. Sometimes it's just such a relief to hear an intelligent, articulate man address issues of race and sexuality in a thoughtful way - consider it an antidote to the general world at large.

he's dangerous but sincere

Sometime Hal Hartley muse and general indie dreamboat Martin Donovan's debut as a writer and director, Collaborator, screened as part of the terrific Canadian Film Festival - a once-successful playwright's melancholic midlife/career crisis that gracefully evolves into a tense and compelling two-man act. It's a good one.

she's happy with the way she looks, she's happy with her gender

for a girl who doesn't even own pants, I sure covet this look

d'amour

My favourite Louis Garrel collaborator Christophe Honore's latest, Beloved, is screening at the French Film festival. This time round Garrel's outrageous beauty costars with Catherine Deneuve and her real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni, Ludivine Saginer and legendary director Milos Forman. Plus Paul Schneider! (holy shit Mark Brendanawicz, that's a long way from Pawnee)It's set in the '60s and '90s. It has songs. What else do you want?

if she tempts you with her charms

Get it! Tennis do The Zombies

the great stone face

heart-on for Buster Keaton

Beastie Boys x everyone I've ever loved

so this came out ages ago (April?) and I have no idea why I only just watched it now. The one after it with Santigold and zombie Ken dolls is a total winner as well. Beastie Boys, making music videos worthwhile since the mid '80s.

half-hour version here, aka the best 30 minutes you'll spend all day

I'm not against collecting stuff

In the mail, the most perfect tee shirt in the world. All you need to know is that it has both Noah Taylor circa Flirting AND Harold & Maude era Bud Cort on it.(Sam has had one for years, natch)

just a country boy that combed his hair

I won't lie -

I like my cowboys via Hollywood. Soundtrack courtesy of Mixtapes for Johanna, as ever

earthquake weather

Ed Ruscha's Every Building On The Sunset Strip

"But the feeling feeling in L.A. that the place was not safe - that hovering earthquake in the air - was why anyone in the trance even came down long enough to learn to thread a camera at all. They had to take their eye off what was probably the apocalypse and invent Theda Bara out of a girl from Cincinatti to make sense out of the light."

(L.A. Woman - Eve Babitz)

Getting my surrogate summer feelings through literary L.A. dreaming with Eve & Joan Didion .

F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.

It's not news that Jarvis Cocker has been my #1 pin-up since high school, and I'm beyond excited to see Pulp in all their seedy cinematic glory at the end of the month. BEYOND. They hold the keys to my musical heart.

that obscure object of desire

Speaking of favourite things, Jeffrey Eugenides is finally coming out with a new book! It's been nine impatient years since the gorgeous odyssey of Middlesex, and I've been pining.

"To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic."

— The First Lines of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot via let us read and let us dance

reasons to be cheerful:

imminent jetsetting

ladies who speak their mind

Southern noir, courtesy of Justified

(hmmm, cowboys)

he's with the band

I've had this photo on my wall for years, I'm in love with the Keith Richards/Mick Jagger dynamic (Keith: "For some reason Mick has a hard-on about me...") and all the Villa Nellcote stories. I almost like reading about the Stones even more than listening to them. (Almost). What I never realised until today was that my cowboy of choice, Gram Parsons, was all this time sitting there just out of frame. 

And the Keef/Gram relationship is even more interesting. I'm halfway through re-reading Twenty Thousand Roads, a really excellent Gram bio, and I've started in on Keith's reminisces and I'm almost at the point where their two stories start converging. For the time being I'll leave you with the ever-astute Miss Pamela's observings of them, directly after Altamont: "Gram was there, leaning against the wall wearing black leather and eye makeup, nodding out. Keith was wearing cowboy clothes. It looked like they were turning into each other".

(photos by Dominique Tarle)

Debut Album

For the Melbournites here's an art opening worth getting out of bed for: the gorgeous Greedy Hen duo are puttin' on a show. Debut Album launches May 5 at Lamington Drive Gallery before hitting the road to Sydney and NYC. Go early so you can get a spot down the front. (BYO underwear for flinging on stage in the throes of hysteria)

the international language

Crushing out in a major way on the new Gruff Rhys record Hotel Shampoo (more fangirling on it for russh here)

And this song!

so far away

My BFF has relocated to Toronto, which is basically on the exact opposite side of the world (and up some). And I miss her.