February 2013
1 post
December 2012
1 post
In 2014, There Will Be a Pitchfork Reviews Reviews...
At the end of the summer I left my job at the music television channel where I worked and started law school, which is where I am now (in the library). You may think that people who go to law school are the people who have completely failed professionally after college and who are suckers for paying for a worthless degree that equips you to join a profession that nobody respects with historically...
August 2012
1 post
July 2012
1 post
June 2012
2 posts
May 2012
2 posts
April 2012
1 post
March 2012
1 post
Interviewing Lil Wayne at a Skateboarding Apparel...
In the back room of a basement club in Chelsea, past the bouncer who mercifully let me in, through the front door and down the stairs, past the coat check and across the dancefloor and down a narrow hallway, I am standing and staring at Lil Wayne through a very thin, almost transparent curtain. There are models and reporters and bottles of liquor and champagne all around me, and smoke in the air...
January 2012
1 post
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
1 post
Pitchfork Writer Ian Cohen Seems to Have Blocked...
Das Racist put out their second mixtape about a year ago and Ian Cohen, a combination entertainment lawyer/Pitchfork reviewer, gave it an 8.7, the second-highest Pitchfork score any mixtape has gotten. Three days later I interviewed Hima (one of the rappers in Das Racist) and suggested to him that Ian Cohen’s review indicated he completely missed the idea that Das Racist is a project about...
September 2011
1 post
3 tags
Posts I Am Proud Of
This might be your first time reading this blog, so you should know that some posts on PRR are better than others, and I think you might like the blog better if you started with one of my favorite posts. Here are a few posts I’m proud of:
Being Obese
Telling Barack Obama About Pitchfork, or the Official Version
Himanshu of Das Racist
A Pitchfork Writer Mailing Me This
Chillwave as an...
August 2011
1 post
The Highly Coveted Pitchfork Music Festival ELITE...
On Sunday afternoon, the last day of the Pitchfork Music Festival, it is 94 degrees outside and me and Jim DeRogatis are sitting on a bench, under a tree, in the dugout of a baseball field behind one of the main festival stages and talking about Jim DeRogatis’ highly coveted and super rare Pitchfork Music Festival ELITE VIP badge. I just took this picture of Jim DeRogatis wearing his ELITE...
July 2011
1 post
May 2011
2 posts
Technical Difficulties That Prevented Me From...
Nine days ago, Sarah emails me and says that a website that she is professionally affiliated with, called Mogulite, is having a launch party tonight and asks if I wouldn’t mind making a playlist of music to play at the party and I say, “Yeah sure,” and then I make an On-the-Go playlist on my iPod at work and then after work I go to Whole Foods Tribeca to kill time and then I...
The Pitchfork Movie
Last week I go to a meeting with a Producer who read the movie I wrote, currently scheduled to shoot in August/September, and wants to talk about writing another one. I don’t know what the meeting is going to be like, or what’s expected of me at it, and on my walk from work to the meeting I try to gather all of my script ideas in case he asks me to present them. He tells me to meet him...
April 2011
1 post
Selling Heroin on Craigslist
Hi! Joe and I wrote the story that’s on the cover of the Village Voice today and you can read it online here, but I really recommend picking it up from one of the red Village Voice boxes on a street corner because the paper is free and reading a newspaper is a pleasure. The story is about selling drugs on Craigslist, mostly heroin, and mostly through the eyes of “Kai”, a very sweet, well-educated,...
January 2011
1 post
Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, 1997
Hi! I wanted to tell you that the movie script is almost done and I think you’ll like it because it’s full of sex, drugs, indie music, violence and cool bikes.
Here’s a picture of me in 1997 that my Mom just scanned and emailed me, and she said, “You should put this on your webpage!”
November 2010
5 posts
19 Hours After Its Release, Jesse Eisenberg Still...
I am at a gala to benefit children who were affected by Chernobyl, the unintentional nuclear explosion in the USSR in 1986, and Jesse Eisenberg walked into the cocktail ballroom and he was swarmed by girls with braces who wanted to take pictures with him. One of them knocked my phone onto the ground in a rush to get closer to Jesse Eisenberg and I had to get on my hands and knees to grab it from...
Gerard Butler's Favorite Rapper is Lil Wayne
In a club in Midtown at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show after-party, Gerard Butler is talking to a middle-aged woman and leaning against the bar. I wait until they’re done speaking and then I go up to him and say,
“Hi! I write a blog about music. May I ask you a question?” He says, “Yes.”
I ask, “Who is your favorite rapper?” He goes, “Why do you ask me about rap?” He speaks in a thick...
Writing a Movie
About three months ago, at my friend Leon’s reading, I read a story about something I did one summer, and then a few days later I got an email from a man who works at a movie production company. His e-mail said that he was at the reading and he thought there might be a movie to be made out of the story that I read, and he asked me if I could e-mail him the story and also if I would like to meet...
DJing a Halloween Loft Party in Midtown
My post is on the website The Awl today:
http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/djing-a-halloween-loft-party-in-midtown
…it is packed and really hot now. I roll my sleeves up and I am sweating a little and my glasses got fogged up so I took them off and then put them back on a minute ago. The girl who looks like Lady Gaga is still dancing about three feet in in front of the DJ booth. I am...
October 2010
4 posts
Ryan Schreiber, Outside the Pitchfork #Offline...
I get to the #Offline Festival, Pitchfork’s CMJ-weekend festival that was announced last week, a few minutes before Angelica, who is meeting me there. It is at a venue in Brooklyn called Brooklyn Bowl that is both a live music venue and a bowling alley. I go up to the box office window and give the guy behind the window the name of my friend who told me that he’s on the press list, but he...
Went to a Literary Gala, Interviewed Rolling Stone...
…Mike waits until Tom Wolfe is finished talking to the woman he’s talking to and then Mike introduces himself, asks Tom Wolfe some questions, and then finishes his questions and introduces me to Tom Wolfe. I ask him if he listens to any pop music.
Tom Wolfe says that right now he is quite fond of this song called You Are The Only Exception and I guess I make a quizzical face to indicate...
Pitchfork Reviews Reviews Read Out Loud in a...
No new long post today, but two weeks ago I was in Whole Foods and I got a Google Alerts e-mail and it was a link to pitchforkreviewsreviews.blogspot.com. I emailed my mom to see if it was actually what it said it was, this blog read out loud in a German accent, and she said it was real and that the boy reading it “reads beautifully.” I thought you might get a kick out of it! I did.
Chillwave as an Economic Phenomenon
I was coming up out of the subway on the way to work today, listening to the Baths record, and I ran into a girl named Natalie who I went to school with, and I took my headphones off and we spoke for a minute and I asked her about some people from college that we both know, but she knows them better and has kept in contact with them and I’ve fallen out of contact with them. Most of her answers...
September 2010
1 post
8 tags
The Documentary Catfish, Chris Ott, and Being a...
During the Christmas break of my sophomore year in college, I went to California to visit friends and see California and get out of new york because I had just stopped dating the girl who I had been dating and I was torn up about it, and I think there is this idea that when two people stop dating, the person who initiates the breakup feels good and the person who gets broken up with is...
August 2010
1 post
3 tags
How Downloading Music Has Literally Saved My Life
When I was 14, I was 5’2” tall and I weighed 220 lbs, and every day I woke up and had to go to school, I wanted to walk in front of a bus, and every day when I came home I wanted to walk in front of a bus, and I didn’t want to look myself in the mirror and I didn’t let people take pictures of me. Every year I went to the doctor for a checkup and I gained at least 20 lbs,...
July 2010
4 posts
2 tags
talked to barack obama, the president of the...
okay so did you ever read that really long New York Times Magazine piece called like “All The Obama Twentysomethings” about all the really young White House staffers, kids in their twenties who went to like Harvard and Yale and now work as liasons or advisers or coordinators in the Obama Administration?
okay well so on Saturday i was at a party and i was gushing about Obama to this kid who said he...
interviewed dov charney, found out he does not...
i am in the american apparel on howard st. and broadway, just above canal street, a live version of I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones is playing on the store stereo and during the chorus the band stops playing and the crowd screams, “I WANNA BE SEDATED”. we just went swimming in the river because of the heat wave and we came here to buy dry clothes and currently i am waiting for my...
you are at the pitchfork festival getting your...
right now i am sitting on the edge of a pull-out couch whose rods have been disaligning my back, in the guest room in my aunt’s house in miami because me and my mom are here visiting my grandma. and right now you are at the Pitchfork festival, wasted and making out with Bethany from Best Coast
you are passing out in ecstasy as the sun comes up after seeing your favorite bands, i need a...
3 tags
on the plane to miami with my mom
hi right now i am on a plane to miami with my mom, we are on our way to visit my grandma. i brought my headphone splitter and my iPod and two pairs of headphones so i could share some music with my mom because she’s curious about what Pitchfork writes about. i played her Best Coast because she grew up during the 60’s and i thought it would remind her of girl groups, and when she said...
June 2010
5 posts
5 tags
wrote this last night on my blackberry at the...
i am at the launch party for the 90,000 square foot flagship Forever 21 store that’s opening in times square, the store has 121 dressing rooms and probably like 6 floors and i am in the basement with about 400 fashion industry people and there is a woman who apparently used to be engaged to terry richardson DJing, she is playing Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. almost all the...
7 tags
pitchfork reviews reviews attends record label...
hey so last night me and joe and angelica went to a modular records label showcase at this bar/venue in greenpoint, me and joe biked there and it was like 999 degrees and humid so by the time we got there my face was glistening with sweat, like beads of sweat were dripping off my nose and my hair was stuck to my forehead, and honestly it couldn’t have come at a worse time because the first...
4 tags
what the Pitchfork office party was like
so i walked into the pitchfork party last night and honestly all of my darkest suspicions about pitchfork were like immediately confirmed. the first thing i noticed was the walls and floors and ceiling were made of stone, the office looked just like a medieval castle or the clubhouse of an ancient secret society. there were no conventional lights but the walls were lined with flaming torches. i...
11 tags
why you should be paying attention to the labels...
i talk to a bunch of people who are really into music and really knowledgeable about it, but who never really got into following which labels put out which artists’ records. that’s a shame because i’ve always found the label that an artist is on can really explain a lot about the records they put out. when i read about an artist i first try to find out their release history, then...
7 tags
what it might mean when you are hearing music as...
last night me angelica and anna were sitting in a bar and the bar was playing only Pavement and the song 5-4=Unity came on and i’ve always hated that song because i thought it just really fucked up Crooked Rain’s momentum and was just stuck in there to indicate that they’re “just fucking around” or “just don’t give a fuck” or something. i mean...
May 2010
1 post
11 tags
wrote this while i was DJing last night, to all my...
hi i am writing this on my blackberry it is 12:40 and i am currently DJing at a secret bar that has no name or sign on the door and is under a fancy restaurant in the west village, like the kind of restaurant where the prices don’t have decimals. the cocktails here cost $12 (which is actually more than i’m getting paid for doing this. because the people who throw this party can only...
