Author Archives: Nina Wexelblatt

Growing up in a small, landlocked city affords the pop culture-curious tween few opportunities to meet celebrities. This problem is compounded if this tween had, say, watched “Almost Famous” too young and decided she was destined to be a Girl Reporter. This might force her to resort to such strange surrogate interview subjects as “Friend »

The battle between stripes and gingham at last week’s Chickfactor indie pop festival in Brooklyn ended staunchly in a tie, with floral-pattern and perennial dark horse candidate, polkadots, trailing just behind. Among the other attire on display on the Bell House dance floor, my floral dress fit in as well as I could have hoped. »

My first experience with T-Pain was during a brief phase of my life when my high school friends decided that sitting in a circle around the one girl who can play guitar was cool. Someone smirkingly learned the chords to the number one hit “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin).” We all got a bit »

Last semester, a sudden urge came over me that required immediate attention in the form of intensive Witch House research. Witch House, if the term eludes you, has been, for the past couple years, a genre of music born and raised in the back alleys of the Internet. Its output is full of somewhat scary-sounding »

Last week, a friend whose musical taste I normally respect introduced me to the song “Call Me Maybe” by the perky 26-year-old Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen. Before she was signed in mid-February to the Justin Bieber-affiliated Schoolboy Records, the only marginal claim to fame she had — other than a remarkably twee name — »

Here are two nuggets about astronomy, kids: the universe hums a steady B-flat, and outer space reads binary. The former, I learned in sixth grade music class and wrote down on the “To Be Used As a Vague Yet Evocative Metaphor In Future Poetry” page in my journal. The latter, I suppose, was the assumption »

The Shubert Theater, like many large and lovely venues of its kind, prohibits the photographing or recording of performances. Fortunately, there are two occasions during which I find it not only undesirable, but also ridiculous to want to experience a night through a viewfinder. The first is when I’m truly comfortable, at home, or among »

Oh, 2011, it’s been swell. You’ve brought us one miserable New Haven winter (complete with some weird weather phenomenon we New Mexicans can only describe as raining ice), an Arab Spring, Tot Mom summer, and an #Autumn of #Occupation. Between raiding compounds in Abbottabad, managing to get the country to take seriously your pizza-themed campaign »

“Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” is a movie about football. It is also a movie about the political and social turmoil of the 1960s: class tension, women’s liberation and the Vietnam War. But if we are being honest, it is a movie about football. The year is 1968 and Harvard and Yale’s teams are both undefeated »

Two weekends ago, New York celebrated the madness that is the CMJ Music Marathon, an enormous music festival whose scores of official and unofficial showcases mean hundreds of shows going on all over one of the biggest cities in the world. And, coincidentally, there I was! In the city! Dressed in my estimation of a »

The world of trendy music operates according to a paradigm eerily similar to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. If Nietzsche is right and time is infinite, then everything that has ever happened and will ever happen will be played out time and time again into infinity. There are several philosophical implications of this — just »

I would like to extend to everyone a sincere apology. I’m sorry to any friend, acquaintance or random passerby happening to linger unluckily while holding the door for me at the post office whom I have exposed to my crippling condition. It really isn’t my fault; I’m sure if you described my undoubtedly pathological behavior »