According to Entertainment Weekly, actor Corey Haim was found “unresponsive” in his apartment in Oakwood early this morning. He was later pronounced dead, reportedly of a drug overdose.

From doing a brief survey of what the internet has to say, it appears the general consensus is that somewhere around 100 people die worldwide per minute — in other words, 144,000 or so per day. So why are we taking time to talk about Corey Haim?
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Last night I popped a bottle of bubbly and sat on the couch for a new episode of Gossip Girl. FINALLY. And only one night after the Oscars! This has to be my best two-night stretch since the last time I was in Ibiza with Val Kilmer.
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Here at TTH Headquarters we’re hard at work putting the finishing touches on the new issue, the FUTURE issue. It’ll be launching soon, and oh is it ever a good one. So, to celebrate, we’ve got a great party lined up for you…

Thursday, March 25th
Glasslands, 289 Kent Avenue (bet. S. 1st & S. 2nd)
8 PM // FREE
The DJs will be Deadbeats. LONG LIVE RAP MUSIC.
…with live performances from Caveman and Glass Ghost!

So mark your calendars and dust off yer dancing shoes! Consider this the official way to usher in the spring.
 
 
 

This week’s Photo of the Day should put some hair on yer chest. Or…make you feel lost and confused.

Tune in to Take the Handle every Monday morning for a photo that’ll get your week started right! When you wish the weekend just wouldn’t end, this will cure all your worries. Photo of the Day!

In a lead-up to Oscar weekend, playwright Josh Koenigsberg defends the seemingly indefensible:

Yes that’s right. Taken was the most underrated movie of the year. Not only that. It was one of the best of the year.

I know, I know. According to the critics I’m an idiot. “Shamelessly lazy filmmaking,” wrote Manohla Dargis in The New York Times.

“Was Liam Neeson looking for a script with lousier dialogue than The Phantom Menace?” pondered Jeffrey Westhoff of the Northwest Herald.

And my personal favorite from The King of Compliments himself, Rex Reed of The New York Observer: “Taken is the kind of exploitative junk everyone expects from no-talent French hack Luc Besson… co-writer of the moronic script.” ¹

So why did I think Taken was so good? Well, lots of reasons. But if I had to boil it down to one thing, I’d say the best part of Taken was the screenplay. Yes, Rex Reed, the screenplay. Let me explain.
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New Yorkers know it’s important to keep your options open. In a town so full of possibility, the only true answer to an invitation has to be…Maybe.

SHOW

March 5, also known as TONIGHT
So tonight there’s a formerly secret, unannounced show from Here We Go Magic, our friends from a little-known musical hub, “Brooklyn.” It’s at Zebulon, a pre-tour sendoff kinda thing. But I must admit, I’m a little biased toward the opening band, Caveman, because I’m in it. So you should come early to see us play, yeah?
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Riding into the city over the Williamsburg Bridge I’ll often glance at the clock tower that rises above Union Square, just to see how I’m doing on time. (I’m almost always early – curse you mama for the way you raised me!)  But what is this clock tower I stare at?  I realized the other day that I had no idea.  That’s one of the funny things about living. I was going to say: “about living in the city,” but I think it’s true everywhere; the city just points it out more.  We can have these daily relationships with various structures we don’t know anything about.  It’s why ideally I would like to learn the history of every building that I walk by, just as I’d like to know the types of trees I pass on every block (a good guess is that they’re London Plane, or maybe Ginkgo).  For now I suppose I’ll settle for trying to get down the larger buildings, the signposts, the ones that you can’t help but see at various points and angles throughout your day.
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How often do you text or chat something absurd to a friend only to have them take you seriously and get offended or confused? The challenge of conveying sarcasm over text-only communication has been a problem since the days of AOL. In terms of saving friendships, there are no plans to invent a way to recall late night mext (mass-text) marriage proposals, there are two projects in the works to define a universal symbol of sarcasm. The first project, called Sarc Mark, proposes a new-age looking spiral that looks like one of Kokopelli’s pubes. From Sarc Mark’s website:
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New Yorkers know it’s important to keep your options open. In a town so full of possibility, the only true answer to an invitation has to be…Maybe.

CHARITY EVENT

March 6
This week’s Scrabble for Cheaters event at 826NYC is a fundraiser for a damn good cause. 826NYC was founded by writer Dave Eggers and, according to their site, is a “nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.” There’s sure to be a great collection of participants (namely one Paul Rudd, ladies), and cutthroat competition for a good cause sounds pretty damn appealing to me.
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This week’s Photo of the Day might put some shit in perspective.

Tune in to Take the Handle every Monday morning for a photo that’ll get your week started right! When you wish the weekend just wouldn’t end, this will cure all your worries. Photo of the Day!

It seems like a good week for staying indoors, ideally somewhere with a lot of windows offering a multitude of views of the windy, wet and slush filled street. I’m picturing a giant wooden dining room table covered with hardcover books and the only light that gray and muted color that is the sun diffused through layers and layers of cloud. It’s like a boat on the North Sea, dark and lonely in the daytime, though maybe not lonely so much as just outside the flood. The flood being time. And although snow and rain might feed the flood, as they’re falling they’re something else entirely: they’re the moment, “this life’s howling gale.” Or to quote W.G. Sebald, “Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it?” I’m picturing a room that’s still and motionless; I’m picturing a room that floats.
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New Yorkers know it’s important to keep your options open. In a town so full of possibility, the only true answer to an invitation has to be…Maybe.

FILM

 
February 26 – March 4
In 1970 Jack Nicholson was thirty-three years old and coming off a breakout turn in Easy Rider, for which he’d garnered a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. After a series of unsuccessful pictures, Easy Rider had finally given his career some much-needed momentum. While that was one hell of a good role for him, this is the one that truly kick-started everything.
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It’s important to challenge yourself to go outside of your comfort zone and explore new things. I feel so safe in the world of tweens and reading, but what about the world of teens and doing whip-its? Teens are the cooler, more sophisticated rebels that tweens start to become when they enter high school. I don’t know too much about them, so I decided to interview an authority, Zan Goodman: graphic artist, illustrator, and designer for Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is to teens as Friends is to everyone… basically, where they go to get all their information. And as the designer for Teen Vogue, Zan has insight into the fantasies and fears of the teen population. Here’s some stuff she taught me:
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This is a big one: if he can’t stop the war, Bernie at least wants the war to be fought by the troops everyone is so proud of – not freelance mercenaries. He and Senator Jan Schakowsky introduced a bill yesterday which would severely limit the use of private contractors in war zones. In the press conference Bernie jumped to the heart of his objection to the use of these contractors:

Private contractors do not operate within the traditional military chain of command,” Sanders said. “They are not subject to the same rigorous standards of vetting and training as are members of our armed forces. Most importantly, when push comes to shove, they answer to a corporate CEO, not a uniformed commander. And let’s be clear – the function of a private corporation is to make as much money as possible, not to serve the best interests of the people of the United States or our policies.

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Whenever TTH contributors want to use a pseudonym it sparks a bit of a debate in the offices. It happens more often than you’d think (Q: Where the hell did I get the name Tret Lo? A: An Asian gang of “Worms” in 9th grade). But why these pseudonyms? Are we worried about those fearful letters T T H popping up on our presidential background check? There’s a part of me which wouldn’t mind if everyone used a list of absurd and ever-changing pseudonyms, “handles” if you will, like some ’90s chatroom rave. But the argument goes that we’re a community of writers and artists and we should be celebrating our real personalities hand in hand with our hard work.

Authenticity arguments aside, there’s a new good reason to be anonymous on the internet: http://pleaserobme.com/. It’s a site which lists twitter users who are good targets for robbery based on their status updates on Foursquare. Continue reading this column... « Less

This week’s Photo of the Day may remind you of this weekend. Or maybe last Thanksgiving? You’re going to want to click on this one to enlarge it — this photo warrants a really thorough viewing.

Tune in to Take the Handle every Monday morning for a photo that’ll get your week started right! When you wish the weekend just wouldn’t end, this will cure all your worries. Photo of the Day!

This week Alex, Dave and Stefan phoned in Wolfman and they were clearly taken in by Benicio Del Torro’s beastlyness. They also experimented with a new form of instant film criticism: TEXTING IT IN! While the movie was playing Alex texted in some wolf puns he overheard being uttered by his friends:

12:57 AM: Spongebob wolfpants!
1:24 AM: Wolf figure it out
1:31 AM: You Can’t spell wolfman without wo-man!
2:12 AM: We’re worried about her wolfare

Did you just see a movie too? Call (or text!) the Take the Handle Phonin’ It In Hotline at (413)-T-HANDLE! (413-842-6353) Remember—the best criticism comes right after you see the movie! Maybe even while you’re walking through the lobby of the theater. Catch that thought while it’s hot!

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It’s still winter, and for the first time this year it’s starting to drag a bit. Sure I’m still looking for the season-specific beautiful moments, the things you aren’t going to find any other time of year, but I’m also starting to really look forward to all those other times of year as well. But oh no, just yesterday I was thinking of how it would be October again before you know it, and I was thinking: how can anybody really enjoy October knowing that November comes after it and then months and months of winter after that; and it made me feel like: what’s the point of looking forward at all? What?! Did I just ask that? That’s when I know winter’s starting to get to me. Maybe I can flip the approach and say that feeling this way is the whole point of February – so let’s really get down into it. Let’s embrace the moment disliking the moment, and still giving it up begrudgingly. I think that’s the best way to pass the time till spring.
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I recently held a dinner party during which an old friend who is going through a somewhat torturous break up gleefully exclaimed, “Everyone in this room is single!” We all laughed (nervously?) at the us-versus-them mentality. Most of us had been on both sides of that divide.

At the very same dinner party, over ratatouille and white wine, the very same friend claimed that I have a tendency to date assholes that are not good enough for me. These are the kinds of things friends say that are sweet, but a bit cliché and not necessarily true. I silently objected, not only because most of the aforementioned “assholes” are not assholes-in-general, just assholes-to-me but also because that statement effaces the complicated nature of human relationships and the proclivity of all human beings towards periods of romantic error. Or, wait, am I just lonely? Sometimes I get so confused.
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When I was 14, my sister, who must have been 35 at the time, introduced me to what would become for several years my favorite comfort food: “Chicken Broth and Noodles.” A can of College Inn broth, a generous heaping of egg noodles, and a few turns of freshly ground black pepper, and I was in HEAVEN. It was nothing special but had some addictive quality, which I later discovered was monosodium glutamate. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying one of the gigantic containers of MSG they have at Food Bazaar, and seeing what would happen if I added some to otherwise home-cooked, natural food, but don’t yet fully believe it’s a good idea. Alongside the noodles, I’d always have an unreasonably large glass of milk. Sorry, I’m blind to you haters, because I LOVE MILK. I can never get enough. It makes everything, except pickles, better. Chicken broth and noodles and milk was my favorite late night snack in high school, or what I’d eat for lunch or dinner when my mother wasn’t around.
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