The third annual San Francisco Green Film Festival, which starts May 30 and ends June 5 this year, will be presenting a series of environmentally-conscious films, mostly at the New People Cinema in Japantown. Here is a selection of pretty stunning trailers for films being screened at the festival this year:

1. The Ruffalo-studded Dear Governor Cuomo, directed by Jon Bowermaster. Man, turns out “fracking” does not mean the same thing in real life as it does on Battlestar Galactica:

2. & 3. Breathing Earth and Garden in the Sea, both directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer, who also made Rivers and Tides, a hypnotic documentary on the artist Andy Goldsworthy:

Here is a link to Garden in the Sea, because it can’t be embedded.

4. Markus Imhoof’s film on the mysterious and terrifying decline of the bee population, More Than Honey:

5. And finally, Andrew Garrison’s film Trash Dance, which probably needs no explanation:

Tickets to the festival are on sale now. See you there?

1. Find a Place That’s Right for You

And what I mean by that is, go somewhere your friends all don’t mind going as well. I know people in San Francisco have trouble making the arduous twenty-minute BART trip out to Oakland with us commoners, and I acknowledge a lot of us Oakland people don’t tend to regard as adequately “real” establishments where you might not get a brick thrown at your face. Find someplace that everyone can agree on. (Just don’t go to Treasure Island. I heard it’s weird there.)

Distance should be no object, as trivia rarely lasts late into the night, and a journey towards victory can never be too long. If you search “trivia” on Yelp, there are a ton of places in both the city and the East Bay where you can go and get drunk and feel smart.

I go to the Sycamore in the Mission, which has great sliders and awards winners PBR and cash, but that place gets pretty crowded already, so here’s what I’m gonna say:

Breaking Bad gif via Tumblr.

I’m just kidding. It’s a fine establishment and you should patronize it.

2. Assemble Your Team

Photo by Matthew Carhart.

You and your tight-knit circle of liberal arts majors can’t do this alone. You may have gotten through Infinite Jest or glanced a de Kooning, but the things that get you through college and the things that help you win trivia are not always the same. You need at least one sports person and one science person. One of you should know esoteric historical facts. You should all keep up with the news, because YOU SHOULD KEEP UP WITH THE NEWS ANYWAY. A few weeks ago my team and I did terribly because there was a section on national capitals in Africa, which proves that trivia is yet another compelling argument in favor of ethnic diversity. Basically, you should think of it like a heist in a film, in which every person plays his or her quirky, extraordinarily specific, but essential role.

These are the drunks you should be emulating– at least with regards to forming your trivia team. Via Wikipedia.

3. Play Nice

This seems like it should go without saying, but don’t cheat. It’s extremely easy to cheat at trivia because you have Wikipedia on your phone. Don’t do it. It takes away the satisfaction of actually knowing the answer by like 100%. And don’t be afraid to yell at people who you see cheating. They knew the risk, and they’re ruining the fun for everyone else.

Don’t let any one person take excessive control of the team to its detriment. This situation is discussed at length in this episode of the Judge John Hodgman podcast:

And finally, have fun with it. Be nice to each other. Get cool jackets made with your team name on them. It’s hard to go out and make friends with people sometimes, and trivia is a cool way to strengthen bonds with people you already like. Good luck!

If you and your mom don’t get to see each other this Sunday, don’t worry. Unless it’s because she’s just suddenly gone missing, in which case, uh-oh, dude, you better go find your mom. I’ve compiled a list of great TV episodes that revolve around issues of motherhood. I don’t advise watching all of them with your mother, but I do recommend them all. And they’re all available streaming on Netflix!

1. King of the Hill – Peggy’s Turtle Song

Peggy, the ridiculously arrogant matriarch of the Hill family, has a sympathetic storyline in “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” When her son Bobby eats too much of a cereal called “Grandma’s Oatmeal Cookie Crunch” and disrupts class, he’s diagnosed with A.D.D. Peggy quits her job as a substitute teacher, but soon becomes bored staying home with a now incredibly well-focused son and takes up guitar lessons. She writes a song about a turtle who wants to escape her shell despite her attachment to it. Hank, her husband, is uncharacteristically tyrannical in this episode, and the prospect of Peggy learning the guitar (from a woman with green hair, no less) and performing her song on Mother’s Day upsets him. He comes around, of course, and attends her recital, where she plays the turtle song– the metaphor of which is not actually clear to her– to a group of caricatures of ’90′s feminists, who hoot and holler in appreciation. She tacks on a line about the turtle finding love “with a turtle named Hank.” Peggy has found liberation in her own square way, which is kind of beautiful.

Key Quote: “I thought we’d agreed to take a big step backwards together, but it sounds like you’d rather play punk music with your hippie friends on boring old Mother’s Day.”

2. The X-Files – Terms of Endearment

Wikipedia describes this episode as “an inversion of … Rosemary’s Baby,” which proves what I’ve suspected for a long time but have never been able to prove: the editors of Wikipedia do not know what the word “inversion” means. In “Terms of Endearment,” Mulder investigates Wayne Weinsider, a demon in human form who impregnates women and takes their babies. Most of the reason this episode is worth watching is that Weinsider is played by camp king Bruce Campbell in a weirdly staid– for a demon– role.

Key Quote: “Mr. Weinsider, I don’t want to arrest Laura. I’m sure you’d hate like the devil for this to happen as well.”

3. Home Movies – Get Away From My Mother

From “Home Movies.”

Home Movies’ central character, child VHS auteur Brendon, and his mother Paula, had, I think, one of the most interesting mother-son dynamics on television. In this first episode, in which Paula goes on a date with Brendon’s loutish gym coach, Brendon is still very much a child, not understanding the concept of dating and desperately needing Paula to watch the new movie he and his friends made, but because of the show’s loose voice-acting style and witty dialogue, the two have always reminded me of a couple of adult friends.

Key Quotes: “I like to go into this date with almost a chip on my shoulder. How dare he ask me out. How dare anybody put me through this. I’m wearing– just– this is my feeling, right now I’m at the precipice of my life, I’m at a turning point. I’ve decided that I’m just gonna go dressed how I am dressed, because otherwise it’s almost false advertising. I’m wearin’ big baggy pants and a shirt that makes a man wanna buy me another shirt.”

4. Arrested Development – Motherboy XXX

From Arrested Development, via Tumblr user keyridan.

If Brendon and Paula had a compellingly healthy and mature relationship, Arrested Development‘s Lucille and Buster Bluth are fascinating for the inverse reason: Buster is an adult child, and his mother uses his dependency to nurture her own vanity. At this point Buster’s left hand has been bitten off by a loose seal, and Lucille feels that Buster’s recent moodiness (and scary hook hand) will hurt her chances at winning “Cutest Couple” at a weird mother-son dinner dance called Motherboy. She takes her grandson and Buster breaks in to the dance to confront her.

Key Quote: “Whenever she changed clothes, she made me wait on the balcony until zip-up. And yet anything goes at bath time.”

5. Archer - Lo Scandalo

Further into unhealthy territory, this episode of the spy comedy revolves around its protagonist, Sterling Archer, attempting to dispose of the body of the Prime Minister of Italy, after Archer’s mother Mallory seduces the Prime Minister and most likely brings about his demise. I didn’t say they were all exemplary mothers. Jessica Walter plays Mallory, a more licensed-to-kill version of Lucille, whom Walter plays on Arrested Development.

Key Quote: “What else was on tonight’s menu? Sex under a hive of Africanized bees?”

6. Mad Men – Shoot

The character of Betty on Mad Men has become increasingly monstrous in the past few years, but Season One’s “Shoot,” gives her an epic moment of vindication. After a neighbor threatens to shoot the family dog for taking a bite out of one of his pigeons (did you ever have a neighbor threaten to shoot your dog when you were a kid? I did, and it bummed me out for days, and I probably wasn’t even that young), and also after a modeling gig falls through for her, Betty takes out a rifle and coolly begins shooting the neighbor’s pigeons out of the sky, cigarette in her mouth. I’ll leave you with this so you can think of how many times your mom probably did something this cool for you as a kid– the answer is most likely several.

What great mom-centric TV episodes did I miss? What’s the best Gilmore Girls episode? Should I be watching that Norman Bates show? Don’t get so caught up in TV-watching that you forget to call your mom!

Marc Maron/ WTF with Marc Maron

Comedian Marc Maron’s creative process is fascinating, and he knows it, and that’s good. On Saturday, I went with my sister to see him perform stand-up at the Palace of Fine Arts, which is a crazy place—I had kind of forgotten that’s where I’d be going, so the Palace’s outward magnificence, its distance from anyplace I ever go to in the city, and its fancy lobby with snacks for sale and statues, disoriented me. The crowd at the Palace was predominantly white, many of them in about their mid-30’s, comfortable but not especially fashionable—a spectrum from white dorks to white hipsters with nothing extreme on either end.

Our seats were far away, but I’m sure I could see Maron lurking behind the stage left curtain and talking to people as they came in. His mustache is pretty unmistakable. It reminded me of the time I met him, over a year ago when I’d first moved out here, at a storytelling event he was headlining. He was skulking around in the standing room and I told him I was a big fan of his podcast, WTF with Marc Maron. My friend Justin and I had just driven across the country and spent hours listening to it, each episode of which begins with ten minutes of Maron ranting about his life—his girlfriend, records, cats and anxieties—before the comedian interviews an entertainer in an insightful, sometimes awkward, but always very personal way. Louis CK has cried on the show, Carlos Mencia threatened Maron in an interview, and Gallagher stormed out.

So I told Maron I was a big fan—my sister was with me then, too—and he took notice of the goofy pins on my messenger bag. “Ya like buttons, huh? I got buttons for you.” He walked off, and my sister looked shocked. “That’s so mean! He totally made fun of you!” Maron reappeared with two pins, one for each of us, with “WTF” and a cartoon of him screaming on them. (I have since lost my pin.) Later in the show he stalked over and confessed, “I have no idea what I’m gonna say up there.” He went up and killed.

Mike Lawrence performed before Maron Saturday night, despite some challenges: early into the set, Lawrence made a joke about Charles Dickens, and a man in the audience emitted a cry aurally similar to cinema’s Howie scream. Lawrence handled the nonsense adeptly: “This isn’t a Limp Bizkit concert”, he said. “This is sad Jews talking.” The screaming continued, no one seemed to make any effort to eject the screamer, and Lawrence excelled at deflecting, comparing the disrupting man to Psy, Mitt Romney and Lawrence’s own father. Much of Lawrence’s actual comedy is kind of obvious commentary on nerd culture—how Batman is like a Republican and so forth—but the young comic dealt with an upsetting situation, the kind that has caused more seasoned comedians to go off the rails in a way that has significantly worsened their careers, and he did it in a poised and hilarious way.

A tweet by Maron from just before the Palace of Fine Arts show.

Maron started the set by acknowledging his notes, and how little he planned on actually using them. His hour-plus set included riffs on autoerotic asphyxiation, Mission Chinese (!), the necessity of judging people, atheists, vegans, Nazis, his ex-wives, his parents, meeting Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, dating a younger woman, and a cat of his that went missing. He told stories—as poignant as they were funny—about a trip to Hawaii and an experience playing baseball as a kid. His routine constantly comes close to being too insular, too slow, too angry, too rambling, making too much of an effort to be deep or touching, but he never actually ends up committing any of those sins. Thus a subplot of the set, thrillingly, becomes seeing whether any of the risks he takes will become excesses, and in general, watching his creative process in action.

I think this is how some people feel about jazz.

The “creative process” subplot came to the forefront towards the end of the night when he began debating out loud which anecdote to close with, then criticizing himself in the third person, in a muttering voice, as if reviewing his own show. “He was really unprofessional… Okay, I just need to figure out an opening paragraph for that.”

A t-shirt honoring Maron’s missing cat, which I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to buy Saturday night.

I was in a hurry to get back home after the show, but my sister urged me to go talk to Maron, who was in the lobby meeting fans. “Thanks, I love you, man,” came out of my mouth.

“I love you, too,” Maron said.

My sister volunteered, “He’s writing a review of the show for KQED.”

“I think I wrote half the article for you,” said Maron.

As I sit down to write about this episode, it seems appropriate that I hunch over, drink bourbon and smoke a cigarette and gaze narcissistically into a past about which I feel a great deal of existential angst, despite having my whole life ahead of me and every privilege in the modern world… So why is tonight different from any other night? Because it’s the premiere of Mad Men’s sixth season!

Before we begin I want to note that judging by the commercial breaks, Lincoln, for whom John Slattery did a cool commercial a while ago, seems to have replaced Jaguar as the overly-intrusive main sponsor of Mad Men. The ways in which this show subverts its own product placement deserve an essay of their own, but I’ll say this: last season the fictionalized Jaguar company involved the SCDP agency in prostitution, and in a later episode, a Jaguar was almost used for suicide—until the car wouldn’t start. So good luck, Lincoln, you’re gonna need it if your products actually end up appearing on the show.

The episode, “The Doorway”, written by the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, starts off with Don and Megan in Hawaii, with Don intoning a passage from the Inferno, which he reads on the beach. Beyond the Dante allusion, there is a lot of heat and fire imagery in the sequence that follows, from Hawaiian fire dancing, tiki torches, and a pair of joints Megan scores. All that hellfire is juxtaposed with repeated reference to Hawaii as “paradise.” Look at my English major paying off, haters!

Apparently Megan is recognizable from some soap opera now—“I can’t believe Victor won’t acknowledge you,” coos a fan who approaches her. Don meets a soldier about to get married before leaving for Vietnam. The soldier’s best man is passed out at the bar, and Don ends up serving in his stead as the couple get married on the beach. Megan finds Don and snaps a picture. Don later realizes he accidentally stole the soldier’s lighter, which has the soldier’s name on it.

The whole Hawaii sequence—from a master of ceremonies telling obnoxious jokes to the tourists for what feels like a long time, to the soldier bragging about killing water buffalo—made my skin crawl. Weiner, in his work on The Sopranos as well as Mad Men, is great at this: showing the subtle horror of average lameness. Don’s aloof smirk is the only thing stopping these scenes from becoming pure “Look at these godawful people” and nothing more—but Don’s passivity also makes him complicit.

Meanwhile, at the Francis residence, Henry and Betty have apparently taken in a young orphan who hopes to study violin at Juilliard. Bobby Draper says the violin looks like a coffin. Last season laid on the ominous death vibes pretty thick, but this season seems to be taking it even further. In the next scene, Don witnesses a doorman called Jonesy having a heart attack, and a doctor named Arnold Rosen administers CPR. Rosen’s wife is played by former Freaks and Geeks star Linda Cardellini.

Betty climbs into bed with her husband and commences saying SUPER HORRIFYING things about the young violinist, suggesting Henry “rape” her. I read this as a comment on present-day rape culture: the past year has brought a lot of ignorance about rape to light thanks to comments from Todd Akin and Tosh.0, to name a few, and it’s interesting to consider the idea that rape might have been spoken of as a mere kink, the way Betty talks about it here, more often in the late ’60s.

Betty then goes downstairs and has a conversation with the violinist, who didn’t get into Juilliard. Somehow this scene made me sympathize with Betty despite the disgusting monologue she just delivered—Betty, in her modeling days, lived in a packed apartment and ate soup out of cans, and the violinist, apparently now intent on moving to Greenwich Village and becoming a bohemian, is pretty arrogant. This is another thing the show is great at: I was raised to believe that the revolution of the ’60s was purely altruistic and important, but I think it’s equally important that we view the squares with sympathy, and see how they stayed square.

We check in with Peggy, whose awful boyfriend is now rocking a Frank Zappa ‘stache, and Roger, who is in therapy, but who mostly uses the psychiatric couch to joke—perhaps he should have been a standup comedian. Roger, who once said, “When God closes a door, he opens a dress,” gives the episode its title by discussing doorways in life, which “all close behind you.” His shrink is not amused, and the next scene parallels this moment, as Peggy is forced to endure a coworker’s stilted recounting of a late-night comedic monologue about American soldiers taking Vietnamese ears for trophies.

A guy named Bob Benson is scheming hard to impress Don, even giving him an extra coffee he just happened to have on him. Ginsberg’s new mustache totally beats Peggy’s boyfriend’s. Peggy, convincing her client to give her time to figure out how to make a great ad, is in full glory-days-Don mode.

Meanwhile, Don, who once said that love is just a sentiment created by ad men like him, is now upset at his firm’s and other agency’s “trivialization of the word.” One gets the feeling he has since learned love from Megan, and has already fallen out of it.

Don gives Dr. Arnold Rosen a camera in a drawn-out scene full of unusually boring banter. Sometimes this show errs too much on the side of dropping its audience into a trivial moment in its characters’ lives and forcing us to wait and find out the significance, if there is any, and this focus on Don and the doctor’s cordial acquaintance is one such instance.

The halfway point of the two-hour special is saved, though, by Roger’s reaction to his mother’s death. Roger is characteristically hilarious throughout her funeral service—a Groucho Marx trapped in a world of Margaret Dumonts. However, it’s clear he had been holding out for his mother to die for a long, long time. Roger’s psychiatrist’s question, “What exactly are you joking about?” becomes very relevant, especially when drunk Don vomits on the floor (at the mention of sunshine) and Roger notices his ex-wife’s plus-one. Roger yells, “This is MY FUNERAL!” and tries to kick everybody out.

This episode placed a special emphasis on uncomfortable monologues: the hacky MC in Hawaii, Betty making rape jokes like a bad comedian herself, Roger’s Portnoy’s Complaint moment, the “ears” routine, and a vomit-inducingly trite eulogy by a friend of Roger’s mother.

Drunk Don presses Jonesy about what happened “when he died.” (“I guess there was a light.” “Like a hot tropical sunshine?”) At this point there are so many commercial breaks that I start to wish I was seeing the soft light of death myself. Betty goes to Greenwich Village to look for this girl, and again I sympathize with her—everyone in the squat Betty visits is a total creep. Megan’s character on the soap opera she’s on becomes villainous, and I really wish we could see the show, a la “Invitation to Love” on Twin Peaks.

The Greenwich Village subplot ends with Betty dyeing her hair for some reason. This is why they introduced that character and everything? I’m wrestling with what all this is supposed to mean, except that Betty is losing her marbles even more than usual.

Don pitches “Hawaii: The Jumping-Off Point”, an ad campaign that unintentionally reminds the Hawaii people of suicide. Don’s pitch and subsequent defense of it (“Heaven is kind of morbid”) is so bad my sister said it reminded her of “Nathan for You”, the new show in which comedian Nathan Fielder tries to sell terrible ideas to real businesses.

Now it’s been over two hours and Don and Dr. Rosen are still just palling around pleasantly. They discuss—you guessed it—death, and then—you didn’t guess it—Dr. Rosen skis away in the snow on the street, and Don gets it on with Linda Cardellini, for what is clearly not the first time. The episode ended, and my sister, as devout a fan of the show as I am, said, “What did any of that mean? Who were half of those people?”

This episode reminded me of one of the best episodes of The Sopranos, an episode Weiner has writing credit on. In it, Tony does something very, very bad, then goes to Las Vegas, where he is surrounded by hell imagery on the level of what we saw when Don was in Hawaii. Tony takes peyote in the desert and yells, “I get it! I get it!” What Tony “gets” seems to be that he can do whatever he wants without consequences. Don seems to have had an epiphany, too: at one point he says, “I had an experience. I don’t know how to put it into words.” Judging by his hectoring of the doorman and by his terrifying pitch for a vacation destination, Don’s unseen epiphany involves a longing for death. What that means for him, or anybody else, in the future, remains a mystery.

SPOILER ALERT! If you aren’t caught up on Mad Men, stop reading now.

I’m a huge fan of Mad Men, but lately I’ve had trouble feeling quite as excited as I probably should for this new season. Maybe I’m taking it for granted because it’s been on for so long, in contrast to something like Game of Thrones, which is still new and exciting to me.

Or maybe it’s because the last season was so overtly damning to nearly every character: the agency of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce swallowed Pryce whole and prostituted Joan and drove out Peggy. The show, via none other than the dream-ghost of Don’s dead brother, came out and basically explained to Don, and us, that a rotten tooth was a metaphor for Don’s soul or whatever. Roger unintentionally exposed Sally to “dirty” sex. Pete was punched in the face repeatedly, and everyone watching it with me cheered each time, even though the second face-puncher was a far greater monster than Pete could ever aspire to be. And as for Megan, I’m not saying she’s a gold digger, but…

So what hope do these characters have? More importantly, can we care what hope they have? Can we get ourselves worked up, for old times’ sake? For… nostalgia? For the good old days of 2007, a time before Skrillex, before the Ikea monkey, when people still sometimes gathered around the soft, forgiving glow of actual televisions, with loved ones— can we reach back to this place we ache to go again, and feel a twinge in our heart more painful than mere memory—

Sorry. Something in my eye. Anyway, yes! Of course we can! Here’s how:

1. Do Some Reading

Since Mad Men is one of the most literary shows since Wishbone, why not check out some of its influences? What else are you going to read, articles about pop culture? Please continue reading articles about pop culture! But afterwards…

–The Short Stories of John Cheever. Cheever wrote his stories, which often concerned mid-20^th-century New York, booze, existential despair, sexuality, infidelity and privilege, with such heartbreaking attention to detail that he became known as “The Chekhov of the suburbs.” If you’re not familiar with his work, check out “O City of Broken Dreams!”, “Torch Song,” (which features a character named Joan Harris), “The Country Husband,” and “The Swimmer.”

–The White Album by Joan Didion. Given the pacing of the show, it’s safe to assume that Season 6 will take place in or around 1968. Here, Didion writes about aspects of that particular zeitgeist—The Doors, The Manson Family— with beautiful, ambling sentences and a mood of dread and paranoia.

–Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara. Because tell me this scene, in which Don reads from O’Hara’s collection of New York School poetry, doesn’t get you amped as heck for Mad Men:

The regret! The misery! You don’t have enough of that in your real life, right?

2. Dress Up Like Your Favorite Character!

You think you’re better than cosplayers and LARPers just because your favorite show makes allusions to Frank O’Hara and Sylvia Plath? Guess what? Allusions to Frank O’Hara and Sylvia Plath are actually the nerdiest thing possible! Embrace it, Poindexter, and check out these great vintage stores in the Bay Area for all of your sartorial needs:

–Mars in Berkeley. This Telegraph Avenue highlight features two floors of old-time class at decent prices.

–La Rosa and Held Over in the Haight. In a part of town that already feels like an unsettling tribute to a bygone era, La Rosa and its less expensive sister store stand above the rest.

–Retrofit in the Mission. This Valencia street space places an emphasis on drag and personal transformation.

You’re sure to find period-appropriate realness at any of these places for your dorky Mad Men get-together.

3. Drink!

(Or don’t. At least, please don’t drink like the characters on Mad Men.)

When my friends and I first got big into this show, we started ordering “old-fashioned” cocktails at bars, a la Don Draper. However, the old-fashioned you get at most bars nowadays, poignantly enough, is not what it used to be. It’s more like a weird, sangria-esque soup of fruit and sugar, or a fruit salad drenched in whiskey and bitters. Are you at all surprised that Rachel Maddow has the most succinct and charming explanation for how to make an old-fashioned old-fashioned?

And of course, the order here is important– don’t drink too much before trying to read any of those books or put on fancy clothes.

What are you doing for the upcoming season of Mad Men? Probably going about your business, not worrying about this kind of stuff? Planning a super-cool party that you’re still waiting to invite me to? Wondering how I got through this article without making a single reference to Jon Hamm’s recent trouser difficulties? Let us know!

Seriously, though, Twitter—along with every other major social media website—has been host to weird, fascinating art and poetry for years. No matter how intrinsically banal a platform may seem, someone in this talented world manages to do something worthwhile with it.

I feel inclined to defend Twitter specifically because of people like John Moe, who I’ve written about here before, as well as Jon Hendren (@fart)—people who have mastered the 140-word joke form.

The real tragedy is not that they call him Lowly Worm, it’s that no one in Busytown even sees that as a pejorative — John Moe (@johnmoe) March 10, 2013

“Google Glass, please find a salon or barber shop that can repair haircut damage from multiple simultaneous noogies” -the future — jon hendren (@fart) March 8, 2013

Others are worth following for what they retweet, such as internet archivist Katie Notopolous, and, if you want to be exposed to the depressing side of Twitter, the user @boring_as_heck, who catalogues pairings of tweets by ignorant conspiracy theorists. A Twitter account like that of @dril could be considered an extended Dadaist performance piece. Many other accounts use similarly absurd humor but frequently break character, often to hint at personal woes or to take stands on politics—a process I’d compare to that of a comedian riffing in front of an audience until he or she finds something funny.

What about Facebook? Isn’t that just where your friends’ moms write long screeds about the need for better gun control in this country, and where bad local bands invite you to come see them? No! It’s also where Princeton professor Jeff Nunokawa posts deep and sometimes moving meditations on literature. If you add him as a friend, you can get these notes on your feed, and he will also wish you a happy birthday on your birthday.

Via Know Your Meme.

Instagram remains mostly a wasteland of brunches and cats, despite the fact that photography is definitely a legitimate art form and not just a hobby for dads and pretty girls. However, you guys, Ai Weiwei, an artist famous for being persecuted by the Chinese government, is now on Instagram at @aiww. The account is decidedly non-controversial—it’s mostly starkly beautiful images of people around him, his cats, and even the occasional selfie. His technical skill and his backstory are what make the images poignant.

Via Ai Weiwei on Instagram.

You should also check out The New Yorker Instagram feed at @newyorkermag, where New Yorker photographers post images while on assignment—right now they’re documenting the 55^thannual Rattlesnake Round-Up in Sweetwater, Texas.

Via The New Yorker on Instagram.

Recently Twitter unveiled Vine, an app that allows users to post and share six-second looping videos. I’m interested in this app because it is one of the first social networking platforms (can I say “social networking platforms” enough times in this article to make people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge?) made expressly for the purpose of making art, (with the exception of Instagram, which is photography, and photography is totally art). Not only art, but an art form on which people spend years and millions of dollars: the movies!

It’s already been established that while Twitter great John Moe is only decent at Vine, actor James Urbaniak—who is only decent at coming up with funny jokes on Twitter—is an absolute champion on Vine. His six-second videos are short films with beginnings, middles, ends, special effects, and costumes:

Oscar Party ’76

Bowie at Home

Is art still best left to the pros, even when it’s free online or on an app? Twitter is telling me no, but Vine is telling me yes. Who else is great that I’ve left out?

Most Craigslist posters of this ilk seem to want you to fit into a very precise mold of a person they’ve imagined. There are several distinct types of posters like this:

One is the type who makes it clear he or she wants you to keep absolutely clean at all times, stay quiet and have no visitors. People who post these listings? I’m advising you not to do that. The only people who fit the descriptions you’re posting are serial killers.

[Anthony Perkins in Psycho, via Wikipedia]

Via Craigslist

I hope my editors don’t mind that I plan on making my next three articles a multi-part analysis of how fascinating this image is. Those jorts!

This man’s post began as such:

“10x11x12 room in 2nd flr apt furnished 42″x96″queensize foldaway,cedar bureau,wood plankflrs,blondmahogany table desk,fridge,TVradio”

Wow, this place has everything! Except space bars, apparently!

The post ended this way:

“House is athletic,Absolutely No Smoking,Drugs,or Alcohol

Must be Kitty cat type person.All animals are well cared for gentle & good at keeping wild animals at bay.”

via Wikipedia.

But the trend in apartment listings I found most upsetting was the one I described in the first paragraph: the friend application. These listings typically feature lengthy and banal descriptions of the people who live in the house before moving on to describe the “you” they’d like. One example I found of a person describing himself to excess:

“He rides his bike everywhere- though lately he’s discovering the magic of walking and exploring hidden treasures around town!”

Walking? I’ve heard tell of this manner of sorcery. Teach me your ways! Another house member in the same post described herself as follows:

“A creative thinker and doer with a flair for bread-baking, a love of animals and children, and a passion for poop (aka ‘sustainable human waste management systems’).”

CODE RED!

The most troubling post I found actually asked the applicant to fill out a quiz with questions ranging from the applicant’s political and philosophical affiliations to his or her favorite television show, and after that it only got weirder. I copied and pasted some of these questions into Microsoft Word for posterity. Click to expand:

Why do people make these friendship applications? Because they’re delusional? Because they can?

It’s also just not advisable for the renter. Having your best pal as a roommate means that you can’t be quite the same kind of pals you were before. You become pals who have to talk to each other about cleaning up. Even when I lived by myself, I hated myself even more than usual because of the terrible state I kept my apartment in.

The real shame of the friendship application is that it’s not a bad idea when it’s not disenfranchising people out of living situations. It’s hard to make friends after college. You have to develop a platonic crush, go on platonic dates, and even then everyone’s always too busy all the time (Jason).

What would your friendship application look like? Here’s mine:

1. Would you prefer to engage in A. a deep talk about our place in the universe, or B. a back-and-forth riff about what kind of nightmares Captain Kirk probably has?
2. Would you make fun of me if I started wearing a smoking jacket all the time?
3. Are you a serial killer?
4. Are you going to finish that sandwich?

If you answered B, no, no, and no, then we can totally hang out. Whether or not I’d rent a room to you is a whole different story, though.

Ask any AV Club commenter: NBC’s recent mistreatment of Community, along with the abrupt end of 30 Rock, are the most horrible events in human history, comparable only to an atrocity like the cancelation of Arrested Development.

It’s easy to get all “life is unfair” about the apparent abuse of these brilliant shows, especially when a show like Two and a Half Men is still so hugely popular. But NBC is only looking out for its bottom line. Beloved as they are by critics and cult fandoms, 30 Rock and Community, as well as Parks and Recreation, have gone ignored by a significant amount of the general public. Why is that? You can pat yourself on the back all you want and say these shows are too witty and fast-paced for dumb ol’ regular folks, but are they really? Community and 30 Rock whip back and forth between scenes at the same rate as popular cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy, and Parks and Recreation is shot and edited exactly like the vastly more popular The Office.

And hear me out on this one: are the jokes that much cleverer, per se, on Parks than Men? Sitcom jokes are sitcom jokes. They take a certain wit to write and a certain grace to deliver.

No, what makes Two and a Half Men worse than any of these struggling sitcoms is that watching Two and a Half Men feels like being trapped in a public men’s room. I’m pretty sure its creator, Chuck Lorre, just hired all of your uncle’s nastiest friends to write it. It’s more depressing than any episode of Louie could ever be, because it takes place in a Mamet-esque chauvinistic moral vacuum.

This New Yorker article by Emily Nussbaum differentiated Men from more incisive sitcoms that also center around dirtbags, such as Archer and Eastbound and Down. Of Men, Nussbaum writes: “The primal joke was on lesser, envious men, as well as the skanks who fell for [Charlie Sheen’s character’s] wiles.” (Lorre’s other big hit CBS garbage sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, embodies that same spirit even though the main characters are all nerds.)

What would The Big Bang Theory be like without the aid of a laugh track? Some genius found out:

Let’s go back to the pacing: those Lorre shows feel really slow, right? Maybe I’ve become spoiled by non-laugh-track shows at this point, but every joke is obviously followed by a laugh from the audience, then another character responds to that joke by making a face or saying, “I don’t THINK so,” or something, so the whole process of a single joke takes forever. It’s so boring that once the joke comes, you don’t care that it’s mean. You’re lulled, then shocked. The slow pacing actually allows for more brutal entertainment to get through. (I feel the same way about football and auto racing, if you subscribe to the idea that people only watch for the crashes, which my one friend who likes NASCAR has never dissuaded me of.)

Here’s another, more depressing idea: do people hate underdogs now? Do Community’s loveable losers, 30 Rock’s consumers of night cheese, and Parks and Recreation’s small-town goofballs deter people for some reason? Are TV’s Sheens and Kutchers just fictional versions of the Trumps, Kardashians, and Romneys who so collectively fascinate and disgust us? Maybe at this point in the history of sitcoms, and pop culture in general, we’ve been so inundated with badness that we can’t recognize a good thing, like Community, when we see it. We’re programmed only to differentiate between slow-paced, mean trash and fast-paced, nice trash. (I also acknowledge that we’re in a golden age of cable television, but that’s not what this article is about. Obviously Breaking Bad would not last two episodes on CBS.)

Maybe I shouldn’t be mansplaining other peoples’ tastes as though they’re some medical condition. Other shows certainly poke holes in my ideas: How I Met Your Mother is nice, pretty funny, fast-paced, and popular. Modern Family is nice, progressive, not that funny, and popular. What do you think?

My podcast obsession started with Doug Loves Movies, Comedy Bang Bang, and the poignant and insightful WTF with Marc Maron. Eventually I branched out into more unusual fare. If you’re ready to venture away from the homogenous comfort zone of the LA comedy scene, here is a list of six podcasts I feel are under-appreciated, all of which are available on iTunes.

1. Welcome to Night Vale

Welcome to Night Vale professes to be a broadcast news report from a town, like Twin Peaks, in which things are often not quite right. “Several Night Vale residents are complaining about extremely noisy sunsets,” mellifluous-voiced reporter / narrator Cecil intones in one characteristically surreal segment. The “weather report” in each episode is just a haunting song by a different musician. Welcome to Night Vale is alternately hilarious, genuinely spooky, and poetic, and an atmosphere of supernatural menace pervades it.

Key Quote: “In light of the ever-declining sales of newspapers and the rise of competition from digital media, the Nightvale Daily Journal announced that it has developed a new business model. Their new mission as a newspaper is to kill news bloggers with hatchets.”

2. New Year’s Eve with Neil Hamburger

This podcast is similarly adept at creating a world of its own. Here, comedian and musician Gregg Turkington assumes his frequently-corny, often-antagonistic stage persona, Neil Hamburger, and brings you a new year every week or so. From “Hollywood Times Square,” Hamburger and his co-host, fellow alt comedian Major Entertainer Mike H, conduct fake interviews with found audio and play cheesy, wah-and-synth heavy songs until the final countdown.

Key Quote: “Mike, good to see you on this most holy of holidays.”

3. Wits

McSweeney’s contributor and indisputable hero of Twitter John Moe hosts this charming, aptly-named public radio show / podcast, which features guests like John Hodgman, Neil Gaiman and Maria Bamford for skits, songs and interviews. Here, Henry Rollins and singer Lissie preview coming attractions:

4. Judge John Hodgman

You might know John Hodgman from those old Mac ads, or from The Daily Show. He’s a brilliant humorist and each episode of his podcast consists of a mock trial. Hodgman rules on minor social matters, from how often it’s acceptable to text in front of someone (“Antisocial Networking”) to whether a couple should raise their kids to believe in Santa (“Probable Claus”). His Judge Judy-ish brusque persona seems to be a goof, but his advice is clearly genuine. I went to the Judge John Hodgman SF Sketchfest show, and at one point there was a puppy on stage, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats appeared as a musical guest and expert witness in a tarot-related case, and I had so much fun that I chose to miss the last train to the East Bay rather than leave early.

Key Quote: “You have part of my attention, you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back in my chambers, where Bailiff Jesse and I are doing things that no one in this room, including Mike and Lauren, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing. Which is to say we’re in there shutting pieholes. Bailiff Jesse, swear them in.”

5 and 6. The Best Show on WFMU  / Best Show Gems

When I classify The Best Show as underrated, it’s not because the show doesn’t have a substantial and avid following — it does. I say it’s underrated because The Best Show is one of my favorite things that exists, up there with the short stories of John Cheever, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and complaining. The podcast is a recording of Tom Scharpling’s free-form radio show, in which he holds court on pop culture and takes calls from the likes of Todd Barry, Ted Leo, and a slew of bizarre and unfriendly characters played by Scharpling’s comedic partner Jon Wurster. He plays the song “Bad Company” over boring callers. Recently Scharpling had callers help him outline a script for the upcoming Entourage movie over the air. The Best Show Gems podcast posts clips from the show, mostly calls from Wurster.

Key Quote: “Can you imagine? That guy [Kelsey Grammer.] Handcuffed to that guy. I’d be like, meh, you know what? My right arm’s not that good. Y’know what I mean? Me and my right arm had a good run. Time to say goodbye to ya, buddy. You’re going to live with Kelsey Grammer now.”

Also worth mentioning:

Thrilling Adventure Hour

How Was Your Week with Julie Klausner (The opening monologue in the recent Episode “Heavy Things Onto Stages” tackles topics ranging from the death of a friend to the new season of Smash, and is one of the funniest, most heartbreaking things I’ve ever heard).