Claire Zulkey writes: ‘I’ve run a handful of races per year since my first 5K in 2008, and have done enough theme/costume runs to be used to seeing women (and occasionally men) in fluffy statement skirts—sometimes stiff ballet-inspired tutus, sometimes just sparkly costume skirts. I stopped thinking of running tutus as a novelty, however, when I saw them being sold as official merchandise at the 2013 Color Run in Chicago.’
Pitchfork says: ‘At the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan on Monday night, Patti Smith opened for Patti Smith. After the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Steven Sebring’s concert film Horses: Patti Smith and Her Band, the screen rose to reveal Smith and said band launching into her incantatory 1979 single “Dancing Barefoot.” Before her next song, a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” that stripped the protest anthem of its hippie hokeyness, she praised the teenage gun-control activists from Parkland and urged the crowd to keep fighting. Then some guy in the balcony started screaming, and she defused the situation by asking if he needed the bathroom, advising that when she had to pee but couldn’t find a toilet, she simply sought out the nearest tin can. Surprise appearances from Bruce Springsteen and Michael Stipe came later in the evening, like generous parting gifts, but it was during this early portion of the show that Smith achieved Peak Patti. Read more »
Rolling Stone says: ‘Franchise extravaganza pits everybody against power-hungry maniac and proves that yes, you can have too much of a good thing.’
Regina Marler writes: ‘The celebrated photographer Berenice Abbott (pictured), who began her career as Man Ray’s darkroom assistant in Paris from 1923 to 1926 and shot her first portraits on his studio balcony, does not appear in his four-hundred-page autobiography, Self-Portrait (1963). This omission was “rather dirty,” Abbott felt, even “bitchy,” and seemed to show that Man Ray was still miffed at her early success, as Julia Van Haaften recounts in her comprehensive new biography, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography. Abbott and Man Ray had been good friends for years, meeting soon after her arrival in New York from Ohio as a journalism student in 1918; they were so close in New York, in fact, that Man Ray had asked if she would do him the favor of being named as co-respondent in his divorce case.’
Janelle Monae has announced a tour in support of her forthcoming record Dirty Computer. The North American trek kicks off in Seattle in June. It’s currently scheduled to wrap up on August 4 in Atlanta. St. Beauty, the Wondaland duo of Alexe Belle and Isis Valentino, will join Monáe on her tour. Check out the schedule here. In addition to the tour announcement, Monáe has shared a new music video for “I Like That.”
Westworld (pictured): The show returned with a time-jumping, storyline-hopping, ultra-violent hour-plus premiere and if you’re already totally confused you have come to the right place. Grade: C+. The Good Fight: The episode dives into microtargeting, the process by which advertisers use ad dollars to zero in on very specific groups of people in order to influence their actions. Unexciting. Grade: B-. Billions: Dollar Bill comes to Axe with a short option on a pharmaceutical company that’s about to go belly-up because of a whistleblower looking to expose the animal cruelty in the lab. Grade: B.
