I’ve got a new piece over at The Awl about Girls lead singer Christopher Owens and the Children of God cult. It’s pretty disturbing, but hopefully worth a read for fans of the band and/or people obsessed with bizarre cults.

Given the passion expressed for girl music on this site, I suppose it’s not too much an affront to my masculinity to confess my obsession with the admittedly unmanly band Girls. Their debut record “Album” is forty minutes of melancholy bliss, late night break-up songs that will make you feel like a teenager suffering from a his first encounter with heartbreak. My introduction to the band’s back-story came through Pitchfork (shut up!) whose review featured a little biographical information on the band’s leader, Christopher Owens: “Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God. His older brother died as a baby because the cult didn’t believe in medical attention. His dad left. He and his mother lived around the world, and the cult sometimes forced his mother to prostitute herself.”

Read it all at The Awl. (It’s kinda NSFW.)

I’ve got a new piece on a bizarro fetish over at The Awl:

In case you’re not familiar, pedal pumping is a car/foot fetish for men who enjoy watching women pump the gas, generally in vintage cars, until they strand themselves by flooding the engine or draining the battery. Um, what? Countless variations on this scenario exist — girls getting cars stuck in mud, Asians revving mopeds in the desert, stranded pedal pumpers with “stinky work shoes.” According to The Daily Beast, Michelle McGee even confesses to making a few pedal pump videos. So evidently there’s a market for painted hags who look like Skeletor pumping the gas with swastikas on their toes too. Most of the videos make up for their poor production values with sophisticated dialogue like “start, godammit,” “no, I don’t wanna be stuck here,” and “fuck this Mustang.”
A search for the fetish yields over 200,000 Google returns and thousands of YouTube videos. There are hundreds of websites that cater to the fetish including pedaltube.com, asianpedalpumpers.com, pedalteens.com and carstuckgirls.com. [All sort of/not really/but kind of Not Safe For Work?]

Videos and the rest of the article here.

The Awl just posted a new piece by yours truly about WinterBand–aka the most important band of our time:

Just when I’d “discovered the magic” of Celtic Thunder and become certain that nothing could more effortlessly succeed at making my ears bleed, a friend sent me a link to North Carolina’s WinterBand–the most disturbing Christian rock band since, well, since ever. If you’re a geriatric, hobo-wizard, Jesus freak with a dirty mop-head hanging from your chin, it’s probably not the best idea to be too critical of others. But that doesn’t stop WinterBand’s namesake, Steve Winter, from attacking Catholics, Muslims, democrats, women and countless others for the intolerable sin of being outside his confusing comfort zone.

Check out this important band’s music over at The Awl.