Even though everyone told us, “Austin is dry,” we didn’t think they meant our favorite spot at Barton Springs Creek, where we like to take the Jack the Wonder Dog swimming every morning when we’re in town. But dry it was. As a bone. We were all disappointed. Texas in summertime is all about the [...]
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
Top 10 songs for a classic MJV road trip
Posted in Listen on Jul 10th, 2009
Road trips always have been a huge part of my life.
Before I got my license, I traveled with Mom & Dad, folded like a lawn chair into the back seat of their Oldsmobile Calais. Immediately after college, I used my Plymouth Voyager minivan to schlep from Boston to New York to chase down a long-distance [...]
While the invention of iPods made things far easier than the days when we had to go through stack and stacks of cassettes to create the perfect on-the-road mixed tapes, there’s still an art to creating the perfect road trip playlist. It takes time, thought, a sense of humor, and a wide-ranging music collection in [...]
Forty-seven percent of road trip success is having the right soundtrack. (The rest is route, scenery, and snacks.)
This week Jenna, Matt and I offer you our Flyover America Mix—10 songs each (though we could think of many more) about flyover states. Of course, road songs needn’t have places in them, but that’s just a little [...]
Because Underdogs Rock
Posted in Discuss, Go, New Jersey on Jul 9th, 2009
Growing up in New Jersey, you, quickly, understand what it’s like to live as the underdog. My poor home state. Its wonders are frequently overlooked. Isn’t that just a place where people who commute to NYC live? It’s an easy punchline for most outsiders. New Jersey. Heh heh. Snicker snicker.
Yes, I’ll admit that, once I [...]
Sophia’s Story
Posted in Go on Jul 9th, 2009
Growing up in New York City, I was deeply indoctrinated in a view of the world that Saul Steinberg’s summed up in his famous 1976 New Yorker magazine cover. There was 10th Ave. and there was New Jersey (which you avoided as much as possible) and then there was a whole bunch of nothing [...]
I fell in love with America out of necessity.
Growing up in a tony New York City suburb, Europe was the vacation hotspot for most kids I knew. All of my upper- and upper-middle class friends got to go to places like Barcelona and London and Paris with their parents. They went often.
And I, the only [...]
Hi. We are Sophia Dembling, Jenna Schnuer, and Matt Villano. Sophia lives in Dallas, Texas (but was Manhattan born and reared), Jenna in Queens, NY (but who can now say proudly that she was raised in Jersey), and Matt in Sonoma County, CA (though he spent most of the late 1990s in Manhattan). We are writers who [...]
