October 2007 Archives
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Listening
What’s in a Band Name?
What’s in a band name? A meaningless handle dreamt up after throwing enough random adjectives together, or some obscure drug reference/street name/sexual maneuver that will only mean...
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Spoofs & Satire
The Backseat Killer
A maniac is chasing an innocent woman. She gets home and runs to her house, just as the pursuing car screeches in to the driveway. How will it end?
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In Hindsight
Behind the Mask
This October, while you were shopping for fake blood and a glue-on mustache to complete your zombie Tom Selleck costume, others were dressing up and making the news.
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Reading
Book Digest: October 29, 2007
From Wislawa Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel Lecture: The world—whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of...
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Watching
Video Digest: October 26, 2007
My best Halloween costume was in grade school. I must have been eight or nine, and my dad helped me turn a cardboard box into a television set. With aluminum-foil...
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The Non-Expert
Phantom Menace
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we rush to the aid of a distressed reader who believes her house is haunted.
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Personal Essays
Keeping Up With the Corpses
When her friend moves into a house whose Halloween block party draws swarms of trick-or-treaters from all over LA, our writer visits, entering a dimension where the candy corn is organic and the ghosts have SAG cards.
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Listening
Questionable Band Bios
While I usually try to share true and pertinent information about the bands featured here, this week I’ve scoured the web for songs I like from bands I’ve...
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Conversation Piece
Once More, With Feeling
Some call Wes Anderson’s new movie, The Darjeeling Limited, mounting evidence of the filmmaker’s racism—others, of his inability to make a decent film.
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Of Recent Note
Nonfiction Books
You’ve stocked up on bookmarks, ordered the bookplates, and now you’re ready to fill the shelves. Next time you’re shopping, pass over the fiction and pick up something with an index. The writers offer a selection.
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Reading
Book Digest: October 22, 2007
From Red Rover by Deidre McNamer: He was generous and grave, Aidan was, and equipped with such frank curiosity about himself and how his life might unfold that he heartened...
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Gallery
Ursine
Photographer Jill Greenberg distorts, caricatures, and cartoons the face of the growling grizzly and the crying child.
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Watching
Video Digest: October 19, 2007
Just over 30 years ago, following inauspicious beginnings, a relative unknown starred in a film he’d written about a scrappy boxer with big dreams who miraculously both beats the champ...
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Going Back to Kali
Making It
A visit to the technology hub that is Bangalore reveals a modern city with vibrant nightlife and a surprisingly literary police force, during the latest stop in this travelogue.
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Reading
Book Digest: October 15, 2007
The silly season has begun—awards nominations being announced and no doubt the attendant contretemps to follow. I’ll refrain from my usual jaundiced opinionating except to relay the good...
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Gallery
Faith
Photographer Jackie Nickerson goes behind the doors of some of Ireland’s most private Catholic communities, and finds ordinary people, living in today’s world, quietly going about their business.
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The Non-Expert
Unfortunate
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we help a reader assess the accuracy of the fortune cookie he just opened.
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Watching
Video Digest: October 12, 2007
Hey, climbing. Another thing that paralyzes me with fear. My boyfriend has been climbing at a gym for a while now, and he loves it, so because I love him,...
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Notes From the Lawn
Secret Gardens
Now a New Yorker, our resident green essayist brings her yardwork series to the big city, even if it means breaking into private plots.
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Listening
The New Re-Appropriation of Hip-Hop
A few years back I tried pushing this concept to DJs called “the new re-appropriation,” wherein they should take rap away from the mumbling, punch-drunk death threats it’s become...
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Spoofs & Satire
America’s Next Top Model Democracy
The winning country receives billions in government contracts and becomes the show’s next host. Who will it be?
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Profiles
Murder and the Masseuse
Many of us imagine killing our bosses; some people actually take it a little further. Meet a woman who got into the massage business to avoid a homicide rap.
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Reading
Book Digest: October 8, 2007
I have never thought myself better or smarter because of my love of reading—though I do tend to think that about others who read. But I am beginning to...
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Gallery
Coney Island Baby
Rivka Shifman Katvan drops her own misfits into the scene for some theatrical improvisation, and captures the Coney Island with a touch of camp and whimsy, both removed and touching.
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Watching
Video Digest: October 5, 2007
A Parisian reader emailed me after my Video Digest about the latest hip-hop dances. Was I aware, she wanted to know, of Paris’s own Techtonik craze? I was, though...
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Profiles
What It Means to Miss New Orleans
The accuracy of Fox’s new police drama K-Ville can only be known by the cops working in post-Katrina New Orleans. An interview with Police Lieutenant Bryant Wininger, who explains where the real drama still is, free of storylines and plot twists.
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Listening
The State of Mashmixes and Remashes
About a decade ago it became common to say about new movies that were good, but not that good: “I’ll wait for it to come out on DVD.” If...
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Letters From London
The Stratus Sphere
For a city that’s constantly grey, why is London so obsessed with the weather? Our man in Britannia takes a look at the capital’s skies, which are more colorful than you might think.
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Going Back to Kali
Breaking Bread
A long-awaited history lesson from a cousin turns into an education on religion and politics in post-partition Kashmir, in the seventh installment of his travel journal.
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Reading
Book Digest: October 1, 2007
I was completing David Plante’s riveting novel, ABC, in which the protagonist has what I would call a transcendental episode with a 1923 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, when I...
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Gallery
Delicate Lines
Stephen Earl Rogers is a figurative artist, working within the long tradition of representational art. Each painting has its own set of concerns and ideas, some formal and others more conceptual in nature.