August 2008 Archives
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Listening
King’s Lead Hat
Fresh off of a tear of high-concept and highly touted public art projects, David Byrne has also been busy finishing up Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, his first collaboration...
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Reading
High Wire
[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] I was a reader of Robert Stone (A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, as well as assorted entries in...
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Of Recent Note
The Hot ______ of the Summer
In times of respite, the mind settles, focusing on what’s really relevant. Here are the TMN readers’ and writers’ hot picks: the jam that fueled parties all summer long, the show we turned down the A/C to hear, and more.
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Fred Benenson
Lauren Cornell
Hometown: Manhattan Currently residing in: Brooklyn Occupation: Executive Director, Rhizome & Adjunct Curator, New Museum Childhood hero: My friends have always been my heroes. What’s your favorite Internet toy at...
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Reading
A Partisan’s Daughter
Though I dipped into Louis De Bernières’s Colombian Trilogy (The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Señor Vivo and the...
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Spoofs & Satire
An Arachnological Guide to the Spiders From Mars
Our planet welcomed their invasion, despite unknown dangers they may have posed.
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Listening
SoCal Decay
Southern California is a dark and foreboding place. People commonly associate it with the Beach Boys and Gidget, but that was from a long time past when you could still...
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Birnbaum v.
Elizabeth Strout
Our man in Boston sits down with author Elizabeth Strout to talk about Maine, her latest novel, and the plights of the modern writer. Now with audio excerpts.
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Reader Letters
Choosing the Right Words
Dear sir or madam, I have been regularly reading and enjoying TMN for several months now, and I was recently taken aback to see a headline reading “Latitude lacks in...
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Gallery
Inner State of Things
Brittny Badger’s series of disassembled appliances is a delight: a study in how the inner materials of, for example, an ordinary coffee maker can become abstract art.
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Reading
Live Forever
You all know, or will learn now, that I admired Kurt Vonnegut a great deal—an admiration that began and lasted past my youthful, stupid years into my golden, stupid...
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Listening
Krautrocker Glory
Brighton's own Fujiya & Miyagi will release their third album, Lightbulbs, in early September. The band has been cited as owing a debt not only to electronic music of the early ’9...
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Reading
Anthology 101
Receiving an advance copy of The Best American Mystery Stories 2008—guest-edited this year by George Pelecanos—reminds me that Houghton Mifflin’s onslaught of its franchise The Best American Series...
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Consoles I Have Known
Second Place Is First to Lose
The current war between console makers is bloody, and sides must be chosen. A look toward the next generation.
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Listening
Engaging the Fans
One of the chief concerns of the digital age is the problem of getting people to pay for music. Of Montreal, the super-popular psychedelic funk freaks of our time, have...
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Reading
André Kertész: On Reading
The ubiquity of digital cameras and the avalanche of images whose lives are wholly lived on hard drives, as well as other aspects of 21st-century visual aesthetics, make black-and-white photography...
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Listening
Field-Tested Dub
It took a visit to New York and the combination of disorientation and fatigue to allow me to really enjoy the recently unmasked British musician Burial. I think you really...
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Reading
Collections of Nothing
I suppose one might be amazed at the subjects that fill the hundreds of thousands of books published each year—and though I don’t want to sound jaded, I...
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Announcements
The Hot _______ of the Summer
August’s Of Recent Note is upon us. This month, we are handing over an inordinate level of control. The theme is: “The Hot _______ of the Summer” Meaning: First you...
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Listening
Is a Revolution
Dan Deacon has garnered notoriety in some circles for his particular brand of electrostatic beepcore (coinage mine), and for, if nothing else, proving that Baltimore can produce relevant artists in...
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Gallery
Forecast
Forecast is the latest in Nicholas Blechman’s “Nozone” series. It’s a bit like an issue of the Economist, but authored by some of today’s best cartoonists and graphic designers.
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Reading
Willie & Joe: The WWII Years
Cartoonists have struggled in the American culture for their rightful seat at the big arts banquet of popular culture—the big shift in their legitimacy can probably be pegged to...
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Listening
Joyous Descent!
The only words I can make out are “all day holiday” and “parachute”—Shugo Tokumaru sings the rest in Japanese at great speed. Tokumaru’s “Parachute” offers neither serene floating...
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The Thoughtful User Guide
Writing My Twitter Etiquette Article: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely
Every form of communication deserves an etiquette manual, if only so we can treat our fellows better, even in 140-character bites.
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Op-Ed
Programming in English, or Translate :: ParseLib :: English
Computer code may not be gobbledygook, but that doesn’t make it art. A survey of the field of programming-cum-poetry to find the ghost (of Hamlet’s father) in the machine.
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Listening
Still Here
Talking about Girl Talk, The New York Times feels it's necessary to explain that hip-hop uses sample loops, but then throws down “At times the album sounds like a cleverly...
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Listening
Monkey: Journey to the West
For those of us practically dying of anticipation for whatever Damon Albarn releases next, our desperate longing since The Good, the Bad & the Queen (less than two years, really) is...
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Watching
SnagFilms
SnagFilms provides a wonderful service: it is “a web site where you can watch full-length documentary films for free.” The site hosts big famous docs, like Super Size Me, and...
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Reading
Books That Stack Up
Last year, when word went out that Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio were once again sharing the silver screen in a film based on Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, I...
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Reading
Hit and Run
Based on an impressively large body of work and awards from people who care about such things, one can say Lawrence Block is a big thing in the crime story...
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Reading
Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
A few months ago I was pleased to note James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems. Now comes a new opus and collaboration. Arguably, baseball is best consumed as...
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Listening
Danny Callahan
It used to be easy to write off Bright Eyes and, by extension, all things Conor Oberst several years ago. Not only were his music and lyrics very cloying in...
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Watching
Mexican Breakfast
About a year ago, a clip of Gwen Verdon, star of stage and screen, dancing Bob Fosse’s three-and-a-half-minute “Mexican Breakfast” routine to the tune of Unk’s “Walk It...
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Reading
Tethered
Any number of things, mostly of a serendipitous nature, bring certain books into focus—life being very much a kaleidoscopic succession. In this instance, Amy MacKinnon’s debut novel, Tethered,...
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Listening
A Crutch or a Cradle
Pony Up is an all-girl group from Montreal that released its first album, Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes, in late 2006. Though the band hasn’t released anything...
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Listening
Medications
Let’s just get this part over with quickly: Bad Brains, Fugazi, Dischord, harDCore. There, much better. It’s best to purge those words as soon as possible rather than...
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Reading
More on Roxana Robinson
Roxana Robinson, who recently published a novel, Cost, with noteworthy blurbs and which received good notices and appreciative reviews, is a skilled literary fiction practitioner whose compact body of work...
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Watching
Target: Women
Do you watch Current.com’s media-mocking show, Infomania? You could call it The Daily Show’s younger sibling: The humor is goofier, the tone is lighter, and the subjects...
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Listening
In the New Year
A new album from the Walkmen, called You & Me, will officially be released on Aug. 19. However, the entire album is currently available from the band’s online music store for...
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Announcements
Re-Digested
Three times a week since 2006, we’ve been publishing our Digest features with the goal of bringing TMN readers the latest in our favorite books (Mondays), mp3s (Wednesdays), and...
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Reading
This Land Is Their Land
I must note that my sense of the people who are popularly characterized as conservatives—officials and pundits—is that they are not coherent enough to be judged as anything...
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Gallery
Paris - New York - Shanghai
Dutch artist Hans Eijkelboom picks out the minuscule ways people in three big cities all resemble one another, then pulls them together in tapestries of logos and patterns, looks and costumes.
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Spoofs & Satire
Save Bubekhar
The world over, do-gooders are doing it for the greater good. But when carp gods and tight blouses mingle, discord looms.
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Profiles
Frames Consigned
Parents love to appear unannounced on a grown child’s doorstep. Rarely, though, do they ship 12 cartons of belongings to precede them.
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Personal Essays
What Is It, Boy?
When a beloved companion dies, existential crises loom. Tracing the history of Neptune, a mixed Australian Shepherd, all the way back to the dawn of mammals.
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Gallery
Under the Waves
Turning the world upside down can be as easy as going for a swim. Using a waterproof camera and watching the tide instead of the viewfinder, Asako Narahashi shows Japan’s coastal areas as seen from the sea.
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Spoofs & Satire
Man Bites Dog
As bookstores swell with narratives, instruction manuals, and other paeans to man’s best friend, publishers turn to even the most inexperienced owners for new pulp.