October 2009 Archives
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Spoofs & Satire
The Babysitter
The kids are asleep upstairs, and the sitter waits alone in a darkened house—and then the phone rings. If you think you know what happens next, think again.
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Current Reads
Raise Your Children Well
Po Bronson first came to my attention with his 1995 lampoon of the insular world of bond-trading, Bombardiers. My next awareness of him came in a conversation with novelist and Iowa...
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Of Recent Note
First Scary Movies
You can sleep with the closet light on, you can crawl into your parents’ bed, but you can never forget your first truly frightening horror movie. Our staff and readers agree.
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Iconography
An Original Original
Inexplicably, 27 years after passing to his glory, there are only a handful of biographies of the great American jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. To paraphrase an obscure rhythm and...
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New York, New York
Window Shopping
Never mind all that gloomy talk of falling real-estate prices. For many renters, even a heavily mortgaged apartment is the stuff of daydreams.
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Spoofs & Satire
Is Rapper Kanye West Dead?
Suspicious lyrics and other clues suggest something may be amiss among the hip-hop royalty.
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Serious Fun
In It for the Money?
Saying someone needs no introduction used to have some validity--before life in the post-industrial world went all 365/24/7 on us. Now the exponential explosion of sense-wracking gossip, trivia, ED adverts, and...
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Back in the Day
LA, LA, LA, LA, LA
New York City may be the American megalopolis hated by outlanders and flyover-zone residents (in part because apparently that's where that unfortunate rubric originated), but L.A. seems to draw...
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Interview
Emily Bobrow
Brooklyn resident Emily Bobrow is editor of More Intelligent Life, the online version of The Economist’s quarterly culture and style magazine. She is also a contributor to The Economist's...
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Gallery
A Kind of Rapture
Photographer Robert Bergman’s first commercial outing coincides with two debut solo exhibitions, one at the National Gallery of Art in DC, and another at PS1. And all of this from an artist who’s never had a gallery show before.
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Announcements
What Was Your First Horror Movie?
Let's celebrate the age-old art of scaring yourself silly. This month, we're wondering: What was your first scary cinema experience like--in theaters or at home, eagerly anticipated or forced into...
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The Non-Expert
Frugal Krueger
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we help a reader in need of creative, recession-friendly Halloween costume ideas.
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Profiles
Beer and Loathing
For agents and publishers, the Frankfurt Book Fair is publishing’s biggest event: part conclave, mostly marathon, and all business. It is absolutely no place for an aspiring author, as we discover.
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
The Crepuscule
News of--one of the trade magazines referred to him as "legendary"; I can imagine the chuckle he got from that--bookseller Vincent McCaffrey's foray into fiction with his novel Hound got...
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The Coffee Table
Power to the Peaceful
Having studied with Gary Winogrand and been critically well-regarded (by Susan Sontag, among others), photographer Mitch Epstein early eschewed the artsy conceit of black-and-white photography to experiment with and perfect...
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Rare Medium
Waste Not, Want Not
One wonders what it would take to shock the American (or any public) to action with revelations of wrongdoing, corruption, or human and animal abuse as the muckrakers of a...
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Interview
Freelance Whales
Freelance Whales cut their teeth playing jaunty pop music on the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Recently, the Metropolitan Transit Authority granted the band a license to play in subway stations...
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Profiles
Same as It Ever Was
Following up with targets of the infamous Rock Critical List, an anonymous, highly personal screed that sparked a firestorm.
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Bookbag
Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom
Forgive my temporary amnesia but I cannot recall what caused the heightened awareness of Latin American literature resulting in the so-called Latin American Boom of the '60s and '7...
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Gallery
Oil
Edward Burtynsky brings us the oil industry’s fields, factories, and graveyards in large-format wall-sized photographs from around the world—Azerbaijan, China, Canada, California, and more.
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Back in the Day
The Original Trotskyite
While I have every confidence that all manner and mode of ideas and activities now labeled with the ungainly appellation "old school" will not suffer the fate of road apples ...
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Personal Essays
Annie Dillard and the Writing Life
Writers aren’t born, they’re made—from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.
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Genre Genre Genre
Making Book
It is not uncommon for doctors (Ethan Canin, Daniel Mason), lawyers (Scott Thurow, John Grisham, Barry Reed), and television anchors (Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw) to venture into the novel writing...
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Letters From Berlin
The Karlsruhe Complex
The re-opening of a 1970s murder case this summer shocked Germans of all political stripes.
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Current Reads
War, What Is It Good For?
Ana Menéndez, (Loving Che) a former columnist/reporter for the Miami Herald has written, variously, about Cuba, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Istanbul, and India, her base for three years. With her...
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The Novice
How to Perform Acupuncture
Those who can’t do, learn. In this installment of our series in which the clueless apprentice with the experts, we try our hand at needlework.
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Interview
Jonathan Ames
Jonathan Ames is a Brooklyn-based writer, an occasional boxer, and the creator of the new HBO series Bored to Death about a Brooklyn-based writer named Jonathan Ames, played by Jason...
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New Finds
Pants on Fire
Growing up in Chicago in the '50s and '60s, I was not aware of this sprawling prairie city's commitment to racial segregation until Martin Luther King came to...
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Gallery
The Map of the Art
Edited by Katharine Harmon, The Map as Art brings together 360 visions of experimental cartography. It is wonderfully inspiring.
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New Finds
Nightime, the Right Time?
Ginnah Howard (Rope & Bone) manages to make the harrowing and bitter world of a shattered family (suicide of the father and one brother and the perennial cycle of substance abuse...
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Opinions
The Pleasures of Saudade
A year in Lisbon teaches you more than how to select a decent vinho verde. An ode to the uniquely hopeful, desperate music that’s missing from the usual American fare.
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The Coffee Table
Eyes Have It
The Scott Dadich-designed Periodical Photographs (Aperture) by award-winning editorial photographer Dan Winters collects and features 90 full-color images (some of which have appeared in New York, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the...
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The Spider and the Fly
Your Final Lay
Of the free games included with Windows, none is more treacherous than Spider Solitaire. In the final installment, the master sets the apprentice free.
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Rare Medium
Hand Me That Rake
If you need a reminder of how degraded, sycophantic, lazy, smug, boring, and predictable contemporary journalism has become, San Francisco State University mentor Peter Richardson's (American Prophet: The Life and...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Remembrance of Things Past
The Kennedy crime family seems to have been the first to come up with the bright idea to import its ill-gotten (remember patriarch Joe was, among other things, a bootlegger)...
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Letters From Mumbai
The Expat’s New Clothes
Living in a region where you dress differently from everyone else, you begin to notice the little things. Our woman in Mumbai undergoes an education in Indian fashion.
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Interview
Sacha Gervasi
Sacha Gervasi is a British director, screenwriter, and journalist. His screenwriting credits include The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Steven Spielberg. Gervasi’s directorial debut, Anvil! The Story...
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Bookbag
The New Morality
Having recently noted Rebecca Solnit's encouraging study of community responses to disasters (like Hurricane Katrina), I also availed myself of an opportunity to chat with Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains),...
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Back in the Day
Everything New Is Old
Since I don't go out much I can't tell if there is a lot of hoopla around the publication of the Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors-edited A New Literary History...
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Back in the Day
Rats in the Cathedral
Given the prodigious and intense scholarship devoted to all manner of subjects--central and tangential--to the Holocaust (or "Shoah" as some Jews prefer to call it), it is an encouraging sign...
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The Coffee Table
New York City Books
As an expatriate Chicagoan trapped in the cosmic psyche experiment of the East Coast, I am loathe to appreciate the ongoing, relentless celebration of New York City as the center...
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Serious Fun
Diaper Advisory
To begin with, Peter Dexter (Train), author of the award-winning and memorable novel Paris Trout (and a fistful of other excellent novels), has penned the funniest dust-jacket biography that I...
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Current Reads
Inconceivable!
Not exactly a household name (except in certain effete and cultivated households) thespian (his credits include over a hundred movie and TV appearances--My Dinner With Andre, Shadows and Fog, Toy...
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Of Recent Note
Beloved Children’s Books
With the imminent release of the Where the Wild Things Are movie, we’re swept up in childhood literary nostalgia. Our staff and readers tell us what filled their tiny bookshelves.