December 2009 Archives
-
Guides
2009 Holiday Survival Guide for Slackers
It’s that time of year again—actually, it’s way past that time of year. And again, you still haven’t done your holiday shopping.
-
Coffee Table Gallery
Keeping Hope Alive
Given, as they say, the objective conditions besetting our country (need I list them?), it would not be unreasonable to consider whether the United States (of Embarrassment, to quote Eminem)...
-
Back in the Day
The Shower Scene That Changed the World
As long as I am levitating in the mid-last century, I should note that Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking film Psycho, released in 1960, is the subject of David Thomson’s latest...
-
Rare Medium
Naked Lunch Redux
I’m having difficulty recalling what William Burroughs (who died in Lawrence, Kan. in 1997) is best known for—being an unabashed (rehabilitated) junkie, being a unrepentant homo (Alan Ginsberg wrote...
-
Letters From Copenhagen
Police and Thieves
Having biked with the protesters, drank with the locals, and trained in a battalion to fight riot police, Mike Deri Smith sums up the clusterfail that was Copenhagen.
-
New Finds
The Ghost in The Squirrel Machine
OK, first, my initial impression of cartoonist Hans Rickheit’s new book The Squirrel Machine (Fantagraphics) was one of amazement (a word I don’t bandy about indulgently) and bafflement....
-
Back in the Day
The Original Trotskyite 2.0
Back in 1995 (or ‘96), Jon Lee Anderson’s definitive biography of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevera was published, and within a short time two others joined the Che historiography. Since then there have...
-
Albums of the Year
The Top 10 Albums of 2009
The past 10 years have upturned the music world, and we’re all better for it. A countdown of the year’s best music, and the artist of the decade is named.
-
Gallery
The Fall
Last year we featured Richard Mosse’s photographs of airport disaster simulations in a gallery that stoked both fear and fascination. In these new photos by Mosse, the wreckage of celebrated machines and technologies is slowly being absorbed by the natural world.
-
New Finds
A Polish Joke
You might think that receiving rave endorsements from writers such as Milan Kundera (“one of the greatest novelists of our century”) and John Updike (“a master of verbal burlesque…one...
-
Current Reads
Crimes of the Utopian Left
Ten years ago, controversial French intellectual/political philosopher Jean François Revel (How Democracies Perish, The Totalitarian Temptation), who died in 2006, published Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism...
-
Personal Essays
To Will a Mockingbird
Fashions come and go, but names tend to stick around forever, even hippie ones.
-
Rare Medium
Mad for Magazines
They are dropping like flies: Last week Kirkus and Editor & Publisher, this week ID, the venerable design magazine. As a recent TMN headline noted, over four hundred magazines closed in 2009 ...
-
Of Recent Note
New Year’s Realizations
Before tackling our shortcomings in January, we thought it would be good to celebrate the year in personal bests. Our staff and readers share their proudest moments.
-
Back in the Day
Good Wood on U.S. History
Pulitzer-winning Brown University history mentor emeritus (The Radicalism of the American Revolution, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787) Gordon Wood has a lucid and elucidating take on history’s...
-
The Book Was Better
On Bookshelves Now
If you visit this space occasionally you might know the high regard I have for journalist Michael Lewis and how moved I was by his story, The Blind Side, which...
-
Interview
Cory Arcangel
Digital media artist and musician Cory Arcangel recently presented Depreciated, his first career retrospective, at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (aka Montevideo). One new piece featured clips of cats walking...
-
New York, New York
Happy Challah-days
For its holiday promotion, a retailer enlisted hundreds of dancers to dress up like elves in Union Square. A break dancer and former Orthodox Jew was among their ranks.
-
The Coffee Table
Black Beauty
It stands to reason that the impressive Deborah Willis (Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present), MacArthur fellow, artist, photographer, curator, historian, author, and educator who...
-
New Finds
Four Million Years
Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto first called my attention to the distinction between residence and citizenship, pointing out that in France, living in Paris makes you Parisian, not French. I am...
-
Personal Essays
From Cover to Cover
Music connects to memories, and so do album sleeves. From ELO’s spaceship to Róisín Murphy’s see-through top, the covers that made one writer a fan.
-
Current Reads
American Civil War Dreamscape
Tennessee born writer Madison Smartt Bell was anointed early, making one of those (silly) Granta list of young authors to watch. Despite the perils of early celebrity or recognition, Bell...
-
Gallery
The Weight of a Social Network
Physical contact between strangers is one of society’s great taboos. Photographer Alana Riley breaks that barrier by asking friends and strangers to cede their personal space both in their workplace and in her studio.
-
Poetry
A Relentless Pursuit of Beauty
If you can set aside (any) concerns about poetry in translation then you may rejoice at the publication of The Poetry of Rilke (FSG) edited by Edward Snow, a highly...
-
Current Reads
Body Parts
Will Self continues his preoccupation with anatomical titles—his last book was entitled The Butt, an early work was Cock & Bull—with Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy...
-
Rare Medium
Obama si? Obama no?
If journalism is, as conventional wisdom holds, the first draft of history, then we are fortunate to have a practitioner such as the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg involved in...
-
Spoofs & Satire
Pushing Your Buttons
Introducing iBox 2G, the fastest, most powerful way to satisfy your greed and simultaneously kill a complete stranger.
-
Announcements
What Are Your Past Year’s Solutions?
The end of the year is nigh and perhaps too the world. Forget new year's resolutions; we want to pause, take stock, and celebrate this past year's solutions. December's Of...
-
Back in the Day
Murder, He Wrote
Recently one of our esteemed senators (his name escapes me), in talking about our world-leading incarceration rate, offered that having so many people in jail might suggest that Americans are...
-
New Finds
Bach in the Day
Back when I was an impressionable undergraduate (as opposed to being an impressionable graybeard), I was heavily into German author Herman Hesse (Siddhartha), devouring his oeuvre and other big chunks...
-
Letters From Copenhagen
Smiling Happily in the Evening of Life
Drawn to Denmark to observe the U.N. meeting on climate change, our man in Copenhagen is somewhat waylaid, eating blazing fire and drinking liquified koala.
-
Apropos of Nothing
Extra, Extra
Even if you don't live in San Francisco, you will no doubt find out soon enough that Dave Eggers, recently of Where The Wild Things Are fame and continuously of...
-
Serious Fun
A Modest List
This is a confusing time of year, especially in the northern climes where a number of seasonal disorders obtain. How else to explain the odd behavior where people spend money...
-
Poetry
Closer to Paradise
Octogenerian Phillip Levine, who was born in Detroit of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and worked in the mind-wrenching, body-breaking auto plants before he took up his poetic calling, has won two...
-
The Rooster
The 2010 Tournament of Books Long List
Now is not the time to look backward over a decade. Now is the moment to look forward: to the 2010 Tournament of Books.
-
The Coffee Table
Mann’s Man
Photographer Sally Mann’s newest monograph Proud Flesh served as the exhibition catalogue (ending October 31) for her recent show at Gagosian Gallery (her Manhattan and Hollywood representative) and is typically...
-
Writing About Writers
Talking From the Grave
If there are non-English speaking writers who have made as big an impact on the literary world as the late departed Chilean, Roberto Bolaño, I am not aware of...
-
Op-Ed
The Fabulous Papers
Journalism is dying, journalism is thriving, the end of the world is nigh—there’s a lot to be excited about. A report on the newspapers that prevailed by hook or crook in 2009.
-
Gallery
Ghosts of Shopping Past
Brian Ulrich’s photographs of closed-down malls and big-box retail stores reveal the potential ghost towns lying inside successful shopping complexes all across America.
-
Current Reads
Room With a View
The possibility of Simon Mawer’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel The Glass Room (Other Press) running off the tracks into banality is immanent in its elements—thankfully, it stays...
-
Writing About Writers
Strunk & White Exposed
The notion of style is a matter confounding even the most nimble thinkers—so it is, at the least, convenient to have some guideposts in this tricky terrain. And for...
-
Back in the Day
People Talk
The unlikely course of historian/activist (or vice versa), Howard Zinn’s subversive (I take that to be a good thing) A People’s History of the United States—first...
-
New Finds
Texas Noir
There is already a Tabernacle-size choir singing the praises of Attica Locke’s first novel. Among others, the inestimable James Ellroy and my old pal (I mean that in a...
-
Interview
Graham Linehan
Graham Linehan is an Irish comedy writer currently based in London. He co-created Father Ted and has written for several other comedy series, including Brass Eye, Jam, and Black Books....
-
Current Reads
You Say Potato, I Say Tuber
This may be a commonplace occurrence—what to do when you read a derogatory review by a writer you admire, of a work by another author you regard highly? It...
-
Guides
The 2009 Good Gift Games
This holiday season, your loved ones could play Operation: “Death Panel” Edition, or you could give them a game where somebody besides the government wins.
-
Spoofs & Satire
This Is Going to Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You
For the good of their children, parents must be able to properly—sometimes even excruciatingly—discipline them when necessary.
-
Apropos of Nothing
Oh, Canada?
Amy Goodman, host of the useful and progressive radio program Democracy Now!, has recently published a collection of articles, Breaking the Sound Barrier (Haymarket Books, edited by Denis Moynihan) with...
-
Iconography
Pop Goes the Warhol
Speaking of Andy Warhol, I suppose it would be missing the point to complain that the person given credit for the prescient observation that everyone would be allotted fifteen minutes...