Four short memories of youth inspired by music randomly selected from the Hype Machine’s most popular tracks, January 10, 2007: “Black Wave, Bad Vibrations,” the Arcade Fire I left for college determined to be a new person: smarter and more interesting. Behind me I’d leave the corpse of
Rosecrans Baldwin’s Favorite Mp3s of 2006 “Ain’t No Other Man” by Christina Aguilera I think I’ve several times performed dance routines to this song. » Listen to “Ain’t No Other Man” “Smile” by Lily Allen Why don’t other seasons get songs? The summer afternoon party anthem.
The holidays are when someone died. Or a grandfather got worse instead of better in the hospital, or a friend drank too much and had a car accident while driving home from a party. The phone call comes on a weeknight. There’s a long silence after the news is
Mystery books for holiday shopping, broken down by reader type: Bookius Nerdius, The Hollywood Reader, Mrs. Elbow Patches, For Those Wounded in Afghanistan.
We occasionally invite guests to review the best songs we’ve discovered that week while surfing around the mp3-blog universe. This week, I invited my mother. Ann Baldwin loves music new and old but doesn’t pay much attention to what the PR people are shilling. As she told
To butter or not to butter: That is the question, and gluttons with high cholesterol should know the correct answer. But when friends organize a gastronomic tour of Paris, who am I to say no?
I went to college in central Maine, a small school on a hill overlooking a rusted-over textile town where Richard Russo used to teach (the town’s river and shirt factory popped up on the cover of Empire Falls). The winters were long, the springs were soggy, and there
In a college film class, we watched the opening to The Shining first with its soundtrack, second with the audio portion muted, third while a student turned off the television volume and used a boombox to overdub music a little more Disney. The point was even paranormal homicide can be
A Remnick addition to the New Yorker’s masthead, pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones must have been the first person to sneak the phrase “inscrutable batphones” into the magazine (as in, “not all musicians below the age of 30 are getting tattooed with runic symbols and sending viruses to
Last night a pothole exploded on our street. Or so we think. No one I talked to on the block is positive about what happened. Here’s what we know: Around eleven last night, the lights in our apartment dimmed to brown and there was a massive explosion; our landlady,
