Amuse Bouche
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?
Rosecrans Baldwin
Mp3 Digest: September 27, 2006
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
Observing Expectations
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
Toronto Revisited
Hi Folks, I’ve enjoyed reading your series on city parks and was very excited to see that Toronto had it’s own article. Being a Torontonian, I was looking forward to hearing about little known areas of this city that I hadn’t yet discovered. This expectation seemed reasonable
The Week in Music, guest-edited by Sasha Frere-Jones
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
Shades of Gray
Dear TMN, Today’s “Not an Open Letter” by Elizabeth Kiem speaks for so many of us who understand how the world works in shades of gray. I was sad and disappointed to learn about Grass’s secret when I first read about it. It was the same knee-jerk
Dread and Fire
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,
A Mix for the Heat
I just spent two and a half weeks submerged in the woods and there wasn’t much music besides frogs and a neighbor’s chainsaw. Radio stations were few; the local NPR broadcast was locked in a fundraising drive; my iPod wouldn’t talk to the tape deck in the
Mp3 Digest: July 12, 2006
Last weekend, my wife and I had two perfect New York days. We had friends over for dinner and stayed up late. We saw a very moving Douglas Gordon survey and ran around Manhattan. We visited with more friends, we had dinner in a restaurant, stayed up late and slept
Mp3 Digest: July 5, 2006
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is dead at 52. I want to dig a hole, erect a church on top, play her “Handel Arias” on repeat, and eat shirred eggs. Her Handel Arias are their own cathedral. I never saw her sing in concert. Tomorrow I will disappear, track down Martha Argerich