Book Digest: November 27, 2006
Mystery books for holiday shopping, broken down by reader type: Bookius Nerdius, The Hollywood Reader, Mrs. Elbow Patches, For Those Wounded in Afghanistan.
Rosecrans Baldwin
As Reviewed by My Mother
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
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?
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
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
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