Sasha Frere-Jones will be reading the first piece he wrote for The New Yorker (*) on Wednesday, January 23rd, at KGB Bar, on East Fourth Street. The theme of the evening is “Design Criticism.” The organizers are being more than kind to think that his take on Arthur Russell constitutes a fruitful engagement with the concept of design. But he is told that someone will be playing the Russell songs mentioned in the piece, and that is a thing worth leaving the house for, as is the opportunity to hear his co-readers: Jody Rosen, Rob Giampietro, and Stuart Bailey. Even if you already have the Russell records, you do not have these people on your shelf. So come on out.

People seem to like the place.

(*) To tempt you to click through, I'll excerpt the opening sentence:

This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.

SFJ at KGB on 01/23

Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.

Nabokov wanted his last work destroyed. Should it be?

"People are always knocking on my door and asking about it," he says. "There's something about neon that people just love."

I think I have an idea ...

                  Scene 7: INT.  TRENT'S CAR - NIGHT

                             MIKE
                        (counting bills)
                   I took out three hundred, but I'm only
                   gonna bet with one.  I figure if we buy
                   a lot of chips, the pit boss will see and
                   they'll comp us all sorts of shit, then
                   we trade back the chips at the end of the
                   night.  You gotta be cool though.

                             TRENT
                   I'm cool, baby.  They're gonna give Daddy
                   a room, some breakfast, maybe Bennett's
                   singing.

                             MIKE
                   I'm serious.  This is how you do it.  I'm
                   telling you.

                             TRENT
                   I know.  Daddy's gonna get the Rainman
                   suite.  Vegas, baby.  We're going to
                   Vegas!

                             MIKE
                   Vegas!  You think we'll get there by
                   midnight?

                             TRENT
                   Baby, we're gonna be up by five hundy by
                   midnight.  Vegas, baby!

                             MIKE
                   Vegas!

Love neon art? Well, look up this address

“HAVE YOU SEEN THE ROMANIAN MOVIE?” This somewhat improbable question began to circulate around the midpoint of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. For some reason, the critics, journalists and film-industry hangers-on who gather in Cannes each May to gossip and graze rarely refer to the films they see there by their titles, preferring a shorthand of auteur, genre or country of origin (“the Gus Van Sant”; “the Chinese documentary”; “that Russian thing”). It’s a code that everyone is assumed to know, and in this case there was not much room for confusion. How many Romanian movies could there be?

More than most of us would have predicted as it turned out.

New Wave on the Black Sea

It's said that Art Tatum's technique persuaded a great many aspiring young pianists to become insurance salesmen. Edmund Wilson's chops were equally phenomenal; not as sheerly, immediately dazzling, perhaps, but in range, erudition, penetration, clarity and unfussy elegance, no less jaw-dropping. And just as Tatum's multivolume The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces is one of the summits of piano jazz, the Library of America's new two-volume issue of Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s, '30s and '40s is one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism.

A Great Deal of Work

It's said that Art Tatum's technique persuaded a great many aspiring young pianists to become insurance salesmen. Edmund Wilson's chops were equally phenomenal; not as sheerly, immediately dazzling, perhaps, but in range, erudition, penetration, clarity and unfussy elegance, no less jaw-dropping. And just as Tatum's multivolume The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces is one of the summits of piano jazz, the Library of America's new two-volume issue of Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s, '30s and '40s is one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism.

A Great Deal of Work

I introduce a précis of this book with a bit of trepidation, but here goes: Bill McKibben records 24 hours worth of programming from every single one of Fairfax, Virginia’s 93 television stations. Then he watches all of them, eight hours a day, for basically a year. On another day he heads off into the mountains and writes about that. Compare and contrast.

I hesitate because this will give you at least one immediate idea, namely that McKibben is a wanker or condescending, or both. Thankfully McKibben himself was well aware of both possibilities, and avoided them studiously.

It’s a fun book, profound, and a quick read. If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), you’ll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV’s involution. In “E Unibus Plurum,” Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don’t need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is crap; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study. McKibben has no problem calling out the low quality of most television.

Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

With extraordinary access, BLAST exposes a world of risky, hardcore, scientific adventure. The story follows an international team of astrophysicists trying to launch a multi-million dollar telescope on a NASA high-altitude balloon. Their journey to discover thousands of early galaxies takes them from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Revealing frustrations, inevitable failures and ultimate triumph, BLAST puts a human face on the quest to answer our most basic question - How did we get here?

Blast The Movie

If you've ever watched "The Sopranos" or the 1997 movie "Donnie Brasco," you might have wondered whether killing people is fun. After all, it seems fun to watch, at least on TV. Or maybe it's not the killing that's fun. Maybe it's the planning, the camaraderie, the petty squabbles, and the disdain for normal bourgeois existence that holds our attention. Demanding protection money and dealing drugs seems fun, too. If you've had such thoughts, have I got the social scientist for you.

A Dealer in the Ivory Tower

Read it

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