Postscripts, follow-ups, and a few odds and ends I’ve wanted to share for a while: 1. Nostalgia or counternostalgia? The Jon Kessler Experience VBS.tv has a little four-part Art Talk! interview with a friend of mine, Jon Kessler, who set up studio space out in Williamsburg in 1980. He took an entire factory building for [...]
Author Archive
The magic of this broken world, part II
From part I: “But I’m not setting out to quibble with Gopnik in particular so much as I want to use him as a representative of a long line of New York complainers about the same things: the grit’s gone, the rent’s too high for the middle class; that there may have been more crime [...]
The magic of this broken world, part I
Hang around New York long enough — 15 or 16 minutes, say — and you’ll hear someone complain about how nothing’s the way it used to be: that all the soulful grit’s gone, not to mention the middle class, and left in its place is something that feels, day by day, a little more like [...]
Thursday playlist: “The One to Beat” edition
David Archuleta, Murray, UT, age 17. The new Donny Osmond? Any additional thoughts on dropping the opening verses? He kept them here, when he was only 13: Marketing like that + talent like that = shoe in shoo in? [Ed: oops.] Whatever the case, that’s a risky song choice, for any number of reasons. Dig [...]
Stumbling into someone else’s karaoke bar
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” my friend Dave wrote at the head of his birthday invitation. Karaoke, wilds of Brooklyn, at a place that was decidedly un-hip. The Carriage House. Sounded more like a place to get married — and how wild could the wilds of Brooklyn be if we were still talking Park [...]
Gone bananas
I’m kind of glad I missed the opening — and first few weeks — of Stefan Sagmeister’s book-launch show at Deitch Projects, one of the few interesting art spots left in our neighborhood. (And by “interesting” I mean all the delicious, snotty ambivalence that word tends to conjure.) The reason I’m glad? Because the exhibit [...]
Lost in Lost
If you’ve never watched the ABC series Lost, there’s a good chance this post will mean nothing to you. If you’d like to know more, though, click here, then watch the season 4 preview episode called “Lost: Past Present Future,” which should take about 40 minutes. Or you can watch the entire series and then [...]
Thursday open thread: Oscar edition
Can you imagine those boos at this late date? (Feel free to link to your favorite acceptance speeches.) So. Will you boycott the Oscars if the strike’s still on? How will you fill out your ballot? Did you think the dialogue in Juno was snappy — or excruciating? Did the library scene in Atonement make [...]
Firsts
Every once in a while I think — usually while calling 5 minutes before I get home to say I’m 5 minutes away from home — how odd it is that in the last century I didn’t own a cell phone. Aside from email, which I didn’t have until the fall of 1994, it’s probably [...]
Thursday playlist: BW’s 2006-07 mix edition
Download the mix by clicking here. You can fit it on an 80-minute CD if you want a hardcopy as a keepsake. Playlist 1. Colleen, “This Place in Time” (2007) 2. Joanna Newsom, “Colleen” (2007) 3. Nina Nastasia & Jim White, “Odd Said the Doe” (2007) 4. Sleeping States, “September, Maybe” (2007) 5. Yoko Ono, [...]
