Archive for the ‘Death’ category

#rip Bowie (1947-2016)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-JqH1M4Ya8[/youtube] In case you haven’t seen this yet. The album is gorgeous. So was the artist. UPDATE: For some reason, Bowie’s death made me go back and dig this from the archives. xo. UPDATE #2: It’s well worth the time to revisit Pandora’s “The Bowie factor” post, also from Year 1.

#RIP Peaches

Our dear old Peaches finished his life today. Our dear cat Peaches went to rest today. He was 14 or so and his kidneys stopped working this week. Here he is with Charlie in Feb 2012. He will be missed. #RIP #catsofinstagram A photo posted by Bryan Waterman (@b_waterman) on Apr 29, 2015 at 11:03am […]

Weekend recs

A Night with Lou Reed (live at the Bottom Line, 1983) Here’s a full hour of Lou Reed in great form, not long after The Blue Mask was released, and featuring (as the album did) Robert Quine. There’s so much good stuff here, but it’s best just to think about this as 40-year-old Lou, back […]

RIP Lou Reed

Impossible to know where to start, really.

In memoriam: Marshall Berman, 1940-2013

I posted an earlier version of this at ahistoryofnewyork.com. One of the great delights of the decade Cyrus Patell and I spent teaching our Writing New York class was the repeated opportunity to screen clips from Ric Burns’s monumental New York: A Documentary Film. Without a doubt, the highlight of that film is — for […]

Our stupid awesome inevitable Afterlife

Why do I want to write about Kenneth Goldsmith and Sheila Heti and Social Media and The Afterlife? Cause they all add up to this really hot sweaty tangled love story. With a surprise ending. Here, come with me… I’ve been running along this intellectual trail for a few months. It’s got some awesome leaps […]

The original underground superstar

Late last week Taylor Mead — the Lower East Side legend widely heralded (by himself and others) as the original underground film star — passed away in Colorado at age 88. From the Times obituary: Mr. Mead was the quintessential Downtown figure. He read his poems in a Bowery bar, walked as many as 80 […]

Kenneth Goldsmith’s Deaths and Disasters

Those of you who know how much I enjoy Kenneth Goldsmith’s work will appreciate how excited I am for this forthcoming book. From the publisher’s description: In Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribes historic radio and television reports of national tragedies as they unfurl, revealing an extraordinarily rich linguistic panorama of passionate description. […]

Muffin

Cleaning out my desk today for an office move I discovered a copy of an essay I received from a student a couple years ago. I asked the class to write about a person who had had a big influence on them. I reproduce the essay here as is, with only the real names redacted. […]

The dumpster

One day there was a construction dumpster in our driveway. We share a driveway with our neighbor and she explained she was having work done on her house. She went on to say that we were welcome to use the dumpster to throw away anything too big for the weekly garbage pickup. This was great […]