July 2010
32 posts
WatchVia the wonderful Halley Bondy, who replaced me at MTV — a video that makes me delighted to get old…
THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER
People love hearing these stories about you mingling with normal people. Why do you think that is? It’s like seeing a bunny rabbit come into your house or something like that, or a bird fly into your house. It’s like, “Hey, there’s a bird in the house.” It’s just kind of a strange thing. It’s like, “Well, that’s kind of unusual, there’s a bird in the house.” Or even a bug, more like a big...
Yay! My first & last article for Newsweek is up! →
The start:
Lily Renée Phillips’s first job in comics was erasing the errors made by the male illustrators who sat around her. It was 1943 in the cramped, smoky offices of Fiction House—the epicenter of comics publishing at the height of the golden age of comics—and Phillips was one of two women on staff and a handful working in the business who filled desks emptied by the war. The...
X-ed out starts...
Two thin, careful girls would sit next to me. They were stenographers, and to type quickly in Chinese it took both of them simultaneously punching on a small red keyboard. One would type the pinyin and tone of the character – given a notation system on the board – and the other would click through to select the correct character out of the hundreds that appeared on a screen. Their lives...
The Simple Life
Here are things my mother’s cat does that make us remark, “Oh, he’s so smart!”
1. If you forget you’re playing with him — dragging his favorite orange feather cluster by a long strand — and instead, you start paying attention to the movie you’re watching, he doesn’t meow. Instead, he reaches up to your hand — which is holding his string...
leoncrawl:
I wish magazines that regularly run long profiles would let readers browse the archives of those profiles by industry. Interested in the art world? Here is every art world profile ever published in the New Yorker. Etc.
I want them to also do it by region! (China!?) But more to the point — read “A Roomful of Hovings” — John McPhee’s profile of Thomas...
This outfit reminds me of Dr. Zoidberg. Everything... →
“I also knew that if I stayed another semester they would hand me a diploma, and that diploma is going to open a whole lot of doors that I don’t want to go through. And I know that I am not real strong, and if I have that key, at some point I’m going to be seduced and want to go through one of those doors. So by not having the diploma, I will remove the temptation. That actually worked out...
When your windowshades are down and you begin to hear the faint trickle of rain but are sure you could be deluding yourself, WHY IS THERE NO WEBSITE TO TURN TO THAT HAS THE CURRENT WEATHER? This was the thought I just actually had.
patti smith, etc.
In addition to my $160-for-$6 first edition Mysteries of Pittsburgh find, I found a first edition Arundhati Roy God of Small Things for $8 dollars — which is going for $55 on eBay! Whoot whoot! Interestingly enough — and I don’t know what this means — my first edition Jonathan Lethem Fortress of Solitude, which I thought would be somewhat collectible, is completely...
When Gulou was destroyed I realized I had to write about Beijing. When I was there, in 2008, everyone was mourning the neighborhoods that had been destroyed before I had gotten there; I saw the mourners but knew nothing of what they were mourning. The boy I was dating lived in a complex of dark towers that surrounded a lake that had swans in it. I assumed they cut the swans’ wings because...
Bookshop Serendipity
housingworksbookstore:
Our friend Josh Farrar, author of Rules to Rock By, emailed me today and I thought you’d all enjoy his little story:
I’d been looking for a copy of Walker Percy’s “The Last Gentleman” for quite a while now. It’s kind of hard to find, but you guys had a nice copy of it (in fact it was the only Walker Percy book you had that day). I’d read it in high school, but wanted...
Q. What compelled you, when you were still a newspaper journalist, to write your first novel?
A. The spur was a financial crisis. My car broke down, and I couldn’t afford to get it fixed. And another journalist at the newspaper had written a thriller and the advance he got from the publisher was £200, which was pretty much exactly the amount of money I needed to get my car fixed. I did not figure...
New Haven 4th of July →
Pitchfork Reviews Reviews: fashion party where i... →
Yeah, this is the type of writing blogs were designed for; the step-by-step navigation reminded me of a Raymond Chandler novel. Keep on!
leoncrawl:
i am at another fashion party that my friend who works for a publication that covers fashion parties brought me to, i came because ezra koenig is on the guest list and is apparently going to show up “any minute now” but the publicist has been...
This made me really mad...
Gulou is basically one of those beautiful, windy-alleyway neighborhoods of Beijing that’s so curvy it’s difficult to navigate on bicycle. I would walk through here smelling baozi baking, watch kids playing, see old people peering out from their living rooms — on my way to those places we used to always go to together: that billiard club, that two story cafe, those bell towers.
Patti Smith's Life is Possible
Today in Northampton I was shopping for Used Books with my Dad. I found a first edition of Michael Chabon’s first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, for $6 dollars, but then I remembered what my mother said once. I had thought it was impressive that I had the first edition signed hardcover of Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel and she said that they make books like that in huge runs these...
Minneapolis Will Be A Nice Place to Live →
World Cup Madness --> Sadness →
Genres
My friend asked me to make her a starter-pack mix of music I like that’s being made these days. There was enough for three CDs. I found I could neatly divide it between
1. For the City at Night
2. Muddy Boys
3. Lovesongs/Ladies
I don’t think there are any questions about what falls into what.
Yeah, Holland won.
I was trying to explain to Ming the immensity of this last week, when they had only just beat Brazil —
“For years, my people have been known for cheese, wooden shoes, pointed hats, tulips. That’s like — one thing per 3 centuries. Now, in this century, there is one more thing!” It’s 1% about sports and 99% about broad, international...
The first pool parites show will have Why?
Just for public information:
The first show July 11th is… DEER HOOF & XIU XIU PERFORMING JOY DIVISION’S UNKNOWN PLEASURES, WHY?, FANG ISLAND, & PICTUREPLANE!
