Drive for Change by Maria Diaz You see in the time leading up to this coming election for president, you are going to meet somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 white girls telling you that you should vote for Obama for president. Alex wrote that awhile ago, and I can confirm it's a number which is almost entirely accurate. I'd like to add the following to: you'll also meet abut 50 former hippies who drive hybrid SUVs, about 500 thin, passive [...]
Feeling Elbows, Rubbing Queasy by Molly Young Through a couple of flukes (acquaintances, a cousin involved in the ownership) I've ended up at The Box twice in one week. The Box is a club in downtown Manhattan. It has a live burlesque show and a drinks list featuring $13,000 champagne (did I read that correctly?) As with many such places, The Box adheres to a mystical door policy. On Visit #1 I was told to say "SUGAR RAY" as a password. On [...]
I'd Like a Bucket of Krang, Please by Joshua Brau Bun 143 Grand Street, New York, NY (212) 431-7999 Of the four East Asian cuisines most popular in the U.S.—Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese—I've always loved the latter most, but only in my dreams. The thing is, I'd eaten far less Vietnamese food than Chinese , Japanese , and Thai , if for no other reason than [...]
I Feel How You Look by Alex Carnevale We were born the adopted son of Pete and Trudy Campbell. We aged, but thinly. We asked, "Should Don Draper throw a courtesy bang to the one-legged widow of the guy whose name he stole in the shit? Should Joanie get peeved off at her fiancee for pulling an Irreversible in her boss' office?" Our teenage years were not notable, except when our mother [...]
You Let Pete Campbell Set You Up On A Blind Date?!? by Molly Lambert I don't feel like doing this in paragraphs or real sentences, so in the style of a pitch meeting, get ready for BULLET POINTS! - The funniest thing about Mad Men from a few weeks ago was that it was sponsored by Revolutionary Road , the Sam Mendes directed adaptation of the seminal Richard Yates tome about feeling bad in the suburbs in the early sixties, which is like 24 being [...]
This is the latest entry in our series about New York . Here we let the multi-talented Bridget Moloney decide whether exactly we want to spend the remainder of our life. Enjoy. Los Angeles v. New York by Bridget Moloney Comparison-shopping is something I could do forever. I like it best online, switching between products, comparing user reviews, prices, shipping costs, color selection. As I considered a move from New York to [...]
Saturdays can be so boring. That's why we're pleased to announce our editor-in-chief will be blogging every sabbath about emerging trends and people. Now you won't have to be bored if you're not a college football fan. Hallelujah. Dog Wars by Alex Carnevale If you watch television and film, you see all manner of assertive, confident people. You rarely meet the meek ones. Cesar Millan doesn't train dogs, he trains people. [...]
This Recording's series on films of the 1980s continues with Jacob Sugarman's take on Oliver Stone's Wall Street. Read up with This Recording's complete Eighties Movie archives . Wall Street by Jacob Sugarman When asked why he sought the company of prostitutes, Charlie Sheen, then an A-list movie star, famously responded: "You don't pay them for sex, you pay them to leave after sex." Fans of the man born Carlos Irwin Estevez [...]
Dry Storeroom No. 1 by Richard Fortey This book is my own store room, a personal archive, designed to explain what goes on behind the polished doors in the Natural History Museum. All our lives are collections curated through memory. We pick up recollections and facts and store them, often half forgotten, or tucked away on shelves buried deep in the psyche. Not everything is as blameless as we might like. But the sum total of that deep archive is what makes us who we are. [...]
Scarier than E.T.A. Hoffman 's The Sandman , more terrifying than Fritz Lang's Metropolis, realer than Blade Runner, the complete horrific history of Robots and Replicants , courtesy of Molly Lambert's Science Corner at This Recording . SCIENCE CORNER Special Edition: History Of Humanoids by Molly Lambert A.E. reborn as a HUBO in A.I. [...]
This Recording's ongoing series about Films Of The 1980s continues this week with Claire Howorth's love of Adventures in Babysitting . You can find the archives of the series here . Something Unpredictable But In The End It's Right by Claire Howorth Selecting one John Hughes from his 80s oeuvre is a task too difficult, too utterly arbitrary, and would no doubt [...]
noise map of SF SF Digest Me Now by Danish Aziz Did anyone else find it "ironic" that "Angel" Island caught on fire? I got some "positive feedback" in the form of "your email sucks" from a delightful "young chap" at a "BBQ" on Sunday. I learned that his "complaint" stemmed from the fact that many DNMRK endorsed shows are apparently "sold out" by the time the "DNMRK Email Team" gets the product out the door. [...]
Consider This An Invitation To My Hulu Nation by Molly Lambert The invention of printing subjected both novels and romances to a first wave of trivialization and commercialization . Printed books were expensive, yet something people would buy, just as people still buy expensive things they can barely afford. Alphabetization, or the rise of literacy, was a slow process when it came to writing skills, but was faster as far as reading skills were concerned. The Protestant Reformation created new readers of [...]
Seduction in Fall by Georgia Hardstark By the time I parked my car and headed in the direction the music was coming from, the rain had stopped for the evening. Everything had a blanket of crisp, freshness over it, and it reminded me how much I adore Fall. I inhaled the smell of roasted peanuts and swiftly passed the funnel cake booth, promising myself a stop later in the evening once I had found a friend to share one with. I was alone, it was dark [...]
Book by Its Cover by Jeff Goldberg "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature... That ignorance is restraining." - Horace Engdahl If you're interested in literature on a global level or even just an American one you've probably consumed a hundred bemused articles and angry blog posts about the above statements made by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel [...]
You can find a useful index of This Recording on the finest television show of this or any other economic depression here . Elisabeth Moss' Love of Scientology and Cloying Good Nature Prepares You For Tonight's Mad Men by Alex Carnevale Despite being a Scientologist and by all evidence thinking she actually is Peggy Olson , Elisabeth Moss has extended her L . Ron Hubbardian tendils over our hearts. Moss will star [...]
We Couldn't Know by Alex Carnevale It was, improbably, the 1990s. It was not quite the 1990s, and then it became the 1990s. I wrote down the year at the top of my paper that first day of the new decade. We were not entirely assured it was a new decade, but the evidence pointed that way. The day my house got Prodigy, I went online. "What is this world?" I thought. The AOL chatrooms were another place to go in the [...]
Dissonance's Child by Molly Lambert Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) - Beyoncé: ( mp3 ) Me Myself And I - Beyoncé: ( mp3 ) Molls McAleer posted the new Beyoncé track and she's right, it is really good. It also gives me an avenue to explore Beyoncé and her spiel . May I just say that I can't belive Sasha Frere Jones gets paid to write about Mary J. Blige and David Banner in The New [...]
Hitchcock's Best Hitchcock told French director François Truffaut : "There are two men sitting in a train going to Scotland and one man says to the other, 'Excuse me, sir, but what is that strange parcel you have on the luggage rack above you?' 'Oh,' says the other, 'that's a Macguffin.' 'Well,' says the first man, 'what's a Macguffin?' The other answers, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'But,' says the first man, 'there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'Well,' says the other, 'then that's no Macguffin.'" [...]
Over the next few weeks we'll be looking at the fall season of television. We last looked at True Blood, and you can find the archive of those reviews here. Letter to Josh Radnor by Barclay Memphis Bro, Listen, someone called me up and was like, are you watching Josh's show ? And I was like, well, it hasn't been funny since [...]
This Recording
Monday Music – 28 May 2012
Bison - Quill
