Gary Shteyngart’s Blurbs: The Movie

On the first episode of All Things Considered of the new year in 2001, there was a story on the many children of  Screamin’ Jay Hawkins coming together and meeting for the first time. When I say many, I don’t mean Catholic or Hasidic many, I mean 57. The man who crooned “I put a Spell on You” and “Constipation Blues” had 57 children living in various places, and they all came together for this reunion of sorts. I thought about that […]

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A Year of Favorites: Jason Diamond’s Favorite New Books From 2012

My motto is: so many books, so little desire to rank them.  But in keeping with last year’s tradition, I present a list of my favorite books that happened to come out over the last 365 days.  My issue with writing a list like this is that–more even more so than years past—I have several books written by friends of mine to choose from. While I realize that makes me fairly biased, I actually see it as a blessing that […]

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Gonna Ride That Train

I used to have more time to myself, so it was perfectly acceptable for me to spend an extra day traveling simply because I wanted to ride an Amtrak train for seventeen hours rather than simplify things by taking a three-hour airplane trip to the same destination. The inconvenience was worth it for reasons I’ve never really been able to explain. While the ugly and cramped Amtrak cars weren’t much different from the airplane cabins I was forgoing, there was something I was trying to find […]

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Nicholson Baker Gives Us Two More Songs

A few days ago John Jeremiah Sullivan described one of Nicholson Baker’s sentences as “Bakerian (Bakeresque?)” in his New York Times review of Baker’s latest collection of essays, The Way the World Works. I’m starting to feel like “Bakerian (Bakeresque?)” might also be an adequate way to sum up the music the writer has been posting up on Youtube over the last few months, or it could serve as an appropriate title if Baker decided to put out a record.

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Band Booking: Silent Drape Runners One Year of David Lynch-Inspired Sounds

The best way to describe the sort of music that Sophie Weiner and Russ Marshalek make is to say it’s pretty much like what you’d get if you had Portishead jamming with Bradford Cox in the Black and White Lodge. One year after coming together and naming their project after Nadine Hurley’s invention, the duo have garnered a good amount of notice both for their own recordings, and well as the “re-soundtracking” they’ve done for films like Twin Peaks: Fire […]

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The Allure Of The Rust Belt

  In the forward to the new anthology of Cleveland, Ohio stories, “Rust Belt Chic,” the editors Richey Piiparinen and Anne Trubek describe Rust Belt Chic as, “churches and work plants hugging the same block. It is ethnic as all hell. It is the Detroit sound of Motown. It is Cleveland punk. It is getting vintage t-shirts and vinyl for a buck that are being sold to Brooklynites for the price of Manhattan metal.”

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