A friend of mine was in town over the weekend. He and I both talk too much, forgetting often why we are going into so much detail. At one point, we were walking in the East Village. I had a headache, and he was reminiscing about his college days, which were not the same as mine. In his day, everyone awaited Friday’s edition of the college paper in a frenzy. He assured me this probably does not happen anymore. “And […]
There’s something off about reading Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill for the first time when you are in your early 20s, vaguely weird and living in a dramatically shitty apartment on the Lower East Side. I imagine that experience is like being a middlebrow rock star’s girlfriend and listening to “Just Like a Woman.” You think: that’s what I look like? You’re repulsed, you can’t even. Who does this person think he or she is anyway? Even if you’re not […]
I arrived too early for my interview with Wayne Koestenbaum. I was nervous because my phone was running out of battery life, and I didn’t have anything else to record the interview with, and I didn’t know if we were going to have lunch or not. It was 11 in the morning, and we were going to talk in a cafe in Chelsea. But upon Wayne’s entrance, I forgot about this. A practiced interviewer himself, he is very used to […]
My parents would argue that I always had this level of love for popular music, even as a toddler in the backseat of our car singing the Kate Bush part of “Don’t Give Up” with an incredible amount of emotion. (Pause for a second, and think of how it would be to hear your three-year-old belt out behind your neck: YOU WORRY TOO MUCH.) Maybe it’s true. As Marilynne Robinson says of hearing the psalms when she was a child, […]
I have noticed that George Saunders has a favorite quote. Well, maybe it’s not his favorite favorite, as if anyone really has one of those, but he has cited it often, in interviews where it had absolutely no place at all. The quote is attributed to Gerald Stern, but Saunders dominates the first page of results if you type the whole thing in your search bar. “If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking,” the quote […]
There’s a blurb in the front of Airships that calls the author “afraid of nothing in experience.” Before you get to any of his work in the book, there’s an “appreciation,” not an introduction, by Richard Ford that makes the same wild claims. When Barry Hannah died, the Oxford American compiled stories from people who knew and loved him; the magazine was an Irish bar and Hannah a dead cop. He’s celebrated, for sure. A total rock star, the sort […]
Last season ended with a pretty memorable tableau: “You Only Live Twice” played while Don walks off the set of a lavish commercial starring Megan as a princess. Season 6, then, was set up rather archly, by a high-camp Sinatra stretching out the word “dream,” cooing that you drift through the years and life seems tame. As this show has always been insistent upon dreams being shattered, upon curtains being admired then pulled back, it makes sense that Mad Men would […]
It took me a second to recognize it, but I laughed once it came to me: the song that closes this episode of Mad Men is from Head, the 1968 cult film starring the Monkees. Critics like Renata Adler and Pauline Kael trashed it upon its release, but the film has found its aficionados like all hypnotic messes tend to do. Critics like J. Hoberman have contextualized it as a significant, albeit disastrous, part of counter-culture cinema, at least as […]