Afternoon Bites: Animated Achewood, Sontag Biography, Meconis’s “Jacob de Zoet” Portraits, and More

The Quietus checked in with Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column. “Thankfully, feminist collectivism has always offered a powerful antidote to corporate-sponsored atomism in this vein. Indeed, the overarching theme that emerges from Women Make Noise: Girl Bands from Motown to Modern, a strenuous new collection of essays edited by British academic Julia Downes, is that countercultural movements are only ever truly momentous when all-girl units are leading the charge from the bottom up.” Alex Niven on Women Make Noise in the Los […]

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Somebody Please Explain This “Cloud Atlas” Comment To Us

New York recently featured a discussion between film critic David Edelstein and book critic Kathryn Schulz on the new film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The comments that followed include the one above, which manages to combine snark, utterly misplaced quotation marks, and Republican-bashing in a film that doesn’t in any way, shape, or form address contemporary partisan politics. Perhaps it’s a riddle; something that will ultimately be decoded by future generations. Perhaps those generations will subject it to Talmudic levels […]

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Touring David Mitchell’s Library at Symphony Space

From its opening minutes, the imagery invoked at Symphony Space on Wednesday night was memorably scenic. Billed as “An Evening With David Mitchell,” this event — opening the latest season of the Selected Shorts series — found the author at the end of a brief stint in the Northeastern United States, timed to the release of the cinematic adaptation of Cloud Atlas, his third novel. Granta editor John Freeman evoked the “ozone scorch of new images being born” in Mitchell’s […]

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Afternoon Bites: David Mitchell, Ellen Willis, 33 1/3 Live, Kate Bush, Tina Fey, and David Foster Wallace’s Self-Help Archives, and More

Tomorrow at Greenlight in Brooklyn: Christopher Weingarten, Daphne Carr, Bryan Charles, and Hank Shteamer discuss their contributions to the 33 1/3 series. Jesse Miller on novels by John Brandon and David Mitchell. Several months ago, we mentioned a conference on the music criticism of Ellen Willis, to take place at NYU. One can now pre-register for said conference here. And Robert Christgau provides some context here. After a twenty year legal pursuit, Kate Bush has been granted the rights to […]

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