New York Without Lou Reed

I drove back home to New York yesterday, and listened to all four of the Velvet Underground’s proper–I say “proper” because I don’t consider Squeeze, without any of the original members appearing, an actual Velvet Underground product–albums, and then Lou Reed’s Transformer and Coney Island Baby. This in itself isn’t strange, considering I could probably do some sort of calculation and come up with some grand total of hours spent listening to albums by the band and their post-Velvets solo […]

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Morning Bites: 2011 NBA champions, John Hodgman on OWS, Amis on DeLillo, Kurt Vile pics, and more

Jesmyn Ward, Nikky Finney, and Stephen Greenblatt became the only people that will be able to say that they won anything from the NBA in 2011.  The Washington Post has a nice Twitter timeline of the National Book Award happenings, and The New York Times has a rundown as well. John Hodgman explains what Occupy Wall Street, Herman Cain, and the musical Cats have in common. Martin Amis talks of Don DeLillo’s “prophetic soul.” (Thanks Gabrielle Gantz for the tip) Ann Beattie talks to […]

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Rolling with Delmore Schwartz

Posted by Jason Diamond Over at Tablet, remembering Delmore Schwartz without making mention of his Lou Reed or Saul Bellow connections isn’t easy to pull off, but somehow it is done. (Also, please note the artwork by our own art director, Margarita Korol.)

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“What came first? The music, or the misery?”

Rob Gordon in High Fidelity (book or film, you pick) was onto the right idea with the above quote, but I like to ask: What came first, the writer or the music they listened to? Did the down-and-out junkie poetry of Lou Reed inspire countless scribes like his band The Velvet Underground supposedly inspired anybody who listened to them to start a band? Or did anybody start writing poetry after finding out that Leonard Cohen the songwriter was (and is) […]

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