by Adam | Thursday 2 February 2012
My latest piece for The Atlantic just went up and I am pretty thrilled about it. The thrust of it is a looking-back at Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as the film turns 40. I had the good fortune of being...
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by Adam | Sunday 24 July 2011
I'm taking the bait about Amy Winehouse's unsettling death and adding my voice to the commentariat. She was extremely talented and tragically a cultural punchline, even now in death. This is really sad news. Appreciate:...
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by Adam | Friday 15 July 2011
Page One: Inside the NY Times: See it. It's not great, but it's interesting material, filled with great access and dynamic personalities. Midnight in Paris: Don't see it. Or don't see it at BAM where the others will laugh extra...
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by Adam | Thursday 16 June 2011
I was recently asked to lend my musical "expertise" to help a future mother compile a list of tracks for her gestating child to listen to while both inside and out of the womb. The parameters were classic, but not...
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by Adam | Tuesday 5 April 2011
Had the privilege of catching the LAST EVER concert by LCD Soundsystem before they dissipated into the musical ether. Here's a highlight, the opener, which melted our collective faces off. If you're impatient, scroll to about 4:00 and move any...
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by Adam | Saturday 12 February 2011
A little stone groove for your Saturday afternoon by the band Sleigh Bells. Although, based on the video, perhaps they should be called Slay Bells. (wakka wakka)...
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by Adam | Wednesday 15 December 2010
While I'm at it with the New York Times Book Review, check out this elegant portrait of Saul Bellow in Wieseltier's review of Bellow's recently reviewed book of letters. One marvels for many reasons at the man who wrote these...
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by Adam | Friday 14 May 2010
An extra prod of nachus is always felt when someone you admire writes something spectacular. Claudia Roth Pierpont, a former professor of mine (clearly not in a course on modesty), is one of those kinds of writers who operates...
Click here to continue reading "Claudia Roth Pierpont on Duke Ellington" »
by Adam | Wednesday 5 May 2010
Christian Scott is a 27-year-old jazz trumpeter from New Orleans. I was directed to this clip by TFR friend Jake. Then I bought his album Yesterday You Said Tomorrow and it's all I'm capable of listening to right now....
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by Adam | Monday 22 March 2010
“I grew up a Jew in New York City,” Najla Saïd declares early in her autobiographical one-woman play “Palestine.” Saïd describes herself as a Semitic-looking girl who was raised on the Upper West Side in a politically left-leaning apartment...
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by Adam | Thursday 9 July 2009
I can't begin to tell you what a great article David Grossman wrote about the Polish writer Bruno Schulz in the double issue of the New Yorker last month. Read it, indulge. There really is no one better than David...
Click here to continue reading "Salmon Fantasies, Sugar Grains" »
by Adam | Tuesday 12 May 2009
It's likely to arouse suspicion when, days before you are set to watch a 74-year-old poet/deity perform in concert on his first tour in fifteen years, ticketmaster sends you an e-mail explaining that there is no opening act and...
Click here to continue reading "Leonard Cohen | Merriweather Post Pavillion" »
by Adam | Tuesday 28 April 2009
Despair has always been a currency with which the world of letters trades. This simply is. Despair is amorphous and timeless. Its depth is unmeasurable and its manifestations endless. As a new revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the...
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by Adam | Monday 9 March 2009
The day started sunny and we weren't looking for trouble, my friend and I went all the way uptown near where he used to live. It was the second nicest day of the year and there was traffic blocking...
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by Adam | Thursday 11 December 2008
For any reader willing to appreciate the well-written-yet-decidedly-hyperemotional train wreck that was the TFR review of Bon Iver's first album back in March, I am now offering you a chance to journey through the Bon Iver concert which ended...
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by Adam | Wednesday 10 September 2008
Growing up, I was handed music like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. It was music that furnished every cliché...defining of the era, the fulcrum upon which generations rested and turned, anthems that even a shoddy parent...
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by Adam | Friday 22 August 2008
Loyal Readers, I don't shill for literary causes beyond my own very often, but I wanted to take a moment and make you aware of a book written by my friend Sadia Shepard which has just hit bookstores everywhere....
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by Adam | Saturday 8 March 2008
Sometimes, my friends interrupt my life to impose imperatives upon me. This has to be, in a lot ways, what friendship is about. The closest of them will demand (as I probably do too often of them) that I stop...
Click here to continue reading "Review: Bon Iver, "For Emma, Forever Ago"" »
by Adam | Wednesday 20 February 2008
Philip Roth has not yet left the building. We will note that Roth, growing more in his later years, has already taken pains to prepare us for the inevitable. His alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman has ushered us through the epic...
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by Adam | Wednesday 19 December 2007
What do you get when you combine three cross-sections of female target demographics and pile them into one ninety-minute romantic comedy? There is no answer to this question because I am at a consummate lack of life experience to...
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by Adam | Thursday 1 November 2007
You must be in a very strange place when you listen to a new Radiohead new album. I mean a very strange place in the physical sense, a locality which is not common to you, not a foreign emotional...
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by Adam | Wednesday 13 June 2007
...I do not speak much French and my exposure to Edith Piaf was initiated by the tribute that seemingly half of my favorite musicians pay to her work, but I went to this movie and it was a car crash on celluloid, a complete fucking disasterous mess, and perfectly emblematic of the life of the Sparrow...
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