Salmon Fantasies, Sugar Grains

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...

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Leonard Cohen | Merriweather Post Pavillion

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...

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Review: Desire Under the Elms

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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Sammiches

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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Bon Iver: Town Hall, New York

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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Apparently Radiohead Controls the Universe

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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The Girl From Foreign

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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Review: Bon Iver, "For Emma, Forever Ago"

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...

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Book Review: Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

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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TFR Film Review: Because I Said So

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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Review of Sorts: Radiohead (In Rainbows)

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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La Vie En Rose

...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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