Wednesday, August 24, 2011
At one point, however long ago, you were a kid, and when you were, you probably spent some time playing with toys, making up intricate stories with which the various characters might inter…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:50PMAt one point, however long ago, you were a kid, and when you were, you probably spent some time playing with toys, making up intricate stories with which the various characters might interac…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 10:49PMMonday, August 22, 2011
"Live in Living Color" boasts the opening number of Catch Me If You Can: The Broadway Musical, with Frank Abagnale, Jr., on the verge of being arrested at the Miami International Airport, co…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:26AMSunday, August 7, 2011
Who is Charlotte Gaffney, and why is she trying to get me to work as an analyst for Bydder Financial? You pause for a moment, scratching your head, pouring over your e-mails, and then you re…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:24AMTuesday, August 2, 2011
Photos/Kimberly Craven"Ray Pinter has a problem," reads the mocked-up Infocom-esque box art to the live interactive-fiction hybrid Brain Explode! "In sixty minutes, his brain is going to exp…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:29AMSaturday, July 23, 2011
I am still here, if you were wondering. After a crushing year of semi-employment, the new job I've started has left me with less time to get to the theater (and even less to write about it),…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 09:26AMThursday, June 30, 2011
Forget, for a moment, the sight of a man climbing and balancing atop an unsupported ladder, and draw your eyes -- if you can -- away from the woman who scales his back and places a second la…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 09:01AMTuesday, June 21, 2011
Photos/Jim Baldassare
It's generally a pleasure to attend something produced by New Georges: whether it works or not, it's fascinating. More importantly, it's always challenging and, in some…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 08:42AMMonday, June 20, 2011
Photo/Carl Skutsch
The moment we are born is the moment we start forgetting. It is our lot to walk through life unaware of what we've lost, or worse, as in the case of Stig (Paul Neibanc…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:06AMSunday, June 19, 2011
Considering that the writers of Any Night are also its stars, the sleepy-eyed theatergoers who stagger out of the cavernous Laba Theater are bound to wonder if there's much of a line be…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:46AMSaturday, June 11, 2011
Photos/Isaiah TanenbaumEvery year, there's a so-called exposé on the traumatic aftereffects of war, as if that grim fact were news. The truth is that as we shift from stones to clubs …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:35AMFriday, June 3, 2011
I'll bet you three hundred people click the link to this review before breakfast, whether they're looking for vaginas, breakfast, or both, the final choice being the pornographic Meal of Cha…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:34AMThursday, June 2, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, June 6, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 7."I unbuttoned the skirt and stepped out of it, still staring at the book. Something had happen…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:59AMWednesday, June 1, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, May 30, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 30."The city erupts, oozes, overflows; everyone is outdoors, walking quickly or standing on the …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:51AMTuesday, May 31, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 83.The only problem with Rash's story is that it's a bit too reliable: from the moment we learn …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:16AMMonday, May 30, 2011
Originally published in Harper's, May 2011. Personal satisfaction rating (out of 100): 45. [Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers]"This is an awful story and it began …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:06AMSunday, May 29, 2011
Originally published in The Atlantic, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 96.Given that he's known best for his heavily plotted horror novels, and not for his characters, it's …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:30AMSaturday, May 28, 2011
Originally published in The Atlantic, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): -1 (i.e., offensive).Not to sound like a snob, but once you start doing the upper-tier crosswords of T…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:56PMFriday, May 27, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 65.Either I'm getting better at identifying excerpts passing as short stories or The New Yorker is getting les…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:58AMThursday, May 26, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, May 9, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 13. "At the booth, he counted out pills, his anti-depressants and her anti-anxieties--he c…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:35AMWednesday, May 25, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, May 2, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 80.A surprising, spry story about survivors: then and now. Mandy's father, a Holocaust survivor, …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:22AMTuesday, May 10, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 90.What makes someone good? Barney, a temporary ranch-hand hired by an accidentally injured Sz…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:28AMMonday, May 2, 2011
The School for Lies, according to playwright David Ives (who is freely and triumphantly riffing off of Moliere's masterpiece, The Misanthrope), is just another way of describing polite socie…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:29AMSaturday, April 30, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, April 18, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 22.[Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers.] "I met my twin soul at dawn on a narrow stre…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:57AMFriday, April 29, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, April 11, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 52.Not the good book, mind you, that much is clear from the opening line -- "It was fuck…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:18PMWednesday, April 27, 2011
[The first in a series of posts that I'll be making for the blog-through of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, all of which can be found, in the future, at Pale Spring.]If we are what we …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 06:59PMLo, and it was true that Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Robert Lopez fill the book and lyrics of The Book of Mormon with references to fucking magical frogs (as opposed to virgin babies), fuck…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:24PMOriginally published in The New Yorker, April 4., 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 38.What's the line -- if there is one -- between humans and beasts? High-school sophomore Haze…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:48PMTuesday, April 26, 2011
Photos/Corey Tatarczuk Company XIV's latest, a so-called "meditation" on the desultory women in Charles Bukowski's life, is a carefully culled selection of the poet's work, each piece select…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 04:23PMOriginally published in Harper's, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 81.A small story, no doubt, but far from a slight one. If Segal had written merely of Maggie's "small ice-…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:19PMThursday, April 21, 2011
Having just gone back to watch the first season again, I maintain that there's nothing on television quite like Treme: it's the most character-driven (and at some points city-driven) show I'…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:19PM 
