Thursday, 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 11:19PMWednesday, April 20, 2011
The play's called High because it follows the attempts of a street-smart, plainclothes nun named Sister Jamison Connelly (Kathleen Turner) to reform a serious drug user, Cody Randall (Evan J…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:17AMFriday, April 15, 2011
From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 91.My dutifully proud -- wear a mask and your face grows to fit it. Avoid all mirrors as though -- and no, wor…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:36PMWednesday, April 13, 2011
From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 75.Here's the most emblematic story of Wallace's c. 2000 fiction-writing style: a clinically written, circuito…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 06:02PMTuesday, April 12, 2011
Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 86.Creativity now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon, the C-sharp siren…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:40AMMonday, April 11, 2011
Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 95.And so but here's the story that's almost the total opposite of "Church Not Made with Ha…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:14PMSunday, April 10, 2011
Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 0.First, an epigrammatic quote from A. O. Scott's New York Review of Books article on the o…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:53PMComing toward the end of the Great Depression, the 1939 World's Fair was designed to be a tremendous exhibition, one that would celebrate and unite the many different peoples of the world. T…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:15AMSaturday, April 9, 2011
Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 76.You may have noticed by now that many of Wallace's stories don't exactly end. After watc…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:46PMFriday, April 8, 2011
Photo/Larry Cobra"Forgiveness is the easiest way to ignore shit that ain't pleasant!" shouts Dexel (Jordan Tisdale) as he attempts to reinsert himself (after a long estrangement) into the li…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:09PMOriginally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 92.As a fiction writer myself (specifically an unpublished fiction writer), I am RIGHT THER…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:49PMThursday, April 7, 2011
If you're writing a very short story, it may be because you don't have much to say, but that doesn't mean you can't at least say it creatively, as Wallace does in one of his odder classics, …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:46PMWednesday, April 6, 2011
When a show runs as long as Blue Man Group (twenty years!), it's easy to take it for granted, a part of the neighborhood you, having once been there, hardly think about any more. I speak fro…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:35PMAnd now, the best micro-story that you'll ever read: When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:56AMTuesday, April 5, 2011
Though they share the same bed, there's a deep disconnect between Marie (Marisa Tomei) and Bruce (Frank Whaley). If that's not apparent from the first moment you see them in Marie and Bruce,…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:51PMAt the tail-end of Girl with Curious Hair (ironically, just before his longest story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way"), Wallace makes a sudden shift toward shorter fiction -- p…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:37PMMonday, April 4, 2011
Originally published in Girl with Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 48.I mentioned yesterday that Wallace's characters were sometimes criticized for appearing to be shall…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:08PMSunday, April 3, 2011
Originally published in Girl with Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 94.When it comes down to media, particularly television -- or video in general -- and the ways in whic…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:09PMSaturday, April 2, 2011
Originally published in Girl With Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 28.[Okay, I've received my copy of The Pale King, but since I haven't finished my taxes yet -- or my c…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 07:01PMFriday, April 1, 2011
Photos/The Hartman GroupIn this bleak economic time, it's nice to have a cheery old-fashioned musical putting a fresh spin on office politics: it's still the daily grind, as evidenced by son…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 07:01PMOriginally published in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men*. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 75.[Heavily footnoted story; for the sake of quoting, I've simply put the footnotes in bra…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:47AMOriginally published in Girl With Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 68.Was telling the dust-watcher how C. Nunn Jr. passed up multitudes of come-hitherish cheerleaders an…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:45AMThursday, March 31, 2011
Originally published in Girl With Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 22.[Continuing the countdown to whenever my copy of The Pale King arrives from Shipping Limbo.] An odd…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:28PMWednesday, March 30, 2011
"We are what we are," goes the bold-for-1982 anthem of La Cage Aux Folles. That lovely music still holds up for this 2010 revival, but it's challenged now by the Broadway sensibilities of an…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:22PMFrom Girl With Curious Hair (1989). Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 61.[Apparently, The Pale King has already been released through some online pre-orders. Regardless, I will continu…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 04:14PMTuesday, March 29, 2011
From Girl With Curious Hair (1989). Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 91.[The Pale King will be released in 17 days. I'll be re-reading Wallace's short stories until then.] Though many…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:25PMMonday, March 28, 2011
From Girl With Curious Hair (1989). Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 97.[In honor of David Foster Wallace's pending, posthumous novel, The Pale King, I'll be spending the weeks until …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:20PMPhoto/Jim BaldassareThere is nothing inexplicable about The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G: for those who have been following the growth of the Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company, this is m…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:05AMSaturday, March 26, 2011
Originally published in Harper's, April 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 70.In a town "where nothing is forgotten (any town, that is, any town is a place like that)," our hareli…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:03PMFriday, March 25, 2011
Originally published in Harper's, March 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 92.In each issue of The New Yorker, there's a one-page section called "Shouts & Murmurs," in which a…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:36PMThursday, March 24, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, Mar. 21, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 51.It must suck to be the one guy in the room who actually cares. The story opens with "I…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:15PM 
