Friday, January 7, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 4. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 18.Being both a cultural tale about the division between the Chinese and the Uyghurs and a generational…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:52AMThursday, January 6, 2011
When we first meet Emily Bridges (Michele Pawk) at the opening of A Small Fire, she's the ball-busting commander of her construction site, joking around with her tough-looking foreman Billy …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:44PMOriginally published in The New Yorker, Jan. 10, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 72.An original series of images -- a fifty-year-old's recollection of her deformed birth as a s…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:53AMWednesday, January 5, 2011
Photo/2boys.tv[Part of the Under the Radar Festival]Your blindfold is taken off, revealing a man in a suit, standing on a box. He wears a cloth over his head, his arms are held out in Guanta…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:24PMJunk television at its most indulgent: just be glad the women are hot and that creator Tom Kapinos has an ear for witty dialogue and a sense for farce, and then go along for the ride. Read t…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 07:26PMOriginally published in A Public Space 03, Winter 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 82.We sat like grade-schoolers, barely touching. Neither one of us spoke. I pointed out the co…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:09AMTuesday, January 4, 2011
It's great when critics agree that a show is terrific, as with The Aliens, Clybourne Park, and In the Footprint, but it's perhaps better when critics disagree, as with The Little Foxes, Lear…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:20PMOriginally published in A Public Space 03, Winter 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 82.In the same issue that brought us a story hidden in what is essentially the pure descriptio…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:21AMMonday, January 3, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space 03, Winter 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 68.[Part of the FOCUS: Peru series.]The only thing missing from this story, about a Peruvian…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:07PMSunday, January 2, 2011
Originally published in Harper's Magazine, January 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 25.I'm going to call this story "specifically generic," for while Slouka adds plenty of det…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 09:24PMSaturday, January 1, 2011
Originally published in Harper's Magazine, December 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): x.I'd like to give Harper's and DeLilo the benefit of the doubt and say that this story wa…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:23AMFriday, December 31, 2010
Just a reminder (and an invitation) to everyone out there: I'm going to be in Times Square tonight, working as a moderator for the livestream and blog coverage of all the New Year's festivit…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:41PMOriginally published in The New Yorker, Jan. 3, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 95.But now, as he stands at the end of waiting, something is wrong.... If he goes into the…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:33PMThursday, December 30, 2010
Originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 20, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 69.What makes us human? What makes us tick? This is the sort of unanswerable philosophica…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 04:34AMWednesday, December 29, 2010
Originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 29.Brilliant opening line: "A Yankee cap- and Ray-Ban-wearing boy of indeterminate age ge…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 08:16AMTuesday, December 28, 2010
Originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 6, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 73.MACROSomewhere along the line, someone convinced fiction editors -- particularly those …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:13AMMonday, December 27, 2010
Photo/Steven SchrieberOf the many types of candies that dance in The Nutcracker and, consequently, in Austin McCormick's "Baroque Burlesque confection" Nutcracker Rouge, cotton candy is…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:08AMSaturday, December 11, 2010
If Mad Magazine collided with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the result would be something like Jonathan A. Goldberg's The Land Whale Murders. With one foot in Nielsen-like parody an…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:15PMFriday, December 10, 2010
So imagine that you're hanging with fifteen graduate-school buddies, a philosophical yet fun-loving bunch. It's three in the morning: you've got a second wind on your buzz, and everything …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:07PMWednesday, December 8, 2010
Does any filmmaker tie music into his movies as well as Darren Aronofksy? His latest, Black Swan, has healthy helpings of the spiraling madness of Pi, The Wrestler's authentically grim look …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:22PMTuesday, December 7, 2010
Photo/Jim BaldassarePuppets are rarely taken seriously, so it says a lot about the puerile premise of Wakka Wakka's Baby Universe that the terrifically designed and meticulously operated pup…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:38PMMonday, December 6, 2010
Threshold of revelation, guys: Angels in America is one of the most over-hyped plays I've ever seen. Irresponsibly long and cripplingly ludicrous, I'm thoroughly convinced that if not for th…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:01PMSunday, December 5, 2010
Photo/Rick Ngoc Ho Three years ago, the Production Company premiered a short version of Lally Katz's Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart, a romantic and quirky look at life after death, in …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 10:45AMFriday, November 26, 2010
Originally published in Harper's Magazine, November 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 46.Hannah's story is from a posthumous collection, so I won't be overly critical, but boy…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:37PMThursday, November 25, 2010
Originally published in Harper's Magazine, October 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 86.Is there any sort of character, any tone, that T. C. Boyle cannot write? Smooth as ever,…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 08:24AMWednesday, November 24, 2010
Originally published in The New Yorker, Nov. 29, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 88.IN ONE SENSE: "They were total strangers except for this dead dog."This is, more…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:49PMIt's ironic that Fixitsolife's mission statement is to create "simple, pure theater" with "no tricks or turns," considering that their inaugural production, Jason Odell Williams's The Scienc…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:07AMTuesday, November 23, 2010
Originally published in The New Yorker, Nov. 22, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 93.eSCENEssence:Ramon, recently promoted from dishwasher to busboy, has been paid by his e…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 08:26PMIn the Footprint is the most sincere, clever, and enjoyable show to ever represent Marty Markowitz with a basketball, Bruce Ratner with a hand-puppet construction truck, and Jay-Z with a Y…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:22AMMonday, November 22, 2010
[Will be playing around with different ways of recapssessing this stories this week.] Originally published in The New Yorker, Nov. 15, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 50.TH…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:13PM[Originally published in Show Business Weekly]Photo/Ari Mintz How do you put an original play on Broadway? To Craig Wright, the comically dazzling writer of Mistakes Were Made, it involves s…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:23PM 
