October 5, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Steve Futterman, in his “Goings On About Town” review of Diana Krall’s new album This Dream of You, praises Krall’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s wonderful “How Deep Is the Ocean,” calling it “bravely refashioned.” Well, it’s certainly refashioned, but not in a good way. Krall practically destroys it, slowing it to a walk, draining it of its lyricism. Krall, of all people, should know better. She swung this tune beautifully on her 1997 Love Scenes.

2. Doreen St. Félix, in her “Not Quite America,” says of Luca Guadagnino’s HBO drama “We Are Who We Are,” “The attention to young bodies feels almost dangerous.” I agree. The series thrums with sex. I’ve been enjoying it immensely. 

May 9, 2016 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The text under Goings On About Town’s "This Week" photo (portrait of Chelsea Wolfe by Parker Day) contains a piquant line: “But it’s the layers of dissonant, cold embellishments, like the acidic bass line on ‘After the Fall,’ from her 2015 album Abyss, that have prickly experimentalists and jet-black metal fans flocking to her sets.” Who wrote that? Is Sasha Frere-Jones back with the magazine? He has an ear for “layers of dissonant, cold embellishments” and “acidic bass lines.” I remember his "Brighter Tomorrow," in which he describes the Fuck Buttons’ first album as “ill-tempered and thrilling—long, sharp drones accompanied by vocals that sounded like they’d been driven through a small speaker to the point of disintegration.”

2. Lauren Collins’s description of the Trumps' marriage made me smile: “it is as blinged-out with male dominance as their penthouse is with Louis XIV furniture” ("The Model American").

3. I relished the brilliant Bendik Kaltenborn illustration for Emily Nussbaum’s "Hive Mind."

4. I made a note to see Luca Guadagnino’s new movie A Bigger Splash, which Anthony Lane describes as “fiercely unrelaxing and impossible to ignore” ("On the Rocks"). I enjoyed Guadagnino’s previous I Am Love immensely.