Brian has made it to more events like this in recent months than I have.
By the way, I know super-short posts like this look kinda funny in my new design. I usually try to fill them out so they look nicer, but I can’t always do that. Use them as an opportunity to enjoy Jesse Ewing’s gorgeous illustrations unmuddied by yards of distracting text. Speaking of Jesse, he sent in an excellent X-Rea contribution the other day, which I will post. (Yours, too, other recent X-Rea tipsters!)

Google Alerts or no Google Alerts, I can’t keep up with every New Yorker-related event in the city/world. That’s why it’s so great when people send in tips like this:

Just wanted to give you a heads-up that Rocketship, a comic book store in Brooklyn, will be hosting a “Big Fat Little Lit” reception/signing with Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, Kim Deitch & David Mazzucchelli this Friday at 8. There will be an open wine/beer bar.
 
Rocketship is located at 208 Smith Street, near the Bergen Street stop (F or G).

for The Sound of Young America Live, the live show of the radio show about things that are awesome (that’s their motto, and entirely true), and although the 8 p.m. show is sold out, you can still go at 10 and see these talented people, plus Jesse Thorn, who is like 20 (OK, he’s a little older now) and one of the most talented interviewers on the air anywhere. The guy’s got to be heard, and seen. He’s like the next John Hodgman, but with a squirrel.

10PM Show Lineup
 
Kurt Andersen is the host of Public Radio International’s “Studio 360,” public radio’s premier arts newsmagazine. He was also the co-founder of America’s last great satirical magazine, “Spy,” and is the co-editor of the new retrospective book, “Spy: The Funny Years.”

Jonathan Coulton is a comic singer-songwriter who has been heard on The Daily Show and National Public Radio. His sensitive and hilarious songs tell stories of computer programmers and evil robot warlords in love. And other, more normal stuff.

Elephant Larry is a New York-based sketch comedy group who have been acclaimed thusly by El Tiempo de Nueva York: “A hilarious multimedia mix of the deadpan and the maniacal. The sketches call to mind, variously, Monty Python, Kids in the Hall and Second City, yet they don’t feel like knockoffs.”

Andres du Bouchet is a standout in the New York City standup scene. You may have seen him on “Tough Crowd,” or on Comedy Central’s “I Love the ’30s”.

Possibly special guests: We’ve got a little space in the late show for drop-in guests, and have a couple of maybes we can’t tell you about. Maybe we’ll just have Coulton stretch, but maybe you’ll get to see someone awesome.

Purchase Tickets Now

Caleb wrote that excellent recent piece on the Mass-Observation movement that also inspired an observational haiku. Haiku has become awfully trendy again, it seems, what with the stacks of Craigslist box poetry. So I’m glad to see that Caleb will be speaking, in either free verse (the event is free) or in form in two weeks, along with two other writers I’m excited to see in person:

The Educational Alliance is pleased to announce that Caleb Crain, Melissa Plaut, and Brandon Stosuy will be appearing on Tuesday, October 17 at 7:00 pm as part of our series, Writers at the Alliance. The Educational Alliance is located at 197 East Broadway (F train to East Broadway, walk two blocks to Jefferson). Readings take place in the Mazer Theater. This is a free event. For further information, contact Liz Brown at readings@killfee.net or call the Educational Alliance at (212) 780-2300, ext. 378.

HERE IS NEW YORK: THEN AND NOW
Tuesday, October 17
7:00 pm
In his foreword to “Here is New York,” written in 1948, E.B. White asserted that “it is the reader’s, not the author’s, duty to bring New York down to date.” The Alliance has enlisted three very different writers with that task, beginning with Caleb Crain who chronicles the extravagances and vanities of New York’s upper class in the nineteenth
century. Next, Brandon Stosuy delves into the downtown music scene of the 1970s and continues through to 2006, noting outerborough shifts along the way. Finally, Melissa Plaut, a blogging cab driver, keeps us “down to date” with her present-day account of life behind the wheel in New York City.
CALEB CRAIN has written essays and criticism for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (Yale, 2001), and is at work on a history of the divorce of the nineteenth-century theatrical couple Edwin and Catharine Forrest.
MELISSA PLAUT was born in 1975 and grew up in the suburbs of New York City. After college, she held a series of office jobs until, at the age of 29, she began driving a yellow cab. A year later she started writing “New York Hack,” a blog about her experiences behind the wheel. Within a few months, the blog was receiving several thousand hits a day. She is currently working on a book based on “New York Hack” to be published in 2007 by Villard.
BRANDON STOSUY, a staff writer and columnist at Pitchfork, contributes regularly to The Believer and The Village Voice and has written for Arthur, BlackBook, Bookforum, LA Weekly, Seattle Weekly, and Slate, among other publications. His Danzig-heavy meditation on Sue de Beer appears in her EMERGE monograph (Downtown Arts Projects, 2005) and an essay he co-authored with Lawrence Brose is collected in Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper (FDU Press, 2006). He’s currently curating The Believer’s 2007 Music Issue Compilation CD while finishing a discussion with Matthew Barney and essays on Wayne Koestenbaum and Gordon Lish, also for The Believer. Up Is Up, But So Is Down, his anthology of Downtown New York literature, will be published in October by NYU Press.

Michael Kimmelman looks at the New Orleans photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, taken by Robert Polidori for The New Yorker. From Kimmelman’s piece in the NYT:

They are unpeopled scenes: New Orleans as our modern Pompeii. Mr. Polidori stood near the corner of Law and Egania Streets where a plain, single-story cottage with a hole in the roof rests beside a telephone pole. A crisscross of power lines forms a shallow X against the empty blue sky. The house, pale green and white, recedes, diagonally.
Except that — the image can take a second to decipher — there are two cottages, one green, one white. During Katrina, the green one, like Dorothy’s house, floated clear across Egania Street from who knows where, stopped perpendicular to its neighbor by those electric lines, which acted like arrestor wires on an aircraft carrier, ripping open the hole in the roof.
If this sounds confusing, that’s the nature of chaos, which can be as hard to photograph as it is to describe. Fortunately, Mr. Polidori is a connoisseur of chaos, and the beauty of his pictures — they have a languid, almost underwater beauty — entails locating order in bedlam.

Related on Emdashes:
Dan Baum on WNYC [on the piece in which Polidori’s photographs are featured]

The very nice Karen Reeds, guest curator at the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia, writes:

Has the New Yorker taken note of the show of drawings and paintings by Virginia Snedeker at Morven (historic house/museum) in Princeton?
It includes many of her New Yorker drawings, spots, and covers. Her younger brother, Dick Snedeker—who must be in his 70s at least—gives a very personal and smart tour of the show. Surely worth a Talk of the Town piece.

She adds:

The material on display comes from the family, which also has connections to one of the families that lived in Morven.
I forgot to mention a fascinating letter from a New Yorker editor on display from, I think, early 1944, outlining the global and domestic political/military situation and what it implied about the magazine’s wants for covers and drawings in the coming year. The editor had no doubts about the Allied victory and was already thinking about readjustments of returning veterans.
It’s about a 1/2 mile walk from the Princeton train station on campus (“the Dinky train”) to Morven.

The listing in the NY Times has this further info:

”Capturing the Spirit: Virginia Snedeker and the American Scene,” paintings and illustrations. Through Nov. 26. Admission: $4 to $5. Hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. Morven Museum and Garden, 55 Stockton Street. (609) 924-8144.

Here’s a review from the local paper Town Topics, which reprints a self-portrait by Virginia Snedeker. Snedeker’s February 3, 1940, New Yorker cover (above) is in the Cartoon Bank, along with several other covers.

From the Times, of all places:

MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, 1120 Fifth Avenue, at 103rd Street. Sunday at 3 p.m., a staged reading of “Camp Logan,” a work about black soldiers in the early 1900’s and the Houston Riot of 1917. Through Oct. 12, “The High Style of Dorothy Draper,” a display of furniture, photographs and other items relating to the career of that noted interior decorator. Through July 30 [actually through August 6], “On the Couch: Cartoons From The New Yorker,” psychotherapy-related cartoons from the magazine. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Suggested admission: $9; 62+ and students, $5; under 12, free; families, $20; Sundays, 10 a.m. to noon, free for all. (212) 534-1672.

Don’t forget! Gary Shteyngart is reading at 7 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble (33 E. 17th Street) as part of the new Upstairs at the Square series. From the press release:

On Wednesday, July 19, at 7:00PM, Gary Shteyngart, author of the new bestselling novel Absurdistan, and singer-songwriter-guitarist-bandleader and Norwegian chart-topper Sondre Lerche, will discuss art — and the art of making it — in America as well as in New York, which both call home. They will read and perform their work. Journalist Katherine Lanpher will again host the program. Admission is free, and no tickets are required. Seating is available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Gary Shteyngart — author of Absurdistan, praised by The New York Times Book Review as ‘so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself’ — was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. The novel was also named a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian. Absurdistan has been translated into ten languages. Shteyngart’s fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Still in his early twenties, Sondre Lerche has already released two critically acclaimed albums, and been called ‘one of the most talented new names in contemporary pop’ by The Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on the Conan O’Brien and Carson Daly shows, toured with Elvis Costello, Jason Mraz, Nada Surf, Liz Phair and Ed Harcourt. His new album, Duper Sessions, is a fresh, back-to-basics collection of songs that showcases a more intimate side of this gifted singer-songwriter. Inspired by Chet Baker, Caetano Veloso and even David Lynch, Duper Sessions transports the listener into a different time and place, filled with melody and romanticism. The album is Sondre Lerche’s tribute to the music he loves.

Katherine Lanpher is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist. Springboard Press will publish her first book, Leap Days: Chronicle of a Midlife Move, this October.

The third event in ‘Upstairs at the Square’ will be held at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on Wednesday, August 16, at 7PM.

Audio downloads of all three events, including the series premiere on June 21 with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, and singer-songwriter Jen Chapin, whose new album, Ready, comes out July 11th, will be available on Barnes & Noble.com.