In a 1964 interview, Playboy asked Vladimir Nabokov about American sexual mores. Nabokov dismissed the question and said: "Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem, sex as a platitude-all this is something I find too tedious for words. Let us skip sex." Couldn't the same be said about rock 'n' roll? Writing about music often feels akin to saying something interesting about sex; it's all so rooted in one's own neuroses that the subject is usually maddening to write and banal to read. Yet when Chuck Klosterman wrote that the Bob Dylan/Kiss collaboration meant that "rock 'n' roll reached its logical conclusion" it felt like a true statement (Klosterman argued that the genre's most genuine individual joining up with the most contrived meant that rock 'n' roll had been solved, and was now done). So while I don't exactly understand why the forthcoming Bob Dylan album of Christmas standards makes me sad, I can tell you about other things to listen to, see and do that don't make one all conflicted and weird and downtrodden in the heart. Well, sometimes.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6
• Queerly, I'm very excited about the new Massive Attack. You might recognize Massive Attack from the theme song to House. Or that song that played in every coffee shop for three years. See how complicated this music stuff gets!?
• Speaking of the impossible-ness about writing about sex/music, there is a Sufjan Stevens remix album of sorts, called Run Rabbit Run, which is the string quartet Osso's reimagining of his album Enjoy Your Rabbit. And Run, Rabbit the book contains some of the cringe-inducing passages about sex (a man's throbbing purple center and such) by one's American literature's most elegant writers. It's all so hard.
• Other throb-inducing music releases today: Air, Black Heart Procession and Gogol Bordello.
• You know what comes out on DVD today? Ally McBeal: The Complete Series. Buy it for someone you hate! Perhaps yourself!


WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7th
• Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz are doing a Times Talk in New York. It is sold out but there are tickets on Craigslist and also you could pretend you are a member of the press, which is what we do! Worth it!


THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8th
• Baaz (The Hawk): This 1953 Indian film, playing tonight at the Walter Reade Theater, is a musical about a female pirate-and it predates The Bandit Queen by 40 years. Tickets.
• Jack Pierson opens at Cheim & Read. All the gays will be there.
• The Mars Volta is playing Roseland for $42. That being said? They do a stellar live show, even if their odd hybrid prog rock Latin-jam metal-band thing has gotten more and more... diffuse over the last two albums.
• Some Like it Hot ends its week-long run at the Film Forum tonight. The only thing prettier than Marilyn Monroe in her prime is Tony Curtis in his.


FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9th
• An Education opens tonight. Yes, more Nick Hornby. But people like this one!
• Wow. Tonight and tomorrow the Collegiate Chorale and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and the 21st Century Orchestra are performing the score to The Fellowship of the Ring, while the movie plays? At Radio City Music Hall? This is so bonkers.


SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10th
• Wishful Drinking. We are actually going to see this Carrie Fisher show, because we should. It was this, on Jezebel, that convinced us. Fisher reinvented the practice of maintaining a public persona that passes as authentic and completely revealing; but really, it's just persona in the service of comedy. Admirable, and tricky. Tickets here.
• This is the annual Open House weekend, which you can read all about here, in which you get to poke into people's apartments and also weird places in the city.


SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11th
• Is it going to be nice out? This show at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, of seventeen youngsters, is not to be missed.


MONDAY, OCTOBER 12th
• You know what comes out on DVD at midnight? Heh. Drag Me To Hell. Which is an awesome, wonderful film. Have you ordered it yet?


TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13th
• The Awl endorses exploration of the following albums:
Andrew Bird, "Anonanimal"
Del the Funky Homosapien/Tame One, Parallel Uni-Verse
Digital Leather, Warm Brother
Echo and the Bunnymen, The Fountain
The Flaming Lips, Embryonic


WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14th
• Have you seen the Deitch show of Kurt Kauper's Portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama yet? It's perfect for the liberal cooling sentiment on Obama. Details here.


THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15th.
• Oleg Videnin, a photographer who works in rural Russia, opens a show of new photography at Sputnik gallery. He is sort of the Robert Frank of Russia? Which, speaking of, if you have not seen the Robert Frank show at the Met, you are missing out, despite its awful exhibition design.


FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16th
• You know what goes on view today? The Christie's jewelry sale, featuring the Annenberg Diamond, a 32-carat diamond that is going to test the high end of the luxury auction market. You can go and look for free, for fun!
• Dead-Alive Peter Jackson's no-budget, 1992 gorefest. Makes Saw look like Steel Magnolias. Tickets here.
• Bonerama is playing at Sullivan Hall. I saw them in a smoke-filled club in New Orleans and that night some booty-shaking girl with bangs lost control of her bottle of beer and now I have a chipped tooth. But you know? Worth it.


SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17th
• As you know, this is the New Yorker Festival weekend. You know what's not sold out, as of this writing? The evening with Loudon Wainwright III today at 7:30, and conversations with Stanley Tucci and Tyler Perry. Tyler Perry is America's most successful entrepreneur, basically, and we should all be taking notes on that.


SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18th
• Who Can Kill a Child? Who, indeed? Maybe an English couple who is confronted by a an murderous tribe of island children? Hmm? MAYBE THEM? This is a 1970's cult classic that's rarely screened but that is what the New York Film Festival is for. Tickets here.