Awl pal Noah Tarnow's Big Quiz Thing turns ten this year, and he's marking the occasion with a ten-hour live quiz show on Sunday, June 3 at 92YTribeca. There is a thousand dollar prize! Hurry up and get your ticket here.

If you're free TONIGHT (and if you happen to live in New York City; sorry in advance, everyone else!), you can head over to the CUNY Graduate Center at 7p.m. to hear esteemed writers Joan Acocella, Rivka Galchen, Alex Ross and David Samuels talk about something called "long-form journalism." Never heard of it, but it sounds fascinating.

Got plans tomorrow night? Cancel 'em! Or at least modify them so that you give yourself time to attend this: "Mark Crispin Miller hosts Chris Lehmann, author of Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class. In Rich People Things, Chris Lehmann lays bare the various dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule in the post-meltdown age. It's a humorous and harrowing tale of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation's financial elite." Awl pal Chris Lehmann! You'd be a fool to miss it. (McNally Jackson, 7 PM)

• Eek, Saturday is MP3 Experiment 8. Um! "Wear a white shirt and bring a bag containing the above-mentioned items."

• Haha, Postmasters is doing a summer group show of art arranged by color. Bring a picture of your couch and you'll know what matches, you heathen.

• The Fighter and Iron Man 2 and Let Me In are all new on Netflix Instant, so, just stay home. (Also, apparently Brazil just finally came out on Blu-Ray?) And there's some… Harry Potter thingie? IDK.

• Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn is a competition between 25 amateur ice cream makers.

Or you could stay home and read some [...]

Tonight! Unless you're going to The Hairpin's drink session tonight in New York, then you must be in Los Angeles, because no one lives anywhere else, and so good news!

• 7:00p.m.: Matthew Gallaway reads at Book Soup, plus a Q&A with Natasha Vargas-Cooper, 8818 Sunset, West Hollywood.

• After, like, 8:30 or so: Drinks with friends at the Parlour Room, 6423 Yucca St., Hollywood. (It's only a "ten-minute drive"! That's an LA ten minutes.) (Poster by Tully Mills!)

This is something you might want to attend: "Influential Brazilian singer-songwriter Tom Zé makes rare U.S. concert appearance" at this summer's Lincoln Center Festival.

This Thursday you probably want to head over to (Le) Poisson Rouge for the fifth anniversary of the Varsity Letters reading series, which will feature, among others, Awl pals Katie Baker, Ben Cohen, Dan Shanoff and Will Leitch. Good times.

Remember Significant Objects? It's the project from Rob Walker (Buying In) and Joshua Glenn (Taking Things Seriously) wherein writers are paired with a cheap garage sale/thrift shop item chosen by the curators. The writers compose a short story about the item, and the item is put up for auction on eBay. Well, here's your chance to signify! Rob and Kurt Andersen visited a thrift store in Manhattan and picked up "three prime examples of junk." Can you come up with a backstory for them? Of course you can! And you should.

717 years ago, Pietro Angelerio, an Italian professional type who had been forced into a promotion to an office he had never desired, decided to quit his job and return to the more sedate climate of his previous position. In honor of Pope Celestine V's resignation we are declaring today Quit Your Job day, although it should be noted that Angelerio had hoped to resume his monastic life as an ascetic pentitent but was in fact taken prisoner by his successor and very probably killed on that same man's orders. So you're going to want to tread carefully with that resignation notice. In any event, go! Do! Quit! [...]

"His film has no distinctly audible dialogue so doesn't need subtitles, and he doesn't move his camera during the first half-hour. There is no music, just the sound of bells, of the wind in the trees, of the bleating of goats." —Would you like to see a movie tonight? Le Quattro Volte is playing at MoMA at seven. Fair warning: you could perhaps achieve the same qualities of stillness and reverence by staring at your bedroom wall. It's only 88 minutes long—but my God, thirty minutes of unmoving camera! (Also, the title is not to be confused with the delicious four-cheese pizza. I'm hungry.)

• Remember how I told you last week there were going to be fireworks in the East River, nicely visible from Brooklyn? Yeah, my fireworks party didn't go so well either, as there were none. Sorry! But supposedly there are some fireworks Saturday night. (Don't take it from me, ask someone else apparently. Fireworks credibility: ruined!)

• Warning: Sunday is gay pride. Don't go west of Broadway. Upside: that means tonight is the drag march. Starts at 7 p.m., Tompkins Square Park.

• Tonight Bob Mould plays at the Highline Ballroom! Have you read his book yet? He's on tour—reading tour—across (parts!) of the country. (Related: Pat Benatar [...]

Don't forget, kids: Tonight's when we meet up in San Francisco for drinks! Join hosts Susie Cagle and Jackson West from 7-9 PM at the Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market Street. A good time is sure to be had by etc.

American culture is rotten to its core. Not only is Natalie Portman pregnant-while-not-married, but there is such a thing as "public television" and also a thing called the National Endowment for the Arts. If only we could convince the last remaining holdouts that mass culture is the only proper artistic reflection of a democracy, they could all join in on making endless japery from the outputs of a serial woman-abuser who is equally popular on both network television and Twitter! Then it might be, if not quite morning in America, something other than twelve strokes to the dead of midnight.

Yet that is where currently find ourselves. [...]

Save the date: February 1, in the city of Los Angeles, in the neighborhood of "Echo Park," at Taix. Awl readers are gathering to drink and discuss their feelings, beginning at 7 p.m. More info will follow in the comments.

What are you doing at the beginning of April? Because this seems promising.

The Museum of Modern Art presents its first time-based artist retrospective with Kraftwerk–Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, performed live on eight consecutive evenings from April 10 through 17, by Kraftwerk, the avant-garde electronic music pioneers. Each evening will consist of a live performance, in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, of works from one of the group’s eight albums, created over four decades, followed by a selection of original compositions from their catalogue adapted specifically for this exhibition’s format, to showcase both Kraftwerk’s historical contributions and contemporary influences [...]

Zines zines zines. People like them so much better than blogs now. They're like artisanal local blogs. They're the organic watercress of the larger cabbage family that is self-publishing. THIS particular zine is getting a launch party tomorrow night (that's Wednesday, November 16th) at the totally adorable Other Music, from 7 to 9 p.m. Um, Tao Lin will be DJing, so… enter at your own risk. (But then so will the awesome Victor Vazquez!) The people-adverse (technically, yes, -averse, but I like the idea of being people-unfavorable!) among us can just stay home and order the zine here; more info here.) N.B. There is no [...]

If you're in town on Tuesday the 6th—and you will be; Labor Day and the summer that preceded it are OVER—you might want to head over to Awl pal Noah Tarnow's Big Quiz Thing at The Highline Ballroom. This one's for the ladies, which makes for a nice change from your usual trivia event: "Proving that acumen knows no gender, the BQT gives a six-round multimedia shout-out to XX-chromosome trivia fans (while welcoming male fans, too), with discount admission for the ladies, a spotlight on women of entertainment and history, and the all-female Three-Way Finale, plus the cash jackpot of $300." You go, girls. Etc.

Fans of composer/guitarist Larry Polansky, the subject of this installment of Difficult Listening Hour, take note: He's part of the lineup in what sounds like a pretty amazing collection of experimental performances happening here in town over the next two weeks.

Whenever I belatedly discover an American master, I feel a pain inside. A guilty pain. A pain related to an understanding that the celebrity-media complex has indeed been "winning." And then I put on some sunglasses and remind myself: It's not personal, babe. It's just late capitalism doing what late capitalism does. (Then I flip myself off in the mirror.)

Mark Rappaport is the man behind Rock Hudson's Home Movies and From the Journals of Jean Seberg. Those two films, which were sold and distributed during the indy-doc craze of the 90s, weren't true documentaries, but found-footage essays of social-crit wrapped up in sheaths of savvy sound-and-image humor. They [...]

This seems like something you might want to jump on: "In September of 2006, the Wordless Music series presented its first concert at the 250-capacity Good Shepherd Faith Church on West 66th Street in New York City. Five years later, we are slightly shocked and humbled to announce the start of our 5th anniversary season with a true musical great: Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, performing his first U.S. live shows since 1998, and in two of the country's great acoustical treasures: on Saturday, September 10, at the 1,050-capacity Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory in Boston; and on Friday, September 9, at an historic 1,150-capacity [...]