Nerd heaven: “After an 11-year break, beloved indie rock band Pavement is reuniting and will be performing on Late Night on September 23. If that wasn’t incredible enough, Matador Records and Late Night are joining forces to give one lucky person a chance to PLAY GUITAR WITH PAVEMENT ON OUR SHOW! Just submit a video of yourself playing one of their songs (from our approved list) by September 8. The band will help pick finalists, and then you at home will pick the winner via on-line vote!”

Don’t call it a comeback, Next Media Animation owns. Just everything about this. There are no words.

The talking points out of Washington on murdered British spy Gareth Williams come from NSA expert James Bamford: “There’s been a lot of hyped-up coverage in the U.K., but even codebreakers die from unrelated violence occasionally. Hundreds of NSA and GCHQ personnel travel back and forth between agencies every year, and leaving a body in a canvas bag sounds more like a jealous lover or drug deal gone bad than a political assassination.” Yes, it’s so much more likely that some jealous person stuffed his murdered spy lover into a padlocked sports bag than some member of a spy agency did. That’s like a daily thing. You know how they are! Always stuffing corpses in bags. Gay lovers: way more murderous than international espionage rings!

Facebook has good ideas! “Subversively move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section in book shops. Make bookshops think twice about where they categorise our generations greatest war criminal.” This will also work for Decision Points come November.

Anonymous ladies at Slate crunch the number of book reviews by gender at the New York Times over the last two years (throwing their data-gathering “associate editor Chris Wilson” under the bus as they do so-no Times reviews in your future, buddy!). So: “Of the 545 books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and Aug. 27, 2010, 338 were written by men (62 percent of the total) [and] 207 were written by women (38 percent of the total)…. Of the 101 books that received two reviews in that period: 72 were written by men (71 percent).”

One note on that data: that second number is somewhat tricky. As I understand it, to this day the NYT Book Review and the paper’s daily book reviewers operate entirely independently, so that second number isn’t necessarily proof of an organized and overarching pro-male bias in anointing “important” books by men, but perhaps a sign that two independent groups skew male. (The overlap in two purple circles of a Venn diagram comes up red, you know what I mean?)

Also it could all just mean that women less often write important and worthy and notable books. (No???)

I also don’t think it means that book reviewers and editors hate or avoid books by women!

It is definitely, to me, another sign that the daily and Book Review book coverage should at last be coordinated (if that is not a project underway already). If I owned a newspaper that covered books (and in my mind, I do!), in a world with tens of thousands of books of fiction alone published in English every year, increasing the number of books reviewed by fifty a year would seem to me to be a useful goal. This system is a remnant of the sacrosanct status of critics at the Times; historically critics cover what they like and no editorial schemes dare intrude.

Another disclaimer: it’s just a newspaper! They’re allowed to cover what they like, how they like!

Still, this also gives weight to arguments that we are not beyond the basics of reminding institutions how we all have an interest in basic diversity. (And reminding certain institutions why the world is leaving them behind.) I know that viewpoint seems very Vassar College 1992 to some people!

In conclusion, I encourage everyone to go buy Julia Holmes’ book Meeks, which received a very nice review by a man in the Times.

It has been, by almost every metric, a miserable summer. Apart from continued economic malaise, a political class that seems unable deal with the problem and a concerted opposition which does everything in its power to prevent success through obstruction and distortion, environmental disasters, man-made disasters, war, famine, flood, Katy Perry and an increasing anger and ignorance best exemplified by the flap over a cultural center containing a small area in which people of a certain faith can worship downtown, it has been really really hot. What has made this summer, in my opinion, so particularly depressing, is the sense that we’re not going to get away with it this time: the bill for the American century has come due and, on reflection, our only option is to leave the keys in the mailbox and walk away. Those of us who are older know that every recession brings pain and doubt, but this one feels like it’s not just going to scar, it’s going to fundamentally change everything in ways which we can’t even imagine but which are going to be deeply unpleasant at best. But as the Summer of Suck expires this weekend, let’s allow ourselves a little false optimism. Even though we know that things are actually going to get worse, let’s pretend that it’s all going to be alright. Let’s be that couple who knows that it’s all going to end in tears, and soon, but who still gets up for one last dance and holds each other close and looks into each other’s eyes and still feels what brought them together in the first place. Let’s try to believe we can still make it through. After all, Smoking Baby, who ushered in this miserable season, managed to kick the habit. Miracles can happen, however briefly, and however minor the miracle. Let’s fool ourselves into thinking that we’ve got miracles in our own future. At the very least, we have autumn. It’s got to cool down eventually, right?

In this morning’s thoroughly believable news, our Dodge Charger-owning friend from New Jersey, whose ride received an efficient totaling from a young misguided would-be suicide, “put the brakes on her pity party writing on the paper’s website, ‘I have not slept since this has happened. My heart and prayers go out to the family.’ The Post denies that it misrepresented the woman’s words saying she ‘dron[ed] on about her car to a reporter in three conversations.’” To be fair to our newly car-less neighbor, this is not the first time someone has felt misrepresented in the Post.

Dear woman who lived up on the hill near the lighthouse,

Sorry for stealing the head of that Greek statue from your lawn.

You might not even have noticed it was missing. There was lots of stuff on your lawn. That’s what brought us there that night, actually, to your street, the name of which I forget, if I ever knew it, in Highlands, New Jersey. There’s a “Witches Lane” up around there somewhere, according to Google Maps, but that would be too perfect for this story, so that’s probably not it. Anyway, yes, we-me and a car full of similarly intoxicated teenagers-we came to see your lawn, so different as it was from most lawns in our area. You’d made it into a display, a found-art project, a sculpture garden of carefully arranged junk. Old toys, mostly. Dolls, teddy bears, fire-trucks, action figures, all sorts of things, all weathered and sun-bleached, set on couches and pedestals. Legend had it that you’d had a child who had died years back, a son, and that every year on his birthday you added another toy to the collection. This could not have been completely accurate, because there must have been more than seventy pieces there-it looked like the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s-and I don’t think your house was even that old. But I don’t know, maybe you added numerous items every year. Whatever the case, it looked creepy. And that story made it creepier. It was dark and secluded and so a fun place to park and smoke pot and stare at the all the unblinking dolls eyes til we got the heebie-jeebies and sped away.

This was in 1987, I think. Junior year of high school. My friend James and I had spent the early part of the evening at the Front Street Trattoria in Red Bank. There was no bar in the restaurant; it didn’t have a liquor license. But we had worked there washing dishes the summer before, and the waitstaff let us drink with our dinner if we brought our own beer. We felt very grown up. We didn’t act that way, though; pyramids of empties on the table-the privilege didn’t last very long.

Everything was going great that night, though. We were chuffed and loaded when our friends Jen and Jen came to pick us up. There may have been another Jen in the car, too. (You’re aware, I’m sure, of the popularity of the name Jen among girls born in the early 1970s.) And maybe another person, too. I don’t remember too well. But there were a lot of us squeezed into the back seat when we set off without any particular destination.

We ended up at your house, of course, idling in front of your yard, passing a bowl around and trying to spook each other out. It was probably eleven o’clock or so when, in a burst of bad decision making obviously fueled by some insecure need to prove myself fearless and free-spirited, I opened the door, dashed out, grabbed the nearest artifact I could put my hands on, scrambled back in and shouted “Go!” Everyone was laughing and screaming as we peeled out. I felt heroic. Or anti-heroic. I felt just the way I wanted to feel.

Once we’d driven down the hill and got on the main road, street lights gave me a look at what was on my lap. It was the head of a Greek statue. A male head. That gray, plaster-cement stuff. I remember the smooth, hollow eyes and the molded curls in the hair. Like the head of an adventurer who’d met Medusa’s gaze. The car got quieter, and whoever was driving, Jen I think, let it be known that she was not so happy to have stolen property in the car. Someone else started talking about how the thing was probably cursed. Suddenly, it didn’t feel so good to be holding this head. Stoned as I was, I didn’t like the idea of a curse. What if it blinked, or started talking? What if I woke up later that night, and it was propped next to my pillow? What if blood started to drip from the eyes? So as we drove over the bridge into Seabright, I rolled down the window, and leaned out as far as I could and heaved the thing over the side. Thank God there wasn’t some late-night crabber down there, rowing himself to Bahr’s Landing by flashlight-this apology would be addressed to someone else, and it would likely have been written from a very different place.

But this is an apology to you. I don’t have a good excuse. I was an idiot kid who too often did idiot kid things. I really hope the story wasn’t true, and that you were just an eccentric artist like the guy who built the big junk sculpture in the community garden on 6th Street and Ave. B. Eddie Boros was his name, he died a few years ago. I lived in a building adjacent to the garden when I first moved to the city. I would look out at the sculpture and think of your yard and feel a twinge of guilt. If the story was true, if you had lost a child, however many years before, and if (please have this not be the case) you noticed the missing statue head and that brought you even the slightest bit of further sadness, well, something like this whimsical little anecdote doesn’t even begin to cover how really very, very sorry I am.

I love this: “I want to roll my eyes on the internet. I want to LOL and OMG on the internet. I want someone to tell me to go DIAF on the internet. I want to be able to talk about the newest internet meme, without having to actually pronounce meme, because fuck people. I don’t know. But I can look it up on the internet! I want to read news and gossip and dramz on the internet.” There is so much more and you should read it all. Thank you.

“What happens when there are no more genres left? What happens when one of the last remaining untapped markets is board game movies, and just about all viable options for originality have been expended?”
-On our age of the meta-film. (via)