Andrew Hultkrans

• 

  diary July 02, 2007

  Smoking Grass

  New York

  If, as the New York Public Library’s promotional literature promised, last Wednesday night was when the twentieth century would go on trial, I began the evening as the Millennium Baby, trailing Father Time, played by Norman Mailer, as he ambulated glacially on twin canes toward his date with Günter Grass. Due to audience overflow—the event sold out in four minutes—members of the press were shunted through a long, spartan back hallway to the loading dock, where we were to check in. It was in this concrete fallopian tube that I found myself following Mailer—brought low by time and entropy—a living

• 

  diary May 31, 2007

  Third-Degree Byrne

  New York

  How to spruce up a reading when you’re a naïf artist with a book of stories, a film, performance pieces, and websites all topping the hipster charts? Why, invite two fellow naïf artists—one old, one young—to “gather together to create a feeling of belonging” at the New York Public Library. Sounds simple, right? And it is, if you’re Miranda July and you have the kind of fan base that gets warm fuzzies when you blush in public. As evinced by Dave Eggers, the Flaming Lips, the Polyphonic Spree, and countless other acts, there’s a great hunger for childlike wonder and optimism in America today, and

• 

  diary April 27, 2007

  Ancient Evening

  New York

  “What goes on in there?” an exasperated woman wondered aloud as she passed the neoclassical slab of prime real estate that is the Puck Building, in Soho. On Monday evening, the question was more pertinent than usual, as members of the Hungry March Band blurted and blatted their Balkan stomp music outside the front door. Having been dispatched to cover the Paris Review’s Spring Revel, a benefit dinner with guest of honor Norman Mailer, I was positively atwitter about gaining admission to this most inscrutable of downtown venues. My gratification, however, was delayed. Arriving at 7 PM for cocktails,

• 

  diary December 01, 2006

  Unrequited Love

  New York

  The Book of Love is long and boring; its author’s voice is deep and deadpan. So learned Rick Moody and assembled throng at the 92nd Street Y on Monday night, when Stephin Merritt—indie rock’s Cole Porter—discussed his lyrics. The notoriously laconic, impressively prolific songwriter for the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes, and other projects, Merritt doesn’t enjoy being interviewed—or, rather, enjoys pretending that he doesn’t enjoy being interviewed. Moody, a novelist and memoirist, wants Merritt to acknowledge an autobiographical, emotional force behind his

• 

  diary October 25, 2006

  Second Coming

  New York

  There was a moment—somewhere between John the Revelator and Tim “Left Behind” LaHaye . . . OK, the early ’80s—when the word rapture connoted something other than the faithful dead blasting out of their graves and flying to heaven before the Great Tribulation. That moment, mainstreamed by the Blondie song “Rapture” and its early MTV video, was the mingling of two previously separate New York undergrounds—hip-hop and punk/new wave. Uptown met downtown, black met white, turntables met guitars, graffiti met galleries. This was new, and as with most quasi-utopian cultural moments, it

• 

  diary September 04, 2006

  Banding Together

  New York

  Luckily, it was an unseasonably cool August night, or the Coalition Provisional Authority treatment attendees received outside the Beacon Theater last week would have thoroughly scotched the vibe of an otherwise benign benefit. Given that will-call lines largely consist of friends and press, putting only one incompetent woman in the booth—protected by clueless gorillas—is sinful. The upshot? Many missed the first twenty minutes of the fundraiser for 826NYC, the local branch of 826 Valencia, a chain of free tutoring centers across the country that help children develop their creative

• 

  diary July 16, 2006

  Soft Launch

  New York

  The hip, youngish art/lit throng attending Tuesday’s launch party for Soft Targets—a new “handheld journal of poetry, artwork, criticism, short fiction, found images, sound, and other ephemera”—was surely feeling softer than usual due to the evening’s exceedingly swampy weather, which Soft Targets contributor and coeditrix Rachel Kushner called “velveteen,” but I call viscous. Like her beau Jason Smith, the de facto “intellectual godfather” of the journal, however, Kushner lives in LA, where inorganic swamp gas (and its attendant street-corner puddles of urban “milk”) is an option,

• 

  diary May 07, 2006

  May Pole

  New York

  Given that it was not only May Day but also the afternoon of the immigrant workers’ protest march in lower Manhattan, traveling to see Ron Athey’s “durational performance” at Artists Space proved to be a somewhat durational affair in itself. The A and C trains had been diverted to the F track, making my trip from Brooklyn unbearably glacial. Then, though the performance was scheduled to begin at 5 PM, the small crowd of art journos and gallery punters—all white, youngish to middle age, surprisingly unpierced—had to mill about on Greene Street for half an hour or so before being admitted

• 

  diary February 02, 2006

  Freedom Guy

  New York

  During her tenure at Vanity Fair, legend has it, Tina Brown read a draft of a commissioned piece from Isaac Bashevis Singer, and, either not realizing who the Nobel laureate was or simply not caring, scrawled “Beef it up, Singer!” across the manuscript. I expected a similarly muscular stance from Brown in her face-off last week with fêted French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy at the New York Public Library. After all, the promotional materials promised a hardball exchange, and Lévy hadn’t even won a Nobel. Quel dommage, then, that this transatlantic logroll left unanswered my nagging question

• 

  diary January 22, 2006

  Cinastey Hack

  New York

  The first thing to remember is that he’s cooler than you. Cooler, in fact, than anyone has a right to be. Raised in Akron, Ohio, home of Devo, Jim Jarmusch studied poetry at Columbia, crashed CBGB in the ’70s with Richard Hell’s “Kid with the Replaceable Head,” was Nicholas Ray’s acolyte and teaching assistant at NYU Film School, used his Louis B. Mayer grant for film-school tuition to make his first feature, didn’t ever pay his tuition (but still received his degree a decade and many acclaimed films later), breaks bread with everyone from Bill Murray to Tom Waits to the RZA, made an entire film

• 

  diary January 06, 2006

  Bones of Contention

  New York

  I’ve long been a fan of cadaver gags—medical students mailing organs and body parts with cards reading “Have a heart” or “Thought you needed a hand,” or posing undissected corpses on campus benches in rakish postures, leaving them to leer at passersby. Hence I was surprised to find little gallows humor in “Bodies . . . The Exhibition,” a pricey, formaldehyde-for-the-whole-family show of jaunty, expressive stiffs and their constituent parts. Strained playfulness, yes—several specimens are pressed into everyman roles as basketball players, symphony conductors, sprinters, even Rodin’s

• 

  diary September 29, 2005

  Wu Yorker

  New York

  If my first stop at the New Yorker Festival doled out a satisfying amount of bile—mostly directed at Hollywood—the next panel on my docket promised greater internal acidity. After a calming hour in the sun at Bryant Park, I steeled myself for my appointment with the RZA, the LZA (Ani DiFranco), the Old Skinny Popster (Ric Ocasek), and the Rapeman (Steve Albini)—not exactly Wu-Tang, but some kind of hell-spawned super-group nevertheless. Moderated by Sasha Frere-Jones, the magazine’s pop music critic, the panel was guaranteed to be volatile, based on the presence of Albini alone.