Capital New York

On a frank and, sometimes, heated conversation about race, between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Ilan Stevens

This tension between biological identity and socially-constructed identity became the night's theme, and Gates didn’t restrict his analysis to others. He noted that his DNA test revealed that he’s 56 percent white. In fact, it was his own family’s racial mixture that catalyzed his passion for genealogy. "My grandfather was so white, we used to call him Casper behind his back," he said. "How has your standing in the African American community changed?" Stavans asked about Gates' DNA discovery. "I got a raise at Harvard," Gates said. More

Posted on May 1st, 2012 5:18pm

At the Guggenheim, Julianna Barwick and Grouper attempt to musically complement John Chamberlain's twisted-metal sculpture

Sam Brumbaugh, a special events coordinator at the Guggenheim and the producer of the "Divine Ricochet" series, said that he'd worked with the curatorial side to find musicians who match with the artists on display. In years previous those bands have been Animal Collective and Beirut; for Chamberlain's exhibition, something more austere was called for. More

Posted on April 17th, 2012 9:24am

Michael Robbins, whose poetry scrambles high and low (and gets spiritual about Guns N' Roses), celebrates his debut collection

Before a reading on Wednesday at Housing Works Bookstore to celebrate last week’s release of his debut poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator (Penguin), I talked with Robbins about his recent influences and interests. More

Posted on April 6th, 2012 2:09pm

With their second album, Odd Future's present seems perfectly, disappointingly sensible

These are the wages of maturity, one supposes. The group, whose sophomore effort, The OF Tape, Vol. 2 is out today, has cleaned up its act (particularly when it comes to homophobic slurs and extended fantasies of horrific sexual debasement and cartoon violence), and even grown up, after a fashion. Two years ago, the group’s leader, Tyler the Creator, would spin a yarn about drowning a woman in a tub of semen; now he’s content simply to screw the old-fashioned way—albeit possibly with someone else's girlfriend. But the issue confronting the group—several members of which are no longer teenagers—on the release of Vol. 2 is whether the advancement is artistic or simply developmental. More

Posted on March 21st, 2012 9:54am

Main Attrakionz at Glasslands: The tale of what indie rap hath wrought over the past decade

It’s odd that so few showed up to catch Beans’ set, since there’s a direct line connecting him with the night’s headliners, Main Attrakionz, and in some ways it’s hard to imagine the latter having a place in rap music, or a following, without the former. More

Posted on March 5th, 2012 5:34pm

Michael Ian Black offers some honest advice from his new book, gets interviewed by Meghan McCain, says filthy things

Wednesday night at Greenpoint’s WORD bookstore brought a seemingly unlikely pairing: comedian and actor Michael Ian Black and blogger/personality Meghan McCain. Yet the pairing is more germane than it might sound: McCain and Black are at work on a book together, tentatively titled America, You Sexy Bitch. Yet Black was there to read from his own new book, a comic memoir titled You’re Not Doing It Right, which centers on the honest vicissitudes of marriage and parenthood. McCain interviewed him. More

Posted on March 1st, 2012 12:07pm

Tweets about pandas, rappers, and dirty stuff plus sex confessions equal a Tao Lin-curated reading at St. Mark's

The literary differences fell, maybe unsurprisingly, along gender lines. The three male readers went for laughs, joked about rappers (as though nothing could be further from their heady literary experimentalism than the black experience), and seemed cooly aloof, while the two women performed their sexuality and their awkwardness, less for laughs than for the sake of some therapeutic confessionalism. If a Muumuu House house style emerged, it was one that was very much in line with the affectless, self-concerned style of Thought Catalog: diaristic essays and Twitter poetry. And it's succeeding. Gaby Dunn, a Thought Catalog writer, scored that Times gig, while Calloway is meeting with literary agents. More

Posted on February 21st, 2012 9:55am

At a Greenpoint coffee house, signs of sophistication in the city's young poetry scene

Five minutes before the scheduled start, the line at the counter (at that point a bar) was three deep. Patrons were drinking coffee still, but also beer, and largely wine: pendulous goblets in twos and threes dotted virtually every table. Even before the reading had begun, the night was going exactly as co-curator Patrick Gaughan envisioned it over a year ago.

"I wanted to create a reading series in a lowlit backroom atmosphere," Gaughan said. "As easy as that sounds, I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I made it." More

Posted on February 14th, 2012 11:54am

Things get chilly, inside and outside, at Jeremy Jay's Glasslands concert

People tend to label Jeremy Jay’s music as icy or cold. Well, last night at Brooklyn’s Glasslands Gallery, the weather matched the music—snowfall peppered the sidewalk outside the Williamsburg venue. Headliner Jeremy Jay’s reception also ended up being chilly, not quite befitting his potential, but perhaps meeting his odd stature. More

Posted on February 9th, 2012 11:16am

At Upright Citizens' Brigade Theater, Fred Armisen drops in on an old network of comedian brothers-and-sisters-in-arms

In recent months, the variety has been intact, but the SHAC has not—the name is an acronym made from the first initial of each member of the troupe—with both the H and the C missing from the lineup. Heather Lawless, a comedian and actor, sold her pilot to Adult Swim last year and has been busy working on that, while Chelsea Peretti, a writer and actor who starred in the pilot of Louie, got signed as a writer for NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation to participate. So then the actual variety, at least in the past few shows, has come in the form of numerous guests to augment the remaining S (Shonali Bhowmik) and A (Andrea Rosen). Among last night’s scheduled guests were a New York-based comedy dance troupe, a musical theater act, Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi, and Saturday Night Live and Portlandia star Armisen.

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Posted on February 3rd, 2012 4:50pm