Believer 2011 Music Issue

...is out! Check out the cover (which looks even more amazing when you're holding it in your hands)! Check out Ross Simonini's great interview with Trey Anastasio of Phish! Ross also put together the excellent CD, of new classical music.

Brian Eno in conversation with David Mitchell! David Byrne talking to Tom Zé!

Frances Cha on K-pop fandom....Eileen Reynolds on the bassoon...Paul Collins on the short-lived craze for turntables in your car...Hua Hsu on telephone calls in pop songs...the Australian festival scene...Much more! Nick Hornby on North Korea (!)...Martha Wainwright! Daniel Handler on Kawabata! Jack Pendarvis...more...more...go...buy...listen...enjoy...it's great...Greil Marcus....more...

Partial magic in the garden

My latest Astral Weeks column, a look at Catherynne M. Valente's In the Cities of Coin and Spice and Tin House's "Fantastic Women" issue, is up at the L.A. Times. This one has all your, I mean my, faves: Borges, Keeler, Cloud Atlas, Samantha Hunt, and so on!

Pony up

Photographs based on scenes in Le Grand Meaulnes (incidentally, a favorite book of David Mitchell's).




From the Beinecke Library's blog. (Courtesy Dizzyhead Thomas)

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Song of the day: Modern Lovers, "Someone I Care About" (via Moistworks/Ben Greenman)

Everything you say now sounds like it was 'Ghostwritten'

In the FT, David Mitchell says: “David Mitchell. Doesn’t Know His Way Around Japanese Cuisine. Shocker.”

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

1. Over at the Athanasius Kircher Society, the most amazing three and a half minutes you'll see today. (Via the Light Reader.)

1.5 Update: But this might be the most traumatic two minutes you'll see today—Lily Tomlin and David O. Russell going ballistic on the Huckabees set.

2. Dizzyhead Hua gets Hip—and then realizes it's every which way but Luc.

3. We love us some Arcade Fire most any hour of the day, but the Driftwood Singers present a rather stunning similarity: "Why Win Butler is John McCafferty With a Liberal Arts Degree." Listen if you dare...

4. Speaking of music—new Psychic Envelopes single "drops"!

5. At This Writing Life, an interview with David Mitchell, in which Mitchell comes off as a rather nice guy, asking the interviewer questions about his writing. (Via Conversational Reading)

6. And rounding out our Tuesday morning coverage (whaa.....) — Dizzyhead Jessica muses on "Joan of Arc—Paris Hilton of the Middle Ages?" over at Slate.

7. Oh one more thing: Tuesday means—a new New-York Ghost!