Today is the official the last day of summer, even if it’s already cool enough to close the windows here at Flavorpill’s New York office. To celebrate, we’re bringing you the joyous convergence of two things we love all year round, but especially in warm weather: Thurston Moore and ice cream. Apparently, rumors have been circulating that Moore manned a Chipwich cart in our fair city back in the ’80s — and, thanks to this evidence from Sonic Youth alum Bob Bert, they turn out to be true. [via Marc Masters]
Scoff about hipster parents and pretentious kiddie programming if you want, but we found the announcement that Thurston Moore would teach a class on white noise to children eight to 12 downright charming. Plus, we once had the good fortune of watching from afar as the impossibly tall Moore hoisted a toddler onto his shoulders, to her utter delight. Cute overload! When it comes to kids, this proud papa knows what he’s doing.
The class, which took place yesterday, got us thinking about our fantasy rock ‘n roll high school and the courses our dream instructors would teach. After the jump, check out 10 seminars we would never be tempted to play hooky from, taught by everyone from Jay-Z to Jonathan Richman to Lady Gaga. Use the comments to add your own suggestions.
1. Owen Wilson is Woody Allen‘s new muse for his next project, but the jury’s still out on whether he will be starring opposite Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. [via THR]
2. From Thurston Moore‘s new blog: “kim [Gordon] and i will be recording a trio LP w/ yoko [Ono] this year with blindfolds.” [via TwentyFourBit]
3. Is Dave Eggers is the best candidate for editorship of The Paris Review? [via The Millions]
4. Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to save Abbey Road studios. (Is it just us, or does this make Paul McCartney look bad?) [via Guardian]
5. A musical theater adaptation of Pedro Almodovar‘s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which director Bartlett Sher and the filmmaker have been developing in workshops for over a year, will debut in Lincoln Center Theater‘s 2010-11 season. [via NYT]
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With images of Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and Smashing Pumpkins and text by Thurston Moore, Michael Lavine’s photo book is a grunge almanac.
As label photographer for Sub Pop Records in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Lavine spent as much time snapping the street scenes in Olympia and Seattle as the bands that made them famous. Grunge collects over 180 of his pictures, ranging from tattooed street-corner angels to the musical artists who would define a generation. Read More »
1. Madonna and Scarlett Johansson both made cameo appearances on this weekend’s Ryan Reynold-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live.
2. Contrary to alarmist tweets sparked by a false hospitalization report on TMZ, Maya Angelou is not dead. [via Reuters]
3. CBS’s The Big Bang Theory has become this season’s highest-rated live-action comedy among young adults. [via NYT]
4. Lorrie Moore isn’t sure if she understands Understanding Lorrie Moore. [via A.V. Madison]
5. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is launching an art book publisher. [via Jacket Copy]
In many respects, the Brooklyn Book Festival is the literary equivalent of the nearby Fulton Street Mall. Think zine vendors instead of sneaker stores, assume a comparably sized weekend crowd (albeit in larger numbers of ironic glasses), and you begin to get an idea of the mob that descends on the borough’s annual lit fair.
Now in its fourth year, the event continued its sprawl through Borough Hall this weekend, packing the plaza with its respective wares (Kabbalah literature, anyone?) and extending into the surrounding government buildings. This year, the Festival really outdid itself, scheduling 97 events and 220 authors into a seven-hour Sunday block. Read More »
According to Stereogum, an upcoming episode of Gossip Girl features Sonic Youth playing their ’80s hit “Starpower” at a party for Rufus and Lily. Thurston and former Be Your Own Pet frontwoman Jemina Pearl previously recorded “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” for an episode sans cameo. Rolling Stone has the pic above and the on-set scoop from Thurston: “Ed [Westwick] and Chace [Crawford] seemed aware of who we are, but they were more interested in Kings of Leon. Those are their boys.” Thurston says that he and wife Kim Gordon are “pretty fanatical viewers of the show.” In fact, “It’s sort of our dose of Shakespeare every week.”
Mind explosion. We’d pay good money to see Gordon take on Waldorf.
Season three of Gossip Girl premieres September 14.
Stephanie Chernikowski, Sonic Youth, 1983, Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art
For this fine Wednesday’s pictorial pick we decided to pay homage to the king and queen of rock’n'roll couples (and our Soho neighbors) Kim and Thurston. This picture, taken by Stephanie Chernikowski in 1983, is on view in the Looking at Music: Side 2 exhibition opening today at MoMA.
Today at Flavorpill, we took an architectural tour of the High Line. We couldn’t believe that the last piece that J.D. Salinger published was a short story back in 1965. We found it funny that Jay-Z is taking on Auto-Tune (and we know who we’d back in a fight…). We wanted the $99 iPhone. We shook our heads over Pete Doherty’s latest arrest in Geneva. (Remember that time he was arrested twice in one day?!) We wondered if Brad Pritt is Quentin Tarantino’s new Uma, and if so, what his feet look like. We were scared of the zombies invading Governors Island until we found out that they were art. And finally, we were elated that ASSME pointed out that Spy‘s been making a comeback. We were about 10 years late to pile of the issues that we’ve read, but that didn’t make them any less hilarious. How many magazines have that kind of shelf life?
Back in 1977, New York was a city in twain, with equal amounts of kvelling (Downtowners: The drugs and poverty!) and kvetching (Uptowners: The drugs and poverty!). For those of us born after those heady and heterodox times, cultural historian Luc Sante describes the scene in his phenomenal essay, “My Lost City”:
“Aside from the high-intensity blocks of Midtown and the financial district, the place seemed to be inhabited principally by slouchers and loungers, loose-joints vendors and teenage hustlers, panhandlers and site-specific drunks, persons whose fleabags put them out on the street at eight and only permitted reentry at six.”
Alongside this less-than-desired demographic and the ashes from downtown’s rampant arson (“By 1980 Avenue C was a lunar landscape of vacant blocks and hollow tenement shells”) bloomed the No Wave cinema (and its famed, same-named sonic analog), a fiercely independent movement that was Beat-ific in a dual sense — its swashbuckling bliss and its Kerouacian belief that “everything belongs to me because I am poor.” Read More »
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