Quick Clicks

Five novels to kill any remaining fantasies you had about the Big Apple.

The indie kid’s guide to classical music. You know. For like, hipster infants.

Slate posts some recession confessions. God forbid we should sacrifice shopping for fun.

Buy some panties, save Darfur. Ridic.

Apparently Starbucks is back in. It’s my fault guys, I had a latte there yesterday. My B.

The surprise ending to that Orphan movie has been revealed. How. Why. Oh my god. It’s SO absurd.

Death Match, Sans Claymation

The Guardian has an article up about the recent literary death match held in the UK. Opium magazine holds these all over the country and now in Europe. Pairs of writers read their work back to back and are judged by a panel. The final round has winners from previous rounds performing non-literary feats and playing games for the final victory. The next death match will be here in NYC on Thursday, July 30 at the Bowery Poetry Club. Who wants to go with me?

Eat Me

SlashFilm has some gorgeous new pictures from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland up. I still haven’t seen any photos or renderings of Alan Rickman (swoon) as the Caterpillar. But I read somewhere that it might be/is his head on an animated or CGI caterpillar body. Torso. Whatever. I’m not up on my caterpillar anatomy…. torso?

His Name Was Robert Paulson

Initially this story didn’t really grab my attention (sorry comment on the state of the world, eh?) but, as with so many things, a bizarre tie-in to writing and literature drew me in.

On May 25, a teenager set off a mostly harmless homemade bomb in a Starbucks on 92nd Street. They recently arrested the kid, and when they did so they found out a score of unsettling details, most notably, that he was basically trying to incite chaos à la Project Mayhem. That’s right. The bomber was a huge fan of Fight Club. He actually had a copy of the film on him at the time of his arrest. Unreal.

The book– and to an even greater extent, the film– certainly makes destruction look glamorous at times. Think of the final scene of David Fincher’s film: the buildings tumble to the ground and Jack and Marla hold hands while the Pixies shimmer and squall in the background. But what one commenter on Gawker pointed out remains true: the film as a whole does not stand behind the idea of chaos and bringing down the world order. Sure, it makes some incredible points about the siren song of consumerism, the soul-hollowing potential of corporate life, the negative consequences of the sublimation of instinct and selfhood… I could go on and on. But it ultimately rejects the notion that the way to go about combating these things is to fuck with the man. The answer that Jack’s character was looking for did not and could not come through external manifestations of revolution; it had to happen internally. He has to pull the trigger on the gun in his mouth (killing his split personality). It reminds me of Beckett or Dante’s Belacqua.