Someone Give This Skater a MacArthur Grant

It’s all well and good when the MacArthur “Genuis” Grants go to musicians, mathematicians, and authors. But I also love the outliers, like paper historian Timothy Barrett or stone carver Nicholas Benson. I hope 2012′s grantee class includes Kilian Martin, who is re-imagining what can be done with a humble skateboard. After watching this short video I thought of Michael Jackson’s dance moves, Tauba Auerbach’s typographic painting, and Merce Cunningham’s choreography. Whatever the difference between performance art, modern dance, gymnastics, and the athleticism of skateboarding, Kilian Martin is right on top of it.

The Untrammeled Excellence of Birthday Bellflower

Yesterday my excellent, excellent friends surprised me with a birthday party at Nitehawk Cinema, where they’d rented out a theatre for a private viewing of Bellflower.  There’s nothing quite like watching apocalyptic, car-fueled menace while eating a cheeseburger and doing shots of bourbon.

If you haven’t seen the film, do so immediately. It’s a bit of Mad Max, a bit of Judd Apatow, and a bit of drunkenly punching yourself in the face. And flame throwers!

Also, no birthday would be complete without a brief tribute to Hugh Grant, whose framed portrait inexplicably occupies Nitehawk’s basement bar.

If you’d like to buy me a birthday drink, you can do so tonight at Lolita. I’ll be DJ’ing with Jason Diamond and ringing in my 30th in a drinking establishment named after an old man’s obsession with a teenager. Fun!

So, I’m DJ’ing Again

In an earlier life, back when Pluto was still a planet, I DJ’ed around New York. Then I started working in publishing and realized books are cooler than dubstep. (Not much cooler,  mind you.)

But! I’m unearthing my crates of vinyl* for a new venture with friend and impresario Jason Diamond: The Mingle. Join us at Lolita Bar on May 30th for some cheap drinks, good music, and a good-looking crowd of STD-free revelers.

*Not really. I use Traktor on my MacBook. Vinyl’s too heavy.

Christopher Wool on Word and Image

Just auctioned for $4M.

Christopher Wool is one of my favorite artists, living or dead. And so on the occasion of one of his paintings selling for $4M, I thought I’d post selections from a 2008 conversation he conducted with Richard Hell and Glenn O’Brien:

Christopher Wool: With Jean-Michel or Picasso, the fact that they could do it so easily is what makes the work, in the end, so great. They had absolute fearlessness. If you’re not fearless about changes, then you won’t progress.

Glenn O’Brien: Richard, did you know Christopher’s work before he asked permission to use your words?

Richard Hell: I didn’t really know it. It’s funny, when I first saw his stuff, I was kind of aghast. When I first saw his word paintings, I thought: I can’t believe what they’re getting away with these days. [laughs] But I grew to really, really love them, and all of his stuff. It’s really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially-to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years. That’s happened to me with a lot of artists, more so than other media, and it’s part of what makes art so interesting.

7x20x21 at BEA 2012

My co-curator Ami Greko and I are thrilled to announce the lineup for this year’s 7x20x21 panel at BookExpo America.

• Nate Silver, creator of FiveThirtyEight.com (a recent Webby Award winner) and author of the forthcoming book The Signal and The Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t  (Penguin Press, September).
• Robin Sloan, the writer and media inventor behind @robinsloan, Fish: A Tap Essay, and the novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October).
• Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life (Henry Holt, June), interviews editor at The Believer, and co-author of The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City.
• D.T. Max, author of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (Viking, August) and a staff writer for The New Yorker.
• Jason Booher, book designer
• Dan Wilbur, creator of Better Book Titles.

What Is 7x20x21?

A Quick World Book Night Story

Someone told me a few years back that my zip code, 11215, has the most writers per capita in the U.S. (I assume this is determined by how many people list “writing” as primary occupation on their taxes.)

So when I registered as a giver for World Book Night, knowing the goal was to distribute free books to  people in one’s community who for whatever reason haven’t read one in a while (if ever), I assumed south Park Slope was probably not the best location.

A Bit of Job News

I’m very happy to report I’m joining The Penguin Press as Marketing Director on April 23rd.

For anyone who’s had to suffer through happy hour with me the last couple years, you know how much I enjoy working at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. And it’s been great producing Work in Progress and coordinating campaigns with authors like John Jeremiah Sullivan, Amy Waldman, Jonathan Franzen, and Jeffrey Eugenides.

So this news is a bit of “onward and upward.” Penguin Press has a great list of authors (*cough* Zadie Smith Clay Shirky Nate Silver Thomas Pynchon *cough*) and a truly impressive roster of editors and publicists. I’m looking forward to painting with a bigger brush, as it were, and launching some nonfiction-driven pilot projects. If you see me at happy hour in the next few weeks, I apologize in advance for my nerdy enthusiasm. (And be sure to keep an eye out for some big Penguin Press news in the next month or two.)

Finally: next Tuesday’s Nerd Jeopardy will serve as my unofficial FSG goodbye party. Come on down to McNally Jackson, drink some wine, answer some literary trivia, and be sure to follow us to Botanica for the afterparty.