Posts by Hank Stuever
Oh, to be able to sing like John Grant
The other night I went to the Black Cat to hear John Grant, who was the opening act for Midlake. Grant is a singer-songwriter who used to be in one of my favorite bands, the Czars. (I still recommend the Czars’ The Ugly People vs. the Beautiful People to anyone who ever asks what I…
Read MoreFreaky Friday
After the photo of the president’s line-editing style, now we get to go with him to Prairie Lights, the awesome bookstore next to the University of Iowa. This photo was on the front of the NYT today. This is what I like to do in bookstores, too: make fun of books that I think look…
Read MoreEditor in Chief
I was struck by this picture I saw on the New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog, which they found on the White House’s Flickr photo account. Those are the president’s hands. That’s his health-care bill signing speech. [UPDATE: A couple of commenters here have said it isn’t Tuesday’s speech; I was going by some of the…
Read MoreSNL Homowatch: 3/13 (Jude Law)
This is SNL Homowatch, where I track the number of haha-that’s-GAY jokes that the writers at Saturday Night Live deliver each week on their forlorn (for Lorne? haha) march toward 1 a.m. I laid (haha x 2) my mission statement out for this project in last week’s inaugural edition, including a “lighten up, Hank, why…
Read MoreOne-Man Book Club: The Room, the Chair, the Gadgets, the Bankers, and Bruddah Dan Kois takes us over Iz’s rainbow
Where were we? The one-man book club (which shall now be written as One-Man Book Club, after a unanimously ratified amendment to the One-Man Stylebook) is adrift. Members keep offering excuses: “I have too many TV reviews to write.” “I’m too goddamn tired.” “I feel too fat to blog.” “I would rather drink a little…
Read MoreTuxedo pants
It’s Oscar night again. For the first time in a long time, I’m not in Hollywood, sweating east-coast newspaper deadlines on a west-coast story and then medicating the adrenalin crash with alcohol once I stagger into the afterparties. (See above, courtesy vanityfair.com.) Right about now (11:30 a.m. PST), I’d be putting on my tuxedo for…
Read MoreOne-man book club: Can we reschedule?
Every member of the one-man book club has to review tonight’s Oscar broadcast on a serious deadline. We’ll reconvene asap.
Read MoreSNL Homowatch: 3/6 (Zach Galifianakis)
For years I’ve been vaguely (in a teensy way) bothered by Saturday Night Live’s complete dependence on sketches that make fun of being gay. I don’t know exactly why. I’ve written a little about this before — “enlightened homophobia,” which is probably socially harmless (as is most televsion, really) but nevertheless irritates me. In the…
Read MoreOne-man book club: Bring out your dead
It’s one-man book club week here in Tonsil-land, where I say all the things I would say if I was in a book club (and the selections were all up to me). Monday and Tuesday I blogged about seven books. But today is the dark-interlude portion of the one-man book club meeting, where a moment…
Read MoreOne-man book club, continued: Pyschos, romances, Anne Frank, Nick Hornby, my wine, and the Welches’ juice
We continue today with More Things I Would Have Said if I Was Actually in a Book Club (and If The Club Chose Books That Were Exactly the Books I Want to Read) … By now I’d be a little drunk on the very excellent wine we serve at my book club. It appears I’m…
Read More