Book of the year?

A few days ago I bought Vince Aletti's The Disco Files 1973-78 at St. Marks Bookshop. It's a collection of the columns Aletti (now the photography reviewer at The New Yorker) wrote for Record World magazine in the 1970s.

If you love classic disco, as I do, this is a goldmine. There's no benefit of hindsight here, and Aletti's taste is spot-on — anybody who can gush about Peter Brown's "Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me" and Claudja Barry automatically gets my everlasting admiration. I've been spending way too much time tracking down some of the songs I didn't know and that he particularly gushes about, and so far it's been one nugget after another. Undisputed Truth's "You + Me = Love"? Amazing! This is what YouTube was invented for. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Turning the tables on David Denby

My trashing of David Denby's Snark is in this week's Time Out New York.

Don't let the following prevent you from jumping to the full review, of course, but in brief: The New Yorker's film critic arrives five years late to the snark party, bearing flat, store-brand soda and stale potato chips. Fun!