I had my own run-in with Time Out New York editor-in-chief Brian Farnham. But it appears that there may be additional problems within the Time Out empire. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Time Out Chicago Editor-in-Chief Joel Reese has been fired for “violating a company policy.” There’s no word yet on what specific company policy provision was violated. And not even TOC Marketing Director Tony Barnett knows, or, at least, he’s not willing to reveal what happened to the press.
This abrupt sacking — Reese was only on the job five months — comes hot on the heels of TOC losing art director Bryan Erickson to his original employer, Blackbook. The official spin, according to Barnett in another piece, is that Bryan “misses New York and wishes to return there.” Although there were possibly other motivations at work here. The Sun-Times reports that Reese and Erickson clashed and that the latter left because he “could not execute his vision for the magazine’s art direction.”
It is also worth noting that former TOC publisher Steve Timble was ousted in September 2006 based on a “mutual understanding.”
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (