J. C. Gabel
IT IS FITTING THAT BRUCE ADAMS’S NEW BOOK, the sardonically titled You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music, begins at Jim’s Grill on the North Side: it was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for this new band, the Smashing Pumpkins, who were regular customers of Bill Choi’s Korean-inspired restaurant when they were first starting out. 
In a recent T: The New York Times Style Magazine story extolling the virtues of boxing films (classic and contemporary), Benjamin Nugent points out that every example of the genre involves a comeback, against all odds. The protagonist pulls off an upset victory in the ring and lives to fight another day. 
“I was under the tragic spell of the South, which either you’ve felt or you haven’t,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in “Mr. Lytle: An Essay,” from his new collection, Pulphead. “In my case,” he continues, “it was acute because, having grown up in Indiana with a Yankee father, a child exile from Kentucky roots of which I was overly proud, I’d long been aware of a faint nowhereness to my life.” With so many books about Andy Warhol already in print, one can reasonably ask why yet another should make its appearance now. What more can really be said about a man—and a mythos—that all but defined modern-day media culture? From the early assembly-line silk screens of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor through the manufactured celebrity of latter-day It Girl Edie Sedgwick to the machinations behind the partnership with proto-punk darlings the Velvet Underground—all these stories have been told so frequently that it’s difficult to distinguish truth from fairy tale.