Since we’re devoting our Hot Tickets feature tomorrow to highlighting next week’s CMJ craziness, we thought we’d let you know now that Yo La Tengo have confirmed their intentions to once again blow the roof of your Hanukkah (or whatever) celebrations this year. Every December, Ira, Georgia, and James play eight consecutive nights at Maxwell’s in Hoboken in honor of the Jewish holiday. Sometimes writers like Sarah Vowell show up, or comedians like the Daily Show’s John Oliver. And there’s always a slew of musical guests. (See yolatengo.com for pictures of last year’s festivities.)  Though as Yo La Tengo states in a long letter posted to  read more »

Looking for something to read during your lunch hour? Check out Esquire's recent profile about our favorite enfant terrible, director Paul Thomas Anderson. The article, which appeared in the print edition of the magazine last month, finally popped online within the last week, and since we don't know anyone who actually buys Esquire, we're guessing you haven't seen it, either.

There isn't really a whole lot of new ground traversed in the piece, as the only people interviewed are former high school friends and acquaintances of Mr. Anderson, who haven't heard from the director in years. Needless to say, their judgment about the man might be a little slanted.  read more »

Don Draper is every Park Slope mom’s fantasy,” said Paula Bernstein, a 40-year-old author who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a video editor, and their two children. “The fact that he is so emotionally withholding and mysterious is frustrating, but women are intrigued by men like that, and as much as they say they want a sensitive guy who’s going to let it all hang out, there is an appeal to a man with secrets.”

Ms. Bernstein was speaking about the darkly compelling protagonist of Matthew Weiner’s 1960s advertising drama Mad Men, which airs every Sunday on AMC, transporting scores of New York women into a haze of longing for an era they never knew and a type of man to whom they definitely aren’t married.  read more »

Matthew Perry alert! Showtime announced that they've picked up the pilot for Mr. Perry's new series, The End of Steve, from Rescue Me creator Peter Tolan. On the show, which is described ominously as a "dark comedy", Mr. Perry will star as a talk show host in Rochester, New York trying to put both his professional and personal life back together. Sounds pretty good!

Of course this isn't actually news, since the network ordered the series in the spring and was set to face a "significant penalty" if the pilot wasn't picked up. But who cares! Any excuse we have to extol the virtues of our favorite Friend is an opportunity we'll take.

Q: For years now, shows like Meet the Press have been broadcasting clips of an SNL sketch, a spoof of political reality, to have a conversation with their audience about the actual political reality. How are you getting to the core ingredients of what’s going on in a way that people like Tom Brokaw can’t seem to articulate?

A: I think they’d like to make sarcastic comments about candidates, but their role as news people prevents that, so I think showing our clips permits them to let us make the point.

I think it would be awkward for even some of the people on cable to be as out-and-out mocking as we can be, and I also think it sort of makes their shows more entertaining—they can do it for free.  read more »

Just a day after eviscerating Starz and their new dramatic series Crash, we might need to ready an apology. Variety reports that the network will be teaming with Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas to create Party Down, a new half-hour comedy series set to appear during the first quarter of 2009. And it actually sounds pretty good!

Down is about a group of six Los Angeles caterers who are starting to realize that their dreams of stardom have gone by the wayside. In the press release, Mr. Thomas compares his show to the BBC version of The Office, heady expectations to be sure; from reading the description, a better comparison might be Extras.  read more »

On the night of Monday, October 13, Oliver Stone was being chauffeured around downtown Manhattan, looking for the dinner party he was running late for, and talking about what the subject of his new film, W., has in common with the Wizard of Oz. Connecting W., which examines and chronicles the life of George W. Bush leading up to and including his presidency, to the 1939 Judy Garland flying-monkeys extravaganza might not seem all that intuitive. But in conversation about his latest subject, Mr. Stone was drawn back again and again to the moment that Dorothy discovers that the great and most powerful wizard was
really just an ordinary man, hiding behind a curtain, desperately pressing buttons and pulling levers to keep up the illusion of his control.  read more »

Last month, Paul “Magic Man” Malignaggi vacated the International Boxing Federation junior welterweight champion title, which he’s held for the past year and successfully defended three times, so that he may fight the welterweight world champ, the great pug-faced hope of Britain, Ricky “The Hitman” Hatton. Nov. 22, MGM Grand, HBO. A seven-figure payday. He’s arrived.

Only Little Paulie doesn’t see that way. He wants the world to know his name.

Mr. Malignaggi, 27, has come a long way from throwing dice and cutting class at New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst—starting with a pair of Golden Gloves in ’98—but the fact that everyone from back in the day had bet on him losing still weighs on him something awful.  read more »

The Hartford Courant's Roger Catlin got a press release touting HBO's 19-disc box set for its critically-acclaimed series Deadwood.

According to Mr. Catlin, it will sell for $179.97, which would be pretty steep even if people weren't about to start boiling their boots for soup, but the 36-hour disc contains something fans have been desperately waiting for: An end to the series. (Then again, it's a heckuva lot cheaper than HBO's Sopranos box which retails for $399.99. And we all know how frustratingly that series en—)

Writes Mr. Catlin:

Among its two hours of bonus materials is something called "The Meaning of Endings" described as "creator David Milch's discussion on what would have happened had the 'Deadwood' series continued'  read more »

Stereogum is right—a "Love Lockdown"/"Reckoner" mash-up was "inevitable." But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth five minutes of your time, particularly considering it’s both an audio mash-up (courtesy of DJ Earworm) and a video mash-up (courtesy of Instamatic). Furthermore, the original Radiohead video actually isn’t by Radiohead at all. It’s by Frenchman Clemont Picon—the a winner of a contest hosted by Aniboom (the YouTube of the animation world) to select the best animated vidoes for a handful of In Rainbows tracks, including “Reckoner.” Thom and Co. liked Picon’s clip so much they decided to make it the official one.

All in all, though, the video splice is a bit of let down.  read more »