One of the many delightful things about the world of John le Carré’s fiction is that his superspies often resemble the nattering members of some great English department. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, for example, is mainly about a tubby and washed-up former spy who learns a great deal about the secret service by reading old files in the Hotel Islay. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, this approach was a conscious reaction to the fictional offerings of Ian Fleming; John le Carré wouldn’t be caught dead in a trick tuxedo, and neither would George Smiley.

Twenty years ago, Debra Ehrhardt left Jamaica for Miami with a pocketful of dreams and a bag full of smuggled currency. Though she is leery of putting an exact number on it—federal agencies tend to bristle at currency trafficking—Ehrhardt says the sum, in dollars, ran to seven digits. That journey, like so much of Ehrhardt’s life, often sounded like something out of a movie. Soon, it will be.

Over the last couple of years, Boston roots-folk act The David Wax Museum has been a mainstay at group houses across Northwest. These house concerts afforded lodging and modest merch sales for Wax and Suz Slezak, his fiddle- and jawbone-playing compatriot. The parties, here and elsewhere, also consolidated a growing fan base that would elect the [...]

Steve Carrell's judicious and graceful exit from The Office after seven seasons has prompted nostalgic YouTube medleys, a RENT take-off, and at least one really baffling article by the very interesting Bill Wyman. (Witness this relatively recent home run, in which the writer who has the same name as the bassist of the Stones impersonates [...]

The new script for Imagining Madoff has many of the things that were present the first time Theater J planned its staging. Talmudic excerpts. Meditations on the New York Mets. Lapidary dialogue verging on poetry. And a hauntingly wrought Madoff character, a notorious but little-known villain through whom playwright Deb Margolin delivers a portrait of [...]

[Ed. note: Thanks to the legal team of Elie Wiesel, our critic was unable to attend Imagining Madoff on 16th street as previously planned. Instead, he had to hoof it to Hudson, N.Y.]
Deb Margolin's button-pushing character study of Bernie Madoff never got a chance to open Theater J's 2010-11 season, but a modified version of [...]

J. Roddy Walston & The Business
Fairfax/Vagrant
J. Roddy Walston is from Tennessee, but he and his band, The Business, split time between Baltimore and Richmond. They also split time between tiresome arena bombast and infectious, smirking boogie-woogie. The group's self-titled record—its first on a label; 2007's Hail Mega Boys was a self-release—comes out today and does [...]

As of Friday, I’m leaving City Paper to enter a doctoral program at UNC Chapel Hill. It’ll be a lot like working here, except the dick jokes are fancier.
I’m going to miss covering baseball-bat crime; waxing pedantic about bad drivers; conducting opaque interviews with Zachary Mason and Van Morrison; reporting on Elie Wiesel's undue influence [...]

Dryads mid-frolic at the All Good Festival; photograph by Annie Galvin

Noodling, n. ~ [noodle, v. int.; nood-ler, n.; var. nüdl] ~ Affectionate if deprecating slang for the solitary gyrations favored by blissed-out attendees at jam-band concerts.
Bag-checks and responsible alcohol regulations have become more and more standard at the major festivals. An innocuous glass dealer at Bonnaroo, earlier this year, had $4,500 worth of pipes and [...]