Sasha Frere Jones has a problem...and NY Mag has a problem with how he's going about solving it. The New Yorker music critic's files, photos and memories have been imprisoned by the evil LaCie 1TB, and the bail is a hefty $5K. He explains on his blog: Several years' worth of photos I took with my Canon PowerShot S400—every photo taken between October 2003 and December 2005—are trapped inside a LaCie 1 TB enclosure......

New Yorkers rate their critics in this weeks Time Out New York issue. The somewhat figure skating like rating system was based on "K=Knowledge S=Style T=Taste A=Accessibility I=Influence AVG=Average score". Some of the winners: • Sasha Frere-Jones took first place in music criticism for his work in the The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Village Voice and others. We like his blog, too. • Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice took the gold......

The New Yorker Festival is two weeks away, but there are still tickets available to some of the events:Friday, October 6: Fiction Night Monica Ali and Aleksandar Hemon 7 p.m. Ailey Citigroup Theatre 405 West 55th Street Antonya Nelson and Thomas McGuane 7 p.m. Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Avenue Andrea Lee and T. Coraghessan Boyle 9:30 p.m. Cedar Lake Dance Studios 547 West 26th Street A NewYorker Dance Party, hosted by Sasha Frere-Jones, with......

While clicking around some of the blogs we check daily, we noticed a link to an article in the Guardian on the Modern Age. The article is about blogs, bloggers, music bloggers and if anyone really knows what they're talking about. A new word is made up to describe their own made up language, Blog-lish. But even the biggest fan of wordplay can come unstuck when written English turns into - here's an excuse to......

Last night, a man was shot outside of Hot 97. This would be scary in most cases, but the interesting thing is that the victim is a part of 50 Cent's entourage, and this happened while the rapper, who was famously shot multiple times and lived to tell and get rich, was inside. Now, the police are not sure if there is a connection between the shooting and 50 Cent, but 50 Cent was making......

Very cool article in the NY Times today about the Gotham typeface, which was inspired by simple sans-serif types seen everywhere in the city, and the young typeface was chosed for the cornerstone for the World Trade Center. It was developed by Tobias Frere-Jones at Hoefler Type Foundry, who didn't even know that the typeface had been used for the cornerstone until getting an email from a client and then seeing pictures of it on......

Gothamist is catching up on music lately. After the "illegality" of the work fuss, Gothamist downloaded DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, the illegal bastard child of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. Who knows what will happen, but our verdict, like many others', is that it's awesome. Download it from Illegal Art. In the legal music corner, we're finally getting around to listening to Dizzee Rascal's Boy In Da Corner, which is also......

Music critic Sasha Frere–Jones gives a rounduop of the best music DVDs and box sets for Slate. He mentioned Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime, Tenacious D's The Complete Masterworks, a DVD from German band Can, a Sun Ra film called "Space is The Place," and the Coldplay Live DVD, but the DVDs we're most interested in are the Directors Label collections of music videos from Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry. Michel Gondry's......

I love the Neptunes and N.E.R.D., and they do have a very hot sound, but the over-Pharell-ization of music today makes things a bit...boring? The Neptunes are the hottest producers these days, but case in point: Beautiful, Snoop Dogg's new song with Pharell Williams (the most visible member of The Neptunes/N.E.R.D.). It's tight and sexy but it gets predictable. This quote by Sasha Frere-Jones in the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop ('Tune versus Tim, as......