Tomorrow: Tad Friend at Kelly Writers House

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Tomorrow: Tad Friend at Kelly Writers House

POSTED: Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 9:41 PM

Ever have a writer's crush? You blush a little bit every time see their byline and picture a beautiful idealized version of them when you read their prose.

I've got the hardcore hots for New Yorker writer Tad Friend, who focuses on the entertainment industry and often writes their Letters from California. Friend's writing is funny and high-minded without being pretentious. He's one of the few New Yorker writers that can cover supposedly low culture without condescending to it. His piece about suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge also inspired the Sleater-Kinney song "Jumpers" and the excellently haunting doc, The Bridge. Is it hot in here or is it just Tad?

Friend will be at the Kelly Writers House tomorrow, Wednesday, January 20, most likely pimping his memoir Cheerful Money: Me, My Family and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, and on WHYY's Radio Times tomorrow morning at 11 a.m.

Got some time on your hands? Read Friend's piece on Nikki Finke, blog goddess/Wicked Witch of the West Coast (depending on your perspective), who runs Deadline Hollywood Daily:

A combination town crier and volcano god, Finke evokes in her readers both anxiety and respect. One top studio executive says, "Nikki's blog you have to check, and the others you have to delete from your in-box. She's very, very, very accurate, extraordinarily so—you have a supposedly private conversation with two other people, and it's on her site within an hour." She usually posts five to ten stories a day, some of them just press releases or minutiae about elections at the Writers Guild, but many of them transfixing: anonymously sourced accounts of clandestine negotiations; photos of newly fired executives with red X's slapped across them (after she'd broken the news of their impending demise); boasts of "TOLDJA!" when something happens that she predicted, or, anyway, half predicted; and helpful career advice ("Stick it where the sun don't shine, you asswipe," she recently counselled a CBS publicist).

Tad Friend, 6 p.m., free, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, 215-746-POEM

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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