Courtesy VICE Books

From Neu Sex

Sasha Grey is one of the most famous porn stars of our generation, and perhaps the first to achieve true crossover success, with starring roles in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and HBO's Entourage. You probably know her by name, face, and maybe even vagina (no judgments), but did you know that she's also a music nerd? Be still our hearts.

With a minimal/electronic project called aTelecine and an ever-growing music collection, Grey shows an impressive range for someone so young-and especially for someone involved in the adult industry. She's currently promoting her brand-new photo book, Neü Sex, which documents her recent life in self portraits: From post-coital stupors to silly faces snapped in mirrors, the book is an intimate look at what it's like to be Sasha Grey, as well as what it's like to be her husband, filmmaker Ian Cinnamon, who helped create many of the photos.

This past Monday at the Standard Hotel's Living Room, in a strictly enforced 20-minute time slot squashed between seven other journalists eager to discuss the book, we took advantage of Neü Sex's release to talk with Grey about rock-and-roll, aTelecine, and the pervasive abuse of Auto-Tune. Cinnamon hung out nearby, as he often does.

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​The four tracks that already leaked from The Most Anticipated Album Drop of the Third-Quarter of 2010 -- the Arcade Fire's The Suburbs -- have been met with mostly unmitigated, exuberant joy (also matched by the city at-large, who got an extra MSG date added recently). There's the waning folk desperation of title track "The Suburbs," the driving punk mumbles of "Month of May," the Supertramp-descendant wide-lensing of "We Used to Wait," and the charging-anthem drama of "Ready to Start" (all of which you can find here).

If that wasn't enough for you -- and for many, it's not -- floating around now is a live bootleg of an Arcade Fire show from earlier this month in Quebec, where the band debuted eight new songs, which include four of the ones you already know. And these are the other four:

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photo by Cary Conover

Stephin Merritt with David Greenspan during the cocktail hour

On Monday night, the SOTC triumverate had the unique pleasure of eating hor d'oeuvres and standing awkwardly beside sardonic anti-hero songwriter Stephin Merritt during the cocktail hour of our paper's 55th Annual Off-Broadway Awards. Later that night, Stephin Merritt took the Webster Hall stage to accept an OBIE for his musical contributions to the David Greenspan project Coraline. "I guess I'm going to go home and put this on my mantel," Merritt said when accepting his Obie. "Do people here have mantels?"

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Hole
Terminal 5
Tuesday, April 27

"Courtney Love is scary," is how the first Village Voice piece about Hole and its "genre-defying," Kim-Gordon-produced triumph Pretty on the Inside began. Published February 1992, this was the month after Nirvana's epochal Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson's pervy-eyed funhouse-romper Dangerous on the Billboard charts, but before Love gave birth to Frances Bean or famously lost her husband. Eighteen years and many public catastrophies later, who would dispute this prophecy? Well, everybody at Terminal 5 last night.

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Craig Hlavaty

"SXSW Attendee Doesn't Want That Free Beer"

1. "Random Guy With Guitar On Street Signed To Major Record Label"

2. "AT&T Makes Up For Past SXSW Coverage With Zero Dropped Calls, Lightning-Fast Connection"

3. "Wristband Holders Have Nothing But Love And Respect For Badge Holders"

4. "Acquaintance Who Says, 'Sorry I Missed Your Show' Actually Means It"

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Nice matching hats, dudes.