In the TV business, you sort of expect executives to pad their expense accounts, use station employees to run personal errands, and even do personal work for profit on company time and equipment. But it's a little different when taxpayers foot the bill. Tom Robbins lays out how the city's broadcast station, NYC-TV, became such a notorious money pit it had to be investigated by the DOI.

What Bloomsbury was to Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E.M. Forster, is Wesleyan University to MGMT, Boy Crisis, and Amazing Baby? Well, a connected filmmaker says, "When somebody moves up a rung, they reach a hand down to the next guy." Oh, so it's definitely not like Bloomsbury. Still, Cristina Black has a go.

Oh no, mumblecore! Calm down; Beeswax, says J. Hoberman, is "an artfully served slice of life."

Gino Cammarata has been lugging his gelato machine around for decades -- and "wherever Gino and that machine go, his followers scamper behind, seeking out what is considered the best gelato in the city," says Sarah DiGregorio. He's now at Piattini at Fourth and Marine Avenue in Bay Ridge, where she interviews him.

"Is Janet the Most Annoying Jackson?" asks Michael Musto. Well, it ain't Tito. This comes up in his interview with monologuist Nancy Giles (Things My Afro Taught Me). He also talks to Eliot Tiber, Demetri Martin, Mamie Gummer and others from Taking Woodstock.

A new Thomas Pynchon novel? Called Inherent Vice? Starring "a dope-smoking, softboiled, Hawaiian shirt -wearing private eye" and with characters named El Drano, Sledge Poteet, and Bigfoot Bjornsen? It sounds like the Firesign Theater, but tell us more, Zach Baron.

The longer obit Deborah Jowitt promised last week for Merce Cunningham.

Also:

Music: Mike Powell on Steely Dan, Rob Tannenbaum on Grace Jones, Vijith Assar on Anamanaguchi.

Film: Robert Wilonsky on Julie & Julia and Paper Heart, Nick Pinkerton on The '70s Buried Treasures at Anthology and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, J. Hoberman on Brit Noir, Anthony Kaufman on Cold Souls, Jim Ridley on Canary, Nicolas Rapold on I Sell The Dead, Tim Grierson on A Perfect Getaway, Melissa Anderson on Bliss.

Theater: Alexis Soloski on The Bacchae (Akalitis at the Public), Jacob Gallagher-Ross on Summer Shorts 3: Series A, Eric Grode on Wildflower.

Dining: Robert Sietsema on Liman in Sheepshead Bay.

Art: Alan Gilbert on art-golfcourses The Putting Lot and City of Dreams Mini Golf.

Ask a Mexican, Savage Love, Free Will Astrology, Letters, and all.