This week’s respondent is author, critic, and curator Vince Aletti, who before making photography his beat, was the longtime music critic at the Village Voice. Although I often see Vince at media previews of photography shows, my favorite place to run into him is on the second floor of the Strand Bookstore where, quickly riffling through bins of catalogues and magazines, he appears to be mentally curating a new exhibition.

Left: Portrait of Vince Aletti by Gary Schneider, courtesy the artist. Right: installation view of "Male," curated by Vince Aletti, Maureen Paley, London, September 2010, courtesy the gallery.

Q: What you like most about being creative
A: If we put "creative" in quotes, getting up late and working at home

Q: Your best quality
A: Decisiveness

Q: Your main fault
A: Procrastination

Q: The natural talent you wish you had
A: The ability to sing or draw beautifully and effortlessly

Q: If not yourself, who you would be
A: Smokey Robinson before he left the Miracles

Q: What you would change about your appearance
A: I'd like to be as slim as I was in my thirties and a shade darker

Q: The qualities you most appreciate in a partner
A: Patience, strength, playfulness, curiosity, sensuality, and unlimited independent wealth

Q: The qualities you most appreciate in a friend
A: Humor, intelligence, and forgiveness

Q: What makes you happy
A: So many things: spring, summer, cheeseburgers (medium rare), used bookstores, dinner with friends, reading in bed, and the moment the lights go down in a movie house and the film begins

Q: What makes you miserable
A: Illness, even the most common cold, and other people's ignorance

Q: What you would do on a midweek day off
A: Stay in bed reading until 11, go to White Columns, my favorite magazine store on Hudson Street, and a late-afternoon movie

Q: Your most admired living people
A: Barak Obama, Fazal Sheik, Pedro Almodovar

Q: The first art or photo book you bought, and where
A: I'd like to think it was the Grove Press paperback of The Americans at the old 8th Street Bookshop but it was probably one of those Pocket Library editions of Raoul Dufy at a museum bookshop when I was 9

Q: Your favorite writers
A: Jean Genet, Carson McCullers, James Purdy, Muriel Spark, Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz

Q: Your favorite New York neighborhood
A: The Village between Broadway and Sixth Avenue and 12th and 9th Streets and Soho in the '70s

Q: Your favorite food and drink
A: Pasta, a caprese salad, and a Coke

Q: What you are listening to now
A: Drake, Rihanna, Interpol, Kanye

Q: Your greatest regret
A: Not writing more and not going out dancing more in the '70s

Q: Your greatest hope
A: To fall in love and avoid the hospital

Q: How you would prefer to die
A: Never. But if I must, after a midnight snack in my sleep

Q: Your favorite motto
A: Get over it

Click for more about the Proust Questionnaire.

Vince Aletti reviews photography exhibitions for the New Yorker's "Goings on About Town" section and writes a regular column about photo books for Photograph. He is the winner of the 2005 Infinity Award in writing from the International Center of Photography, where he was an adjunct curator for the museum's 2009 "Year of Fashion," including "Avedon Fashion 1944-2000" and "Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now." "Male," a book of photographs from Aletti’s collection, was published by Andrew Roth's PPP Editions at the end of 2008, following exhibitions of that work at New York's White Columns and Vancouver's Presentation House. "The Disco Files 1973-1978," a collection of Aletti's weekly columns on disco, was published in spring 2009 by DJhistory in the UK.