photo by Sharokh Mirzai  

Self vs. Author

by CASS DAUBENSPECK

Tao Lin stays awake in his apartment 2-3 days at a time, taking small walks outside to buy expensive vegan snacks while high on Adderall and Xanax. When I visited him at his studio apartment in Kips Bay, I liked the feeling that everything inside his space was there because it had once been brought in by someone else, for an unknown purpose (a kiddie pool, overturned in the kitchen – a kite, broken in a pile on the floor) not because it had passed a test before being admitted. I liked the feeling that nothing had been scrutinized after it was used, then rendered useless and thrown away. I liked the feeling that Tao did not give a shit about the mess. Or about how anyone perceived life inside his house.

I have a secret sympathy for the misanthrope. I get the hoarder. I understand the mad desire to hold on to every piece of accumulated material, to stay alone all day in a cool, dark apartment among one’s things. So I have always had benign feelings of admiration for writers like Tao Lin. I recognize the safety of indoors, and the fear of losing something precious simply because one deigned to enter the world beyond social media.

photo by Sharokh Mirzai

When I first introduced myself to Tao Lin, I was 21 years old and still using Hotmail. I’d read one of his stories and e-mailed him to tell him I liked it. “I don’t have many friends,” he had said. “I don’t like being around more than one person at a time, usually. Or I don’t like people that much generally. I don’t know.”

For six years I “got to know” Tao through the internet, through emails and gchats, and then a week ago, I went over to meet him. He asked me to come around 4 p.m., a little after he woke up. When I arrived the door was propped open and he was sitting at a rectangular desk in the small studio. There were no lights on, except for the gooseneck lamp clamped to the mirror in the bathroom, emitting an eerie reddish glow on the doorway, and the melting shadow of sunlight coming in through the apartment’s only window.

photo by Sharokh Mirzai

The room was crammed with broken things: lamps, piles of hangers, old clothes, huge blankets, and what looked like a collapsed tent. “That was from my ex girlfriend,” he said, in the kind of hushed, uncertain staccato that is his voice. Piles of dishes, unfinished art projects, scissors, tape, and envelopes, black plastic bags filled with who knows what, barricaded his desk and the surfaces around it. There was the distinctive sound of water dripping as I took a seat on a cluttered sofa and offered him a Tecate from my bag. I didn’t know what made everything so uncomfortable. He said “there’s beer,” and opened the refrigerator and took out a Wolaver’s.

Perhaps even more apparent than the commanding aura of hoarder tendencies in the place was a sense of absence - the apartment’s evocation of all that had been excluded, had failed to capture Tao’s interest enough to be brought in in the first place, which are probably most of the things of “good taste” or the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. Tao’s apartment was not “comfortable” by any conventional means, but there was something comforting about an environment from which “disorderly actuality” had not been removed. I was pleased by the success of my plan. I felt that being inside of Tao’s apartment allowed me to understand him better.

photo by Sharokh Mirzai

“What did you think of my book?” Tao asked, after we had been sitting there holding our beers for ten minutes. “Most of the reviews were negative.” I asked him about the fish on the wall, cut out of newspaper, and the broken lightbulb next to the Natalie Imbruglia CD on his desk. “My ex girlfriend gave that to me.” He stood up and went over to the tiny refrigerator and pulled out a rectangle covered in aluminum foil. “Someone sent these to me,” he said, and started breaking up small pieces of pot brownies, holding the freezer door open with his elbow. I took two 1x1 pieces and chewed them around and washed them down with Tecate. The conversation moved on, and I did not say I had tried to read the book twice but couldn’t finish either time.

photo by Sharokh Mirzai

“Do you think memoir is more authentic than fiction?” I asked.

“No. I mostly just think in memoir that person is lying.” We sat together on the couch and signed in to Twitter.

“Don’t you think,” I asked, “men tend to write fiction instead of memoir when they want to write about themselves, because of ego?”  “No,” he said.

“Really,” I said. “Why do men hardly ever write memoir?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Why don’t you write memoir?”

Under my twitter handle, Tao typed in the appropriate amount of characters letting people know we’d be heading to KGB bar for a reading, and then he added hashtag #potbrownies.

photo by Sharokh Mirzai

A cab dropped us off outside 8th Street Organic Avenue, a boutique vegan grocery store with pristine white shelving and a hospital vibe except for the smell, like fresh cut lawn. This is the place Tao goes pretty much every day after ingesting Xanax, to buy a chocolate mousse, a coconut yogurt parfait, and a green juice, which costs him $31. “This is so good,” he said, showing me a coconut mousse from a wall of containers that looked exactly alike. We walked several blocks to KGB bar and pushed through a crowd of people waiting to get in the theatre on the floor above. Inside, it was very dark and cool, and we sat in the corner. “I eat the Xanax first because it makes things taste better," he said, eyeing his green juice. I expressed my need for water for the second time in two minutes. “Oh shit,” Tao said, peering into my face, holding straw paper limply between his dry lips. It was the first time in three hours I’d heard him speak in a normal tone of voice and it scared me. A guy came over and shook my hand. Tao said “he saw Twitter, he saw the hashtag, don’t worry" as if that made any sense to me. I was starting to feel like I couldn’t see anything clearly. It took a lot of effort to figure out how I was supposed to leave.

This is what real life looks like, they tell us. This is the job of a writer – to vanquish mess – to inhabit the studio apartment, or the Lower East Side bar of actuality, to pick out a few elements with which to make a story, and consign the rest to the garbage dump. It is wrong, then, to assume that in the presence of a novelist, the experience of them will be the same as how you experienced their stories, as you were reading them. But for Tao Lin that is true. With him in person, no small awkwardness is spared. Images of panic-inducing chaos crop up frequently, not just as metaphors for the failure or absence of meaning, but as advertisements: for his own depression, sense of floating, meaninglessness.

photo by Sharokh Mirzai

During the three or so hours we were together, I became drunk and high and moved into a sort of panic, and Tao was fucked up on any number of pills he had taken, plus beer, plus green juice plus another beer, and it was just like his book Taipei. It was just like we were in that book, on our way to some party, susceptible to great mischief and misunderstanding along the way. Barely moving his mouth, he asked if the photographer would stop taking pictures soon, because he was getting too fucked up. I said “What?” not hearing him, or remembering we had been taking photos this whole time.

photo by Sharokh Mirzai

For some years – five or six – Tao was a living person inside my head. For his entire life as a published author, he has been a living person coexisting with his own literary persona. Tao does not do well with it, I think. I do not do well with it, and when I left him at the bar, I left with the memory of someone I quite liked, but felt angry at, and was now worried about, the same way I would worry about a brother in the hospital, or a friend going through a breakup. All the impressions and ideas I have ever had about Tao had been accumulating over the years, and now none of them added up. Riding home over the Williamsburg Bridge, I blamed Tao for being himself, for being just like the characters in his books, because he was violating my creation.

As an author of fiction, his great subject is the tension between falseness and reality. To him it seems there should be nothing but the present. There should be no dividing line between reality and parody of truth, no shield in real life or fiction that says life is not fucked and death is not near. He doesn’t write, as some authors do, to invent a world in which things that are pristine and mythical and inconclusive are the dominant matters of concern. He does not wish to pick out parts and dispose of the rest in order to make a story.  He imposes narrative on his own life - all of it – and the stories are concrete, and they are sometimes boring, and, as with Taipei, they drag. His work says, this is what it is, right here. I am showing you. Everything adds up. “Real life.” And yet, there is a sneaking suspicion, just as I have right now, writing this, that I am missing something. The novelist, even as he tries not to, exists in two forms - both himself, and as author -  and one cannot know for sure which side of him - the one that sleeps through his flight and misses his book readings, the one that ingests many drugs, the one that fell in love so hard he eloped, the one that shamelessly self-promotes - is putting on a show or being earnest. And that is the mark of a good fiction writer: the one that never lets us fully accept the work. The one that leaves us questioning if we really understood what we just read, and how much about life, about people, about the author, we can really ever know.

Cass Daubenspeck is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She can be found in many bars. She interviews people about their private lives here. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Sharokh Mirzai. 

"Oregon Trail" - Bad Banana (mp3)

photo by Sharokh Mirzai

Return to San Francisco

by DAN CARVILLE

They landed without much effort. A man inspected the plane and called out to his co-worker, "I am so tired. The morning is an afternoon."

Max found a cab without much trouble. A blinking light on the dash bothered him to no end. The cab driver said, "Without a witness, there's not much to do. You wait for hour, but it's a happy kind of waiting, absent the pressure I thought I would feel."

A culvert trickled water. The house creaked and settled at an angle. He opened every closet to be safe. The caretaker stopped by, rapping on the door with a wrinkled knuckle. He told Max how to turn on the water, to be sure to lock the fridge. The man took a call, and quickly became heated. "Put it back wherever you got it," he screamed.

Picking up a package of hot dogs at 7-11, he spotted an old "friend" who recognized him instantly. "Max!" He could not place his friend's name, but he soon realized it was not necessary - any other synonym would suffice. Eventually he said it: it was Richard. A few of Richard's friends came back and drank all the beer in the fridge, the one he could now not remember how to close. When Dana called to tell him she was coming over, Max kicked them all out, saying, "The jetlag is always worse than you can imagine."

She did not stay long, and appeared substantially more interested in the house than anything else present. Feebly, Max heard himself offering to dogsit for her. She touched every wall with her red fingernails. Before she left he said, "There is a fascination with repeating yourself that I have never been able to understand until now."

In the morning he woke early, but not early enough to view the rising of the sun. All Max recalled of the previous night was her thighs. Could not imagine what kind of work she had done to make them look so smooth, like the crests of waves. When the mailman delivered a few circulars and a book of coupons to the house, he took off a hat with a picture of John Lennon on it and said, "The blue lagoon is closed today. Some kind of problem with shrapnel in the air." Max could only nod as he drove off.

Max walked around the city, up and down it really, quickly getting myself far more lost than he intended. A cadre of Colombians were staging a festival; children oscillated on bouncy castles for as far as Max's eyes could see. Mothers tried to decrease incrementally the velocity of their descent, shouting, "A careful churl comes to no sorrow, slow, slow, slow," in a language he could only half understand.

A crowd had gathered around a magic act on the esplanade. The magician looked young for his skill level; his moustache was obviously fabricated. At some point during his demonstration, the magician shouted as loud as he could that the painting he was about to make disappear was an American classic.

In the daylight the house resembled the burning end of a cigarette. The temperature dropped, and he had packed nothing to insulate himself against any kind of cold. He called the caretaker but the connection was indistinct. All he could hear was a woman breathing very heavily before she said, "March in single file. When we arrive you can eat it."

He thought of calling Dana, but remembered the events of the previous evening with more clarity. Her expression had only been familiar to him at first, but he had difficulty placing its meaning completely. Now, as he placed his phone inside an old drawer, he fathomed what it was: the same expression he had seen on his sister's face at their father's wake. He pulled the phone out of a drawer and called a number. He said to himself, but also to the house, "A mercurial phantom rides a long way. Come now the snow, the dithering in the artifice, to me if not to her as well. I could sit here, but I wait."

Dan Carville a writer living in Brooklyn.

Paintings by Hadas Tal.

"The Best of Friends" - Glass Towers (mp3)

"Tonight" - Glass Towers (mp3)

we were told there would be no subtle touches of reassurance under the dome

Hurtful References to Domes

by DICK CHENEY

Under the Dome
creators Brian K. Vaughan & Stephen King

Do you know what hurts the most? 

oh no the pilot from lost isn't here to take charge what will we do WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO BIG JIM

Lost. Do you know what hurts the second most? Puns on bald men. Under the Dome joined an uneasy fraternity of titles like Powder and Baldlands. There is a bald man in Under the Dome, Big Jim (Dean Norris) and he is the second most evil man there is. (The first most evil is his son.)

king has 3,000 bad experiences with women so we get this?

When the only slightly porous dome slices through the town of Chester's Mill, the bald man's son abducts a woman and stores her in his fallout shelter. This is the Hatch of Under the Dome, and if it doesn't interest you, would you be more into a redhead-type reporter?

what is she going to post these pictures to, a bulletin board?Print ended for this woman a long time before the Dome made her husband disappear. I was so hoping that her husband would be played by Matthew Fox that I smashed a jar of vaseline I was holding in my left hand; I was holding it for reasons.

Suddenly cut off from the internet, people start going legit crazy in 48 or so hours. People made a lot of racist and misogynistic comments they planned to post on messageboards, but instead they sat around in a diner and said them to one another. Many perished.

Still, things are maybe calmer than they should be because none of the residents of Chester's Mill heard about the Trayvon verdict. In the opening episode a pilot from Lost who plays the police chief (um this is a clue right?) has his pacemaker explode. As a friend wrote to say, "This whole show was made for us to realize Lost sucked right?" Yes.

Lost did not have Samantha Mathis or ridiculous eyewear, so there was that

Then again, there was something to be said for a show that ensured that every black father-son combination will be called Michael and Walt. I still don't get what the deal with Walt was supposed to be, was he in the closet or something? Or was he in heaven the whole time? His power sucked.

There are three black people in the Dome, and a solid 33.3% percent of those individuals are DJs. Let that sink in. Now realize that Samantha Mathis is 63 years old. It's like quicksand, isn't it?

guys, just so you know, this is making us all friends forever

Watching Under the Dome is a kind of death, because although the bald man is very good, and his bald reverend friend is also not bad (as an actor), that's the extent of the casting prowess exhibited here. It is unfortunate that the rest of the cast simply cannot act at all. For some dramas, it's best to choose relative unknowns, but for a show like this that demands... so little of everyone? Oh forget it, I guess they wanted to make it like a B movie, established as Abrams' favorite genre.

try doing this in the window of a bank, always fun

Instead of adapting mediocre Stephen King diarrhea, I don't understand why Brian K. Vaughan wouldn't just do Y: The Last Man. About 50 percent of all scenes in Under the Dome involve someone putting his or her hands on the surface of the dome itself and observing some familiar quality of it. These two kids just go around the dome looking for weak points, it's like don't be naive Domers. Then, another person nearby says, "STOP TOUCHING THE DOME." (The subtext that you should not stroke a bald man's head intimately is completely unappreciated.)

Behind it all is the sneaking suspicion that Lost was just a series of Los Angeles apartments and forty minute long beach scenes. I feel like I was let down somewhat by the promotional material for Under the Dome. There was talk of a dog being on the outside of a dome and wanting to get in, but I have seen no such motivation from canines so far.

there are no small children in the town of Chester's Mill for some reason, this poster was a lieIf you are caught in a dome, it is far more likely than your dog will tell you to go fuck yourself and become the dog of someone who was having lunch at Denny's when the dome fell. Such a lazy portrait of small town America is only possible from someone who lives in a fortress in the middle of Maine. Have you ever seen Stephen King's house? It looks like a bad tattoo, or, alternately, the place where you would go to manslaughter a teenager. (This is now legal in our country.)

logically it might be best to burn down the home of whoever wrote "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"

We really don't need to redistribute wealth in this country, we simply need to redistribute Stephen King's wealth. Everyone else at least did something to deserve it. (Pseudonyms are mere cowardice.) Since I'm not lazy enough to look up the book version of this trash and discover that the Regulators were responsible for this dome all along, and since it will probably just be re-explained later on in a Richard Bachmann novel serialized for supermarket shelves, I will have to wait to see if that poor girl can escape from her underground prison, and who made the Dome. If you do you just start missing everybody.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"The Last In A Long Line" - The Leisure Society (mp3)

"The Sober Scent of Paper" - The Leisure Society (mp3)

Constellation Prize

by SHELBY SHAW

I once read that birth control pills were somehow linked to cellulite. In high school I had heard that the Pill would clear your acne, make you lose weight, and “most importantly” make your chest bigger. It seemed the perfect teen solace and I knew a number of girls who went on it for the promise of clearer skin. Couldn’t I then go on it to help my womanly development come along? I wasn’t exactly a late bloomer but in some respects I would say I was. I never took the Pill in high school.

One cold Chicago night I took home a sick friend and shared my bed with him while I made him tea. In the midst of our musings and questions and bigger thoughts, I asked him what he would do if he got a girl pregnant. “I’d kill myself,” he replied instantaneously, a sort of loud guffaw. He quickly followed up by saying that “of course” it “depended on the girl” and the situation. Of course. I told him I wasn’t on birth control and that if I had a baby I would travel to Europe to raise it, live with my aunt in Paris. We talked of other things, casually drifting around a harbor of related topics. I then suggested that we should have sex.

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Recently I returned to the textbooks from my class on Western Esotericism, one of the best courses I took during my last summer in art school. It was refreshing to break into educational assets and not just think that my young obsession with Harry Potter meant I knew anything about historical magic. The first performance alumnus of the school, who went on to become an astrologer through the University of Chicago, graciously mocked up the natal charts of each of the ~13 students in class. She then gave a brief summary of what it meant about us, how to read the chart in the future, and signed us up for her weekly horoscopes.

It’s important to keep in mind that the horoscope you probably read on Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, any tabloid magazine, or other largely-read source is drawing upon your solar sign. This is your horoscope from the perspective of your zodiac in tropical astrology (ancient Greek), i.e. Aquarius, Gemini, etc., based only on the vernal equinox. Sidereal astrology (traditional Hindu) relies upon the fixed position of the planets and stars at the exact time and location of your birth. A natal chart makes it privy to you and only you, as opposed to a general horoscope written for all the people born around the world within the same 30 days as you.

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Once you fall for someone with tattoos, it’s hard not to fall for someone with tattoos. The same thing goes for piercings or hairstyles or wardrobes. Reminders are curious things. I’ve only felt tattoos on me but I’ve not had one myself. I used to think I would get a tiny crack on my chest, like a break in concrete, but I thought it wouldn’t be recognizable as anything deliberate, more like a stray pen mark by mistake. I most recently had wanted “CANCER” written across the inside of my left wrist but I told myself it would come off as more offensive than intriguing when I would disclose how no, I’m not a survivor of, nor am I living with, cancer but rather Cancer is my zodiac sign.

Since I tend to think akin to Dionysius’ via positiva I’d prefer to use symbols for my life, and Cancer is denoted by crab claws that are otherwise known from puberty as the 69. Tropically I’m a Cancer but in sidereal tables I’m a Gemini. I’ve never looked into the Gemini sign other than casually, because it is my brother’s tropical sign (he is therefore a sidereal Taurus.) I have, however, been leaning towards Dionysius’ via negativa as of late, which is the opposite of using symbols and looks for ultimate metaphysical knowledge through the absence of absolutely everything, particularly images and meaning.

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There were twelve gods of Olympus. Hercules had to overcome the Twelve Labors. There are twelve signs of the zodiac and twelve houses in the horoscope. There are twelve months in a year. Days run on twelve hours or twice the twelve. There are twelve inches in a foot. I was twelve when I became a woman. Eggs are sold generally in a dozen. Christmas is remembered as twelve days. Jesus had twelve disciples, but I honestly don’t know anything about Christianity and therefore can’t really weigh any significance in the claim. My high school AP Studio Art portfolio had to have a twelve-part series. There are twelve school levels until you’re a graduate (excluding, of course, kindergarten). To get to Hogwarts you must board the train at Platform 9 ¾ and nine is three-quarters of twelve.

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I was once at Trader Joe’s, chock-full of groceries and en route to the cashiers, whose lines I chose purposefully based on attraction. Suddenly a man, 30s, about my height, nervous and soft-spoken, came over to me browsing olive oils or sea salts, both of which were in the same aisle. “Excuse me, but you look exactly like my friend’s wife,” he said. I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to be flattering or enticing since it obviously made it seem like he had a thing for his friend’s wife.

“Well I can’t say I’m your friend’s wife,” I replied. He shook his head, my resemblance apparently uncanny.

“Why are you wearing all black?” he asked. This question immediately told me there was no possible understanding between us.

“Oh, this is just my Tuesday outfit.”

“Oh, really?”

I nodded and restrained myself from admitting no.

“I thought maybe you were in an orchestra.”

At this point I realized he was trying very hard in the middle of a Tuesday in summer, no other plans or targets in sight. My so-called orchestral uniform (a comment I found quite humorous) or “Tuesday outfit,” which I threw out there as a sarcastic remark on the unremarkability of the thrift-store dress I was wearing, was brought up throughout conversation. I said I was in Trader Joe’s every Tuesday and, clearly a little anxious about this, my stranger in conversation made it clear that he wasn’t always in Trader Joe’s on Tuesdays. I made a mental note to never return to Trader Joe’s on any Tuesday.

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Girls just want to have fun, or something. Girls don't want to grow up. Girls with eating disorders, particularly anorexia, don't want to grow at all. They would rather stave off their inevitable — and necessary — maturation into womanhood, trying to prolong the physical sense of youth while inside they have long been buried, the first shovelful of dirt thrown into the grave the first time food was denied, regurgitated, or abused. It's not a new notion of the Cult of Domesticity — eating disorders have been around for centuries if not forever — because girls and women are not trying to embody a submissive and cute, oblivious and tittering child. They are trying to hone in on the purity of a body unchanged, the timbre, so to speak, of Humbert Humbert's attraction to young nymphettes in Nabokov's classic, before puberty turns their faces into oily canvases of reds and pinks, their fingers become grubby, and their bodies overall begin to seemingly disobey the order of what had been the natural pageantry of childhood beauty. Even Humbert Humbert began to develop a disgust with Lolita's hormonal display.

And yet, I am consistently amazed at how beautiful the coming generations are. Beauty is undeniable, no matter one's age, gender, or life; it is acting on attraction to said beauty that gets people into pedophilia and adultery. Openly observing beauty to yourself is harmless, natural, and should be done so as to take your mind off of yourself and prove that you acknowledge others. I used to pour over fashion magazines, big fat ones with glossy covers and Condé Nast titles. I could name nearly all the supermodels in all the spreads, and when up-and-coming models were gaining career momentum, I was personally proud, pointing out their photos to people who didn't know or care. If anything, they would comment on how I knew all the haute couture faces on every deathly-glossy page.

I stopped reading fashion magazines in the middle of high school when I realized they were just heavy sheets of paper with images of women whose genetics I never did, and therefore never would, possess. Many of these women didn’t even have the genetics the magazines endowed upon them in ads. There is always someone better than you, but more importantly, there is always someone better than who you thought was best already.

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“I notice you’re not wearing any rings,” said the stranger in Trader Joe’s. At this I was alarmed because I didn’t (and still don’t) think I looked quite the age of the average married woman (a number I admittedly do not know) and laughed lightheartedly with/at him.

“Yes, I’m not wearing any rings.” My bare fingers were openly gripping the handles of my reusable bags, full of groceries that were getting undesirably warm. I find statements of obvious circumstances to be utterly obnoxious.

This man then went deeply — or so he thought — into how a Greek god is assigned to a different finger. Naming them each, I interrupted him because I had heard something similar to this thought, and I immediately had been charmed by the topic of ancient Greek mythology, spouting facts before he could. Surprised, the man asked if I studied mythology in college. I laughed at him again. I said I was currently in school and taking a class on Western Esotericism, but that the mythology we covered in it was more like a refresher from my youth.

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I was born on a Saturday over two decades ago, on the Fourth of July. I began to detest any red/white/blue color scheme as soon as I could voice such a distaste. I’ve always found it amusing how America declared itself as its own country, independent of Great Britain, yet we borrowed patriotic tunes from pre-existing British scores for the USA’s own anthems, and we made a flag not too different in layout but — most entertaining — not even using different colors from the ex-Motherland. How independent were we that we couldn’t even choose different colors for our “new” country’s flag?

It’s no secret the Founding Fathers had esoteric agendas in Freemasonry and occultist practices that have bred a whole slew of Internet sites backing up conspiracy theories and deep analyses of their secret and deliberate decisions hundreds of years ago. They even wrote a movie, I’m sure you’ve seen it, it’s called National Treasure and it had a sequel. While certainly not a non-fiction, historical film, aspects of the story are based on various hypotheses surrounding little-known factoids. It is a curious thing, the hidden past, but that’s why it’s called esotericism and not exotericism. America is hardly the beginning anyhow.

Supposedly the Founding Fathers chose July Fourth to declare independence, two days after voting on reaching independence, because it held esoteric astrological properties. In trying to uncover the truth behind this (in)famous date I was born on — my expected due date, mind you — I read that the star Sirius, apparently linked to Satanism, held the Sun in its astronomical positioning on July 4, 1776. The astrologer who did my natal chart told me that the specific star aligned with my specific birth is Sirius. “It’s one of the greatest stars,” the astrological expert told me in class. I recently bought an old necklace that has written, on one side, “CANCER” and has the corresponding symbols beneath; on the back is a gold coin with a woman’s profile and “1776” written on the bottom. Do I think there’s any connection here? Maybe I should wait for the next National Treasure to find out. You’ll see me in it.

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I’ve stayed in contact with very few friends from high school, mainly due in part to their dependent use of Facebook and my abhorrence (and therefore avoidance) of the site; if you search me on Facebook you will find, among other people with the same name, a blonde porn star, or so I’ve been told. It explains the nude searches on Google that have driven people to my site for zero seconds. “Shelby Shaw” is the fictional character name of the fisherman who brings shark casserole to the Olsen twins’ family in Our Lips Are Sealed. I decided to recently make my Twitter account public because I’ve settled on a voice for it that doesn’t impose on the voice of my appearance when I’m with peers, professionals, or no one.

One friend who I stayed in touch with post-graduation, and regard highly in my small circle “from home,” invited me to the lake by his house one night a couple summers ago. We sat in my car around 3 a.m. waiting for a meteor shower to dazzle us beyond our expectations of the vastly blank sky. We waited and waited and the shower still didn't come. “Ten minutes and then I have to go,” I warned, concerned about whether I’d be able to stay awake for my half-hour drive, always littered with dangerous deer on twisted streets. In the moonlight, a startling shade of bright, the car was surprisingly dark, and my friend leaned towards me, over me, brushing close. “What should we do with those ten minutes?” he asked. I don’t remember how I ended up in the passenger seat of my own car.

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I used to have my entire childhood room covered in advertisements of my favorite models and fashion spreads from major and obscure magazines alike. I had quotes from articles and interviews, illustrations and comics, a few original photos here and there, some original artwork. I took pride in the fact that if I died, one would need only to read my walls. I taped smaller finds and artifacts in hidden places of my room, my desk, my doorway. "I'll keep the surprises coming, they'll think they know me and then they'll find more," I thought. This was throughout middle school.

During high school I tore everything off my walls, in careless strips knowing full well that they wouldn't be able to be pieced back together. My mother ran down the hall to see what I was doing when the sound of ripping paper wouldn’t cease. She yelled as I silently continued my actions. I remember being very serious about it but not really feeling certain of what my hands were doing. "I just don't look at these things the same way anymore," I said in a low voice that night as she cried in bed, not knowing what to do with me. Soon thereafter I re-wallpapered my room in new ads, photos, clippings, etc, but mostly the walls were covered with a first layer of upside pages from a French-English dictionary which had yellowed slightly. The replacement of my artifacts was slow, but still happened. About a year after the first take-down, I repeated my actions and my mother repeated hers. I never put anything up on those walls again after that.

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Towards the end of our drawn-out conversation, the man in Trader Joe’s leaned in and lowered his voice for privacy, or maybe perverse intimacy, as he asked me, “So, what are you doing later?” I loudly replied, “I’m going to see The Dark Knight with my old roommate.”

Only now, in writing this, did I decide to research the facts on the association of Greek gods and wearing rings. If you Google it, you’ll find the exact script I heard in Trader Joe’s, ways to pick up women despite it being a belief from antiquity. To think I had this used on me once makes me all the more merrier that I never returned the voicemail the TJ’s man left me later that week. I had given him my number only because I gave him credit for trying so hard for half an hour with a passing audience; I knew from the beginning that I would never pick up or return his calls. I felt like I couldn’t go back to the same Trader Joe’s after that, and definitely not on a Tuesday. I never ran into him again, or if I did I never noticed.

+

The inside of the wrist tends to be a popular place for seriously commemorating the deceased or for girls to get small hearts and stars like an unknowing cult of cool (which, we know, is therefore ultimately uncool.) Gypsies — although I’m sure other sects of beliefs and lifestyles agree with this — believe that you read the left palm for foresight of a person because its lead directly to the heart, and we already know the Greeks believed the ring finger to belong to Aphrodite, and sometimes listed as belonging to Apollo, because of its connection to the heart, to love.

I can trace a prominent vein from the Mound of Jupiter (Zeus, index finger) all the way to my chest. On the inside of my forearm, this prominent vein is met by another vein, or two, and forms the sign of Jupiter, something of an obscure “4,” which is my rising sign, which is also, I was told by the astrologer, the sign of the writer. The only time I had my palm read was at a bat mitzvah party, or perhaps it was a sweet sixteen. I don’t recall if the woman who was stereotypically in costume as a fortune-teller had been the one to tell me about the gypsies or if I had already known it before then.

+

When I was very young, not raised Protestant like my mother or Jewish like my father, I deduced that religion of any kind was silly and devotional worship was the opposite of freedom. I’ve come to see that the lack of any sort of belonging growing up — whether in a stable family life, a consistent group of friends, a string of angst-scorned heartthrobs — has prompted a never-ending search for something that feels like an answer but always ends up being left blank, the way I would feel stupid for talking about “problems” to therapists who told me what I was already thinking or agreed with my own deductions or simply sat and listened and waited for me to make the next move in progressing myself along, which seemed pretty counter-productive. What I needed someone to tell me, what I was searching for from school psychologists to private practice psychologists to the psychiatrist who visited me in Northwestern Hospital’s emergency room one night around 2 a.m., was for someone to tell me what on earth I’m doing here.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York City. She last wrote in these pages about The White Queen. She tumbls here and twitters here. 

Artwork by Alexandra Levasseur.

"Gonna Make My Own Money" - Deap Vally (mp3)

"Bad for My Body" - Deap Vally (mp3)

Insult to Injury

by KARA VANDERBIJL

I am always a little surprised to discover that I have a body. Soon after I’d moved to Chicago, someone brushed my arm on the train and I almost cried because I could not remember the last time someone had touched me.

In the summer I bruise easily. The backs of my calves bloom with purple-black spots at the impact of bike pedals. Now, on my thigh above my knee, there’s a yellow-green spot from when I walked into a drawer that I had opened just moments prior. It’s disappointing, as an adult, to discover that you cannot pass unseen or untouched as easily as you did when you were a child.

I would rather reveal a deep, humiliating secret than have somebody invade my personal space. In the city, there are degrees of closeness. A certain touch in the train is formal, compartmentalized into what we refer to as “rush hour”: the slow sludge movement of hundreds of people trying to squeeze through doorways and turnstiles, through the curled spaces between other humans.

Even if they never reach the same physical proximity as these commuters, someone who means harm can be detected almost immediately. The bodily threat hangs pungent in the space between us. I remember a strange boy putting his hand on my knee when I was in high school, but perhaps he just lifted it from his own and began reaching towards me.

“Don’t touch me,” I warned.

I’m taller than almost any other woman I’ve met, and of a serious, unsmiling disposition. On the street, men whistle, but I don’t know what they’re whistling at. These hips? These breasts? I spent years trying to wish them out of existence, not because I was ashamed of them, but because the fantasy of being admired for simply my mind held an undeniable lure.

When a boy I liked in high school kissed me on the cheek one morning in the hallway before class, I felt it all the way down to my toes. I wasn’t kissed on the mouth until later, long after most people my age had already lost their sense of physical wonder. It was a little bit like being picked last for a sports team, except I was great at it right away, like my body knew things that my mind didn’t, answers to questions that have circulated since the beginning of time.

I took to water like a fish, not afraid of its depths like most children but terrified of the man-made box it was in, the feats of engineering that drained it and filled it and filtered it. When I was seven, I went swimming alone in the deep end by myself. I slipped underwater and reached down to touch the bottom of the pool, near the drain that I feared so much. As I let my body float to the surface of its own buoyant accord, I closed my eyes. My right cheek struck something sharp. I surfaced, bringing my hand to my face, and opened my eyes to see blood covering my palm and running down my arm. I’d gashed my face open on the ladder. At the hospital, they covered my face with tissue paper as they stitched up the wound with a needle shaped like a fish hook.

I forgot to drink water during my freshman year of college. I woke up in the middle of the night sometimes so parched I’d search the whole room, in the dark, trying not to wake my roommate up, for enough change to go buy a bottle of water from the vending machine. Sometimes I couldn’t find enough change and I had to wait until breakfast. The water in the bathrooms tasted metallic, with a twist of chlorine strong enough to make me reminisce about entire Southern California summers spent in the pool. It was a cocktail of childhood, of living in a place I’d lived in before after I’d lived in a place that obliterated all other places for me. My body was the only constant between here and there, and it has never been constant.

I bit my nails for years. Never until they bled, but close. Now, when I see someone on the train with badly bitten fingers, my stomach turns and I have to look away. I wish I could remember how I stopped, or why when I’m taken almost completely out of my body by a book or a film, I resume the old habit.

Eating a lot, and eating well, has always moored me to the physical. But it’s a transient activity. If only I could pick up some sort of tic, a discomfort that would constantly remind me of my body. If I could tap my toes obsessively. If I blinked more than the usual amount. If I possessed one superhuman sensation, even at the expense of another. I realize that these wishes are nonsensical, even offensive. But the desire to change, mutilate, or enhance one’s body has been around forever. It is simply the desire to be a body that we are also proud of, instead of this paradoxical creature that we happen to be but cannot always identify with.

My thighs are touching again. I’m wearing a sundress and the humidity makes my legs stick together uncomfortably. When I’ve felt unbeautiful, I’ve known deep inside that it is simply a result of my own feelings, not the physical reality of me. I’ve always thought more about what I could give to people in terms of my presence or thoughts; giving my body to friends or lovers to embrace and study seems foreign and bizarre even now. I enjoy it with the same wonder as I enjoy pondering a new and difficult concept.

We copyright them sometimes, but in truth, our thoughts are universal. Once you share an idea with someone, you’ve put it out into the universe, and you can’t take it back. Our bodies are the only things that truly belong to us, truly are us. Even in our most intimate physical sharing, we remain separate. You can pass an idea off as your own but you cannot pretend to own somebody else’s body. It’s the part of us that keeps us from becoming truly universal, perhaps from fully belonging.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about a Provence state of mind. She tumbls here and twitters here.

Photographs by David Drebin.

"Strep Throat" - Georgia's Horse (mp3)

"A Long Ride Home" - Georgia's Horse (mp3)

The debut album from Teresa Maldonado is called The Mammoth Sessions.

Sinister World

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Vuillard lived with his mother and sister. The shy painter spent all his time either representing them in his small, pursed canvases or writing in his journal. A short distance away workers labored to construct that ugliest of monuments: The Eiffel Tower.

His older sister Marie was, to her mother's disappointment, not yet married. The static scenes of the two women we find again and again in the artist's early work characterize the relationship between mother and daughter, but it was a subject easily exhausted. Vuillard resolved to change this: he would get his sister married.

Self Portrait with Sister

Vuillard was sustained by the women in his life. After he convinced his best friend Roussel to marry Marie, who was seven years the man's elder, he was forced to find other females to surround him. He met women in the parks of Paris, the only place he could freely move about without anxiety. it was there that he came upon Misia Nathanson and her husband Thadee.

Seducing painters had always been Misia's metier. She loved toying with them, making them fall in love with her, putting them off and on. She was as charismatic as she was intelligent, finally perishing in Paris in the year 1950. Before then, she lived off her skills as a pianist. Vuillard professed his love almost immediately. He wrote her letters:

I have always been shy in your presence, but the security, the assurance of a perfect understanding relieved me of all embarrassment; nothing was lost by this understanding being a wordless one. Now that we have been so long without seeing each other I have sometimes anxiously wondered if it is still as perfect as it once was. Your postcard arrived in answer to my question.

And no, I found nothing ridiculous in your thought: I saw it simply as a token of your affection. You met halfway a desire that flashed across my mind yesterday and that I was afraid of not having time to mention to you. So there is something better than wireless communication. The best thing was that you were there! It seems to me I am happy now, thanks to you. I am calm...

his 1925 painting of Misia and her niece and the black cups Liaisons of this sort were nothing new for Misia. Later, she would take up with Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec among others. But now her omnipotent position in Vuillard's work started to make some of his patrons uncomfortable. After all, she was a married woman. A painter in Paris could sleep with a married woman, or paint her without any repercussions, but not both.

Misia was his love instructor more than his intended, however. In his sights was another married woman, Lucy Hessel.

lucy hessel

Keeping his affairs a secret was not exactly Vuillard's strong point. Soon enough people knew that he and Lucy weren't platonic simply by the volume of their public screaming matches. They began spending the summers together, half-encouraged by her husband Jos Hessel, who sold his wife's lover's paintings for a lucrative profit. The three spent the next forty years in a perversion of symbiosis.

the reader, 1896

Vuillard kept his journal faithfully during this period, but it was destroyed by Jos after his death. Confidence in his work and love life filled him. The attraction of two outstanding women to his person enabled him to conceive of soliciting others to the position. He dallied with models in his studio until he became absorbed by an actress named Lucie Belin. It is no surprise that Vuillard's favorite play was A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In 1897, he bought his first camera, a Kodak. He immediately set to work taking pictures of his aging, sick mother. I mean, what else was there?

It is one thing to be a great artist and another completely to be told that you are in your lifetime. Even for painters there is a sophomore slump, a momentary lull in creativity. Vuillard's first representations of his life resembled a turtle poking out of its shell; his characterizations afterwards lacked that artistic caution. Japanese and medieval art constituted the pillars he returned to; a shy man loves history because it justifies his prejudice that the world is filled with terrors.

Yet artistic confidence can overcome whatever the passing of first inspiration evaporates. Any white man must go outside his own experience in his art, or else his work is reduced, eventually, to caricature. The Dreyfus affair and the events of the first World War had a tremendous impact on Vuillard's view of his country. Misia Natanson, Leon Blum and others were persecuted as a result of these events, and Vuillard leapt to their defense when he could. A gentile man who mixes with those outside his own experience finds there is another world beneath this one, and a menace beyond the menace he suspects he exists when he is a child.

Vuillard's mean portrait of Popescu

Still, Vuillard's art never approached the political. It is always personal for him, from the first time his work, so different from the others, was presented to his peers at Lycee. When the Romanian actress Elvire Popescu missed various sittings for her portrait, Vuillard avenged this slight by putting wrinkles where there weren't any.

Vuillard's mother remained of utmost importance to him until the day she died in his arms. He lived with her until he was 60. She represents, in his many depictions of her, that world into which he first entered. Her slow deterioriation only enhanced the sinister quality she possessed in some of her son's canvases. Because something he loved was vanishing before his eyes, the joy seems to fade from these images as we view them.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about The Last of Us. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Astronaut" - Gregory Alan Isakov (mp3)

The new album from Gregory Alan Isakov is entitled The Weatherman, and you can purchase it here.

Run of the Play

by MARK ARTURO

New York at the start. Windswept jack-o-lanterns, the mighty gamble.

She wore all kinds of things. Prim dresses, outdated lingerie. I saw her on stage. She was in Cyrano at the National Theater. I always hated that play. It didn't make any sense to me, in a world where everyone generally knew who everyone else was.

I waited for her, expecting other admirers. There were none. The play closed at the end of the month, the newspaper said it was "a spirited revival in the way that a glass of tap water can also be said to have spirits."

She let me into her apartment and she assembled herself on the rug Indian style, breathing deeply, before she changed. I had a bottle of something she had put in a cooler for me. My shirt was almost soaked through. As soon as she was in her new things, I was undressing her, like that. She stopped me when I was having trouble with a certain latch, and she explained that if she screamed No! it meant keep going, but if she said anything in French, I should leave.

I finally got the latch, so I said, "The more costume changes there are in an act, the less likely I am to be interested in it."

Fucking was like a high-wire act for the first bit, until she relaxed. She could really control her breathing, and she was athletic - not like, limber, but she could slam down on my cock from almost any angle, and she always did me the courtesy of pretending I was so big it hurt. I knew immediately that nothing like this was possible with the third lead in Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.

When we came back to her flat after that, she never changed. Her sweat was redolent of chamomile. I did like that she would listen to me, but I never got a big head about it. I knew she had other men, but she did not see them after her performances. I was there, I know.

It felt like most people we knew were actors. She possessed loads of friends, she would wave to them along the avenue. She did not stop to talk to them, and when I asked her why, she said, "Je sais les hommes de un autre existence." Her French was poor. I spoke it better, but not in front of her.

Her apartment was a hole but mine was not much better and if I suggested taking her there she would pretend to cry. I did not really want to, so I said okay.

One day I came in late. She had a very severe look, the sort where you know apologizing isn't going to get you to the place you want to go. I thought she was going to tell me to be on the other side of the door, but instead she asked me if I knew the story of the man with the golden arm. I shook my head, so she said, "He lifted everything, until he could not even lift his own arm."

Figuring if she wanted me to get lost, she would have said so in her perverted French, I said, "Who's troubling you?" It turned out to be some lope who lived a few floors above her. I went to take care of it, but she held me back and brought me to bed. You know what happened after that.

More often than not she was a mess when I got there. I couldn't tell if it was to add spice to our sex, or for some other reason. Her stomach got a little larger, but I did not know what that meant either.

Finally once when she was asleep, and the night had been a particularly bad one, I tiptoed upstairs to find this wretch. I make it sound like it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, when I have never once decided something like that lightly in my life. For one, I had been looking at the ceiling all night, thinking of the man with the golden arm. And also, I had already half-unscrewed every doorknob in the building - in case I had the wrong room, or I had to hide.

Once I saw the light I knew whose room it was. I lowered myself to the ground, carefully unscrewed the doorknob and peeked in. A man held a small boy, perhaps only three or four, in his arms. He rocked the child back and forth, singing a lullaby. His voice, low and soft, kneaded up in itself. He sang,

La lune trop blême
Pose un diadème
Sur tes cheveux roux
La lune trop rousse
De gloire éclabousse
Ton jupon plein d'trous

An older child came out from a bedroom, holding his little sister's hand. He asked where his mother was.

Mark Arturo is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Torpedoes" - Lake (mp3)

"Don't Hate Yourself" - Lake (mp3)

The new album from Lake is entitled Circular Doorway and you can purchase it here.

The Only Arab City Without A European Quarter

by SUMEJA TULIC

I am no stranger to the prefix pan: pan-Slavism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, and if all things go well, by the year 2050 pan-Europeanism. These concepts and the presupposed membership of my family in it were the Santa Claus and the New Year that were celebrated in my parents' house; the fine illusion of a cause and excuse for all sorts of lacks and sacrifices.

At odds with most of the pan-isms, their symbolic meaning was closes to the one of the candles in Judaism. We lit them on happy days that were hard to distinguish from the sad and hungry days when we ought to light them again. Small people do that: imagine people like them and believe that one day they would all be together crossing the Red Sea under competent leadership.

Later an older version of you notices that people are already crossing not just the Red Sea but pretty much all seas and oceans, alone. Once they have crossed to a place far from where home used to be, they are tuning to a broadcast of a prayer during Ramadan from Mecca, and they are thinking of their simple uneventful afternoon in late autumn when the sun was gentle — as if drawn with watercolors — and how it moved slowly over the mountain, the almond trees, the lemon trees, the orange sand, the stray dogs nobody loved, and a freckled noise eager to inhale all that.

When I came to Naples I was set on meeting a girl who would understand what I have just wrote, who could tell me if it ever snows in Naples and does she then draw almond trees in the snow and sign her name next to the drawing in Arabic?

The bottom line of Naples is not a camorra ditch or graveyard, it is that Naples belongs to nobody. In very narrow streets those dark black eyes own you, everything on you and in your bag, but only for seconds. Seconds it took for you to smell the detergent evaporating from shirts and undershirts and socks assembled in a cloth line above your head. Some 25 white, blue, pink, yellow and dotted flags of hello and welcome.

If that is not enough, touch the graceful angels imprinted on the crusty walls of the passage and continue on. Keep walking, nobody cares, and even if it seems they do, it is your skirt, waist and breast they would love to meet and greet.

On an unrelated note, a man’s ideal woman is the one the conquistadors met on the shore of an uncharted island — chestnut eyes, bare-chested, afraid, unable to utter a word of English, Spanish or Portuguese and thus mysterious. The sailor (better call him a sailor than the conquistador as the latter can butcher, burn and enslave her village) loves her instantly. She is perfect. She will be so easy to leave. From the same place he found her with tears in her chestnut eyes she will wave at his sailing ship.

An often-neglected streak of Islamic and Arabic tradition is traveling. The traveling is almost always a kind of ransom. Hardly ever do the roads lead to exceptional raptures or gifts. Almost always it is a surviving strategy, a refuge-seeking mission to extend life in the outskirts of Mecca, in Taif, in Medina, Ontario, New York, Paris, Palermo.

Centuries ago came Arabs to Naples with turbans smelling of sweat and flower water, carrying lemons and oranges, coveting numbers, concealing intentions. I don’t think any curious chestnut eyes met them on the shore. The wind must have blown very hard as it does on eventful days. Prayers were said and hopes set high. Centuries will pass and new young Arabs will come. Young students from Nablus, Haifa, Gaza with slick hair and tight shirts and pockets full of words like wattan (homeland), hurreya (freedom), adouw (enemy).

As the beautiful Napolitan girlfriend runs her hands over her Palestinian man’s hairy chest, she feels the spikey wire that trapped the white dove. His swaying affection would evaporate in the shabby dark room. Two things would dominate the silence – the strong perfume he wears and the skillful way he manages to look through her without it being so obvious.

At first she didn’t get it. Nights and months into their love she knew the streetlight or the pathetic moonlight creeping through the window takes him places. As she wished for solid thick clouds and electricity failure, he chanted something. Much like his protests in front of the university, or his shouting at his Arabs sitting around a table covered with newspapers where Yasser Arafat’s face is glued to Nasser’s hand by the sweet tea the Moroccans made, and the Syrians spilled over the paper. It sounds something like a lullaby that culminates in a wedding where, at some dull moment, guns will be fired.

At times when I am heartbroken and away from home, I would literally pay to hear azan or see a mosque. At best, in the frightening moments of insecurity, when I’m failing at everything, I would press against his shoulder and then say Hey! Look there. My people!  My people is a covered women with her brood and her man and his mustache and his sister that, even from the tram I was in I could tell, was loudly chewing pink gum. My people are my mosque, my cross of protection and preclusion.

I point rudely with my index finger at them, but what I actually do is frame them with my palms that are summoned by the word Amen! Following this very self-centered reasoning, I am not surprised to meet an Algerian Facebook poet at the exit of a masjid in Naples. I could see him dancing in a drunken sea resort on the Mediterranean or in a trashy Parisian bar among pale and eager patrons. I could see him ride a motorcycle up the Atlas just so he can lie near the cliff and gaze at the sun from behind his retro chic Police sunglasses. He must be chronically heartbroken here in Naples.

He said that he could show me things and make me nice food. I said thanks, but I have a meeting with the Imam. Beside, if you cook for me and show me places, eventually I’ll fail at reciprocity. And then what? You are My people. I cannot scare you by pointing at you. Also, in Naples it is all masjids without minarets. How would I distinguish God’s house from any other house?! Go away! I must talk to the Imam.

Up narrow stairs tailored after those in Amsterdam I am sure, I found the Imam. He was younger than me, and regardless of his authority, he was modest and very comfortable with not speaking too much, or at all. His working desk was a mess and he looked at me like I am a human, not a temptation. I knew straight away that he reads poems during some afternoons and maybe named his goats after the Seven Hanged Poets.

That is something I would have done, but as he tells me in classical Arabic that he studied literature in Libya and became an ”oversea imam” after the revolution, I knew he had really done it. Goat after goat — elegantly stupid and reckless, jumping and bleating — he named them after poets once showered by masters of Mecca with golden coins.

Typical of students of literature, and of shepherds as well, the imam delegated the speaking of the practicalities of the Muslim Arab life in Naples to his aide. His aide is a middle-aged man who looked like my father, and spoke like my mother — first the most dire and stressful issues, and then, if we have time, we will be thankful for the little joys that miraculously appear against all odds.

Muslim Arabs like all other immigrant communities, and pretty much every other southern Italian, are heavily struck by the economic crisis. There is a growing dependency on aid from charity organizations, a rising number of people that are becoming homeless. Most of the men roam the streets hungry during the day or sit in Piazza Garibaldi and other squares. At night they sleep at entrances of churches, somewhat wet and cold but protected. Decades after they have been in Italy, they are either buried in a mass grave or shipped back to the country of their origin. Having in mind that the transport is costly, most end up in a mass grave mourned by few, forgotten very soon. Italy has one or two Muslims cemeteries with ridiculously small capacities. I try to constrain myself from pointing how all that can be seen as a spin of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone.

Straight down from Piazza Bellini is a place described as “a square for relaxing and socializing," a mosaic of youth, leafs, pedals, pizza, marijuana and music. Down a steep street still wet with unexpected rain I met girl’s father — the girl that must have dreamt of the almond, olive and orange trees of her father’s country. She is a dancer or an actress, I cannot tell now, but she sure exists. Her father loves her very much and she is free to do whatever she wants but go to Bellini and inhale pedals.

The English ambassador in the mid-1800s called Naples “the only Arab city without a European quarter.” This malicious allegory of the place's somewhat dysfunctional social and architectural mixture is true today, but doesn’t do justice to all other cities within Naples. For one, let's wait for the metro stations to be completed. Until then, inhale paddles and leafs and dance in Bellini even when it rains. When you get tired, and your pan-isms kick in, open the windows of your apartment and play loudly Fairuz or Marcel Khalifa. Play loud enough so your nagging neighbor shouts her complaints. And when she does, in her yelling you will hear Umm Omar from next door in Homs. I swear.    

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and photographer living in Sarajevo. You can find her website here and her flickr here.

Photographs by the author. 

The Best of Sumeja Tulic on This Recording

The saddest day to leave Beirut

Planning to learn to skate

The charm of a Libyan night

Stifling her natural, hideous laughter

Possibly a woman needs a place

Dislike of geographical distances

19 to Present

by LAURA HOOBERMAN

1. During my college years, I cultivated a brand of sadness that was lithe, trivial and mixed with boredom, which I found shameful. Most of my internal life centered upon the relentless process of apologizing to myself for myself. In some instances, I recognized this tendency in strangers, and to them I either opened up excessively or not at all. 

2. I was once told by a man I loved desperately that he loved me, too, just not in the way that he needed to see me all of the time.

3. I once kissed a boy with green eyes and a sort of whimpering, pouting quality of mouth to which I tended to be impossibly drawn. He was drawn to me, too, but he couldn’t take me seriously. We spoke about Europe and Jung in the darkness of his sweat-ridden apartment, and though the blackest of blacknesses, he sought to puncture our intimacy. Our tense touching harbored the impression of anonymity; our unseen forms made contact and then released. For days after, I reflected upon the way his mouth formed the soft phrase, “I’m not going anywhere.” I wondered if he’d meant it, or if he’d already grown tired of me.

4. As a young person with literary ambitions and an irrevocable, cerebral bent, I immersed myself in the solipsistic examination of infinite dynamics of self to self. To this end, I drank profusely, read Infinite Jest, and generally felt kind of sorry for myself. 

5. I attended lectures taught by professors of a certain renown who, in the early morning, to a sea of soft faces, whispered. I attended a class where I was the only one who wanted to discuss the queer slant to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I was taught by a professor who drank seltzer with ice in a tumbler at nine in the morning and wore a fedora around the literary department of New York University. No matter what I wrote, he marked my papers with B+’s. I once scheduled a meeting with him to tell him that this wasn’t normal for me.

6. At the crux of my freshman year, I walked in an unfamiliar daze suffering what felt like tiny heart palpitations and the onset of insanity. I listened to “Karen” by The National on repeat, which seemed to capture the strange disconnect between heart, head and hands that my body had suddenly inflicted upon itself. I texted my mother to ask her if it was possible for me to be dying from an amphetamine overdose. Twenty minutes later she responded, “Not really.”

7. The complexities of my relationship with Casey confounded the two of us but bored or distressed all my friends. Harbingers of doom presented themselves with brazenness and profound frequency. We were on the floor of his shower discussing things when he told me, “I don’t know how to interact with you outside of this realm.” The evening withered and beckoned us into its dissolution. When we finally fully broke from one another, I told him, “Ending is hard, but it’s easier than loving you.” “Okay, that sucks,” he said.

8. We met for lunch in the sterile light of a basement cafeteria at a campus dormitory. He told me that my shoes made me look like a Dutch prostitute and that he’d started dating someone who was “sexually illiterate.” His interest in her was cultivated, it seemed, by her interest in him and a set of preternatural good looks. I hoped. I fingered haphazardly and anxiously the insane display of off-colored, lukewarm food that I had, in my nervousness, assembled. We suffered through requisite, bloated lapses in conversation and held deliberate eye contact. As we parted ways, he gave me a long hug and whispered, “let’s not do this again.”

9. Thinking got me intro trouble. Doing got me into trouble. Feeling got me into trouble more than anything else.

10. I have lived, thus far, for five years in New York City, which, as necessitated by the nature of its mythology, rarely exemplifies the nature of its mythology. In order for any of its potential ecstasies to find themselves felt, one must suffer, in equal or greater portion, shades of despair and desolation. And as extremes rarely manifest, the day-to-day sense of triviality and frustration was pronounced, diffuse. I tried to mediate this quality of ordinary life by getting drunk and texting ex-boyfriends. I wanted desperately to be affected by people. As I get older, to most of my urges and inclinations, I mutter, “No. Take a walk around the block. Put yourself to bed.” 

11. Incapable of discerning good influences from bad, I regarded people indiscriminately for what new sentiments they could stimulate in me. All the dudes I dated shared a slightly cruel bent and the ability to debilitate, in some manner, my already shaking sense of self. None of these men struck me as particularly happy, but I am fairly certain that at least two will become famous.

12. My sense of guilt established itself paramount and manifested in diverse ways. I kept track of the damage I had done to myself. I wrote relentlessly, and, perhaps exclusively, poorly. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis exposed to me the possibility of perfect writing and simultaneous redemption, and as I was capable of neither, my profound swell of inadequacy arose. Guilt lingered about my flesh and inched the fat from my bones. My body seemed to me to harbor the imprints of some slight, unnatural disaster, which made it all the more surprising to me when I realized that people found me pretty. 

13. Petty boundaries presented themselves ripe for the breaking. Kerrie and I once flirted shamelessly with the opening act at a Yoni Wolf concert and then retold the story fondly, as though we hadn’t basically humiliated ourselves. We did things, I think, simply because we didn’t know what else to do. For awhile, I was waking up regularly in a famous filmmaker’s house in Brooklyn and suffering tiny spasms of confusion and nausea. A sense of inconsequentiality permeated as experiments in intimacy and camaraderie mounted, diffused, and pittered into absence. The world was loud and transient, and we did confused things within it.

14. I developed insufferable habits. I alternated ordering cappucinos and bellinis at cafes while trying and failing to write things. I got drunk and wrote lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" on the bathroom walls of the exclusively gross bars I frequented. I became familiar with insomnia and hangovers. I settled into a mode of existing that straddled awkwardly some barrier between neuroticism and nihilism, which proved unsustainable.

15. My interest in moralizing subsided when it seemed to become impossible to justify any of my impulses to myself at any time by any logic whatsoever. My institution of self knowledge sort of came to rest on the Myers Briggs test and episodes of Mad Men, which have both been vastly valuable resources for me.

16. Exhausted by Manhattan, I made the misguided move to North Williamsburg, which proved emphatically to be not far enough.

17. In Williamsburg, everyone looked at everyone. The act of looking and of being seen created a reciprocal composite that plastered itself over the experience of existing in an infinitely public realm. The neighborhood and its cameras craved spectacle, and even at its outskirts, one felt compelled to consider deeply the appearance of self. On a date, I blithely mentioned that my bangs were so integral to my appearance that people often told me that they didn’t think they’d recognize me without them. “What other problems you got?” he asked.

18. On Bedford Avenue, I ran into a man I’d dated years prior and felt satisfied that his new movie had come out to sort of shit reviews. He looked pale and strung-out and dirty, but he was doing exceptionally well in his new job at Vice. At a piano bar in Greenpoint, we connected in a forced, dull way. Remembering more of him than he had of me, I reveled in the opportunity to suppress all my habits he’d found irritating and adopt the affects of someone slightly more to his liking. It was an experiment in utilizing my neuroses so as to suffocate my neuroses, which I found intriguing. Later that night, in a brief moment of comfortable intimacy, I accidentally mislabeled James Blake James Blunt and sort of understood why he’d broken up with me.

19. I attended parties in Bushwick where people spoke casually but compulsively about Kubrick and Heidegger. On rooftops and fire escapes, drunk kids made slurred, personal revelations and went home with one another. Typed amateur screenplays on old wooden desks fluttered in stray wind. My preferred party game was guessing peoples’ Myers Briggs types. Though I was almost always correct, I managed to endear myself to precisely no one.

20. After a night of drinking at Night of Joy, I texted Luke, “I’m making bad decisions for everyone.” “Tell me about your bad decisions,” he responded. 

21. I befriended beautiful and intelligent girls who, without exception, felt that they had something to prove. One balanced her time maintaining a 4.0 GPA and blowing pungent pot smoke out the window of our dorm room in a weird effort to lift herself from the oppression of cliché. Another occupied herself by finding increasingly elaborate methods of masking a long-term eating disorder. Still another shouted at me, during a discussion of a disappointing break-up, “but I’m so smart, Laura. You have no idea how smart I am.”

22. Between 2008 and 2013, my historic fear of aloneness evolved into such a profound reliance on my solitude that I could sustain myself for days on end on my thoughts alone.  The compulsive need I felt for silence made my choice to live here seem bizarre, rooted only in impossible abstraction. I tried to leave New York once, but it didn’t take.

23. As time passed, we all kind of started to grow up and practice settling down. I watched one of my best friends fall for and engage in serious relations with a dude that I had once unceremoniously but fervently referred to as a shithead. For whatever reason, I took this as an omen of audulthood.

24. Where I had once craved laceration and sublimation in equal amounts, I began to hanker for consistency and control. I satisfied myself, in this respect, by habitually making my bed. If I was feeling reckless or indulgent, I practiced prolonged eye contact with strangers in the street. I started reading a lot of George Saunders and cultivated a healthy terror of things to come.

25. There is a sense of profound discomfort that arises from existing in spaces made familiar by occurrences that have long since ceased to feel familiar. A tangential rationale explains why I have lost contact with most of the people I knew in college. What exists between me and the people I used to know is not bad blood, per se, but blood still comes to mind. I cannot fathom how much of myself I unwittingly lost to others when I hadn’t the slightest sense of what I was made of.

26. I want relationships, lately, without the hassle of cultivating or participating in them.

27. I moved into a windowless bedroom in Greenpoint, which expanded upon my personal, thematic divide of internal versus external. I once walked unknowing into an erratic storm in March that sent snowflakes jittering stupidly toward the sun. The air went soft for a moment. There was a rush of wind, a soft moan in the cavern of my ear, and then came the hurricane.

Laura Hooberman is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Greenpoint. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Sabine Wild.

"The Color of Industry" - Radiation City (mp3)

"Babies" - Radiation City (mp3)

June Again

We Need to Talk About Pretty Wild

by ALICE BOLIN

At the start, E!’s Pretty Wild might have been destined to be less than a footnote in the history of reality TV. Following two teenage sisters, party morons/“models” Alexis Neiers and Tess Taylor, the show was after the audience of The Hills, MTV’s classic reality show about random rich twenty-somethings in the Hollywood Hills, every stilted, mesmerizing minute of which was staged for the cameras. It is safe to assume that the producers of Pretty Wild at least tried to stage every minute of it too. There are many silly reality TV setups: Alexis and Tess buying bikinis, Alexis and Tess frolicking on the beach in Cabo San Lucas hand in hand. Tess goes on a lackluster “date” with singer Ryan Cabrera, who has been courting girls with reality shows since 2003, when he dated Ashlee Simpson at the time of her MTV series; he was also one of Audrina Patridge’s love interests on The Hills.

Most of Neiers and Taylor’s modeling careers seem engineered for the show too, as when their mom, Andrea Arlington Dunn, reports that she’s booked them a job with “an organization that’s doing a photoshoot.” One suspects that the organization was called E! Entertainment Television. And the girls gamely play up their shallow, ridiculous personas for the camera: Neiers talks about how she is eager to be in the music video for Kid Rock’s new song, “Rock Bitch.” “It says in the song, ‘sliding down from heaven on a slipper pole,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘That’s totally me!’”

The weirdo factor that elevates the girls to subjects of TV-interest is their mother’s wacky spiritualism. Their house is decorated with three-foot Buddha heads. Dunn reports that she’s designed her home-schooling curriculum around The Secret. The family prays incessantly, ending each prayer with the affirmative “and so it is” instead of “amen.” Dunn is often shown wearing the ear clips that go with her “frequency meter.” This might have been all the show was: bikinis and vodka cranberries and “and so it is.” But three factors changed the show’s course and its destiny, making it of significant interest now as an artifact of Hollywood crime history, and as a testament to the competing realities of “reality,” journalism, and art.

The first was Neiers’ arrest, shortly after the show started filming in summer 2009, for involvement in the Bling Ring, a group of LA teenagers who, over less than a year, stole more than $3 million of goods from celebrity homes. The second was Neiers’ arrest, in 2010, for possession of heroin, the year-long stay in rehab that gave her health and sobriety, and her revelation that during the filming of Pretty Wild she “had an over-$10,000-a-week drug habit,” “smoking 20 80-mg oxys a day” and “doing tons of cocaine.” The third was the production of a movie, The Bling Ring, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, which bases characters on Neiers, Taylor, and Dunn, and directly, faithfully reenacts long scenes from Pretty Wild.

Pretty Wild makes for some uncomfortable television — the very real strife in its subjects’ lives resists the show’s genre, that of staged “reality” TV, a form that is typically placid, awkward, and artificial. At times the show tries to co-opt its stars’ troubles for its clumsy set-ups: Dunn adopted Taylor when she was young because her mother struggled with drug abuse, and when Taylor is unable to take care of her new puppy, they have an obviously staged family meeting in which Taylor’s inadequate puppy parenting is unfortunately compared to her own abandonment by her mother.

There are also times when the staged scenes spin crazily out of control, as the family’s problems assert themselves unexpectedly. In the series’ last episode, the producers broach Neiers’ addiction lamely, with scenes of Dunn finding a bottle of Xanax and a sleepy looking Neiers walking around holding a blanket. Dunn says that Neiers has been acting strangely “for the past two days”; she must have been aware of Neiers’ substance abuse before then, since by Neiers’ later account, when the show wasn’t filming she was “living at a Best Western on Franklin and Vine” because of her drug habit.

During the episode, Taylor, Dunn, and Neiers’ younger sister Gabby decide to have what they call “a little intervention.” This was probably meant by producers to come to a happy resolution, with Alexis agreeing to seek help, or to produce some sterile, amusing reality TV “drama.” But the intervention escalates scarily and unexpectedly — especially if we are meant to believe that Neiers had only been mildly abusing Xanax for two days. Shortly after their “supportive” opening comments, the family starts yelling at Neiers, following her as she runs through the house and yelling “You are a drug addict!” and “You are crazy!” “Everyone saw Anna Nicole like this too,” Dunn says to her, “And look at her now.”  That remark hits so close to the reality of Neiers’ drug problem that it seems unlikely it was in the script.

This slippage between the real and the fake is disorienting and sad. One can imagine that the family might find comfort in the ordered, artificial “reality” that the show laid over their lives — that it might have helped them to have some distance from their pain. Their enthusiastic participation in this heightened, simplified performance of their lives could explain why the most real moments on the show feel the most false. When the police come to the house to arrest Neiers for her involvement in the Bling Ring, Gabby appears at the top of the stairs and yells theatrically, “What is going on?” Her performance is so phony that one starts to believe that the cameras may have missed the actual moment of the arrest, and the show’s producers have had to reenact it. But then the police officer at the door says, “Shut off the cameras,” and the picture goes dark. So the scene couldn’t have been staged. Could it?

The immortal moment in Pretty Wild occurs after Neiers has agreed to be interviewed by Vanity Fair reporter Nancy Jo Sales, who has promised to “tell [her] story.” Neiers is devastated by “lies” Sales writes about her, including that she wore six-inch Christian Louboutin heels to court, when in fact she was wearing “four-inch little brown Bebe shoes.” Neiers is shown in hysterics, recording voicemail after tearful voicemail for Sales.

On the show we see a portion of their interview, and it is so chummy that Sales’ ultimate betrayal does feel a little unseemly. “We are so wholesome and down-to-earth,” Neiers says, lounging with Sales on a bed. When Neiers breaks down, talking about the “very rocky, tough, tough times” in her life, Sales gives her a hug. This is just the predicament of the journalist that Janet Malcolm talks about in her classic book The Journalist and the Murderer. Malcolm describes the journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” The journalist promises to tell the subject’s story, when that is never their intention — Sales was loyal to her own story, not Neiers’. Sales’ article also mentions Neiers’ use of oxycodone, which is a more logical reason for her meltdown than Sales getting her shoes wrong. This fact is not mentioned on the show, which is, of course, not telling the whole story either.

Coppola based The Bling Ring on Sales’ article, and the film follows it very closely, with its dialogue often pulled directly from the article. The most outrageous borrowed lines in the movie come from the character based on Neiers, played by Emma Watson. “I’m a firm believer in karma,” Watson simpers, “and I think this situation was attracted into my life because it was supposed to be a huge learning lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being.” Watson’s contempt for her own character is obvious. “I want to lead a huge charity organization,” she says with sticky insincerity. “I want to lead a country for all I know.”

Coppola gave actual words spoken by Neiers to a classy British actress to say in an over-the-top valley girl accent, so that the fakeness of the delivery heightens the reality and ridiculousness of the lines, making the obvious point of the film even more obvious: these kids are shitheads. The film also restages scenes from Pretty Wild, as when Dunn is giving the girls a home schooling lesson on “character development,” and asks them what characteristics they admire about Angelina Jolie. “Her husband?” Taylor says.

But as closely as the film recreated things Neiers really said, Watson’s portrayal of her is different than Neiers’ character on Pretty Wild. On the show, Neiers is babyish, shallow, and mannered — she comes downstairs the day after she’s arrested wearing a pair of pink short shorts with “POLE HOTTIE” printed on the seat — but she is not the cold, robotic, empty-headed beauty queen of the movie. She is at times blindly affectionate towards her sisters, at other times hysterical and desperate — which is understandable when considering the severity of her addiction and the long prison sentence she was facing.

Coppola’s film allows the audience to enjoy the audacity with which the Bling Ring fulfilled their fantasy of owning a piece of celebrity, while it comfortably condemns them as stupid, entitled, and amoral. They almost certainly were these things. But Pretty Wild, despite all of its artificiality, sometimes gets closer to the real story, by acknowledging a truth The Bling Ring doesn’t deal with: shitheads have feelings too.

It is notable throughout Pretty Wild’s nine episodes the number of times that Neiers bursts into a litany of her good attributes. “I’m a great person,” she says, “And people who really know me, who did do their research on me, would know the great things I do for the community, for this universe.” “We are successful, independent, strong women,” she and Taylor tell each other on the beach in Cabo. “My main destiny in life is to be a leader,” Neiers tells Sales during their interview, and later, when she is leaving her a voicemail, she says, sobbing, “I opened up to you so the world could potentially know what a great, amazing, strong, talented, healthy girl I am.”  When a guy she’s on a date with asks about her involvement in the burglaries, she says, “You should at least know that I’m an honest, good, spiritual person.”

Coppola has interpreted this habit basically as a kind of PR damage control, Neiers’ clumsy attempt to shape her public image. But Pretty Wild offers another explanation. The beliefs that Neiers was raised with, essentially the self-help spirituality of The Secret and Ernest Holmes’ Religious Science movement, place a huge emphasis on the power of positive thinking. This compulsive affirmation was the way Neiers learned from a young age that she could control her reality. “If Buddha can sit under a tree for forty days, I can do this,” Neiers says after she is sentenced to six months in jail. “I can do this.”

Alexis, her sisters, and her mom are a close, indulgent family, saying, “I’m so proud of you” at the smallest signs of progress. Their cheery approach to their problems is ultimately what makes Pretty Wild so sad. Dunn talks about how she wasn’t raised with any boundaries, so she hasn’t been able to set them with her children — she walks in on Taylor in the shower and says, “Nobody has breasts like you do.” Then she enlists Gabby to help with an impromptu nude photo shoot; “You are so gorgeous,” she says while instructing Taylor to soap up her breasts. At one point, Dunn tearfully apologizes for not being a good role model and not setting rules for the girls. “Yeah, we’ve been crazy and wild,” Neiers says, “But we love each other.” This is obviously true, but it couldn’t prevent Neiers’ jail time, it couldn’t prevent her heroin addiction.

The proof of the sincere intentions behind Neiers’ words on Pretty Wild is how much she still sounds like this now — now that she is sober, an adult, a wife, and a mother. Her message is still similar to the one Watson repeated in The Bling Ring, that her hardships were all for the best. “I believe that, in some weird way, this whole thing with the Bling Ring, this whole reality show, is going to give me an opportunity to help people,” she said recently in an interview. It seems like the spiritualism she was raised with has dovetailed in some ways with the rhetoric of addiction and recovery. But recovery places an emphasis on honesty, stripping away the layers of deception that build up in an addiction — and this honesty is also a pose, just like the positivity of her childhood. Like all systems of self-improvement, it’s a way to fake it until you make it.

Even today, Neiers denies any involvement with the Bling Ring burglaries. Despite the fact that other members of the group have talked about her involvement, and she is shown on a surveillance video leaving Orlando Bloom’s mansion, and items stolen from celebrities were found at her house, she insists that she sat in a parked car outside Bloom’s house, “totally loaded,” while the others committed the burglary, and she “never stepped foot in that house.” “I gladly share my deepest and darkest secrets to the world in the hopes of helping others with my story,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I admit to stealing to support my drug habit?” But as we have seen, there are so many motives, so many complications — the reality of Neiers’ story doesn’t have to be the real story.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She last wrote in these pages about Cleo from 5 to 7. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find her twitter here and her tumblr here.

"Roadside" - Whitley (mp3)

"My Heart Is Not A Machine" - Whitley (mp3)

Recently

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Three years ago today, Anthology Film Archives screened Andy Warhol’s Empire – an eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building filmed from the 41st floor of the Time-Life building in 1964. I didn’t go to the screening, nor could I imagine anyone who might, but that Saturday afternoon I remember wondering if the experience, much like a runner’s high (though entirely in opposition to the threshold of endorphin release), produced some kind of floating, near-delirious state in its audience. I considered loitering outside the theater around the time the film let out if only to see the faces of those who had lived through it. While oxymoronic, there is something distinctly “summer” about spending a third of a day in the dark, zoning out, watching time pass. Like something very teenaged. In no other season can a person devote the majority of daylight inside and still emerge expecting to see the evening sun. 

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Before I met the kittens, a sister and brother named Annie and Dean, Sarah described their toy-sized bodies to me by cupping her hands together. Half an avocado, a squash ball, maybe two, could fit in that space. I was reminded of my friend Kate who years ago before I knew her, smuggled a hedgehog from Korea back to New York. She named it Louise. When Kate tells the story of how she snuck Louise through customs, Kate cups her hands and smiles just like Sarah. It’s funny how holding something small makes us grin as though we are up to no good. As though anything miniature is not yet meant for the world, and yet, there they are, yawning, sleeping, narrowing their eyes.

I never met Louise because she died of depression, but I’ve imagined her in the space between Kate’s cupped hands, and I imagined her again, in the space between Sarah’s hands.

Sarah brought Annie and Dean home on a particularly hot day; the kind of day that if they were babies and not kittens, years from now she might recall the day they were born in a storied, exaggerated manner. Heat waves in retrospect become folklore.

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After showering, the lotion on my inside elbows always dries last and stays cool longest, especially when air from my fan hits it.

At night, my fan brushes my hair over my face. It feels like spiders are crawling all over me.

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In June I went home to Montreal for my father and stepmother’s wedding. I began to tear up during my speech as I described a moment from childhood where one afternoon at a café, my father drew on a napkin the algebraic formula for when two people’s eyes meet in a room. While we often spent weekend afternoons together, especially in the summer –at cafes or at bookstores talking about who knows what – this afternoon and that piece of napkin algebra has outlasted them all. It was my father’s way of playing pretend with his daughter. I must have been old enough or tall enough for my feet to touch the ground, but I listened intently, like only children whose feet don’t yet touch the ground listen.

A few days after the wedding my father and I went to a bookstore. He couldn’t come inside with me because now he has Willis, a puppy Welsh terrier. I went in and sat by the window reading from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather while my dad found a bench and a coffee.

Willa in my lap, Willis at his feet.

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Until you see your friend riding her bicycle, it’s so hard to picture your friend riding her bicycle.

Until you see your friend wearing that shade of pink that half the table argues is coral and the other half argues is salmon, it’s so hard to picture your friend wearing that shade of pink.

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A couple weeks ago I saw a pregnant woman take a picture of her shadow. She was amused by its roundness. A few blocks later I was still thinking about the woman and soon my thoughts wandered to her future child a few years from now. Instead of a boy or a girl, I pictured a shadow. Mother and child shadows at the beach, feet walking and waddling towards the water – the baby’s shadow arms shaped like mini Popeye muscles, puffed out with floaties.

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Whenever I see a swimming pool I think about a friend of a friend named Greg who, a few summers ago got a job painting pools. Despite having brown hair, Greg had a red beard, and no matter what time of day or no matter how many showers Greg took, all summer, Greg had specks of blue paint in his red beard.

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Immobile and in pajamas, Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window is a New York City heat wave personified. He’s stuck and sticky and upset and paranoid. But Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont is dynamic, lissome, as though her feet are attached to spinning records. She enters the small Greenwich Village apartment in airy Edith Head gowns, tossing on a chiffon shoulder-wrap, lounging in chartreuse. Even her nightgown appears unreal: a filmy glow that trails her.

But Lisa Fremont’s mobility, in all of her gossamer goodness, has a clear purpose. Near the end, she climbs a fire escape and slides through an open window as her boyfriend watches panicked from across the courtyard. She is spry, agile, nimble. And it comes as no surprise.

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Neighbors keep their windows open. I hear the clatter of utensils being sorted. I hear someone practicing the trumpet, repeating The Godfather theme. I hear a dinner guest arrive with wine and inquire about an opener. I hear a phone ring; it sounds like a landline. I only hear landlines ring in homes with parents. Has a parent moved next door? But I mostly hear utensils being sorted, twice, sometimes three times a day.

One night I hear a couple argue outside my bedroom window. Upset, she doesn't follow as he walks away.

A few minutes later he comes back and says, "Baby." 

I can hear resistance because I can hear nothing at all, but then I hear two pairs of footsteps stumble and find that sweet spot home.  

+

Sarah and Jesse invited me over for dinner. There was more food than room on the table so Sarah moved the lamp to the floor. It sat at our feet like a pet might, an old family pet that no longer begs for scraps of food, that longer cares to. I looked down at one point and saw Sarah’s sandals flopped beside the lamp, her legs folded under her bum. In fact, nobody’s legs were under the table. Everyone’s bodies were slightly turned and the floor beneath the table was just the lamp, the sandals, and an oval-shaped yellow yolk of light.

Later that night I went home and wrote Sarah an e-mail. I told her I thought that dreams, it’s likely, are lit with lamps that sit on floors.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Sidney Lumet.

"Heart Talk" - The Polyphonic Spree (mp3)

"Popular By Design" - The Polyphonic Spree (mp3)

A Well-Poised Observer

by ALICIA PUGLIONESI

In 1927 Mary Craig Sinclair was having trouble keeping it together. The Long Beach, California home that she shared with her famous husband, Upton, belonged to stolid upper-middle-class America, but for Mary Craig, Long Beach was the end of the world, or the limit of the world. Nothing but a lonely stretch of sand stood between her front door and the “awe and wonder” of the Pacific Ocean. In this place, the laws of nature and human capability would stretch and break.

The Sinclairs settled in California in 1916, and a decade of radical crusading, political campaigns, and constant work was taking its toll on Mary Craig (who went by her middle name). She began to suffer from a nervous illness that left her debilitated and unable to leave the house. It does not diminish the reality of her physical suffering to add that her ailment was at least partly philosophical. Confined to her study, she sat down and tabulated the practical outcomes of the couple's grinding reform work: “At the rate we were going,” she wrote, “we would be old and gray before we could see much more than the beginning of the social changes for which we were striving...this was too slow!"

Like many Americans looking for solutions to problems that blur the lines between mental and physical, Craig started reading self-help books. When her doctors told her that the problem was all in her head, she delved into the literature of the mind cure, New Thought, and Christian Science, the most popular self-help doctrines of the day. These movements had many differences, but all focused on the capacity of the mind, through unknown mechanisms, to effect change upon the body, upon other individuals, and upon society – let's call these “powers of mind.” Captivated by the promise of a cure, Craig was nevertheless troubled by the suspicion that a placebo effect was at work, rather than genuine telepathy that supposedly allowed mind healers to treat distant patients.

Interest in powers of mind was quite normal for an upper-middle class, educated woman like Craig – crazes for telepathy, hypnosis, and spirit communication had come and gone in the United States and Europe for the past hundred years. Rather than a clear divide between “science” and “the paranormal,” Americans applied an experience-based epistemology to judging such phenomena on a case-by-case basis. That is to say, they trusted a thing they called common sense, inherent to almost all people of respectable social and economic status – particularly the growing middle class. If they could experience powers of mind firsthand or through trusted testimony, and satisfy their curiosities and doubts, ordinary people were inclined to accept the extra-sensory as a matter of common sense.

Grolier's The Book of Knowledge (1931)

Psychical research emerged in Britain in the 1870s, as an amateur science devoted to the investigation of the human mind and its possibilities – most particularly, to discovering factual evidence of the survival of the soul after death. This was actually quite a respectable pursuit, sharing the scientific territory of psychology and psychiatry; however, it sought to undermine the materialist basis upon which scientists were constructing a new, secular reality for the twentieth century. Historians who bother with such dead ends call it a “last gasp of metaphysics,” a search for spiritual reassurance in the wake of Darwinism and the hollow materialism of modernity. The practical work of British psychical research was mostly seances and ghost hunting.

This project spread to the U.S. in the 1880s, but psychical research would lead a very different life here. Ordinary Americans were already debating over spirit mediums, telepathic performers, and mental healers. Newspapers, magazines, and books were filled with the stuff. People wanted scientific investigation to uncover the mechanisms of powers of mind, but many people felt that the most important standard of evidence was their own witnessing.

Founded in 1884, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) boasted many eminent men of science among its members, along with the heads of universities and government research bureaus. Thousands of people submitted reports of paranormal experiences in the hope that the ASPR's experts could verify or explain what had happened to them.

Let's return to Mary Craig Sinclair, who, in 1927, wrote an impassioned letter to the ASPR regarding a series of psychical experiments which she organized among her friends in Long Beach. “It is very different to see such a phenomena than to read of it,” she remarked, explaining how her research into the mind cure led her to seek out an actual psychic medium and invite him into her home. She wanted to test the reality of telepathy, because, if scientifically verified, “it meant a new philosophy, a new religion! And a relief from Socialism!"(Upton had, at that time, run for Congress twice on the Socialist ticket.) Although Craig was a special case in that she married a man of radically materialist politics, her situation was emblematic of a widespread desire for spiritual meaning in the midst of secular modernity.

Ostoja with Leo Tolstoy

The psychic, who called himself Count Ostoja, provided Craig with astonishing evidence for telepathy. A popular stage medium, his act involved entering a trance state in which he could be buried alive or impaled with various sharp implements. He also practiced mind cure techniques and hypnosis. Craig faced a moment of choice: she could ask him to cure her nervous illness, with the possibility that he merely employed auto-suggestion, or she could investigate Ostoja scientifically to determine the ultimate truth of the mind cure. “I decided I did not want to be hypnotized,” she explained, “because this might incapacitate me as a judge of his work – as I would be under his influence. She asserted that “I couldn't rest without knowing whether [telepathy] was real and usable.”

Craig tried to establish herself as a credible witness, motivated by scientific curiosity rather than the selfish desire for physical or spiritual comfort. Her nervous symptoms faded away as she threw all her energy into organizing a rigorous investigation of Ostoja. It was time for that cocktail party of the occult, the séance.

Craig secured the home of Paul Jordan Smith, a prominent literary critic who she hoped might take an interest in Ostoja and help with his rather costly upkeep. Next, she assembled a séance group of trustworthy observers. They didn't need scientific backgrounds – on the contrary, Craig was skeptical of professional science and medicine. Doctors, in her view, were the worst perpetrators of narrow-minded materialism. Scientists were a bit better due to their “patient, exact method of observation and criticism” – they made excellent witnesses as long as they could reign in their professional “repugnance towards unexplained things." Thus, Craig invited a few “prominent scientists and medical men” in part to render the spectacle of unexplainability especially piquant.

the sinclair home, 1934

More than professional credentials, the séance group needed a reputation for common sense. Paul Jordan Smith, the critic, was “a professional sceptic [sic] of the whole Universe,” while his wife, Sarah, was “almost stolidly materialistic; she could never be emotional.” As a final proof of the group's complete lack of preconceptions, Craig declared that “none of them had ever before seen any psychic phenomena, nor had they ever read anything on the subject, though all of them are highly educated and cultured.”

The phenomena of the séance itself are a void at the center of this rhetorical apparatus of witnessing. There are no notes from that evening. Rather, Craig collected numerous statements from witnesses affirming that the medium had not cheated and the phenomena appeared completely genuine. These statements included criticisms of Craig's own conduct during the séance, as if to prove that she had not influenced the testimony. Both Paul Jordan Smith and Melville Ellis, a local physician, accused Craig of trying to influence the medium with her gestures. They claimed that this could not have influenced the outcome because Ostoja's eyes were closed, but suggested that Craig might be lacking in scientific rigor.

It is almost as though the particulars of the psychical phenomena – what exactly was said, heard, and felt by the séance guests – were irrelevant. What mattered was the fact of their experience, an experience attested to by upstanding individuals.

For whom was Craig crafting this very canny representation of the Ostoja case? For what judge did she assemble her evidence? Craig was plagued by doubts about Ostoja, and about her own powers of judgment. She could not rest assured that telepathy had been proven for all time during that summer evening in the Smith's parlor. Although she had “kept in mind the danger of 'believing what we want to believe,' I cannot be certain that I have escaped this danger.”The evidence of her psychical experiment survives because she bundled it together and sent it to Walter Franklin Prince, a leader of the ASPR. She begged Prince to come to California to examine Ostoja and verify his phenomena.

In pleading letters to Prince, Craig repeatedly underlined the problem of subjectivity, self-deception, and inexperience. “My interest in Ostoja's demonstration reaches the point of excitement, perhaps even over-emotionalism...I was not a well-poised observer,” she wrote, but “I do not want you to think I am at all times unfit as a witness. Although Craig possessed a bounty of common sense – both her husband and Prince attested that she could be practically “cold-blooded” in her “skeptical point of view” – she could not help but doubt her own senses when they attested to something as fantastical as telepathy. In search of objectivity, she sought the authority of experts.

“Clairvoyance” George Cruikshank (1845)

For Mary Craig Sinclair and the members of her séance circle in the 1927, the experience of astonishment was still essential to producing knowledge of psychical phenomena. Americans of an earlier generation had enshrined this experiential knowledge as the gold standard in judging the claims of mind cure, mesmerism, and Christian Science. The appearance of the ASPR in the 1880s created a new source of authority, a group of experts with the imprimatur of proper science – some observers were better than others, and some experiences more valid.

Craig never persuaded Walter Prince to come to California. The trip was too expensive for the cash-strapped ASPR, and too long and exhausting for the aging Prince. Sifting through the onslaught of frantic letters from Craig, one can understand his lack of enthusiasm. Prince had explained early on in their correspondence that Ostoja was simply the new stage name of a performer that the ASPR had already investigated and found to be a fraud.

This rejection didn't persuade Craig to drop her seances or her pursuit of telepathy – instead, it sent her off on an even more eccentric course. By the time she was done with the hapless Count Ostoja, Craig claimed to have turned his own powers of mind against him. The only way to judge the reality of the phenomenon, she concluded – rejecting scientific authority and returning to the primacy of experience – was to master telepathy for herself.

Alicia Puglionesi is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the Personal Pelvic Viewer. She tumbls here.

The next part of this series will appear in early August.

The Best Of Alicia Puglionesi On This Recording Happens Now

Dream of a whorl without pain

Earliest autobiography of Margary Kempe

History of the contraceptive douche

Stands at the vanishing point

The effect of the Dalkon Shield

A woman at home views herself

"Five Senses (Everything Will Change)" - The Wild (mp3)

"There's A Darkness (But There's Also A Light)" - The Wild (mp3)

How To Think About Quitting New York

by SARAH SALOVAARA

I hadn’t washed my hair in five days. My brush sat at the bottom of my backpack, beneath DVDs and magazines (yes, those old things), untouched. I had just returned from North Carolina, the suburban, Southern, Disneyland-for-beer-guzzling-beachgoers sprawl known as the Outerbanks. OBX if you’re nasty. 

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At 2:30 a.m. on July 4th, I awoke as we entered the mini-golf strip. I discovered that sleep — at first feigning it, then committing — was the only viable way I could silence my cab driver who immediately deemed me an ungrateful brat as I slide into his backseat. I told him my father had rescinded my ride from New York, and I was left to scramble, at my mother’s insistence, for flights that night. Be grateful, he told me.

He spoke from a place of Reason and Experience. His children did not speak to him. Didn’t call him on Father’s day. Not even his Birthday. And it was all because of his damn ex-wife — the German-Italian — who gave a child up for adoption when she was sixteen, years before they were together, but never told him about it, as if that was the source of all their problems. He cheated on her constantly, but that was beside the point. He’d never been to New York, but knew he could make it there anyway because he was a Hustler. A vet, but a Hustler, nonetheless. There was something in there about his illiterate mother with a 10th grade education, before I zipped my eyes shut, the words raining out of his mouth like white noise.

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It is acceptable to not wash or tame your hair when you are in the vicinity of the ocean because, no matter the time of day, you could have just come from the beach. There are only so many inland areas where it is still okay to wear a beaver’s dam atop your skull. New York is one of those places.

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“How was Connecticut?” I turned from the dinner table as my roommate bound through the front door, Whole Foods bags weighing heavy on her wrists.

“It was great! It just made me realize how much New York sucks.”

“Mmmm,” my dinner companion nodded.

“Lately, I’ve been feeling so stifled, and unable to create things and I just realized I kind of hate it here.”

My friend’s head still bowing in thanks.

“All there is is culture, and I can’t respond to that. I’m so uninspired. Maybe I’ll move.”

I stared at my friend. Unblinking.

“What?” she said. “You don’t want to stay here, either.”

+ 

I say this with equal parts self-loathing and self-awareness, but I am something of an anomaly, in that New York is considered my “comfort zone.” I grew up here, my family still lives here, a handful of my childhood friends do as well. In short, I have a safety net; where others are met with the stomach churning excitement of the expansive unknown, I have familiarity that masquerades as something much greater in its constant evolution. New York is not supposed to intimidate me. I am supposed to love it. Supposed to not want for anything more. It is my home. My hometown. I can say that, and I get to mean it. I have license, because it is, honest and true, all I’ve never known.

But I never say it. And even when my heart catches in my throat, and I find myself filled with such warmth for my surroundings even in the midst of Times Square — and no, it’s not whatever’s wafting from the grates or that Nuts For Nuts cart — it’s fleeting just the same. It’s a reminder, not some cherished, divine intervention.

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At night on July 4th, we gather at one of the beach houses to watch old Super 8 videos of my grandmother and her family. “This is so Stories We Tell IRL,” I want to say to my second cousin, once removed. We — all 65 or so of us — watch as my grandmother and great uncle dash along the same shores that sit just beyond the bay windows some seventy years prior. There are no houses on the horizon, just sand dunes. I can read her lips as she tugs at the edges of her brother’s face, briefly suspending the rapidity of the frame. Smile she says. It’s a universal gesture. Corny music plays over intermittent PowerPoint slides. It is so bad I have already barred it from memory.

It stops and I remove my arm from my grandmother’s back and offer to demonstrate Eskimo kisses with a distant little girl who will point her finger at me, accusatorily, and shout, “You’re friendly!” 

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That morning, before any of my cousins are awake, I go out to the porch that overlooks the road. I don’t mind, like my mother and uncle do, that we are not directly on the beach. I write a story. It is the first time I have written a story since college, and it is fantastic.

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“Wait!” My mother’s cousin — “Crazy Cousin Elizabeth,” as she is widely recognized — pipes up from before the television, 8 dollar bottles of Cabernet coursing through her veins. “We’re gonna show pictures of the farm!”

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I remember visiting Crazy Cousin Elizabeth, for an afternoon, when I looked at Middlebury. I can’t recall much about her farm — generic details aside — because when I arrived on the campus, I was stopped and interviewed by a local news crew, which was obviously the chief takeaway of the trip for any insecure, narcissistic teenager. I remember what I was wearing. Head to toe.

+

The farm is beautiful. Really picturesque and alluring. There are fruits and vegetables, but also horses. And CCE, it must be said, knows how to wield a camera.

“That’s one of the WWOOFers,” she narrates.

“Elizabeth!” I gargle my G&T. “I WWOOFed!”

“Really?”

The slideshow stops. It is the two of us, calling after each other, halfway across the cramped room.

“Yes! Outside of Nashville! I loved it!”

“Well, you have to come visit me!”

“6 am to 3 pm?” I recall the working hours, readily eclipsed by the 3 o’clock marijuana haze that was more punctual than any agricultural ritual I undertook.

“We do morning till about 1 usually, because it gets too hot, and then we eat lunch, and go back out around 4 for a couple more hours.”

“Ah.”

“I mean it.”

“We’ll talk.”

I turn my eyes back up to the screen, embarrassed, or at least feeling like I should be.

Once we’ve returned to the first photo, Elizabeth shoots up and beelines for me. She throws her arm around my shoulder and turns me away from the circle. We pace, thick as thieves. She tells me all about Slow Food, and permaculture, and how excited she is I’m going to stay with her. She can pick me up from the train station. Anytime.

I come back from the bathroom and greet another relative who I haven’t seen in eight or so years. The only thing I remember about him is his name. “So,” he smiles, “Liz tells me you’re going to spend some time up at her farm.” 

I need to find my great uncle to tell him what time I want to go on his sailboat tomorrow, but he is gone, and I don’t know which house he is in. Elizabeth offers to take me to him, and I resist, because I don’t want her to pressure me into committing to something I’m not ready for. I need to focus on work, not distractions. We walk and she doesn’t mention the farm once.

+

I have always threatened to leave New York. If not to myself, than to my mother, or a close friend. I was definitely going to move to LA after graduation. Then it was Berlin. San Francisco, too.

“I am going to be away from New York for a while,” I email my best friend, drunk, from my apartment in Baltimore. “I can feel it. But, please, remember, that no matter where I am, I am always thinking of you, and always loving you.” 

I think about what I always say whenever someone asks me about Baltimore. How grateful, how lucky I was to go to school there. I love the city beyond words, but it is a place I never would have dreamed of living in otherwise. I am ready to say this about another city, for another reason. It is not, I state, healthy to live in New York all one’s life. 

My best friend now lives with her boyfriend in Boston, and I, in my entire post-graduate year, have not left New York for more than a week at a time.

+

July 5th. Again up early, getting some productivity in, before I go to the beach to socialize. I read the story again. Tweak a word or two. Still fantastic.

+

It had to be New York, because it couldn’t be Los Angeles. I was going to work in film, so it’s either one of the two. In New York, people are passionate about film like I am. In Los Angeles, it is alternative means of investment banking, I instruct, to myself and whomever will listen, again and again.

Perhaps, I thought back in February, I will pick up and go somewhere else once my job is done in March. But March came, and I felt like I had to at least try and capitalize on any opportunities that arose.

+

“Traveling is the worst thing you can do when you lack stability,” my friend tells me. “Because no matter where you go, you will still be wishing you were at home working, advancing. You can distract yourself, but your true aims won’t go away.” I listen to her, but don’t know if I agree.

+

We are picking crabs and a round of relatives trickles in to say their goodbyes. They have early flights, dates with the road at ungodly hours. I speak to yet another second cousin. We are both 22, and I have memories of us being very close at a young age. He has just quit his job at a production company in LA and is moving to Patagonia to work as a ranch hand. He is going to write for two hours everyday. His old professor is married to an editor at The Atlantic, so who knows. The old bay stings my eyes. I am green with envy. 

He hands me his phone and I send myself an e-mail. I write “Relativez” in the subject line, and nothing else.

Later, I touch his mom’s shoulder and tell her how awesome — honest — it is that she supports him. “Well,” she admits, “It took us a while.” I feel better, but only just.

+

At some point recently, film lost its hold on me. The blinders that tell me I won’t be happy unless I am working within the industry are receding, and I am unable to edit a film I shot. My ex-boyfriend is doing it instead.

The funny part is, I know exactly why it happened. And it’s impossible to convince you that it isn’t trivial. I fell in love with someone who ditched film for the environment. I hung on every word that was preached about working outside yourself, engaging the bigger picture. It was subconscious at first, then, insidious.

I felt myself returning to writing. Not scripts, but essays. Long form. At least once a day. And reading. Reading nonstop. The irony here, you say, is that being a writer is not any less self-involved than being a filmmaker, and you are right. But I can’t seem to help it. I have always oscillated between the two, and perhaps eventually, I will accept that I can do both, but that requires placing passion beneath time management.

Though for now, that reality, that you don’t need to live in New York to write like you might need to in order to do film, strikes me on the shoulder more often than not.

+ 

My other roommate walks in the door with her boyfriend. They too have just returned from Connecticut, from her parents’ house.

“I didn’t want to come back. I need to leave New York,” she also announces, but with faulty conviction. “It’s just talking to all of my friends, you realize how much you sacrifice to live here, and that most of the time, it’s not even worth it. My friend just moved to Providence, and bought a car. And not because she has buckets of money, but because she can.”

“No, no, no,” her boyfriend, ever the optimist, says from the couch. “We leave New York after we’ve established ourselves. After we’ve succeeded.”

+

Last week, the two of us, my roommate’s boyfriend and I, were talking about one of his friends who recently left the city to return home. “I hate so much,” he told me, “How it’s never, ‘Oh, well, Billy just realized he liked Detroit better.’ The narrative is always, ‘He couldn’t handle New York.’”

It is, isn’t it? We are always overwhelmed by the city, never under. It is greater than us. Either adapt, acclimate to its dictations, or forfeit.

Would I be part of that narrative? Could I? Or do I get a free pass, again, because I’m from here?

+

We leave North Carolina at 6:30 a.m. and I’m sad. Sad because I know I’m going to return to New York and sit on my couch and write, day in, day out, indoors. Not in plain air, on a porch, a stone’s throw from the sea.

I call my mother and ask for Elizabeth’s email. I don’t have work the coming week. I decide I am going to go up to Vermont and help on the farm and write. I am going to take a break, and think about whether or not I’m going to stay, like I told my roommates I would, when my lease is up in August. If I have the courage to leave New York.

I go to Vermont and it is wonderful. Just what I needed. I sweat all day, and then at night, I sit around the table and talk with strangers and have eye-opening conversations. Then I go to my room and I write, and it’s great, too. I am learning things. About the environment, about sustainability.

+

Of course, none of this actually happens. Instead, I take a break from the couch and get in the shower. I use half a bottle of conditioner on my dreading ends. I wonder if all my hesitancy is as ephemeral as my love of my life and this city. I write this essay. I am still not sure.

Sarah Salovaara is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs about film here, and you can find her twitter here.

"Calling" - Lewis Watson (mp3)

"Made Up Love Song #43" - Lewis Watson (mp3)

Way Too Long

by SHELBY SHAW 
 
The To Do List 
dir. Maggie Carey 
104 min.

Maggie Carey’s directorial debut was a 2001 documentary called Ladyporn in which two female students attempt to “produce a porno for women.” Carey’s first feature, The To Do List, seems to spring from a similar well. Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) is valedictorian of her Boise high school’s class of 1993, and she has the record-breaking GPA to deserve it – but she has one last thing to learn before her pre-Georgetown education is complete: sex, and all of it.

I can’t help but wonder how she missed out on learning anything at all about sex acts when going through sex ed in school, a notorious time to crack jokes and act like a know-it-all (which, in some people’s cases, wasn’t acting at all). Didn’t she at least see Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Think of movies from 2002 that you know, it doesn’t seem so far in the past. Maybe she scoffed at the very idea of Fast Times, but her best friends really didn’t try to convince her, or force her to watch it on VHS the way they eagerly plan a whole night to watch Beaches?

How could Brandy not have a single inkling of sex? She has two best friends (who seem to be her only friends) deemed “slutty” by everyone else. She has an older sister Amber (Rachel Bilson) who got sex out of the way when she was 15. Brandy’s unending innocence with all things sexual may be comically unbelievable on its own – like when she consults an Encyclopedia Britannica for “rim job” – but putting into perspective the lack of Internet and today’s aggressively candid portrayals of sex in “reality TV,” movies, and books may almost make it acceptable to be so far out of the know. MTV’s The Real World did premier in 1992, but that was when MTV actually stood for “Music Television” and pop – not pulp – culture.

Brandy’s desire to become a wise sexpert, and not necessarily a lustful sex icon, begins with Rusty Waters (Scott Porter). With a name that already sounds like a colon-related STD, Rusty looks like a surfing model or boy-band frontman and is home from college for the summer. There is a precise lonesome quality of Rusty’s that lets us see no harm with Brandy pursuing him.

Sure, our first image of him is at a party, playing guitar surrounded by girls – before somehow mistaking a drunken Brandy for a blonde he’s meeting for sex – but he is never popular with other women otherwise. He keeps more or less to himself at the pool and keeps a playful, not sinister nor even suggestive, banter with Brandy, or “Newbie” as he calls her in regards to her new lifeguard gig. Brandy’s haute crush on him and determination to ultimately give him her virginity is like a harmless crush on a celebrity.

Brandy is trying to accomplish many things, from hand jobs to orgasms, but she never lets anything such as emotional attachment or reputations – her own or the guys’ – get in the way. When the other lifeguards at the pool find out about her list of sex acts to complete, they assume she’s writing a sex manual. As Derrick (Donald Glover) puts it to Rusty, Brandy can do anything sexual that she wants to do because “it’s all research.” Guys are in awe of her, but is it because she has sexual freedom without reputational tarnish or is it because of her undertaking to complete this sex encyclopedia? Can women only be awed or held neutrally accountable for sexual curiosity if it can be backed up by a bigger purpose than just personal experimentation?

Later, Brandy masturbates while wearing a Clinton shirt and achieves orgasm with her face next to Hillary Rodham.

Brandy makes plans with Derrick to make Rusty jealous. But when she gets to his house, Derrick is the one to propose a plan: cunnilingus. She’s surprised he’s wanting to do this with her, but he explains that he was dumped for not being good at it. He wants to practice to make perfect, she wants to get it done to know what she’s dealing with for future reference. It’s the only time male and female sexuality are equated or even compared. Derrick is doing exactly what Brandy is doing, but it isn’t made to seem that way, and they never “practice” anything else afterwards. Their mutual symbiosis is just another one of her endeavors.

Regardless of how much respect or awe or coolness she may (silently) gain, Brandy never gets called a slut nor is treated like one, she is never pressured, and is never put into compromising situations except when others constantly walk in on her experiences. Initially Brandy's friends are supportive of her sexual journey, and at one point she is even encouraged to look at all the progress she’s accomplished in one summer. Only when Brandy disregards the boundaries of her girlfriends is she denigrated for her behavior, by her own best friend no less.

When Fiona (Alia Shawkat) begins to dance around the idea of a date with Cameron (Johnny Simmons), Brandy’s best guy-friend and painfully-obvious True Love, emotions come into play for the first time, even though at this point Brandy has already dry-humped with her friend Wendy's ex-boyfriend. Is it that only when threatened by losing sexual attention women are more prone to competition with one another, creating allies and cutting off foes? Or is it that Fiona and Wendy are calling Brandy out on her no-boundaries promiscuity, despite in the name of discovery research, for the sake of girlfriend code? It isn’t until Brandy’s sexuality branches out to include and protect certain guys that her friends – who are considered “slutty” but are never actually shown exhibiting this trait – disapprove of her behavior. 

Despite the campiness of the humor and the mildness of the 1990s setting (the interiors supplied enough Nineties to make up for the dialogue), The To Do List is like a Lifetime original with swearing and better cinematography. For a film about being deflowered on as many accounts as one girl can manage, nothing is raunchy or terribly obscene – no nudity (despite often losing her top), no explicit footage of hand jobs, blowjobs, or even straight-up intercourse, which is always censored with thickly wrapped blankets almost to the point of absurdity. The “real life” goal in such a constructed deliverance made me think of Lizzie McGuire if she tried to learn sex from Clarissa Explains It All.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these places about replacing her artifacts.

"Here Comes The Snow" - Matthew Ryan (mp3)

"Summer in the South" - Matthew Ryan (mp3)

A Few Things You Need To Know About Living In New York

by MOLLY YOUNG

Living in New York? Me too. Here is a pocket list of information that may aid you in your quest to take a bite out of the big apple.

Good luck.

Things you will spend money on

Coffee

Laundry

Things you won't spend money on

Gas

Things you will accumulate

Cheap umbrellas

Plastic cutlery

Tote bags

Things you will not have inside your apartment

Clean towels

A kitchen counter

Stairs

Interesting-shaped windows

by leeah joo

Subway etiquette #1

Don't trim your nails on the subway.

Social warning #1

Low-income smokers in New York spend 25 percent of their income on cigarettes. Try to quit smoking.

by Leeah Joo

Taxi cabs

Why are you taking a cab? The subway is faster and cheaper.

But okay. The main thing to remember with cabs is this: after you hail your cab, be sure to climb inside before directing the driver to your destination, especially if you are going to a different borough. If you stand outside and meekly suggest your outer-borough destination, the driver will simply shake his head and drive off.

This is crazy. You're a paying customer! You should not need to audition for a cab. It is also unlawful: drivers can be fined $500 for refusing to ferry customers from one part of the city to another part of the city. So get in the cab first and then tell the driver where you want to go.

Do not undertip.

Common sights you will see

Squashed rat

Bottle filled with pee

Mysteriously tiny drug bag (why is it so small?)

by Leeah Joo

Social warning #2

Melodrama wrapped in sophistication is still melodrama.

Social warning #3

Your crackpot radar needs to grow exquisitely refined. This applies to strangers, obviously, but it also applies to acquaintances. Living in any large city means that your social circle grows exponentially, which in turn brings about a statistical increase in the likelihood of encountering iffy types.

Designer juice

Don’t be ridiculous. Unless you are pulling in more than 500K after taxes, you do not have $10 to spend on a bottle of juice.

Subway etiquette #2

SCENE: A man leans against a subway pole on a crowded 2 train at 4 p.m.

Woman: This pole isn’t for you to lean on. It’s for people to hold on to.

Man: Is there a sign that says that? You see a sign?

Woman: I don’t HAVE to. It’s a crowded train. Stand up like a man.

Man: Woman, don’t loud-talk me.

Woman: YOU ARE A WEAK MAN. I CAN SEE IT.

END SCENE.

God, don't let this happen to you. Avoid leaning on the pole.

by Leeah Joo

Subway etiquette #3

Situation: A train pulls into the station. It is packed except for one car, which is curiously empty. Do not board the empty car. It is empty because something truly terrible has happened there.

Social warning #4

Learn to say "no".

Molly Young is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her Twitter here and her tumblr here. She writes for GQ and New York magazine.

Paintings by Leeah Joo.

"Eyesdontlie" - Machinedrum (mp3)

"Body Touch" - Machinedrum (mp3)

Types of Instagram Friends

by LARA MILLS

1 The one who only uses Instagram to post pictures of him/herself partying.

Photos look like: people, people, people, people, beer.

I say: I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, give me some.

2 The one who takes glorious photos with Instagram but consistently blurs out everything except his/her intended subject.

Photos look like: What might be the most stunning cliffside view of a foreign country you have ever seen except the cliffs are all blurry and the ocean waves are a smear in favor of highlighting one travel companion or significant other on the crest of that cliff who is permitted such exquisite detail by the Instagrammer that you can read the sports team motif on their trusty sunworn baseball hat.

I say: Your composition is so good that your intended subjects will be naturally highlighted. Please don't be paranoid and controlling and instead let us enjoy every detail of your wonderful photographs.

3 The one who only uses Instagram to post pictures of his/her family, family home, and family traditions in celebration of their wonderful family.

Photos look like: people, dog, cake, mom's pie in the window, dad being goofy, two or more relatives wearing matching costumes.

I say: I am so happy for you that your family is perfect but I live ten thousand miles away from mine plus we're really not cute or into each other or even ever really talk so I'm going to ignore these representations of the perfect American family but thanks for the assertion despite all my years of denial that the archetype actually does exist.

4 The one who lives in a foreign country and has fun relating daily street life back to friends at home.

Photos look like: Street food carts, adorable foreign babies, weekend trips into badass equatorial nature.

I say: Oops sorry this is me and about a dozen of my Instagram friends so I don't know how this comes off but people seem to like us okay. I admit it always makes me a little sad to share a foreign country with more adventurous travelers than I am whose Instagrams present some of the most stunning pictures of places I actually have access to by living out here but will never visit because I missed out on some weekend trip or another.

5 The one who somehow manages to take bad photographs with Instagram.

Photos look like: Zoomed-in latte foam which looks like rolls of naked human body fat; a chicken-shaped napkin holder on a table with its shadow; rotting oranges.

I say: I do not know how you manage to create such terrible images with the easiest, most intuitive photo editing software available on the market. Let’s reevaluate how you see the world and begin again with an online photography tutorial on composition and possibly a stronger glasses prescription.

6 Foodies

Photos look like: Perfectly arranged hyper-zoomed deliciousness framed by black or scrubbed-out white borders.

I say: How do you have so much free time on your hands to cook and consume such incredible meals seemingly every single day? You make me feel like an unhomely mess and I hate you and on top of that I'm hungry now but I don't want to eat peanut butter and jelly for the fifth day in a row so your picture of melon-ensconced prosciutto on a bed of radicchio leaves is making me want to go to the hypermarket in rushhour Jakartan traffic with a 100 degree typhoid-induced fever.

7 The one who thinks that hashtagged captions create grammatical sentences.

Photos look like: Oh, anything.

I say: #You #have #norespect #for #your #followers #if #you #think #wearewillingtoreadallyourhashtags #plus #ITDOESNTEVENWORK #if #you #are #makinguphastags #totes #random #whatevs. Double curses if they import their Instagram hashtags into facebook’s newsfeed because that doesn’t even make sense leave us alone.

8 The one who can use the word "selfie" in every day conversation with a straight face.

Photos look like: One big head at an angle plus half an arm backed by some famous historic monument or beautiful nature or at its worst, nothing particularly discernible.

I say: I'm biased against needlessly abbreviating the English language and especially abbreviations which just tack on a lazy "-y" suffix or its sonic equivalent so I find the word "selfie" inherently annoying. But I like you or else I wouldn't be following you on Instagram, so I do want to see your face in interesting places and will use selective blinders on your super hip hashtags because my word bias is my problem. However if you are taking pictures of yourself in a mirror again and again and then again in a different mirror then you are using up the wrong app's bandwidth.

9 The one who is really into his or her budding nuclear family.

Photos look like: Happy homebodies cheerfully snapping pictures with their significant others and especially their dog and in another year or two probably their baby(ies).

I say: Luckily my friends aren't child-bearing yet (though they're close!) yet a streak have lately adopted their first official relationship dogs which I guess is a precursor to toddlers except way more destructive given how many slobbered-beyond-recognition shoes or leery-looking beagles with a chew toy are popping up on my Instagram feed lately. Also I am not a huge fan of being subjected to a relationship's whole lifecycle from those initial months of cutesie look-where-we-are-together pictures through to dour shots of rain-soaked windows and ice cream tubs and breakup-friendly cats but this is another area where I realize that how you use the platform is your prerogative so good luck to you and I hope you find catharsis in at least making the pictures pretty.

10 The one who really likes his or her cat(s).

Photos look like: Cats looking grumpy, piled on top of each other, or snuggled in a lap in a carefully-framed self*e.

I say: Wouldn't it be fun if Instagram let us add big block Impact font letters to photos to insta-meme the cat pictures but then also everyone agreed to use one specific hashtag for all of their attempts and then Instagram let me filter out that single hashtag so I never actually had to look at them? That might work.

Lara Mills is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Jakarta. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"The Kiss (Jesse Perez remix)" - Ellen Allien (mp3)

"Need" - Ellen Allien (mp3)

His Glass House

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Philip Johnson's estate in New Canaan, Connecticut features eight buildings:

1) his house
2) a guest house
3) a gallery devoted to paintings
4) a gallery devoted to sculpture
5) a library
6) a folie
7) a ghost house
8) a tower

Thirty-three acres surround these structures, all as meticulously put together as the buildings themselves.

with his mother and sisters, 1917

Philip Johnson's mother Louise took a lot of staged photos of her children. She was relatively late to motherhood, and had not entered it lightly. She parented her only son with great purpose, pushing him towards academic achievement. She did not wish to be his friend. When he felt his first stirrings of attraction towards other boys in his class, he asked his mother what these feelings meant. "Philip, how should I know?" she replied.

with his sister

When Philip was a teenager his father was appointed by the government to investigate reports of pogroms in Poland during the first World War. The family sailed for Paris on the Aquatania. When they returned to Cleveland a few months later it was hard not to find it a disappointment.

He made few friends at boarding school — he was more concerned with winning the respect of his classmates. After being voted "Most Likely To Succeed," he entered Harvard, where he had none of the status of his more bourgeois friends, but all of the money. Finances were never a concern for young Philip: his father had purchased Alcoa stock i(n Philip's name) before the company became a behemoth. He bought a car and began amassing a library to his tastes. Philip tried kissing a few of his classmates with varying degrees of success. His father told him to forget about wanting to fuck men.

in Cairo 1928

Philip was depressed throughout his time at Harvard. A visit to Egypt claimed his virginity — he mated with a guard inside the Cairo Museum. Because of his numerous absences, he found himself a semester short of a bachelor's degree. Instead of finishing, he put his car on a boat crossing the Atlantic and arrived in Berlin. It was 1929.

Men of his particular predilection were numerous. The city thrived around him. "The Americans were the conquerors of Germany," he said later, "and the young Germans were eager to accomodate them. Paris was never that gastfreundlich." He observed the Bauhaus with wonder, making his first acquaintance with the artists there as a patron. The first painting he bought was a Klee.

PJ in Berlin, 1930

Other members of the group impressed him less. "Kandinsky is a little fool who is completely dominated by his swell Russian Grande Dame of a wife," he wrote. "He has millions of his sometimes painful abstractions sitting around the house and thinks he is still the leader of a new movement. It is sometimes pathetic, sometimes amusing."

Two months after the Museum of Modern Art opened in New York, Philip was back in America, finishing his degree so he could relocate himself in the institution's shadow. He became infatuated with a boyfriend named Cary Ross. In a letter to a female friend, he wrote that "You are the only one who knows about Cary and me, and to whom I can talk now. As you know the only reason it came about was because he is good-looking and identified with that group down there in my emotional life. Well it seems now that it was merely a passing whim with him, and he was too weak to tell me, and let me go on thinking more. He came up the other day, and naturally I soon found out where the land lay, and am now in a species of hell which I heartily dislike."

with Mies Van Der Rohe and Phyllis Lambert

Philip worked at the MoMA for no salary; he did not require any money from them and even paid for his own secretary. He travelled to Berlin often in order to indulge himself. The art dealer Julien Levy later said, "He showed me a Berlin night life such as few could have imagined. The grotesque decadence I was to discover over and over again in Berlin those few short weeks could only be compared, one might suppose, to Paris during the last days of Louis XVI."

Unlike in his youth, depression passed through Philip like a whim. He enlisted Mies Van der Rohe and his associate Lilly Reich to design a New York apartment he had purchased on a lark. He wanted the place to eschew the contemporary urge towards art deco.

Philip busied himself by preparing a massive event designed to feature modern architecture, the first in the MoMA's history. Despite or perhaps because of his experience with the artists of the Bauhaus, the final exhibition diminished Gropius, Le Corbusier (Philip was not a fan) and Van der Rohe quite significantly, placing their American peers on at least the same level. The arrangement satisfied no one, and Frank Lloyd Wright was also made furious by his depiction in the catalogue.

Philip replied,

I feel more than badly that you have misunderstood my intentions and actions to such an extent, and I am writing in the hope of clearing up as much as possible the reasons for your complaints. Please believe that I have appreciated your efforts to remain friends despite the many misunderstandings which I sincerely regret.

I feel as strongly as ever that I have a great deal to learn, much more so after the the experience of trying to make an exhibition. I still hope that we can have a good visit when I come West this spring...

For Philip Johnson toadying was itself an art of the highest order.

philip in NYC 1933

The moment Hitler emerged on the world political scene, Philip Johnson heard of him from his German-American supporters. Philip knew very little of world politics when he attended his first Nazi event in Potsdam, NY; his life in the city among gays and Jews effectively constituted Hitler's worst nightmare. Philip had even recently jumped into a relationship with a jazz singer named Jimmy Daniels. After all, Harlem was only a short trip up from his Upper East Side stomping grounds.

Jimmy Daniels perhaps a decade later

When Hitler came to power in January of 1933, Philip defended the man to anyone who would listen. He wrote an article for his Jewish friend Lincoln Kirstein's magazine entitled "Architecture in the Third Reich." Although he had not grown up hating Jews, he was receptive to Hitler's views of them. When Hitler ordered the murder of gay Nazi Ernst Rohm because of his homosexuality and potential challenge to the dictatorship, Johnson presciently left Germany.

Sony sold the building Johnson designed in New York to AT&T this year. I walk past it all the time — it seems to me it would be wholly at home in Nazi Germany. It is not surprising that Philip found something to admire in Hitler — many gentile intellectuals of the period did, just as many are attracted to the charisma of contemporary dictators now. But it is disgusting to be attracted to the Nazi aesthetic itself.

Johnson left his position at the MoMA in order to join up with Huey Long, the "left-wing" populist whose plans to redistribute wealth were ironic considering Philip's position. The MoMA board was completely embarrassed when Philip informed them that he was leaving to become Long's "Minister of Fine Arts." When he arrived in Louisiana, Long refused to see Philip.

After Long's death later that year, Philip attempted to join the cause of the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, another populist whose anti-Semitic radio addresses were familiar rhetoric across the Midwest. Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice, an organization based on the man's plan to attack banks and the country's wealthiest citizens. Philip's biographer Franz Schulze rationalizes Philip's dabbling into politics thusly: "He could, when so inclined, impose an immense concentration on whatever concept seized him."

philip and jeannette in Nice

Because he was gay, Philip Johnson knew he could never properly be a Nazi.  Among his friends were those loyal to Germany, and this put him in the government's crosshairs. The FBI began assembling a dossier on Philip. He complained of Jews trying to buy a magazine he was interested in, and was disgusted by his experience observing a Polish ghetto. He was ever more convinced of the superiority of his mother country, and planned to celebrate when Hitler conquered England.

He took a position for the German propaganda ministry and dispatched reports in English favorable to Germany from the "front lines." Reading his reports, bile rises in every mouth. Such indiscretions are routinely tossed aside by those who wanted to embrace Johnson fully as an architect. I can't myself look at any of his buildings without remembering the things he said, even if he was a young man.

his later attempt at a synagogue

During the war, Philip was admitted to the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He had co-written one of the books assigned for his class in the history of architecture. One of his projects at Harvard was to build his own house, a lot he purchased at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge. He tried to put his Nazi past behind him by joining the Harvard Defense Group, but he was eventually dismissed after complaints. He tried to apply for a position with U.S. Naval Intelligence but was rejected for obvious reasons. The FBI continued to follow his activities.

Most people at Harvard actively avoided the young Nazi, but occasionally some found his personality charming. After sitting next to him at a socialist dinner party, Betrand Russell commented to the host that "your friend Philip is a diabolist, which is a strange thing for a friend of yours to be, but how much pleasanter it is to spend an evening with a gentleman you disagree with than with a cad you agree with." After his first year there, he moved into a room in the Hotel Continental, hiring an English butler and a Filipino houseboy to keep the place familiar while his new home was constructed.

On March 12, 1943, Philip Johnson was drafted into the army. He never left the U.S., or even advanced beyond the rank of private. His fellow soldiers called him "Pop" because of his age and general ineptness.

with Frank Lloyd Wright after the war

Through the influence of his friend Alfred Barr, Philip returned to the MoMA after his discharge from the army in 1944. Shortly thereafter, he bought his estate in New Canaan and began construction on what would be known as The Glass House. The irony was lost on him, and in fact irony itself did not emigrate to America until a decade later.

The Glass House was Philip's primary residence on the estate. It was first and foremost a bachelor pad except to the extent that it did not afford a measure of privacy, kind of like a closet that wasn't. Since such a structure could only be realistic on an estate that allowed total isolation from passersby, The Glass House is of course impossible except for the very rich, who tend to value their privacy more than most.

By 1949 he had completed the Guest House, opaque where his own residence was open. He moved in and immediately set to work on an article documenting the construction of both buildings. He invited the editors of every architectural publication he knew to come visit. In the meantime his attempts to pass the licensing exam in his field failed again and again. In order to continue practicing what was now his trade, he relocated his office to New Canaan and began teaching part-time at Yale.

One of his commissions in the years that followed was the design of a synagogue in Port Chester, New York. He had won the job by promising to deliver his design at zero cost. The resulting structure is among the most revolting of Johnson's designs — the wholly uninspired, predictable interior clashing with an exterior that was nothing short of repulsive. Years later Philip would continue his half-hearted desire to atone for his Nazi past by designing an Israeli nuclear reactor.

Sorek Nuclear Research Center

In 1954 Philip finally passed the architectural exam and relocated his practice to Manhattan, where he shared space with Van der Rohe. Together they collaborated on the legendarily bad Seagram building, although the vast majority of the responsibility for the building's dullness fell on Van der Rohe alone. He would make his own name during the ensuing decades, falling in and out of the zeitgeist depending on the various whims of the media and his peers.

Philip was forever wanting to add structures to his New Canaan parcel, and the pavilion he added to the lagoon was the worst of his ideas. Aesthetically, it was a hodgepodge, and its intrusion on nature — in effect, in created a small island where there was nothing — made it not only objectionable but dangerous. "There is something attractive about making some part of a building precarious," Philip would later claim airily. "It is titillating. I sometimes get an erection when I jump over that little stretch of water."

Philip fared better in the museums he designed in the 1950s as his star rose. He had already had good practice when he fashioned an extension of the MoMA, and his work on the fantastic Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Nebraska and an art museum in Fort Worth emboldened his confidence. His proposals for Lincoln Center were not well-regarded among his peers, but his early designs for it have aged better than many of his more celebrated structures.

one of his unbuilt plans for Lincoln Center

In his personal life, Philip had dumped his serious boyfriend for a gorgeous Yugoslavian immigrant named Peter Vranic. They kept each other supplied with what the other lacked; as Philip would later put it, things were "very violent, very sexual, very physical, and very short." When Vranic found out he wasn't in the now 50-year old Johnson's will, however, he bailed. In the chaos of this turmoil Philip met the man he would spend the rest of his life with: then-RISD student David Whitney.

Early in their relationship, Philip had treated David like a fawning admirer, installing him in a Manhattan apartment. There David established friendships with Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns to satisfy him whenever Philip ignored him. Whitney used Philip's money to great effect, and soon buildings had to be constructed to accomodate the paintings his lover desired. Before David's arrival, Philip had only installed an oval-shaped swimming pool near The Glass House, but with David's input he designed a large art gallery, completed in 1965. A sculpture gallery followed by 1970.

david whitney in 1975

David Whitney died in 2005, five months after Philip. Tours now run through The Glass House from May to November. An extended survey of the place runs about $100 and should be booked in advance. Taking a virtual tour on the website is far more cost-effective. If you did not take care to remember, you would think that The Glass House had suddenly popped into reality to serve some new master — it is no good as a museum. This place sheds history, now rendered invisible among the structures Philip imagined.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Vuillard. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

photo: Richard Payne

"On the Street Where You Live" - Matthew Morrison (mp3)

"Ease On Down the Road" - Matthew Morrison (mp3)

Dome Touching

by DICK CHENEY

Under the Dome
creator Brian K. Vaughan

People are constantly touching one another Under the Dome. Last week, a bearded blonde veteran named Barbie (Mike Vogel) was for some reason walking all alone one night as it was pouring. Even then, an intrepid ginger reporter (Rachel Lefevre) accused of copyright infringement by the Japanese executives who own the rights to the April O'Neal character finds him in the rain. She tells him, "Waah I had a hard day Bahbie" so that he will do the thing where he embraces her then makes a quick transition to putting his tongue in her mouth.

they look like two pelicans but I was moved by their romance to be sure

In the morning they are in her bed.

She gives him a variety of looks there, each of which I have broken into discrete parts. (Examining the range of post-coital facial expressions was my thesis at the U of W.)

1. Mild disgust
2. Approbation
3. Sunlight in her ginger eyes
4. Total comfort and acceptance

wiping the last barbecue sauce in chester's mill off his lover's face

5. Where are you going?
6. You're leaving?
7. Just for water?
8. Starting to have some regrets?
9. Pretty happy to be interrupted by my pregnant neighbor, huh?
10. Will I see you at home?

every morning in the Bezos home
Meanwhile, men feel a very different set of emotions after sex. They can run the gamut depending on exactly how gentile the man in question is, a 1 being David Paymer and a 10 being Kevin Costner. Here is what I outlined in 1973, and it is no less true today than it was the day I woke up my wife Lynne with breakfast in bed, you know, just because...

1. Where am I and who did this to me?
2. These sheets are redolent of lavender.
3. I wonder if Alex Rodriguez addressed the media.
4. One day we will all need performance enhancing drugs.

Crest. Colgate. Sensodyne. Tom's of Maine.

5. My penis feels like a tube of toothpaste.
6. When did I romance a ginger newspaperwoman?
7. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. I hope he fires E.J. Dionne first, and meanly.
8. She probably thinks I want to get out of here, because the rest of the Dome is so fun. Instead I'm going to assuage those doubts with my Crest.
9. I wonder if later in the episode we will lie on the couch saying absolutely nothing to each other.

curling up and listening to "Silent Night" UTD, it does not get any better
10. Yep.

please god not Richard Bachmann
Fortunately romance in Under the Dome is not confined to women and the men who killed their husbands. Norrie (Mackenzie Lintz) and Joe (Colin Ford) went searching for the exact middle of the Dome, and when they got there, they found this year's hatch from Lost. But no, it was like a small dome this time, and underneath it was a black egg. When Norrie touched it, she saw Samantha Mathis in the woods, possibly the most disappointing thing to ever happen when someone touched the Dome, and that includes a fatal heart attack.

An egg is controlling the dome. Think about this.

The main thing that bothered me about Under the Dome was the ongoing storyline where psychotic ex-boyfriend Junior (Alexander Koch) locked Annie (Britt Robertson) up in his Dad's fallout shelter.

He told Angie that it was because she had changed and the Dome was doing something to her and he wanted to keep her safe, but that entire time I suspected otherwise. Every single episode I watched I was consumed by the desire to know when Angie would free herself from this underground prison until finally Junior's father decided to let her go, assuming everyone would be dead after the U.S. military leveled a missile strike on the Dome. (Everyone survived except for common sense.) When Angie finally made it home last night, her brother did not even ask where she was or what she had been doing since the Dome fell.

crossing my fingers this parcel becomes the UTD WalMart

Under the Dome is kind of like watching a car accident in slow motion. You know it's going to be bad, so you have to know just how bad. It actually shocks me that Stephen King was never involved with Lost in the first place; he is the master of setting up some overblown mystery until it turns out, "That was just an earthquake doing it," or "Something evil made that happen." I believe the antagonist in one of King's recent books was actually a copy of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Children ran away in fear because it was on their summer reading list.

Do you ever feel like a black man, maybe a close friend who HAPPENS to be a black man, is narrating your life? No?

I don't want to make this all about how much Stephen King sucks, but let's face it. The Green Mile was about a magical black man who heals white prison guards by touching them. The Shawshank Redemption was about a magical black man who heals white prison inmates through superior voiceover work. Besides former Boston Red Sox closer Tom Gordon, these are the only black characters in all of Stephen King's work. Don't get me started on The Stand, it's so fucking stupid my head hurts just thinking about it. The distinguishing feature of Stephen King's work is that he never stops to think if an idea is good, he just believes in it because he had it.

WALT

Since Under the Dome has been renewed for a second season, it's guaranteed to be dragged out much longer than it should. The show deserves praise for killing off Samantha Mathis, although in an ideal world she would have been vivisected by some kind of alien blade. Instead she died of a heart attack roughly the same time that her daughter touched the small dome and asked the egg to speak to her. Unfortunately since a number of characters/helicopter pilots on Lost have already perished, this just increases the screen time given to the black DJ of Chester's Mill and the Asian radio station operator. I hate token minority characters even more than I hate The Newsroom.

Jeff Bezos will want someone inside the dome. That's when I strike.
To get your news Under the Dome you have to find the right frequency. In the future, all newspapers will be owned by white billionaires as vanity projects; they won't even have advertising; they will simply be a public service provided by the very rich to the very poor. I can't even imagine what people from low socioeconomic backgrounds think when they read The New York Times.

I forgot about the black female lesbian Hollywood agent stranded in a New England town. So many stories to tell. Through six episodes, she's had one line that wasn't, "ALICE!"
This could, however, be the saving grace of the media. Instead of having to drive pageviews by offering stupid shit like, "The Top Ten Things He Thinks After Sex", maybe they'll actually do some reporting on, you know, the government or private sector instead of writing long editorials about sports teams and Amanda Bynes. When you wake up Under the Dome, there is no newspaper. When you turn on the radio, all you hear is a DJ playing Nina Simone and Nat King Cole. There is no Jeff Bezos Under the Dome. There is no Tina Brown Under the Dome. There is only the corpse of Ezra Klein and sex without birth control.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. You can find his first Under the Dome review here.

"Crazy for You" - Madonna (mp3)

"Lucky Star" - Madonna (mp3)