Manual Labor

by KARA VANDERBIJL

We stayed with a lot of strangers when we returned to Southern California for the summer after our first four years in France. It was as uncomfortable as you can imagine, with moments of gut-squeezing anxiety, like when your suitcase looks the same as every other suitcase on the baggage claim carousel. 

Our first hostess was the sort of woman who flapped around the house in an expensive, colorful kimono and made margaritas before lunch. She also preferred that we fold down the duvet before sitting down on a bed in one of her many guest rooms. Naturally my mother and I were slightly reluctant when she invited us to join her at her favorite nail salon one morning. It was in a stucco strip mall; across the parking lot was a Starbucks and a Cold Stone Creamery. On the other side of a newly-paved street — and a stretch of landscaping so young the saplings were still braced — sat another nail salon, Starbucks and Cold Stone Creamery. Mom parked our rental car and we flip-flopped our way into the salon.

We leaned against the counter as we waited to be assigned to both a chair and the unfortunate human squatting in front of it. In a small alcove, the ladies had erected some sort of crude shrine in which a fat Buddha stared benignly at a pile of day-old donuts. My head began to spin. It was perhaps the acetone or that season’s newest shade. Mom and I got French tips, which we laughed about, because in France they call any kind of manicure “American nails”, just like they call French braids “Indian braids”.

Years ago, I read a children’s historical novel about China. One of the minor characters was an old man who had never cut his pinkie fingernail because it was a symbol of his wealth, the fact that he never had to do any manual labor. It grew in on itself, curled and brown.

This fact about ancient China is passed around like an urban legend, a sort of disgusting anecdote that amuses and impresses. What's funny to me is that although they are less physically repulsive, we still cherish these status symbols. We still like having an extra $30 to burn so that it looks like we spend all day sipping mimosas over brunch, gripping phones and flipping perfect beachy waves. It's like, have you ever done the dishes? Rolled out a pie crust? Picked up something? I don't understand the desire to look like someone who has never stepped off the pages of a lifestyle blog. 

Is there only beauty in the immobile, the indestructible, the unchipped? 

From an early age, I became obsessed with a picture book about the demise of Pompeii that the local library left at child’s-eye view. The images filled my thoughts. I was not afraid of volcanoes (there were more important things to be afraid of, like rattlesnakes in the backyard and earthquakes) but I was fascinated with the images of the people who had lived in Pompeii, the people who had without warning been torn from their pleasures.

Vesuvius left only traces: lewd sketches above doorways in what used to be a brothel, large paintings of penises in inner courtyards. The residents of Pompeii died with eating utensils in their hands. Locked in an embrace. Curled up into themselves, hands over their ears.

For a few years, I considered the merits of living by what I came to call the “Pompeii test”: I would only do things that would be instantly recognizable if I were instantly encased in molten lava for all time. Had a volcano magically erupted in Southern California on the day my mother and I were getting manicures, archeologists would have found us thousands of years later forever locking hands with the nail technicians. “Look,” the archeologists would say, “these women were comforting one another in their last moments,” or, “Look, these women were performing sign language” or “Look, these women were handing primitive tools to one another.”

It isn’t remembering Pompeii that keeps me from getting manicures these days, though. I feel unlike myself when I walk into salons featuring the same peach-colored walls, faux Grecian columns and flat-screen televisions playing daytime soaps. Women with perfectly straightened hair in yoga pants read fashion magazines while they get their bunions rubbed, then walk out gingerly in rhinestone-covered sandals. I have nothing against these women, but I am not one of them. I haven’t brushed my hair in a year.

It is fascinating to me that we develop beauty products that completely deny the ever-evolving, ever-moldable aspects of our bodies. We take our live fluid hair and fill it with products so it won't move. We dutifully hydrate with special creams to prevent wrinkles that we know we'll get anyways. To me, this is a lot like closing the curtains on an ocean view and plastering them with pictures of motionless waves. 

Something must be said for allowing yourself to be ruined and ripened by your environment.

A few weeks ago I listened to a woman in the bus complain about her most recent manicure over the phone. She expressed disdain for the salon and called the technician who had performed the manicure a string of adjectives I wouldn't even assign to my worst enemy. I snuck a look at the toes peeping out of her T-strap sandals. They were painted a trendy neon orange. I couldn't pick up any visible flaws, except that she had none.

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

"Will We Ever Be Friends Again?" - Ida Maria (mp3)

"I Just Need A Hug" - Ida Maria (mp3)

Hours Alone

by HOLLI CARRELL

I moved to New York City because there was nothing to do but move to New York City. A girl like me from Utah romanticizes about this sort of thing when she’s fifteen — sees herself smoking off a fire escape somewhere artistic, like the West Village, with nothing else but a punchbowl and a wad of cash in her back pocket. I hadn’t been to New York in six years — since I was seventeen and staying in Midtown with my mother, hailing cabs to Ellen’s Stardust, and venturing no further than 59th street. My mantra: If it isn’t going to work out in New York it isn’t going to work out anywhere.

I agree to sublet my childhood best friend’s apartment in Washington Heights. I pay for three months up front because she says it will be “just right” and I’m all for easy acclimation. She and her husband and their three-month baby are boarding the party plane to Brooklyn. Their apartment is filled to overflow with U-haul boxes that feel like Greco-Roman ruins of the cardboard variety. When I arrive, we go grocery shopping. I haven’t had anything to eat since the Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwich in Denver, when I wasn’t even hungry, just wanting to fill myself full after traveling with so much lightness. I’ve sold everything except the suitcase with me; a crate of journals back home underneath my parents' stairs.

My hosts weave me through the neighborhood, drawing my attention to the best cheap pizza, a cluster of aging Dominican men playing dominoes, a dead pigeon in the gutter. I’m surprised by the amount of trash on the street. “Don’t go east of Broadway,” my friend tells me, pointing. “I mean you can, but it’s probably not a good idea.” We pass a Bodega owner yelling at a schoolboy. I can’t understand his Spanish or the rest of the noise suddenly against me on the sidewalk, bottlenecking. I’ve noticed we’re the only Caucasians on the block and I feel guilty for noticing, but also disoriented — sticky with humidity and neighborhood eyes. I knew it would be like this but not like this. I feel certain everyone hates me on sight for spreading my flavor of white gentrification. I enclose my futon bed in a pillaring crescent wall of boxes that night. I don’t sleep, but keep my eyes shut tight.

My friends depart for Brooklyn and I sweep up the moving dust accumulating to the floor and blackening my feet. I am glad they are gone with their shared togetherness. I leave the neighborhood early — while sidewalk vendors lazily unload fruit crates from vans — and litter downtown cafes with crisp resumes I have kept pressed in a green folder from college.

I sit on benches along Central Park West in the afternoon, eating bagels and consuming paper cups full of sludgy convenience coffee — the burnt the better. I like to sit in Washington Square Park with my headphones on but no music playing; listening to student’s quarrels and the combined amplification of the living. I stay where things are easier until sunset, and then ride the A-train home past 168th. I try to not hate myself for my discomfort; for knowing, at any given moment, the dominating demographic of my fellow car passengers; for being raised in a whitewashed Anglo-dominant environment.

I get hired at a trendy coffee shop in SoHo. The manager tells me to dress cool. My co-workers are interesting and creative but far too familiar. I realize I am content sunbathing in the landscape of my solitude, feeding for days off random interactions with strangers: a shop owner telling me he likes my haircut; a homeless woman on the platform who stares into my eyes and smiles. I keep carrying around my navy blue trench coat, some adult security blanket, even though it’s nearly June.

My parents call often, worried. This is what this is all about I want to say. I came to the city to be alone, to dig! I recognize the hilarity — sandwiching yourself between eight million others for desolation — all the while anticipating a hand on your shoulder in the subway, steadying.

My one bedroom apartment is too large for the zero furniture I own and the vast, echoing tumor-like chamber of nullity I feel spreading on occasion from pole to pole in my body. In the evening, I turn off the lights and with a cup of wine in my hand, dance to Otis Redding’s "Lonely and Blue" — the outside street lamp bathing holy orange light through the white sheet drapes. Below my apartment is a pumping gym. Men stand outside in ripped t-shirts watching younger versions of themselves across the street, calling to teenaged women reclined in windowsills. I’m lucky if I average five hours of sleep a night — especially on the weekends, when the block DJ hooks up his stuff and blasts merengue at volumes I didn’t know possible; when the building’s little boys play soccer in the lobby, designating either end of each wall as goalposts.

Some mornings as I lay awake, everything lifts and I feel gloriously present, listening to the constant array of thumps as if each beat were my very own heartbeat, a reminder against the wall of my chest: You’re here; We’re here; You’re here; We’re here. Connected.

On the first terrifically suffocating evening of the summer, I open my screenless window and am visited by a German cockroach two inches long, plodding across my hardwood. I’m unable to squash it, send it down the toilet, or throw it out the window (where it might land on an innocent neck) so I trap it in a Tupperware container and punch holes in the plastic for ventilation. I resolve to buy a glass aquarium at a bric-a-brac store the next morning, pave the bottom with leaves and my leftover dinner scraps. I can make it work for the both of us.

When I wake up the poor creature is curled on its back: shrunken, dead. I can only think to leave the apartment.

At the front door, I intersect paths with an elderly Dominican woman who I’ve gathered, in passing, is my neighbor. She wears a long burgundy skirt and holds a sack of laundry and a bushel of roses. Stacks of golden bracelets circumnavigate her wrists. Her face is disarmingly alert and for the first time in two months she turns, looks at me, and speaks. I have no idea what she’s saying. She laughs, places a finger to her lips, hands me a rose only partially wilted, then leaves. I re-enter my apartment, put the flower in water, flush the cockroach, and stare in the mirror. Only time can arrange my expression.

Holli Carrell is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Manhattan. You can find her website here.

Photographs by the author.

"You Can't Be Told" - Valerie June (mp3)

"Wanna Be on your Mind" - Valerie June (mp3)

Any Way That You Want Him

by DICK CHENEY

Breaking Bad
creator Vince Gilligan

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) has recently been exposed for the first time. Some of the people that he knows know some of the things he did, other people know others of the things he did, one or two people know a few of the things he did.

it's called a garage beard and it is fantastic

No one knows everything, but Walt's brother-in-the-law could now list the vast majority of Walter White's murders, but he could not possibly detail them all. "If that's true," Walter tells Hank as the last episodes of AMC's Breaking Bad unfold, "if you don't know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly." He obviously has not seen Hank on Under the Dome.

sic the child on him Walt, protect yr family
For some reason it is far more disappointing to watch the protagonist of Breaking Bad lie than it is to watch him kill someone. Each moment he used deadly violence as a means of communication, we know in our hearts that Walt had no other choice. Even when he poisoned a child with the byproduct of a rare plant, he had a moral ground from which to operate. Did you ever read Kissinger's autobiography? It wasn't full of apologies.

staring away from someone and looking mad is an entire class at Juillard
His ex-partner Jesse Pinkman stands on no such firmament. Watching him redistribute his wealth made me physically ill, just as I become sick to my stomach from the Nazi references in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Giving away your money to make yourself feel better about things you have done is fiction's second oldest cliche after Leonardo DiCaprio talking very quickly in a loud voice.

never get seafood at the Dog House, you will regret your choice

The sad thing about Jesse Pinkman's current existence is that it's about a million times more exciting than mine. He hung out with his friends, and went to pick up some hot dogs. That sounded fantastic. Then he gave a bum $10,000. If you really want to give money to people who deserve it, flush it down the toilet, because whoever makes that disappear is a magician who deserves to be compensated. Or go on Bandcamp with some earplugs.

Aaron Paul's acting has been reduced to its most basic component. His skull ensconced in skin now looks like Mr. Potato Head, and his eyes, as usual, do about 90 percent of the work:

that was voyager

His only morality is that he does not obey the rules of others, which is a very good morality indeed. Paul's general approach to playing the character of Jesse Pinkman has never bothered me before now, but the constant eye rolling, the peripatetic motions of his tongue and mouth and the staring as a substitute for meaningful response to stimuli does not scream spin-off to me. I was really hoping this would all end with Jesse turning into the new Sam from Cheers but that hope dims every time he tries to expose or apologize for his past. If Ted Danson can walk around with his hairline, so can you Aaron.

jeez walt just shave your head and pretend you have cancer, we've all done it

The number three cliche in scriptwriting is of course showing the end before the beginning. With his ginger hair growing in and his live free or die apparel, Future Walt resembles a tea party adherent who has been infected with Simon Pegg's DNA. His trunk full of guns holds no interest for us, since shooting people has never been Walt's metier.

did not personally find Leaves of Grass all that affecting

Presumably Future Walt has been given leave by Hank to flee. The people Future Walt is now running from are more likely to be his old partners than the law.

This hokey past/present set-up has taken some of the juice out of the season until now. Walt has returned to Albuquerque to reclaim his secret poison, and we are meant to wonder who exactly will be his target. Lydia seems too obvious, and her definition of business casual too restrictive to perish in such a scenario.

lydia your sense of style was unencumbered by the birth of your child and I respect that immensely

More likely he finally has to put Jesse out of his bliss. Even Mr. Pinkman has never fathomed Walt's ways completely. In not-so-subtle fashion he tries to get Walt to convince him that Mike is alive somewhere, that the only friend he made in this sordid business was not also consumed by it. Walt composes himself on Jesse's couch, thinking in his head that it is time for one more good lie before he tells the truth.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location and the former vice president of the United States of America. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about touching under the dome.

Walt never saw a bong before this moment, he was shocked by this device

"Any Way That You Want Me (Troggs cover)" - Spiritualized (mp3)

"I Think I'm In Love" - Spiritualized (mp3)

A Grand Alchemical Ambition

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

You can find in America a place where houses are built from the remains of shipwrecks and wedding bands are cast from railroad spikes, where people welcome you with a sneer instead of a smile, and where a wooden gallows casts its shadow across the town square. I found my way here late, having returned home after a night of drinking with that downtrodden feeling restless inside of me, when I listened for the first time to Buell Kazee’s version of “The Wagoner’s Lad,” a song that begins with the verse:

Oh, hard is the fortune of all woman kind
She's always controlled, she's always confined
Controlled by her parents until she's a wife
A slave to her husband the rest of her life

It was not a sentiment I expected to find in an antediluvian ballad. And sung as it was in Kazee’s lonesome Appalachian moan, I was profoundly affected. I listened to that track, and another performed by Kazee, “The Butcher Boy,” over and over until it was near dawn, feeling the odd comfort of a bittersweet sisterhood. The mayor of this bleak place I had ended up in was a man named Harry Everett Smith. He was the person responsible for including the Kazee tracks on the compilation I had been listening to — the Anthology of American Folk Music.

In 1951 Smith moved to New York City. As was typical, he was broke when he arrived on the East Coast and contacted Moses Asch, who had recently started the Folkways imprint, with the hope of selling him part of his record collection. An avid collector of obscure records since his early teens, the now 28-year-old Smith had a collection of recordings numbering in the thousands. Asch was intrigued by Smith’s collection, but instead of purchasing part of it, he commissioned Smith to curate what would become the Anthology of American Folk Music — an 84-song collection that played a crucial role in the folk revival for the 1950s and ‘60s. At the time he was compiling the Anthology, Smith was reading Plato, an inspiration he recounts in a 1969 interview: “I felt social changes would result from it. I’d been reading Plato’s Republic. He’s jabbering on about music, how you have to be careful about changing the music because it might upset or destroy the government.” By serving as inspiration for the protest songs of the era, the Anthology did indeed contribute to important social change.

It wasn’t just what Smith put on the Anthology that made it a subversive spellbook, but how. He arranged the songs — from the Devil’s whistle of “faaa-dita-la-dita-la-daaay” relayed by Bill and Belle Reed to the rounds of “We thank the Lord” of the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers and back to the effusive “Kill yourself!” whoop of Uncle Dave Macon — so that themes of suicide and salvation looped around a Möbius strip of red, white, and blue bunting. Smith assembled tracks so as to erase any context of race, gender, and education, and he omitted these kind of biographical details from the album’s liner notes. “It took years before anybody discovered that Mississippi John Hurt wasn’t a hillbilly,” Smith said. It took several months for me to realize that Buell Kazee wasn’t a woman. With no gender context for the name Buell and given the quality of the old recording, Kazee had become the person I needed to hear sing what had registered as a proto-feminist ballad — a woman.

The celestial monochord being played by the hand of God that Smith used for the cover of the Anthology of American Folk Music

In his book on Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus wrote of Smith’s codex, “The Anthology was a mystery — an insistence that against every assurance to the contrary, America was itself a mystery. As a mystery, though, the Anthology was disguised as a textbook; it was an occult document disguised as an academic treatise on stylistic shifts within an archaic musicology.” The Anthology of American Folk Music was exactly the kind of arcane catalog you would expect to be produced by a man who claimed to be the son of infamous occultist Aleister Crowley and Anastasia Romanov, youngest daughter of the last Russian czar who was executed by the Bolsheviks.

Recording a Lummi ceremony in 1942

Another (more likely true) claim from Smith about his childhood was that when he turned 12 his father gave him a blacksmith shop and told him, “You must perform that magic feat which no one in the history of the world has yet performed: the conversion of lead into gold.” This father was a Freemason who worked a variety of jobs in the Pacific Northwest salmon-fishing industry and was married to a woman who worked as a Lummi Indian teacher. They were theosophists and encouraged their son’s interests in the unusual. The elder Smith also had his son build models of Edison’s light bulb and Bell’s telephone in his blacksmith shop. His mother’s work with the area’s Native communities inspired Smith to document their culture. On self-modified equipment, he recorded ceremonies and songs, developed a notational system for translating their language, and collected artifacts (later repatriated) — all while still a high school student. This was the beginning of Smith’s lifelong quest to document and arrange the different permutations of culture as a means to esoteric enlightenment.

The common understanding of alchemy is that it’s the study of turning lead into gold. But this fabled ability, known as the philosopher’s stone, is only one facet of alchemy, which is more philosophical tradition than bunk science. Alchemy is in part physical transmutation, of base metals into noble ones, but even that is said by Hermetics to be symbolic of the greater aspect of the study, which is spiritual transmutation via purification processes, or to bring the body and mind to perfection, to accomplish the Magnum Opus.

Still from Mirror Abstractions, 1957

While the Anthology of American Folk Music was a Magnum Opus (or Great Work) in its own right, it was also just one example of Smith’s grand alchemical ambition. Through his documenting and arranging, he hoped to uncover universal patterns and with them a deeper understanding of all human creation. There was his paper airplane collection, assembled over a 20-year period from the playgrounds and streets of New York and annotated with the date and location found for later analysis, and his research into string figures, a storytelling method he considered a global form of expression. During a stint at a Bowery homeless shelter, he made audio recordings of the snoring sounds of his vagabond bunkmates. For Smith it was all a means of divination. He elevated documenting and arranging to a ritualized process — as the preparation for the mystery of transmutation to occur. It became a trademark, particularly in his film work.

Smith's string figures

Smith began his experimentations in filmmaking while living in Berkeley. He moved there after dropping out of his anthropology studies at the University of Washington and quickly fell in with the 1940s bohemian milieu. His works were drug-enhanced experimentations in synesthesia that attempted to unite the experiences of hearing and seeing. These experimentations included screenings in San Francisco’s Fillmore district where jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie would improvise a soundtrack according to Smith’s color projections. Inspired by painters like Kandinsky, Smith considered synesthesia a mystical correspondence between the senses. Exemplary of his Hermetic assemblages was his Film #12: Heaven and Earth Magic, a story of a heroine who incurs a toothache after the loss of a valuable watermelon. The dialogue-less film was primarily made from collaged catalog and medical illustrations and influenced by Max Ernst, turn-of-the-century psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and Georges Méliès.

With his mural at Jimbo’s Bop City in 1950

Avant-garde film scholar P. Adams Sitney has written extensively on Smith’s Film #12 Heaven and Earth Magic, and on the topic of alchemy in Smith’s film opus he has said, “The chance variations on the basic imagistic vocabulary of the film provide yet another metaphor between his film and the Great Work of the alchemists. For the Renaissance alchemist, the preparation of his tools and of himself equaled in importance the act of transformation itself. Since every element in an alchemical change had to be perfect, each instrument and chemical had its own intricate preparation. The commitment to preliminaries is so strong that in its spiritual interpretation, alchemy becomes the slow perfection of the alchemist; the accent shifts from goals to processes.”

For all the intricate codifying that went into Smith’s collections and artwork, a parallel and destructive urge ran through him. Toward the end of his life, Smith taught for several years as a shaman in residence at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, and a former student said of his process there: “He would just concentrate and study and work and go haywire, drive himself crazy, getting everything in exactly the right order and then he would just give it a kick and say ‘that’s it.’ But he knew when he kicked it that he’d chosen the right moment and however it fell was going to be right.” This Surrealist technique allowed for the magic of alchemy to occur — the purification process of arranging film pieces perfectly and the final “act of God” that transformed the base work into a noble one.

in 1965

When Smith’s violent gestures were taken to the extreme, however, they resembled self-sabotage. Heaven and Earth Magic was printed in black and white, but Smith built a special projection unit for showing it that allowed for him to change its color and shape using a series of filters and gels. Smith threw the projector out a third-story window in a tantrum, destroying it. And during a talk at the Queens Museum in 1978, Smith would say that the filmstrip of Heaven and Earth Magic screened that day was a fifth generation print, the previous four having been thrown out by Smith and later recovered by friends.

Still from Early Abstractions, 1941-1957

He was equally destructive with himself and his relationships. He liked to brag about killing people and claimed to have never had sex (the latter claim another of the few likely true statements about himself). “Smith is a legitimate visionary, whose disdain for the personality can be found not only in the absence of biographical references in his art but also in the lies he tells about himself, in the tricks he plays so assiduously to hold others at a distance, and in his utter disregard for physical and emotional well-being, whether his own or that of others,” wrote poetry scholar Stephen Fredman. He would borrow equipment from friends and then refuse to return it or pawn it for money without apology. Another anecdote about Smith has him reading to his mother on her deathbed a chapter titled “Sadistic Trends” from Karen Horney’s Our Inner Conflicts. No word as to whether Smith was accusing his mother, in her final days, of being a sadist, or if he was trying to offer an explanation for his behavior.

Hunchbacked from childhood rickets, Smith further deteriorated his body with decades of drug and alcohol addiction and poor eating habits. (When he finally adopted a “healthy” diet late in life, it was said to consist of “bee pollen, raw hamburger, ice cream, and Ensure,” as well his usual marijuana and “whatever combination of Sinequan and Valium he found in his jacket pocket.”) Between the six months Smith worked as an engine degreaser operator for Boeing while in college and his final years as a teacher, Smith seems to have survived solely on the occasional grant and benefactor or generosity of friends (particularly Allen Ginsberg, who let Smith room with him on several occasions). His indifferent poverty meant that he had a well developed sense of ingenuity, but it also resulted in many projects remaining unfinished and the loss of his collections. In 1965, while working on a recording project in Oklahoma, Smith was evicted for nonpayment of rent and his irreplaceable artwork and collections were dumped in the Fresh Kills landfill.

With Allen Ginsberg in 1987

In a 1976 interview, Smith said, “When I was younger, I thought that the feelings that went through me were — that I would outgrow them, that the anxiety or panic or whatever it is called would disappear, but you sort of suspect it at 35, [and] when you get to be 50 you definitely know you’re stuck with your neuroses, or whatever you want to classify them as — demons, completed ceremonies, any old damn thing.” It is this rare confession of vulnerability that perhaps gets to the heart of Smith’s alchemical obsessions. The desire to ameliorate these feelings is the desire to achieve spiritual transmutation. And I can’t imagine a more beautiful way to consider one’s uncomfortable feelings and self-defeating urges than as completed ceremonies, timeless and inscrutable, something at home in the nation of the Anthology of American Folk Music. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s quote seems appropriate to consider in conclusion: “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!”

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Joy Williams.

still from the Anthology Film Archives

"Wagoner's Lad" - Buell Kazee (mp3)

"The Moonshiner" - Buell Kazee (mp3)

Bit Decorations

by SARAH SALOVAARA

It’s like painting your nails once you’ve bitten all of them off. You end up with garish, colored skin, your brushstrokes overestimating. You’re decorating what isn’t there.

There was something hilarious about her ability to turn rejection into romance. We are not, you wanted to enunciate, in the 19th century. You would lean close, maybe take her by the shoulder, gently, and speak it. Your words are not traversing the Atlantic on an ocean liner, fueled by hundreds of men, shoveling, pulling, churning, turning. It is a click. Of your mouse. Or your finger. A tap to the enter key: nothing more. Inconsequential.

The mind, she will speak plainly, plays fantastic tricks. You want something because I’ve told you no, not because you want it.

photograph by abelardo morell

Then what about the start? Do we honestly pluck these things we call feelings from nowhere, out of sheer boredom, no mind for the outcome, one way or the other. Or do we allow ourselves to be tugged by some promise? Like a lobster pot, roped around a rudder, following its every move, yet never fraying: something to exist outside of a cartoon.

But you don’t say this. Instead, you blame her. You started it. Like you’re in pigtails on astroturf in middle school gym class. You thrust your juvenile finger back in her face. The ball zooms past and your classmate rounds second base. Pay attention, you lecture yourself, head tilted toward the fake grass.

(Right. Where was I?)

You heard from so and so that she felt this and that, and then, only then, you allowed yourself to consider, what you say, was out of the ordinary. Extra. You allowed yourself to fall in love, beyond your normal frame of reference. But it was all a misunderstanding, see. A bad game of telephone. She never felt this and that, maybe that and this, but that was it. She’s telling you the truth, maybe, but you continue to rationalize your way out of it.

She doesn’t budge. You torture yourself, little by little, everyday, your delusions like morphine. You wonder if maybe she is right. If she knows you better than you think. That it’s all a bit of meaningful pursuit. You spill your guts like clockwork. Still, nothing. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

photo by abelardo morell

She is moving back to France. You laugh as you say it aloud. Back to France. It’s great, for you, that I’m leaving, she will condescend. It will be good. You will forget about me. About this. But what is the subtext there?

You try again, unashamed, drunk, and she resists, again. We’ve reached double digits, I’m certain.

When you say goodbye, she hugs you second. It is quick and ephemeral; they are not the same thing. The first person she hugged has started down the block, and you too progress in that direction. You turn around, watching as her hair is consumed in the crowds, as she makes her way to the subway, to a cab, to the airport.

You feel sorry for yourself for five seconds, and then you get over it. She was right, and you are determined anew to prove her wrong.

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. She last wrote in these pages about quitting New York.

photograph by abelardo morell

"Spitting Fire" - The Boxer Rebellion (mp3)

"Semi-Automatic" - The Boxer Rebellion (mp3)

photograph by abelardo morell

Fast Foodie            

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Yesterday your palate was as sophisticated as a half-eaten Hot-N-Ready® pizza and a flat Red Bull. Yesterday your palate was wearing sweatpants and double-fisting Ben & Jerry’s and episodes of Breaking Bad. But today, you’re going out to eat. You may be meeting friends for lunch, taking someone to dinner, or grabbing brunch before a jaunt at a modern art gallery. Needless to say, your palate needs to update its resumé. Today we give you a few tips on how to become a foodie, fast.

Self-deprecation. Nothing is more pretentious than someone who claims to have always had stellar taste in food. Describe the joy with which you ate the McRib in your youth. Refer to your past self as an “Olive Garden-variety eater”. Then, wink at the waiter and order something involving paté.

Notice the location. Every self-respecting foodie knows that the atmosphere lends as much to the experience of the meal as the food itself. Say, “I really love this space.” Elements to be admired: exposed brick walls, naked light bulbs, ambivalent industrial fixtures. Elements to be derided: menus not printed in typewriter font, flowers that aren’t in mason jars, a lack of cork sculptures.

Think small. You may have grown up going to restaurants with confused medieval decor and Grecian-inspired menus that spanned twenty or more pages. You may have fallen prey to television advertisements promising juicy lobster, sizzling steaks, and reduced-price appetizers. It was entirely possible to receive not only a bowl of popcorn as a free starter but also a basket containing various kinds of carbohydrates. Your meal came on a plate as big as a pizza pan, and you did not share. Those days are over. You will learn to navigate plates smaller than those on which toddlers receive their evening portion. “Small plates” will offer you four bites of something doused in balsamic vinegar that costs $12. Never mind. It has a “surprising flavor.” This will be your mantra.

Drink slowly. And heavily. Grab a Bud Light at one of these places and you’ll be thrown out or looked on as an immaturely ironic hipster. No, it’s to the mixologist you must go, which he’ll call himself, even though he’s just a bartender dressed in an unironic beard and cryptic arm tattoos. Keep a straight face while he tells you that yes, the rosemary is organic, it’s grown right in the back alley.

Know your oil. E.V.O.O. isn’t a new FDA certification, it’s Extra Virgin Olive Oil. You will refrain from mentioning the adulteration of olive oil in Europe as you pepper it expertly and dip your perfectly toasted bread into it. You have two options with truffle oil: go along with the con of faux luxury, or educate your peers. Either way, you will often find yourself in front of a giant plate of fries doused in the stuff. It’s also in the pasta, the aioli and the salad dressing. Great news, everyone! Truffles are now so abundant that we’re just throwing them in the condiments.

Story time. There comes a time in every server’s life, especially if he or she started out by wearing orthopedic shoes and throwing $5 Applebees apps in front of drunk college students, when they can get revenge tenfold against the nibbling, “dressing on the side” masses. It’s called reading the menu. They’ll do this with an aching precision, asking after each section whether or not you have any questions, if you’re doing okay, if everything is still all right over here. They’ll leave a full bottle of water on the table for you to use at your leisure, and will still stop by every three minutes to refill glasses you’ve barely sipped out of, all in the name of protecting the nebulous 20% tip that will pay their rent. Do them (and yourself) a favor: listen to them. Indulge them. That we as a foodie culture have managed to lasso an entire population of the workforce with such fear of losing a few extra dollars on the bottom of a damp receipt at the end of a boozy night is a crime worthy of severe punishment. I vote that the offenders sit in a dark room and have their unfavorable Yelp reviews read into their ear at a deafening decibel.

Brunch is your safe word.  Food-wise, brunch is nothing but the breakfast you had time to make because you didn’t press snooze three times before getting ready in five minutes and going to work. The power of brunch is in the idea that those who eat it belong to an exclusive club of people who wear J. Crew and get up late because they spent all night partying, drinking pricey cocktails and most likely eating fine foods that will show up in a different form on their brunch plate. When you text, “Brunch?” to your friends at an acceptable hour on Saturday morning you can all for one moment believe you belong to that club.

Fads. You’ll want to log into Pinterest at some point and check out what hybrid freak of nature desserts are stirring people into a frenzy these days. Don’t.

Purism. Long ago, a man was judged by the content of his character, then by the car in his garage, and now he’s judged by the contents of his plate (and if we’re being really honest, the contents of the contents of his plate.) You may have been wondering why your coworker is staring you down while you pop your sad pocket change into the vending machine at work. “Ugh,” she says, “don’t you know that granola bar is full of chemicals?” The correct answer to this and all other similar questions is, “Oh, I know. It’s my guilty pleasure.” Guilty pleasure will let you get away with bathing in a tub full of high fructose corn syrup with an aspartame syringe shoved up your arm. Guilty pleasure will save you from judgment when you’re caught by your roommate with your arm covered in Cheeto dust. Guilty pleasure will shield you with invisibility when you find yourself in the suburbs drinking a blue raspberry margarita at Chili’s.  Use it wisely, though, because it’s only guilty if it’s rare. 

Kara Vanderbijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about manual labor. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Headed Separate Ways

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Blue Jasmine
dir. Woody Allen
97 minutes

Watching foreign actresses playing white American socialites is an occupation, like lawyer, seamstress, or federal agent. There's an actual word for it, but it's filthy.

There are these tiny little apartments in San Francisco, maybe you've seen them? They're for wealthy people. Everything is for wealthy people, Woody Allen's new film Blue Jasmine tells us, and he knows this from experience. About eighty minutes in to Blue Jasmine, Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard) suggests that he and Jeanette (Cate Blanchett) spend the next three years in Vienna. Watching Cate Blanchett consider this proposal is the task of the person with the job that sounds like a filthy word.

Foreign actresses all loathe the American parts they have to play because they're fake and made up. After the death of her husband, Jeannette has moved to San Francisco to be with her sister Ginger (British actress Sally Hawkins). Even though she has no money and no other place to go, she still flies first-class.

It's like a regular American family, except all the people in it are, you know, not Americans. There's one point where someone asks Jeanette where she grew up and she reflexively lies, another time she says "New York." We never find out where she grew up, but Allen takes great care to inform us that these women are adopted.

The main incident in Jeanette's life, the one that really stuck with her, was meeting her husband Hal. They were together for 30 years, you see. In this time, in the fiction of Blue Jasmine, virtually nothing happened except vacations (St. Tropez), golf (The Masters). Nothing really happens to rich people, Allen is informing us, so your jealousy of them is misplaced.

Now impoverished, Jeannette takes a job as a receptionist in a dental office. The man Woody Allen hired to portray the dentist fills his own coffers by performing in a stage show as famed Jew Arnold Weinstein. Jeanette disapproves of her sister's boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) because he is some kind of weird 1990s Woody Allen memory of what the one working class person he met briefly at an event was like:

Flashbacks interrupt the tedium of Jeannette's San Francisco life. She had a beautiful home with her now-deceased husband Hal. He was the gentile Bernie Madoff, but even when we know what is behind them, his slick business assertions enthrall everyone present. Until one significant moment, we are as overwhelmed by Alec Baldwin's choice in belts as his wife and everyone he meets.

That's until Andrew Dice Clay comes on the scene; somehow his body has crumbled into this beautiful thing:

Hal is of course repulsed by this construction worker brother-in-law, and steals all the money that he won in the lottery by funneling it into his Ponzi scheme. (That's how poor people get $200,000, Woody Allen could imagine no other feasible way.) But Dice Clay's Augie is equally repulsed by Hal, and it reflects poorly on both of them that they cannot find any common ground whatsoever.

In the present of Blue Jasmine, a divorced-with-two-kids Ginger bags groceries and looks for a new boyfriend, someone her sister will be more impressed by. This is what she finds:

These women are not as hapless as they first appear. They do not really have very bad choice in men, although once Chili is so mad that he breaks a telephone. Not a cell phone, like a telephone you might have seen in The Maltese Falcon.

Jeanette tries taking a computer course, but all she gets from that experience is an invitation to a party. That's where she meets another widower. She lies to him about her past, about the husband who hung himself in his prison cell. For a few vague moments, Jeanette considers the possibility of a new life containing all the allure of her previous existence.

Woody's grasp of low culture is what you would expect of a 77-year-old man. Unlike the upper class, the lower class is constantly forced to change its parameters, but for the very wealthy, it is always Paris before the war. His assessments of the people he chose to surround himself with feel somewhat relevant.

We judge Jeanette/Jasmine the most harshly. Everything Blue Jasmine does to win us to her side falls flat: we see the excess of her old life and have to admit she deserves her new one. It's a bad reflection on the people who put this maudlin little stage show together that we can't feel pity for a sobbing once-rich woman babbling to herself in a public park, but it's a condemnation of ourselves as well.

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

"A Different Room" - Travis (mp3)

"Anniversary" - Travis (mp3)

Crime Potpourri

by DICK CHENEY

No one I know remembers anything they do. It's only television characters that are constantly reminded of their failures; it's called, you know, continuity, unless you work for J.J. Abrams, then they call it what? who gives a shit.

What is real? I have no further knowledge of this. When I meet a child in the real world - this usually only happens in church or when I'm buying schnapps — they talk like adults. But when I see them on television, they talk like babies. Did I ever tell you guys what my first word was? I'll give you a hint: racism was huge in Nebraska in the early '40s. There is a similar problem with the Detroit presented in Chris Mundy's new AMC series Low Winter Sun.

why are no crime dramas set in St. Tropez?

I was only ever in Detroit a couple times of times because it's so shitty. Viewing the repulsive vistas of the place in constant eponymous dusk, it's worse than I remember. Homicide detective Frank Agnew (Mark Strong) is haunted, we know this for sure because there are constant flashbacks to him telling a prostitute that he loved her and he wants to "know everything about her." This is the most disturbing thing about Frank, the second most disturbing thing is that he murders one of his colleagues by drowning him in the sink and framing it as a suicide.

always missing u gale

Frank is appointed to investigate the murder he committed. This would appear to make his life a lot easier, but internal affairs scion Simon Boyd (David Costabile) is watching his every move. Both men are relentless in their aims, and this is true of nearly everyone on Low Winter Sun. Since there is not really much to have in Detroit, it stands to reason that it's a lot harder to get what there is. Costabile's muted performance is so captivating that the show would do well to focus on him more than it does, and his interplay with Frank is more nuanced than most marriages.

this is the holmby hills of detroit, the rest is just charred newspapers and jpegs of automobile factories

We get the sense that Frank is a capable police officer despite his flaws. His counterpart in the criminal world is the whoremaster with a heart of gold Damon Callis (James Ransome). Through the cooperation of the cop Frank murdered, Damon planned to put a rival operation behind bars and open a magnificent house of ill repute in what I believe is Detroit's Champs-Élysées. As a young godfather, Ransome shows so much charisma he nearly blows everyone else off the screen completely. Once I saw him without his shirt off and I literally gasped.

he was also fantastic in Ken Park

Low Winter Sun is very grim, constantly implying that the auto bailout was a horrid idea at nearly every turn. I would keep talking about it, but I usually save my analysis of inner city race relations for my private journals about Treme. Here's a sneak peek though:

Who is this person? Is he a musician?
Are they divorced?
Who is this black person?
I thought the parade was over. Oops.
Who is this black person?

Low Winter Sun, as magnificent as it is (hiefly because of the direction of Spike Lee cinematographer Ernest Dickerson), also serves a more important purpose — making Breaking Bad seem lighthearted and fun in comparison. Just make sure you don't stick around for Talking Bad, or you will be gifted with the realization that without smarter individuals to script their dialogue, actors all sound like Jesus during cocktail hour.

Lydia you look so fantastic I have forgiven your appetite for destruction completely

Last night marked the return of the great Todd to Breaking Bad. Have you ever met a Todd who wasn't a complete dick? Respect to Lydia for not settling for meth with 64 percent purity. She is a stickler for that extra ten percent. The pairing of Todd and Lydia reminds me of a variety of great tandems: Mario and Luigi, or for a more recent example, Justin Bieber and any woman. Their romance shall span the ages.  I guess I finally understand the deeper meaning behind Martin Lawrence's 1996 masterpiece A Thin Line Between Love And Hate.

an opportunity was missed here to use Alicia Keys' "Fallin'" but whatever
Skyler White also knows the meaning of this. Her loyalty to her husband was not particularly surprising in this episode — I sense she did not really like Hank, partly because you can never really embrace the person who becomes more important to your sister than you are, and partly because you can trust a bald man, but only one bald man at a time. "I can't remember the last time I was happy," she said at one point last night, and Walt's reaction indicated that it was a common ground between them.

you know they could just beg him, it works when brad pitt wants sex I never realized that people don't like Skyler; I guess because she was so mad at Walt and sexed up Ted? I never argue with a woman with lips that large out of fear I could eventually be swallowed whole. There is something about a wife who stands by her husband's choice of underwear that we all can respect. Then again, the idea that loyalty, even blind loyalty, is a virtue killed more people than firearms.

The idea that anyone could not like Walter White, or begrudge a single thing he has ever done, strikes me as so completely insane I can barely fathom it.

when I look at this I see a speedboat made of gold and whimsy. When our president does, he sees an investment for solar powered tacos

What Walt does with his money is his business. When I was a kid I used to wonder why they didn't just print more money, until I learned the reason. (Paul Krugman never did find that out.)

The best scene by far featured Walt in his office with his lawyer Saul Goodman, subject of the rumored spin-off. For that to happen, Bob Odenkirk would have to imbue the character with something more than a light anti-Semitism. Actually the more that I think about it, it's just nice to have an openly Jewish character who doesn't speak like they are from Parsippany.

I keep my extra cash in a hollow safe I had surgically installed in my wife's cervix
Walt's immediate rejection of the idea of killing Hank was hilarious, but it also makes logical sense. It's not like Marie wouldn't know the culprit. Still, there would be more tension surrounding this revelation if we did not know from the flashforwards that Walt is definitely going to be revealed to the world. At least we can take solace in the fact that he is still alive and well, leaving open the possibility of Walt as the lead in a male version of Orange Is The New Black.

let my people go jokes are a relic of our wordpress daze

My wife Lynne tells me that too often I jump from subject to subject. Women don't like this, she says, because they sense that if you can so easily abandon a subject on your mind, then you might well move on as quickly from the idea that you love them.  "Who is that black person?" I replied. She said it was Alfre Woodard.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the former vice president of the United States and a beacon of subsistence for every citizen who comes in contact with him. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

reminders of the numbers on Lost always take me to that dark place

"A Moment's Grace" - Boy & Bear (mp3)

"End of the Line" - Boy & Bear (mp3)

why don't we just relocate the population of Detroit here. I guarantee they will be happier and if they dig a bit they will find millions

How the Heat Broke

by RACHEL SYKES

Major Fall, Minor Lift

by SHELBY SHAW

Prince Avalanche
dir. David Gordon Green
94 minutes

Forget all the roles you think of when you think of Paul Rudd, including his memorable role as Josh in 1995’s Clueless. Now Rudd is moving on from his current oeuvre of Apatow-ridden comedies and familiar funny-guy castings in David Gordon Green’s new film, Prince Avalanche.

Alvin (Paul Rudd) works in constructing the streets of a quiet area of Texas, evident from the state’s embroidery on his work clothes. With him for the labor is Lance (Emile Hirsch). Lance is out of high school, but he has the vernacular and tendencies of a thirteen year old. He is also the younger brother of Alvin’s significant other, Madison. Madison is not around in Prince Avalanche; she is home with daughter Olive, but letters are written back and forth over this summer of 1988.

Just as Frances Ha is a film about the transgression of female friendships, Prince Avalanche can be said to be a masculine contemporary, one that is slow and steady. If watched on mute about 80 percent of the film would be mistaken for a documentary episode on the Discovery Channel.

Alvin tries to learn German in anticipation for a trip with Madison, reads mail-in magazines, builds campsites, and takes charge. There’s often a feeling of Alvin shaking his head in wonder at how Lance’s seemingly-eternal youth is channeled into dance moves and trying to score with ladies instead of how to catch a fish, set up camp, and make a general effort to become A Man. There are a lot of long takes and overall less happens than one might have hoped for, but more comes through than one may have expected.

After falling asleep in a hammock he sets up by himself - alone for the weekend while Lance tries to “squeeze the little man” in the city - Alvin's elaborate dreams go on so long that it isn’t clear whether or not he’s dreaming at all.

There is something of a music video in the attention paid to all the slow zooms and pans of Texan wildlife that more strongly resemble New England than Texas: bright flaming oranges and deep lush greens amid the tall, dark, wet stripes of endless barren trees. But it’s all left behind when Alvin’s dreamscapes delve into a deeply surprising surrealism.

The mystery of the reappearing aviator, the relationship budding between Alvin and Lance, the solitude of the nature – it all slips away as a phone conversation between Alvin and Madison plays out in clear voices over light uplifting music set to a rapid discourse through the woods. It feels like hearing a cold reading and watching something else, like being handed too much of the truth of their failed relationship, spelled out when all this time things were anything but spelled-out clearly. Prince Avalanche yields a strange and affecting climax in the most anti-climactic sense.

At the end of this sequence Alvin comes walking through the trees, blue paint dashing through the forest until, the camera tracking downwards, there is a straight blue line on which the phrase “i love you so much” is written in blue. It’s as if someone made a Tumblr gif of a film and it somehow got put into the real thing.

Prince Avalanche is not so much about becoming an adult as it is about two different men learning how to take the reins of their lives with the help of one another. There are a number of things never explained, like Alvin’s medications, or the mysterious woman who appears only to the two of them, or the truck driver who is always lugging pop and booze to them on the road.

Even Madison’s true relation to Alvin is not fully disclosed until long after Prince Avalanche has picked up. But it is this kind of floating of the story that has Green entrusting it to his audience – backing out at the first sign of discomfort or surprise makes Prince Avalanche the “weird Paul Rudd movie.” Don’t back out. Alvin may realize he’s impossible, but it doesn’t make him any less capable. Even Lance proves that.

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 pages about The To Do List.

"All Things At Once" - Tired Pony (mp3)

"The Ghost of the Mountain" - Tired Pony (mp3)

by joan salo

25 & Up

by SARAH WAMBOLD

I am going to be 29 next month. I’m don’t have any big feelings about this birthday. I think more about the days leading up to it, these next 20 or so days. The days between August 22 and September 13 are like a drop off the edge of a cliff; a distorted period of panicked, can’t-turn-back-now feelings. It's completely different at the bottom.

This time gap marks the 25th anniversary of my diagnosis. I was four when it arrived. I came back from a summer vacation on Lake Michigan with an uncontrollable nosebleed and no energy. A second opinion determined it was Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia and I started taking Rosy Periwinkle the next day. I turned five four weeks later. When I turned seven, I finished treatment.

I’m reluctant to call myself a cancer survivor. I don’t remember much about my life before I had cancer; I felt like I came alive right when I got sick and during treatment came to understand that this is what life was all about. You live life in between periods of feeling sick and going to see the doctor. Once that sick period was over for me, I started to become aware that people expected me to wear this experience on my sleeve, contribute my picture or my story to causes, or because I didn’t do any of those things, they assume I don’t remember any of what happened.

The thing I’ve come to realize is that I’m actually pretty shy and when you get cancer as a kid you don’t get the chance to be shy. You walk around bald, fat and if you were me, with a large ribbon tied around your head.  As a kid with cancer you get all the attention and fun every kid deserves. The pediatric oncology ward is full of cool art and toys. I watched E.T. everyday. There was so much light in there I had to wear my 101 Dalmatian sunglasses during chemo.  Many of the other kids I met became nightly news stories and went to Disney World. My mom told me I wasn’t sick enough for all that, but I don’t know what she was talking about. I could hardly eat the cake at my 6th birthday party without throwing up.

My mom is the real survivor. So is my dad. Do you know what they do to parents in the pediatric oncology ward? They make them crouch down in front of their kid so we can pull fistfuls of their hair and scream until we can’t breathe while a doctor taps our spine with a needle for bone marrow. I once kicked my mom in the face after all my veins collapsed and they had to resort to putting an IV in my foot. My parents send me gifts every year during this time gap, letting me know how happy they are. If you really want the emotional, triumphant survivor story, ask them.

Their story is tough and completely heartfelt and I can hardly write about it without breaking down.

by joan salo

I used to stay up all night when I was a kid, lying on my floor thinking about how some people die from cancer (my uncle, my neighbor, my friend’s mom) and some people don’t (my grandpa, me). My heart would beat almost out of my chest until I closed my eyes and imagined I was vibrating out into the universe like a dying star whose fast fading light we still see on earth. Those feelings don’t go away.

My friend came to visit me last weekend and we were reminiscing about the clubs in our old neighborhood that had signs that said Must Be 25 & Up. We were too young at the time to go inside. Why 25? What did you know at 25 and not at 24?

Sentimentally, my time is up. I would like to thank the doctors and nurses who kept me in the game. I wish I knew the people who took part in the trial drugs that allowed for my life to go on. It must be that if you make it to 25 & up you sometimes want to keep going, even though you don’t know why. The cliffs get higher. The bottom gets closer, faster. You find yourself down there again, living it up.

Sarah Wambold is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here. She last wrote in these pages about the decay. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Paintings by Joan Salo.

photo by brewcitysafari

"An Acute Sensitivity Is Not Simply A Madness" - Keiji Haino & Jim O'Rourke & Oren Ambarchi (mp3)

"Invited In Practically Drawn In By Something" - Keiji Haino & Jim O'Rourke & Oren Ambarchi (mp3)

by joan salo

To This Day It Is True

by TERESA FINNEY

Battling a belief that started in 1988. It is Thanksgiving morning. I am helping my Mom make the pumpkin pies when an open can of pumpkin (my mother has always been a big fan of the semi-homemade concept) slips out of my tiny hands and onto the kitchen floor. Orange puree painting the beige linoleum, an image so vivid I can still see its snapshot in my mind at times when I shut my eyes.

My father, who up until that point paid no attention to what was going on outside of the book he was reading, spins around and says, calmly as if asking for the time, “Sometimes you are so fucking worthless, Teresa.” I am four years old.

By 1993, he’s already gone. Mom is working her way up the corporate ladder and I am helping to take care of my little sister and brother. I cook, I help my sister with her homework in between doing my own. My little brother has a lot of health issues and is in and out of the hospital. I feed him children’s Tylenol and read to him in bed.

1993 is the year Mom got an old, used stick shift car that would get stuck each time she steps on the brake. She isn’t very good at driving stick but it was apparently cheaper than the automatic she was also eyeing. A distinct memory of the clutch getting stuck at a red light. We are on our way to school. The guy behind us is screaming at the top of his lungs for “this bitch to move.” Mom is frantically trying to get the car unstuck, but it won’t budge. I keep turning around to see if the crazy man behind us has gotten out of his car. I kept thinking “We need dad, we need dad, we need dad…” I don’t remember how this incident ended but that was the first time I saw my Mom cry. In retrospect, that was also, probably, the beginning of my anxiety.

That same year Mom gets her first boyfriend after dad. Then another. And then the following year, another. These guys always love me and always try so disgustingly hard to get my approval. To this day this is true. It’s like when a dog knows you hate it or are lowkey afraid of it, so they hump your leg whenever they see you. It’s exactly like that. We won’t see dad again until the year I graduate high school.

That year I am dating the man I am convinced I will marry. How adorable at the age of 17 to think I know anything about anything, but especially anything about love; especially anything about men. Dad shows up at the graduation party Mom has spent weeks and lots of dollars planning. He just shows up without a phone call or invitation, so this sets my mother off. They fight audibly for a bit, then he agrees to leave. He hands me a lavender envelope that has a card inside. He’s written “Happy graduation. I love you, Dad” on the inside. “Love” isn’t spelled out, it’s just a drawn heart and I remember thinking ah yeah of course, you can’t even write out the word, you bastard. That night I get drunk for the first time with my older cousins. I am sick for two days after.

My brother, sister and I don’t see or hear from dad again for six years. We tell ourselves he is dead, because well even if he was alive and only, we discovered later, living in the next town over all those years, he may as well be. We could have run into him at the grocery store or something but we never did. So life went on. We all grew up and I forced myself to deal.

At 22, I had just moved back home to the Bay Area after a short stint living in Los Angeles. The dreams I brought along with me in my suitcase, stunned to death by the cold harsh truth of my reality, which was that I did not yet have what it took to create a life for myself. So I read. And I wrote. And I found myself paying attention to everything, but most especially to the seamy undercurrent of my own thoughts. What I found terrified me. I felt like a toddler watching a horror film; I covered my eyes at all the scary parts because I didn’t realize it was just a movie. 

I knew that I had tried unsuccessfully to fill a void, and the more I stuffed myself with unimportant things (I became exceedingly familiar with men who were no good for me, red wine, and 3 a.m.), the less fulfilled I felt. The things you will do to yourself when you harbor a fundamental belief that everyone will eventually disappoint you and leave you. I am a lot of fun to be around, ask anyone. 

Dealing with the fallout is essentially an upkeep. Last year I invited a man I thought might be fond of me over to help drink my whiskey and eat homemade mac and cheese. This eventually became a six hour confessional and sort of weird tell-all on his part. He cried while telling me about his father, who was also absent. I just scooted closer to him and held his hand, it was all I could do. His boozy confessions floated out of his mouth and hung in the air and clung to me like cigarette smoke. Up until that point he had been very fleeting in his ways, always saying the things I wanted to hear at night, and come morning it was as if these conversations never happened, as if we never happened. It was as if the previous night was merely a nightmare. 

The next morning after we slept in separate rooms of my Harlem apartment, he left without waking me up and without folding the blankets I gave him to sleep with (be wary of people who do this). The previous night only a figment of my imagination, again. Our leftovers were strewn all around my living room. The tissue he used to wipe his tears on the coffee table. The empty whiskey on the kitchen counter. A bowl full of uneaten tortilla chips stared at me. As I was emptying the chips into the garbage, I thought to myself “I am literally cleaning up the mess my father made.” Had I known better, had I cared enough or perhaps just a little less, the sting of this rejection would not have meant as much as it did. 

Maybe if my father had been capable, I wouldn’t have searched for him in every other man I would meet later in life. Dealing with it has come with its own price tag. That has been my experience though; it’s always one thing or another, sometimes all at once. And I have never found my father, not in other men and not in all the places he was supposed to be. 

The truth is, I forget what I have taught myself constantly, all the time. On my darker days, this belief that I’ve dismantled again and again feels like old sneakers with holes in the heel. I only wear them because I always have and I forgot about that new pair in the closet with the tag still on. It is a cycle, a circle of forgetting and remembering; forgetting and remembering and each time the remembering is a homecoming. Worthless? Not in this lifetime or a million ones after.

Teresa Finney is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Harlem. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her twitter here.

Photographs by the author.

"Home and Consonance" - Tropics (mp3)

"Reunion (Tropics remix)" - M83 (mp3)

True Nature

by BRITTANY JULIOUS

Orange Is The New Black
creator Jenji Kohan

No one holds Piper Chapman’s hand. Not really. Instead, she is groped and ignored and ridiculed. This stays true to the fish out of water narrative of Orange Is The New Black and Piper is a classic fish out of water. Nice, quiet white ladies do not end up in prison. And if they do, it is because things happen “to” them rather than “because” of them. But as Orange Is The New Black unfolds, we soon learn that Piper is not hapless or innocent or quiet. She is certainly not nice. No, like the other women in the prison, Piper is a woman who made choices and must now face the consequences.

Piper (Taylor Schilling) is serving 13 months in prison for helping smuggle drugs across the border for her ex-girlfriend, Alex Vause. It is no surprise then to learn that Piper must now serve her prison sentence with Alex. For the first few episodes, Piper makes her animosity toward Alex well known, ultimately blaming her for her prison sentence. In true Piper form, she has neglected to take responsibility for her own actions and her complicity in the crime.

Orange Is The New Black is about finding the humanity in people we often assume have none. We stigmatize the experiences of people in prison without knowing what led them to this environment. For Piper, the reality of prison has not sunk in. Her only possibility of survival is to accept both what she’s done and her true nature as a woman who is not as perfect and nice as she thinks she is.

It becomes evident as the show progresses that the most compelling characters and stories have little, if anything, to do with Piper. There are no magical negroes or spiritual guides for Piper’s experience in prison. The show is a powerful and overt representation of race relations both in and outside of prison. The stereotypes are thick with vitriol in the show’s initial episodes, though they dissipate as the show progresses. As Piper begins to acclimate herself to the culture of prison, there is a real possibility that for Piper’s sensibilities, even speaking openly about race (prejudiced or otherwise) is a shock.

Elsewhere we are drawn into the romantic yet troubling “relationship” of Daya Diaz (Dascha Polanco) and correctional officer John Bennett (Matt McGorry). We are fascinated by Miss Claudette (Michelle Hurst), Piper’s roommate and an older woman who must come to terms with the possibility of her own parole. And Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox), a transgender woman and a truer protagonist of the show, is all glamour and wisdom and heart. She could certainly warrant a spin-off on her own.

The opening credits of Orange Is The New Black are particularly compelling. Featuring a theme song by Regina Spektor, we view a series of close-ups of different women’s faces. None are particularly “pretty” and really, that is not the point. The credits go on for a long time and they linger.

What we find ourselves more drawn to is the sheer abundance of faces – young and old, wrinkled and baby-faced – that represent the varying demographics of the prison system. Yes, jails are disproportionately filled with black and hispanic men and women. But there are many different “types” of prisoners, and the circumstances that led to their imprisonment are as diverse and distinct as their faces.

In a recent interview for Fresh Air, Orange Is The New Black creator Jenji Kohan noted that a show featuring a rich cast of multidimensional and racially and sexually diverse characters could not “sell” without a protagonist (a white and blonde and pretty protagonist) like Piper. Granted, the initial source material for the television show is the memoir of the same name written by Piper Kerman. But many elements (such as Piper “reuniting” with Alex) were created or altered specifically for the show.

In the interview, Kohan said:

In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You're not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it's a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it's relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It's useful.

Still, Orange is the New Black represents a teachable moment for its lead. It is OK to hate Piper. In fact, as the show progresses, the writers and creators have made sure to highlight Piper’s flaws (and there are many). Within these walls Piper finds herself. And as nauseating as that reads, what she unwraps is someone who is not as great or insightful or “good” as she thought she was and what other people have told her she must be. In prison, Piper discovers what makes her like anyone else. That she must be locked up to understand this only speaks to the ways in which her privileged life has sheltered her from the realities of her own adulthood.

Brittany Julious is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about a solitary existence.

"Your Face" - Delorean (mp3)

"Unhold" - Delorean (mp3)

Cigarettes and Magazines

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Gone Home
The Fullbright Company
design by Steve Gaynor

Now that the 90s are a good fifty or sixty years in our collective past it is possible to take stock of them. Adjectives are inadequate — who can deign to describe Rome at its most opulent? It is like staring too long at the sun. Gone Home returns to this moment, represented by an empty house in the Pacific Northwest during a thunderstorm.

Kaitlin Greenbriar is the protagonist of Gone Home, the new game created by the Fullbright Company. Gone Home suggests that Kaitlin is a fairly heteronormative straight A student who comes from a troubled family, which we will learn more about presently. Since there are no mirrors in the Greenbriar house, we never see who Kaitlin is in the present of Gone Home. We have to be content with the family photos and documents that show what her and family looked like in the past.

Rotating and examining various objects in the Greenbriar house up close, with rain pouring down in the background between the fantastic score by Chris Remo, is the game. In 90 minutes or so you can finish Gone Home. By the end you will have opened a safe in the basement replete with accusations of molestation, explored an attic darkroom where Kaitlin's sister Samantha made out with her ROTC girlfriend Lonnie, and felt completely alone in the world.

It is another life completely, each detail reinforced by the accompanying cultural reference. Gone Home contains an astounding level of detail. Along with guilt and fear, each room in the house generally holds a box of tissues, a lamp, and a handwritten letter or list at the very least. There are always more secrets left to find here. Going through your family's private writings and keepsakes feels like a betrayal. On this level, Gone Home is spot on, since no one cared a whit for anybody else from 1990 to 2001.

Gone Home has inspired divergent opinions on the internet; there are no reports as of yet as to what the Prodigy.com userbase thinks of it. Some seem to feel it is wry or obvious commentary on the positioning of homosexuality during this period; others connect with the general Americanness of Nirvana on the radio, The X-Files on the VCR. It is completely ridiculous to make this time innocent or unknowing in any way, and Gone Home avoids this softening at every turn.

The general milieu inspires a nostalgia that already itself feel like an affection borne of a second, additional remembering. Now we not only recall the original period, maybe from news clippings, television and movies, but we also revisit our memories of our memories.

It was as a child that I learned how easy the past is to bring back in conversation, how it let me understand other children when they were no more than tiny, walking mysteries. In a society with no history what is left over becomes even more powerful. At this point Ronald Reagan is just a fucking face on a t-shirt. Much like Sam Greenbriar, 1995 was the worst year of my life, and also kind of the best. When Sam Greenbriar's girlfriend tells her she is enlisting in the military, it is very difficult to get over whether she goes through with it or not.

 As with anything sentimental, a vocal minority loathes Gone Home. There is a deeply reductive idea that any piece of art must appeal to every single person. That seems to me misguided, although I do regret some of the things I said to people who liked The Dark Knight. Those who object to Gone Home's austere precociousness are usually those who did not come of age in the 90s, since it describes the decade perfectly.

Until the 90s, there was the distinct possibility that there existed a place more exotic and fascinating than the boredom we inhabitated. Today we are factually aware that the entire world is just a mirror. Kaitlin Greenbriar returns from college, the place she went to abandon the dullness of her Oregon life. She discovered, we may intuit, that it was all the same - now everything follows you everywhere. Then, youth could be fled or rearranged: people actually forgot the things that Lillian Hellman said and did, Margaret Mead was written about positively in magazines while Norman Mailer and Paul Gauguin were not locked up in jail.

The documents in Gone Home maintain an ineradicable record of our fuckups, making that break impossible. Jeanne, a disciple of Karl Jaspers, wrote that the philosophy of freedom consists of knowing that a choice made today projects itself backwards and changes our past actions. She could have added two words to the beginning of her definition to make it more accurate — before now.

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

"Everything" - Nine Inch Nails (mp3)

"While I'm Still Here" - Nine Inch Nails (mp3)

What She Saw In You

by LAURA HOOBERMAN

In the opening scene of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film Last Tango In Paris, we bear witness to a hunched and graying Marlon Brando pulling at the edges of a camel-colored overcoat and screaming a succinct plea to the ceiling of the overpass that creates a line between his body and the evening Parisian sky. Against the mounting noise of the metro moving overhead, he shouts, “holy fuck,” matching its mechanic droll and squeal decibel for decibel. To his right ambles by a beautiful young woman draped in white fur, the softness of her face punctuated by the brim of a black wool hat. Upon that brim, blossoming flowers writhe against her forehead. She pushes ahead of him, looks back, disturbed.

They find each other again, almost impossibly, in a phone booth and then, again, in a squalid and abandoned apartment. They listlessly discuss their considerations for renting the space and dance about one another in a grotesque courtship. He pulls her toward him, and, against the fraying wallpaper, fucks her. When she moves to tell him her name, he stops her.

This apartment becomes the battleground of their intimacy. They meet here, and under the weakly protective guise of anonymity, engage in expansive bouts of sexual experimentation. Their intertwined shadows on the floor are filmed as browns against gold. She is shown frequently, and pointlessly, topless. Their conversations are punctured by his refusal to discuss the past and her pervasive frustration with his abrasiveness and palpable misery.

We discover their histories only through peripheral plotlines that bleed outward from their shared, ethereal existence within the flat. He, Paul, is an American living in Paris whose wife’s suicide left saccharine splashes of blood all over the bathroom of their shared home. He returns briefly to find the stains still there – vast and impermeable. We watch him move through shadowy high-rises and the shadowed urban streets. His grief seems complex and boundless, but he wraps it in tight, neat violences. To his wife’s corpse, drenched in flowers, dressed funereally, he whimpers, “it took you 35 cents and a cheap razor to get out of our marriage.”

She, Jeanne, has a fiancé who shadows her with a film crew in a fashion that suggests proto-reality television. He observes her through this detached, cinematic lens and imparts upon her manipulative and self-absorbed abuses. Her first love from youth was her cousin, a prodigious piano player with whom she once engaged in mutual masturbation beneath suburban oak trees.

While the film lingers about the spectrum of Paul’s emotional deterioration, it lingers, with almost equal fascination, on Jeanne’s physicality, the shapes her body takes against the background. She is shown, in one scene, thrashing wildly against her fiancé in tense combat as the metro rushes by. We sense that her body exists as the plaything for these volatile men, that not only is she designed to be looked at, but also to be pummeled, debauched, almost in the pursuit of discerning a boundary that does not exist.

In the film’s most notorious scene, Paul sodomizes her with a stick of butter while sputtering forth gibbering phrases that hint disjointedly at incestuous taboo. In another, his dirty talk features the imagery of dead and dying pigs. There seems to be little meaning to it. After some time passes, she cannot help but wonder if they’re in love.

The archetypal love story progresses from anonymity to intimacy to either consummate togetherness or heartbreak. Paul and Jeanne waver, with pressing immediacy and reckless confusion, between anonymity and intimacy. The film occupies this territory of extremism, brought into existence within the decrepit apartment in which they both touch and recoil from one another. At one point, laying pressed against him, she whispers, “it’s beautiful not knowing anything.” This line exists at the crux of the film; it represents the lure and possibility of pure escapism, the erasure of both the profound and minute elements of identity. What Paul and Jeanne know of one another are unspoken truths that emerge from physical and visceral relations in the wake of extreme vulnerability. This is problematic, because these are terms we use when talking about love.

Aesthetics appear to my mind a more immutable and digestible force than ethics. One could watch the film on mute, and, surprisingly, in many instances find its sepia-toned intimacies and intimations more beautiful than vulgar. In one scene, Jeanne and Paul are in an elevator after she has abandoned her fiancé, and she lifts a lace and white wedding dress up to reveal shadeless brown thighs. The light is soft and flickering. They are drawn thus in a dizzying escalation upwards. He accepts her physicality and its implications into his encumbered arms. You consider the whirl of filth and havoc out of which such a rare moment of tenderness arises. You do wonder, briefly, if perhaps love is not only this much closeness, but exactly this much brutality.

If it is, it’s a sort of shit brand of love. And the film isn’t a love story. It’s a story about grief and need and the rare breed of expansiveness that has arisen within their contained and artificial reality. Paul’s single mandate of anonymity allows implicitly for all other forms of linguistic and behavioral freedom, and thus the space in which they exist is infused with not only debauchery but also liberation. For diffusely emotional reasons, they are continuously compelled toward one another. You think about that. You think about her, the perplexity she suffers with him. It’s much easier to ignore someone who ignores you than someone who actively treats you poorly.

The film itself doesn’t think about her much. The magnitude of Brando’s celebrity rests in the film’s forefront, and Paul’s withering psychosis occupies the bulk of our thematic focus. Jeanne is sketched less deliberately, existing fundamentally as the springboard against which Paul reacts and as a point of our aesthetic attention. Any indication of strength on her part is drawn as the sort of feistiness found charming by misogynistic men, rather than referring back to any fundamental fierceness or resolve. I find this personally sort of problematic, because I want to relate to Jeanne. On a certain level, with only tepid approval, I do relate to her. She and I are members of the club of girls who feel big and confusing things for destructive men.

I sort of want to vindicate her, to draw her into focus. I can imagine being her. Imagine being young and inexperienced and having a body that appears to you as a map of questions yet to be answered. Imagine being stalked by a man who has accessed the darkest parts of you, who grabs you and demands your attention after you have ostensibly tried to break things off. “That was one thing, in the apartment,” he tells you. “Now we can start with the love.” He brings you to an archaic ballroom and vacillates wildly between being charming and cruel. He pulls you onto the dance floor. Each set of bodies that surround you, you think, represents some unique possibility of love. The effect of existing among them is dizzying. You realize your profound differentness from these forms that float into one another and float in and out of your periphery. You do not have what they have. This man holding onto your waist, pulling at you, is dangerous.

You find yourself in an apartment with this unknowable man. You want to murder this void of distilled emotion he has created within you. The boundary between your interiority and external reality has become distorted and strange. If you don’t pull the trigger, where is there to go? And if you do pull it, who have you become?

It is discomfiting to exist in her head, to consider the extent to which emotions can be widly untamed and un-categorizable. The first time I watched the film, I felt primaily disturbed by the images and dialogue that are designed to be disturbing, revolting. What makes the film an uncomfortable watch is what makes it resist a softer analysis, but there was for me certain softness to the film, a light ethical pulse. Upon finishing Last Tango In Paris a second time, all I could think was that it is a truly terrifying thing to mistreat one another.

Laura Hooberman is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Greenpoint. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about her life in New York.

"Dream Sequence" - Tythe (mp3)

"Careless Woman" - Tythe (mp3)

Scorned as Timber

by REBECCA ARMENDARIZ

In the months that I turned 22 and 25, Neko Case put out new records. In 2006, when Fox Confessor Brings the Flood released, I commuted 40 minutes to a 9-to-5 corporate job following my college graduation and began descending toward the pitiful end to my first long-term relationship. In 2009, when Middle Cyclone released, my boyfriend died after a 16-month cancer battle.  

The struggles with guilt and boundaries, with perspective, yearning, and self-worth, were the same in these two differently fractured periods, and Neko’s songs spoke to me on a level so unintentionally specific and personal, my experiences molded to fit her words. Her vibrating voice dug to the root of everything I felt.

In June she released a trailer for her latest album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. The trailer features the first minute or so of “Where Did I Leave That Fire." In the video, Neko shoulders thick branches as she walks in a field in knee-high boots that are both sexy and rugged-seeming. The camera pans to show her belt buckles, arranged on the top of her dresser, and one reads “CASE.” She emerges from the bathtub she’d sunk all the way into. She awakens from a twitching sleep and smiles. She rolls over to reveal tattoos on each of her forearms that together read “Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky,” the title of a painting by artist Emily Carr, from 1935. Fireworks burst against an ink sky.

“I wanted so badly not to be me,” she sings. There were times when that sentiment applied to my life like an impervious paste. She’s lost her fire, she says, and at the end of the song someone calls about it: “You can pick it up if you come down with ID,” she sings from the perspective of the man who’s found it. I picture myself after losing my own fire, looking as if someone drew an outline of my body and the shape walked off with my spirit. “You look like you lost your best friend,” a stranger said to me at the CVS up Georgia Avenue a few months after Clark died. I’d stopped there to buy cigarettes a day or so after quitting.

Sometimes emerging again to fill the shell of your own skin after leaving it for a while happens so naturally the switch flicks unnoticed, without fanfare. It happened for me at a Tom Petty concert within the opening notes of “Listen to Her Heart.” It happened to me one morning after a few months of waking up regularly for 7 a.m. yoga classes. It happened to me when I took home the guy from the bar with holes in his t-shirt I’d just met but felt connected to. He turned out to be the guy who wears a NASCAR hat only when he uses tools or drives a rented Zipcar truck, and now I live with him and his Queensryche obsession. 

Her poetic articulation of my feelings mixes the perfect storm’s elements, her voice like thunder, the falling patter of the drums, harmonies swirling like the wind to stir something unanticipated inside me. I wonder what this new album will adhere to, what lines will stick with me and why. Despite loving them outside of the context I originally heard them, I remember certain sparks in songs from Fox Confessor and Middle Cyclone as if nothing has changed.

The first track on Fox Confessor is “Margaret vs. Pauline,” about a girl named Pauline who’s got it easy compared to Margaret, who faces mostly hardship. As 2006 dragged on, my boyfriend and I stopped having sex as he figured things out, a phase that lasted months. He started hanging out with this woman who was clearly in love with him, though they were just friends. He’d go visit her some weekends, and her name was Margaret. “Margaret is the fragments of a name,” Neko sings. “One left a sweater sitting on the train,” she says of Pauline. “And the other lost three fingers at the cannery.” Listening, I tapped into both the person who hated his Margaret and the person who always loses.

When Middle Cyclone first came out, Clark, the boyfriend who died of cancer, couldn’t walk and was shitting in diapers. Neko performed two nights in a row in April at the 9:30 Club in D.C., where I worked part-time.  Clark’s friends came over to babysit and I went alone both nights, uncharacteristic of me considering everything else I’d skipped over the months. I stood on the balcony watching her and sobbing. She ended both sets with the first track on the record, “This Tornado Loves You,” in which she compares herself to a natural disaster murdering everything in its path for the sake of an all-sacrificing love. It was relevant.

On the album she segues from “Tornado” straight into “The Next Time You Say Forever,” following up the title line with “I will punch you in your face.” I felt that anger, too, because in my gut I knew I was about to lose. On “Vengeance Is Sleeping,” she says she dips her cigarette before riding the bus, romanticizing an addiction I needed so badly to pass the length of the day.

A month after Clark died, I went to see her again, this time in Baltimore. Patches of rash appeared around my eyes from crying to “Don’t Forget Me,” the Harry Nilsson song she covers on the record that I guess is about divorce but at the time was only about my loss. “You know I think about you; let me know you think about me too,” it goes. It had rained all day on Clark’s last day. After he died, I went outside to smoke a cigarette on this bench right outside the hospice doors, and suddenly, the sky was pink. Now anytime I see a pink sky, I think of him. I think of him somewhere thinking about me.

That same month I made a mix for the guy I’d started fucking, someone I worked with at the 9:30 and had known for years. I put “I’m An Animal,” a song about sex, on the CD. (I figured out its meaning on my own, but I also heard her say it once in some interview.) “I love you this hour, this hour today, and heaven will smell like the airport,” she sings, and I cry with the harmonies on the word “airport.” I know what she means. I know that smell. And while I’m sure Neko didn’t mean to remind me of an actual person I hope is in heaven if heaven exists, she did. I also loved that guy I was fucking, and I still do, for what we shared in those few weeks. He knows it.  Now we are friends, and I am glad I don’t have to regret giving Neko to him.

Since Middle Cyclone, I’ve started owning my experiences and gleaning keepsakes from them to sustain my evolved self. I like myself a lot more, and I feel strongly about a lot more things. “Hey little girl, would you like to be the king's pet or the king?” she asks on “Wild Creatures,” the first track of The Worse Things Get. “I'd choose odorless and invisible, but otherwise, I would choose the king.” Same, Neko. I want everyone to leave me alone and I don’t want to be held responsible for anyone’s suffering but the worst would be serving some patriarch. 

“Night Still Comes” is about depression, and grief, and how you can’t plan on anything. “I revenged myself all over myself, there’s nothing you can say to me,” she sings, and it’s like she’s talking to herself. The “you” is her, and it’s me. “You never held it at the right angle,” she wails, seemingly blaming herself for her failures. On “Nearly Midnight Honolulu,” her otherworldly voice tells a story to validate a helpless kid’s pain and apologize for his and everyone’s loveless plight. It’s sad and uncomfortable to think about, and it’s so beautiful I can’t skip it. It pops up in my mind during the day, without prompting, while sitting at my desk at work.

Listening to "Man" on the new album I can feel my anger, visceral and heavy, in my body. “You’ll have to deal with me,” she says of herself-as-man. Maybe it’s something to do with my age and that I spend a lot more time reading magazines than I used to. Maybe it’s stoked by the internet, by my constant access to a stream of information that pertains to the issues I care about on twitter. Maybe the same thing’s happened to Neko, who tweets regularly.

“Know what's cool? When you tell a person conversationally that you want to find someone to be with and then they make fun of you for it,” she tweeted on August 2. It’s weird that she’s so accessible, that I have access to the mundane things that fuel her words that I then reapply to myself. But it also shows me how brilliant she is to voice the everyday horrors of modern American life in a way that’s so beautiful and perfect that it encompasses all varieties of loss and sadness and sexiness and anger. Neko’s twitter gives her an outlet for her own politics, her own alliances, her own hormones. It gives her a chance to be a regular person. It shows me that she’s doing OK despite her struggles. It’s better now. I’m definitely better now.

Rebecca Armendariz is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find her website here. She twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about her mother.

"Man" - Neko Case (mp3)

"Local Girl" - Neko Case (mp3)

Inappropriate

by DICK CHENEY

I have so many things to say about the portrayal of mental illness on television and only 20 percent of it is thinly veiled jokes about Matthew Fox's acting ability. But first I have some pertinent questions, all of which you must answer without delay.

1. In The Bourne Identity, was Matt Damon's character supposed to have a touch of down's?

2. Chris Pine in everything, same question.

3. Norrie on Under the Dome....what's happening there? She just makes some dude be her boyfriend? I don't think that's allowed.

4. Have you guys seen Diane Kruger on FX's The Bridge? She makes Matt Damon look like the guy in Plano performing an all-cowboy version of Glengarry Glen Ross. (She's incredible, reminding me of myself were I a lithe blonde woman.)

sonya at her high functioning best

My apologies to Chris Pine's family. Before now, if you did not know all the pertinent elements of Aspberger syndrome, you could be mistaken for thinking that Sonya Cross, a homicide detective investigating a series of murders by a serial killer called the Beast, was simply eccentric.

A prevailing lack of social skills is the pervasive factor in Sonya's life. When the son of her Mexican colleague approaches her romantically and she finds herself unable to deal with it, she turns her entire body to face in another direction. In another scene, she meets a junkie mother who cannot care for her children. In a matter of seconds she has alerted everyone else in the room to this state of affairs. Sonya's illness does not limit her very much as a police officer, for the simple reason that police are always saying the obvious.

this man should have been the new doctor who

Set in El Paso and Juarez, The Bridge pairs Sonya with a Mexican cop named Marco Ruiz (the awkward Demián Bichir) to investigate the murder. He is slightly more ethical than other Mexican police, but not very. He cheats on his wife with great frequency, but at least he does not outright lie to her when she accuses him of it. He and Sonya make a good team because he is sorely in need of a person in his life who accepts him for who he is, and she has no other way of understanding the world.

Sonya has made me realize how often I do not say exactly what I am thinking, for example that I think all barbers are arrogant pricks, or that Chris Pine looks like he got his face smashed in by a car door. The violence that runs through El Paso and Juarez is extreme, but no more than the smaller violences Sonya has to conquer simply by existing. The Bridge reminds us that these horrors are equal. It also suggests, like no other show on television, that most people who do destructive things do them for entirely valid reasons, and that makes their crimes all the more repulsive.

Your eye shadow disgusts me Norrie

Repulsive is a word I never use lightly. I guess in my heart I was really upset by Norrie because she blamed Joe for the death of her mother the same way that Lynne once blamed me for the death of non-combatants in Iraq. Joe should have told Noreen what I told Lynne then: "Eventually you'll thank me."

Under the Dome is truly running off the rails now as the showrunners desperately find ways to extend painfully thin premises now that it's a hit. It was funny when Big Jim killed one person, but now that he's basically a serial killer I have a lot harder time taking things seriously. This week he killed Mare Winningham; it would have been emotional except she had been introduced to Under the Dome twenty minutes earlier. Then again, all he did was dump her, handcuffed, into the middle of a lake. Possibly she could breathe underweather like the semen of Hugh Jackman.

at least she's not spending 90 percent of her time complaining Timothy Olyphant works too hard

Big Jim's latest adversary is Mare's daughter Maxine (Natalie Zea), who is running some kind of fight club where she sells drugs and other vices (presumably the GoT DVD sets that are all the Domers have left). Maxine has threatened both Big Jim, historically a questionable move, as well as Dale "Barbie" Barbara with the secrets she has on them. Now that her mother is swimming with the fishes, this plan may well have been put in jeopardy.

at least throw on a caftan b4 you summon a god

The women of Under the Dome are the forgiving sort. Angie got over being kidnapped and imprisoned in an underground shelter within the space of a single episode. Norrie lost her mother and returned to the boyfriend that inadvertently caused Mom's heart attack without a second thought. Maxine was betrayed by Dale Barbara (military customs dictate he must be referred to by his full name or playstation handle, Brbie420, at all times) and in the very next scene she was shoving her forked tongue down his throat.

he looks relieved he didn't have to put her down as well

The magically gorgeous Julia Shumway (Rachelle Lefevre) found out this week that the Dale Barbara she had been sleeping with, because why not, lied about killing her husband. Since she discovered that her husband was just trying to set her up with a sweet life insurance policy, she forgave Barbie his lie. He was incredibly surprised by this, but since there are very few Jewish-American ingénues imprisoned under this dome, he was unable to contain his excitement for what she may allow him to do in the bedroom next. Most likely both are suffering from an undiagnosed case of narcissism.

Has no one ever thought of touching their penis to the dome? In my experience, doing that makes a lot of things go away.

trying to find a way to break it to her that there is no room for a french braid under this dome

Finally, Breaking Bad. All this Walter White backlash is starting to get to me. The greatest man alive was threatened by a DEA agent who didn't know there was a criminal mastermind in his own family? Pssshtttt. The confession video Walt made was a hilarious stroke of genius, and the first true surprise of this final season. Hank's resigned look and ensuing, "You killed us Marie" was a fantastic callback and twist.

don't talk back to your father. really. don't.

The reason I can't abandon my feelings for Walter is this: he never, absolutely never, destroys those who respect him. The things that Jesse Pinkman said to him, the things that his brother-in-law said to him...when he never did a single thing to disrespect either man. This means that whatever Walt decides for them is righteous and correct. Some vain and immature people think they can control others, even those they know are powerful, because this is just their way of life. Walter White is the end of their fantasies, and they must wake up to survive. 

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location and will be manning a F-15 to take care of this Syria problem personally in the very near future. He's thinking Tuesday. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. OK see you guys

"Until I Am Whole" - The Mountain Goats (mp3)

"Until I'm One With You" - Ryan Bingham (mp3)

All Farewells Should Be Sudden

by DICK CHENEY

Objectively we know Jesse Pinkman has the right to be ungrateful. "He cares for you," Hank tells Jesse about Mr. White. "He has done things to bring you closer, to keep you around." It is not so much that Jesse does not believe these words, but that they are only words. I have to admit that there is probably something missing in me, because I had made up my mind about what Walt should do about Jesse the moment the words Old and Yeller were invoked. God knows I hated that fucking dog.

too bad there is no extant video of the krysten ritter murderNot as much as I despise the prick who hosts Talking Bad. The thing I need least in the world after an involuntary hysterectomy is an actor geek explaining to me how mad Walt is now. Inserting it between the commercials is embarrassing amateur hour, AMC. The performers don't mingle with the audience during intermission you selfish fucks. If you're going to analyze the last scenes of the best show on television, bring the emaciated corpse of Terry Eagleton, the scalp of Elvis Mitchell, a painting resembling Camille Paglia or nothing at all.

they could call the after show Peaking Twins... "What does Shelly want right now?"

Imagine if during the commercials of Twin Peaks David Lynch was muttering about the tragic dream he had the previous night while nibbling on a Snickers bar: "Chris, in my vision God was dressed like a prostitute with gold teeth..." If Twin Peaks had a godawful wrap-up show, it would never have been around to turn to shit shortly after they revealed the murderer of Laura Palmer. Some bespectacled doofus would interrogate the man with, "Where did the thinspiration for the character of Donna come from?" and Lynch would just gargle and beatbox.

you know what's a much better lie Mr. White? "I spilled some gasoline." End of story.

Weak after-show aside, it was tough to see the internal machinations Walt had to go through in order to justify his decision to spare and then murder his former partner. This precocious indecision was also slightly unbelievable, emphasized by Mrs. White observing, "What's one more?" in her swanky hotel room. Things have been pushed so far beyond the brink already that my own internal compass was smashed the minute Saul Goodman's nose was broken or, really, when Gus Fring had half his face blown off. Walt is retired now, and when he gave up cooking meth, the curtain dropped for me - this extended wrap-up is like the third part of "November Rain."

Jesse's final surge of energy and rage reminds us that all heat seeks a lower state to rest. Dissauded from burning down the White homestead, he passed out like an overdosed addict at Burning Man. Sleeping it off in Marie's guest room we were reminded that a right turn resembles a wrong turn in all the most superficial ways.

still better than alaskaIt is hard to remember the epilogue of anything that was really enjoyable, the way all goodbyes should be sudden. The end of Cheers was a 60 minute view of Ted Danson's bald spot, the only other show I can remember the ending to was M.A.S.H. and that was because it was entirely self-congratulatory. Most finales reek of stale death.

I've booked you a flight to a dome. No tears only security checkpoints now

Ending Breaking Bad - or anything worthwhile - gracefully requires a high degree of skill. We have seen Jesse and Walt butt heads so often that the feel good route might have been to pit them both against Lydia. That would have been a false equivalence and a cop out, but the path we tread now shows how difficult it is to make Walt vs. Jesse fresh again. Here every last word spoken is like an invocation, just like Twin Peaks' "fire walk with me." I think I have mixed approximately 80 metaphors since this essai began, I need to go lie down and dream of bombing Syria after this.

remember him on sex and the city. yeah you do

Breaking Bad would be easier to deal with if every possible ending for these two jokers was not so unhappy. By the same token, Walt living in a retirement community and intimidating seniors wouldn't feel fitting either. When Twin Peaks began to fall apart shortly before ABC executives forced David Lynch to reveal the central mystery at the heart of the show, he resisted. He knew that once we knew that MacGuffin was bullshit, the threads the show's characters hung on would fade as well.

I have a similar look on my face every time Lynne suggests going to Applebee's

Breaking Bad already unraveled the moment Mike died. (I'm still not sure how that happened but I blame Jesse, or possibly Todd.) Now the mysteries of the show have been vanquished, and the remainder is merely obituary, the lowest form of art after reporting on college football. Vengeance is the only motivation left for Mr. White's antagonists, and revenge constitutes a state of being without thought. We can't, don't engage with it, we simply witness what occurs.

lara flynn boyle aged 40 years during this show and another 20 during the practice, making her true age 124 today

During that fateful final season of Twin Peaks, Mr. Lynch argued with co-creator Mark Frost, who felt they had to detail the perpetrator of Laura Palmer's murder in a train car, after a parrot named Waldo had pecked her shoulders bloody. By that point it had already become obvious Laura Palmer was the most useless person in the town, making her death itself a kind of mercy. Frost was incredibly wrong in wanting to explain the reason for her death, since no answer would have been satisfying, and the one given led to nothing afterwards.

So too with Walt and Jesse: they already survived their lives. The rest is a footnote.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He sometimes sips gasoline when he is cranky. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Alive" - Empire of the Sun (mp3)

"Disarm" - Empire of the Sun (mp3)

In Paris, Young Paul Bowles

by ALEX CARNEVALE

You see I shouldn't be so wretched if there were only some way I could be sure that some day, be it fifty years hence, I shall be able to justify to myself the fact that I'm alive, but now I see no way, not even a vista of what might become a hope. It is not a help for me to repeat that life is its own excuse. I say: my life is no excuse. I have a horror not of anyone's failing to find merit in my existence, but only in my own. And in order for me to find myself worthwhile, I have got to be pretty brilliant, and understand everything.

Paul Bowles arrived in Paris in 1931. When he rode up to the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, they could not believe they had been corresponding with a college student. "I was sure from your letters that you were an elderly gentleman, at least seventy-five," Stein told him. He was twenty-one years old.

Bowles started fast. He had been insulated from the world until the age of six, when he was sent to school. "I developed a superiority complex the first day," he wrote in one of his many, many letters. His advancement continued apace:

When I was eight I wrote an opera. We had no piano, but we had two or three pieces of sheet-music which I studied and I had a zither which I tuned in various scales and modes. My first sexual thrills were obtained from reading newspaper account of electrocutions. At the time I was quite unconscious of the facts, except that I had the New England guilt about it.

Bowles' first literary idol was Poe, and crossing the Atlantic aboard the S.S. McKeesport he contemplated setting some of the man's poems to music. As a self-described modernist snob, Bowles' perspective on other artists resembled his shaky feelings about being turned on by torture -  a mix of wonder, awe and pain. Upon his arrival in Paris, the first person he went out of his way to meet was Jean Cocteau. At the beginning of April 1931 he writes that Cocteau

rushed about the room with great speed for two hours and never sat down once. Now he pretended he was an orangoutang, next an usher at Paramount Theatre, and finally he held a dialogue between an aged grandfather and his young grandson which was side-splitting. I think never have I seen anyone like him in my life. He still smokes opium every day and claims it does him a great deal of good. I daresay it does. By definition, the fact that it is considered harmful for most mere mortals would convince me of its efficaciousness for him.

Reading Bowles' private letters is like watching the precise movements of a guided laser. He writes completely differently depending on the level of intimacy with his correspondent. He penned almost stream-of-consciousness Joyce imitations to his friend Bruce Morissette, adopting a more formal tone for those whose friendship he coveted and had yet to earn. With his closest ones he even vacillated between styles with a severity of purpose nearly bipolar in its enthusiasm.

By June of 1931 he was in Berlin. He hated the city, all rain and mosquitos, but it was mostly that the place suffered in comparison to Paris. It is obvious how much his surroundings affected Bowles' personality. In his letter to the Paris-born Jew Edouard Roditi, Bowles accurately described his view of the German metropolis:

if only the world were stronger! if only there were more dimensions! if only we thought in terms of perfumes! if only there were a third world where we could hide from the other two. then the other one would not be always grinning in feeling so perfectly well that we could do nothing when it intended to enter. there would be two of them there, and the two would be easier to fight than the one. but now it is always either one or the other, and neither one stays away long enough. in full noon sleep falls upon one for one tiny second without measurement and one knows there is no escape. berlin is not a beautiful city

Later he would tell Roditi, and in a sense himself as well, that "I have the feeling you are primarily two people, one of which should be killed."

Among so many potent writers and artists, it was natural for young Bowles to feel a bit discouraged in his own writing. Yes, he could write or speak to Gertrude Stein anytime he liked, but reading further and further into her work, he despaired of his own.

All my theories on her I discover to be utterly vagrant. She has set me right, by much labor on her part, and now the fact emerges that there is nothing in her works save the sense. The sound, the sight, the soporific repetitions to which I had attached such great importance, are accidental, she insists, and the one aim of her writing is the superlative sense. "What is the use of writing," she will shout, "unless every word makes the utmost sense?" Naturally all that renders her 'opera' far more difficult, and after many hours of patient reading, I discover she is telling the truth, and that she is wholly correct about the entire matter. And what is even more painful is that all my poems are worth a large zero. That is the end of that. And unless I undergo a great metamorphosis, there will never be any more poems.

In August he boarded another ship, the S.S. Imerethie II, with a destination of Tangier. His reaction to this lush place was the polar opposite to his experience of Berlin. In a postcard to John Widdicombe he wrote, "here I shall live until the eucalyptus leaves all fall and it starts to rain across the strait." He took up residence in a villa with Aaron Copland. The villa featured a permanently out of tune piano, and while Copland found he could not do his work, Bowles' mood improved immediately. After a sojourn in Marrakech, Bowles returned to Paris before stopping in London at the beginning of December.

London did not offend him as a city, but as a way of life. In a letter to Charles Henri-Ford, he writes,

I have crossed the little water that is mightier in its human gap than an ocean, and fallen again into the great pit of London. The chalk cliffs at Newhaven were all greyer through the dawn rain than any human eyes could be, and white gulls fluttered out of the black wind into the vague lights of the boat, and seemed to cry when their flight crossed the boat, but to be silent when they went back into the darkness again. There is little change, save that Piccadilly grows more and more like a sprawling Times Square, running down Haymarket and Coventry and Regent, all garish and burning with neon. It doesn't fit. In New York, the great planes of the lifting buildings can carry it off, in London it stays right there, on the ground, on your mind, on your hands, and you can't lift it. I am sad for this.

Paris left me empty. I look only, everywhere, all hours, for that new way of looking at the human thing, the heart, I suppose, of the world, and I found it not there. I was childish to look for it. Only the echo of the beat, not the strong pulse.

At any rate, it was good of you to lead me about by my nose, and to let me meet so many people. As you know, I like to meet everyone in the world at least once.

He had met many of the most important artists of his generation; from Klee to Gide to Stein to Copland to Pound. For a short time, it raised all boats to be amidst such individuals, but eventually Bowles' surroundings discouraged him: 

Literature has never lived on literary talk, and literary acquaintances. I want to take every poet and shove him down into the dung-heap, kick all his literary friends in the ass, and try to make him see that writing is not word-bandying, like Stein, and the thousand legions of her followers, but an emotion seen through the mind, or an intellectual concept emotionalized, and shaping its own expression. You can't write from a literary vacuum, and all of Paris, I felt, was trying to. They get all tangled up in trying to write cleverly and as no one else has, and get lost in the timber hills of their effort. I can't help thinking Shakespeare never worried about writing a new kind of blank verse, just went ahead instinctively and did it.

The artists and writers Bowles once idolized had begun to let him down, as they had to. (He called Gertrude Stein, who told him, "Why don't you go to Mexico? You'd last two days there.") Friends he depended on for money were no longer as forgiving; after all, he had been in Europe for almost a year. A traveler is always welcome, a wayward resident finds himself more swiftly resented. Even Copland became slow in answering his letters, and Bowles stopped visiting the Stein home. He developed syphilis and then acute tonsilitis, medical expressions of how little Europe had left for him. How he loathed these ancient cities! By the same token, he did not want to go home at all.

In Algiers he began, for the first time in his life, to read the work of Marcel Proust.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Blue Jasmine and the Fullbright Company's Gone Home. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"On My Own" - Zero 7 (mp3)

"Don't Call It Love" - Zero 7 (mp3)

in his library