Getting Away With It

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

The following is an excerpt from the novel I Have To Tell You, available for a limited time in pre-release from 0s&1s Novels.

I work as a secretary for LunchKase Games, a mobile gaming company based in a loft on King West. They’ve got more venture capital than they know what to do with, so it’s a pretty sweet gig: we have a patio, a home theatre-sized screen on one side of the office, and a lavish kitchen on the other. The other secretary, Sherene, kind of hates it here though: she talks a lot about her trysts with professors and poets, and punctuates her hourly smokes and our daily tasks with heavy sighs (we order office chairs at Grand and Toy, we purchase ever-more envelopes, we refill drawers with granola bars for the BWs – which stands for Boy-Wonders, our secret name for the LunchKase developers, designers, and programmers.) It’s Monday, so this morning I hear all about her weekend: she was too hung over from cigars and Cristal to do anything but stay in bed all Sunday, reading some theory she’d forgotten she’d hated in school, and eating canned soup. “So much psychic tiredness I couldn’t even shower,” she says, dropping her tired glamour and condescending academic-speak for a moment, and I am touched.

Irving, our boss, peers out from his office and points at the overfull sink, and I stand. I collect Tupperware containers from the BWs and peel limp crusts and lasagne from them, then scrub each with green apple detergent. Restocking the office fridge with dozens of soft drinks I’m painfully aware that I’m being watched: the BWs watch me in mini-shifts, popping their heads up like groundhogs, staring as I strain, lift and stack; strain, lift and stack. I’m never so aware of my body as I am when I restock the drinks. I feel squeezed into whatever I’m wearing, my belt always too tight, as sidewalk slush dries inside my slow-rotting shoes, as I clop back and forth with armfuls of cans, hating them all. Sherene doesn’t look up at me once, though I wish she would.

It’s hard to explain how Sherene gets away with everything, though I understand it perfectly because I’ve known a dozen girls like her. She hardly does anything and complains about everything, and everyone falls over themselves to cushion her experience of the office – of carrying boxes, of answering the phone, of purchasing new software, of the spectral men in her stories. Of course I don’t know her specifically; I don’t know her at all – she wouldn’t bother with me. Once I spotted her lingering by Irving’s desk with the mail cradled in her arms, and overheard her describe me as ‘cute,’ and I understood she meant ‘boring.’ I don’t resent her, and I don’t envy her either – I really don’t. Her magic is exhausting and unsustainable, and I think – I know – it’s running out.

So even if it’s Sherene’s fault, Irving only addresses me when something’s wrong, and it’s always immediately accusatory: “You didn’t…’ ‘You didn’t…’ ‘You didn’t…” I guess I’ve had it coming: for the past few weeks I’ve been drinking too much at night with my heartbroken roommate Mark and spending the daytime all glazed, ignoring the slow drift of paper from one side of my desk to the other. I’ve been getting thin pink invoice slips from the Pepsi supply company, from office-chair delivery people, but allow them to sit in my plastic in-box undisturbed. Last week I started getting yellow slips, playing dumb for the grim-faced delivery-people who smell like King Street traffic, then stuffing those in my in-box as well.

Later in the morning Irving calls me into his office. He closes the door, picks up a letter, and returns to his desk without once leaving his wheelie-chair, steepling his small fingers and giving me a long look. He tells me I’ve been careless. I cry. He shifts around in his seat as I cry, hands me a tissue box, then rolls over to a stack of receipts, gossamer-thin and four inches high, secured with a dirty rubber band. He curls my fingers around it, telling me to tally the expenses, and I spend the rest of the day tallying four-hundred dollar dinners and two-minute cabs, ignoring Sherene’s hissed whispers about the sexist Pepsi delivery man and his busy hands, and ignoring the BWs too, as they put the newest game Smash Princess through final tests and throw paperclips at each other. In the washroom Sherene and I stand side-by-side in front of the marble sinks, and her eyes seek mine in the mirror. “It’s not worth it,” she says, so matter-of-factly I don’t ask what ‘it’ is supposed to mean until she’s almost out the door.

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” she asks, her eyes focusing on me, then flicking to her own reflection in the mirror behind me, and then back to me again.

I clear my throat. “What isn’t worth it?”

She pauses, and then takes a couple of steps towards me, then a few more. She lowers her chin and fixes me with a long stare. She touches one of my hands.

“You strike me as very young, Ashley. Don’t tell me how old you are specifically – I’ll get jealous.”

She laughs, so I laugh too.

“The thing is, you’re not only young young, you’re…I get the feeling you’re from a smaller place, a smaller town. Am I correct?”

“Yeah, I’m from St. Thomas.” I’d already told her this maybe four times. “What do you mean, you get the feeling?”

“Well,” she begins, and to my amazement she blushes a little. She looks down at my hand and then, after a pause, grabs the other one. I stiffen up.

“Listen to me, Ashley. You call this the big city, and maybe that’s true – for Canada anyway, this is it. And maybe it’s great here in Toronto – I think it is. I certainly couldn’t leave. But there are such fucked up people here, such twisted sickos, and the city produces and attracts and encourages them. It gives them ample and luxurious venues to do fucked up things together and to others and just… and Irving is one of them. You hear me? And so if he makes it easier for you when you let him…on days like today when he, when you, you know –”

She lets go of my hands. “I mean just what I said: it’s not worth it. It might feel like an exchange, but it’s robbery.”

She turns. She leaves.

The sun that afternoon slants through the blinds, slowly lighting up my desk. I bring Irving the final sum and he wheels over to take the still-warm printout and banded receipts from me, then rubs my palm.

“I make you nervous,” he tells me. I allow him to rub my hand, terrified that I’ll lose my seventeen-dollars-an-hour job, accustomed as I’ve become to overpriced King Street lunches (fifteen-dollar salads; nicoise with artichokes and truffle oil one day, peppery green with seaweed and avocado the next.)

“How many boyfriends have you had, Ashley?” Irving asks, wheeling over to close the door, then rotating to face me. I look down at him, and he looks up. “Hundreds,” I say, and we understand each other at last.

“I think you misunderstood,” he says. “You see, Sherene and I…we’re basically dating.” I think in a flash about how she’d tower over him, then wonder what they could possibly talk about, then wonder what ‘basically’ means.

I trail Sherene to the bathroom, scrub my hands, watching her in the mirror. “He said you’re dating. Irving.” I say, but maybe she can’t hear me over the water, because she doesn’t respond. She smells foul with cigarette smoke and rub-on perfume, and squeezes her hair in her hands as she leaves.

Irving is standing in front of the BWs when I get back, buttoning up his coat and knotting up his nice scarf and saying something that elicits a scattered cheer. “We’re having a release party for Smash Princess tomorrow,” the lead illustrator, Seth, explains to me, and Irving glances over. “I’ve compiled a shopping list of party snacks and alcohol for you, Ashley,” he says, then turns back to the BWs. “Booze!” he says, eliciting one more cheer as they get up and drift out separately.

I watch them leave, stacking some folders, then walk over to the giant screen. I’ve Windexed the whole thing dozens of times – tight little circles, standing on a chair to reach the top – but I’ve never turned it on before. I flick the switch now. The screen glows brighter in some patches than in others, then a massive jungle shimmers to life.

I pick a controller off the coffee table, and Smash Princess herself jerks awake, blinking huge eyes and flexing her biceps. I make her leap into a tree, then leap down, her skirt fluttering; I guide her through a river where she fights with an alligator, and I grind the controls and shout my exhilaration as she grips its pebbled back and rips it in half. She stands in the river as the alligator bleeds and melts into the molten water, straightening her back – she’s almost life-sized on this screen – and another alligator brushes her leg, and she roars. I drop the controller on the floor with a yelp and she dives dutifully into the water, and no matter what I press, I can’t bring her back again.

+

“You messed up, dude,” Mark whispers. “Companies like yours are legally required to provide food at boozy, you know, gatherings.”

“No way,” I say, slurping my wine.

“Yes way! Hey, do you think the BWs will play the new game with me?”

“Shh, don’t call them that here! You should hope they don’t play it with you, they invented it,” I say, and he looks around the room, then asks, “Which guy’s the one who leaves mouldy lasagne every week?” I look through the small clumps of BWs, sipping their Gatorades and beers. “The ginger one,” I say, nodding toward Seth, then poke Mark – “Jesus! Don’t stare.”

"Fucker,” Mark growl-whispers, sort of flexing his skinny chest, and I laugh. “You went on a date with him, didn’t you,” he retorts, and I blush: I did, it was awful. I ate too much and too quickly; he scrolled through his iPhone and took his blazer on and off.

“Did you cut his steak for him? Did you throw in a massage?”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is I should’ve gone into engineering like these guys – look at them, fresh out of school, a hundred-ten pounds each, ordering beautiful women around all day.” He puts his empty beer bottle on the floor, then walks to the conference room to replace it.

“Irving – that’s Irving, short guy in the kitchen – he said yesterday I’d be an exotic dancer in another life,” Sherene is saying very quickly to Seth and his brother, laughing a little into her wineglass, rubbing a sequined shoulder with her free hand. “And while that’s enormously problematic and maybe a year ago I’d slap him silly, I understand he gets such a thrill from old-fashioned, painfully gendered behavior, and hell, so do I. I mean, what you like in bed doesn’t always align with your politics, right? He’s not saying it’s because I’m slutty, you understand, but because he knows how I am with people. You know: lots of people, that sort of connection, all easy. You know?”

“That’s fucked up,” Seth says, and his brother snorts. Sherene laughs again – her earrings jangling – then turns to me and Mark. We’re still lurking by the conference room, and I’m feeling swollen-headed and oafishly drunk, suddenly terrified I’ll start giggling and not stop for hours. “What a shit. I don't care. I could have him fired if I wanted. My name’s Sherene, how are you, you’re Ashley’s boyfriend? How you both doing for wine and beer?” Sherene says as she grips the fleshy part of my arm and leads me into the office kitchen. Mark follows, and drains his new beer in three long gulps. “She’s friendly,” he whispers when she steps away.

Sunlight streams through the kitchen windows, reminding me that it’s daytime and that I’m drunk. It’s so bright that I squint a little, and Sherene – her dress fiercely aglitter – hands my glass to Irving, who is drinking by himself. He leans back in his chair and, with his free hand, yanks the blinds down. Seth comes into the kitchen again. “Hey, uh, I didn’t mean to come off as rude before,” he says.

“That is so OK, Seth,” Sherene says, rubbing his arm, and Irving watches her do it. “Me and the other illustrators are wondering if you’d pose for us sometime, Sherene,” Seth continues. “We’re starting Smash Princess 2, and we’ve got this new, like, bikinied revenge character. We need a tall, sort of Amazonian woman for reference.”

“Sure,” she says, “When?”

“I’ll have to talk to the guys and get back to you,” he says, taking out his iPhone.

Sherene stares at him for a moment, then grips the hem of her sequined dress, and yanks it up over her head. Her hands are veined and beautiful and her breasts look heavy, striped with the light coming through the blinds. I gawk at the freckles, the mottled nipples, the paleness and pinkness and brownness and blood vessels. I could stare for an hour. I’m red down to my neck. I understand the five dollars men forked over for Penthouse before the internet made porn cheap and grainy and free. I start prickling with sweat.

“No. Do it now,” she commands.

“Whoa,” Seth says, then recovers: “can you stand with one foot up on this chair, like a warrior? Perfect. I’ll be right back, I gotta get my pencils.”

“Irving and I were talking – are you really just twenty, Ashley?” Sherene asks me, scratching her elevated thigh. “You seem so mature.” I look at her, understanding her envy and her fear, and Mark glances at me quickly, then says: “You bet she is! She’s been keeping me out of trouble since she was sixteen.”

“My first wife was pregnant at your age,” Irving murmurs in my ear, and then Seth returns, trailing three other BWs laden with pencils and massive sketch pads. I watch the stream of dark wine as Irving refills my glass himself. I watch Sherene pose, shivering in the chill of the too-bright office, feeling too sad to speak: she will never be on my side, and they will never be on hers.

You can purchase I Have To Tell You here.

Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. Getting Away With It is an excerpt from her novel I Have To Tell You, for which she gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council. You can find her website here. You can find an an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Love Don't Owe You Anything" - Strays Don't Sleep (mp3)

"For Blue Skies" - Strays Don't Sleep (mp3)

Always There

by ALEX CARNEVALE 

The Red Road
creator Aaron Guzikowski

Jason Momoa's sexuality is like an extruding pimple on some poor sap's face. When he bends down to retrieve something from underneath a car, he always looks up, as though there were something above he wanted to view him as well as whatever was below. His sex is always there. Momoa's jawline is rearranged by a scraggly beard that constantly has to be reworked on set. There is a person whose job it is to only deal with Jason's facial hair. If something goes wrong with the facial hair, this person, whose name we can presume is named something like Anne, will be disemployed and have to do a much worse job, like be responsible for Channing Tatum's goatee or work construction.

The only person I've ever been attracted to as much as Jason Momoa is Robin Wright Penn. The year was 1998.

In his new show The Red Road, airing exclusively on the Sundance Channel, Momoa portrays a half-Indian ex-con named Philip Kopus making collections for his crooked white father (Tom Sizemore). In old age Sizemore looks an emaciated shell of his former self, yet he still clings to a certain firmness of spirit that matches Momoa's artful solidity.

After Philip gets out of prison, he spots a police officer with whom he matriculated from high school searching for a missing boy. He immediately knows the boy is dead and suspects the killer, resolving to protect this person from harm.

His high-school buddy, police officer Howard Jensen (NZ actor Martin Henderson) appears to be a repressed homosexual former football player. The man just wants to protect his two girls, both of whom are named Rachel for no reason I can fathom. Having white children appears to be a considerable responsibility, and when the older Rachel takes up with an adorable local member of the Rampough Indian tribe named Junior, Rachel' mother Jean (Julianne Nicholson) freaks out. In a fugue she takes her husband's gun to go find her daughter and accidentally (oops) runs over a local Indian boy.

The casting of Julianne Nicholson in this role is against type, and basically all wrong, which is the point. We cannot conceive of what interest Howard would have in this prissy woman, and indeed he sleeps in the guest room.

Putting Jason Momoa in a storyline where he has an adversarial, pseudosexual relationship with a police officer is certainly most thinking people's dream scenario, right up there with him playing Mr. Darcy opposite Selena Gomez. Momoa has the bad early George Clooney habit of looking up through his brow to deliver his line, which I believe Steven Soderbergh cured through shock therapy. It absolutely fucking ruined ER though, I can tell you that much.

Momoa's Philip calls up his cop classmate for a reunion. They meet at a goat farm in New Jersey; I guess there had to be one. The officer looks as out of place as Momoa, feeling out jitters while he holds the biggest gun he can find, cradled in his arms like a baby. At first Momoa stays in the car in order to give the officer command of the meeting. Before long, and when he feels it is safe, he steps out of the vehicle to hand the officer his own firearm, jostled as it had been from the man's wife SUV as she manslaughtered a boy.

The rest of The Red Road concerns the cover-up of these events. Several times, but not sequentially, Momoa will lift his shirt over his massive head for a pinup pose, and in the briefest of moments we can see the chance he had of being the one approaching Pemberley on horseback, instead of the ruffian-type roles he plays now.  Momoa was on that Stargate spinoff, and it was amazing. Khal Drogo was a crying little baby in comparison to this individual:

Even with his trademark scar, Momoa is always complete in himself. In contrast, the teenagers in love on The Red Road resemble each other too closely; we can suspect that Rachel and Junior may share the same father, or at least much of the same blood, and this more than anything else is the reason for their coming together. (We know that this sort of conglameration often happens when children are not told who their parents are, and recognize something of themselves in their cousins.)

Sherman Alexie is probably turning over in his bed, but there is a lot of unmined material here. The Red Road's Juliet/Rachel is not so fetching really, and Junior makes even worse decisions than Romeo, bringing his girl to places as dangerous to him as they are to her. Momoa is like a brazen Mercutio at times, and those moments where his absence of malice seems most obvious are when we permit ourselves to like the characters in The Red Road. It is the grace period we afford the people in our lives before, inevitably, they disappoint us.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"This Blue World" - Elbow (mp3)

"New York Morning" - Elbow (mp3)

The Greatest Throne Of All

by DICK CHENEY

Morning comes, and the disappointment of last night's True Detective finale has yet to wear off. I can't shake the overwhelming sensation that the Yellow King is still out there somewhere — I was pretty sure it was going to be Marty Hart's eldest daughter, especially after she set up one of the crime scenes in her playroom. I believe that children, and to a lesser extent, toupees, are our future. Treat them well and let them have three-ways. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride.

Sometimes I think Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown's tendentious relationship was the only thing I have ever really cared about.

he didn't mention AIDS during this episode either

The show did reveal the centerpiece of the Carcosa myth, which is that it is a place you can go, a passage to the underworld. It is shrouded with branches and corpses, both of which made the lair of the YK one of the great television sets I have seen since the mill on Twin Peaks. The weird wooden statues are merely signs or guideposts to the passage. "There is only one story... light and dark," Matthew McConaughey muttered at some point last night, which caused everyone I watched the show with to burst out laughing.

I once tried to kill something that was attacking me. It turned out to be hail.

Before Rust entered the throne room of the Yellow King, he heard a noise behind him. He never identified it, or tracked down the source of the disturbance, but it could not have been the King himself, peeking out of the underworld to see what happened on Earth? Statues are merely signposts; the beings they indicate lurk nearby. Even a hospital is merely a marker for something else, some passage in and out of things.

it's like...a waypoint from the darkness into the light GET IT

It seemed like the True Detectives of True Detective knew where the killer was for over three episodes; they were so sure of their results that they had a mute guy mail them to local newspapers. Instead of taking the yellow king alive, they chose to eliminate him in his lair, possibly due to their worries he could be vindicated by Tuttle elements in the criminal justice system. Going to the evil lair of a killa with no Kevlar or satellite phones sounds pretty dumb, but then, clearing one murder case over a twenty-year period isn't exactly stellar work either.

this loving relationship could have had more screentime

I always believed I could solve any cold case purely from reading the wikipedia entry. JonBenet's killer is probably dead now, and can't be apprehended, but didn't someone once say the truth is out there (in her wikipedia page). The next season of True Detective will feature a killer whose calling card is posting the DOD of their victims on wikipedia as a sadistic, Adobe-flash based calling card. (In an ironic twist, the perpetrator will turn out to be a Brooklyn woman disappointed by sexism.)

I thought we had all retired light and dark as a metaphor after the Harry Potter series IDK

Murder, True Detective suggests, is the second worst crime. It is worse than treason or rape, abduction or corruption. The absolute worst crime is having an accent that sounds like dogshit.

actually nevermind the worst crime is that shirt

+

I have watched my last episode of The Walking Dead. The writers who could actually compose dialogue were fired and forced to write Mob City by Frank Darabont at gunpoint. Whoever is left over penning these awful episodes fell asleep during the part of writing class when they instructed verbs other than "to be."

a woman in her twenties who has never had a drink. In the south. That's likely.

Every line of dialogue now is the same, each conversation the identical meaningless pattern.

"I have to go."
"You don't have to."
"But I do."
"You'll be gone."
"I want you here."
"You have to be gone, don't you see?"

It is utterly maddening byplay. Worse even than the terrible dialogue, though, is that even the show's most taciturn figures to this point are now voluminous holes of un-vocabulary. Sure it was fun to cut the budget by killing off the The Walking Dead's most educated characters, but there has to be a middle ground between long Bible quotations and the dumbest pattern dialogue since Aaron Sorkin wrote most of Studio 60 on cough syrup and pure. That was bad, and this is worse. Action talks, bullshit walks.

cut out her voicebox with that knife please

A recent episode, which consisted of the impotent natterings of a blonde woman to a white power activist, soured the concept of an odd couple for me forever. If I hear one more word out of Carl about how he's capable of handling himself, I'm going to burn down Sanctuary. They should just keep hiring people from The Wire, since the rest of the show's cast can't act worth a fucking shit.

oh wipe the sad face off, if you loved your wife so much you never would have left her side

Let us not forget the scene where a man left two ten year old girls in the wilderness, stood them back-to-back and told them "you're going to be fine." This actually happened. And good lord, Glenn, grow up. She's just a woman, even if she is your wife. I am going back to watching Four Weddings and a Funeral every Sunday, enough of this shit.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Felicity having sex for her country.

maybe he was just annoyed by her

"Keep On Wanting" - The Fray (mp3)

"Wherever This Goes" - The Fray (mp3)

The Place That Forgets You

by JOSH MILBERG

Moving to New York in winter makes for bad timing but allowing this ongoing fantasy first impressions in autumn gives its staging and extras unfair advantage. It's September and October when the city comports itself a little more gently, when boots and cuffs are still unsalted and the counterfeit-wealthy and bonafide rich walk Manhattan's Broadway and Brooklyn's Bedford a touch overdressed, eager to wear coats that look new for a moment and age inevitably like the Empire State Building, fading day after day like a concrete dildo that convinces the anxious to sublimate headfirst through the top and out through the smog. And, though the decline in environment may have started in autumn, it's too slow and insidious to be seen by the newbies. The air is brisk, the dogs are happy, and there are still straggling subleasers willing to learn and return home sexual sherpas with extravagant chi.

It's September and October that establish for daydreamers, optimists, and even those cynics who make piece with life's shittiness, that the flight down from Cloud 9 or 8 or even 3, ends with a softer landing on a longer runway, when the trip to summer is longest and heat and sunlight slowly invert themselves against mud and slush, when uncovered coughs test immune systems as though they stood any chance and the results could be charming. Within a few weeks the happiest and healthiest question, as they must, what it means to opt in here.

Oracles and wiseacres from Long Island and Jersey wield that phrase to the newly initiated, as one did to me, like a dare or weapon. They say you must opt in to this place because, without choice and intention, you'll make sense of your life under the weight of a train. They often leave out what is tacit and obvious and need not be said but arrives here for kicks and the naïve in the room: When ones banks on a dream, he had better outbid.

The mood in this place is conspiratorial. There are dollars here, sure, but also a sense that The Bear and The Bull play smashmouth with manna, that it must take decades to know who to blow, and that poetry is the price of that platform called Kickstarter. If only for phonies and the Ponzies they pull, the game always rigs against writers and artists. In the land of opinions and 1% vacancies, there's always some shorty here jocking your spot.

Like a 19 year-old who recently wrote for the City Room that, if you escape it, this place will forget you. No one cared that she was only 19, which is when such declarations should be made out loud and published nowhere but Facebook, a bathroom and, on occasion, through Tumblr. The confluence of pathology and truth is a convenient phenomenon and one I hope errs on my side more often than not but, before age 19, most of us, thankfully, are pretty forgettable, and I hope with a vitriol cushioned by coffee, bourbon, and the most heinous drop-sets known by that torture called bench-press, that she will be too. Here I am, a decade her senior, typing in one of the poorest zip codes in Brooklyn, and I know that, for me, it's already curtains.

It's just below freezing; water flies down in rain and snow and something called pellets, and the dogs, so I think, are very unhappy. Meteorologists and morons have ditched eschatology and now talk earnest with kindlier words. Armageddon and apocalypse give way to precipitation, polar vortices, and that injuctive, precaution. Their civility shows no weaker a sign than a locust-invasion or biblical pestilence that the world, as we've known it, is soon to be over. But worrying deprives the present its pleasure, so onto a myth and its place amidst seasons.

My second summer in Brooklyn I went to a party held twice a month at a place that served pizzas the size of a slice at five times the cost. Even my poorest and smartest friends (which at the time were one and the same) talked about eating the pizza like gluten and dairy were the culprits at Jonestown. In addition to fantastical pricing, the business made use of a rooftop garden, a once-naked waitress, and an army of youth barely aware, if at all, that their charm was the charm that exudes from a game show: token to wit, the dark/liberal arts, and the trappings of culture with the expression of none. And, while the restaurant was famous for pizza, the party was prone to half-decent disco, a little arrogant sufferering, and a dearth of facilities to serve masses' asses. So, unwilling to wait, I walked past the lines that led up to the bathrooms and made for a shack just slightly off base. As I got down to business, a 5-foot flyweight came up behind me, skipping, I'd guess, like an ingenue from Godard or a Midwestern newsletter. And though there were plenty to bust for open-air drugs, it was me she was after. She signaled two men, each a little bit taller and a little bit lighter than me and told them to kick me out. I looked at them while she called me motherfucker over and over and a voice in my head said, Knuck if you buck.

The party would improve the following year by moving to Queens where portapotties abound and locals can spot who's not to be fucked with. But that second summer I spent here in Brooklyn, before the restaurant had a cookbook and the party found Queens, I spent my time cavorting with friends happy to skip it. They took me to parties less hampered by parents, but also, to movies, dinner, and shows in the park. We danced, we got drunk, and Cupid unloaded like Rambo in Nam. Sooner or later I got sweet on a fine one and we'd run with her dog in the rain through the night, laughing at people still losing at love.

The September I moved here it was already chilly. It took seven months to make any friends and, because I wanted it to, I thought it had meaning; in the delay and despair of that wait before friendship, I wanted some truth that gave satisfaction, and I wonder if it would have been briefer had I timed my arrival somewhere near spring, when there are roses to smell and parties to crash. But I don't wonder too much. We're almost done with this winter. The city holds hundreds of gyms that don't ever close and, while the curb frosts, defrosts, and refrosts all over, I keep my game tight with knees tall off the treadmill. No matter the month, I stay sexy for summer, for when parties pack full, the music gets loud, and a wall is a bathroom awaiting your all.

I was recently asked when transplants transition and take stake in that title, the big one, New Yorker. I'm not there myself and I'm not all that sure, but were I 19 and smarter and a little bit lucky, here's what I'd say: The fall is seductive, the winter is shitty, and henchmen will follow wherever you go, but when you deliver your mark with what courses inside you, neither willing to wait nor happy to budge, that's when you know what it means to opt in here.

Josh Milberg is a contributor to This Recording. This is his first appearance in these pages. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He writes Televised Atlas for Nowhere and you can find his twitter here.

"Seasons (Waiting On You)" - Future Islands (mp3)

"Doves" - Future Islands (mp3)

Deliver Us

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Call the Midwife
creator Heidi Thomas

The year is 1957. It will be another four years before Britain’s Family Planning Association adds the pill to its list of approved contraceptives, and fifteen years before all women in all U.S. states will have access to it, thanks to Eisenstadt vs. Baird. Commercial ultrasound machines won’t be available for another twenty years. If you’re lucky, you might get a gulp of laughing gas to manage the pain, but on a normal day in the impoverished East End of London, giving birth looks a lot like lying on a rubber mat in your own bed, hoping that you and your baby will come out of it relatively unscarred. If not, it’s just as well—you probably have four or five others to feed, anyways, and without contraception, it won’t be long before you’re back on that rubber mat.

Enter the midwife: your best friend, your lord and savior, your own personal Florence Nightingale.

Directed by Heidi Thomas, Call the Midwife follows nurse Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine) as she disembarks from a life of relative comfort into London’s rough-and-tumble Poplar neighborhood. She, along with three other RNs — Trixie, Cynthia, and Chummy — live and work at Nonnatus House, an Anglican nursing convent which provides medical care of all sorts for the community. 

When the phone at Nonnatus House isn't ringing in some new crisis, the nurses navigate their life in Poplar as any young woman in the late 1950s would: making friends, listening to records, smoking, and going to dances. But with the post-WWII baby boom still in full throttle, the nuns and nurses spend most of their time staring down a birth canal.

The BBC drama is based on Jennifer Worth's bestselling memoirs, and has proved to be a runaway hit in both the United Kingdom and the United States, its number of viewers surpassing even that of Downton Abbey. Since I started watching it several weeks ago, I’ve been trying to put my finger on what makes the show so very appealing (besides the British accents). I must admit that I was also looking for something to assuage my massive guilt, as I gave up television for Lent and still returned home every night to watch Call the Midwife.

For starters, it’s a medical drama, which people love, and it's a drama set in the late 1950s, which is terribly in vogue right now. However, as it's set in a poor neighborhood, there's very little of the glamour we associate with the time period; instead, it only serves to remind us of all the medical problems that had not yet been solved, and the comforts that were not yet available to expectant mothers. For example, let's all be grateful that hot soap and water enemas are no longer de rigueur before childbirth.

And for a medical drama, Call the Midwife isn't very dramatic. There are no mystery illnesses to solve, no adrenaline needles being shoved into the nearest unsuspecting patient's heart. In fact, the show relies on the same plot device over and over to keep it going: some poor woman goes into labor and phones Nonnatus House to send over a midwife. The midwife spirits away on her bicycle in the dead of night, arrives at the scene, and delivers the baby with or without incident. Crying ensues on everyone’s part. Even the lack of modern technology, which does add to the suspense, cannot conceal the fact that the show revolves around a process with limited outcomes that is as old as the world.

Childbirth. Do you remember that episode of Friends where Chandler finds a tape of what he thinks is lesbian porn, but what is in fact a video of a woman giving birth? His reaction to it is basically how I imagine every human has been conditioned to react to childbirth: disgust, horror, pity, and fear. Childbirth is violent and should be hidden; childbirth is shameful, and it should belong to women, and women only, and even women should only be allowed to talk about in terms of pain, and fear, and horror, especially to one another. As soon as a woman gets pregnant, she should know immediately what she’s in for: hell. With a pink bow on it.

Maybe this reaction to childbirth is relatively young itself, born along with the generation that is being born in Call the Midwife, once contraceptives became widely and legally available and childbirth became a choice, not a consequence. So much good has been gained from the introduction of the pill that it’s hard to see what we lost with its arrival: namely, the knowledge that women are strong, that women shelter and give life, that childbirth is a raw, mysterious, beautiful thing that belongs only to women in the sense that women, and only women, will ever be able to do it.

Granted, the women of Poplar do it because they have no choice; that’s the sad irony, one that Call the Midwife examines with grace. The forty-two year-old mother of eight who simply can't have any more children, yet finds herself pregnant despite all her precautions; the fifteen-year-old prostitute who will get kicked to the street if her condition is discovered, and who will lose her baby as soon as it's born because she is considered unfit to raise a child; the two women who deliver black babies, because they had an affair, and will do anything to keep their jubilant husbands out of the room; the many twentysomething women who are already on their third or fourth pregnancies, aged beyond their years, and now destined to spend the rest of their lives in an endless cycle of washing, cleaning, drying, soothing, and cooking. Each woman is different, but when they are in labor or holding their babies for the first time, they are all the same. They are universally and absolutely Woman; they have accomplished a terrible, wonderful thing and they know it. It's nothing short of mesmerizing.

When the pill was introduced, Jennifer Worth writes that childbirths in Poplar went from somewhere around 80 to 100 babies born each month to 4 or 5. "Now that," she writes, "is some social change!" Women were not only able to choose when they'd have their families, but they were also able to begin pursuing the things that society frowned upon once they'd become mothers: careers, or further education. The fabric of the neighborhood began to change. 

When babies aren't being born, the rest of Call the Midwife is full of what you'd more readily expect to see on television: romance, friendship, and copious amounts of tea-drinking. But the female friendships are anomalies as well: they're completely natural, and provide the foundation for a show that is as much about the community of women as it is about womanhood in general.  Jenny, Trixie, Cynthia and Chummy form a solid bond despite their differences in personality and taste, which may seem like the most rudimentary definition of friendship you've ever heard until you think of all the friendships that have dissolved, or have never happened, for much less. 

This may have happened because, as Jennifer Worth writes, the world of men was still very closed off to women, and there was nothing else for them to do but band together. But who would accept such an explanation? Throughout history midwives were often the community eccentrics, trained only by experience, and the bringing of life into the world happened behind shut doors, underneath the gentle ministrations of sisters, mothers, and aunts. Women banded together because they knew what they were doing, who they were, had the power to change everything.

You’d be hard-pressed to find another show on television right now that celebrates women from all stages, walks and choices of life with as much compassion and humor as Call the Midwife does. It honors the aged, the infirm and the unlovely just as much as it honors the strong and the gorgeous. It deals with religion, politics, race, handicap, age, sex, education, beauty, parents, money, and eating cake, all without stooping to moralism or ridicule. In fact,  I’m tempted to send it in a care package to Lena Dunham right now. 

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about subplots. She tumbls here.

"How Can I Drop You Without Gravity" - Plainfire (mp3)

"All So Nostalgic" - Plainfire (mp3)

The new album from Plainfire is entitled But When Words Fail, and you can find his bandcamp here.

Delicious Frosting

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Grand Budapest Hotel
dir. Wes Anderson
100 minutes

Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) is an apprentice baker at Mendl's, a famous patisserie in the greater Zubrowka area. She is ostensibly content; she has a boyfriend and a caring mentor at her workplace. She sleeps in an attic room that occasionally becomes cold during the winter, but that is when the warmth from a wood stove fills the room with a comforting heat. Still, something troubles her placid existence: she is the only female character of any note in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel.

There is something profoundly satisfying about Wes' movies, since you know no one will ever change or be altered by the events around them in the slightest, except possibly a small note of recrimination or exuberance at the completion of their tale of woe. This rejection of the traditional satisfaction of narrative turns The Grand Budapest Hotel into a sort of vapid picaresque, something like eating the frosting off the top of a cake.

The masterstroke here is casting Ralph Fiennes in the role of a bisexual concierge who seduces rich old ladies. At first we are disgusted by this frothy caricature, but we soften to him like we do to so many other Wes Anderson protagonists, who succeed merely on the enthusiasm of their love of their world: its elevators, booby traps, perfumes, handsoaps and keys.

Fiennes has a protege of his own, the precociously-named lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori). The two travel to the home of a Dowager Countess (Tilda Swinton) who Fiennes has masterly seduced in the confines of his hotel. She is a disgusting creature, basically a less ambitious Cruella de Ville, and in the wake of her death Fiennes hopes for a bequest from her estate.

The concierge discovers she has been murdered by her family, and the rest of The Grand Budapest Hotel concerns itself with what will now happen to her ample holdings. In a particularly disturbing scene, Willem Dafoe pursues and executes the family's Jewish lawyer in an allegorical fable of anti-Semitism. Attorney Deputy Kovacs is the most virtuous character in all of Wes' movies, for he is the only one who gives a shit about his duty.

The hotel itself is rather deprived of joy before and after the war, and the other major set, a prison camp, is also a design disappointment. It would be weird to repeat the detailing of the Life Aquatic's submarine on a concentration camp, but it is hard to believe there wasn't a better prison movie here. What the director is really in love with is how style should overwhelm anything, and nothing will survive when pitted against it. He proves this so often we must agree it is mostly true.

Abandonment of people and places is foremost on Wes' mind here. "I can't go back to prison," the subtly ethnic Fiennes whines about his tenure in a Harvey Keitel-infested jail, but he could equally be talking about the hotel itself.

Rather than a celebration of anything, the hotel is a cauldron of bad memories and unexpected feelings, just like every long lived-in place. When we move on from painful environs, The Grand Budapest Hotel points out over and over again, they are never the same upon our return to them. This is an ancient, romantic theme; but then most of Anderson's recent movies feature an intense aversion to anything contemporary. It is only his best work which tell us something about the world we live in, rather than the one they lived in.

In his debut as young Zero, Tony Revolori's laconic expression makes the most of his unforgiving role as Fiennes' refugee lackey. He is never given very much to do in the part; he only really changes his clothes once or twice in the entire movie. The full depth of his affair with Agatha is avoided at all costs: we are never permitted to watch anyone show real love to each other in The Grand Budapest Hotel, as if that would violate the sanctity of the place. Ronan offers even less in her slim role. We are mostly told, in grating, purposeless voiceover, about what a remarkable and brave person she is.

Despite this coldness, there is some kind of underlying sympathy in The Grand Budapest Hotel, although it takes great pains to really locate it among dark jokes about dead cats and Jews. You actually have to admire the director for not pulling the heartstrings more, since both of the protagonists of the film are poverty-stricken orphans. But had we been informed of that at length, we would have instantly forgiven them anything. Forgiveness and pity is never what such people want, and they are loathe to accept any.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"When You're Older" - Fair Oaks (mp3)

"See What the Sun Gave" - Fair Oaks (mp3)

The Ideal

by TAYLOR HINE

The sky was threatening rain that day we agreed to meet for lunch. The dark underbellies of clouds that loomed over the downtown skyline, over all of us that day, shrouded the tops of the tallest buildings; those who worked and lived in those top floors probably had no idea what was going on outside their windows, below them.

After class, I walked quickly down glass hallways and out into the early afternoon. I buttoned my mohair sweater against sharp gusts of wind and quickened my step, hoping to be the early one waiting for you.

We had planned to meet at a cluster of park benches next to the campus athletic field. I recognized you before seeing your face – your dirty blonde hair, grown long almost to the point of being unkempt, and your wide shoulders filling out your white t-shirt. You were sitting, leaning over, your hands loosely clasped between your knees. You reached down for your messenger bag.

You turned around, looking for me as though you sensed my approach, the way some people can tell if a television has been soundlessly turned on without seeing it. You smiled when you saw me; it took you a moment to recognize me, probably because of my recent weight loss and cropped hair. I liked to think that you’d never seen me look better. You stood up and came toward me; I nearly trotted into your open arms. It surprised me how tightly we gripped one another; we hadn’t seen each other in over a year, and rarely spoke during that time. We exchanged shy hellos after letting go.

“What’re you feeling for lunch?” you asked me.

“What about that burrito place you were telling me about last night?”

You grinned. “Excellent choice.”

We chatted animatedly as we walked downtown. Businessmen and women crowded the sidewalks at this hour, some talking deeply and professionally, others being more friendly with one another. One man, in a black suit and lavender tie, stared me down as I passed, his blue eyes sharp and unblinking. You walked behind me and I could feel your eyes on my ass. All of this, I remember, made me brazen. I stood up straight and looked ahead of me instead of at the ground.

“Here it is,” you said, pointing across the street. We crossed, and you playfully pushed me into a cloud of steam shooting out of a sewer. All I could do was laugh and grin, calling you names without meaning any of it. We were falling back into old ways, and it had taken no time at all.

You opened the door for me. The entire back wall was paneled in creamy coffee colored wood, bumper stickers, and license plates from all over the country. It was quiet and nearly empty, save for the din of the kitchen and the music playing over the speakers.

“I don’t have much of an appetite at the moment,” I told you sheepishly after I ordered chips and queso.

“Well, let me pay for you. I’ll let you have some of mine if you get hungry.” You winked jokingly at me. I snorted, rolling my eyes.

While we ate, we compared our course loads. You showed me your abstract math notes; I read aloud from the first couple paragraphs of Mrs Dalloway. Our knees touched under the table.

“You got in touch with me pretty quickly after I changed my relationship status." You nodded. "I guess Facebook is good for that."

You nodded again, taking another bite of your burrito. “Not that I was waiting for it or anything. I just happened to see it.”

“Sure.”

“What happened with you guys, though? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I don’t.” I paused, looking around the room, assembling the events of the past week in my head to explain them. A North Carolina license plate hung just above the cash register, and I remained rooted to my chair, resisting the urge to run to the bathroom.

“I guess we weren’t on the same page. I was more committed than he was. The long distance didn’t help that at all.”

You nodded. “It doesn’t sound ideal. I’m sorry.”

“No worries. I’ll be all right.” You must’ve thought I was on the cusp of tears.

“Hey,” you said. “You haven’t looked me in the eyes yet, and we’ve been hanging out for all of 57 minutes.”

I straightened, looking up at you. Your eyes were hazel, with mirroring amber patches, like I remembered. Your smile reached them.

While driving to your house that weekend, I steered with surprisingly steady hands. I remembered the right turns to make as though from muscle memory. Still I religiously checked the piece of paper I scrawled your address on. When I neared your street, I began to shake, checking my mirrors constantly. I wondered if your family would remember who I was; it had been over a year since I’d been to your house, and I wasn’t there often to begin with.

Your house was the most rickety on the block, and the most cluttered, both outside and inside. It was painted a bright cherry red, with chestnut brown trim. I counted the steps up to the front porch – six – and your pack of dogs barked when I rang the doorbell. It was warm that day, though raining, and you’d left only the screen door closed. Bikes and skateboards and flowerpots littered the front porch, and I felt the familiar chaos I always felt when I came over.

“Hey there,” I said as you opened the door for me. The house was silent. “Anyone home?”

“Surprisingly, no,” you said. “My brothers are at the skate park, and my sister’s at work. Parents are out running errands.” I sidled in, leaning down to pet the dogs that had amassed at my feet, ears flat and tails wagging.

“They remember you,” you said fondly.

I looked around and remember why this house felt like home to me: potted plants covered every available surface – ferns, cacti, palms – and all the furniture was overstuffed, scuffed, dented, and lived in. Nothing looked new or untouched. The walls were painted a burnt orange, and the rugs on the wood floor were magenta and blue.

I followed you into the kitchen, painted lemon yellow. “Want anything to drink?”

“No, thank you.”

You shrugged and poured yourself some iced tea.

“Hey,” you said after a moment. “I rearranged my room. Want to see it?”

“Any excuse getting me upstairs, huh?" I said.

Turns out, you’d pushed your bed into a corner instead of having it in the center of the far wall. The walls were still the same navy blue, the same posters still hung up – Foo Fighters, Pantera – and the same white sheet still functioned as a curtain. I sat on the bed, crossing my legs innocently.

It wasn’t long before you were kissing me again. When we heard the front door open downstairs and the voices of your parents, you got up and shut the door. I let you take my shirt off and feel my curves; you tugged gently on the hair at the back of my neck. For a moment, I thought, Jesus, I’m cheating on Thomas. How can I be doing this to him? Then I remembered that it didn’t matter anymore, that he could very well be taking off another woman’s shirt this very moment, and neither of us had a right to care. You were lying down, and I had my legs on either side of your hips; I pulled you up by your hands and pulled your shirt off.

Instead of letting you unbutton my pants, I whispered, hesitantly, “I don’t think I’m ready yet.” This was the second time I’d said this to you.

It was dark outside, and the only light in the room came from your stereo and your alarm clock. Your hands were on my hips, and you stroked my legs.

“It’s okay,” you said. “It’s a bit soon.” This was the only time you ever said this to me.

We woke up together a few hours later; the clock blinked 1:14 a.m. We untangled our limbs and gathered our clothes.

“Let me walk you to your car,” you said, still half asleep, but you only guided me to the front door through the dark house, light and small sounds creeping out from under the bedroom doors. You gave me a hug goodbye, and I was grateful that you didn’t kiss me.

When I got in my car, I looked back at your front door, but you were gone. I didn’t hear from you for another year.

I got back together with Thomas during that time, but when the same old issues crept up again, and again, I texted you, Hey, man, I know it’s been a long time, but how are you?

We met almost nightly to do homework together at various coffee places. I would watch for you over the top of whatever novel I was reading, and when I saw you, I’d start reading again, pretending not to notice you come in. I wondered if you ever saw through this.

One night, while snow fell sideways and the wind made the windows creak, you asked me, “What are you doing for New Year’s?” I had told you about the issues Thomas and I were having at the time, and you were careful to not ask about them, afraid that you may feel like what we were doing was wrong.

“Working, probably until we close. Why?” I asked hopefully. I hadn’t talked to Thomas in days.

“Well, Eric and I are going to Leela’s. Just us, as far as I know. You should come after work.” I smiled.

“Sure. Definitely.”

On my way downtown after work a few nights later, the train shook violently all the way to the arts district. I smiled into the darkness dotted with red and off-white car lights and the occasional flickering highway lamp.

I had been to the 24-hour bar and café many times, with you and others; you were the first person to introduce me to it. I’d seen the morning light of sunrise between the buildings outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the beaten, thinly paneled wood floor creaked familiarly as I walked across it, looking for you, maneuvering shyly between clusters of people. I saw you sitting across from one another in a booth close to the stage. The air was musty with closely packed bodies and loud with happy yelling. Bottles clinked and people agreed to brave the frigid cold for a cigarette.

I waved at Eric, who saw me first, and sat next to him. You playfully protested, “Okay, fine, sit by him.” He and I had become close friends over the past few months. I grinned.

“Just so we can look at you,” I said.

Eric looked quizzically back and forth at us, laughing loudly and smiling stupidly, for the majority of the night. He glanced down at my phone whenever it vibrated on the table; Thomas’s name showed up every time. I texted him back only intermittently.

“I’ll go get the next round of beers,” he offered after a while. He moved away through the crowd. My phone vibrated, and Thomas’s text read, Am I cramping your style by texting you? I shook my head and put my phone away.

“Is that your boy texting you?” you asked. I nodded, rolling my eyes dramatically. Eric came back with three tall mugs. You didn’t look me in the eye again.

“I’m dead tired,” Eric said after we finished. You and I nodded in agreement.

“How did you guys get down here?” I asked.

“He drove me,” you said.

“Well, if you’re really tired,” I offered, “I can drive Isaac home. It’s right on the way.” I glanced at you challengingly. “If you’re willing to ride the train part of the way, of course.”

You agreed readily. Eric got the hint. Later, he’d tell me that he saw where the night was going for the two of us before we even knew it.

While you and I walked to the train station, you laced your fingers with mine. Our breaths left thick white trails of cloud behind us and I rubbed my other gloved hand on your naked one, warming it. The cold stabbed my pores.

When we got to the train, you let go of my hand sheepishly, embarrassed, and you sit across from me. I checked my phone and responded to Thomas: I love you, too. Sleep well. Happy New Year.

“Hang a right on Florida. No, wait, um, Louisiana. Go left there, actually,” you said when we reached your part of town. I laughed at each misdirection you gave me, squeezing your hand more tightly on the console between us.

“I assure you,” you insisted, “I’m just kidding. I’m not actually drunk.”

Your apartment building was tall – four or five stories – and dotted with lit windows and balconies. There were black wrought iron bars covering the first floor windows. I pulled into a parking space just outside the front door, the only empty one in the entire lot.

“There are never any parking spots out here this late at night,” you said. You fell silent, and I stared into the dashboard. “You can come upstairs if you want.”

My radio was still playing and you looked at me; I could feel your eyes on me. I always could.

When you opened the door for me, I smiled warmly at you. I followed you up four flights of mint green linoleum stairs, past a man coming down, eyes downcast. I was tempted to pull the fire alarm and run back out to my car.

The carpet was a dark maroon, and a damp smell permeated everything, even the warm air. It clung to my skin. The fluorescent lights flickered the way those in old buildings are supposed to. I followed you around a couple of corners. You told me, as the keys clattered, “My roommates are sleeping.”

Light from the moon and neon signs nearby reached into the room through the sliding glass door. “My room’s on the left, down the hall,” you whispered, closing the door behind you. I stepped lightly. Snoring came from one of the bedrooms; I pushed your door open and it creaked. I trembled.

I felt for the light switch and you came up behind me, wrapping your arms around my waist. I tensed. You smelled like the cold winter outside, all cracking leather and stale skin. I held your hands in place, and then leaned back into you.

I was surprised that I was the one to lead you over to your bed. When you asked, “Are you okay?” I thought for certain that you were having the same thought. Are you okay with this happening?

“I didn’t expect this,” I told you as you were unbuttoning my jeans. “I haven’t been on birth control since I last saw Thomas,” I added, half hoping that they’d stop you dead.

“I think I have some condoms.”

I stared at the ceiling as you rummaged in your desk and turned my head toward the wall when you put it on. When you slipped into me, I’d never felt more hollow, before or since. I let out a small sigh of relief when you said, a few minutes later, “Damn. I can never stay hard with a condom.”

I didn’t fall asleep right away; it surprised me that you held me while you slept, and it felt too comforting to miss. I noticed the little sleeping habits you’d only ever told me about – both legs have to be straight, arms reaching out – and I offered a smile to the orange lamplight slanting in through the blinds. I watched your shoulders breathe, glad to have you in a warm bed for a few hours.

That was the intent, I realized. I just don’t want to be alone.

I was grateful when you finally did turn away, and when I fell asleep, it was on a damp pillow. The next morning, just after sunrise, I gathered my clothes, but this time, I showed myself out. Before leaving, I looked at your sleeping figure, frowning, wondering where your thoughts would lead throughout the day. Would you think about me? Would you feel any remorse?

I steeled myself before coming over to your house. Eric had invited me; you had just moved in together, with your sister and her boyfriend, and this was the first time I’d be seeing it. My phone vibrated: You there yet? Thomas said. Yeah. I’ll let you know how it goes, I thumbed.

Eric came to the door before I had a chance to ring the bell.

“Hey!” He smiled. “Come on in.”

The house was bare, save for a couch and a kitchen table and chairs that had yet to be situated. Boxes hadn’t been moved in quite yet, possessions hadn’t been arranged. The walls were light blue, moving to custard yellow in the kitchen. Bright summer light shone in from the unadorned windows.

“And look at the yard!” Eric grabbed me by the wrist and led be to the back door.

“This is really great,” I responded after a few moments, peeking around corners. I climbed the first couple of stairs leading to the bedrooms, paused, and smiled back down at him. “This house is huge.”

You came out of one of the bedrooms just then, in red basketball shorts, flip-flops, and a gray t-shirt. My legs turned into cement blocks, and my heart thudded dangerously slow in my chest. You trotted down the stairs past me without a word. Eric later told me that he’d never seen me go so still, and when I stopped asking after you out of politeness, he stopped mentioning you at all.

Taylor Hine is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Denver. You can find her tumblr here. She last wrote in these pages about the corner of her eye.

Photographs by the author.

"Morning" - Beck (mp3)

"Unforgiven" - Beck (mp3)

Without A Sound

by MAUREEN O'BRIEN 

I met Joseph Hanna in the West Village, poking around his leather store while I waited for a dinner reservation. The place was cavernous. Big messenger bags were stuffed into corners and luggage hung precariously from the ceiling. Maybe the piney smell of leather oil was making me feel dreamy, but that particular night I felt an aimlessness that was an invitation. My fingers drifted across the soft straps; searching for flaws in the grain of the wood countertop; tapping out in Morse code, “talk to me.” New York is a city full of stories after all. You just have open yourself to the unexpected.

The shopkeeper sensed I had time to kill. He grabbed my purse, opening and closing the clasp. “Nice — from Greece,” he said, not needing confirmation. We started chatting while he mindlessly oiled the infinite crannies of my vintage bag. I have trouble telling people I work in advertising, especially the sort of man who has owned a leather shop for 40 odd years. I stretched for a better truth. “Oh, you are a writer?” Joseph asks for confirmation, “I have a story for you.”

Mostly, he could recall the feeling. He had been practicing all night, launching himself off the kitchen counter. He got the technique down; flight required lifting his legs up higher than he’d expected. But he wanted bigger — he’d jump off the roof next. His sister, who had been his cheerleader all night, followed him outside. She was scared. He asked her not to watch, to go inside. She was a tattletale, and their mother couldn’t find out. But despite his curfew, despite the dangers of getting caught out late at night in a country kept quiet by the pervasive hand of authoritarian control, he knew his curiosity had gotten the better of him. He climbed to the roof, inching down the slope until his toes curled around the eave. Hesitating, the fear hammered through his chest. Then he jumped and, for a moment, fell, plummeted, helpless. Still in the air he closed his eyes, fighting the panic, and lifted his legs. A breath and he was back in control, skimming over the melting ground. Confidence brought him higher and before long he commanded the dark, muted night. He spied houses of his classmates, peered into backyards full of secrets. Harnessing his breath and his momentum he turned back for home. Tonight he wouldn’t push his luck. He landed softly on the backyard grass and snuck, barefoot, his toes sinking into the dewy soil, across the lawn. His sister asleep, his mother gone, he slid into bed without a sound.

Joseph’s story was from a long time ago and he hadn’t thought about it in years. Vivid dreams, apparently a side effect of open-heart surgery, have surfaced a slew of his dusty memories. This particular one had been stored away for years. But here, in this shop, flying was so crystaline. I listened to Joseph, despite his story extending well beyond the time of my reservation.

photo by Thomas Bollier

His excitement was contagious, but I didn’t make too much of the tale. I didn’t need to find truth in it yet, because that spring I had magic of my own — I was dizzy in love. That first kind of love with wind-on-your-face, can’t-jump-out-of-the-car momentum. Standing in this West Village shop, I had no beginning or end, just the next thing. “I have to go; we are late,” I told Joseph. “You must believe me,” were his parting words as I stepped out of the door and grabbed hold of the arm of this man I loved, unconquerable.

That night we left the restaurant and moseyed through the windy West Village. We peered into the townhouses on the cobblestones. Big windows had drapes obscuring paintings and bookshelves; we imagined what their lives must be like, and what ours could be like.

We had moved to New York together less than a year ago and the seductiveness of the cobblestone street was still overwhelming.

“Maybe when I’m a lawyer someday...” he said, craning to see into an empty high ceilinged kitchen.

“I’d rather live anywhere else, I think,” I deflected, scared of the word someday now hanging between us.  

We dropped into silence.

“What are you afraid of most in the world?” he asked me.

I knew my answer. “I’m afraid of being alone,” I told him. “I’m afraid of the truth it holds, and how little I am maybe.” He turned to me.

“What do you mean?”

"Oh you know, loneliness and...” As I was talking I realized he wasn’t looking for clarification. He just didn’t agree. His pace picked up.

“I don’t know, Maureen. What’s that Sartre quote — if you’re lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.” It was our first real disconnect; things started going downhill that night. Words fell flat more often; our differences felt like a widening stream. In October we broke up.

photo by Thomas Bollier

Looking back, it’s hard to remember the way love felt. What I do hold on to is patchy: his smell, the fast blood in my veins, the way his fingers curled around a coffee cup, a pen, my waist. As for the particulars, my vision was blurred and I missed a lot. A user-friendly time warp, love robbed me of weeks, months, years. I look back on it and try to fight the seemingness to find a realness, or at least the truth as it seemed.

A year later, I said goodbye to him. It was late summer and he was leaving for a different city. We clambered over rocks to find a spot where we couldn’t see the street behind us. The only light was from Manhattan, across the East River. There was a warm soft wind blowing and I turned my face to it. Who knew when it might turn cold? We joked about things — the awkward date next to us, I can’t remember what else. He took my hand and I felt like jumping into the water just to freeze my jackhammer heart. “Maureen, I love you,” he said.  To me, it sounded like an apology. “Aren’t you going to miss New York?” I asked him. I can’t recall his answer. Myopia takes over from here, and I remember the magic, the ending ignited like a sunset.

Falling out of love? It wasn’t so simple. I wracked my brain for the ammunition to wrestle this one out of me. I drove through miles of my mind. This was the most deleterious thing I’d ever been complicit in. How could gravity have gotten the best of me? For a while, all I could hear was the sound of my name in his mouth. His shape faded and I had no place in this whole world. But inevitably, like watching a sunset, patience rewarded me. The colors swelled across the sky and I began to construct the story.

“You must believe me,” Joseph pleaded as I walked out of his shop. The truth in what he had told me, the art of Joseph Hanna was in the generosity of this moment. With such fervor he wanted me, me, to know just how real flying was for him. He took such care with the sharp details, handing me the precious pieces of his life. “It’s as if this happened yesterday,” he explained. Here he was, an old shopkeeper with wrinkled hands coated in years of leather oil, oceans away from his Russian home. The insignificance of time was what astounded me the most.

We need magic. Sometimes we only know it was there in hindsight, or in vivid dreams like Joseph Hanna’s. It comes to us in perfect moments when the sun hits the face and we feel like we’re flying for no particular reason at all. Then we can unravel ourselves from the little realities to make life extraordinary. Start with something truthful, maybe it’s just that feeling of your toe leaving the ground, or the heart hurt of being in a city full of people and knowing you are the only one in the world. Take that and jump; collide with the continuous unfolding. Stories are for when memory is erased. The good ones are ignited with fictions, punctuated by fantasy, and tell the truth of aliveness.

Joseph Hanna quietly flies in the background of my new story. I have reduced the distance between us into an abstraction, giving myself permission to tell the story as my own. I probably wouldn’t recognize Joseph on the street. Would he remember me? Would he care for me calling him by his first name? And yet, his story lives inside mine, stacked like Russian nesting dolls.

Love burns and burns and burns. It burns out, and I close my eyes. The flame is alight on my eyelids, truer than ever.

Maureen O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about following her grandmother to New York. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She twitters here.

Photographs by Thomas Bollier.

"Head, First, Down" - Whitley (mp3)

"The Piece You Took From Me" - Whitley (mp3)

photo by Anna Jones 

Tiny Things

by JOSIANE CURTIS

The baby was full-term, healthy, born four days before her due date. She weighed five pounds, 14 ounces. This is very small, although not technically underweight, the cutoff for which is five pounds, eight ounces. It seems morbid, disturbed even, to recall that I looked at her in my arms, a few hours old, and thought that I could crush her head in my hand. I would never, obviously; I was overwhelmed with love, and an immediate willingness to protect her at all costs. But these feelings only magnified her fragility. I looked from her face to my hand, my arm, barely flexing under her weight, and thought about the few times I’d caught a softball in high school gym class. She would have fit inside a catcher’s mitt.  

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Boys are carried out, and girls are carried up. The first-born looks more like the father. Men inherit baldness from the maternal side – so men, look at your mother’s dad for a glimpse into your future. A woman is deemed most attractive when she is at peak ovulation in her monthly cycle. Women, correspondingly, rate men’s attractiveness more highly on average while ovulating. Each woman has a finite amount of eggs at birth, and will ovulate approximately 300 to 400 eggs in her lifetime, before reaching menopause. A full-term pregnancy is actually 10 months after egg implantation, not nine. Sudden infant death symptom (SIDS) is exactly what it sounds like: the sudden, unexplained death of an infant. Doctors used to think it could be caused by babies sleeping on their backs. Today, they think stomach sleeping may be a leading risk factor. There is so much we don’t know.

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When I was 25, I donated my eggs. Egg donation is not exactly what it sounds like, because the donor is always paid. “When I was 25, I sold my eggs,” sounds callous, but I wouldn't have done it for free.

My profile was chosen within minutes of uploading my initial background information and photographs. I can’t say I wasn't flattered.   

From start to finish, the process takes between two and three months. The donor is examined weekly throughout the last month, with an endoscopy and blood samples taken daily for the last week. During the final week, the donor is also required to self-administer hormone shots up to three times a day. I cringed at the prick of every needle into a gathered skinfold of my stomach, and also at the irony of using the baby changing table in the office restroom to mix hormones before loading them into the syringe. Donors are restricted from high-impact exercise during the last two weeks of the cycle, so I exchanged my morning jog for swimming laps at the community pool across the street from my house. Toward the end of the process, I became aware of eyes lingering on my bare midsection, which was painted a leopard pelt of bruises from the shots. 

It was comforting knowing the recipient would undergo an even more difficult process. Not because I desired commiseration, but because it meant that whoever would be getting this baby wanted it so badly. It would be so loved. I felt happy to be able to give that gift.

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Growing up, I knew of my father, but never knew him. Perhaps because of this, I've always leaned more toward the side of nurture in the nature/nurture debate. In the clinic-mandated pre-approval therapy sessions, I believed it when I said that this would not be my child.

photo by anna jones

The donor is required to provide a detailed medical history, at least two generations back, from both the maternal and paternal sides of her family. About halfway through the donation process, I spoke to my father for the first time in years. Over the phone, he told me that his parents had died of natural causes and no they didn't have any specific ailments or allergies and yes, he still has a full head of hair. I heard myself in his cadence.

I imagined that sometime down the road, a teenager might appear at my door wanting to know why she smiled crooked or threw her head back when she laughed. I would invite her in.

That I came to terms with the full weight of what I was doing, that it felt good to give such a gift, isn't to say that it wasn't emotionally draining. I began to look at the children around me differently, especially the blondes. I wondered, since I would not ever meet the recipients, if three years into the future, I might pass a couple on the street and see my own green eyes looking back at me out of a stroller. In my mind it was always a girl.

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My egg retrieval was a success, meaning my ovaries produced plenty of eggs (above the average number for donors at that clinic, I was told), and they were harvested from my body successfully. However, the implantation was a failure, meaning the clinic used all the harvested eggs in attempting to fertilize and implant at least one into the recipient’s uterus, but the end result was not a pregnancy. This is not necessarily a reflection of the donor’s ability to bear children, I was also told. There are many factors at play, and many women seeking in vitro fertilization may have difficulty with the implantation stage. I’d be lying if I said it didn't scare me anyway.

In egg donation, the donor is always paid, regardless of the end result. Let me tell you something about guilt.

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Apparently, it’s not entirely uncommon to think of babies in relation to sports equipment. In the hospital, while the tiny baby’s mother, my best friend, rested, the baby’s father swaddled her in a yellow blanket with grey elephants, tucked her gently into his elbow, and said something about the way a running back’s most important job is to protect the football. Later, after most visitors had come and gone, he sat and gazed at her as she slept peacefully on the tops of his thighs. “I wonder what you’re gonna be like,” he whispered.

photo by anna jones

If you have siblings, it’s a fun pastime to note your similarities and differences, and think about all the possibilities for other offspring your parents could have had. My brother and I have near-identical features, and have often been confused for twins, though he is three years older. Among friends who come from larger families, the differences between siblings can be both subtle and striking. Imagine how those possibilities multiply exponentially when you consider one parent’s genes combined with any number of partners. As a child, I sometimes wished for a different father, one who was around. If true, it would mean, biologically or psychologically or both, that I would not be who I am. Who else might I have been?

The possibilities for the baby I could create are not exactly endless, given the finite amount of eggs a woman will produce in her lifetime, but close. There is so much we don’t know.

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There are some things I do know. People say we come into this world alone and we leave it alone, but I know that’s not true. The baby is almost three weeks old, and she has never been alone – not for one second since she was born. She looks more like her father than my best friend, and she sleeps on her back. She is gaining weight, but her nose, lips, fingers are still remarkably delicate, doll-like. She fusses, as babies do, when she is hungry or needs to be changed, but she quiets if you saunter and slide across the hardwood floor in socks, bouncing gently to the beat of Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble.” She quiets everyone else, too; people speak softly in her presence. She quiets the sound of the bills through the mail slot, the crash of the garbage truck outside on the street, the mental din of work and emotional clatter of a recent breakup, of money problems, of time and worry and wondering if you will ever make anything as beautiful. She will be so loved.  

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about an end to flight.

Photographs by Anna Jones. You can find her website here and her instagram here.

"Strong" - London Grammar (mp3)

"Wasting My Young Years" - London Grammar (mp3)

Beauty

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

In a 1972 episode of The Mike Douglas Show, co-hosted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Barbara Loden is introduced by her hosts as "a very lovely lady," as "married to a very famous gentleman," as "wife of Elia Kazan," as "a mother," and as a "filmmaker in her own right." Seconds later, polka-dotted set doors slide open and Loden appears.

She is wearing white jeans, a black knit shirt, and lace-up boots. Her bangs flop over her forehead and her blond highlights have grown out — color-blocking her long, thin and wispy hair. Loden looks like a dream. She has the smile of a young Cloris Leachman, she begins her sentences with "Gee" and speaks of being "bashful." She is from another time. Like a woman in a Sunkist beauty ad — the kind from Teen magazine: "Leaves your hair looking squeaky-clean, smelling lemon-fresh." It’s as if at any moment she might turn, stare straight into the camera, and sell you a bar of Dial soap.

Loden’s voice is soft and her words are considered. It is nerve-wracking to listen to her, a cause for concern. She is wary when discussing her marriage to Elia Kazan, especially in comparison to that of John and Yoko: "We lead a rather insulated life. We don’t get around much." Loden barely reacts when it’s made clear that Douglas hasn't even watched her film, Wanda, but is posing questions nonetheless.

However, once she starts talking about her movie — the only one she would ever write and direct — poise outdoes caution. Loden speaks faster and with finality. Her thoughts accrue in increments. She uses her hands. Her focus turns urgent. It’s clear she feels a deep kinship with her character, Wanda Goransky, a woman Loden says is living "an ugly type of existence," a wife and mother who has abandoned her marriage, her children, and herself. She is uncertain of what she wants but persuaded by what she doesn’t want. Loden is her advocate. Wanda is Loden’s orbit.

"She’s trying to do the best thing that she can. Life is a mystery to her," she says, though not to Douglas, not to John or to Yoko, but to some perhaps doubtful though vital, and resolving side of her nature.  

Premiering at Venice in 1970, Wanda, was released a year later in New York and L.A. Largely ignored and omitted in the United States, like so many endangered American independent films, Wanda was revered in Europe. Marguerite Duras, who writes in The Lover, "My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women," as well as Isabelle Huppert, who released a DVD of Wanda in France in 2004, were fans.

The film begins with a shot of a Pennsylvania coal mine. The landscape is lunar and the machinery looks miniature: crater-sized puddles and Tonka-sized trunks. Mountains of coal denote work, hard work, repetition, and men. We immediately know that Wanda, the title character, whoever she is, is likely detached from this world, these men, this work — especially if the work is hard and repetitive. A Woman Under the Influence, which also starts at a work site, is called to mind. Five Easy Pieces, too. Mabel Longhetti, Rayette Dipesto, and Wanda Goransky: all women whose lives, in various ways, have been trivialized. As Loden puts it, they simply "drop out."

But it’s the echoing sound of machinery at the start of these films that creates a discrete type of stillness: moving parts that carry out tasks, strictly physical, toiling tasks — tools, methods, with functions that function. When Wanda appears moments later, waking up on a couch — a single white sheet as her blanket — she is hungover and bothered by a wailing baby. Wanda is neither functioning nor ready to carry out tasks. If this family and town are hers, they are hers to escape.

Before the movie really takes off, a series of events where Wanda is alone or Wanda is with someone who makes her feel even more alone, unfold. A portrait is painted of a woman who is trying to get as far away from herself as she can and who hasn’t yet found her "use." She walks far distances — a tiny white blemish crossing mountains of gunmetal gray coal — to beg for money, to catch an empty bus, to show up late for divorce court, to look at the judge, point to her husband and say, "They’d be betta off with him."

Too slow as a seamstress, she loses her job at a factory. Too broke to buy a drink, she wakes up hungover in motel beds with men who hurry out in the mornings, who reluctantly drop her off anywhere. In one scene she stands on the side of the highway, licking ice cream as a man peels away in his car. Never did a woman with a goofy high top ponytail look so scrappy, so dejected and doomed.

Aimless, either looking at clothes in a department store and standing beside mannequins which bear an uncanny resemblance to her, or going to the movies, only to fall asleep curled up in her seat, her purse two rows down, emptied of what little she had, Wanda continues to wander. And yet, shit out of luck, she doesn’t mope or mourn — her nothing-to-lose manner is less attitude and more delusion and wear. She’ll look for a comb to neaten her bangs instead of accounting for where she’ll be sleeping that night. The camera gets near to her face, as if convincing us that Wanda is unafraid, if not entirely withdrawn.

But then she meets Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins), a hapless robber and miserable man, and she attaches herself to him. Maybe it’s his gruff way or that he tells her who he is, what to do, and what he doesn’t like — "I don’t like nosy people," "Go back to your comics," "Why don’t you do something about your hair? It looks terrible." Whatever it is, Wanda is fastened to and maybe even fascinated by Mr. Dennis. 

He buys her spaghetti at a diner. She eats it with her fork in one hand and her cigarette in the other. "Did you want that piece of bread?" Wanda asks. “That’s the best part,” she continues while mopping up the leftover sauce. Later, when Mr. Dennis orders her to take the wheel and drive, she does. But Wanda does not use it as opportunity to take control. She follows instructions. She does as she’s told.

Unassuming, loyal, already on the lam, Wanda makes for a perfect accomplice. But first, her clothes have to go. "No slacks! When you’re with me, no slacks!" Mr. Dennis yells. "No hair curlers! Makes you look cheap!" He throws both her pants and her box of curlers out the car window. When Wanda asks him where they are going, he barks: "No questions! When you’re with me, no questions!" While his tone is threatening, Wanda’s been with worse. He’s a bully — a hapless, miserable bully. 

In one scene, Mr. Dennis’ temper dissolves. Standing in an open field as Wanda sits on the roof of his car, the two drink beers and eat sandwiches. The sun is setting and he lends her his jacket. It’s the first moment in the film where two people talk to each other, where vulnerability isn’t an action or inaction, but a single sentence that reveals more than we were ever expecting to learn about Mr. Dennis: "If you don’t have money, you are nothing."

For Wanda, who ignores questions about her kids while painting her nails on the side of the highway, who exchanges her ponytail for a smarter-looking pin-cushion top bun, yet still looks taken down, being "nothing" isn’t so bad. Like Rayette in Five Easy Pieces, whose Stand by Your Man adages are infinite and misguided — "I'll go out with you, or I'll stay in with you, or I’ll do anything that you like for me to do, if you tell me that you love me" — Wanda, too, will do anything, especially if it keeps her moving and at length from recognizing what it is that she wants. 

Barbara Loden died of breast cancer ten years after making Wanda — a debut which feels incredibly close to the writer, director, actress; a debut which is a cumulative expression and hopefully, liberation of herself. Her marriage to Kazan appeared restrained and guarded, and while in some interviews he praises his wife’s film, in his memoirs he writes: "She wanted to be independent, find her own way. I didn’t really believe she had the equipment to be an independent filmmaker."

The word "equipment" is interesting to note. It implies invention and esprit, substance, smarts, ideas of Loden’s own, courage. It is also used by Barbara herself on Mike Douglas' show. When describing Wanda’s inability to take control of her life, to claim desires, Loden says, "She has no equipment." It is a startling coincidence, a fluke that might mean nothing, but one nonetheless. It underpins Loden’s pressing need to make a film about a woman whose story had been told for so long in other people’s words. Her vision was born from a gameness she often concealed as a model, actress and wife, but that she laid bare, masterly, on grainy 16mm, shot over the course of ten weeks with a crew of four.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Love Never Acted" - Eleni Mandell (mp3)

"The Man Who's Always Lost " - Eleni Mandell (mp3)

The Friendship Mask

by ALEX CARNEVALE

She says the same thing, that bitch, that you do about me, that I'm an emotional cripple, by which she means that I don't release my true emotions, that it's a cover-up, what I show the world.  

- Elia Kazan to his therapist about Barbara Loden

Elia Kazan decided to break things off with Barbara Loden. She had already felt, almost imperceptibly, his reluctance. She had recently told him at length of all the men she had ever been with. She informed him of her history, she said, so he did not have to wonder.

Enraged, Kazan began cheating on her whenever he could. She rehearsed her part in The Changeling all afternoon and evening at Lincoln Center, and he was free to stroll off from the set during those times. With a blonde girlfriend, he now exclusively courted brunettes.

with first wife Molly

One of these available women was a singer in a religious choir he had met in Tennessee. She kept her eyes closed while they fucked, mystifying Kazan. Another was a Greek brunette who tried to convince him to impregnate her and disappear. (He refused.)

While Loden was being fitted for costumes for her role, he wandered in Central Park one day and picked up a girl playing softball. She gave him her dead husband's favorite sweater.

Kazan's friends feared that Barbara Loden had trapped him years before by keeping her only pregnancy. The boy, Leo, was now three, and Kazan had less than no interest in him. "I've never regretted telling Barbara that if she wanted a child it was all right with me," he writes in the best show business autobiography ever penned, A Life. "Knowing my nature, wouldn't you say she was taking a riskier chance than I was?"

wrapping up 'Streetcar'

Seven years into the relationship, Kazan was now weary of her. ("No one can tell me that novelty is not a great charge in sex," he states in A Life, as if that were a revelation.) His numerous indiscretions only further convinced Kazan that he and Loden did not have love between them anymore.

Elia and Barbara

He planned to pick up Barbara Loden from rehearsal in a cab and head back to her place, where he would break the news gently. In the taxi, she immediately began complaining about how he had blocked her scenes, and criticized his directorial efforts in general. Kazan turned on her, dismissing his earlier reticence towards cruelty. She listened quietly to what he said.

Once her room, she took off all her clothes immediately, as she always did, to appease him. "I wanted to lie still on the bed and hold her," Kazan writes about the post-coital mood. "But I noticed she didn't like this the way she once had, and although her head was on my upper arm, and her leg over mine, she seemed tense, like a runner before a race. Then she said, with a casualness I thought feigned, 'Daddy, I wish you'd tell me what you want me to do.'"

with his father

He could think of no real reply. Moments later, she said, "It's either we marry or break up for good." After seeing her home, he went to the apartment of the young widow. There he was happy for a time.

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When Elia Kazan had first introduced Barbara Loden to his friend John Steinbeck, the writer told him, in no uncertain terms, to stay away from her. Kazan planned to resolve his conflict with Loden by leaving for Europe; his therapist suggested he would feel better if he said goodbye to her. There, on a bench in Central Park, he met his son Leo for the first time.

Molly & Elia with John and Elaine Steinbeck

Elia had been with his first wife Molly Kazan when he first met Loden. Ostensibly a playwright, Molly was not much of a writer and on some level, even after four lovely children by her, Kazan could not forgive this weakness. Molly first learned of Kazan's penchant for infidelity during his not-so-quiet affair with the actress Constance Dowling.

with katharine hepburn & spencer tracy

He always made a habit of introducing his wife to his mistress, but his affair with Constance was so obvious Molly was told by a third party. His wife banished him to the study of their home, right next door to the bedroom, and seriously considered divorce. A friend gave her a piece of advice: "If you want him, you'll have to take him as he is." The only one who supported the director in the marriage's impasse was his parents.

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He started up with Loden originally on the set of Splendor in the Grass. They had sex during every single lunch break. When the production was in New York, he would go home to his wife and their maid would serve the family dinner. He only stopped having sex with Loden when she became visibly pregnant.

directing Vivien Leigh in 'Streetcar'

Again he was compelled to see what Molly thought of Barbara, and vice versa. Unable to resist, he asked Loden for her opinion on his wife. "She's a very handsome woman," Loden said.

with Molly and their four children

Throughout these lascivious trails, Kazan reveals he felt very little in the way of guilt. His penchant for self-acceptance in A Life reeks of 20/20 hindsight, but there is something else at work there, too, an essence his analyst identified and determined could never be fully repaired. Kazan did not long for other women because there was something lacking in his life. He had determined that this was his life: what primacy could any other part of his self claim, to stand up to that?

Elia's commiseration with Loden waxed and waned as the years went on. Sometimes she sent him letters describing an empathy she felt for him; at other moments she wondered if she even liked the man at all.

From his perspective, her innate destructiveness and lack of interest in how others viewed her was what attracted him in the first place. It was also the inner element which produced the natural charisma invaluable to her work as an actress and filmmaker.

Molly Kazan

Loden and Kazan continued to see each other, if infrequently, in the last years of Molly Kazan's life. (She died from a brain hemorrhage in 1963, and was buried with her wedding ring.) Given a new primacy in his life after Molly's death, Loden challenged Kazan regarding the stage roles he gave her. She constantly threatened to move to Los Angeles.

Kazan openly wondered to friends whether he'd required Molly to make his relationship with Loden work. He lost the ability to maintain an erection with her during sex, and attempted to break things off, as I have already described.

with Marlon Brando

Free of Barbara, wandering the earth, Kazan felt somewhat alone. He wrote to Loden, suggested he missed her and asked her to come to Japan. They kept writing until she arrived, and when he saw her at the airport, he knew he had made a mistake. Still, she did everything she could to please him, and he responded in turn. She seemed happy to be with him again until Kazan told her that he had been fucking around with another woman in the month before she arrived.

Back in the U.S., Kazan continued seeing both Loden and his new mistress. (He was never able to manage much more than two at a time.) Again, his curiosity got the better of him, and he encouraged Barbara to confront the other woman he was seeing. Kazan called the girl to warn her Loden might try to see her.

"She's right here," the girl said.

"How are you getting along?" Kazan asked.

"I like her very much."

Loden somehow emerged the victor of these events, and she moved in with Kazan a few months later, walking into Elia's study and putting Leo in his lap. They were married in Kenya soon after, and a ceremony was held in the Caribbean. They were wed for less than a year before he found a mistress that would complement her better.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

loden during her cancer
"No Devotion" - White Hinterland (mp3)

"Wait Until Dark" - White Hinterland (mp3)

Consumer Society

by RACHEL SYKES

Hannibal
creator Bryan Fuller

The remarkable thing about Hannibal is that it should never have existed. Adapted from the fiction of Thomas Harris, whose novel Red Dragon originated the Hannibal myth in 1981, when the show premiered in 2013 it seemed like a redundant addition to an already exhausted format.

The compelling first season largely dismissed low expectations by focusing on the budding relationship between FBI investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and forensic psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) as they work to solve a number of highly disturbing murders. Indeed, their relationship upends the Hannibal canon by disturbing the viewer’s expectations of who the reliable narrator might be. Agents refer ambiguously to Will’s place on the “spectrum” yet the FBI continues to exploit his inability to judge social situations, to rely heavily on the paranormal levels of empathy that allow Will to visualise the ways in which a killer has worked simply by attending the crime scene.

Of course, Hannibal still murders people and regularly feeds their limbs to his house guests in increasingly ambitious and experimental attempts at haute cuisine. But throughout the first season, it is equally clear that Will is unfit for FBI employment, that he struggles to function in society, to maintain personal relationships, and ultimately to switch off from the horrific crimes he is called on to solve.

The finale of Hannibal’s first season was particularly startling for the speed with which it motioned towards the future in which Will and Hannibal are mortal enemies. By the end of the episode, Will realises that Hannibal is the psychopathic murderer the viewer knows him to be and, just as quickly, Hannibal frames Will by planting the ear of one victim down his throat miraculously, and comically, intact. The finale also set the scene for a startling twist on the memory of Lecter as he will be in The Silence of the Lambs.

At the beginning of Hannibal’s second season, it is Will who wastes away in an archaic prison cell, waiting for his fate to be decided in an elaborate series of dystopian cages and ever decreasing scenes of grey. The bleakness of Will’s reality is then mirrored, if not parodied, by the FBI’s increasing involvement with Hannibal, who becomes central in aiding their investigations. Will can only escape his cell through the power of hallucinatory daydreams.

What’s interesting about Hannibal and its distinctive take on mass murder is its curious reach for objectivity. At times, the show comes close to stilted affectation because each character seems so consumed with the avoidance of emotion. With Hannibal, this process is self-explanatory - mass murderers pathologise the emotions of themselves and others in order to enact their gruesome tasks. But with others the absence of feeling spreads like a sickness and emanates from their involvement with Will and the crimes to which he lends his profiling acumen.

Similarly, show runner Bryan Fuller’s phantasmagoric approach frames the act of murder as a statement of aesthetics, troubling the idea that Hannibal is set in any reality we might know. None of the murders in Hannibal could be described as crimes of passion and motives are generally conceived aesthetically.

This variant of Harris’ text is disinterested, then, in serial killers as an absent threat or as a symbol of fear – if Hannibal, or any his contemporaries, want you dead then you will, very soon, be dead. Rather, the killings that occupy the center of each episode are statements on the nature of art and reality, on the aesthetic differences that colour our varied perceptions of the world. People are murdered in Hannibal, often graphically and without warning, not to induce fear or disgust in the viewer, but to show how people express and hide themselves in art and how the artistic process is at once creative and destructive, for the creator but also for the consumer.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. 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 American Hustle.

"Give" - Octo Octa ft. Raw Moans (mp3)

"Cause I Love You" - Octo Octa (mp3)

Bodily Threat

by SARAH WAMBOLD

When Frank Frazetta turned down a contract to play professional baseball, artists were making more money than major league players. He lived to regret his decision, often waxing nostalgic about the dough he could have made and the physical satisfaction that playing ball gave him. “It almost beats sex — almost,” he said in an interview about the sport. Sales and sex are at first blush the most noticeable angle of Frazetta’s artwork, but these are his passions. When pushed, he admitted to getting more exhausted from painting, an exercise that used more of his imagination.

A purely commercial artist, Frazetta began doing line drawings of comics. He transitioned into painting after a successful rendering of Ringo Starr for the cover of Mad magazine. From there it was all book covers and movie posters, with his painting’s narrative often eclipsing the story itself. Frazetta was accused more than once of swiping images, but only by the uninformed. He continued to paint with a security of vision hardly capable of copying. Director Robert Rodriguez exhibited his collection of Frazetta's work last week at SXSW, and assembled in one place, the paintings displayed a inimitable security of vision.

This isn’t work that has earned him acceptance into fine art circles, despite raising the form of illustration to new levels of skill and detail. He is still considered one of the best illustrators of his era, an important influence on science fiction fans and a true genius of fantasy representation. All of this is the art world's nice way of putting him in his place among working class artists whose popularity feels relatable.

Critics squint their eyes at the overt titillation in Frazetta’s depiction of women. They unironically call them ‘girls’. All of his females appears with as much physical might as any other figure in his paintings, but they’re also fully formed characters who have their own agenda. In "Swamp Demon", its unclear whether the woman is meant to charm or infuriate the creature before her or which one is the real demon.

Compared to his watercolors, which he preferred to work with, his oil paintings have a certain weight that goes beyond just the paint itself. The backgrounds are deeper, the characters thicker and themes darker. "Death Dealer I" depicts the character on his horse, an enormous animal as menacing as the scythe poised in front, still dripping a rainbow of blood. The world of the Death Dealer deserves its punishment; a similar vibe radiates off the frescos in the Sistine Chapel. It is hardly a jump to go from Frazetta’s drama to Michelangelo’s, they were both painting strictly from their imagination, presenting it as photographic evidence and getting paid.

The exaggerated darkness in Frazetta’s work is born out of the fantasy stories he was commissioned paint, but its the light in his work that is more the mirror of ourselves. An immature hope that appears all around, it pours into a painting like "Fire and Ice" gracefully, shining on mottled demons crawling towards human heroes who think they can fight back.

Americans have always fancied themselves control freaks, a reason the subtlety of an Edward Hopper painting fits more perfectly into their vision of themselves. Unrequited, depressed, leering. Frazetta’s work is too teenage, the threats are too bodily, the detail too ornate. Yet Frazetta grew up in Hopper’s landscapes; he used the same colors and afflicted figures, but preferred to use them in a painting you cheered for, not just observed. 

It would be correct to say that Frazetta achieved the same amount of fame as an artist as he would if he’d have gone pro. Baseball would have given him access to stadium applause, the scoreboard showing proof of his success. With art, he got to work in Hollywood painting monsters. If painting today was as influential, artists would take more chances. More importantly, people would pay attention.

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

"Wicked Games" - Emilie Simon (mp3)

"The Eye of the Moon" - Emilie Simon (mp3)

This is the first in a two part series on the life of director Nicholas Ray.

Too Masculine A Role

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Ever since I was four and she was nine I've wanted to make it with my sister Helen, because she was my sister.

Alcohol was the major feature of Nicholas Ray's young life. His father was an alcoholic; his mother was active in the abstinence movement. "I learned about Aqua Velva long before I started shaving," Ray later recalled. "No, I didn't drink it. I poured it over the sheets or into the bathtub to clear the smell of my puke." La Crosse, Wisconsin was about as American as it gets.

While his father went from bar to bar, Ray would wait in the car, sometimes using the time to masturbate. When he was especially drunk, Ray's father would beat his son. One night young Nicholas dragged his father home from a particularly severe bender; he had dragged the pathetic man up from where he lay in puddles of vomit. Later that afternoon, his mother called him to tell his father was dead.

His older sisters were all married by then, pleased as punch to be out of La Crosse. Ray and his mother did not get along so wonderfully, and part of the time she sent him to live with his sister Ruth on the north side of Chicago. A friend attended the University of Chicago, and Ray focused his efforts on transferring from a La Crosse junior college to a place where he might have Thornton Wilder as his instructor. Eventually through sheer force of will he was accepted.

He arrived in Hyde Park with two gallons of undiluted grain alcohol, a determination to have sex with as many women as possible and a passion for acting.

in old age

The director of Wilder's on-campus productions was a popular professor named O'Hara. He took a serious interest in Ray, working up to the point where he parked his car on Lake Michigan and attempted to give the boy a blowjob. "He caressed me," Ray explained whenever he recalled the story. "I wanted to please him. God knows I wanted to say thank you, somehow I wanted to say thank you. I said thank you. He unbuttoned my trousers. I wanted to come if he wanted me to come. I stroked his gray-white hair. I couldn't come. We drove back to campus."

Ray's sexuality was a deeply confusing subject, but he harbored no attraction to the older man. His own mixed-up ideas led him to notice similar confusion in others: "I always suspect the warmth or tenderness or color range of a person who publicly disports himself in either too strict a feminine or too strict a masculine role," he said.

Nicholas Ray only lasted one term in Hyde Park before returning to his junior college in La Crosse, unable to keep up with the academic work. There he started a theater group that become modestly successful, allowing him to open a school for drama that would teach teens in his mother's house, where he now lived.

at Taliesin

1933. Ray's friendship with Thornton Wilder secured him a place with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin. The compound had a variety of activities that suited Ray's talents in the theater, and it was hoped that division would bring in the money Wright's enterprises sorely lacked. Given Wright's financial position at the time, anyone who could pay six hundred dollars a year was accepted.

Ray didn't have the money, so he headed for New York in the meantime. He crashed on a couch in the West Village, sending Lloyd Wright postcards. He had no money by then: his father's death had left his estate to his wife alone, and Ray swiftly spent all he had made from community theater. "Struggle is grand," he wrote Wright unseriously. "It's what we young should live with a great deal more than we do; it is a little-undernourishing to the body sometimes, but what matter, it is as solid as pain."

Wright eventually travelled to New York, and while there he invited Ray to return to Taliesin with him to aid the prospects of the Hillside Playhouse, a new structure which boasted a 200 seat amphitheater. To draw crowds to see films which did not usually make it to Madison or Milwaukee, the playhouse began screening a variety of foreign films. It was Ray's initial exposure to Eisenstein and Carl Dreyer, even the first glimpse the future master of color had of animation.

In mere weeks Ray had himself appointed director of the playhouse. The highest of masters and lowest of apprentices all shared in communal work at Talesin. This mixed Ray in with apprentices in every field. On a sexual level, both men and women wanted him for themselves. But this prominence in the community also drew unwanted attention from its king. Wright had planned to construct sandstone over a few lovely oak panels, and Ray dared to question the architect, asking him, "Is that it, Mr. Wright? What looks organic is organic?" He was on a bus out of Taliesin the next day.

Wright argued that it was Ray's alcoholism which set off the feud. In a letter describing Ray's departure from the commune, Wright wrote, "I am letting him out today... He is intelligent and has many charming qualities, notwithstanding his defects. He should make the most of them." Others have suggested the reason for Ray's departure was due to Wright's secret desire to be with men.

Elia Kazan, Ray and others

In New York he joined a group of left-wing actors and writers calling themelves the Theatre of Action. There he re-met an acquaintance from his hometown, the director Joseph Losey, and a short Greek actor named Elia Kazan. Except for Kazan and a few others, most were communists; and under direction from political leaders in the party began advocating for certain changes in the New York theatrical world. Ray and his girlfriend Jean Evans lived in the theater's 27th Street home. When the theater broke up, the two relocated uptown.

Losey went on to better things, and hired the still-destitute Ray to be his stage manager. Recently returned from Russia, Losey was the darling of the left-wing theater, a Darmouth and Harvard grad who was engaged to ready-to-wear clothing designer Elizabeth Hawes. Losey quit the play they were working on due to interference from the party before opening night, but joined the movement later.

on the set of the CBS show

Ray made good money and with a baby on the way, looked for more. The couple moved to Washington, where the father took a job with the WPA and met Alan Lomax. "He was certainly one of the most splendid young men in the whole world," Lomax said of Ray. "He seemed to me to be the person I'd always dreamed of being. He was very powerful and gentle and wonderful to look at. He had a kind of grin and laughter that were the same thing."

Ray grew to hate his desk job at the WPA, as much as he enjoyed spending time with Lomax and producer John Houseman. Initially faithful to his new wife, he soon allowed himself to step out on her in Washington. He had a conflicted attitude towards these dalliances. "I'm afraid that sex destroys intimacy more often than it creates it," he admitted regretfully. They eventually went back to New York to try to claim a better life for themselves where they were once happy. Ray directed a CBS series entitled Back Home Where I Come From featuring performers from Lomax's project.

After the show was canceled, they lived on Evans' income alone. "I think we're going to get really straight on our own problems," Evans told her friend. "We've been very happy in many ways — and there's something we've got now which we never had before — a kind of cohesiveness that comes with trouble." She could not have been more wrong.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Coming Home" - Kaiser Chiefs (mp3)

"Meanwhile Up In Heaven" - Kaiser Chiefs (mp3)

Honey You Are A Rock

by DICK CHENEY

At first it was difficult to decide what song exactly I should choose to commemorate the all-too-sudden passing of Gwyneth Paltrow's marriage from this earth. I was pretty much evenly decided between Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis" and "Gangsta's Paradise," until I remembered how my wife Lynne quietly whispered, "There's far too much Gwyneth to take in here/More to goop than can ever be found" when Chris Martin initially went outside of his marriage for a consolation prize. Her mane reminded me of a young Simba: Gwyneth can never be surpassed, only glided alongside, like an F-15.

I have been crying all night, and when I stopped crying and trying to make the lyrics of "Magic" apply to Chris Martin's weird affectation of considering pre-come "first orgasm", my tears evaporated. That's when my pride kicked in.

Is there anything she can't do, except you know, be happy?

To console myself, I wallowed in what is perhaps one of GPalt's most underrated performances - her two hour long butchery of an English accent in Neil LaBute's weirdly flaccid Possession. In a rarity for a major actress, Paltrow plays ten years over her age, in a role that would make a lot more sense for her now that she is (1) crazypants and (2) showing the faintest glimpses of a middle age that most prayed would never arrive.

Possession concerns the romance between Maud Bailey (Paltrow) and a young American scholar portrayed by Aaron Eckhart. Together, they pursue the mystery of a literary affair centuries old. Despite ample use of awkward silences and the penetration of the American's anus with a quill pen, the two never quite generate the requisite chemistry to make their romance the slightest bit believable. Gwyneth's accent varies from slightly bad to utter and complete shit, but it's all worth it to watch her play a buttoned-up English professor whose idea of a compelling sexual experience means getting felt up on a weekday.

literary research b4 5mbps internet was so hard guys, you don't even know. So many turtlenecks.

Possession switches back and forth between Gwyneth's genuinely sad accent and a literary romance discovered by the two scholars that took place during the late-1800s. The chemistry between the historical couple (Jeremy Northam and Pride and Prejudice's Jennifer Ehle) is equally lacking, especially since the woman seems to have a greater interest in an extremely attractive lesbian (Lena Headley). In contrast, Gwyneth's sudden movement and prevalence of onesies gets the heart rate moving a bit faster.

It is hard to think of who exactly Gwyneth ever had any chemistry with. She felt a lot more like Iron Man's mom, her version of Sylvia Plath turned her modest, and as Margot Tenenbaum she was so asexual that the only relationship she could ever consummate was with the mirror image of herself (Luke Wilson). She never even had to "consciously uncouple," her natural state was isolated, like an extremely shy owl.

Doing everything he can to resist complimenting the part in her her hair.

Possession is a lot better on mute, since watching Gwyneth swish and strumpet around like she's hunting for the Declaration of Independence in National Treasure begins to take on a momentum of her own when you're not focused on how silly she sounds. You always knew that Chris Martin was in no way the right man for Gwyneth, because she would require a timeless beacon of sexuality that could unnerve her steely veneer, and allow her to come apart without being torn asunder. (I have been reading a lot of Courtney Milan novels, so my apologies.)

At the time it was released, Possession's main story took place in the present. Watching it now, both tales are period pieces. No one has a cell phone, and all interneting is done on Macbooks. A good twenty percent of the film, in fact, is just waiting for the Prodigy service to load whatever Usenet group had good information about the sex life of the unfortunately named Randolph Henry Ash. Things were pretty bad before the internet was instantaneous, but waiting for web pages to load added to sexual tension and brought baby lion cubs closer together.

No woman has ever looked better in a down jacket than this girl.

I alluded to this earlier, but perhaps the main failing of Gwyneth's real life husband was that he thinks everything that comes out of his body is some holy object. The second he starts getting the least bit moist, he loudly exclaims "I'm coming! I'm coming!" and puts on a shit eating grin like he's just found all the differences between the two pictures in those Highlights puzzles.

The New York Daily News reported the two had been separated for some time, a relatively obvious state of affairs given that one can only pretend to take a man who writes a song concerning his adoration of clocks seriously for so long. Gwyneth's initial new squeeze, according to the paper, was a doofy looking entertainment lawyer who actually had the decency to keep up with her website. He would romance her with certain bon mots like, "Saw your website today," or "Good post GPalt" and she would melt into a small, Simba-shaped puddle. It is truly astonishing how little it takes to make some people happy. 

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.

"Keep It Real" - Timbaland ft. Ginuwine (mp3)

"Lobster & Scrimp" - Timbaland ft. Jay-Z (mp3)

Creative Inertia

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Jeff Buckley’s brief intro before launching into a cover of “Dido’s Lament” is murmured in a ghost’s timbre, barely outdoing the white noise on the recording even at highest volume. His audience laughs, spooked, then the piano opens. “Thy hand, Belinda,” Jeff sings.

His is a freakish voice, made all the more odd by the grainy quality of the recording; a high falsetto mimicking the dramatic mezzo-soprano for which Purcell wrote the aria. He wails — his voice almost breaks, but doesn’t. Listening, we want it to break; the melody is too pure, its perfect desperation too stringent for this wild, unpredictable thing. Remember me, forget my fate.

It is this drama, the constant rediscovery and redelivery of a familiar, worked-over, oft-repeated tune that defines Jeff Buckley’s work. Like his voice, each song defies an original genre or mood, turning back to a more primal source. Is it a lament? A mockery? A strange self-issued prophecy from a man who, two years later, would walk into the Wolf River in Memphis, TN and drown?

Like many of his other performances, this one (a set at the 1995 Meltdown Festival in the UK) now only exists on the web, maybe even on fragments of a video somewhere. Had Jeff Buckley lived past the age of 30, it might have remained among the other, less-than-perfect detritus of a long and successful career. But when the talented die young, we like to watch their home videos. Their unprotected moments. Their failures, blow-ups, fuck-ups. Anything that might give us clarity about their end: what “brought them to this point.” Short of simply accepting that it was death that did Buckley in, we might say it was the success that got him.

Only four years earlier, Jeff had sung in public for the first time, at a tribute concert for his estranged father Tim Buckley. They had met once, when Jeff was eight, after one of Tim’s shows; two months later, Tim overdosed on heroin. Neither Jeff nor his mother Mary Guibert were invited to the funeral. When Jeff stepped onto the stage at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn to sing Tim’s “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain”, most people weren’t aware that Tim had a son, and most people who knew Jeff didn’t know he could sing — he’d patented himself, stubbornly, as a guitarist — so the evening unveiled not only Jeff’s vocal talent but also exactly where it had come from. This pissed Jeff off. If anything, he had hoped to use the brief set as his way of paying his respects, of breaking away from Buckley senior.

Years later, when a fan shouted a request for one of Tim’s songs, Jeff looked her straight in the eye and said, “I don’t play that hippie shit.”

Jeff escaped his hometown of Anaheim, leaving behind what he described as a “rootless trailer trash” existence. He’d been struck by New York fever. Over the next year and a half, he played at coffee shops and nightclubs in Lower Manhattan, and eventually earned a regular Monday night slot at Sin-é in the East Village, accompanying himself on the guitar. He covered Bob Dylan. Nina Simone. Van Morrison. Once, singing “Sweet Thing” with Glen Hansard, the still-obscure Buckley drew a crowd by taking the second verse through a series of vocal gymnastics that lasted fifteen minutes. People outside the club began pressing up against the window to hear him perform.

A brief writing streak with Gary Lucas resulted in two original songs, “Mojo Pin” and “Grace”, that Jeff nevertheless rarely played in his set. Lucas also invited Buckley to perform in his band, Gods and Monsters, early in 1992. By that time, however, the streets outside Sin-é were lined with record label executives hoping to snag Buckley for a solo album. That October, Buckley signed with Columbia, hired a drummer and bassist, and recording for what would be his first and only studio album, Grace, began the next summer. A quick EP, Live at Sin-é was released in November ‘93, documenting Jeff’s coffee-shop years, a time he’d long for intensely almost as soon as he left it.

Jeff was not prolific; of the ten songs on Grace, he penned only three on his own. Lee Underwood, Tim Buckley’s guitarist, said once that Jeff suffered from an all too-relatable sort of creative inertia. “[He] felt uncertain of his musical direction, not only after signing with Columbia, but before signing, and all the way to the end. He did not know himself — which musical direction he might want to commit himself to, because taking a stand, making a commitment to a direction, or even to composing and then successfully completing the recording of a single song, was extremely difficult for him. One the one hand, creativity was his calling. On the other hand, any creative gesture that offered the possibility of success terrified him.” To speak nothing of the looming shadow of a father he never spoke of, to whom he was inevitably compared, as well as a sort of dogged perfectionism that plagued his studio sessions.

Spending hours, as he did, overdubbing the vocals until he had reached what he felt was the optimal delivery, Jeff seemed reluctant to pin any one mood onto his work. Andy Wallace, Grace’s producer, had to piece several of the songs together from dozens of takes. The music was in constant metamorphosis, to the point where later, live renditions of the songs sounded different, singular, wed to whatever Buckley had learned or felt or needed in between one performance and the next. He seemed to rewrite them each time.

Grace is disparate, wavering between the almost cacophonous landscapes of “Mojo Pin”, “Grace”, “Last Goodbye”, and “Eternal Life”, the hushed, sacramental “Corpus Christi Carol”, and the desperate “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”. Buckley alternately whispers or wails, seems to laugh and growl, shreds remarkably. The music is a story as emotionally complex as its author — calling it simply brooding or romantic minimizes its scope. In reality it is confused, mystifying, indecisive.

The album, like the EP preceding it, sold in a slow trickle. Jeff’s songs rarely made it to the airwaves. Critics were either charmed by its triumph or turned off by what, altogether, seemed to be a confusing melange of emotions and genres. The French loved it, though, and in 1995 awarded Jeff with the Grand Prix International du Disque, an honor he shared with the likes of Edith Piaf, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan. David Bowie claimed that Grace was the one album he’d want with him on a desert island. Meanwhile, Jeff silenced restless crowds in concert halls across the globe with a few strums of his guitar, with a Buddhist-like opening chant called “Chocolate” that hushed chatter until you could hear a pin drop. Only then would he break into “Mojo Pin”.

Putting Buckley’s cover of the Cohen song in a separate category — as I undoubtedly must — “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is Grace’s masterpiece. Jeff introduced it first at Sin-é when he signed with Columbia, luring listeners who had previously doubted his ability to produce a decent song of his own. Back then it was just Jeff and his guitar, sans the divine harmonium intro, the swelling gospel choir, absolutely pure. Lyrically, it’s as seductive as it is sad — as Jeff escalates to “It’s never over/my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder,” a tingle begins deep down. It’s as much the power of his voice as the power of his poetry. He chokes it out, like an old love letter he’s been forced to read aloud.

I will say this about “Hallelujah” — everything blooms from the single, conquered breath that opens it.

Buckley is remembered for these quieter contributions, and appropriately so; in a way they serve as auto-epitaphs. An incredible mimic, he nails Nina’s voice during brief moments in “Lilac Wine” and rivals any choir boy with Britten’s “Corpus Christi Carol”, which had been introduced to him by a friend in high school. But it’s palpable anger that colors the rest of Grace, anger that Jeff would take with him on tour and into the beginnings of his second album, My Sweetheart, The Drunk. He butted heads with the bigwigs at Columbia when he refused to make a music video. He alienated friends, his photographer Merri Cyr, and some of his strongest supporters with careless words. Seamlessly integrated into his public image were frequent moments of conflict, uncertainty, and stubbornness, most of them related to his burgeoning fame, and almost always triggered by casual comparisons with the late Tim Buckley.

When People Magazine nominated Jeff as one of their “50 Most Beautiful People” in 1995, something snapped. He dyed his hair black and stopped washing it. He wallowed, thin, in giant thrift-store plaid shirts and Doc Martens. On stage, Grace changed: “Buckley and the band were now playing harder, faster, and louder than ever before, transforming slow-burning epics — ‘Last Goodbye’, ‘So Real’, ‘Eternal Life’ and the title track — into rock and roll firestorms that bordered on the metallic. ‘Mojo Pin’ circa 1996 was almost unrecognizable: Buckley screamed so hard as the song built to its thunderous climax that you feared he’d cough up a vocal cord,” wrote Jeff Apter, one of Buckley’s biographers.

Touring took its toll on Jeff; he needed peace and quiet to work things out, to create, but the frenzy of the road worked up a hysteria in him. Once, in Ireland, he disappeared for a few hours in the afternoon and walked around singing and playing guitar in the pouring rain, skipping interviews and a sound check. Another time he arrived so drunk on stage he broke into a rendition of one of his father’s songs. Yet another time, wasted, he fell asleep underneath a table at a show in Manhattan. Another musician would have been thinking of giving the public a second album to chew on; Jeff was just trying to stay alive. Returning to New York in 1996 after two years on the road, he found the Village, which had once afforded him the comfortable hum of cappuccino machines, the safety of coffee shop anonymity, completely transformed. Sin-é had closed its doors. What few shows he did play, he had to advertise under pseudonyms. He needed a quiet spot, a shrine. So, in early ‘97, he went to Memphis.

During the last few months of his life, Jeff Buckley lived in a shotgun house which he rented for a paltry $450 a month. He owned little more than a couch, a telephone, and a telephone book. What time he did not spend cycling back and forth from a Vietnamese restaurant he spent lying in the grass in his backyard, or at the butterfly exhibit at the Memphis Zoo. He played at a beer joint called Barrister’s, quietly. He recorded sketches of new songs on Michael Bolton cassettes that he’d picked up for pennies and sent them to his band in New York. My Sweetheart, The Drunk tremulously came together. On May 29th, the band flew into Memphis to begin recording.

That night, Jeff sang Led Zeppelin as he waded into the river.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Call the Midwife.

with chrissie hynde

"Ghost in the Room" - Numbers (mp3)

"Shortly Broken" - Numbers (mp3)

The Courtship of Katia Mann

by ALEX CARNEVALE

To use the words of young Nietzsche, I love and affirm in "the atmosphere of ethics, the Faustian flavour, the cross, death and the grave." In art I believe in pain, experience, recognition, love, profundity, and confront all superficial beauty with either irony or impatience, as seems appropriate.

Four fantastic years of Thomas Mann's life were spent in the arms of a man. Sex with women had never really interested the German writer, although he was able to maintain an erection with women at times while picturing a more masculine partner. His lover during those four annums was Paul Ehrenberg, a German Jew far lovelier than Mann himself. Mann enjoyed the company of Paul, who was a talented violinist and his brother Carl. But the older man was already a visible novelist and critic with a promising future. Nor could Paul's affections entirely be relied upon; Mann wrote of his boyfriend, "How is so much torture possible?"

No, Ehrenberg was the wrong choice for so many reasons. Thomas Mann needed a wife.

Mann's requirements were not demanding. He wanted a woman who was not overly desirous of sex or demonstrative of her ardor. He needed a wife who would not feel thrummed down by the extensive time he devoted to literary craftsmanship, someone with her own life and family. When he first met Katia Pringsheim, that characteristic — of a woman enmeshed in her tight knit family — was also a curse. How to pry her away.

Katia Pringsheim 

Twenty-year old Katia was not lacking for suitors, and the leading candidate was a professor in his early fifties who, from all available evidence, could furnish her with more of the comfortable upper-middle class life to which she had become accustomed. In Germany before the war, there existed an entire echelon of upper-class, mainly secular Jews, none of whom could ever have imagined the gruesome fate that awaited so many of them.

Katia's father and twin brother Klaus both favored the well-mannered professor over Mann, and it was only Katia's mother, a former actress, who saw something in the awkward, regimented behavior of the writer. Showing up at Katia's door looking somewhat like A.J. Soprano in his military school uniform, Mann was never terribly good at controlling how he appeared to others. "Gently and tactfully," he had written of the brothers Ehrenberg, "they overcame my gravity, diffidence and irritability by accepting them frankly as concomitants of talents they respected."

The pursuit of this woman, unexpectedly, roused something in him. He struggled to work up the courage to have someone introduce him to Katia, even though a few of his friends knew the Pringsheims well. Watching her across an amphitheater, he described "her appearance of wanting to hide her awareness that many people were looking at her." He wrote about her in his journal, mostly to describe how ineffectual he felt his passion was, and sometimes to jot down ideas for stories which paralleled his own experience:

Detail for a love story. As passion wanes, there is an increase in one's ability to conquer, to make oneself loved. For days he had suffered frightfully over her, full of yearning, weak, disoriented broken down, ill. Then after seeing her again in a big hat which did not specially suit her, he suddenly felt healthier, fresher, more free, more forward, less full of yearning, stronger, more "egoistic," able to challenge, score points, pay court, make an impression.

As all this was going on, he was slowly, exhaustively, finishing his reading of Goethe.

his writing desk
Eventually, Mann felt the strong inclination to make himself known to Katia. On a daily basis she bicycled to her experimental physics classes, but when it rained she took the tram. He watched her have a fiery argument with a conductor who demanded a ticket she had thrown away, and something else took over. The next week he pretended to return a book to her house, and in ensuing days he invented other excuses to call on the Pringsheims.

Mann shocked himself by how much he admired her; she was "a miracle, something indescribably rare and precious, a creature who through her more existence has more cultural value than the output of fifteen writers or thirty painters." He also could not help but notice her essential boyishness, an androgynous charm that called to him.

Katia's mother had soundly cast her vote in favor of Mann, but the rest of the family, including Katia, was not as convinced. Mann mostly expressed his feelings to Katia in a mode of worship, a predilection that made the object of his affection uncomfortable. It did not help that they were always chaperoned, ensuring the two would continously encounter various black holes in conversation. Mann did better in his writing, expressing himself in a way that felt oppressive in person. He tried to logically reason things out:

I am quite aware of not being a man who arouses simple and instantaneously safe feelings. To prompt mixed feelings and 'perplexity' is after all — forgive me! — a sign of personality. Someone who never provokes doubts, never astonishes, never causes a slight feeling of dread, someone who is always simply lovable is a fool, a phantom, a figure of fun.

beach day

This did not even represent the full spectrum of his "awareness."

I am aware of causing a certain awkwardness through my 'lack of spontaneity,' of ingenousness, of unself-consciousness, all the nervousness, artificiality and difficulty of my nature, hinders everyone, even the most well-meaning people, from coming closer to me or even dealing with me in a bearable, comfortable way; and that troubles me all the more when I detect in people's behaviour towards me that warmer interest which is called sympathy, and in spite of all the obstacles, this happens with quite incredible frequency...

You know that personally, humanly, I could not develop like other young people, that a talent can function like a vampire — bloodsucking, parasitic. You know what a cold, impoverished, merely representative, merely symbolical life I have been living for years, know that for many years, important years, I regarded myself as nothing, in human terms, and wanted to be considered only as an artist. Only one cure is possible for the attachment to the representative and artistic, this lack of instinctive trust in my personal and human side: through happiness; through you, my clever, sweet, good-hearted, beloved little queen. Be my affirmation, my justification, my fulfilment, my salvation, my — wife. 

Katia felt she could not give him an answer yet. He despaired at her reticence and caution, and his friend Kurt Martens encouraged him to give her a deadline or pull away for a time altogether to see what she would do. Mann resisted putting this pressure on Katia, correctly thinking that making his feelings seem so changeable was more likely to unnerve her than draw her closer. Instead, he continued along the same lines, making the legal case for himself:

Silly little Katia. Still carrying on about "overrating,' and insisting you will be unable to "be" for me what I expect you to be. But I love you. Good God! Do you not understand what that means? What else is there to expect and to be? My wife is what I want you to "be," and in that way to make me absurdly proud and happy. After all, what I "make of you," the meaning I give you which you have and will have for my life — is my concern, and it gives you no bother or responsibility.

Katia and her brother Klaus
Mann's letters were unlike any others she received, and slowly she began to warm to him. Whenever the idea of marriage came up, a deeply fearful look overtook her (Mann described it as that of a "hunted doe"), but other than that, the couple enjoyed spending time together. Finally, one afternoon before she was to leave Munich for the summer, Katia and Thomas were permitted an afternoon alone. Afterwards he wrote "there was a indescribably sweet and painful parting which is still present in all my nerves and senses."

He doubted her until the very moment of her assent. "Her naivety is extraordinary — supreme and dumbfounding," he wrote. "This strange, kind-hearted and yet egotistical little Jew-girl, polite and without a will of her own! I can still hardly believe she will ever bring the word Yes to her lips."

the Mann family many years later

Mann tried to appeal to Katia's more rational faculties — after all, she was a student of mathematics. She insisted that in comparison to him, she was stupid and not worthy of his adulation. It was his letters that finally got to her. Mann's desire for her to be his wife was so evident and honestly broadcasted, that she could not truly feel she was getting any part of the man that was not the real thing. In one particular missive, he even confessed to weeping at the sight of her handwriting.

At first she had been overwhelmed. Now she was simply whelmed, and Mann knew it was his moment. "I believe you feel as strongly as I do that it is high time to put an end to this in between state! Do you not think that once we belong together in the eyes of the world, the relationship will be much more clean-cut and comfortable?" Mann biographer Ronald Hayman described the moment: "When he took her in his arms, he was half-surprised she neither pushed him away or called for help." The wedding took place on February 11th, 1905. Katia conceived on her honeymoon, and the two had sex very infrequently, mainly indulging themselves only to get Katia Mann with child.

After the engagement, Mann lost all touch with the Ehrenbergs, and Paul himself was married by the next year.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Baron in the Trees" - Picastro (mp3)

"Vampires" - Picastro (mp3)

God Wants You To Cease Filmmaking

by DICK CHENEY

Noah
dir. Darren Aronofsky
A billion minutes

It feels like an eternity waiting for the only sex scene in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. It takes about ninety minutes into this mess for that to happen. In an instinctual move brought on by the realization that Anthony Hopkins has restored her ovaries, Emma Watson instructs her bf (Douglas Booth) to throw her a high hard one in the area every thinking person calls a hermione. He complies, and we wait for this transcendent moment humanity was denied for too long. Instead Aronofsky cuts away. An entire family sitting next to me whispered, "Goddamnit."

Emma clearly fired her hairstylist for calling her Granger too often, because this is completely unacceptable.

Noah (Russell Crowe) has been instructed by some vague dreams that the world is about to end. He goes to see his "grandfather" who drugs his son and later hits on his wife. Methusaleh (Anthony Hopkins) is the devil in disguise - for Christ's sake he is Lecter - and for good reason. He is the only performer in this utter disaster with the least bit of acting ability.

actually there was a kind of frosty sexual tension between RC and Ray Winstone, but it was never fully explored. Sequel? Jk.

Lynne wanted to see Noah because she loves when two animals, two animals of the same species, are brought together in close quarters. I asked, hadn't she had enough of that?

He can't stop thinking about how weird her ears are. He will never stop thinking about how weird her ears are.

Noah's wife Naameh (a completely insane Jennifer Connelly), reprising her entire performance from the weirdly cold blooded roles she is forced by her agent to play, has had enough of this proximity to another person. So far, all her marriage to Noah has brought her is two mediocre sons and a tent in the desert. He never fucks her, not even on her birthday.

Connelly's Naameh has one completely bizarre scene where tears run down her face and around her mouth, making her look like some depraved ex-wife shown up at Noah's doorstep. You start to wonder why Noah is even in a relash, given that he never looks directly at Naameh the entire movie. When they finally reconcile later he resorts to a bro hug because he doesn't want his mouth to touch her gross tears.

this is the mother of all retouched photos. Actually she looks like the wicked witch of the west tbh
It is hard to know who to blame for this disaster. I could joke and say it was on God for making Aronofsky in the first place, but that would probably be a premature assumption. All of the director's screenwriting efforts have been complete fuck-ups, and in Noah, he even loses the visual éclat that brought him to prominence in the first place.

the people who cut down trees in Avatar were evil, here they are heroes. Missin u always James Cameron

Instead of feeling like a surplus of excess, the visuals of Noah are highly dated. At times the CGI looks unprofessional, and the characteristic bestiary is never even viewed in its entirety. The animals have no personality, even as themselves. We never see them up close, just as a indeterminate mass. No one care for them. Lynne could only conclude that the makers of the production held some bias against any type of creature at all.

The ark itself is a massive disappointment, looking more like a sloppy 2x4 than a construct befitting the God who commissioned it. The only thing that would have made it worse is Frank Gehry.

at least have them kiss with tongue. It's not too much to ask.

No scene in Noah is more than ninety seconds, lest we realize the complete clichéd absurdity of what is being communicated or said, or see how little there is to this entire thing. Aronofsky has never been the slightest bit skilled at subtlety — the individuals in his films rarely turn out to be anything other than what they are. As Ila, Watson herself never provides any kind of Eve-ian sexuality; in fact there are few roles in cinema she would seem more ill-suited for, given her mincing, sexy mouse-like appeal and flaccid Englishness.

For some reason Aronofsky figured it would be better to have everyone doing poor English accents, while allowing Crowe to just talk as he normally does, and Connelly to keep her own American whine. Noah is a linguist's nightmare, and it's also a completely racist festival that includes only whites. No one is even tan, though many are dirty.

"Guys, there is this really mean blog post about our movie. Let's build another ark."

What is most missing from this piece of shit is wonder. The world ending and a boat floating across its flooded ruins is supposed to be at least partly enjoyable, the way that falling from a great height suggests a thrill we will remember for the rest of our life, no matter how much longer it may go on. There is no wonder to the animals or the places the ark goes, no delight even at finally reaching land — we suddenly cut to the entire group on a beach, without even seeing the discovery. At that moment, I felt like Tom Hanks when he found out Captain Phillips was utter bullshit — extremely upset and disappointed with myself for even witnessing this debacle.

I mean, I feel so fucking embarrassed for this shit (below). Emma has like five scenes in the movie, and 90 percent of her lines consist of telling someone her belly hurts:

God will have his revenge on those responsible for these lies.

I mean yes, The Fountain was completely embarrassing and stupid, but it was just some revolting made up story, it didn't have actual things like drama and exciting moments that you expect from the story of Noah. At the very least Noah could have made a compass or done something besides send a really tired seagull out to find land for him. Deprived of all the things humans do in order to survive difficult situations, Crowe's Noah just growls a lot and tries to kill his grandchildren. It would be laughable if it was not so completely dull and boring. Throw in a swordfight, or cast Antonio Banderas as Jennifer Connelly's latin lover. Anything but this.

0/10

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

"Don't look at the metacritic Jennifer. You won't like what you see."

"Lonely Child" - Christina Perri (mp3)

"Sea of Lovers" - Christina Perri (mp3)

Amplification of the Senses

by ELEANOR MORROW

Growing Up Fisher
creator DJ Nash

Is the idea of a blind person doing something with difficulty that other people do with ease somehow amusing to you? If so, you are in for a treat. At one time, it seemed like the only reliable source of blind jokes was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but Monica has moved on, I have moved on, most blind people presumably have moved on. The one exception is the creators of the situation comedy Growing Up Fisher, who seem to derive great joy from watching Mel Fisher (a way too goofy J.K. Simmons) do such sighted people tasks as standing on a roof in the middle of the night, cutting down a tree, or walking without assistance.

Based on a true story crows the opening chyron of this NBC multi-camera affair. The least plausible part of the entire show is the sex-crazed 11 year old son (Eli Baker) of the blind man constantly asking his dad how he can best get intimate with a woman. The entire arrangement is a bit unorthodox, but perhaps not as orthodox as the fact that Jenna Elfman's face has not aged in any way over the past twenty years.

Joyce Fisher (Elfman) is a lovely woman who the show takes great pains to point out what a pathetic mess she is. Even though she's a charming blonde with a questionable interest in the works of L. Ron Hubbard the only date she can get is with a grocery store clerk. Meanwhile, her blind and ancient husband has his pick of the local women.

He never let the fact that he couldn't see prevent him from doing anything. These words are uttered almost a million times in Growing Up Fisher. Mel's wacky shenanigans seems enough to merit a separation on their own - once, he actually drives a car with his daughter as a passenger — but the reason Joyce really ended the relationship was to "find herself." You will not be surprised to learn that the most entertaining/offensive part of the show is young Henry Fisher's Asian best friend, who is named Runyen and is strangely a preteen homosexual caricature. I guess kill two birds with one stone?

The success of certain family oriented comedies like Modern Family and The Middle has increased the demand for the portrayal of children. The breeding kennels on which such child actors are produced have become regrettably depleted. Fred Savage had a certain ethnic flair that is lacking from these roundly nondenominational homes. Since representing any specific background with its own idiosyncrasies would be theoretically alienating to some viewers, everyone is just a WASP.

Growing Up Fisher lapses into a Jason Bateman voiceover at every opportunity, which is exactly what no one ever asked for. Moreover, there is not even any nostalgia being recalled — the show basically takes place in the present, which means the disembodied Bateman voice is from the future. Instead of telling us what the world has become decades from hence and what happened to North West, he has to continually inform us about how zany his dad is all the time.

Writing for children is very difficult, and although it is somewhat plausible that an 11 year old could be obsessed with the older girls in his apartment building, it is very unlikely he would know what to do with them should they consent to his plans. Even less realistic is the idea that he would rely on his father for advice every step of the way.

Growing Up Fisher was originally conceived with Parker Posey playing Jenna Elfman's role, and publicity photos were even shot with the two as a couple:

Somehow, this throws everything into further doubt. The same boy's mother could be a striking, tall blonde woman who loves terrible science fiction, or she could be the original Party Girl and nothing else in the world would be any different. It is indeed something of a mystery how a bald lawyer and a blonde woman could father two semitic looking children. I believe that anything that comes out of Parker Posey is wonderful.

Looking back, I sometimes tongue a scone and think of what The Wonder Years was actually about. Like Growing Up Fisher, the voice-over really sucked, the lessons and moralities were incredibly blase and obvious, and the setting was nondescript and Midwestern. What actually made The Wonder Years interesting was that despite the central dullness of American life, events of great tragedy and depth surrounded the mundane: Winnie's brother was KIA in Vietnam, fathers got in financial trouble, couples broke up unexpectedly and the repercussions were completely real.

In comparison, these vapid family sitcoms deal with nothing in the real world that might alienate their audience; Growing Up Fisher feels like sketch comedy in comparison. Now Winnie has a Maxim spread, Dan Laurila was arrested after beating up Dan Hedaya for stealing his look, and Fred Savage straight up murdered that guy.

That's not all that is different today. Children aren't even really children — they're just adults-in-training, and the training extends almost interminably, until the day they make television shows about how fucking precocious they were. You shouldn't have let your blind dad fix that satellite dish, buddy. For Christ's sake, Winnie's brother was only a child.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Stranger" - Skrillex (mp3)

"All Is Fair In Love And Brostep" - Skrillex (mp3)

My Name Is A Secret

by NATHAN JOLLY

I was about to hurt a person I could have grown to love. It wasn't like ripping off a band-aid, and it wasn't self-preservation, and it wasn't her, it was most definitely me. It was just cold and cruel and necessary. I was wearing a red woolly Cobain jumper that I knew she hated, as if that would be the comfortable crash-mat that softened the fall. My hair was an unwashed nest, my eyes were blurry from the coffee that had kept me up most of the night and exacerbated my anxiety, and I had swallowed so much Extra chewing gum to counteract my coffee-mouth that I was afraid the warnings on the packet of a laxative-type effect would be realised on the 423 bus that was slowly steering me towards the sad scenario I had sketched for myself.

In the sunlight, when her eyes squint and those faint lines crease in that way that always sends me stupid, maybe when she laughs at one of my dumb fucking jokes with her entire body, and accidentally whips me with her hair while doing so, maybe then I will realise this isn’t what I want, and that I actually am happy with Mickey, and that it is just the rest of my life that isn’t sitting quite right. Maybe if we go to that café near the train station and I eat something not meaty and not bready that sits right in my churning, burning stomach, maybe everything will finally be in place, and I will be able to see that I need Mickey, that I love Mickey, that I don’t need to watch her face crumple, her eyes well up, and her voice quiver.

Once I watched a couple break up in a crowded café courtyard, and I was stunned by the callous cruelty of it all. The ingenuity of breaking up in a neutral zone to avoid the lengthy, lumbering, desperate debate was whitewashed by the awful humiliation; this strange girl’s quiet resolve, and this strange guy’s stung anger was impossible to watch without wanting to weigh in, but of course this wasn’t a movie and therefore we weren’t allowed to watch, comment, or judge — at least not openly. This is why I was traveling to Mickey’s place and not a shaded courtyard, taking a bus the eight or so blocks that separates us in order to limit the amount of time I could to and fro inside my head before having to face up to the decision I had long ago made, and was about to finally play out.

Life isn't so bad these days, I often decide during the brief moments I can think about it softly. I am writing at a rate that I can finally be proud of, and I'm placing insignificant articles in significant publications. I'm quickly tucking away a few pieces each month that I am happy enough about now to feel they won’t slay me when I revisit them at a later date, like an old photo taken at a party where I seemed happy and had incredible hair for a split, stolen second. I have always been aware I’m just collecting memories to be studied and missed at a later date. I’m forever envious of those people who seem so thoroughly in the moment that they aren’t even aware that these are the times they will miss. I have had these moments, I’m sure, but I recognize them too quickly, and in one quick shot, all is ruined. I file and catalogue and study and store. I miss the way things are now.

This is Mickey’s bus stop, so I swing around the businessman standing unceremoniously in front of the door, the kind of guy who will tread on toes and block doorways because he is arrogantly unaware of the space he occupies and where his body is at any given time. Those guys are worse than tourists digging sharp, lumpy backpacks into strangers on a crowded train, swinging and hitting some poor old woman as they talk with their entire bodies. I am outside of Mickey’s house now; she isn’t aware that I am coming around but I know that she is home, because she is an analogue clock I learned to read months ago.

Mickey likes clean-shaven, buzzcut, buttoned-up boys who study law but have no sense of justice, who watch cricket because it is on, who travel in packs, and hold their girlfriends like accessories. I have never gotten over the shock that Mickey was interested in me, and have been waiting for her to realise that not only am I not the one, I’m not even in the correct bracket of ones. There are guys built for her, and she should let one find her. I studied my appearance in the rearview mirror of a scooter parked out the front of her apartment, and decided I looked sufficiently not-the-one. I did feel a strange buzz looking in the mirror of that scooter, but decided to shelve that particular feeling for my inevitable mid-life crisis. It’s sometimes nice to know what lies ahead, even if it is tired and well-traced and ultimately embarrassing.

It was too late to lean on gin, I was too close to leave now. I held my breath, clenched my stomach muscles and knocked on her door, for the final time.

+

Sydney, you are a wonderful lover. I’m swaggering up lanes that belong only to me. My red-tinged sunglasses — bought for $7 at a discount store that sells postcards of the harbour, dubious drug paraphernalia, and long-expired lollies I haven’t seen or thought of since primary school — are painting everything with a Polaroid-perfect tinge, and I am taking photos, shaking photos and putting them in my jacket pocket to look at when I am old and no longer broken. I have freed myself from the only relationship that had ever caused me to stay up at night out of fear that I was circling too close to the sun, only I never felt in danger of being burnt, only of melting into her until I was wandering glass-eyed through farmer’s markets and nurseries, picking baby-names from books, and designer fruit from identical designer buckets. I was destined to be poor Charlie Brown, never quite getting to kick the football.

Now, I was walking back to the bookstores and dimly-lit second-hand shops which hold all that I love about this town. You know the feeling when you exit the cinema and are pierced by the blinding sunshine? That’s how I am feeling at the moment, and in a quick flash I decide that today, on this beautiful September afternoon, with the church bells singing a melody too perfect for religion, the streets sliding like a travelator under my feet, and everything bathed in a $7 red haze, that the deep depths of second book stores, the sad history and discontinued board-games no longer drew me in. Today was a day to sit in the dog park overlooking the courtyard of my favourite inner-West pub and squint into the sun. Today was a day to look forward.

Mickey would bounce back soon — of this I was sure. We were tourists at a colonial-style amusement park, getting our photos taken behind those old-timey wooden characters with the face-holes cut out. This wasn’t a whippable offensive. Nobody was drawn and quartered. If someone else was in the photo, Mickey would still put it on her fridge, and it would look perfect, like a family you would want to be in. I am happy for us to remain undeveloped, one of a host of blurry memories living in a film canister in a sock drawer.

I wanted to call Penelope — the girl I should have been with — to share the news: that we could start our new lives together, assuming of course that her block-headed boyfriend slept with a face-painted babe he met at one of the loud, sweaty clubs I assume he goes to on a Saturday night, with lines of fake tan and fake everything snaked around the block and two burly bouncers letting in one guy for every six girls. Obviously, I can’t call Penelope. Sunday afternoons are for boyfriends and road-trips to cousin’s backyard BBQs, and plonking on lounges to watch films that intersect those few commonly shared interests that most mismatched couples cling to. They weren’t for phone calls from people she’d never had to explain, and I knew this, and she knew this, and everywhere I looked this afternoon there were girls that I could start an entirely new life with right this moment. I could crawl into their townhouses, and meet their housemates, and flick eagerly through their book collections and DVD shelves, and stacks of street press I had written for months ago that hadn’t been thrown out yet, because the little hidden ledge under the coffee table is as good as thrown out anyway. I could wear her jeans, and try on her t-shirts, and drink beer with her in the morning because that’s the quickest way to get to know someone, and I always wanted to know everything right now — so eager to catch up, like a television show I had discovered when the sixth season was winding to an end.

But all these women seemed to cruelly pass me by today, with their dogs and their men, and their Sunday shopping lists, and their mobile phones. Sydney is a great lover, but it is also an ocean, which either propels you towards the shore, or drags you out to die. It lifts you, and dumps you, and fills your lungs when all you want to do is paddle. It blocks your sonar with seaweed and blinds you with saltwater. It is hard to see somebody in the ocean, and harder still to get to them before they have been scuttled across the shoreline, or dragged below the surface. In Sydney, when two people get together quickly, one of them is always being rescued.

+

Does love get in the way of life, or does life get in the way of love? I have spent months comatose and nesting, letting life whir by in the background like a carnival scene from a teen movie I’ve only ever seen posters for. Inside the rollercoaster capsule, there are only two to a seat, the background is blurry, and we seem motionless in the midst of it all: not scared, not screaming, and happy to stay where we are — until the ride kicks us off, and we are propelled back into the carnival, squinting into the sun, looking around like lost tourists.

After the type of breakup that makes me want to stay indoors alone, I often find that instead of locking myself away, I fling into the world, searching for a purpose that isn’t attached to a girl and her smile. I work more, I write lists and buy diaries, and plot and plan. I get things done. Free of the numbing calm that a relationship can provide, I am alone and against the world. I find myself ignited with a flame that burns so brightly it distracts me from the fact that I am on fire.

Being in a big city makes you acutely aware that anything is possible, and not only possible but probable —big things are expected of you in a big city, and the more people swarming in and out of high rise buildings and warehouses that store indie musicians, the more sense you get that it’s all important, that all the photos and art exhibitions, and banks and big money, and boats on the harbour are all working in service of something bigger, and all you need to do is tap into this, and start stacking, start spreading the news —owever quickly that news changes from day to day. Every new hour is both a fresh start, and an extension of this thing that will exist here long after you leave. It’s comforting when you are alone, and only depressing when you are lonely.

I moved into a new house in a new street in a white, blind rush a few weeks ago for reasons too tedious and technical to recount with any sense of artistry. The constant scaling down of my realty expectations and a previous, grueling ten-hour day of holding open heavy doors with legs and torsos, while arms tried to Tetris heavy boxes through security grates — back and forth and up and down — meant that this time I hired a removalist (and felt guilty for not helping out, despite the very good money I was paying him) and took the first house with hardwood floors (all the better to spill you with), a gas stove and a bathtub I could live in. The moving process was, for the first time, quick and painless. Of course this disregard for detail meant that in these past few weeks I had found many displeasing elements were alive and squeaking in my new home: hooks that bled down the walls whenever you hung anything heavier than a hope on them; scarcely scattered powerpoints seemingly placed by architects or electricians who had never owned more than four appliances at a time; sinks too small to wash your hair in; and all the rest which I will discover soon. Still, I am settled and content for what feels like the first time in years. Until this feeling passes, nobody can touch me. I am white light.

A few weeks earlier, lying on a mattress in my packed-up house, after deciding to leave both this sleepy street and my sleepy relationship, I realised I ultimately felt tied down by my possessions, and that all you need is a good book, a soft bed and a head full of hope. And a microwave. And housekeys. And did I really pack away my deodorant? I hoped my television remotes were in the same box as the television — in my haste I wasn't quite sure where I had packed anything at all. I hoped I hadn't left anything behind — some trinket or memory hiding in a high kitchen cupboard. I needed everything I had ever owned and I needed to know where everything was at all times, or I could not sleep.

I paced the empty house, seeing new shapes in carpet stains, old dust in the sunlight, letting my pupils dilate as I stare into the uninviting fluorescent kitchen light. The kitchen was always too cramped and impractical to be satisfactory to anyone but a divorced dad lovingly dividing Chinese food into three mismatched bowls on 'his weekend’. I would probably be that guy in ten or so years, I sighed inside my head, vowing never to have another one night stand, never to fall prematurely in love and be too lazy and in the moment to safeguard against such a scenario. I knew a daughter would probably be able to fix me, but I saw that particular movie all around me, in sad little kitchens like these, and I knew that it never ended the way anyone hopes it will. Fourteen boxes and a suitcase filled with papers — this was everything I had collected, all the things I hadn't yet forgotten why I’d kept. All the things that would define me if they found my body in this empty, sad house.

I cannot wait until the main thing I look forward each evening is a glass of red wine, the kids finally fast asleep in their Disney-painted bedrooms, and me and my girlfriend (never a wife, that word belongs with consumption, castles and kingdoms best left in the past) watching 60 Minutes and tutting at the state of the world: a world long left behind for the everyday reality of child-care centres and kindergartens and Spongebob band-aids and packed lunches and soccer games and all the banal brilliance that I fear may never be a part of my life, unless of course on bin day, when it all comes spilling out into the street. Right now, the only way to form this cosy future is to soak myself in gin, go to the loosest bar in the inner West and indiscriminately fling myself at anyone who looks like they may one day love me. It's five dollar drinks until dawn, it's meals from vending machines, it's unprotected everything; it's cold and cruel, and necessary. All the promises to myself: quietly, quickly broken and shooed out of the room by her lips and her hips and what they could hold over me and my future just by being there and being available. It sure feels like being alive, but right now I cannot remember any one way I have felt, any former aches or joys. I gun my drink, check my hair in the reflection of my phone and look around. Hi, my name is a secret. Would you like to have a daughter with me?

Nathan Jolly is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Sydney. He last wrote in these pages about the one. He tumbls here and twitters here.

Paintings by Isca Greenfield-Sanders. 

"Light at the End of the Tunnel (live)" - Cloud Cult (mp3)

"We Made up Your Mind For You (live)" - Cloud Cult (mp3)