at her usual table in the Café de Flore, 1945

Her One Reality

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

Young Simone de Beauvoir shared her room with the maid. Outside her family's Paris apartment was the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnesse. At the age of three she threw her first conscious temper tantrum. To her credit, she stopped when she no longer required the attention.

Her parents spoke to her only in a reproving tone during those difficult years. Simone reserved her true conversation for her sister Hélène. They made up a language their parents would not understand, full of winks and sounds, intimate gestures that they alone could understand in the presence of their parents. Together they created a fantasy world based on the lives of the saints. Simone would play the martyr almost exclusively.

She wrote of Hélène that "she was my accomplice, my subject, my creature. It is plain that I only thought of her as being 'the same, but different', which is one way of claiming one's preeminence. Without ever formulating it in so many words, I assumed that my parents accepted this hierarchy and that I was their favourite."

the sisters aged three and five

Although Simone's father was engaged in the slow process of falling out of the upper class, he would not send his children to the public lycée, fearing contamination. One of her father's favorite remarks was, "The wife is what the husband makes of her: it's up to him to make her someone." The pressure he puts on his wife Francoise extended to his precocious young daughter, who he expected would discuss books with him. Simone de Beauvoir had a library card at the age of four.

The de Beauvoirs fled Paris in fear at the onset of the first World War, but soon returned. Georges de Beauvoir was called to the front and returned to his family after a heart attack. Back in the presence of his young daughters, they could not help but be antagonized that his moustache had gone as well. The sound of gunfire could be heard every night. The family was forced to subsist on a corporal's pay, and Simone imitated her mother's frugality.

In her 1990 biography, Deirdre Bair recalls Simone's younger sister Hélène telling her, "In our games when she liked to play the saint, I think it must have given me pleasure to martyrize her even though she was so kind. I remember one day reaching the summit of cruelty: she took the role of a young and beautiful girl whom I, as an evil ruler, was keeping prisoner in a tower. I had the inspiration my most serious punishment for her would be to tear up her prayer book."

Most of Simone and Hélène's classmates had left the city. Walking the grounds of their school was most eerie, almost like visiting a graveyard. The date was 1918. Paris had always disappointed her; it was too familiar, and she had nothing else with which to compare it. Simone de Beauvoir was ten years old.

She wrote in her memoirs that "I had made a definite metamorphosis into a good little girl. Right from the start, I had composed the personality I wished to present to the world; it had brought me so much praise and so many great satisfactions that I finished by identifying myself with the character I had built up: it was my one reality."

Her father's law practice had faltered, and a job with his charlatan father-in-law also dried up as soon as the company's military contracts vanished. The family moved into a middle class building at 71 Rue de Rennes. The fifth floor flat had no elevator, and Simone now shared a bedroom with her sister. Seeing the small room, their friends could not contain their looks of shock. Her father wanted to give the girls bicycles, but her mother, in view of the family's finances, could not allow it.

She did not understand sex, although she was determined to flirt with men, to do anything impetuous or brazen to attract their attention, not knowing what any of it meant. When she was very small she had thought her parents bought their children in a shop.

Until her adolescence began, she was her father's favorite. The entire family had listened to her stories with rapt attention. But acne interfered, and soon she was clearly the less beautiful of the senior de Beauvoir's two daughters. It was not simply her new appearance that so disgusted Georges de Beauvoir, it was that his daughter's education had not stopped in the place that his had. She was becoming an intellectual, and he hated that sort. He called her ugly.

At school she fared no better. Her classmates ignored her, bullied her, mocked her. She told Bair, "Of course it bothered me that I was not popular. But when I compared all to the satisfaction of reading and learning, everything else was unimportant. Those slights meant very little, and soon I didn't even think about it." Even as a lie, it was a good one.

The last time Deirdre Bair saw Simone de Beauvoir was on the afternoon of March 7, 1986. It is difficult to imagine her at this age, so small and frail. In the introduction to her biography, Bair describes the last tiny embrace Simone gave her, hugging her lower body. Bair towered over Simone by several feet.

with sartre and others in 1951

Her first attempt at writing was titled, "The Misfortunes of Marguerite." She abandoned it when she realized, after consulting an atlas, that the crossing of the Rhine where she had set the story did not in fact exist. Her parents had a low opinion of cinema; they regarded Charlie Chaplin as completely silly, even for their young daughters.

When she found that despite her Catholic education, she was both willing and eager to discard God, Little Women entered her life. Of course she was Jo. She fantasized about her own death, imagining her funeral, the weeping mourners.

with sartre in china

Her first real friend was Elisabeth Le Coin, an emaciated little girl with a dark scar on her left leg, suffered at her own hand. Elisabeth replaced Hélène in Simone's life, much to the younger de Beauvoir's chagrin. The two became inseparable. Simone's mother would tell her nothing of becoming a woman, so Elisabeth and Simone were forced to figure out the particulars together.

Sexuality scared her more than anything. Once a young clerk in an antiques shop exposed himself to her, and she had no idea what to make of it.

with Richard and Ellen Wright on her first trip to New York City, 1947

Her prettier sister had no such conflicts with men. They both had heard their parents engaging in rowdy sex through the thin wall in the tiny apartment, but Hélène alone was normalized by relationships with her peers. Although she was at the top of her class, her parents' only wish was that she meet a man and get married.

Simone found an article in a magazine about a woman who had become a philosopher and was now teaching the subject. Her mother was completely disappointed by Simone's lack of interest in her Catholic faith. To hide from her mother's frequent invasions of privacy, she wrote in handwriting so small it could not be detected by any eyes other than her own.

Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. She last wrote in these pages about the first marriage of Gregory Peck. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Collapse" - Vancouver Sleep Clinic (mp3)

"Flaws" - Vancouver Sleep Clinic (mp3)

VR

by ALEX CARNEVALE

And even so, could you delimit what you saw?

A friend of mine has a pretty bad commute. She rides all the way out to the tip of the island, where it looks out on the ocean,  and then back into the city. The way out is slightly shorter; just over two and a half hours, and there is no good way of getting back. Since she is an instructor, she uses her time to grade papers, send oblique messages like "u there?" or "thanking bout you" and quietly shift in her seat, indicating to herself the provenance of an event that may never come.

She is a religious woman, and she thinks of God during these times (I think of Michelle Obama). She wonders, with no small amount of respect for the entity she has determined is greater than herself, why has He put her where she is?

Virtual reality has come a long way since Nintendo produced an ill-fated device called the Virtual Boy. Selling just over a million units worldwide — far below the company's expectations — the device rendered simple games, 2-D and 3-D, in a flummoxing red and black. Still, your eyes were properly ensconced among these awkward visions — indisputably, you had entered another world.

VR prodigy/prophet/sellout Palmer Luckey sold his new and improved virtual boy, code named Oculus Rift, to Facebook last week for $2 billion. His company was on the verge of releasing its second prototype, a $350 pair of goggles intended mainly for developers, but made available for the greater public as a both a nod to the history of new worlds, and to fulfill promises made in their first effort at fundraising on Kickstarter.

Why is Luckey a prodigy? His ideas about Oculus VR being primarily a gaming experience and pitching it directly to friends in the development community proved savvy so far, but he has proven his pedigree by attracting programming talents like those of ID founder John Carmack to his vision of what the VR platform should mean for users.

Mark Zuckerberg changed all that. "If we can make this a network where people are communicating, and buying virtual goods, and there might be ads down the line," he told stockholders in the understatement of the year. "That’s where the business could come from."

Yes, an alliance with Facebook means ads in your new universe, but did you really think any new world would ever be without them? Someone else has chosen the universe you will enter; creating universes for others will soon become a caste, just as there is a commuting caste, or an iPhone caste. I believe Neal Stephenson was the first to develop this idea.

Such caste divisions will also exist in Riftworld, but violence and bodily harm are impotent there. Trade and financial considerations will still change lives. Relationships and betrayalthons are likely to continue as distinguishing features of human existence, such as the vitriolic barrage that pelted Luckey when he sold his fledgling company to a data-mining behemoth headed by a man who never made anything in his life except money.

Supporters of the Rift's early prototypes have disparaged Luckey for seeming to compromise a stated plan to be an independent, open piece of hardware. Comments on the company's KS page excoriated the founders for "giving up their vision." More than a few demanded the latest prototype for free, "as a gesture." Others idiotically and amusingly requested part of the company's purchase price.

Deeply hurt by his most devoted subjects' irritation, Luckey sprang out to the media to reassure his followers that Mark Zuckerberg might be a very powerful man in the IRL existence we all know and treasure, but in the VR world he was planning, such estimable influence was merely a function of godliness.

The wounded god sputtered out: "I am sorry that you are disappointed. To be honest, if I were you, I would probably have a similar initial impression! There are a lot of reasons why this is a good thing, many of which are not yet public." Not even the Wizard of Oz so quickly drew his curtain!

Do you think He reveals himself to those who do not please Him?

Churches have many influential supporters, until they don't. In some areas that means a reduction in services for the poor and homeless. In my hometown, a soup kitchen is badly needed, and no local church has the financial wherewithal to offer one. An extensive VR operation, with rows and rows of terminals for the needy, requires no expensive supplies of meat and vegetables, since eating is nonce in Riftland. We do not have to cure poverty or hunger, we must merely provide a useful means of allowing a person to ignore it.

This notion, of worlds below worlds, is more ancient than recent. Popular beliefs among the early Nordic peoples suggested that time ran at different speeds, slower in the lower worlds, faster in the higher ones, and even differently in the spaces between those places. Being able to postpone an emotion is surely useful, and this feature, adapted from real world denial, has a variety of military and non-military uses. There is almost always a place we would rather be than the one we are in.

It is easy to conclude that $2 billion dollars, most of it in overvalued FB stock, was a cheap price to pay for what is essentially an unstable entry into Hogwarts. As for my dear friend who rides the railroad for hours on end, I'm certain my own heart would be ten times more comfortable knowing she could be in Riftland during that long commute, observing Hawaiian sea turtles or climbing the Western Wall.

There, in that new place, each thing is either different or the same as every other thing. She will be sworn to an allegiance not unlike the one she took with the man who created the real universe. Joining Riftland, there is another God, in his early twenties, named Palmer Luckey. He did an AMA on reddit, he probably linked it on his twitter?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

Photographs by Julia Clarke.

"Booty Killah" - Elliphant ft. The Reef (mp3)

"Everything 4 U" - Elliphant (mp3)

Fate and Flesh

by KYLEE LUCE

Nymphomaniac: Volumes I & II
dir. Lars Von Trier
241 minutes

The first Google result for “sex ego death” is a crowdfunding attempt from August 2013 that raised 15 dollars. The funds they failed to crowd were intended to erect a “sex and ego death” billboard on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, in order “to MAKE PEOPLE THINK, and through that process gain enough understanding of their ‘true self’—the self without judgments or social constraints.” 

Nymphomaniac, Lars Von Trier’s latest two-part sexual provocation, has a similar aim but with a budget of 10 million; a chunk of change that managed to secure, alongside stars Gainsbourg and Skarsgård, the presence of Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, Christopher Walken, and Shia LaBoeuf.

Shia, who might be infamously hotheaded but, as he announced by scrawling in Sharpie across a brown paper bag and wearing said bag over his head at the Berlin premiere, is not famous anymore. Shia's supersized sense of self has long since bestowed him the post-empire honor of being a celebrity who Gawker, along with everyone else, hates; but he’s brilliantly cast here because plenty of us would still fuck him.

Incidentally, the first Google result for just “sex ego” is the wiki for the term “Ego-dystonic sexual orientation,” described as a “mental disorder characterized by having a sexual orientation or an attraction that is at odds with one’s idealized self-image.” My grey matter doesn’t really square with psychoanalysis; “It’s boring,” I’ve said enough times to bore myself. But early this year my eyes fell on the phrase “ego death” and snared there, mid-Google search for “sleep deprivation,” which I did after reading a study showing that ceasing to sleep for a few days was temporarily effective in cutting through the psychic chokehold of depression. Nymphomaniac is the last entry in Von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy.” 

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The rug wasn’t exactly pulled out from underneath me. I didn’t trip so much as decide to jump, fling myself from a flying carpet; but there’s a dim panic that descends when major pieces of your life tumble into chaos like a pile of loose change, a slanting tendency to do things you thought weren’t like you at all. Like, for instance, staying awake for two days straight and then going to a mall-watching assorted legs wander the sky bridge over the street separating the cheaper stores (glaring Forever 21 bags stuffed like suitcases) from the seductively expensive Tiffany’s section, a rail train slotting down the middle like needle into vein; like suddenly finding it unbearable to be anything close to sober in the presence of other people; like finding it even more unbearable to be alone. 

In this phantom-limb delusion of fresh heartbreak I told myself that love was a flying carpet and I had rug burns; that this faded, insomniac floating felt like salve.

I was sleep-deprived and riding shotgun on a long drive when, down a barren stretch of desert road, talk turned to Lars Von Trier; someone said he thought Melancholia was meant to indict us. I asked if every movie had to have a message, if intent even mattered (it does, a little bit); but Von Trier isn’t quite on par with the natural nihilist in Harmony Korine, wrecking sandcastles for fun. Closer to him is David Lynch, whose work is like a long bath just beneath a hard surface, like dunking into a subliminal cenote. 

Twin Peaks was the first thing I felt like watching after moving into a new apartment for one, because its project was to map the blood relation between nostalgic beauty and death, between ugliness and love. And in Lynch’s cosmology their symmetry has a glinting refulgence. The best scenes make me feel the same way that Von Trier’s best movies do, which is drenched in a kind of molecular, vibrating awareness. 

In Von Trier’s own words, “Maybe Lynch and I share a fetish.”

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We meet the nymphomaniac facedown in the street. Joe (an ever-magnetic Charlotte Gainsbourg) is bruised and bleeding when the sexless, aging Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) takes her in and makes her tea. “What happened?” he asks. She replies, “I’m just a bad human being.” He tells her he doesn’t believe in such a thing, and from there she proceeds to relay her entire life’s sexual story to a riveted audience of one. 

For a memorable time in her early adulthood Joe is fucking “up to ten men a night.” In carefully orchestrated trysts Stacy Martin, young Joe’s avatar of droll face and lithe flesh, spends Volume I gyrating against nearly a new body per frame per second. Young bodies, old bodies, bodies that walk like big cats, bodies that do nothing but eat her cunt; the only constants being that they’re all men and her own omnipresent nudity. But the most memorable, and most Lynchian, scene of the first film finds her fully clothed, staring blankly at the floor, while Uma Thurman’s scene-stealing scorned wife (“Mrs. H.”) tries to scorch her from her mistress’ seat. 

It doesn’t work. Joe’s sexual nihilism turns out to be flameproof right up until her desire burns out. But sometime during the close shots of the philandering father’s children’s faces, or definitely by the time Mrs. H. departs down the stairs with a piercing, anti-comic shriek of pain, it occurred to me that Nymphomaniac, in spite all those O-face promotional posters, is hilariously unsexy. Which should have come as no surprise — I remember feeling more titillated watching Rooney Mara’s Dragon Tattoo rape scene, a textbook example of men filming the sexual violation of women like they’re gunning for an AVN award, than anything Von Trier has ever done. 

Tiny pleasure-rushes from a few beautiful bodies in the buff (LaBeouf had a great personal trainer, and Martin might be a real mermaid, the kind that drown men for fun) flutter like dying insects under the film’s morgue-esque moods. In young Joe’s final scene on a speeding train every pore on her face pops into relief under sickly fluorescent light, open mouth and lidded eyes evoking an undead Megan Fox, right before she coerces a stranger into a blowjob; the overarching sensation being something like a death dream. 

That ever-enduring debate (don’t say Woody All...) about separating the artist from his art has become deeply dull because it’s beside the point. Every known thing about a person inevitably informs their work like tributary streams, all flowing into the same final destination: the noumenal ocean of the Internet, where I read the following Lars Von Trier quote in an interview about Antichrist: "If the film has anything to do, it has to do with that there is no God; that is how I see it.” In the same interview he said he “hadn’t read much of” and “(didn’t) want to talk about” Nietzsche, which didn’t do much to halt a lot of theory-bro thinkpieces, or me. If God is dead, then Antichrist was an arch illustration of his absence, Melancholia an apocalypse fantasy as foray into the gothic swamp of the (mad) mind; Nymphomaniac, on Von Trier’s other hand, tears into the last component of the Cartesian divide: body.

In careening withdrawal from a specific body it feels like you might actually die from an absence of touch. There’s a line at the end of Lindsay Hunter’s short story “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula” that immediately became one of those arrangements of letters etched in tattoo ink across my memory. It’s recurred to me in recent months like a wave of déjà vu: “because if no one is there to touch you are you even really there?”

In a new city and beside a new body, I had the dumb compulsion to say, “This is kind of out of character,” a phrase I had started using like it was a protective umbrella that would shield me from the results. But words aren’t waterproof. Do something outside your idea of yourself and your stick-figure lines just expand to encompass it; everything you’ve ever done is you.

Joe, the teenager who would only fuck a man once, eventually tries to grow up. She falls in love and becomes a breeder; years that she once counted in collected cum pass stoically behind a baby stroller. But after trying on a normal life for size — to our utter unsurprise — it just doesn’t fit. Without her rabid sex-life Joe feels dead. Lust is the closest approximation of living she’s got and she can’t even come. Volume I may witness her watching the shit-and-blood bodily failure and death of her father, but in Volume II she unequivocally declares: the worst thing that ever happened to her was losing her ability to orgasm. 

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The loss of her desire was the more existential loss, and through his anti-heroine Von Trier asserts the impossibility of mind over matter, or matter over mind. In Nymphomaniac there are only -alities: states of being alive. To mourn, or in Joe’s case to lubricate, is at least a feeling; depression is the state of being without any, the -ality of the void. (“Fill all my holes,” Joe commands Jerome, the only lover she’s ever actually loved, while naked on top of him. “I can’t, Joe,” he says.) 

Desperate to “rehabilitate” her sexuality, she resorts to replacing penetration with pain; this time, beneath the spanking-crop of a suave blond dom, it works. To the tune of “FIDO,” her new name, her lust finally moves like the blood to her ass. The most graphic shots by far in this purported porno aren’t of cocks but of purpled and bleeding welts and wounds; and thanks to them she’s back in business, in more ways than one. 

But like most hard-won victories, this one comes with casualties; completely gone from her life is her family, is love. Soon she’ll be horizontal in a gutter. If depression can be understood as an enduring state of alienation, the separation from shared reality can act as dangerous buffer. Destruction is all fireworks from a distance. “For a human being killing is the most natural thing in the world. We’re created for it,” Joe says. And for all Seligman’s insistence on her innocence over her self-proclaimed indictment of her own moral character, kill she eventually does. 

Why doesn’t matter. Von Trier cares not about reasons. Or at least Joe doesn’t seem to have any beyond fate itself, narrating that she “discovered my cunt at age two” and spiraled into ruin from there. Outside of “sheer lust” there’s no discernible motive driving anything she does, from Volume I’s teenage sex competition on a train (one of the movie’s many conceits so masculine they make a case for the queerness of the director’s lens — the popular theory that he identifies as the women in his films rather than the men) to Volume II’s forty Roman ass-lashes and ruinously-wounded cunt. 

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In an interview with The Daily Beast, Uma Thurman said of Von Trier: “The idea that people debate whether he’s a misogynist? People should debate whether people who don’t even write women are misogynists. The fact is, he’s dedicated a large portion of his artistic life to the exploration of the female psyche — good and bad, light and dark, shadows, textures.” Von Trier himself has said, “I, of course, believe that women are as bad as men.” He neglects to mention that women may well be born as bad but are then nurtured into being much worse off.

In a 1951 speech called “Keeping Calm and Composed, Let Us Awake to Our True Self,” the Japanese philosopher Shin'ichi Hisamatsu spoke about his idea of the “formless self”: the highest state of which he called “formless composure … unobstructed by mind and body.” He then quoted from the Buddhist text The Heart Sutra: “Emptiness, just as it is, is form.” 

In his last three films, Lars Von Trier has attempted emptiness as emotional form. Modern life can be seen in macro as the division of human consciousness into cubicles, then the movies in the Depression Trilogy — in their exploration of alienation-ality — all perform a possible set of psychic consequences. And this last entry, in its blithe parade of bodies, feels emptiest of all. 

A dualistic God demanded that we master the body; love just wants to subjugate lust; and Nymphomaniac is a circle in red ink around the pointlessness of both endeavors. But there’s something weirdly comforting about the bare honesty of its effort. In yet another interview about Antichrist (he hasn’t done any since Melancholia premiered, when he made a few spectacularly PR-unfriendly comments about Hitler,) our Danish auteur said, “No matter how ridiculous it might seem, the film, like all my work, is made from what I would call a pure heart. I am not ever trying to, as you say in England, take the piss.” 

Self-induced insomnia never killed my ego, but without sleep I felt blurred, somehow softer, like my sharper edges were sloughing off. Deep in the snarl of sex I sometimes feel the opposite — a temporary expansion of self, a euphoric unfurling. As Susan Sontag wrote in her journal: “The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego.” In the final scene of Volume II, Joe waxes poetic about what she has decided is her only way forward: eradicating her sexuality completely. “I will master all my stubbornness, and my strength, and my masculine aggression,” she whispers to Seligman, calling him “my one and only friend.” Minutes later, she shoots him. That the film’s framing centers around a single question — whether or not Joe is a bad human being — is in the end a red herring that fades into black, swallowed whole by the real conundrum: the pure fatalism of having flesh. In the way she describes giving birth to her child: “I didn’t feel fear; more like a kind of disgust. I could have sworn I saw him laughing.” In Von Trier’s empty visions, fate laughs at us.

Kylee Luce is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Salt Lake City. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her tumblr here and her twitter here.

"Send Her To Holloway" - The Rails (mp3)

"Panic Attack Blues" - The Rails (mp3)

Allan Sekula

Passover Treat

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Whitney Biennial 2014
curators Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms & Michelle Grabner

There is an overwhelming number of penises in the Whitney Biennial. In order to deal with them properly lest the sensation of mass phallus overtake you, it is prudent to rename those cocks "jimmy-jammies." You will find this expression goes much more smoothly in your art-based convos e.g., "did you see the macaroon at the end of that guy's jimmy-jammy?" (Macaroon is a Yiddish expression that refers to the tip of a jimmy-jammy, or alternately a sweet, fluffy after-dinner treat.)

The worst part of the exhibition itself is undoubtedly the pron room, or as it is technically referred to, Bjarne Melgaard: Intimate Transparencies. There, among greasy couches and oversized models of vaguely erotic resemblances, you have a "reaction" to the jimmy-jammies. Light satire is the opiate of the masses. Artists and media types are ironically the most prudish among thinking peoples, mostly because their consumption of culture prevents them from focusing entirely on the practice of sex as a moral imperative. The Biennial itself, despite all the macaroons and full frontals, is as Puritan as the Mayflower.

Bjarne Melgaard

As the exhibition notes detail, "Melgaard intends for his installation to communicate the effects of what some scientists call the Anthropocene, a new geological age created by human activity, especially through global warming. He proposes that our collective psyches have been abused and damaged in much the same way the environment has, resulting in sadism and an utter disregard for humanity." Global warming did this, you guys.

Using three different curators for this year's event, the last to take place in the museum's Madison Avenue location before the Met takes it over as storage space for its lesser paintings, was a bold move. A bold move is what you call something when it doesn't quite come together the way you want it to, like The Lone Ranger or the Munich Pact.

proposed mock-up of the new Whitney

I attended the event with a local painter, a woman who goes by the nom de plume of Medium Rosenstein. She made several observations about the Biennial that I jotted down so that you can get an idea of how a working artist perceives such an occasion:

- "I just heard someone say a sculpture was rococo. It sounded like the way you would describe a roof."

- "This is an eight minute video. It easily could have been on YouTube."

- in reference to spooky music and creepy stuffed animals prominently featured in the staircases between floors: "It's harder than you would think to confuse high art with like, a really good Halloween party."

- "The guy wearing the tutu has a massive jimmy-jammy. When I was a kid I thought the word penis ended in a vowel."

Shio Kusaka

- "I find it difficult to take seriously any exhibition with space for Gary Indiana."

- "I just saw two girls crying at the David Foster Wallace exhibit." I asked whether she attempted to console them. "No, I just told them the mock-science video about the guy with HIV was pretty good."

- "I've heard Susan Howe is a bit of a prost."

- "If I see another flaccid JJ, I'll scream."

- "Carol Jackson is a genius":

Carol Jackson

Eroticism has always been an important part of art, but none of that was terribly present at the Biennial. There was only evidence of the exertion required not to get turned on by something that would ordinarily be stimulating to the senses. It is something like going to a rodeo and being upset when a rider is bucked off a horse.

Many of the pieces included by all three curators were collaborations, or re-imaginings of artwork produced but never officially displayed as intended. Such works rarely cohered, like the photographs and artwork commemorating the relationship of a couple in which each party was changing gender in the opposite direction. It all seemed like a slice of something real rather than the actual thing.

from "The Relationship", Rhys Ernst & Zachary Drucker

Work by Jackson, Ken Okiishi, Dashiell Manley and Joseph Grigley's hilarious tribute to the dead critic and painter Gregory Battcock were the clear highlights. The modest number of paintings seem to recede into the background, taken over by the most extensive installations, and the arrangement of Battcock's papers as a series of clues to the mystery of his murder made for the best room in the building.

The fact that so many of the artists were either deceased or being reinterpreted really should not matter, but an event like the Biennial always feels like a hodgepodge, and implicating the dead seems like a distraction from the purpose. I really hate to be harsh, but Medium Rosenstein agrees with me: It's a bit morbid to only have buildings full of art by people who can no longer enjoy or profit from any of the admiration the work engenders. It is even stranger to make this part of what is supposed to be a modern, contemporary exhibit. David Foster Wallace's notebooks might be worth a laugh, but they surely don't belong in a glass case to go untouched by human hands. They were meant for somebody.

the deceased Gretchen Bender

All told it took just over two hours to cover the Biennial and trifling permanent exhibit of the Whitney. The latter element contained a variety of mediocre Jasper Johns and Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, and who ever thought those artists would ever be thought of as entirely sincere? If they knew introducing satire in the context of visual art constituted an irreversible change, I doubt they ever would have been so glib.

The Whitney generally has a thing about not showing off the best parts of their substantial collection. It is the reason they are moving their base of operations to a location in the meat-packing district, where they will have ample room to fete a wife-beater like Edward Hopper more lavishly. Again I am being overly unkind — the presentation of paintings in their respective rooms has long been far more pleasant at the Whitney than at the cramped Met or overly spacious MoMA. You would not think it would be so hard to know how much of one thing to pour into something else, but it is.

Dashiell Manley

Afterwards, I bought Medium some Jane Austen temporary tattoos from a nearby gift shop, and I applied the one relating most closely to Mr. Darcy to the inside of my left thigh. We talked over a malt what the very best of the exhibit was. "I liked the stuff by the woman in her 90s," Rosenstein informed me, swallowing the edge of a Pop Tart she had been housing in her purse in order to keep her blood sugar up. She was referring to the Beirut-born Etel Adnan. "It felt like she was putting everything into it, holding nothing back for later. If she had an idea, it was there, even if it did not fit just right." I nodded and stroked my tattoo with a plastic fork. It itched.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

Etel Adnan

"Moving to the Left" - Woods (mp3)

"Leaves Like Glass" - Woods (mp3)

Rebecca Morris

The Device

The letters of the American writer William Gaddis range from an almost precocious naivete to a hardened cynicism. These shifts occur so frequently we can assume they were a distinctive part of his personality. Although the main output of his career was two voluminous novels, The Recognitions and J R, he assembled the raw material for these tomes through a variety of occupations, and various dalliances with the opposite sex, both of which merited time-consuming research. Many critics and readers struggled to understand Gaddis' brilliance, provoking his frustration at times. When his anger was set off, he expressed his dissatisfaction in a number of ways, but always in writing as well, since it was his prime form. In his letters Gaddis shows, like a master juggler, the merest of tricks first before asserting any mastery at all.

As a boy he had not yet been taught of evil.

January 1932

Dear Mother,

We just came back from the library but I didn't get any books.

I finished Bomba the Jungle Boy and I have started Bomba the Jungle Boy at the Moving Mountain. I wrote a poem and it went like this:

Easter

Easter is on Sunday
But today is Monday
And Easter is 11 weeks away
At Easter the bunny hides eggs all over,
Some in the grass, some in the clover.

Did you like it?

With love

Billy

He met model, artist and muse Sheri Martinelli in New York in 1953. He wrote her one surviving love letter, but never sent it:

Massapequa

Summer 1953

Sheri, what a great happiness it was, seeing you again; though there were enough moments of feeling young again, and too young again, and though other people seem to want to be young again I do not, once was enough. So we all go not changing just getting more so.

But you again, is something else, and still beautiful, yes: even then I could not understand other people taking your presence for granted and still I cannot, nor understand, no one weeps looking at you, I will. So, such a recognition, seeing you again: but to be grateful, right before God and everybody, for your being happy to see me again, take that for granted! no, no that could not be for granted, too kind a gift. Or, if the present is every moment reshaping the past, so that any instant is liable to come up with the verdict, I was wrong all the time! or, I was right all along — there: I was right all along? Not being a scientist who by measurement attempts prediction, it is a very dangerous way to live today. So gifts asked from the most selfish motives are the humbly received. And considered upon retirement. Knowing you go right on now, every minute being, thought of and loved you know. My selfish motives, my humble gratitude, then always the retirement for finally there is only the work. And all the while you are loved.

W.

 Never one to miss an opportunity, Gaddis sent his debut novel, The Recognitions, to the father of the atomic bomb.

4 January 1955

Dear Doctor Oppenheimer.

I have already taken a greater liberty than this, asking your attention to my letter, in having called Harcourt, Brace & Co., who are publishing a long novel I have written, to ask that they send you a copy. You must receive mail of all sorts, crank notes and fan letters of every description, but few I should think of half a million words. And since I can also well imagine that you seldom if ever read novels, if only for not having the time, it is an added imposition to have sent you such a bulky one.

But for having read your recent address at Columbia’s anniversary, I should never have presumed to do so. But I was so stricken by the succinctness, and the use of the language, with which you stated the problems which it has taken me seven years to assemble and almost a thousand pages to present, that my first thought was to send you a copy. And I do submit this book to you with deepest respect. Because I believe that The Recognitions was written about “the massive character of the dissolution and corruption of authority, in belief, in ritual and in temporal order, . . .” about our histories and traditions as “both bonds and barriers among us,” and our art which “brings us together and sets us apart.” And if I may go on presuming to use your words, it is a novel in which I tried my prolonged best to show “the integrity of the intimate, the detailed, the true art, the integrity of craftsmanship and preservation of the familiar, of the humorous and the beautiful” standing in “massive contrast to the vastness of life, the greatness of the globe, the otherness of people, the otherness of ways, and the all-encompassing dark.”

The book is a novel about forgery. I know that if you do get into it, you will find boring passages, offensive incidents, and some pretty painful sophomorics, all these in my attempts to present “the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue” as I have seen them: I tried to present the shadowy struggle of a man surrounded by those who have “dissolved in a universal confusion,” those who “know nothing and love nothing.”

However you feel about the book, please allow my most humble congratulations on your address which provoked my taking the liberty of sending it to you, and in expression of my deepest admiration for men like yourself in the world you described.

W.

After eloping with a woman named Patricia Black, Gaddis felt he had to write a letter to her mother for some reason. What resulted is the best, and the writer even outlined it beforehand, writing, (dnt wnt to snd apologtc: proud)(come see us, I dnt know when we can get there) (household problems, $, the usual bickering over groceries, the life I hope to give her &c, but I depend on her stability & household sanity, after bachelordom &c).

May 1955

dear Mrs Black,

It is late for me to be writing you, at last, of my marriage to your daughter, and I want first to offer you my deepest apologies for uncertainty and anxiety that you have suffered because of the way we have managed things starting off our life together. Like so many difficult parts of the whole situation, this letter is hardly the way I should want to be doing even now, writing you instead of seeing you, to tell you of what is already accomplished, instead of seeking your good wishes for our plans. All of this does bring home how selfish I have been, or both of us have been perhaps, not in what we have done, but in the way we have done it.

A moment came when it seemed there were so many complications that the only thing to do, and the best thing, was to take matters into our own hands. We have been aware of the complications that would follow and, to some extent of the hurts and disappointments we might cause. My mother had met Pat and of course liked her immediately, but she too found our news rather abrupt, and had a little difficulty adjusting to it so quickly. I know how much she would have wanted to participate in such an important event in her only son’s life, and in spite of how happy she is about us now, I shall always regret causing her that disappointment. I wish that you and she could have met before this, —but I could sit here writing ‘I wish’ all day, and it wouldn’t change any of the anxiety we have caused for others. Except for these things, we are happy, I know we are going to be happy together but I hope never at the expense of others who are, in different ways, equally dear to us.

I was fortunate in meeting your son Bob, and I hope the advantage we took of his stopping here didn’t seem an unfair one, in asking him to carry our news home to you. Never having had a brother or sister myself, that relationship will probably always be strange to me, and I find wonderful how much Pat shares with her brother, even after such a long separation. I also marveled at how he could step out of army life in Alaska straight into new responsibilities, to his return to home and civilian life, and I deeply appreciate how readily he took on what we asked of him, and how well he must have taken care of it.

Now I wish I could go on to say that we were coming down to see you any time soon. But you may imagine we have a good deal of readjusting to do ourselves. For myself right now that involves pulling together enough writing work which I can do at home so that I can be with Pat here in Massapequa, instead of commuting to New York or spending the hot summer there. If I can continue to work this out, she should spend a restful and pleasant summer out here in the country, and be as healthy and ready for the fall as possible. None of this yet is the life I hope to give her, but it is a good start. Meanwhile she is an excellent cook, which isn’t difficult to appreciate after so many years of cooking for myself. But cooking aside, there are qualities in her, of patience, and kindness, and unselfishness, simple consideration and loyalty, which I know that at last I have you to thank for, in the way you brought her up. And as these things go, from generation to generation, I suppose the only way I will be able to show my appreciation will be indirectly to you, by trying to be worthy of them in her, and making her happy.

Looking back at the early part of this letter, I find a constant tone of troubled apology. I repeat it, concerning my feelings and our feelings for you, but I don’t want that to be the whole tone of all this because I am proud to have your daughter Pat for my wife, and grateful, and happy at the prospect of our life together. I hope that it will be something we will be able to share in some ways with you, and that after the anxiety we have given you, you will be proud of us.

W.

with legendary dick Donald Barthelme at an awards ceremony

Pat Gaddis divorced her husband eventually, taking the kids with her, and Gaddis remarried a travel editor at Glamour, Judith Thompson. This is his first letter to her.

August 1966

How strange this is the first ‘letter’ I have ever written you, & can’t begin “Dear Judith” with a straight face, dear girl, dear Judith, dear heaven how long ago only this time yesterday already has become.

And you may imagine how much news there is here since our telephone call—and how you haunt this house — and that downstairs room where I hope to move tonight if the children can be persuaded to move into theirs, Sarah quite entranced with hers, mirrored dresser &c — and how this letter is merely a device to see if mail really works between here and there, and so you will have something in the mail, and know I have mounted a pencil sharpener on a kitchen wall and once more spread out work.

And to tell you you must call, wire, come, if things, pressures, get too disproportionate won’t you—including $ (and use the enclosed just to keep you in balance until I see you)—though for the moment 2 days’ a week work may not be unrealistic, may allow you a little more freedom at home—the horoscopes keep insisting how splendid everything is for us, and that means work I guess, you to fight off the difficulties in your situation there, toward work; I to fight off the attractions in mine here, toward work; and toward seeing you Sunday night, barring disaster.

yours, with you know what and you know why

W.

Gaddis sent a copy of F. Scott Fitzgeralds' The Crack-Up to his daughter Sarah and enclosed the following note:

September 1970

Dear Sarah.

Here is a book I’ve meant to get you a look at since you talked of keeping a sort of notebook journal. Obviously it’s not for you to sit down and read straight through but I thought you would be interested in what one writer turned the idea into and continue and expand your own along the lines of catching ideas, impressions, thoughts, images, words and combinations of words and overheard remarks and stories and anecdotes at that instant you encounter them, which is so often one you can never recreate purely from memory and may in fact lose forever. Of course in this case, assuming Fitzgerald never expected these notes to be published, I think you find a lot of material which he would have reconsidered and thrown out and never wanted published; but at least, having written them down, he gave himself that choice, rather than putting himself through those long moments of trying to remember — What was it? that remark I heard yesterday, that idea I had last night . . . What is it that makes end of summer at Fire Island unlike anywhere else, and yet like a concentration of the whole idea of summer’s end everywhere.

See you soon, much love, write!

Papa

The following letter Gaddis wrote in the style of a classified report in order to advise his wife Judith of his activities while she was away.

REPORTREPORTREPORTREPORTREPORTREPORTREPORTREPORT EYES ONLY EYES ONLY EYES ONLY EYES ONLY AM 26FEB74 OFFICIAL CLASSIFIED 26FEB74 OFFICIAL CLASSIFIED

08:25 waved

08:26 watched down hill to make sure car turned corner safely; waved

08:28 walked dog to Aufieri garbage can and returned

08:31 poured coffee

08:45 decided to move car back to house so I would not keep looking out and thinking Judith had gone on errand and would return

08:46 saw bag with grapefruit, put it by door to remember to give to Jack

08:47 let cat in

08:48 poured coffee

08:49 saw MIL’s letter

08:59 went in to look for stamp for MIL’s letter

09:00 saw work laid out on table, decided to have drink

09:01 let cat out; decided not to have drink

09:02 decided to move car back to house so I would not keep looking out and thinking Judith had gone on errand and would return

09:04 burned toast

09:09 called John, reached hoarse lady who said he would call back

09:11 let cat in

09:12 poured coffee, looked at work laid out on table

09:14 decided to clear kitchen table and bring typewriter there to be near ’phone

09:16 tied up newspapers

09:23 emptied ashtray

09:25 decided to make list of things I must do

09:29 could not think of anything so decided not to make list

09:31 cleared kitchen table

09:34 John called; read him note from his Mrs emphasizing all underlined words but did not know Pat’s ’phone number. Haha.

09:44 let cat out

09:45 decided to move car back to house so I would not keep looking out and thinking I had gone on errand and would not return

09:46 moved car back to house

09:58 looked at work laid out on table, decided to have cereal

09:59 made cereal

10:02 ate cereal reading Swarthmore alumni bulletin; noted one alumnus who claimed 3 billion dependents for federal taxes and given 9 months in prison for filing fraudulent W-4 form, decided must remember to warn MIL who might consider something similar

10:40 looked at work spread out on table

10:41 twinge at noticing coffee cups &c, put them in dishwasher to not be reminded of departure

10:48 examined contents of refrigerator, discovered spaghetti sauce with Message and put it in freezer

10:50 discovered corned beef and potatoes

10:55 thought I should probably go down and get butter; checked first, found 4 sticks of butter

10:57 let cat in

10:58 hung up coat

10:59 put trash out

10:00 listened to news on radio

10:04 went upstairs and looked around

10:08 came downstairs and looked around

10:13 sat down and studied design in kitchen floor linoleum

10:20 looked outside for car to make sure I had not gone on errand and might not return

10:22 decided I should probably go down and get cigarettes; checked first, found 5 packs

10:24 brought typewriter in to kitchen table to be near ’phone

10:28 decided to have nap till suppertime when I could have corned beef

10:29 sat down in livingroom chair

10:33 woke startled by ghastly liquid snoring, decided I had horrible cold and should have drink

10:34 discovered snoring was being done by dog, very relieved

10:37 decided not to have drink, went to typewriter in kitchen to work

10:41 decided I should get some letters out of the way before settling down to work, got paper

10:50 could think of no one to write to

10:51 stacked wood more neatly on porch, checked newspapers to make sure they were well tied

10:57 returned to kitchen and listened to refrigerator hum

11:01 examined contents of refrigerator

11:04 thought I should probably go down and get milk; checked first, found a full quart

11:06 looked to see if mail had come but flag was still down

11:09 discovered memorandum WILLIAM THINGS TO REMEMBER and read carefully

11:29 put cat out

11:31 examined clam chowder from refrigerator

11:33 decided clam chowder looked thin, decided to add potatoes

11:34 peeled and diced 3 small potatoes and put on boil

11:51 heard mailbox, got mail

11:55 opened mail, one item from American Express with new card and literature which said read enclosed agreement carefully

11:56 read agreement carefully

PM

12:18 diced potatoes somewhat soft, added them to chowder; decided chowder looked somewhat thick, got spoon

12:22 served bowl of hot chowder, got spoon

12:23 ’phone rang: talked with Hy Cohen at agency who said check should arrive this week; who also said Aaron Asher is leaving Holt and was concerned that Asher’s departure would not or might upset me; I told him I was not unless Holt wanted their money back; he said that would be fine, certainly sell it elsewhere; I told him I was working hard on it right this minute; he said Asher might go to Dutton which would be logical following on Hal Sharlatt’s death; I said Dutton had no money; he said we will think about it, it could all work out extremely well especially if I finish the book soon; I said I would finish the book soon, was working on it right this minute; he did not answer; I told him my only real dismay at this moment was confidence and faith Asher has shown in me and my work over many years and would be a shame to part with him at this point; he said we will talk about it, that the Dutton possibility is only a possibility; I said I will not tell a sole; he said we’ll be in touch with you I said boy you better.

12:55 poured chowder back into pan to reheat

12:56 listened to news on radio

01:00 ate chowder, reading interesting article on Alaska in Swarthmore bulletin

01:21 checked upstairs, nothing changed

01:23 checked downstairs, emptied ashtray

01:26 looked at work spread out on table, noticed stamp for MIL’s letter

01:29 walked out with dog to mail MIL’s letter

01:42 returning from walk waved cheerful friendly wave to neighbor standing on corner

01:43 realised neighbor standing on corner was really Jack’s garbage can, hurried inside hoping no one had noticed

01:52 sat down at typewriter to work

01:58 ’phone rang, talked with Mr Cody a real estate agent who wished to be helpful if we wished to rent or sell our Saltaire house this summer; wrote reminder to call Savages

02:11 got notes for present sequence in book beside typewriter

02:13 suddenly realized I had better get cat food before stores closed; checked and found 2 full cans of cat food

02:19 decided to call Hy Coen back with some ideas

02:35 could not think of any ideas so declined to call Hy Coen back

02:36 reread notes for present sequence in book

02:39 reread notes for present sequence in book

02:41 decided to reread whole book through up to this point

02:42 looked at MS, decided not to reread whole book up to this point

02:44 reread notes for present sequence in book

02:47 began to type rough version of present sequence in book

03:05 dog passed through going east to west

03:07 dog passed through going west to east

04:01 began to type second page of rough draft

04:26 dog passed through west to east

04:27 dog passed through east to west

04:44 read two pages of rough version of present sequence in book

04:48 began to type third page of rough version

05:26 decided to have drink as Adrienne rang doorbell, told her to come back in the spring

05:26 fixed drink

05:28 sat down to read pages of rough version just written

05:31 laughed heartily

06:31 decided might be a good idea to start checking motels in Virginia, North and South Carolina

06:35 could not find Mobil guide to motels in Virginia, North and South Carolina; wondered where they were

06:44 wondered where they were

06:55 turned on oven to heat corned beef, dog passed through west to east; let cat in

06:57 reread pages of rough version just written

07:02 did not chuckle; wondered where they were

07:09 put in corned beef to warm; wondered where they were

07:16 fed dog; wondered where they were

07:18 fed cat; wondered where they were

07:41 served corned beef

07:42 ate corned beef

08:01 watched Benny Goodman Story did not know he was such a sap and wondered where on earth they were

Gaddis felt the barest measure of politeness for people who considered him their own because they had read his novels. Here he is turning down an interview request.

July 1981

Dear Tom LeClair.

Yours of 21 July & ‘no graceful way to ask about the interview’ must provoke no graceful way to decline it. Unfortunately the deadline of your publisher ‘who wants to schedule printing’ has got to be of less concern to me than mine.

For now then, all I can do is recall to you some lines I wrote 30 years ago in The Recognitions (p. 106 in the careless little Avon edition) asking what they want from the artist they didn’t get from his work? & why must one repeat this & repeat it when that is what the whole damned thing is about? If it didn’t come through in the work then what use or interest is an ‘interview’? All the purposes such interviews can serve seem to me, on the one hand, to say ‘this is what I really meant to accomplish’ or, on the other, some definitive statement from the writer regarding his ‘interest in making some statements about fiction and (his) work’ as you say; whereas this is precisely what his work constitutes for better or worse when he offers it, in the best & most final shape he can give it at the time, the final statement in ‘interview’ terms being, of course, his obituary, & the real final statement no more than the sum of the work itself, its fictions offering probably fewer opportunities for misinterpretation even than the interview’s that isn’t what I meant (at all).

So for the moment at any rate your notion of publishing any transcribed version of our talk edited, disclaimed or whatever, is unacceptable, as a condition of your original proposal. I appreciate your time and effort spent on it but it was very much the petulance of an afternoon.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

You can purchase The Letters of William Gaddis here. It is edited by Stephen Moore and published by Dalkey Archive.

"Many Moon" - Great Plains (mp3)

"To Remain Weightless" - Great Plains (mp3)

Blue Islands

by CATIE DISABATO

Grocery shopping is an aesthetic experience. The cardboard boxes built to hold crackers are decorated with designs that the cracker companies hope will make you feel a feeling, then buy crackers. The crackers lead to cheese. The cheese leads to fig jam. Everything I know about advertising I learned from television – certain colors make you feel certain things and what I call love was invented by guys like Don Draper to sell nylons – but I remember vividly when Coca-Cola debuted those mini-cans in the early 2000s. It was all I could do to keep myself from constantly buying them. They were so cute and little and came in Diet.

If you completely fetishize the act of grocery shopping, the way I do, it becomes totally divorced from cooking and eating. It becomes about places and things. Sometimes I manage to leave the house with an idea of the foods I want to cook. More often, I’ll leave the house with a list of grocery stores I want to visit.

photo by henrico prims

I grew up in the southern suburbs of Chicago, which, in the late 80s and early 90s, did not have a grocery store that carried organic meat and produce. My mother was a sort-of ex-hippie and wanted to raise her children on organic meat and produce. We did not have pop, we had Spritzer. We did not have potato chips in the house, we had blue corn chips. All the other kids made fun of the blue chips, they looked so strange. Sometimes, a boy would agree to eat one on a dare, like sometimes a boy would agree to eat a worm on a dare. I would insist that they tasted just like yellow corn chips, but no one would believe it until they had the chip in their mouth and they were chewing. I relished the attention from my classmates, but it was also hard to be the kid with a weird lunch. 

To get our organic items, blue corn chips, and Spritzer, my mother trekked into Chicago several times a month to visit the closest Whole Foods, approximately 30 miles from our house. She buckled us into car seats and filled a cooler with ice, to keep the meat and frozen food fresh during the long drive home.

by hannah sheffield

I remember the Whole Foods from the vantage point of a person so tiny the aisles were like long, wide stretches of road and the shelves were the height of one-story buildings. Shelves filled with colorful bags, bottles and boxes, which themselves were filled with things that tasted good. Things I could have and hold and make my own. In an age before my parents give me privacy, food was something I could own because once you eat it, no one could take it away again. My brother always stole my candy; I learned to eat it quickly so it could be mine.

I hated the fish section, which smelled bad and still smells bad. I loved the bulk goods, the tubs of grains, each with their own consistency. I could sense their enticing textures. I wanted to touch them, the way I wanted to touch paintings in museums, to see what the heavy paint felt like when it dried. While my mother ordered fish and meat at the counter, I tried to touch everything. I did not distinguish the Whole Foods from other playgrounds.

On the few occasions my father took me grocery shopping, he took me to the “regular” grocery store (in Flossmoor, Illinois, this was either Jewel Osco, Dominic’s, or Walt’s). My father lead me through the produce section, grazing. He ate green beans and cherries and anything small left out in piles. He taught me to be grazer. When I’m at Trader Joe’s, I visit the free sample stand two or three times. I eat the green beans from the produce section at Whole Foods. I also eat the nuts, candied fruit, and yogurt pretzels out of the dried goods bins. I use the plastic spoons to pour two or three items into my palm and I eat them while filling plastic bags with lentils or red quinoa.

The only distinctive grocery store my father brought me to as a child was Calabria’s, a small Italian grocery store in Blue Island, the south Chicago suburb where my father grew up. Blue Island is primarily a Hispanic neighborhood now, but when my father lived there, all of the families were Italian immigrants. My grandfather, Michael Arcangelo Disabato, was born in a town in southern Italy called Ripacandida. Calabria’s was named after a region in southern Italy so, combined with my family’s town of origin, I sometimes like to think that Blue Island was a town for southern Italians exclusively. No one ever told me this, but my grandfather died when I was eleven and I don’t remember him very well, so I make things up to fill in the emotional gap. I don’t really remember my grandfather’s voice. I don’t remember if he had an Italian accent.

Calabria’s is hard to remember, too. Narrow aisles, wire racks, boxes of pasta – all vague images. In the back, there was an Italian deli, with fresh baked bread in plastic bins. I remember the bread bins. I remember my uncle, also a Michael, and my father making us capicollo sandwiches in my grandparents’ kitchen. My father made mine with mild capicollo and no provolone cheese. My brother, a third Michael, ate the cheese and the spicy capicollo, the way it was supposed to be.

After college, I moved to Los Angeles. Every neighborhood has a farmer’s market and the produce in the “regular” grocery stores (Albertson’s, Von’s, Ralph’s) is as beautiful as the produce in a Midwestern Whole Foods. I’ve been looking for a good Italian grocery store in Los Angeles. I haven’t found one yet because I’m not really looking for a good Italian grocery store, I’m looking for something that reminds me of Calabria’s, and nothing really reminds you of half-forgotten nostalgia. I’m looking for a feeling I never felt in the first place.

Sometimes I go on a private scavenger hunt for a particular item. I once went to three different stores searching for Morningstar Black Bean Burgers, at least half of which are still in my freezer, crusting over with freezer burn. I searched for Edmond Fallot Dijon Mustard for weeks before finding it in a cheese shop in Century City. Now I see it everywhere, winking at me at the butcher shops and the specialty stores.

I’m the kind of person who will drive half an hour out of my way to go to the nearest Whole Foods, because the grocery store near my house does not have the Sea Salt & Vinegar rice crackers that I like to eat while watching Revenge and drinking red wine. The red wine is from Trader Joe’s, because Trader Joe’s is the only place I buy my wine. I’m the kind of person who will drive fifteen minutes out of my way, from one grocery store to another, just to buy one bottle of wine.

Walking the aisles, I feel a sense of calm and control which I so rarely feel outside of the grocery store. I can pretend to remedy my persistent budget worries by cutting costs in each aisle (no nuts, no meat, no pre-prepared salad). I can combat uncertainty by completing a task, nevermind how small the task. The path before me is clear and unencumbered, the goals are modest and attainable, the competition of those goals is imminent. Checkout, paper bags, refrigerator, pantry, done.

Catie Disabato is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"The Wedding Band" - The Nels Cline Singers (mp3)

"Red Before Orange" - The Nels Cline Singers (mp3)

Six-Word Story

by TERESA FINNEY

On an average, otherwise mundane Tuesday night, I have found myself splayed out on a kitchen floor that does not belong to me. The wine glass that shattered in my hand as I fell has cut deeply into my palm and wrist. Blood is trickling down onto the cold linoleum floor. Standing up requires gargantuan effort, but I make it over to the sink. Grabbing onto the counter to steady myself, I stick my hand under the cold water, which stings. I notice the blood, as if a river, streaming down my chest and pooling at the collar on my shirt.

A fact I had forgotten about in the four seconds it took me to stand up and walk to the sink, is that I fell on top of the stem of the wine glass. My chest was cut up badly and bleeding all over the empty sink. I was in shock and losing blood and I needed a hospital.

Despite the blood loss and disorientation, I managed to Google map the nearest emergency room, which I discovered was located a mere block from the apartment I was staying at. I walked there. Why I did this, I don’t know. But, my hand wrapped in a towel, and my other injury-free hand holding a dishcloth to my bleeding chest, blood dripping all over the streets of Astoria, NY, I walked there.

Twelve hours and seven stitches later I wake up on the couch back at the apartment. Instinctively I check my phone and notice my battery is at 2%. I get up from the couch and walk into the bedroom. Outside it is sunny but winter still lingers in the breeze. I charge my phone, then fall back to sleep. I’ve been house- sitting for a friend for the last eight days, and the circumstances in which I’ve found myself in my 29th year of life are clearly less than ideal. The recklessness of my 20s has finally caught up to me.

I was out of work because of my hand injury and had time to think. I had time to confront in my mind how I had gotten to that exact place in life. I considered how I had corroded my youth in alcohol and self-contempt and now that I was almost 30, I terrified myself. I knew that I would be dead soon if I stayed in New York. I would not live to be 30 if I didn't get help. I knew this to be as true as the earth orbits the sun. I decided to go home.

A few afternoons later at brunch, a friend asks, “Are you still a mess?” I pick at my BLT as we talk, then just nod. Two weeks prior I had sent her a weird late-night whiskey-fueled Facebook message. “It wasn’t a nice message,” she said. I look out the window at commuters climbing the stairs to take either the N or the Q train to either Manhattan or Brooklyn. It is another sunny but chilly day. I apologize.

"I was really drunk, I’m sorry."

Ernest Hemingway's famous six-word story reads: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The six word story of my 20s is “I was really drunk, I’m sorry.” Exactly four months shy of my 30th birthday, I write this with remorse.

In the days prior to leaving New York I joked that my fall and subsequent injury was some weird, physical manifestation of what had been going on in my mind during those days. Each time I laughed about it and each time after the laughter stopped, I realized I was not joking.

+

I am back amongst the soil that birthed me, my golden California. I am out west in a strong calculated effort to move aside all distractions that tempt me to forget myself again. Like all those times in the past when instead of writing that essay, I worried myself sick about why someone didn’t love me. Like every time I drank too much wine and stayed up until 4am instead of going to therapy. I did this and more for nearly a decade until distractions were all that I was made of.

Dusk in California is a spiritual experience. The golden, witching hour. The Santa Cruz mountains, and the Sierra foothills; the roaring Pacific Ocean, and the towering, ancient-as-time Redwood trees all seem to become even more vast and loom even larger under the gold setting sun. This is notable to me as Mom picks me up from the airport and we drive down Highway 152. I'll be staying with her while I get myself together. I don't know how else to say that I'm home because I had a nervous breakdown. I don't know what else to call it. When I realized I could have killed myself the night I fell in my friend's kitchen, it halted me entirely. The day before my flight is scheduled to leave JFK, I write "New York didn't almost kill me, I almost killed me." The distinction is important, I'll take the blame.

As soon as I land, I am dodging questions from friends and family.

"How long will you be here?"

"How are you feeling?"

Their curiosity is innocent enough but I feel threatened by their questions. They don't know that I wouldn't be able to answer them, not even if a knife was held to my 29 year-old throat. Text messages and emails go unanswered because I don't want to sound directionless so close to my 30th birthday. This feels like proof of ten years down the drain, like a sure-fire failure. Of what?

Before I can address any of their questions, I have to answer some of my own. I want to know how it is possible that residual heartaches leftover from childhood can keep an adult up at night, long after the city has gone to sleep and street lights hum an orange glow that beams into bedrooms. I want to know why thirty feels like a deadline. How can I reconcile within me the fact that a decade is just about over and what do I do about all of these regrets? What was the point of the last ten years?

Sometime around age 23 I learned what alcohol could do. Before then it was just an additive to parties, something I could take or leave. But soon it became a tool. I manipulated alcohol to make life more bearable, to make me more bearable to me. I liked the way I felt when I was drunk because I felt like someone else. I believed the lie that my father had told me once when I was a little girl, that I was “fundamentally flawed.” I believed the lie I sold myself, that I wouldn’t be successful or happy — ever — as long as I was the deeply imperfect person that I was. And because the only time I could ever escape myself was when I drank, I kept drinking. I rarely stopped. I was positive I was slowly killing myself and still, I did not care. Like the time I passed out drunk under an awning on 145th St in Harlem during a rainstorm. I had passed out first on the subway. I have vague memories of two strangers putting me into a cab, and the when I came to, I was using my scarf, covered in vomit, as a pillow. I knew this was not good, but drinking to that point was a punishment. Punishing myself in this way felt correct. It felt like the thing I had to do in order to cope with just being alive in this flawed body, with this flawed mind. The residual beliefs of my childhood taunted me, still lying all these years later.

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What I know for sure is this: I know that when I disappoint myself, it places a sensation akin to a ticking time bomb in the pit of my stomach. I know exactly the place in my chest where it feels like a smoldering heap of blue ashes when I have lost someone I love. I know the texture life takes on when I am hating myself and indulging in excess.

That I drank too much for ten years and have been worried about turning thirty that whole time are two directly related facts of my life.

I've been the youngest in my group of friends for years so I have heard amazing things about being in your 30s. It's like Dorothy opening the door to her tornado-stricken home in Oz, the technicolor land of mystery and possibility, they say.

"You instantly get an attitude about life. You just stop giving a fuck."

"You learn to love your body, finally."

"You have better sex!"

It's as if I've been watching an infomercial selling me the idea of Turning Thirty for the last ten years. Now I'm skeptical. I want a refund even before I've tested the product. I don't believe the hype. Thirty isn't Oz. I am not Dorothy. I feel time slipping away from me even though I understand I am wrong.

My 20s feel like cold, hard fact. When I think back to a year, two years, five years ago, I think of the mistakes. The alcohol-induced decisions I made, the ones that cannot be mended. I think about the people I angered, the ones I lied to because the truth was unutterable. I wonder how many of those people recoil at the drop of my name and if I'll be forgiven. I think about the men who served as mirrors that only reflected back to me my beliefs about myself. I think about the terrible things they did and said and how it was possible I could have permitted any of it. I think about the countless days and nights I drank too much in an attempt to forget about all the men who left, and all the ways in which I abandoned myself too. And that life goes on still.

There are regrets, more of them than fingers to count them on. There are failures. In no poetic way, simply, I had failed. Bills went unpaid. Phone calls went unanswered. Needs went unmet. Cold, hard fact. But because I am still here, none of that is unfixable. Life is still happening. It does not matter that I have failed, the sun will still set in the west tonight. It does not matter that I left New York before I did what I moved there to do, air still fills my lungs. Despite a raucous decade, breath still rises and falls in my chest. The depths and heights of being human have left their mark on me, and life still turns gold under a Californian sun. 

Teresa Finney is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in California. She last wrote in these pages about the exact address. She tumbls here and twitters here.

Paintings by Mehran Elminia.

Cushioning

by LINDA EDDINGS

Q: He doesn't look after you.

A: Maybe he does help me, but that's not the same.

Q: You were playing a sort of game.

A: You have hit on a pet peeve of mine. Which is the placing of the words "sort of" where that expression should not be. Perhaps it's just an aspect of your dialect.

Q: That's fair. My own problem is with the word "just." When you consider the matter at any length, the word means little to nothing at all.

A: The game Tim and I were playing was to observe and determine the relationships of various people to each other. If you spot identical twins, it's called champagne. There is nothing better.

Q: You see a father and his daughter.

A: That's a riesling. And a mother and her daughter is a merlot. Because of mere - that's the joke anyway.

Q: "That's the joke."

A: Tim noticed an old woman bending over a doll.

Q: Is that like, toilet wine?

A: You sound like him, you really do. Context is everything.

Q: Not really. Say you were dating a man and for eleven months it was going along swimmingly. At the end of that month, he gets inebriated, drunker than you have ever seen him, and gives you a black eye. Is it over?

A: What kind of car does he drive? What color is the car, his eyes? The hardest thing to do is wait for all the information. As I said, we witnessed an old woman, most likely homeless, most certainly with no fixed address, bending over a doll. She kept nodding to herself. He explained that the reason the woman was nodding was because the doll was telling her something.

Q: What was the doll telling her?

A: I was on vacation once with my parents; I had just turned twelve and they took to me to the Riviera. I was from the city; I couldn't remember ever seeing a beach. I met another girl my age named Eloise. She showed me necklaces she had constructed of seashells, and when I encouraged her, she showed me the animal that provided one of her shells. It was seated on a tiny purple cushion.

Q: She honored it.

A: Not quite. It was a jail. But you have perhaps hit on why the woman was nodding to her doll. She may have considered it divine.

Q: Do you believe that?

A: No. But Tim showed a mixture of disgust and resignation that I finally realized was concern.

Q: "Perhaps" is another expression like that, for me. You've said it twice today. Isn't everything "perhaps", when you get down to it?

A: I know someone who would agree with you. "The closest thing to God is an individual."

Q: What did Tim say next?

A: We began to argue. He said that she belonged in hospice care, or under some supervision at least. I said that we were all taking orders from someone, and a variety of other things. Sometimes I think I sabotage my relationships, but this was not one of those times. Later, under the covers, he was more gentle than he had ever been.

Q: You don't often show your anger to those closest to you.

A: That's perhaps true, but it was something else. It was sort of that he could not decide whether he was the old woman, or the doll. And he just knew the fact that he was waiting for me to confirm his suspicions meant that he was more likely the old woman.

Q: Have you had your period this month?

A: I'm having it now. There was blood on his cock. I wiped it off before he could see it. A certain type of person never looks at herself unless she is told to, and even then.

Q: That old woman you saw. You said that she nodded her head to what the doll was saying. Did she ever shake her head? Yes? That seems like an important distinction.

A: I didn't finish the story. In the morning, he wanted sex again, but was afraid to say so. What bothered me was that he wouldn't just ask me for it. Because if it was the reverse, that is what I would do.

Q: You came.

A: Yes. But as I was coming, he was talking to me, not even about me, or what he was doing.

Q: What did he say exactly, as you came? This may be important.

A: He said, "I'm glad we didn't meet on Tinder."

Q: He sounds like an old woman. Was the animal on the purple cushion dead by the way? That seashell girl. When you were on the beach.

A: Eloise, yes. She arranged her shells by color, then by various other criteria, and then by size. She explained the virtues of each separate arrangement. Then I noticed that she moved me around her arena in the exact same fashion as the shells she held in her tiny hand. I told her that it was pointless to arrange anything by size, now. There was no real way of telling how much it would grow.

Q: When he was inside of you. When you came, you told me what he said when you had your orgasm. What did you say?

A: Nothing of any import. It felt like I was listening, not to him, to the world beneath him.

Q: Did he come?

A: Yes.

Q: What did he say when he came?

A: He asked me what time it was. As if there was none at all to waste.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Abbas Kiarostami.

"The Bones" - One Clueless Friend (mp3)

"Bird in Flight" - One Clueless Friend (mp3)

The Marvel

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The first thing Jean Marais noticed about Jean Cocteau was that he kept a scarf knotted so tightly around his neck he could barely imagine how blood got to the man's brain. Marais was a mimbo of 24, an aspiring actor. (He was born when Cocteau himself was 24.) A procurer had selected Marais for Cocteau, who hoped to find an unknown star to feature in his adaptation of Oedipus the King.

Marais approached Cocteau for the audition at the man's opium den in the Hotel Castille. Cocteau was unimpressively, disgustingly clad in a bathrobe dotted with cigarette holes and various other fluids. His hands were ghastly pale because he kept his shirtsleeves buttoned so tightly. Marais was not one for detail; furthermore he would take any suitable work. He later wrote, "I felt intimidated, lost, declassed in this milieu given to strange forms of glory."

The only true word was strange.

Cocteau absconded with Marais to his country villa in Martigas: he had many various routines that sated his artistic, sexual and chemical needs, and Marais would be crucial in each sphere. Starring as Galahad in Cocteau's production of The Knights of the Round Table, Marais was just as useful in preparing his lover's opium pipes and allowing the older man to swallow his semen. When Cocteau was too far gone to be wakened by a firm shake, it was Marais' job to blow opium into his lungs to bring him back to life.

The second World War interrupted this idyll. The pair were vacationing in Saint-Tropez at the time. Marais was forced to enlist, and Cocteau abandoned his apartment at Place de la Madeleine.

the author in 1920

It was the unexpected end to a great love story, for Cocteau had written, "It isn't uncommon for a man to become the captive of some zone in his city and to remain imprisoned there for life. Some spells binds him to the forms and fluids that emanate from it. In my case, the temple of the Madeleine forces me to radiate about its columns. From hotel to hotel, flat to flat, I have been stumbling about for years within that geometrical shape which prolongs, like some baleful halo, the bulky, green-gabled church." He was now 50.

Cocteau used his influence to get Marais a relatively safe post as a chaffeur. Having flunked out of that position, he was assigned to a bell tower where his job was to identify incoming German aircraft, which due to his myopia he could not see. He spent most of the time tanning and talking to Cocteau on the phone. Coco Chanel sent Marais various shirts and accessories.

When a squadron of German planes did finally arrive, not even a blind man could mistake it. Now everyone left Paris, and the darkening pall of soot and ash over the city made it impossible to see more than a car's length in front of you. The French wanted out, the Nazis marched down the Champs-Élysées. The city archives had been bundled on a barge for preservation; the structure sank.

Marais and Cocteau returned to Paris during the occupation, taking an apartment in the Palais Royal. At first Cocteau made a great show of dining out on black market steak, but as homosexuals, the two were better off hidden. For others these were lean years, but for Cocteau and Marais, the next buffet was continously at hand. If the war ruined one meal, the next was always in the offing.

It was occupied Paris, but more importantly, it was still Paris. Simone de Beauvoir recounts her first meeting with the playwright:

Cocteau looked just like the pictures of him, and his torrential flow of conversation made me dizzy. Like Picasso he dominated the conversation, but in his case words were his chosen medium, and he used them with acrobatic dexterity. Fascinated, I followed the movement of his lips and hands. Once or twice I thought he was going to trip up; then - hurrah! - he recovered, the knot was neatly tied, and he would be off again, tracing a new series of complex and exotic arabesques in mid-air.

He expressed his admiration of No Exit in several most gracefully turned compliments, and then began to recall his own early days in the theatre, and especially the production of Orpheus. It was at once apparent that he was absolutely absorbed in himself, but this narcissistic streak neither contricted his vision nor in any way cut him off from contant with other people: the interest he had shown in Sartre and the way he talked about Genet both offered ample proof of this.

When the bar closed we walked down the Rue Bonaparte till we reached the quais. We were standing on a bridge, watching the Seine rippling beneath us like black watered silk, when the alert sounded. Pencil-thin searchlight beams swept the sky, and flares exploded. By now we had become used to these noisy, apocalyptic displays, but tonight's seemed an especially fine one, and what good luck to find ourselves stranded near this deserted river, alone with Cocteau!

When the aircraft fire died away, all was silent except for our footsteps - and the sound of his voice. He was saying that the Poet should hold aloof from his age, and remain indifferent to the follies of war and politics. "They just get in our way," he went on, "the Germans, the Americans, the whole lot of them - just get in our way."

Although Marais was as gorgeous as ever, Cocteau had found the playwright Jean Genet. He romanced the younger writer using completely opposite tactics, showing only a slow appreciation of his artistry and tip-toeing into his life. Genet's sincerity matched Cocteau's extravagance, and though the affair was brief, the important thing is that two genuises were able to take the full measure of one another. Genet later wrote,

A thick layer of human humus, always fetid, exhales puffs of heat which sometimes make us blush with shame. A sentence, a verse, the pure and almost innocent stroke of a drawing pen emits smoke between the interstices of words, at their intersection point: ill-smelling and heavy air which reveals some intense, underground life. Thus, the work of Jean Cocteau had the apparance of a light, aerial civilization suspended in the heart of ours. The poet's very person adds to it, thin, gnarled and silvery like olive trees.

Despite their respective affairs, Marais and Cocteau retained their relationship. Along with a friend, the three purchased a house in Milly together where Cocteau planned to retire. Eventually their sexual arrangement dissipated into mere friendship, and the corporation which purchased the property was dissolved. Cocteau still needed every ally he could muster.

Pablo Picasso never requested or enjoyed Cocteau's visits, gaining a healthy approbation of the man over time. Cocteau would therefore attach himself to various groups visiting the artist so that his arrival would not seem so unwelcome. Jean employed the biographer James Lord for this very purpose once, and when Lord returned to Picasso's estate for a second visit by himself, Picasso asked him, "Why did you bring that whore to my house?"

piasso, francine weisweller, jacqueline roque and cocteau

It was in this unsettled state, lacking some friends who had perished in the war or simply died of old age, that Cocteau wrote Diary of an Unknown. Cocteau biographer Frederick Brown looked down on the fanciful work: "Vacuums are not empty, time and space are but points of view, and Cocteau's duplicity is a metaphysical phenomenon for which he cannot be held responsible." In Brown's defense, it is almost impossible to write a serious treatment of Jean Cocteau's life without laughing.

"I wonder," Cocteau says in that volume, "if I could be otherwise than the way I am, and if my difficulty in being, if the faults which impede my career are not my very career, the regret of not having some other?"

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

with Stravinsky in the early 1950s

"Un Peu D'Innocence" - Miracles (mp3)

"Quand Je Tombe" - Miracles (mp3)

Science Is Over

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

At the dawn of the 1980s, no one’s wardrobe was complete without a pair of Fiorucci jeans. Preferably you would have seven of the skin-tight pairs — one in every color of the rainbow, to be worn with your gold Fiorucci cowboy boots. When he turned 15, Marc Jacobs "saved and saved" for his first pair. Miuccia Prada has claimed to have only ever owned one pair of jeans; they were from Fiorucci. Diana Ross, Jackie Onassis, and Lauren Bacall were fans, as was every 13-year-old girl with a Seventeen magazine subscription.

Elio Fiorucci opened his first shop in Milan in 1967 not with couture in mind, but with the idea of bringing the London street trends of the Youthquake movement to Italy. The Fiorucci line debuted shortly after in 1970. However, Elio was a marketing whiz with a taste for the outré, not a designer. The clothing reflected this; much of the line consisted of basics like polo shirts, denim jackets, and tote bags emblazoned with Fiorucci’s winged putti logo.

To Elio’s credit, before Fiorucci, designer denim was unheard of. The company was also one of the first to embrace a global aesthetic, importing not just English looks, but also drawing inspiration from traditional prints and fashions of India and Brazil, with Fiorucci sending young trendspotters around the world (or downtown) to scout for unique local styles to be reproduced by the label. "What he had done was to capture a kind of international ideal of teenage promise and bottle it," said Eve Babitz, author of Fiorucci: The Book.

While the garish fashions of Fiorucci may have rarely made the pages of Women’s Wear Daily, the stores’ parties did. The opening of the Beverly Hills store was famously shut down by the Los Angeles fire department. A year later, Blondie held a post-concert party in the same store to celebrate their album Parallel Lines going platinum. Attendees Wilt Chamberlain, James Woods, and Karen Black watched as Debbie Harry arrived in a World War II tank. Today one can revisit the scene by watching Xanadu, which features Olivia Newton-John and Michael Beck dancing to ELO’s "All Over the World" while Gene Kelly shops for a new suit.

The fluorescence of the Beverly Hills shop may have been permanently archived on celluloid, but the real epicenter of Fiorucci’s cool was its New York store at 125 East 59th Street. Opening in the spring of 1976, it soon became a destination for all those young and weird. The press compared its atmosphere of debauchery to that of Studio 54. In 1977, New York magazine would declare: "All it took this year to achieve instant chic, day or night, at the slickest New York party or the trashiest was a pair of $110 gold cowboy boots from Fiorucci."

Much of the store’s cachet was due to its eccentric staff. Klaus Nomi, drag performer Joey Arias, designer and filmmaker Maripol, and Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone all worked for Fiorucci during its heyday. The store was one of the first places to sell Betsey Johnson’s clothing and exhibit Keith Haring’s artwork. Fiorucci’s knack for youth-driven pop-art consumerism also attracted the likes of Andy Warhol. Surrounded by a coterie that included Truman Capote, Warhol launched Interview magazine with an in-store party. Douglas Coupland was inspired to quit studying physics after visiting the store.

"There was this absolute density of color and imagery," Coupland recalled. "I just thought it was the most perfect place I had ever been to." He brought back a postcard (the only thing he could afford). “It was on my desk. I looked at it and thought, 'Science is over.' I stopped caring about school. I had been a straight-A student and I started getting D’s. It felt like the best drug ever, and I thought, 'If this is what a bad grade feels like, this is great!'"

The store was a playground of glitter and spandex. Wide-eyed squares in their drab trench coats regularly gathered in front of the legendary window displays to see fashion at its most fun and subversive. It was Shangri-la for freaks and the conservative world couldn’t get enough. A People article from 1981 describes one memorable display: “Wearing a Merry Widow corset, bikini bottoms, fishnet stockings, and spiked heels, the Barbie Doll model reclined in a zebra-striped bathtub that had been placed in the window of Fiorucci's Manhattan store. For the next six hours she read smutty paperbacks, ate bananas, and blew bubbles — to the delight of a street crowd pressing 20 deep against the window.”

By way of explaining Fiorucci’s aesthetic, the article quotes Elio as calling haute couture “pathetic.” He embraced a certain trashiness in dress — lamé, peek-a-boo plastic, animal prints — literally incarnated when the store gave away miniature garbage-pail backpacks covered in brand-name stickers to customers who spent over $150.

Despite its popularity, the New York store wasn’t necessarily profitable. In the beginning, Fiorucci bet on the store’s ability to establish the brand’s image within the United States and, in turn, entice retailers around the country to sell Fiorucci merchandise, increasing the company’s wholesale business. At first the gamble paid off, and profits quadrupled the year following the store’s opening.

However, the label was built around the fickle tastes of the youth market and success was short-lived. Soon after Fiorucci jeans hit the market, Calvin Klein signed a jeanswear deal and his brand would emerge as the new must-have designer denim, bringing along with it his beige-on-beige minimalism as the look du jour. The Manhattan Fiorucci shuttered in 1988. The brand was further hindered by a series of ineffective business deals and relaunches that flopped.

Today a Williams-Sonoma occupies the 59th Street address and the Fiorucci name doesn't hold the same prestige it once did, but its impact remains. The boy who once spent his summers hanging out in the store, Marc Jacobs, has said his Marc line is influenced by the label. And the cheap plastic key chains and makeup compacts of his accessories boutique are certainly a nod to the tourist-friendly knickknacks Fiorucci used to carry. Any store that has hired a DJ and tried to turn retail into a party experience (ahem, Fashion’s Night Out) is indebted to the Italian label, as is anyone who has tried bring a little sex and trash into fashion.  

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and here. She last wrote in these pages about Device 6.

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Joy Williams oozes a milky substance

"The Key" - Hercules & Love Affair ft. Rouge Mary (mp3)

"I Try To Talk To You" - Hercules & Love Affair ft. John Grant (mp3)

Someone Was Awake

by MICAH RUELLE

The last few nights I’ve been sleeping with the window open. A few trains pass by our home in the night, and as you can imagine, the sound is even more robust without the window as a buffer. This nightly occurrence drives my housemate up the wall, stirs up the curses in her when the train’s route is brought up by guests. She rants it's the only reason why she was able to afford a down-payment on the house. But I like it.

All my associations with trains have been very positive. Growing up, my parents had a tiny condo off of Clear Lake, Iowa. We’d drive up on the weekends to ski, fish, visit the dollar theater in town, and spend time in the park. Sometimes, a carnival would come through, and I would be allowed to ride on one or two “safe-looking” rides. Clear Lake is quaint. Thursday evenings are celebrated by locals, during which time they have their own festivals and parades. But aside from a few weeks of the summer, we were one of the invaders — the tourists that come to vacation Friday-Sunday. I’m afraid it won’t always stay so sweet, but a part of me still wants to get married on a white Missouri Ferryboat, lovingly named “The Lady of the Lake,” that has resided there since before I first visited the lake for the first time as a little girl.

One Halloween my parents let me attend a ghost-story night that was hosted on the top deck of the boat, under the stars. Regardless of the time of year, though, in the middle of the night you could hear the train pass through town. And every time I heard it, I remember feeling a warmth, the passing “oh yeah — there it is.” Someone was awake, in the middle of the night, steering the train. Someone was driving a beautiful, metal beast through the flat plains of the Midwest, keeping watch. I always slept so well those weekends, even if it was more to do with the physical exhaustion and heat then anything else.

In my early twenties, I moved to small town in Missouri that was a common stop for trains along the way to Kansas City and St. Louis. The summers there were considerably warmer, stickier than in Iowa. My friends and I would stay up on the back porch, usually lounging in a hammock and a few folding chairs, talking into the early morning hours, the bugs being electrified to death to the soundtrack of some new music L had just found. I miss that girl.

Once I escaped by train from an unbearably awkward situation which occurred during a cousin’s wedding. For everyone’s pride, I won’t go into details, but I was annoyed to the point that I called my grandmother a few hours away in Minot, North Dakota to see if I could stay with her immediately after the celebration was all over. From Minot, I took the train to St. Paul, where I was greeted by a few university friends and flowers. Escaping by train sounds silly and archaic to the point where I expect associations to fork at either a John Wayne western or a Russian novel. The situation is, of course, laughable now. As cliche as it sounds, if it were to happen again, I would’ve done the exact same thing. I spent most of the actual trip to St. Paul watching the sun rise through the train windows and reveling in the sensation of how much I wanted to stay on it — just a little while longer, much like kids on swings. 

When I moved to Oxford, my mother and I had planned a mini-trip beforehand. The ride from London to Oxford was considerably less romantic, lots of stuffy commuters and stink and noise. And of course, we were dragging along with us a considerable amount of luggage as I would be staying for some time. Still, I can’t imagine Great Britain without trains, and I hope the day never comes when my associations between the two lessen. There’s something nice, too, in knowing that a massive city was right there, on the cusp of our very old town, just an hour or so out.

It seems nothing short of fitting that my window is just eclipsed by the fence that helps to pull the trains past our home in the middle of the night in Austin. I hope that I always live in a place with trains that sing loud enough for me to hear them, but far enough away for me to still interpret it as just that: singing.

For legal reasons, I can’t touch on this point for long, but at the assisted living home in which I work, one of the residents shares my love of trains. In the car, he always points out what train it is, where it must be going, and how far it could keep rolling if it so desired. He even owns an old hat that he wears religiously with a prominent train logo on the front. It’s the kind of hat a mom would’ve ruined in the wash, or thrown out in secret. He might love trains more than anyone I’ve ever met, and probably ever will. This thought simultaneously fills me and then, all of a sudden, threatens to drench me in a kind of sadness — as is a pattern with so many things I experience. For whatever reason, I’m deeply disposed to melancholy, which I manage — even at moments like this, thinking of mortality. I’ve kept at the managing for years, and have finally grown comfortable enough with it as a companion. We’ve made a truce, but I’m the one that upholds the peace.

My birthday was a few days ago, and I’m struck by how the life I have lived — outside of me — has been beautiful so far. And I say that in a detached kind of way — looking at the facts, people, and places— lining them up on a timeline, finding myself shocked, and weirdly denying that I’m involved. These memories just involve figures that looked like me and thought and acted like me — but distinctly aren’t me. Said figures are passing through that place, loving and being loved by these people, and raising some sort of hell, and listening for trains in the night.

Writing all this about trains makes me wonder if I’d much rather get married on a train than a ferryboat. Yes, and if not on a train, maybe a train station somewhere. Do conductors have the same power to marry people as sea captains? Just so we’re clear, this train-wedding tangent is only half of the absurd girlhood fantasies I haven’t managed to shake in adulthood, if I’m honest. And to put it even more bluntly, I can’t write over 500 words about why I wanted to get married in a water-processing plant for quite some time. It’s a long story that I have no intention of telling, so here I am making myself ridiculous on another topic: trains. Come fall, I’ll be returning to my masters program in the Hill Country of Texas. During my commutes, I will be delayed by the seemingly endless train that cuts through the middle of the town, which will bring on a new-found annoyance for the steaming, huffing beauty. But that’s no matter; all Beauty can act like that.  

Micah Ruelle is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here and her tumblr here.

Photographs by the author.

"Who Are You, Really?" - Mikky Ekko (mp3)

Desperate Uncertainty

by RACHEL WILLIAMS

Turn
creator Craig Silverstein

It has been six years since the Emmy award-winning miniseries John Adams aired on HBO. Based on David McCullough’s acclaimed biography of America’s second president, the series stripped away the veneer of mythology that swirls around the events of the Revolutionary War, humanising the Founding figures who dominate cultural depictions of the conflict, and injecting a dose of grime and cynicism into an all-too-often sanitised and triumphal narrative.

AMC’s new Sunday night offering, Turn, based on Alexander Rose’s book Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, does even more to disrupt the Founding Father narrative, focusing on places, people, and actions that have, until now, lurked on the periphery of the popular imagination.

Turn tells the story of the Culper Spy Ring, established at George Washington’s command to operate in the heart of British territory at a time when conventional methods of warfare were failing to break the empire’s stranglehold. From the outset, this is an unconventional Revolutionary War tale; we start, not with the Boston Massacre of 1770, nor with boxes of tea cast over gunwales in 1773, but months into the war – months after the heady rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence has given way to the bloody, protracted reality of securing permanent separation from the Crown.

The scrawled text which opens the series is loaded with language that underlines how doomed this project seems – Washington’s forces are in retreat everywhere, and the men and women who will eventually call themselves Americans are dismissed as “insurgents,” “rebels,” “sympathisers.”

The geographical locus of the series is unusual, too; far from Philadelphia and the high political wranglings of the Continental Congress, this war plays out in the fields and woodlands surrounding the tiny community of Setauket, Long Island. Here is fledgling America at its most untameable: the action takes place, not in the stately buildings and hushed council chambers of John Adams, but along boggy coastlines and in ancient forests. New York City, the main counterpoint to the wilderness of Setauket, is a bawdy, corrupt place filled with licentious theatres, shadowed corners, and dank jails.

The people of isolated, inconsequential Setauket, then, react to the continuing British occupation with varying degrees of disgruntlement. Among them, struggling to get through the war unscathed, is Abe Woodhull (Jamie Bell), a young farmer with a family to feed and a maggoty crop of cabbages to tend.

Abe is no idealistic hero – he is more concerned with the debts against his name than with the lofty aims of independence, yet he finds himself drawn against his will back into the orbit of his old friends, bluecoated Connecticut Dragoon Ben Tallmadge (Seth Numrich) and scruffy smuggler Caleb Brewster (Daniel Henshall). Tallmadge and Brewster, their bridges in Setauket burned through public declaration of their Patriotism, and aware that the dastardly British have a mole in the Continental army, single out their old friend to turn spy for the rebels.

Even before he is recruited, Abe’s efforts to keep the marks and taints of war from his door are increasingly futile; there are British regulars billeted in his house, their red coats a violent and ominous disruption to the grubby, autumnal palette of his farm. Even his little son is a political battleground – his wife, Mary, warns against teaching the boy to walk (“the sooner he can walk, the sooner he can march”) only days before Abe’s father brings a soldier toy fit for a future Loyalist.

No matter how hard Abe tries to hold onto the structures and traditions that have shaped his life, he can see them crumbling before his eyes. There is a naivety to his conviction that life will revert to its old rhythms once the war is over. Legacies, his father warns, have been sullied forever and irreparable rifts are opening in the community. Lovers are torn apart by politics, church pews are ripped out and replaced with officers’ desks, and the respect and obedience once considered a parent’s due are no longer foregone conclusions.

The simmering tensions and ambiguous loyalties at play in Setauket are symptomatic of the larger crises of social, moral, and political authority that made the Revolution possible. Major Hewlett (Burn Gorman, in excellent pursed-lipped form), the local commander, loudly heralds the primacy of the law from the safety of his garrison, even as, outside, villagers re-enact the most mythologised of anti-establishment stories - Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot - with a gusto that makes it difficult to discern where their sympathies lie.

It is all too easy to forget how distinct the colonies were from each other in 1776, and the vast, perilous distances people, goods, and information had to traverse. The task of building a nation from insular, isolated localities was immense, haphazard – we forget, too, how unlikely a Patriot victory was at almost every stage of the war. It was almost inconceivable that the British crown would be defeated by these upstart provincial rebels, especially when so many were cut from the same cloth as Abe Woodhull; politicised accidentally and against their will, seeking nothing more than a quiet life.

This is what Turn does best; it explodes the myth of inevitability, and reminds us that America’s future was far from secure in 1776, by flipping the triumphalist, teleological motifs of previous cultural incarnations of the Revolution on their head. There is plenty that is familiar here – cold, plum-voiced British officers, plucky tavern wenches, gruff Scotsmen – but there is much more that is new, or different, or troubling.

This is a grimier, messier Revolutionary War than we usually see, one where vicious scout groups wage amoral, opportunistic guerrilla warfare in the undergrowth, and where political allegiance is based as much on pragmatism as principle. "They picked the wrong side," Abe’s father, Richard, says of Patriot families forced to flee the town, urging his son to break all ties with dangerous sympathisers. Even if we know that, eventually, he will be proved wrong, Turn captures the desperate uncertainty of the Revolutionary era, and in so doing, renders the actions of the rebels – especially the reluctant among them – more remarkable and more extraordinary. There is a sweet and knowing irony to Major Hewlett’s smug quotation from Henry IV, Part II, when, relaxing after a fine meal, safe in the knowledge of the might of the British army, he declares, "O God! that one might read the book of fate,/ And see the revolution of the times/ Make mountains level, and the continent,/ Weary of solid firmness, melt itself/ into the sea!"

Rachel Williams is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about Sleepy Hollow. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find her twitter here.

"Vertigo" - Jason Derulo ft. Jordin Spark (mp3)

"Bubblegum" - Jason Derulo ft. Tyga (mp3)

Vikings of Our Day

by RACHEL SYKES

Silicon Valley
creators Mike Judge, Dave Krinsky & John Altschuler

In HBO's Silicon Valley, the tech industry is a lot like Rome before the fall. As unassuming techies gain millions by selling apps to Google, the pilot episode leads us through a world of monster parties held in cavernous mansions and filled with awkward people. In one courtyard, a baffled Kid Rock plays to largely unmoving crowd of coders whilst, in another, strangely bearded men hypothesise on whether the properties of liquid shrimp, for $200 a quart, are consistent with ejaculate.

Palo Alto is like Rome, then, but largely without the hedonism. At the heart of Silicon Valley are four programmers, Richard (Thomas Middleditch), Big Head (Josh Brener), Bertram (Martin Starr), and Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), who are archetypal computer nerds living and working in a tech “incubator” and hoping to create the newest, weirdest app to finally make it big.

Indeed, the “incubator” is largely a frat house for nerds whose residents write apps like Nip Alert which provides the nearest location of a woman with erect nipples. Unlike fraternities, however, this bravado doesn’t quite fit – Richard and his co-workers are clearly the tiniest fish learning how to swim with the sharks. By day, they surf dating websites specialising in Asperger’s and by night, when a stripper calls round at the house, they scatter like lightening offering excuses that range from “I need to make a playlist” to “I’ve overcooked some water.”

These are awkward men, then, distinguished by their “somewhat ghostly features,” who are reluctant colleagues and only sometimes friends. Importantly, and perhaps most interestingly too, they are poised at the very beginning of something huge, living together out of necessity as technophiles flock to Palo Alto and raise rents way beyond the programmer’s living wage.

Show runner Mike Judge, best known for creating Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and the near canonical Office Space, is committed to documenting the pitfalls of the programming Gold Rush. After Judge graduated from UCSD in 1987, he moved to the area of Northern California already known as Silicon Valley and began work at a start-up video card company. Quitting after just three months, Judge is vocal about how much he hated his time there, likening the company’s culture, his colleagues, and their ethos to the Stepford Wives.

Twenty years on and in Silicon Valley the platitudes of the Steve Jobs generation have gone into overdrive. One fictional tech company, Hooli, regularly baits its employees with slogans and banners as Judge artfully shows how these institutional platitudes seep into the culture.

Early in the pilot, Richard attends a terrifyingly accurate TED talk in which a venture capitalist rails against the prescriptive learning of the education system. “The true value of a college education is intangible,” a detractor yells back. “The true value of snake oil is intangible as well,” he replies, receiving a witless and congratulatory laugh from the audience. In the new tech world order, every batshit concept has its own inspirational platform which largely goes unchecked.

It is Richard, however, who is the heart of the show as he designs a website called Pied Piper which helps artists identify copyright infringement. This idea seems laughable to many of Richard’s rivals: as one colleague mutters, nobody on the Internet cares about stealing anymore. However, whilst making fun of Pied Piper, a group of engineers realise that Richard has developed a compression algorithm that has the potential to make whoever refines it a billionaire.

The repercussions of the technology are endless, they venture, and Richard is forced to make a choice which, from the way his body reacts, could be the first of his life: should he sell his algorithm and buy a lifetime of liquid shrimp or should he accept a smaller sum from a company willing to let him be CEO of his own venture?

By the end of the pilot Richard is suddenly leading his own company. This decision sets up the rest of the series and the anticipated takedown of the Silicon Valley mentality which will presumably rob Richard and his friends of their ethics one by one. The decision to strike out alone also sets up the dilemma of aspiration that must be the show’s main focus. “For thousands of years,” the programmers mourn, “guys like us have gotten the shit kicked out of us. But now, for the first time, we are living in an era where we can be in charge and build empires. We could be the Vikings of our day.”

Judge knows, however, that the revenge of the skinny white man is not a concept that can run and run. Through his knowing takedown of the TED industry, his send up of the charitable projects and “spiritual” gurus guiding many of today’s CEOs, Silicon Valley represents the absurdities driving the innovations of the modern age and, in its opening episodes, shows the potential to grow into a large scale interrogation of big business, “ethical” living, and the inferiority complex driving the surprising successes of the geeky white male.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. She last wrote in these pages about Hannibal. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"In Silence" - The Folk (mp3)

"Deep Space" - The Folk (mp3)

Hard People

The poet Charles Henri Ford was gay, he had a boyfriend, and he was open to other things. Say, for example, he saw a man passing by on the street. He might think of him later, assuming he had a particular flair or gravitas. Years later the individual might appear in one of Ford's poems, for the only thing he enjoyed more than sex was immersing himself in his art. 

In his diaries, Ford proves himself the best American journaler of his century. He makes Kafka's cogent observational entries seem clunky and unaware of themselves in contrast, because he takes so much of what the world is in without flinching. In his primary relationship with the painter Pavlik Tchelitchew and the other affairs he consummated in full view of his partner, Henri Ford brings the sex life of his period into full and magnificent display in all its decadence, glory and shame.

The entries that follow are highly excerpted from the original manuscript, which you can purchase here.

The masculine type of simple boy who goes with girls and yet has something passive about him. The incredible looking gymnast who appeared in the weightroom yesterday at the Y: face of a soap-sculpture athlete (baby face), expressionless corn-blond hair contrasting with double-thick black eyelashes which gave the final artificial touch - what can you do with a big doll like that? Why, it's too heavy to pick up.

+

We were sitting in the front row, someone pinched my ear from the back, I turned around and it was Carl Van Vechten. Carl is editing some works of Gertrude Stein, I sent him recently this quotation from Jung: "...only when we have found the sense in apparent nonsense, can we separate the valueless from the valuable."

Gertrude Stein told me, in 1933, after she learned of my liaison with Pavlik: "Americans are strong but Russians are stronger. You'll come out the little end." And when she couldn't "break it up" she stopped seeing me.

+

Pavlik, as he went to bed last night, "I don't love anybody." "Not even me?" "Not even myself." His work is at the point where he can't go back and cannot see his way forward.

Yesterday afternoon we went to New Haven to see the Sartre play. Jed Harris' "restrained" direction is more strained than directed. The casting is abominable — Boyer no more than a voice. The play has been disastrously cut and mauled — it's cheap with a cheapness even Edward, My Son doesn't touch. If this is the theater, take me away from it.

Bert told me of the women he'd had in Milwaukee, Philadelphia - and in Newfoundland, where they wanted to go out and fuck in the snow... "And when you jerk off do you try to make it last a long time?" Bert: "No, I like to get it over with as soon as possible." He told me of how they used to extract the alcohol from shellac, on board ship, by straining it through a loaf of white bread. And he said, "It's been so long since I've had a woman that it's pathetic."

The human, being there - one is moved, that's all.

+

Where does sleep go when we get enough?

We float on a cloud of sleep through a landscape of dream.

Is sleep, like the sun, always there even when we don't see it?

And if I married a girl, I'd want to sleep with her — both of us naked, in a double bed, the light would go out and we'd begin to fuck. Sex would be no problem. The problem would be: would she bore me the next day?

On arrival in Weston Friday before tea, Bert jumped into his Levis, looking more sexy than ever, and we three took a walk. Vorisoff, our neighbor, came to dinner. Shortly after dinner Bert and I went upstairs, he wanted to look at the pornographic playcards and since there was nothing else to do he suggested we go to bed so I went back downstairs and said goodnight to Vorisoff and Pavlik. Bert was going to spend the night in my bed. "Fuck me between the legs," he said — and hollered when I hit the piles which seem to be practically out — because the next afternoon even my tongue hurt them (I had taken him in his bathrobe downstairs and washed his ass for him.) So after we had both come (I sucked him after shooting between his legs — I can see him now in bed lifting one leg to wipe the come off his crotch with the towel I tossed him), he said he was hungry so we had scrambled eggs, then he said he felt "jumpy," that he wanted to take a walk and wanted me to get dressed and go with him. We had had Scotch after we got back. I shall make a list of "What's beautiful about Bert." Not now — it's too long.

+

Last evening before bedtime Pavlik had another of his crises, in which he unloaded his feelings about our relationship. The most terrible thing he said was that he had the feeling I was waiting for him to die and that when he did die I wouldn't shed a tear: "Americans are the hardest people in the world..."

He said that when I was away from the apartment, then he "bloomed," that there were other people who "calmed" him when he was nervous, but that I drained him — "I feel your pulling, pulling all the time, that's why you look so young, you age me, if you were to stay away from me one year you wouldn't look like you do now, like your portrait, just look in the mirror after one year, you'll see!"

I told him, "If we are only staying together out of convenience and cowardice, then it's pathetic, a break should be made..."

+

The voice of Leonor over phone - soft, and low pitched, very seductive.

I like the idea of liking girls and going to bed with them but I'm afraid I'm much too conditioned by boy-loving. On the boat, in the group Tanny-Bobby-Betty (latter a dark skinned ballerina traveling with Tanny), it was always Bobby who set off the sparks and whom I liked to look at, touch, listen to — I'm made that way, that's all.

+

Concentration is like an animal or rare plant that must be hunted — I'm on the road. "My shitting is of a completely different kind now," Pavlik announces, on the road to recovery.

Up at six and found a feather in my bed, as though, while I was sleeping, I'd been a bird.

+

There was a tremendous circle around the moon last night ("like the asshole of the universe," I told Pavlik.) Even the sun can embrace but half the world at once.

+

In the marketplace: a little girl's pushing a littler girl's screaming face in the placid face of a munching sheep. A trembling white duck being weighted in hand-scales: part of the trembling world, part of me.

Mountains change, even the bare rock ones with their melting leaves of snow.

Pavlik is absolutely as wild as a domestic cat — always ready to be petted or frightened.

A gypsy woman asked me for 10 lire for bread for a child then proposed to read my hand and I let her - she said I had an amico who wished me well from his heart but that an end would soon come to our friendship.

+

Dear Jung is so sensible about sex: "A direct unconstrained expression of sexuality is a natural occurrence and as such neither unbeautiful nor repulsive. The 'moral' repression makes sexuality on one side dirty and hypocritical, on the other shameless and obtrusive.

Gino is here. He is unbelievably sweet and pure. We took a nap together after lunch and he was very affectionate and caressing but — "If you were a girl..."

He kissed me goodnight but wouldn't let me sleep with him.

+

Gino's asked me never to say again that I'd like to sleep with him. I'd kissed him on the lips and he'd responded with the information that men never kiss men on the lips.

Pavlik came and sat on my bed and asked me if I were "fallen in love." I said, "No how can I fall in love with someone who refuses to go to bed with me?" and Pavlik said, "That's exactly when one falls in love!"

+

Gino tells me: You're different today than on other days. I tell him: I change like the lake, not only every day but every hour. He asks, Why? I say: I'm water.

The three C's of (novel or) dramatic writing:

Create Character Continuously

+

He's leaving this morning on the 10:20 bus.

He says he came here like a baby and that I took his hand and told him how to eat.

Gino has gone... gave me a goodbye kiss - on the mouth. "Very clever of him not to go to bed with you," says Pavlik.

+

Dream: I fled, but with not enough speed (I felt) to put a safe distance between myself and three black horses wildly dashing in my direction. "There are two people in you," Pavlik told me, "and the bad one is very strong."

+

"La fatalite" is not, as Antonin Artaud implies, "the materialization of an intellectual force" - but the result of millions of things which happened independently of each other but whose combinations and conjunctions cause what seem to be single occurrences. One thing at a time is never one thing.

It's the desire to go to new extremes: either down (like Sade) or up (like Rilke). Baudelaire embraced both extremes: crime and the sublime.

A big egg-truck came down the hill with a sex-beast of a truck driver at the wheel who smiled at me, saying, "Kind of slippery, ain't it?" I smiled back and then knew he'd set the mechanism going which would end in my jerking off.

Why not have children instead of continuing in pursuit of the deformed image?

+

To get back to poetry: it's leaving the world in order to find it. To write: grasp the magic wand (phallic symbol) and trace your words with it — after the trance is induced.

When Hart Crane perceived that he had exhausted the exhilaration derived from drink and sex and poetry, he drowned himself. He had lost contact with the thread that leads up, Poetry, and took hold of the Whirlpool and didn't let go.

The moon was shining. The valley was full of mist. "Nice night for a murder," said Bert.

Coral (my ten year old niece ) tonight. "You ought to get married." I reply, "Why should I get married when I'm happy the way I am?" She said, "That's just what I'm afraid of. You're happy and may never get married!"

+

No travel to beautiful places, no children, no lovers — none of these can give me "consolation" — only my work — poetry — can give me the pride in existence that seems so important.

And so I wrote a prose poem. That feeling of being lost in creation — a forgetting of self — is one I haven't felt in a long time.

+

The annoying, symmetrical flies.

What a lot of fun we'd miss if we were born wise. We wouldn't run the risks.

Well, there are dreams we do not remember; but they exist, nevertheless.

+

Are not the winter trees nude? They are not skeletons — but "undressed", says Pavlik.

The image I want to catch is harder to capture than a butterfly with bare hands.

I mean, "it's the end of a year" becomes meaningless to me if I imagine it's being said by everyone in the world.

To be what you are - infinitely.

1948-1953

Paintings by Amy Shackleton.

"Photographs (You Are Taking Now)" - Damon Albarn (mp3)

"Lonely Press Play" - Damon Albarn (mp3)

Dislocation

by JANEA KELLY

Alexa asked me months ago if I wanted to go to Chicago. It starts with a “yo girl, so you tryna” and a nervous giggle traveling from Bel Air, Maryland to Catonsville, Maryland over satellite. She’s in her tiny childhood bedroom that’s covered wall-to-wall with posters like a Warped Tour Hall of Fame. It’s the sort of bedroom where you want to put your checkered vans on, maybe tighten your studded belt before entering. There is a collection of porcelain unicorns and stacks of CDs and movies that I am sure I rented at some point my life at Blockbuster.

It’s 3 a.m., maybe 4 a.m. and she’s probably in a Taco Bell drive-thru after a show. We’ve been here time and time again. Her long black hair with a slight part in the middle is down and if it were 2008 I would definitely be able to say some of it’s caught in her Armor for Sleep hoodie. Her finely plucked eyebrows knitted together as she propositions me like a Ryan Gosling meme.

“Yo, girl, so you tryna go to Chicago?"

Hesitation curbs enthusiasm. Her call comes the day before or after someone scorned, scolded and reminded me that I am hard to rely on, I am inconsistent and that I have very little follow-through. You know I can take criticism, hoard it even, but I have no idea what to do with it. I go through the mental labor of storing it — naturally I use compliments immediately before they spoil. I smoke and salt criticisms, complaints and insults. I consider how much more tender and savory they’ll be after marinating. I can’t wait to chew the fat and become wiser. I will be more punctual, less needy, open up more and overshare less.

So vengeful to live well but hopeful to change. I promise to get back to her later and later becomes months. Her name is a flashing reminder of my flakiness: “So you still down?” It’s a day before the trip.

“Yeah, I guess.”

There's nothing like doing something spontaneous to remind you that you are alive, you know? Apparently all the involuntary work that my body does everyday without fail isn’t enough for me. Spontaneity comes like a stranger that stops and jumpstarts you, no questions asked, even offering to wait with you until AAA comes. Sometimes spontaneity just reminds you of the ways in which you are limited and trapped — you’re helpless, alone with that stranger, unsure of danger. You notice your phone has 10% and a weak signal. Did you know the only difference between hope and desperation is how much you’re willing to sweat for change? I didn’t. I just made that up.

I pack everything the night before, which seems very strange and ominous. I've never packed the day before anything. I often pretend I am going to, even fantasize about myself getting ready (a montage sequence set to Solange’s “Losing You”) and it’s all a really joyous process. I make a to-do list (both on paper and using an app) then I tweet about making a to-do list and the tediousness of it and then I Instagram the to-do list to further share with the world that I have, in fact, a life worth leading. I set several alarms and tell at least six friends and/or several hundred via Facebook.

It is with little surprise that I wake up on Friday, the marked day of voyage and change my mind: I needed new outfits, suddenly feared looking too fat (because I am too fat) or too frumpy (I’m practically a gigantic living wrinkle) and it is necessary for me to do one more load of laundry to explore my options.

I look at my savings. Not online but the crumpled folds in my wallet and humility is a lump in my throat. There is a panic induced by the fear of your friends finding out just how little money you have and that you are not actually the safest bet. If Luck be a lady, then it’s definitely not me. It is best to ignore that telltale claustrophobia. Fake it til you make it. Can’t worry myself with what’s responsible or healthy. With a mixture of terror and delight (a byproduct of reckleness) I spend the morning repacking and unpacking and repacking. The rhythm of it is pacifying like rocking myself or sucking my thumb.

If you strip me of self-importance, illusions of grandeur, and a keen attraction to disaster... I’m just a Gatsby in coal mines, an Aladdin with a candle. I’m Sisyphus just kicking rocks. I try to detach myself from these yearnings, these cravings for more. I see skyscrapers in my bowl of cheerios. I try to shake it every day. I try to remind myself of what's my reality, but the thing is that I haven't a clue because I'm so far removed it'd be legal to marry myself in an alternate universe.

I get into a car with a stranger, Jay, who looks responsible and Alexa. Despite how long we’ve known each other, Alexa always retains the novelty of a missed connection found. Jay is doing the driving and he’s arrived with us after a morning of school, work. He’s well dressed, clean shaven and I’m a literal wrinkle in time. We’ve never spoken before or met.

On a road still in Maryland I dread chit-chat. Not because I don't love to talk. It is only that I do not want to have to pretend to know the answers to my own life. I’m an ostrich with my head in the sand; I like to think of it as a cheap way to exfoliate dead skin.

What do you do?

I try not to cry or reveal to complete strangers that I'm actually a husk.

What did you major in?

Parties and bullshitting. Jaywalking while juggling.

When do you finish?

Probably before Puerto Rico gets independence.

What are you going to do with that?

I'm going to set my gchat status to "away" and refresh my gmail. Hope someone will talk to me while at work — I hope to be someone's daytime fling and we can get hot and heavy procrastinating until they have to do something real. They'll slowly move away from me and I will make like Pluto, which is actually still a planet when you get technical just as much as I am actually still a person.

It is gray and wet most of the drive through Pennsylvania until we're met by black horizons in Ohio five hours later. Jay turns off Michael Jackson's "Beat It" which is blasting on some oldie’s channel and puts in Death Cab's Transatlanticism. I scoff. I complain. I speculate openly about this guy's tastes, sucking my teeth until despite myself I’m singing along.

We’re singing along to it (start to finish) in near harmony. It’s an album I can tell you exactly where I was when I first heard it. If I were more honest I’d admit that I don’t know all the lyrics to “Beat It” but could probably win a contest lip-syncing Ben Gibbard.

After the album ended I wanted nothing more than to sign into my Livejournal:

I sang along to “Tiny Vessels” with a boy in a car in Chicago on a rainy day.

We didn’t hold hands but it felt like our fingers touched

when we were so close to harmony.

A fourteen-year-old girl’s dream of singing sad songs in enclosed spaces with almost lovers — our mouths so close we could die of carbon dioxide poisoning. It is all pretty stupid since there was nothing actually romantic about what we were doing and yet I would be lying if I said that I was not grateful for this particular pleasure, no, opportunity, using this stranger as a stand-in for juvenile fantasies while watching the clouds irrigate the farmlands in Dutch Country.

Somewhere in the dark of Ohio I request both to pee and to get a coffee. We stop in somewhere that looks like it would be home to the grossest bathroom — the epitome of being on the road — pancake houses and roach infested bathrooms. It emanates the only light for miles, a lighthouse in the sticks. I walk in and seek relief immediately. It is one of the nicest bathrooms I have used to date. Only when I'm coming out, reluctant to leave (considering staying in that bathroom and starting a new life), a young man around my age rocking on his heels as he refills cups says to me, "Hey there, stranger. How's it going?"

"It's all right. It's going as well as it can when you're driving from Baltimore to Chicago."

"Well, know that I'm happy you're here right now. It's gotta be great to just go somewhere new." I want to correct him and say that it isn't anywhere new, but I am stuck on his general sense of cheer when he tells me that there is only a ten cent difference in coffee sizes and that it totaled 96 cents. It isn't the best cup of coffee but it's warm; I am happy.

I crawl back into the car with mini donuts for the gang — Alexa's passed out in the back and Jay's eyes are focused on the road. I want to run back into the gas station and tell that guy “I’m going to write you down. I’m going to keep you forever.” I don’t. I just tell Jay, “Yeah, I’m good. I’m ready.”

We arrive in Chicago at 3 a.m. I am awake for 9 of the 11 hours and wake up to the Skyway Bridge. I crawl into a bed around 4 or so. I wake up to the banging of housekeeping at 7:30 a.m. I push myself out of the bed expecting fatigue to make my limbs heavy but instead they’re light and happy. I open the door but find no one except a vacuum cleaner. I look both ways before switching the sign to “Do Not Disturb.” I’ve always wanted to do that.

Everyone's asleep. Alexa planned, Jay drove, and I rode along. I tried to be useful answering texts and trying to provide amicable conversation. I'm not sure if I ever succeed in being quite useful but it's a fake it til you make it, until you arrive. Showering, quietly making myself up and creating a character who could be deemed “down-to-earth, comfortable in her skin.”

Have you been to Chicago? Did you enjoy it? Were you alone? I woke no one except to whisper a dream to Alexa that I was leaving, I'd see her later (later would be the next day,) and stroke her hair.

I ask everyone I meet that afternoon if experiencing Stendhal syndrome while viewing the downtown skyline from a small bridge on the southloop is normal.

I inquire for directions once and eagerly admit, "I'm not from here." A woman with a faint Eastern European accent says to me, "Good thing you're here right now. There was snow on the ground a few days ago." Good thing I’m here. Right now.

I make eye contact with the Sears Tower again after exiting the train on Division and Milwaukee. No matter where I go those enormous structures dwarf me, bullying me into honesty. I cry. I apologize for a decade of excuses and inertia. There is snot and smeared eyeliner. I take off my blazer and cry so hard into its fabric, which smells of the detergent I use in Baltimore. Five a.m. Monday I will be back in Baltimore and this would all seem but a dream, a pleasant escape from rapid cycles and hysteria.

Sitting on a bench for a moment to collect myself. In some ways I had absolutely no idea where I was in the world. I’m here, I thought, at the right time. I was experiencing a once in a lifetime opportunity on Pluto where I could see the Earth: bright, blue, and happy.

Janea Kelly is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her twitter here and her instagram here.

"Non Aligned States" - Neon Neon (mp3)

"Years of Lead" - Neon Neon (mp3)

The Other Inbox

by MIA NGUYEN

The act of writing a letter, or even receiving one in the mail, has become almost obsolete in an age where technology has taken over the majority of our precious time. These last years I found myself being drained from the lack of romanticism in receiving empty e-mails and text messages. I wanted something to hold onto.

In 2011 I started exchanging handwritten letters with strangers online, incubating long distance friendships. The intimate exchange of handwritten letters lets me connect authentically and compassionately with others on a level to which we are no longer accustomed.

Location: Preston, England

Dearest M,

This letter will take some explaining... As you know, I wrote this letter originally some months ago – how time flies! – but it was lost in the transcontinental mailing system. I'm hoping for better luck this time.

This was the original letter I sent. I am glad I make drafts!

"I received your letter an hour before writing the first draft – I wrote drafts! –but this likely won't be sent out before I return from Devon because it is a long way to the post office, now that my local one has been shut down for refurbishment.

As you can probably can probably tell, I am trying out a new letter hand – I decided I should at least be proud of the handwriting in these things, if not the content! 

It pains me to hear your persistent downing, and I so wish I could help in some capacity other than the written word, so marvelous, as it is... I guess that is our luck!

The perfume is sublime, honestly. I will have to badger my girlfriends to buy it! I now love three girls' perfumes: Ghost Deep Night, that Vera Wang one, and one I still do not know the name of...

I'm writing outside and it is still not cool at 9:30 in the morning and I can hear magpies – which are terribly ugly-sounding birds and very loud.

I do indeed like your little sketches and doodles. Would the time machine you're suggesting double up as a teleporter? Because otherwise if you travel back too far then you'd just end up in the pre-1600's in America, which wasn't so hip and happening!

Your Faithful Friend,

and Kind Stranger,

E

P.S. I am listening to Beach House and drinking coffee and thinking only of you while I was writing this.

P.S.S.S. I so hope you are well by the time you read this and I wish you all the luck and happiness in the world.

Location: Boston, MA

M,

As you may have guessed, I've been running around like a mad woman because of my new position as editor of the literary magazine. Regardless, this semester has been quite rewarding.

I've been reading a lot more lately, particularly my assigned books from feminist philosophy class – very, very enriching. Even now, one Valentine's eve – I'm beginning to actually enjoy the freedom of the single world. It's taken me a while to get to this point, but do you remember the man from Providence named Jagdish? The one who likes the long, "delicious" hugs? Yeah, I've taken a lot of what he said to heart – sometimes you really just need to hug yourself.

So...I've taken this opportunity to more or less date myself. Anyway, I apologize for the somewhat late response; I completely forgot to check my mailbox for a good two weeks. But I had a lovely, unexpected surprise when I checked it twenty minutes ago – a perfect addition to Valentine's Day; there's nothing more poetic than sharing your handwriting the good, old fashioned way with a good, old friend.

I hope you're still doing well and I also hope by this point you've painted some lovely pieces with your new canvas and paint. Let's make a habit of corresponding with each other, this way of enjoying a long-distance friendship that I've never experienced before. By the way – THAT OFFER IS STILL VALID – PLEASE COME VISIT ME! I'd love to cook dinner with you, I think that would be so much fun. Enjoy your night and I hope to see you soon!

Sincerely yours, 

S

Location: Preston, England

Mia,

A few things have changed since then, as you know. I'm not writing outside for a start, and I have moved into my university room for the first time. I have had a different room every year for four years. I have grown accustomed to moving around, I suppose. I don't know how I am going to feel about returning to Birmingham next year and staying there. For the formidable future, at least. Moving around has given me a sense of stability. Does that make sense? Probably not...

I have changed my letter hand since then, and I am still not happy with it, but perhaps I just need some time to get used to it. I hope that is the case; it is getting out of hand!

We have fallen apart a little, as you said we would, sadly. It was one time I truly hoped you were not right. I won't let this ruin our friendship, or whatever this is, for you are an amazing person and I feel I need you in my life. Is that coming on too strong? Ah well, probably but I mean every word.

This has taken me a very long time to write, and I am going to stop and send it before I decide I want to change my handwriting again!

I do this finds you well, I hope for nothing more than that! If it takes me a long time to reply it is because I have run completely out of money and am starving through pride of not wanting to borrow any from my parents.

Yours earnestly,

and with love,

E

mwah xxx

Location: Providence, Rhode Island

M,

I am writing this to you in the middle of the Blizzard of 2013. Hopefully we both make it through unscathed. I have to help out with shoveling for my girlfriend's business because they plow and shovel during snow storms. I am not looking forward to it. I wish I could just stay in and watch movies and drink hot chocolate. One of my favorite things about big snowstorms is that they remind me of being a little kid and having to just stay inside for the day. I'll be making $20/hr though so at least there's that.

I am proud to announce to you that I have accepted a job offer! The position that I was hired for is an Energy Advisor, I'll be going to people's homes and determining where they are losing energy and how they can be more efficient with the energy they are using. I start training on February 18th so my days of unemployment are coming to an end. It's in Boston so for now I'll be commuting, but I'm hoping to move out there. I'm excited to start and get my life going!

Are you pumped for the summer and California? It's going to be great! Sorry this is short. For some reason ideas of things to write aren't coming to me today. I mainly just wanted to tell you about the new job. Hope school is going well!

A

Location: New York, New York

Dear M,

Someone ordered green paper by mistake at work ­– how much are your eyes hurting right now? It was neat to get a letter. The mail I get is mainly postcards from horrifyingly shitty illustrators, work so bad it calls into question their sanity. When I was in high school I had many pen pals. I was big into ska and punk music, and read a lot of zines and had for flung friends with the same interests, but very few real live humans in my life with my tastes. You know…high school.

My current favorite album/musician are Dirty Projectors, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Fiona Apple. I listen to all of them incessantly. I love pop music, too – I sing karaoke every single Friday, and we do puite a lot of Katy Perry and 90s alternative rock. My all time favorites are definitely The Beatles, particularly Abbey Road. How about you?

Anyhow – tell me what your major is and what your favorite crappy movie is and a thing you are great at cooking.

Sincerely,

L

Location: Los Angeles, California

Dear M,

Thank you so much for the Cliff bars! I look forward to my next adventure in anticipation of trying out the blueberry crunch in a desperate moment of nutrition. By the way, I couldn't be happier about writing letters as a form of communication. Even though it is a dead, or dying, form of correspondence, it is a great exercise for training the brain to write in an entirely different circumstance. Already having written what I just have, I immediately have a need to go back, change words, or strengthen sentence structure. Naturally, this comes from being too familiarized with word documents, Twitter, e-mails and other formats where we can edit and re-edit everything we write. Admittedly, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety that I am experiencing without being able to change things up, but for now I will continue with romanticizing the liberties of irreversible expression like the giddy tool that I can be sometimes. Having just hyphenated "romanticizing" brought me back to my grade school days and now I am already relishing the benefits of making this decision to write! Granted, I do journal my life's progress on a weekly basis, but writing in a journal is very dissimilar. Do you journal? It's a great way to track your trajectory. 

So anyway I do miss the East Coast, regardless of how cold it might be over there right now. I grew up in Haworth, NJ, a very small suburban town with not much to do. So when I moved to Boston when I was 18 you can imagine how happy I was to be in an active setting with a lot going on around me.

Sorry to hear about your eczema, but it seems like you have everything under control. As I'm sure you are aware, it is problems such as these that can lead you to discover new things unexpectedly. It also teaches you, new things. That keeps you young. Well, that and kombucha! Favorite flavor? Mine's ginger. Apparently you can brew your own, which I want to learn, because otherwise it's so expensive. But getting back to what I was saying, I'm glad your perspective has changed on health. Having what I thought to be crippling anxiety only helped me get better as a person and learned new things once I was willing to take on the challenge. I had to change the way I think and act and in doing so learned some very interesting ways to help improve brain functionality. Therefore, I work regularly at trying to repress any anxiety by challenging my brain to do new things. Adventuring is only one of many, exercise is another. I've ran half-marathons, completed triathlons, and now I'm trying to compete and finish a half iron-man in July. They're a lot of fun, good luck with your race come March! 

You seem like a very interesting person to get to know. That's why I wanted to reach out to you. I'm glad I did. I really enjoy reading myself, but I haven't read Bukowski yet. Many people I know have recommended him so I have added his books to my reading list. Any recommendations? My favorite author is Douglas Adams, he has had the most impact on my writing style and even on the way I think. Others include George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, and the comedic styles of Larry David and Jon Stewart. I also enjoy non-fiction. One book I became fascinated by was this one called Imagine by Jonah Lehrer; which details everything that makes someone a creative person. Great read.

I feel as though we've only just scratched the surface and that there's so much more to delve into, but I will save that for later. Tell me, what do you do for fun? What are your passions? What are your inspirations? Maybe even your flaws?

Looking forward to your next letter, and please take your time if there are other things you have to do. I would even prefer if these letters show up randomly and unexpectedly. All the best.

Sincerely,

T

Mia Nguyen is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Rhode Island. She last wrote in these pages about her ex-boyfriend. You can find her twitter here and her website here, and her instagram here.

Photographs by the author.

"Woe Is You" - Hunter & Wolfe (mp3)

"Somebody New" - Hunter & Wolfe (mp3)

Some Recent Notes

by LUCY MORRIS

In Iowa this was the winter of Beyonce and hashtags, which is to say it was no different from winter anywhere else. “We’ll never hear this album and not think of this time,” someone said, and it seemed true, certain tracks inextricable from solitary hood-up walks home as early dusk bore down, others forever linked to an afternoon when we convened at Olivia’s for a specific but forgotten reason and accidentally stayed all night. It seemed too cold to walk home, on that and many other days, although our houses were all less than a block away and it wasn’t like the temperature would stop dropping as midnight turned to one to two. This was also the winter I began experiencing intermittent but uncontrollable hysterical laughter, and flopped on the couch with my friends, my abs ached and my throat went dry from the effort of my amusement.  

My shopping lists from the coldest months show these consistent repetitions: 2 lbs. cabbage, 8 cloves garlic, tomato puree, 2 oz. dried porcinis, potatoes, sweet potatoes, garbonzo beans (15 oz. x 2), 6 large red onions, butter, bananas, a pomelo? (check price), spinach (check expir. date). I didn’t buy limes until the first day of April; $4.69/lb. but I needed to believe in summer after a winter when it seemed to not climb above zero for days on end, not above freezing for weeks. Still, I managed okay: I sealed off my windows, until my view of the outside world was filtered through layers of  rippling plastic, and my spirits were good enough to formulate a joke about a sext for a polar winter such as this one: “I’m not wearing any long underwear.”

Selected notes from recent months:

• “Trusting yourself is another form of work.”

• “A book is its only explanation.”

• “Teachers should only ask questions they don’t know the answers to.”

• “A restless essay.”

• “An essay that’s mired in grad school.”

• “Insists on its own obscurity.”

• “Defying meaning is a one-trick pony.”

• “Secrecy and privacy are chosen forms of isolation.”

There’s a bit — of my own invention — about how Iowa has made me the woman I was always meant to be. When I do it over the phone to friends who knew me before, I describe my clogs, my fleece, and the lengthy mid-morning constitutional I take around my neighborhood daily. I say the music I listen to is mostly the kind my parents did, that I always have spare light-bulbs, laundry quarters, and a variety of shelf-stable grains on hand now, that I make a point of “listening to my body” — although in practice this has mostly meant making other people listen to me talking about it, a daily enumeration of muscles and joints that feel better or worse, an assessment of my appetite and what specific cravings might indicate, a declaration that I require more sleep, a lap swim, or additional protein. But for all my self-mockery, the eye-rolling dismissal of the-self-as-project, living alone for the first time — which is to say, standing at the center of my own life for once — has basically been a religious experience in the extent that it’s transformed me. Which has much less to do with what I keep in my cupboards or put in my body than I tend to make it sound.

Another note was something a professor said, and the context is not recorded, but I underlined it for emphasis: “One doesn’t want to cannibalize one’s own past too much.” I had done that for a long time, been a slave to the how-it-happened of life, and of my life, but now I thought I was mostly done with that. People sometimes used to ask me if it wasn’t hard to record my own recent past so closely, which I see now was not a question but actually a warning. And maybe it was because I could never satisfactorily answer it as the former that I also could not heed it as the latter.

A document on my desktop, entitled “Some Recent Theories”:

• A theory on people whose intelligence is predicated on proper nouns and not original thought

• A theory that women who are more critical of men as a group have more successful relationships with men individually

• A theory that we all have one friend who embodies the part of ourselves we will never permit ourselves to be—someone louder or stranger or more aggressive, someone bolder or more measured or maybe just diplomatic.

Not so much a theory as a hobby I’ve invented for myself: speculative gossip. To imagine aloud the life of someone you know only a little, the home routines you’re not privy to, their private interactions. You don’t want to be mean about it, just imaginative. You want the person you’re talking with to build the image with you, aid and abet it.

The two kinds of trivia I am bound to remember are the ages people were when they made works of art, and achievements people have had while incarcerated.

• Bruce Springsteen wrote “Thunder Road” when he was twenty-four

• Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide” when she was twenty-seven

• James Baldwin wrote “Notes of a Native Son” when he was thirty-one

• Shyne signed a $3.1 million record deal from prison

• Vybz Kartel recorded a sixty-one song album on his smart phone while in jail

• The governor of a minor region where I once lived in Russia was convicted of corruption and then re-elected while incarcerated. 

On the subject of cannibalizing one’s own past, this is a note I made at twenty-two after a conversation with a friend: “It’s like reentering a party after a long sober conversation outside. How do you continue on after that?” We were referring to the possibility of people we’d loved going on to love other people, which seemed an incomprehensible concept at that time. Drinking “margaritas the size of our faces,” which I noted was what we were doing at the time of this conversation, on what I remember was a weeknight at that, is now the more incomprehensible concept of the two.

Other notes from the couple years following that:

• “That patience and tact you have is a real gift.”

• “During the interactive classes, much of the burden to keep discussion going was placed on the students.”

• “You should read some Tolstoy, both for the marriage stuff and party planning tips (bears).”

• “A quiet campaign of avoidance.”

• “Nostalgie de la boue! Just learned this term.”

• “The explanation of secrecy as an illusory form of control makes so much sense.”

• “You didn’t tell me there was an aquarium.”

• “It seemed like each encounter fueled the next, it seemed like everything was working...”

But then there are the notes of a realer life, running mileages recorded, subway directions copied down, hours worked, appointments noted, addresses to write on envelopes when I got to the post office. 

People sometimes link youth and its attendant mistakes to a sense of invincibility, but if there was a guiding principle of my own early twenties, it was much more a sense of inevitability. Of course I would end up staying for another drink, or sleep with the person who presented themselves to me, or spend some idiotic sum of money on nothing. Prolonged, public decision-making may have been something of a recreation among my friends — that weighing of options among people who still thought options would always be limitless—but I mostly remember a feeling of being carried along by the events around me, the decision made before I was even aware that there was one to make. I used to retrospectively classify my actions as either good ideas or bad ones, the wild oversimplification of someone with an aversion to nuance — or of someone too lazy to do the real work of figuring out what she wanted, or maybe just busy with other things.

• An essay I can appreciate, in its entirety:

“I thought his carelessness was charming.” – Lia Purpura, “A Novel in Two Parts.” 

The lens through which I tended to view my life made it so that I never noticed when I found myself in unusual situations; I wasn’t really out of my mind so much as I was out of my body, looking down on myself with a peculiar tunnel vision. I worked briefly as a transcriptionist for a cult, and I was foreman of a jury, and for a phase I dated only people I had met years before, never anyone totally new, and none of this seemed odd or impressive, although it did sometimes seem foolish. Although I am in too many ways unchanged, I am more self-conscious, more tentative, which means I go home after a few drinks, think things through more carefully, and generally find myself residing in the realm of the pleasantly ordinary—dinners cooked with friends, regular routines, plenty of sleep.

“Find” is a construction I always favored; it frees you from complicity in your own life.

Some notes I took at a recent Q&A with Rachel Kushner:

• “The day is a continuous opportunity of chances not to fail.”

• “Too much comfort for me is distracting.”

• “Writing doesn’t have to be hermetically sealed off from the world/ravages of history.”

• “An arena of potential compromises.”

• “I don’t want a tube into my imagination of the world.”

“You’re scared,” one of my friends said tenderly, with the incisiveness of someone who knows you well, sees you change at the gym, texts you each morning to tell you the weather before you can even check it yourself. And she was right, of course, but whenever someone says this to me, which isn’t altogether infrequently, I want to reply, why are you not scared?

Notes from a recent lecture by Laurie Anderson, entitled “Some of My New Projects”:

“Choking on their own goodness.”

“It’s hard to make a lobby sound bigger.”

“Looks at audience and sees dogs — Yo Yo Ma, too!”

“An invocation to whales.”

“What do animals sing?”

“When you love something you can be too careful.”

“Mother’s maiden name becomes so obscure it’s a secret question.”

“Engineering our own lives.”

“Every time you tell it you forget it more.”

Emily and I have taken to telling each other bedtime stories over the phone. I tell her, like it’s a fairytale, about how the first time we got together we ended up sitting in a park so that she could make a conference call for work. And I was so blown away by her poise, I tell her now from bed, phone pressed between cheek and pillow, the way that a single person could be both outrageously, energetically interesting and exceedingly professional, and I knew we would be friends forever. Although this one happens to be true, bedtime stories don’t actually have to be — the point is you believe them because if you didn’t you could never fall asleep.

Some amendments to the above:

• Invincibility and inevitability both stem, probably, from a mix of anxiety and arrogance.

• Regret gets too close to complicity for most Americans to handle, but I do at least wish that I had taken more time with the beginnings of things, instead of taking too much time with the ends. Although in writing, of course, just the opposite mistake is what’s common.

• When I say I stop after a few drinks now, that’s not quite unilaterally true. I stayed out until four on Saturday and was ruined until Tuesday; I felt injured by a friend who had done nothing at all, skipped an event I would have enjoyed because going out and smiling at everyone seemed like a burden, and on my walk home one afternoon I unexpectedly began to cry.

I never liked people — writers — who always had pen and paper handy, as if they could never turn off their absurd instinct to record, as if the commodification of experience was a job they could never bring themselves to clock out of. Now I take notes all the time, but I couldn’t say why exactly, except that maybe after you become conscious of how you see the world — not from outside yourself, telescopically, but from painfully within — the intent will always be to analyze it. My favorite notes are from physical therapy, not just the number of reps of each exercise I’m supposed to do, but my PT’s advice, which I like to record verbatim. “If you think you’re going to get hurt, you will,” he says, and he’s talking about my patellofemoral injury, but it could be anything. “You don’t deserve to feel pain,” he says, and he is talking about the ankle I kept trying to jog on for six months after I sprained it, but also, I have chosen to believe, not just about that.

A list of the things I was grateful for when I came home at four in the morning the other day:

• That it was easy to get a cab, because bars had long closed

• That because it had rained earlier in the evening, and the grass had that particular wet scent to it, the comforting mustiness of my building’s interior was especially strong

• Classical music was blasting in the lobby, as it always is

• The hallway was poorly lit in its predictable way

• My bed was comfortable

• I could lie down in the middle of it and spread out my limbs without impediment.

The weather forecast today for zip code 52240, where I live, was a high of sixty-one with — I’m quoting directly here — “abundant sunshine.”

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and translator living in Iowa. She last wrote in these pages about . She tumbls here.

Experience the Best of Lucy Morris on This Recording

The inverse of pleasure

Living for love alone

Ransacking her mind for what is not there

The weight of what happened

Losing the excitement over its possibility

All that's left is the text

An extended vacation from New York

While he was sleeping she was turning the dials

Serious thrills of library cards

Dances With Something: Part One/Part Two

"According to Plan" - Augustana (mp3)

"Need A Little Sunshine" - Augustana (mp3)

Mindful Malaise

by ALEX CARNEVALE

La Grande Bellezza
dir. Paolo Sorrentino
142 minutes

The central character of The Great Beauty is the rather unfortunate-looking Jep (Toni Servillo). He postulates himself as a journalist of sorts, but he is more a critic of his culture. Since he resides in Rome this is no culture at all: it is a series of sex scenes bookended by lonely walks among ruins.

Rome began to fall for the first serious time in July of 1776. America was born on that day, or didn't you take social studies?

There is a scene in The Great Beauty where Jep, the master indiscriminator, happens upon a woman in a pool. (He has been peering through her fence.) "Aren't there any men who want to just tawk to you?" he growls while she paddles. Naturally, she accepts this peeping tom's invitation to a degrading party that evening. Jep was watching her bathe, what else could she have done?

Like any Roman after the fall, Jep requires no reason to use a woman, it is only a function of his being a Roman that dictates the misogyny. None of these people have ever even had the decency to watch Treme.

Toni Servillo attempts a brusque affability in the role, but he is badly undermanned for the part, appearing to be at most a disturbed creeper obsessed with his own failures, at best a non-murderous Patrick Bateman. He has a terrible habit of never moving his head to look at people, and this is not the only way he has totally abdicated his humanity. Humbert Humbert had like a scary amount of charm compared to this doltish fellow.

After publishing a mournful novelette, Jep acquires a kind of notional cache with some very desperate and pathetic people. Some have family who were complicit in the Fascist takeover of their country. Others are only intelligent enough to believe what they read.

Jep treasures this gross social life because he has not been able to write any fiction in over forty years. This case of writer's block leads him to go around interviewing artists, mostly women, who differ from him mostly because they have something to say and he does not. This disparity in inspiration angers him, so he tells the women that their art isn't very good, or goes off to have unprotected sex when his editor thinks he is reporting.

The party he invites the stripper lounging in the pool to is terribly unfun. The Great Beauty makes a congo line look like a scene in The Human Centipede; the viewer has no choice but to avert her eyes. In the shadow of neon and garbage, Jep and his friends wonder aloud what other countries think of Italy. This is most important to him, as if he were content with a bronze at a beauty pageant.

Rome is a pretty rough city for women, who at the very least are met with constant catcalls. Many of the men are not afraid to approach a woman alone and harass her, touch her body, suggest she put on winter booties when they are out of season, or make her murder someone in an Amanda Knox-esque fashion. It is even worse to be a man in Rome, The Great Beauty argues for like eight hours, because you have to witness all of this and are thus incriminated in the sexist effluvium by proxy.

These decadent events that celebrate the fall involve a great mix of ages. It is implied there is family money at work in these gatherings. The great mass of people at the soiree are constantly peeling back their heads and aiming them skywards. It isn't that the dancers don't enjoy their escapades, but it seems best to check if something more funsies is on the horizon.

There is little mention of God in The Great Beauty, for he is forsaken in the end, and that is why the city of Rome is cursed. In the painful and over-elaborate cinematography of the dying metropolis, Jep trolls for women in the shadows; there by the river! He is a connoisseur of people who he can decide not to be sympathetic towards later on.

"There is no reason anything is beautiful," wrote John Cage, who was beautiful. The Great Beauty attempts to convince us that even something aesthetically appealing on the surface can be disgusting underneath, a lesson most of us learn before third grade. Jep is unable to absolve himself from the decline that surrounds him, and that is the only heartening part about this cynical film. If a man tumbles from the roof of a building, he might very well enjoy his ride down. But coming down so quickly is a bit disorienting. A man could, probably, only fall so far so fast.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Country Life" - Jaki Whitren (mp3)

"Ain't It Funny" - Jaki Whitren (mp3)

Shades of Turner

by MARK ARTURO

Joseph Mallord William Turner never stopped thinking about color. When he woke, it was color, it was color before he went to bed. Not just the range, not just the spectrum: the emotional resonances, clashes and collusions, its general mien.

In the final analysis he rejected any determinative theory on the subject, although he read and agreed with some of what George Field had argued in Chromatics, or an Essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colors, published in 1817. For Field, color was merely an extension of a central philosophy, the former having been deduced from the latter. For Turner, a subscriber to Field's Outline of Analogical Philosophy, his interest in these intersections was as a skeptic, which is not to say he did not read Field's various silly musings with some avidity.

As a young man he had traveled to Paris for the first time, essentially to see what sort of color he could find. His mission was confined to observations in the Louvre; he spoke very little French.

Turner made twenty-five copies of the paintings he saw there. He paid particular attention to the color paintings of Titian, lavishing hour after hour in view of the Pastoral Concert, which was painted either by Giorgione or his disciple Titian in 1509.

Where Turner differed from Field was in the idea that the subject could be reduced to a specific theory or worldview. Admiration flowed in only one direction. Turner's first and worst biographer writes that Field told him, "Turner's most extravagant conceptions were a perfect harmony." There is a bit of an insult in this seeming compliment, for Turner was far from delighted by Field's praise becuse of how faciley the man described his work as, impossibly, squaring the circle.

For him, these matters were not at all simple. Self-trained, Turner always sought to educate himself further on the subject of light, to the point where even his painter friends grew tired of the subject. He kept his own notebooks on light's various properties. In them, he defined color as a "material substance indued with a quality of diversely affecting the Eye according to the matter wherein it is found."

A practical approach suited Turner better - after all, he was first and foremost a working artist. He broke things down as follows:

YELLOW: Glory

BLUE: Duty

RED: Power

GREEN: Servitude

PURPLE: Authority

"Comparatively," he wrote, "Red possesses the utmost power of attracting vision: it being the first ray of Light." From the air, yellow would be "medium, red material, blue distance, white in prismatic order in the union." Rainbows and prisms occupied a particular fascination for Turner; they were something like looking at all of one's ex-girlfriends assembled together in a room.

In London Turner discovered a daguerrotypist named John Mayall who had taken several views of Niagara Falls. Mayall was distinctly puzzled by the strange, slightly portly man who came to his shop, rarely saying a word. Turner only sought to watch Mayall work, and after the man's labors were done, he would engage him in conversation about the color spectrum before taking his leave.

At a party for the Royal Society Turner attracted many admirers. Noticing this, Mayall asked who his visitor was to garner so much attention. His companion stared at him as if he had grown a second nose. "That's Turner," the man said. "That Turner."

Subsequently, Mayall approached Joseph with a cocktail and offered his help freely. Turner redirected the conversation to the spectrum. In ensuing years the artist referred Mayall a great number of customers, but never visited his shop again.

George Field was not Turner's only academic target on color. In 1840 came the first translation of Goethe's Theory of Colours. Turner read it before it arrived in England because of his friendship with the book's publisher, and his annotated copy of Theory of Colours is as close as we will ever get to a definitive text from him on the subject.

Where Goethe writes, "Every single opposition in order to be harmonious must comprehend the whole," Turner adds in his neat handwriting, "or ought to be a part." The main disagreement between the two men boiled down to their ideas of where color originated from: for Goethe, it began when "light meets the dark," for Turner color emerged entirely from light. In a way, it seems that both are so.

Mark Arturo is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about his college relationship.

"Let Me Know Your Heart" - Black Prairie (mp3)

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Gabo

by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like on the day he died. It hovered around 50 degrees in New York, but I don’t know if it was sunny and the Internet has moved on. The red moon came and went. I prayed for rain but instead we got hail, some days before or after his passing, I don’t remember. I resented the sunshine when it came. It seemed disrespectful. Gabriel Garcia Marquez had just died, but the sun had come out anyway and somewhere everywhere young co-eds unpacked their shorts and headed to campus lawns carrying Frisbees. Life went on.

Some Christians believe that, for three hours after Christ died, the Earth was cloaked in an inky darkness. From Matthew: “From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.” Theologians disagree on the specifics of the event and we can only fact-check against the Bible (a precarity that should be avoided), but there’s something immeasurably reassuring in believing the heavens will turn black for you, even if that specific move is reserved for the Messiah. The sky didn’t darken when Garcia Marquez passed away and as much as I searched for some kind of local sign, there was nothing. Green chrysanthemums did not start sprouting out of bathroom faucets, eggs did not lose their yolks, white doves followed no one, and midnight fireworks over Sarasota did not warn the poets on the boardwalk about how it all might end. Magical realism had failed us.

There is a Jonathan Larson song from Rent that I’ve always liked. The singer, who is dying — remember, this is Rent, everybody is dying — goes through a list: rain falls, grass grows, flowers bloom, children play, eagles fly, the earth turns, the breeze warms, the tides change, the oceans crash, the crowds roar, the babies cry. What follows the list: “But I die.” The singer has HIV and is literally dying but she also misses her ex-boyfriend and is amazed that life was going on despite her pain. It’s not a wholly solipsistic expectation but it is naïve to carry around that sense of spiritual entitlement. It is also immeasurably comforting.

with his family

Growing up on a steady diet of Garcia Marquez’ works, from the journalistic accounts of his early career to that last book he wrote that nobody liked, groomed me to be the kind of adult for whom magical realism was not merely a literary device, but a belief system that provided a language for the way grief was metabolized. For Joan Didion, a dignified adulthood meant losing “the conviction that lights would always turn green for me.”

Garcia Marquez coddled us, promising that not only would traffic lights turn green for us, but swallowtails would swarm the house if someone in it had their heart broken. He didn’t offer a solution for sorrow, but he promised cosmic sympathy. Believing him might be foolish, but it is a legitimate way to grieve.

In Bluets, a little book about heartbreak, Maggie Nelson quotes a friend who said that “we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.” Magical realism meant never having to experience sadness alone because the earth was looking at us suffer and would respond in time. Maybe a tree would grow outside the house and its fruit would taste salty, like tears, or maybe honeybees would leave their empty hives as an offering outside the kitchen door. Crying was not a private act and mourning was communal.

This was true of Garcia Marquez’s funerary procession. Thousands of people pilgrimaged to the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City to say goodbye to Gabo, as he is affectionately called in Latin America.  A storm hit as the public waited for the presidents of Mexico and Colombia to take the stage. The public released yellow butterflies — a mechanic in One Hundred Years of Solitude was always followed by yellow butterflies — into the wind. His ashes might be shared by Mexico and Colombia. It seemed like a very important diplomatic consideration. Thousands of pilgrims with yellow flowers waited their turn to see his urn. Gabo had died, leaving behind him a trail of tears and yellow butterflies.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New Haven. She last wrote in these pages about false positives. She tumbls here and twitters here. 

"I Hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You" - The Hold Steady (mp3)

"On With The Business" - The Hold Steady (mp3)