HOUSTON, TX -
God, this is frustrating. I have something I would much rather be writing about right now, but can’t seem to focus on. In a cute little twist, the way life tends to always enjoy twisting things, my equilibrium is off both figuratively and physically.
The metaphor I will eventually get around to dealing with, but the fact that I am pretty much completely deaf right now deserves a little more immediate attention.
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND -
Television has been very important in my life.
It made a strong impression on me from a very young age. When I first saw colour TV - I wet my pants. Literally.
Television is how I’ve made my living for most of my working life. It’s inspired me. Exasperated me. Paid my bills. Introduced me to my great love. Taken away my great love. Given me lifelong friends and opened the door to terrible enemies.
You could say television has had a profound influence on me.
But maybe not as profound as it had on my sister.
ELLENSBURG, WA-
Way back, when I was innocent, I sat in the church balcony with my grandmother every Sunday and listened to old men tell me I was going to hell. At least I felt that way. They were serious, finger-pointing authorities with heavy robes and they spoke from a big book written by God. I was twelve, and the authorities I chose to listen to were a boy a named Calvin and a tiger named Hobbes.
PARIS, FRANCE -
Emerging from the Metro station in Montmartre, Paris, the sun plays through a haze that makes all the edges of the city drip with dew. I think back to the maps that got me here.
I came from Germany — a trip in a couchette as resilient as birch wood, to the Metro sub-station in France. Then a quick and jarring ride on the Metro to Montmartre. Paris was going to be a different experience than Germany. The Metro map told me so.
TNB TV
When Sara Barron was eleven years old, she wrote a pornographic movie script entitled A Porn in a spiral notebook. Here, for your entertainment pleasure, is a (comedic) dramatization of that inspired fledgling effort. In this video, modern day Sara talks with her eleven-year-old former self on the telephone.
People Are Unappealing
TNB contributor Sara Barron’s uproarious collection of essays is now in print and you can buy it RIGHT HERE.
LOS ANGELES—
When I was ten, my parents sent me to summer camp for two weeks. They made the arrangements secretly, knowing a fit was inevitable the minute they broke the news. I was an explosive kid, coming as I did from a histrionic family, and my parents wanted me gone for a while so they could rage at each other without me around to upstage them.
(more…)
THE DEEP SOUTH-
I stop by the spot where the old bar used to be and dig through the ashes of days gone by.
We used to be the hottest college nightspot in town. Our Thursday night line would wind down to the Campus Fil-A-Sack and back but now they’re closed too. I heard a strip club came in but from the look of things it’s been shut down awhile. There’s nothing but the shell of a sign, some trash and scattered glass. Weeds growing up through cracks in the lot. A slit still exists in the blacked-out front door so I cup my hands around my eyes and peer inside. Other than the requisition runway and metal pole things still look a lot like they did so many summers ago…
SOUTH COAST, ENGLAND-
A kid walks into a bookstore, he buys a book, it changes his life in a way he would never have imagined.
But what if that book is never purchased? What if, on that grey summer morning when the clouds are bursting with fine rain falling so gently it’s like the spittle of an overweight and drunken relative trying to hold a semblance of civilized conversation after Christmas dinner, that book never reaches the destination that fate had intended?
RICHMOND, VA —
My daughter, not yet eight, has grown suddenly careful with her money. She’s not greedy. (She often forgets to ask for her allowance.) But, now that she’s figured out that money is finite, she spends what she has with great deliberation.
Prior to our recent beach vacation, she planned a lemonade venture for weeks in her mind, fantasizing about the preparation of the drinks, the inevitable line of customers, the transactions. Our family has a running conversational riff about one day opening a store selling only her favorite foods: salmon sashimi, cucumber, chocolate, a few others equally eclectic. She’s sophisticated enough to know it’s a joke. So when she contemplated the lemonade stand she settled on two items she thought would have a better shot than sashimi: lemonade and chocolate brownies. (more…)
Last week I received a package in the mail from my cousin Kelly.
It was the tap dancing outfit I wore in my 4th grade dance recital.
That recital marked the debut, the apex, the anticlimax, and the denouement of my dance career.
LOWER EAST SIDE, MANHATTAN-
On Water
I’ve become pretty water-savvy over the past few years. Who hasn’t? Spring water, sparkling water, water from the quickly disappearing glaciers of Alaska – we’ve all been drinking more bottled water. I know some people who have stopped drinking tap water altogether. They say they don’t like the taste, but I think it’s actually a matter of trust. I drink it, but I probably shouldn’t. When I order tap water in restaurants, it’s slightly embarrassing. Can’t I afford the bottled water? Am I making some kind of statement? (Sometimes when the refrigerator in my kitchen kicks in, the lights in my apartment dim a little, and I feel my eyelids dip to match the encroaching darkness as though they’re struggling to blur the line between what they guard and what they guard against.)
COLUMBUS, OH-
It’s true, my mother had an affinity for mud. Perhaps her penchant was derived from some hardwired inborn affection stemming from a DNA memory recalling our emergence from the primordial slime. She loved the stuff, shaped it, rolled it, sculpted it and threw it on the potter’s wheel. She couldn’t leave it alone.
LAS VEGAS, NV -
I moved back to Vegas from Charlotte over a year ago. The reasons? Too many. But one of them was that my mom (my grandmother actually) was battling cancer and I wanted to be by her side. I spent many sad nights on the east coast thinking about what she was going through. It hurt like nothing I ever felt before. I felt like a horrible son.
NASHVILLE, TN -
I am a closet smoker. That means that after I look at people smoking on the street with disgust, vigorously waving their offensive carcinogenic cloud away with my hand until they either stub it out or tell me to go fuck myself, I sneak around the corner and light up. Why do I do this? Why do I scowl at those souls honest enough to light up in public and then turn into a hypocrite?
I grew up in a house with two chain smokers for parents who felt persecuted by the world whenever they encountered an environment that did not allow them to light up. Whenever they visited me in New York, inevitably they would wail, “Oh WHY is the world persecuting us?! Isn’t there ANYWHERE we can smoke?!! God, how we hate this commie town!”
LOS ANGELES -
The late-night June sky was exceptionally clear, rabid with wild stars. As I walked home from a Silverlake bar, I witnessed the usual constellations—Orion, Ursa Major. In addition, I spotted new, undiscovered formations. I named them all: Zardoz, Love Bullet, Moonlight’s Motel.
LONGMONT, CO-
I’m at the airport, confident. I’ve never had vertigo in a plane before, so I’m not worried about jumping out of one.
Besides, my dad is jumping, too, and I don’t want to wimp out on him. Mom is here, too, documenting the whole thing in photos, so if I wimp out, there will be photographic evidence of my cowardice. (more…)
TNB TV
Jeff Rivera interviews Sung J. Woo.
Everything Asian
TNB contributor Sung J. Woo’s critically acclaimed debut novel is now in print and you can buy it RIGHT HERE. Commence at once with this commercial transaction.
PARIS-
These arrangements of empty chairs are what’s left of celebration, argument, meditation, sleep and revelation. They huddle together like still animals in the cold. From a chair beneath a plane tree, the round tracks of a cane disappear into the gravel.
The single chairs are absent of their poets, readers and afternoon philosophers.
Those side by side and face to face are absent of their lovers, their chess players, the soon to be married and the just abandoned.
The great groups of circles and strange half-moons have lost their lecturers, their students.
