November 21, 2023 First Person Paul Bowles in Tangier By Frederic Tuten From left, Paul Bowles and Frederic Tuten in Tangiers in the eighties. Photograph courtesy of Frederic Tuten. I immediately found a taxi in front of my hotel, which I thought meant good luck for the venture ahead. The driver smiled. I smiled. I gave him the directions in Spanish, then French, and finally I gave him a slip of paper with an address. He smiled. We drove slowly up and down hilly streets and then into a valley of people selling carpets and kitchenware; a mosque towered above us. We passed a man walking with a live lamb draped over his shoulders. It was my second day in Morocco, and I was not yet used to such biblical scenes. Ten minutes later, I saw the same spread of carpets and the same array of pots and pans, the same mosque, and I gestured to say, What’s going on? He shrugged and gave me another of his wide smiles. I was not reassured, thinking of stories of kidnapping and worse that supposedly happened in Morocco, stories I had admired written by a man I had admired since I was sixteen and whom I was on the way to meet. But then, finally, I arrived safe and free, ten minutes late and lighter by thirty dollars—with tip. Paul Bowles was already there, waiting for me on a bench at the American School’s entranceway. He was very thin, slight, in a beige jacket, gray trousers, and a narrow, quiet tie, and was smoking a cigarette in a holder. “I hope you had a good ride,” he said. “Fine. There was a cab waiting at my hotel. The Hotel Villa de France,” I added, with a certain pride, because Matisse and Gertrude Stein had once stayed there. “It took only forty minutes.” “Oh!” he said. “You could have walked here in less than ten. But then, I suppose, you’d have to had known the way. That’s a good hotel,” he added, “or at least it was forty years ago. Is the place still run-down?” Read More
September 28, 2023 First Person So Fierce Is the World: On Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman By Richard Deming Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010. Photograph by Justin Hoch, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0. “He’s dead.” The voice on the phone belonged to Joshua, a friend with whom I had gotten sober years ago. Back then, in the nineties, driving to and from twelve-step meetings held in smoky church basements across Rochester, New York, in a rickety station wagon with my drum set in the wayback, we kept ourselves focused by improvising sketch comedy and working out stand-up routines that Joshua would then use in his fledging act, which he’d eventually abandon in order to become a travel writer specializing in Southeast Asia. He was calling from Portland. “Who’s dead?” I asked, trying to think who from our past might have relapsed. “The actor, the guy you’re writing about. Overdosed on heroin.” Read More
September 21, 2023 First Person W Stands for W By Stephen Haines The W Hotel, Barcelona. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. When I was first hired as a bartender by the W Hotel in Seattle, the brand was still owned by Starwood, an indistinct consolidated corporation that has since been subsumed into the ravenous belly known as Marriott. There was a lengthy process involved in getting the job. I interviewed twice: once in the HR office and then a second time downstairs with the manager of the hotel restaurant and lounge. After being hired, I attended a mandatory, introductory eight-hour job training that was quite similar to the one I’d experienced prior to beginning a regrettable stint at Starbucks. I was stuffed into a room with about twenty other new hires—everything from housekeepers to sous-chefs to servers to maintenance workers—and we were each inundated with Starwood history. Starwood business policies. Starwood subsidiary family trees. We watched videos. We read dense packets filled with glowing customer surveys and reviews. We broke into small groups, and we were quizzed about the things that we learned. We won prizes—Starwood-engraved keychains, W Seattle pens, and the like—for each answer we got right. These gifts would be tossed about the room by the two HR workers who gave these training sessions, and they would clap with absurd enthusiasm each time. Their gusto was on brand with that of a game-show host or some seasoned motivational speaker as they shouted into their blouse-pinned microphones. “And you get a prize!” “And YOU get a prize!” Read More
September 13, 2023 First Person Two Strip Clubs, Paris and New Hampshire By Lisa Carver Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La danse au Moulin Rouge, 1890. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Every summer, my mother would take me and a friend to Salisbury Amusement Park to eat fried dough with cinnamon and powdered sugar and go on the roller coaster until we were sick and then get our minds blown by the 2001 Space Oddity dome, which spun us around in complete darkness while a narrator intoned about galaxies and time warps. But best of all: every hour, on the hour, the Solid Gold Dancers jogged out of a pit in the center of the fairgrounds and, sweating under the August sun in full gold lamé, would kick, spin, leap, and boogie for fifteen minutes while disco music boomed (those loudspeakers carried barely any treble, which made for a peculiar version of disco). Sunrays glinted off the sequins and I was hypnotized. It all jumbled together in my mind, the sensations, the nausea, the ecstasy. That gold-flecked feeling of 1979 faded away until thirty-five years later, when my French husband, Bruno, took me to the nightclub in Montmartre that started it all: the Moulin Rouge. I walked through red velvet curtains into the past and straight onto the set of the sweetest magical movie flop of my youth, Xanadu! Roller skates, a swimming pool rising up out of the stage where we could see women dancing underwater. In costumes made of diamonds and skin. I was in heaven. The show lasted two hours. It had everything: a fantastic light show and sound system, constantly changing sets—a castle, a pirate ship, a circus, a London street corner at the turn of the century, a … a Chinese opium den? Even though the women had naked boobies, they still looked like angels. I think angels do have naked boobies, now that I’ve seen this show. And there were so many of them! A teeming flock or herd. Singing and kicking and dancing. Costume changes for every act. A personal favorite was the giant red-feather puffballs with legs sticking out. No arms, no head, just a big red puffball on legs. One act featured good-natured Siamese twins, another strongmen who balanced whole humans on a single elbow, wow! At the Moulin Rouge, clowns are bare-breasted along with the angels. And I shouldn’t have been surprised that in France, one clown act per nightclub experience was not enough … there had to be two. Read More
September 11, 2023 First Person Jets and Trash By Tao Lin In May 2005, I graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism. That fall, I got a job off Craigslist working for a twenty-nine-year-old Afghan man named Richard Zaher, who was creating a jet charter company called Paramount Business Jets, seemingly by himself. He lived in a dark, bare apartment in Lower Manhattan with his sister. I went there zero to four times a week over around three months. In his bedroom, we worked on his company’s website. The website’s purpose was to entice customers to call the company, which for a fee would facilitate travel by private jet. My job was to (1) copyedit the text he’d written; (2) find and Photoshop images of jets, jet interiors/cockpits, limousines, mansions, cruise ships, champagne, and other things to put on the website; (3) collect statistics and write descriptions for a hundred-plus types of jets. My work is still online, I recently learned. This sentence made me laugh a little, reading it in 2023: Richard was also an actor. His acting name was Baktash, which seemed to be his birth name. He’d been in two movies. He’d starred in FireDancer—the first Afghan film submitted to the Academy Awards, a film assistant-directed by his sister, Vida, who when letting me in the apartment a few times had seemed quiet and stoic, like her brother—and he’d appeared briefly in Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Read More
September 6, 2023 First Person Dark Rooms By Ntozake Shange Ntozake Shange at Barnard College in November 1978. From the Barnard College archives, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The following three short essays describe Ntozake Shange’s experience with psychoanalysis. After the success of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, she struggled with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and drug addiction. Her mental health challenges continued for decades, and she was remarkably open about them and diligent in seeking help through psychoanalysis and traditional talk therapy. Characteristically, Shange’s complicated emotional landscape is rendered with tenderness and beauty, which is particularly important given our collective recognition of the importance of mental health care. In this, too, Shange was ahead of her time. —Imani Perry Editor’s note: Except where a change was necessary to avoid errors that altered meaning in the work, Shange’s original handwritten notes and misspellings are how they appear in her archives. The editor aimed to maintain the integrity and urgency of Shange’s writing style, and to publish her work as she left it. The Dark Room When “For colored girls …” was at the height of its controversy/popularity, I found myself wearing very dark glasses and large hats so that folks wouldn’t recognize me. I couldn’t ride elevators, up or down. If someone figured out who I was, I calmly stated that I was frequently mistaken for ‘her’. I’d had other occasions in my life, when I was the only African-American in a class or banished to the countryside that my family loved so much, when I’d been known to disassociate, to refer to myself in the third person. Then, I was ‘Paulette’. Now, Ntozake repeating the pattern of the girl I’d gleefully left behind. This was very troubling. I’d just become who I was and was in the frenzied act of ‘disappearing’ me. Now, I confess to discovering many, many roads to oblivion, but I rarely recounted these episodes with warmth or a sense of well-being. So, I did what I thought troubled writers did, I went to my producer, Joseph Papp, to seek counsel. To my alarm, Joe recommended against analysis or other therapies, “because, then, my writers can’t write anymore’. Well, writing I was, living I was, living I was not, even though I wasn’t always a strong supporter of my own perceptions. The ability to write in isolation for hours about anything and enjoy it is a gift, but it is not life. Even, I knew this. I could not hide in a dance studio, either. My presence was unavoidable , yet unbearable. Read More