June 26, 2017 First Person Beyond This Point You May Encounter Nude Sunbathers By Christopher Bollen Paul Signac, Cassis, Cap Lombard, Opus 196, 1889. In August 2004, my friend Joseph and I organized a trip to Dubrovnik before chartering a boat on the Adriatic Sea. A Croatian friend advised me of a tiny nearby island called Lokrum. It was popular with nudists, he said, and had perfect swimming coves. I told Joseph about the island when we met up in the Dubrovnik airport, and the next morning, anxious for the sea and sun, our skin the color of too much office work, we rode the ferry toward Lokrum. Only then did I mention that it was a nudist beach. “I don’t mind,” Joseph assured me. “Me neither,” I replied. “I just hope some of them are attractive.” Joseph turned to me with a smirk. “No,” he said. “I mean, I don’t mind being naked.” I hadn’t seen much of Joseph in the past year. Now I was going to see too much of him—every inner-thigh freckle, scrotal wrinkle, and circumcision mark. Read More
June 23, 2017 First Person One Way Out By Jonathan Wilson In the refulgent early seventies, I owned, but was never fully occupied by, the Allman Brothers Band’s double album Eat a Peach. More than the hit “Melissa,” it was that soon-to-be-iconic cover, featuring a truck with a giant peach (Roald Dahl eat your heart out) that made the greatest inroads into my admittedly wobbly consciousness. I bought into the myth circulating at the time: that Duane Allman, who had died on his motorcycle, had been struck by a flatbed truck transporting Georgia peaches through Macon on their way to some orchard in the sky. The grisly truth regarding the crash was less inspiring, and a less-interesting conversation starter for visitors to my off-campus cottage, where the album held pride of place on the mantelpiece above my fireplace. Later I learned that the elegiac cover took off either from Duane’s admiration for T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or his euphemistic turn of phrase “Every time I’m in Georgia I eat a peach for peace,” which apparently referred to his on-and-off-the-road activities with local women who were hotter than Georgia asphalt. Years—no, decades—passed. Sometime in the summer of 1996 my fourteen-year-old son acquired two tickets to an Allman Brothers concert at Great Woods in Mansfield, Massachusetts, a forty-minute drive from our home. He’d arranged to bring along a friend, a girl but not a girlfriend, and for some reason everyone involved, i.e., both sets of parents, were cool with letting them attend without a full-time chaperone. I would drive them to the concert, wait in the lot, and pick them up on their way out, the sounds of the last stupendous encore still ringing in their juvenile ears. Read More
June 12, 2017 First Person Proud, Prouder, Proudest By Bryan Washington New Orleans during Pride Week, 2016. Photo: Tony Webster It was Pride Week in New Orleans. The parade had just ended. I spent the evening getting blitzed under a balcony, stepping through polyrhythms in tandem with seventy thousand other men and women. Afterward, the audience broke off, in various stages of undress, to porches and curbsides throughout the French Quarter, until the road was strewn with beads and condoms and go-cups. It happens every year. New Orleans has a ton of queer households on the census. It’s a pretty colorful city. And inevitably, those colors deepen in June, when Pride Week comes around: the clubs host parties funded by globalized sex apps, tiny drunken congregations bloom all over the Quarter, and the week climaxes with a march the final evening. And then brunch, or, depending on your persuasion, maybe a little more. But even if the city moonlights as a Babylon of the South, it can also be a dangerous place to go out. Loads of murders go unsolved annually in New Orleans. At least two this year have involved transgender women of color. Assaults in the loop of gay bars by Bourbon Street are hardly unheard of, and the city isn’t at all removed from the South’s virulent thread of hatred. But when the parade turned the corner of Conti Street, those facts hardly diminished its tremors; and, in a town that isn’t terribly diverse, you were suddenly as likely to find yourself grinding on some Canadian kid as a flock of Iranian bears. Read More
June 8, 2017 First Person Where I Wasn’t When Manchester Bled By Tom Benn The Manchester worker bee, as depicted in a mosaic on the floor of Manchester Town Hall. Like a nightmare from the past To the sound of splintered glass … What kind of times are these? They drive you to your knees —“A Person Isn’t Safe Anywhere These Days,” by the Chameleons, a Manchester band I was eight and watching Saturday Westerns with my maternal nana in her Moss Side maisonette when the IRA bombed central Manchester in ’96. My nana had a color TV, but she preferred to watch the world in black and white. I’d helped her drain the settings. She had a budgie called Bluey and an Alsatian called Blacky and a serpent tattoo on her thigh. We were eating grapes. But my mother is convinced we weren’t. Not when the bomb went off. Years later she told me she’d heard the news before we left the burbs; she’d taken me to see my paternal nana in Wythenshawe that day instead, avoiding town. Read More
May 24, 2017 First Person My Albania By Brian Cullman A postcard of Albania, ca. 1910. Some people wake up at four in the morning wondering if they’ve left the light on in the kitchen. I wake up in a cold sweat wondering if there’s some country that I’ve forgotten, some place on Earth that’s slipped through my fingers. For many years now, I’ve collected music from the farthest reaches of the planet. I’ve found tapes of music from islands in Indonesia where drummers build their own instruments and eat them after each performance; records of Eskimos who sing into each others’ mouths; forty-fives of South African bands that sound just like the Sir Douglas Quintet; and records of Mongolian houmi singers who can hit three notes simultaneously. When I can’t sleep, I go wading through my collection like Scrooge McDuck swims in his money bin. And so I panicked when I awoke one night—this was now more than thirty years ago—and realized that I had no Albanian records. Not a one. And I didn’t even know where to look. Read More
May 4, 2017 First Person It Is Known By Rajeev Balasubramanyam From a 1952 Air France poster advertising flights to Corsica. As France flirts with political Armageddon, my mind returns to the gentleman with whom I shared a flight in 1996. I was returning from India on an Air France flight bound for Paris. He was sitting to my right, an unshaven, tousle-haired man in his thirties who smoked incessantly and refused all food, drinking only coffee. I asked him where he was from and he said Corsica. The Corsicans, he explained, were “the most dangerous people in the world,” and he showed me the tiny knives tattooed on his shoulder. I can’t be sure, but I believe each represented someone he had killed. I asked him if he had enjoyed his time in India and he said, “I hate it.” He was “too sensitive,” he explained: the poverty hurt his feelings. I asked if he had liked the food, at least, and he replied, “French food is the best in the world.” When I suggested this was a matter of opinion, he banged his fist on the pullout tray and said: “NO. IT IS KNOWN.” Read More