December 1, 2011 Fiction 420 Characters By Lou Beach Illustration by Lou Beach.The stories you are about to encounter were written as status updates on a large social-networking site. These updates were limited to 420 characters, including letters, spaces, and punctuation. The author hopes you enjoy them. I KEEP MY FRIENDS IN A BOX under the bed, categorized and separated, secured by blue rubber bands that originally held broccoli. One day I removed the lid and saw that they had all turned into little bones. I strung them together into a long strand that I looped around and around my neck. TURNS OUT she wasn’t really pregnant, just doing a number, needing someone to hold onto. Hell, I’ve been married four times, I sussed it out. Anyways, I cut her loose in Bismarck and got a job on a road crew. Saw a big gray wolf deep in a field of snow. He sniffed the air and was gone. THERE IS A PLACE I visit, where no one else goes. The rocks are slippery and sharp, the drop to the dark sea below makes me dizzy. The sun never muscles its way through the gang of clouds that hover overhead shedding a mist that plasters my thin hair to my head, makes me turn up my collar. No, you can’t go with me, I don’t want a sandwich to take, thermos of hot chocolate, though your asking may keep me home. THE FLOOR MANAGER cued him for the break. “When we return—a report on elder abuse.” He stood and stretched, sat back down when the stylist came to fix his makeup, adjust his hair. “You’re so handsome,” she whispered as she dropped two pills into his waiting hand. “You’re killing me,” he said and put his hand on her ass. I DON’T KNOW HOW she tracked me from Bismarck. Maybe she followed my scent. Anyway I was working in Waukesha putting up vinyl siding and I look down and there she is, looking up at me with a hand on the ladder. “Hey.” “Hey.” I was still a little pissed at that pregnancy bullshit she tried to pull, but there was something about the curve of her neck and that dumbass gap-toothed grin … Read More
November 30, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn A cultural news roundup. “His innate humility counters his naked ambition, his earnest sentimentality complements the company’s ironic capering, and the shy reediness of his singing voice strengthens the appeal of lyrics steeled with resolution.” On Kermit the Frog. Long-lost Kerouac. Long-lost Brontë. Long-lost Walt Disney, in pictures. The lost art of titles. “You better get fitted for a black eyepatch in case one of yours gets gouged out by a bushy-haired stranger in a dimly lit parking lot. How fast can you learn Braille?” Cruel rejection letters. Judy Blume: “I would cry when the rejections came in—the first couple of times, anyway—and I would go to sleep feeling down, but I would wake up in the morning optimistic and saying, ‘Well, maybe they didn’t like that one, but wait till they see what I’m going to do next.’” Miranda July sets up shop in SoHo. Pippa instructs on how to be the perfect party hostess. Margaret Atwood draws! Obama pushes books! Ray Bradbury relents!
November 30, 2011 Arts & Culture On ‘Holiday’ By Josh Lieberman Here’s how it begins. You are in a bookstore on the main drag of a small town. You walk along the mystery and western paperback sections, and then you see a wicker basket overflowing with Life magazines. You idly flip through the stack because you know Life was once an important cultural force but have never seen the magazine in person. The copies of Life are musty and torn, and in the middle of the heap you come across something called Holiday. It has the same heft as Life, more than a foot tall and surprisingly heavy, but in place of a black-and-white photograph on the cover there is a colorful swirling yellow illustration of the sun and the words “California Without Cliches.” The magazine is from 1965 and you think it would look good on your coffee table. Also the ads are campy and fun (“San Diego Is a See-Do Vacationland!”), so you buy the magazine—why not, it’s only a few bucks—and take it home. You turn on the TV and half watch Seinfeld as you flip through for the ads. Then you come upon “Notes from a Native Daughter,” the Joan Didion essay you read in college but don’t really remember. You read how California is only five hours from New York by jet but really that is just a delusion: “California is somewhere else.” Now you are somewhere else. Seinfeld ends and another Seinfeld begins and you read the entire essay and then discover a piece by Ray Bradbury, your old pal from high school English. You read his rhapsodic paean to Disneyland (“No beatniks here. No Cool people with Cool faces pretending not to care, thus swindling themselves out of life or any chance for life”), and you think that’s pretty good, too. You head back to the bookstore to see if they have any more issues of Holiday. *** Whenever I mention to someone that I’ve started collecting old issues of Holiday, the excellent yet forgotten monthly travel magazine that was born after World War II and lived until the late seventies, the response generally falls between bafflement and irritation. “Why would you do that?” people ask, as though I’ve just admitted to hoarding old shoehorns or something truly sinister. Read More
November 29, 2011 Nostalgia The Corner Booth By Vanessa Blakeslee I became a writer because I was raised at a diner in rural Pennsylvania. My parents opened the Chestnuthill Diner the first week of August 1984. The diner arrived the summer I turned five, and I watched, gaping, as its twin sections were maneuvered from flatbed trailers onto the concrete foundation that had been poured weeks earlier. I celebrated my fifth birthday in a corner booth, pleased by the shiny chrome and flame-red seats, the flurry of waitresses rushing past in their brown-and-white striped uniforms, the tables bursting with customers. That was the first day the larger world opened up to me, the realm outside school and playmates, where real life really happened—the swear-laden frays between the cooks masked by radios blasting heavy metal, the combined whiff of grease and lettuce as the produce deliverymen wheeled their hand trucks in the back door, the coolness of the dough resting in the kitchen. After school, on weekends, and for the next six summers, I would enter the back door of the diner on the heels of my mother, who trundled her coin bags, bookkeeping ledgers, and payroll checks. Past the bright bakery where dinner rolls and pies cooled on the racks, around the corner of whirring compressors and my grandfather’s work bench—he kept himself busy part-time as our fix-it man—stood the basement offices. Read More
November 29, 2011 At Work William Kennedy on ‘Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes’ By Elisabeth Donnelly Revolutionary times fuel William Kennedy’s newest book, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, which follows the career of journalist Daniel Quinn. The novel’s first half takes place in 1957 Cuba, where Quinn gets writing advice from Ernest Hemingway (“Shun adverbs, strenuously”), falls in love with a gunrunner named Renata, and hikes through the jungle for the ultimate journalist’s prize—an interview with Fidel Castro. The second half finds Quinn, eleven years later, witnessing another kind of revolution, this one in his hometown of Albany after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, as the city hovers on the verge of race riots. The eighth novel in Kennedy’s Albany Cycle—which includes the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ironweed—Chango’s Beads has a cast of characters that will feel familiar to readers of the earlier books, characters united by jazz, corruption, heroics, journalism, politics, and the perpetual revolution of history. I talked with the eighty-three-year-old Kennedy at his home in Albany—a townhouse where Jack Diamond, gangster, bootlegger, and the subject of Kennedy’s second novel, Legs, was shot to death. Read More
November 28, 2011 Arts & Culture The Desert’s Daughters By Jenna Wortham From 'Nevada Rose.' Photograph by Marc McAndrews. Not long ago, I became obsessed with sex work. I spent hours poring over the autobiographies of peep-show workers. I grilled my friends who dabbled in fetish work about their jobs, and I spent more time that I’d like to admit in strip clubs and all-nude revues. The tantalizing intimacy of the performance was only part of the thrill; the real allure, the draw that sent me to club after club in San Francisco, Miami, New York, Amsterdam, and London, was the desire to understand what it is like to take off your clothes in front of strangers for money. I got a revealing peek into this world on a recent Friday, at an event for Nevada Rose: Inside the American Brothel, a book about that illicit alternate reality. Marc McAndrews, a photographer from Reading, Pennsylvania, spent five years in the desert documenting the secret—albeit, legal—world of the American brothel. He visited more thirty brothels in Nevada, often spending a week or more at each establishment, including the infamous Moonlite Bunny Ranch featured in the HBO documentary Cathouse, as well as smaller brothels scattered throughout the region, sporting names like Angel’s Ladies and Sue’s Fantasy Club. Read More