Driving Through The Projects On Super Bowl Sunday by Nekallah Binns
March 7, 2012
December 12, 2011
How Heavy Metal Saved My Life - by Steve Almond, Virginia Quarterly Review 2005 Copyright University of… http://t.co/UitjVPwZ
December 10, 2011
How Heavy Metal Saved My Life
by Steve Almond, Virginia Quarterly Review 2005
Copyright University of Virginia Summer 2005
I spent three years as a rock music critic in El Paso, Texas, which was where I lived at the tail end of the eighties and where I came of age, in a sense-grew old enough, that is, to recognize that heavy metal was, essentially, tribal in nature and that it had everything to do with rhythm and aggression and desire and conquest and physical release and death, which is to say, with sex.
But I’m not here to lecture on sex, or The Social Mores of the Headbanger Subculture, circa 1989. My job, as I understand it, is to suggest how heavy metal saved my life, which it surely did, and not by inspiring me toward complex thought, but by the opposite process: the complete annihilation of thought in favor of instinct-. To live dangerously, absurdly, even fallaciously-this was the legacy of my metal days. To believe one might get laid, sucked off, gulped down, on any given night, anywhere on earth-a hidden stairwell, a crowded bathroom, your neighbor’s porch, anywhere.
But please don’t ask me, did it happen and how and what did she smell like, because you’re missing the point. It isn’t the facts I’m speaking of here, but the desire. Not the deed, but the possibility. What is a piece of art, after all, but the possibility of a particular truth? And what are artists but suckers talented enough to win a few converts?
December 10, 2011
Some Questions Concerning Art and Suffering
Shapiro explores the relationship between art and suffering. He says that the difference between what one’s suffer in the daily lives and the suffering enacted in a Greek tragedy has to do with how that suffering is shaped and ordered. He concludes by saying that he wants the kind of art that admits it is giving a song and dance when it transforms suffering into pleasure, pain into insight, life into clarifying images of life; the kind of art that recognizes there is no good substitute for the precious flesh.
(4622 words)
by Alan Shapiro. Tikkun. San Francisco:Jan/Feb 2004. Vol. 19, Iss. 1, p. 28-32
In the fall of 1999, my brother was dying of brain cancer, my marriage was falling apart, and I had just moved into the basement apartment of a house whose owner was an eighty-five-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s who every few days would knock on my door and introduce herself. One night in the middle of this outtake from the Book of Job I had a dream in which The Oresteia by Aeschylus, which I was translating at the time, had been adapted for the Jerry Springer Show. What I remember mostly were the characters as they came on stage: Agamemnon first-decked out in armor, spear in hand, horse hair bobbing from his helmet: as he strides to his chair, the caption on the screen reads: “Sacrificed Daughter to Stop Wind!” He’s followed by Cassandra, who staggers out, babbling incoherently. The caption flashes: “Thinks she’s clairvoyant!” Then Oedipus, not Clytemnestra, strides confidently to his seat, so confident in fact that he hasn’t noticed that he’s strayed in off the set of another tragedy while Jerry whispers to the home audience, “Slept with Mother, Murdered Father, Doesn’t realize it yet!”
December 10, 2011
Reading, Writing, Social Climbing: Fifteen Years as the Headmistress of Spence
by Monique P. Yazigi
(2170 words) Copyright New York Times Company Oct 3, 1999
EDES GILBERT saw it all. For 15 years as the headmistress of the Spence School, she saw the parents who lobbied for their 7-year-olds to be assigned to classes with children who weren’t their friends but whose parents were rich and prominent — in the hopes that the students would become friends and so would the parents.
She saw the jockeying to volunteer on the ”right” parent committees. ”Mothers would be upset because they weren’t put on a committee with someone who would give them that social leg up,” said Mrs. Gilbert, who retired in 1998 from Spence, the prestigious Upper East Side girls’ school. ”Mothers would throw a hissy fit.”
And she saw how back-to-school night, when parents flood the school to meet teachers and rub elbows with other parents, often had the aura of a competitive Park Avenue cocktail party: some adults networkfuriously to set up play dates for their daughters with the offspring of prominent parents, who include Sigourney Weaver, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric and Ronald O. Perelman.
December 10, 2011
Vegas Landscapers Betting on Palm Trees; Desert: Casinos want the tropical icons to set the mood. Scouts patrol Southern California, looking for homeowners willing to sell their specimens for up to $1,000
Vegas Landscapers Betting on Palm Trees; Desert: Casinos want the tropical icons to set the mood. Scouts patrol Southern California, looking for homeowners willing to sell their specimens for up to $1,000
by Angie Bluethman
Tom Chacon considers himself a recycler. He sends his “spotters” out across the West, counting on them to buy and uproot prized palm trees from people’s back yards and bring them to Las Vegas—a city that’s gone mad for palms.
“The palm tree business is a booming business in Vegas. Vegas is a hot spot. For how long, I don’t know,” said Chacon, owner of TC Enterprises, a Fontana, Calif., based palm tree company that also has operations in Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Those beautiful palm trees can be seen just about everywhere in Las Vegas. Their big leaves wave on the Las Vegas Strip, almost all the major resorts and most housing developments. While palms may be plentiful, what it takes to get them to this gambling mecca is another story.
“It’s phenomenal,” said Ray Hoffman, division manager at Cedco Landscaping in Las Vegas. “It’s just unbelievable. Every project that we’re doing requires palm trees.”
Hoffman believes the craze started eight years ago when the Mirage opened with palm trees planted outside and preserved palms gracing the lobby.
Now every casino wants palm trees.
December 10, 2011
Skip Hollandsworth Does It Again: A 2002 Texas Monthly profile on a Houston hostess that is as fun as any party.
Full Text
(6102 words)
(Copyright Texas Monthly. 2002)
“OH, YOU MUST COME. You simply must come,” Becca Cason Thrash exclaimed. I had called her to see if I could get myself invited to the party she was throwing in April to benefit Houston’s Stages Repertory Theatre. “We’re calling the night ‘A Celebration of American Fashion,’” she said, her voice as creamy as vichyssoise. “Anna Wintour [the editor in chief of Vogue] will be here, and some of the great American fashion designers are cominga[euro]”Diane von Furstenberg, Mark Badgley and James Mischka, and Carmen Marc Valvo.”
“And I assume it’s black-tie?” I asked.
“High black-tie, my dear. This party is going to be flawless, absolutely flawless, and I expect everyone to look their best. I’ve told my girlfriends, ‘You have to wear something by an American designer, and you have to look divine.’”
For five years I had been seeing the name Becca Cason Thrash in boldface almost every time I glanced at the society columns in the Houston Chronicle. I read about her extravagant parties in Women’s Wear Daily, Town and Country, Talk magazine, and Liz Smith’s gossip column. I read stories that called her “the high priestess of posh.” I read that Houstonians had nicknamed her TriBecca because she changed her outfit three times at every party she threw. I read about her wildly avant-garde, 20,000-square-foot mansiona[euro]”a house originally designed by Preston Bolton that her husband, John Thrash, the chief executive of the Houston energy company eCorp, had remodeled, tripling its size.
December 10, 2011
Singing in Dark Times: A beautiful piece by Erica Funkhouser on the role of poets in response to war
by Erica Funkhouser (Copyright Harvard Review 2005)
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
-Bertolt Brecht, “Motto”
Early in 2003, poet and editor Sam Hamill was famously uninvited to the White House. Laura Bush had originally invited Hamill to join her at a February symposium to celebrate “Poetry and the American Voice.” Hamill accepted and then he asked a few friends for poems representing “the conscience of our country.” This was during the weeks leading up to the March invasion of Iraq, when President Bush’s plans to “shock and awe” Baghdad were well publicized: three thousand missiles would strike the city in the first two days of the war, the president promised. Hamill received 11,000 responses to his request for poems. When Laura Bush caught wind of this, she “postponed” the symposium. On February 12, 2003, the day when the original symposium was supposed to have taken place, hundreds of counter-symposia were held across the country. Later that year, Poets Against the War, edited by Hamill, was published with work by 174 poets.
December 10, 2011
Poet Sam Hamill on meeting Kenneth Rexroth as a young, lost ‘frisco street kid, and on Rexroth’s influence on him, both as a poet and as a man.
by Sam Hamill, originally published in the Chicago Review, Autumn 2006
I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. […]! wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the
Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.
-Kenneth Rexroth
In 1959, I was hip. On the Road had put me on the road a couple of years earlier, when I was fourteen and caught a freight train bound for who-knows-where. It was leaving Utah, and that was good enough for me. I huddled in an empty cattle car and smoked Lucky Strikes and peeked between the wooden slats as the vast salt desert clanged by. Hours after dark, I got off in Reno, where I scraped most of the skin from one arm and knee and broke my nose by jumping too soon-assover-teakettle into the gravel and railroad ties. A couple of hours later I was in the back seat of a squad car bound for detention, where I sat for several days before being put on a Greyhound bus back to Salt Lake City, to be greeted by irate foster parents. I was cool.
I hot-wired cars, hopped trains, hitchhiked, and visited detention centers or jails in most of the surrounding states over the next year.
December 10, 2011
Steve Job’s once-estranged daughter on Mona Simpson’s fictionalized portrayal of their family.
Driving Jane by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Published in The Harvard Advocate, Spring 1999
We drove. I sat on my mother’s lap in the driver’s seat and steered while she did the pedals, keeping us at 15 mph. She held her hands an inch away from the steering wheel, hovering, in case I overestimated one of the turns on our twisted road in Los Trencos, California. It was just the two of us, my mom and me – so nobody told her she was crazy. My mother knew: at five I was coordinated enough to steer the car.In my aunt Mona Simpson’s book, A Regular Guy, a girl named Jane also drives. Her impoverished mother, Mary di Natali, sends her to find Jane’s rich father, Tom Owens.
I didn’t read the book for two years. Mona sent me the manuscript before publication, and asked me to read it over. I expected it to be a series of conversations from a cocktail party, an idea I remembered her telling me about years before. She told me that I was to tell her if I thought she should change anything. I was honored. After reading only a few pages, it was clear that the book was about something different—but I only read so much then, and I only asked Mona to change a few details. I was intimidated to ask her to change more. Who was I to tell an accomplished writer what to do? Her first two books, Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father earned her literary fame—her work has been translated into 14 languages. She is the recipient of Whiting writer’s award and a Guggenheim grant. She was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. Yet, in the first few pages, I was confronted with my family, my anecdotes, my things, my thoughts, myself in the character Jane. And sandwiched between the truths was invention—lies to me, made more evident because of their dangerous proximity to the truth. Less than the uncanny resemblance between Jane and me, it is the mixture of fact and invention that grates. Jane is me and not me. Jane and I are playing tug-o-war; I am truth, Jane is lies, the rope is fiction.
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