Tinnitus hissed through the music, the laughter, the static. It wasn’t crowded in there, but it was loud. Two women at the bar, a few feet away, were engaged in a conversation that consisted of whooping and screeching at the top of their lungs in response to every...
I Could Have Written That By John Tottenham Like you, I am tired of my own voice, these incessant I’s and me’s. But what’s the alternative? I don’t have the audacity to employ another he or she or We. Nothing could be worse, psycholinguistically, than that sententious...
All the Paper in My Life By Eve Wood We are born into paper— Our lives bookended in signatures, A certificate To prove you exist And another to prove you Do not, each day teeming With permits, credentials For entry and forms to depart, Passports, agendas, Records of...
Imagine That for YC By klipschutz Rachel Cusk flies first class and drives a hybrid. Waiting at the bus stop I raise my hand. If I change the names is it fiction? What if I keep the names and make up lies? Or is that like saying it’s a poem if it...
The Mountain If a man should ask to meet me at the summit of a mountain to discuss the great questions of life, I would have to turn him down. Talking Woman A woman with a coarse voice can be very sexy, especially if she only says the most negative things. Table In...
The Swan Motel By Alan Yuch The hot nights, the swelter, even the walls would sweat. Sweet Marcy in the same cotton dress, patterned with red, white and blue balloons. The windowless room, matching walls, the air-flooded neon. This room was meant for sleeping,...
Gomorrah by Eddi Saladoe Right when I believed that I was finally free from the angry longing and a need to hear your voice just one more time you come to me in dreams like smoke sneaking under a bedroom door the innocent sleepers unaware that the civilization...
It’s a typical Saturday night, the drinks are flowing and the music is playing - as I lie in the bathtub reading another David Goodis novel, sipping another tequila and soda, with a Brahms piano sonata playing softly in the next room. I’m in my natural element,...
The trail you blazed was a well-worn path. Narcissistic heroics, with one eye on posterity. Until the time rolled around to reverse into the antithesis of what you once so convincingly pretended to be: stripped of the trappings of excess, climbing the twelve steps on...
More than a re-imagining of the Michael Jackson story, Julien Nitzberg’s play, For the Love of a Glove, serves as a point of departure for a wildly surreal take on an already bizarre life, from the troubled entertainer’s repressed childhood in Gary, Indiana, to the...
Located in the heart of Dublin’s Liberties district, the seven-story Aloft Dublin City hotel stands out in a gritty neighborhood of winding residential streets and old distilleries. The Liberties (the unusual place name results from this having been the only part of...
“You’ve caught me in a really good mood,” said Jeffrey Poe, as he sidled up to the bar of an upscale West Hollywood restaurant. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I was hoping to play up the ‘lonely at the top’ angle and find a backhanded way of comparing your...
In order to kill time while waiting for John Waters to take the stage for a Conversation to celebrate the publication of his new book, Mr. Know-It-All, at the Renberg Theatre in Hollywood, I made the mistake of checking my phone. One email awaited me. It was from a...
The Day of Forevermore, Marnie Weber’s first feature film, is the culmination of the artist’s long career as a weaver of macabre and otherworldly scenarios through art, film and music. Over the last 25 years Weber has created her own distinctive realm of avant-garde...
I recently overheard somebody make the observation that David Bowie’s death has “staying power.” It sounded like an idiotic remark at first but in this case it seems accurate. Sure, Bowie was one of the greats, an unfading star who provided an exhilarating soundtrack...
Ten years ago, when I learned of the existence of a film called Trona, shot in the desert hellhole of the same name, I feared the worst, especially when I learned that it was a thesis film by a CalArts graduate. It was hard to imagine anybody associated with that...
Where do you start with a six-hour operatic extravaganza on sex, art, alchemy, reincarnation and the decline of the American auto industry, drenched in melodrama and symbology, with so many threads running through it that the original material, if any, is obscured; a...
There are few sights more ridiculous than a grown man wearing a pair of shorts. Back in my day, grown men simply did not venture outside clad in shorts. Anyone choosing to appear in public in such outlandish garb would be laughed off the streets. Scorn would...
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