I have to admit, I was more than a little confused by Spike Lee’s message here. I understand that none of the characters seem to be “doing the right thing,” with the exception of The Mayor, but he’s playing with all manner of sub-surface racial-tension throughout and he reaches for something a little deeper at [...]
Jazz
“‘I chose you. Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you [...]
Quicksand
“Annoyed, but still hanging, for the sake of the twenty-five dollars, to her self-control, Helga gave her head a little toss and flung out her hands in a helpless, beaten way. Then she shrugged. What did it matter? ‘Oh, well, if you really want to know. I assure you, it’s nothing interesting. Or nasty,’ she [...]
Lunch Poems
If you’re a big fan of New York, or mid-sixties pop culture, the O’Hara poems collected in Lunch Poems are indispensable. If not, there is less reason to jump on a copy. Most of Lunch Poems are meandering and groundless almost to the point of being schizophrenic. I do not have to make perfect sense [...]
Midnight Cowboy
There’s something to be said for watching a movie in the comfort of your own dorm room, by yourself. You can make all the inappropriate comments you like, laugh at all the wrong moments, offer running commentary and advice, even, when the DVD started skipping, yell at the projector booth and throw empty White Castle [...]
Why can’t we live without ribs?
Me and my monkey
not enough dead zombies
across a campus shooting
stench of death
Beside Ben
this is drivel
Greco-Roman
Jupiter cardinals
singing frogs of
Alabama’s fury insanity.
Soul-kitchen.
I can cook too, in Spanish pictures.
Bugs Bunny-blender.
Sunny-Spanish-scalpel-souls.
Whiskey-bullets
in the kumquat ivory.
Fornicates, dies.
Like silken jazz.
rough blue shit explosions.
Now.
Now.
Here.
Penis.
Dis. I see sex.
Keeanu Reeves.
Pointless controversy.
Shoot’em up, meteor storm far away, so why not now?
The G. There’s a lot of us, boisterous, uncontained. Loud voices discussing things sure to frighten other passengers. Ejected by steam into the vomit-coated street. Turning in place. Standing in the chill and talking; the little one shivers like a wind-up penguin and tells us she can kill a man with her bare thumbs. We shove wadded-up [...]
Jacob Riis was a Danish-American journalist with a reformist bent from the turn of the century. For those not a personal fan of Riis, the term is “muckraker.” He was the son of a hard-working Danish newspaper-editor who had fourteen other children to worry about. At 12 he donated all of his Christmas money to a poorer family [...]
Today’s post is on: nostalgia, or, ‘we don’t live here anymore.’ Some of them try to capture what the city of New York, metaphysically, ideologically, hypothetically is, some simply seem to see it as their duty to preserve a clear record of New York as it existed from their distinct perspective (what New York is [...]
