Low Log: February 2010

2/26/2010

Smart People

by Joshua Abelow

Who the hell is Joshua Abelow?
I ask myself this question
every day at noon when I wake
up and see my reflection
in the mirror. Of course, this
question is followed by a much
more interesting question;
Why is he so handsome?
OK! OK! Enough stupid jokes.
Let's get to something
serious and intellectual
and proper and sophisticated.
We are smart people after
all. Otherwise, we wouldn't
be reading poems or looking
at paintings. And we
certainly wouldn't be
trying to make them
either.

Looking Out an Airplane Window at Night as a Child

by Ryan Baker Green

2010
Photo Collage
4.75 x 4.75 inches

Alex Bleeker Interview: Part 4

by Ida Griesemer

This interview with Alex Bleeker (of the Ridgewood, New Jersey bands Real Estate and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks) took place on January 13, 2010. It will appear in six parts.

View: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6

In which Real Estate finds their name when Martin’s parents offer all four band members jobs in their realty firm.
LL: How did the name Real Estate happen?
AB: I guess it was because over the summer Martin was going to real estate school to get his realtor’s license. His parents are realtors so he had this safety net job as a realtor. And we were having the like – I’m sure you’re very familiar with it – the common post-college existential crisis, like, What are we going to do with our lives? We’ve been so sheltered and institutionalized for the past 16 years. We don’t wanna get jobs! How do we even get jobs if we wanna get jobs? And so Martin was doing this thing, and we were having dinner and his parents were like, You guys can all work for us if you got your real estate licenses. And we were like, What if we all went to real estate school and all were realtors, and we also had a band, and we called it Real Estate. It was a just a joke. And when the band became an actual band and we had a show booked – our first show was two Octobers ago – we needed a name and that was the only thing… And we thought it sounded vaguely like a soft rock staple, sort of like Steely Dan, I don’t know why. For some reason we were interested in that kind of aesthetic.
LL: What about the Steely Dan aesthetic was appealing to you?
AB: Especially Etienne and myself, but also the other guys, got really into soft rock for some reason. We wanted to make music that was like – and in a way we’ve achieved it with Real Estate – music that was like, smooth. Laid back, you know, head bobbing, grooving. And so that was sort of the original inspiration for the band, and we wanted the name to fit that. I definitely think we have stronger influences than bands like Fleetwood Mac or Steely Dan, but that sort of idea was attractive to us at the time.
LL: It’s interesting that you felt connected to that kind of music because it was at a time when you were like, Are we gonna be realtors? Are we really gonna do this as our job? I mean, we could. And that’s sort of a serious thing.
AB: Totally. And you know Martin, who’s the front man of the band, is. He goes to work at his parents’ real estate office when we’re not on tour.
LL: I love that. It’s so literal.
AB: Yeah. I mean it’s definitely become totally associated with us that we’re from New Jersey. We’re these very normal, typical suburban kids. A you-know-these-guys kind of aesthetic.
LL: Well it’s familiar to you guys, because that’s where you are.
AB: True, but I think we’re interested in appealing to common experiences. You know, we wanna make it clear that I think our music is relatable because it’s coming from an honest place where we’re those kids that played music in high school. We just never stopped.
LL: So if that’s where you’re coming from, where do you think you’re going as a band? What do you think is most crucial?
AB: I think we need to – right now we’re experiencing a lot of success, which is really exciting, but can also be really intimidating. Because when we wrote these songs, when Martin wrote these songs and when the band formulated and when we started – you know, I think Martin is the chief songwriter of Real Estate for sure, but I think a lot of our appeal, especially the appeal about the live show, is it’s obvious that we know each other and that we’re having a lot of fun and that we have a deep musical connection. We didn’t meet each other for the purposes of being in a band together. This is something that we’re all passionate about, in different ways, but we’re on a similar wavelength, and I think the magic of Real Estate comes from that. It comes from that long friendship and pure love that’s come into the creation of it. And we had 10 years to develop that, in a way. Even though all the songs that were on the record were written within the span of a year, there was no pressure to write them. It took us five years to arrive at this specific sound that makes sense for the four of us to play together. And you know, we’re going to have the opportunity to put out a second record, and now there’s a different kind of anticipation for that record, or a different kind of attention going on. I think right now it’s important for us to stay calm and to stay grounded. Take everything as it comes. We’re about to have a really busy year. We’re doing a lot of traveling.
LL: Do you feel yourself floating and getting a little bit detached at times?
AB: I mean, it becomes more of like a – when you play shows every night it’s great, it’s a dream come true, it’s amazing - it’s also a job. So we have to keep the spark and the energy there. We have to want to play together. We have to be careful and look out for each other’s feelings, and we also have to not worry - in a weird way this is funny because this is a press-related moment – we have to not care about the press. You know, we have to write good songs, we have to evolve naturally, and not try to cater to a sound that we’ve been pinned to. We don’t have to write songs about the summer. It’s about not being compelled to be anything and to allow the music to come organically, which can be scary and hard now that you can read people’s comments about you on Brooklyn Vegan. Which is the worst feeling in the world, in a way. My darkest moments are when I go scour the internet for hate comments about our band. You look for the bad things, or you anticipate the backlash because you know it has to come, because we’re getting a lot of positive attention.

View: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6

The Table

by Molly Goldman

No matter the house
I will be alone

at the table
no matter the excuse

I will be alone
at the table

no matter so suddenly
I will be alone

at the table
tongue no tongue again

not again the bath
and I will be alone

at the table
the cameras are busy

I will be alone
at the table no matter

left shoulder left
shoulder birthday

no birthday try no try
to swim, clutching the lake

no matter
unable unable

DMovie

by Jack Rohman

Alex Bleeker Interview: Part 3

by Ida Griesemer

This interview with Alex Bleeker (of the Ridgewood, New Jersey bands Real Estate and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks) took place on January 13, 2010. It will appear in six parts.

View: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

In which Real Estate and Underwater Peoples Records are born (together, like twins).
LL: Did that band stay together throughout high school?
AB: We stayed together for freshman and sophomore years. Marc was around for a while, but we never really had our own material, we just played covers. And Paperface couldn’t play together anymore because Matt left for boarding school. None of us liked school very much, which was another thing that bound us together. We were all angsty, failing all of our classes, smoking weed behind garages, talking on the phone. So when Matt left and another one of their members graduated because he was two years ahead of us, that band kind of fell apart.
So we started this other band, Martin, Julian, and I, called The Enormous Radio. Which I think is a really good band. I was listening to our demo – and that’s when we were juniors in high school – I was listening to that the other day and I was like, It’s pretty good. It was super lo-fi, because it had to be.
That was the reason why I made the Freaks band. It was a total throw back to just the core, the originals. The four of us just know each other’s styles so well. Martin, Matt, Julian, and I were the people who were my most inspired musical community growing up. The three of those guys. There’s definitely an oddly huge musician pool from my town that I feel like I could draw from, but those guys, we hung out the most together, we did the most together, we played the most music together.
I think that we’ve influenced each other’s taste, because whenever we’re interested in something, we share it, and that will sway us in a direction, so it became this friendly, I don’t wanna say competition, but like, activity, to find new bands. I mean it’s still like that. If one of us gets into something, we’ll share it and usually that will influence what we’re listening to and that will influence the way that we’re writing. And that’s what’s cool, we sort of keep each other present. We’ll send each other demos as soon as we finish them for advice or critiques or just to share. They’ll definitely be large influence on my music.
LL: So you’re at a point where you can take that kind of criticism from each other?
AB: I think so. You know, it’s sensitive. It’s sensitive, for sure, especially now that we have records that are materializing. That’s pretty surreal on one level, but it also feels like a really natural progression on another, because it happens kind of slowly. In high school all we would talk about was “getting signed,” like, if we could only get signed, than that opens up this other world. But now, realizing that we had no concept of what that even meant, or the fact it’s not some romanticized version of becoming a rock star.
LL: How did that transition happen? How did you become involved with Underwater Peoples?
AB: Well, those guys are from – those guys are very much something that’s really exciting too – Underwater Peoples is organically grown from the place where we come from.
LL: They’re from Ridgewood also?
AB: Yeah, well, one of their members, Evan Brody, who’s also the front man of that band Family Portrait, he was a year younger than us in high school and became a part of our group of friends. And he went to college and met these other kids who are not from Ridgewood, but I feel like they could’ve been. They sort of fit into the family really well. They’re into all the same stuff we are and they’re really good people. They’re in it for all the right reasons. The band Real Estate and the label Underwater People are two things that 2009 was a huge year for. We began the same month. The very first Real Estate record, our first 7”, was their very first release, ever.
LL: And then the Freaks record was the first 12” that they put out too, right?
AB: Yeah. Which is my first effort.
LL: Is Brody on the cover of your album?
AB: Yeah. Actually all the Underwater Peoples guys are the cover. I don’t know if people know this but every member of Family Portrait are also the four founding members of Underwater Peoples. They’re like the house band.
They always wanted to have a label. They’d been talking about it for a while. They started really getting serious about that idea the same summer that we started really getting serious about Real Estate. It was just really lucky that that coincided because we didn’t have to convince – we didn’t have to like find a label and convince them to sign us. We knew them for a while, they were familiar with our music, they had heard our recordings. It was like, Let’s do this together. Let’s put out a record. I don’t even think any of us knew if it would grow beyond that single record or not. And, I don’t know, something aligned correctly for us to have good fortune in the past year.

View: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Notes From the B Train: Part 2

by Lucy Morris

View: Part 1

V.
It goes dark and cold in Brighton Beach without me noticing. The Christmas wreaths have been lit and a staff of what seems like dozens is hard at work on holiday displays, bringing me signs to proofread. An outrageously sized television has been placed in the front of the store facing the street. It plays loops of video advertisements that feature a series of blonde, high-cheekboned Slavic women who all look alike. The sound is muted and they move their facial muscles double time and try triply hard to entice you into the store without making a sound.

I have been coming here every day for six months and it turns out I am lonely. So I am plotting friendship. The only thing I miss about working with Americans is the ease with which camaraderie can be established between two people. There is always a crazy customer with an inflated sense of importance or a secretary meaner than her job description should allow, and stories about those characters and circumstances keep conversation going throughout the day and, if you are lucky, after work hours are over.

My rare conversations at this job are almost entirely about my understanding of Russian, my coworkers’ misunderstanding of English, or some genial combination of the two with a touch of humor about cultural drinking practices. There is also my constant suspicion that I am somehow the butt of a joke I can’t understand. Nobody knows where I live or whom with, what I do at night or on weekends, or even my age and education level. I would like to change this, at least a little bit, and my best prospect looks to be Igor. Igor wears a cell phone holster, occasionally asks my opinion, and makes good use of his limited English to cobble together Dick Cheney jokes. In general, I think he's magnificent. There are days when I believe he does nothing except read whatever website provides information on both Iraqi insurgencies and Lady Gaga's new videos – a combination that I find amiable since it is reminiscent of my own liberal arts college curriculum.

My second prospect is Alyosha. Alyosha is a Gogolian figure, with an oversized overcoat and gut, a sparkle of gold teeth, and the air of a civil servant about him. He and Igor are – for now – the best of friends. I like to see myself going on cigar breaks with them, or stepping out for lunchtime pierogies: two middle aged Russian peas and a confused American girl half their age, all in the pod chairs of the Cafe Arbat.

If that fails, there is always Anastasia, the kind of Russian woman that inspired the folktale, “Princess Never-Smile.” Occasionally Anastasia is given the impression that she is responsible for my work, and as a result we are bound together by a series of knowing looks and nods, which indicate her accountability and my submission to it. She has a deep look of sadness about her at all times - permanent frown lines that exaggerate her age by perhaps as much as a decade - and a fleece vest she keeps at work, the lapels of which she clings to for warmth and comfort. Anastasia consumes more caffeine than me, visiting Starbucks sometimes twice a day for the largest sizes of the blackest coffee. One Monday I run into her in the morning, just about to clock in. She doesn't look like she has ingested any caffeine yet, frown lines firmly in descent. I ask her how she is. She glances up at me appraisingly. "Excellent," she says in robust Russian, smileless, without the slightest hint of either sarcasm or enthusiasm.

VI.
Sometimes I work with Lyonya, and by virtue of him being the person I sit closest to most often, I suppose he is my closest friend. Lyonya has hooded eyes, sharp Slavic features and skin so pale it all conspires to make him look exotic, a hint of the Mongol about him. He makes it a practice to ignore me whenever I am in need of technological guidance, technology being his area of expertise. When I am busy, though, he occasionally makes time to be friendly. Lyonya was the underdog of the office before I arrived, and once I arrived, instead of conspiring with me, he turned on me. He specializes in a kind of undermining that never reflects all that well on him. He got picked on for not eating meat, something he was fiercely proud of in the face of office jesters who urged, “Just a little bit of hotdog, it’s barely meat!’ – but when he found out I'd been a vegetarian longer, he immediately distanced himself from his principles. “Well, at least I eat fish,” he said. I liked Lyonya immediately for both his ability to be humiliated daily and his total antagonism toward me. It seemed like it required effort to suspend his empathy so thoroughly.

My relationship with Lyonya consists of periodic sympathy over crazy people who call his customer service line, and a strict game of favors in which one of us strives to have one up on the other at all times. At best this might be considered unhealthy competition, but what makes it really unfortunate is that, at times, I seem to be the only one playing. I make a call to Immigration on Lyonya’s behalf, to straighten out some issues he’s encountered in registering for the Selective Service. He can’t understand the Southern employees at the call center, whose accents are so thick even I have to unstick their words one by one in my brain. In exchange, on a day when I'm working from home and my numbers are worse than usual, it seems fair that he would hold off on reporting me to our superiors. Instead, I get a call from my boss while I’m working at a West Village café, informing me I’m a disappointment. After the confusing phone call, which ends, like so many Russian conversations, with both parties shouting “We’ll see!” in defiant tones, I walk inside to see a friend working behind the counter. “This figures,” I grumble, “You can never trust a Russian not to inform on you.”

VII.
Besides being tenuously in-house, I am also a freelance translator. The idea of freelance, from what I gather, is not to have a single boss, but I have one and his name is Oleg. Oleg runs a legal firm with a Yahoo email address and is the man who funnels clients to me. He calls me up sometimes and says, "Lucy, my dear, do I have work for you!" and then repeats the sentence in Russian. Oleg originally came to me in two voicemail messages I ignore, because I do not make it a practice to return calls from strangers who leave no reason for their call, just an emphatic plea to return it. I wonder what kind of mess I've gotten myself into, like maybe the Russian version of those fraudulent collect calls from prisons. Or was this the result of earlier job hunting? Perhaps my offer to take part in a research study of Russian DJs via Skype? On his third message, Oleg admits he has been referred by my boss. “Call me as soon as you get this!” he says with an air of merry urgency, the kind used by the office gossip barely containing some salacious news.

Of all the things in the world that I hate – people who do not walk as fast as they might on subway stairs, ants inside a candy apple, that the working world turns on an axis that requires waking before noon – speaking on the phone in a foreign language ranks high among them. But I call Oleg and he asks me to come see him Friday at 10 AM. It somehow fails to occur to me that this is an interview. I neglect to bring a resume and forget to brush my hair. But by the end of our meeting, we’ve surfed the web some, I’ve been called dear several times in several languages, and I’ve named a mostly arbitrary rate. I do own what was known a decade ago as a “power suit,” three versions of the same resume to highlight different skills, and I pride myself on my cover letter mastery. But with Russians, my professionalism always fails to assert itself, replaced by a kind of lethargy that extends not just to interview dress but to my general air with my coworkers and superiors: one of, at best, half-hearted interest, and of virtually no investment. I know many people who utilize this approach in their romantic lives on the premise that the less you act like you want someone, the more they’ll want you. I know few people for whom this has worked in relationships, and no one for whom this has worked in business. Then again, I don’t know anyone else who works for Russians.

I'm Not Saying Kissinger is Satan, But...

by Tait Foster

I have always strived to be unbiased. I have my own opinions, as does everyone else, but I have always tried to understand all sides of an argument before reaching my own conclusions. As such the use of personal attacks in debate has always struck me as counter-intuitive, making any kind of balanced discourse impossible. This would seem obvious as a discussion about even the most heated issues can maintain its intellectual stability due to the fact that you’re arguing about certain points and stances rather than irrelevant and distracting assaults. The difference between, ‘I disagree with your take on Israel because of points, A, B, and C’ versus, ‘If you believe that you’re a fascist’ is fairly clear. With that being said I will delve into the realm of total hypocrisy and say something I think everyone can agree on. Henry Kissinger sounds like Satan.

This is not to say that, ‘Henry Kissinger is Satan’ or that ‘Henry Kissinger is a messenger for Satan’ or finally that ‘Henry Kissinger is related to Satan.’ No. What I am merely stating is that the Kissinger that exists purely in the audible and oral world sounds like what I, and I assume most of us, imagine Satan to sound like. Satan also known in Hebrew as ‘the accuser’ (הַשָׂטָן), in Arabic as ‘the adversary’ (الشيطان), and in some Christian texts as Lucifer is in essence the premier angel in Heaven and God’s greatest creation. That is until attempting to usurp God’s power and being cast out forced to spend the rest of his/her/its days tempting good people into sinning against God and earning a ticket to Hell (for Christians and Muslims) or just fucking with people, (in the case of Job in the Old Testament since there is no Hell in Judaism).

Now that the history of Satan is fresh in our minds, watch this interview Kissinger gave on Charlie Rose in 2007. Tell me if I’m crazy but does that not sound like the night manager of the 24-hour motel we call Hell, or the voice you hear laughing in your ear when you take a drunken tumble down the stairs? Sure the Barry White/Rick Ross bass that he’s working with is certainly intimidating. And the gravely voice that sounds like someone who’s replaced Listerine with conflict diamonds isn’t what you want to hear singing you to sleep. And the German accent has never really had a great track record for comfort. But all three?! It’s the perfect storm of pseudo-evil sounding voices. This is what Big Brother would sound like when he’s pissed.

I’m not trying to make a comment about Kissinger as a public servant, historian, or even just a person. I’ve read more than I care to admit about those topics ranging from his historical neutrality, his status as a possible war criminal, and so on. What I will say on that topic is that I wonder if he sounded like the special guest in this video, maybe he wouldn’t have such a bad reputation.

Alex Bleeker Interview: Part 2

by Ida Griesemer

This interview with Alex Bleeker (of the Ridgewood, New Jersey bands Real Estate and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks) took place on January 13, 2010. It will appear in six parts.

View: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

In which Alex, Matt, and Julian all have the same guitar teacher who lives in a windmill in Paterson, New Jersey.
LL: Did you continue practicing separately that year?
AB: Well, what happened was, we couldn’t hold Emerson X-Ray Solution together because egos were just flailing, people wanted to take the band in different directions, some of us didn’t even really like ska. It was continually frustrating to me to be just a singer. I was learning guitar as rapidly as I possibly could because I felt self-conscious about being just a singer and not having the songwriting capabilities. So we’d get in a lot of fights and stuff at practice, and I’d go practice guitar in a corner.
LL: Was someone teaching you?
AB: I took guitar lessons. I also learned a lot from Matt and Julian - Martin was a bass player at the time, he didn’t play guitar until college really, he’s always been a really talented musician – I’d go over to Matt’s house, once we become friends, on Saturday afternoons and after school, and he was maybe a year ahead of me in terms of guitar playing skills at the time, so he would show me how to play Pixies songs and Weezer songs. A lot of great learning happened. I had a great – we all had the same guitar teacher. He would teach Matt, Julian, and I on the same day. He come to our houses, then the three of us would hang out after our guitar lessons, and we’d show each other things. We learned a lot from each other.
LL: Are you still in touch with that guy?
AB: Tony Scally. I wish. We talk about him all the time. We’re like, I wonder if Tony Scally knows that we’re quasi career musicians now. And would he like the music that we’re making, or would he hate it? He’d see my Grateful Dead CDs and be like, Why do you like this band? They’re terrible.
LL: What was Tony Scally into?
AB: Jazz. He always had good stories. He knew we were all potheads, so he’d try to be a positive influence. He was a great guy. I remember he was a big influence on all of our lives because he went to Columbia, he was really smart, but he decided to be a musician and he taught lessons for a living. He lived in Paterson, New Jersey, which is this urban, run-down, dying city in our county. He lived there in a windmill. And he was married to this jazz singer who I never met but I always imagined her to be very beautiful. Her name was Grady Stone.
Tony was like a bard. He would come and teach you a little bit of guitar and then tell you really good stories. And we’d share stories that Tony told us. We still do.
LL: So you’re all learning guitar. And ninth grade begins.
AB: So Emerson X-Ray Solution fell apart, very dramatically, as ninth graders are. It was the most important thing ever and we just couldn’t stop fighting. Egos collided. I quit the band. There were three of us who sort of staged a coup. We left and formed our own band. I quit, but it was also – something had to break. So I left along with the drummer and keyboard player. And Martin didn’t quit the band, but he came with us too to form this other band. And that band was called Marc. We were basically a cover band. And then the ska band got a new drummer, got a different guitar player slash lead singer songwriter, and they became this band called Fletcher and the Sticky Wickets, that Martin was also in. Between Marc, and Fletcher and the Sticky Wickets and that other band Paperface who stayed together through this, we became this trinity of bands in high school. That was our little taste of hometown glory. We made stickers and buttons and we played all the open mics. People knew our songs and our covers. It was the hugest thing in the world. I remember there was a girl who I had a crush on, and I asked her to borrow her calculator, and it had a Marc sticker on it. And I had never talked to her. It was my own little private victory.
We threw our own show one summer – I think it was right before we went back to school – and we bought risers, we bought a stage, and we got a PA. Something like 150 people came, which was so awesome. And my brother, who I always had a rivalry with, his group of friends came, and he was older than us. We were these nerd kids but we threw a good party.

View: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Windmill

by Tisch Abelow

2008.

31 1/2 x 24 inches

Oil on canvas.

Notes From the B Train

by Lucy Morris

Check back on February 17th for another installment of "Notes."

I.
There was a year when I lived in Russia. I was 19 and most of what I did was watch television and drink tea and read books, and although that doesn’t sound so bad, at the end of it I was twenty pounds underweight and my nose was crooked in a way it hadn’t been before I left. I thought for sure I’d never go back. Now I am not so sure, only because a year is a long time to live somewhere without thinking of being there again someday: no matter how much you want to, it’s still hard to imagine not seeing your most hated relative again. Why make the investment of hatred without expecting a return? As it turned out, I didn’t need to go back to Russia because Russia came back to me. I finished college and within three weeks I got a call from a man named Nikolai asking me to come down to Brighton Beach to interview for a position as a translator at a large Russian retail company – the biggest, they claimed, in North America, though there were rumors of an errant Canadian side family with more books than us. “You do speak Russian, right?” he said. “In principle,” I say, which is one of the very first things I learned to say when I got to Russia.

II.
When I check for yesterday’s mail every morning, the name on the letters is Lucy Morris. I say goodbye to my sympathetic boyfriend, who is the other half of our two-person household in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and walk one block to buy my bagel and then walk another to the subway, where I board the R train at the second door on the third car. When I get off the subway an hour later, my name is Lusya Morrris – with a slack-jawed “ya” and an “R” that makes waves – and my main identifying trait is that I am American: an Amerikanka in the parlance of the world I work in. I spend my days trying to convince myself and those around me that I am a professional English-to-Russian translator, and on a given day I do this at one of two offices somewhere along the last handful of stops on the B and Q lines, after Sheepshead Bay and before Coney Island. Over the course of my commute, I watch the train empty of people speaking English and fill with those who don't: men in pointy shoes negotiating business deals in Russian, bundled-up babushkas clucking at their bilingual grandkids, and women my age in glittery jeans and elaborate heels texting intently in Cyrillic. I always arrive early enough to go to Starbucks, not because I like the coffee – I do not, particularly – but because it is my last contact with American New York before I go undercover for eight hours.

III.
There are days when I do feel like a spy. Misha, who is a security guard at one of my stores and somewhat sweet on me, likes to say that I am planning to work for the CIA, as though a job translating instructions to Russian Monopoly (“BE THE BOSS WHO DICTATES THE RULES!”) is a dice roll away from secret agent. One day he instructs our boss to only speak to me in Russian. I politely offer that this isn’t necessary, but he won’t have it because practice makes perfect and perfect makes you lots of money with the federal government. Misha looks at my time sheet, at the top of which my name is written LUCY MORR'S, and he says, "Special Agent LUCY MORR'S," as though saying it in his official English voice will make it true. In one of my first workplace embarrassments, Misha makes me recite some Pushkin. It is a very famous poem I memorized in Russia partly to fulfill a phonetics assignment and partly to impress babushkas - my central fan base in a nation that still assumes anyone who wants to visit must be a spy. The first line goes like this. “I loved you once, and perhaps I love you still.” I force the words out of my mouth with the reluctance of a Russian Custom’s officer validating your visa. Misha looks at me and says, with a great big smile: "That used to be serious and now it's funny!" I laugh with him and try to convince myself that butchering the country’s most famous poet is kind of like doing a remix. Europeans are pretty into techno, right?

IV.
Early on I make the mistake of referring to the company I work for as the Russian gift and book mafia. The problem with this bon mot is that people think I am serious. There was a Russian translator who wound up dead in the basement of a Russian couple two years ago for working on a mafia case, just a few blocks from where I get my coffee every morning. And the thing is that at first I wasn’t sure if I worked for a mafia front, or at the very least a highly successful counterfeit operation specializing in nesting dolls and child-rearing guides. Mysterious black garbage bags with Aeroflot cargo tape would appear on rainy days at the back door of one of our stores, seemingly truckloads of them, all hustled into the office and then taken down to the basement. It remains unclear to me what about seventy-five percent of my colleagues actually do. But I also spent my teenage years working at English-speaking retail companies, and there was always something there that could be misinterpreted as well: certain handling of cash boxes and bundles at the end of the day, where mysterious paperwork we were expected to arduously keep track of actually ended up and always, always, there was a basement room no one could get into. Now, though, my language disadvantage happens to place my observation talents just behind the dimly lit door to understanding, so everything is cast in this shade of confusion that is easy to mistake for suspicion. The Golden Rule as we define it – do unto others, et cetera – is predicated on being able to see yourself in someone else's shoes. When the sizing system of your shoes is itself an entirely different one from that of your peers, this is considerably harder to do. In America I am a size 6.5, but at work I am lucky if I get my shoes on and tied right each day.

View: Part 2

Deck the Hills

by Emma Barrie

“It’s going to be in the 70s while you’re here,” Mom e-mails me from LA. “Bring a jacket.” I laugh that laugh of a New Yorker, of someone’s who’s spent time in the trenches. Oh please, Mother, I think to myself, in sort of a British accent. You don’t even know what cold feels like.

I take the A train to JFK at 5am. On the way, I have an imaginary conversation with her.
Mom: You’re taking the SUBWAY? At FIVE AM? To the airport? Take a cab! I’ll pay!
Me: Mom, you don’t even get it. This is so much easier, and cheaper. I hate cabs.

I think about how efficient and competent and independent I am. I think about how I’m a grown-up. I miss my stop to JFK because I’m playing with my phone, and end up in the middle of fucking nowhere, at a beach that looks like it was just stormed in the invasion of Normandy. I’m shocked there are no dead bodies. Mom is always right. Even the mom in my head.

I never mention to my mother how I got to the airport when she picks me up in LA. Coming out of the terminal, I have to shield my eyes from the glare. I feel like someone who has never seen the sun. Like Edward Scissorhands. Or like Kevin Spacey in K-PAX: a foreigner from a distant, more sophisticated land, who might just be delusional. The heat feels good on my face, on the back of my neck. It seeps through my clothes and my skin, directly into my body, into my veins, like a much needed injection. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes think about moving home.

“Hi, Bunky.” She gives me a big long hug and she still smells like my childhood. I rest my cheek on her shoulder.
“Hi, Mom.”

We drive through the flats of Beverly Hills, past Christmas carols sounding from speakers attached to every lamppost, past Santa Claus and his seven (Eight? Twelve?) reindeer flying over palm trees, past signs that say Deck the Hills! It’s easy to forget the town is run by a bunch of Hollywood Jews. I notice the chandeliers that hang over Rodeo Drive are there, but they are always there. Year round. And it’s things like crystal chandeliers in transparent boxes that provide me with the Hate part of the Love/Hate relationship I have with my hometown.

My father calls me at least four times that day, making sure he can reserve my place at dinner that night for Chanukah festivities. I made it into the town for the last of the eight nights, so obviously we’re going all out: latkes will be served, and the menorah will make its way out of the storage closet. He tells me everyone will be attending—everyone meaning my stepmother, her children, one fiancé, and my legitimate blood brother. I know to get ready for a circus. Less Cirque Du Soleil and more Barnum & Bailey.

“I don’t know, I just don’t like the guy,” my brother Max says of my stepsister’s new fiancé. “His shirts are too tight. You can see his abs and shit.”
“Are you just jealous you don’t have any abs?” I ask, poking at my brother’s belly. He’s gained at least twenty pounds in the last year or so, and it’s mostly gone to his stomach.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m jealous I’m not a douchebag, too.”

We’re in the car together, and I’m driving because Max says he’s tired. He says he hasn’t slept in two nights, but he doesn’t know why. He’s always had trouble sleeping. And because I’m home, I’m here to drive him around. But when I leave, I wonder if he’s able to get a ride. Or maybe my absence means Max’s bedroom seclusion.

“But couldn’t you have at least gotten dressed?” I ask. He is in a bathrobe and sweatpants. I know he’s going to get shit from Dad. He often shows up to family dinners or parties in his bathrobe, presumably for attention. But no one really says anything because everyone’s thankful he’s not in real trouble. And it’s easier this way, I tell myself. At least this way we never have to point out who the crazy one is. At least this way he doesn’t have to wear a nametag.

“I love my bathrobe,” he says. “It’s so soft. And clean.”

Max has severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Part of his OCD prevents him from re-using hand towels to dry his hands or his face. So he uses toilet paper. Rolls and rolls of toilet paper. Mom was buying a new twelve-pack every few days, so she eventually had to put her foot down and tell him that if he wanted toilet paper, he’d have to pay for his own. She still buys it for the rest of the house, but because he started stealing it from other bathrooms, toilet paper is now hidden behind curtains and under beds. Often, I’ll find a roll without even looking. A fun surprise.

“I always wanted a little brother,” I tell my older brother.

We arrive at my father’s house, where the Madeleine Peyroux CD I got him as a Chanukah gift three years ago is playing. I wonder if this is a nice gesture or a subtle hint that I better had gotten him a gift this year. I did not.

“Hello, hello.” He looks my brother up and down. “What, you couldn’t find your clothes?” Max manages to give the most awkward halfway hug, where his back leg lifts up as he leans forward, and one leg stays grounded. They pat each other on the back repeatedly. It sounds like weak applause. My father kisses me on the cheek and I press my head into his stomach. “Don’t you look cute,” he says. I won’t lie. It’s nice having someone around telling me how cute I look all the time. For some reason my friends never do this.

My stepmother tells me she wants to show me her cat’s new trick. “Look what Igor can do now!” she says, and pats on her breasts. Igor jumps four feet into the air directly onto them. “Yay!” she screams, as she presses his tiny cat body against hers. My dad chuckles that chuckle—something somewhere in between “That’s actually sort of impressive” and “Kill me now"—and I know that if I ever decided to move back home, I wouldn’t just be around for the main show, I’d be around for every damn cat lesson.

My stepsister, her fiancé and his five-year-old daughter sit in the living room by the fire. The little girl sits on her father’s lap, and my stepsister stands behind them, giving him a massage. All of their sentences end in “Babe.” They look like one of those LA celebrity couples you’d see on the cover of Us Weekly with their elaborately ripped up v-necks and crucifix jewelry. But the little girl is cute. She has geeky wire-rim glasses and a button nose.

I have only met this five-year-old once before, but for some reason, at this particular dinner, she attaches herself to my hip.

“Do you want to sit next to Daddy?” The Colin Farrell look-alike asks as we find our places at the table.
“I want to sit next to Emma,” she says. I help her onto her chair. I’m usually pretty into people who are into me, whether it be men who want to date me, or small children who want to be my best friend. I feel like they must know what’s going on.

My other two stepsiblings—both boys—are also at the table. The older one is covered head to toe in tattoos (“Great, you paid to have someone cover you in permanent ink!” my father has been known to say every time a new one surfaces), and the younger one has a face, I’m sure, but it’s usually covered under a hat brim and pointed downwards, towards his phone, while he texts.

Everyone asks me how New York is. Depending on my mood—which fluctuates moment to moment—I say, “freezing,” or I tell a coffee shop anecdote so that I can do an impression of the owner, showcasing my Jersey-Italian accent and excessive hand gestures. This always gives my dad a good, hearty laugh. After I have one glass of wine, I’m giving a detailed explanation of how to make hearts and leaves out of milk fat on top of peoples’ lattes. It’s something I’ve come to take a lot of pride in.

My dad then tells us he has a surprise.

I should mention that about two weeks earlier, my parents discovered Skype. My parents haven’t really spoken to each other in years, except for at my graduation where they got into a fight and my mom left early. But somehow, they both managed to discover outdated technology in exactly the same week. Watching my parents with new technology is like watching someone who has stumbled into a leprechaun. THEY ALWAYS SAID IT WAS REAL BUT I NEVER THOUGHT BUT HERE IT IS OH MY GOD. It’s comparable to when my grandmother got her Xerox machine in 2007. (“Look! It made another one! Hooray! Now there’s one for everybody!”)

When my mother and I video chat she says things like “When I was a little girl this was considered like, the FUTURE, you know? But now we’re in it! We’re in the FUTURE!” And then she shows me how she learned to add a virtual crown onto her head.

The first and only time my Dad Skyped me he was at a complete loss for what to say. He spent about five minutes telling me how cute I was, and saying “Look at you!” and then luckily my stepmother called him away for dinner.

I have a feeling if I moved home, the Skyping wouldn’t stop. It would just be in closer proximity. “Come on, humor your mother!” I can practically hear her yell from her downstairs office after I’ve declined a chat.

My father brings out his Chanukah surprise, which, to everyone’s disappointment is not an all expenses paid trip to Honolulu, but instead, his old PC. He proceeds to video contact his best friend David in San Diego so that we can all say the prayers over the candles together. My father then gives David a virtual tour of his house, and shows him his new digital picture frame—another piece of technology recently acquired. (Not knowing exactly how to use it, Dad ended up uploading his entire photo library onto the thing, so that it circulates mostly through photographs of himself on various vacations. Dad on a snowy mountain holding skis. Dad in his swim trunks holding a giant fish. Dad in Paris, playing with perspective, pretending to squash the Eiffel Tower with his fingers.)

“It’s a high-tech Chanukah!” my father yells, enunciating into the machine, the way you might speak to a foreigner.

The excitement dies down after my father closes his laptop, and we all shift focus back to our latkes. The little girl then turns to me.

“Everybody farts,” she whispers, piquing my curiosity. Is she stating a fact? Recommending the title of a good book? Confessing to a sin? She continues to use the latke as a utensil, as a scoop to the get the applesauce into her mouth.
“You said it, sister,” I say, because no one ever taught me how to talk to children. She nods and continues licking her potato pancake.

The conversation turns to my stepsister’s engagement party next week, something I will unfortunately not be in town for, but hope there will be pictures of on Facebook. That way I’ll have something to do on a Friday night after work, and after I’ve inevitably turned down my roommates’ invitation to a concert at a venue in Williamsburg. Maybe because the walk to the subway seems too long and too cold, or because I intentionally locked my bike up somewhere far away since I hate riding it, or because I’m still stressed out about how someone yelled at me for not putting enough foam on their cappuccino. I’ll just end up going home and compulsively flipping through the party photos, laughing at the absurd decorations or the fellow Us Weekly looking guests. But then I’ll start to feel bad that I missed it. It will begin to look like my brother and I could have had a few laughs while we were there. And the pictures of the little girl will look pretty cute.

“Battle on!” Max yells at Igor. Igor and Bing (my father’s dog who looks like a Jim Henson creation) are lying on the floor pawing at one another. They pause for a moment, look bored, and both stand up to walk separate ways.
“Battle off,” Max says with disappointment, and shoves a latke into his mouth.

It’s gift-giving time around the fireplace and we all watch Colin Farrell open up a new plaid shirt from my stepmother.

“Oh, this is great, Mom,” he says, pulling off his current shirt to try it on. His 15,000 abs draw everyone’s attention. I think one of them is looking at me. I even see my father sneak a peak at his future step-son-in-law. I can tell he is mentally calculating how many hours of NBC Nightly News treadmill walking it will take to get him to look half as fit. I guess my brother had been waiting until the Ab Distraction to disappear into the bathroom, because once they notice he is gone, everyone immediately starts to worry.

Presumably their first thoughts are that he’s gone to shoot up somewhere or down a bottle of Vicodin or hang himself with the shower curtain. I assume he’s just fallen asleep, cheek to the tile floor. At least, this is what I hope for. My father stands by the bathroom door repeatedly asking him if he’s ok, not trusting his answer: “I’ve got a stomach ache!” No one settles down until he’s back. “Are you ok? Is everything ok? What was going on?” my stepmother asks repeatedly. No one believes the “stomachache” story. I know my mother wouldn’t have bought it either. She was the one who had all the locks taken off the doors in her house, so that in situations like this, she could bust in to discover the truth. They all turn to me, their eyes begging for answers, because after all, I am his keeper. The priest to his penitent. If something were up, I’d know about it. But this time, I don’t. I’ve been gone too long.

“I like you a lot,” the little girl squeezing into my chair whispers. “You like me too, don’t you.”

After a few more presents, after a few awkward half-hugs and handshakes, after another arrangement for lunch this week before I head back to New York, Max and I get into my car. I put the key in the ignition so that we can turn on the heat. It’s probably 60 degrees, but my LA instincts have already kicked in after less than 24 hours.

“You feeling ok?” I ask.
“Yeah, why?”
“I thought you had a stomach ache.”
“Oh, ha,” he says, and pulls rolls and rolls of toilet paper from his baggy robe pockets.
“I should have guessed. The TP bandit. At it again.”
“Yeah, well.”

I pull out of my father’s driveway and Max falls asleep right away. I remember our mother taking us on car rides when we were little, to get us to go to sleep. I felt safe falling asleep first, or at least trying to, as my brother stayed alert in the seat next to me, attentively watching the moon, keeping one eye on his little sister.

Driving down Sunset, I keep both eyes on the road but occasionally glance to check on my brother. I turn off the heat and roll down my window a little. And though it doesn’t feel warm, it doesn’t feel cold either. It’s just a light wind on my face that whispers, “Moooveee hommeeee.” But then I hear it whisper “Everyyybodyy fartttsss.”

In Gratitude

by Durga Chew-Bose

Brimful and smiling, like a grandfather whose prolific life can still offer the most patient eyes, my teacher, acknowledging each of our faces, asked, Who else? Who else should we raise our glasses to?

It was our last class of the year and for some of us, our last as undergraduates. Together, we had read a canon of 19th century novels and thousands upon thousands of pages, spanning four seasons; Spring! he once shouted, I promise Spring will arrive the day we start Anna Karenina!

Occasionally saccharine, his style of teaching prompted us to read deeply and to follow our more tender persuasions. If even the slightest image, its meaning perhaps at first ineffable, surfaced on the page—an orphan's misspelled name written earnestly, a pair of polished, porcelain shoulders, an inkwell the size of Vesuvius!—our teacher pushed us to follow our tiny wonders, endowing them with significance. Short of Ethan Hawke's gauntlet throwing O Captain! My Captain!, this class offered a similar spirit; that strangely mournful feeling of truly loving a book.

And so, in the annex of an old building on the south side of our campus, we met twice a week, each of us carrying the current selection; its cover and pages worn from a week of inseparable and dogged reading.

On this last day he had brought food and wine to celebrate. We passed the paper plates and plastic cups around the table—a sober act, no matter the occasion. I watched as we reached over one and other for the cheese platter, for the salad, for more wine. That too, the image of people around a table—ripping grapes from the vine, offering napkins, politely asking, mind passing a knife?— is by some means plaintive in its cheer.

Again, my teacher asked, So? Who will we toast?As if summoning something long hushed and undeniable, he threw up his glass and howled, To Huck! To sweet, darling Huck!

To Huck! We joined in.
And Jim! Someone added.
To Peggotty and Micawber!
To the Tail in Moby Dick!

We raised our glasses with (and to) our teacher—a room full of dopey-hearted literature students, tossing wine and wondering, This just might pass as bittersweet.

After graduation, all the nights left in summer came and went and soon it was Fall; the most scholastic season, burnished in those sentimental coppers and tans. Quickly, I began to feel an absence and this growing sense of bankruptcy.

For the very first time in my life, I had no school to attend, and more importantly, no new teachers to meet and no past teachers to visit. Where had all the adults gone? The ones with corduroy blazers, gray trousers, published books, who carried worn briefcases and drove olive green cars, where were they hiding? Does a borrowed book mean less if it wasn’t on loan from my teacher? Her copy of My Antonia. His Cathedral. His Yates. An impassible week of writing blocks and listlessness was turned around when my teacher would offer me a book from her shelves: Here, when you get a chance. That chance encouraged the side of me that is embarrassingly liable to hug a book.

I began to miss the way an entire class might rally around a teacher’s story. We’d sit and watch as he removed his glasses, as he unknowingly rolled up his sleeves and squinted, like he was awakening a vulnerable detail from a life he rarely revisited. Stories like those strayed from the syllabus and volunteered immediate and impressive lessons. More special was witnessing our teacher remember; watching as he allowed the past to outdo the present. Never before was our glow of admiration brighter than when our teacher became susceptible to his own nostalgia.

Another teacher, who often arrived at new ideas mid-sentence, would throw her arms up, waving them with emergency: Forget everything I just said! She would pause in a separate world—I imagine her standing in her beloved garden, planting a bulb or cutting a peony, her face shaded under the rim of her hat; a glass of gin, forgotten on a fresh bed of soil, the phone ringing inside. She’d return soon after with bright eyes and a cleared throat: Forgive me, class. Let me try that one again!

To be near that kind of pressing vitality is something I long for. It's a quality I've only seen arise in my teachers; an unflappable poise, occasionally punchy and candidly imperfect.

The best teachers, the important ones, were those who helped me find what was most authentic in my thinking. Perhaps my fear is not of being teacher-less, but of depreciating and losing site of what they had perceived in me.

He had a hunch. She saw something hidden.

It might seem callow to seek validation. It might seem freshly amateur, perhaps maddening the way younger siblings are maddening, but who can deny having had a similar charge, having wanted regard, scanning a paper, hoping to decipher the mildest check or scribble, or being excited by the occasional note: Let’s meet later this week. I have some thoughts about the ending.

Like anything remembered, no matter how long ago or how near, I cannot dismiss the less candied moments when the same teacher who encouraged boundless invention was occasionally coarse and frank. That same teacher was often very removed from my more adolescent and honest tempers; seasonal loafing, heartbreak, those critical and creeping doubts about everything, all at once! Expressing uncertainty to my teachers was something I never figured out how to do. Inertia born from contradictions and plucked from that jittery fear of suddenly questioning purpose, was something I could not admit. Instead I reread favorite essays and stories, anticipating images and sentences that never failed to reach straight into my center. Somehow, reading was far more purging than speaking or writing.

Nearly nine months have gone by since graduation. On some mornings I ride the train to work wishing it were my teacher's office I was heading to instead. A year ago, come winter, I was always late, running with my boots half on and my scarf wrapped carelessly. I would hurry across the campus, passing a friend as she said Hey you, and as we exchanged plans, and as I'd excuse the rush, Call me later?, and then I'd run down a few stairs and enter the building, suddenly flush and out of breath; unready and having forgotten my purpose, My notes! Shit. I would hesitate a second before knocking, but as I entered, ducking my head in first, that indescribable sense of belonging was immediate. There was nowhere else I was meant to be.

The Outdoorsman

by Alex Fox

She looked sweet; big dark eyes, smooth clean coat, even if she was a little gaunt and strange around the edges. Just after she died I put my hand on the soft black skin of her nose. It was still warm and I cupped it with my hand like a mug of cocoa until it grew cool. I could hardly believe that I had found such a deer. Back then my strategy was just wandering around the woods until I ran into a deer. People would tell me, “That’s not hunting. You’re supposed to find the deer, not just walk aimlessly.” I would look at them and say, “Well, you have your approach and I have mine.” I didn’t like the hiding and the surprises of hunting. I just wanted a nice, relaxed deer that wouldn’t mind me stabbing it in the heart with a big knife. So this last deer I killed was walking through the forest on the same game trail I was but in the opposite direction. I stepped to the side and offered to let her pass first, but instead she just stood there looking at me with one of her big inky eyes because I was standing too close for her to see me with both at once. This seemed like grounds for a conversation:

“It’s pretty cold today.”
Silence.
“You don’t have to talk. I just thought you seemed nice, and you stopped so I thought maybe you wanted to talk.”
Sharp exhale from her nose. Two rolling clouds of steam.
“I really like the woods. I wish my house was made of leaves sometimes and that it would change colors in the fall.”
Silence.
“But then I guess in winter all the leaves would die and I wouldn’t have a house…”

She lowered her head and started to walk in circles around a tree. I followed her with my hand resting on her back.
We talked for a while and eventually I showed her my knife and asked if I could push it into the side of her chest and twist it around until she died. She stayed completely still which I took as permission. I lay my hand just behind her shoulder blade and felt the pumping of her blood and the whooshing of air between the slots of ribs. It made me think that we might all have forests inside us. Wind swishing leaves around big strong trunks of bone, hearts going lub-dub like animals stomping out a rhythm on the ground, and quiet dark places where stillness collects like rain water in a bucket. I cut her with my knife.
I ruined her when I was getting ready to pull out her guts. I was trying to cut her belly open but my knife was a little dull. I had to push hard to get through and the knife went in too deep when I finally did. I put a hole in the digestive tract and poop and soupy food got all over the meat. You could smell it right away and it couldn’t be argued with. The smell was very succinct and bad. I yelled, kicked leaves around.

For a long time I didn’t even want to kill deer for food. I would just walk through the woods and look at them if I saw them at all, afraid of what I might do to them if they let me have them. I never liked making the deer feel as though I was stalking them or aiming something at them. I just thought of it as two animals, who happened to like the woods, bumping into each other. I spent some time sitting in bars whimpering, mostly to old timers who would hear anything you wanted to say to them.

“When that deer looked me in the eye I knew she would let me kill her.”
“Son, you must’ve stumbled across the most boneheaded doe I’ve ever heard of. Come to think of it, probably had worms in its brain. I hearda that before. You didn’t eat them brains did you?”
“I just can’t stand the idea of taking an animal’s life without asking it first. I think people kill things they don’t deserve to.”
“Askin’ it first? What the shit a deer gon’ say to you?”
“All I mean is, that deer looked me in the eye and saw my knife and didn’t move. We respected each other.”
“I think you ate its wormy brain is what I think.”

He pushed me the newspaper and slapped a finger on an article titled “Local Deer Getting Wasted”. It was about something the deer were catching called Chronic Wasting Disease. The article said it was a variant of mad cow disease and that it messes with the brain of the deer. They said there had been no reported cases of humans getting it from deer, but were advising hunters not to eat any animals they bring down as a safety precaution. They gave a list of symptoms: “Weight loss over time. Behavioral changes also occur in the majority of cases, including decreased interactions with other animals, listlessness, lowering of the head, blank facial expression, repetitive walking in set patterns, and a smell like meat starting to rot.” I hoped it was true people couldn’t catch it—the last thing I needed was for my wasting to get chronic.

I had to move to a new town—the factory I had been working in was shut down after someone lost an arm in a machine or something. Moving wasn’t terribly difficult on account of my not having much stuff, but the woods by my new place were filled with hunters. In fall it almost seemed like the trees were beginning to drop fluorescent leaves as hunters walked around in bright orange vests trying not to get shot by each other. The deer that hung around these trees acted a bit different. I didn’t see a single one. I passed a hunter and asked him about it.

“Hey, how come I’m not seeing any deer on my walk?”
“Cause them shits is scared. They smelled you and ran off, I’d say.”
“Why are they scared?”
“You’d be scared too if everybody in town with a firearm was fixin' to shoot you in your little deer face.”
“Suppose you’re right.”

He was right. I would be scared if a bunch of people were trying to shoot me while I walked through the woods. As reasons to be scared go, this is not a bad one. I wasn’t being sneaky or trying to shoot the deer, but they were afraid of me anyway. All the other deer killers and eaters had been hiding and launching bits of metal at forest creatures for some time now. Still though, it was hard not to take it personally, to not feel misunderstood. I would walk far out into the trees, past where the hunters would go. I wouldn’t even have my knife with me. I was worried about what the animals thought of me, whether they respected me. I didn’t imagine them sneering and joking at my expense. It was worse, I felt like they didn’t think of me at all. They would just avoid me on instinct, the same as any other hunter. I thought I was different, and I thought those differences mattered, were valuable. I felt tragically overlooked.

I spent days walking through the woods alone, wildlife disappearing before I got close. I was disgusted by the other hunters. I would look at them, fat and bolted into a tree up off the ground, and wrinkle my nose or maybe shake my head. Some of them had assault rifles, I didn’t like that either. I would see them posing for pictures with a deer they’d killed, holding the head up by the antlers, the body dangling limp, smiling proudly as though this meant they were better than the animal they had partially blown up.

I was beginning to feel guilty for wanting to kill a deer. I had always thought of it as my connection to the forest. I was a real forest creature because I would walk through the trees and eat wild animals for food. Living things were always disappearing into other living things; this was the way things went. I was a kind of animal that deer were eaten by. Killing a deer wouldn’t speak to its value or mine. It would just reaffirm the kinds of animal we were. But how can I want to kill an animal when I know everyone else is thinking about what it would look like on their wall, or whether fur underwear would be too warm?

I was hungry and had been living off of a fifty pound bag of rice I stole from the back of a truck. Thus far my plan to find a job in this new town had belly flopped so I was running out of cash. It became clear that my usual meet and greet strategy was not going to work. The deer didn’t seem to care what I did so I asked around and got somebody to lend me a barely functioning .22 rifle. It’s not good to hunt deer with a .22. The bullets are so small that you are more likely to maim the deer than you are to get a quick and clean kill. I scraped together the last of my money and bought a batch of SPIKED Deer Urine. This was recommended to me over other choices such as Jimbo’s Extreme Heat Deer Urine. This bottle of gussied up deer piss was supposed to attract deer.

I was perfectly still, lying among some rocks on a small hill which overlooked a clearing in the forest. I have drenched one of the trees with a the SPIKED Deer Urine. It was totally overcast, the sky looked like it got in an accident and had to be bandaged up with gauze. Everything was cast in a silvery haze. Other gun shots rang out through the forest. Someone was riding an ATV not too far away—very stealthy. I didn’t want it to be this way. I wanted to be honest, and but instead I was carefully positioned downwind of the clearing so the deer wouldn’t smell me. I had to hide. The world was indifferent to my intentions and its indifference turned me into something ugly: a man with a gun.

The wind kicked and lulled, squirrels bustled around in the dead leaves and chased each other up and down tree trunks. I waited all day, hearing and occasionally seeing other hunters in my periphery. I caught a few glimpses of deer too far off to consider shooting at. I began to feel like my batch of deer pee might not have been as “spiked” as it could have been. The light was beginning to dim and my stomach had been empty for a long time.

Finally, the sun went down. I was starving, but a little relieved I didn’t have to shoot anything. The whole time I lay there among the rocks I felt so distant from the forest and the animals I saw in it. I had come to it with a scheme and equipment. I felt like I was staging a bank heist—throwing a cheeseburger away from the vault to distract the comically fat guard while I cracked the safe. Yet, for all my planning—choosing my hiding spot, spraying the urine, loading the gun—I felt absent from the whole thing. I couldn’t have made a gun myself and I certainly didn’t come up with the idea of bottling deer urine, let alone “spiking” it. It made me feel lonely. If I did shoot a deer it wouldn’t see me or smell me. If it died it wouldn’t be because it trusted me, it would be a kind of monument to normal physics, to billiard balls and chemical reactions.

But regardless of how different I felt on the inside, my guts were the same as all the sneaky hunters with shotguns—I needed to eat. I went out again the next day to the same spot. It was early in the morning and the air was cold in my lungs. I looked around, everything looked the same as the day before and it was hard for me to imagine something different happening. I lay down among the rocks and got ready for all the waiting I was going to do. I was trying to hide my body in the forest so the animals wouldn’t see it. I never used to feel I was in the woods, I felt I was part of them—wind blowing and heart stomping in my chest. Now, I was out of tune and staring through the trees with this gun.

I was watching a squirrel burying nuts. Every few seconds it perked up and looked around. It seemed nervous, but squirrels always seem nervous. It ventured out a little ways into the clearing. From the trees a large, dark shape swooped down. The squirrel saw the Goshawk at the last second and screamed as it ran. It made a quick left turn in the leaves that the hawk matched with its long tail feathers and short rounded wings. The hawk’s claws caught the squirrel on its hind legs and the back of its neck. Its furry tail beat frantically as the hawk waited for it to die.

The trunks and branches started to waver in and out of focus. I rubbed my eyes and shook my head. Once everything realigned I saw the deer coming through the trees. It was a buck and his antlers looked heavy, he was dragging them along the ground like he was trying to rake leaves or something. He was moving slowly as he came into the clearing. My eyes were still blurring but I lifted the gun and lined it up with the buck. On cue, my stomach growled so I shot. The gun made a sad noise, like a thin, dry branch snapping. The buck didn’t move, didn’t lift his head. I wasn’t sure if I hit him or not. I was squinting, trying to see and I spied a deep red spot beginning to drip.

I shot him in the ass. Clearly, this was a less than fatal wound, but he still hadn’t moved. I was a bit confused but didn’t want to waste time or screw up another shot. I stood up and descended towards the buck. I was pretty close to him when I took the second shot, aimed just behind his shoulder where it would likely put holes in the heart and lungs. This shot went where it was supposed to but the buck didn’t go down. Instead he started pacing, still dragging his antlers. I had expected something a little more grisly from my botched shooting—more blood and suffering. So far this didn’t look so bad, odd behavior aside. I got even closer, and put another bullet in the gun. I wasn’t really sure where to shoot. I could hear him struggling to breathe, but his pacing wasn’t slowing down. I might have only hit one of his lungs. I could have reached out and touched him but he hadn’t even looked at me. I shot him in the head and he fell to the ground. Then I was alone.

CMovie

by Jack Rohman

Ken Doll

by Hannah May

For the past four months, I've been doing most of my reading from a kindle. A kindle isn’t the kind of thing I would ever buy for myself, mostly because of the price tag but also because I really like everything that comes with reading actual books. I like browsing bookstores and picking something out on a whim if I’m feeling rich enough or, if I feel broke, waiting until I do feel rich enough to buy something I’ve been wanting. I like the way books travel in families and groups of friends. I like borrowing a book from my brother and finding the song lyrics he was working on in the margins, or borrowing an old book from my parents and finding a boarding pass from a business trip my dad took in ‘95 tucked in the pages. I like my signed copies, I like the way they look on my bookshelf or piled next to my bed. There is no denying that there’s a lot that is lost with a kindle. The kindle is also not the most asthetically pleasing gadget - it looks like something that might belong to a Star War's storm trooper. It's nowhere near as pretty as a collection of vintage hardbacks.

That being said, I was as skeptical of the arguments against the kindle as I was of the kindle itself. I enjoy Nicholson Baker’s obsessive prose style but I wasn’t convinced by his New Yorker article. A lot of anti-kindle sentiment seems focused on the more superficial aspects of reaing: how will other L-train riders know that I’m reading the new Murakami as opposed to New Moon? What about the library of Penguin classics that I’ve carefully arranged by color? Or it seems hysterically technophobic: these soulless machines are taking over everything! I’m totally attached to the corporeal incarnations of the books I’ve read and loved, but sentimentality doesn’t seem like a convincing enough argument against something that really does make reading easier. Books are not accessories and they’re not furniture. It should matter most what we read, not how we read it or what physical trophies we have to show for what we’ve read in the past.

So, when my parents got me a kindle for my birthday I was pretty stoked, if a little ambivalent. I was excited about having a new toy, but I was hesitant about giving up my paperbacks. Anything that makes books more portable I am 100% in favor of, if only for purely self-involved reasons. I am small and weak but a lot of the books I love the most are huge: 19th century “loose baggy monsters” or post-modern fatties packed with endnotes. There have definitely been times when I have opted for the paperback novella over the big guy because I didn’t feel like lugging the big guy from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again. Also, with a kindle I can carry many books around at once. If I wake up in the morning in the mood for George Saunders but find myself sitting in a coffee shop after work wishing I had some Bronte it doesn't matter, because it all fits in my kindle. If I get the sudden craving to read something I don't already have but it's three in the morning and I'm in my apartment in Bushwick, all I need to do is press a few buttons and I have exactly what I want.

What’s more, reading a kindle (from a kindle? on a kindle? I still haven't figured that one out yet) doesn’t feel all that different from reading an actual book. Kindle screens aren’t backlit, so you don’t get any of that eyeball burn that comes from staring at a computer/TV/iPhone screen for too long. Once the novelty wears off, you get so lost in what you’re reading that you forget how you’re reading it. It really doesn’t make the fundamental experience of reading any different. Keith Gessen recently mentioned Powells bookstore in his blog, writing that "Powell’s is a physical bookstore and buying books from them helps keep them physical," assuming that keeping books in the format we're used to is something really worth trying to do. This attitude seems misplaced to me. No industry has ever benefited from trying to go against technological progress, and it seems that publishers would be better served by embracing the inevitable and trying to work to make ebooks as varied and worthwhile as printed books.

The only thing I don't like about my kindle is that it's still new enough to elicit reactions from strangers. I don't really like talking to strangers if I can help it, but I've become a reluctant kindle proselytizer on the subway, on airplanes, at coffee shops. One woman asked me if it was a Bible. "Well, it could hold a Bible. It could hold ten Bibles!" I told her. "Man," she said. "I gotta get computerized."

I do think the advent of the ebook is going to change how we read, and I think it’ll change for the better. It won’t change the content of what we read, or make reading any less meaningful. Of course, you could never digitize a book like House of Leaves, but I also think Danielewski could do something really wonderful with the ebook format. Give him about ten years.

Universe I

by Ryan Baker Green

2010
Photo Collage
18 x 6.5 inches

Under the City, Under Your Skin

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Alex Bleeker Interview: Part 1

by Ida Griesemer

This interview with Alex Bleeker (of the Ridgewood, New Jersey bands Real Estate and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks) took place on January 13, 2010. It will appear in six parts.

View: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

In which Alex starts his first band with 12 friends on the last day of 8th grade.
LL: So you graduated from Bennington in 2008, and that summer you started playing with Real Estate?
AB: Well, yes and no. In a way I’ve been playing with Real Estate for 10 years. It’s been sort of a flow of evolution, but I guess under the moniker Real Estate, and with the set of songs that we were playing that then became our album, that started happening, the seeds of that. We all came home for the summer. Martin and Matt came home. We always played music together, especially the three of us.
When Matt, Martin and I were going through college, over breaks we would always jam together, play music, because it was like, all we did. It was the basis of our friendship in high school. And we always maintained that friendship throughout college. So whenever we got to see each other again we would play casually, in someone’s basement, or go to a show. So we just started doing that in the summer, just drinking at Martin’s house and jamming in the basement.
LL: How did you start playing with Etienne?
AB: Etienne has been on board for a few years. That started the very first tour that we went on with Julian Lynch. The tour was more Julian’s music, he was the leader of that band and it was his creative project. It was called the Lese Majesty. That was in the summer of 06, I wanna say. After my sophomore year. We had like no…it was completely different than what it would be like to set out on a Real Estate tour. We also had no semblance of any kind of an established band thing. We just sort of did the best we could. We booked this ambitious 5-week tour through myspace and emails and stuff. And that’s when we met Etienne. He and Matt had the Amherst connection and we needed a drummer for the tour. All five of us – the four members of Real Estate and Julian – made that Lese Majesty record, but Martin couldn’t come on the tour. It was originally gonna be me, Matt, Martin, and Julian, but Martin couldn’t come so we got Etienne. Etienne has been within our musical community since then.
LL: So with the other Real Estate members, was it in high school when you first began to play together?
AB: Martin and I started our first band together on the last day of 8th grade. I went to a show, a high school show, the day before the last day of 8th grade. And it blew my mind, it changed my world. I had no idea that that stuff was going on in my town.
LL: Who played?
AB: It was this band then that we thought were going to be the biggest band ever because they were a relatively tight band and they covered Weezer songs. It was called Easily Amused, and they’re all like, married and not playing in bands anymore. But it was this school’s out, backyard bash -10 bands or something like that. And I saw this and I was like, I can’t believe what’s going on. And I went back to school the last day and was like, We have to start a band. It’s possible. We can do it. So that day, we all got really psyched and the idea traveled around to 12 people, so there ended up being 12 of us going to this house after school and having our first band practice. It was a friend thing, so we didn’t want to exclude anybody. It sort of became a ska band because we were into Reel Big Fish at the time, and we had friends who played trumpet and sax. But then there was also a synth player, a turntable player… I couldn’t play any instruments at the time, so I was just the singer. But we were 8th graders and obviously couldn’t manage this huge 12-person project, so that band basically split into two separate bands that became our dominant high school bands for the first 2 years of high school. Then everything sort of shifted.
LL: What were the names you were using at that point?
AB: The first band that I was just talking to you about was called Emerson X-Ray Solution. It was super ska. And we had like, one song. And we played one show. We practiced all summer for our first show ever. Emerson X-Ray Solution was the most important thing for the summer after 8th grade. And then we broke up shortly into 9th grade. But that was the foundation summer.
We played a show in September, on Martin’s birthday, and that was that ska band’s one and only show. We played a bunch of covers and 2 original songs. We invited all our friends and had a big sleepover afterwards. It was a big deal. The band who opened the show was these kids who we were just starting to meet but didn’t know that well, from around the neighborhood. It was Paperface, and that band was fronted by Matt Mondanile and Julian Lynch. That was their first show too, and there was a little bit of a rivalry between our two bands because we didn’t know each other very well yet. We were young and it was before we got old enough to know everyone in the town, and grades were a large separation marker. They were a year ahead. So they were these older kids who also had a band, and that was sort of our introduction to both those people. Which was definitely more a rivalry than it was friendly in the beginning.
LL: Do you remember what that tension was like that night?
AB: Well, they made fun of us and stuff. We were younger, and we were playing ska, so I guess it’s fair. They were definitely a cooler band. They played a Dinosaur Jr. cover. They were a little bit more hip than we were. I remember they were looking for a bass player for while, before they had one. And they saw Martin walking around, because Martin and Matt literally live down the street from one another, and so they were trying to steel Martin from us or something. So there was tension over that. I remember AIM conversations with Julian and Matt at Matt’s house and me and Martin at Martin’s house, and they were trying to convince Martin to leave our band, and they were like, that kid Bleeker’s lame! But then we all like…you know. I guess those other people who were in the bands, they’re definitely still in our lives and we’re still friends with them, but it’s funny that the four of us wound up coming together. We started at the exact same show at the exact same place, and we realized that our sentiments, both friendship-wise and musically, were more alike than some of these other people that we were playing with.

View: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

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