You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Redeeming the Inanimate.”
Travis Barker--he of the Eminem-a-like hip hop wigger lifestyle replete with marital discord (in his iteration it includes a catfight between the old ball and chain and pre-prison Paris Hilton)--yes, that Travis Barker, was briefly my boon companion aboard a rather small US Air carrier for some four hours when the traffic radar in Atlanta went out, was rerouted to [...]
Here I am in Bergdorf Goodman, and not for the first time, holding up the left half of a pair of $900 boots with the kind of delicacy usually reserved for fine antiques and newborn babies. It’s an exercise in frustration, a form of self-inflicted torture: I barely have $900 in the bank, let alone the kind of expendable income [...]
I’ve been living half a block away from the Russian-Turkish Baths on 268 East 10th St for two years, and until the other day I’d never been inside. The sidewalk thereabouts smells faintly of eucalyptus, like parts of San Francisco, but not because of the trees (which are mainly gingko and ailanthus). Eucalyptus and lavender are infused in one of [...]
Arriving at work for the night tour on October 29, 1974 I discover the firehouse to be as abandoned and silent as a cemetery at midnight, I was spooked by something but wrote it off to the approach of Halloween when in reality it was actually an omen. I am the first member of the night tour reporting in for [...]
Herald Square is not a good neighborhood in which to work. In fact, it’s not a neighborhood at all. It’s an area. On street level there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Office buildings empty into crowds of slow-moving shoppers who move in and out of the oxymoronic Manhattan Mall. They move about at a bovine pace. They take [...]
The mysteries of 47th Street—men in oily black suits and beards the color of tar, swollen red noses and black eyes lined in soot, wiry eyebrows, faces half-hidden by coarse pepper-black hair, tallit dragging from the sweaty hems of their coats. Men with secrets. In their pockets, translucent wax paper folded and folded again like some ancient origami. Papers passed [...]
Climbing the steps of the Chelsea townhouse, I hoped the guy who opened the door would be a stud. I found him on Craigslist, in the rideshare section. He was headed to L.A. via Omaha, where I was getting off. Nine days had passed since I answered his cross-country-in-a-cargo-van ad. In that time he assured me I was going, then [...]
Finally we were meeting for dinner. I called him at just the right time when he happened to be in the neighborhood. That meant that he had class at Hunter and I was on his way home, in between him and Fort Greene. "Why don't you come up here?" he asked. "Because I'm down here, and it would take me [...]
When you buy a secondhand coat, you never really know what you’re getting into. The lining was a little ripped but something about this vintage coat spoke to me, though I couldn’t tell you what. This coat, with its uncelebrated designer, I found at Legacy on Thompson Street in SoHo. It is fitted on top, cinched at the waist, before [...]
6:30 A.M. I’ve only been able to sleep about six hours because there are three bars downstairs which close at around 3 A.M. It’s just getting light. I’m in a corner apartment on the 6th floor overlooking Orchard and Stanton Streets facing South and East. The morning sky is streaked with indigo, pink and brown. I close my eyes hoping [...]
As a survivor of a tragic event, I remember it like it was yesterday and yet, it seems like a dream. The first five weeks were surreal. I don’t know how I got through it. My friends helped. Everyone said I was strong--I wasn’t. I wanted to die. I almost did but I held on bc I figured Jon would [...]
[When the site first published Ennis Smith's "The Super With The Toy Face," its impact was felt immediately--not just on the site, but on the literary history of the United States. Smith has sent us a revised version of the piece, which we are happy to publish below. We're going to keep the original up, though, in order to see [...]
I've always preferred to do things the hard way, without anybody's help. For the first five years my husband and I lived in New York, half our things were in storage. The other half were crammed into a 280-square foot apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement building overlooking the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The place was short on closet space, [...]
I am not expecting it to be so pink. The floor is tiled light mauve-ish, though it’s having a brown sort of day, what with the rain and the customers tracking in the muck from outside. The counters and tables are a marbleized pink and the occasional wall panel is deep purple. I had been expecting a lot more bright [...]
[A few months after this piece was originally published, Ennis Smith sent us a revision which we have also published here. Look at the two versions side by side and see if you learn anything about how revision figures in the writing process. --Ed.] They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the super of the building on the corner [...]
The sex club looked more like a cheesy New Jersey club than a happening orgy fest. There were balloons on the ceiling and people dancing to seventies music. Most of the people were not very attractive. The women were bleached blondes with frizzy hair and a bit dumpy or with fake boobs. The men had beer guts and receding hairlines. [...]
June 14th 2006 3:30 pm Philadelphia "Who are these fucking people? They've been following me for years. Why the hell are they bent on exposing me as goddamned fraud?" I did a little research of my own and was disturbed to find that they were not only my closest friends, but my family as well. I called New York from [...]
Jake's girlfriend broke up with him, so he started driving and turned up eleven hours later at my apartment. We were the kind of friends who'd been close once but who didn't speak often anymore, owing not to any particular falling out, but to the passage of time and a mutual inability to put any effort into the maintenance of [...]
On the southwest corner of 2nd Street and Avenue A is a nameless bar (its patrons refer to it as “2A”), and it has on its second floor large picture windows through which one can survey the goings on in the neighborhood. Across 2nd Street is a wide patch of sidewalk where a street vender can usually be seen selling [...]
All over the city, people leave their bikes locked up to fences, sign posts, whatever they can find, but there probably isn't a neighborhood with a higher bikes-locked-overnight density than the West Village. Our photo editor, Josh Gilbert went out one snowy January day and politely asked some to strike a pose or two. That's all for now.
This essay appears in Thomas Beller’s essay collection, “How To Be a Man.” * There are those for whom a T-shirt is just another name for an undershirt, the sort of thing that never sees the light of day. But for others, myself included, T-shirts often are the main event, and the arrival of spring has prompted me to reconsider [...]
Of the big five, our sense of smell is supposedly the one most closely associated with our memories. And I buy that, because I’m always a little turned on when I smell Burberry perfume. I can’t really describe it, but I can always identify it when I smell it. My first college girlfriend wore Burberry perfume. And the sensation associated [...]
I got all dressed up for the opening night of Land of the Dead at the United Artists Union Square Multiplex. It was June and I wore a fine white picnic dress. My new boyfriend wore his usual tee with a funny message and ordinary jeans. I have a tendency to scream. When I attended a scary movie with my [...]
It was 4 am. Maybe 4:30. The sun was just coming out, shading the city gorgeous cool oranges and blues and pinks and yellows. It was late spring, early summer. We had been up all night listening to Johnny Cash, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey. We were on Skillman Avenue, Brooklyn, in my canted railroad apartment that had big picture [...]
On the way to the laundromat I passed a message chalked out on the sidewalk. In large, neat block letters on a square of pavement it read: “The best part about the night was taking the train home with you.” The note seemed to be directed at the building across the street, but looking up it was impossible to tell [...]
The odds for winning the Powerball are146 million to one. I would suppose that finding the winning ticket lying on the street would be a million times the 146 million to one. But I do propose to you the question of how likely it would be for a mayoral candidate of New Orleans to be walking in downtown Baton Rouge [...]
In April, 1992, I was in Los Angeles preparing to go to the Academy awards as the date of someone who had been nominated for an Oscar--my mother. The Oscars are about Hollywood, about bright, ephemeral glamour, about surfaces that reflect. My mother is not about these things. Yet there we were, an unlikely pair, preparing for our big night. [...]
After my boyfriend and I broke up, I was lonely so I put an ad on Craigslist. What is it about a man that makes him think sending a picture of his private parts is going to turn a woman on? A little mystery and anticipation is a great thing. I put the ad under "women seeking men." Hoping to [...]
Heath Avenue. I recognized the building right away. Public housing always stands out from all other domiciles. It looms, and, like a tall man, commands your attention. But when you look up, expecting to see his face, you see a blank outline, no distinguishing features. No nose. No mouth. No eyes. We parked on the side street around the corner. [...]
Because I’m Jewish, my Christmas decorating habit started small. Creating yards of silver sparkle, I drizzled hundreds of tinsel strips on hanging plants spanning my living room window, which overlooks 77th Street near First Avenue. I clustered evergreens in vases too. Although my husband David came from a more observant family than mine, he didn’t mind the white poinsettias I [...]
They say she’s holed up like a squirrel, nuts to last the winter, glimpses of green bath- robe when she shuffles down the hill to her mailbox to collect more rejection. People start laying bets, perhaps she has a corpse hidden like, what’s her name, was it Emily? Maybe she’s taken a bad spell, some female kind of thing. No, [...]
If all goes according to plan, in three weeks I will run the New York Marathon. For most people, training for a marathon is empowering. It gives them a feeling of accomplishment and a sense of self-worth. For me, it has been one lesson after another in humility. At five am one morning this past August, I set out on [...]
There was a while when it seemed like every year New York played host to a parade of hand-painted fiberglass animals. The cows were the most famous. The German shepherds were a lot less famous and they disappeared from the streets pretty quick. But, here and there, you'll still see one, sitting guard outside the entrance to a hospital or [...]
“Athens has got ruins, Rome has got ruins. Ours are bigger, but there’s no guidebook to them.” —Lowell Boileau Part collage, part museum, part mausoleum, and all constructed around a series of intricately conceived online “tours,” detroityes.com depicts Detroit’s past and present in a library containing thousands of vivid photographic images. For many, the centerpiece of the website is “The [...]
I go in the afternoon, before the hordes set in and children are let out from school. Your Fairway, my speedway, basket in hand, I dash past soft, yielding cheese;/crisp baguettes and spears of tender green, fast as I can. Racing through the crowded market, I avoid the stew of white-haired ladies with heavily laden carts/ and elbows, pointy and [...]
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