The week after I left the island,
it was Shark Week on Discovery.
Sure, I’d chosen to forget; in salty
surf, murky waters, there were apex
predators, the same way sex
is impossible, scalloped-edged, sad. Obscured
from view, it was a dolphin’s dorsal
that crested the waves. In my pink cowgirl
pajamas, face illuminated by the flicker
of a tiger shark snatching an albatross [...]
“If there was no music, then the world would be silent” is the opening sentence of Afghan Star, uttered by a child blinded by war just after he sings his melody to the camera. Originally commissioned as a standard television documentary, the colorful excesses of this project reel were taken up and transformed into a cinema [...]
I.
The first time R and I said “I love you,” what we really said was “Isle View,” which was a park on the Niagara River with a picnic table and a slipway for boats where R’s fat parents would drive us in the evenings, holding hands in the front seat while R and I groped [...]
At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful [...]
Not by choice. You swung the axe but it was not your choice. You have never looked at wood so closely. The carefully hewn boards fitted together so carefully. A man with responsibilities. Mouths to feed. You were at a saloon on Water Street. Witnesses say. You were taken out of the place and put [...]
In the late 1970s a group of people living in the borough of Hackney in East London began building a structure on a derelict lot in their neighborhood and continued building until this January. The story of the project’s origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known is that because the residents couldn’t decide on [...]
This week Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament, receiving over 7% of the Swedish vote. The party was created on the first day of 2006 with a platform based on the desire “to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are [...]
