Things I Can't Ask My Date

by JACKIE KRUSZEWSKI

Brian is an actor. He took me to an off-Broadway opening at American Airlines Theater one recent Tuesday night, followed by an opening-night-celebration dinner/open bar at the B.B. King Blues Club nearby. If he had given me an itinerary of the evening beforehand, including mention of the "red carpet with paparazzi" entrance, I might've laughed aloud at such a clichéd plan to impress a suburban girl like myself. I had already slept with him, hadn't I?

But I forgot that the neon glow of Times Square - vis-à-vis my conception of being inside a Super Bowl halftime show - can open up to a moving art form known as Theater, built upon a craft known as Acting, which sometimes happens inside an airline-sponsored theater. An art form that, at some point, almost all of us thought we might flourish in - become famous and universally adored, buy a château, languish comfortably in the satin of fame, lend our face to makeup lines and charities, inspire the masses, and defy all our families' expectations of mediocrity. I forgot that I was genuinely impressed, and amused, and vaguely envious of Brian's world.

Some of those theater dorks you knew in high school actually went and studied drama in college. Then a smaller few of them moved to New York and went thousands of dollars into debt for grad school at Tisch, where they learn to stay afloat in the acting world AND, perhaps more importantly,  prove to casting directors that they are serious enough to go thousands of dollars into debt to be in the business. The occasional high school drama dork even loses their acne, keeps their hair, generally grows into their faces/voices/personalities, experiences amazing luck and becomes famous. But that's another story.

Then there's a vast lot of them who make do in theater, commercials and bit TV parts. They might have a couple agents, one for commercials, one for theater, one for TV. They float on and off unemployment. They pay out-of-pocket for bottom-of-the-barrel health insurance. Their parents bite their tongues supportively and buy them iPhone plans for Christmas. They reach 30 without knowing whether they'll ever have a steady income, yet more convinced than ever that this is the life for them.

I attribute this necessary self-delusion partly to the fact that they all hang out together - mostly in the little town of New York City. Some, like Brian's friend, consign themselves to production jobs in sleek, professional shows like the one we saw, and they hand out free tickets to their grad school friends, who in turn crowd around afterward congratulating them for being involved in such a brilliant show - "Those programs you designed were amazing!" Brian and his friends immediately sequestered one of the tables at the after-party that was on the stage of the B. B. King. I couldn't help but joke about the hubris of the aspiring young actor crowd staking out a table on the stage when Blythe Danner was present. That joke didn't go over well.

Neither did the joke where I told Brian that I'd thought he was gay the first few times we hung out. (If I had a nickel for every former boyfriend who once thought I was a lesbian, I'd have at least 10 cents.) He seemed perturbed by the revelation. "I know you're not gay now though." We went to our separate homes that evening and that was the last time we saw each other.

Oh yes, the play. Road to Mecca starred cinema Spiderman's wet-eyed aunt ("With great power, comes great responsibility, Peter") and 2 other tony-looking and Tony-award-winning actors, whose feats of line memorization and voice projection I will never attempt.

In 1970s South Africa, the young, progressive schoolteacher visits her older friend, a free-spirited Afrikaner widow. This is a pure friendship, we are asked to believe, that stands as a model to platonic, soul-completing romances everywhere, built on serendipity, on benevolence, and on the mutual appreciation of surrealist, Warholian lawn sculptures. (Just go read a summary, OK?)

Miss Helen and Elsa Barlow fawn over each other, they fight, they search themselves, they save Miss Helen's house and freedom from a meddling but affectionate pastor, and they realize deeper truths about themselves in the sepia-tinged glow of Miss Helen's apartment. Candles are used as a metaphor for the light of self-realization, and we know who the good guys are because they disagree with apartheid. Suicide, abortion, racism, love - it's all here, and it was a compelling, beautifully-acted play.

Brian held my hand through the entire second half. I had bought us overpriced wines before the show started - "don't worry, I have the money," I said. He leaned in at some point during the show to tell me it was a "fixed set," meaning everything was on a slight inward angle making the audience feel more ensconced by the scene. "Notice how they haven't moved the chairs at all - that's because the legs are cut on an angle." I felt duly ensconced.

While Elsa and Miss Helen were crying over their love for each other on stage, I was wondering if I could ever love an actor. Sure, he was personable, fun-loving, confident, complimentary, and a good lover. He had taken a Xanax before he came - I tried not to be appalled that he would volunteer that information so soon - but he had taken a Xanax for ME! And yet, he lived in a world that I couldn't help but view as if through a snow-globe.

Actors are not artists. I've dated Artists - they are wild and driven by some deep, creative impulse that makes them all the more attractive. They are the conduits through which art is created and their bodies are these tempestuous, bipolar tangles of wire that can magnetize as easily as they can electrocute.

Actors, though - actors are themselves the Art. Their personalities, their mannerisms, their style, their affectations - they have cultivated themselves so thoroughly by the time they're my age that they are polished, concrete versions of the person they want to be, even if the insides still run on anti-depressants.

In the end I never got to ask my many questions - how do you pay your bills? Why do you have a picture of yourself as your background on your blackberry? How do you afford a blackberry? Have you ever written a cover letter? Will you ever quit acting if you're not at a certain level of steady income by a certain time? Did you just take me to that play because you knew your ex-girlfriend's sister would be there? How do you have the self-confidence to submit your constructed Self to the brutal process of auditions on a regular basis? Will you marry me and raise our children and let me support you and your dreams?

Instead, I emasculated him piece by piece - shrugging off the price of theater wine, being overeager to buy dinners, joking about thinking he was gay - and I deserved the radio silence I got from him after that Tuesday night. Actors are men too, it turns out. And I shook his neon, snow-globe world a little too hard in my attempt to marvel at it.

But the play was lovely.

Just, lovely.

Jackie Kruszewski is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages. She blogs here and here and twitters here.

"One Soul Less On Your Fiery List" - Okkervil River (mp3)

"Plan D" - Okkervil River (mp3)

"It Is So Nice To Get Stoned" - Okkervil River (mp3)

Watching and Growing 

by QICHEN ZHANG

Up All Night
creator Emily Spivey

I've recently begun to realize that there's a slight possibility that I may be projecting my own self-proclaimed third-wheel identity onto my film and television choices. I'm shocked I could feel as much unadulterated loathing as I did for Keira Knightley when watching her steal Carey Mulligan's doomed loverboy in Never Let Me Go. Blame it on my ethnicity, but I can't help but see myself as the "supportive Asian friend" in rom-coms living vicariously through the obviously more sexy and more sex-having (and usually blond) main character. I liked Seth in The O.C. before it was cool to like him more than Ryan. Without getting too Freudian about it, I can definitely see myself chilling with onscreen tagalongs. 

Even without my inherent gravitation toward underdogs, though, Maya Rudolph wins my sidekick of the year award for her role as the pure embodiment of womanhood in NBC's Up All Night. Playing attention-loving TV personality Ava who hosts an eponymous, motivational show for women à la Oprah, Rudolph is initially and ironically portrayed as the single friend of the married couple, of which the wife is Ava's producer. Which is fine. Ultimately, someone’s gotta play the supporting role. But as a person whose YouTube habits accounts for half the views on Rudolph's national anthem video, I really cry at the prospect of her being relegated to the side. 

So when NBC first rolled out commercials for the debut of Up All Night I was initially disappointed that Rudolph was cast as the third wheel. The show mainly revolves around the hip married life of Reagan (Christina Applegate) and Chris (Will Arnett), a young couple with a newborn who create comical hijinks from their unusual stay-at-home-dad arrangement. Chris used to be a stuffy corporate lawyer but, once becoming a father, makes the progressive decision to stay at home, simultaneously quitting his job to take care of the baby and buying Bjorn Borg underwear. Instead, Reagan goes off to work each day running Ava’s show.

The show’s premise spotlights the couple as an exemplary paradigm of what a young, contemporary marriage should be. They drink, they party, they squabble over the tackiness of Chris’ Brendan Shanahan cardboard stand-ups. Somehow in all of that, they find time to change diapers as well. Among the fanciful notion that a serious relationship consists of disagreements on décor complemented with a shit ton of midday drinking, I found little space for Rudolph’s comedic prowess to manifest in NBC’s starry-eyed attempt to make marriage “edgy” and “alternative.” Guys, it’s Christina Applegate, not Christina Ricci. 

And what's ironic about the character positioning is that Ava is pushed off to the side despite her headlining her own fictional show with the main character behind the scene. In most episodes, Ava's constantly barging into Chris and Reagan's home uninvited, usually clutching a bottle of Sauvignon and smiling Rudolph's signature bright-eyed and gummy smile, with Chris mumbling sarcastically, "Why, Ava, come on in." 

But Rudolph doesn't take to the sidelines meekly. In just a few episodes, she's successfully managed to embody femininity and mock it at the same time. And it's hard. Last year's Holly McKay article that basically told female comedians to "be less ugly" demonstrates how the assumption that women can't be funny and attractive at the same time prevails in mainstream comedy. Rudolph confronts this assumption head on, embracing and yet rejecting it at the same time.

Wearing designer clothes as a TV idol and acting like the biggest diva since Beyoncé post-C-section, Ava sasses us into oblivion with zingers like, "Can you cut your hair? We are neither in a little house nor in a prairie." Even though we're supposed to be focused on the fact that Reagan and Chris are disrupting traditional gender roles, it's Ava that makes us acknowledge the reality of double standards. "At a certain age, a woman has to choose between her ass and her face," she delivers with complete sincerity in the pilot episode. I guffawed, even though I instinctively wanted to nod. But actually. After Ann Coulter, slowing metabolism is probably the biggest asshole around the block. 

Rudolph's making this transition from SNL to prime time look so damn easy. Although Arnett and Applegate are also playing characters relatively new to them — Arnett's trying out this new thing where he's not over the top, and Applegate is still reclaiming her dignity from those Kelly Bundy days — Rudolph is just killing it with her new role as a Hollywood diva and life-coaching guru. "Keep on watching and growing," Ava repeats in each episode while her face delivers a wise and perfectly lip-glossed smile. I want to laugh, but at the same time, I'm wondering if I would've become more in touch with my "inner woman" or whatever if I had watched more Oprah growing up. 

I'm not implying that Rudolph triumphs as the underdog on a show sustaining marriage norms despite tricking viewers into thinking it's defying gender expectations with the stay-at-home dad gimmick. (Although that's exactly what it does. Married life is so fun! A husband and wife's most serious problem is how to organize the junk drawer! How quaint, ammirite?!)

I'm not even trying to suggest that the show instinctively sought to overshadow Rudolph with Arnett and Applegate in the first place. I mean, the chick is undeniably funny in her own right without being obnoxious about it, unlike Molly Shannon, who guest starred as an incompetent soccer mom in arguably the worst episode of the season. (Put her back in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform and we'll talk.)

Up All Night caught my attention for its unique and relatively harmonious relationships between its characters. I'm not sure how long this third-wheel act can work, and whether dynamics between Reagan, Chris and Ava will change once Ava gets more serious with her new handyman boo Kevin, played by a lumberjack-y Jason Lee who actually seems to have gotten lost and confused on the way to the My Name is Earl set. But maybe it’s a good thing that the writers have incorporated this May-December romance into the show. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have gems like, “When he touches me, I feel as if I’m being sandblasted.” 

For now there's a certain balance to the show, in terms of both comedy and relatability, that gives each character his or her due. In the Christmas episode that primarily focused on Reagan's obsession with giving her newborn Amy the best first Christmas evarrrrr, Ava gets to jab the audience with her funny bone too. Not a mere reminder that her character's existence on the show is relevant, Rudolph's punchy deliveries stand well enough on their own, usually due to how damn relatable they are. After she tries on a skiing outfit to prepare for a romantic winter getaway with Kevin, she gets trapped in said outfit and shouts to her assistant, "It feels like I'm being raped by a sleeping bag!" Girl. You and every other chick trying on a North Face monstrosity at the mall. 

Maybe I'm biased, given my history of underdog admiration. But in Up All Night viewers can see just how the third wheel gets the audience's attention while simultaneously maintaining the balanced feng shui of the cast. In a recent episode, Ava appears in a karate outfit for a particular segment on her show. She asks the guest instructor, "Master Hu, what's the belt that allows me to catch a fly with chopsticks?" This has got to be a step up from that Karate Kid rerun on TBS you'd be watching instead. Plus, Megan Mullally just guest starred last week. Don't tell me you haven't missed that squeaky little woman. 

Qichen Zhang is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Cambridge. She last wrote in these pages about Parenthood. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"The Wind" - The Fray (mp3)

"I Can Barely Say" - The Fray (mp3)

"Munich" - The Fray (mp3)

Go Play Your VG

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson
1056 pp

I had a creative writing professor who once gave our class a fascinating assignment. Her idea was that we had to compose a story that would contain everything in it: every aspect of the world, no matter how niggling or inconsequential, would have to be factored in somehow. Neal Stephenson takes this joke to its ultimate extreme in his stunningly brilliant, massively entertaining 1056 page novel Reamde.

Reamde was probably not the best title for Stephenson's novel. In Robert Louis Stevenson's era Reamde might have been called Fight to the Finish! or alternately, Fighttothefinish.org because of the hundred page action sequence that concludes the work. Regardless of what you call it, the novel is of the tech adventure variety, and not in the sense you're probably thinking. There's a point where Stephenson's protagonist, multimillionaire Richard Forthrast, who is kind of a parody of Steve Jobs/ glowing tribute to the best Silicon Valley has to offer, realizes that his virtual self in the MMORPG of T'Rain is essentially doing the exactly same thing his physical self is doing, at the exact same moment - entirely by accident.

We realize that it is no accident. Many of the appalling coincidences (terrorists living one floor below hackers!) on which the international abduction story of Reamde hinges are not actually coincidences. We might be forced to puzzle out some of the thornier moments ourselves if we were not so used to having Stephenson explain them at length. In order to introduce a minor jihadist who dies by shotgun shell to the head mere pages later, Stephenson unfurls a 1000 word description of his life experience before this moment. He has taken the absurd writing cliche of "show don't tell" and flipped it so far upside down it becomes exciting again.

At times Stephenson's discursiveness borders on what it must have been like to shepherd Rain Man to and fro. This is no more evident than in the lengthy sequences where characters in Reamde play the online roleplaying game T'Rain. (It's heartening to know the graphics are evidently superior to anything World of Warcraft has ever produced.)

The innovation perpetrated by Forthrast's version of the familiar world is that he has utilized real life geological science in order to maintain the verisimilitude of reality. In other words, when you dig beneath the wintry mountains and open fields of the T'Rain simulation, you actually encounter ore and various mineral deposits in varieties like you might see on Earth. The backstory of the world implies that a rogue asteroid composed of alien matter struck Earth and such deposits lurk within our home planet, whereas the moon is a part of Earth that broke off in the collision. It's a masterful moment when Neal breaks off to think of how weird it is, for part of them to be in us, and part of us to be out there. It's also breezed by like a traffic light.

Richard Forthrast's niece Zula Forthrast is actually the protagonist of Reamde. She is the adoptive scion to a troubled Iowa family. Zula is abducted by the Russian mafia because of her hipster boyfriend Peter selling credit card numbers, and then subsequently by an Islamic jihadist named Abdullah Jones in a manner so haphazard that it's clear the switch is something of a joke about how we believe all terrorism is indistinguishable, when it is not. The Islamist who abducts her is an educated British man commanding a group of warriors he can barely comprehend.

Zula finds out 90 percent of what she knows about the villain and her predicament from Wikipedia, and the accuracy of the information tends to vary. Stephenson gets many of his jollies mocking the database's inadequacies; he does not subscribe to the maxim, "Beware of making the best the enemy of the good." In his view (and many others) a technology that is just short of being perfect is worthless; the same is true of ideology, in fact, all ideology.

Stephenson's technological and political views are easily extrapolated to the world of literature. He prominently features two writers in his novel, both of which never leave their homes and barely even serve a function in the plot other than to allow Stephenson humor at their expense. There is Devin "Skeletor" Skaerlin, the kind of mass-market fantasy writer that Stephenson both abhors and harbors a grudging admiration for because of the man's prolific abilities.

The second is Stephenson's Oxford-educated parody of Tolkien named Don Donald, or D-squared. Stephenson incorporates D-squared - an expert in many languages who revises the world of T'Rain, mostly by removing the apostrophes that Skaerlin added to the world's backstory. There are many jokes about how seriously such people take themselves, which is also possibly Neal's tongue-in-cheek way of apologizing for his more pedantic moments.

It is not simply the writing style of these men that Richard Forthrast does not understand. He is a businessman, an entrepreneur, and it entails a completely different sort of creativity. He cannot conceive of what even makes them tick, allows them to spend time in their own respective fantasy worlds, the ones he is paying them to create. He does play T'Rain at length, but only because he must to run his business, and then again when he has to use the virtual world to track down lost Zula. There's a moment where he returns to the game and finds his character simply sleeping and eating as he waits for him, and nurses a pang of guilt. He has stumbled on a great truth - that everything that thinks for itself is alive, as well as a great many things that cannot think for themselves. He is ashamed to be their god.

The fact that Stephenson understands this feeling explains what he does to his own characters. Almost all receive happy endings to their abduction stories, a great many find both love and happiness as a result of their alienating behavior. Connecting with people, even when you are known or worshipped by many, is still a problem for Stephenson, and he does want us all to get along. This sentimentality and weakness in his writing is potentially the only thing that saves Reamde from the cold esoteric fact-telling that it stumbles into at times.

Part of the great fun of Reamde comes because no other human being could have written it. Whenever I see a work of art that pretends technology doesn't exist, I inwardly groan. For Stephenson, the relationship between man and machine is the fundamental one, and there are not many writers willing to write fictional narratives that can't happen unless every character has both a constant connection to the net and a healthy disgust of actual people. Sure, William Gass might have conceived of some of the ideas, but he would not be sufficiently tech-savvy to elucidate them the way Stephenson can. It can even be said of most of the man's books that they are so astoundingly original that nothing like them will ever be produced again.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about the BBC's Sherlock.

"Chimney Sweep" - The Abodes (mp3)

"850" - The Abodes (mp3)

"Oh Lucile" - The Abodes (mp3)

River of Ashes

by DAYNA EVANS

It occurred to me as we sat in the ladies waiting room at Varanasi Junction, while I watched a mid-size rat scratch at an empty plastic biscuit wrapper and we sedately moaned about our train to Kolkata’s obvious delay, that it was no coincidence that our final resting place in a three-week holiday to India was Varanasi, the holy city.

This last day being then the mystical Friday the thirteenth, after a guesthouse owner had laughed at our “Bible,” (the overstuffed but indispensable Lonely Planet India) and after one of us got spontaneously ill over a toilet, I realized there were no coincidences in India. A scheduled departure was delayed as dusk approached, and my nerves forced me to pick nail polish off my fingernails like flaky sky-blue scabs. The pieces fell to the ground near the rat and the mess looked like shattered sky. Varanasi, where the sky had shattered.

We had been in Varanasi for three days. It is a distinctly holy city. The feeling that Varanasi disseminates is a mixture of overwhelming purity and ceaseless disquiet. At the times that I wobbled near the edge of uneasiness, squirming inside with the thought of how I might be being penetrated by some hyperevil Satanic antiforce that would reveal to the sacrosanct mass what kind of person I really was, I also felt good, wholesome, fulfilled. Cleansed.

Photography is prohibited at the burning ghats of Varanasi, where my friend and I ended up without having planned to when we turned a corner. I still wanted to, which I think is fairly normal, and I fought every instinct in my body. It was the first time I’d ever seen a corpse and there wasn’t just one, there were twenty. Maybe thirty. If I could have photographed the smell, I would have.

A man had adopted us. I never was able to catch his name but he was wearing a black-and-white striped shirt that was made from the same material as what I imagine to be a circus tent. He was actually considerably clownish in his conversation, especially as he identified that we liked jokes. His idea of a joke was confused with rhyming, so he thought that maybe if he rhymed words, we’d laugh.

“No worry, no hurry, no chicken, no curry.” I did laugh. What could that even mean?

We were standing in a narrow courtyard that looked out on the burning ritual. My friend and I were near the edge of the overlook point and it gave us a stadium-like view of men's and women's stuffed corpses being carried down a set of stairs to the Ganges below. The mother Ganga. The man explained that those with more money were burned closer to the Ganges. It was a status symbol. It got you closer to God. It made me think of my friend who told me that during Ramadan women are granted special God points for cooking and tasting the food in a way that makes it so they won’t actually swallow and break the fast. I wondered if I’d ever done anything ever to amass God points.

In three rows that crept closer toward the Ganges, we saw thatches of wood being stacked and disassembled in individual square patches, each assigned to a different person. Or, rather, now a nonperson. The bodies were brought down the stairs silently by four members of the Untouchables caste. They were laid on a patch of wood, then buried beneath several cross-hatched logs, and lastly, the whole structure, with the body packaged snuggly within, was lit on fire.

The bodies looked comfortable beneath their wooden blankets, which makes the heart feel lighter than one might think at a funeral pyre. Because only the head is revealed, and because I was too scared and disoriented to come closer, my view of the closest body was as near to the edge of disturbing as my reticent core would allow. I was experiencing quiet, unhinged nausea.

I saw skin melt off of a skull, which is the one detail I choose to share when pressed. I don’t think I should have to hold on to that image alone.

Our friend in the circus-tent shirt asked us if we’d like to go on a boat ride after he had shared more rhymes that had gotten worse and less natural to laugh at. I took a few moments to catch my breath and said “Sure” to the boat ride offer.

“Take it in stride, time for a ride.” The skull. Of a nonperson. Being burned, singed, melted.

We didn’t move, though. Watching us, he didn’t either. He offered up this detail: “The men who are in the river, right near the banks, do you know what they are doing?”

Wading in ashes, I thought.

“They are looking for gold and silver. When the body is prepared for burning, they have lots of fine jewelry on them. Gold, silver, lots of it. Those people want that jewelry. To sell.”

Jewelry to sell. I had imagined instead that they wore it, the men wading out of the ashes with big chains around their necks but a torn, ragged look on their faces from the weight of the burden of establishing someone’s honor and holding on to it. I saw the men emerging like zombies from the septic waters of the Ganges, but with big hearts. I thought of God points again. Surely, they’d get God points for that.

We saw three puppies sleeping next to a huge pile of water buffalo shit. The circus friend asked us again about the boat ride, then introduced us to a tall Nepalese man who had one tiny braid on the back of his scalp. The braid was capped by one green and one red bead and his hair was very greasy.

“He’s the boat man,” the circus friend told us. “We’ll take you down the river together.”

The Nepalese man rowed and I chatted with the circus friend. “Animals are too pure to be burned,” he said. “They get thrown in the river instead. Dogs, cows, water buffalo. Pregnant women, too. They must go straight into the river.”

I believed that my worst nightmare was a dead pregnant woman floating to the surface of the river while we rowed along leisurely. I scratched my ankle and peered into the mucky water. Nothing. All brown grime.

“And cobra bites.”

“And what?” I said.

“If you are bitten by a cobra, you go straight into the river. You are pure.”

“Can we get off now?” my friend asked. She startled me. She gets very seasick and I’d said that a boat ride would be fine. I’d dragged her along with me without even thinking.

“I don’t know where we are,” I said. Our clown friend was telling a story that I wasn’t listening to. I had my eyes closed behind my sunglasses. Then, very softly and shifting my body over my bag toward him, I said: “My friend is feeling sick. Can we get off now?”

“It will be very far for you to walk. We’ll turn around.” The circus friend rowed this time and the dirty Nepalese man played songs from his cell phone and sang along quietly. My friend and I didn’t really talk, but not out of animosity. Our faces looked dry and cold, hers was white, drained of humanity. Her eyes dragged.

We got off the boat where we’d got on. My friend didn’t get sick, though I was certain she would.

That night, she showed me some sketches she’d done of the bodies burning. She managed to deepen my anxiety over the charred skull by coloring the drawings in red. They looked like raw, exposed muscle, like an anatomy class. I didn’t remember the actual bodies that way, and it disturbed me that she did. Then I realized she’d only been using red China pencil for her sketches, and it was probably just a coincidence.

We got dinner at a restaurant called Ganga Fuji where I drank illicit beer that is illegal in the old section of town, and my friend had Coke in a glass bottle. The food released masala-scented steam and it helped us return to our senses. I was patiently wishing to sleep well that night as I rounded my fingers against the steel cup, listening to the tabla player tap out rhythms on a stunted stage behind me. I anticipated our last train ride in India, the stiff plastic cot beds and sheets that slid as you shifted around. We ate in near silence. My body felt hollow.

We eventually boarded the train that would take us to Kolkata, where I would fly immediately back to Bangladesh. Three hours in, we were both feverish and in pain. I locked my bag to a metal pipe and a stranger opened the sliding door to ask us if he could take our photo.

“No,” I said. “Thank you.” As the train shuffled onward, I brought my palm to my forehead and moaned from the heat.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Bangladesh. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Roman Polanski's Carnage.

"Met Before" - Chairlift (mp3)

"Frigid Spring" - Chairlift (mp3)

"Amanaemonesia" - Chairlift (mp3)

Glass House

by BETSY MORAIS

Commuters flood in and out of Metro stations in the morning and in the evening, coinciding with the standard hours of government operation and the jobs that revolve like concentric circles around the Beltway. The metro cars are quiet, the seats are cushioned, and I have yet to see anybody sneak in food, aside from myself.

I have learned to walk on the left side of the station escalator and stand on the right. The piercing glares of more experienced D.C. residents strictly regulate such conduct.

It is cinematic: the standardized station design is gray concrete with rectangular insets in the walls of dramatically-shadowed passageways. I can look at a monitor that tells me when my train will come. There is almost always wireless service to distract me until the train arrives. The darkness underground reminds me that I am only in transit to a more important destination. This is unlike the New York subway that I came from, with its assertive lighting and smells, and where one might feel all-too present.

Washington is a metonym for the American government, and in the city are bureaucratic tendrils — kickball leagues, cycling clubs, politically-associated meet-ups, and non-profit potlucks. D.C. has a special fondness for affiliations, organized by interest, otherwise by neighborhood. Networking people gather for crucial conversations in which they discuss nothing.

I got a gig photographing a prime schmoozing event with an open bar, where I was tapped on the shoulder and told to be sure to take pictures of particular guests. Nobody wanted to be in candids. Out of the corners of their eyes, my subjects caught what I was up to, and posed with their wine glasses — smiling like tourists outside the Lincoln Memorial — then slipped out of the shot to restock their cheese plates. The party was lively for a while. Nothing lasts until very late on weekdays though, because the Metro closes down at midnight.

Washington hardly comes across to me as a city as much as an idea. If I am walking along the street, I am on it, but not in it — so I meander, inconsequentially, through an imposing configuration of nationally significant structures. I'm just a short-legged civilian crossing into the federal sublime. I look at it through the glass, archived in museums, erected in marble, preserved at precisely-regulated temperatures. This vision of Washington has been filmed and photographed, over and over again, by Frank Capra and Time, and also by me on a disposable camera I brought when I visited for the first time in third grade. Among those old prints are repeated images of my brother and me striking the same poses in front of alternating iconic backdrops.

The Capitol hovers over the city. In 1899 Congress passed a Heights of Building Act, stipulating that private structures could not be built taller than the Capitol or other significant government buildings. In 1910 Congress enacted another law, which set a maximum building height of 130 feet, or less, depending on the width of the facing streets. Height limit rules were not unusual in cities then, but a hundred years later one finds the issue to be quite contentious: there is a desire here to see Washington grow into the metropolis it could be, and yet, dissenters argue, Washington is not like any other city. Indeed, it is not, and in no small part because the buildings stretch like canyons across D.C., so that only the Capitol can catch the light.

I am struck by the contrast between the city outside and its recesses — all of the hollowed-out spaces inside the district, where Washington’s paramount activity is tucked away from the surface — as cart vendors sell patriotic tie-dye T-shirts on the National Mall.

After going out for Happy Hour — the locally sanctioned way to socialize here — I arrived at a bar called Recessions, which, of course, is located in a basement. The bar area could be found down a flight of steps that resembled the stairwell of some abandoned Hyatt, and through an archway, leading into a dimly lit room with a pool table in the middle. Men in button-downs and slacks drank from oversized beer mugs, and women unfastened their blazers. There was velvet, or possibly velour, up on some of the walls, like wallpaper. I didn't want to stay too long. The time was shortly after 9 o'clock when I said I ought to be getting home, and when I walked to the Metro the streets were empty, the storefronts closed, and the sky as eerily dark as any place shut down for the evening.

Washington is a city made up of very important places, and to travel to D.C. is to make a pilgrimage to these idealized edifices. But it is also a city woven through and around the abstract, with very real charms and faults. That is not the city I visited in third grade, nor, I suppose, is it where most anybody is headed when they come from elsewhere to take in Washington.

Any sightseer arrives at a destination with specific scenes in mind, certain snapshots to return home with, but in Washington one might feel as though the snapshots are the only things to see at all — the rest forms a gorge of uniformly-heighted office buildings, colored across a muted beige-gray spectrum, with not very many people coming in and out.

So it would seem from the pictures I bring home, and from my purposeful walks to snatch one photo-op after another. How could Washington be seen any other way, and six months in, how could it be anything other than a collection of still frames? I can only report that I remain a tourist, and that I do not know this city, because the idea of Washington is such a bold fixture of the imagination, and the city itself only faint by comparison. The dimension and heft of Washington in the abstract has been delivered to me only in postcards, while the city’s breath is too light to be felt through my skin.

At the end of my morning commute, I go up the station escalator that ascends to street level, and I watch the city slowly come into view. I hold my breath and wait for the scene to unfold, to reveal itself to me so that I can step out and participate in it. But I have no point of entry, and instead of walking up into the city I walk along side it, from the metro to the office where I work. I have no sense of place in Washington, perhaps because such a thing is only an idea.

Betsy Morais is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and twitters here.

Photographs by the author.

"Seven Stars" - Air (mp3)

"Nowhere" - Wild Nothing (mp3)

"Andrew In Drag" - The Magnetic Fields (mp3)

Self-Credited

by SUMEJA TULIC

The way it goes for not that pretty girls with freckles and wavy hair is to adopt a survivor mode that enables anticipations associated with pretty girls. And that is exactly what I did. I chose rich and to some extent delusional interpretations of my reality and coupled that with curiosity and outspokenness.

Of course, if you are raised in a confused patriarchal family – where your mother is your father and your father is a mother with short outbreaks of bad temper – this will get you into lots of trouble. For instance, the first time I was punished for my curiosity was when I asked why Jews and Muslims wear small hats and should one give it up? Had I not had my own interpretation of the slap that surprised both me and my father, I could have gone through life blaming him for my subsequent lack of courage, sense of adventure and maybe even lack of academic ambition, but I took pride in the fact that I felt fear and anger in my father’s eyes more than the warmth that seared my cheek. I just knew I had to.

Luckily, amongst the decomposed layers of things, ignorance and fear that made my 1990s, fragments of narratives slipped in. I never got the whole story or the accurate chain of events. All I knew was fueled by the excitement that rushed in while realizing that I had nowhere to go with my questions. My mother was a sad beautiful woman trapped in a desert, my father was tired and worried and most he could do was to explain verses from the Quran in a puppeteer sort of a way. Our school textbooks were the well-implemented thoughts of a poorly educated submissive male.

My knowledge on sex came from few completely different formats and sources. My school friends and graffiti could give speculative information on the subject in form of nervously written "Fuck." However, in one of the houses my family lived in, the former attendant left a stash of Van Damme movies and what I later in life figured out was a porn collection. I never got to the porn, but the action films that my parents kept contained a few riddling scenes. Some disturbed me, others – such as the one in which a man literally bakes an egg on women’s chest – made me confused.

Later, while visiting a friend, I stumbled on One Thousand and One Nights. Strangely, my parents didn’t mind me sitting by myself on a green couch in their friend’s house; reading soft erotic tales dipped in a sea of adventures every time we visited. Up to this day I don’t really know how did I learn what sex technically meant. Actually, when I think of knowing about it, it is sort of a memory. A defused and blurred collection of cinematic fragments starring random people I knew, places and walls in dusty towns I lived in.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that intertextuality doesn’t only come to the well read amongst us. Of course, well read people can line up few legitimate footnotes beneath their claim. Others can't. I hope I don’t come off as a completely ignorant and smug, bragging about one's self-credited genius, because, in all honesty, I'm not trying to. If anything, this is inspired by acute depression and envy that I regularly feel when reading and listening to some of you, dear peers from other places.

The drama of it all is that I can divert myself from my own fault by rightfully blaming few dictators and warlords along with my teachers and parents. All those were members of a gang that crippled the education and wider academic upbringing of entire generations. And it was so easy: they took books off shelves and put nothing instead. Literally nothing.

During the lunch breaks at school, I would sneak out and cross the highway. I would run very fast to a newspaper stand. The vendor was used to being confronted by angry fathers demanding a refund, so I lied, telling him my parents gave me money to buy a kids' magazine. Once I was back at school, beneath my blue school uniform, the colorful pages of the magazine would be glued by sweat to my body. I knew I did my part. The rest was up to somebody else.

Coming back to not that pretty girls with freckles and wavy hair: when you grow up to be a not that pretty woman with very cute freckles and God knows what kind of hair, you realize that your survival mode fails you badly when you are talking to that attractive guy who seems very smart. But this is something completely different and I am not comfortable talking about it just yet.

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and photographer living in Sarajevo. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her childhood in Libya.

Photographs by the author. You can find more of her photography here.

"Paddling Out" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Devil's Work" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Black Tin Box" - Miike Snow & Lykke Li (mp3)

Last Dance

by BRITTANY JULIOUS

Party Girl
dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer
94 min.

The most iconic Party Girl moment for me is Mary's walk of pride post-jail. Things happen to her. Life is something that happens around her parties, outfits, and friendships. A night in jail is just another event in a long line of events, but it can't define her. She is too much her own girl for that.

I say girl instead of woman, as Party Girl is a film about an emotional late bloomer's transition into adulthood. Mary (Parker Posey) may scrape by on rent parties to keep her spacious Chinatown loft or parade around the East Village in Chanel, but she is no more grown in her actions and choices than any other member of the underground party scene that frames the narrative.

I first watched Party Girl in college during my film boom dedicated to post-collegiate happenings. Paranoid about a future that increasingly appeared bleak and rife with stress, I took to films featuring "hip, young things" or just "young things" as a way to seek solace and comfort before the party of sporadic classes and little responsibility ended.

With its charming outfits, spastic supporting characters, and rampant early-90s Manhattan romanticism, Party Girl was a personal favorite. In particular, Parker Posey's talents – the way she needs only a facial expression or two to dominate and escalate the comedy of any given scene, her voice that is simultaneously Valley Girl and know-it-all pretentious – created a lasting impression. Watching it again recently further cemented the film as a modern, independent classic for the girls and women who view "a good time" as a translatable goal from work to play.

For the casual viewer, Mary's transformation from Downtown It Girl to library student is a radical one. But director Daisy von Scherler Mayer subtly hints at the necessary skills of a librarian that Mary possesses throughout the film. She is able to get along – or at least communicate effectively – with different types of people. She has a general curiosity for the world around her and approaches each person she meets with an eagerness to help, or just bring them into her fold. And her closet – organized in a methodical system that only she truly understands – speaks to the Dewey Decimal System, a source of anxiety followed by pleasure for the heroine.

Mary ditches a date with young, dreamy falafel seller Mustafa to learn the Dewey Decimal System, all the while transforming the space into a party-like space of her own. She dances atop the table in her shorts and combat boots. She gets things done (“things” being a knowledge of a system she had been unfamiliar with upon taking the job at the library) while still maintaining a connection to her old self and her true self.

Later, Mary organizes temporary roommate Leo’s record collection based on this same system she spent a long evening trying to understand. Mary honestly described the evening as, “The wildest night of my life.” Understanding the system was further solidification of the connection between her burgeoning interests and her love for organizing the people, places, and things that are a part of her life.

Leo (Guillermo Díaz) is visibly upset by the order that disrupted his chaos of more than 1,000 singles and LP’s, but Mary remains unfazed by the potential problems in her unwarranted organizing project. For Leo, it is a challenge to his lack of a system and the potential catalyst for losing a paid gig as a DJ. For Mary, it is a way to more effectively provide the world to Leo. Like telling Leo earlier about Rene, the owner of the bar that Leo is auditioning at as a DJ, organizing his set of records is a means of helping a friend and bringing him more closely into her fold.

This method doesn’t always prove to be beneficial. A party thrown at the end of the second act turns disastrous for Mary who no longer has her library clerk job. Unlike her work in organizing Leo’s record collection, Mary’s party is another task to make rent. Inviting friends to DJ or Mustafa to sell his food is less a method of helping a friend succeed and more a means of making things better for herself. At 24, Mary’s growing sense of purpose feels familiar, but it is her quick emotional descent once that newly-found career path is taken from her that is disturbing in its truth.

Thus far in this decade of personal development, I have realized people are unhappy or dissatisfied, that it is not just an internal frustration, but also a universal, generational worry. I’ve also realized that people have many goals and aspirations, and the older they get, the more hesitant they are to admit them. Goals begin to feel like things that young people do and accomplish, and now one’s goals should be simpler: fall in love, get married, have children, live in comfort. I remember how my friends talked about what they wanted to do, but now they talk more about what things have been done to them. There is a loss of control. Career goals are still exciting, but the ability to hold on to them as reality loudly asserts the difficulties of The Way We Live Now, can crush even the most starry-eyed party girls.

Mary eventually triumphs as friends and coworkers believe in her and it is this moment that makes the film so memorable. As a viewer, I come back to Party Girl for the fashion, the dialogue, but also the "happy ending." There is a comfort in seeing one’s life not end in a similar way to how it began: confused, jumbled, and floundering.

Brittany Julious is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. 

"Peter Piper" - Run DMC (mp3)

"Mama Told Me Not To Come" - The Wolfgang Press (mp3)

"Burning (Vibe mix)" - MK (mp3)

Dial Tone

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Are You There, Chelsea?
created by Dottie Zicklin and Julie Ann Larson

In the mid-90s, during the early stages of filming a pilot, NBC president Don Ohlmeyer had a little problem. The embryonic show in question had a script wherein one of the main female characters was to sleep with a man on the first date. Ohlmeyer worried this would negatively color the audience’s perception of the character; he was concerned that she would appear promiscuous, and promiscuity was not an appropriate trait for what was supposed to be a highly relatable character. After taping the pilot, producers handed out a questionnaire to the studio audience members, most of whom did not mind the character’s sexual behavior. The plot stayed intact.

That pilot was the first episode of Friends, and though networks like NBC probably still include questionnaires in their screening methodologies, the idea of gingerly surveying an audience’s reaction to a one-night stand is almost too quaint. At least it is in the context of the current crop of network comedies, whose pitches might have read, "Women who keep it real, have sex with their bras on and make a lot of dick jokes." Whitney Cummings wouldn’t bat an eye at Monica Geller’s first episode tryst with Paul the Wine Guy – she’d applaud it.

All of this hoopla — the hoopla about women who burp and fart and fuck and swallow the tequila worm on a regular basis — really started in earnest with Bridesmaids and now seems to be culminating in NBC's Are You There, Chelsea? starring Laura Prepon as a young Chelsea Handler and Chelsea Handler as Sloane, Chelsea Handler’s more responsible elder sister.

Are You There, Chelsea? is an evident paraphrasing of Handler’s ribald 2008 memoir Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea; the erasure of the word “vodka” from one title to the next reflects the clumsiness of the translation, as Are You There, Chelsea?’s writers have amputated all of the grimy charm of the book and replaced it with jokes about redheads and dull sitcom platitudes.

Handler is a fairly funny woman, both on her E! show and in her memoirs. Her compendium of sexual encounters, My Horizontal Life, isn’t explicit in the way a Cosmo Red-Hot Read would be, but it is autobiographical, tart, picaresque and optimistic, like a promiscuous Great Expectations. One chapter depicts Handler as a reluctant cruise ship passenger, tossing back vodka and Kool-Aid in Dixie cups, then vomiting over the side of the ship and having a man named Rico carry her back to her room "like a scene out of The English Patient." Later on the vacation, she has sex with an acrobatic young man who turns out to be a cruise ship performer. Embarrassment ensues.

A TV adaptation of Handler’s stories would seem ideal: her anecdotal style would convert well into 30-minute segments; her sex life is absurd enough to be comical, ample enough to be appropriately “edgy” for younger viewers, and still not explicit enough to merit much censorship; and her fan base would follow her from late-night to primetime without difficulty. After all, Chelsea Lately snags more young female viewers than Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The reasons for the terrible quality of Are You There, Chelsea? is threefold. First, there’s the writing. Chelsea works at a bar in New Jersey; a flashback reveals she has attempted to mate with her semi-boss, Rick (Jack McDorman) only to discover that both she and Rick enjoy being on top too much to make things work. This joke, already a bit of a stretch, is repeated three or four times throughout the pilot with different verbiage. Chelsea makes fun of a ginger hookup ("Maybe I should go out with someone like that, even if he does look like Kathy Griffin") and her virgin roommate ("She is a rare and beautiful creature. We need to keep her the way she is, and then stuff her when she dies").

Her best friend (Ali Wong) plays the sidekick to excess, and that virginal roommate (Lauren Lapkus) is an ectomorph who scurries around her apartment like a Rachel Dratch SNL sketch canned before the first dress rehearsal. Chelsea's father is crass and cheap (a flashback shows him buying a "Lettuce Leaf Kid" for a kindergarten-aged Chelsea) and the bar employs a little person (a notorious Handler fixation) who at one point explains his yen for "seniors": "She was 64. And the osteoporosis brought her down to my size."

The writing well may be symptomatic of the show’s second ill, the format. Every stale joke only grows staler in the context of multicamera shots and Ye Olde Laughe Tracke. Falling back on weary television formats seems like a cowardly recession-era impulse for comfort and reassurance. It's the equivalent of plying woman to buy chocolate by showing the same old adverts: chick cuddled up on the couch, warm and snuggly, slowly devouring a one-inch square of processed cocoa product. The most successful shows on television right now, besides those that involve warbling neophytes and panels of smug judges (a.k.a. “smudges”), establish substantial stories and employ formats that feel contemporary.

The only saving grace of Are You There, Chelsea?, Ms. Handler herself, wastes away in the fruitless older sister role. Handler parlays her trademark bitterness into playing Sloane, the evident moral compass (you can tell by the mousy brown wig) who in the first episode gives birth to a baby whose father is in Afghanistan. Sloane plays the married and monogamous foil to Chelsea and her many conquests. The portrayal of Chelsea herself is loose and relaxed, as if perpetually three drinks in, but it lacks Handler’s acidity. Like John Belushi when he removes his sunglasses near the end of The Blues Brothers, Handler can convey plenty of meaning through a single look, except Belushi’s gaze was puppyish and Handler’s is withering. She doesn't show up nearly enough in the show, and one wishes 36 weren’t an age that Hollywood deems unfit for providing suitably youthful television.

In a recent interview, the artist Josh Kline called actors "surrogates." To him, television shows are substitutions for the parts of life you don’t have time to live, and television characters as people with whom you can maintain a "low-maintenance relationship." In other words, "you know them, but they don’t know you." What makes such a one-sided relationship possible is the desire to know those ostensible actor-strangers, the people who begin as foreigners and end up as friends. Theoretically, Chelsea Handler’s popularity arises from the simulated intimacy of her talk show and books; she speaks to you, she regales you with her embarrassing stories, she is on your level, even though she’s on E! and you’re on your couch. But even that low-maintenance relationship between viewer and character becomes laborious in the context of Handler’s sitcom. There is no desire to make the foreigner a friend when the foreigner’s punchlines smell like mothballs. You don’t need a questionnaire to know that.

Like the other female-centric shows of the moment, Are You There, Chelsea? suffers from maladies of form and content. It isn’t as if Laura Prepon and Whitney Cummings and Kat Dennings aren’t funny. When Cummings dresses up as a naughty nurse and forces her boyfriend to fill out hospital forms, when Kat Dennings says "I’m dead inside" with a pouty poker face, when Prepon tells her roommate her cat’s name is Assface: this shit is completely capable of drawing laughs. But the laugh track, so useful in the 90s as a tool for underscoring the most quotable lines of Friends and Seinfeld, now murders humor with Dexter-like efficiency. Women are funny, and there’s no need to devote one article after another to that astounding fact, but in order to move forward, ladies need to ditch decaying sitcoms in favor of something that serves them better.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Pulp Fiction. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Mothership" - Enter Shikari (mp3)

"No Sssweat" - Enter Shikari (mp3)

"Labyrinth" - Enter Shikari (mp3)