The Slaughter →

The Morning News, August 2015

Feeding Ravens, Self Portrait (Detail), Agnieszka Sosnowska, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

"Two goats and two sheep have congregated in the corner of my cousin Chris’s corral, chewing their cud. The air is a moistureless 104 degrees, and the sun is simmering in a light-blue sky embellished with cotton-ball clouds. More than a dozen members of the Chavez family are lingering around, elbows resting on pickup truck hoods, arms cradling newborns, fists gripping cans of light beer. I’m leaning up against the fence, watching one corpulent sheep, placated and docile, chewing obliviously. That’s the sheep I’m supposed to kill."

Read more here...

The View From Up Here

The Morning News, May 2015

Yoav Horesh, Myjava Central Bus Station, Slovakia, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Feinberg Projects Gallery, Tel Aviv.

"The notion of upward mobility is something slippery, something I don’t understand. Yet it’s also something tangible. Things change as you ascend. You start removing words from your vocabulary and incorporating new ones. You walk differently. When you go to the airport, you no longer have to listen to what the TSA agent is saying at the security gate. You’ve been there. You’ve done that."

Read more here...

Review: The Escape Artist →

New Orleans Review, June 2014

what I expected to be some invasive act of voyeurism turned out instead to be a work of scholarship, introspection, honesty and sincerity. Beller acknowledges that what he is doing is against the will of his subject. The finest moments in The Escape Artist often arrive when Beller turns his critical eye away from Salinger and onto himself. The reader sees the biographer, scurrying back and forth between two tables in the Salinger archive, one where the source letters and documents lay, where pencils and paper are forbidden, and the other where his laptop sits open and alone, and Beller describes his research as carrying handfuls of water between the two tables. In another instance Beller is trying to pull information from the daughter of Salinger’s New Yorker editor, Gustave Lobrano. Through their conversations, Beller conveys how carefully he must word his requests, and how he must distinguish himself from the hordes who have hounded these sources for information over the years. 

Read more here...

Breaking Pierpont

Lent Magazine, April 2014

Waves pounded the shore. Even here in the Cove, where jetties cut the surf, they were getting serious. I drank my beer. Sand floated in with the swill and I felt it on the back of my tongue. The bonfire lit up the sand that surrounded it, and the three of us faced our fire. Tony burped. Our eyes squinted from the heat while our backs felt the cold bite from the foggy marine layer that crept up onto the beach. A waxing moon shone through the clouds every once in a while. Out on the horizon, faint in the fog, the oil platforms’ emergency lights looked like Christmas bulbs. I shivered and drank my beer. The wind was getting stronger.

Read more here...

Review: Both Flesh and Not →

New Orleans Review, January 2015

"While the title piece, “Federer Both Flesh and Not” represents Wallace at his non-fictive best, making this reviewer feel the literary equivalent of what Wallace himself calls “Federer Moments” (Read it. You just have to read it.), there are also pieces that lack that inexplicable brilliance in some way or another. Not that it makes these lesser pieces terrible, but the works assembled here span the entirety of his professional writing life, some coming out while he was in graduate school, when he hadn’t fully encapsulated the nuances of his irony. Or otherwise he reaches into territory outside of his literary comfort zone. The prime example, used by other reviewers as well, is “Back in New Fire,” a brief essay about the AIDS epidemic, where Wallace asserts that this terrible plague might have some advantage, that “it could well be the salvation of sexuality in the 1990’s.” He says this in terms of the value of impediments to love. Without dragons to slay, or in lieu of social mores, AIDS is that generational fire that a person has to get through to find love. And I see what he’s getting at. In fact, “Back in New Fire” reminds me of the sort of post-post-modern sincerity that Wallace writes about in so many of his other works. Only he’s writing this in 1996. Maybe he hadn’t quite figured it out yet."

Read more here...

Apple's Private Beach

The Millions, November 2013

"The cause of any death at Mavericks is always subject to some degree of speculation. When considering the demise of a pro surfer like Sion Milosky, the questions that arise have to do with the moment of death. We know he wiped out on a tremendous wave, but did the initial impact knock him unconscious, or was he alive, unable to discern sea-floor from air, trying to pierce an impregnable surface where the sheer weight and downward force of enormous waves held him down? Maybe he looked for light, or listened for any sound, or just waited one minute, two, three, until his mouth opened, involuntarily, and received no air; maybe he knew that that was it. It all happens beneath the surface, and the whole Greek tragedy of a death at the hands of one’s love takes place invisible to any and everyone. Then the corpse washes up on some distant shore, the board and the body entangled with the leash."

Read more here...

An Open Letter to the Guy Who Stole My Truck →

Nola Vie, August 2013

Dear Guy Who Stole My Truck, Wrecked It, and Walked Off With My Juggling Clubs,

I get that it’s nothing personal against me, that you have no idea who I am or what I do. You just thought, “Hey, that’s a sick truck chilling on the street,” and then you popped the lock, hot-wired it and drove off while I was at work-study. You even had the foresight to fill the tank (I usually only put five bucks in at a time). And when you took a sharp turn into the Causeway guard-rail — when they took you to the tow yard and refused to let you go home with the radio — I kind of felt for you. You even knew how to drive stick.

But what did you do with my juggling clubs?

Read more here... 

Review: Surfer Girls in the New World Order

Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events, April 2013

"Nothing in Comer’s research resolves comfortably. Perhaps this is the nature of the New World Order: because a B-movie in Southern California can motivate a generation to turn the pristine oceans of the world into their playground, nothing can ever quite settle, but rather everything is subject to the perturbations of capital and liquid markets. Still, one finds earnest hope in the stories of the Paradise Surf Shop or the inspiring life of Hawaiian surfer Rell Sun. Comer has taken surfing, as examined through her own academic interests, and reflected on both the broad tides of globalization and the small wakes of real people in specific places."

Read more here...

Expect the Internet →

Airplane Reading, April 2013

"But there’s something about this ad that, while not necessarily subversive, seems to suggest a deeper delving into its target audience’s psyche. The paragraph underneath the header reads, “Face it—you need Wi-Fi.” It’s something you “crave,” something you “sniff out in public parks and coffee shops.” While the ad is visually banal, it is trying to scratch underneath the skin of the contemporary passenger. It is a reminder not so much of what other airlines lack, but of what you can’t do without. It presents itself as the back-alley dealer, who says “I got what you need.”   

Read more Here...

The Somebody Else Up There Who Loves You →

Airplane Reading, December 2012

"It’s all rather transcendental. The pages are SWA color-schemed (the new Canyon Blue livery, not the original Desert Gold). The document is an inspiring primer of the guiding values and principles of SWA. It’s more than an airline—“it’s a family” and “the opportunity of a lifetime.” According to one intern’s testimonial, “Once you’ve experienced Southwest, there is nothing that compares. I honestly would have come back and cleaned toilets just so I could work here.” A true measure of devotion."

Read more at here...