An Actress Prepares
Is that a slow-motion me—my slow-motion hopes, my slow-motion dreams — unraveling? An unraveling, slow-motion me, reaching for, beseeching make believe: Don’t abandon me for reality! Is that the topsy-turvy, twisty, tipsy world of me—unraveled? Is that really me? In real time? Reaching for reality? Is that real-time me still me? In gauzy slumber I lie still and frightened. That final ravel will toll the death of me, of Bryce Maclaine, actually, and my fantastic life, the life of an actress, unraveling now, in torturous time. I can feel reality — with feet like axes — crawling...
Read MoreAt McDonald’s
An attractive employee with mussed hair pacing outside smoking a cigarette two construction workers discussing in simple Beckettesque lines the difficult old lady impossible to please with either woodworking or painting the family pulling up with the camping trailer ordering the biggest breakfasts they can get the father with two identical copies of himself all with crew cuts and turned up noses trailing along behind oh McDonald’s microcosm! I look at my reflection in your window wondering when it was I got to be so old and stupid...
Read MoreThe Coefficient of Friction
Ann Marie pulls yet another exam from the stack of ungraded tests and glances over the multiple choice answer sheet. The Scantron machine has marked only a single incorrect answer. She flips over to the short answer portion of the test and reads: “#51: Explain, in several sentences, the relationship between friction and heat.” The response, in sloppy scrawl, reads: Friction is a force that opposes movement. Ann Marie recognizes the phrase: the exact wording from the textbook. At least someone is doing the reading. Ann Marie looks up for a moment, rolls her neck until it pops....
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of Dec. 15 (Pop Culture)
For better or worse, pop culture and the movies are big news this week,as our contributors take a closer look at our relationship with the things we read and watch. In Jonathan Lowe’s witty “The Secret History of Walter Mitty,” he takes us on a stream-of-consciousness pop cultural journey. A.J. Huffman’s “The Road to Anvil Road” waxes philosophical about Wile E. Coyote of the Warner Brothers Roadrunner cartoons. Jack Vian’s “The Spandex Spider” shows us the drab reality behind a super-hero’s masked life. In Jack Vian’s...
Read MoreMy Personal Biopic, in Black and White
It’s tonight again, presently well past midnight, and I have accomplished as much as anyone can in one day, am now too tired to read anything, and unfortunately, have no new movies to watch, so must relegate myself to this— the endless saga, more boring than an Andy Warhol film— “Sleep”—for example, And I don’t want to sleep!!! So I’m here again. Actually, I’m always here, shackled to my seat in the same screening room, nothing more than my own darkened skull, the concession stand selling only Scotch and ice, which I buy, suck on, bread and water, you know, but man cannot...
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