Breezing easily between exotic Chinoiserie and hometown hoedown, whisking lightly between woodwind delicacy and jazzy trombone, he must have the widest and oddest repertoire of gestures, which allows him a stylistic and dynamic range unusual even among today’s most highly regarded conductors. The way he slipped from the grandiose opening Adagio maestoso to the suddenly…
My armpits smell like Campbell’s soup and my hair feels like the welcome mat beneath the sign to wipe your feet between the showroom and the shop. Who’s the new guy sweeping up? Six bucks an hour, off the books. Outside the showroom and the shop, he sleeps in cabs of junkyard trucks, eats at…
So you think I couldn’t have been the life of your miserable party. You think because I graded 9th-grade quizzes into the night I was probably fit for just that. You think I didn’t finish my novel because I feared it might not sell. You assume because my immigrant parents refused to teach me their…
Why are you so hard on the suicide like self-love is his only problem not getting the position of his body right in front of the train? Full sun. The mirror in the hotel actually a television set, no one here to make a commentary to, last night, you sat next to the brother in…
I meet Margaret Mead that year— “that old lady, what a pain in the ass she is!”— or so her helper says, a dreadlocked Dominican from Yonkers; but outside her suite at the Museum of Natural History in the corner turret high above 77th & Columbus after she’s pottered off I take photos of the…
We were sitting in the restaurant window when I heard myself saying Seamus is here– though there was no greeting, and our view was blocked by a brewery lorry pulled up on the kerb. I’d no sight of him, but it was nothing spooky either. What I had seen under the lorry were two feet…
They laughed, at first, at his shrieks seeing the face his father wore: a horse head mask unearthed from the closet where he kept his army uniform, the white rubber face with real hair for a mane under which his father’s shoulders bulged. His father’s large hands tossed the boy into the air then onto…
Of our first album critics remember only the flaws. Major domo/manager/producer, I recorded the band live from Boston’s Park St. Station— over a pay phone to my parents’ house in Quincy. Rush-hour subway screech tilting everything apocalyptic, amid the operator’s recurrent ten cents for three more minutes, please. “I had nothing to lose,” Molloy said,…
Magical numbers! Roosevelt the most famous infantile paralysisadult to ever live with it, thrive with it, die with it, at sixty-three,contracted at thirty-nine, the same integral number as my birth yearand the year, 1939, when the world war that changes everything starts—the President treading water with his hands and arms, standingat poolside in Warm Springs,…
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