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home > issue #5 Issue 5 - Fall/Winter 2009 Contributors:
NONFICTION:
POETRY:
ART: Read "The Story I Just Finished Writing" by José Luís Peixoto >> Read "Three Movies I Liked" by Tao Lin >> Read Excerpts from Rock! by Piero Negri Scaglione >> Read "Freedom Song" by Willie Perdomo >>
Fiction - Issue 5 "The Story I Just Finished Writing" by José Luís Peixoto Last week I showed my mother a story I had just finished writing. She put on her eyeglasses, sat down, lifted up the pages, and started to read them. I waited for her to finish reading, looking at her occasionally. While she was reading, I saw the expression on her face change many times. After finishing the last sentence, she placed the pages on the table and looked at me over the lenses of her eyeglasses as if she needn't say anything, as if what she had to say was obvious. Then she said, "You can't publish this." Not so much asking as telling me, she said, "What will people think?" I looked at her and laughed. I told her that she wasn't really understanding the story. I tried to explain to her that when reading I, people wouldn't think that I was actually talking about me, in the same way that by reading my mother, they wouldn't automatically think I was talking about her. My mother has very curly hair, so as an example, I showed her a sentence in which I had written, my mother has very straight hair. And she said, "But these people don't know me, and they will think that I have straight hair, and that I say the things that you wrote that I said." I asked her why she cared so much about the opinions of people who didn't even know her. She smoothed back her hair, and said that the people she sees on the street don't know her either, but she still combs her hair whenever she goes out. Nothing in this is true. My mother didn't say any of these things. I showed her my story, she read it, and said, "People will think that I have curly hair and that we argue about the stories you write." I told her that this didn't matter because we both knew she had straight hair and that we never argued about any of my stories. She looked half-sad, and said, "Yes, we know that, but people will think otherwise." I tried to comfort her. I stroked her hair. I showed her the sentences in which I wrote, Nothing in this is true. My mother didn't say any of these things. She asked me whether I truly believed that simply by reading those two sentences, people wouldn't think we had said everything described in the story. Then, as if leaving me to think it over, she stood up and went to the window to smoke a cigarette. To my knowledge, my mother has never smoked a cigarette in her life. Only with a great effort of imagination can I conjure up the idea of my mother someday lighting a cigarette and smoking it. When I showed her the story I just finished writing my mother said, "Don't even think about publishing this." Only very rarely have I seen her eyes look so furious. She said, "If I find out that you published this, I will forget that I have a son, and you won't set foot in this house again." I looked at her, not understanding where all this anger had come from. She continued speaking, until I understood that it was because I'd written that she had been smoking a cigarette by the window. She talked about a lack of respect. She said, "Don't forget that I am fifty-three years old, not a girl your age. And if you forget that, then at least don't forget that I am your mother." She spoke some more about a lack of respect and then she opened the door and slammed it closed with all her strength. "What will other people think?" she whispered under her breath. "They'll definitely think that I'm someone who throws fits of rage and goes around slamming doors." She looked at me worriedly and said, "That they think I smoke isn't the worst part of it." Her worried expression remained. "I'm sure people will think that I'm always thinking about what they might think about me.' I tried to explain to her that when reading I, people wouldn't think that I was actually talking about me, in the same way that by reading my mother, they wouldn't automatically think I was talking about her. Then I tried to convince her that in this kind of story, I and my mother were abstract constructs, characters in a world in which my mother and I would enter only slightly. I explained that only she and I thought about each other when reading those words, and that people who didn't know us, by reading I, would think about themselves, and by reading my mother, they would think about their own mothers. I like my mother very much. To think that my mother is worried causes me deep anguish, so I held up the pages and showed her the sentence, I like my mother very much. She looked at me and smiled an innocent smile. When she finished reading, my mother placed the pages on the table, placed her eyeglasses on the pages, looked at me, and laughed. "What a weird story you wrote," she said. I started to laugh, too. Then, realizing that I didn't know why I was laughing, I stopped. I asked her why she found the story weird." My mother said that whoever read the story wouldn't know whether she had curly hair or straight, whether she smoked or didn't, whether she was anxious or relaxed, whether she worried about what other people think or she doesn't. I said that none of that made the story weird. I said that people indeed would not know any of those things, but those things would always be things they couldn't know from any story anyway. My mother asked, "Then why did you write this story?" I felt insulted. Wasn't my reason for writing the story obvious? Get Issue 5 to continue reading >>
Fiction - Issue 5 "Three Movies I Liked" by Tao Lin
The second movie I liked was also a documentary. I
saw it last year also with Kelly. It was also a movie about people
who focus their entire life on developing one skill. The movie
was called King of Kong. It was about professional Donkey Kong
players. I felt very emotional watching this movie. It focused on
a person named Steve Weibe who was really good at baseball
but messed up at a crucial time, I think in a playoff game, and
then didn't play again, but got married and had children. Then
he got really good at drums. But he regretted never becoming
really great at something. Then one day he was looking online at
Donkey Kong high scores and thought that he could use his time
to become the best Donkey Kong player. He bought an arcade
machine and put it in his garage and played every day. He beat
the high score as recorded on a website. But then certain people
cheated and disqualified Steve Weibe somehow. The certain
people included one man who was really strange and was like
the "enemy" of Steve Weibe. After the movie I said "Why was
that person so evil, that isn't true, people aren't evil like that."
Steve Weibe cried on camera when they interviewed him about
how his high score was disqualified because the people in
control of the Donkey Kong world had cheated to stop him from
being the best. Then Steve Weibe traveled to a famous arcade and tried to get the high score on a public arcade machine, and he did it, but then other things happened. The "evil" person
regained the high score by cheating again. After the movie Kelly
and I went home and text messaged each other variations of
"best person ever" about Steve Weibe. I liked King of Kong very
much. Steve Weibe was calm and nice. He sometimes seemed
severely depressed about life. But he directed his depression into
drums and Donkey Kong instead of into acting like an asshole
all the time.
The third movie I liked was not a documentary. The
movie isn't out yet, I only saw the trailer. I learned from the
trailer that the movie is about four people who go into a cabin
in the woods with the sole intention of going there to make a
movie. Early in the trailer a person wearing a bag over their
head appears and scares a girl. I thought this was funny but
later I would think it was even funnier. The trailer then shows
some scenes without any people with bags over their heads. It
becomes apparent that maybe the person whose idea it was to go
there to make the movie deliberately wore the bag over his head
to provide plot, or something, to their movie. The trailer shows
another person with a bag over their head running toward the
cabin and scaring everyone and then someone says something
to indicate that the person wearing the bag is just "screwing
around." But then the trailer shows a person wearing a bag over
their head walking into the girl's room. Then it shows people
saying "Did you wear a bag over your head?" and people saying
"No, I did not." It shows that for each person, and each person in
the cabin says they were not the person who wore the bag over
their head. Then the girl says "Well, someone wearing Kevin's
clothes walked into my room wearing a bag over their head, and
they saw me naked." I was laughing at this point in the trailer.
Then the trailer said something really funny. It said the title of
the movie. The title of the movie is Baghead. Kelly and I were
laughing a lot, and I said Baghead out loud many times.
Get Issue 5 to continue reading >>
Nonfiction - Issue 5 Excerpts from Rock! by Piero Negri Scaglione
When Andrea Bosco, the Editor of paperbacks at the Torino-based Giulio Einaudi publishing house, asked me if I knew someone who could write a book on the essential records in rock 'n' roll history, I started to think who would be the best choice. I called a couple of contributors to Rolling Stone Italia (I was a managing editor at RS back then) then I finally realized—I had to write this book. Rolling Stone (the original and American one) is the only magazine I have been reading all my adult life. My life—as the German filmmaker Wim Wenders famously said—has been saved by rock 'n' roll. Saved—well, let's say changed—in significant ways. I had decided to learn English to understand what Jefferson Airplane was singing about. I had decided to graduate in American literature because of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, and I had started to work as a music journalist while still at university. In 1989, when I was twenty-three, I was sent on my first important assignment to L.A. to see The Who perform Tommy and interview John Entwistle. I stayed at the Mondrian, but I did not meet anyone worth remembering. I was the managing editor of the Italian edition of Rolling Stone back then, and I had become an expert in the art of exploring the magnificent Rolling Stone archives. When I finally told Andrea I had to write the book, he was perplexed. I had just published a book on the life of the Italian post war writer Beppe Fenoglio: what did neo-realism in literature and rock 'n' roll have in common? A lot, I said. Fenoglio died in 1963, before rock 'n' roll boomed in Italy, but he was crazy about Frank Sinatra, and he sang "Laura" with great passion. Also, he tried all of his life to write—in Italian—just like John Milton. Somehow, I convinced him. But I had some strict rules to comply with. Each piece would be 2,300 characters long. The book had to be about albums, not songs or artists. The total quantity of albums had to equal a number which was as meaningless as possible (not 100, for instance, or 150, or 666). I stopped at 161, starting from Frank Sinatra's 1956 Songs For Swingin' Lovers! and arriving at Radiohead's 2007 In Rainbows, which was the first album by a major rock 'n' roll band that you could buy online before it was traditionally released. I tried to tell stories, 161 very short stories; and give an idea of what each album was about, stylistically and socially. I even tried to tell the story of the rise and fall of the modern instrument for communicating music, the album, from the invention of the 33 1/3 vinyl record to MP3 files. My idea was that albums, not just songs, not just live shows, are the stuff the rock 'n' roll dream is made of. I am afraid that the dream is over, but that could be the subject of a totally different book. Or maybe the best reason to write this one. ***
Love This is the masterpiece that went unnoticed, the album that everyone talks about now and includes in their personal "best of" lists; and yet, when it came out, it didn't get past the 154th slot on the charts. It's the creative flame that ignites people, engulfs them, the magic that makes the wizard vanish forever. It's a mysterious sound—halfway between the Byrds and Burt Bacharach—that gets under the skin of whoever listens to it, that verges on kitsch many times without ever actually going there, and makes you fall in love with it, no ifs, ands, or buts. Forever Changes is the work of a twenty-two-year-old who feels death approaching (at age twenty-six, he predicts) and comes up with an album so he can greet it without too much suffering. (He'd actually die of an illness in 2006 at age sixty-one, leaving behind him the legend of the greatest unexpressed talent in the history of rock 'n' roll). "Sitting on a hillside, watching all the people die. I'll feel much better on the other side," are the best-known lines he ever wrote. They're found in "The Red Telephone," which takes its title from the hotline that would connect the White House and the Kremlin in the event of a nuclear crisis. Basically, the album isn't without its references to current events or the world we all live in, yet its interpretation remains intimate, personal, private. Get Issue 5 to continue reading >>
Poetry - Issue 5 "Freedom Song" by Willie Perdomo
big man big man come here big man got these lady liberties big Get Issue 5 to read more poetry >>
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