I recently became aquainted with writer Alex Green via my review of his excellent book, The Stone Roses. I have been having some personal correspondance with him via email. He has given me a link to his website, Caught In The Carousel, cataloguing his writing on music and other endeavors-so check it out if you are so inclined.
I've just discovered a new podcast from Salon.com, Conversations, which features interviews with various artists. The Ian McShane interview is where I first noticed this feature, but there are conversations with the likes of Keanu Reeves, Richard Linklater, Amy Sedaris and more. I like to listen to podcasts when I don't have anything to read on the train-and here's an interesting new option.
My friend Arie was recently visiting and brought me several back issues of The New Yorker and I stumbled across a great short story, "Once In A Lifetime", by the talented Jhumpa Lahiri, author of the excellent short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Here's a teaser:
I had seen you before, too many times t count, but a farewell that my family threw fo yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when begin to recall your presence in my life. You parents had decided to leave Cambridge, not fo Atlanta or Arizona, as some other Bengalis had but to move all the way back to India abandoning the struggle that my parents an their friends had embarked upon. It was 1974. was six years old. You were nine. What remember most clearly are the hours before th party, which my mother spent preparing fo everyone to arrive: the furniture was polished the paper plates and napkins set out on th table, the rooms filled with the smell of lam curry and pullao and the L’Air du Temps my mother used for special occasions, spraying it first on herself, then on me, a firm squirt that temporarily darkened whatever I was wearing. I was dressed that evening in an outfit that my grandmother had sent from Calcutta: white pajamas with tapered legs and a waist wide enough to gird two of me side by side, a turquoise kurta, and a black velvet vest embroidered with plastic pearls. The three pieces had been arrayed on my parents’ bed while I was in the bath, and I had stood shivering, my fingertips puckered and white, as my mother threaded a length of thick drawstring through the giant waist of the pajamas with a safety pin, gathering up the stiff material bit by bit and then knotting the drawstring tightly at my stomach. The inseam of the pajamas was stamped with purple letters within a circle, the seal of the textile company. I remember fretting about this fact, wanting to wear something else, but my mother assured me that the seal would come out in the wash, adding that, because of the length of the kurta, no one would notice it, anyway.
The entire story is available online here.
Chuck Klosterman, author of the entertaining Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and columnist for Esquire, is interviewed by the Sports Guy in two parts this week(links supplied by my brother a Sports Guy enthusiast). I think Klosterman is one of the most funny and interesting cultural critics around these days.
I know there's not much crime in Japan, but is this, from Japan Today, newsworthy?:
4 teens arrested for throwing eggs at taxiSaturday, June 4, 2005 at 07:20 JST
TOKYO — Tokyo police have arrested four male teenagers on suspicion of damaging a taxi by throwing eggs at it, police officials said Thursday. The suspects, aged 17 to 19, allegedly threw eggs at the taxi that was stopped at a red light, from the seventh floor of an apartment building in Minato Ward, Tokyo, early on March 17.One suspect, an 18-year-old university student, used to be a pitcher in high school. The suspects formed what they called "rantoukai," or egg-throwing group, and repeatedly threw eggs at cars, the police said. A number of taxi drivers have reported similar "eggings" in the same district since late last year, they said. (Kyodo News)
Last Week Seth Stevenson, from Slate, wrote a week long journal about travel in India, "Trying Really Hard To Like India." All of the entries have great insights (and most are hilarious), but I'll leave you with his genral impression of India:
It's the spinach of travel destinations?you may not always (or ever) enjoy it, but it's probably good for you. In the final reckoning, am I glad that I came here? Oh, absolutely. It's been humbling. It's been edifying. It's been, on several occasions, quite wondrous. It's even been fun, when it hasn't been miserable.That said, am I ready to leave? Sweet mercy, yes.
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