But reversion to infancy is normal in Ricky’s Candy, Cones & Chaos. “I had a kid in Morristown just standing with a rat in his mouth,” Jeff calls out to a couple perusing the gummy rodents. “Just standing there, the whole head in his mouth, gnawing on it. It’s this big!” He waits for me to look up. “This big!” he cries, holding his hands a foot and a half apart. “You get to see stupid things because people get stupid in here. You pick up just about everything.”
Through the grass I slowly slide to a great big stone. The sun is shining, I am warm, and I hope I’m left alone. He’s flying. His mouth makes a happy triangle, widening over toothy blips. One dimple stretches into … Read More
My mission, since I chose to accept it, was to see whether or not there was a way to survive comfortably in the town of Princeton – eat two meals and maybe go on one interesting excursion – while spending … Read More
Nadine Jordan will be working late tonight. She does so every night, often from five in the afternoon until two in the morning, handling the steady and familiar flow of customers at the U-2. “It’s usually pretty busy here throughout my shift,” she says. “I hardly get a chance to catch my breath.”
But this is a job she needs. The sandy-haired, former stay-at-home mother took this job, with all its drama and tedium, because she needs the paycheck. Yet like most who appear to live simple, unencumbered lives, there is more behind this cashier than just cigarettes and beef jerky. She has a long and heartbreaking past.
I was watching an episode of The Sopranos in the TV room in Terrace last week, when a friend of mine made a comment that never fails to make me groan: “Dude, this show treats Italian-Americans so bad…” I doubt … Read More
Spring! And with it, the advent of this season’s crop of light, sugary pop albums designed to serve as background music as you luxuriate in the sun. At the fore of this season’s harvest are The Concretes, a Swedish octet … Read More
It certainly looks like things cannot get any worse for the Little Sisters of Hoboken, New Jersey, when two-thirds of the nuns die from ingesting a tainted soup prepared by Sister Julia (Child of God). When the play opens, the … Read More
A few years ago the song “Fortunate Son” was used in a commercial for Wrangler Jeans. To many this seemed yet another belated obituary for the 60’s, yet another testament to the casual victory of the Establishment. After all, here … Read More
Schmitz’s real purpose is to marginalize 185 Nassau and a group of people who create. And how better to do this than to reduce all their striving to a simple exercise in what Edward Said terms “refinement”—the long, steady, reactionary march toward sameness, marked by a constant re-reading and emulating of a constricted Western canon. Anyone can write a villanelle in a vacuum, but the teaching of creativity, the encouragement of a fresh perspective—these demand an understanding of the physical world and of the writer’s particular circumstances.
How did this poor excuse of a pulp fiction spy novel, bereft of the quirky detail, realistic complexity, genuine human interaction, and factual statement that make a true memoir interesting rise to ninth on the NYT bestseller list? The answer lies in his narrative form of analysis of US foreign affairs, and in the nature of his target audience.
As I plopped down my pasta-covered plate between three matzo-munching members of my eating club on Sunday, I braced myself for public humiliation. “Someone broke early!” one of them announced, pointing to my oozing manicotti. “Yeah, yeah,” I said, lightly … Read More
Looking back at my week out of the country, I realize that, of all the uppers and downers that passed through my body, the most effective drug I took during my spring break was the Snake’s Nest itself, a place … Read More