I was wearing fresh white high-top Converse sneakers, untouched by the inevitability of unclean, unsacred journeys to come. A slight gap between the crisp canvas shoe and the hem of my tight, black, and somewhat shiny floral trousers exposed a thin dimension of my pasty leg. Tucked in to my pants, which I’d purchased in “the city,” infinitely adding to their fashionable credibility in the suburban, small-town view of my image, was a comfortable white, cotton t-shirt.
It happens more often than perhaps it should: a celebrity, be it rock star, movie icon, or stud athlete, is upheld on a pedestal for many years during his or her career, only to come crashing down at some shocking revelation that leaves fans disappointed and disenchanted. Sunday, February 4th left me with a similar feeling, when it was proclaimed over various social media outlets that Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his New York apartment with a needle in his arm and significant amounts of heroin in the vicinity.
Kanye West is a puzzling man. When I first heard that his newest album would be titled Yeezus, I did what I do in response to most of Kanye’s antics: I burst into laughter. Weeks later, however, when I realized that the album had leaked a few days before the official release date, I was scrambling over the internet in desperation trying to find it.
Hundreds of people are crammed into a tiny room and the room is pulsating—not in a figurative, metaphorical sense, but literally. Bodies bounce against each other, arms and legs thrash out angularly, and heads bang in unison.
The world of contemporary poetry has a startling new voice—and it is one that sounds a lot like an MC. This voice is that of Michael Robbins, who had his first poem chosen by Paul Muldoon to be published in the New Yorker just last year, and who this past year published his first collection of poems, Alien Vs. Predator.
