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The Car Tree Game
There’s a man claiming to have seen a giant squid. He says it came up close to the edge of the bay, swimming in T-waves, and shaking a little bit. He says it probably would have eaten him alive, but that he got away just in time.
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La Vie Bohomo
Last weekend, I went to see the new movie version of Rent….The movie, like the play, is immensely self-congratulatory about its “edge,” and specifically its “queerness,” its portrayal of just these kinds of crazy gay things. I found it funny, because it made me wonder how much of the way I know how to act…
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The Wine of Astonishment
“Church music” for a Haitian in Trenton means a trumpet player dressed like Miles Davis, a twelve-year-old boy on a drum set, a trombonist, and a lady in purple wailing, singing, shouting, and dancing like Aretha Franklin. No droning organ here: The altar, crowded with instruments, looks more like the stage for a salsa band…
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Tune Every Heart and Every Soul
Nearly every object in the Princeton University Chapel has been given in someone’s memory. Names of dead Princetonians are etched on the backs of pews, on plaques at the bases of statues, on the very stones that form the Chapel walls. The Chapel does not only memorialize individuals; it seems also to eulogize a past…
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Commercial Christianity
Toward the end of June, as the dog-days of summer fell upon New York City suddenly and definitely, I made a religious pilgrimage to Corona Park, Queens, to see Billy Graham’s supposedly Last Crusade. Riding a crowded 7 train out to Queens I felt a palpable sense of excitement….It was like going to a Mets…
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Nasty Culture
The President of Italy and his three friends, a Duke, a Magistrate and a Bishop, sit at the head of a table surrounded by teenage SS officers, a few older women, and about twenty young boys and girls. Some of the youths are dressed in suits and dresses, others in their underwear, while still others…
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Princeton Cemetery: Can You Dig It?
…The gravedigger’s laugh turns to hacking as he takes off his soiled gloves and exposes his hands, which are caked with cemetery earth… Come closer, come closer (my pretty, my sweet): let me feel your weight on my chest, the rubber soles of your sneakers marking my skin pink. I feel you, lingering, some feet…
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Transatlantic Cruising
For a kid with a fear of the dark, public bathrooms, flying, and dying alone, I embarked intrepidly on a transatlantic cruise that mirrored the intended route of the ill-fated Titanic of 1912 from port at Southampton to New York City. In fact, I crossed the second largest ocean in the world on The Queen…
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The 26th Annual Nass 100
1) Whatever ancient crime forever embittered the staff of Thai Village. 2) The Princeton Tiger’s obsession with third floor bicker. You guys are in Tower, assholes. 3) People who, when you tell them that snot tastes better than earwax, say “Yuck” and pretend they’ve tasted neither.
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Don’t Sweat the Bullshit…and it’s ALL Bullshit
How many times have you heard a friend or acquaintance congratulate herself on her ability to bullshit? … Funny thing: currently, the best-selling book at the U-Store is called On Bullshit.
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Getting Handed a Q-Tip
Near the end of the whole ordeal, when she has become short of breath and the coughing is wet and yellow and particularly productive, my mother sits cross-legged in the crook of our brown couch, a wool blanket wrapped tight around her shoulders, searching madly for her last words.
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Operation Vile?
Operation Style put on their annual charity fashion show on Friday on the Frist South Lawn. It looked like a benefit in a second-rate but affluent suburb, or a production at a private school looking to increase its endowment.