It’s inconceivable that you read this blog and somehow haven’t already heard – but this Thursday I’m reading with some witty high-rollers at Happy Ending. It’s Opium Magazine’s reading series, starting at 8.30 on Broome and Forsyth. I’m reading with:
– Thomas Beller (http://thomasbeller.com/ and http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/)
– Samantha Hunt (http://www.samanthahunt.net/)
– Dennis DiClaudio (http://www.parentheticalnote.com/bio_dennis.htm)
– Nick Poppy (http://www.zombie-american.com/bios.html)

I’d love to see each and every one of you. It’s free, there’s booze, there’s a short film on zombies. Can’t miss.

—-

OpiumMagazine.reading Series #11
(http://www.opiummagazine.com/events.html)

When: February 23, 2006, Doors: 7:30 p.m.; Readings start: 8:30 p.m. (Thursday)
Where: Happy Ending, New York City, NY
302 Broome St. @ Forsyth
212.334.9676
Directions
B,D to Grand Street or F, J, M, Z to Delancey
How Much: Free!

After a life-changing and magazine-affirming All-Star Gala, Opium’s
monthly reading series resumes with a series of brilliant
storytellers. Readers include Thomas Beller (How to Be a Man),
Samantha Hunt (The Seas), Dennis DiClaudio (The Hypochondriac’s Pocket
Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have), Ryan Sloan and
a hilarious short film, Zombie-American, by Nick Poppy. Plus, an
all-new set of Opium buttons will be on hand, and you’ll be able to
buy Opium’s .print2 on location!

people having seriously more fun than us
Originally uploaded by smitten.

Down the steps to Bethesda Terrace, Central Park.

Innertubes are so the way forward.

Flickr, by the way, has so many brilliant photos from the blizzard – you should check them out. Clearly, I keep doing so.

Federal Paza
Originally uploaded by jgo ★.

This is what I love about snow – the way we see things newly, strangely, freshly.

Great ancient snakes or park benches in the plaza, it’s still fascinating to me.

Soho Winter
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

I finally have my snow tonight, rolling down the avenues and blanketing all sound.

Can hear laughter below my living room window, the slush of cars like waves pushing against rocks. Whalesong of carhorns far off, suddenly close, distorted over distances. One lone cyclist threading his way through the fat whiteness of the street.

And as for my need to romanticize icy flakes of water, what do I do with that? It’s as if I grew up in a warm climate and never had to shovel snow. The wind picks up, the sky’s a low violet, the streetlamps buzz with a thousand furious bees. Footprints cut diagonally across intersections, thick parked cars disappear, half a block away the world becomes opaque, lost.

In the early nineteenth century sense of the word, in the darker edge of a storm, what isn’t Romantic about the raw, wet world outside tonight?

Young Sloan in Yorkshire, 1996
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

I lived in Northern England a decade ago.

It’s hard to believe, really. Just this kid stumbling through the Moors and Highlands, discovering imperial pints and hand-carved snugs and Cromwell’s fallen arches.

And apparently I had very curly hair. This was taken by my friend Bart near the old monastery. He and I had the same old Pentax – I’ve got mine around my neck there, leather strap outward to hide the side with my father’s mid-80’s technicolor. You know the strap, you had it too.

We used to take photo expeditions through the city with long lenses catching people on the sly. Unposed portaits, especially audiences watching street buskers.

Later that summer, Bart and I traveled to Siena, Italy for the Palio races. Not lank, brooding Yorkshire by any stretch. We stand in the center of the piazza, fever-heat rolling off the thousands anxious to have their contrada’s rider be the winner. Bart supports the guy with the hedgehog on his kerchief; I pull for the rhinoceros and beobab. Once, twice around the track and only a third are still riding – others have been yanked off.

Third, fourth, the crowd around us screaming, pushing, hands in the air, Bart’s bellowing, “Come ON, damn you.” The horseman in the lead, the hedgehog, is nearly there and the second place man reaches forward and grabs him by the shirt and yanks him from his horse and the third-place rider wins and the crowd falls to ground around us, a high moan cutting up. Clutching at their hair. Crying. Wringing their hedgehog bandanas. I take off my rhino/beobab gingerly and dig for my camera instead.

And then we run for it.

Gnarled snow at Met, Jan 05
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

Do you remember the blizzard a year ago? I do. Fondly.

Ow. Ow. Ow. Oprah’s tearing James Frey a new one, it appears, and live on public television.

Quoth Oprah, presumably with him sitting mutely for once:
“I feel duped. I don’t know what is true and I don’t know what isn’t,” she said, before addressing Mr. Frey with the question, “Why did you lie?”

Say what you will, it had to painful sitting next to her, even if your bottom is delicately padded with millions courtesy of the last time you sat there. Oprah’s the uber-mom – I’m sure when she turns on the shame, there’s no going back.

Hope he invests that money wisely.

I guess, by the way, I’ve lumped myself among the gleeful hordes on this one, but actually it’s pretty tough to watch Frey get called out and made to endure a public confessional.

—–

Mr. FREY: I mean, I feel like I came here and I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to…
WINFREY: Lying.
Mr. FREY: …what I have been–to lying.
WINFREY: To lying.
Mr. FREY: And I think that’s…
WINFREY: Which is not an easy thing to do.
Mr. FREY: No, it’s not an easy thing to do in front of an audience full of people and a lot of others watching on TV.
WINFREY: Yes.
Mr. FREY: I mean, if I come out of this experience with anything, it’s being a better person and learning from my mistakes and making sure that I don’t repeat them.
WINFREY We’ll be right back.
(Announcements)
WINFREY: In closing, I wanted to say this: I read this quote in The New York Times from Michiko Kakutani, who said it best, I think. It’s why I really wanted to do this show. She says this is not about truth in labeling–a case about truth in labeling or the misrepresentation of one author, that it is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth. And I believe that the truth matters. I thank you for being on here today. I thank you.
Mr. FREY: Thank you for having me.
WINFREY: Thank you for being here.