In 1979, my parents would attend Saturday Night Live parties thrown by our neighbors in suburban Philadelphia. We children were always dragged along, encouraged to play nicely in a hideously paneled basement, with the hope that we would pass out long before the TV show began. Most of us followed suit, but as a spiteful insomniac, I would bribe my little sister to stay up with me in order to creep up the stairs to see what the big deal was. The poor thing would usually fall asleep on the top step, but I could hear the skreetchy jazzy opening music of SNL and then the exciting cast introductions. I could never keep my eyes open much past that, but would always remember a boozy neighbor yelling that Gilda Radner “should have a sandwich!” Then laughs all around. (This coming from Mr. M. who yet other, uninvited neighbors would say, “could barely keep the shirt on his back, from his little Atlantic City problem.”) Invariably on the heel of the laughter from the witty sandwich comment, Mrs. S. would jump in with “And someone should throw that Laraine Newman a bucket of chicken too!” More hilarity. And this from the woman who drank hairspray when she ran out of “the good stuff.” Ironically, I never heard anyone hoot and yell that John Belushi (whose contempt for female writers was savage) should drop the fucking cheeseburger. I’m not judging my parents’ neighbors or their choices in life. My point is that they are just normal, flawed, vulnerable, occasionally graceful, sometimes vile humans, just like “Gilda and Laraine”. When Angelina Jolie and her pin thin arms and dramatic leg pose took center stage at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, it was clear that we, as an...

Photograph by Tom Flynn I was on my way home to Milwaukee for the weekend, somewhere in that brief stretch of no man’s land that separates the casino town of Dubuque, Iowa from the Wisconsin state line, when 2011 National League MVP Ryan Braun, whose appeal of a fifty game suspension for having tested positive last October for synthetic testosterone – a “Performance Enhancing Drug” banned under Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program – had the day before been upheld by long-time baseball arbitrator Shyam Das, concluded his twenty-five minute press conference at the Milwaukee Brewers’ spring training facility in Phoenix, Arizona. Scanning the radio dial, I was able to follow reaction to what was perhaps the most direct and impassioned public denial ever issued by a baseball player accused of using PEDs – while standard procedure is to look toward the future from behind some sort of pseudo-legal smokescreen, Braun went so far as to say he would “bet [his] life” that the banned substance in question did not enter his body, either intentionally or otherwise – in two rather different forums: on the popular syndicated sports talk show the Jim Rome Show, guest hosted that morning by NFL network personality Andrew Siciliano, and on a local sports call-in show broadcast out of Madison, Wisconsin. Not surprisingly, reactions varied. Siciliano, addressing a national audience, scoffed – he literally produced a guttural, scoffing type sound from out of the back of his throat – at Braun’s all but unequivocal implication (though he was careful to stop short of outright accusation, noting that he knew what it felt like to be “wrongly accused” and did not want to subject someone else to such an injustice) that during the forty-four hours that his...

Dear Nora, I’m afraid I’m going to be tight-lipped, I just finished that presentation, and it was positively awful. While I was speaking, the professor was flipping idly through her copy of Notes, and afterward the students just all stared at me blankly – it wasn’t that blank look in praise of sublimity either. Wow, perhaps I need a frozen yogurt with gummi bears and butterfinger bits and chocolate chip cookie dough, too. Throwing a fully loaded waffle cone off the Pasadena Bridge sounds like a great hell freezes over gesture, but do I have to remind you that you are the one that wanted to go to Art Center instead of matriculating with me over here in the Big Apple? If I have to cross another mall to find you I may just have to give up on you altogether. Consider my American Apparel days numbered…I can see the resignation letter now…(“I hereby tender my resignation with immediate effect….”)…It’s possible I may need to converse with you on this one…You’ve got some of the best exit lines around…I’ve managed to bypass that important rite of passage at every turn. Next time – if there is a next time – you can reach me by cell at the exact moment your unadulterated dairy sacrifice passes away from the line of sight. To be dialed in the second firmament’s hit. I bet it will make a satisfying splat sound. One day I hope to do the same myself. Fuck me – this optimism is strong stuff! I’ve loved your last few emails. It’s good to have your batting eyelashes and twinkle-toes back in my everydays once again. Rimbaud does this all the time: who is “hideously beautiful with an ulcer on her anus.” Sigh. You’re...

Bullfight posters are not hard to come by in Spain. Indeed, in any place in the country with touristic pretensions you can probably find a shop where they’ll inkjet your name on to some simulacrum of a traditional bullfight poster such that to the untrained eye it will look as though you yourself, alongside some José Tomás and Such-and-Such de la Frontera, were one of the three brave matadors who stared death in the eyes in Plaza de Toros de Madrid back in some timeless past and lived into the Disneyfied present to tell of it (what these posters in fact announce, of course, is that you or someone who cared enough about you to buy you a gift visited Spain). With its flick-of-the-wrist abstractions, and the bull about to enter the ring as though at the edge of some kind of black hole – with the blood-red text streaked, near the bottom, as though with blood – the image above, created by contemporary Majorcan artist Miquel Barceló, hardly resembles the iconic bullfight posters from which the aforementioned souvenirs take their folkloric cues. All the same, it is the most beautiful bullfighting poster I have ever seen, because the bullfight it was created to promote – on the 25th of September at the Plaza de Toros Monumental in Barcelona – was the last bullfight ever held in Catalonia. * I am no bullfighting expert. But having spent probably a quarter of my adult life in Spain, and a fair percentage of that time heading up groups of American high school students who naturally can’t go back home without having seen a Spanish bullfight, I’ve been to enough to know the basic script. Each bullfight features three matadors and six bulls, each of which gets...

Hello Nora, We haven’t communicated in ages, and it’s entirely my fault, but I would love to know how things are going. Email me your phone number because I’ve lost my phone book. Things here are much the same: taking classes (one with Art Historian Rosalind Krauss that’s quite good), attempting to absorb something of this city, since I feel like my time here is a protracted goodbye. I’m not returning next year, but I’m not sure I can say more than that, although it might have something to do with some sort of naive adolescent appeal made to me by Kerouac while I was sitting on a strange toilet in the middle of the night. I can’t avoid vulgarity, see? And I’ve always thought, probably mistakenly, that you were too good for it — by mistakenly I mean not that you’re too good for it, only that I never should have presumed to make a judgment about it one way or the other. Have you talked to Max? She was in town recently. I ran into her in the Bowery. She was wearing a chainmail dress, chatting with some art people. I guess she gave up smoking. But I thought she did that a long time ago. I asked her about you, which amused her. We should get together, she said. Her eyes still have that wide-apart look I look for in a sister. I hope that you’re doing well. Am I out of prayers? Simon...

  Kate Durbin was robbed.  It was a subtle theft, one that occurred with a polite denial on the part of the thief.  Corporate theft of an artist’s intellectual property is something that happens often and very difficult to prove.  The complete story about this thievery can be read here. What transpired after is her performative challenge, “N O Bikini,” and the derogatory comment left on her post – which leads us to the dinner conversation via Facebook. What kind of conversation is the run of texts on Facebook?  Is it idle chatter?  Banal, overused idioms that have polluted our daily conversations?  At times, comments on a Facebook post can become criticism (even in its ad hoc state) and eventually, by nature of its form, a social commentary.  Given these parameters, I give you a little dinner conversation.  Brought to you by Facebook.     Kate Durbin will be performing Prices Upon Request at our invitation only event, Zg Presents on June...