May 2013
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When you’re leaving work after 9, again, and you’re draggling your lipstick-smudged self and sack of ersatz vin en vrac up some stairs at Union Square only to emerge upon a statuesque man wearing only high-heeled sandals, one of those shrug sweaters that is basically 90% sleeves, and a pair of galaxy leggings that have warped a bit white near the seams like a water bottle crushed past...
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Better Living Through Chemistry Sets
It turns out that if you run out of Grand Marnier and add a little bit of blue curaçao to your chipotle-infused margarita it turns a virulent grass green. I swirled it around in my glass, looking at this color that really should not occur in a liquid with no passing acquaintance to either spinach or spirulina, but instead of looking disturbing it looked oddly familiar to me. Later it comes to...
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April 2013
7 posts
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Dreamscape →
This is really cool and all but based on my own personal experience I am skeptical about its predictive rigor. “The pattern of brain activity suggested that the subject was dreaming she was at a fundraiser, held in a 17th century Italian villa called The Boniface Arms that had somehow manifested itself complete with olive groves upon a block near the Myrtle-Broadway J station, benefiting the...
March 2013
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“I feel like in today’s society, women who don’t work are bucking the convention we were raised with … Why can’t we just be girls? Why do we have to be boys and girls at the same time?”
-“Feminist Housewife” Kelly Makino, in NYMag
“Fall 2013 Fashion Week Trend Wrap Up: Dresses Over Pants”
-Various designers
COINCIDENCE I THINK NOT.
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When it’s that confluenza of bitter cold winds wafting trace amounts of new pollen and the four blocks to the train has left your nose running terribly, and the only tissue-esque thing in your bag is a paper towel upon which you have written down data to take home & enter into Excel somewhere where you can also drink wine, data that’s the product of four hours of set-up, seven days...
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“Is it modern?”
-Emperor Joseph II, Amadeus
“Some of them have pierces in the nipples also—and uh-oh—in other areas too!” He laughs his Count Chocula laugh and shakes his head. “That’s modern.”
-Karl Lagerfeld
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February 2013
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On this, the first night of February, I was walking home from work, nearly 10 pm, hideously tired, cold, and angry at the vagaries of the scientific method that nobody tells you about until it’s far too late, and I saw a tiny lavender tutu just hanging out in the gutter on 67th Street. It was a little bit sparkly. And I thought how the fuck did that fucking tutu end up in the gutter,...
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They were all terrible. All of them were just terrible. He sat with his head in his hands, looking down at the stack of paper, each page containing a new sort of failure: failure of voice, failure of verse, blank failure, black failure, failure of enjambment and, perhaps the worst sort of failure, the failure to end properly. Probably there were also kinds of failure he had never even considered...
January 2013
43 posts
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CC:LIVH - Mini-Crossley - The Big Not-So-Easy
The street is thronged with people: stumbling, shouting, tripping over curbs in the onrush of insensate humanity. A boy is slumped against the door of a closed shop, sobbing, his friend dragging desperately at his sluggish arm; a girl entreats passers-by for help. Creighton knifes through the surging mob, intent on her destination. She flashes her ID, strides through the door, and asks the man...
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On the train, there was a girl carrying one of those Madewell New York state tote bags, and for a while the only bit that was visible was a corner that said, “You can thank Rochester for s’mores!” and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it meant Rochester, NY, and not Mr. Rochester, like, maybe there’s some apocryphal side-plot of Jane Eyre where Rochester invents s’mores? While...
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CC:LIVH: Contrivance and Compromise
A fine snow sifts down, turning red lights into glacé cherries as streetlights strew confetti. It’s a glimmer on the air but a bastard on the feet: in the thirteen minutes Creighton’s been on the balcony, she’s seen five people bite it. She winces, hands winding tighter on wrought iron, thinking “don’t think bite.” Especially since Louis is hovering...
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We tried to stop Instagramming our food, we really did. We realized it had become something of an obsession, rather than anything actually fun. We halfheartedly threw up rationales: it provides a place card for memory so it’s like, when I look at my Hefe’d Scandanavian Benedict I’ll remember celebrating Aloysius’ birthday. But really, how many times can you take a...
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Artificial
When you’re putting some Emergen-C into your water, and the faucet hitting the powder on the bottom of the bottle poufs it out into an invisible cloud that leaves artificial flavors and an almost acrid sweetness on your tongue when you breathe in, and you remember a brief trend from 6th grade where it was de rigeur to carry around a small Ziploc baggie full of powdered Kool-Aid and eat it...
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Once upon a time, two little girls grew up together, side by side in an unremarkable house with a porch and a lawn and an apple tree. The elder was Dorrie, the younger, Anne. They played together, two little blonde heads bent over the same project, two white skirts whirling when the wind knocked the petals from the apple blossoms, two sets of green beans tucked under unfinished mashed potatoes. ...
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CC:LIVH: Prose and Recons
“Yo, batgirl.” Macky Humboldt stands on the sidewalk outside of the precinct, hunching shoulders into the wind and trying to make his official bulk inconspicuous. If the other detectives knew he was reaching out to a 5’4” redhead with a penchant for artisanal bitters and Argentinian literature for help with his case, he could forget about a post-shift Jameson at the local...
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“Still, bio designers must grapple with the Frankenstein factor: a concern that their experiments will unleash some unmanageable new horror.”
At first we were skeptical about buying a couch made out of slime molds. The color, for one, but the designers assured us that yellow slime mold couches were so 2023. They could make them any color now. We considered.
Pros: Ecologically...
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What Happens When a Scientist Gets a Spa Facial:
Aesthetician: Just relax.
Scientist (thinking): Okay. Deep breaths. So, based on the informatics clusters, there are a lot of virus-interacting proteins so knocking down these genes might affect the efficiency of infection which would skew the assay … oh my god. Shut up. My face is tiiiingly.
Aesthetician: Now I am putting on the collagen mask.
Scientist (thinking): Is it an agent...
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I’m sure you’ve seen those delivery yards, the fenced-in lots on slightly disreputable blocks, the ones full of anonymous cube trucks that never seem to drive in or out. I’m sure you’ve heard the faint echo of dogs barking, though you never see the dogs, and why someone would need a dog to protect this grimly abandoned array of old trucks is rather beyond you.
Perhaps...
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CC:LIVH The Next Day
Thursday:
It’s raining, and steam pours out of manhole covers onto the nightblack streets as if choreographed. Brake lights flash on/off in an code that quickly blurs uninterpretable on wet asphalt, cabs leave plumes of dirty water in their wakes. Creighton, stalking down narrow sidewalks in the furthest southnesses of Manhattan, plays chicken with the slick traffic, narrowing eyes and...
