september 3rd, 2015

MANOLOS AND GENOCIDE: A LOVE STORY

“What shoe size are you?”

This is how she hired me. At twenty-three, I was looking for an identity, and found it by becoming the assistant to the publisher of the most coveted foodie magazine in the world. A magazine glamorous in a gleaming midtown office building over a hundred years old that used to house carnival acts in old New York at the turn of the century. 

september 24th, 2013

THE HEALING INITIATIVE|TRAVEL + LEISURE’S JIMMY FARREN HICKEY

“So much of the news media today is fear based. When I watch it I find myself saddened at the condition of our planet. It all starts to look so hopeless.”

august 24, 2013

One Small Step for You: A Look Into the Slumdog Children Across the World

Where did your feet take you today? Mine padded across my apartment, into my work shoes, out to the pavement and onto the subway. There was more pavement, and then a carpeted office. Maybe, if I’m lucky, they’ll later take me to a bar, a club, a movie. This mundane route is actually a revival of one I took before I left for Cambodia to volunteer. It feels different now, because before, each step I used to take I felt connected to my feet, when in reality, they never even touched the streets at all. In that sense, I was never truly grounded: never connected to the earth, never connected to anything. So, on this morning commute did my feet actually take me anywhere at all? Did they touch the world; did they really choose my path? My answer after my time abroad is no.

july 24, 2013

VOLUNTOURISM 2.0

Eighteen-year-old Sita wants just one thing—an iPhone.

Even though I'd been volunteering in Cambodia for eight weeks, this revelation comes as a surprise. First, because Sita would have no way to pay the monthly bill; he sends every dollar he makes to his mother. Second, it’s common knowledge here that the country’s service towers don’t work with the iPhone.

june 25, 2013

SMALL STEPS AND SLUMDOG CHILDREN OF THE WORLD

I was protected by the barrier of my shoes and my routine. In New York City, trash is strewn about, vomit, discarded food containers and dog shit. And though I walked those avenues every day, my feet did not touch them. For that, I was less thankful than I was complacent. I mean, who even thinks about such things as gratitude for shoes when living in New York?

june 11, 2013

Isms

The Khmer people, they of the lovely almond skin complexions and river stone eyes, have a way of expression, perhaps like none other I have, or will ever, experienced. If you have a big, protruding Western nose unlike their small flat Eastern one, the will come up to you, even if you are mid-sentence with one another, and honk it. If you are heavyset, they will run after you on spindly legs in awe of you, and your reincarnation of Buddha. Women in close quarters will grab your breasts, whether big or whether small, and squeeze them, admiring the plumpness and give and take as if they are selecting dragonfruit at the market, and mutter to themselves in agreement that you shall feed your child well. This is very good, they will say, and they will beam.

june 3, 2013

Doctors Without Orders

It started, as so many things in Cambodia often do, with Angry Birds.

There I sat, under the blush of clouds that seemed to appear only because it was my day off, attempting to roast my skin to a deeper brown under the rays of the singular Southeast Asian sun, the singular rays, at least I hoped, so strong that they would penetrate my bikini-clad body even as they were fully obscured by the darkening sky.

may 21, 2013

The Killing Tree

The land is green, rolling and gentle-seeming in the way only places far from home can seem. Valleys are carved into the ground, covered in carpets of silky grass and steadfast moss. There are meandering paths on which to walk. To view the nearby rice paddies and lotus flowers, the thick orchards of exotic fruit trees, the sugaring fronds with razor edges. Tourists of all creeds wander about with audio guides affixed to their ears, stamped lanyards hanging dorkily from their necks. 

september 17, 2011

GEN F: Salem

Heroin, hustling and a kinship with witch trials aside, the members of gutter industrial trio Salem are more delicate than damaged. Like many salient artists, Heather Marlatt, Jack Donoghue and John Holland have wounds to spare (Holland’s salacious sex-for-drugs backstory was recently featured in Butt magazine). Unlike many, Salem isn’t jaded. “We’re, like, children,” Marlatt says. And like children, they’ve retained their innocence by living and creating with abandon.

september 15, 2011

An Interview with Akron/Family

 A couple of weeks ago we put on long-johns and headed to the boondocks of Quebec to check out the excellently weird and little-publicized Festival de Musique Emergente, better known as FME. While we were there, we caught up with Seth Olinsky, frontman of noise-folk outfit Akron/Family.

may 17, 2011

Hey Look, It's That Forever Alone Fedora Guy!

At 7:30pm last Friday, the 17th of May, 4chan’s "Forever Alone" humiliation project brought the world's attention to one haberdashed love-hunting gentleman of the night: Keats, aka the "fedora guy". The public access CCTV cameras trained on Keats as he waited alongside a dozen or so other single men, for a date that would never arrive, didn't have the effect 4chan had desired though. They had planned to show their victims up as undateable sad acts, but for Keats, the opposite became true as a photo we took of him throwing us an alabaster middle finger sparked legions of lonely women into internet swooning. 

september 23, 2008

HEATERS
Michna is game

On the hottest day of the year so far, Coney Island is crawling with dirty little kids and Michna wants to play skeeball. He wants to smash bumper cars. He wants to “shoot the freak” with a mounted paintball gun, and pushes through a sweat-soaked crowd for his turn. After his barrage of bullets hit their mark square in the freak’s wooden chest plate, he turns to me and grins. “Shoot him in the nuts,” he says. So I do.