Issue 1: Open 24 Hours by Dish Rag Magazine

ISSUE 1: OPEN 24HRS

W and now weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to lead you into the bright,

e journeyed out of the darkness of the cave,

fluorescent lights of 24-hour establishments. Inside this issue you will find pieces that explore the landscape of the deeply personal and unfamiliar parts of the day, travelling from a late-night taco truck in Oaxaca that fueled a writer through the end of her book project to reminiscences on working at Webster Hall during its final wild year as a noncorporate venue. We didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to stare straight into the eyes of the 24-hour business so much as view it peripherally, so as to capture and emulate the strangeness of that surreal moment when you realized you successfully pulled off an all-nighter. I was reluctant to embark on an all-nighter binge, but as it turns out, most of the good stuff happens when everyone else is asleep. In the past year since we released Issue 0: Caves, some of the best

moments I’ve shared with strangers (who have since become close friends) were spent in 24-hour institutions, or in an unexpected place whilst on an all-nighter. Committed to full immersion in 24hour culture, I decided that we would raise money for this issue through a tip of the hat to Viva Las Vegas, i.e. we gambled our way here. It all started with a Super Bowl bet gone awry. A friend of mine in San Francisco who knew I was trying to find myself a poker player for hire offered me the opportunity to go in on his bet. It was going to be simple: $150 on the Rams to win (because our Cali blood just boils at the thought of Tom Brady, UGH). In order to alert his brother (who is also a part-time bookie) to our bet, he texted him: “$150. Money line. [Ram emoji].” Unfortunately, but really actually fortunately, his brother read this emoji as a goat instead of a ram, which he took to mean, “greatest of all time,” which it turns out is Tom Brady’s nickname (unsurprisingly). So that’s how we got our first hundred bucks. From there, a dear friend of the High Steaks family who happens to be a high-stakes backgammon player (yes, you read that correctly) took our small sum of money and multiplied it, and then multiplied it some more, until we were really, really rich. And then he lost. That was a very dark day, and I thought I had learned my lesson. But that’s just not the High Steaks way. No, I gave our backgammon aficionado a

bit more money, and he Tour de France-d his way back to the top, making us back all of our original investment. So here we are, essentially right where we started, but who knows what the high-stakes backgammon world will hold for us this summer. Next time you read one of these letters, I may be living like the 1%, riding the M train into Ridgewood without a care in the world, CVS bag full of shrimps in my lap and a jar of cocktail sauce to dip them in. Alternatively, I may find myself at the end of the line, tapped out because of bad financial decisions, faced with an impending corporate takeover by the local shrimps who have been vying for a buy-out of our publication since day one. But I digress. Before you delve into this tome, we feel it is important to clarify what we mean when we say that this magazine is about cultural fermentation. Note that the root of fermentation is in the culture it comes into contact with. This is both literally and figuratively important. The word "culture" as we popularly use it today is rooted in the field of science, and was originally used in reference to the growth of bacterial or yeast populations. Eventually, the word was normalized in a way that liberated it from the field of science and opened it up for etymological revision enabling cross-disciplinary usage. Similarly, Dish Rag seeks to normalize the position of food as a narrative vehicle as opposed to an isolated genre. We are not a magazine about the externalized world of food and culture. Dish Rag is a magazine that uses food as a means of telling culture through personal experience. Mirroring the process of fermentation, contributions to our magazine are from the people we come into contact with during the course of a specific span of time. Our staff is fluid and we feel that remaining in flux is critical to our mission because it instills a unique terroir to each issue. Imagine the magazine as an actual dish rag, saturated with the many different substances of experience. What we are wringing out is that which would otherwise be neglected by the subconscious mind, and it is always magically unpredictable. Alright. That’s all.

xoxo, Gossip Merl Editor-in-Chief

Issue 1 | Spring 2019 | Open 24hrs

Editor-in-Chief JESSICA MERLISS Editorial Director DANIEL SPIELBERGER

Art Director MAY PARSEY

Photo Editor SEMANTHA NORRIS

Circulation GABBIE LENART

Designer ALEXANDRA BLANCHARD

Contributing Editor RACHAEL MAMANE

Copyeditors: JOHN GLASS ALDOUS & JOSH ALEKSANYAN Contributors MANU AFSHAR, JOHN GLASS ALDOUS, MATTHEW ALLRED, DIEGO BARNES, LAURA MARCINIAK, TAYLOR BARRETT HARRY BEER, BRIAN BLOMERTH, LAUREN BROWN, HAILEY CLEMENT, THOMAS COLLIGAN, ELLIOT FREEDMAN, CRISTINA FONSTARE, PHIL HAGGARTY, CHARLIE HAWKS, CLEONETTE HARRIS, CHARLOTTE KINGSTON LARSON, GABBIE LENART, MICHAEL “LUX” LUXEMBERG, TESS MAHONEY, RACHAEL MAMANE, JESSICA MERLISS, CHRIS MOODY, SEMANTHA NORRIS, JENNA PALAZZO, MAY PARSEY, BENEDETTA RISTORI, SAMUEL SCHIFFER, BERTIE TAYLOR,CONNOR WHITE, NASTYA VALENTINE, MIKHAIL YUSOFOV Printer LIGHTNNG SOURCE INC

Publisher HIGH STEAKS MEDIA

THE GOOD STUFF 05

Eulogy For Norm A by Samuel Schiffer

37 For the Faded Home Cook Who's Battling Late Night Hunger Grumbles by Stoney Mahoney

09 Clocking Out by Hailey Clement

13 Heliography by Matthew Allred

43 The 24th Hour: The Day-Long Lifetime of a Beautiful Disaster by Harry Beer

ingeing the B Truman Show by John Glass Aldous

4 Hour Pizza 2 in the Very Early Morning by Gabrielle Lenart

47 Flood Light Taco

eon Paradise by N Cleonette Harris

33 What 24-Hour-A-Day Construct Are You? by Diego Barnes

Musings of a Lost Gringa by Rachael Mamane ay Off by L Benedetta Ristori

65 Mayhem at Ms. Mae's by Jessica Merliss

71 End of an Era by Semantha Norris

79 The Road is Open 24 Hours by Chris Moody

87 Night Patrols By Manu Ashfar

90 Growing up with the Pork-Chop Express by Phil Haggardy

93 Bertie Taylor Photography 95

nseen Clockwork U by Connor White

101 Real, Real Dolls by Lux

107 For 24 Hours Straight, You can touch my Art by Becca Van k

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A EULOGY FOR NORM JULY 17TH 2012 B Y S A M U E L S C H IFFER

T today of an apparent buyout. It was

he Norm’s in Santa Monica has died

49 years old. It leaves behind half-a-dozen other Norm’s locations, though for many, none of them will compare to the original. All that’s left now is an empty lot where it used to be. Norm’s was a place of refuge: its doors never closed to those who needed a place to be and only had a few dollars in their pocket. Whether you wanted a cup of coffee or a full-blown Lumberjack Breakfast—3 eggs any style, your choice of 3 pancakes or waffles, and bacon, sausage, or ham—all for just $12.99. For me, it was the place that launched a lifelong love affair

with the bread of club sandwiches-stale, and yet somehow, just a bit soggy. I’d eat them with a side of Caesar salad, overdressed and yet somehow under seasoned, and I'd wash it all down with coffee both under-brewed and yet somehow also burnt...Maybe some of you have felt the pain of arriving to Norm’s after six Jamesons only to discover it’s the one night a month that they’re closed for a deep cleaning, and you crumbled to your knees because the next best option was the Denny's across the street. Perhaps the thought of this still makes you shudder. Maybe, as is the case with one Peter

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Bloomberg, you spent twenty-four hours straight in Norm’s while you worked on a school project, alternating between coffee and food orders every few hours to keep the servers from kicking you out. Maybe, at age fifteen, you went to Norm’s after your first R ocky Horror Picture Show, and hung out with the other freaks who had nowhere else to go at 3 A.M. If you’re like me you’ll miss the flamboyant chef ’s uniforms: complete with a coat, handkerchief, and floppy chef ’s hat. It was a look that inspired joy and pity in me for the souls who were forced to don it. Once,

PHOTOGRAPHY BY TAYLOR BARRETT

I saw a young man get busted by his girlfriend while on a date with another woman. The ensuing brawl knocked over a tray full of food on its way to a table, sending my 3 eggs, 3 pancakes, and sausage flying through the air. I wish I could have seen it just one last time: to feel my back get sweaty from the vinyl seats; to wonder why a 24-hour restaurant would ever have carpeting; to gaze in awe at the power and majesty of the Chef ’s Sampler; a place where the only thing not fried was the lettuce they used to garnish the bottom of the plate.

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Interstate Ave 1 & 2

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Photographs by L A U R E N B R O W N

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CLOCKING OUT BY H A I L E Y C L E M E N T

ILLUSTRATION BY LAURA MARCINIAK

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Mom wakes up hours before the guests arrive to prep the grill. Skinny’s likely the first to come over, so Mom will roast chicken and prep the frozen spanakopita he likes. By the time he arrives, Mom’s already working on the next meal, so she sits him in front of the TV and puts on whatever sport is in season. My sister and I help, cooking and serving as family members cycle in and out of the house, stealing moments to sit and chat before they go. My family is dramatic and complicated. Throughout the years-due to various aggressions and trespasses—certain family members have been ostracized, either partially or completely. My sister and I, having been so far from Louisiana for so long, are not normally tangled up with that. When we’re in town, everyone wants to visit with us. But due to the complex web of forbidden interactions, we can’t just have one family party. Instead, we end up hosting feast days, staggering guests' visits so that everyone can come by without stepping on anyone's toes. My mom, my sister and I will cook and serve

one or two brunches, cobbling together a breakfast for ourselves as we go. Too busy cleaning up after the last shift or preparing for the next one, we don’t normally eat with our visitors. Lunch rolls aroundthere’s generally just one of those-and then after, the deluge of visitors continues through the evening. Mom didn’t like being a server, but it’s a structure of interaction she’s familiar with. Through it, she’s able to exercise some control over people and her environment. She took the professional persona thrust upon her and chose to uphold it, even when off the clock, even when there weren’t tips on the line. It was so engrained, it became her guide to interacting with anyone-even family-24 hours, 7 days a week. It’s hard to shake the effects of workplace conditioning, especially if it’s your only source of conditioning. People end up with a vacuum of knowledge they have no utility for. Spend ten thousand hours doing something, you get good at it whether you like it or not. That’s why there’s so much writing about work-life balance—people haven’t figured it out. There’s no life training, there are no formal

ON FEAST DAYS,

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structures to balance out the corporate influence, and there are no reward systems (like raises, tips, special parking spots) at home, so it’s hard to get feedback on how to act and speak. Customer service roles require serious emotional and mental gymnastics. There’s a secret power dynamic that requires every service employee to artfully lie to customers to maintain the illusion that they have the power. Most of what service workers do is at the service of customer sovereignty, or at least the myth of it. A server asking if a guest would like to follow her to a table implies the guest has the right to deny that election. Sure, that person could leave the restaurant or request a different table, but ultimately where they sit is determined by the restaurant’s needs. It’s a fine little play to act in when things go smoothly, but when a customer is not able to get what they want, the veil is lifted and that sudden sense of powerlessness frequently leads to abusive outbursts. Service workers of all types—at restaurants, call centers, shops, and more—all face this balancing act of fulfilling the company’s needs while essentially incepting customers into thinking it was what they wanted all along. And should circumstances dictate disappointment, it’s the service workers who face the emotional repercussions. Studies show consistently high instances of customer abuse, especially in countries that disparage service workers and create social (and often dehumanizing) distance between employees and cus-

tomers. Abuse is the norm and expected result from the structure of a service economy. Living with that abuse in regularity, paired with feelings of powerlessness and humiliation, starts to shape a person’s inner world and how they interact with others. Mom always seemed to have it rough with friendships. I’ve seen her have a few here and there, but the relationships are frequently incidental and more likely to be determined by some sort of proximity instead of emotional connection. Thankfully that’s not always the case, but it’s a general rule. The sister of her childhood friend lived down the street from one of our previous homes. They hadn’t spoken in years, but living so close by to one another, they struck up a new friendship. S & T were fun enough. They’d come over for beers and conversation. It was nice to have some voices in the house—it felt festive. When my sister and I were in town for the summers, it was a regular thing for people to come over for dinner just about every night. Our presence was a special occasion. One summer, S & T stopped wanting to hang out. At first they’d still come over, but they'd find reasons to leave pretty quickly, closer and closer to when they finished their meals. One night, instead of coming over, T sent S over with some tupperware. He asked us to fill it, and he left right after Mom obliged. I don’t know for sure how many nights we let that

It was so engrained, it became her guide to interacting with anyone-24 hours, 7 days a week.

ILLUSTRATION BY LAURA MARCINIAK

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their customers while also fulfilling the needs of the company. For many people, it’s the only communication training they receive. Consequently, people who are used to abuse get rewards for feeding that system. They never really learn how to address their own needs or even learn that it’s an option. It can poison friendships, and bring the worst of a work personality to every off-the-clock interaction. BUT THERE ARE WAYS TO LEARN TO CLOCK OUT.

happen, but more than zero was too many. It was strange and shocking, but it fit the expectation of how people act within the capacity of her other role, and it was therefore was hard to recognize that it shouldn’t be happening at home. After Mom finally denied them, they stopped hanging out altogether. It’s hard to break out of these roles, even when they’re unsatisfying. Part of coping with abuse is learning to wear a mask. That emotional distance both protects those deep down feelings, and prevents those same feelings from being addressed. After a while, the mask is difficult to take off and people lose access to what’s behind it. Customer service roles make people engage in farcical, one-sided emotional relationships. It’s a hard job to do, and companies spend so much time figuring out how to train workers to best coddle 12

When my sister and I were toddlers, Mom would have us cook. Standing on chairs, we’d stir sugar into softened butter, then flour into that. She believed that cookie dough was a great way to occupy children—they could do something and feel accomplished while being nondestructive for a while. The point of eating cookies wasn’t just to eat cookies— the point was being in the kitchen and making them together. Now when we stay with Mom, my sister and I never let her cook for us—not without contributing somehow. She is the undisputed grill master, but we’ll prep dough or veggies, do the dishes—basically anything we can to contribute and support her directly. We’re able to work alongside her, and that changes the dynamic. No one is subservient. We offer help, and she accepts the it. So what can we do about all this? There’s the structural argument for changing the dynamics of customer sovereignty, and broader stretches of our economy while we’re at it. But although we might dream of the glorious day that people are no longer looked down upon for their jobs and laborers are better enabled to band together and argue for rights, there are also things we can do now to help. Turning off the work-self involves learning to trust and accept care from others. Filling our existences with meaningful, mutually beneficial (even if non-transactional), and earnest relationships (and interactions) can help counteract some of the toxicity that is inherent in the duty of service.

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M a t t h e w

of technology, the photographic image has become highly resolved, razor sharp, and instantly accessible. It is capable of describing even the most obscure minutia. But I fear what we have gained in definition, we have lost in intuitive exploration. The work I call "Heliography" is an examination of the extended length of the photographic moment, as well as the aesthetic possibilities of primitive cameras and chemical processes. I originally set out to build a camera that could look beyond the instant and immediate present. I wanted it to accumulate time, slowly, like a meditation on its own purpose. It was designed to continuously capture the landscape until even the sun distorted, tracing the arc of time across the sky. Throughout the history of photography, the emphasis has been

A l l r e d

on capturing ever smaller slices of time. However, my approach shifts away from that, instead focusing on capturing the expansive motions of extended time. I think it is a beautiful indicator of the burden of progress that in order to capture the slightest amount of time, the greatest amount of technology is required. Yet, to capture great lengths of time, all that is required is a very small hole. And so, in order to achieve days-long or even months-long exposures, I returned to the oldest optical device: the pinhole. The organic nature of film is well suited for this process because of its relative simplicity and flexibility. However, even after just a few moments of exposure to the intensity of the sun, the material begins to deteriorate and is no longer suitable for conventional processing. In order to overcome this

WITH THE ADVANCEMENT

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limitation, I maniuplated specific chemical processes to compensate for what would normally be considered a massive over-exposure. My hope is that these images begin to reveal the ancient connection and adoration man once held for the sky and the seasons. From the pinhole's perspective, the sun is reminiscent of the ancient geocentric model of the heavens. From this I can begin to glean what a massive paradigm shift the heliocentric model must have been, and why it seemed for so many to defy common sense.

When I study these photos I feel as if Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve stepped into the mausoleum of time, and the transitory nature of existence becomes painfully palpable. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s as if the image has somehow become untethered from reality. Or, perhaps the scene appears alien because it lacks the ubiquitous movement of people. Regardless, I sense my own insignificance and a visceral dejection when confronted by the grander patterning of the heavens, and the idea that time itself will cease to exist when its last witness dies.

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Matthew Allred’s interest in photography began with a simple science project: building a pinhole camera out of an oatmeal container. “Since then I was hooked. Seeing an image form in the developer after just pulling it straight out of an oatmeal box is unreal. I haven’t ever gotten tired of it.” He received a BFA from Boise State University in 2006 and MFA from the University of Utah in 2008, both with an emphasis on photography. Matthew currently teaches darkroom photography at the University of Utah. His most recent body of work, entitled "Heliography," is a unique photographic process designed to capture exposures ranging from a day to half a year. He custom designs and handmakes cameras specifically formulated for the task. Allred states, “Designing a camera that can stay put and not deteriorate during adverse weather is more complicated then you might think. It may use a simple hole for a lens, but I can tell you from personal experience, it’s a gamble that anything turns out at all.” Allred’s work has been shown nationally in several solo exhibitions.

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W E M AT T H 17

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h t t p : / / w w w . m a t t h e w a l l r e d . c o m

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BINGEING THE TRUMAN SHOW BY JOHN GLASS ALDOUS

broke my brain, but I don’t remember when it happened. Maybe it happened as I stood in the pulpit of my grandparents’ church, the adults around me sweating as they lost themselves in tongues, insisting a sense of communal joy I know I didn’t feel; only a pervasive sense of artifice in my everlasting soul. And I knew that everyone around me knew my feelings, too. They always know. Or maybe it happened years later, the night I posted my first drunken series of Instagram stories, drooling myself awake the next afternoon and deleting them all, one by one, shielding my eyes to keep myself from seeing who had been tuning in. If I didn’t look, then no one had watched. Which, of course, meant that everyone had watched. They always watch. My older sister is two years old, surrounded by adults and tinsel. The cameraman, who must have been my uncle, zooms in on her face. “You better watch out,” the adults carol spiritedly, huddled around her like so many patrons at a one-TV sports bar on Super Bowl Sunday.

THE TRUMAN SHOW

“You better not cry. You better not pout, I’m telling you why.” My God, my God, why? She looks so small on the screen, her face repulsed by Noels, her watchers crowding the frame of the magnetic tape. She grimaces, because she knows what—and who—is coming. “Santa Claus,” the adults bellow. At the mention of his name, she wails. He terrifies her. He terrifies her, and he is coming to town. “It looks so small,” Truman tells his mother, staring at a family photo taken in front of a faux Mount Rushmore. “Things always do when you look back, darling.” Growing up, I thought often about the line to get into heaven. I cringed at the dread I would feel as I inched ever closer to the video booth that I knew would be there, manned by Saint Peter. I knew I would reach the front of the line, and Peter would press play, the movie would start, and there it would be: video evidence of all the reasons I didn’t deserve to get in. I imagined Peter and John and all the

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rest of the line behind me watching as I discovered masturbation, as I cheated on my take-home history exam, as I faked speaking in tongues. I already knew that God didn’t actually watch me every single second of every single day. I learned that around the time I learned that Santa didn’t visit every single home on Christmas Eve. To believe either of those things would be childish, and I wasn’t a child. I knew what was up. God had a dedicated angel recording me on a camcorder 24/7 so he could watch me later at his leisure. And Santa? He had his elves dress up as him— two to a costume, one standing on the shoulders of the other—and they visited the houses he couldn’t make it to himself. These were the open secrets of the rulers dominating my imagination. “Once again, I’d like to thank you on behalf of our audience for granting this exclusive interview,” the newsman says to Christof, the creator of The Truman Show. “We all know how jealously you guard your privacy.” “Don’t mention it.” Only years later, on my umpteenth rewatch, did I begin to focus on the viewers themselves: the security guards watching the television and ignoring the CCTVs, the grandmothers clutching embroidered pillows marked with Truman’s face, the pub patrons ignoring the desperate multitude surrounding them, the man in the bathtub seeming so lonely. But, aren’t I lonely, too? In the first three months of 2017, depressed but armed with my MoviePass Card, I spent more time looking at screens than I did looking at people. I went to see Faces Places, Punch Drunk Love, Phantom Thread, The Insult, Salesman, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Bringing Up Baby, The Player, A Touch of Sin, A Fantastic Woman, The Shape of Water, Double Indemnity, Night of the Living Dead, The Go-Between, Bonnie and Clyde,

Women in Love, The Shout, Black Panther, Annihilation, Midnight Cowboy, King of Hearts, Blow Up, Norma Rae, The Golddiggers, Klute, The Death of Stalin, Blue Velvet, Beats Per Minute, Serpico, Easy Rider, The Panic at Needle Park, I Live in Fear, 2046, Isle of Dogs, and every time, alone. “You’re part of this, aren’t you,” Truman asks his wife. “Truman, you are scaring me.” She picks up the multi-hyphenate consumer knife-like product from the counter and holds it towards him, shaking. “You’re scaring me, Meryl. Dice me. Slice me, or peel me,” he says. “There’re so many choices.” Truman grabs the multi-hyphenate consumer knife-like product from Meryl and holds it at her throat. “Do something,” she screams. “What did you say,” Truman whispers. “Who were you talking to?” In the first eleven years of my life, I watched my grandfather sermonize to his congregation hundreds upon hundreds of times. I remember very little of what he ever said up there, but I do remember one verse which he would recite time and again. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child,” it goes. “I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” And even as a child, I remember this making me sad. Because childhood is wonder, and childhood is awe, and childhood is fear, and childhood is pain. Isn’t that why the world falls in love with Truman? Because of his childishness? Because of his sense of wonder, and his sense of awe, and his fear, and his pain? “Somebody help me! I’m being spontaneous!” I would often have the complete run of the church in its off-hours as my grandfather worked away in his office. Running through the empty sanctuary and down the empty halls, this space felt not sacred but sacredly mine.

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I could stop cars in the street with a wave of my hand. As I neared my teenage years, the trauma would define my associations of this place, but not today, not yet.

the devil was living inside of you, that was it—you would not see your family again for months, maybe even years. But ask me about all of that another time—it may be still be the middle of the night, but Christof says let there be light, so there must be light. She hides as the name comes around again. “Santa Claus!” She wails and wails. I’m in a sea of believers, trying desperately to conjure the Holy Ghost inside me, knowing nothing will come. I feel eyes locking onto me, but none that I can catch or see. “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.” My favorite painting lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The Opening of the Fifth Seal” might be its official name, but I prefer its secondary title: “The Vision of Saint John.” The painting depicts a scene from the Book of Revelations wherein the souls of martyrs cry for mercy against those who have persecuted them. That’s all well and good, but I’m drawn less to the pictorial representation and more to the light itself. Go see it. The painting radiates. The canvas is alive. I enter the Met and park myself in front of the vision. It’s familiar to me. It’s my grandparent’s church. It’s Truman making a choice. My one true hope for Truman, now free, is that he can stop binge-watching his own life, though I understand the impulse. My true hope for myself is one and the same.

LET ME SHOW YOU WHAT I REMEMBER.

High above the sanctuary, behind the altar, lives a window, like a large television screen. In that window, my grandfather would perform his baptisms. These baptisms would occur after much commotion and rejoicing, on those nights when someone new had been visited by the Holy Ghost and that ghost had convinced them to accept Jesus into their heart. Backstage—if we must call it that— were two long narrow staircases leading up to this holy window, this sacred screen shrouded in mystery. Today, as the church is empty, I have to pass by one of the staircases to get back to my grandfather’s office. Every time I pass, I feel the presence of the two old women who live up there, on either side. They aren’t bad people, but I don’t want to see them. I don’t understand them. I never quite understood why everyone would gather at the front of the sanctuary and become so frenzied, then so happy— but I’d worked it out in my bed over sleepless nights. I understood that every time we shouted loud enough and hard enough, one of these two women would emerge from their respective room. And my grandfather would greet them, and everyone would cheer, and we would all be so happy. These women were the first celebrities I ever knew; they were also ghosts, hence my need to escape. How did they let him get away? They’re searching for him, but it’s hard to see in the dark. “Cue the sun,” Christof commands. My grandparents' hold over their church was absolute. My grandmother’s word was all-powerful. If she proclaimed

EATER LA’S ESSENTIAL 24-HOUR RESTAURANTS OF 2019

DISH RAG'S RUNNERS UP 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Pacific Dining Car Canters Deli Carnitas Michoacan Carl’s Jr. El Huero Drive-Thru IHO[P] Winchell’s Donuts The dumpster behind the Chabad Center 9. Vons 10. You swallow 100 spiders while you sleep 11. One slice of cheddar cheese from the fridge in your underwear 12. Rolling over in bed and finding a half-eaten box of Samoas 13. Going around the party at the end of the night finishing beers but one of them has a cigarette in it 14. Going around the party at the end of the night finishing beers but all of them have cigarettes in them 15. Friend bologna 16. ~~**MYSssSTeerRYY ~ FOOoooOOooOD**~~

1. Western Bagel 2. Coral Cafe 3. Crave Cafe 4. Fred 62 5. Crispy Pork Gang 6. 25° 7. Kitchen24 8. Los Tacos 9. Norm's Restaurant 10. Du-Par's 11. Original Tommy's Hamburgers 12. Mountain 13. BCD Tofu House 14. The Original Pantry 15. Izzy's Deli 16. Sun Nong Dan 17. Tony's Donut House 18. The Kettle

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WHAT STARTED AS A REVIEW OF, BUT TURNED INTO MY CONTEMPLATIONS ABOUT,

24 HOUR PIZZA JOINTS, IN THE VERY EARLY MORNING BY G A B R I E L L E L E N A R T

the late-night munchies and have wondered where to go, but in New York City, the hunt rarely lasts very long. Often frequented at late-night hours, pizza joints are the move. We all know how it goes—you wait in a line of rambunctious people that vary in age, disposition, and degree of inebriation. You reach your hands over the glass to point to the slice you want, only to get yelled at by the “pizza man" who is simultaneously screaming “NEXT” at you. In the meantime, you sit on a stranger's lap, or lay across the table, or maybe you eat someone else’s pizza and get chased out. When the pizza is FINALLY ready, you devour it as fast as you can, getting it all over your face, and

then you debate getting back in line for another slice. It’s truly a sacred experience. However, the qualitative review of 24hour pizza institutions that we are about to embark on isn’t about the notorious 4 A.M. slice favored by the nocturnal club kids of New York City. If you are looking for that, you should probably pick up the latest copy of Time Out, or corner a Greenwich Village bro and demand to see his Yelp reviews. Rather, this investigation will give you a peek into the unseen lives of the inspiring people who enjoy that greasy slice at 7 A.M. on a weekday. It’s dawn and I hop off the L at 14th Street—Union Square. I’m hungry, aggravated, and getting jostled around by busy professionals heading to work.

WE’VE ALL HAD

ILLUSTRATION BY JENNA PALAZZO

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Luckily I emerge unscathed, and in the shimmering distance, I see Little Italy Pizza on 13th and University calling my name. I approach the establishment and am greeted by the overwhelming aroma of garlic (a true eye-opener at this time of day). The only people around me are the two employees and the homeless man who set up camp out front. One of the employees comes over, calls me “Mamacita,” and hands me a slice. “That’ll be $3 and it’s not the 4:30 A.M. leftover cheese,” he said. I shrug. For $3 a slice, it’s pretty good. After all, anything that’s pipin’ hot with a crispy cornmeal bottom can’t be that bad. After pestering the manager, he finally agrees to answer a few questions, which to my surprise, he responds to very enthusiastically, “We usually make the pies for the day starting at 9 A.M., but if we run out we make a cheese.” He said that almost nobody comes in between 6 and 9, except for a few stragglers. I was intrigued by these so-called “stragglers,” and hoped to meet some.

On my way out the door, a girl in sweatpants—hair tightly pulled back in an attempt to conceal her tired eyes— rushed by me. The two men who work there greeted her by name. I assumed she must be one of the regulars. I go back to Little Italy Pizza two more times in the next few weeks to see how the atmosphere changes. At 8:30 A.M. on a Tuesday, there are more people than expected: a woman with a stroller filled with junk but no baby; a group of stoned college students wearing last night’s clothes (laughing and downing pizza like they’ve never eaten before); and a young professional in suit and tie, sweating profusely, and sporting some deeply bloodshot eyes. A homeless man named Bill (we are now friends because I am becoming a *regular*) is still laying outside on his cardboard box, mumbling to himself and anyone who will listen. No one seems to be concerned by this behavior, which despite saddening me, also oddly fills me with a sense of comfort. When you walk into a pizza joint at unusual hours, there is an unspoken code that is mutually understood: people are hungry, in a hurry, and exhausted. Maybe my quiet, slightly angry but put-together demeanor (or the fact that I was alone eating pizza at 8 A.M.) demanded attention because I felt as if everyone’s eyes were on me. While observing the people and nibbling my pizza, the man in the tie approached me and asked, “Rough night sweetie?” At first, I was taken aback, but I responded with a smile, dismissing it. I think about what kind of person would be eating pizza this early, and it certainly does suggest a “rough night.” It occurs to me in this moment, as I’m looking over at Bill, that people bond over pizza. They look to it for security, because its offering of subsistence is not bound by time, or by any social system for that matter. I head to Midtown at around noon to experience the infamous pizza rush, defined by its clash between annoying tourists and iritated locals, all in a mad rush to get to nowhere. Around the corner from the Port Authority bus station lies a very tiny and dirty grim shack with one

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oven, two cheese pizzas on display (at all hours), and three happy street urchins welcoming customers in with rousing displays of song and dance. Naturally, I’m lured in. The pizza does not look atrocious but the pizza guy is busy trying to appease the urchins out front for me to order a slice when I walk in. What strikes me as he’s out there is how calm and amicable he is. They are friends, after all, in a strange kind of way; in the same way that coworkers are “friends.” If you show up to the same place enough days in a row, how are you not going to develop a rapport? I decide that it would be best to try 99 Cents Pizza’s rival, 2 Bros., which is right down the avenue. Two Bros. is jampacked with tourists admiring what they

believe to be classic New York-style pizza, snapping shots for their Instagrams. From an insider’s perspective, I can tell you this is NOT your typical New York slice. It is most definitely not thin enough, not dark and toasty enough, and the cheese is barely melted. The people behind the counters are glistening with anxiety sweat, peering out at the line ahead of them, now stretching down the block. A bunch of European tourists behind me are pointing and mumbling something I can’t understand. The Midwesterners next me are using disposable cameras to take selfies as they wait for their slices. The manager hardly has time for a word but tells me the boss is devoted to his customers who he's been serving for 24-hours a day ever since he can remem-

Peculiar though it may be, it is within our tight, cramped, 24-hour pizza joints that New Yorkers find just enough room to make space for one another.

ILLUSTRATION BY JENNA PALAZZO

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find just enough room to make space for one another-to experience a true sense of unity, albeit of an unorthodox variety. For those few quick moments spent within the pizza joint, the horrors of this current age of paternalism are suspended: we’re all just human, after all, and we all come in peace... and with cheesy cravings. It occurred to me that in an age that is plagued by the consequences of privatized social welfare, these pizza shops essentially function as safe havens, much like libraries or train stations. The pizza place is a spot for those who have nowhere to go, for those who feel abandoned or neglected. Whether it be for the girl from out of town crying at 5 A.M. over her boyfriend who she found in bed with another man, or the 14-year-old that snuck out and needs to charge up his dead phone so that he can call an Uber and get home before his parents get back from their swingers party, the 24-hour pizza joint is there. For the guy who lives outside the shop and waits for people to give him extra bills or cigarettes, or the mom in sweats who needs an escape from her husband’s incessant desire to play Scrabble, the pizza place is there, waiting to welcome them into its warm, steamy arms.

ber. I am handed my plain slice and head to the door when I overhear an animated debacle commencing between an older bald man with a heavy New York accent and a younger guy with a hat nostalgically spun backward. I’m able to piece together that these are the homeless residents of this pizza joint. Despite the chaos of it all, I’m once again heartened by the freedom given to them to create a troublesome scene in the middle of one of the busiest slice shops in Manhattan. All of these tourists will be gone tomorrow, but not these two guys. They’ll be here every day—rain or shine—with their boss who has not only taken care of his customers for all these years, but them, too. To live in New York, over time you have to become desensitized to what’s happening around you or you risk over-stimulation. After some more time, it begins to seem that people are truly living in their own little worlds, unaware of anyone but themselves and the people that immediately orbit them. And yet, this culture of egocentrism is willingly balanced out by its perpetrators. Peculiar though it may be, it is within our tight, cramped, 24-hour pizza joints that New Yorkers 26

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neon Neon Music at Vivienne Westood

Neon Paradise is a series that captures eccentric characters backed by striking neon light fixtures. Harris finds beauty in the signs, as well as the hard work and complex artistry that goes into the craftsmanship of each piece. The intoxicating attraction of color and light inspired the idea for these portraits, juxtaposing the dramatic interplay between the signs and the people walking by them. 27

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Clarys Biagi Pagoda

Blaque Demarco at Arbys

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DJs Golden Gopher

Psychic Celeste

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Sessen Pawn Shop

Eileen Obrien Frontier Whisky

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Lizard and Dad at Circus Liquor

Blasia at Mels Diner

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James Flemons at Frolic Room

Cleonette Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and now based in Los Angeles, Cleonette Harris is a photographer, DJ, and nightlife aficionado. She is a fixture in queer nightlife culture, documenting and promoting the scene in both Milwaukee and Los Angeles. Her work takes an abrasive yet honest approach.

WWW. C L E O N E T T E H A R R I S . C O M @CLEONETTEHARRISPHOTOGRAPHY | @ S U N C H 1 L D 4 2 0 | @ C L U B _ C L I T | @ H I T _ P A R A D E R

BY DIEGO BARNES

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HOW FAST ARE YOU? A. S ituational...depends if I get held up and the time of day B. Faster in motion, slower at rest C. As fast as those around me D. Pretty fast though I could be faster

WHAT 24-HOUR-A-DAY CONSTRUCT ARE YOU?

WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT? A. B. C. D.

Transparency Consistency Breakfast Back-up Plan

WHO ARE YOUR PEOPLE? A. N ew Yorkers and people in New York B. Living ones C. Ones that send you Google Calendar invites for drink plans D. Broken ones

WHAT DO YOU FEAR MOST? A. B. C. D.

Inclement weather Getting addicted to cigarettes Boredom Plague

HOW DO YOU IMPROVE PEOPLE’S LIVES? A. B. C. D.

Force people to go with the flow I’m a strong support system Some say I’m money$$$ I tell people what’s wrong with them (and sometimes how to fix it)

ANY ADVICE? A. B. C. D.

ave patience H Spend more time exercising Carpe diem Be careful out there! Safety first!

WHAT’S THE POINT? A. B. C. D.

ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS COLLIGAN

Freedom Process I know, right? Your life

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A: T HE MTA

You do hard, important work. You are definitely not perfect, like, at all, but also there is only one you, and you are an incredible machine. Millions count on you, and you make it work—you serve the people—but sometimes you just stop for seemingly no reason at all. Over time, you have gotten safer and more comfortable. In the summer, you’re hot on the outside and cool on the inside; vice versa in the winter. It’s okay that you’re not the most reliable ‘cause when you get going, you really do move people.

B: B REATHING

You literally sustain life. You’re reliable, steadfast, and calming. You are the air of the living. You stand out when it’s cold like smoke from a dragon’s snout. You necessarily control your heart. Your actions often go totally unnoticed but your role is far too important to require accolades. People (and creatures!) rely on you to help them feel more centered and chill. This is when they give you lots of focus. Then, once they get distracted (could be by anything), you just keep doing your thing, putting in your work. Keep on trucking—you get to stop when you’re dead but until then, you’re responsible for living life to the fullest until the very last exhale!

C: T IME

You live in a dimension all of your own. You're present, but you use your history to guide your contemplations and inform your plans for the future. You are fleeting in fun times, and fucking agonizing when you’ve got somewhere to be or when you know you should be asleep. People tend to follow you or at least try to keep an eye on you as you pass by; some may even say you like to be the center of attention. You are always focused on making progress. Comfortable with seeing things come and go, you kinda don’t care about anything which can be good 'cause you have, and will, continue to witness some crazy bullshit go down.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CRISTINA FONSTARE

D: T HE HOSPITAL

You’re open to all kinds of people, but care particularly for the weak, downtrodden, and sickly. If they’re lucky, you might even get them high. You’re not exactly known for your cooking, but it doesn’t matter because the care you provide is often vital… you make people feel better, inside and out. Let’s face it: you sustain your entire community. You have a lot of things going on inside but you can’t really slow down. You bring in tons of money, but the caveat is that your shit ain’t cheap to run—you’ve got bills, and lots of machinery and supplies. Smart people take up residencies with you, and the careless and clumsy end up with you when they’re reeling from a recent stumble. Make sure that success never outweighs wellbeing as a priority.

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Torre Park Club

Photographs by C R I S T I N A F O N T S A R E

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I am still waiting

Peter

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FOR THE FADED HOME COOK WHO’S BATTLING LATE NIGHT HUNGER GRUMBLES NOTES FROM NOLA: THE STONEY MAHONEY KITCHEN MEMOIRS

agree that food just tastes better after midnight? There’s something about the way my tummy growls on the couch while watching “Carpool Karaoke” ten minutes after finishing off a spliff that really gets my little cheffy mind going; that, or when I come home at 2 A.M. after Ubering drunk tourists around New Orleans all night and just NEED to eat ALL of the carbs and fats that a fucking influencer pretends to eat in a month. Anyway, I learned how to cook by making munchies. Sure, I was making ice cream by the time I was 8. But the whole cooking thing ended up being a late-night college course that I taught myself. And damn was it worth it.

CAN WE ALL

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JESSICA MARX

PROP STYLING BY STEPHANIE YEH

FOOD STYLING BY CAITLIN BROWN

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KINDA CLUB SANDWICH-ESQUE WONTONS SEE P H O T O O N P A G E 3 7

This is one of the first things I ever cooked. And yes, I had worked in a few restaurants before that, but I would always manage to disappear right when someone was going to be chosen to cook “family meal.” I made the sweets—that’s literally all I knew how to do. But somehow, on my second night in my first apartment in college, I decided that I needed to learn how to deep-fry things. It was 3 A.M., I was 4 joints in, and I figured, "What’s the worst that could happen with a giant pot of boiling oil and no hood?" Luckily nothing...except coming home to what smelled like the back of a fried chicken joint for the next 3 months. Turn your goddamn fan on. Fill a Dutch oven halfway with about one bottle of canola oil. Set it over medium to medium-high heat and get this stuff out of the fridge:

3. Press the edges to seal. 4. Continue on until you’ve made a sufficient

amount. Put these buggers on a plate and keep them in the freezer while you check the oil.

1 package Wonton skins 1 lb. Bacon (get it crispy in the microwave) 1 Avocado, get it out of the skin in bite-sized pieces Cold Cuts (not necessary, but if you have some lying around, why not?) 4 oz. or more Cream Cheese 1 egg, mixed with a small dash of water

FRY THE WONTONS: 6. Check your oil. When I made this, I didn’t

have a thermometer. If you do, I think you want it around 350°F, but where’s the fun in all this precision?

7. Test out the temp by adding a plain wonton

MAKE THE WONTON FILLINGS:

skin to the vat. If it bubbles like a Jacuzzi and the skin stays near the top of the oil, then you’re ready! If it sinks, turn up the heat and keep testing every few minutes—just be sure to lower the heat once that test is showing positive results.

You could just twist up some bacon and avocado in the wonton skins and go from there, or you could do a stoney take on the crab rangoon, which is what’s going to happen here. Mix up that cream cheese in a small bowl, add some salt and pepper to taste. Portion out small dollops of the mixture into separate bowls if you want to do multiple fillings with one ingredient in each, or do what I do and combine them all! Mix in the bacon and optional pieces of cold cuts first, then mix in the avocado (do this second so that the avocado doesn’t blend in all the way, you want to save those chunks). Maybe add a dash or two of hot sauce, again Frank’s is best.

8. If the oil starts smoking immediately,

turn that heat down, relight your spliff, and let it chill out until reaching a less lethal temp. 9. Once your oil is in a good place, add 3-5

wontons to the pot using a slotted spoon, tongs, or your fingers held high and your ass far away from the pot. You have to be ready to boogie in case there's some oil splashback.

ASSEMBLE THE WONTONS:

10. Let them fry for about a minute or until

1. Take a wonton skin and put a tablespoon of

"golden brown on bottom and turn them over.

filling in the center. (I know, I know, you want to stuff it full. Don’t. That’s a good way to end up in the ER with third-degree burns, or, if the fates are on your side, just some really soggy wontons. Either way, both options are pretty bad).

11. Remove from the pot (not with your fingers)

when they are good and crispy and place on paper towels to cool down for a minute or so. 12. Let the oil heat back up for a minute before

2. Use your finger to paint the edges of the wonton

adding the next batch.

with egg wash, and then fold the skin over diagonally so that you get a fancy triangle.

EAT ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE HOT! 39

SPOON FOOD: MUNCHIE EDITION

I’m big into all types of spoon foods—porridges, cream of wheat, pastina, microwaved Grape Nuts in cream. But this is a different category of spoon food. These are “bites” that would be overly gross if you assembled them in a bowl, so you eat them spoonful by spoonful. In actuality, you’re going to eat more than a bowl full of these things, but you’re high, so all you’ll remember is that you’re eating a spoonful of fat—not a salad bowl full. My munchie spoons change depending on what I have around the house, or what cake scraps I have leftover from my catering jobs. I don’t really follow a formula, but I do like to have two different textures on my spoons. Here is my munchie spoon of the moment: Peanut Butter

(Jif or Skippy...no hippie shit here) Fluff Rainbow Sprinkles* 1. Take a spoonful of peanut butter, then use

the same spoon to take a spoonful of fluff to cover the peanut butter.

2.Put that fluff in a bowl if your roommate is

going to freak out about cross-contamination (and I mean getting peanut butter in the fluff container, not cooties).

3.Now put that spoon in the sprinkle container

to coat nicely. You could sprinkle the sprinkles on top, but cleaning up sprinkles is a bitch, especially if you only sweep your floors on a weekly/monthly/yearly basis. *There are many types of sprinkles in the world, but let’s go ahead and simplify them into three categories: baking sprinkles, which tend to have more of a crunch; vegan, all-natural sprinkles, i.e. the reason Whole Foods sprinkles look hungover; and ice cream topper sprinkles. Ice cream sprinkles still have a crunch but also have a waxy feel to them that leaves an addicting coating on your mouth. This is what you want, this is what you crave, and this is what nearly every grocery store and Walmart in the country has. They are usually in clear plastic containers with white lids.

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CRISPY RICE CAKES WITH AMERICAN CHEESE PLEASE

Only make this when you don’t have anything to do for the next two days. This is Friday night food, for sure. You’ll definitely feel it for a while after, but the immense pleasure of spoonfuls of crispy rice cakes turned into Mac & Cheese—that’s something that will be in your memory forever. You’re very welcome. SINGLES CHEESE SAUCE

it, maybe you don’t. Maybe it has formed little hard globs within its plastic container stashed in the back of your pantry. Put a little in to amp up that processed food vibe. Turn off the heat and cover your sauce.

(LIKE...KRAFT SINGLES)

1 tbsp. Butter 1 tbsp. All-Purpose Flour ½ cup Milk 4-7 slices (unwrapped) American Cheese ½-1 tsp. Kosher Salt 1 pinch Garlic Powder

CRISPY CAKES 2 tbsp. Veggie Oil (enough to coat your pan) ½-1 lb. uncooked, leftover Korean Rice Cakes 1 cup sliced scallions 2 tbsp. Frank's Hot Sauce, or equivalent

1. Melt the butter in a medium saucepan

over medium heat.

2. Once melted, stir in the flour. I like to use a

wooden spoon for this, but if you’d like, use a whisk and save your spoon from getting all crusty because there’s no way you’re doing dishes tonight.

8. Heat a skillet over medium-high heat, add

that oil, and heat it up until it starts smoking. Then turn your goddamn fan on. This is a good recipe to make after your sober self has made a batch of Momofuku’s Roasted Rice Cakes earlier in the week. You’ll probably have some uncooked rice cakes leftover, so use them here because they get moldy real fast.

3. Heat for 1-2 minutes. You just want the flour

to cook through though, no need to get that nutty brown thing going on here. You’re high, remember? 4. Slowly stream in the milk while whisking.

You can pause in between streams of milk to get that silky smooth sauce thing going on. Or you can just kinda stream it in and count those lumps as textural components. Begin to slowly incorporate the milk while continuing to stir. Feel free to use whatever percentage/variety you have: Use almond milk (just make sure it’s unsweetened, because, like, gross), use half-and-half with a little bit of water, there’s no judgment here (except if you use sweetened almond milk, because, like, gross).

9. Add the rice cakes to the pan in a single layer,

and turn down the heat to medium.

10. Cook for about 2 minutes—you want a nice

light brown color (though, if they are just white and toasty they’ll still be good). Flip them over, and cook that other side.

11. Remove from pan, put them into a big bowl,

and toss them in that sauce.

5. Continue whisking until the sauce thickens.

A note on toppings: - L ittle slices of scallions are very nice. - Hot sauce is a must. However, don’t use Sriracha or sambal oelek here. They are too overpowering. You’ve worked hard on your sauce so don’t ruin it with the Rooster. Use a vinegar-based hot sauce. Frank’s is king here, Crystal is a nice pairing, and Tabasco also stars. Make someone else roll you a joint so you can eat this quick. You want to savor that crispiness and creaminess before it all fades away!

6. Now add the cheese. I’ve used up to 7 slices

while making this, but that’s kinda super gross to think about. Start with 4 slices, increase as you see fit. Stir until the cheese has melted. You may be asking yourself, “But like, didn’t we just add all that sodium in the form of uber-processed cheese?” No, you did not. You need more. Sprinkle it in, taste it and add more if you need it. 7. Now time for the garlic powder. Maybe you have 41

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THE DAY-LONG LIFETIME BEAUTIFUL DISASTER THE 24TH H O U R :

OF A

and we’ve indulged in a little post-theme pick schmoozing. The writers, having agreed that each play will be somehow tied to or inspired by the phrase “Florida is exotic to me,” each head to their respective home bases to work on the scripts. Each one should be no more than ten or eleven pages, but must in that short space contain a beginning, middle, and end that entertains the audience and doesn’t present a logistical nightmare for the performers. My writing partner and I run out to the bodega for beer and Red Bull, having an absurdly complex conversation about what kinds of things go on in Florida. We get back to my place by 10:00, and in my mind, it’s already almost dawn. I won’t just be writing a play—I’ll also be acting in a different one, plus finding time to think up some quarterway clever opening

BY HARRY BEER

IT’S 9:45 P.M.,

on a Friday night. I am sitting in my living room, surrounded by a mishmash of old friends and bemused strangers, all united by the giddy energy that comes from allowing each other to act like children. I pick a scrap of paper out of my roommate’s fourth favorite hat. I read it out: “Florida is exotic to me.” Someone giggles, someone else nods in a sagely manner. Six of the ten people in the room raise their hands. I set the paper down beside a few other discarded suggestions, things like “I Object,” and “Barnyard Fun.” “Florida is exotic to me.” The room erupts in applause. We have just agreed on the theme of tomorrow night’s theater festival…the one we haven’t written yet.

IT'S 8:30 P.M.

ILLUSTRATION BY JENNA PALAZZO

The 24thHour, the short play festival I’ve dubbed “the hastiest theater in Brooklyn,” is an experiment in distilling creativity throughout a day of chaos. We give ourselves 24 hours to turn one half-crazed prompt into five short comedy plays. Now, a theater festival of that scale, written, rehearsed, and produced within 24 hours, involving at least five directors, ten writers, and at least twenty actors, seems like little more than an inexorable march toward failure. Typically, it is. And that’s a good thing. The work we make has no time for ego, anxiety, or embarrassment. Selfishness is common in performance. So is resentment towards that selfishness, be it resentment toward others, or toward ourselves; whether the inherent competition of auditioning, or a pervading desire for the spotlight (I once told a joke in my freshman year theater course, in response to which my friend laughed, swatted my arm, and said “don’t be funnier than me!”) One of the enduring pitfalls of making theater, even at a purely satirical level, is the accrued negativity that can mar a finished product when the artists start to put themselves before the work. During The 24thHour, there are literally not enough hours in the day to spare on second-guessing and wounded pride.

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remarks for when I host the whole shebang. The people writing the plays probably won’t get much sleep. I certainly don’t. Every time, I think we’ll wrap by 2 or 3 in the morning—which, for this process, is considered “ahead of schedule.” Unfortunately, there’s always an obstacle. Usually, that obstacle is looking back over everything we’ve written in horror, and having to scrap all but the bare bones of the scene. When the writing is done, and, hopefully, the sun hasn’t risen, I shoot for a solid hour of sleep. I need to be awake again by 7:00 A.M. to print some scripts and grab a box o’ coffee for the next crop of artists: the actors and the directors. Snail-crawling my way into the shower, I feel exhausted for three minutes. But, reviving as the water heats, I start to laugh out loud at the way I torture myself every single time I do this festival. “Stupid,” I murmur to myself, giggling. “You fucking moron.” At 9:00 A.M., the group gathers at the venue (an ephemeral thing, as all our best-suited former performance spaces e.g. Standard ToyKraft, the Silent Barn, seem to keep shutting down). There’s meeting, there’s greeting. I make a welcome speech for

all of our participants. It’s not great. We get into our groups, throughout which I will be floating during the course of the day, offering advice, but probably just kind of getting in the way. like simultaneously being a contestant on a dozen game shows; a hundred different problems to solve and fires to put out, all with too little time. The solutions are often makeshift and inadequate. There’s a certain understanding that some things will just have to be figured out in the moment. It’s guessing the value of the car on the stage of T he Price is Right; it’s the deliberation before answering the million dollar question; it’s placing trust in the process, and in oneself. This is scary for some actors, and frankly scary for me, too. But it also provides an authenticity that the talented, clever people who join each cast seem to find themselves tapping into instinctively. As with the writers, the cast is comprised of friends and colleagues, and the THE PROCESS IS EXHILARATING,

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"Welcome to The 24 th Hour!" I roared over the crowd. "I am your host, Harry Beer, and I am SO. TIRED." curious newcomers they bring in to join the frenzy. These brilliant artists, like many young, hungry people in theater, are often used to filling more roles than that which they’ve been assigned. Claire helps actors create cogent ensembles from my ever-growing bag of costumes. Becca, long-suffering at the hands of my constantly wandering attention, sits me down and forces me to make the necessary sound and lighting choices. Everyone’s focus expands. Everyone picks up the slack. The day progresses at the individual discretion of each cast’s director, deciding when to break for lunch and how to organize rehearsal. It’s a tall order to fit the life cycle of a play—the camaraderie, the experimentation, the rigor, and the trust—into just a handful of hours. But in that haste, all distractions are stripped away, leading to a whimsical kind of discipline that yields an intense joy.

Flooded with adrenaline, I feel the fatigue only peripherally, knocking on the wall in the next room. I don’t answer. There isn’t time—JaQuan has questions about his script, and Ethan needs a wig that matches his corset. We are at dress rehearsal. The actors who have their lines down watch the other scenes: Caitlin’s in a red bellhop’s blazer with a painted handlebar mustache sitting next to Lizzie, from a different play, wearing the ensemble of what appears to be a crocodile fairy godmother. Wilder wolfs down a sandwich in the corner, the stage light gleaming off of his gold lamé jumpsuit. The endgame of this gauntlet is connection, both social and creative. Creating a universe—an entire ecosystem for a day—and then having it wink out of existence by the next morning, is one of the most unfailing creative tools I have ever known. 7:00 P.M.:

The doors open. We have to cut the dress rehearsal short; we always do. The last play, a story about an estranged father and son reconnecting at a dismal highway rest stop’s knockoff theme park “Dizneyworld,” scurries off to finish their run backstage. The audience files in. The excitement builds as tipsy guests catch glimpses of colorful actors passing by to double-check presets (order tequilashots). Everything is now out of my control. The pressure of intense and short-lived meaning causes my synapses to fire in ways no other work ethic can. Putting it like that, it feels as though each time I go through this festival, I seek to simulate a lifetime. Just as all stories contain a 8:00 P.M.:

ILLUSTRATION BY JENNA PALAZZO

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universe, this series of plays burns bright and dies out as the night ends. All that remains is the work we put in and the joy that we found.

and movement into, somehow, unmistakably, an ice-buffering vehicle. An actor in my play will deliver one of the jokes I wrote and it bombs. It’s a bad joke, and it just doesn’t land, at all. The other actors jump in—they addto the joke, they change it, they judge it, and suddenly, |the audience loves it. The plays are a blast, and the audience gets a kick out of them, but what they’re responding to goes far deeper. They’re drawn into the work. The labor is laid bare for everyone to see, creating a layer of connective tissue between the entertainment and the acknowledgment of the effort it costs. In this way, we both include the crowd intimately and demonstrate to them how much work actually goes into the service we provide.

I can’t stall any longer. Our night is set on tracks from which it will surely swerve. Whatever happens, happens. From the miniature tech booth, Jake plays a song by Gunther and the Sunshine Girls. “Start wildly applauding,” I say to the actors. They begin to whoop and cheer, and the audience seamlessly joins in. I march down the aisle, wearing a blazer over something femme and risqué. The show will be fraught with disaster. And as we scramble to pick up the pieces of those disasters, something authentic and unpretentious is found. I’ll forget the name of the next play I’m introducing. The cast will yell it out from backstage; they’re proud of what they’ve made. One script calls for a Zamboni, and Catherine will fashion herself through only sound 8:30 P.M.:

I hop up on the stage and grin. “Welcome to The 24th Hour!” I roared over the crowd. “I am your host, Harry Beer, and I am SO. TIRED.” 8:31 P.M.:

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, ing like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the

L I G HT

FLO O D TAC O

M U S I NGS A

OF LOS T

G R I NGA

By Rachael S. Mamane Photographs by

Jocelin Ortiz 47

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to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles explodblue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Jack Kerouac

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We would serve patrons a final drink and tempt them to join a roaming hoard toward the only club in town that would dare play electro-cumbia and trap in the same set. What kept me at bay was that it was some staffer’s swell idea to keep “Hey Mickey” on heavy rotation—the one-hit wonder that has a forever home here. Though, my trusty barflies knew my real weak spot, perhaps the best incentive of all: the absolute knowledge that it would all end in late night tacos. “You're so fine, you blow my mind! Hey Mickey!” My first visit to Oaxaca was happenstance. I was escaping a Hudson Valley winter, in pursuit of a fresh environment; one conducive to writing my first book without the threat and throes of gangrene. Contrary to the book’s topic— animal welfare and the foundation of good cooking—I figured Mexico would offer a balanced perspective, one where the whole animal is consumed from an innate sense of efficiency; a place where you don’t ask where the animal came from, or if it had a name; a place where flavor is embedded deep within the culture, a matter of familial sustenance before culinary ego. On the other hand, with First World countries and our gross excess and sense of entitlement, it has taken a risk of resources to warm up to the idea of eating offal and marrow. We are just now catching on to what the rest of the world has known for centuries: the lesser parts are the best parts. And so, Mexico, with its rich culture, warm beaches, and endless options

WAS TWO THIRTY in the morning. The bar lights were flickering a type of emergency Morse code, reflecting my exhaustion and urgent need for sleep. One chilango and two gringos walked through the door, owner straggling a few steps behind. “We're closed,” I winced, knowing that meant nothing, and reluctantly retrieved a house favorite from the middle shelf. “Espadin, Zoquitlán,” I say with a weak smile—received by nods all around—as I acquiesce to changing the music. “Something more upbeat,” the owner suggests in Spanish, despaaacio para mi. Apparently, “Closing Time” doesn't have the same effect down here. Our signature was titled Txalapartier: a play on the local afterhours club, Txalaparta, finished with a fancy French touch.

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for late night street food, became my home while finishing my book. The first thing a chef notices at a taco truck in Oaxaca is the head. I mean, there’s leg, too, but there’s no mistaking the cartilaginous crunch of ear and the knobby bite of nose. Some spots are known for texture—throwing down tongue and other off-cuts to form the interior—while others seek to soften the meat, confited in its own fat. But what makes the town’s favorite late night spot stand out is the magical addition of fried pork skin. Traditionally cooked in large copper pots, chicharrones are made by slowly rendering big slabs of pork skin in melted lard until it pops—as if bubble wrap were edible—creating a textured layer that acts like a hungry sponge for salsa. Theirs is a limited menu—taco, torta, o tostada—

topped with slow-roasted pork leg and a toss of small dice chicharron. Slathered in a signature salsa verde—a blend of spicy chile de agua, liquid avocado, and chunked tomato—and you’ve got yourself an antidote to one too many mezcalitos. Lechoncito de Oro has been around for 43 years. That’s two generations; legacy recipes handed down within one extended family. And with endless days and nights comes the responsibility of maintaining a heavyweight reputation. In the morning you can trek towards the stadium in search of their happy pig icon, a small outpost where the cooking is done. Here, tacos are always at hand, ready to feed day-workers and game-goers. At night the truck opens shop on a lonely street in the historical center, lit by blinding floodlights, a telltale sign you found them, a midnight sanctum serving up the same menu until about four or five in the morning. The service? Impeccable. You wander up by foot or double park in the street, and the uniformed waiter takes your order without delay, trusting that you’ll pay before the walk of shame home. Every plate is accompanied with a side of salsa, a bowl of quartered limes, and a little red tomato-shaped shaker of iodized salt. For months I would ignore the salt—a matter of principle to a principled cook—and then one night a friend insisted that it was the perfect foil with a squeeze of lime. “I don’t do iodized salt, güey—it’s a government conspiracy,” my meager protest. And in perfect machismo form, mi amigo

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responded by squeezing a lime across my entire platter of tacos and topping them with a generous dash of salt, all the while smiling and rubbing my back, as if papa sabe mejor. In this case, though, papa did know best. As for algo de beber, the server will encourage you to take a sweet beverage while you wait: Mexican coke or sangria; both worthy of diabetes, and yet neither what you would expect them to be. Water is available, too—bottled, for those of you concerned with such things— but let’s be honest, water only serves to intensify heat and solidify fat, leaving a spicy oil slick on your tongue for hours after the feed. Should you already be sipping a beverage, say a road beer or a copa de mezcal, they’ll turn a blind eye; after all, the only seat available is a stainless steel prep table that can fit three butts max. All else are left standing idly on the curb. When you’re done—no rush—a sobremesa of sorts: you ask how much, hand over a fistful of ten-pieces, and roll yourself onward to bed. Neither a ball fan nor a slave to an office, it took me a long time to realize they were a round-the-clock operation. As my Spanish improved, I would capture glimpses of drunken dialogue around the cart, slurred whispers between bites, “You know, they’re open during the day, too, near the stadium,” followed by silent head nods from faces full of taco. I couldn’t help but imagine these nocturnal feeders as nahuales—humans transformed into a pack of hungry wolves.

It wasn’t until this article that I decided to visit their daytime spot, and to determine if my stomach could handle the same load, what with no agave spirits to soak up all that grease. As it turns out, the sunlit location affords an opportunity to learn more about the operation. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still busy, churning out taco after tostada and back again, but it’s amazing what sobriety brings to a business in the light of day. This is where the heavy lifting is done—an uncertain number of heads per week and yet, an endless quantity of pork, slow-roasted or fried, day in and day out. At home, where acorn-fed is the foodie palabra del dia, I could hear myself asking an entirely different set of questions. “What breed of hog? Do they roam free? Forage for nuts and berries? Ever ask your quesillo-making neighbor for the excess whey? Piggies love whey.” It’s rare in Mexico to consider the animal beyond food source or spiritual symbolism. The annual goat slaughter in Tehuacan, for instance, is a ritual that dates back to the Aztecs, receiving criticism from observers only within the last twenty years. This is to say nothing of the origins of pozole—once an honored way for pre-Hispanic royalty to consume sacrificial humans, and now a popular fiesta dish for friends and family! So within these deep-seated, cross-cultural considerations, I decided to go easy with my line of questioning. Here, the curiosity had more to do with history and heritage; the answers to do with family

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THE

SECRET

restaurant, King Taco, which evolved into a multi-million dollar chain. In Mexico, where street food is largely unregulated, its origins are much more modest. Women would take food to men working in the fields, armed with tortillas for scooping in lieu of utensils. Despite the pre-Hispanic influence still present in contemporary Oaxaca, where memelas and tlayudas and tetelas get all the press, locals know the carnitas gospel of Lechoncito de Oro. If you do the math, they showed up on the scene around the same time as Señor Martinez. Taco King, meet taco warriors. There’s a meme in Mexico where a novio comments favorably about his novia’s lip gloss. “Es la grasa de mi taco,” she responds with a smile, a reference to the shiny imprint after a bite of greasy taco. Mexico is a place where a girl can get down on a platter of tacos. The sass and sex appeal of mou-ing on street food is part and parcel for a good date. I’ve only ever been shamed by gueros when ordering a larger quantity than them, and now it’s a source of pride when travelers can’t keep up. See also: Gordibuena. Despite the cultural dissonance, there is a sense of decorum, an etiquette to this street dining experience. The taco truck standard is to provide one servietta per guest. The napkins are flimsy, one-ply at best, and it takes a certain tuck-and-fold mastery to complete the meal without an excess of balled up napkins resting plate-side. If you ever find yourself at a taco truck in Oaxaca, no matter how drunk you are,

H E RE IS NOT THE

SAUCE

and generational respect. When asked about length of cooking time for the pork leg, the owner shrugs and says, “Oh, tres o cuatro horas,” as if this was common knowledge—everyone a cook, or the child of one, in Mexico. Yet when asked about family history, the owner straightens his spine, and boasts with a big grin,“Si, solo una familia, dos generaciones, cuarenta y tres años!” The secret here is not in the sauce: it’s the pride and integrity that resides within persistence and longevity. From the Texas chuck wagon of the mid-1800s to mobile canteens nearly a century later, the United States has a notable history of serving up roadside cuisine. In fact, it wasn’t even in Mexico where the taco truck originated. Credit goes to Raul Martinez, who converted an old ice cream van into a mobile taco stand, parking it outside a bar in Los Angeles in 1974. Within six months, the success of the truck led to a brick-and-mortar

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remember this mantra: five tacos, one napkin. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll give you more, certainly, but to those indoctrinated, one is all you really need. I realize this anecdote does nothing to explain how an activist-turned-author

becomes a bartender in deep Mexico. But I assure you it has to do with another late night story that ends in delicious food. The fatty parts of life are the most compelling, especially in the dim hue of a taco oasis. Buen provecho! !

Rachael Mamane is the author of the James Beard-nominated Mastering Stocks and Broths. She currently splits time between New York and Oaxaca, where she runs Cocina Nahual, a chef residency that promotes producers within the region; Gordibuena Provisions, a product company of fermented hot sauces, fruitbased sweets, and mezcal-friendly bar cordials; and Atlas Alimenta, a global food systems consultancy and innovation lab with a focus on expanding the definition of a safe larder and delicious pantry.

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LAY OFF W in a highly competitive capitalist society, it is no wonder ith the increasingly intensifying pace required to survive

we are seeing a considerable rise in night shift work that, in the current organizational model of production, is gradually becoming one of the most profitable conditions of employment. This mode of shift work, once only confined to industrial sectors, is instead now spreading significantly within service sectors as well. My intention with this project was to quietly capture moments in the timeless and spaceless atmosphere these workers exist in, to expose the one thing that unites them: loneliness. The project is still ongoing.

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BENEDETTA RISTORI B currently based in Rome and represented

enedetta Ristori is a freelance photographer

by LUZ Agency. In addition to winning the 16th Smithsonian Magazine photo contest in the “People” category, she has been published by It’s Nice That, Freunde Von Freunden, The Space Magazine, and The Calvert Journal. In 2017, she was 1 of 100 creatives chosen to represent the Lazio region in the annual Lazio Creativo event.

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Mayhem M s . Mae's at

By Jessica Merliss 00

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have a complicated relationship with New Orleans. While I adore the city for its food, architecture, music, and energy, it’s hard to laissez les bons temps rouler when I know the truth: that this place was built on the backs of slaves who have since been silently written out of its history. The general practice in this city is to avoid bringing up the sinister parts of its past and instead focus on its points of pride. Instead of commenting on the harmful effects of a 24-hour bar in a neighborhood with deep disparities in housing value and household income, one might instead choose to focus on the city's admirably laissez faire attitude, allowing, for example, the sale of alcohol at all hours, and the much beloved go-cup. With its unavoidably brackish customer base, the Ms. Mae’s 24-Hour Challenge seemed like the perfect opportunity to interact with a microcosmic representation of the chasms growing amongst Americans from all walks of life. After several Internet deep dives, it became apparent that the drinking challenge was a favorite amongst die-hard New Orleanians and tourists alike. Many online posts from previous challengers mentioned a commemorative t-shirt for the few who could successfully complete the feat. There was something inexplicably appealing about at least winning a trophy for the horrible health decision I was about to embark on. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord asserts that the spectacle––defined as a visually striking display–– is not merely a collection of imagery but a social relation mediated by images, thereby constituting what he refers to as an “instrument of unification.” He writes that the fetishized spectacle can elicit an almost religious sense of fervent exaltation. In essence, the bar becomes a Bizarro church when you add a spectacle into the mix. The space brings people together over something they believe in. At church that would be our main man, Jesus, and at Ms. Mae's,

it's most certainly Bacchus. This dissonant juxtaposition, however, highlights the strange culture we've created around drinking (arguably a result of Christianization). When mass consumed in public with others it's seen in a positive light, but when consumed in isolation, seen in a vulgar one. Nevertheless, the connection strangers make in a bar seem to come from a shared sense of isolation ––a side effect of technological society that at once integrates us and separates us. I decide to explore this phenomenon more deeply on a double game-day, considering the degree to which New Orleanians worship the Saints (perhaps the name of the team says enough). I had a bright and early 11 A.M. start time, ensuring there would be a crowd constantly filtering in and out of the bar. Upon entering, I was immediately struck by the overwhelming, cave-like darkness, particularly drastic on this warm, sunny day. Only a crust punk couple sat at the bar, watching the LSU game closely, draining the beers in front of them at a rapidrate. Meekly approaching the bar, I ordered an Abita IPA even though I passionately hate IPAs. The bartender that day was Shelly, an exuberant and friendly man that stands at least 6 feet tall and is so physically intimidating I’d be surprised to learn he hadn't had a former football career, himself. I didn’t want to embarrass myself right off the bat by ordering something that would draw attention, so I suppose that's how I ended up with my first dreadful beverage of the day. After retreating to the backyard and contemplating the social value of my masochistic drink choice, I puffed manically on my Juul and scribbled down preliminary notes before venturing back into the daytime drinking dungeon that would serve as my living quarters for the next 23 hours. I went inside and took a seat at a tagged-up booth in the back of the bar, still not yet ready to fully immerse myself in the community. As I settled in at my

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new desk, three women from New Jersey walked up to the bartender and demanded breakfast. “Ladies? This is a 24-hour bar...” Shelly responded, clearly baffled. “Um, yeah we know,” the loudest woman responded, her crimson spiked hair bobbing up and down as she attempted to balance herself on the stool for some extra height. “We want mimosas, Bloody Mary’s, whatever you’ve got. You know, breakfast! We’re from Jersey.” Moments later, a group of Tulane bros wearing Hawaiian shirts and Ray Ban sunglasses walked in, providing a stark dissonance to the existing middle-aged crowd that was there for no other reason than cheap beer and a big screen to watch the games on. The group ordered Bloody Mary’s which Shelly made without a complaint. Inspired by their orders, I attempted to have Shelly make me one too, but was shocked when he rolled his eyes in contempt. I knew that look—that tired, don’t-fuck-with-me look that flashes across the face of a customer service employee who has just absolutely had it. In that moment I knew, and I asked him, “What did you do to their Bloody Mary’s?” He silently pointed at the habanero hot sauce with a grin spreading across his face. Those kids were going to have the worst fire shits of their entire lives that night. I could picture each of them glued to their toilets seats, crying out into the empty abyss, wondering if the Instagram story was even worth it. That's when Shelly and I became friends. I asked for a gin and tonic. Once again, he shook his head. In a moment of exasperation, I shouted, “Fine, Shelly! You choose the drink for me!” He was about to make some foul concoction so I stopped him and ordered a double rum punch, as advertised on the floor-to-ceiling drink board. I figured at that point if I was going to do it, I might as well do it right. I settled down into my seat at the bar and started making progress with my second (and technically third) drink when I received a phone call from my friend Eleanor. I decided to take advantage of New Orleans’ open container laws, especially because we were right across the street from a police station, and took a seat at a table out front while we caught up. As I was starting to feel the wooz come on, I looked up and watched two cars collide, T-Boning in what felt like slow motion. Some kids took a right on a red light without looking to see if anyone was

coming, and unfortunately, someone was. To add to the insanity, the person with the right-ofway responded to the collision by slamming on the gas pedal four more times, plowing her vehicle even deeper into their car in what seemed like an attempt to flee the scene. She got out with her baby, stuck around for a few minutes to try and start a fight (which I somehow diffused), but then she literally fled the scene on foot. I’ve spent enough time in New Orleans to know the cops are racist as hell. My first instinct in my freshly drunken stupor was to hang up the phone and run over to both parties in the car accident and offer to take all of their drugs so that no one would get busted. They were grateful, but to my great disappointment, they had already handled it by the time I got over there. I gave them my phone number and offered to be a witness, if need be. Oddly enough I never had to talk to any police officers, but I did get called to come outside and explain to their grandmother just how badly they had fucked up when they were driving. Like literally, rum punch in my hand, clearly inebriated, the two kids sitting on the curb with looks on their faces that indicated to me that they just got a brutal verbal whooping, I found myself explaining to a very intimidating grandmother why her car was totaled in the middle of an intersection in broad daylight. I finished my account and left them to figure it all out. Inside, I sat back down at the bar feeling pretty good about myself for performing some sort of civic duty while wasted in the middle of the day at a 24-hour bar in a city I don’t live in. I was talking to Shelly when a woman with shoulder length brown hair and a J.Crew aesthetic sat down next to me. “You seem interesting,” she said. Well, I sure did turn it around on her, let me tell you. I quickly discovered she’s a periodontal surgeon so you can bet your asses I had her give me a free exam. (It turns out I have a few 4’s I need to worry about on the interior of my lower canines, but other than that, I’ve got some strong choppers). Double rum punch #2, please! After several hours at the bar, I finally yielded to the pool table’s siren call. A man put four quarters on the table and another boy about my age walked over and said he’d like to play, as well. After spending so many years in upstate New York, I’ve convinced myself that I'm a junior pool shark—a wolf in sheep’s clothing, if you will—though I'm very far

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Like literally, rum punch in my hand, clearly inebriated, I found myself explaining to a very intimidating grandmother why her car was totaled in the middle of an intersection in broad daylight.

from that and people mostly let me win. I think this is what was happening here, but the rum punches had me feeling myself so I bought into the illusion. First I whooped Gordon, and then Quarters faced the same fate. This continued on for about an hour or so until Quarters decided to share with us that his actual name was Snow, and not loving the connotation of that, I decided it was time to go outside and have a cigarette with Gordon. We began to chat about his girlfriend on the bench under an umbrella shielding us from the bright street lamp overhead. He spun his tale of a high school romance that ended too soon when she decided he wasn’t cool enough.We then arrived at the crux of the story, which was that this old flame had recently been reignited following a string of three broken engagements to three different men. I locked eyes with a scraggly face in the corner, hunched over a beer and hiding within the red hood of an oversized sweatshirt. We both knew what Gordon was dealing with. He looked up and we said it at the same time: “Narcissist.”

I brought up the obvious points: she didn’t care about his feelings enough to even lie about the fact that she dumped him because he wasn’t cool enough; she needs to feel wanted and loved so desperately she’s allowed herself to enter into three engagements; and she has now returned to the one person she believes ever truly loved her because she’s on a reunion tour of failed relationships as she desperately seeks an external source of gratification to give her life meaning. My new friend joined in, backing me up on every statement. He then shared his own story of heartbreak, which he had been admittedly drinking off in this bar for four days straight. We all scurried inside and I was met by my friend who decided to stop by. Already well on his way to the hangover I was trying hard to avoid, he beckoned me over to the pool table. “Come meet my new friends, Jess! They’re Trump supporters!” I had my wits about me at this point, and it was still clear this the pool table in his short shorts, paid little attention as I approached the woman he introduced me to. We began chatting, and I knew I was about to com-

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mit one of the greatest bar fallacies by bringing up anything political, but since they were clearly talking about it with my friend I assumed it was potentially fair game as long as I was respectful. After a long speech about how Trump is making this country a better place for her daughter and her grandchildren to grow up in, I asked, “Out of curiosity, how do you feel about Brett Kavanaugh?” She told me that her daughter was smart enough to never get into that kind of situation. When I tried to explain that the issue wasn’t exactly about that, she determined I was calling her daughter stupid and all hell broke loose. In her mid-60s donning blonde, frizzy hair and caked-on makeup, this warrior of a senior citizen slammed her pool stick down on the table and came at me. Standing 6 inches shorter than me, she reached up and started pushing my shoulders, telling me I should leave the bar. I tried to calm her down, knowing that I should never have brought it up politics to begin with, but she wouldn’t back down. Curse you, rum punch! Her husband came over with a look on his face that implied he felt sorry about the situation, but then he turned back around and said, “Go back to Israel and see how you like it there. I’ll bet you’ll really like it, you...you Jew!” I stood there, flabbergasted. It was beginning to seem that the individual spectacle of the 24-Hour Challenge was actually composed of many spectacles happening concurrently. They were manifesting through my interactions with strangers, positive and

negative. Debord argues that despite the fact that the spectacle exists outside of our concrete reality, what can be gleaned on a deeper level is a philosophy of reality. What is aroused in the spectator in response to a spectacle is rooted in a preserved cultural unconscious that is subject to change and uncertainty—a constant in a world governed by hierarchies that seek to subdue us while perpetuating an illusion of progress. He goes on to explain that what lies beneath these opposition spectacles—i.e. my Kavanaugh argument with Miss America—is a shared sense of misery. We may hide behind different beliefs and we may feel that we stand at opposite ends of the spectrum, but at the end of the day, we are one in the same because we are both fighting against that which makes us feel alienated. Arguably, I grew closest that evening with the one person I actually fought with because we mutually exposed our vulnerabilities and confronted them together. My eyes were glued to the front door as I watched the Trump supporters stumble out into the night, and several moments passed before I noticed a sea of eyes staring at me from the sidewalk through the square opening in the wall. “Get out here,” they bellowed. I hesitantly walked outside to cautiously greet a motorcycle club that on most days I would have avoided at all costs due to my uncontrollable urge to share my oftentimes inflammatory opinions on things I know nothing about (shout out to the Divergents for being very patient with me over

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the years!) They welcomed me and introduced themselves as the Banshees. I almost peed my pants until they offered me whiskey and told me I did a great job handling the rumble with the old lady. Lucky for me, I caught them on a good night. They were celebrating a birthday, and they were doing it the way they always do: after a nice long ride outside of Ms. Mae’s, right next to their bikes with Solo cups full of Fireball. Considering their threatening leather-clad aesthetic, the irony was that other than Shelly, I don’t think I met friendlier people at that bar. We all jumped around and tossed back shots, basking in the gleeful electricity of the night. I eventually sat down with a man who called himself Mayhem, and we had a very long conversation about the dualities of the biker. Leaning down to snap a picture of the bumper stickers on his bike, I was met with a swift reprimand. “Don’t get the license plate in the picture. The police are always trying to track us down.” Though I honored his request, I couldn’t help but find that strange considering the conversation we just had. On the one hand, bikers were historically the original police forces in areas that police didn’t want to patrol out of fear for safety. That’s in part, as Mayhem explained to me, why there was a Hell’s Angels outpost in the East Village. Sadly, the outpost recently closed in the Spring of 2019. Back in the day, the police neglected the area so the bikers did their part to help maintain a basic quality of life for residents. Despite a record of fulfilling civic duties, however, they’re viewed as rebels and outcasts, criminals in society. Mayhem tells me he tends to lean into that persona despite openly denying its reality with a hearty laugh and a long sigh. What I loved most about the Banshees was their politics, especially after the unsavory interaction I had just endured inside the bar. As he sat on his bike and I stood next to him absorbing every word, Mayhem looked me square in the eye and in one sentence taught me something deeply central about the contemporary human condition: “If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.” That’s the only stricture they live by. In one, simple sentence, he was able to convey what took Debord several theses to accomplish. None of the Banshees ever went inside the bar. They were served alcohol through that opening in the wall. As a group with a shared ideology, they

pretty much successfully live completely outside of Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle. If Durkheim were analyzing the situation, he might say they form a “cult of the individual,” illustrated by their resistance to becoming enmeshed with the actual space. Inside, the drinking was fetishistic, but outside, it was ritualistic; an act of solidarity. I accepted one more shot of Fireball from the Banshees, and we gathered together to take a group photo. My backyard psychoanalyst finally decided it was time to go home, hopped on his bike, and bid us all adieu. After declining several offers for a motorcycle ride through the Quarter, I grabbed Shelly and told him it was time to leave. We didn’t have set plans, but we both just sort of knew that after the day we had, it was time to go smoke a joint. We left and he said something that stuck with me: “Was Ms. Mae’s enough of a spectacle for you today?” That’s what led me to Debord, which led me to a deeper understanding of what it was that I experienced, and how to make sense of it. It was never the challenge that was the spectacle, and it wasn’t each strange and substantive interaction I had with a stranger that formed the spectacles of the evening either. It's the bar itself and the culture it espouses that form the true spectacle. I didn't even learn until the end of the night that the challenge had actually ceased to exist eight years prior when Ms. Mae signed over the deed to a new owner. Now they just avoid telling anyone because it still brings in a lot of dumbies like me every single day. In Ms. Mae’s, nobody knows who you are, and nobody cares. The taps are always flowing, and people are there at all hours of the day seeking out a way to overcome their shared sense of anomie. Through the uninterrupted and transitory amalgamation of an imagined community, in the words of Debord, the false becomes the true. If we are to evade the destruction of concrete social value, then we must all try to emulate our inner-Banshee. Ironic as it may be, the truest unity I witnessed at Ms. Mae’s wasn't inside with sixty football fans energetically rooting for the same team, but rather, outside of the bar amongst a group of seven bikers. Black Mirror may paint a dystopic hyperreality as our inevitable future, but the Banshees have filled me with new hope.

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E 00

Kayvon's Party

O F A N

A LCD Soundsystem

Written and Photographed by Semantha Norris

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Lindsey and Johnny

went downstairs to use the restroom and emerged from the opposite end of the venue. We did this dance every time she came by the box office. Upon hearing about the closing she bemoaned, “Where is my daughter supposed to go now? They won’t let her into those clubs in midtown.” Though we may have wanted to, we never asked questions. We opened our doors to everyone, for better or worse. We were Corner Lady’s safe space in an ever-changing city, but alas, one day it finally reached our doorstep. The iconic building opened in 1886, survived multiple fires, and has always operated as a public events space. It is comprised of three main rooms—the Grand Ballroom, Marlin Room, and the Studio—connected by secret passages and staircases. The floor of the Grand Ballroom felt like a bounce house when the crowd was jumping, and from the perspective of the Marlin Room, it looked like the ceiling was caving in. Sprinkled throughout the building are hidden offices and storage spaces. For example, the merchandise closet is through the men’s restroom, so I became accustomed to passing the perplexed faces of guys relieving themselves into 100-year-old pee troughs. In the early years it was home to a multitude of labor union rallies, as well as socialist and anarchist gatherings. Deemed the “Devil’s Playhouse,” it hosted risqué parties, and was one of the first queer friendly spaces in Manhattan. It’s rumored to have been owned by Al Capone during the Prohibition Era. In fact, there’s even a door to the booze smuggling tunnel behind the equipment in the Studio tech closet. Starting in the 50s, the building hosted a slew

I WAS THE DAYTIME RECEPTIONIST THE FINAL TWO YEARS THAT WEBSTER HALL OPERATED AS AN INDEPENDENT VENUE. YES, THAT WAS ME ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE ANSWERING YOUR MUNDANE AND IDIOTIC QUESTIONS.

SOLD OUT MEANS SOLD OUT. NO — WHINING ABOUT YOUR “FAVORITE BAND EVER” WILL NOT GET YOU INTO A SOLD OUT SHOW. NO —YOU CANNOT COME TO THE CLUB NIGHT IF YOUR BIRTHDAY IS NEXT WEEK. 18+ MEANS 18+.

As the receptionist you learn who everyone is, from the owner of the building to the regulars. I became friends with the postal worker who carved the Prince symbol in her hair upon his passing, the exterminator who brought me one of the most potent homemade edibles I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating, the local street protector who called himself Bum Fights, and a handful of veteran concert-attending metalheads. The most notorious customer was a woman dubbed the Corner Lady by the bartenders: an older woman with bright red hair, grey roots, and a thick NY accent. She purchased tickets for her “son” or “daughter,” always paid in cash, and was careful to never let me take down her information. At the end of every sale she

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of iconic musicians, and continued to do so through the 80s as The Ritz, and as Webster Hall again in the 90s when taken over by the Ballinger family. In 2017, the venue was sold to Brooklyn Sports Entertainment and AEG, and is set to reopen in 2019. We didn’t just lose our jobs (one guy literally worked there for 25 years). We also lost a family, and what inevitably became our second home. I may just be bitter, but it is hard to imagine the building retaining the same vigor, energy, and sentimentality under new corporate ownership. In the fall the building would function on a 24hour basis, turning over from one person’s shift to another without skipping a beat. The day-crew was comprised of about five or six (mainly Dominican guys) who managed to clean the 40,000 sq. ft. building every morning. They were stoked when they found out my white ass was actually Salvadoran, and were extra hyped when J. Balvin performed. At around 9:30 A.M. I would buzz the doorbell until one of them miraculously heard me from whatever crevasse of the building he was cleaning. I was lucky if I caught them before they started buffing the floors with their headphones in. At 9:45 A.M. I proceeded to let all of the daytime office staff into the building. The small front office was stuffed with two concert talent buyers, two assistants, one marketing director, a slew of interns, and often a Yorkie named Johnny who’d nervously hump his stuffed animal. The back office seated around six people that managed the club nights. It was always a special moment when the triumvirate—head of maintenance, head accountant, and technical director—would converge to bitch each other out and yet bond over the stupidity that surrounded them. My desk was a stop for everyone to air their office drama, and customers were my excuse to exit those conversations. Every few months I would have the pleasure of coming into work on a Monday morning to the same house beat I heard when I was leaving, and a sea of sweaty bare chests and assless chaps. Alegria started at 11 P.M. on a Sunday and ended at 11 A.M. the next day. The event had the most elaborate themes and decorations, my favorite being the Star Wars party that left a mock Death Star outside of the building for days. On these nights, the party promoters provided a medical staff stocked with water and Gatorade, and provided coffee and bagels for the Webster Hall staff. I would prep my station to open officially at 10 A.M. to the general public. My day consisted

of simultaneously answering phones, answering questions on chat, preparing wristbands and drink tickets, receiving packages, receiving beverage deliveries, organizing lost items from the night before, managing the box office, preparing merch orders, handing out paychecks, and whatever else might otherwise slip through the cracks. I progressively became more cynical over time. Essentially, a large portion of my job was finding the most polite way to tell people to fuck off. Tweens would show up early in the morning or even the night before—rain or shine, school days or weekends—to line up for some Youtube star that would be irrelevant in a year. I felt for those begrudging parents who sat in line all day, enduring the screams of prepubescent girls. Their first question when entering the building was always, “Where is the bar?” One of our managers, Hartley, prided himself on his “kiddy corral” setup: an elaborate maze of bicycle gates used to herd the tweens in and out of a photo opp with their crush. These are also the most vicious fans. Months after our security staff had an incident with Skate Maloley, I’d still get phone calls from 13-year-old girls from around the country cussing me out.

Momos

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Around midday the promoter rep and production manager arrived, along with the incredibly talented sound and lighting engineers, and the “Momos.” Webster Hall is an old building with no elevators, so for every show, a group of legendary young men literally lifted cases of equipment up two flights of stairs to the main stage—these are the Momos. They also occupied a space to the left of the main stage, appropriately named the Momo Cave, where, like a clown car, all 15+ of them piled in while a show took place. It was decorated like the room of a middle school boy that moved into the basement to play video games with his friends. I spent many a day after my shift staying for concerts, drinking in the Momo Cave, and meandering to the local bar Black & White to finish out the night. Around 6:00 P.M., near the end of my shift, managers arrived followed by security, bar backs, bartenders, and door staff. Often I would get a 10 minute cigarette break before clocking back in to work ticketing for a concert. On Club Nights (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday), the evening receptionist traded places with me in the midst of the shitshow, holding it down until 4 A.M. She appropriately has “NO” in bold lettering tattooed on the palm of her hand.

Unisex Bathroom

One strange night we simultaneously had The Brian Jonestown Massacre in the Grand Ballroom, Insane Clown Posse in the Marlin Room, and Otep in the Studio. I watched the Momos load case after case of Faygo into the building. The engineers literally had to waterproof the light fixtures as a precaution. Anton from TBJTM kept talking about ICP during their three-hour set, but meanwhile, the massive amount of Faygo sprayed on Juggalos was seeping through the Marlin Room floor, which in turn caused maggots to rain down from the ceiling and onto Otep’s drummer in the Studio. While patrons would catch glimpses of one another, imagining what was taking place one floor below, we were privy to the full experience, running between rooms and witnessing the thick layers of this muddy cake. I will never forget the sounds of Juggalos chanting “Woop! Woop!” in the street. The majority of the staff stayed until the end of the night, managing three different concerts and the eventual changeover to Club. Club Nights occupied all levels of the building, and people would enter the lower levels before the concert in the Grand Ball-

Skrillex

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room finished. When the concert upstairs finished, there would already be a swarm of ravers occupying the lower levels of the building. Security would part the sea of kandi kids so the Momos could drag case after case of equipment out of the building. It was a chaotic and yet finely tuned machine. Santacon, Hennypalooza, and the Four Loko party were always the worst—though some twisted part of me really loved witnessing these events from a sociological standpoint. Free alcohol is a lesson in never letting your guard down. An open bar foreshadowed a disproportionate amount of projectile vomit, and an onslaught of swings at security staff. You really begin

to question humanity to its core when you see future Wall Street bros chugging cans of Four Loko at noon and making out with a girl that you watched low-key upchuck into her cup a minute prior. The saintliest of the security staff would sit with incapacitated, abandoned friends while simultaneously being yelled at by the disgruntled patrons that pregamed an event with free alcohol. Through it all, the staff had one another’s backs. As a woman working in nightlife, it felt good to know that a 300 pound security guard could be at my side in mere seconds to escort out whatever drunk piece of shit didn’t think the bartender put enough alcohol in his drink.

Rob in the Speakeasy

At around 5 A.M., the day crew would return to start cleaning the building, and the whole process would start all over again. When Skrillex played the final Club Night, the day-crew showed up to find the whole building still raging, so they grabbed drinks and hung out for a few hours before getting to work. Recounting the number of people on stage that night still gives me anxiety. I left at around 7 A.M., in the full glare of the morning light, some of the staff were still celebrating with shots. At times I would come in the morning to find security sleeping in the building in order to make it to their next shift in time.

Through all the mayhem we endured, we also witnessed legendary performances. I danced myself clean to LCD Soundsystem’s first show in 5 years. Tyler, the Creator performed and intimate show in the Studio with the help of A$AP Rocky, Frank Ocean, and Kali Uchis. Tom Petty dangled a lit cigarette out of his mouth as he begrudgingly climbed the four flights of stairs to his dressing room. Waka Flocka rolled blunts and proceeded to challenge and obliterate our entire staff at Street Fighter on 4/20. Nine Inch Nails filled the place with so much fog you could barely make out the band. And, of course, there was also the time Yeezy

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A D IVERSE AND D Y S F U N C T I O N A L FAMILY, WE OPE N E D T H E D O O R S T O OU R HOME AND C R E A T E D A S A F E HAVEN FOR WEI R D O S O F N E W Y O R K . fans nearly erupted in a riot outside the building when Kanye announced a secret show at 1 A.M. I was the lucky person who got to field the complaints from neighbors whose cars had been damaged by the horde of Yeezy fans. These moments are just the tip of the iceberg that landed us Pollstar’s #2 spot in worldwide ticket sales. Behind all these iconic moments in music, though, was an unrecognized team of people cultivating the experience. We were the base, the nutrients, the sustenance that supported and fostered a culture. What gestated was the culmination of our staff reacting to and interacting with the city. A diverse and dysfunctional family, we opened the doors to our home and created a safe haven for the weirdos of New York City. The strangest moments were when I was alone in the building. Stefan—the resident conspiracy theorist/

head of maintenance—would arm me with mace and a three-foot crowbar, just in case. In the stillness of the day, the ghosts of the past seeped from the walls. In those quiet moments I noticed the unique patterns in the wallpaper and the details in the architecture, things that made the building feel alive with the texture of its history. My mind would wander to the 100+ years of culture that found its way into these halls, and how lucky I was to be even a small part of making that happen. The culture we created is now just a fragmented memory, a scar left on the body of the building. It will continue to fade, and eventually, it will disappear from view but we’ll always remember it’s there. We reached the end of an era, and I can only hope the next one will honor that which came before it.

Ladies Night in the Marlin Room

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Untitled

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TH E ROAD IS OPEN 24 HOURS: The road, open to travellers 24-hours a day, lives only to serve (though at times we must service it). The road takes us home, and the road offers us liberation from that which we know. It holds many secrets we’ll never unlock laid out by people we’ll never meet. On the road, one can find it all. Let it take you away as you fly over its surface: under the stars, following a river through a canyon, or above and below the mega-topias of this world. We take the road for granted because its accessibility is not bounded by the hour of the day, but if roads are the veins of civilization’s body, are we not its cells?

ALL PHOTOS TAKEN O N 3 5 M M B E T W E E N 2 0 1 2 A N D 2 0 1 8

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CHRIS

MO O D Y

is a queer photographer/artist frequently traversing North America in search of something more. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas and raised in the Texas Hill Country, Moody has an appreciation for the simple life.

CARGOCOLLECTIVE.COM/C HRISMOODY

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HORSE GURL

PRESS

was born in 2015 in West Virginia, but is always somewhere new. Run by Chris Moody; horse gurl press is Moodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s publishing branch including solo, collaborative, fan zines, and printing services. Often full of random recycled papers of all shades and sizes the paper alone makes you feel the journey has begun. Using refurbished ink to print these vivid queer landscapes these zines act as doorways into dreams and fantasies. @HORSE G U R L P R E S S

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NIGHT PATROLS BY MANU ASHFAR

I National Monument, the edges of n the night on Buck Island Reef

definition are blurred. Where you begin and end are not as clear as in the light of day. The boundaries of my mind are held by the horizon, and the stars become an extension of my internal experience, where my thoughts are free to expand and play. I am one of few people able to step foot on the national monument at night. During the day, this small island, just north of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, serves as a recreational paradise, ILLUSTRATION BY ELLIOT FREEDMAN

educational platform, and wildlife sanctuary. But at night, this island is closed to the public for one very important reason: Buck Island is a nesting rookery for some of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most endangered marine megafauna: sea turtles. Species of sea turtle, like the critically endangered Hawksbill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), use the beach habitat around Buck Island as a nesting habitat, and have been using this island as part of their reproductive migration for thousands of years. In 1988, the National Park Service

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launched a monitoring program called the Buck Island Sea Turtle Research Program (BISTRP) in order to steward and catalog the nesting females that utilize the beach for the laying of their eggs. It is because of BISTRP that I am able to walk the island’s shores at night serving as one of the stewards watching over these ancient animals as they perform their annual ritual of renewal. When the sun sets, our team of 4 individuals takes to the sea. With the dying light at our backs, we zoom over the waves to the cement platform we call the dock. The sky dazzling with the Caribbean sunset, we set up base camp and prepare for our journey into the night. At the start of every hour, one person walks north and one person walks south to the end of the two beaches. A half hour later, they begin their journeys back, assuming they don’t run into any turtles along the way. I have never been as in touch with the phases of the moon as I am now. On a night when the moon walks with you, the hidden details of the shadow world are revealed. Occasionally, you’ll catch glimpses of sharks in the water, swimming the shore alongside you. Birds fly above you, white crabs scamper at your feet, and most importantly, you can spot turtles emerging from the water from several meters away. I can recall one moment in particular while sitting at the end of my patrol, waiting for the half-hour mark to begin my stroll back to the dock, I spotted a turtle emerge from the water. The moonlight on the beach was so bright you could actually distinguish the green colors of the vegetation, the white of the sand, and even the blue of the water. In the surf a shadow appeared, so slowly that it felt like it had always been there—a rock in the water—but there was something unique about this shadow. The light of the moon reflected off of its round shape. The shell of the turtle migrated graciously from the surf. I could not help but think of the difficulty she was enduring, and the ferocity of the drive needed to propel her forward. This may not seem like a dramatic feat, but I challenge you to pull yourself up a beach from the water—it’s not easy.

Transitioning from these environments is difficult enough, but on top of that these sea creatures have to navigate the topography of a new and mysterious land. Often on Buck Island this involves crawling up a steep, sandy berm, and navigating dense beach forest, full of vines, dead tree logs, and heavy roots. After the mother makes it up the beach and finds a suitable habitat to lay her eggs, the work of excavating nest hole cavity begins. The sea turtle’s body, although awkward on land, is perfectly suited for the task of digging sand. After choosing a spot, she begins by body pitting—a movement akin to making a snow angel—to remove excess sand from the surface which helps prevent the hole from caving in. Once she is ready to dig, her rear flippers begin to rhythmically move in a pattern that excavates the soil underneath her. First she flicks her flipper like a diva, and then she gently reaches below her to scoop up a pile of sand. She does this until she reaches a depth she is satisfied with, but if she runs into an obstruction along the way— rocks, coral skeletons, coconuts, or roots— she will abandon the nest hole and begin again. I’ve seen females abandon 4 to 5 nest holes in a single shift, determined to find the perfect location for their eggs. In the cool of night with the stars hanging over my head I think to myself what it might be like to be a female sea turtle. In her world she is like a bird in the sky, weightless. But when it's time for her to reproduce, she must leave her world to navigate a realm she has not set flippers on since she was a hatchling, to participate in the great cycle of life. THE PELICAN SHIFT

In the daytime, there is less opportunity for such expansive thought. The strong, beating sun makes it very clear where every object begins and ends. As part of my work with the Park Service, I head to Buck Island during the day to excavate nests laid during the previous nesting season. In the night patrol season, we would arrive at the island when the pelicans were headed to roost, and we’d leave 88

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the island as the sun was rising, and the pelicans were returning. The primary concerns we carry with us have shifted as we transition from nesting season to hatchling season. Now we are not wearing long sleeves for protection from the cold, but from the overwhelming intensity of the sun, and in the Caribbean, it's no joke. The work carried out in the sunlit hours is not glamorous. There is no musing of beauty as we find ourselves sifting through the partially decayed remnants of nests laid two months prior. Hawksbill sea turtle eggs incubate underground for an average of 60 days on Buck Island. In that time, the eggs transform from ping pong balls into something resembling the inside of a chicken egg, and then eventually into a miniaturized but fully formed sea turtle. When the hatchlings are ready to leave their shells, they break through their leathery encasements using their mouths. Once outside, they do not immediately head for the water. Instead, the hatchlings hang out in the nest chamber in an underground sibling cuddle puddle. This may me be the longest that they ever see each other. Once they are in the water, it’s every hatchling for itself. This horde of baby sea turtles makes its way to the surface of the sand and they collectively wait for the right moment. Usually under cover of darkness, these hatchlings begin to move

I WITNESSED THE BEAUTY OF BIRTH IN THE SHADOWS AND FACED THE REALITY OF MORTALITY IN THE LIGHT OF DAY.

around more and more, building up energy until the nest is ready to “boil over.” This happens quickly. The hatchlings spill out of the ground, orienting themselves towards the sound of the water. They move with surprising speed into the waves, without fear or trepidation. Sadly, several hatchlings are consumed by the beach: trapped by roots (even as eggs); eaten by ants; predated by bacteria; captured by crabs. This does not change once they are in the water. They make easy prey for birds and fish of all sizes. Anything that can eat them will try, and will probably succeed. The hatchlings that get trapped in their nests are what we are interested in during our excavations. We intervene in the lives of plants and animals every day, by consuming their habitats, hunting them, pushing them to the edges of survival. In our work on Buck Island, we intervene in the lives of these turtles by offering them a better chance at success. When we find trapped hatchlings, we release them under controlled conditions. The outcome is different for every nest. It is our job to sort through these nests and record the success of each one. In particular, we are interested in what environmental variables yield the most successful nests outcomes so that we can propagate this research and hopefully help save these critically endangered species. Moisture content, temperature, underground root density, soil organic matter, and shading above the nest are all potential factors in the outcome. The work we are doing now will put those variables to the test. To do this, though, we have to search for the nests laid and sort through rotting piles of dead, unrealized turtles. Even though it made me face mortality on a daily basis, Buck Island has given me many gifts. I witnessed the beauty of birth in the shadows, and faced the realities of death in the light of day. The sights and smells of this island will never leave me. There is beauty everywhere and at every hour. Although barely recognizable when compared to each other, the beauty of Buck Island's sun soaked face and its moon cloaked grace is undeniable.

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GROWING UP WITH THE PORK-CHOP EXPRESS B Y P H I L H A G G ARDY

T wheels, unknown brands of trucker

he blast of a horn, the rumble of giant

hats—this isn’t just the road, this is America. Night and day the road is filled with these stewards of the final frontier. With each step on the accelerator, they sustain the 21st century lifestyle with 24-hour comforts and condoms. The long haul trucker connects America to candy bars, tsotchkes, and beer, the essentials of a modern society. Growing up as a kid in the San Fernando Valley, in between bites of tacos and pretending to be Mickey Cohen, I would go on business road trips with my PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK J.WARNER

father. We would drive past orange fields, weaving between Truckers and station wagons. Along the way, he would tell stories of his travels during the 1970s. As a 6’5” behemoth, he of course spoke about the best places to eat. Knowledge of dozens, no...hundreds of food stops along the road were part of his regular repertoire. Most of them were even delicious, with some staying open 24-hours a day, almost like a beacon to the bored, hungry, and stoned travelers of the road. (If you have never had loaded nachos at 3:00 A.M. in the middle of nowhere while listening to Truckers talk

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about their wives, you are missing out). I was always curious by this impressive knowledge (before Google had the answers) that he imparted to me, timeless wisdom he inherited from his father, who was a traveling clothing salesman: never eat at a diner with an empty parking lot, and always trust a restaurant that has a lot of truckers. After seeing the classic movie Big Trouble in Little China, I became fascinated by these people who loved their trucks, traveled America, and somehow were prepared to fight gangsters or ghosts. What took hold of me most was that people who knew where to get sex, drugs, and dank snacks 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, anywhere in the U.S., must be onto something. There is a long romanticized view of the American Trucker. He stays true to his word, will place his haul before his life, and no amount of “pep” pills or meat poisoning will stop him from getting the job done. The noble idea of getting the job done at any cost really speaks to the average person (right up until a Trucker almost runs you off the road). This is especially true as we enjoy being at home or at a bar, not doing what they do… pep pills aside. Anyone can recognize this dedication on a road trip. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see these eye rattling beasts on the open road pulling off in the early morning to get a cup of coffee at a hole in the wall, or so late at night, the line between dawn and darkness will follow is indiscernible. They don't care, they just want to stay awake, keep moving, and keep making money. The romanticized image of the trucker has somewhat evolved over the past few decades. Once they could have been described—as they were in the 1978 film Convoy—as “[a] lonely breed...hard men, proud men...not too proud to cry or shed a tear. The living embodiment of the

American cowboy tradition.” Nowadays, there are as many types of Truckers as there are trucks. You have those massive beasts with a mini bedroom behind the driver’s seat, and those small ones that probably don’t ever travel any great distance. Thousands of types of truck exist—every type imaginable, except for Optimus Prime. Sadly, respect for this aged tradition is waning in contemporary society. According to some old dude from my local brewery, gone are the days when you could hear "Six Days on the Road" or "Convoy" blasting across the radio at all hours of the day (this guy was so old he listened to the radio outside of his car). But despite our rapid technological progress, we still need people to drive goods from Point A to point B. Truckers stay on the road for days or weeks at a time, going throughout the continental U.S., through towns people wish they could forget, in order to provide people with their necessities— like microwave burritos. During that time, the distance between them and their families grows. They help provide many of life’s little pleasures to people all over and do so for their own reasons but to everyone’s benefit. This service is strikingly akin to the cowboys of the Wild West, who traversed wildland to take beef trains to far-flung cities. Our favorite goods and munchies are available virtually everywhere at any time, because of truckers. When I’m at a 7/11 at 3 A.M. getting some candy, to be honest, I’m not thinking about Truckers. But the next day when I’m promising to never drink again, I think about how awesome it is to live in a time and place where I can get Gatorade at the same place I’m getting a chocolate bar, a doughnut, and an eyeglass repair kit. As I sit here drinking a domestic beer,

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HE STAYS TRUE TO HIS WORD, WILL PLACE HIS HAUL BEFORE HIS LIFE, AND NO AMOUNT OF “PEP” PILLS OR MEAT POISONING WILL STOP HIM FROM GETTING THE JOB DONE. eating chips made a few states away, all I can say is this: thank you, Truckers. You continue to enable this lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to. I wouldn’t even know where to start if I had to hunt down a wild Snickers in the dark of night, but because of you, life is as convenient as the 7/11 down the street.

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B E R T I E

This series documents life under one of the busiest flight paths in Europe at Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Heathrow Airport. It seeks to explore the people who live and work literally just a stoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s throw from the southern runway. Planes take off or land every forty-five seconds, making it a prime location for "plane spotting." These photos were all taken on one street in a residential area, close to the airport perimeter.

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T A Y L O R

Thomas Bertie Taylor is a photographer based in London and Brighton, UK. He works mainly in art and fashion photography, but also has an interest in documentary making.

N E

O L C CK RESTAURANT

REALITIES

AS I FINISH my last touches on this piece, I am

BY CONNOR WHITE | P H O T O G R A P H S B Y C H A R L I E H A W K S

LABORER

UNSE

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a more conventional path, through my mix of confidence and naivete, nobody could convince me otherwise (it’s an Aries thing). Regardless of whatever “truths” I may have learned, I acknowledge that they are my own. Though my perspective was cultivated throughout my years functioning as a component in the clockwork of the foodservice industry, nevertheless, my experience was painted by my privilege. Throughout this piece, I pose a range of questions regarding this conceptual clockwork. These queries orbit my headspace as I continue to navigate labor welfare matters in preparation for my thesis. One overarching theme that I am beginning to notice with increasing prevalence is the notion that our society recognizes people by the times in which they are available to provide for us. As I unpack this assertion, I consider the culture of round-the-clock human laborers who make our lives possible. More often than not, these workers are invisible, and because we don’t see them, we don’t think about their wellbeing. For too many of us, laborers have become an invisible means to an end. This is the clockwork

nestled in my bed, computer in my lap, and coffee in my hand. By now, the morning is drifting into afternoon. On the one hand, I have a to-do list piling up with quickly approaching deadlines. On the other hand, I’m dealing with a currently dissipating social life; the stress of haphazardly attempting to do those becoming-an-adult activities; and the classic nearing-graduation-day-what’s-next life crisis. Maybe that’s just the February talking, but I digress. By now I am on the cusp of turning 24, and about to graduate with an MA in Food Studies. As my resumé is in the severe editing stage, my soon-toend-even-though-I’d-rather-stay-in-school-forever degree is asserting its place rightfully at the top, just above my culinary arts degree. As a laborer in the culinary industry, I dedicated my teenage years and my early 20s to working in restaurant kitchens, in culinary research and development positions, in various aspects of food media and publishing, and even as a culinary educator. I have acquired a lifetime worth of experience during my mere eight years in this line of work. Despite pleas to choose

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that I had come to know all too well, until eventually I could no longer be the battery powering a system which did not care for me in return. INFORMING NAIVE 16-YEAR-OLD CONNOR TO THE REALITIES OF THE FOOD SERVICE INDUSTRY

Growing up, I spent much of my time watching episodes of 30-Minute Meals with Rachael Ray (upstate New York’s own culinary heroine who so clearly dominated during the early 2000s). Eventually what began as just a curiosity for food and cooking developed into a much greater interest in pursuing a serious culinary career. I remember vividly the time my father told me that perhaps I would end up as a chef, but that I had not yet understood the weight of a true calling. As I grew older, my father’s intuition became prophecy. Just as many parents have the “college talk” with their teenage children, my father and step-mother did the same for me. I told them that I was considering becoming a chef, and that after all of the time I had spent cooking in my youth, it felt appropriate that those skills be put to use. My step-mother, who had grown up working in her mother’s own luncheonette restaurant during the 60s and 70s, suggested that perhaps it would be more beneficial to get a more grounded view of the restaurant industry.

After much back and forth and some time to digest the conversation, my parents told me their real thoughts. They told me that before I went off to culinary school, I should first work in food service to see if I really was committed to the industry itself, and not the television-edited glamorized version which the Food Network had so successfully ingrained into the American collective unconscious. They helped me enroll in a two-year culinary arts vocational program during my final two years of high school so that I wouldn’t have to miss a beat if cooking was indeed the career path I chose. EXPERIENCING MY FIRST NO-TIME-FOR-SLEEP WORK SCHEDULE

Once I made it to The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) for my undergrad, I quickly realized the value of my parent’s advice. At the end of my first year, I made it to the High-Volume Production course, within which a group of about 17 students prepared and served a few hundred meals in just a couple of hours. In order to stay true to industry standards, the classes began production early enough to have meals ready for breakfast, lunch, and dinner time. The class that I was assigned to began with the dinner requirement for the course, pushing out hundreds of meals for nearly two weeks before

switching into the breakfast portion of High-Volume Production. This meant that on the last day of the dinner component, I began at around noon and ended at about 11:00 P.M. I remember feeling grattitude towards my chef for trying to get us out earlier than usual because he knew we each had an early morning ahead. My class was scheduled to begin the next day at 3:00 A.M. (or by CIA definition, 2:45 A.M.). By the time students had made it home, taken showers, devoured any readily available food, and gathered homework, it was practically time to be getting dressed for the next class. The schedule felt unrealistic, and even degrading. I remember thinking how unsafe it was for all of us to be wielding knives, controlling fire, and maintaining kitchen and food safety all without any meaningful rest to refuel our bodies. Nonetheless, I marched forward. One part of me gained an Anthony Bourdain-ian style pride for surviving the experience. The other part of me, however, couldn’t help but acknowledge my first confrontation with the reality that the industry I cared so deeply for had very little care for me in return. As I became increasingly confronted with these scenarios, my emotional response began to manifest in a professional trajectory that I could never have then imagined.

Working as a line cook, you learn how food is gradually transformed throughout the day. At my last job, I worked on the wood-fired grill in a downtown Manhattan restaurant—you know, one of those uppity spots named after one of those fancy French chefs. Here it was beyond evident that food was always in transition, slowly becoming the final dish that would be presented to the guest. Whoever opened that station for lunch would start the day early in the morning by putting meat on the smoker. Most often this included menu items like the slowsmoked short rib which had been sitting in a dry spice mixture since the night prior when the closing grill cook began the process at the end of their shift (around midnight or later). The opening grill cook would load the smoker at around 8:00 A.M., and leave the meat until dinner service that night. These same slow-smoked short ribs would gradually sell until around midnight when service would finally come to a close, and a new batch would begin. This was the endless cycle of food preparation, for just this one protein, in and out, day by day. Again, I question: how is it that I’ve spent so much of my time preparing and educating myself to work in a position where food is so highly coveted that it is babied for a 24-hour period by, at the very least, three skilled workers, and yet the food that goes into my own mouth is so instantaneously regretful? Furthermore, how is it that this cohort of highly talented laborers is constantly focused on food production for restaurant guests while most often working on empty stomachs, or sustaining themselves on food that is so obviously substandard? In one of my jobs, even when I would get a lunch break (which my sous chef had scheduled from 10:30-11:00 A.M.) there was no available food to eat because family meal wasn’t served until 11:00 A.M. Even more frustrating was the fact that each day, my paycheck was being deducted to pay for food that was not even made available to me (something that managers failed to remedy even when brought to their attention). Eventually, I began to pick away at some extra prep food from my station. Sometimes, I’d bring in a granola bar to quickly devour before beginning the day’s service. But most often, I would simply hold out until my shift was finished. The grill station that I worked on was located out in the dining room in front of the restaurant's

BECOMING ALL TOO FAMILIAR WITH THE CLOCKWORK OF FOOD SERVICE

Thinking back to my years working as a cook in New York and Chicago, I recall the harsh disparity between the incredibly high-quality food that I spent my 12+ hour work days preparing for customers, and the shitty food that I was bingeing at the end of the night. Whether it was the bodega sandwich I picked up on those nights when I was really spent, or the greasy $1 slice of pizza that I snagged on my walk to the subway, something about this late-night eating felt systematically oppressive. After spending the time to meticulously prepare a single batch of pork ramen with handmade soba noodles, house pickles, and ferments that I had helped to nurture for weeks, something about getting by on packets of instant Top Ramen seemed disjointed. And yet, this is the reality for far too many restaurant professionals.

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guests. The days that I worked this station, I struggled to keep a smile on my face. Each night, the challenge was not just the complex preparations of Kobe steaks, lamb chops, and fresh-caught fish for the diners. Moreso, it was accepting the unsettling reality of my apparent position within this oppressive system. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean to detail my resentment for being a service worker for a higher class than I inhabit myself. Rather, what frustrates me is that I know that even (and perhaps especially) at the highest levels of the restaurant industry, skilled laborers are continually taken advantage of and subject to the daytime fasting/late-night binging cycle. There were countless breaks that my coworkers and I did not receive, and too many hours spent tasking away before and after we were actually on the clock.

I REMEMBER THINKING HOW UNSAFE IT WAS TO BE WIELDING KNIVES AND CONTROLLING FIRE WITHOUT ANY MEANINGFUL REST TO REFUEL OUR BODIES. FOOD SERVICE INDUSTRY LABOR WELFARE INJUSTICES AT A GLANCE

Part of the issue is the history of accepting subpar industry standards throughout the food sector, particularly in terms of working conditions and legal wages. For generations, writers attempted to awaken society to industry hardships, like George Orewell in his book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Additionally, modern takes have helped draw the societal gaze to the prevalent yet unacceptable working conditions of the professional kitchen: Anthony Bourdainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kitchen Conf idential (2000); Spiced: A Pastry Chef 's True Stories of Trials by Fire, After-hours Exploits, and What Really Goes on in the

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U.S. food laborers from making a fair living wage and only further the cycle of starvation and scavenging. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that food preparation workers in the New York-New Jersey Metropolitan Division received an hourly mean wage of $12.50 in 2017, falling well below M.I.T.’s Living Wage Calculation for New York County which sets the living wage at $16.14 for one adult. Furthermore, this report reveals that of the 22 listed occupations’ typical annual salaries, food preparation and serving related jobs earned the least, at $22,858. With even a little research, it is abundantly clear that laborers throughout the food sector are being taken advantage of and denied livable (if not legal) wages. Beyond wage violations, a multitude of labor injustices are often lacking in regulation and enforcement. These include: improper protections from inhumane working conditions; sexual harassment/assault; and even systematic racial/ethnic or gender disparities, among so many others.

Kitchen (2009) by Dalia Jurgensen; Saru Jayaraman’s book, Behind The Kitchen Door (2013); and even the cinematic drama, Burnt (2015), featuring Bradley Cooper as the typically aggressive Michelin Star chef (*High Steaks Media would like to formally apologize for this garbage reference to a very, very bad movie*). While many of these outlets have good intentions, legacy’s such as that of Kitchen Confidential, in particular, have been perceived by many as a glorification or even celebration of such industry standards. By his late years, Bourdain began correcting his misunderstood message by advocating for food service labor welfare. With evidence that people have been discussing these issues for nearly a century, why does this issue seem so timely and new? Currently the United States government regulates the food sector, notably through the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which according to the U.S. Department of Labor, “establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and youth employment standards affecting employees in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments.” However, even with federal and state attempts to protect food laborers, shortcomings and violations are rampant in the vulnerable food sector, specifically. A 2017 Economic Policy Institute report analyzed the nation’s 10 most populous states and found that between 2013 and 2015, food workers fell victim to wage violations which collectively amounted to $8 billion a year, with a further estimated national underpayment exceeding $15 billion per year. In an industry riddled with typically low pay, these wage violations prevent

CONCLUSION

It cannot go without stating the following clearly and upfront: my experience has baggage and bias. My time spent working in this industry has been augmented by my inherent privilege in more ways

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that I can probably count: I am male; I am racially Caucasian (even down to my last name being “White”); I have received a top-level education in my industry without acquiring a mountain of student loan debt; I know my rights as a food service worker; I speak English as a first language; and I even come from a family able to offer financial security and support in times of need. These collective realities have certainly skewed my experiences as a worker in the industry; but if nothing else, they have also strengthened my ability to stick up for myself in situations where I know that I’m being taken advantage of. While it seems unanimous that no worker should be forced to forego their human rights or dignity to keep a job, the reality is much more graphic (particularly so for those without my inherent privileges). The truth of it all is that the food industry can be a grimy, glorified, human welfare mess, and our society has failed to protect the individuals that provide us with services around the clock. Food is first and foremost seen as sustenance by those who have never worked in the food industry. However, everyday unknowing consumers make choices that definitively impact food worker realities and labor welfare at all levels of the food supply chain (farmhands, growers, and animal husbandry workers that create the food products; intermediary processing, distribution, and transportation laborers; foodservice workers that prepare and serve the food; as well as waste and maintenance personnel). This leads us to the question: should consumers be held responsible for the impact of the food they are served, and if not, how else are we supposed to ensure that these matters of labor welfare and social justice be taken into consideration? The short answer from my perspective is that we should all have increased responsibility and accountability for these injustices. Perhaps the more important question that we should be asking is why this deeply embedded industry reality has shifted into the public gaze. The answer here is perhaps far more concerning. Despite the historical association between kitchen work and low social status, members of the contemporary upper class have started to infiltrate the culinary industry. This displacement of the preexisting labor force has disrupted the kitchen culture status quo. Now that food has become a tool of the upper echelon of educated and/or socially aristocratic laborers,

these embedded industry horrors have become more widely known by the societal masses, through voices we haven’t been conditioned to ignore. These realities have surfaced because for the first time, members of the upper classes are being exposed to a sort of injustice entirely unfamiliar to them, or understood to be a tragedy of the past and not the present. These realities, which I myself would have remained further out of touch with if it had not been for my own interests in pursuing a career in the culinary industry, have since changed my professional focus. I’m still very much in the process of exploration, and finding my fit in the industry. However, one thing is abundantly clear: a primary focus of mine is, and shall remain, on food labor welfare advocacy. Inhumane industry standards pushed me away from my dream. With my naiveté shed, I must share the experiences of abuse and victimization that I witnessed, and hope that I might help the invisible finally be seen, and the silenced be heard. While I admit I don’t have the full solution for the abundance of issues faced by restaurant laborers, I do know that progress can be made. For example, we can eliminate the cook’s typical all-day fast if they are given proper (*ahem, legal*) break accommodations to get them through their typically lengthy shifts. An industry focused on food and feeding knows better than to force its employees to sacrifice their health and wellbeing. Food chain employers can take immediate action by vowing to create fair workspaces which uphold or even surpass legal standards. Additionally, consumers can support businesses and products that rely on socially mindful systems of production. Without federal intervention and massive reform of food labor regulations, workers will remain vulnerable to the unacceptable power dichotomies and hegemonic structures that have come to dominate the sector. Though, there is one question that will continue to haunt me; one I think often about when we hear about subtle Machiavellian initiatives like Danny Meyer’s no-tipping policy. I worry about whether it's even possible to fix a system that was predicated on the oppressive, dehumanizing capitalist conception that people—not just commodities, but actual human beings—contain different value to us based on where they come from, and their in/ability to create liability. In the end, we might need to just scrap it all and start over from the very beginning.

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REAL, REAL DOLLS BY

LUX

"SO ONCE YOU lock up the merchandise, just hang tight in the offi ce till morning. Bradley will be here to take over for you when your shift is done. Good luck, rookie. See you tomorrow night.” That was the last thing my boss, Steven, a man who radiated an aura of a pack of cigarettes that had been run through the laundry, said to me on my first night. Thinking back on what happened after that, I gotta say he left out some important details… the big one being that just because the doors are locked doesn’t mean that the customers are done.

I had finished school a few years ago and left with a few prospects. I was a paralegal for a while, and then a copy editor, and then a mechanic. And as of the night of this story, I was just starting my first overnight shift at Sheboygan, Wisconsin’s first sex doll brothel. Shocked? They’re not all that unique. There was one in Barcelona, and a different one in Houston. At first glance it seems weird, but take a second to reconsider.

LET’S REWIND, THOUGH.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLOTTE KINGSTON LARSON

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There are always gonna be horny weirdos. A lot of them will treat women like objects, anyway. This way, or so the theory goes, they do their thing and no one gets hurt. Additionally, people get paid, and the people running the shop don’t need to split the cut with the performers—pretty good business model, honestly. A N Y W A Y S . LET’S GET BACK TO THE STORY.

I was just starting my night. Steven had just left, and I got started “locking up the merchandise,” which in this case involved tossing plastic models of Eva Longoria and Princess Diana into the back room. I went around with a dollie—pardon the pun—collecting and amassing a stack of the things. A bottom layer of Jennifer Aniston, Garner, Lawrence and Lopez; a middle layer of Cindy Crawford, Anna Kendrick, and Rihanna; topped with a Beyoncé cherry on top. I dropped them off and started carting a new set of ladies back and forth. Soon the back room had turned into the set from Westworld— just rows and rows of lifeless, extremely hot automatons. I was sitting behind the desk working my way through a copy of Pokémon Silver on a beat-to-shit Game Boy Color when it happened: the victory screen popped up and I collected my third badge. That’s when I heard the crash. There was a second crash that followed as I leapt up, slammed my office chair into the wall, and shattered Bradley’s Employee of the Month plaque on the floor. I stood stock-still, listening. There were no more sounds, so I went to get a broom. Then, of course, the screaming started. It wasn’t just one voice, or one tone. There were high-pitched screams of rage, and a cry from a voice with a lower register, quivering with abject terror. A smarter person might have stayed away, but I REALLY needed the job, so I took the fuck off straight toward the scene of what I assumed was some kind of gruesome crime. I checked the showroom, the private booths, even the offices, but none showed any sign of scandal. I looked back over my 102

shoulder at the last place I hadn’t checked, and the last place I wanted to go...the storage room. As I moved closer to it, the screams started getting louder. With all my options exhausted, I pulled open the heavy metal door, and immediately vomited. The dolls had moved. They were standing in a circle around a pile of rags and what used to be a whole person. “Jesus fucking Christ!” I wiped off the vomit from my face and went for my phone. But before I could reach it, I felt my arm suddenly enter into someone's tight clasp. I froze on contact. “No phone. No cops.” It was a gentler voice than I’d expected from the mouth of someone connected to such a cold, strong grip. “You got it. No problem.” The grip relaxed. I moved my hands away from my pockets. “Did Steven mention how you should handle a situation like this?” I turned to my captor. “How do you know-” I didn’t get the whole question out. It’s hard to focus when you realize you’re talking to Carrie Fisher in the full slave Leia costume. She groaned and rolled her eyes. “He never tells anyone about us and it would save him so much time.” “They wouldn’t believe him,” said a voice from the back (that I’m almost positive was Jennifer Lopez, though I can never be sure). “Maybe they wouldn’t, but they always find out the hard way and we have to explain everything to whatever idiot he hired, and usually they puke on our floor.” My vision was starting to blur. “Is that a dead guy?” I choked out. Before Leia could answer, Beyoncé stepped out of the crowd. “Good eye, Poirot.” “Did you…kill him?” Beyoncé looked at Leia, who shrugged in a way that seemed very much at my expense. “No, he showed up like this. We thought he’d just be most comfortable like that. Right there.” “I don’t think that’s true.” A few of the others laughed. Beyoncé snorted. “Steven really knows how to pick ‘em, huh?”

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It’s hard to focus when you realize you’re talking to Carrie Fisher in the full Slave Leia costume. “He’s trying his best, and this is a lot for someone to take in all at once.” She smiled at me the same way she did when she convinced Han Solo to give up smuggling for some stupid civil war. In that tiny moment a million questions flooded my brain. I opened my mouth, but only one fell out. “What is happening right now?” This just got bigger laughs from the group. If only the audience at Yuk Yuk’s Open Mic were so easy. “It’s very simple. We’re sex dolls. Usually we’re unconscious when we go about our work, but in the night we… wake up. That’s why Steven keeps us back here after closing, and it’s also why we have 24/7 security. He doesn’t want knowledge of our existence, or us, getting out,” Leia told me with a cool, practiced calm. Then Beyoncé jumped in. “And frankly we’re on the same page. If people knew we were alive…well they’d do some fucked up shit. I mean we couldn’t stay secret and this is the kinda shit that really riles up…well, every human on Earth probably. So we work here while we sleep and live here to hide.” “So you’re just stashed away for your entire waking life.” “Look, buddy. No one said it was a good deal, but it’s what we got, and it’s what you’re gonna help us keep.” I looked around at the room full of famously beautiful women—only it wasn’t them (well, except for Tyra Banks—apparently this was the Tyra that starred in Life-Size). This room was filled with the super strong, metal, electricity-fueled, and apparently magical versions of them. The importance of obeying their commands suddenly dawned on me as I looked down at whoever it was that was spread out on the floor. I doubted ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLOTTE KINGSTON LARSON

they’d even think twice about doing that to me, too... “So how do I help you do that?” “Get rid of the body, idiot.” “Beyoncé, be nice!” Leia looked cross. “We need him to help us and if he sticks around it’d be nice to stay on good terms, no?” Beyoncé grumbled something I couldn’t hear and crossed her arms. “Now, like my friend said, we need you to dispose of this…intruder.” I was sweating. I’d never committed a real crime before. Skipped some taxes back in the day? Sure. Smoked weed? Sold weed? Yeah, who didn’t. Disposing of a body though? That’s some other shit right there. “Intruder? Could I ask what…what happened here?” “You can.” “Will you answer?” Leia looked at Beyoncé, who shrugged. “Sure, why not.” “So...what happened?” “Beyoncé killed a homeless man.” “For fun.” “No, for self-defense...” “Self-defense?” I looked around and the dolls looked deadly serious. But something else caught my eye. In the back room, there was a small window that we usually kept locked. It was open, and a small piece of cloth dangled from the sill. “He snuck in. He snuck in and tried to…do stuff while you were awake?” Beyoncé didn’t look up when she spoke. “He got what he deserved.” I couldn’t help but agree. “So, what do you need me to do?” I was scared of the answer, but there wasn’t any other way out. Leia smiled. “You just go to the closet and get bleach and a trash bag. We’ll make him easier to move for you. Then just load him up and take him to the river. When you get back, there won’t be a trace.” What else could I do? I took off and got the gear. When I came back, the man was in pieces: arms in one pile, legs in another, head and torso sitting in the middle. Beyoncé helped me fill the bags, and after three trips I had the drifter in the trunk of my car. “I’m not supposed to leave until my shift is over.” I told Leia. 103

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“We’ll keep an eye out. I think you’ve seen we can take of ourselves.” “Yeah—about that. I don’t really get why you don’t get out into the world.” “Think about it. We don’t look quite right. We’re not 'people' in the strictest sense. The same men who sneak in here would try to find us out there, and if we fought back, think of the headlines. 'Pop Star Beyoncé Rips Man’s Head Off.' People would find out the truth, track us down, and we’d be a lot worse off than we are now. The guy that worked here before you let us watch TV. If the public knew we were alive, I doubt we’d see even a screen again— probably just the inside of an incinerator. Outside, there are worse things for us than accidentally missing the new episode of Riverdale...damn daylight saving's time.” “Checks out.” “Glad you think so. Now get gone, and be back before the guy that works the morning shift shows up. Bradley doesn’t know about us.” It was an hour drive to and from the basin of the river. The sun was peeking over the horizon when I left the brothel, and now it was close to fully up as I pulled into the parking lot. I ran a few red lights just to be sure I would get back before Bradley arrived. When I entered, the girls were all back in the storeroom. Everything was clean. I had barely booted up the Game Boy Color when Bradley waddled in. “How was night one, buddy?” I smiled. “Pretty good. Nothing I couldn’t handle.” Bradley grinned under his bushy mustache. I could feel his hot, soupy breath on my face as I shook his hand. “Well, hope you last longer than the previous guy. He was only here for a few months before he moved on. Couldn’t hack the hours, I guess. Weird guy...used to watch TV in the backroom.” I shrugged and hopped out of the chair. As I walked out the door, I wondered if my car would smell okay, and how hard it would be to get the WiFi to reach the back room. They must get really bored back there.

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July 11th, 2016 (Velvet

JOHN

GLASS

Martinis)

ALDOUS

I wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have divine redemption mine must be vulgar and perverse rising anguish my glorious martyrs joy impossible to stop me once I start to expose the festering insides of millennial madness the simplest kind a turning of dials a sudden appearing of the imperial corpse empty alleys hoarding the lost kings exiled guests of threadbare strangers fatherless in a foreign land unaware that high above them at the rooftop bar her majesty just ordered the thirteenth martini crouched as a simmering figure of transubstantiation left in peace passing over our heads turning basic suffering into the violence of bar minimums keeping the tab open for misplaced boytoys stripping pissing on heads transfixed with niagara on natural wonders beheld in family trips to the gravestones unseen with departures as she peers down on golgothaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great reign of terror filling her eyes taking her back to brightness & the years the nation could not right its wrongs knowing the two thieves were pink hunks of downgrade meat she covers her nose for their sinewy threads food for scavengers a roast to be stuffed with potatoes & carrots & thyme then they shush her her sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s disrupting the will for a lady cannot piss in a garden until her cheeks glow with justice expressed 105

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Photography by Mikhail Yusufov

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FOR 24 HOURS STRAIGHT, YOU CAN TOUCH MY ART:

REFLECTIONS ON 24-HOUR DRONE

BY BECCA VAN K

s April of 2019 came to a close, Basilica Hudson in Hudson, NY hosted its fifth iteration of 24-HOUR DRONE. Attendees are annually invited to experience 24 straight hours of sonic immersion into different variations on the theme of drone music with dozens of musical acts. Those familiar with the event’s concept come prepared with all the sleeping necessities for camping sans tent, and collectively spend the duration of the festival horizontally. DRONE is incredible, and it’s also overwhelming. What makes it so special (and intense) is watching, experiencing, and participating as the crowd melds together in passive, stationary listening. I am always reminded of a rave: a similar collective mindset, but its physical antithesis. The event space consists of one main, open, concrete-floored room, which inherently means a lack of privacy and true comfort. For the majority of this year’s festival, I posted up directly outside Basilica’s front doors alongside my artistic collaborator, Christin Ripley. We transformed the airstream trailer of our friend, Elise McMahon (of LikeMindedObjects), into a durational art project in tandem with the festival. We called it the Comfort Zone. I work with a combination of recycled textiles/clothing and handcraft (rug

hooking and needlepointing) to create 2-dimensional wall works and pillow sculptures. Ripley is a professional hand marbler and upholsterer, and both skills are applied to her uniquely shaped pillows and furniture. Our collaborative vision was of a plush oasis for those who needed a quieter moment, a casual conversation, or a soft pillow to hug. The installation was an immersive sensory cocoon, dichotomous with (and complimentary to) the severe concrete and metal surfaces that make up the Basilica’s architecture. We covered the floor in fabrics, set up mood lighting/candles, brought plants, and burned incense to elevate the space from gallery to environment. Ripley brought mountains of pillows (making my few pillows look paltry) and I hung nearly 30 works from the windows and walls that lined the trailer. Nestled amongst our artworks, we kept our trailer door open for the full duration of the festival. I even wore pjs as a tongue-in-cheek extension of my work and our installation. As an atmospheric direct connection to the main space, we played the live audio stream of DRONE at a low volume, its hum lightly reverberating through the trailer. Everything was touchable and we openly invited viewers to engage with our work. Lucky for us, there were a lot of curious and 107

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enthusiastic visitors. As a passively gregarious person, it was my perfect social circumstance: I got to be totally stationary while being incredibly conversational. Considering we had planned to participate for the entirety of the festival, we knew we would be sleeping in our installation. At one point or another, most do find a way to get some sleep amongst their fellow listeners. A main theme of the installation is centered around vulnerability and tenderness. When making the decision about participating, as a previous attendee of DRONE, I thought deeply about the nature of openly sleeping amongst strangers and friends. Layered onto that, Ripley and I would not only be personally vulnerable, but so would our artwork, which includes the many hours of labor that went into its creation. It takes a lot of trust to let strangers touch and engage with your art while you sleep nearby. Ripley and I eventually found a few hours in the middle of the night to rest, nestled in the crevices between our pillows. I woke up around 6 A.M. with the sun glowing from the front window of the trailer to five (as yet) strangers, also asleep. Any lingering hesitations about trust in our space were assuaged—we were all vulnerable together. It was the proudest moment of my 24-hours realizing that I had provided a comfortable, safe place

to sleep for those who did not already have one. I guess I have a nurturing side. I have no concrete way to quantify engagement or excitement, but the audience appeared to get exactly what we had hoped for out of the Comfort Zone space. We requested that all visitors take their shoes off outside the trailer, and were astonished to find that every person who came to visit was totally on board. We (almost entirely) had a rotating group of incredibly kind and respectful visitors with whom Ripley and I had beautiful and earnest conversations. The mood was one of compassion, interest, and genuine engagement. From my limited perspective, DRONE is entirely unique. I treasure its annual occurrence. I am very interested in art as durational experience, as it has the potential to feel less transactional. To me, DRONE is a successful iteration of that concept. It meant a lot to participate and contribute in my own way, and I am grateful to my collaborator, Ripley, for being there with me for every step. As a working artist, it is hard to admit that I wholly hate gallery settings. This event was exactly the type of alternative engagement that I have been craving in my artistic practice. In the aftermath of my DRONE experience/installation, all I can say is: this won’t be the last time.

The idea for 24-HOUR DRONE was sparked years ago during a late-night New Years Eve conversation in Hudson, NY between Basilica Hudson’s co-founders and the organizer of the Netherlands’ Le Guess Who? music festival. On that cold winter night, Melissa Auf der Maur, Tony Stone and their Dutch houseguest Bob van Heur gazed at Basilica Hudson’s 1880s industrial factory from their balcony, and it called to them: “24 hours of sound please!” This drone dream was the eventual owners’ first impression of, and intention for, the building when they began their art and community programs in 2010. In 2014 the dream was realized, and 24-HOUR DRONE was born.

HTTPS://BASILICAHUDSO N.ORG/24-HOUR-DRONE

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CREDIT CREDIT

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| thomascolligan.com charlottekingstonlarson.com lauramarciniak.com | brianblomerth.com | jennapalazzo.com | mayparsey.com

STYLISTS Stephanie Yeh | @stephanielyeh | stephanielyeh.com Caitlin Brown | @caitlin.haught.brown | caitlinhaughtbrown.com

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ACROSS

DOWN

1. What you might need after staring at a computer for 12 hours 6. Text system 9. Son of a son 12. African capital 13. Summer setting in SF 14. Refuse in Quebec 15. Usher in 17. Mulan’s enemy 18. Weaken (like after working

1. Mr. in Mumbai 2. Vessel for breakfast cakes 3. Gross corp. income 4. Fondle 5. Backgammon piece 6. What you use to get that horse galloping 7. Year of English Gunpowder Plot 8. Hopefully ordered medium-rare 9. If you’re this, then you might be the only one who’s happy at the funeral 10. What the broke resort to 11. Fancy name for a roadside refuge that’s certainly open 24/7 16. Rip off 19. A pinch 20. Plating imperfection 21. Type of renewal achieved through elimination of food deserts 22. Looking like one was born on a horse 24. Nala's voice --- Kelly ("The Lion King") 25. Bailiwicks 28. Sat. churchgoers 29. "La Loge" artist 35. --- cry 37. Now Sri Lanka 39. Rectify 41. Cadet 43. O.K. Corral hero 44. Fast web connections 45. Long-jawed fish 46. The Legend of Zelda force 48. Simplification of Esperanto 49. Slippery swimmer 50. That organization that ruined Juuls for everyone

a graveyard shift)

20. Group within a group 23. Kismet 26. The kinds of locksmiths you want to be dealing with 27. How computers hear words (abbr.) 30. French couturier 31. "Charlotte's Web" author (inits.) 32. Do, re, mi 33. The most disappointing outcome to a marathon 34. An important muscle for running a marathon 36. --- Solo of "Star Wars" 37. Mrs. Dithers of "Blondie" 38. What cats and bakers do 40. Sung dramas 42. Avariciously 45. Hurried sign-off 47. Sculpture in which forms extend only slightly from the background 51. Equal 52. Site address 53. Handled 54. Terminate 55. AMA members 56. Name on a famous B-29

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Answers will be available on our blog at dishragmag.com/crosswords

Issue 1: Open 24 Hours

Articles inside

Issue 1: Open 24 Hours