The Indelible Kitchen: The Skewer Report on a Really Hard Life

16.4.07

The Skewer Report on a Really Hard Life

The Skewer sends this riff responding to an article that notes: “last week mega-rich parents often set a spendthrift example – a Long Island businessman, David Brooks, spent $10 million on his 13-year-old daughter's party, which included performances by the rock group Aerosmith and the rapper 50 Cent, together with $10,000 party bags for the teenage guests.”

MY HARD LIFE
By the Skewer

As if a bad ski season in Gstaad weren't enough, I got scorched by an untrained bikini waxer getting ready to go to St. Tropez. Really! I had to take a week at Las Ventanas just to get over it.

And now, just when I should be relaxing, there's the pressure of what to get my niece, whose father gave her a miniature fainting pony for her fourth birthday. A horse that is known to fall over? What was he thinking?

But she loves it because the mane is so fluffy, according to the nanny (Vanessa? Birgit?).

I was going to get her a Big Sister/Little Sister Spa Day when I heard that, just across the park, the parents of a one-year-old threw her a $30,000 birthday party with 100 guests, each child dressed like their favorite member of a royal family.

And if you can believe it, not one etiquette book gives guidance and my friend, Claire, whom I usually consult, was climbing a peak in Patagonia and unreachable by cell. So on the way back from Las Ventanas, I was forced to start my own list:

1 Year Old - Lobster, life-size cake, guest appearance by Cirque du Soleil traveling troupe, for no more than 40 child friends (plus equal number of children of parents' business associates) in the Hamptons

5 Years Old - Custom-designed clothing line, launched at Fashion Week; factory tour with "Happy Birthday" sung by factory team associates

10 Years Old - A hard age. Polo team and own pony, with private lessons by team members. Or art lessons by downtown's next big thing, and stock portfolio, followed by all-night slumber party at museum

Sweet 16 - Party with known singing or rap star and private helicopter (no more lift lines) with pilot on retainer

Big 18 - Open-ended trip to Paris or Ibiza with jet-load of closest personal friends

21 Years Old - Private island or, if only islands with rocky coasts are available, refurbished castle in country of choice

I don't know - is it enough?

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Contributor Bios

Jorn Ake, a contributing editor for The Indelible Kitchen, is the author of All about the Blind Spot and Other Poems (Popular Ink) and Asleep in the Lightning Fields (Texas Review Press & winner of the X. J Kennedy Award).

Ake worked as a painter (of pictures of the fine arts variety, not of houses) before moving to Arizona to complete a Master's degree in Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Ake is a winner of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. This grant helped support work on his current manuscript, Boys Whistling like Canaries, begun when Ake lived in Prague, Czech Republic. He now lives in New York City.

While Ake enjoys a good interpretive dance, he says that he never understands quite what he is interpreting and who is receiving the message. We hope to get some footage of him dancing soon.

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Emily Anderson recently received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Caketrain and Bailliwik. She lives in Wisconsin with her parents, but only temporarily. (Yeah, right, Emily! We’ve heard that one before. How old are you now anyway?)

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A recipient of the Tennessee Commission for the Arts Individual Fellowship in 2006, M. C. Boyes has been featured in Fiction International, Rhino, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others. Boyes is the author of Gingko, Pigeon, Light: A Fable, Popular Ink, 2006 and editor of the anthology, The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings about Americans and Their Work Experience forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press.

When not writing, Boyes spends an inordinate amount of time sorting through jelly beans and arranging them by color. Boyes claims to be scared of canned cheese dip, but insists on sending lengthy cover letters to us, thus risking a delivery of a case of the stuff. Despite the fact that we know almost everything about Boyes from the aforementioned cover letters, we have yet to learn of his/her gender and know nothing of his/her sex life. We don’t know where he/she stands on interpretive dance.

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Contributing editor Tracey Cockrell has been featured in the Fitchburg Art Biennial, Boston Center for the Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art of Portland, Oakland Arts Council, SoundCulture International, Works Gallery, and San Francisco Arts Commission, among others

Review’s of Tracey Cockrell’s work can be found in Sculpture Magazine, Art New England, The Boston Sunday Globe, The Portland Phoenix. You can also access reviews on WGBH and Maine Public Radio’s Maine Things Considered.

Cockrell, a former professor of sculpture and new media at Maine College of Art, now lives and works and dances in Oakland, California.

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Jeff Crouch lives in Grand Prairie, Texas. His writing has appeared in bucket load of places. To keep people from wanting to injure Jeff Crouch, we have edited the giant list way down.

Here are a few places where you can read Crouch’s work: Canopic Jar, Cordite, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Laika Poetry Review, Literary Chaos, Locust Magazine, Media Cake (formerly Experimental Candy), PFS Post, saucy vox, semantikon, SN Review, Subterranean Quarterly and Wire Sandwich.

Crouch has work forthcoming. Again, we had to edit so that you would not want to throttle Jeff Crouch for being so damned prolific. Here are some places were you will soon be able to read more of Jeff Crouch’s work: Blue Fifth Review, Brink Magazine, Theaker's Quarterly Fiction, Sein und Werden, and Vibrant Gray.

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James Robert Daniels has been published in books ranging from the U.S. Navy's Concept of Operations to the Fabjob Guide to Become An Inventor, and in magazines including Boys' Life, Inventor's Digest, Classic Boat in the U.K. and The Helix in Australia. You can read more of his work at authorsden.com/jamesrdaniels and http://www.writers.net/writers/Jim.

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Colorado native Tabitha Dial ditched the idea of working for a few months in Antarctica so she could hustle for a community Web site and newspaper called YourHub.com in Denver while riding her bicycle to work and the grocery store for a couple years (We, the editors at Indelible, are guessing that this bicycle riding was done outside of work and that it was not a continuous activity, but you will have to ask Tabitha about the truth. We certainly have found that bicycle riding and writing are not compatible simultaneous activities. For all we know, Tabitha has a really steady hand, a knack for multi-tasking and some of the most well-developed calf muscles in all of Colorado.)

Before moving, in August of 2007, an hour and a half north to Fort Collins, Colorado, where she will continue her Colorado nativity and bicycle activities and get herself a beautifully mounted MFA in poetry, once she gets her license to hunt them.

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Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. His work is in the collections of New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

His paintings, drawings and collages have been published in Otoliths, Foliate Oak, Siren, Dirt, DMQ Review, Broadsided, Eclectica Magazine, Ascent, and Blue Print Review, among many, many others.

Haber has received three National Endowment for The Arts fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants and, in 2004, The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.

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Gentry Hoffman lives in Austin, TX where, when he is not writing poetry, he likes to “paint things” on his computer. He also likes to make t-shirts.

Gentry Hoffman does not like to capitalize proper nouns but we do, so we fixed them for him.

Based on the following statement, it is clear that Gentry Hoffman has read our guidelines:

“just ask my numerous and varied lovers. Like one time, there was this girl who I met in the grocery aisle near the cheese dip--you know, the kind that stays fresh for at least six months after opening...”

Gentry Hoffman hates interpretive dance, but if you press him hard enough, he will do a lovely little number for you.

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Alyssa Kelly is a teacher, poet, and singer/songwriter. She received her Master's Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Lancaster in England, via their extension program in Ireland. Alyssa spent this past academic year living on the coast of Maine and working on a poetry manuscript. She currently lives in Massachusetts. Her hobbies include (but are not limited to): traveling to developing nations and practicing monogamy.

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Melanie Lamaga has a BA in Photography and an MFA in Creative Writing. Over the years she has pursued various jobs in order to support her art habit. She currently works as professional photographer and resides in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico.

Melanie is also a fantastic interpretive dancer. We hope that some day her path will cross with Roy Scholten’s. We have a song in mind (by Job for a Cowboy) that we know they would do justice to.

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Popular Ink author Nathan Long grew up in an antebellum cabin of chestnut logs and mud and horse hair chinking. He went to college for far too long, but learned about life hiking the Himalayas, meditating in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, living in a queer anarchist commune in Tennessee. We at Popular Ink also pride ourselves on teaching Nathan Long a thing or two. What those things are or how we taught them, we won’t go into here. But let’s just say our teachings had to do with high tensile strength balloons, sports cars and cheese dip (you would know, if you read our guidelines, what kind of dip we are talking about).

Long is a devotee of water, especially swimming naked. He is also good at drinking water and uses it well for hygiene purposes.

Long’s writing has managed to slip into journals such as Glimmer Train, Indiana Review, Story Quarterly, The Sun, and Tin House. Long contends that this is because he writes such short pieces. He is researching how to collapse the ribcage of words, to get them into even smaller spaces. He is the author of The Dog and The Last Hot day of Summer (Popular Ink).

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COREY MESLER is the owner of Burke’s Book Store, in Memphis, Tennessee--one of the country’s oldest (1875) independent bookstores.

Mesler’s work has appeared in Rattle, Pindeldyboz, Quick Fiction, American Poetry Journal, Thema, Mars Hill Review, Adirondack Review, Poet Lore and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best (Algonquin Books, 2002)

Mesler is the author of the novels Talk (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006) for which he got a lot of nice blurbs by some very famous writers, but is explicitly against the populist inclinations of Popular Ink for us to mention who these very famous nicely blurbing people are.

His latest chapbooks are Short Story and Other Short Stories (2006), The Hole in Sleep (2006), The Lita Conversation (2006) and The Agoraphobe’s Pandiculations (2006). His poem, “Sweet Annie Divine,” was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.”

Mesler says he can be found at www.coreymesler.com, but we think he is probably at home or in his book store rather than floating around the ether.

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Rebecca Prashner is a sophomore at a high school that we will not name in a place that we will not name because Rebecca Prashner is not yet 18 and we don’t want any weirdos bothering her. Rebecca Prashner is not even her real name, so don’t get any wise ideas.

Prashner only gave us information on her school and the fact that she is a sophomore. We are pretty damned impressed with this though.

We are sad to say that Prashner did not mention any experience with interpretive dance. We might also note that Prashner, as far as we know, does not make origami or listen to death-metal. We are pretty sure, however, that Prashner brushes her teeth.

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Roy Scholten is a multimedia designer, illustrator and animator from Holland. He creates educational multimedia content by day, and draws more mysterious stuff at night. Pixelgrafiek.nl showcases his black-and-white pixel drawings. (Though we are not sure why, Scholton wants us to note that NO Photoshop was used in the creation of the images at pixelgrafiek.nl.)

Scholton enjoys listening to death-metal and early nineties trash while obsessively creating origami. Scholton is especially fond of giant paper birds and has amassed a collection of over two thousand of these. While we can’t confirm this, we have heard that Scholton is choreographing some jazz moves for his paper birds and will debut them in the short film “Origami, Birds, Jazz, Early Nineties Trash, Death-metal.” The score will performed by Slayer.

Scholton is also a master in interpretive dance.

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Felino Soriano lives in California where he is employed as a behavioral assistant for developmentally disabled adults. He is also currently studying philosophy. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rogue Poetry Review, Blaze VOX, Houston Literary Review, Ygdrasil, and Blue Fifth Review, among others.

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Louise Weinberg’s art has been exhibited in over 150 shows nationally and internationally.

Weinberg, an independent curator/exhibition manager, has put together exhibitions for the Queens Museum of Art, The Hudson River Museum, Flushing Town Hall (where her latest effort was Recuerdos: Celebrating the Day of the Dead), The Dalton School, The Atrium Gallery at LaGuardia Community College and Beacon Street Gallery. She is currently the consulting curator at Art-O-Mat LIC.

For the past 20 years, Weinberg has lived and made art in Hunter Points, New York where she and her three cats are presently being priced out of the neighborhood.

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Zack Wilson was born in Skegness, England in the 1970's. Later Wilson moved to Yorkshire and then to Warwickshire. (We can only assume that he did so in order to avoid having to repeatedly write or say the word, “Skegness.” Here, you try it: Skegness, Skegness, Skegness.) Finally, Wilson settled on living in the more melodically named, Sheffield.

He has worked as a clerk, a cook, a labourer and a teacher, and is now a clerk again. (We don’t know what a clerk actually does, but we are betting that Wilson does not have dirt under his nails these days.)

Wilson’s work has appeared in the always appetizing Zygote In My Coffee, The Quiet Feather, Gold Dust Magazine and Dogmatika, among others.

The Indelible Kitchen

Welcome to Popular Ink's INDELIBLE KITCHEN.

Now get the hell out!

16.4.07

The Skewer Report on a Really Hard Life

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