If someone you love dies, there will be nothing more tenderly, heartbreakingly intimate than their oldest pair of sneakers. Shoes that dashed them through rainstorms, won and lost games, bounced with eager impatience, knotted stubborn in airport security lines. They have been stretched and pounded into a shape no manufacturer ever envisioned. They smell of sweat and earth and freedom.
The project is so daft it is touching: an attempt at nothing less than a comprehensive visual catalog of the entire material culture and socio-familial life of the Vietnamese as they were then, an attempt initiated by a young man in the colonizing machinery meant to drag the Vietnamese into a Western conception of modernity.
Some people (though not many) still read the recommendations and restaurant guides that Sauce and Feast put out. And it may be hard to come by in this city, but in the cracks of the journalism industry, readers can still find restaurant criticism… somewhere.
To new generations, the secrecy of the past is often baffling. A secret is a woman laced so tightly into her velvet gown that she cannot breathe or speak. We show up in jeans. Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison”: they isolate the keeper of the secret, require lies, breed distrust, and become the unwanted inheritance of a generation bewildered by the need to keep them.
George Foreman was not such a political naïf as he led people to think. He was castigated and ostracized by many Blacks in Houston. But he was on the road to becoming heavyweight champion of the world. He had a name, and even if his skills were not polished. He was big, strong, with a hard punch, and a willingness to train and follow his trainers’ instructions. What were his Black critics, those loudmouthed, street losers he left behind, going to be? Nobody was buying what they were selling. What Foreman learned early on was this: do not try to sell unhappiness. People are already more unhappy than you think.
I had known her parents, and now all four of our parents were in their graves, and we were parents of grown children. We lived in the same metropolitan area. Why would it not be pleasant to sit together and imagine the futures that remained in each of our separate lives?
The proliferation of pickleball has clashed with its racquet elder, tennis. The contrast between the two can be felt from the global to the local, where Facebook rants, city council meetings, and passionate letters to the editor serve as sites of tension.
No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias.
Crises come in specific forms, which might determine needs for an apocalypse house. Will you need a well or stream, and seclusion? Or a bus to a workplace and mutual aid groups? How comfortable do you hope to be? What will you do for leisure?
As St. Louis is freezing, Los Angeles is burning. While a fake image of a burning Hollywood Sign circulates on social media, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office is trying to debunk a local hoax on Facebook that says there is a serial killer in Hillsboro. The killer, the post warns, “goes around knocking on peoples’ [sic] doors claiming to be homeless & he attacks you after you let him in. He’s ruthless and very dangerous.” The sheriff says not to share the post; people do anyway.