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is dedicated to the enjoyment of audio and visual stimuli. Please visit our archives where we have uncovered the true importance of nearly everything. Should you want to reach us, e-mail alex dot carnevale at gmail dot com, but don't tell the spam robots. Consider contacting us if you wish to use This Recording in your classroom or club setting. We have given several talks at local Rotarys that we feel went really well.

Pretty used to being with Gwyneth

Regrets that her mother did not smoke

Frank in all directions

Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais

Simply cannot go back to them

Roll your eyes at Samuel Beckett

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion

Metaphors with eyes

Life of Mary MacLane

Circle what it is you want

Not really talking about women, just Diane

Felicity's disguise

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Entries in anne frank (3)

Friday
Nov082013

In Which We Lift Our Feet Above The Ground

by Peter Max

His Trip To Greece

by WENDY ARAND

He is loudly asking a baby, Where do I know you from? and I am picking grass from green and throwing it in the air, like nothing is going on. I suppose I am trying to ignore all of the yelling at the baby, much as the mother of the baby is doing. He has looked at a lot of flashcards, pictures of cars, dinosaurs, closets.

Though I know that babies look alike, I’m not insane, and don’t know why he’s screaming at this baby. Come on, I say, let’s go. He’s playing on the swings, swinging higher and higher. I sit down on a bench and read The Diary of Anne Frank. I am just to the part where she’s almost getting caught, later I will learn there’s plenty of such parts.  
    
I cannot tell if he can hear me as I write this, and try to tell what happened; a small fly buzzes past my ear, and reminds me he cannot hear loud, distinct sounds, because I was ill during pregnancy. For now, I think of the time when he was just a baby. I was bottle feeding him in a eerily similar-looking park, and he was refusing to cooperate. That was then, the birds were out, pecking and bobbing around for seeds, seeds, seeds.    

A crowd of children tosses triscuits into the catfish pond.  

I think he is among them; the white mixing with orange, his color. It is twenty seconds before I realize what I mean. The space of twenty seconds holds an Indian woman selling arm-bands for charity while I take a can of vegetable soup from a nearby box, for it is best to steal from those with very little, because then they miss it.  
        
He is dancing in front of paintings that tilt to the sky. I squeeze my eyes together. Cubist frames, another movement. And as everything appears to be slowly accumulating into a finite collection of people and moments that could wash clean if it could stop raining, snow would be fine instead, he punches me in the elbow. Why didn’t you name me Tyson, Mom, he is saying, I am wondering if I am also beginning to suffer from hearing loss. I give him The Diary of Anne Frank to read.  It is his second book of that length and he finishes it that night, under the covers, by flashlight, as I see the light through the door of his room, which used to be a closet.
    
Do you want to hear a story about grandma? I say. We, my mother, blond-tressed and conclusive, and I, seated on a stone couch in a graveyard, wait for the sun to come up, so that the flowers can be laid down. My brother Nic is telling us about his trip to Greece. I say to my mother, we should have brought sandwiches. She doesn’t respond, though a sandwich might reduce the gloom of us going to my father’s grave on an annual basis.  

by Peter Max
I was alive for my father’s funeral. I was seven, and didn’t have a baby then, and my baby wasn’t screaming at a baby in a park built by Poles. Witlessly, this has become another story about my mother. At the funeral, with all its dirges and strange potato chips set out in bowls by Nic and my mother, as if there was anything at all in that. The arrangements were generous, I thought of nice moments I’d had with him, my father, whose name was also Nic. An earring pierced through cartilage, a way of saying ‘hey’ and leaving it at that, and a wide open mouth like my son’s, who conveniently says, can I bounce on that moonwalk?
              
Bright waded sun. Though there is a little sign that dissuades someone of his height from bouncing too high and also at all, I tell the man running it, it’s OK.  I’m a child psychologist. He needs to learn to fly so he can learn how to walk. The authority is understood. Learning, learning. He bounces, up on the waxen moonwalk. A geriatric patient wanders up and sees him bouncing.  Something gives then, my son bounces off and hits his head on something hard. He is bleeding, and the geriatric patient has noticed. A bruise, he said, as I rushed to aid. I pick him up and dust him off.

How’s your head, I say, he doesn’t say anything, the child discovering he is not an adult. I write this down.

The geriatric patient, he himself perhaps a nameless veteran, if not of war, then of other complicated things. Nothing a band-aid won’t fix, the geriatric patient says. My son starts lightly punching the geriatric patient in the ribs. The security guard holds him back, then, later, in the paneled office, gives him a band-aid.
                                
At home we talk about anger.  

In the park on the following Saturday, shaggy ladies walk miniature dogs, he says, you could step on those dogs and probably snap spines, and with my eyes I see tantrums for which I will have no antidote. It seems he is not that old after all.  I wonder if I am raising the Fourth Reich, and, of course, I wonder about the father specifically, and what genetic role he might have played, because I don’t know who he is. I am not looking for the father, though I know many who are. I have to cope with the son.  
                
In the park, artists sketch portraits of what the next Saturday will be like. Now he is reading and trying to summarize chapter twelve of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It’s important, I told him, to be able to summarize it all succinctly, even though I’m glad he’s reading the book when he’s unable to fully understand it, like my mother giving me Schindler’s List as a birthday present. 

Still on that day we eat strategically, and feed the rest to the grass. The chapter is called “Transformer.” I ask him to read his favorite part to me. He says, Boom!  Boom! The boy dreams of destroying the world. You know? he says. You bet, I say.  
    
At the same time next afternoon, I am flipping through the summer camp section of the Times. This one looks nice, I say, and peaceful. It is somewhere in Maine on a river. There is, presumably, a girl’s camp across the lake and dances. But he doesn’t have that preconception. It’s something that’s been in my head, but not in his. Not like in Heart of Darkness (which he reads at eight), when Conrad said that our minds are capable of anything because everything is in the mind, all the past as well as all the future.
        
He wanders off, around, maybe to the swings. I try and think of things for him to read that will make him realize he is only one element in a world of too many, but I can’t think of a book that isn’t either about him — the male psyche, or the end of the world, neither of which I think he needs to learn anything about. I go down to the bookstore which is about a block away, and come back with a calculus textbook.

by Peter Max

I find him sifting through a sandbox with children much younger than him. He is removed from the scene, and his glassy eyes and ghostlike face tell me he’s not there at all. He has no presence, he’s not individuated, and he doesn’t know how to type.

You don’t know how to type, I say, so we go home and I teach him on my old typewriter, because his fingers, greasy with onions and bartering, would harm my computer. He spends most of the time in his room but in two weeks he has learned the name of every U.S. congressman. So who’s the surgeon general? I ask. He turns, his back, on me.  

I take him to the market that’s one exit off the dirt highway, sweeten his voice with the Italian men my father always seemed to be around, worried he will catch colds, rocking back in birthday chairs. My hip is not faring well this year, and I was in the hospital at odd times, for days. Unable to sleep on my side, I spent nights without rest trying to get the slightest hint of how he will treat women.
    
With a fortnight of bartending courses under my belt, I give him a polo shirt for warmth and tell him I decided we’re leaving tomorrow, for the day. The country air feels better, he tells me, and the rented car seats, new with leather, are good for him as well. He is not, I hope, thinking anything, anything about the end of the world, anything bad about me. It’s crushing, sure, I sleep with it when I can, but during no other important time is it so close to me. Waking up in a bread and breakfast, I watch him sleep. Though television has ruined a variety of child-related moments for me, his breath echoes mine, though he is in a dream life and I am awake.  
    
As that distinction blurs, he stirs, still capable of bundling, and crawls onto me. I ask him, how was your dream? He tells me that he feels the books he’s reading are influencing his dreams. I know, I say. I say I know. And years pass.

I tell him about Borges’ nightmares in which, each dire sleep, he found himself in a labyrinth. Then I’m glad I wasn’t in something I couldn’t get out of, he says.  I pass him a Times crossword puzzle I can’t finish, I pick up a toothbrush, I’ve no intention of brushing my teeth, I grit my eyes together and pound my head against the wall. Is everything all right? he asks.

I don’t hear him. I don’t hear a thing. Within my head, the words merge together. So wise, they say. For christ’s sake, if nothing else, he’s wise.

Wendy Arand is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. This is her first appearance in these pages.

Paintings by Peter Max. 

"Charades" - The Shivers (mp3)

"Crash This Train" - Joshua James (mp3)

by Peter Max

Friday
Aug172012

In Which We Leave The Grey Room

Response System

by DAYNA EVANS

When I was in third grade and had just moved to America from England, I used to sit by this big brick wall every day at lunch and read. I didn't have any friends because all the kids thought my accent was weird, so I took solace in sitting by that wall and reading for an hour. There were many times that kids would come up to me and taunt me with "Say something, let's hear your voice, say something" and that scarred me and made me really shy. Maybe part of the reason I can't remember a lot about what I read or what I favored in books when I was little is because I associate it with a really awful time in my life when I was constantly picked on by American children.

I got over being shy, but I never dropped the habit of reading books. In a way, I think it was the books that helped me not be shy. Original, I know. I saw in them characters who were smart, interesting, weird, and somewhat manic like me, and I knew that I could take charge of my life like they had. It’s probably not surprising that I also wanted to be an actress for several years. “Hey, change yourself. Just pretend.” My experience with reading as a shy, heavily freckled and portly child was the same as when someone sees those Thor movies or The Hulk and immediately gets P90x delivered to their homes. I would read Matilda or The Secret Garden or A Wrinkle In Time and they were my P90X. I didn’t have to be a shy weird girl with a British accent anymore. There were people in this world for me and I could just pretend to be them. And if I couldn’t, there would be a Miss Honey to help me through.

Weirdly enough, I did sort of have a Miss Honey when I was in third grade. I had this teacher named Miss Rose (all third grade teachers had names taken from an Anthropologie catalog) who really took a liking to me because I knew what the word “vicissitudes” meant. I don’t know how I knew it, but it was pretty symbolic that of all words above my age bracket that I could know, it was one that represented an unfortunate change in circumstance, exactly what I saw as my falling out of favor with children my age once I moved from the UK to America. Anyway, Miss Rose tried to give me free therapy when she should have been teaching me cursive, and I shunned her much as I did my real therapist. All I needed to get me by was a dose of truth from an empowered girl character between the pages of a library book. And lucky for me, I’d found my soulmate.

by sandro castelli

Anne Frank and I had a lot in common. We had both been exiled, felt weird, and were highly perceptive while also being dumb and a little too big for our britches. She understood what I was going through, even as far as not knowing about sexuality, which I didn’t formally discover until my sophomore year in college. Her diary was my greatest inspiration to begin writing, and I can’t erase this thought from my mind fast enough, but basically as a child I thought, “Well, if that girl wrote and got famous off of it, so should I.” Yeah, I know. Now you have to deal with it, too.

In England in third grade, you study the Holocaust because the British don’t make allowances for sensitivity. We also would memorialize May Day every year by dressing up in traditional WWII garb, standing on chairs in a line outside of my primary school, and singing “You Are My Sunshine” to the tilt. The British treat their children like miniature adults with fully formed emotional response systems. When we learned about the Holocaust, I started naming my journals. I tried for “Missy” but thought that sounded too similar to “Kitty,” Anne Frank’s diary, so I changed it to “Kat.” I was a genius.

After moving to America and realizing that not only had no one in my age group heard of Anne Frank, they did not know about the Holocaust (I grew up in a very Irish/Italian neighborhood), I was distraught. But also secretly pleased. Anne Frank represented the “vicissitudes” of my cultural collateral. I not only knew big words, I knew big ideas, and my accent could no longer hold me back.

Well, it turns out it could. I continued to be mocked and disliked, especially because I grew boobs and got my period at ten, making me a verifiable leper. In times of trouble, I turned to Anne (who overcame the largest adversity I could imagine) and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, who despite her awful brattiness, actually sort of healed people. I used their successes as not only an example of what my successes should be like, but I think I started to believe that I’d also done those things. Like all horribly insecure and self-aware children, I acted smarter, more together, and more aloof than I really was, but it got me through years of turmoil with the underlings of the American school system. Unfortunately, I still haven’t grown out of it.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Breaking Bad. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Enjoy The Perils Of A Literary Childhood At Your Leisure

Elena Schilder and The Babysitter's Club

Lily Goodspeed and The Golden Compass

Helen Schumacher and Little House on the Prairie

Jane Hu and Walk Two Moons

Kara VanderBijl and A Wrinkle In Time

Hafsa Arain and Harry Potter

Lucy Morris and Bruno and Boots

Dayna Evans and The Diary of Anne Frank

 

Friday
Aug142009

In Which The Summer Wind Came Blowin' In From Across The Sea

Summer Here Kids

by MOLLY LAMBERT

What happened to Summer? Not that betch who dumped Joseph Gordon Levitt and made him enroll in fictional military utopian school to become Cobra Commander. I mean the actual season. Where did it go? Was it not so long ago I first broke out my SPF 10000 moonscreen (4 gingers, you couldn't understand) and tiki umbrella?

Is it really so soon that I feel the wispy cold leaves of autumn a rap rap rapping at my cab cab cabinet. Were it not for my birthday and the impending return of Mad Men I would dread the arrival of September. Vestigial dread of high school starting back up.

Where were the summer jams? Instead all we got was the death of the eighties, as personified by Michael Jackson and John Hughes. Where is the justice? Who'll stop the rain? How about four year old Zachary Clouter of Ipswich, Suffolk? 

Yes this genius found a potato that looks like a goddamn duck. How fucking cute is that. Would that we could all go back to the days when we reveled in the simple pleasures, pleasures like finding potatoes that look like ducks, instead of focusing on the inevitable day of reckoning when ducks and potatoes alike will be slaughtered and roasted and sold for their delicious hides. 

Which one is which? Will a potato duck float? Or maybe you've been wasting your life looking for duck shaped potatoes when you should have been out winning Ernest Hemingway lookalike competitions. 

It's enough to make a person develop courtship disorder. In a rare bit of good news, Yahw-h has chosen to fulfill all of Alex's fantasies with the news that Disney has acquired screen rights to a new rendition of The Diary of Anne Frank, to be written and helmed by David Mamet. I can't wait to hear what Anne sounds like with Mamet's wordistry. "Fuck! I'm stuck in the motherfucking attic! Fuck those fucking nazi cunts."

                          and I pray, oh my god do I pray

Fall is a good season, perhaps the best season, even in Los Angeles. But it is a contemplative season. When you feel the need to pull on sweaters and listen to Red House Painters or Smog or some other band that gives you feelingz.

But I'm not done with you yet, summer. I wanna body surf on a rainbow.  I want to feed dolphins with that gap toothed betch from True Blood. I am but a dreamer. I have so many dreams, world. Why won't you let me dream them. I just want to train elephants.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here. She twitters here.

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"Turn Up The Dial" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3) highly recommended

"Ambulance" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)

"Cream Dream" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)