HBO may be back from the premium channel dumps with its new show How to make it in America. I had never heard of it until a friend (thanks, Nick!) sent it over, solely based on the fact that some of the music featured on this site also featured in the show. Well, we just watch the first episode here and we think the show is dope. Forget the L.A. lifestyle of entourage, and the Upper East side panache of Samantha and the girls, this show is all downtown! It’s got art, it’s got grit, it’s got hustle, it’s got street, and it’s got music (with cred0. It’s a bit too early to comment on the show as we have only watched the first episode tonight, but we think this show has massive potential and appeal to not only NYCity dwellers, but to anyone who has been confronted with the decision of whether or not to chase their dreams, or to let them fall by the waste side and decide to grow up and ‘get a real job’. It’s a question we tear down and weigh everyday. We think that’s going to be the underlying, universal question of this show based on the first episode, with all the usual quarrels, violence and sex that make any television show successful. But most of all, it’s an escape for 30 minutes. And everyone can use an escape once a week. The question is whether or not you’ll want to spend yours with a few hoodlums trying to flip a quick buck in their search for their golden ticket out of Queens.

Cheers to HBO for this one. Also, check out the facebook mixtape put together by Kid Cudi, DJ Green Lantern, and Broke Mogul here. As always let us know if you agree, or you think it’s just another hipster fad that won’t make it past the first season.

Update: New York Times review can be found here.

Kevin Wilson drinks Kook-Aid. It’s that simple. His short-story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth isn’t your run-of-the-mill literary fiction where obvious lessons are learned and sentences sparkle with words you can’t pronounce. Although there are elements of these planted sporadically, they’re not overbearing and obvious. Mr. Wilson deftly places characters in quirky situations where you are left with the choice to ‘hop on board’ and explore from the first sentence, or head back to the bookstore, get back in line and wait for the $13.99 refund. If you do choose to hang on and follow the characters’ plight in these zany and unfamiliar situations, you’ll be rewarded with an author whose talent lies in scrutinizing the uncertainty that beds itself in the dark depths of the tortured souls inhabiting his world.

“Grand Stand-in” – an older woman rents herself out to families as a grandmother so they don’t have to confront their children with the news of a passing family member.

“Blowing Up on the Spot” – a scrabble factory worker bides his days by searching for the letter Q amongst the factories millions of alphabet tiles. It’s a story of young love and spontaneous combustion!

“The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys” – An experimental story written in 2nd PPOV. Story unfolds through diary-like entries about ‘things’ that trigger memories of a dead sister.

“Birds in the House” – Four brothers from a broken family gather to do battle over their inheritance. The deceased patriarch left specific instructions on what/how game is to be played. Hint: it involves Origami birds, an oak table, and four giant fans.

“Mortal Kombat” – Two high school nerds (boys) end up hooking up while waiting for the video game Mortal Kombat to be released. Their friendship is as explosive, dynamic, and dangerous as the game itself.

“Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” – Recent college grads gather in the backyard of one of their parents’ house and begin digging a tunnel system that spreads under the city in an attempt to avoid the ‘real-world’.

“The Shooting Man” – After a week of badgering, a guy convinces his girlfriend to watch a man shoot himself in the face at a carnival show. The effect and consequences differ from what he had hoped.

“ The Choir Director Affair (the baby’s teeth)” – The father of a baby born with a perfect row of pearly whites is having an affair with a private school girls’ choir director. Story told in 2nd PPOV where you are the father’s friend and alibi, only to be confronted by the baby’s mother about the father’s whereabouts.

“Go, Fight, Win” – A cheerleader obsessed with building model-cars befriends a younger, troubled boy living across the street. Things turn ‘explosive’ as they discover each other.

“The Museum of Whatnot” – A post-grad finds work as a museum curator where junk is the artistic commodity of choice.

‘Worst-Case Scenario” – A man makes a living evaluating the worst possible scenarios for anyone willing to pay. A discovery happens when providing his findings to a client and the man has a change of heart.

People who are ‘between places’ in their lives populate the stories in this collection. No one person is the same, and most (except the last story) of the situations are doomed from the get-go. But that shouldn’t stop you from reading. Somehow, Mr. Wilson manages to pump breath-after-breath out of these troubled characters that suffocate under the weight of day-to-day living. Not only does he give them hope that something better is just around the next turn, but he manages to reach through the page and shake our heads with a ferocity that matches his prose.

This was another one of my summer anthems. And befitting of the title, I wrote a little poem. Enjoy!

Independence Day

It’s the 4^th of July and you’re Naked.
Your clothes, a cotton puddle, aimlessly float
Like an oil slick in the shallow creek bed at your knotty feet.
Children stop digging and building. Their heads snap and hot dogs
Drop. They look up. Your ankles, wide and firm, break the water and rise
Up like a Lousiana Cypress. Dance Bitch, Dance, a little one calls out from
Behind a sand castle. Listen Bitch, his buddy spooning a red shovel says, when
Billy tells you to dance, you do it.
You’re placid and pay no mind to the little ones. You’re eyeing the charred
Weiners and swollen buns littered across the shore. Your belly rumbles
And you fart. Billy and his buddy light M-80’s and toss them at your
Feet. You dance and scream. And when I walk up to grab your
Hand, I’m Reassured everything will be alright because
I can taste the Prozac on your breath.

Just thought I’d share a bit about what I’m reading. Voices from Chernobyl is a first-person account, as told through translated interviews, with survivors 10 years after the incident. I am into it and can only say that it’s both heartbreaking and inspiring: heartbreaking because of the insurmountable suffering these people have gone through, and inspiring because the strength and resolve each displays by not only sharing their story, but essentially reliving it day in and day out.  The writing is smooth and restrained, almost to the point of a Carver-ish minimalism. In this case, it works perfectly because the narrative is at the forefront, rather than the author’s style. I would definitely recommend this book.

Denis Johnson is one of my favorite writers. His book Jesus’ Son is at the top of my ‘everyone must read’ list. No, no, no it’s not a “let me be a witness to you and help you find Jesus” kind of book. Rather it’s the opposite. The stories that comprise this book center around the no-formal-named protagonist. The narrator only clues us in by calling him Fuckhead. The book is Fuckhead’s journey through the dark, deep, often unemotional, pits of earth. Through these stories of despair, drug addiction, abortion, etc, Fuckhead rarely shows emotion towards the world around him, yet—a compliment to Johnson’s mastery—we somehow come to care and empathize with this numbed man who is really just trying to find his lot on this earth.If you haven’t yet run into any of Johnson’s work, I recommend starting with Jesus’ Son and moving on to the 2007 National Book Award winner Tree of Smoke. I’ve yet to read Nobody Move, so if you have, drop a comment and let me know what you think.

Below is from The New Yorkers fiction podcast. Tobias Wolff, and amazing writer himself (his Bullet in the Brain story is a must read), gives Emergency by DJ the radio reading it deserves. Take a listen.

Emergency by Denis Johnson as read by Tobias Wolff