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There’s something about being in a family home that, when in a point of closure or major transition, forces you to get through by no other means than disassociation. The virtue and simple peace of a dinner party in Los Angeles – mothers, aunts, siblings, aprons worn, wine glasses and iced tea passed out, Southwestern…

6:50pm, 20 miles from Malibu, California, high above the water – the scene of the perfect American sunset. I’m walking up a steep winding cement road with my friend in Topanga Canyon, right around the summit of Tuna Canyon Road. You can see the ocean distantly past the neatly shrubby, deeply sloped mountains, blending seamlessly…

Loving too hard always felt like more of a liability than a point of beautiful character. She’s a freelance stylist who lives off of the Myrtle Broadway J and M stop. She runs clothing racks to executives with walkie talkies and places lunch orders on the phone. When she is asked to, she consults succinctly…

Like many American cis femme girls, I was pretty young when I fantasized about the idea of romantic partnership. “True love”, “husband”, “king”, “fairytale ending”, were all highly elusive terms and things to strive for as a central goal of happiness and purpose in our lives. You may say we live in a modern world…

A major facet of modern day optimism sprouts from this idea that if you’ve experienced a certain number of bad events in your life – heartbreak, death, famine, injury, poverty, war – that the universe will sometimes repay you in a form of positive karmic retribution. In other words, you will spend equal amounts of…

I remember when I first read the story about Frida Kahlo’s bus accident. When she was 18 years old, the bus she was riding in got hit by a trolley car, resulting in a number of crippling injuries. Internal organs, her spinal column, her bones – all affected. Her convalescence ultimately resulted in discovering her…

I recently took the stage at Smalls Jazz Club this past weekend – a hallmark of jazz tradition, rites of musical passage and cutting teeth through jam sessions, a jazz club that emerges down a skinny tunnel of stairs into a tightly packed, dimly lit basement club in the heart of the West Village. Me,…

I took AP Psychology in high school. I didn’t retain an incredible amount of info from that class due to my constant sleep deprivation and perpetual stress at the age of 17, although I was fascinated by the subject more than any other class I took. One of the things I do remember was this…

“Different Trains”  is a Steve Reich recording I essentially discovered by accident. When I first heard it, it made a severe, unsettling impression on me. I recognized polyphonic strings playing paradiddle variations, a rhythmic pattern derived from drummers, while the string voices move in contrasting motion pitch-wise. It mimicked a train’s haphazard chugging, much like…