This is too amazing to mar with any kind of comment, so I will just get out of the way: “KEITH RICHARDS has reignited a row with MICK JAGGER — by claiming the singer has a tiny WILLY. The ROLLING STONES pair fell out in 2005 when the guitarist first said Sir Mick had a ‘small c**k’. Keith, 66, was forced to publicly apologise. Now he says Sir Mick’s ex MARIANNE FAITHFULL ‘had no fun with Mick’s tiny todger’.”

Here’s another babies die alone in hot cars story, from the New Times chain, regarding which, we are very sorry to bring this topic up. But this supposedly heart-wrenching story, unlike the infamous Story That We Try Not To Mention, in which we learn about how people actually do forget about their babies in cars, is instead about a guy who knew very well that his baby was in a car and, like, went out to check on her and crack the window and then spent a couple hours hanging out with his buddies in the air conditioning at work. So basically you can cool it on the six pages of frothy emotional appeal and talk of “inconsistent laws”-the dude left his kid in a car for a couple of hours and the kid died and he went to jail. That seems unsurprising.

Happy First Balloon Boy Anniversary, everyone! Do stop believing.

The Pixies in Chile: The Best Videos

I personally slept in an extra 33 minutes yesterday, one minute in observance of each Chilean miner, but everyone pays tribute in his own meaningful way, like the Pixies’ 33-song show in Santiago the other night. Which, you know: also? An awesome, awesome show. Here’s the best four videos we can find from their last few dates in South America.

Actually this is very helpful to those of us who know nothin’ about sports. Now I get it why those cheeseheads sports fans are so angry. Also now I understand how they conduct investigations at the NFL-they hang you upside down I guess, like in Ye Olden Tymes. Also something about how the male gaze is actually a laser.

by Jaime Green

When I was a freshman in college, a friend of mine wrote a play for her senior thesis, a play about, I think, Samuel Coleridge and his sister and another poet. (I’m not looking it up because let’s see what I remember from those frighteningly many years ago.) Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were also characters. (This friend is now a successful playwright, so well done there.) There was a lot about writing, and a little about an asthma attack, and also, at one point, Gertrude said to Alice, or Alice said to Gertrude, “Salt makes things taste more like themselves.”

I realize now that this was not the first time that idea was put together, but it was the first time I’d heard it, and my eighteen-year-old mind was, if not blown, then struck pretty strongly. I still think of it often. Not even so much in context of salting things, although I do that pretty often, and often intone that the secret to making vegetables delicious is salt, oil and heat (Brussels sprout season is coming so soon!), but more in terms of the fruits and vegetables at the farmers market, and the broader idea of when foods taste more like themselves.

(I think I even invoked this back in my past life, you know, in 2008, when I spent as much time doing my work as defending it, dramaturgs being, to people who know what they are, much maligned. Evil agents of theatres that want to dilute plays until they are spark-less and sucky, turning them into what Artistic Directors think their audiences can stomach rather than what the playwrights want them to be. But all I was trying to do was help playwrights write the best version of their play. And I think I did, sometimes. But maybe it was all about vegetables. Like a successful play tastes more like itself.)

I think, before I started being like, holy shit this green pepper tastes like a green pepper!, I’d encountered this idea by way of hearing people talk about grass-fed, pasture-raised, generally happy chicken. It might’ve been in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, because why not give that book yet more credit, where Michael Pollan helps slaughter a chicken, and then eats it, and then is like, holy shit this chicken tastes like chicken! (It’s something like that, I think.) We’ve spent all our lives thinking we know what chicken and green peppers taste like (in both cases sort of bland and inoffensive, bordering on flavorless), but then we meet a chicken that’s eaten what chickens are supposed to eat, or a green pepper that hasn’t been on a truck for a week, and we’re like, holy shit, I had no idea.

But so I’d heard and/or read that grass-fed chicken tastes like chicken, like something. More powerfully like itself. And I bought some greenmarket apples and not only were there more options than supertart Granny Smith, mushy Golden Delicious, or gross Red Delicious that makes my tongue feel all dry (does that happen to anyone else?) but these apples had all sorts of flavors! Flavor profiles, you could even say, assuming that phrase refers to the sorts of complex flavors we’re told can be found in wine, cheese, coffee and things like that. (I bought a bottle of wine the other day, and the wine store guy kept trying to translate my “I like Pinot Grigio and hate Chardonnay” into preferences of tropical vs. stone fruit, issues of richness and fullness and finish and I was like, dude, I have no idea, I just have the DVD of Bright Young Things to get home to, and let’s keep this around ten bucks.) But back to apples. It was like, Oh! So this is what apples taste like!

(There is the sad flip-side of this, around January when there’s nothing left at the farmers market other than apples-still delicious, if tiresome-onions and potatoes, and I get a bunch of overpriced kale from Whole Foods, or some broccoli from the supermarket by me, and it’s like, bleh, this tastes like nothing. I’ve been gorging on vegetables this summer, as if that can somehow stave the winter off.)

After, what, three years, I consider myself an old hand at this greenmarket thing. The produce tastes better, is fresher, I say “hey” to the farmers and most of the time it’s cheaper. I only rarely, any more, try new vegetables. There are rarely any more any new vegetables to try. I got pretty excited this summer about, though I’d seen them summers before, purple carrots (taste mostly like regular carrots, are prettier), and yellow-white and purple bell peppers. (The purple ones were a little bitter, the yellow-white ones looked ghosty and turned orange as they went overripe.)

I’d also seen grapes before, but hadn’t bought them before this year. They show up in late summer, in crates with cardboard “NO SELF-SERVE” signs, with little baskets of samples and a cloud of hovering bees. I’d even tasted grapes from the sample baskets, and loved them, I’m sure, but this year for the first time I’ve been buying grapes. Taking grapes home and then running to whomever’s around saying, “Oh my God, you have to try this,” and then expectantly watching their face for the moment the grape bursts open in their mouth, and the taste hits them. I don’t expect anyone to be as excited as I am, though that would be nice, but I worried that some of the wows were for my benefit.

But how can you not be wowed? I’m sure they, like me, especially in the case of my sister, where I know for sure, have grown up on supermarket grapes. A little sweet and refreshing, but miles away from the sweet smack of grape juice. Maybe we’ve wondered at this, but no more seriously than we wondered about the distance between grapes and grape candy (or Dimetapp), not much more than we faced the Slurpee machine and wondered where actual raspberries came in blue.

Maybe, a little older, we wondered about the distance between the grapes we’ve known and the taste of wine. Could fermentation be doing all the work, coaxing complexities out of these innocuous things we’ve picked from fruit salads our whole lives? Maybe we didn’t wonder about this. I’m not sure I ever did, but I should have.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up in wine country, have maybe never seen grapes on the vine. My grandfather fed me carrots straight from the garden, and I remember how sweet they were, but I never got the chance with grapes. (I think the only raspberries I ever ate as a kid were from his backyard, but almost nothing meets that standard now.)

But so now, this year, I have been buying New York State grapes, tiny little grapes with names like Jupiter and Mars. They obviously come in varieties beyond “green” and “red.” They come in red and deep black-purple, and burst tart and almost cloyingly sweet at once, with that complexity of flavor that is what the guy at the wine store was probably talking about.

And my first thought, the thought I’m trying to spark for all the friends whose faces I’m shoving these into, is a revelation: Oh my God. This is what a grape really tastes like!

And at first it’s thrilling-grape juice finally makes sense-and it’s delicious and this long-lost secret is back, and in my fridge, and I’m so excited to have these in my city, to savor the month or two of their season.. But then I start to wonder, where have these grapes been my whole life? Why are they selling the flavorless grapes, telling us that those are what grapes are? (Something something, simulacrum. Something something, The Matrix.) I can’t help feeling like I’ve been had.

Previously: Radish Chips
Asparagus is Here!
The Farmers Market in Winter

Jaime Green hopes you’re even half as excited about Brussels sprouts as she is.

“In retrospect, perhaps we should have made the bear do something more obvious like a dance at the bus-stop to ensure that consumers knew that this was a humorous stunt. We sincerely apologize for any concerns raised and inconvenience caused.”
-Philips Electronics was forced to abandon a viral marketing campaign in which a man dressed in a bear suit was set to appear at various locations in Singapore. After the bear’s initial appearance at a bus stop, “the Singapore Zoo dispatched a team armed with a tranquillizer gun. Three members of the Animal Concerns Research and Education Society also helped to scour the area…”

by Awl Staff

Tess Lynch is a writer in Los Angeles. Unlike most writers of fiction and nonfiction, she also sometimes falls into acting-reasonable, given her location. This is obviously a weird and alien situation to most writers. So we wanted to talk to her about the cross-pollination of those two creative fields. For performers, is writing different? And is acting just like writing, but with more immediate shame?

The Awl: Some people get nervous when they see that people have official-sounding things like “actress” in their bios! Why is that, and also, what does “actress” mean?

Tess Lynch: I’ll have to defer to my stage presence, Cathy Tarmack. CATHY: Well, you know, I got “the bug” when I was around 14, while I was in the accelerated program in my hometown gifted children’s program, RACE. From there, I got my first role as the youngest female senator in the Lifetime movie, “What Cost Political Fame?”

The Awl: Oh, indeed.

Tess Lynch: Ha. Okay. Well, I act commercially and mostly do shorts. It actually started because I’ve always had pretty bad stage fright, and I wanted to try to kind of overcome that.

The Awl: So it was an assertiveness program, really.

Tess Lynch: It was part of my Russell Simmons “DO YOU” renaissance.

The Awl: Fantastic motivation.

Tess Lynch: I’ve always wanted to be a writer but I’m a very invested audience member, and I love to play around. I wouldn’t say that I ever thought, “Hey, I’d love to be an Oscar-winning actress.” It was more, “I would love to challenge myself to not be a wuss who stutters and gets flop-sweat.” I got a Crest commercial this year and it actually allowed me to spend more time writing and doing shorts, so it kind of became something that I felt I could try to master, as much as I think I’m capable of mastering it. Which is not to a very great extent.

The Awl: Ha! For some reason writer is often considered the opposite of actor. Mostly we file that under sexism though, yes?

Tess Lynch: There’s definitely some of that. It’s also an exercise in objectivism/subjectivism. When you’re auditioning, and you’re nailing it, you’re completely “present” and there’s no internal narrative. You’re just existing. When you’re writing, and even when you’re doing something you think you might write about later, you’re dictating.

The Awl: Oof. Can’t imagine.

Tess Lynch: “Tess walks into the room and slates her name. She turns to show her profiles, and when that happens she never books the job because her nose is crooked. She grabs a box of maxi-pads and thinks about it.” It doesn’t work too great, in the room. I’m trying to master the switch, to be able to turn it off and on.

The Awl: Very sorry about your nose.

Tess Lynch: Me too, kid. But you know, that’s the thing: I think it’s kind of nice to be able to try to sell the nose, and when nosebody’s buying, I can at least think about my nose and maybe write something about the nose of every man.

The Awl: So your careers crosspollinate! You have a tendency to write funny fictions. I don’t like funny things because I don’t find them funny but I like reading yours.

Tess Lynch: Thank you! I hate to laugh, but I just did! I am very surprised that people enjoy the fictional conversations I write. I am also the only person in Los Angeles who doesn’t have a spec script. And Willem Dafoe never got back to me about staging my Fake Dinner Parties.

The Awl: What a jerk.

Tess Lynch: The muscle that dare not speak its name.

The Awl: Thanks, I’d forgotten about that.

Tess Lynch: His parts are the least private, and the most.

The Awl: The way that editorial and creative are the least important, and the most, ©DON DRAPER. So I really only have one question, and that is: what is the ideal outcome for you? By which I mean: your dream of adulthood.

Tess Lynch: Well, that’s a good question. When I was a kid I dreamed of writing a book, so I could go into a Barnes and Noble and stare at it. When I graduated from college and found that everyone was like, “Really too bad you missed the time when print was thriving! How about PR?” I felt kind of discouraged.

The Awl: I can see that.

Tess Lynch: But now I guess I’d say that my dream of adulthood is to be part of an interesting new culture of writers who are resourceful enough to figure out how to have a voice in a medium that’s changing so drastically, one that we’re struggling to form. It’s exciting and scary to think that we don’t know what a writer’s career will look like: it could be wonderful, you know? Or horrible. I’d like to think that there will be a community that will take everything good about writing for the internet and incorporate some of the things we miss from traditional print media.

The Awl: That’s crazy. You’re such a freak.

Tess Lynch: I know, I’m so slimy with optimism. It’s gross.

The Awl: And yet I find your optimism charming and healthy!

Tess Lynch: That’s what I’d like, though, to be a part of that group of people. I mean, it’s kind of a weird time to be a young adult, but it’s also interesting to think that the people whose blogs I read might be the ones who build a new art form. In sum: I would like those people to offer me money to write silly fictional conversations, and with that money I would like to buy a house made of cashmere.

***

“The Smartest Thing She Ever Said” is a Tumblr based digital storytelling art project featuring four teams of two-one artist and one story editor-between now and the end of the year. For three weeks each, the teams were asked to interpret the phrase, “The Smartest Thing She’s Ever Said.” The current team features photographer Laura Taylor and writer Tess Lynch with support from project curator Alexis Hyde. ArtSheSaid.com and its artists are entirely supported by Ann Taylor in collaboration with Flavorpill.

See the story unfold HERE.

What is your favorite Belle & Sebastian song? Is it “Lazy Line Painter Jane?” If it is, I couldn’t argue with you. (Although I could also not argue with you if you said “The Boy With the Arab Strap” or “This is Just a Modern Rock Song.”) In any case, if you’re not already like, “Shut up, dork,” and about to throw in your tape of Katrina and the Waves, you will be happy to watch this performance of “Lazy Line Painter Jane” with the singer Jenny Lewis singing Monica Queen’s part that was just recorded in Los Angeles. Hooray!

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

This week, two new poems from Angelo Nikolopoulos.

GOING GARBO

In the talkies
I’m more holistic than duplicitous:

Garbo talks, Garbo laughs,
Garbo works in a jam factory-

all the houses look alike
on this joyless street.

And if someone asks you,
Iris Storm, how to get

to the end of the cul-de-sac,
tell them flank pain

and renal failure,
metallic taste in the mouth.

I’m less Mata Hari these days
and more eating-dress,

divine velour of solitude.
Black eye of the day.

To be let alone,
an espionage of pores,

in the down comforter of light
where I am lovely

and singularly Swedish.
Not bedridden

but boudoir-bound-
there’s a difference-

to peel back the skin
to become all tulle. Chalk puff.

But don’t get it twisted-
I like you, mon monde,

my talking heads.
It’s only partially disgusting

that I prefer my own self instead.
But let’s switch onuses,

you carry the burden
for a change. Stage left:

my penny-loafered starlet,
how would you lift it-

my heartthrob,
your own blonde dread?

HOT INTERRACIAL, HARD FUCK, BIG BLACK COOK
-Xtube video title

And why not-
when it’s a scrambling, isn’t it?

Kidney shuffle, blowing one’s beans,
overture of parts,

dry to wet, mouth-whisked
and body-beaten to barmy foam.

Though this cook’s no regard
for precise ratios:

2 parts meat : 1 part yolk, and so forth.
It’s soulful improvisation,

a dash of this, fistful of that,
a finger in every pink-teemed pot,

since math makes no good art.
Not typo then-

unforgivable swap of nouns-
but something Freudian,

a slip into the bread and butter
of relations,

simple reduction:
how we lump our parts together

willy-nilly and sweat-streaked-
a sloppy alchemy-

and hope for the best:
profligate limbs on the mealy sheets

left to rise leavened and browned-
in the morning

we’ll depart wholesome again.

Angelo Nikolopoulos is a graduate from NYU’s creative writing program. His work has appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Gay and Lesbian Review and Los Angeles Review. He hosts The White Swallow, a reading series in Manhattan.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to read more? Visit our vast archive of poetry!