by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Hemisphere

*

I came from winter in the north to summer
in the south. Does that follow?

The plaza turned pink with flowers
as though a goddess were expected by evening.
I waded through the pools of perfume

and passed the empty steakhouse
where two busboys were kissing
on a table full of folded napkins.

Time had begun again.

*

A crowd gathered at the city limits: women on foot
and a brown girl-cow dragging her rope in the foul
crook of the curb. The flat bone between her eyes

shone like a plate of copper in the sun. The border
patrolman waved her back with his knife: If you enter
you will die. He let a truck crammed with children pass.

The river-smell did not reach the provincias, and my eye could not reach
the other side of the river, so the river became the sea — 
both were crossable in those modern times.

*

I dreamt I took a train to the provincias,
then I took one upon waking — does that follow?
When I arrived I saw the girl-cow

behind a wire fence. The patrolman was gone.
I held my hand out for her wet nose
and enormous tongue. We couldn’t touch,

but I could say: If you enter
you will not die. They want to save you
for the slaughter. If you enter,
you will not die.

/

Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, translator, and essayist based in New York City. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Acentos Review, Boston Review, and Colloquium, among other venues. She is the MacDowell Colony’s 2013–2014 Isabella Gardner Fellow in poetry.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Alice Bolin

“Lolita is a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary.”
 — Alfred Appel Jr., in his introduction to The Annotated Lolita

“Baby put on heart-shaped sunglasses ’cause we’re gonna take a ride.”
 — Lana Del Rey

I moved to Los Angeles at the end of last summer to sell my soul to the internet. When my job opportunity in new-media listicle construction fell through, I searched for sublets on Craigslist to borrow time. My first roommate was offering a room in an Echo Park bungalow-cum-rapper crash pad. He was an indie hip-hop producer who is, in his own way, pretty famous; I’d wake up to find rappers on the couch, rappers on the living room floor, rappers in the shower or using the microwave.

One week, my roommate and his girlfriend went to Humboldt County in Northern California to camp and cut marijuana. I enjoyed having the house to myself for maybe twelve hours, wandering around in my underwear and watching my roommate’s VHS tapes. Then Josh, a rapper, showed up; he had come from San Diego to spend a week mastering his new album. Josh is a funny, gentle weirdo with Kramer haircut and a tattoo of Emilio Zapata. “In San Diego they call me EPM,” he told me, “Epiphanies Per Minute.” One night when Josh was there, my friend Justin texted me an audio file of a poem called “Drizzy,” named for the rapper Drake. I placed my phone on the kitchen table and Josh and I gathered around it. “Why why why am I crying alone on my bed,” Justin read, “with Xbox Live home screen glow.” It continued, “I am for everyone to smile bigger than any city they fell in love with after college.” Josh buried his head in his hands. “Let’s listen to it again,” he said. A few days later, when my roommate came back from the wilderness, he told me that a rapper friend had just gotten to town from Chicago and he was going to stay in my room. I packed up my stuff and left on October 1st.

A few weeks later, defeated by a day of work, I was driving on Union Street, leaving downtown LA, when I first heard “American Girl” by Bonnie McKee on a new music show on Top 40 radio. It’s a juicy pop jam structured around guitar riffs brazenly ripping off “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” I later learned that it was not properly “new music” at all — it had been released in July in a bid for the title of Summer Anthem, reached number eighty-seven on the Billboard Hot 100 Charts, and fallen back below the radar. “American Girl” reminded me of another underrated single from summer 2013: “Made in the USA” by Demi Lovato is a hybrid country-dance pop track featuring both acoustic guitars and a throbbing drum machine beat. “I know that we will never break/Because our love was made in the USA” goes the crucial line in the song’s chorus, evoking a love with as much integrity as an American factory.

The fact that the height of American patriotism coincides with the height of the summer — and the mega-success of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” — might explain the popular gambit of namedropping America in your summer pop single. But what makes “American Girl” remarkable is how laced it is with pop cliché irony. Her vision of the American includes the United States’ prodigious tackiness. “I fell in love in a 7–11 parking lot,” the song begins, “Sat on the curb drinking Slurpees we mixed with alcohol.” She also touches on even more problematic aspects of the national character, as in the best line in the track’s chorus: “I was raised by a television./Every day is a competition.” The picture she paints of an American girl is someone ambitious, independent, rebellious, and trashy. “I am an American girl,” she sings over and over, “And I’m loving taking over the world.” The “American Girl” music video is even cheekier and more frenetic than the song: McKee and her gang do porny dances in 7–11 and in front of a vending machine; they play the retro board game Girl Talk and hang out at the mall; McKee chills by a pool wearing American flag-print Lolita sunglasses; and they drive a red Mustang to Inn-N-Out, then out past the Hollywood sign to the canyons surrounding Los Angeles. At the end, the Mustang inexplicably explodes into flames, so McKee and her friends roast marshmallows. McKee illustrates Los Angeles’ special boredom — there is nothing to do, but so much to get into. She’s not the only one who has believed the essential invocation of the American — and more specifically Californian — spirit is the bored, sexually mature suburban teenager.

My second roommate in Los Angeles was a twenty-one-year-old who had a cat named after Joan Didion; that was the main reason I moved in with her. She was offering a two-month sublet in her apartment on the far western edge of Echo Park. She had gotten the apartment with her best friend who ended up never moving in. The complex raked up from the crowded street in a series of rose-filled terraces. My roommate showed me sheepishly how the place seemed to be made out of styrofoam and cardboard. “I got drunk, fell down, and kicked a hole in the wall,” she said, pointing out an opening in the thin plaster. The first night I moved in, ants came out from cracks in the closet and swarmed my backpack. My roommate gave me Lysol, which I sprayed over the entire surface of the floor and on many of my belongings. I had no furniture. A few days after I moved in, the bulb in the overhead light burned out. My roommate told me hers had stopped working months before, and she had been using candles ever since. I was at my waitressing job seven miles away in Century City from 10am to 9pm most days, and when I got home, I watched Dateline and ate hot sauce-flavored potato chips by the light of my laptop. I slept on the floor the whole time I lived there.

“Something bad happened to me today,” my roommate told me one night when I came home. She had put a bottle of white wine in the freezer and forgotten about it, and it exploded. She carefully hoarded the hunks of frozen wine in our Tupperware. “Aren’t you afraid of drinking glass?” I said. “I made an IndieGogo page to fund a new bottle of wine,” she said. Three weeks in, she told me that her best friend wanted to move in after all, and I would have to move out after one month instead of two. My clothes and books were still in the milk crates I had moved them in.

Bonnie McKee was born in 1984 and raised in Seattle. She released a teen pop album in 2004 that failed to chart and was dropped from her label, then became addicted to crystal meth. In 2009, she was introduced to mega-producer Dr. Luke, with whom she wrote eight number one singles for artists like Britney Spears and Katy Perry. The question is whether she will ever be known as anything other than a songwriter — whether she can shift her public image from hit-deliverer to star. Her second full-length album was set to be released in Spring 2014, but she hasn’t dropped another single.

Demi Lovato was born in 1992 and began her entertainment career as a child actor on Barney & Friends. Starting in 2007, she was indentured to the Disney Channel for three years, starring in the Camp Rock movies and the TV series Sonny with a Chance. Lovato is famous for her struggles with mental health issues; she said that she first experienced suicidal thoughts at the age of seven. In 2011 she entered rehab to get treatment for bulimia, cocaine addiction, and bipolar disorder. This ended her relationship with the Disney Channel, but it also helped her graduate from “tween star” to “serious artist.” “Ms. Lovato is twice the rebel Ms. Gomez is,” the New York Times said after the release of Lovato’s fourth album, Demi, comparing her to her former Disney Channel colleague, Selena Gomez, “and four times the singer.”

Lana Del Rey was born Lizzy Grant in 1986. She went to rehab for alcoholism when she was fifteen, and she studied philosophy at Fordham. In 2008, she released an album as Lizzy Grant before rebranding herself as Lana Del Rey, a “self-styled gangster Nancy Sinatra.” Because it was unclear whether she or her management were behind the shift in her persona, people wondered whether the moody, retro sound of her popular lead single, 2011’s “Video Games,” was a craven corporate attempt to manipulate the indie audience, the Plan B of an artist who couldn’t succeed by being herself. Lana Del Rey’s first album, Born to Die has sold over five million copies; her second album, Ultra Violence, debuted at number one.

Halfway through Lana Del Rey’s 2012 Paradise EP, she breaks out a lugubrious cover of the fifties standard “Blue Velvet,” and no one is surprised. She has always shared filmmaker David Lynch’s fetish for fifties culture, singing about looking for her James Dean and the “fifties babydoll dress” she would wear to her wedding. With Lynch’s twisted fifties aesthetic as a guiding standard, Del Rey’s music is an odd and innovative mix of trip hop and cabaret, featuring both echo-y drum beats and cinematic strings, sometimes stripped down, fuzzy, washed out, other times lush and retro. She has developed a fully imagined persona that goes way beyond the concept album, something like a freaky Connie Francis with a death wish.

In the United States, the nineteen fifties is remembered as the most nostalgically, wholesomely American decade, riding the pride of winning World War II into the paranoid patriotism of the Cold War. Precisely because of this wholesomeness, nineteen fifties America is a trope that is easily, and enjoyably, perverted. Del Rey’s music is overtly about America, with song titles like “American” and “National Anthem.” She displays an almost Freudian interest in her cultural origins — who begot her, who formed her vision of herself. Maybe this is why she displays an obviously, kinkily Freudian interest in fucking her dad.

“I gots a taste for men who are older,” Del Rey sings on “Cola,” a sentiment that, taken with the rest of her catalogue, is laughably obvious. Most of the relationships she describes have a creepy daddy-daughter dynamic. “God I’m so crazy, baby,” she sings on “Off to the Races,” “I’m sorry that I’m misbehaving.” Most stunning is another line on “Cola”: “I fall asleep in an American Flag./I pledge allegiance to my dad.”

“Light of my life,/Fire of my loins,/Be a good baby, do what I want,” Del Rey sings on “Off to the Races,” and doesn’t that sound familiar. Not only does that song audaciously quote from the first chapter of Lolita, elsewhere on Born to Die, there’s a track called “Lolita.” Her song “Carmen” — “it’s alarming honestly how charming she can be” — recalls a popular song Humbert quotes in Lolita. “O my Carmen, my little Carmen,” Humbert half-remembers. “Something, something, those something nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen.”

“Is ‘mask’ the keyword?” Humbert Humbert asks in Lolita. Alfred Appel Jr., tireless annotator of Lolita, directs us to a moment where Humbert’s narrative mask slips. In the novel’s shortest chapter, we get a vision of Humbert in jail, despairing, “Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet.” In his 1967 interview with The Paris Review, Vladimir Nabokov said:

Another project I have been nursing for some time is the publication of the complete screenplay of Lolita that I made for Kubrick […] The film is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wish to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlost is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass.

This strikes me as a very Los Angeles story. Los Angeles is a land of iterations, versions of versions, a swimming pool’s endless refractions, a city that sprawls forever. “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!” Humbert says. Is it obvious I don’t know what I’m doing here? I have no sense of Los Angeles; with this diary I build a collection of things I have authority to speak on. Light of my Lana, fire of my Lana. My song, my sort of.

Lolita is a twisted vision of fifties America too, a charming road novel about a pedophile and his kidnapped stepdaughter. Lolita’s power is in how it demonstrates the lure of evil and the banality of innocence, with its slick, seductive narrator, Humbert Humbert, and his repulsively ordinary victim, Dolores. In the novel, Humbert’s attractiveness cannot be separated from his European identity, and Dolores’ crassness can’t be separated from her American identity. If the American spirit is a bored, sexually mature suburban teenager, then Del Rey does everything she can to embody her.
Nabokov famously inserted himself in Lolita by using anagrams of his own name, most notably “Vivian Darkbloom.” Del Rey hides in plain sight too, but sometimes it’s not clear whether her Lolita burlesque is actually the disguise. “Like a groupie incognito posing as a real singer,” she sings on “Gods and Monsters,” “life imitates art.” Is mask the keyword? It’s a feat to make yourself disappear while actually being straightforward, honest, even autobiographical.

My third roommate in Los Angeles was an actor in his early forties. His apartment was in a strange old row house in the heart of Koreatown. “Ok, I’m just going to be honest with you,” he said the first time I met him. He told me the landlords were elderly and apparently insane. He had convinced them that his friend who lived in the apartment for fifteen years had never moved out, so that he could maintain rent control. “If you lived here, you would have to pretend to be my girlfriend,” he said. “And the hot water doesn’t work in the kitchen.” I moved in five days later.

A few weeks after I moved in, I passed my roommate in the kitchen. “I forgot to tell you. There’s a homeless man named Gary who lives in our carport. I give him five dollars a week,” he told me. “The landlords know about him,” he added to ease my mind. I continued boiling spaghetti in my hot pot. “Gary might call you ‘you guys,’ even though there’s only one of you,” he said. “He hasn’t been looking good. I don’t think he’ll live much longer.” One day when I was home alone the landlords shoved a piece of paper between the front door and its frame saying they would be visiting the apartment later that week. As I left for work on Friday, I came face to face with an ancient man with charcoal hair oiled back like Jimmy Stewart’s. He looked at me with obscure suspicion, but he didn’t say anything.

Alice Bolin is a writer living in Los Angeles.

In light of the discovery of more bedbugs, on another N train — leading to calls to fumigate the entire line — one wonders how long it will be before Uber, savior of the public from our degraded, inefficient and apparently infested transit system, offers a bed bug special.

“Welcome to The Moviegoers, an occasional new series in which the Op-Ed columnists Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat banter about movies, pop culture, television and other real-world distractions.”

The following is composed entirely of chronological excerpts from the feature’s first installment.

***

Ross,
Have you seen it? I think you should.
Yikes.
Restore me to August, Ross.
Comfort me with superheroes.
Talk about a bait-and-switch:
have no you mercy, man?

Which I guess is a way
of saying that like you,
I’ve had a pretty good art-house summer
steak-and-potatoes

one of the best such since “The Matrix,”
for my money
Have you seen it? If not,
tell me

Ross, Ross, Ross.
In this sense I do think
moviemakers are tapping
into the American psyche

ilk,
Ours is not a tale of two cities
a truly neutral party
numb

may I say that
I’m ashamed
I have some thoughts on one trend
of the summer movie season that pleased me
mightily

Frank, regarding your failure to see “Boyhood,”
Seriously, it’s a good movie, but
just how perilous
a youth spent
I’m pretty sure I’m stealing this line from someone

Back to you:
Tell me about the trend. Did I read you right?
I’ll channel your semantics and answer
There was something poignant about watching “Apes”
against the backdrop of the mess
in the Middle East

Here’s how and why the summer sang to me, Ross
We began with priests
we’ll end with women.
There’s a case to be made.

Read John Podhoretz,
no, Frank, no!
I suspect female
Until next time…

Photo by Boohoomiam

by Kit Dillon

Last summer, on the northwest corner of Union Square, a group of twenty or so black and Latino teenagers had just been kicked out of the McDonald’s for being too loud, shouting orders and messily passing around Extra Value meals. Somebody on the staff got nervous and called the cops. One teen, as he walked out, stopped long enough to show another how to lock an elbow in a dance move before grabbing a handful of his unfinished fries.

“She’s alright,” Goofy, the nineteen-year-old leader of the group, a dance team that calls itself W.A.F.F.L.E or We Are Family For Life Entertainment, said of the security officer. “Everyone has a job to do. I try to tell the team that — you know, to be respectful. You gotta be aware of how people see you.” In front of new people, Goofy talks quietly and keeps his eyes pointed towards the ground, glancing up only to see if he has been understood. Goofy is around five feet, eight inches tall, and the sinewy quality of his muscles, toned by constant dancing, was apparent beneath his loose-fit shirt, while a polychromatic spray of colors faded in and out across his scalp.

On some unspoken cue, the kids grabbed their backpacks, spare shoes and a portable speaker, and started moving south toward 14th street in small clusters. Some danced as they moved away from the corner, breaking out into small and practiced routines. “You’re just ruining it for yourselves,” an NYPD officer, standing in front of the restaurant doors, his arms folded across his chest, yelled. Some of the crew, slightly ahead of Goofy, started throwing ice from a half-finished soda cup at the people directly behind him; a retaliatory bombardment passed over his head from the other direction. Most of the chunks, half-melted and slick but sticky with soda, missed their targets and scattered on the street.

“Yo, Stop!” Goofy shouted. The ice salvos ended abruptly. “They be doing crazy stuff,” Goofy said as he shook his head and kept walking, an eye on the kids ahead of him. Two years ago, Goofy put the team together with just a few of his friends, but now he’s responsible for a rotating roster of somewhere between twenty and thirty dancers. He collects the team’s entrance fees for dance competitions; coordinates practice sessions; and designs the team jerseys, which feature everyone’s dance name on the back, like Lil Busy, Case Move, A-Mac, Waffle Crazy, Tootie (the group’s sole female dancer), and Aero-14. “I try to teach them how to handle situations,” he said. “I make mistakes too, but I try to make sure they’re in school, doing well outside of dancing. If one thing don’t work out the other will.”

Six years ago, Goofy was one of the first dancers to walk onto a crowded New York City subway with a few of his friends turn up some music playing from a portable speaker and announce, “What time is it, ladies and gentleman? Showtime!” before launching into a dance routine that few people had seen before. The moves were so new they barely had a name yet — just a funny looking series of steps that a few kids in the parks were starting to call “Litefeet.”

Litefeet’s roots are grounded equally in New York City parks and the internet. Over the course of 2006 and 2007, DJ Webstar released the tracks “Chicken Noodle Soup,” and “Tone Wop” (or “Toe Wop”) and designed some dance steps around them, a series of abrupt close steps, bouncy but compact. Teens spent the summers filming themselves in their bedrooms, high schools and city parks like Slattery Ave and uploaded the results to YouTube. The dancers kept their arm movements pulled in, near their body, with the added occasional signature contortion or body lock; a foot hooked into an elbow and held for a moment in a more dynamic example of something a Park Slope yoga diehard might do during their practice. It was a dance that fit well inside of the cramped frame aspects of closely filming laptop and cell phone cameras.

As both the Chicken Noodle Soup and Tone Wop spread in popularity, dancers began to combine both dances into a single, distinctive style. By tightening up their footwork and inventing steps of their own, the first definitive Litefeet sequence was born: Known as “The Rev-Up,” the dancer lifts his leg and pivots his body before stepping in and out with a forward heel kick and snapping his hands on the last beat. In 2007, dancer Chrybaby Cozie, one of the early innovators of Litefeet, can be seen here at one of DJ Webstar’s 2007 Voice of Harlem parties combining some of Litefeet’s earliest movements into what would later become the The Rev-Up. It was arguably when these moments were uploaded to YouTube that Litefeet was born.

Plenty of artists had come and gone through the New York City subway system before Goofy and his friends stepped onto the trains to dance for the first time. But Litefeet dancers could pull off moves in spaces as small as a few square feet. In the beginning, Goofy and his team kept the routine simple: Rev-Ups into Wave Connects into Lock Ins, which punctuate the end of Litefeet sequences like a period at the end of a sentence. Over time, the shows evolved, and teams began incorporating props and subway handrails to modify and expand their repertoire of moves. Today, a good Lifefeet subway routine includes backflips down the center aisle, hat and shoe tricks — a shoe kicked up over the head of one dancer, caught between the shoulder blades of another — and increasingly difficult acrobatic stunts. Dancers might flip up onto their hands and lock their feet into the subway handrails or lift themselves and twist their bodies, contorting their shoulder and elbow joints before suddenly unwinding towards the floor in a press up or handstand, their bodies inches from commuters’ faces.

On a typical day in 2010, Litefeet teams like W.A.F.F.L.E could earn anywhere between a hundred and three hundred dollars per person in the subway. For two years, it was enough to pay Goofy’s tuition at The Walk In Love Christian Academy in Brooklyn. But their success was easy to see and drew countless imitators, just like the other competing hustles on the subway cars — the human beat boxers, Motown crooners, pint-sized discount candy crews, job-bucket drum soloists and high school basketball team collection runners. Lesser crews began to saturate the market, turning a show that you were lucky to see once a week into a daily or even hourly occurrence. “For a little while,” Mo’Black, Goofy’s close friend and fellow dancer told me, “The L was good. The A train people, they know the culture already. They was like the Soul Train. They get into it. But you couldn’t make as much as you could with the Q. Then a lot of people started coming out with no skill, complaining that they can’t get cash anymore. Now they’ll say it’s not whack. But I know it’s whack. Your show is whack!”

By the summer of 2013 Litefeet in subway cars had reached a breaking point. For some commuters, every ride to and from work became “showtime!” Complaints and reports of fights and violence initiated by the dancers mounted. “Some people, I don’t know, they weren’t raised right,” Goofy said. “They go on the trains being rude and yelling at people, it makes us all look bad. It’s like going to a real job disrespecting your boss and expecting to get paid.” In one incident reported to the NYPD, a commuter was slapped. It was enough to get new Police Commissioner Bill Bratton on TV, warning that crews like W.A.F.F.L.E spread a sense of fear and threatened subway safety. It presaged a crackdown, with plainclothes officers arresting nearly a hundred dancers since the beginning of January, and charging half of them with the Class A misdemeanor of reckless endangerment.

As W.A.F.FL.E. made its way to Washington Square Park, someone turned on the portable speaker, a plastic blue Behringer stereo amp that has become a staple of the scene: even though it doesn’t seem to be for sale anywhere, it’s in the hands of dance kids everywhere. Shaped like an oversized dustbuster with a built-in speaker/aux input, the unit hides a pair of powerful speakers behind a single grey plastic grill. The speakers spat out “Keep It Stacc,” a hypnotic, looping new piece from sixteen-year-old producer Lil’ Live. Like most of Litefeet’s music, the song is organized around a few simple loops and oddly pitched-up vocal stabs. It’s distinct, unpolished. With a heavy bass line and a hynoptic melody, Keep It Stacc is popular among the members of W.A.F.F.L.E. “Fire,” remarks A-Mac. The others nod their heads in agreement.

While on the subways it’s rare for groups to get larger than four to six dancers, in a park, an entire team can dance and cheer each other on. The dancers formed into a circle in one small area of the park, with different members of the team stepping in for a minute or so and showing off a few steps before ceding the floor to the next dancer. Soon, a wide circle of around a hundred and fifty passersby formed around W.A.F.F.L.E, most holding iPhones, iPads, and digital cameras as Goofy walked around the perimeter, handing out business cards.

Mo’Black stepped into the middle of them and rolls through his own version of the Rev-Up, laying down a string of moves before grabbing the hat from his head and throwing it in the air while lightly bending back into a sweeping leg flip. The hat arced over his body as his legs came around underneath him, and as the last beat landed, the entire group stamped the ground while the hat, previously framed mid-air, landed back on Mo’Black’s head, his hands shooting out to the right with a snap.

When the music stopped, the crew fanned out trying to collect some cash for their efforts. But the crowd dissipated even abruptly than it had formed. “We’ve made about two dollars each,” Mo’Black laughed while wiping the sweat from his face. “New York is not a place where people want to see you go far,” Goofy said. “Everyone trying to get there first. But there are always new people coming in. There will always be somebody new to dance for.”

Kit Dillon is a writer, among other things, in New York City.

All photos, except the triptych, by Mario Scarpaci

A sign goes up in a rapidly changing New York neighborhood. It contains this joke. On Facebook, a reasonable demand for an apology: “This is racist at worst and insensitive at best.”

A survey of the responses:

— “Cruelty”?!? Really? Don’t make everything a race issue, princess.

— ^^ Agreed. Sickening — Typical transplant bullshit. Go elsewhere with this — we don’t want this here. Honestly, I’m so sick and tired of all the nubies that need to act up like this — Here’s a thought: MOVE TO FLORIDA. IT’S VERY HIP AND SUPREMELY IRONIC THERE.

— Phew almost went off topic there. Anyway, this sign does not offend me.

— This is stupid. Find something serious to get upset about. Why do you young leftists always have to go around starting protests left and right over non issues.

The problem isn’t the real problem. The real problem is talking about the problem! And it looks like we’ve almost cracked it, together.

“In 2012 Americans ate more almonds per capita than shelled and unshelled snack peanuts combined (not including peanut butter).” Almonds are great — especially in milk form — but what the fuck is wrong with you America?

Nuts, properly ranked (updated for 2014):

11. pine nuts
10. regular walnuts
9. hazelnuts
8. pecans
7. cashews
6. almonds
5. brazil nuts
4. macadamia nuts
3. peanuts
2. black walnuts
1. pistachios

But I suppose this new development does reflect, in its way, our particularly American way of privileging mediocrity, and who can fault, like, American values?

Photo by Shelby Root

“Let’s say Ron Paul is Nirvana,” begins the first paragraph of a piece that wonders if the “Libertarian Moment” has finally arrived. “Our libertarian moment, in other words, might very well pass unexploited,” begins the last paragraph of the same piece.

★★ Another unvaried installment of high-but-not-too-high summer. The sky was a reasonably deep blue. If the morning was short of being hot, the child riding up on the shoulders made up the difference. The river’s surface lay in glossy patches, and no relief was stirring from that direction. The Times Square subway platform raised a full sweat to the surface. Downtown, the tilt of the grid made itself apparent, as sun baked the downtown side of the crosstown streets. Again the cumulus clouds migrated into the midday sky. A big one overlaid the sun, and for a while it was not hot. When the sun did return, though, it was piercing. Breezes, not exactly cool, moved now and then. A film crew maintained the street as its studio with impunity. Thunderstorms, any sort of changes, were not going to be more than a rumor in the newspaper.

by Andrew Thompson

Last summer, a dozen people, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, crowded into a living room in Aldan, Pennsylvania, a small working-class suburb outside of Philadelphia. They toggled back and forth between smartphones and tablets while they downed an energy drink called Verve. “Did you know Red Bull and Monster can stay on the shelf for more than four years?” one guest told another. “That’s disgusting,” the other person replied. “Verve has a shelf life of eight months.” The chatter continued until Erin Wilkers, the twenty-year-old college dropout who had invited them into her parents’ home, quieted them and began her soliloquy. “I’m just going to start off by eliminating the people in the room that aren’t right for this,” she began. “I know this sounds blunt, but if you’re cynical, there’s the door, leave. Straight up. I don’t want to work with you. And that’s fine if you’re cynical — if you’re happy with what you’re doing.”

Wilkers put on a YouTube video. In the video, a twenty-three-year-old named Alex Morton stands in front of a wall plastered with the Verve logo, talking to a group at Verve Central, a company training center in Virginia Beach. His bro-ish drawl, combined with a rapid-fire speech pattern, makes him occasionally smear his words. “I’m not here to tell you it’s the next Facebook, but it’s the next Facebook,” he tells the audience in the video. “Society says, ‘You want to be a millionaire? Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ They make it some fantasy thing. You have to be on a game show to have a million dollars? That’s not true. That’s why three percent of this country own ninety-seven percent of all the money. Three percent own everything. So that means most of our moms, dads, teachers, professors and friends don’t know how to make money. So chances are the person in your life currently teaching you how to make money is probably broke.”

After the video, a man named Jim Brogan, a former San Diego Clippers player, appeared on the television screen. He had dialed in with Oovoo, a Skype-like service hooked up to the TV. Despite the poor frame rate and the mild pixelation that softly scrambled his face, he projected a bone-rattling ebullience from the television. “Learning about this business is easy,” he said in a mild Philly accent. “It’s similar to going to school. I don’t care if you’re taking philosophy, calculus, reading 101, economics 101, I don’t care. We see young people, fifteen to twenty-four-year-olds, that are making — there’s two fifteen-year-olds making a hundred thousand dollars, two twenty-four-year-olds making over half a million. Don’t be cynical about your chances. Don’t be cynical about what’s happening out in the world. Stop watching the news and all the crap and all the negativity that’s out there.” He eventually talked about Verve: “You’ve got a product that helps people,” he said. “If they have cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, chronic headache, they’re a little overweight, why not say, ‘For thirty days, try this’?”

At the end, when he asked if there were any questions, I responded with one about how, once we started selling Verve, the payment plan actually worked. “The more people you help, the more money you make!” he said. “Haha! I love that line!”

Verve is the flagship product of the Vemma Nutrition Company, which was founded in 2004 in Scottsdale, Arizona, by Benson “BK” Boreyko. At first, Vemma sold an eponymously named liquid vitamin supplement — the company’s name is an acronym for Vitamins, Essential Minerals, Mangosteen and Aloe — that promised to slow the aging process. In 2008, on the wave of a bullish energy drink market — the industry reached about six billion dollars in sales that year — the company introduced Verve, which added caffeine to its original vitamin formula and injected it all into a Red Bull-sized can. The advertising for Verve boasts that it has “the highest antioxidant value of any energy drink, revitalizes energy levels and supports a healthy lifestyle” and that “if you are drinking Verve, there is no need to take a multivitamin supplement.” It also comes in six different varieties now: Verve, Verve Zero Sugar, Verve Bold (extra energy), Verve ReMIX (a “fresh approach to energy and taste,” Verve MoJoe (“awesome coffee), and Verve ParTea (a “spark of energy” with “bright fruit tea flavor”).

But Vemma isn’t like most energy drink companies. It’s a multilevel marketing company, or an MLM, meaning that it sells its products through independent salespeople who are compensated both for the products they sell along with whatever is sold by the additional salespeople they recruit, much like Amway or Avon. Vemma doesn’t recruit salespeople from a central office, but through independent distributors like Wilkers and Brogan, who host meetings to tell attendants about the company and its products and compensation plans — often with galvanizations of opportunities for wealth not available in the traditional job market, without the shackles of a 9–5.

In 2011, Verve became the foundation for Vemma’s brand shift towards Millennials, who found themselves facing news-making levels of student debt with poor prospects for repayment. Vemma adopted the slogan “Young People Revolution” and developed a social media presence, punctuating its tweets and Facebook comments with the hashtag #YPR. In one video, Boreyko touts Vemma’s “more social approach,” calling its business model “social network marketing.” It added a sales reward in which the company pays for the lease of a BMW 3-series sedan if salespeople hit certain sales quotas. Between 2011 and this year, it has enlisted a roster of celebrity endorsements, including Dr. Oz, Chris Powell and Jenny McCarthy, and it has sponsored the Phoenix Suns and Charlotte Bobcats. According to figures provided by the company, sales have risen from ninety million dollars in 2011 to two hundred and twenty-one million in 2013. The Direct Selling News Global 100, a sort of Fortune 100 for direct marketing — which includes all companies who replace storefronts with independent sellers, whether or not they compensate their sellers for additional recruitment — now ranks Vemma as the fifty-third largest direct-marketing company by revenue, up from eighty-first last year and ninety-seventh in 2010.

In January 2013, the same week that Wilkers dropped out of Temple University’s advertising program after her scholarship had run out, she quit her job as a server at a local restaurant. She then scheduled a Friday night to take LSD in an austere, furniture-less room with a group of friends. It wasn’t Wilkers’ first time using it, but the combination of drugs and fresh unemployment felt like a personal nadir. That night, just before she planned on taking acid, Rachel Fry, a friend from the restaurant, called Wilkers and told her to come to a meeting. “She was like, ‘Dude, get out of bed. Like, what are you doing laying in bed?’” Wilkers told me. She abandoned her plans and decided to go with Fry.

Fry took Wilkers to a Prudential Fox and Roach real estate office in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, a wealthier, unaccented suburb on the Philadelphia Main Line. Inside was a large conference room filled with about a dozen people. Jim Brogan, the man from the television, and his brother John, a man in his mid-fifties with a slightly boyish, slender figure and spiky, gelled hair that’s thinning, but not receding, pitched the crowd on Vemma’s supersonic growth and its potential to free them from the shackles of debt and a boring life. In the middle of the meeting, Jim asked Wilkers to stand up and tell him her five-year plan. “And I didn’t have one,” she told me. “I said, ‘You know what, maybe this is for me.’”

Wilkers spent a hundred and fifty dollars on a couple of thirty-can cases of Verve — one to give out as samples, the other to drink — and began building her business. She reached out to old high school friends and Facebook feed became a stream of optimistic memes and brief motivational sermons. (“I’M NOT HERE TO FIT INTO YOUR WORLD I’M HERE TO BUILD MY OWN.”) She began talking to the Brogans more. Jim “literally had no other reason to do this other than the fact that his wife had ovarian and uterine cancer and she was taking the product and it helped her immensely. He’s a business partner and makes about seven grand a month part time and has a full paid-for BMW. But this is just something that he does to help people,” she told me.

Three weeks later, I met John for the first time at his real estate office in Ardmore. He greeted me with an extended hand, and a warm pitch that began a preemptive defense of the company. “I mean, now why would Dr. Oz, the Phoenix Suns, Charlotte Bobcats — why would they get involved in something like this?” he said shortly after I had introduced myself.

When I met him again, a week later at a cafe just down the street from his office, he recounted how he got involved in Vemma and came to sell an energy drink whose branding feels like a paean to YOLO, targeted towards someone about thirty years younger than him. His brother Jim, he told me, gives private basketball lessons at a day school in La Jolla, California. “There’s no Verve product at this point, just Vemma,” he said. “One of the kids at his day school was…a high school senior going into college. Jim starts to teach him how to become a better basketball player.” But when the student hurt his knee, and could no longer play basketball, his father, an early Vemma distributor, encouraged his son to also become a distributor. The student reached back out to Jim to convince him to become a distributor, too. “Jim’s thinking multilevel marketing, he’s thinking Amway,” John said. “But he’s completely convinced in the product. And the reason he’s convinced of this product is this handout.”

John pulled out a manila envelope and withdrew a faded graphic that looks like it was printed with a printer almost out of ink. “Your body is a sponge…” read the paper, and underneath was an image of two human-shaped sponges — one being doused by a liquid slightly darker than carrot juice from a Vemma shot glass, and another with five capsules resting on the sponge, not being absorbed. The idea was that without infusing a drink with your necessary vitamins, they inertly rest in your intestinal tract. “Most diseases that are known in the world today can usually be attributed to a nutritional deficiency, and that involves your immune system,” John told me. “I do this with people all the time: Would you agree that over that time frame, quality of food in this country has gone in that direction?” He turned over the sponge picture and begins drawing a chart, or something resembling one, that begins with the fifties and ends in the current decade.

“Sure,” I said.

“How about now?” he asked.

“It’s still bad,” I told him. “I don’t know if I can argue one way or the other. We were eating Salisbury steak in the sixties and fifties.” Before I had even begun my answer, he began drawing a line, an x-axis notched with marks indicating decades. “Over that time frame, would you agree that the incidence of disease is on the increase?” he asked. “I’m gonna fill you in, because you’re too young to know.” He then drew a line indicating an upward trajectory of sickness against a y-axis measuring disease. “How about diabetes? How about fibromyalgia? Irritable syndrome? How about cancer, any type of cancer?”

I didn’t know, and I was less interested in epidemiology than I was in the specifics of Vemma’s compensation plan, so John pulled out his phone and opened the Vemma app, a sleek interface that allows brand partners to keep track of their orders, customers and distributors underneath them — essentially, how much money they’re making. John told me that his goal is to make twenty thousand dollars a month, which is the somewhat informal standard of success in Vemma. He quickly crunched the numbers; he needs nine thousand distributors underneath him, making up two “legs.” Through some inscrutable twist of the model, John’s left leg is heavily stacked with Vemma distributors, but it’s not until he hits a certain number of distributors on the other leg that he actually reaches another level of compensation. “And that’s the thing,” he said. “These young people just keep feeding this side for me!”

The precise mechanics of Vemma’s compensation plan are convoluted, and discussions of how the plan works sound like knockoff financial jargon. “Once you cycle one time, you can cycle a thousand times,” Wilkers explained to me at one point. Vemma calls its business model a “binary compensation plan” that depends on stacking people on two different “legs.” The bones of the compensation plan work like this: Under any given distributor are two “legs.” Whenever a distributor brings on a new Vemma distributor or customer, that person is placed on one of them. Then, for example, when Leg A has six people and Leg B has three people, the distributor is paid. Each time the distributor’s recruits bring more people on, those new recruits also fall into the corresponding legs. If you drew it on a piece of paper — and in YouTube videos explaining the plan, many have — it looks like a pyramid. This doesn’t make Vemma a pyramid scheme — an illegal business model, typically involving salespeople paying substantial fees in order to participate in the company, in which payment primarily depends on the recruitment of new salespeople rather than the sale of good or services. But some experts in the field have doubts about the company.

Bill Keep, the dean of the College of New Jersey in Trenton’s business school and a pyramid-scheme expert who found some renown after his research was cited to explain Pershing Square Capital’s billion-dollar short on the MLM company Herbalife — after making the short, one of the company’s hedge-fund managers attempted to convince the investing and regulatory worlds that Herbalife was a pyramid scheme to crash the stock — has looked into Vemma and believes it may meet the criteria to qualify as a pyramid scheme. (Last year, Boreyko told the New York Post, “Don’t call us a frickin’ pyramid scheme because we’re not.”) To Keep, what’s remarkable about Vemma is that it appears to be the first successful multilevel marketing company in history to aggressively target Millennials, rather than jaded sufferers of midlife crises who find themselves dissatisfied with their lives and incomes by the time they reach their forties.”If you look at the videos, there’s this ‘life sucks, the world sucks, you’re screwed if you’re going to college, there’s no jobs out there,’” said Keep. “You would have never heard that message in 2005.”

Legally determining when a company is a pyramid scheme is something of an art; there are no hard and fast three-pronged tests to apply. But the official example for when something is not a pyramid scheme was laid out in the 1979 landmark case In re Amway Corp. The Federal Trade Commission, in its decision, cited Amway rules that ensured that products and money are not simply circulating within the distribution chain and are, in fact, reaching end users who aren’t also Amway distributors. For instance, Amway required each distributor to sell at wholesale or retail at least seventy percent of its purchased inventory each month, a policy known as the seventy-percent rule. Essentially, compensation wasn’t primarily based on recruiting more people.

“I think [Vemma has] many features that could be at issue if they’re held up to a legal standard,” Bonnie Patten, Truth in Advertising’s executive director, told me. One of the things Patten cites is Vemma’s model of compensating brand partners for recruiting more brand partners; Vemma distributors receive “bonus points” for signing up new members (part of an aggregate of points that eventually turns into money), and the Frenzy Bonus rewards distributors with a cash payout for signing up three new distributors in a single week.

Before 2004, Vemma was known as New Vision International, which marketed a concoction similar to the original Vemma formula, but with different panacea-like ingredients. New Vision was sued by the FTC for claiming that the formula could treat ADD, which it claimed with a surprising lack of circuitousness:

The problem: Johnny isn’t staying up with the rest of the children, he’s getting into fights at recess and he’s just not listening. The teacher has seen it hundreds of times: ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) — the most common form of treatment: Ritalin. Parents trusting the advice of well-meaning professionals are unknowingly starting their children on a cycle of chemical dependency. Is there an alternative? The good news is yes, and this tape will outline what has become known as ‘God’s recipe’ as well as letting you hear from some doctors on this very subject.

New Vision was enjoined from making further claims and, as part of a settlement, was placed on a regimen of accountability, which required the company to more closely monitor the statements of its distributors. Boreyko told me over the phone that the complaint was triggered by one distributor who made claims unauthorized by the company and that he was subsequently fired. “I stood up and said, Hey, we’re going to take responsibility,” he said.

More recently, in June, Italy’s Competition and Markets Authority — Italy’s analogue to the FTC — ruled that Vemma’s compensation plan and purchase requirements qualified as a pyramid scheme and forced the company to institute changes to its plan to reduce emphasis on recruitment and product purchases by distributors. The company reacted by simplifying its jigsaw arrangement of bonuses and by appealing the decision, and made a formal switch from “network marketing” to “affiliate marketing,” a change more nomenclatural than practical. “Italy is a very small market to us, under a couple hundred thousand dollars a month,” Boreyko told me. “I still don’t know why they don’t like it, but they don’t like it.”

In my conversation with Boreyko, I told him that Brogan pegged his measurement of Vemma success at a twenty-thousand-dollar monthly income; Wilkers and her team alternately threw out numbers hovering between twenty thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars a month. Morton, in his YouTube pitch, had said that a million dollars a month was a reasonable expectation with enough time and effort. The figures were always monthly, never yearly, perhaps because doing so would strike those involved as too redolent of a salaried life dependent on employers.

Vemma’s own income disclosure figures state that roughly ninety-seven percent of people made eleven thousand dollars per year or less, while ninety-percent made under fifty-seven hundred dollars year. “I never say everybody is going to succeed,” Boreyko said. “I say, hey man, you’ve got the same opportunity as everybody else, and you can work your way out of that ninety-two percent and get into the three percent or four percent or one percent or wherever you want to go, just like when you buy a Subway, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a business owner.”

“Are you telling me that everyone that signs up for Vemma can be making twenty thousand dollars a month, every last person if they worked hard enough?” I asked.

I hear silence on the other end, then, “Alright, you want hypotheticals or you want reality? Because I can deal in both.”

“Both, I suppose.”

“Okay. Hypothetically?” he said with an upwards lilt. “No,” with a chuckle as if hearing a preposterous idea. “It’s never going to happen. In reality? Guess what? It’s never going to happen.” He continued, “You look at just in America, startup small businesses, the failure rates in the first five years. Eighty percent. Not the success rate, the failure rate. Eighty percent failure rate. And these people sign leases, they mortgage homes, they take out loans, they save after tax dollars to buy a dry cleaner or buy a sandwich shop or any of these small businesses, as you look through the strip malls across America, these people who have dreams, they’re willing to stand up and fight for them. And you know what? The eighty percent odds are that they’re going to go out of business in the first five years. That’s just the small business association. That’s what they report. So I’m just telling you, you know what, if you took that same number in Vemma, how am I going to put a number on your head and get you to say no, don’t even try? You know what, you’ve got an opportunity, Andrew, but I don’t want you to even try, because you know what? Eighty percent chance you’re going to fail. Why do you want to start someone out in business saying the odds are you’re going to fail?”

I saw Wilkers and her team for the last time in September, at John’s office in Ardmore. Wilkers had invited two old high school friends from Facebook to hear about Vemma. Two months earlier, John’s office was packed beyond capacity with about thirty-five potential recruits that various Vemma distributors — Wilkers, her teammates and those up-leg from her — had invited. Wilkers got up to perform her routine, reciting her Vemma creation myth, in which Fry invited her to the meeting and Jim asked about her five-year plan. She put on another YouTube video, the slickest one I’ve seen yet: A series of celebrities — Will Smith, Steve Jobs, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barack Obama — speak vaguely about greatness, leading into a briefing on the gloomy economy, followed by a kinetic flash of images of Boreyko and BMWs and Morton, overlaid with Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead.” “I keep it 300/like the Romans/300 bitches/where the Trojans?”

Seeing her flatly recite a rehearsed sales pitch, it dawned on me that her energy, in retrospect, is not about Vemma, but desperation to escape the new miserable normal of post-college life — one of stagnating wages, of tech-bro robber barons, of mortgage contracts engineered to ruin your life. The financial meltdown may have triggered the Occupy movement, but its power derived from the fact that our system of cultural logic had broken down — that people like Wilkers were victims of computerized shuffling of binary code on a trading floor, meaningless points that somehow turn into money. It seemed, at the moment, that the young people involved in Vemma didn’t enter the company to become rich; they wanted to create a parallel economy that allowed them to create their own dynasties and regain a sense of control, working with rules that they can actually understand.

I never saw Wilkers again, but over the last few months, her Facebook posts became dimmer, the optimistic memes petering out until she didn’t post them at all. Eventually, her posts indicated that she had begun working as a telemarketer, and she began to post poetry — not swift uplifting aphorisms, but thoughtful stanzas. In March, she wrote:

Her whole life she has been reduced to a work of art,
often looked on with admiration and
sometimes touched by awe-inspired hands,
but never examined to see what lay beneath
the surface. They have always wanted her,
but only to hang in their gallery — 
to show off as their trophy.
She has begun to believe her offerings are made up of
batted eyelashes and perfect skin. You
need to remind her that she is a masterpiece,
wonderfully crafted, with her true value locked away in the unseen.

Andrew Thompson is a writer living in Philadelphia.