From The Recesses

From the Recesses – An East Facing Rock

By Michael Tallon on Friday, May 28th, 2010

Back when I was a teenager one of my favorite words was “cosmic.” It’s kind of embarrassing now, but I’m sure you had your own silly colloquialisms, so no harm done. I remember many “cosmic” moments in the adolescent years: like when Craig and I wandered up to Grand Boulevard and were hammered to the… »

From the Recesses – Salting the Ocean

By Michael Tallon on Monday, April 12th, 2010

My grandmother died in late January of 2005, at 93 years of age. The day before she ended this dance, she and I were planning her 94th birthday party and joking about the hospital food. Sometime in the evening a nurse came in and said the doctors wanted to start her on a… »

From the Recesses – Everything Was White

By Michael Tallon on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Earlier this morning, my mother sent me a note through the interwebs. She said that the East Coast was in a deep freeze and that New York City was bracing for a monster snowstorm that might drop up to two feet around the Metro Area. I was telling a friend about the email and the… »

From the Recesses – Mrs. Tiffin’s Christmas Crucible

By Michael Chrisman on Friday, December 18th, 2009
Piano Boy (Ethan Bortnick)

I went to a Christmas piano recital in the States recently. This is not something I do regularly anymore, though between the years of eight and thirteen I struggled through more than a lifetime’s share of my own. I was there because a couple of kids I know are taking lessons, and their mother asked… »

From The Recesses – Remembrance Of Sleaze Past

By Miles Afuera on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
Hot Spur

For some of us back in the day – or maybe just the über-alienated twenty-something nihilist pop-culture junkies like me – the movie Taxi Driver was our Wizard Of Oz. And if Travis Bickle was our gun-toting, whore-saving Dorothy, then the piss-yellow brick road that led to the Emerald City was New York City’s 42nd… »

From the Recesses – The Day of the Dead

By Michael Tallon on Friday, October 30th, 2009
Jumping Between the Graves - Photograph by Nathan Golon

A few years ago the cemetery lost my grandfather.

He’d been buried almost a quarter century before and I’d be surprised if anyone had visited his grave in twenty of those years.  We all loved Grandpa Ray, it wasn’t that we were glad to be rid of him or cursed his memory.  Rather, it just isn’t… »

From The Recesses – The Mob and Me

By John Rexer on Saturday, July 18th, 2009
vinny-vella-three1

The bowl of spaghetti with a red clam sauce would normally have been large enough to feed me for a week. But I was famished. It was July and hot, and this was the lunch special for $7.95. It came with a salad, bread and thick red wine served in a small water glass.

The spicy… »

From The Recesses – Of Misfits and Murderers

By Michael Tallon on Friday, May 22nd, 2009
loneliness1

The Misfits’ Club

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when he… »

From the Recesses – Whorticulture

By John Rexer on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
whores-2

I’ve been thinking about prostitutes lately, as one does, right?
Whores, harlots, prostitutes.
Kind of like, “lions, tigers and bears, oh my.” But not exactly.
Yes, that is what has been on my mind: ladies of the night, tarts, trollops. And, besides the obvious reason, DEPRAVITY, I am not exactly sure why.
Perhaps it is because a friend of… »

From the Recesses – The Parting Glass

By Matthew Grimm on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
banger-2

Sit on the deck chair of this club that otherwise wouldn’t let me in to park cars, much less as a member, and gaze inside with booze-frosted eyes, as if beholding a crux moment of a film shot by Haskell Wexler. Late summer cool cascades off the inlet on northern Long Island, rectangular lights of… »

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