She kept telling herself she was OK. She could do this. Everything was OK. Breathe. She had thought about it (a lot) and had conducted little silent arguments with herself, as well as with the man who used to be her husband. You want to run off and do whatever you want, like no one...
The business was not how the average person who was not in the business would imagine it. Sheila wouldn’t understand, that was for sure. She never did. Certainly, he hadn’t really understood how it all worked before he became a part of it. People don’t really know what they don’t really know is how he...
When news of Marty Erndel’s debauched poker game leaked, initially on an Internet celebrity gossip site and subsequently, almost instantly, onto the Web feeds of “legitimate” news organizations, the gentlemen whose lives were about to be ruined dealt with the developing calamity in one of three ways. Peterphile (and others) denied that beneath the Toy...
Monroe couldn’t remember what he was supposed to ask Lia about, but he knew it was something important, important enough for him to remember that he had forgotten something. “Damn,” he announced to her back, as she stood at his kitchen counter, slicing a lemon into perfect quarters, “this weed is strong.” “For sure,” Lia...
“No, that’s not going to happen right now. I love you. Goodbye,” Lia Chang mumbled into her phone. She shook her head. “No, Monroe. Not at Planetary Pictures. Goodbye. I love you…Because. I told you. Goodbye.” She hung up. Monroe was Lia Chang’s boyfriend. At least that’s how she viewed their relationship. She didn’t envision...
The investigator’s report, neatly collated and stapled, and hand-signed by Ed Keen, with his detective’s license number typed below and embossed with a notary’s seal, looked official and convincing. If you read it carefully, which Sheila Harvey had done twice, in one sitting, you wouldn’t be inclined to argue with its findings. There were copies...
Ted Denenberg hadn’t wanted to take this meeting. He had all the ideas he needed. He wasn’t looking. But a friend of a friend knew his friend, Cohen, who another friend, Freeman, knew from shul (until Cohen stopped going a few months back) and who Freeman thought could be coaxed back into the congregation with...
Doug Bishop loved to ride his bicycle around Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, and Melrose, and Thai Town and Little Armenia. He considered the activity a kind of window shopping, although he seldom had any inclination to buy the clothes and used tires and garden supplies he saw on his perambulations. Doug was window shopping for...
He found his center. He inhaled until he no longer could. He exhaled slowly through his nose. And although he knew nothing had changed, that he was still Ross Newman, working actor, to everyone else he was no longer Ross Newman. When he stepped from behind the scrim and into the lights, the man they...
“So you’ll think about?” Marty Erndel pleaded. Lenny Wizenberg grinned, delighted less at the terms of the deal than with the abstract idea that a man as putatively important as the Kike would want to do a deal with someone like him. “I said I would, Marty.” “It’s good for all of us.” Lenny inhaled...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Alien invasion! Earth occupied by creatures far smarter than humans! Thousands of years of civilization rendered irrelevant! Cory Finley’s movie adaptation of M.T. Anderson’s novel Landscape with Invisible Hand accomplishes the impressive feat of being simultaneously incisive/critical/instructive and entertaining/funny/touching. While the film is ultimately a scathing indictment of colonialism, capitalism, and artificial intelligence, the action...
