I remember when I was a kid I told my dad once that I was going to buy and own a Dippin Dots stand. He smacked me over the head with a rolled up Wall Street Journal and from that point on I had to read the WSJ every day.
How do we come to be who we are sexually?
How do we cope with the forces of desire?
How can we understand the relationship between the transcendent and the physical, between the wish for love and the anarchy of the erotic?
Daniel Bergner looks for answers in the stories of four people whose longings are very different from our own: a devoted husband burdened by an insatiable foot fetish, a clothing designer who finds ecstasy in the pain of others, a man smitten with his young stepdaughter, and an advertising director who casts traditionally beautiful models but who is attracted only to amputees. Bergner finds in their desires metaphors for the issues that confront us all and raises fascinating questions about the erotic differences between men and women and the nature of ecstasy itself: Are some people actually experiencing more ecstasy than the rest of us?
The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing
Cheers to Four Barrel on their 2nd anniversary. Jeremy was nice enough to let me do a photoshoot there when I first moved to San Francisco and I’ve been going back ever since.
According to a recent estimate by the C.D.C. an average of eighteen American veterans kill themselves every day. That number accounts for 1/5th of all of suicides in the United States.
These images are of call responders working for the Department of Veteran Affairs in Canandaigua, New York talking vets back from the edge. It’s the frontline of the government’s attempt to curb the rising suicide rate among active duty service members and veterans. The center is the only one of its type in the country, and was established in 2007 by the VA.
That year, the line received about 10,000 callers. In 2008, it received almost 70,000, and in 2009, just under 120,000. By June of this year alone, operators had already taken just under 100,000 calls.
On average, the operators in the center receive over 500 calls every day. After the phone’s hung up, there’s no follow up, and the operators almost never find out what happened to the veteran they spoke to. They go back to their reading, or facebook pages, and wait for the phone to ring again. (via VII The Magazine)
My mom didn’t kill me; she wept. It was my father who vented his fury. “I wanted to write, too, you know, when I was young. I studied French poetry and philosophy. But do you think I could feed our family on poems? Can you name one Vietnamese who’s making a living as an American writer? What makes you think you can do it?”
This was the late ‘80s, and the vast majority in our community were first-generation refugees, many of them boat people who had subsisted for years in refugee camps in Southeast Asia.
“I can’t name one,’ I said. “There may not be anyone right now. So, I’ll be the first.”
Father looked at me and with that look I knew he was not expecting an answer; it was not how I talked in the family, which was to say respectfully and with vague compliance. Perhaps for the first time, he was assessing me anew.
I matched his gaze, which both thrilled and terrified me. And crossing that invisible line, failure was no longer an option.
the education of a vietnamese writer | angry asian man
(via Jacket Mechanical)
