America washes ashore like cultural driftwood in countries like this one. The locals wear and digest it like an imported non sequitur as they walk through an absurdist landscape that used to be their homeland.
Henry Rollins, “Good News: The World is Finally Flat,” Vanity Fair, 11/12, on the occasion of seeing a woman in a Black Flag T shirt walking around the slums of Jakarta.
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Being an enthusiastic coughstucker myself, I would someday like to ask Henry if it was the insulting delivery of the word, or the subtext of gayness that the word implies that angered him most? Seeing as how our department is gleefully R-rated in much of its casual discourse, it’s hard to know.
Hank Stuever, “Coughstucker,” Hank Stuever’s blog, 11/4, on the recent Washington Post Style section fisticuffs
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Gold recommended what he called “the winciest dish in town: a sharp, glistening steel skewer stabbed through thin coins of meat sliced from a bull penis, which bubble and hiss when they encounter the heart of the fire, sizzling from proud quarters to wizened, chewy dimes.
Dana Goodyear, quoting Jonathan Gold, “The Scavenger,” New Yorker, 11/9
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Inverted Soapbox 