{ON THE STANDS}

In Celebration | AUDACITY

To reflect and celebrate the beginning of a new era, we've put together a special collection of prose and poetry. A special issue for a unique time. Ah, the audacity of being human.

{Editorial}

Audacity: The New Scarlet Letter

BY CAROLINE BERGER $\"Four score...\"$

1.
"Audacity: the quality or state of being audacious: as a: intrepid boldness b: bold or arrogant disregard of normal restraints." -Merriam Webster Dictionary

As I type these words, it is 12:45 a.m. on Inauguration Day, and I cannot sleep. About an hour ago, I watched, giddy with excitement, the clock's slow progress toward history. Granted, my being awake was in part due to a looming deadline for this essay and one or two espressos, but as it grew nearer and nearer to the stroke of midnight, I could not help but think of what the day ahead symbolized, and could not help but wonder if our President Soon-No-Longer-To-Be-Elect was also awake, and also typing away at his keyboard or his Blackberry, making those final edits for a speech that will forever be part of history.

I have been thinking about the word "audacity" a lot lately, and on this eve of change, it seemed an appropriate theme for our winter SalonZine issue. As an artist, one must embrace audacity. Audacious art is the sort Nita and I wish to see more of, and it is what you will ...

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{Fiction}

Jen the First

BY BENJAMIN MATVEY

Suddenly, there is a scent in my nose that makes everything around me irrelevant: the perfume of the first girl who was ever foolish enough to have sex with me. I had been fingering through the latest contribution of Desmond Morris an instant ago, but now I am assaulted with wafts of that far too sweet, girlish, nonsensical scent; like a mixture of lavender, cinnamon, and citronella. I shove the book back into the shelf and spin around, startling an old man in a tweed hat behind me, but I do not see the culprit. She must have just walked by, distributed her scent and moved along.

My eyes dart to both sides and see too many women browsing, but none have the correct vector to have just passed me. But where would she go smelling like Jen the First? The romance section? The homeopathy section ? The self-help section? Inexorable focus floods over me again and decides there is nothing more important in the History of Ever than finding that scent. But which way, left or right? ...

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The Hopeful Story People Want to Hear

BY CATHERINE CURAN

I. Faith

Three weeks before your twenty-fifth birthday you visit a well-known New York hospital to see a specialist, a kindly old blue-eyed doctor who is so pleased to meet you, who inserts a long thin needle into your throat efficiently, apologetically, looking for evidence of a malfunction you feel confident he will not find.

The odds are against it: you are young, you are healthy. More importantly (in your view) you are an intuitive person; if something were wrong you would have suspected a problem, felt a nagging unease.

In twenty five years you have seen ample reason not to trust your body, with its eruptions of acne, of canker sores the size of raisins on your tongue, its sensitive skin that scars and bruises and flushes and burns altogether too easily, its untrainable lust for the wrong man, who is regularly updated but never fundamentally changed.

You have no reason to believe the God you were raised on exists, reason not to, even, because of your many unanswered prayers to Him. But these are selfish prayers, about men and work, foolish prayers for world peace, and God's failure ...

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{Non-Fiction}

A Report from Kenya: Parsing a Native Son

BY CHARLES A. MATATHIA

This piece was written just before the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America on January 20, 2009.

Has Change Really Come?

Thousands crowd around transistor radios in Nairobi and all around Africa from Goma to Mogadishu. Far away in Chicago, a once upon a time "skinny kid with a funny name" stands before an ecstatic crowd. "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible," he begins, "who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer." That man, that black man, is Barack Obama. And in that moment, as he speaks and America applauds, as his image and words are beamed to the world from one satellite to the next, across cellular networks and along fiber-optic cables, that son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas is American Zeitgeist personified. We cannot see it in his demeanor but we can hear it in his words: "It's ...

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A Cub in Winter

BY LUIS H. FRANCIA

Her skin tells the truth: full, curvesome, with hints of over-ripeness, and yet glorious, glorious. My own skin, alert as a prairie dog.

Those were my salad days, the days of my early summer, they were the days of her early autumn. And it was winter that January, cold, brutal, my first in the realm, tempering the jubilation of an unrepentant ex-acolyte who, by moving to faithless Manhattan, had strained, if not broken, the thick leash of church and home. I needed sex as an aperient, to expunge still powerful strictures from my system. I needed symphonies of carnal love to flesh out the music my body had long been hearing, needed to feast on a buffet of bodies offered willingly, needed to pursue more earthly kingdoms.

She had sensed this at my older brother's party—my brother, who regaled me with tales of New York on his occasional visits to Manila—sensed the night's augury, when my eyes gloried in the sight of her décolletage. She picked up on my overwhelming lack of artfulness (praise be to naivete! I recalled thinking later on), sensed that I would be putty ...

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A Day at the Dentist

BY ERICA SILBERMAN

It's just after rush hour on a warm July morning and I'm picking up my mother at Grace's place in Bridgeport. I have to work at five-thirty in Manhattan and I'm praying that the traffic will behave and I will be able to take my mother to the dental clinic at Norwalk Hospital, bring her back to Bridgeport and make it back to the city on time. I drove to my father's place in Connecticut after work the night before because I am panicked that I'll miss the appointment, and it makes more sense to drive to Connecticut from Manhattan after work rather than driving home from work in Manhattan to Brooklyn and then leaving in the morning. Even though I have called my mother a few times to remind her that we are going to the dentist I know that she will not remember. I park in front of Grace's building and buzz her apartment.

"Hi, Grace, it's Erica." No response.

"I'm downstairs."

"Okay, we'll be down."

Grace says that they'll be right down. That means at least ten minutes. My mother is on Alzheimer's time and ...

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Memento Mori

BY BARBARA SUEKO MCGUIRE

It's raining cats and dogs. Thunder, lightening—by California standards, practically a hurricane. The clouds are so thick that even if the sun hadn't set, it'd be dark. But it has—it's eight o'clock, so in a sense, it's twice as black as it'd normally be. Regardless, when Bob Harris gets a call from Long Beach Airport wondering if he'd be interested in flying three people—a man and two women—over to Burbank, five bucks each, he doesn't hesitate.

"Sure," he says, and is out the door and on his way in less than five minutes.

Bob's got a single-engine instrument-rated commercial pilot's license and owns his own plane. He spends a lot of time at the airport, getting in good with the guys in the tower so they'll call him when freelance jobs like this pop up. It's been about three years since he was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, and for the time being, flying is fun, pays the bills.

Bob's only twenty four, but after combat in the jungles of New Guinea, he figures there's not much left in life to ...

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100% Armenian Blood: A Theoretical Performance

BY NANCY AGABIAN

I want to set up a stand at Vernissage, the weekend flea-market-cum-craft-fair in the middle of Yerevan, where all the tourists get their Armenian souvenirs, beautifully crafted and sold at rock bottom prices. I will sit at a table, and there will be someone with me in a white coat and a syringe and a tourniquet, sapping red fluid from my arm into tiny vials. I will dab white makeup on my face to appear pallid and there will be a sales rep passing out brochures explaining the prices and the authenticity and the dire necessity of the product. The sign, hand lettered like the notices of shows at the Opera House, will read "100% Armenian Blood".

***

During this first month of my Fulbright fellowship here in the Armenian capital, I have made an unlikely discovery: Some people don't understand that I'm Armenian. They meet me, hear my name, see that I don't comprehend most—if not all—the language that they are speaking, watch me smile wanly, and ask me where I'm from. The answer is that I'm from New York, which is the answer New Yorkers ...

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{Music Review}

Neptune’s Daughter, Luminescent Orchestrii

BY DOMINIC MASI

When hearing the term "gypsy punk," a few images come to mind: band members jumping around like mad men, a crazy audience, loud drums and a load of booze. Going into "Neptune's Daughter," the new release from Brooklyn based band Luminescent Orchestrii, I had a certain idea of how the album was going to sound. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Unlike the raucous hysteria of modern day gypsy punk heroes, Googol Bordello, Luminescent Orchestrii's sound has a bit more class and subtlety. The album begins with "Moldavian," a fast paced instrumental that sets the tone for what follows. The heavy drums and racing violin strings bounce off of each other in such a way that there is no craving for vocals—just more volume!

Lumii plays everything from more traditional klezmer punk styled songs ("Mur Strojmeno," "Di Zun Vet Aruntergeyn"), to Spanish flavored songs ("La Tarde"). The standout is "How to Play Romanian," a classic instrumental that uses haunting violins to bring the song to a calm in the middle, only to work it into an absolute frenzy by the end. The perfect song to dance to...or start a riot to.

Besides the beautiful ...

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