Yes Virginia, the Bristol Casino Will Change Your Luck (for the Worse)
‘If people make stupid bets, how is that my problem?’
A casino is not so much a place as an absence of place, a transportation nexus from reality to its opposite
Coal-town gamblers battle depression in a state of ‘dark flow’ while politicians and developers steal their paychecks through legislated fraud
Jimmy and I are sitting at a plastic high-top table in the Bristol Casino bar. He’s wearing jeans, a faded Florida Gators hoodie, and a navy ball cap with an unfamiliar gray, triangular logo. It’s a Saturday night in Virginia, and some local bluesy act is playing too loud on the makeshift stage behind us.
“Do you know who Graham Betchart is?” Jimmy shouts over the licks. He doesn’t wait for my reply. “He’s a mental skills coach for the Sacramento Kings. He’s got this thing he says. He says, ‘Be where your feet are.’ Live for the moment. Don’t worry about yesterday or tomorrow. Be in the now. That’s how I live life.”
Jimmy rolled into town four days ago, and he’s been at the casino every night since. “I like this place,” he repeats for the third time, but always with a new qualifier. “It’s got good music, good energy. I don’t really believe in God, but I believe in energy.”
Six months ago, …
Peter Plate Does Not Wish to Be Found
San Francisco’s furtive noir novelist is no mystery to me. He’s a herald of the darkness that is now upon us.
‘The contradictions are brutal. You have to write about them.’
He meets his publisher in anonymous public spaces and rejects computers as a tool of the surveillance state.
Cities get the writers they deserve, and writers get the cities they need. London with Charles Dickens and Zadie Smith. New York with Edith Wharton and Gore Vidal. Los Angeles with Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. Tokyo and Haruki Murakami. Istanbul and Orhan Pamuk. And on and on. But cities change and so do the writers who best represent them. For ages, Dashiell Hammett and San Francisco were an inseparable pair. Now there’s a new writer on the scene who threatens to take the spotlight away from the author of The Maltese Falcon and its hardboiled detective Sam Spade.
His name is Peter Plate. He’s the author of ten mystery novels, all of them published by Seven Stories in New York. Plate is a mystery, too. If you have never heard of him, or aren’t sure who he is and what he has written, that’s no accident. He doesn’t promote his books nor publicize himself. Bookstore signings aren’t his thing. …
What Is Punk Now?
The Age of Insta-culture means you can counterfeit insider knowledge by searching Spotify
Hot Topic and H&M let Taylor Swift fans be ‘punk’
While the oldheads whine about CBGBs and apply purity tests, a new, more democratic sensibility is being born for kids who actually care about music
CBGB, as most insufferable oldheads will tell you, was the epitome of all musical culture in New York City, and therefore on the entire planet, especially punks. But since its demise in 2006, three years before I was born, the insufferable oldheads have seemingly switched their attitudes from, “That was the coolest place” to “All other places are fake and there is no real music subculture left anywhere on earth, so help me God.”
As a self-diagnosed punk, I can tell you that a “real” music subculture in NYC definitely still exists. Last Sunday, the Bowery Electric’s Hardcore Matinee, a free, all-ages monthly hardcore show, featured local bands such as Winter Wolf, The Give-Ups, Incendiary Device, and other local favorites. It seemed to contain everything that the oldheads didn’t want to hear: The same thing they’ve been fighting for in their “punk’s not dead” attitude for so many years, us youngins are …
