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http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/04/hbc-90006880

My piece about Cairo, IL ran in the US print version
of TIME Magazine this week. I've gotten a lot of good feedback.
Best of luck to the people of Cairo and Ace of Cups.

I went to the This American Life studio in Manhattan to be interviewed
for Chicago Public Radio yesterday and talked with Richard
Steele about the history of Cairo, IL, the young punk resettlement,
and historical race relations in Southern Illinois. You can check
out the archived interview here (10 min.)

I also wrote a piece about the Tarnac Communists for the Abu Dhabi
Review: you can see that online here

Labels: Cairo, Chicago Public Radio, France, IL, Tarnac, TIME

On the sidewalk,
walking towards the bar to get drunk
I catch myself wondering
“Are the days moving faster than they were back then?”
They are.
My days shorter
my gait brisker
my drunks drunker
my awakenings more rude
“Everyone else thinks about these things”, I think.
They just forget to write them, I write.
The potpourri of North Carolina spring
that mysterious scruffy foliage just off the sidewalk wafting in
the Tarheel blue fade of police lights
gong of that church bell that tourists and drunk people love to ring
I couldn’t ever properly capture the loneliness,
the expansive sense of possibility
of a nighttime walk down an empty North Carolina street.

Patrick asleep on the orange recliner
the soft whirring of the electric fan
late afternoon sun pouring in open windows
downtown Greensboro waiting outside,
cast in ancient white marble, immutable stagnant
weathered by the seasons
a portrait of Southern Greco-Roman stability the sun on
dust specks rising up en masse from a piece of carpet
books scattered on shelves and tables, across Patrick’s lap
years of pleasant memories here
I come back to this in-between place.
sleeping in the closet, a warm womb with white walls
fistdeep in the soggy mush of ancient, nigh-forgotten details
the visceral tracers of stories I can’t recall
quotations memorized and then promptly forgotten
you remember the shape, the outline
a garbled mash of intonations
abandoned buildings and the Quadratic Equation
drunkenly broken into.

"Zine Scenes" New York Post, November 29, 2009. Marissa Meltzer wrote:

Aaron Lake Smith, 26, a journalist, is the author of several zines, including one on Joan Didion and his most recent, “Unemployment,” which was written during a jobless period last winter. He started doing a zine one summer when none of his friends were around.

"Photocopied and Stapled" The Rumpus, Jason Diamond wrote:

What sets Lake Smith apart from what Tobias Carroll referred to as a “post-Cometbus generation of punk rock memoirists” is his ability to balance the silly with the serious. He goes through bouts of guilt that would make any Catholic jealous, and is constantly haunted by the dark shadow of capitalism. Whether or not Aaron Lake Smith is happy watching what he refers to as “the crumpled and fading empire of America” is of no matter to me, but the fact that he documents it so well is what matters.

Arthur Magazine, Andy Folk

Labels: Press, Unemployment, Unemployment Zine

I did some pieces at the COP15 Conference, mostly about the panels, the alternative climate summit, and the protests. This is a little directory: my pieces up on Audubon Magazine, Huffington Post, and N + 1.

Labels: Audubon Magazine, COP15, COP15 protests, Huffington Post, n + 1