the second round

(7) the pixies, “wave of mutilation (uk surf)”
closed out
(2) Nine Inch Nails, “closer”
449-424
and will play on in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 15.

mika taylor on “closer”

I first heard Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” while riding the school bus my junior year. The album had come out the spring before, but this song didn’t get major radio play until the fall of 1994. It was a “power play” through September and topped out at 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October. From the back of the bus, I wouldn’t have heard the opening, that heartbeat rhythm, the bump/gush of a bass drum and what sounds like TV static. The chucklehead talk jocks liked to joke during an initial lull. There would have been no way to make out the faint piano melody, little before that bold first line. “You let me violate you.”
I had friends who were cooler than I was and wore their NIN and Jane’s Addiction t-shirts with Docs and chain wallets, friends whose older sisters had taken them to an abandoned airfield in Rhode Island for the third Lollapalooza (though no one I knew had been to the first). They knew the song well enough not to listen, and so it didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time. Trent Reznor’s desperate rasp was background music to our rural bus route past open fields and tall trees. I wouldn’t really hear it until later.
My friends had probably seen Mark Romanek’s controversial video on MTV when it was released in May. We didn’t have cable at my house, so I wouldn’t get to watch for years, when I found it on the internet, uncensored. It starts with the clicking of a hand cranked camera, a bouncing title card and then a sound sync beep. In the first shot, a human heart nailed to a chair pumps to the drumbeat and releases puffs of steam. Beneath plays a chromatic piano melody, haunting and elemental. The set is a basement museum, a curio collection of the dead and deformed, bones, meat, cobwebs, and decay. The footage, jumpy and sepia, is meant to look found not made, taking the industrial and electronic elements back to the turn of the century or before.
Added to the beat is a techno ticking version of the disco high hat along with a keyboard pattern to round out the melody. Reznor sings into a microphone that could also be a breast. “You let me violate you.” In the video, roaches crawl over dusty glass bottles and beakers. “You let me desecrate you.” Candles drip wax. Behind the singer is a line of human skulls. “You let me penetrate you.” The “you” is a live mannequin in thigh high boots, hairless, as anonymous and interchangeable a partner as they come. Her identity is unimportant. The you is a piece in the collection, an object, not a subject, there to be penetrated, felt from the inside.
“Closer” is a third of the way into The Downward Spiral, a semi-autobiographical concept album that follows a man down the road from depression to suicide with stops for sex and drugs along the way. It is the point in that descent when shit’s falling apart, but there’s still some shred of hope, a chance for him to feel at least something through violent and desperate sex. At age sixteen, when I first heard the single, I’d never even kissed anyone. I didn’t do drugs. I’d never been drunk. “Closer” is as much about self-hatred as it is about sex though. That, I understood.
Now, I have a hard time placing myself in this song. Maybe it’s because I was a teenage girl when it came out and am an adult woman now, but I identify far more with the “you” than the “I”. I still feel the carnal power of the beats, the lush lure of the bass line. There is need, desire, desperation in those vocals. It is a song I would fuck to, for sure. But its lyrics disrupt my subject position, making it clear that mine is not the pleasure that matters here.
In consensual BDSM (alluded to with various gags, blindfolds, and restraints in the video), the submissive partner can find pleasure in being violated, penetrated, desecrated. Objectification is not necessarily objectionable. But I get stuck on the fourth line “I want to complicate you.” As if I, as object, am not complicated enough in my own right, as if I am nothing without that proposed penetration, that animal fucking, as if there is nothing inside me until he feels it there. The most he can imagine is not a distinct subject position, but an object complicated by his desire.
“Help me,” begs an unholy choir, Reznor’s falsetto harmonized with itself. “I broke apart my insides,” he claims in a rougher tone. The object is not just complicated by the singer’s desire, she is also his salvation. “Help me. I have no soul to sell.” Sex is the only thing that works anymore, the only thing that offers relief from the pain of living. “Help me get away from myself.” When he sings about drugs and depression and sex, about that deep and unfulfillable need, physical addiction and psychic desire, Reznor captures a perfectly teenage feeling. He claws the walls of a solipsistic cage.
As a teenager, I bought into all of that shit. I wanted male attention. I wanted to be pursued, maybe even overpowered. Songs like this one made me flush with desire. It was dark and primal in a way that I wasn’t. I wanted to be openly and undeniably sexual even as I feared my own sexuality. I wanted to be the object. I was not. I was tough and average and shy, fairly awkward and mostly alone, and I watched with awe as girls my age lived lives that seemed so far beyond me.

The chorus in “Closer” is the memorable part: the dirty word, the surge of melody, the fantasy of being held down, fucked like an animal, felt from the inside. This is a song about sex and self-hatred, but the sex is what resonates. No emotional admission of flawed existence can compete.
Tommy Lee, the drummer for Mötley Crüe and contributor to the album (though not this song), called Closer: “the all-time fuck song.”
“Those are pure fuck beats,” he told Blender in 2002. “Trent Reznor knew what he was doing. You can fuck to it, you can dance to it and you can break shit to it.” Tommy Lee’s sex tape was filmed a year after this song came out. In it, Lee looks a little a bit like Reznor—lean and dark haired, but the sex is as straightforward as it comes, the object a bottle blond on the deck of a boat, with manicured nails and enhanced breasts.
“I didn't think it would become a frat-party anthem or a titty-dancer anthem," Reznor told an interviewer for Details who found it “hard to tell whether his principal emotion [was] pride or embarrassment or despair.” It’s fair to say, “all time fuck song” was not what he’d intended. In the EP, the now memorable refrain was looser: “I want to fuck you/ I want to taste you/ I want to feel you/ I want to be you/ Just like an animal.” His sound engineer, Sean Beavan, remembers Reznor worrying that the more iconic line sounded “trite.” Everything in the video fights that simplification. There are animal bodies parted out, flayed and decapitated. Reznor is a mannequin, an awkward body suspended and spinning, a head on a platter surrounded by orchids and roaches on rotting food. He is the submissive, blindfolded, chained, and writhing, even while he sings about domination. The song is meant to mean more, to complicate.
Its legacy may be the consequence of the objectification. No matter how complex or nuanced you mean it to be, no matter how layered the track, anything can be oversimplified, refined down to its catchy chorus.

A bit of lore: This song, and most of the album, was recorded in the house where Sharon Tate, her friends, and her unborn child were murdered by members of the Manson family twenty-three years earlier. Reznor set up a recording studio in the living room and named it “Le Pig” or just “Pig,” the word one of the murders wrote in Tate’s blood on the house’s front door. Reznor filmed a music video there. He recorded parts of Marilyn Manson’s 1992 album Portrait of an American Family there too. He paid $11,000 a month in rent. He was the last to occupy the home. When he moved out at the end of 1993, he took the door with him for his studio in New Orleans. The original house was torn down and rebuilt with a different address.
This detail is not at all essential to understanding “Closer,” and yet, it treads the path of objectification and using others in service of an aesthetic. Reznor later told an interviewer at Rolling Stone, that he hadn’t even considered the implications of living and working there until Sharon Tate’s sister confronted him about exploiting her sister’s death. “The whole thing kind of slapped me in the face,” he said. “I realized for the first time, “What if it was my sister?” […] I went home and cried that night. It made me see there's another side to things, you know? It's one thing to go around with your dick swinging in the wind, acting like it doesn't matter. But when you understand the repercussions that are felt... that's what sobered me up.”
Taking is a talent. Reznor’s gift as a musician is in his reuse and distortion of sounds. Everything in the “Closer” track is sampled, distorted, reworked, and run in and through a bevy of mixers and machines which I won’t pretend to understand. The background includes a sample from "Take A Chance With Me" by Roxy Music, reversed and modified. Even the initial kickdrum beat is a heavily processed sample from Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing.” Reznor was meticulous about a song’s sonic qualities, pushing for the new and interesting, the never before heard. According to Beavan, the only sounds Reznor didn’t alter were the vocals and guitar. “He wanted it all to flow together, because everything else was so piecemeal. To his way of thinking, whereas the rhythm should be perfect, the emotion should come from the voice and the guitar.” There is a power to this creative process and beauty in the music it produces, even with the limitations of his lyrics.
The video is likewise a mélange of borrowed imagery. In it, Romanek recreates works of Francis Bacon, Man Ray, Giorgio de Chirico, Joel-Peter Witkin, and James Van Der Zee. Along with the religious iconography and the bondage gear are decontextualized images of race. There’s a page torn from Jean Brunhes’ “Races”, a work of “human geography.” A pair of heavily hennaed twins are attached together by their hair. There is a black man dressed as a porter holding a pig’s foot that could be a penis, styled in the mode of Van Der Zee’s photographs of the Harlem Renaissance. A blond girl in spiral curls sits prone on a velvet chair. The mannequin woman holds a sheep skull in front of her face as she spins. Seven bald white men in suits move towards camera. A Dadaist metronome ticks with a picture of a human eye. There seems little meaning beyond the power of image, an agglomeration of racial and scientific history. It is compelling to watch, but it also feels like erasure. Race, like identity, like female sexuality, is decontextualized rather than explored, valued for its aesthetic as a part of the collection.
I need to pause here and talk about the monkey, a grey capuchin tied to a cross, a nod to Witkin. Of all the imagery aimed to shock, this remains the most disturbing. He looks as if he is panicking or in pain, writhing and baring his teeth. “I want to go on record about the monkey,” Romanek said afterwards. “That monkey was not in any danger even though he appears to be in distress. The monkey was just munching on bits of banana and enjoying himself.” In the version edited for MTV, the cross is blacked out, but the struggling monkey’s face remains. Gone too are the mannequin’s breasts and crotch, the crucifix on her blindfold. Gone is the shot of Reznor gagged and tied to a chair, surrounded by fetish toys. There is no more anatomical drawing of a woman’s splayed vulva. Images of sexual and religious taboo were edited out for the broader audience, but the monkey’s pained face passed the censors. I do believe that he wasn’t hurt, that this is a disturbing image ethically created. But it furthers a theme I cannot ignore: the way a self-involved I (be it the “I” in the song or the eye of the camera) flattens all desire but its own.
This is how the object is used. It is there to give meaning to the subject, to render him more interesting, more dynamic, perhaps profound, to bring him closer to God. “You make me perfect,” Reznor says. “Help me become somebody else.” This is the responsibility of objects, of images, and of girls.

I knew a girl in the nineties who did taxidermy and claimed to be a vampire, “not for blood, for love.” I knew a girl who dressed in velvet and dyed new streaks in her hair every week. Boys trailed behind her. I knew a girl who lived in a lean-to in the woods across from our high school. She moved in there with her boyfriend so her parents couldn’t tell her what to do.
I was none of those girls. I was not cool enough to layer my clothes or line my eyes. I had no older sister to take me to shows or paint my nails black. I did not know to differentiate between commercial music and art. I did not understand what it was to sell out. So, I watched and envied girls who seemed to know so much more than I did—girls I wanted to be.
I knew a girl who went on Trent Reznor’s yacht in the late nineties for a sex vacation. His girlfriend invited her, and she said yes. It was neither violent nor violating. She had a good time.
I knew a girl who showed up with a friend on Perry Ferrell’s doorstep in LA.
     He said, “Come in,” but she didn’t.
“Why not?” I asked later.
     “What was I going to do,” she said, “sleep with him? What kind of asshole sleeps with teenagers who knock on his door? I’m not a groupie.”
These were girls who knew themselves. One gave and the other held back, and both of them retained powerful subject positions well beyond the singers’ desires.
I was not that girl. I dreamt of being desired, assumed it would validate me, but I was never the target of this type of obsession. I did not go on sex vacations or get invited in by rock stars. I was a virgin in the nineties and remained one up until right before my twenty-third birthday. I had kissed three maybe four people before that. I slept with a friend of the coolest girl I knew, just so I could get it over with. She had Betty Page bangs and knew every lyric to every song. He was a shitty bassist from Venice Beach. We were going to do it a second time, but he drunkenly called me by her name.
Even as Reznor begs for help and salvation, the “you” in “Closer” could be anyone. Objects are interchangeable.
I know a girl who purged what she ate. I know a girl who didn’t eat at all. I know a girl who cut herself in thin lines on the insides of her thighs, back before that was a thing girls did.
“Closer” ends in a crescendo of music. It has been an unsatisfying climb, layer upon layer of sound, ever upward with no relief. Reznor whispers into the microphone, almost inaudibly, “Through every forest/ Above the trees/ Within my stomach/ Scraped off my knees/ I drink the honey/ Inside your hive/ You are the reason/ I stay alive.” And then it is just music for the rest of the song, two minutes shorter than the album cut, but still long for radio play.
I know a girl started a band, who put out two albums and went on tour. I know a girl who left her parents’ house at seventeen and lived with a prostitute in a third-floor walkup. I know a girl who made up so much of her life that it was hard to keep track of what was real.
In the video there are insects, eels, human faces, slabs of beef, white men, a pig’s head spinning, the heart, the monkey on his crucifix. In silhouette, Reznor licks the microphone/breast. An eel, a vulva, a blindfolded man, the porter, the heart. Reznor’s face, distorted by an air compressor, skips and jumps and then the film burns in the projector.
I know a girl who drank her way into the hospital. I know a girl who snuck out of the ER after she OD’d. I know a girl who was too drunk to say no. I know a girl who said no but it didn’t matter. I know a girl who said yes when she wasn’t sure. I know a girl who said nothing at all.
The porter blows a puff of dust off of his top hat and the screen goes white. We are now watching through a 60’s era tube television. Most of the sonic elements that have built up over the course of the song are stripped away all at once.
I know a girl who was held at knifepoint on a date, whose rape was her first experience of sex. I know a girl whose mother’s boyfriend came into her room at night. I know a girl who dreamt of hypodermic needles in her vagina. I know a girl who took too many pills—luckily, they found her in time. I knew a girl who was alone when she died. I know a girl who announced with pride that she’d still never had an abortion. She miscarried a day before her appointment and we all got drunk to celebrate.
Reznor floats up to a disemboweled piano mounted on the wall and I wonder about who I’ve objectified along the way. What was I doing, collecting these girls? Listening to their stories on the back of the bus, sampling and distorting their details, imitating their musical tastes, sleeping with their friends. In idolizing these girls, I surely oversimplified their motivations, romanticized their pain. I envied the purity of their rage, but of course they suffered. I wanted the outlets they had in sex and drugs. Their taboo acts seemed revolutionary. I’m sure, in some, I mistook pain for pleasure, self-loathing for bravery. It’s hard to know which self-medications hurt and which heal. Still, these were not girls I wanted to use or exploit, they were girls I wanted to be. Theirs were exciting subject positions I imagined occupying. I valued them because they were complicated and dynamic in their own rights—I never thought my wanting made them so.
In the last measure, Reznor plinks out the final melody as its echo moves across the soundscape. There is no satisfaction or resolution here, no redemptive coda, only the last vibrations of what came before.

Mika Taylor was a Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, Ninth Letter, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Guernica, Diagram, and others. You can read most of them at mikataylor.com.

A MUTILATED LIFE OR REALLY GOOD FICTION: STEPHANIE MANKINS ON ”WAVE OF MUTILATION (UK SURF)”

It starts with a kick. A wet kick, drenched in reverb. Then the snap of a snare.

BOOM-BOOM-CRACK. BOOM-BOOM-CRACK.
BOOM-BOOM-CRACK. BOOM-BOOM-CRACK.  

The bass sends in a string­­ of single notes so low

DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA,

That we’re surprised when the next ones are even lower.

            DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.

We’re pulled down, wading through ten million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey. It’s a soft sludge, comforting, and we sink back into it like an old, familiar chair and ride it through to the end of this long, long day.
The strumming of an acoustic guitar fades in. It’s a ramp that launches us into the full song made complete by a haunting melody picked out on an electric. We’re awash in tremolo, wavering in time with the beat. We’re being prepared by magicians­­ to receive the enigmatic lyrics of this fucked-up lullaby, sung in a breathy voice: 

Cease to resist, given my goodbye
Drive my car into the ocean
You think I’m dead, but I sail away
On a wave of mutilation, a wave of mutilation

I was home from college on winter break the first time I heard the Pixies. There were seven or eight of us standing around my parents’ dingy suburban living room drinking Milwaukee’s Best—a truly unspectacular swap meet of bad roommate stories and new music finds—when someone asked if I’d heard the album Doolittle. I shook my head; I hadn’t even heard of the band. Jewel cases were shuffled, a cd was lifted from the flimsy plastic tray and another set in its place.
For someone else, someone much older, maybe, it might have been merely a young band’s sophomore effort, but for those of us straddling adolescence and adulthood, it was a seismic shift. Suddenly, our lives were as extraordinary as we’d dared hope they were, our moment in history as seminal as we’d always felt it could be. No longer were we me and you, sneaking cigarettes in your beater, moving pieces around a chess board we’d never master, earning minimum wage at Corn Dog 7 in the mall north of Dallas. We were gigantic.
The album’s third track, Wave of Mutilation, moves quickly with an intensity typical of many Pixies songs, but as the languid UK surf version proves, its power isn’t tied to tempo. If anything, the slower pace allows us to dive deep into the broodingly surreal and morbid existentialism that is the first verse. According to Black Francis, these four lines are about the 1980s phenomenon whereby foundering Japanese businessmen would commit murder-suicide—driving themselves and their families off a dock and into the ocean. Pretty gruesome stuff, yes, but I wonder—does it matter if you know what the lyrics mean, or where they come from?
Fast forward thirty years: what matters to me now isn’t exactly what mattered to me then, music or otherwise, which is something I attribute directly to becoming a mother. Having kids doesn’t diminish the importance of music, but it definitely rearranges priorities. Or maybe music is merely easier to lose sight of when faced with the more pressing demands of small humans: warm food, snacks, clean clothes, snacks, or replying to the urgent email from the school nurse who’s threatened to bar my daughter from virtual school unless I send in her immunization records immediately. Did I mention snacks?
Before I had children, music was all about me and my experience. Not that I didn’t marvel at its beauty and power, but I was always searching for what I could take from it. What could it do for my own music? How could knowledge of this or that aspect of this or that band elevate my standing among peers? What knocks me over now is realizing that there are whole musical worlds my kids don’t know about. There’s so much I sometimes feel like I can’t play it fast enough—songs and albums and bands that shaped my life—and the best part is that it has nothing to do with me. At least, I’m not looking to gain anything from it, not in the same way. I love to see their reactions, how one band will thrill them while others don’t seem to make an impression at all. Or it’s even simpler, a single moment: I can call out, Cease to resist, and one, if not both of them will answer back, given my goodbye. Depending on the mood, we may sing the next line, and the next, or even the whole verse, ending on wave of mutilation, something not one of us can easily define.
I hadn’t really given that phrase too much thought before I started this essay. I didn’t need to. The song’s fragmented, evocative imagery coupled with its singular sound was powerful enough to capture the raw angst of my late-teenage years, a vulnerable age when music tends to bore its way into your DNA. After that, the song and everything it encompassed were mine, and not something I needed to continue questioning. The same way I don’t think to ask why the sight of a slow-building thunderstorm—all blacks and blues and grays in constant collision—hovering above acres of tall, skinny pine trees comforts me. The same way I don’t wonder why sweet iced tea and salty fried okra always and forever belong to summers in east Texas.
Even so, wave of mutilation? What the hell is that?
My sister says that human existence can be thought of like waves in the ocean—each life one wave; each life a brief expression of a timeless entity too vast to comprehend. We are, every one of us, made up of the same stuff as everyone else. I like this analogy. It wouldn’t have meant much to me thirty years ago, but now it’s reassuring. My individual worries, the problems that threaten to overwhelm my day-to-day, are not unique to me. I am not alone.
The next step is a simple mathematical equivalency: If a wave is a life, then a wave of mutilation is a life of mutilation­­—or, a mutilated life. We all have our wounds, some of us more than others. Some of these wounds fade with time, but others leave us permanently scarred. If the scars are small or well-placed, we cover them up and get on with it. But if there are too many to hide, or they’re too large to disguise? What does it take—how many cuts—to render an entire life irreparable, mutilated beyond recognition? How damaged does your life have to become for you to no longer want it?
A few weeks into my first semester of graduate school, I arrived to my “Craft of the Essay” class and was met with the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide. The mood was somber and many were shocked, though if you’d read even a little of his work, you couldn’t have been too surprised. Depression, suicide,  and the agonizing mundanity of life figure prominently in all of his fiction. The conversation continued around the table as more students arrived, the word ‘tragedy’ thrown about as if it were a given, indisputable. While it’s almost always true that a suicide is a tragedy, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s the life that’s tragic, and the suicide is the only response, the only way out.
I can’t say I was saddened by his choice, not exactly. I was sorry that his life was so painful he decided it wasn’t worth living, but there’s a difference. I couldn’t articulate this difference immediately and it took some time to process, but in the end, I was relieved. I felt relief for him. His family and friends were grieving the loss of him personally, that I understood. The literary community at large, on the other hand, was grieving the loss of what could have been—assuming that had he lived, he would have continued to create phenomenal art—but I couldn’t. Not then. It seemed selfish to even contemplate whether someone’s suffering was worth what that suffering could produce.
And it was his suffering that produced his fiction. He and his characters may have inhabited different worlds, one real and one not, but they were equally dark. Wallace once said, as if speaking directly to this connection, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Popular music—rock, grunge, whatever—may not be fiction per se, but it is a fiction, and the best of it, like Wallace says, is about what it means to be human. Or, as in the case of ”Wave of Mutilation,” maybe what it means to fail, to give up being human.
There’s more to being human than suffering and failure, though: enter Wallace’s definition of really good fiction. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State, he said, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”
Can we see these possibilities in “Wave of Mutilation?” I was discussing this with my fourteen-year-old daughter the other day, and when I told her how Francis came up with the first verse, her gut reaction was horror followed by a resounding No! But the character in the song is not necessarily the same as the real-life businessman who killed his family and himself. Given the second line, You think I’m dead, but I sail away, you could be forgiven for deciding our character doesn’t die, that to sail away on a wave of mutilation is to accept that life is suffering and then continue to live, even if it’s a mutilated life, even if that mutilation is self-inflicted.
The second verse, and the song’s only other lyrics, is equally ambiguous.

I've kissed mermaids, rode the El Niño
Walked the sand with the crustaceans
Could find my way to Mariana
On a wave of mutilation

Sure, the world of kissing mermaids and riding a climactic condition (El Niño) is fantastical, but no one said realism is the only kind of fiction that can be great. Children live in fantasy worlds, and maybe that’s the best way to deal with a crappy reality. Plus, Mariana could be a woman, and love is always hopeful. That is, until you learn that Mariana is a reference to the Mariana Trench, the deepest oceanic trench on the planet. It’s hard to argue that finding your way there could mean anything other than dying and sinking to the bottom of the sea. Then again, the character says he could find his way to the Mariana trench, not that he necessarily did.
Lucky for us, in trying to decide if the song meets Wallace’s criterion for really good fiction, we’re not restricted to the lyrics alone. Unlike fiction that exists solely on the page, the fictional worlds of songs are created by music as well, and in the Pixies case, nothing is more alive than their music. It’s alive not only because it makes you feel alive when you listen to it, or because it serves as a bridge to your former lives, but also because it’s widely acknowledged to be the starting point for the era of 90s guitar rock, influencing such bands as Radiohead, PJ Harvey, Weezer, Soundgarden, and Nirvana.
Whether Wallace’s fiction succeeds in depicting a world that is both dark and includes possibilities for being alive and human, I can’t say. In the very least, it’s beyond the scope of this short essay. But if you’ve found this to be true in his work, you’ve found it, and it’s yours. Be thankful. I’m only sorry Wallace himself never did.

Stephanie Mankins graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in mathematics, and from Sarah Lawrence College with an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction. From 1998-2004, she and her band, Adult Rodeo, based in Austin, TX, recorded and released four full-length albums: The Kissyface (1999, Shimmy Disc); Texxxas (2000, Shimmy Disc); Long-Range, Rapid-Fire (Four States Fair, 2001); and Tough Titty (2004, Four States Fair). In 2016, she finished a short documentary about her sister’s decision to get a cochlear implant, Do You Hear What I Hear?, which can be found here: https://vimeo.com/167353167  She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband, two kids, and their dog, Iggy. She’s currently working on her first novel.