Elsewhere in Mexico: Pie de la Cuesta

Mexico City: Scenes: Mercado Merced and Centro Historico, August

 

 

 

Mexico City: Scenes—Party in a Salon

I went to a party at a hair salon. It was weird.

 

Everyone's a Critic: What Justin Bieber is Good For

I listen to a lot of music on YouTube, and the most frequently used put-down in the comments section goes something like this:

If you don't like this go listen to your fucking Justin Bieber.

Funny Things About Serious People: Richard Yates, Dakota Fanning, Haley Joel Osment, and Tao Lin

I'm sick of books about weird people who turn out to have been sexually molested as children. Does the percentage of characters in American fiction who were molested as children reflect the percentage of actual Americans who were molested as children?

The Vampire Thing Never Dies: To Absorb as Many Lives

For the Best American Travel Writing thing I had to write a fifty-word bio. It was the longest bio I've ever had to write and I had a lot of trouble with it. I just came across some early drafts in my papers:

1. Avi Davis wrote, directed, performed six starring roles in, and was in the midst of editing the original version of The Undead Travel when his producers cut his funding (I still have the master tapes, you fuckers!!!) and handed over the project to Tony Scott. Davis is currently overseeing the construction of a winter bungalow in Tahiti.

2. Avi Davis was born and raised in Nepal, the only son of an American couple who ran a popular ecotourism lodge in the Himalayas. He gave up a promising military career in that country to pursue an in-depth study of socioeconomic barriers facing gypsy communities in the former Soviet Union. The fruits of his investigations will appear in the book Raggle Taggle Riff Raff (of which the present essay forms one chapter), set to be released by Vintage Books in mid-2011.

3. Avi Davis cites his formative influences as "my first dog, Ginger Bakersfield," and "being struck by lightning during a family camping trip in New Hampshire." The Undead Travel is his first published work on catamaran repair, a subject to which he hopes to devote more dead trees in the future.

4. Poet, essayist, statesman, painter, astrozoologist, actor, and model Avi Davis lives in a heavily-fortified villa in Cookesbury, a remote town in southeastern Maryland. He enjoys Chinese classical music and the occasional BDSM session.

5. Avi Davis' (Davis's?) (Davis'es?) (Davises'?) (Davisez'''?) work has appeared in Harphers, Harper's Bizarre, The Three-Thousand Penny Review (formerly the Two-Thousand Seven-Hundred-Fifty Penny Review), The Upper-Hudson Hippie Review, The Southern Misanthrope Cousin-Fuckers Review, The Kenyantiafrican Review, Open Shitty, Tin Spouse, The New Porker, WTF, BLROBL, Vizor, and Is This a Magazine?. He is a professor of creative writing at Escritito University in Utah.