A strange, awful and yet wonderful paragraph from a New York Times article on the death of an artist I had never heard of:
A Hamster’s Nest is what it sounds like, but with humans in the rodent roles: You shred a few hundred phone books, paint the walls, then ingest enough intoxicants so that every scrap of sentience disappears. “It was really intense,” recalled Ms. Snow, whose divorce from Dash was finalized this summer, though she remained close to him to the end. “We were all really high, and there were concerts. It was like a whole other world, an intense moment, all these people with paper, piles of Yellow Pages, no air or ventilation and fumes everywhere. We were already so drunk. The iPods kept getting lost in the paper.” Three days later — with no clue how it happened — she woke up in Berlin.
Full pathetic story, written by Alan Feuer and Allen Salkin, here. It also contains a sentence you don’t expect to find in a newspaper: “Being alone, of course, is not the same as being free.”
I really like how the NY Times’ style – which always refers to people as Mr. X or Ms. Y – results in sentences that seem to have been specifically written with his surname in mind:
Mr. Snow’s body spent the night of July 13 in a basement refrigerator at the New York City morgue, chilled to 32 to 40 degrees.
And:
Mr. Snow’s body, meanwhile, was taken to New Jersey and cremated.
That is an obituary almost worth dying for.