Nerve Insider : Sarah Hepola

Scanner's Stories of Love and Hate: A Pre-Valentine's Day Reading of Sorts

Nicole Ankowski — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:32:00 GMT

Scanner Emily (yes, the literary goddess/casserole maven who’s also venturing into burlesque) reminds us about tomorrow night’s fab reading:

Hey New Yorkers, don't forget to join your Scanner bloggers and special guests (see below) for a pre-Valentine's Day reading and after-party at Rififi Tuesday night.

Scanner's Stories of Love and Hate: A Pre-Valentine's Day Reading of Sorts
Featuring Nerve.com's Scanner Bloggers and Special Guests
Tuesday, February 12, 8 p.m.
Rififi, 332 East 11th Street, NYC
$5

Featuring Bobby Tisdale, Emily Farris, Will Doig, Sarah Hepola, Katie Halper, Bryan Christian, Brian Fairbanks and Nicole Ankowski. We promise chocolates, red hots and maybe you'll laugh so hard you'll pee your pants. Or cry. Or neither and then you can eat chocolate and scowl. Then stick around for the after party.

From the Archives: The LUG in Winter

Nicole Ankowski — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:17:00 GMT

It’s cold outside, but this personal essay will warm you up. In “The LUG in Winter,” writer Sarah Hepola took a look back at her own college days, MTV’s forays, and all the girl-on-girl kissing that Britney and X-tina engaged in, before they were preggers. Things got a little hot on the message boards, as well: there was almost as much heated back-and-forth among readers, as we can imagine there was in Sarah’s dorm room bed…

Things were different when I first kissed a girl. My story is fairly typical: I was twenty years old, and drunk, and at a party, and the tale of how my friend Carolyn went from lying beside me to having her tongue inside my mouth is not the first story lost to Jack Daniel's. She and I had been cuddling and fondling each other's hair on the couch, and the kiss seemed almost a natural extension of that behavior. Later, after I sobered up, it was a little astonishing; I was a good Texas girl with childhood dreams of Johnny Depp and River Phoenix. But the most astonishing part was how good that kiss was — soft and warm and shot full with longing. Ten years later, it is still one of the best kisses I've ever had.

Cuddle up with Sarah: read the entire essay here.

New on Nerve, 1.15.08: Wire Fire

Nicole Ankowski — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:12:00 GMT

Writer Sarah Hepola admits that, while much-admired, The Wire is not sexy in a conventional way. Then again, if you’ve ever had the good fortune to meet Ms. Hepola, you know she’s not a conventional girl. So she asked herself, if “The Wire is bleak, devastating and difficult...why does it get me so hot?” She builds a pretty good (and conveniently numbered!) case:

Theory #2: The Wire as the Anti-Sex and the City
Consider that The Wire is the inverse of HBO's romantic girlie fantasia: One is a valentine to New York while the other is a eulogy for Baltimore; one is light and fizzy while the other despairing; one has a voiceover that wraps up every episode like a Tiffany's box while the other is messy and sprawling, with a stubborn refusal to eliminate loose ends. In a nutshell: light vs. dark, hope vs. cynicism, chicks vs. dicks. And whether you think it's sexier to wave around a fruity Cosmo or a glinting Glock — well, that's up to you.

Chicks, dicks, Glocks and all five theories: right here.

New on Nerve: Installment Six of Crying in Restaurants, by Sarah Hepola

Sarah — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:15:00 GMT

As you may remember from previous installments, Sarah cries a lot. But in this installment she doesn’t weep in a restaurant. She cries in other places, but by the end of the story her tears have dried up and been replaced by something else – love, fulfillment, hope; whatever it is, we’d all be lucky to have stories that end like this. Read the essay here, or start from the beginning.

From the Archives: Essays by Ada Calhoun and Sarah Hepola

Sarah — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:30:00 GMT

Ada Calhoun and Sarah Hepola have written some terrific pieces over the years. Below are two of my favorites. Both essays discuss, in different ways, what women are really like, how we feel and act and are, not how we wish we were or how we think we should be. They are smart, concise, penetrating, compositions that will take far less than six hours to ingest.

Ada’s piece from almost a year ago, The New Prudishness: “The columnists [who say we live in an oversexualized world] seem to be of the opinion that sex isn't supposed to be messy, or icky or to involve things like online porn or spring break or stupid shoes. But it does.”

Sarah’s series “Crying in Restaurants,” first installment: “Sometimes, when I cry, it's because I've lost sight of what I want. And I feel so ripped up between what I want, what I thought I wanted, what other people want, and what I want to want that it's like this twelve-car pile-up.”

New on Nerve, 12.6.2007: Commentary on “Flying”, a documentary by Jennifer Fox

Sarah — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:15:00 GMT

Don’t miss this dialogue between Ada Calhoun and Sarah Hepola about Flying, Jennifer Fox’s six-hour film about modern womanhood. Sarah and Ada didn’t like the film very much; read the piece for their intelligent, humorous, biting critique.

Sarah: “This documentary purports to be about feminism but seems to be shockingly ignorant of the entire canon of feminist literature. It’s a personal diary with very expensive, travelogue scenery.”

Ada: “Basically, she's going around the world finding the worst situations and saying, ‘Me too!’”

Sarah: “I begin to wonder, maybe narcissism is a part of the modern American female experience.”

New on Nerve, 11.29.2007: “Erotic Dreams About Film Critics,” fiction by Sarah Hepola

Sarah — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:45:00 GMT

Sarah Hepola has a hilarious piece of fiction up today, “Erotic Dreams About Film Critics.”

“Tony turns me around, pushes me to the floor. ‘You saw Sweet Home Alabama, and you liked it!’ he barks at me. His cock is hard, and I take it in my mouth, let my tongue roam around the tip. ‘You own Crossroads, that shitty Britney Spears movie, on DVD, don't you?’ he asks.”

Nothing more to say, just read it right away.

In Other Blogs: Good-Bye Scanner Sarah!

Sarah — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

• Oh how we’ll miss her: Scanner Sarah says so long, and thanks for all the lube. (She also says “Xanadu.”) The romantic journey continues for others, however, including Heidi Klum, who plays with her boobs, cougars in Kenya, who wanna get laid and the Audrey Underwear company in Taizhong City, Taiwan, which declared November 21 “Camisole Day,” and encouraged all 500 women working in the firm’s headquarters to wear only their undies to work.

"We have been waiting for this day all month. Today, we are super high, and don't know where to put our eyes," salesman Cai Mingda told Straits News. As Scanner Bryan says: Thus did "super high" become our new favorite way to say "fully erect."

• Screengrab brings us the morning deal report: Brad Pitt flies outta Edward Norton’s coop; the director of The U.S. vs. John Lennon is working on a new documentary about Michael Hutchence of INXS; and just what you’ve been waiting for…a new movie called The 13^th Disciple. It’s about…yes…Jesus’ evil twin. I feel a Halloween costume coming on… Plus: Chuck Norris gets political, crazy.

• And the Nerve Video Blog brings you the secret of rock-star sexiness from rock star-turned motivational speaker Andrew W.K. Hint: Norman Mailer would approve; your mother would not. Plus, the origins of the terms “420.” Is Bob Barker in on it, or not?

— Nicole Ankowski

From the Archives: Sexual Fantasies about NPR hosts

Sarah — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

In honor of today’s interview with Peter Sagal and unlikely NPR-associated inspirations, today’s archive find is a piece by Sarah Hepola from earlier this year about her sexual fantasies about NPR hosts.

“After he had passed the microphone to another correspondent, it would sometimes be minutes on end before I realized I hadn't heard a word anyone else was saying. That I had been in some kind of lusty trance. That I had been in a darkened sound booth somewhere, tugging off the trousers of Ira Glass.”

New on Nerve, 11.6.2007: Sarah Hepola's "Crying in Restaurants"

Sarah — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:43:00 GMT

Crying in Restaurants is a series by Sarah Hepola about … crying in restaurants. Today’s piece is the fifth installment.

5. Try not to involve the waitress. She's had a long night. She's probably a very nice person who would like to do nothing more than kick off her heels, do a bump of coke and lose an hour or four at the bar before going home to her loft and boning her scraggly indie-rock boyfriend. So leave her out of this. But sometimes you mean to, and you can't.

Like when she comes to take your order, and you say, "Do you think I should have the fish or the steak?" and the man you are with says, "Order whatever the fuck you want," and then it's like the air was vaccuumed out of your lungs — why is he talking to you like this? — and the tears gush out before you can even stammer a response. You're just going to have to work the tears; they are no longer optional.

New on Nerve 10.22.07: The Film Issue!

Sarah — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:57:00 GMT

Check out Nerve’s film issue! We do special issues every two months or so, although it’s been a while since our last one, the Dating Issue. The kick-off (and kick-ass) piece is by Scanner’s Sarah Hepola, about the cultural impact of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Can you believe the movie turned 25 this year? Read the piece below and check out the line-up for the issue here.

New on Nerve, 9.18.07: "It's my duty to talk about sex."

Sarah — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:31:00 GMT

This morning we have an interview with Will Sheff, lead singer of Okkervil River by Sarah Hepola. The Nerve Insider is a huge fan of Okkervil River, and the interview does not disappoint. Sheff is thoughtful, insightful and extremely appealing.

At the beginning of the piece Sheff orders a sandwich from Subway. Sarah didn't put this in the article, but he told her, “I want this interview to be really good, let me finish this sandwich and call you back.”

Other tidbits that didn't make it in the piece:

"One thing about will is that he's a movie fanatic, and he's pretty encyclopedic in his knowledge. I used to write about film for The Austin Chronicle, and we actually asked him to contribute to the film section. The articles are published under his full name, Will Robinson Sheff. Here's a link to the archive of his work.

Also, during the interview, we had a funny conversation about his working at video stores. He told me he'd been fired from his job at I Love Video, another famous indie movie enclave in Austin, and I asked why. This is what he said:

WS: Because I was incompetent. I forgot to open the store one day. What can you do? Musicians. But this one girl was really gunning to get me fired, too. She wanted to see me go down.

ME: Do you think she just wanted your space on the employee pick's wall?

WS: Yeah, she wanted to fill it up with vampire movies.'" -- Sarah Hepola

From the interview, Will Sheff on...

Trashy TV:
I think low culture is all culture. Rock and roll is low culture that has been elevated to high culture. There is something so boring about the idea that something must be an opera or an etching to matter. It's all human beings trying to connect, trying to understand one another.

Porn:
It's the most simple art imaginable: It's people and sex. You might throw in costumes and a storyline, but that's not what people rented it for, or downloaded it for. They downloaded the porn to see people fucking. There's so much debate about what it means. All it means is what it is.

I think rock and roll is supposed to be about sex. It's my duty to talk about sex, just a little bit. Especially in indie rock, because there's this trend toward kind of fetishizing childishness and being freaking out by sex. But the songs that I loved, the David Bowie and Iggy Pop, those songs were all about sex.

Groupies:
That was a big theme, yeah. I guess I'm trying to look at people who are such big fans of art that they would throw their lives away. And they're such big fans that art becomes sexual. This is your way to interact with this person, that you want to have sex with them.

His sad songs:
I don't think of the songs as being sad. I think of them as being ecstatic. Like having a blended sadness and happiness and poured on in enormous quanities. I like the idea of these strong emotional states, for those things to be present at once, that there is something jumbled in the way they co-exist.