61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
Rubber bands want to be boys. Stretched back from an index finger, they are missiles. In study halls a hundred years ago, I strung a cat's cradle between my fingers, bent paper wedges across their two, vibrating whiskers, and shot messages at girls. Meet me. Eat me. Bite me. The sting of the rubber band on the duck web between my thumb and forefinger pulsed pleasant as a secret pinch.
A bag costs less than a dollar and provides a thousand replications of four or five varieties — the blue, thin, camel-lipped rubber bands that are used only for holding certain tax documents; the green, squid circles that girls, before scrunchies, wore at the base of their pigtails; the bland khaki ring, a preppy gum of service and industry, faithful and dull.
And last, and best, the red slug-fleshed rubber band, the one that turns and spins when you roll it on the table. It can be pulled and seduced around any circumference, or, according to the practical tips of memory-building books stretched across the back of one's knuckles to remind you of a date, a promise, intentions of penance. I always have five or six scattered on my desk, ready to be snatched from the flat plain of wood, ready to stretch and yawn. Tumescent but alive, they threaten to break and beg to break, built to break, built to snap, built for mistrust. But then again, they are also weirdly submissive to whatever they encounter, taking the form of what they hold, water turned rubber.
To conserve them, I slip them on doorknobs. Coming across them on the fly, during my day, I spread them and slide my hand through, the hairs on my wrist tugging. I snap them onto my wrist, cuffs, the red swell of them removed before bed to reveal a chain of indentations, staggered and uneven, like the rubber crease of a panty line, the suggestive ring of a stocking top on skin surprised to be released.
