The Price is Right

Photo from: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/03/11/price/

The excerpt from Richard Price’s Lush Life gave me a taste of his fast-paced storytelling. The narrative instantly gripped my attention when it took place right off the Williamsburg Bridge, where my home is in the Lower East Side of NYC. But I didn’t know what to expect from the reading; maybe he would just read a few passages monotonously and then be on his way. When I saw him at the reading, I was surprised by how much of a normal guy he was. Actually, he was so normal that he was wearing the same shirt I had seen him wearing in the LES tour video! His manner of speaking seemed very nonchalant, yet he never spoke nonsense. Even when going off on tangents, he made his words count.

I admire when a respected artist is comfortable poking fun at his/herself, and I knew Richard Price was this kind of person when he introduced his piece by saying the first couple of pages might have to be translated. He knew his heavy use of slang might leave the reader confused. He captured the essence of my neighborhood eerily accurately and it made total sense that he had to write about a murder to get these different groups in the same neighborhood to come out of their bubbles and interact with each other.

After the reading we were all dying for him to “tell us another one.” The second piece he read was written from the perspective of living in Harlem. Price seemed to me like an Anthropologist who wrote his etymologies in poetry. He lives with and studies different groups of people and how they interact, then he writes about it. The storyline needn’t be factual because the culture and the types of people he depicts are truth.