Remsen Street Rawdog (ft. Christian Lorentzen)

Our Struggle

After six years apart, Lauren and Drew reunite in the Den of the Wizard of Remsen Street (noted literary critic Christian Lorentzen) to produce [sic] an episode that some will call unlistenable and others mumblecore. They bear witness to the completion of a new Lorentzen piece (“I’m going to see my editor at the bar later,” he says). Lauren fiddles fruitlessly with wires and mics she picked up from a listener/new friend serendipitously named Gunnar in Williamsburg, Drew sprawls out on the couch with an old Spanish guitar, and Christian's neighbor and pod supplicant Krithika Varagur shows up with salted licorice. Lorentzen, ever the solicitous host, supplies the discussants with Pepsi (Mexican, mid-century sugar), coffee (Chemex, poured over paper towel) and Miss Vickie’s chips. You are listening to an excerpt of what was in fact a deep, deep--geologically deep--hang: Drew and Krithika bonded over incest and heroin in the work of Edward St. Aubyn, Lauren smoked Lorentzen’s Camel Blues, and the critic himself typed away and commented on the mingling of smoke and afternoon sunlight in his study. In a state of classic Our Struggle delirium, Drew and Lauren finally vowed to face that evening’s bar hang without chemical aid--raw-dogging life, as the kids say. In that vulnerable, intimate and perhaps diseased spirit, we humbly present our first-ever in-the-flesh episode, REMSEN STREET RAWDOG with Christian Lorentzen and Krithika Varagur