Aaron Gilbreath has written essays and articles for Harper's, The New York Times, Kenyon Review, The Dublin Review, Brick, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and Saveur. He's the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz, the personal essay Everything We Don't Know, and the forthcoming book Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California. @AaronGilbreath
My mother calls in the middle of my shift again. She sounds worse than she did this morning. She’s crying — I can’t make out her words.
Chicken is what I understand. Made chicken. Need sleep.
So go to sleep, I say. Eliza will drop me off soon.
But I don’t want Eliza to drop me off soon. I want Eliza to drive me all around town, and I tell Eliza this. I want her to buy me as many packs of cigarettes as I can afford, and a bottle of anything, and I want us to talk, the two of us, in her car, on the beach, anywhere. I want her emo music turned down low on the radio as I tell her what my life’s been like; I want to tell her about home, about the Senior; I want to tell her that once, I could have been an Olympic athlete, or a jockey. I want to talk to her until my mother wakes up. I want my father. Most of all, I don’t want to go home.
By shadowing our children and using technology to keep tabs on their movements, their digital communication, and their time, are parents eliminating kids’ ability to take necessary risks or have an inner life? At The New Yorker, novelist and essayist Jess Rowexplores what he calls the “culture of constant supervision,” which is another phrase for about anxious, overprotective parenting. Drugs, abductions, vape, driving while texting — the world is full of dangers, sure, but when children rarely get to be truly alone, our protections carry hidden costs. Row isn’t suggesting parents quit monitoring their kids’ whereabouts or online lives. He’s conflicted and trying to work through the pros and cons of intensely attentive parenting, because he wants to find the best way to parent his own children.
As my children get older, I’m realizing how profoundly my instincts have been shaped by this culture of constant supervision, which wants to believe that it’s the same thing as intimacy. I still prefer it, over all, to the enormous distance that I sometimes felt as a teen-ager toward my parents. But I want to ask: Who is speaking up, today, for a young person’s right to a private life, to secrets, unshared thoughts, unmonitored conversations and relationships? Phrasing it this way sounds dangerous, and also counterintuitive: Don’t teen-agers and young adults today accept that technology is embedded in every aspect of their lives, that just being alive means being present (at least to some degree) online? My daughter, just coming into her own digital domain, certainly does: she has her own phone and laptop, ostensibly for homework, is allowed to text and chat with her friends, and desperately wants her own social-media accounts. Kids her age seem to accept, reluctantly, that the price of having a social life is having their parents one step away from everything they do, sharing the same accounts, playlists, search histories. We’re the ones who regulate her time online (and use the indispensable plug-in Freedom to keep her offline while she’s studying, just as we use it ourselves). When we notice an item that warrants a conversation—a questionable YouTube search, for example—we talk about it. At length. We’ve already had more family conversations on issues related to sex—sometimes in the form of extremely contemporary tangents, related to Cardi B’s taste in shoes or Stormy Daniels’s career choices—than I ever had with my parents.
In 1994, essayist and book critic Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Even during the early phase of the internet, the reader and bookseller in Birkerts could see how digitization offered a never-ending candy store of sweet distractions, and those distractions posed a danger to not only reading, but what reading does for the solitary reader. Birkerts rightfully feared how the screen would undermine a reader’s ability to sustain deep concentration, to make the connections needed to discern meaning in narratives, to do what he calls “vertical reading”; and that our distractedness would inhibit our ability to deeply examine ourselves. At the Paris Review, Mairead Small Staid reexamines this telling book to see which of Birkerts’ concerns have come true.
Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”
I no longer have a Facebook account, and I find myself spending less and less time online. As adulthood settles on me—no passing fad, it turns out, but a chronic condition—I’m increasingly drawn back to the deeply engaged reading of my childhood. The books have changed, and my absorption is not always as total as it once was, but I can still find, slipped like a note between the pages, what Birkerts calls the “time of the self… deep time, duration time, time that is essentially characterized by our obliviousness to it.” The gift of reading, the gift of any encounter with art, is that this time spent doesn’t leave me when I lift my eyes from the book in my lap: it lingers, for a minute or a day. “[S]omething more than definitional slackness allows me to tell a friend that I’m reading The Good Soldier as we walk down the street together,” Birkerts writes. “In some ways I am reading the novel as I walk, or nap, or drive to the store for milk.”
By using avatars, Facebook, fake websites, and fake news, new private intelligence firms staffed by Israeli intelligence personnel are waging wars on perception to alter targeted groups’ beliefs and behavior. In their story for The New Yorker, Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow profile one firm called Psy-Group to delve deep into this disturbing frontier, which one Israeli intelligence officer described as “a place where wars are fought, elections are won, and terror is promoted.” Psy-Group wanted to tap the growing, lucrative field of American elections. So why was it planning an “influence campaign” over a hospital board election in rural Tulare, California?
The 2016 election changed the calculus. In the U.S., investigators pieced together how Russian operatives had carried out a scheme to promote their preferred candidate and to stoke divisions within U.S. society. Senior Israeli officials, like their American counterparts, had been dubious about the effectiveness of influence campaigns. Russia’s operation in the U.S. convinced Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad director, and others in Israel that they, too, had misjudged the threat. “It was the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American society was torn apart,” Pardo said. “This is a weapon. We should find a way to control it, because it’s a ticking bomb. Otherwise, democracy is in trouble.”
Some of Pardo’s former colleagues took a more mercenary approach. Russia had shown the world that information warfare worked, and they saw a business opportunity. In early 2017, as Trump took office, interest in Psy-Group’s services seemed to increase. Law firms, one former employee said, asked Psy-Group to “come back in and tell us again what you are doing, because we see this ability to affect decisions that we weren’t fully aware of.” Another former Psy-Group employee put it more bluntly: “The Trump campaign won this way. If the fucking President is doing it, why not us?”
Early in the morning of Sept. 4, 2018, Woody and Masters told friends at the time, a man broke into the apartment while they were there. According to three people who talked to Woody and Masters after the robbery, the couple said that the intruder held them at gunpoint while he stole Woody’s watches, phone, and computer. Woody told Taylor he was convinced that the assailant was after his cryptowallet, which was protected with an encrypted password; without it, there was no way to access the money. Still, he and Masters were terrified — whoever it was might come back and demand the password.
It’s unclear who stuck up Woody. Masters told a close friend from the dispensary that the thief had claimed to be an FBI agent, that he had acted bizarrely, and that she thought the robbery might have been staged. Taylor said he thought the intruder could have been any of the people to whom Woody bragged about his bitcoin. That left a lot of people for Woody to suspect. Woody filed a police report at 3 a.m. the morning of the robbery, but the incident summary offered by the LAPD is light on specifics and lists an address other than Taylor’s. It’s unclear if police even investigated.
“They were very scared,” the dispensary friend said.
It was then that Masters wanted to buy a gun. When Sean DeGroff, her boss from the dispensary, found out, he texted her saying how worried he was. Masters finally called him.
I love Scotch and Japanese whisky. I don’t love hearing peoples’ descriptions of whiskies’ flavors. Can’t you smell the vanilla pudding laced with new forest berry skins and the grated hulls of lightly charred hazelnuts? Not necessarily, but I can tell the difference between an Isley and a Speyside. Would I enjoy whisky even more if I had a whisky sommelier to guide me?
As the class chuckles over that distinction, Frankenberg reminds us: “Remember, taste is always subjective. No matter if a professional tells you, ‘This tastes like wet slate from the Loire Valley.’ ” I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed by almost every taste expert I’ve visited. And yet, every one of these experts has a vested interest in taste being way more codified than subjective.
Indeed, what the rise of specialized taste education, the cult of sensory analysis, and the wine-ification of everything means is that taste is becoming more and more codified all the time. There are good tastes and bad tastes; not only that, there’s a growing caste of gatekeepers in every field who are keeping score on what tastes great, middling and flawed. Maybe this is what morality or philosophy looks like in an increasingly post-religious, post-intellectual, materialistic United States. We are a people in need of an authority, a higher voice, some guidance — even if it comes from behind the cheese counter. Maybe, for many affluent Americans, the sommeliers of everything represent something shaman-like. Listen to me. I am your one true sommelier.
Jeff Gold has lived many lives. He was the first employee at Los Angeles’ Rhino Records back in 1976. He served as VP/Marketing and Creative Services at A&M Records, and as Executive Vice President/General Manager of Warner Bros, where he worked with everyone from Iggy Pop to Herb Alpert. He’s currently one of the most active, respected music archivists and record dealers in the world, a status he cements through frequent donations of historically important memorabilia to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He helped drummer Ringo Starr catalogue the first copy of The Beatles’ White Album, numbered #0000001, which sold for $790,000. While searching through the collection of Rolling Stone magazine cofounder Ralph Gleason, he found a previously unknown, live recording of Bob Dylan playing Brandeis University in 1963. And he also identified 149 acetates full of unreleased songs that Dylan made during the Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning sessions — they’d sat in a Manhattan apartment for decades. Those are monumental musical discoveries!
At his core, Gold is a dedicated listener who’s collected records since his parents’ collection first enchanted him at the age seven or eight. He just loves music, and he’s turned that love into a multifaceted career. If you’re an Iggy and the Stooges fan, you have him to thank for a few things.
Various Stooges message boards have breathlessly wondered how an unknown Stooges outtake named “Asthma Attack” ended up on the 2010 deluxe reissue of their debut album, TheStooges. And there’s been whispers about who found John Cale’s original, rejected mixes of that album. We now know — Gold found them, waiting in Danny Fields’ unpaid storage locker. Gold’s diligence saved those recordings, along with the earliest known live Stooges recording: live at Ungano’s in 1970, from certain death.
Somehow, no one had formally asked Gold about how these recordings were discovered, so I did. I’m just an excited fan, too, and since a documentary impulse drives a lot of my writing, I wanted to save the story of Gold saving music, and share it with you, fellow Stooges fans.
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Aaron Gilbreath: How did you get to look through Danny Fields’ storage unit?
Jeff Gold: Danny and I have a very close mutual friend. That guy knows that I am always looking for memorabilia to buy, and he hooked me up with Danny who had a lot of stuff he wanted to sell to raise some money. So I flew from Los Angeles to New York [around 2002]. Danny was one of those guys who saved everything, so he had file cabinets full of stuff. You’d look up ‘1971,’ and there would be everything from postcards from Lou Reed to a Christmas card from his printer thanking him for his business, or dry cleaning receipts, you name it, and it was indiscriminately saved. I just sat on his floor for days and went through it, file by file, item by item, and pulled out anything that I was interested in buying. I found lots of amazing stuff that Danny was very happy to convert to cash. I probably spent two and a half days at his place the first time, then came back a few months later for round two. While I was looking I said to him, ‘Hey, do you have a storage locker?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I haven’t really paid the bills in a while, they’re bugging me.’ I said, ‘Danny, you have to pay the bills. If you don’t pay the bill, they open up the lock and sell the stuff at auction or, if it looks uninteresting, throw it away.’ He sounded very uninterested. I said, ‘How about I pay the bill and go look and see if there’s anything I can buy from you?’ He said sure. So he called the place up, which was maybe five blocks from his house, and told them that I was gonna come pay the bill, which was three or so months in arrears, and that I had permission to look in the locker. It was a funky storage locker. With no lights and no windows, this place was a dark jumble of boxes. I kind of looked around for a couple of hours and pulled stuff out.
When the shit hits the fan, will you be ready? The Arkansas Defense Force will be. An independent militia, these guys meet regularly to eat, share knowledge, and increase their disaster preparedness. When an ice storm hit Arkansas in 2009, some of them had enough food, water, and battery power to remain completely unaffected. They’re also prepared for invasions, gang war, and civil unrest, too. For the literary magazine TriQuarterly, Caroline Beimfordspends time with the ADF, to understand their concerns, their philosophies, how they got into survivalism, and whether they are, as many people believe, just plain weird.
A series of tragic events involving his first wife and son also shed light on his belief in self-sufficiency and preparedness, as well as his suspicion of most government bodies. He was able to save his wife’s life during a road trip as the result of his basic medical training, and he claims his son was de facto kidnapped into the Oklahoma foster care system as the result of federal funding incentives. His focus now is to convert his parents’ 4.5 acres into a more secure, private compound. Though he currently resides in a trailer on the property and cares for his aging parents, he has plans to move the house back from the road, build a fence, and construct a gun range and several sheds so he can empty out the storage units he currently rents.
Still, according to Scott, the big picture is about helping people in “the now.” When he reads about men calling 9-1-1 when their cable goes out, he’s afraid for humanity. He sees himself as a protector of knowledge once broadly held but now fallen from favor with the rise of urbanization. A K-9 trainer and Search & Rescue member in Arkansas and Oklahoma (he was a first responder after the Oklahoma City bombing), Scott says he’s “less interested in volcanoes and more interested in real life.” Expanding on Werner’s classroom jokes about iPhones and GPS, he says, “If your phone dies and you get lost in the woods, I’ll come find you.”
Reading Tom Zoellner‘s Tucson Weekly piece “Interstate 10: A Personal History,” about the road between Phoenix and Tucson, I knew immediately I was meeting a native desert rat who knew my home turf. I grew up in Phoenix and went to college in Tucson, so I’ve driven that same stretch of interstate countless times. During my drives, I used to sketch ideas for ways to write about it, about the dry land it travels through and all the active roadside businesses and decaying relics of yesteryear. I never got past the note-taking stage, which is partly why I am so excited to see someone else write such a worthy homage to what Zoellner calls the state’s “most reviled” stretch of road.
People loathe it and do it on auto-pilot. By paying close attention, Zoellner functions as a tour guide in a place you’d never expect to want a tour, narrating all the interesting, ugly, and odd points along the way, as well as his connections to it. Ultimately, his piece is as much about the land as it is about learning to see past our own boredom and prejudices, to cast the familiar anew. When I read the word “caliche” on the last page, it made me homesick. Only a desert rat knows what caliche means, and seeing it in print warmed my red-chilé-colored heart. Zoellner talked with me about writing this piece and the nature of placed-based writing.
* * *
You lived in Phoenix but grew up in Tucson. When did you get the idea to write about this stretch of desert highway?
I suspect every commuter has a funny ongoing relationship with the buildings and objects outside the window on their regular drive — little physical mysteries. Who lives in that house? How did that ugly sculpture get there? Does anyone really feel socially elevated after going to “Elite Car Wash?” These musings, often pointless, are the background noise of real thought, like a radio station playing a song of which you’re barely cognizant, and I realized with a jolt while on I-10 that the essential spool of these half-awake thoughts had not substantially changed since I was 12 years old. Nor had the highway, really — it was just as uninviting and shabby-looking as ever. And it occurred to me that this was Arizona’s most unloved highway, but it was also the one most traveled by a statistically overwhelming margin. That became the central paradox of the story, and pretty much everyone who lived in Arizona would get that instinctually, and likely have a similar interior relationship with this road.
Had you made other attempts to write about it? I ask because I did — I sketched notes for a piece about it for years while driving it — and I’m excited to see that you succeeded where I failed.
Writing can take place in the mind long before your fingers ever hit the keyboard. Stephen King has a wonderful simile about writers as paleontologists who are not so much creating material from scratch but merely excavating fossils that have existed in the subconscious for a long time. In that sense, I’ve been writing this piece since I was a sixth grader with no awareness that anything was being created. And so one day, while making my umpteenth Phoenix-Tucson drive for unrelated reasons, I just scribbled a note on every “old friend” that I saw out the window, as well as the same brief and entirely-predictable thing I always thought when I spotted it. The actual piece took less than two hours to spit out once I sat down. It had already been “written.”
What did your Tucson Weekly editor think of this idea at first? Were they like, “Why would anybody write about that boring drive?”
This was first pitched to Arizona Highways, the legendarily well-illustrated publication of the state highway department that has been touting the visual glories of the state since 1925. I thought they might enjoy a counterintuitive take: “You’ve seen enough of Monument Valley. Now here’s what you didn’t know about the state’s most butt-ugly road!” Suffice to say, this wasn’t for them. I’ve been friends for two decades with Tucson Weekly editor Jim Nintzel, probably the state’s most astute political reporter. He was good enough to give it a try.
Have you read or been influenced by other road stories, a genre that might be called roadside journalism or highway literature?
One of my favorite books is U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America, a collection of essays and photography published in 1953 by the under-appreciated American writer George Rippey Stewart, and then brilliantly updated by Thomas Vale in 1983 in a book called U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America.
Picacho Trading Post, demolished. Photo by Aaron Gilbreath
What’s it like writing for an alt-weekly right now? Some still seem unpredictable, fun, and adventurous.
When I was a daily newspaper reporter, I wished for the kind of length and freedom enjoyed by alt-weekly writers. I’ve been lucky these last few years to occasionally freelance an article for a few of them.
As you say in the essay, the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) razed most of the town of Picacho, which had been there since the 1880s, and no media outlets wrote about it. Did you discover that while writing this, and is this essay sort of your way to correct that?
Yes on both questions. Picacho deserved a much better civic obituary than I could give it, or that it ever got. ADOT couldn’t tell me much of anything about the decision to virtually eliminate it for the widening of the SR 87 interchange. It was a vanishing whose paper trail seemed thin enough to have been anchored in the 19th century rather than the 21st. Highway villages have an odd relationship with history — built to serve people who are going someplace else, who never stay and who barely give it a close look or remember it.
What are your ideas about the way we relate to physical locations, and about writing about a personal relationship with place?
It’s extremely hard. You could write a ten-volume set about a small place, and still feel like you didn’t capture its real essence. The center will always retreat from your grasp. Maybe that’s why I’m attracted to motion seen behind windows.
Most people have their favorite late-night food to comfort them or hurl them back in time: Jack in the Box tacos; Denny’s Moons Over My Hammy. For writer Cord Jefferson, nostalgia is a huge pollo asada burrito from Tucson’s 24-hour joint Nico’s. In a feature for Eater, Jefferson admits these might not be the world’s best burritos, but his lifelong attachment to them means he will, in his words, “stand up for when its goodness is challenged.” The virtues he extols for Nico’s extend beyond their delicious food, to the things that make us all love our late-night spots: ambiance, reliability, memorable, slightly ugly interiors. But for him, Nico’s also helped break the monotony of the affluent, elderly, largely white Tucson suburb where he grew up, and the restaurant embodies what he now considers the real Tucson.
It was around this time that I started going to Nico’s a lot. People at Nico’s were mostly young, and not so many of them were white (Tucson gets slightly blacker and a lot more Latino the farther south you go). More exciting than that, though, was the atmosphere, a raucous energy generated by the confluence of drunks and teenagers and insomniacs and drag queens and college students and stoners and people just getting off work and old men in Hawaiian shirts and straight-edge vegan hardcore kids and cops, and various combinations of those things. Nico’s presented a different Tucson than I’d ever known before. One that stayed up late. One that was diverse and lively. It wasn’t just a clubhouse for me and my high school friends like the Max, or wherever the smoldering “teens” of Riverdale hang out. It was a flophouse into which we were funneled along with hundreds of other night owls in a town that largely shut down after 9 p.m. We’d put in our order at the counter and then try to find a booth from which to wait for our food and people-watch. If there was nowhere to sit, we’d stand in the parking lot and eat.
Before long, we became chummy with the Nico’s staff. They gave us free food and didn’t hassle us when we filled up our plastic cups for water, which was gratis, with soda, which was not. A few times they even gave us beers, which weren’t on the menu and were presumably part of their own stash. Some friends of mine asked if their band could play an impromptu show at Nico’s, which obliged. The crowd ate nachos a few feet away from the drum kit while the lead singer perched atop a table and wailed on his saxophone. The night we graduated high school, a bunch of my friends ended up at Nico’s just before dawn. They sang karaoke on the intercom system and helped the employees mop the floors in preparation for breakfast patrons. (I would have been there, but earlier that evening I broke up with my girlfriend for the last time and walked home from a kegger crying melodramatically, like I was in an Aaron Spelling teen drama.)
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