Author Archives

Aaron Gilbreath
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

The Unsung Women of Rock and Roll

The sensitivity of male egos, the demands of motherhood, and the general disdain for female ambition made loneliness the likely lot of the chick singer. For the young, female rock-and-roll fan, the arm of a male musician might have seemed more welcoming. Girlfriends and wives appeared as fairy-tale heroines who held royal sway in the courts of their rock-star loves. Even groupies—at least “the concubine elite,” to use Des Barres’s term—lived a preteen dream, consummating their crushes nightly while avoiding the emotional and physical perils of being married to, say, Keith Moon.

Alexandra Molotkow writing in The Believer about the contributions, sacrifices and struggles of the women who loved rock and roll’s leading men, from Cynthia Lennon to Marianne Faithfull, and the sexual politics of popular music.

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Twisting History to Tell Universal Truths

Readers often wonder how much of an author’s real life ends up in their novels. In 2013 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, novelist Nina Revoyr described how she combined elements of her life with the real lives of silent-film era actors Sessue Hayakawa and Mary Miles Minter in her book The Age of Dreaming. Revoyr had become obsessed with their stories and used history to explore her own struggles with regret, fear and self-doubt, because, she said, it was easier “to pour my own deepest feelings into a character who appeared to be vastly different than myself.”

But despite the large backdrop against which it is set, the story ultimately centers on one flawed man. And the core of his feelings, and failings, are my own. When I assumed his voice—when I became Nakayama—I was able to explore and depict feelings of frustration, of sadness, of failure that I could never have admitted to as myself. Jun last appears in a film when he is thirty years old—the exact age I was when my own writing came to a halt. As I imagined an old man who hasn’t acted in forty years, what I was really exploring was this: What happens to someone when he stops doing what he loves? What does he become? How would I feel later on in my life if I never tried to write another book? And what if my abandonment of writing had nothing to do with a lack of ideas or bottom-line-driven publishers but was instead just a failure to persevere?

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Trouble Between the Buns at Whataburger

Photo by Rick, Flickr

There’s nothing simple about selling simple burgers for a living. The decades-long relationship between Whataburger’s parent company and the Andrews family’s successful Whataburger franchises soured recently, when the Andrews’ company filed a lawsuit, claiming Whataburger violated an agreement. In Texas Monthly, Loren Steffy writes about the bad blood and changing corporate culture at Texas’ second-largest homegrown restaurant chain.

When most Whataburger customers walk into the restaurant, they have no idea if the place they are eating at is a franchise or a corporate-owned branch. And as long as they can still get their Green Chile Double Whataburgers or Honey Butter Chicken Biscuits, they probably don’t care. But the rift between the Andrews family and the burger chain they helped build represents a struggle between the past and the present, and between two families who have known each other for a long time. “It’s a little like a public divorce—neither side walks away looking good,” says Michelle Hartmann, a Dallas attorney who specializes in private-company litigation. “It hurts the brand ultimately.”

This is a terrible time to risk messing with the Whataburger brand. The Texas burger landscape is more competitive than ever, thanks to an influx of regional mini-chains such as Austin’s P. Terry’s, the Metroplex’s Twisted Root Burger Co., and Houston’s Becks Prime and smaller national chains such as Smashburger, Five Guys, and Shake Shack. Whataburger is bigger than all of those, and that may be the point. It isn’t a small business anymore, and to keep ahead of the competition, it may have to start acting its size. Its competition is McDonald’s and Wendy’s, not a boutique operation with three locations that offers grass-fed-bison burgers topped with arugula on a gluten-free bun.

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Thelonious Monk on the Moment He Became Aware of the Police

During the 1960s and 70s, legendary jazz drummer Art Taylor interviewed his fellow musicians. The interviews are collected in the 1993 book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, and it’s one of jazz’s greatest. The familial, casual conversations are also serious and insightful, full of history, portraiture, and revelations about race relations in America, and the lives of black musicians in a music industry run by white people. From Philly Joe Jones to Kenny Clark, Taylor knew his subjects because he played with them, so he asked probing questions. Here’s an excerpt of his 1969 talk with pianist-composer Thelonious Monk:

Monk: I don’t know. I was aware of all this when I was a little baby, five, six or seven years old; I was aware of how the cops used to act. It looked like the order of the day was for the cops to go out and call the kids black bastards. Anything you did, if you ran or something, he called you black bastards.

Taylor: That was their favorite lick.

Monk: Yeah, I remember that; it was the first thing that came out of the mouth.

Taylor: I consider myself lucky to have survived.

Monk: Sure you’re lucky to have survived, you’re lucky to survive every second. You’re facing death at all times. You don’t know where it’s going to come from.

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Seeing Robert Johnson’s Face for the Third Time

In 2008, Vanity Fair published a story about a guitar salesman named Steven Schein, who found a photograph of Robert Johnson, the world’s most influential Bluesman, for sale on eBay for $25. The photo was mislabeled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???”. Only two photos of Johnson had been publicly released. The article is about Schein’s experience buying and identifying Johnson’s face, and the issues it raised about who gets to control and profit from the music and images of one of the world’s most influential musicians, and one of Columbia Records’ big sellers, who happened to be a black man:

With the eBay photo still on his computer monitor, Schein dug up his copy of the Johnson boxed set and took another look. Not only was he more confident than ever that he had found a photo of Robert Johnson, he had a hunch who the other man in the photo was, too: Johnny Shines, a respected Delta-blues artist in his own right, and one of the handful of musicians who, in the early 1930s and again in the months before Johnson’s death, had traveled with him from town to town to look for gigs or stand on busy street corners and engage in a competitive practice known as “cuttin’ heads,” whereby one blues musician tries to draw away the crowd (and their money) gathered around another musician by standing on a nearby corner and outplaying him.

Shines had died in 1992. His picture was included in the boxed-set booklet, and Schein saw a resemblance; if both of his hunches were right, then the photo was even more of a find. At that point, Schein became possessed of two thoughts: One was “to hold the photo in my hands,” he says. The other was “to protect it.”

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Living Some Kind of American Dream at Sizzler

To us, Sizzler was the epitome of the American meal. We could have big steaks, the likes of which were expensive in Korea, reserved only for special occasions. There were nice cloth napkins you put on your lap. The waitresses were friendly and would refill your drinks for you; the drink glasses were enormous. At restaurants in Korea, we had to refill our own drinks and serve our own tea from a pitcher on the counter. We had to yell to get the waitress to come to our table. The American waitresses came by on their own, and brought us complimentary slices of cheese toast — warm and crisp, salty and buttered, with just the right amount of soft white bread in the middle.

And, of course, there was the salad bar. Like the steaks, it was also the American dream epitomized, in all its shiny brass-and-glass glory. It was all-you-can-eat — you could never go hungry in America. All the vegetables, fruit, and lettuce you could ever possibly eat were here.

Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee writing in Eater about moving to America from South Korea and shaping her new life through American icons like Sizzler.

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Relationships in a Time of Excretory Trouble

Dating is laborious and embarrassing. Irritable bowel syndrome is, too. In Narratively in March 2014, food critic and memoirist Gwendolyn Knapp wrote about both, detailing the humor and stamina involved in dating with IBS in a city of spicy food like New Orleans.

When you feel the need to shit uncontrollably, dating is tough. Like your mind, your whole existence is in the toilet, has been for years, and you certainly can’t expect to drag someone down there with you. One poor guy, Michael, contacted me after I hadn’t spoken to him in two years. He’d just moved back to New Orleans after a brief bout of grad school and veganism and wanted to know if anything cool and cheap was happening on Saturday night. We met up in Mimi’s, where most of these horror stories begin. It’s a popular bar in the Marigny that has great tapas and nightmarish bathrooms. The ladies room has two toilets that practically face each other and no stalls. There’s always the chance some crazy bitch will follow you in and lock the door, drop trou and sit down on the pee pee drops, looking at you like, “What, you pee shy or something?” Sucks for you.

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Developing Strawberry 2.0

California produces 29% of the world’s strawberries, but the ample water, cheap labor, chemicals and climate that support the state’s output are changing. In Bloomberg Business, Dune Lawrence writes about a breeder at Driscoll’s who’s trying create a strawberry that requires fewer chemicals, less water and less oversight.

Having spent decades building a brand known for consistent quality, Driscoll’s thinks consumers are ready to pay more for super premium varieties. “You have that kind of segmentation in many other products—like cars—and you begin to see the beginnings of that in berries,” Bjorn says. “We think that’s sort of where the next frontier is.”

The U.K. market is especially encouraging. There, Driscoll’s Jubilee line, marketed as “the Queen of Strawberries” and featuring a rich ruby coloring, commands a 30 percent premium over other varieties. In the U.S., the company has introduced a blackberry variety that’s especially flavorful, which it sells as “Season’s Finest” for just a short period each year at a steep markup. Stewart is working on doing the same for domestic strawberries. “Fundamentally it starts with the genetics,” says Bjorn. “If you don’t have the genetics to support that, you can’t make the product better.”

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Cloak-and-Dagger in America’s Cornfields

In Li’s luggage, [FBI] agents found two large Pop Weaver microwave popcorn boxes. Buried under the bags of unpopped snack kernels were roughly 300 tiny manila envelopes, all cryptically numbered—2155, 2403, 20362. Inside each envelope was a single corn seed. In Ye’s luggage, agents found more corn seeds hidden amid his clothes, each one individually wrapped in napkins from a Subway restaurant. Customs officers were dispatched to the gate area for the Beijing flight, where they found the two men and conducted body searches. Still more corn seeds, also folded into napkins, were discovered in Ye’s pockets.

Ted Genoways writing in The New Republic about China’s efforts to steal American food technology in order to increase its domestic corn production and reduce reliance on American imports. The story of agricultural espionage is a high stakes cat and mouse game reminiscent of Englishman Robert Fortune’s theft of tea seeds from China in the 1800s.

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China’s Booming Domestic Wine Industry

Although eighty-three percent of the wine China drinks is produced domestically, and baijiu grain alcohol is still its favorite alcohol, that’s changing. China is now the world’s fifth largest wine producer. In The California Sunday Magazine, Amy Qin writes about the changing taste of Chinese drinkers, and profiles Ma Qingyun, one producer who is helping change the face of the country’s fine wine industry:

When Ma started Jade Valley, he was drawn to the idea of saving the village from the fate of so many rural Chinese areas. As China’s cities have expanded and new ones have emerged seemingly overnight, traditionally agricultural regions have been eaten up by urban and industrial sprawl. Ma envisioned a beautifully designed winery that would provide high-paying architectural jobs and draw tourists to the Yushan area, giving it a better chance of fending off Xi’an’s encroaching development.

He pitched the idea to his brother. After years spent working as a technician in a military garment factory in Xi’an, Jianchao had returned to the village to set up a small business growing and selling traditional Chinese medicine. “I knew nothing about wine,” Jianchao says. “I only knew about industrial enterprises — input, output, and raw-material processes.” But as the two brothers talked, Jianchao grew enamored with the idea of helping farmers and bolstering the local economy.

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