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

Does Ty Segall Ever Sleep?

Another factor zooming Segall into the here-and-now is his prodigious streak, which has been an unintentional but fortuitous adaptation to the era of social media, where music arrives and vanishes from the cultural consciousness in the space of mere days, if not hours. It’s tough to forget him, because he always has a release on deck: an album, a 7”, or maybe he’s just playing drums and singing backup vocals on his friend’s record. Suddenly, without realizing it, the last three LPs you bought have Ty Segall’s name on the cover, or somewhere in the liners. Though, for better or worse, 2012 may mark a golden age for Segall’s workaholic bent. “Never again,” he says, laughing, when asked if he’s got another three records in the bag for next year.

Aaron Leitko writing in Pitchfork about guitar shredder and prolific songwriter Ty Segall.

 

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Lightnin’ Hopkins Gets Your Head Tore Up

In the summer of 1960, Dallas, Texas journalist Grover Lewis went to Houston’s Third Ward in search of Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis found him in an old ’54 Dodge. The resulting essay, published in the Village Voice in 1968, is a small masterpiece of personal music writing, offering a snapshot of artistic endurance, 1960s race relations, and the daily life of one of the pivotal figures in the ’60s Blues revival. It’s also a shining example of how to blend first-person interiority with reporting in a way that shows the effect music can have on our lives. Lewis isn’t as well known as his New Journalism counterparts Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, but he’s just as good. You can read the essay in the book Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader:

The head-tearing up process, which was enacted in a succession of piss-smelling little beer parlors, wore on for days, at the end of which I knew considerably more about sour mash whiskey than I had counted on. But in the end, I also knew considerably more about myself, and the South (and that knowledge ultimately freed me to leave it forever), and my own forebears, who, like Hopkins in his young manhood, had been sharecroppers Somewhere along in there, too, in those feverish, rushing days and nights of sweet, raw whiskey fumes and mournful guitar cadenzas ─ even as we shyly began to feel each other out over the clattering racket of the Dodge’s hoarse engine ─ I realized with a dawning sense of wonder that the quest I’d initiated in looking for Lightnin’ had begun long before.

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Reinventing One of Scotland’s Most Unpronounceable Whiskies

No one knows why Bruichladdich whisky tastes the way it does, but plenty of people think they do. In Reynier’s view, the distillery’s proximity to a shallow bay makes a difference. (Bruichladdich is Gaelic for “raised beach.”) When the tide goes out, across the road, algae are exposed to the air, which influences the spirit as it matures, giving it a maritime tang.

Officially, the company also credits its distinctive tall, narrow pot stills, the oldest of which has been in use since 1881. But McEwan differs sharply. “The shape of the pot is not significant, in terms of flavor—this is a kind of fairy story,” he says. “It’s the artisanal skills of the whisky-maker.”

Kelefa Sanneh, writing in The New Yorker about a London wine dealer’s mission to revive the revered  Bruichladdich distillery, on the Scottish island of Islay. Sanneh’s piece ran in February 2013.

 

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The Gaijin Who Makes Great Ramen

As a ramen maniakku or enthusiast myself, I reread Lucky Peach‘s debut Ramen Issue once a year. The issue has an essay by chef Ivan Orkin, where he tells what it was like operating a ramen restaurant in Japan, as a gaijin, or outsider. Lucky Peach is a food quarterly started by chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan in 2011. The Ramen Issue is long out of print and fetches wildly high prices on eBay and Amazon, but Lucky Peach published Orkin’s essay online for the first time, just for us. Here’s an excerpt:

The first big break came at the end of August, when I was asked to make an appearance on one of the big prime-time talk shows. The episode aired on a Sunday night; on Monday, there was a line of thirty people outside a half hour before we opened. After that, the crowds kept up every day without fail. At least ten people waiting to get in every weekday, and at least thirty every weekend. Lines even in the midst of a typhoon, which happened more than once.

Following the fans came the second wave of blog entries, good and bad. My favorites were from the infamous Channel 2 websites, where anonymous writers go after everything and everyone, and where being criticized means you’ve finally arrived. Many of the threads were conspiracy theories: some people believed I was a front for a large Korean corporation, others that I was a front for a Japanese chef. The best theory was that I was actually Japanese, and only pretending to be a foreigner. It was an idea so good I wished I’d made it up myself.

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More from Lucky Peach in the Longreads Archive

It’s A Big Ocean, Full of Seaweed

In Lucky Peach‘s twelfth issue, Rachel Khong writes about the harvesting of wild algae, more commonly known as “seaweed,” on California’s coast:

The seashore is where all our stories start. It’s understood that present-day humans evolved in littoral spaces, where the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and shellfish, originally from seaweed, were needed to evolve complex nervous systems and big brains. Which is to say: eating seaweed — either directly or by proxy — was what made us us. And seaweeds sustain life on earth, producing 70 to 80 percent of the world’s oxygen through photosynthesis.

The word seaweed is about as descriptive as “dog.” The “weed” part is especially misleading, because seaweeds look like plants but aren’t. They’re neither plant nor animal, but actually algae, which doesn’t narrow it down much, either. That term is also an incredibly vast umbrella, encompassing ten million different species that come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, from the tiniest microscopic phytoplankton to the most gigantic of kelp forests.

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Looter to Who? James Baldwin on Racism in America

In 1968, essayist, novelist and activist James Baldwin spoke with Esquire about racism in America, Dr. Martin Luther King, poverty and police brutality. In our current era of high profile police violence in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, and protests in Baltimore, Maryland, Baldwin’s words sound as prescient and, unfortunately, fresh as they did forty-seven years ago, proving the slow pace of progress in America, and how much hard work we have left to do. Below is an excerpt from the interview:

Q. How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?

BALDWIN: Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word “looter”. On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.

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The Way Theater Worked in 1955

In 1955, playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman, published the essay “The American Theater” in the American travel magazine HolidayHoliday ran from 1946 and 1977. Joan Didion’s “Notes from a Native Daughter” first appeared in Holiday. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Paul Bowles and John Steinbeck wrote for it. Though E.B. White’s Holiday magazine essay “Here Is New York,” and Truman Capote’s “Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir,” were later published as slim, stand-alone books and have assumed canonical status, “The American Theater” is a compelling analysis of Broadway system, and many of Miller’s observations still ring true. Holiday folded in 1977 and just relaunched in France this year. I found Miller’s essay in the 1956 anthology Ten Years of Holiday, though the essay appears in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Below is a short excerpt from “The American Theater”:

All over the country there are nine-year old girls, for instance, who are walking around the house as my daughter is at this very moment, in high-heeled shoes with the lace tablecloth trailing from their shoulders. If mine doesn’t recover before she is sixteen she will wake up one morning and something will click inside her head and she will go and hang around some producer’s office, and if he talks to her, or just asks her what time it is, she may well be doomed for life.

The five blocks [in New York City], therefore, are unlike any other five blocks in the United States, if only because here so many grown people are walking around trailing the old lace tablecloth from their shoulders.

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