Author Archives

Michelle Legro

How Long Does Barry Jenkins Have to Keep Hanging Out with Damien Chazelle?

Moonlight‘s surprise win on Sunday night was a shared-stage moment, a tantalizing suggestion that we were perhaps living in an alternate timeline. “Did the Oscars just prove that we are living in a computer simulation?” asks Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker, only half as a joke. “Since the advance of intelligence seems like the one constant among living things—and since living things are far likelier than not to be spread around the universe—then one of the things that smart living things will do is make simulations of other universes in which to run experiments.” Read more…

The Business of Being a Feminist Bookstore

IFC

“This is a top-selling author. Do we want top-selling authors in here?” says Candace to Candace as they consider inventory for Women and Women First, Portlandia’s fictional feminist bookstore.  “No,” says the other Candace, ” we want bottom-selling authors.”

For seven seasons, Portlandia has filmed inside the In Her Words bookstore, which last year severed its relationship with the show for being “in every way diametrically opposed to our politics and the vision of society we’re organizing to realize.” If the business of running a bookstore is hard enough, the business of running a feminist bookstore is deeply entwined with a collective spirit and political agenda, and money can serve as the beginning and end of those problems. (Portlandia, the bookstore noted, also didn’t pay the store to film there.)

At LARB, Stephanie Young looks at Kristen Hogan’s history of the feminist bookstore, which details the divisions in the movement within the business of selling feminism. In a review of the book from last year, Laura Tanenbaum writes that “In focusing on survival, bookstores, like many other feminist institutions, found themselves professionalizing and turning away from antiracist and political commitments and utopian spirit.”

The financial and political woes of A Woman’s Place in Oakland is the flashpoint of Hogan’s narrative, a business which grew by two thousand percent in nine years, from 1973 to 1982, and served as the livelihood for the six employees who worked there. The group eventually fell out over management of the bookstore, which had “gross sales over $250,000 operating without a budget or financial analysis.”

Nearly every aspect of the store was locked in generational disputes. The older women were staunchly separatist, and resisted the younger four’s desire to host some events which would be open to anyone interested, including men, or only for more particular groups (disabled women, women of color, parents). Pagano, Summers, Kubo, and Meredith wrote that Wilson and Lando hoarded power like bosses, with ruinous effect on financial decision-making. The group regularly failed to reach consensus on basic operational processes. Covering vacations and work shifts was an ongoing source of irritation. Wilson’s notes from a 1981 meeting register this frustration: “Jesse had another fit about lack of substitute policy.” After the lockout when the store was ordered to reopen, a receiver’s report showed dangerously high inventory. Apparently the group couldn’t agree on how to cull books for return to publishers, nor on who should do the work. High inventory limited cash flow, a significant problem given their high expenses, the largest being salaries for six paid collective members.

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The Last Decent Person in Washington

Librarian of Congress
(Barbara Haddock Taylor/The Baltimore Sun via Associated Press)

There is a straight line from the worst person in the government to quite possibly the best: Every tweet that Donald Trump sends each morning, setting off news alerts for a groggy American public, pings across millions of timelines before settling in its final resting place, the Library of Congress. The keeper of those tweets—and of George Gershwin’s piano, Rosa Parks’s peanut-butter-pancake recipe, and Bob Hope’s joke collection—is Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, an Obama appointee who embodies the calm, measured wisdom of the 44th President and the forward-looking hope of that era.

The New Yorker’s Sarah Larson visited the library in the days after the Inauguration and she wanders through the collection like a person tasked with cataloging Noah’s Ark, the last great treasury of humanity tossed upon the seas of an angry God. At the helm is Hayden, a career librarian with a drawerful of butterscotch candy. Hayden replaces 87-year-old James Billington, a Bush-era appointee who had “been asleep at the switch” as the library struggled with the digital age. The library is still far behind where it should be technologically—Kyle Chayka at n+1 noted that the library did not have a Chief Information Officer from 2012 to late 2015, among other institutional failures—but Hayden’s cool competence is a light in the bureaucratic darkness.

Hayden met the Obamas when they all lived in Chicago. When I asked about her relationship with them, she was reticent—no anecdotes, no self-aggrandizement. (She also gently demurred from talking about Trump.) But if you watch footage of the Inauguration, you can see the affection there. Hayden, in a black coat and black gloves, is seated just to the right of the Capitol door. Michelle Obama, looking melancholy, smiles and waves in her direction. A minute later, someone yells, “maga!” Horns sound, and Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama emerge. Obama sees Hayden, waves, beams, approaches her, and leans in for a hug. “Sir!” she says, heartily, patting him on the back.

In her office, Hayden picked up the Jefferson candy bowl and offered me some butterscotch. “This is my secret sauce,” she said. I asked if there was anything in the library’s collections that people might love to explore but not know about. “Oh, yes! Oh, my goodness, yes!” she said. “Like the comic-book collection.” It’s the largest in the world. She described the depth of knowledge among the librarians: “You’ll say, ‘I’d like to see the original “Luke Cage,” ’ because of the TV show. And then they tell you, Luke Cage first appeared in this comic…’ And they just keep going.”

I later visited Georgia Higley, the head of the newspaper section of the serial division, who showed me an array of comics milestones (“All-Negro Comics” from 1947; Batman; Luke Cage), many so valuable they’re available only to scholars. I was struck that even “Archie” had notes of the country’s painful history and present: “The Mirth of a Nation,” the cover said, as ice-skating Archie flew over some barrels, toward a hole. “Wonder Woman,” Winter Issue No. 7, from 1943, was called “Wonder Woman for president.” There she was, with her boots and golden lasso, banging on a lectern covered in stars-and-stripes bunting. Below that, it said, “1000 years in the future!

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A President in Search of An Enemy

A day after President Trump’s now notorious solo press conference, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza floated an idea gleaned from a senior White House official, that without an enemy in his sightlines, Donald Trump is virtually at sea. It was Steve Bannon who suggested “the media” as a target—simple for Bannon, the official grumbled, “because he never talks to the media”—and minutes after the hour-long presser ended, the administration seemed to solidify this tactic by rolling out the “Mainstream Media Accountability Survey.” The survey is a masterclass in leading questions (“On which issues does the mainstream media do the worst job of representing Republicans?”), and some of its sentence constructions are gnarled beyond comprehension by double negatives (“Do you believe that contrary to what the media says, raising taxes does not create jobs?”). If anything, the survey resembles the kind of impossible questioning one might find on a literacy test for voters in the Jim Crow south. Read more…

Was the World Press Wrong to Choose This As The Photo of the Year?

Burhan Özbilici / AP Images

Earlier this week, the jurors of the World Press Photo of the Year chose the defining image of 2016: the dramatic assassination of of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey at an art opening in Ankara.

The image began to go viral within minutes of the attack, which was captured on live video, and critics noted that the staged quality of the event—the white walls of the gallery, black suit of the gunman, the triumphant pose over the slain ambassador, all captured in a split second by AP photographer Burhan Özbilici—was “like a scene from Godard or Tarantino.”

But The New York Times reports that the jury was “quite split” with the decision, and one dissenter, jury chairman Stuart Franklin, quickly took to the Guardian with a short post explaining his reasoning. According to Franklin, this is the third time the image of an assassination has been chosen as photo of of the year (a group which includes Eddie Adams’ iconic 1968 photograph of the killing of a Vietcong police chief), but he argued that to choose it in our present moment is “morally as problematic [as publishing] a terrorist beheading.”

Placing the photograph on this high pedestal is an invitation to those contemplating such staged spectaculars: it reaffirms the compact between martyrdom and publicity.

This debate’s not new. The Greeks probably started it, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, when Herostratus sought notoriety by torching one of the seven wonders of the world and the judiciary, in response, banned any mention of his name. To be clear, my moral position is not that the well-intentioned photographer should be denied the credit he deserves; rather that I feared we’d be amplifying a terrorist’s message through the additional publicity that the top prize attracts.

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Kathleen Hale Hunts the Most Dangerous Game

Illustration by Perri Tomkiewicz for Elle

The animals, it seems, will not be contained. A few weeks ago, Ollie the Bobcat, on the loose from the National Zoo, was found a near the bird house a few enclosures over; a toilet in Texas revealed not a single rogue rattlenake, but dozens; and Sunny, a female red panda, escaped from the the Virginia Zoo and is still on the lam after a reported refusal to mate.

“In the wild, pregnancy makes animals even more vulnerable to predators,” writes Katheen Hale at Elle. Hale’s essay about her own pregnancy intersects with a move to Los Angeles from Brooklyn and a deep desire to go where no pregnant woman has gone before: Into Griffith Park to hunt P-22, the city’s celebrity mountain lion. “For the neurotic, celebrations of life can conjure death,” Hale’s psychiatrist tells her. “Pregnancy is a time of regression. It throws the mind into maturational crisis.”

I’d read laboratory studies on the effect of predator exposure on pregnant mice: expectant mothers that were exposed to rat urine refused to give birth to the litters they were gestating. If they could do that, so could I. I’d hold off giving birth for years if necessary, like an elephant, which cooks its kids for two full years. But my obstetrician said I couldn’t refuse to give birth—apparently that’s physically impossible. I wasn’t a mouse or an elephant, I was a human woman, and I was due on June 2.

The solution was simple: I’d hunt down P-22, and hang his head on the wall of my baby girl’s nursery, so that when she became sentient, she would know that her mother was strong, and that she was safe.

Getting from point A (finding P-22) to point B (decapitation) remained a mystery to me, but in my blurry state of hormonal unbliss, I simply didn’t think about it. Instead, the following day, I laced up my hiking boots, parked my car on the winding road leading to Griffith Park, and set off into the dusty wilderness with only a water bottle, potato chips, and my phone, like a crazier Cheryl Strayed. She’d gone off trying to find herself. I’d find the lion and take it from there.

Like me, he had migrated to Los Angeles. But only one of us could stay.

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