The Longreads Blog

The Curious Case of Justin Alexander: Adventure Tourist or Murder Victim?

Landscape view near the river between Manali to Leh Ladakh in India. Getty Images.

The Parvati Valley in the Indian Himalaya — known for its overwhelming beauty — calls to those who want to shed their possessions as part of a quest for spiritual enlightenment. As Harley Rustad reports at Outside, it’s also known for a plethora of missing and (presumably murdered) Western adventure tourists.

But beneath Alexander’s glamorous tales was a person searching for higher meaning, sometimes at the expense of sensibility.

In December 2013, at age 32, Alexander announced his retirement. Disenchanted and restless, he sold the majority of his belongings, packed a backpack, and took off. In the first post on his travel blog, Adventures of Justin, he wrote: “I am running from a life that isn’t authentic…I’m running away from monotony and towards novelty; towards wonder, awe, and the things that make me feel vibrantly alive.” He spent the next two-and-a half years on the road, backpacking through South America and Asia, and driving his motorcycle around the United States.

On the surface, Alexander embodied the “I quit my job to travel” trope, and he amassed a horde of followers—more than 11,000 on his Instagram account alone. Many gravitated to his stories of climbing the Brooklyn Bridge at night, partaking in a shamanistic ritual in Brazil, undertaking a monk’s initiation ceremony in Thailand, and helping build a school in earthquake-wracked Nepal in the spring of 2016. Others were drawn to what his adventures represented: Alexander was minimalist but not rejectionist. His smartphone didn’t disgust him; it enabled him to tell his story. And his path appeared to be one not of disassociation but of action, as if he were the protagonist in his own epic novel…He once said that his life was about “walking that razor’s edge” between living in modern society and a free existence.

However Alexander’s journey ended, something happened at Mantalai Lake. In the September 3 photograph taken by the hikers, Alexander is wrapped in his gray shawl. He appears calm and stoic. Maybe Alexander’s realization wasn’t about himself but about the man he trusted to guide him—that he came to see the holy man as a fraud, unable to offer what he sought. It’s possible Alexander found what he was looking for: a dreamlike revelation while sitting near the source of a holy river, listening to the minute motions of nature, that showed him the way forward. Or maybe at the end of the trail, he found nothing; that the harder he tried, the more it felt like he was grasping at mist—chasing tendrils higher and higher into the mountains.

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A Woman’s Work: The Outside Story

All artwork by Carolita Johnson

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | January 2019 | 23 minutes (5,775 words)

When I freelanced as a “fit model” in the early aughts (the unglamorous kind of modeling that helps patternmakers adjust their patterns to fit humans correctly) I signed a contract with my agency that legally bound me to “maintain” my “appearance” while they represented me. My skin, all my visible hair (on my head, my eyebrows, my legs, armpits, and face), as well as my weight and several key body measurements all fell under this rubric.

There is nothing unreasonable about this: the main part of the job, besides the obvious — trying clothing on for patternmakers to see if there’s anything in an item that needs correcting, to avoid producing thousands of flawed garments — is to make sure your body is always the same so that a designer can produce clothing that is a consistent fit. The unspoken truth is that even though it’s technically only about measurements, it wouldn’t do to show up without a minimum of good hair and makeup, looking as attractive as you possibly can with whatever looks you pulled in the Lotto of good looks. This goes for all size categories, from junior to plus size.

Accordingly, my accountant and I came up with a deductible category we called “maintenance” — well, I came up with it and she translated it into the IRS-accepted language — and under this category I placed gym membership expenses, haircuts (and eventual hair color as I aged, because my gray hairs upset some designers even if their clothes still fit me perfectly), mani-pedis, and occasional waxing for lingerie and swimwear jobs. I might even have been able to get Botox deducted if I’d kept doing the job long enough. I left it to my accountant to decide what I could legally include.

For context, just because most people are curious about the job description, the ideal fit model has a body that isn’t extraordinary in any way. I was a size 6/junior medium, a size for which there’s a relatively small market, so I didn’t work 9 to 5 like a size 10 or a size 18W would have. This was what made the job perfect for a cartoonist/writer like me.

It was extremely enjoyable to be able to deduct these expenses for that relatively brief period of my life as a woman. It never escaped my ironic notice that with few exceptions, most women feel contractually bound to maintain their appearance in all the same ways I had to as a pro, while paying for it all on a sliding scale from “religiously” to “happily” to “begrudgingly,” usually depending on the amount of social and financial power they are born into or acquire through hard work or marriage.


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A Race to Claim a Piece of Space: The Out-of-This World Obsession of Meteorite Hunters

When word spread of a crater in Carancas, Peru — a tiny, remote village at 12,000 feet — the world’s scientists and meteorite enthusiasts were skeptical. The only way to know just what happened was to see it in person, and “there were only so many people in the world willing to head to the highlands of Peru at a moment’s notice to look for things that fell out of the sky.” In a Wired and Epic collaboration, Joshuah Bearman and Allison Keeley profile two professional meteorite hunters, Mike Farmer and Robert Ward, who travel to Carancas to see the crater for themselves — and recount what happens after they arrive.

After a day of poking around olive groves, the group retreated to their hotel. They’d said their goodnights when Farmer first saw the reports from Carancas. He called Ward. “Did you see what happened in Peru?” he asked. “Come down to the lobby.” It was midnight by then, but Ward hurried downstairs to huddle over Farmer’s computer and look at the images showing up on the meteorite forums. A crater in the middle of an empty plain. Photos of villagers posing with black rocks in their palms. And reports of witnesses falling ill, struck by some invisible ailment.

Farmer was skeptical; he thought it might be a hoax. The forums were full of theories: It was a spy satellite, it was volcanic, it was just a sinkhole. There were images of fragments, but they looked like chondrite, and that made no sense. Chondrites are among the most fragile of space rocks. They usually burn up or explode in the atmosphere. They also don’t make craters. Karl smoked and looked at the screen, uncertain. Ward was undaunted; he wanted to see it firsthand.

They knew they had to move fast. Speed is vital in the case of a witness fall—when a meteor is seen hitting the Earth—because rival groups will be vying for the same otherworldly prize. At times the competition includes a French father-son duo, a Russian team known for long hunts in places accessible only by helicopter, and a pair from Oregon who hunt with what they claim is a team of meteorite-sniffing dogs. It can be a shifty business, and distrust is common. Once, before they teamed up and were both hunting the same landfall in Kenya, Ward thought Farmer was having him followed—until he realized the tail was hired by someone else altogether.

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Swipe White

Illustration by Wenting Li

Jennifer Chong Schneider | Longreads | December 2018 | 15 minutes (3,673 words)

Last summer, my friend and fellow English professor, Danielle, was punched in the face by a white man. When she called the police on him, she was arrested for fighting. She sent me this information in an email, and later I saw pictures of her bloody nose, split lip, fractured teeth. She is a black woman, and I can think of no other reason for her arrest.

After this episode of violence, before she left the country for good, fed up with America and its racist antics, Danielle gathered her friends to say goodbye. We were at a bar and there was only one white woman at the table, a salacious marketing peon who regaled us with sex stories in the style of a late 1990’s HBO show. She told us about her current sexual conquest, a Puerto Rican man who is muscular and masculine. Then she looked at Danielle and said she also loves to have sex with black men, adding that all black men have huge dicks, Puerto Ricans are next in line, and Asians have the smallest dicks, because she slept with an Asian person once. She insisted white men were the only group with any diversity. “White men are unpredictable,” she said, “there’s no rhyme or reason.”

I stood up, put my hands on the edge of the table and considered flipping it over, but decided to just leave. Danielle followed me out and asked if I was upset. I told her I was leaving to go have sex with an Asian man with a huge dick, and the anger rose inside of me for a reason I couldn’t articulate at the moment.

In the morning, Danielle forwarded me a pages-long email from the white woman, prefacing it by saying she and another black professor at the table spent hours berating the white woman until she cried; but she cried not about her sexual racism, but because she liked me and now I’ll never be her friend. I read Danielle’s message and deleted the other.
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Where Have All the Music Magazines Gone?

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Aaron Gilbreath| Longreads | December 2018 | 25 minutes (6,357 words)

When other writers and I get together, we sometimes mourn the state of music writing. Not its quality — the music section of any good indie bookstore offers proof of its vigor — but what seems like the reduced number of publications running longer music stories. Read more…

Memory and the Lost Cause

MEMPHIS - OCTOBER 04: Hernando De Soto bridge in Memphis, Tennessee on October 4, 2016. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,360 words)

 A few days after my father’s funeral, I rented an Airbnb on Memphis’s Second Street, two avenues over from the Mississippi Riverfront. From one window, in the mornings, I could see riverboats slowly slinking by. From the other, a view of the Hernando de Soto Bridge. Named after the conquistador who arrived from Florida in 1541 in search of gold, the bridge was constructed in 1982. It connects Tennessee to Arkansas and is in many ways a dividing line between America’s east and west coasts.

During their heady romance, my father drove the length of that bridge from West Memphis, Arkansas to court my mother. She once told me they’d ended their relationship in a teary conversation while driving across. The night of my first date, at 16, I parked and walked along Riverside Drive, just south of the Memphis entrance to the bridge. It was late in August, the dog days of summer, the start of my junior year in high school. The air was sticky and sweet, mosquitoes nipped at my shoulders. I had a feeling of expectation in my heart, an idea of a future that I could construct.

The Mississippi River is a marvel. It is filthy, contaminated, and mostly unsuitable for swimming, drinking, or fishing. It is also, for me, steadying and grounding. It is a site of many beginnings, and something told me it was where I could grieve my father privately after many days of public ceremony. About a year before he died, I’d started missing home and made plans to go back for an extended time, for longer than a visit. In my longing, the reasons I left nearly 20 years before seemed a nebulous mix of striving and progress and running from something, or some things, I was not yet ready to name.

Memphis is a place where, if you’re Black, and you can, you leave. It is a proud majority Black city, and Blacks have power, but it was and is a tenuous kind of power, slow-coming and distributed in a scattershot way among a selected few. We elected our first Black mayor during my lifetime, in 1991, nearly 20 years after Atlanta. And I remember when white students left my school by the dozens and how my mother labored to enroll me in another school, to follow the current of good teachers to a better place.

My mother grew up and raised all of her children in Memphis, but five years ago, she, too, left, to live out her retirement elsewhere. In the years since, I heard a lot about a “reverse migration” where young Blacks, disappointed and frustrated by the urban North, went back to the Southern states of their ancestors for better weather and lower costs of living. Last December, Memphis’s monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general responsible for the brutal Fort Pillow Massacre and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, came down. This year, a new cadre of progressive leaders like Tami Sawyer, London Lamar, and Lee Harris became elected officials. My dread about home and my longing for it began to work on me anew.


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* * *

“Americans do not share a common memory of slavery,” Blain Roberts and Ethan Kytle write in Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy,  a powerful account that uses the history of Charleston, South Carolina, the “cradle of the Confederacy,” or “slavery’s capital,” to trace the origins of the nation’s competing visions of slavery. One view, of slavery as “benevolent and civilizing,” say Roberts and Kytle, supported by “former slaveholders and their descendants” is “a whitewashed memory,” ignoring or minimizing how brutal it was when human beings were chattel, and how central slavery is to our nation’s history. The other vision, maintained in memories and ritual by “former slaves, their progeny, and some white and black allies,” has a gorier truth.

Memphis, founded as it was, on the Mississippi River, situated at the borders of Arkansas and Mississippi, has long been a commercial port. Americans purchased the land from the Chickasaw Nation in 1818, and the city incorporated in 1826; soon after, it became a point to transport and sell Mississippi Delta cotton. It also became an important slave market, and trading in slaves was how Nathan Bedford Forrest made his name.  He was, according to scholar Court Carney, “one of the largest slave traders on the Mississippi River,” and a two-term city alderman before enlisting in the army. Tennessee was the eleventh and last state to secede from the Union. Its mountainous eastern end, far away from cotton country and less dependent upon slavery, retained pro-Union sentiments throughout the war.

According to Kytle and Roberts, the myth of the “Lost Cause,” a term coined in 1866, took root among former Confederates in the decades after their loss. It emphasized the valor of the Confederate army and how’d they’d been outmatched by better resourced Union soldiers, but fought anyway. Standing in moral defeat (and with federal troops still occupying the South initially), former Confederates and sympathizers “scrambled to distance the Confederacy from the peculiar institution.” They claimed that while slavery played a part, it was loftier goals like states’ autonomy that the secessionists had fought for.

Yet this revision of historical memory was not benign. It coincided with losses of recently acquired rights of citizenship for freed men and women. Reconstruction officially ended in 1877 when federal troops left the South; by the 1880s, state governments began erecting barriers to voting rights and mandating separate accommodations for Blacks and whites in public spaces. Lynchings, usually committed as punishment or warning against some breach of social order, spiked in the 1880s and 1890s. According to data compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center,  the biggest increase in dedications of Confederate monuments and memorials was in the early years of the 1900s. Memphis’s Forrest monument was dedicated at a ceremony attended by nearly 30,000 in 1905. Throughout the years, proponents of the monument included prominent leaders in business and city government, and they celebrated the former general’s “rough-hewn, unschooled martial style,” and held him up as a “pinnacle of southern manhood,” writes Carney. At least, publicly, they mostly minimized or ignored his history of brutality, but sometimes, when Blacks were particularly vocal and assertive, like during the push for desegregation during the 1960s, Forrest enthusiasts resorted to threatening an unruly populace that the general would be somehow resurrected to avenge something lost.

Even in Memphis of the 1980s and 1990s, when I grew up, remnants and relics of the Lost Cause mythos were everywhere. My first job was as an actor in a city theater performance of Tom Sawyer, a musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s first novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I played a friend of Amy Lawrence, essentially a chorus girl, and had two speaking lines. I was thrilled to have the job  — I was 12 and got to be out of school for more than half the day for rehearsals and performances. I earned a weekly stipend and adored learning from the veteran actors in the theatre’s resident company. The cast was a mix of company members and actors from outside, and we were a multicultural crew. A Black actor played Tom Sawyer, and I was the one Black girl in the chorus. Nigger Jim was played by another Black girl; we only called her character Jim. The actress had several speaking lines and performed a solo musical number to the song “Buffalo Gal,” a song I now know is from a minstrel written by early blackface performer John Hodges. Throughout his life, Mark Twain wrote about his love of minstrel performances, calling them “nigger shows.” He said in his autobiography, “If I could have the nigger-show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, I should have but little further use for opera.”

Watching the actress’s adroit performance every afternoon and night, singing along with the rest of the chorus to songs about the glorious Mississippi and the whistle of steamboats, I don’t remember feeling anything I would call embarrassment. I sometimes got a vague feeling of discomfort, but, truth be told, I thought I was different from the other Black actress. I was, after all, playing a schoolgirl, not a slave on the run. Weren’t we simply celebrating the glory of Mississippi River towns? Our shared land and culture? I was a child and I was deluding myself.

It is only now, looking back, that I realize that none of the theatre’s resident company, the actors with guaranteed jobs and pay for the season, were Black. While researching this piece, I learned that is still the case.

A subterranean racism is intertwined with many Southern artifacts and practices. It is an incomplete nostalgia, a false memory, a longing for an old South stripped of the truth of what living then meant for many people. At Memphis’ Sunset Symphony, a seemingly benign, popular, old-fashioned outdoor picnic was held on the Mississippi River every May. “Ol’ Man River,” from the musical Showboat, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, was performed for 21 years by local bass singer James Hyter as the crowd-stopping finale, with encore after encore. Hyter would change the lyrics many times throughout the years, removing words like “nigger” and “darkey.” Even without the hurtful words the song still describes a Black man’s life of impossible toil.

It is only now, looking back, that I realize that none of the theatre’s resident company, the actors with guaranteed jobs and pay for the season, were Black. While researching this piece, I, learned that is still the case.

* * *

Late last month, the investigative journalist and author Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted a long thread about the failed slave revolt allegedly planned by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. “This man was free and prosperous,” she wrote, “but never separated himself from the enslaved, recruited 9000 ENSLAVED PEOPLE — 9000! — to his plot to liberate enslaved in SC, overtake the armory, commandeer a boat and then sail to Haiti…” She said she learned “next to nothing” about Vesey, despite being  an African-American studies major in college, and that omitting or minimizing the truth of Black resistance is a form of “social control.” Indeed, the details of Vesey’s plot, its scale and depth, explained in a comprehensive biography by David Robertson, are remarkable.

In high school, what I learned about North American slave rebellions and resistance was cursory. I knew they happened; I learned them as facts — a laundry list of who, what, when, and how: Stono’s in South Carolina before the American Revolution; Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia; John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.

I didn’t learn that they were more than isolated incidents — that those individual instances of resistance acted in concert with other global eruptions. They were also proof of how utterly unsustainable slavery was. Rebellions, small and large, were “frequent and were ferociously put down,” throughout the Americas, according to a website dedicated to information about Bristol, England’s role as a trading port in the transatlantic slave trade. This resistance is a missing link in the gap between the two strands of collective memory about slavery. It disrupts the Lost Cause narrative of slavery as benign, and its history has been deliberately suppressed. Robertson writes, “In order that his life and actions not be publicly commemorated, any black person, man or woman, seen wearing mourning in the streets of Charleston within a week of his [Vesey’s] execution was to be arrested and whipped.”

…the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

From,”The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison; Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

* * *

Identity is nothing if not a collection of memories, strung together over time, lunging forward to inform and create a future. Who and what we mourn, too, is bound up in what we love and value. According to Kytle and Roberts, newly freed people held countless public commemorations and a “yearlong wake,” to celebrate the end of slavery, including, in one instance, a procession with a “hearse carrying a coffin labeled ‘Slavery.'” The first Memorial Day, held May 1, 1865 was an occasion when Black volunteer associations in Charleston reburied the remains of Union soldiers in properly marked graves.

Walking in the new Memphis, twenty years after the last time I lived there, I was often lost. There was little pedestrian traffic, but many police cars in the tourist spots I visited. An old Black man, ostensibly homeless, asked for my carton of takeout food. In an old place I loved years ago, sitting at a piano bar alone, having a cocktail, I was the only Black person who was not obviously an employee. In the new places, a fancy coffee shop and a fancier restaurant, it was the same. Chicago’s South Side monument to Ida B. Wells-Barnett may be erected before the end of 2019. There is a marker for her in Memphis, on Beale and Hernando Streets, near the offices of the Free Speech, the newspaper for which she wrote columns, investigated lynchings, and urged Blacks to leave the city if they were not treated more humanely. Wells-Barnett took up that work after grieving the March 1892 lynching of her friend Thomas Moss, a postman and an owner of the People’s Grocery, as well as two of his employees. That May, the Evening Scimitar printed an editorial about Wells-Barnett threatening “to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison streets.” At Main and Madison, a few blocks from the bridge, the river, and where I’d gone to rest after burying my father, there is no marker.

* * *

Danielle A. Jackson is a writer and associate editor at Longreads.

 

The Science of Dreaming

Photo by Eddie Kopp / Unsplash

Jessica Gross | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,551 words)

In 2011, when she was in college studying abroad in Peru, Alice Robb ran out of reading material and picked up a copy of Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Her initial skepticism quickly dissolved, and she and a friend spent the summer practicing LaBerge’s tips: they recounted their dreams to each other; they did “reality tests” during the day to trigger similar checks while sleeping. Robb began keeping a rigorous dream journal and found that, after very little time, she began remembering her dreams in detail.

In short, she began taking her dreams very seriously — a stance that she has maintained since. In her new book, Why We Dream, Robb, a science journalist, presents a comprehensive and compelling account of theories of and research on dreaming from ancient times through the present day. Throughout, she displays an intense respect for what our minds do while we’re sleeping, and the findings she presents — that dreaming is essential for sanity, that analyzing our dreams can be revelatory, that dreams can be used as diagnostic tools and even manipulated for our own mental health—corroborate her conviction that, as a culture, we would benefit from paying more careful attention.

Robb and I met at a bar near where she lives in Brooklyn to talk about dreams’ predictive power, what it’s like to make your dream journal entries public (hint: uncomfortable), and what closely observing our dreams can offer.

Toward the end of the book, there is a line that moved me so much: “I like seeing proof that even while I’ve been unconscious, I’ve been alive.” It seems to me that dreams as proof of life — so then, maybe, as defense against death — is a pivotal concept in this book.

I used to have a lot of trouble sleeping and I was kind of afraid of sleep. A lot of people have compared sleep to death, and being unconscious is a scary thing to think about. But paying attention to my dreams and improving my dream recall and seeing that there’s actually so much going on in my mind while I’m asleep has made sleep feel more like a lively time — more integrated with the rest of my life and waking hours — rather than this weird period where I just shut down. Read more…

A Portrait of the Mother as a Young Girl

Image courtesy Marlene Adelstein / Portrait by Aaron Kurzen

Marlene Adelstein | Longreads | December 2018 | 13 minutes (3,190 words)

When Mom sees me, a big smile lights up her face, her blue eyes shine bright, and I give her a hug and kiss. “Hi, Connie,” I say. Although she doesn’t know me any more as her daughter, she seems to recognize my face. I’ve flown down to Florida to visit her in the assisted living facility where, until last year, she lived with my dad. When he suddenly got an infection and needed to be hospitalized, Mom, who has late-stage Alzheimer’s, couldn’t be left alone. It was clear what needed to happen. We moved her one floor down to the locked memory care unit, a necessity that was long overdue. My dad had been her caregiver since her diagnosis but the last couple of years she’d simply become too much for him. He recovered from the infection and moved back to the facility but into a smaller apartment, a one bedroom, where he lived alone for about five months until he had a sudden, dramatic decline in his health and, at 89, died.

Once she moved to memory care, Mom would often ask for my dad by his name, Bernard. He was the last person she remembered. But lately she has asked for Bernard less frequently and now when she sees me she says, “Have you seen the other guy?”

“No,” I say cheerfully. “I came to see you! Want to go out to lunch?” Redirecting is the name of the game to avoid the extremely unpleasant outbursts which my mom is known for. A few times a week she sets off the alarm by opening the door to the stairwell while trying to leave the floor, yelling and flailing as the staff restrains her. Exit seeking, the staff calls it. Connie wants to see her mother, who she claims lives across the street. She shoves caregivers away or pounds on the window overlooking the rehab wing my dad was in for many weeks, where she often visited him. Mother, I’m guessing, represents her husband, her children…home.

Back in her studio apartment after lunch, I give her a book called “Bear Hugs,” a small board book meant for very young children. It contains drawings of animals and the various cute nicknames their loved ones call them. I read it aloud with exaggerated expressions, acting it out. “You’re super cute and cuddly, as sweet as pumpkin pie.” When I get to the end where a mama bear grabs her baby in a bear hug, I demonstrate on her, which makes Mom giggle and smile. She loves that part. “That is so sweet,” she says and she flips through the book. She quickly forgets that we just read it so I go to the beginning and read it to her again. She loves being held and I have to admit, I like it too. I was never particularly close to her but in recent years that’s changed as our roles have reversed and I’ve had to care for this mom-child.

“You’re good,” she says to me after the third time through the book. “Well, thank you,” I say. “So are you,” and again, I get that brilliant smile out of her.

Later when I am getting ready to leave the facility, always a dicey situation, I tell her I have to say goodbye. Sadness descends over her like a curtain and I think she’s going to cry. I give her an effusive bear hug, holding my mother the way I would have held the child I never had. When she asks for her mother and “what’s his name,” I rock her back and forth as if playing a game until I am able to cajole that smile again. “I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise,” I say.

The elevator is taking forever to come so I punch in the code to disarm the alarm and duck into the stairwell to hide my tears, the door clicking shut behind me. I hear Mom screaming “Let me go, I want to go home!” and when the alarm goes off I realize she’s tried to follow me out the door.
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Regarding Joan Miró

Painter Juan Miro in His Studio. Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images

Sophie Beck | The Point | November 2018 | 31 minutes (6,109 words)

 

The difficulty began with the title of a painting at an exhibition of work by the Spanish artist Joan Miró. The title was Woman Entranced by the Escape of Shooting Stars (1969). I particularly like this title. The painting itself pleases and eludes me at the same time—the woman’s upturned face has a serenity and happiness that comes of no clear aspect; she has stopped doing something to contemplate the heavens. I can’t make out what objects are in her hands and, if I were to read an interpretation, I’d probably find it questionable. There are two stars: one twinkles and the other spirals. Next to the painting was a sculpture I didn’t like, and then another sculpture constructed of found objects I considered meaningless to the point of being irritating. There was a whole room beyond that full of pieces I didn’t look at very closely. It was crowded in the museum that day. People around me shuffled, stopped, and shuffled, deep in their audio tours.

I stood before Woman Entranced by the Escape of Shooting Stars absorbing the elements—woman, star, spiral star not shaped like a star, inscrutable other stuff—then it followed me into daydreams and lodged in a fold of my mind. I am not an artist or critic and lay no claim to any special understanding of Miró’s work or methods. I am not his admirer, countryman or contemporary. I just started liking the guy despite not liking the guy. I couldn’t stop thinking about him so I wanted to write about him, but the more I wrote, the more I came to believe that the key to his fantastic work, to the sheer volume of work—he kept working without pause from age nineteen to ninety—was that he was phenomenally boring. It seemed that only Miró could take the fact of being Miró and make something lustrously reality-bending, inspired, haunting and gorgeous out of it. To be removed by one degree, to write about him or his work, is to risk crafting something tedious to read. My initial essay flamed out so thoroughly that I threw it in the digital garbage on multiple occasions. Each time, I fished it back out again, attached to the gleaming scraps of something resiliently and stubbornly salvageable.

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Take Script, Add Snow

Still from Christmas in Evergreen. Front Street Pictures / The Hallmark Channel / Getty Images / Composite by Katie Kosma

Jane Borden | Longreads | December 2018 | 12 minutes (3,211 words)

In a big city, a woman lives a fast-paced life until something forces her to visit a small town, just before Christmas. Shortly after arriving, she connects with a charming small-town man. Commence ice-skating, hot chocolate, a tree lot, tree decorating, caroling, gift giving, charity work, big family meals, snow, snowmen, snowballs, snowball fights, red scarves, cookie decorating, a grand old house or country inn, sleigh bells, giddy children, and the soft plucking of stringed instruments whenever a character delivers a joke.

Every made-for-TV Christmas movie tracks the above plot. And yet, the uniformity does not prevent proliferation: This year alone, Hallmark made 38 holiday films across its two channels. Lifetime made 14. “The word is insatiable,” says Meghan Hooper, senior vice president at Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network. “We don’t seem to be able to do enough to make the audience happy.”

“Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure,“ says writer-director Ron Oliver, who has made 13 Christmas movies for TV since 2004, mostly for Hallmark, which has become synonymous with heartfelt, holiday romantic comedies (it’s the Xerox of them, or, if you will, the Kleenex). “I have not seen this happen until this year. Everybody jumped on board.“

In 2017, 83 million people watched at least one Hallmark Christmas movie during their Countdown to Christmas and Miracle of Christmas events. The Hallmark Channel was last year’s number one cable network among women 25 to 54 in quarter four, and is shaping up to remain in that spot for 2018. Both Hallmark and Lifetime boast double-digit ratings increases during December. And the field is getting crowded: UPtv produced seven original holiday movies this year, Netflix made four, and Freeform made three.

How did America become obsessed with sappy, predictable, low-budget Christmas movies? Before we delve into history and psychology, let’s finish the plot:

Our protagonist falls in love, of course. She also rights an ethical wrong, always something from the past awaiting resolution and absolution. “It all goes back to Dickens,” Oliver says, referencing Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol. Like Scrooge, our modern-day heroine receives help, her three ghosts being her new love interest, the small-town community, and a stranger who slightly resembles Santa (what Hooper calls “a Santa-like”). At the film’s end, she and the love interest kiss, usually for the first time (these are family films), and she either moves to the small town or is forever changed by it. No one asks why the moms and aunts look only 10 years older than the protagonist. Roll credits, start the next one, begin to confuse which characters are in what.

It’s easy to assume that viewers enjoy these movies in spite of the repetitive plotlines, as if the networks greedily scam us. But Hallmark and Lifetime both do extensive focus grouping and ratings analysis. They know what works — we watch these movies because the plots are the same. In fact, Oliver calls the plots peripheral: “The real elements of these movies that make people love them is this sense of returning to your own past, your own childhood and sense of innocence from that era.” The slightly varying setups and environs must be similar to deliver us. These films are not art or even entertainment — they serve a function. They are ritual, a ritual as pagan as Christmas’s origins. And their key piece of iconography is the kind of American small town that’s quickly disappearing.

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IMAGINARY AMERICA

“Small towns have always been the iconic image for human relationships,” says Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, whose work specializes in nostalgia. “The older woman lives here and the nice young family lives here. When you present the imagery of the small town, it’s portraying how we can get along in peaceful ways and help one another.”

Oliver grew up in one of these towns. He recalls, “It was this absolute Norman Rockwell Christmas town.” However, he adds, “I went back, maybe 20 years ago, and it is now strip malls. There is nothing to hold onto from there, so you hold the memories and recreate them in stories.”

He uses his hometown as a template when designing scenes and sets, but admits a challenge: “A few places exist, but they are getting harder and harder to find. We have to make them. We use every trick in the book.” Christmas Everlasting, one of this year’s Hallmark films, is partially shot in Covington, Georgia, because Oliver was drawn to its charming town square. “But when you go two blocks from there, it’s Walmart and CVS,” he says. Ultimately, the setting of the film is an amalgamation of three different small towns, plus a healthy dose of CGI.

Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure.

So these movies deliver a fantasy of a memory — except, for most of us, it’s a false memory we internalized through Norman Rockwell art, and Rockwell was also delivering the fantasy of a memory. You can trace the line of American Christmas imagery all the way to Queen Victoria: In 1848, The Illustrated London News published an etching of Victoria and Prince Albert standing around a Christmas tree with their family. It was published two years later in the States, and had a lasting impact of popularizing the tradition. “Christmas was not always a family-centered celebration,” explains Bruce Forbes, professor emeritus of Religious Studies at Morningside College, and author of Christmas: A Candid History. It became a family holiday in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the wild popularity of Queen Victoria, and to Charles Dickens, who published A Christmas Carol in 1843. “Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet,” says Forbes. “When we talk about the ‘spirit of Christmas’ now, we talk about generosity. That’s a Dickens creation.“

What did exist prior? In England, not much. As a result of the lasting effects of the Puritan revolution in the 1600s, the English hardly celebrated Christmas at all. The Puritans’ beef was twofold: Christmas was not celebrated by early Christians (the holiday didn’t appear until the 300s) and those who did celebrate Christmas, Forbes says, “went to midnight mass and then to the tavern and got drunk.” So Puritans wiped it from the English consciousness.

The Illustrated London News (1848)

Taking the baton from the Victorian image was Currier and Ives. The phenomenal success of this New York City lithography firm in the mid- and late-19th century put affordable prints of snowy landscapes into the hands of a nation. Then in the 20th century, Norman Rockwell paired nostalgia for 19th-century Christmas with images of our mid-century obsessions: the nuclear family and suburban life. It was a powder keg. Today, pulp-like TV Christmas movies recreate these images again — in their own way as prolifically as Currier and Ives — but this time they’re more reflective of our modern world. Additions include both the mundane (texting) and the imperative (finally, after years of criticism, we see characters of color). Nostalgia is meta by nature.

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ART IMITATES ART

A few years ago, Hallmark Cards, Inc., the parent company of the two Hallmark networks (aka Crown Media), tapped one of its senior illustrators, Geoff Greenleaf, to create a series of images about a fictional town called Evergreen. The series of snowy scenes in a small town, featuring quaint shops and an iconic vintage red truck, became a bestseller. In response, Crown Media turned the cards into a 2017 film titled Christmas in Evergreen. The movie, and its 2018 sequel, Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa, were shot at Burnaby Village Museum in British Columbia, itself a fictional setting designed to preserve and romanticize small towns of yore.

Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet.

Oliver believes the mid-century American imagery that these films capitalize on is so effective because it speaks to a time “when America was truly powerful and firing with all six cylinders: making great cars and great music, going to the moon, for crying out loud.” But, of course, Rockwell and his ilk rarely painted the whole picture. “It’s sanitized,” says Forbes. “It ignores all kinds of things: race, teenage pregnancy, poverty. But it was the image that white Americans had of themselves.”

TV Christmas movies have certainly perpetuated this brand of whitewashed nostalgia. As the films’ popularity rose, networks received ample criticism. Still, just five of Hallmark’s 38 holiday films this year feature leads of color. This includes Christmas Everlasting, starring Tatyana Ali, who also stars in this year’s Jingle Belle on Lifetime. “It speaks to a shift in our culture, that suddenly there is a move afoot to have more and more of our real world look like our television world,” says Oliver. Still missing in the genre are LGBTQ love stories; no lead to date has been gay. 

As American as a proclivity towards heteronormative whitewashing, so too is the tendency towards consumerism — some of the imagery within the films is for sale. Christmas in Evergreen has an adjacent product line: a keepsake ornament of the red truck, a magic snow globe, a mystery key, Santa’s mailbox. “We worked in partnership to look at a couple of the products they had that we could weave into the overall storyline,” says Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and network publicity for Crown Media Family Networks, which owns the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. And of course they did: Hallmark was a retailer long before it got into content creation. “Not all brands evoke emotional connections,” Vicary says, “but that is at the top of what this brand promises and it has been since the beginning.”

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CAPTIVE ON THE CAROUSEL OF TIME

These films are not merely delivering the past; the stories achieve a delicate balance between familiarity and novelty. In them, we see a “constant struggle between wanting to hold onto certain things from the past but wanting a new beginning,” says Batcho. That new beginning is provided primarily by the love interest — TV Christmas movies are never not romantic comedies. Hooper says her team at Lifetime learned the importance of adding a romance element, after trying other versions of holiday films without it.

This makes sense to Batcho. “Like nostalgia, romantic stories focus on relationships and the sense of the ideal,” she says, adding that early brain imaging studies suggest that romance and nostalgia produce similar hormonal releases in the brain, “the loving, feel-good, pro-social feelings.” Plus, of course, as important as it is for us to protect the village, we need new relationships to strengthen the gene pool. But Batcho also says novelty is intrinsically linked to nostalgia. She likens cyclical markings of time, such as holiday celebrations, to a carousel: Each time it goes around, the horses look the same, but different people may be sitting in different places. “By being different and new, [novelty] allows you to escape so you’re not trapped in the past,” Batcho says. “Nostalgic people tend to be more optimistic, forward-looking people.”


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Although nostalgia was originally defined as homesickness and categorized as a disease, scientists now understand its healthy and profound psychological function. Studies suggest that exercising nostalgia enhances mood, reduces stress, and increases both social connectedness and self-regard. “Nostalgia helps us rediscover aspects of our authentic self, by going into our past,” says Batcho. Studies even suggest it helps us ascertain a meaning or purpose to our lives. Batcho also describes nostalgia as a social experience, since we identify ourselves in terms of relationships. “Nostalgia actually helps diminish loneliness by reminding people that, even if you are not physically with those who have loved you, you were once loved,” she says. Further, the process isn’t random. We specifically seek past memories that will help our current state.

“Every time you turn the television on,” Oliver says, “you’re seeing news about another betrayal of an ideal that America held close for a long time. I think the country is trying to find its moral center again. There’s a consistency to these stories that people hold onto like a life raft in the middle of a cultural storm.” Perhaps, as viewers, we also try to right a wrong.

The makers of TV Christmas movies wisely trigger nostalgia in several ways. “We certainly have gone after a certain type of talent, in terms of recognizable faces we grew up with from ’80s and ’90s shows,” says Lifetime exec Hooper. Nostalgia serves us. A 2018 survey by Cigna reports that most adults are lonely — as in, the average score, on a scale from one to lonely, was at least lonely. Other studies have shown loneliness to be a major predictor of poor physical health, leading some researchers to declare loneliness both a health crisis and an epidemic.

Further, cohorts aged 18 to 22 and 23 to 37 reported more loneliness than older generations. “That’s new,“ Batcho says. A press representative for Hallmark identifies the network’s demographic as women 25 to 54, but says that during the fourth quarter – our holiday season – “our women and adults 18 to 34 are through the roof,” suggesting a potential link between loneliness and viewership. 

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WE ARE ALL JUST PAGANS BY A FIRE

Nostalgia TV has been booming for a few years now, and the seemingly endless reboots and remakes premiere all year long. So why this huge surge in viewers around Christmas? Even otherwise prestige-TV-obsessed viewers, who turn up their noses at predictable schmaltz, now indulge in made-for-TV Christmas movies. “I don’t know if the season causes it as much as the season gives you permission,” opines Oliver. “From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.”

“It’s something about the holidays that is just built in: indulgence. Drink the hot chocolate, eat the food, lay on the couch, enjoy your family,” says Hooper.

And when Batcho is asked why people insatiably consume this kind of content during the holidays, she says, “Winter represents nature dying and taking a pause. It makes you feel very sad and hoping to look forward to a rebirth in the spring, which tells us that it is very fundamental and natural for people to like cycles. Bears hibernate. Even human beings need to take a pause.”

In one way or another, they are all saying the same thing, which is that we watch Hallmark around Christmas for the same reason Christmas happens at Christmas: the solstice. In the 300s, when the church designated the holiday, it likely chose December 25th for a litany of savvy reasons: some political and some for convenience, some building off already established pagan rituals. “You could guess them even if you didn’t study the cultures,“ says Forbes. “If it’s a midwinter festival, it would be a festival of lights to push back the darkness. It would feature evergreens because they look alive when everything else has died. To get past the isolation of winter, you would have feasts. And you would have dancing, singing, and drinking.“

From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.

Part of why we’ve celebrated midwinter festivals since before recorded time is because, as Batcho said, we like cycles. They help us predict regular change: It’s cold and dark now, but abundant spring will come again, and we know it. They also help us deal with the constancy of change, with whatever on the carousel is new. “We can’t stop change. What do we do instead? Build cycles,” Batcho says. These cycles come in the form of temporal landmarks, which trigger nostalgia: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays … holiday movies. “We anchor ourselves. It is important for psychological well-being to have a sense that we are not out of control.”

The consistency of plot and its predictable ending therefore serve an important purpose: we need the films to be predictable because they are another icon of the midwinter festival. We see one and our brains not only know what to expect, but also what to do. If we seek this iconography now more than ever, then we must feel especially out of control.

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THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

It would be easy to attribute the popularity of these films to a kind of escapism resulting from the current division in our country, from the fear and hatred that many feel on both sides. But the rise of both Lifetime and Hallmark TV holiday movies started ramping up around 2012 (see graph). Perhaps the division in our country and the popularity of holiday films (and nostalgia programming in general) are effects of the same cause: an almost unfathomable acceleration of rates of cultural change.

In the 1980s, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller (he of Dymaxion House and Geodesic Dome fame) posited a theory known as the knowledge-doubling curve. This sort of stuff isn’t 100 percent measurable, but the basic idea is: The amount of information we know, as a species, doubled about every 1500 years back when we were cavemen, and every 100 years in the modern era, up until World War I, at which point, it started doubling at an ever increasing rate. In the ‘90s, Artificial Intelligence researchers estimated the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months. Today, varying estimates suggest that the amount of information in the world doubles every 10 to 13 months, and that, in our lifetimes, it could begin to double every 11 hours.

Change is coming at a furiously accelerating rate, providing us with greater and greater dominion. However, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, evolution did not equip us to handle this kind of rapidly increasing power. For millions of years, Genus Homo was positioned in the middle of the food chain. Only in the past 100,000 years did we jump to the top. “Humankind ascended … so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence.” Our genus, by contrast, stumbles along with far less than a majestic prowess: “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this overhasty jump.”

We need help adapting to cataclysmic change. Nostalgia provides aid, and so does story. Researchers discovered that character-driven narratives cause the brain to release oxytocin, which can enhance empathy, thereby motivating cooperation and leading us to trust strangers. The study, led by Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate University, also found that we continue to mimic the actions and feelings of characters after the story ends. If a protagonist accepts shifts in her life and finds optimism for the future, then so may we.

We know that loneliness is on the rise. We know that both nostalgia and story help us create and sustain relationships. And we know that more than 83 million of us are turning to nostalgic stories during the annual month when humans anchor themselves against change, all during a time in history when the pace of change threatens to destroy us. Maybe we’re obsessed with schmaltzy TV Christmas movies because humans understand, deep down, that the real savior, this season and every season, is each other. Come on, you knew this article would have a Hallmark ending.

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Jane Borden is a freelance culture writer based in Los Angeles.

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Editor: Katie Kosma

Fact checker: Sam Schulyer

Copy editor: Jacob Gross