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Part 1: NO MERCY
The sun has barely risen over Miami, and Dale Brown loads an orange shopping cart with everything he owns. Through the morning’s swampy heat, he pushes the cart to the edge of the railroad tracks, where he hauls the items one at a time into some overgrowth and covers them with branches. His tent from Walmart, meticulously rolled and packed. A garbage bag with clothes and a blanket. He unscrews the lid to a plastic gallon jug and empties his urine into the brush.
“You feel like an animal,” says Brown, 63.
This industrial neighborhood just beyond Miami’s far western edge is home to lumber yards, auto parts warehouses, and, in recent months, roving encampments of homeless sex offenders. This summer, Brown and a half-dozen other men were living beside a chain-link fence outside a hardware company. Five blocks away, more lived in tents and makeshift shacks. And 12 blocks from there, about a dozen arrived in cars each night.
A combination of federal, state and local laws has rendered almost all of Miami-Dade County off-limits to sex offenders with young victims. The feds say they’re not allowed in public housing. The state says they can’t live within 1,000 feet of a day care center, park, playground, or school. The county says they can’t live within 2,500 feet of a school. In a place so densely populated, forbidden zones are everywhere. And in the narrow slivers of permitted space, affordable apartments with open-minded landlords are nearly impossible to come by. Read more…
My dad moved out of the house on January 1, 1990. He’d packed up his cartons of books, records, and stacks of old issues of the New Yorker from the shelves built specifically to house them. This left his study, my favorite room in the house, vacant. I’d largely accepted my parents’ separation and forthcoming divorce. I wasn’t Haley Mills. I had neither a twin nor a plan to get them back together. I don’t remember exactly how I managed his departure, except the first night he was gone — really gone — I lay in bed reading Anne Rice novels and listening to the Beatles on my Walkman, thinking my mother’s claims of “Nothing will change, everything will be the same, and we’ll be all right” had a fine whiff of bullshit about them.
Dad’s apartment was on the second story of a recently renovated building in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, full of other divorced parents and distracted weekend children. When the custodial schedule put me there, I spent a lot of time wandering our then-empty downtown. I might have stumbled into the sort of trouble that would have made me cooler in high school. But like most red-blooded American teenagers, I was really into Latin and architecture and Renaissance politics, so I spent a lot of time at the Basilica. There I pined after rosaries as jewelry, accidentally stole candles, and visited with the priest. He was a good-natured and quiet man, who perhaps recognized that even pious adolescents don’t spend whole Saturdays alone wandering around a drafty church if they’re even remotely happy. I’m sure I needed answers to a lot of the Big Metaphysical Questions life had served up the past few months, but mostly we talked about the Grand Central Oyster Bar and why my nascent atheism would be a real barrier to entry if I ever wanted to convert to Catholicism.
One Saturday, Dad took my younger sister on one of those guilt-fueled, divorced-parent shopping benders. When she returned, flush with toys, new stereo equipment, and a pair of hamsters, Dad handed me a blank check to take to the public library and pay my king’s ransom in overdue fees. I filled it out at the circulation desk under the twitching eye of the upstairs librarian. On the way out the door, I caught a glance of a yellow flyer that read AUDITIONS TODAY: YOUTH THEATER COMPANY SEEKS YOUNG ACTORS.Finally, I thought, a reason not to find God.
I might have stumbled into the sort of trouble that would have made me cooler in high school. But like most red-blooded American teenagers, I was really into Latin and architecture and Renaissance politics, so I spent a lot of time at the Basilica.
I hadn’t curled my hair, put on lip gloss, nor prepared a song from Les Miserables that was hopelessly out of my vocal range and life experience. But I needn’t have worried; I made the company in about 30 seconds. I was flattered and impressed with myself. I didn’t even have to act. They could just see the talent emanating right off of me. The director said she’d see me at orientation the next week at the theater — your new home away from home! Afterward, I stood on the sidewalk across from Dad’s apartment building, January sleet silvering down on me, and glanced up at the basilica. I thought, That poor priest is going to have to find someone else to talk to.
My mother took me to the information session. Unlike my father, who’d met news of my professional theater career with a “Great job, bud” and a nod back to the golf game, Mom found the whole turning your kids into professional actors pitch suspicious at best. I couldn’t figure out what her problem was. Sure, the audition process was unconventional. The theater, in name only, was a filthy warehouse filled with giant spiders and dingy whitewashed brick, with ancient wooden floors so bowed and worn you could pass notes through the cracks to the cellar. The next production was “an Irish play, you know, for St. Paddy’s Day” that had yet to be written seven weeks out from opening. My fellow young thespians were mostly the homeschooled children of hippie parents, and a handful of tough girls with skinhead boyfriends, lipstick the color of bruises, and pack-a-day smoking habits at 13. My closest peer was coincidentally the daughter of my father’s divorce attorney. I couldn’t exactly figure out what she was doing there, but I was glad she was around. Driving me down the derelict alley to rehearsal the first time, my mother was alarmed at the scruffy day-drunks relieving themselves against the wall across the street. I thought it was bohemian, you know, kind of punk rock. Though I would never have said that aloud because the tough girls would have punched me in the arm and called me a poser.
Mom thought it was possible the owners were running some kind of elaborate con. I was sure I was not being conned. “I mean, they haven’t asked me for a dime,” I said. “Yeah, well, they’re charging me several thousand dimes for you to be involved in all this,” she replied. I felt kind of guilty about that, but I also knew that because of the weirdness of the divorce she probably wouldn’t say no. Read more…
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 18: Big Boi (L) and Andre 3000 of Outkast perform at the Treasure Island Music Festival on Treasure Island on October 18, 2014 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)
Along with a cluster of other seminal albums that debuted in 1998, Atlanta hip-hop duo OutKast’s masterful third album Aqueminiturns 20 this year. I was in Memphis then, a high school student living at my mother’s house. To me, Atlanta was like a sophisticated older cousin — still country, but sexier, with more polish and definitely more lights. Many of my friends’ dreams were there, and when I listen to Aquemini now, it still sounds like dreams, a frenetic, far-out ambition, and a real love of home and roots. At The Undefeated, Atlanta-based writer Dennis Norris considers how the album defined the contemporary South and anticipated the pop music landscape of today.
The idea of having pride in the South has for a long time generally been associated with whiteness. “Southern pride” conjures images of Confederate flags and a longing for a time when the states below the Mason-Dixon could own black people. But what about black Southerners? What do we have pride in? Growing up in Mississippi, I didn’t find any pride in my elementary school named after Jefferson Davis. I didn’t find pride in the Dixie flag fluttering above my head every time I drove through downtown Jackson.
Outkast showed us our reflections as seen in the shiny spokes of Volkswagens and Bonnevilles, Chevrolets and Coupe de Villes bouncing off Old National Highway potholes. They reminded us of the life we could find pride in. The Bayou Classics. The Essence Festivals. Music crafted with the same love and care that the Gullah use to weave a perfectly made handbasket. That perfect slap of a domino smacking the table to drown out the sound of stomachs growling waiting for the ribs to get off the grill.
While we were fighting for monuments of oppressive Southern pride to get torn down, Outkast was constructing a monument to the beauty in the ugliness around us. Aquemini was a love letter to home — a reminder that we were imperfect kings and queens in flip-flops and socks. Aquemini‘s promise was that, if we turned our love inward toward the place that raised us, then we’d see the beauty around us. Because excellence is only magnified by the obstacles overcome to get there. I say, to have a choice to be who you wants to be / It’s left up-a to me / And my momma n’em told me. That’s why Outkast including that Source clip at the end of the album is so powerful. They stuck the landing.
But the acclaim of the album goes beyond mere critical ratings. It’s no coincidence that the years following Aquemini would bring about an era of Southern dominance over hip-hop culture. And while the cultural shift changed the course of the national music scene, it also transformed Atlanta. The city of Atlanta, complete with a black woman as mayor and possibly a black woman governor on the way, embraces hip-hop as much as any other large city in the country. From T.I. and 2 Chainz with restaurants seemingly on every corner to Big Boi and Gucci Mane performing during halftime at Hawks gamesand even the Atlanta United soccer team embracing the likes of Waka Flocka to get the crowd hype. This is an Atlanta that understands the beauty of Southern culture. This is a country that sees the city and its blackness as a triumph worth emulating.
For Billboard, Dan Charnas compiles an oral history of Vibe magazine, the first issue of which was published in September, 1993. Founded by Quincy Jones in partnership with Time Warner (and still publishing digitally today), the magazine represented a “new black aesthetic” that “championed hip-hop but thought broad and wide about the genre’s connections to the past and the future.”
Mimi Valdes (editorial assistant, 1993-94; assistant editor, 1994-95; style editor, 1997-98; executive editor, 1999-2002; editor-at-large, 2002-03; editor-in-chief, 2004-06): Jonathan [Van Meter, editor-in-chief 1992-93] booked Madonna and Dennis Rodman as a cover. And Eddie Murphy’s publicist was mad as hell that Madonna was getting the cover over Eddie. We all wanted Eddie over Madonna, so we were upset about it too. When [word of the cover choice] started to get out in the industry, we all felt the need to save Vibe’s reputation.
Scott Poulson-Bryant (senior editor/writer, 1992-96): I said [to Jonathan], “The staff needs to have a conference. People are really not happy about this.”
Van Meter: I said, “This isn’t The Village Voice. We’re not unionized. You can’t come in here representing the staff.”
Valdes: We were all standing by waiting for Scott to give us the go-ahead to come in. When Jonathan saw us, he got really upset.
Van Meter: I felt like I was losing control. And I said [to Scott], “You’re fired.” People in the hallways started crying. Mimi Valdes was screaming as if she’d just found out her mother was shot and killed. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I made it worse.”
Poulson-Bryant: He came to my office: “You’re not fired. Look, we’ll have a staff meeting.”
Quincy Jones: I was staying away from editorial policy. I got involved when Jonathan put the Beastie Boys on the cover and told me he was following up with Dennis Rodman and Madonna. He had already shot it!
Van Meter: I guess Quincy was getting a lot of shit from people for putting the Beastie Boys on the cover, and when he sees the Madonna cover, he went crazy.
Jones: I said, “Over my dead fucking body! That’s the way you blow an urban magazine.”
Van Meter: Madonna was queen. You can’t not put her on the cover. I couldn’t conceive of killing the best cover story we had done so far. [Quincy and I] ended up having a fight on the phone, and I smashed my phone into a thousand pieces and cleared off the top of my desk onto the floor. I think I said, “I quit.” I went home. And then the phone calls started. Everyone tried to get Quincy to change his mind. Even Madonna called me at home. She was really pissed.
Jones: I called Madonna and I said, “I’m telling you as a friend: it’s not personal, but you cannot pander with an urban magazine this early.” She said, “Quincy Jones, you and I can take over the world if we want to. See you around, pal.” I haven’t talked to her since then.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner tried to profile actor-director Bradley Cooper for The New York Times. He spoke with her, but he wouldn’t answer her personal questions. He largely stuck to the film’s plot and production and parrotted what he’d told other outlets. That wasn’t the stuff Akner wanted to know. She wanted to better understand Cooper and the connection between him and his story. Readers did, too. “I don’t necessarily see the upside of it,” Cooper told her. “You know?” So she searched for answers elsewhere. The profile she wrote from that is a lively Pirandellian story about a movie that’s about how commerce affects art, about where art comes from, what the best profiles can do, and why people read them.
He told me: “And my hope is that — and that’s the thing about art — in creating this story you did learn a lot about me.” And I took that as a half-assed apology for not really talking to me about his life.
But he wasn’t rebuking me. He wasn’t avoiding me. He definitely wasn’t apologizing to me. He was just telling me that I’m asking the wrong questions. He could tell me about his sobriety. He could tell me about what his father’s death meant. He could tell me about his baby and his relationship. But that’s just information. If you really want to know him, you can’t sit with him and ask him. You have to watch his movie. You have to feel it. You have to be willing to accept answers that are spiritual and not literal.
Here is his movie, Mr. Cooper was telling me. Here is the out-of-the-past character who is a shout-out to a time when an artist could take himself seriously, like the actors he so admired. Here is the allegory of the chokehold of marketing. The not explaining himself to me is the message. The not explaining to me is who he is.
September 2008 was a whirlwind month for Michael Grynbaum, then a markets reporter for the New York Times. A self-described “newbie” to the paper’s business desk (he had previously worked on the metro desk), Grynbaum was immediately thrust into reporting on a financial maelstrom, a period which included the collapse of Lehman Brothers (otherwise known as the largest bankruptcy filing in United States history), the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the transformation of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into bank holding companies, and what very well could have been the collapse of the nation’s economy.
Among Grynbaum’s responsibilities was “covering all the daily market plunges and the economic reports,” he told me, which meant he was busy that September, trying to keep pace (along with the other Times reporters like Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jenny Anderson, Eric Dash, and Michael de la Merced, among others) with a tumultuous flurry of daily breaking news. “As a reporter, you couldn’t divert your gaze for one minute,” says Diana B. Henriques, then a senior financial writer for the Times. “It was like an atomic blast, with ripples going in every direction.”
One of those ripples was the House of Representative’s September 29th vote on a $700 billion economic rescue plan; despite pleas from both President George W. Bush and Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, the House voted down the bill, 228-205, a move which prompted the Dow Jones Industrial Average to fall nearly 800 points.
Grynbaum remembers reporters and editors gathering around TV screens scattered about the Times’ newsroom to watch the landmark vote, and as it became clear the proposal (which entailed using taxpayer money to buy and absorb troubled assets) would fail, “an eerie silence fell over the newsroom,”he says. And then, “The Bloomberg machines started flashing red: the market was plunging.” He soon realized on that late September day a decade ago that he had to write the “breaking story about a historic stock collapse.”
“Everyone was working on adrenaline, aware of how consequential this moment was,” he says of the coverage:
At 1:30 p.m. the House began to vote on the rescue package that Mr. Paulson and Congressional leaders negotiated over the weekend. About 10 minutes later, when it became clear that the legislation was in trouble, the stock market went into a free fall, with the Dow plunging about 400 points in five minutes.
At his home office in Great Neck, N.Y., Edward Yardeni, the investment strategist, received terse e-mail messages from clients and friends. “Is this the end of the world?” one asked. Another sent a simple plea: “Stop the world, I want to get off.”
At some point, Grynbaum thought to call his parents, suddenly aware of the affects a stock market free-fall would have on their 401(k)s and portfolios, which were “taking a massive hit.” Ten years later, and another Great Depression averted, and Grynbaum can recall those weeks with some necessary and illuminating perspective, adding, “It was a thrilling and slightly scary time to be covering Wall Street.”
To others intimately involved with the roller-coaster fall of 2008, like Gary Cohn, then the president of Goldman Sachs, that same sense of measured introspection is notably lacking.
Since resigning as the director of the National Economic Council, Cohn has emerged as arguably the lone sane voice operating within the current chaos—aka within the Trump administration. First there were reports of his near-resignation following President Trump’s comments on the violence in Charlottesville, VA, and Bob Woodward’s recently published Fear alleged Cohn removed letters from Trump’s desk, thus saving trade agreements with several countries. During a period in which many feel as if they are vainly screaming into a void, Cohn’s protests—real and alleged—have endeared him to those looking for any sort of official resistance.
But that aura shattered around the time of the collapse’s ten-year anniversary. During an interview with Reuters, Cohn outlined the primary cause of the financial crisis, and surprisingly, the former Goldman exec largely laid the blame on Main Street’s front porch, saying,
“Who broke the law? I just want to know who you think broke the law. Was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?”
Cohn’s comments echo a popular opinion for many of those in the financial industry, and yet, that doesn’t disqualify his statements as anything less than mind bogglingly obtuse. It’s easy to navel-gaze in an attempt to diagnose the financial near-collapse and subsequent recession: yes, Americans became entranced with debt—at the bubble’s peak, the average American owned 13 credit cards—and yes, people flagrantly spent, running up an average household debt of roughly $15,000. But to absolve Wall Street and its employees is negligent, and ignorant that Wall Street became just as cozy with risk. Lehman Brothers and its ilk posted leverages (or the debt to equity ratio) of $30-plus to $1, and the notion that these investment firms, which were in the midst of accumulating massive annual profits (and bonuses for its executives), heeded any attempt to self-regulate proved farcical.
So yes, while that waitress accumulated homes (a fictionalized anecdote that borrows heavily from Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which recounts a similar—but not exact—instance), Wall Street was creating—and profiting spectacularly off of—the vehicles that allowed people to gamble so recklessly. The events of 2008 were the result of one massive feedback loop: the embrace of a free market economy led to lax oversight of financial firms, which enabled banks to pursue strategies that would lead to tumescent payouts. As the housing market was seen as the bedrock of the American economy, those strategies sought to commercialize that stability, and thus complex and complicated securities and derivatives like CDOs, MBSs, and CDSs were born; everyone wanted to get rich now, and those catchy acronyms allowed both the American people and banking execs to plunge ahead. Greed on Wall Street fueled greed on Main Street (and vice versa), until the very thing that inflated the bubble—debt—was so overextended that it had no other option but to fail. The illusion couldn’t hide anymore.
Cohn may have been the sanest person in the White House, but that he would lay the blame squarely on Main Street is utterly preposterous, and suggests a lack of nuance and perspective that—ten years after the nation’s economy nearly collapsed—is frightening. In Margin Call, a 2011 film which is arguably the best depiction of the financial crisis, Jeremy Irons plays the CEO of an investment bank that, thanks to the levels of risk it carries on its books, is threatened with extinction. After a 24 hour period in which the firm survives by unloading its risk onto Wall Street (thus eliminating its own exposure but contributing to the toxicity that soon engulfs the financial world), Irons justifies the bank’s actions:
It’s just money. It’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t have to kill each other to get something to eat. It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different today than its ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, ’37, ’57, ’84, 1901, ’07, ’29, 1937, 1974, 1987—Jesus didn’t that fuck me up good!—’92, ’97, 2000, and whatever we want to call this. It’s all just the same thing over and over. We can’t help ourselves. You and I can’t control it, or stop it, or even slow it, or even so slightly alter it. We just react, and we make a lot of money if we get it right, and we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been, and there always will be, the same percentage of winners and losers. Happy fucks and sad sacks, fat cats and starving dogs in this world.
That speech is a perfect encapsulation of what happened in 2008. There is none of this equivocation of whoever deserves a greater share of blame, and Irons’ monologue contains more truth and accuracy than anything Cohn is peddling on his rehabilitation tour.
The ’90s Are Oldis a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.
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In 1998, my first real job — at which I was terrible — was as an editorial assistant for a New York book publisher. My breathtakingly privileged days consisted of emailing mean jokes about the assistants I didn’t like to the assistants I did, and slacking off at my desk during my boss’s long lunches. That’s when I discovered these things called “webzines.” My 1993 black-and-white PowerBook had been powerful enough for abysmal college essays on Heinrich von Kleist, but not for something called a browser, so it was not until my entrée to the professional world and its professional-issue Windows 98 that I began “surfing the ‘Net” in earnest.
In the nascent years of online ubiquity — when CHHHHHHHHHH BEEboo BEEboo BEEboo became a household noise, and not just something for extreme nerds — the web was both very big and very small. In 1996 there were only 100,000 websites in the Whole Wide World. (Today there are almost two billion.) Plus, aside from a few early leaders in e-commerce, ’90s sites were usually personal homepages, accessible only to the visitor patient and accurate enough to type the precise address, down to the tilde. Alas, what made the webzines of the late ’90s the best was also what would end up making the internet the worst: anyone could publish anything about anything, and very few people expected to be paid.
Victoria Namkung | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (3,020 words)
Since the early 1950s, parents in the United States have adopted more than a half-million children from other countries, with the vast majority of them coming from orphanages in Asia, South America, and, more recently, Africa. South Koreans are the largest group of transracial adoptees in the U.S., and by some estimates, make up 10 percent of the nation’s Korean American population.
Nicole Chung, however, was born prematurely and placed for adoption by her Korean immigrant parents in Seattle, and raised in a sheltered Oregon town five hours outside of Portland. Adopted by religious and loving white parents, she grew up as an only child who always felt a bit out of place. The narrative she was always told — that her biological parents made the ultimate sacrifice to give her a better life — comforted Chung as a child, but as she came of age, experiencing racism and finding her own identity as an Asian American and a writer, she began to question the “prepackaged myth” of her adoption. After getting married and becoming pregnant with her first child, a daughter, she went in search of her lost roots.
All You Can Ever Know, her memoir of this search, confronts the ways in which traditional adoption narratives rarely tell the whole story and shows how idealistic and well-intentioned white adoptive parents are often wildly unprepared for raising children of color in a society that is nowhere near the post-racial future of many Americans’ imaginations. She writes: “It feels like my duty as my white family’s de facto Asian ambassador to remind them that I am not white, that we do experience this country in different ways because of it, that many people still know oppression far more insidious and harmful than anything I’ve ever faced. Every time I do this, I am breaking the sacred pact of our family, our once-shared belief that my race is irrelevant in the presence of their love.” Read more…
My parents’ story together began in the spring of 1973 when they married and struck out west. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-two, and they’d been dating a matter of months when she told him she was leaving Cleveland, a city she had never much liked, for Seattle — where she had always planned to live, and where her own mother had spent the war years, living with her aunt and her uncle, the Swedish fisherman. My mother had not inherited much from her mother, save her red hair, quick temper, and stubborn attachment to the green beauty of provincial Washington State, so different from the smoke and cement of Cleveland and the small farm community outside it where her family lived. She had been to Seattle, carted along on cross-country road trips in the family station wagon, to visit her great-aunt and great-uncle, and she’d never forgotten the pine-scented air or the snow-tipped mountains wreathed in clouds, the hilly city lapped at its edges by a cold saltwater sound. Now she had gotten into nursing school out there — so, was he coming with her or not?
Though their families charged them with desertion, the move had its appeal: they were each one of five siblings, high in the birth order, and in different but defining ways their parents had been hard on them. More than three hundred people attended their wedding. Back then, it was still a little unusual for a Hungarian boy from one neighborhood to marry a Polish girl from another. There were fisticuffs at the reception, and it was generally agreed that the bride’s relatives both began and ended the fight, but everyone was laughing by the time they farewelled the couple.
They did move out west, but not to Seattle; not yet. A printing company had offered him a job in Ketchikan, Alaska, on Revillagigedo Island in the Alexander Archipelago. She found a job at the local hospital. They rented a basement apartment in a cottage on the edge of the Inside Passage, where they could step outside and watch eagles wheeling over the ruffled water. For a pair of born-and-bred Clevelanders, Ketchikan was almost too quaint to be believed with its fishermen and modest tourist trade, its streets and wooden pilings slick with rain one hundred and forty days out of the year. It was not quite the change she had envisioned, but a chance it still was, to escape Ohio and try on a different life. They liked it there, and felt like pioneers.
Still, when the transfer to Seattle came a few years later, they were ready to live in a city again, eager to meet new people. One Sunday, on a whim, they visited a little white-steepled church set into the hills above the neighborhood where they rented an attic apartment. It was nothing like the large, drafty old churches they’d attended as children in Cleveland; everyone wore jeans. The priest’s gentle Polish accent reminded her of her beloved grandfather, but it was someone else at the parish who commandeered their attention: a short, stout nun with blunt brown bangs peeking out from under her minimal wimple, a far cry from the strict, ruler-wielding sisters of their youth. They told Sister Mary Francis they had little interest in organized religion, let alone the church in which they’d both been raised, but the nun somehow convinced them to return. Soon my mother was leading a Bible-study group and my father was running errands for Sister Mary Francis’s elderly mother. They were back in the fold, with barely a token argument raised in their own defense.
This time, though, they were changed: they believed it all. They asked God to move in their lives. They saw his hand at work — in friends met, in jobs found, in day-to-day life — where they had never looked for him before.
Snipehunt 1994, cover by Sean Tejaratchi, courtesy of Portland Mercury
It’s hard to imagine now, but Portland used to be a tiny ignored little city that a lot of bands didn’t want to play and national media largely ignored. Those were sweet times. In that relative cultural isolation, a poster artist named Mike King started a music fanzine named Snipehunt to both harness and serve Portland’s small arts community. Enlarged and fully realized by editor Kathy Molloy, her volunteer team designed, edited, published, and distributed the magazine themselves. Snipehunt had a devoted following and helped launch the careers of its then-unknown freelance writers. Then in 1997, it abruptly quit publishing, and Molloy ghosted everyone and moved to British Columbia.
The scene that inspired Snipehunt featured bands that weren’t getting media coverage and writers and artists without an outlet. The magazine soon became a breeding ground for local creators, and its contributor list is a peek at the kind of local talent and energy emerging during that time: novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, current Portland city commissioner Chloe Eudaly, filmmaker and installation artist Vanessa Renwick, local writer and publisher Kevin Sampsell, novelist Rene Denfeld, Crap Hound and Liar Town creator Sean Tejaratchi. For many of the contributors, Snipehunt was their first publication, their first opportunity to regularly try out their ideas on an audience.
A typical issue of Snipehunt had interviews with local and national bands, pages of comics from independent artists, scene reports from West Coast cities, oddball prose pieces, political action coverage, and pages of reviews—albums, zines, live shows, films, and books. It was a broad take on DIY culture, loosely based in the punk scene but covering artists and subjects far beyond the imposed limitations of that world.
With the magazine’s history largely absent from the internet, its name unfamiliar to the majority of current Portlanders, and physical evidence of its existence difficult to come by, I reached out to a couple dozen of its contributors to provide me—and the rest of new Portland—with a much-needed history lesson.
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