The Longreads Blog

Looking Back at Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville

Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Sometimes the music that endures is the music a musician writes early in their career, when they’ve lived inside a bubble free from fans and critical expectations. Songwriter Liz Phair made a huge splash in 1993 with her debut album Exile in Guyville. The album spawned a devoted following and, thankfully, its own 33 1/3 book. Twenty-five years later, Phair is rereleasing Guyville alongside her early home recordings.

For Esquire, Phair-fan Tyler Coates sees her play at Chicago’s legendary Empty Bottle, examines his own fandom, and talks with Phair about creativity, authority, and those early years before, as she put it, “I had a public awareness of what I represented to other people. There’s me, and then there’s Liz Phair.”

The dueling identities—the public and the private—are tough to pull apart for your average listener. Most of Phair’s work feels brutally honest and unfiltered; Guyville, released when she was 26, remains notorious for its frankness. She sang about messy hookups on “Fuck and Run,” the inevitability of a breakup on “Divorce Song,” bemoaned the behavior of obnoxious men on “Johnny Sunshine” and “Help Me Mary,” and growled the declaration “I want to be your blowjob queen” on “Flower.” When Phair sang her lyrics, you believed they were her truth. That’s never more powerful than on the Girly Sound recordings, which are playful and intimately confessional.

The personal nature of her work is, naturally, what has drawn listeners to Guyville for the last 25 years—and why the retrospective to the album and its origins have been so rewarding for both the singer-songwriter and her fans. For so many, the album is formative. Its frank lyrics, while infamous, are also incredibly empowering.

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Standing in the Buffer Zone

Clinic escorts, in orange, in front of a group of anti-abortion protestors outside a Planned Parenthood clinic. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

In MEL Magazine, merritt k has an interview with Jeff, a 30-year-old man from Indiana who’s volunteered as a Planned Parenthood clinic escort for almost a decade. Patients trying to access healthcare services at Planned Parenthood clinics are often forced to make their way through a vocal gauntlet of anti-choice protestors; escorts serve as both a physical and emotional buffer. And as Jeff notes, male escorts are particularly good at redirecting protestor ire.

They prefer to yell at dude escorts, which I guess is the best case scenario for everybody — they get it out on us. What you learn quickly is that they don’t have a lot of space for women’s agency in all the ways you’d expect. Like, when they yell stuff at me, it’s particularly targeted at how “men are supposed to protect women.” The idea that women have choices isn’t involved at all. Certainly that’s the case with patient guests too. Like if you’re a girl coming in with her boyfriend, they’ll usually target him and tell him that it’s his job to be a father. You see that kind of erasure of agency happening in real time in ways that are both strange and instructive.

But it’s not all helping patients avoid the negative — Jeff is also able to offer some emotional labor to women who might have other sources of support.

But the other side of clinic escorting that I really like comes from interacting with patients or their guests. It’s just a hard day for some people, and sometimes people just want to go outside and smoke a cigarette and shoot the shit with somebody. There are times when people will disclose to you things about their lives or situations that are heavy and hard, but are born of that beautiful interaction you can have with someone where you know you’re probably never going to see them again. There’s an honesty that comes out of it that’s really cool. What you learn after a while is that on a day like that, people just need someone to vent to. Because all of this stuff has been so stigmatized that a lot of them don’t have people who aren’t going to judge them.

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The Power in Knowing: Black Women, HIV, and the Realities of Safe Sex

Illustration by Janna Morton

Minda Honey | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes (2,763 words)

 

In December, when a creative agency asked me to participate in a regional Volunteers of America public service announcement encouraging my fellow community members to “know your status,” I said yes. A hesitant yes, but a yes. At least once a year, I make it a point to enlighten myself by asking my gynecologist for a full screening for sexually transmitted infections, including an HIV test. But I’m more of a safe sex bronze medalist than an all-star. My 17-year track record of requiring men to wear condoms during intercourse is only nearly flawless, my trysts with unsafe sex more recent than I’d like to admit.

A retrospective on my vagina’s contact with bare penis: When I lost my virginity — It was over and done with before I could utter any questions about using protection. There was time the condom slipped off — it happens. Or at least it did that one time. In an encounter with that same man, who I’d casually been sleeping with for a long stretch, he sweet-talked me into letting him take the condom off mid-act. I want to feel you, he’d said — I’d felt terrible afterward. I knew better than to trust these hoes with my sexual health. There was the spontaneous Halloween makeup sex in the back of a minivan with a guy I was kinda in a relationship with. Immediately after, he accused me of trying to get knocked up because I’d always been so vigilant about condom use, nevermind that a jobless, carless rapper living with his brother’s girlfriend’s parents isn’t my ideal baby daddy material. There was the man I was seeing who made a fuss about it every single time, whining he couldn’t come with one on, so half-asleep, I finally just let it happen sans condom. Shortly after, I learned he’d been cheating on me. And, I assume, he’d been doing the same sort of whining in the other woman’s bed, being sexually reckless with us both.

And, more recently, when after a 12-hour stretch of drinking, I fell into bed with a man and nodded when he asked if it was OK, even though I knew I wasn’t OK with going without a condom. Every time we hooked up after that first time, I felt weird about insisting he wear one, so I didn’t ask him to. Even though changing your mind is totally allowed and asking can be so simple and I’m sure he would have complied, it just felt complicated in ways that feel dumb now. This lapse in judgement happened to overlap with my period deciding to be six weeks late and my new gyno calling to tell me my IUD might have shifted and might not be effective. After two intravaginal ultrasounds (and a negative pregnancy test) it was determined that, LOL, my IUD was actually where it was supposed to be all along.

I worried that doing the PSA would make me a hypocrite. Who was I to encourage others to engage in safe sex when there were times I hadn’t? I reasoned with myself that I’d read enough inspirational quotes on Instagram to know my humanity wasn’t a byproduct of my perfection but rather of my mistakes. So I decided to do the shoot anyway, because I was someone who knew what it was like to be so distracted worrying about the possible long-term consequences of my split-second decision not to require a condom that I couldn’t even enjoy the act itself. I was someone who’d felt bashful about asking to be tested because heaven forbid the medical professional I pay to look after my reproductive health, and who I was required to see once a year to re-up on my birth control pill prescription, know that I, an adult woman, was having sex outside of a monogamous marriage for purposes other than conceiving a child. I was someone who was tired of always being the enforcer in the bedroom. It made me feel like a finger-wagging mom-type: “Eat your Wheaties, do your homework, wrap it up!”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

David Pollack / Corbis via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ben Blum, Reeves Wiedeman, Mizuho Aoki, Amy Wright, and Sarah Scoles.

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You’re Putting My Brain Where, Exactly?

"Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer," Michiel and Pieter van Mierevelt, 1617.

When you donate your body to science, you don’t get a whole lot of say over what happens to your parts. You might end up as a teaching tool for medical students or as part of scientific study, or your brain could be illegally handed off to a forensic experimenter — in a bucket! — while the rest of you is sold for a discount. In D Magazine, Jessica Pishko investigates the Mark Lundy murder trial and re-trial, the scientific evidence on which his convictions hinged, and the possibly dodgy provenance of the human body parts that evidence required.

Although UT Southwestern has an established system to divvy up body parts for research between various internal departments and other universities, there were exceptions. According to internal emails, Dr. Marlene Corton, a researcher at UT Southwestern who, according to her website, focuses on the female anatomy, was able to get donor tissue free of charge and without going through the official tracking system. On Tuesday, January 14, 2014, she made an email request for “fresh specimens, preferably within 12 hours” for a histology study. She also asked for a “spinal cord OR brain” for her colleague, Dr. Word. Claudia Yellott, the manager of the Willed Body Program, forwarded Corton’s requests to staff, adding that they should find one “that we know we are not able to use for much.”

The next morning at 8:20, an embalmer notified Corton and the rest of the Willed Body staff that donor 64039 was ready. “This donor can be used for the vagina sample, rectum sample, and brain without spinal cord sample.” Emails indicate that by the afternoon of January 15, Sue’s brain had been removed for Word. The vagina and rectum samples were sent to Corton, and by midnight of January 16, the cadaver was back in the cooler, where the C-1 spine was removed and placed in a blue bin for the University of Toledo, which purchased it for $800, minus a bulk discount.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Fly Fishing With Your Father

Illustration by Steven Weinberg

Heather Radke | Longreads | June 2018 | 6,282 words (25 minutes)

In front of the cash register at the fishing shop in Grayling, Michigan, between the Trout Unlimited maps of the river and the hats that say size matters, there is a small shelf lined with business cards. Each of the stacks of cards, save one, are for fishing guides, men who will take you to the good spots on the river and teach you how to cast a fly rod. The final stack of cards is for a local urologist.

I am here with my dad, trying to finally learn to fish. We have driven three hours up the middle of the state from Lansing to Grayling, one struggling city to another. Camp Grayling, just outside of town, is the training ground for the Michigan National Guard. There is only one expressway that far north in Michigan, and as we approached Grayling on the two-lane highway that runs to the Upper Peninsula, tanks and camo Humvees slowed us down, too big to pass.

Michigan is a state of struggling towns, places that depend on a trickle of tourism, small farms, or a single industry. There was a time when the promise of the unions and the auto industry was this: You can make enough money working on the line to have a house in town, a car in the driveway, and a cottage on the lake. It feels ludicrous now to think that a blue-collar job could propel you so far into the middle class, particularly as we drove through the desiccated remains of the failure of that once-true promise. Grayling was the kind of place where you might have built the cottage. Now the tanks, the Family Dollar, and the boarded-up bow-and-arrow factory hint at the presence of another Michigan cliché — the Michigan Militia, a right-wing paramilitary group that was once rumored to be affiliated with the Oklahoma City bombing.

As we turn off the main road into the gravel parking lot, the fishing shop stands before us in contrast to much of the rest of town. Fly-fishing is a gentleman’s sport. It is literary and beautiful, historic and manly. Elegant in the simplicity of its mechanism, it suggests stewardship and stalwartness. This shop does not sell florescent orange camouflage vests or mechanized crossbows. It sells fishing baskets and slouchy hats, signs that say catch and release, volumes of poetry from local authors, millions of tiny hooks and feathers meant to be ordered neatly into small boxes, collected and organized taxonomically for ready response to myriad conditions. Read more…

The Cold War and its Fallout

Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Vincent Czyz | Longreads | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,418 words)

 

I was born into Cold War America, 1963: Brezhnev, the Kremlin, the KGB, ICBMs, the Warsaw Pact. My father was a hard-line Republican, a Rough Rider looking for his Roosevelt. Reentry vehicles, NATO, first-strike capability, limited strike, and hardened silos were all part of my vocabulary by the time I was 12. He dismissed with contempt liberals who wanted to cut the defense budget and showed me bar graphs comparing U.S. and Soviet military hardware. The red bars representing Soviet numbers always towered alarmingly over the blue ones, except when it came to helicopters; the United States had a lot of those.

The stalemate between the superpowers has been over for a long time, but every now and then I still catch some of the fallout. While making a furniture run, for example, with a friend — Danny had mothballed a bedroom set at his mother’s house and needed a hand getting it into his truck. We went to the front porch in jeans, construction boots, jackets. It was a chilly March afternoon. He rang the bell.

Danny’s mother, a small Korean woman, opened the door. She gasped when she saw me, then covered her mouth. I almost stepped back, wondering what I’d done wrong.

Mrs. Lo Cascio lowered her hands. “You look just like your father!”

From his early 20s on, my father had had a mustache, and this was the first time Mrs. Lo Cascio had seen me with a beard. Her reaction was a rerun of an incident at my father’s wake in June 1983, a couple of weeks before I turned 20. Uncle Eddy, an adopted member of the family, put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You’re the ghost of your father when he was 17.” As often happens at funerals, his face performed a high-wire act between smiling and crying.

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Where Your Stuff Goes When You Lose It in Tokyo

The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images

Did you forget your sunglasses on the shelf of the Kinokuniya bookstore? Leave your umbrella under the izakaya counter? They might end up at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s six-story lost and found center in Bunkyo Ward. Japan is known as a country of citizens so honest that pedestrians won’t pocket money they see lying on a busy city street, and Japan’s Lost Property Law reinforces this. Items as inexpensive and disposable as socks and as irreplaceable as ash-filled urns, even pets, find their way to the center.

A 660-square-meter basement room handles the 3,000 umbrellas that are found in Tokyo on an average rainy day. In 2016, the police processed ¥3.67 billion worth yen worth of lost cash. Seventy-four percent of it was retrieved. (Only 0.8 percent of the umbrellas were.) For The Japan Times, Mizuho Aoki investigates how this system of storage and retrieval works, following the life of unclaimed items as they end up for sale at secondhand stores.

The center stores the items it receives in an orderly manner.

Officials at the center will then try to locate the owner from the information they can glean from the item, typically making an average of about 250 phone calls a day and sending notices by post, Okubo says. If the police find a foreign passport, they will forward them to the embassy concerned.

“It’s a lot of work,” Okubo says.

In 2016, an average of 286 people a day came to the center to pick up their belongings. As you’d expect, the vast majority are overjoyed to be reunited with their lost property. Foreign visitors are especially grateful, Okubo says, with some even asking officials at the center to pose in photographs with them.

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Just Another Bugout Behind Bars

Attica Correctional Facility, New York. Photo by Jayu via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In New York state, 10 out of every 11 psychiatric patients in the government’s care are actually in prison, not hospitals or rehab centers. In Esquire, writer and current Attica inmate John L. Lennon — whose brother Eugene struggled to find appropriate treatment for his bipolar disorder and ended up dead of a heroin overdose — tries to understand why a maximum-security prison is the right place for someone like fellow inmate Joe:

One morning, he woke up believing that a creature had caused him to lose nearly fifty pounds overnight. It was his first full-fledged psychotic episode. In the months and years that followed, his symptoms worsened: A mole on his arm contained a hidden message; he thought he could shoot white energy orbs out of his palms; he showed anyone who’d listen a grainy video on his flip phone, footage, he claimed, of UFOs, angels, and demons.

Nevertheless, he scraped by. Around 2009, at Maria’s prompting, he saw a county psychiatrist. He was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and began taking a motley regimen of medications. He also began receiving a monthly disability check.

Then, in 2014, broke, evicted, and nearly blacked out on Klonopin, he pulled a ski mask over his face, palmed a BB gun, and entered a Smokers Choice. Seven months and one plea bargain later, Joe was just another Attica bugout.

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Frailty, Thy Name Is Immigration Control

Culture Club / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

A Philadelphia judge quoted a line from Hamlet in a recent ruling fighting against the presidential mandates of immigration control. Lawyers and judges have long set a precedent for citing Shakespeare; during these murky, divided days the Bard’s words may ring truer than e’er. Clemson University Professor and The Atlantic author Walt Hunter writes how a play like Hamlet, so imbued with political chaos, holds a mirror up to our own legal and ethical confusion. 

Hamlet makes sense in 2018. Almost too much sense. The contours of his tragedy, as with many of Shakespeare’s doomed characters, are startlingly familiar at a time when Americans are deeply divided over the fate of the country and its people. The story of a man exposed to the political violence of a kingdom under usurpation, some would argue, offers an eerie parallel to the lack of sanctuary or safety in the United States for many of the people who seek to make their lives here.

Shakespeare’s frequent treatment of ethical and legal questions is marked far more by its ambiguity and unresolved tensions than by clear directives and propositions—this is part of what makes his work simultaneously playful and vexing. Yet the choice of the quotation from Hamlet, “No place indeed should murder sanctuarize,” responds directly to the present political moment—and uncovers the play’s contemporary relevance.

The meaning of Shakespeare’s works, or for that matter of any literary work, is not preprogrammed by the monumental status of the plays, but rather set loose by their malleability and the time-bound nature of any single interpretation.

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