The Longreads Blog

What It Means For a Lucha Libre Wrestler To Be Unmasked

Photo: Angeloux, Flickr

Unlike most sports, pro wrestling is unconcerned with numbers. Nobody seems to have a win-loss record. In lucha libre, the truly important matches, the bouts that make up one’s official record, are not even world championships. They are, rather, Mask vs. Mask matches, or Hair vs. Hair, or Hair vs. Mask. Luchadores wager their masks or their hair on the outcome of a fight. The mask is the more serious wager. When a wrestler is defeated and unmasked, his face is seen by the public for the first time. His name and his birthplace are published in the papers. His mask, which symbolized his honor, is retired and cannot be used again.

The loser in a Hair match is publicly shaved and humiliated, but lives to fight again. Hair grows back. Cassandro, whose hair is resplendent—it is currently dark blond and swept into what he calls his “Farrah Fawcett look” (“I’m so stuck in the seventies”)—has fought and won many Hair vs. Hair matches, as well as a couple of Hair vs. Masks. He has also lost a couple of Hair matches, including one to Hijo del Santo in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, in 2007. Videos of his public haircuts make for painful watching. Cassandro cries inconsolably and, with his cropped hair, seems to turn into a small, unhappy boy. Of course, unmasking Hijo del Santo was never going to happen. And the payday for losing that match—twenty-five thousand dollars—was a comfort.

William Finnegan writing in the New Yorker about Cassandro, the drag queen star of Mexican wrestling.

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Southern Music’s Racial Double Standard

We believe automatically that Chris Knight is not — could never actually be — that homeless man with a gun.

Put the same lyric in Killer Mike’s mouth, though, and you think something different, don’t you? You do not assume instantly that Mike is merely inhabiting a character. No, in your mind, he is the man with the gun in his hand.

Think for a second about the history of Southern music. Our Appalachian musical heritage has a long and grand tradition of what the academics call “murder ballads” and what the musicians just call “killin’ songs.” The archetype, perhaps, is “Knoxville Girl,” in which the protagonist beats a girl with a stick “until the ground around her within her blood did flow,” then drags her by her hair into the river to drown.

Southerners have written and still sing hundreds of ballads about killings. We sing them at festivals and around campfires. Academic musicologists study them as cultural artifacts. Though they are dark indeed, no one finds them too objectionable. Johnny Cash “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” and we’re not scared. We just love Johnny more.

But when the gun in the song is in the hand of a black man, things get weird. The song becomes less cultural artifact and more an object of fear. We reflexively object. We worry about what the children will hear.

You think we have a little double-standard problem here? Yeah, me too.

Chuck Reece writing in the Bitter Southerner about the rapper Killer Mike.

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Photo: Mads Danquah, Flickr

The Genius and Mystery of Willie Nelson

Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He’s an uncanny vocal phraser: “The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson,” said the late producer Jerry Wexler. “The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they’re going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It’s some kind of musical miracle.”

In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. “The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers,” says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, “Oh, why does a guy write? I don’t know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it.” Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, “a bit of a mystery.” “He’s really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you’re talking about,” says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. “You’re like, ‘Fuck, Willie, answer the question!’ There’s a lot of exterior there. That’s why you’ll never quite fully get that picture.”

“You never get to know him like you should, but you know there’s more there than what you’re seeing,” says Loretta Lynn. “I know there’s more there because of how he writes. He can’t fool me!”

“He’s a hard man to know,” Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. “He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn’t talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him.”

Patrick Doyle, in Rolling Stone, on the story of a music legend.

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Photo: thomashawk, Flickr

‘The Library Is One of the Few Civic Spaces We Have Left’

I have a dear friend who’s working at the library in Chattanooga, which is one of the rare states where the budget is increasing, and she’s doing all of this neat stuff with technology: bringing in 3-D printers, teaching web-use skills, all of these public services that are really necessary beyond making books available for people. I’m bullish on the need for libraries. I’m pessimistic about our ability as a society to come together and pay for their small sanctuary if our public services are under attack.

The library’s one of the few civic spaces we have left. People are feeling like there’s no other ways for these online platforms and services to be run, it’s our destiny to have them be privately run, and yet we invoke the analogy of the library or archive all the time. To me it says that we find it realistic that Google will be our archive when it’s an advertising company. We’ve seen them get rid of services that are not profitable (Google Reader), and we’ve seen them demote things like Google Scholar. That’s realism, where it’s unrealistic to think we’d build on the success of the library with a national repository for knowledge, arts, and culture?

Libraries exist and they’re open. Libraries exist with all these values we invoke in the digital sphere, but there are very few people thinking about how we might build upon them.

Writer and documentarian Astra Taylor, in Flavorwire, on the importance of collectively supporting and funding culture.

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Photo: raypride, Flickr

On Not Going to College After Excelling in School

I know that for the rest of my life, I’ll have to explain myself to future employers. My hope is that my work and life experience become of such high quality that my education (or lack thereof) will fall off the bottom of my résumé. I’m aware it will be an uphill battle. Traveling was always a part of my plan, and last year I applied to the Peace Corps. I was told I was rejected for one reason: my lack of a college education. It was a speed bump, but I wasn’t deterred. In fact, I recently left my real estate job for a nine-month volunteer community-service-focused exchange program in Israel. I’ll work in a school, learn about agriculture, and be immersed in different cultures.

— Grace Jay-Benjamin in Philadelphia Magazine on her decision not to attend college after excelling in two of Philadelphia’s best schools, and what life has been like for her since.

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Photo: Sholeh

Chaz Ebert on Becoming One With Roger During His Sickness

Chaz Ebert stopped practicing law when she married Roger, and ran the business side of things for him. They worked side-by-side throughout their marriage. As he became sicker, and was only able to communicate through a computer, Chaz’s role grew.

At some point, he asked me to be his voice. So we would do some things on the computer, and then he would say, but I want you to say this. It’s important for you to say this part. You know, and so we — when he was very sick, it felt like we became one person. There, I didn’t feel the boundaries that you feel with two people. And I know those boundaries so well because when he got better and he got stronger, those boundaries were resurrected. And I became my own person again and he became his own person. But the period where we became one was a very interesting period when I think back on it. Because I didn’t realize that that’s what was happening. I don’t even know how to explain it. But I actually did feel him in my soul when we became one person.

— Anna Sale interviewed Chaz Ebert for WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast. You can listen to the interview, or read a transcript of it here. Life Itself, a documentary about Roger Ebert’s life up until his final days came out in theaters this summer.

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Photo Credit: From ‘Life Itself’

It’s 1969 And This Is Robert Lanza’s First Time Experimenting with Embryos.

His best friend’s mom laughed when Lanza told her he wanted to become a doctor. “You’d probably make a very good carpenter,” she said. When Lanza announced his plan for the school science fair—he would alter a chicken’s genetics and turn it from white to black—his classmates giggled and his teacher said it was impossible. It’s a word he’ll hear many times.

Down in the basement, wedged between the furnace and clothes dryer, a homemade Styrofoam incubator on the table in front of him, he’s decided the chicken experiment is challenging, but not impossible. He talked his way into syringes and penicillin at local hospitals and borrowed tabletop centrifuges from a guy across town who works for the state health agency. His neighbor drove him to local farms so he could gather eggs from white chickens and black ones. Now he’s been working in the furnace room for months, trying to introduce pigmented genes into white embryos while his mom stands in the kitchen telling her friends that “Robby is downstairs trying to hatch chicken eggs.” Not quite, Mom, he thinks.

Eventually several white chicks will emerge from their eggs with brown spots. Lanza will drop by Harvard Medical School to get help repeating the results, and in a scene straight out of the movies, he’ll mistake the founder of Harvard’s neurobiology department for a janitor. Stephen Kuffler, “the father of modern neuroscience,” won’t mind a bit. He’ll introduce Lanza to a graduate student who will later become director of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science, and who will spend hours chatting with the eager teen about his chicken project.

Molly Petrilla, writing in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the early life of Dr. Robert Lanza. Dr. Lanza has racked up a slew of scientific accolades—and generated an equal amount of controversy—for his pioneering work on cloning and stem cells.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 4

Our latest collection is now live at WordPress.com, featuring stories from Gangrey, Indianapolis Monthly, The Hairpin, The New Inquiry, Carrying the Gun, the Washington Post, and more.

‘The Muse Only Shows Up When You Put Your Ass in the Chair’

In my twenties I realized that the muse is a bum. The muse only shows up when you bait her by putting your ass in the chair. She can only be lured to your side by the sound of pounding keys, the smell of paper and ink. At some point (I imagine it was when the telephone company cut off our service) I realized it was time for me to start taking my life and my writing seriously. People who are serious about their work show up to work, day or night. So I started setting myself little goals and deadlines. That helped. When I had a project I was excited about, I was manic. I worked mornings, afternoons, nights—whenever I could steal the time. I became infatuated with my writing, obsessed, in love. Perfection was writing all day in bed until I was spent. When it was going exceptionally well, any time I wasn’t writing I was thinking about writing. It was bliss. Until, of course, it burned out, or blew up sometimes with the same degree of passion with which it had begun. All it took was time and distance, some sleep and a few square meals, and suddenly I couldn’t stand it.

My writing was so tedious, so phony, so wrongheaded and stupid. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with it. I wanted it gone. It was just a reminder of how tedious, phony and wrongheaded and stupid I was. And then I wouldn’t write for weeks and weeks. There is nothing like having a baby to enforce routine. It quickly became clear that the only way I could get time to write was to ask for it. The only way that worked was for other people—my husband, babysitters, friends—to know when I was going to work so there would be someone to care for the baby. I found that when I told people that I was going to write, and then actually did it, they made space for me to do it. (Here I must say that I am married to an extraordinarily generous, supportive man and blessed with great family, friends, and babysitters. Also it should be said that I am not particularly pleasant to live with when I’m not writing.) In order to get that time alone—which I craved and needed—I had to keep writing. So I got into a routine.

Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls, in an interview with Slice.

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Photo: YouTube

Virginia’s Unregulated Day Care Industry

Of the 43 deaths in unregulated homes, The Post’s review found that 22 were sleep-related, 10 involved physical abuse, three were accidental and one was natural. In seven cases, the causes were unclear in the available records. All but one of the sleep-related deaths involved risky actions taken by caretakers, records show. These included leaving infants to sleep in an unsafe setting or failing to check on them for extended periods.

In 2010, 7-month-old Finnigan Bales was found unresponsive in an upstairs bedroom in a Virginia Beach townhouse where Deborah Blaney ran an unregulated day-care operation. He had not been “checked on or fed for hours,” according to an investigation by the local branch of Child Protective Services.

Blaney had too many children in her care — seven — and eventually was convicted of operating a day-care program without a license, a misdemeanor. She was sentenced to serve 10 days in jail.

Finnigan’s mother, Megan Bales, said she and her husband interviewed Blaney and checked her references, but they learned that Blaney had no license only after Finnigan died.

“They don’t even know what time Finn passed away,” Bales said.

— A two-part investigation by The Washington Post looks into unregulated day care providers in Virginia. Since there is a the shortage of licensed day care providers in the state, unregulated day care providers—who don’t need to have any child care licenses or CPR training as long as they are caring for five children or fewer—fill in the gaps, especially for families who are unable to afford to place their children in licensed centers.

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Photo: U.S. Army