Search Results for: The Nation

A Stimulus Plan for the Mutual Aid Economy

iStock / Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Livia Gershon | Longreads | November 2018 | 9 minutes (2,142 words)

If you’re a highly educated white man without serious disabilities—a description that, not incidentally, fits a large majority of people who make and write about policy in the United States—the economy probably looks like this to you: a web of financial transactions between individuals and companies, with support and guidance from the government. To Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha—a disabled, chronically ill writer and performer—it looks completely different. “Your life is maintained by a complex, non-monetary economy of shared, reciprocal care,” she writes in her new book, Care Work. “You drop off some extra food; I listen to you when you’re freaking out. You share your car with me; I pick you up from the airport. We pass the same twenty dollars back and forth between each other.”

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An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich

Steve Miller | Detroit Rock City | DaCapo Press | June 2013 | 39 minutes (7,835 words)

 

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White StripesOur thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

* * *

Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.

Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’

Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.

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The Wrong Pair

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lisa W. Rosenberg | Longreads | November 2018 | 15 minutes (3,844 words)

 

Dr. Alvarez furrowed his brow, crouching to view my right breast head-on, inscribing something on it with a dark blue marker — a map for his scalpel.

“You’ll notice a real laterality here,” he said, glancing up at one of his two male assistants, presumably residents. “Not so much on the left.”

“Yeah,” The younger physician concurred. “Wow.”

I bit my lip, amused. I was too giddy to be mortified. Nothing in life prepares you for a situation where three guys in white coats marvel at the nuances of, and the contrast between, your breasts. I sat, compliant, tolerant. My greatest wish was coming true. On the other side of this day would be relief from my aching middle back, from carrying around twin entities that had never felt like mine, and which had contributed to a struggle with body image that lasted through my mid-40s.

When Dr. Alvarez finished marking me up, he asked if I had any more questions before they wheeled me in for anesthesia. He had explained everything already: what kinds of I incisions would be made for minimal scarring, what the healing process would be like, how long before I’d be able to run.

“How small can we go?” I said, though we’d been over this as well.

“A C-cup,” he said. “Any smaller would compromise the integrity of the breast.”

Integrity and my breasts had never belonged in the same sentence as far as I was concerned. I felt no guilt about my choice, no reservations. A woman I’d met at physical therapy a few weeks before, who had overheard me talking about the upcoming surgery, had clicked her tongue at me.

“God don’t mess up,” she’d said.

But he did in my case, I’d wanted to tell her. I pictured a boob conveyor belt where God’s helpers — whoever they might be — awarded specially-selected, custom-designed boobs for every female in the queue. I imagined a woman in line before me: broad, tall and brash, with frosted, feathered, Barbara Mandrell hair, pausing to fix her slingback heel. Then me, pushed forward, forced to take the double E knockers that God had designed for her, instead of the nice, delicate A cups intended for my slight frame.

“A B-cup might be nice.” I told Dr. Alvarez.

“I’ll do my best,” he said.

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James Baldwin and the Lost Giovanni’s Room Screenplay

(Photo by Anthony Barboza/Getty Images)

Michael Raeburn was in his early 30s when he first met James Baldwin in 1974, a chance encounter at the London book launch for If Beale Street Could Talk. Raeburn was an aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter, with just one short film on his resume, while Baldwin was a literary giant, an essayist, and a civil rights activist. The connection between the two was instantaneous. “He was an extremely influential figure in my life,” Raeburn says. “We were very strangely connected in an almost psychic way. I knew when he would arrive somewhere—he’d travel to New York City, and I would be aware of when he’d arrive at his house.” Read more…

The City I Love Is Destroying Itself

All artwork by the author

Nicole Antebi | Longreads | November 2018 | 18 minutes (4,438 words)

For the past few years I’ve been working on a topographical film titled Fred’s Rainbow Bar and Other Stages on the International Border featuring a variety of animation styles along with live-action and archival imagery to interrogate histories, memories, and imaginings of the border landscapes of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the region where I grew up. During this time I’ve also been following the incredible story of “Paso Del Sur” a watch group in El Paso who have been fighting to save Duranguito, the oldest barrio in El Paso Texas.

At any time of day or night, a group of older residents can be seen patrolling the Duranguito neighborhood in downtown El Paso, Texas, located across the river from downtown Juárez, Mexico. Historian David Dorado Romo is one of several “Paso Del Sur” figureheads who have been fighting the City of El Paso, for over a decade, to preserve the spaces Romo has long been writing about. In his 2005 book, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Romo tracked the footsteps of Mexican Revolutionary folk hero, Francisco “Pancho” Villa and other historical figures of the period throughout Duranguito and greater downtown El Paso. I visited Romo this summer in Duranguito where I interviewed him about their battle with the City and the El Paso Del Norte Group, a bi-national consortium of developers who disobeyed a court order and illegally paid people to demolish their own property. At the time of our interview the neighborhood was in a state of limbo with a section punched out of each of five buildings by orders issued by the City; giving the distinct anthropomorphic appearance of a body disemboweled and left for dead.

The day after the 2018 midterms, while awaiting edits on this piece, I got word that the City of El Paso had increased their police presence in the neighborhood and resumed fencing in properties to speed up an archaeological study, with plans to resume displacement and demolition within the next week.

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NICOLE ANTEBI: Where does the name Duranguito originate from?

DAVID DORADO ROMO: The provenance of the name is both anecdotal and historical. One of the stories Toñita Morales, who lives in the adobe-looking house over there, tells me, is that she first heard it when she was a young woman living in Segundo Barrio in the late ’40s. She told me that there was a family from the State of Durango with three daughters that lived here on one of the streets and when young men would go back to visit people would say “A donde vas?” and they would respond, “Vamos con las de Duranguito.”

What I’ve seen in some of the oral history records at the University of Texas at El Paso is that it was called Barrio Durango back around the turn of the 20th century and they don’t really say why, but I get the feeling that it may have been called that because one of the streets here is Durango street. So you can find all these streets in the Anson Mills plot map of 1859, even before the railroads came here, and these were all wagon destinations. So Chihuahua and Santa Fe streets were part of the old Camino Real and Durango was also one of those destinations where you would go.

Later, in the 1990s, you had the central business association led by Tanny Berg who had plans to gentrify this place and turn it into a destination with bars and a nightlife and he started calling this whole place Union Plaza based on the Union Depot. That’s a relatively new name. And so now the city is saying it’s not called Barrio Duranguito, its called Union Plaza.

Names and terrains have always been contested. That’s part of the identity of a place and that’s also part of the struggle. We are trying to revive what the neighbors themselves call it. But in fact, if you go back to 1827, it was called Ponce de Leon Rancho and it was the first land grant on this side of the river. In 1873, when El Paso was first incorporated, Duranguito was designated the First Ward. There’s an older parcel where the Chamizal or the Segundo Barrio used to be, that, it could be said, was the first, but it was still on the Mexican side of the border at that time. So in 1873, this became the first land grant on the El Paso side. And when they first broke ground, there were a lot of adobe structures that were designed to protect themselves from the Apaches. So that was also contested terrain. And even the Apaches were themselves contesting this place. There is archaeological evidence all around of Pueblo-style sedentary communities. So really, this is part of a long, long, history of contestation. But this isn’t the kind of history the City feels like it can promote.
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The Lasting Effects of the Lolita Complex

Florence Sally Horner, 1950 and Dominique Swain, 1997. Philadelphia Bulletin / Associated Press, Andrew Medichini / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lacy Warner | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,431 words)

It feels like I’m watching porn. The video is grainy and cheap looking, like an old daytime soap shot with Vaseline over the lens. In the corner there is a grey couch that sits against a wall painted the desperate sand-beige color of every strip mall in America. This is a six-minute, twelve-second YouTube video of Dominique Swain’s screen test for the title role in the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita. At the four-minute mark, director Adrian Lyne gives a line reading of the word, “slut.” He says it over and over again. Jeremy Irons, 49 years old at the time, had already been cast as Humbert Humbert. In the video, Swain is 15 years old, playing 14, though in the novel, Lolita is 12. Seconds before the end, she looks toward the camera, smiles, and says in a bad, mock-English accent, “I’m a conniving little slut.”

***

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” In 1954, Lolita was rejected by five American publishing houses. Eventually, the down-market French publisher Olympia Press agreed to publish the first edition. Riddled with errors, this initial printing would be Nabokov’s albatross for the next three years. In 1958, Lolita finally saw its American debut, and became a bestseller overnight. Critics and readers alike have called Lolita many things: the great American novel; the great road novel; an allegory for the alienation caused by exile; a satirical tale of the incompatibility between European and American cultures; a great detective novel; smut; high-brow porn — but what it has never been called, until now, is true.

Last September saw the publication of Sarah Weinman’s nonfiction book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World. Weinman investigates the 1948 case of Horner, who was abducted as a child by the con-artist and pedophile, Frank La Salle. Horner lived with La Salle as his captive for two years, spending her 12th and 13th birthdays on the road as he took her from her New Jersey hometown across the US to California. Horner’s story is also Dolores Haze’s story. Through careful critical investigation, Weinman maps out how Nabokov learned of, and developed Lolita around, reports of Horner’s kidnapping and abuse.

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The Fault in Our Stars: On Fake Celebrity Interviews

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,670 words)

“I play with my breasts, not to show off but to demonstrate a kind of revulsion. I simply transform myself into a voice for all the tormented souls of this world.”

That’s Courtney Love in 1996 in SZ, the magazine belonging to one of the largest newspapers in Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung. It sounds a little crazy, but then, she’s a little crazy. And anyway, Tom Kummer, the Swiss journalist who attempted to style himself after Hunter S. Thompson, always filed outlandish exclusives and cover stories like this from Los Angeles — Pamela Anderson on her aching implants, Mike Tyson on eating cockroaches, Bruce Willis on immorality. From the mid-nineties to 2000, he was kind of a celebrity himself. Beloved by editors, he also wrote for the German magazines Der Spiegel and Stern and Switzerland’s Die Weltwoche. In fact, it was in the latter that, roughly two years before the Love interview, he wrote, funnily enough: “She plays with her breasts not to show off but to demonstrate revulsion. She wants to embody the voice of all tormented souls in the world.”

Tom Kummer had been flagged for fabrication before, but it wasn’t until an exposé in Focus magazine in 2000 that it was confirmed: he had never interviewed Love, or Brad Pitt or Sharon Stone or Kim Basinger, or anyone really. SZ followed with a breakdown of his deceit, like The New York Times would with Jayson Blair in 2003; it published an apology for the “falsified” stories and fired editors Christian Kämmerling and Ulf Poschardt. You would think Kummer would at least nod at contrition — like Janet Cooke in 1982, like Stephen Glass in 1998 — but he took the Jonah Lehrer route instead and talked boundaries. He even had a name for his approach: borderline journalism. “I wrote impressionistic, creative, literary descriptions of the life of stars in the form of so-called interviews,” he told The Guardian in 2011, adding, “Everybody loved my stuff and I guess they were addicted to some kind of illusion that stars should talk like I made them talk.” He claimed he was never asked for proof, that his editors had approved of his methods. As Stern’s publisher told the Times, they — Kummer and his editors — “appeared to have a different idea of journalism.” Read more…

Consider Who Can Afford the Oyster

You may know Ruby Tandoh as the runner-up from season 4 of The Great British Bake Off; you may not know that she’s a thoughtful writer working hard to stretch the boundaries of what “food writing” means. In Vice UK, she uses the life of ur-food writer M.F.K. Fisher — whose Consider the Oyster is about to be republished — as fertile ground for an exploration of the limits and potential of food writing.

The boundaries of food writing are hard to trace, but what is clear is that in spite of the soaring popularity of the food memoir and its ilk, little editorial time and space is being given to topics that sit in more overtly political territories. The Guardian‘s Feast magazine, and many other national food supplements, are rich with imagery, whimsy, and culinary flights of fancy, but largely apolitical. Famine, urban food deserts, food legislation, and the workplace rights of restaurant employees lie outside of the remit of much contemporary food writing, shoved sideways instead into environmental or political journalism and often taken off the plate entirely…

“Pearls,” Fisher explains, “grow slowly, secretly, gleaming ‘worm-coffins’ built in what may be pain around the bodies that have crept inside the shells.” Just as the parasite, the wound and the body converge in the milky stillness of a pearl, food writing must allow itself to crystallise around points of tenderness. Moving away from the assertive “you are what you eat,” we can venture into a more uncertain, questioning space: Why do you eat what you eat? Who has the freedom to eat for pleasure, and who does not? Why does food matter at all? We start, but do not finish, with the Fisher-esque culinary selfie. The gastronomical “me” is no longer a monolith but an anchor point: a place in time, space, family, and culture from which we might turn our lens outwards to explore issues of hunger as well as comfort, suffering as well as joy.

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A Mysterious Crack Appears: Past Trauma and Future Doom Meet in “Friday Black”

A sinkhole opened up in Philadelphia on Monday, January 9, 2017. Matt Rourke / AP

Alana Mohamed | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,988 words)

There is a certain genre of viral news story that we recycle every so often: odd activity on the earth’s seemingly stable surface that, while probably having a reasonable explanation, is reported on with breathless excitement when its cause is still unknown. “Mysterious Crack Appears In Mexico,” one headline shouts. “Mysterious crack appears in Wyoming landscape”; “A giant crack in Kenya opens up, but what’s causing it?”; “Splitsville: 2-Mile-Long Crack Opens in Arizona Desert”; “The White House lawn has developed a mysterious sinkhole that’s ‘growing larger by the day.’”

The follow-up stories (“Giant Wyoming Crack Explained”; “Let it sink in: The White House sinkhole is no more”) rarely gain the same traction. The mystery offers a chance to surrender control, an increasingly tantalizing option in a world algorithmically engineered to offer us the appearance of optimized choice. We choose, momentarily, to believe in something bottomless and chaotic. Read more…

Father of Disorder

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Wilbanks | Ruminate Magazine | Summer 2012 | 29 minutes (5,761 words)

 

I

My anger, when it comes, grows from my chest outward. It’s as if my heart turns into a cauldron, simmering my blood until it rages its way through my veins, blushing my neck, quivering my hands, and pulsing itself into my formerly peaceful thoughts.

This used to happen to me quite often when I was cooking dinner for a man I loved. I’d be washing carrots idly, chopping garlic, and then that heat would start pumping. I’d clench my lips closed and concentrate on the chopping, until this man—a very good man whose own blood ran lukewarm—would ask me for a spatula or something, and then all holds were off.

I can still see this man’s face, surprised at first, like a toddler walking blithely through the park, thinking he’s holding his father’s hand before looking up to see a stranger. Of course this man took my anger into himself, thinking maybe his desire for a spatula was wrong, that he was wrong, him instead of me, simply because I was fiercer and more furious. But this man was not a dormouse, so then his own blood finally charged him up with adrenaline and fury, and we would fight over the food we were cooking.

It seemed to me when one prepares a meal in a swirl of rage, some of that rage must disperse into the food, so that when we ate hours later, after our blood was running at a more reasonable temperature, our previous heat dissipated into the meal. This is very likely a misinterpretation of the law of entropy, which states that energy tends to flow from being highly concentrated into places where it has the freedom to move.

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