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The Secrets We Keep

Markus Spiske / Unsplash / Getty Images, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Deena ElGenaidi | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,651 words)

 

My dad pulled his car over — the Jeep Wrangler he’d bought after divorcing my stepmom — to tell me that he’d gotten secretly married a year ago.

“M said you think I’m a hypocrite,” he’d said a few minutes earlier, just before putting the car in park.

He’d come to New York for the day to see me.

“I didn’t — what did M tell you?”

I was sure my aunt hadn’t betrayed my trust fully, that she couldn’t have told him what I’d found: the women’s bath products in his bathroom, signs that he was still dating the woman 20 years his junior. I was 28 at the time of the discovery, which would have made her 35. I knew that despite his Islamic religious beliefs, he was likely having sex before getting married.

“She said you think I’m a hypocrite because she’s not Muslim,” he said, the second “she” referring to Alexa, the woman whose name we both avoided saying out loud.

My dad had been twice divorced — first from my mom when I was 4, then from Anne-Marie, the woman he married when I was 10 and stayed married to for about 15 years. Now, he’d moved on to someone younger, someone only 7 years older than me.

I told him the truth, that about a year earlier, I’d gone into his room to see if he had any suitcases I could borrow for my trip to Southeast Asia, and spotted the flowery body wash, the women’s deodorant, the pink razor.

“I don’t care what you do,” I said, with the knowledge that I also kept secrets.

Still, though, I felt anger at my father’s hypocrisy. He claimed to be religious and was often judgmental of those who weren’t — judgmental of me. For years, I’ve kept my own secrets from my parents. I grew up in an Egyptian, Muslim home, and in many ways, keeping secrets has been my mode of self-preservation, as it is for many children of immigrants. My family is conservative — not politically, but in their everyday lives. They don’t drink or believe in sex before marriage, and if you are dating someone, it is with the intention of eventually marrying them. They expect their children to uphold the same Islamic values, and they’d prefer us to marry within our own culture, if possible. In this sense, it’s ironic that my dad has been with two white women — Anne-Marie and now Alexa — whose cultural backgrounds are starkly different from his.

I’ve talked to other children of immigrants, and children of religious parents, and have found an almost universal experience among us all. Though the values vary depending on culture, there is the same sense of understanding between us. Our parents, unlike many white parents, absolutely cannot know about certain aspects of our lives. A part of me is afraid to disappoint and disillusion them, but now knowing of my dad’s secrets, I wonder if I even care about their finding out about mine anymore.

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Let’s Talk About Sex Scenes

Anna Sastre / Unsplash / Pexels / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

The first sex scene ever filmed was not a sex scene at all. It was a kiss. And there was way less kissing than talking. May Irwins’ make out session with John Rice, a recreation of the smooch from the Broadway musical The Widow Jones, took all of one second. Filmed in 1896 at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio, the soundless footage — titled, simply, The Kiss — opens with Irwin deep in conversation with Rice. While it is impossible to tell what they are saying, the two actors appear to be discussing logistics. Thirteen seconds in they seem in agreement. Both pull back, Rice dramatically smooths out his moustache and, while Irwin is still talking, he cups her face and the two of them peck. Or, on his end, nibble. All in all, the actual moment their lips touch is almost nothing — 94 percent of the first sex scene was actually the discourse around it.

Were this to happen today, the actors would have had clearer direction. Last week Rolling Stone reported that HBO would be hiring intimacy coordinators for every show that called for it after “The Deuce” star Emily Meade, who plays a prostitute in the series, asked for help with her sex scenes. The network consulted Intimacy Directors International (IDI), a non-profit established in 2016 that represents theatre, tv and film directors and choreographers specializing in the carnal. “The Intimacy Director takes responsibility for the emotional safety of the actors and anyone else in the rehearsal hall while they are present,” their site explains, alongside a standard set of guidelines called The Pillars: context (understanding the story), communication, consent, choreography and closure (signaling the end of the scene). Read more…

Theater of Forgiveness

Illustration by Buff Ross

Hafizah Geter | Longreads | November 2018 | 32 minutes (8,050 words)

 

On Wednesday, October 24th, 2018, a white man who tried and failed to unleash his violent mission on a black church, fatally killed the next black people of convenience, Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Jeffersontown, Kentucky Kroger. Today, I am thinking of the families and loved ones of Stallard and Jones, who the media reports, along with their grief, their anger, their lack of true recourse, have taken on the heavy work of forgiveness.

***

June 17, 2015, two hours outside my hometown, a sandy blonde-haired Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That night, Roof, surely looking like an injured wolf, someone already on fire, sat with an intimate group of churchgoers, and I have no doubt, was prayed for. If history repeats itself, then surely so does religion: the 12 churchgoers like Jesus’s 12 apostles in a 21st century fable. Roof the Judas at this last supper. As we know, Roof would wait a full hour until heads were bowed in prayer and God had filled every corner of the room before reaching into his fanny pack.

By June 19, 2015, two narrow days beyond the shooting, there would already be reports of absolution. “I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof at his bond-hearing. “I forgive you,” said Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the nine dead, her son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, not yet buried.

Intimately, I have been held by this wing of southern Black religiosity. My father is of Black southern Baptists who, originating in Georgia and Alabama, found themselves one day in Dayton, Ohio. Growing up, I was as curious about my Black American family’s white God as I was about my Nigerian mother’s African Allah. Much of my childhood was spent either at the foot of my mother’s prayer rug or beneath the nook of my paternal grandmother’s arm — grandma’s fingers pinching my thighs to keep me still, awake, and quiet in the church pews. At the church I attended with my Black American family, they were always praying to be gracious enough to receive forgiveness or humble enough to give it. A turn-the-other-cheek kind of church, it was full with products of the Great Migration and they were always trying to forgive white people.

As a child, though I could never quite name the offenses of white people, I could sense the wounds they had left all over the Black people who surrounded me. The wounds were in the lilt of Black women’s voices, in the stiffened swagger of our men; it was there in the sometimes ragged ways my boy cousins would be disciplined. And I knew this work of forgiving had somehow left bruises on my aunts so deep it made their skin shine. In church, we prayed and forgave white people like our prayers were the only thing between them, heaven, and damnation.

It’s left me wondering: Does forgiveness take advantage of my people?

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After World War I, Horror Movies Were Invaded By an Army of Reanimated Corpses

"J'accuse!" 1919.

W. Scott Poole | an excerpt adapted from Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror | Counterpoint | October 2018 | 23 minutes (6,219 words)

The murderous folly of the Great War chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.

Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.

Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland. Read more…

Dress You Up in My Love

Thomas Northcut / Getty

Doree Shafrir | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (3,123 words)

It never fully dawned on me that Halloween was really a holiday for kids until I was trying, and failing, to have a child myself. But really, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me in my 20s and much of my 30s, when Halloween seems like the ultimate party for adults — an excuse to prove, via costume, just how clever and/or how sexy you are. Then one day, bam, it hits you: you’ve outgrown sexy adult party Halloween, and all your friends are doing daytime kid-party Halloween and taking their baby pirates and toddler dinosaurs trick-or-treating while it’s still light out, and since you’ve been trying to have a baby for two-and-a-half years it’s a little much to be bombarded with all these photos on Instagram for, like, three days straight. So instead you’re at home watching The Crown because it’s basically the chamomile tea of television and that’s about all you can handle right now.

Since Halloween is now a several-day spectacle, it’s hard to escape, and last year, Halloween fell on a Tuesday, so naturally the weekend before was filled with festivities. Compounding my misery at seeing everyone’s kids looking even cuter than usual for days on end was that the week before, we’d found out the IVF embryo we’d transferred “wasn’t viable,” as they say in the biz. I’d been pregnant for about 4.5 seconds — my blood tests had shown me to be barely pregnant, and from the beginning the doctor had told me there was only a very slim chance it was going to make it. But I’d been in an agonizing limbo for a week-and-a-half while the embryo — a girl, which we knew because it had been biopsied and tested for chromosomal abnormalities before we had our doctor insert it, via a catheter, in my uterus — took its sweet-ass time deciding whether or not it was going to stick around. It probably heard me talking about the wage gap and how we were all going to die in natural disasters because of climate change and was like, nah, I’m good.

So I was already deep into self-pity mode when Halloween came around. I hadn’t been asked to go to a single Halloween party, except for a kids’ party that I had been invited to because the host clearly felt sorry for me after it came up in a gathering where I was the only one without kids. “You should totally come!” she said, in the bright, cheery, please-don’t-actually-come-it-will-just-be-awkward-for-everyone way that people who have kids and are currently pregnant invite people who have been trying to have kids for two years to their kid-oriented gatherings. So of course, I didn’t go. My husband Matt was away for Halloween weekend, because he’d taken an eight-week job hosting a TV show that required him to be in New York every weekend. This was week four, so we were deep into long-distance marriage territory, and I was starting, a little bit, to lose it. I was alone with our dog Beau, who, thanks to his behavior issues (namely, his predilection for lunging aggressively at strangers and acting like he was going to bite their heads off), couldn’t dress up like a carton of French fries and participate in any kind of dog costume festivities. My social media feeds were filled with pictures of parties, literal and figurative, that I hadn’t been invited to.
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Shelved: The Sound of Big Star’s Self-Destruction

Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (3,146 words)

 

In 1948, Columbia Records introduced the first commercial long-playing record, which revolved at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute and could hold more than 20 minutes of music per side. The older technology, 78-rpm records, couldn’t hold more than three and a half minutes per side. It was now possible to make a self-contained album.

Prior to that, the term “album” was used to describe a printed collection of short classical music pieces, such as Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Later, 78 records would be bound in volumes called albums, which would allow the limited medium to communicate longer orchestral works. By the same token, the books that contained family photos also became known as albums.

With the new technology, it wasn’t long before albums were used to communicate a collection of songs united by a common theme. Frank Sinatra is widely credited with releasing the first concept album, 1955’s In the Wee Small Hours. All of the songs were arranged by Nelson Riddle and were united in their themes of love, loss, and romantic dissolution.

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The Hospital Where

The Temptation of St. Anthony the Great. Jacques Callot, 17th century. Corbis Historical.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah | A short story from the collection Friday Black | Mariner | October 2018 | 20 minutes (5,385 words)

 

“I think I will go to the hospital. My arm is paining me.” My father’s voice. I heard him from some shallow corner of a quiet, hateful sleep. I imagined waking up somewhere different. I opened my eyes and was not somewhere different. I had no command over this place or the people in it. And yet, for the first time in more than three weeks, I felt the mark of the Twelve-tongued God, an X followed by two vertical slashes, burning on my back. My muse, my power, was awake again.

“What?” I asked.

“Can you drive?” my father asked.

“Okay,” I said. I got ready. My father sat on a white plastic chair in the kitchen near the microwave and the hot plate. The only ways we had to cook. Beneath his leather sandals was a thin puddle of water that had leaked, as it did every day, from the shower in the adjacent bathroom. It was a basement. Dark mold had to be attacked with bleach regularly. But it never died. I hated this place we lived in and had for a very long time. My father scooped oatmeal into a bowl.

“Arm pain can be linked to other problems,” he said. I tried very carefully to tie my shoes. “Better for you to drive.” This was all long before we knew of the cancer nesting in his bones.

“You’ll be fine,” I said.

“I know, but just in case,” he finished through a mouthful of oatmeal. While I waited for him to eat, I grabbed the latest issue of a small journal of stories and poems called Rabid Bird and one of my notebooks. The Twelve-tongued God beckoned in the form of the heat I felt on my back, and while I waited for my father to finish his oatmeal, I tried, finally, to write. I scribbled and felt the free feeling of fire in my bones. Transported into a world where I had command and anything was possible. Read more…

Tax the Rich

Getty Images / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Livia Gershon | Longreads | October 2018 | 9 minutes (2,206 words)

In May, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, declared that, if Democrats win power in Congress this fall, they will work to repeal the $1.5 trillion tax cut package passed last year by Republicans. Sen. Cory Gardner, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, responded with apparent glee. “I wish Nancy Pelosi the biggest platform ever to talk about her desire to increase tax revenue,” he told NBC News. “I hope she shouts it from the mountain top.”

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The Last Puerto Rican Social Club in Brooklyn

Still from the documentary Toñita’s. Used with permission.

Carl-Johan Karlsson | Longreads | October 2018 | 13 minutes (3,603 words)

Nestled within the brown, red, and yellow gingerbread houses that line Williamsburg’s Grand Street in Brooklyn, Toñita’s (technically named Caribbean Social Club) is easy to miss, unless you spot the neon Corona sign and the weathered sticker that says We’re open. Inside, there’s a disco ball, a reindeer head mounted on the wall, and a palm tree wrapped in Christmas tinsel. A pool table surrounded by plastic chairs stands in the center of the wood-patterned vinyl floor. Photos of baseball players in eclectic frames festoon the walls. Gilt baseball trophies jostle one another on high shelves. The biggest frame is dedicated to Roberto Clemente — the sainted Puerto Rican right fielder who died in a plane crash in 1972. On the walls, posters for salsa shows and domino tournaments compete for space. A wooden plaque — from the City Council of New York thanking Maria Antonia (Toñita) Cay for her service to the community — hangs on the wall by the little bar in the corner.

By 9 p.m. on a Saturday, darkness has rolled across New York, but Toñita’s is just waking up. Little tornados of smiling people dance around the pool table. Salsa tones mingle with conversations in pattering Spanish. Occasional cheers ring out as a pool player sinks a ball. In the corner, two 80-something men in baseball caps meditate over a game of dominoes — oblivious to the tumult from the TV on the wall, where a Spanish-speaking Arnold Schwarzenegger guns down a group of assailants.

Behind the bar, serving Corona and Heineken, stands Cay. She wears a black silk jacket. Colorful rings adorn her fingers. She is 77, with curly reddish hair, dark eyes under carefully plucked brows, and a vague smile.

“It used to be several social clubs just on Grand Street,” Cay says as she opens a beer. “But one after one, they all disappeared.”

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West Across the Sea

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

 Sam Riches / Longreads / October 2018 / 17 minutes (4,328 words)

The first thing you need to know about Iceland is that sheep are everywhere. In the pastures, on top of the mountains, next to the highway. They graze freely and abundantly and peacefully, most of the time. An approaching vehicle can cause them to scatter — bells clanging frantically, fuzzy butts bouncing wildly — into the countryside, where the only predator to worry about, other than humans, is the delightfully cute but sometimes fatal arctic fox.

Icelandic sheep are hardy creatures. They are farmed mostly for their meat but also for their wool, which provides insulated, waterproof protection against Iceland’s damp weather. For centuries, sheep have been fundamental to Icelandic life — so perhaps it is not surprising that one of the most intriguing basketball prospects the country has ever produced was, just four and a half years ago, focused on a more traditional career: sheep farmer. Read more…