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Where the Spirit Meets the Bone: A Memoir by Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin  | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words)

Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.

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Tony Judt’s Life with ALS: A Reading List

The Ice Bucket challenge raised millions for ALS research, not to mention awareness about the disease: the motor neuron disorder, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, affects thousands of Americans. It’s also served as a reminder about the work that Tony Judt did to convey what it was like to live with ALS, in his diary entries for the New York Review of Books. Judt died in August 2010. Here is a short collection of stories: Read more…

Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List

When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to map a cartography of loneliness. Published in 2012, Laing writes, “What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal.” Four years into my New York experiment, the pang of loneliness has dulled and has been exchanged for a desire to retreat from an overstimulating city with my close friends and a bag of salted caramel.

This brief list takes a dive into the discussion about loneliness and solitude in our contemporary lives—what it is, how we cope, and how it affects our bodies. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, if you have them.

 

1. “American Loneliness” (Emma Healey, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2014)

I’ve been watching MTV’s reality show, Catfish in awe for the past two seasons. I vacillate between heavy feelings of eager empathy and awkward amusement. Healy explores what Catfish reveals about our common loneliness, longing and vulnerabilities as well as how easily we suspend logic in the pursuit of companionship.

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The Believer Interview: Ice Cube

Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words)

 

The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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‘Music Is a Mirror of What We’re Going Through, Not the Cause of What We’re Going Through. It’s a Reaction, It’s Our Only Weapon, It’s Our Only Way to Protect Ourselves, It’s Our Only Way to Fit, It’s Our Only Way to Get There.’

Before rap music, New York might as well have been:

Paris


Africa


Australia


A thousand miles away from a thirteen-year-old Ice Cube

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Once upon a time, the name Ice Cube was analogous to explicit lyrics, guns, women as “bitches,” South Central, and attitude. Bad attitude. Not to mention mind-blowing rap music wrapped in raw emotions. But those were Ice Cube’s teen years, before he married Kimberly Jackson, became father to four kids, and turned into a true Hollywood player. A legend long before he turned thirty, Ice Cube, together with his fellow N.W.A. members, revolutionized not only the rap/ hiphop genre, but all music, by making it OK for musicians to speak their minds and then some.

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‘I Will Try to Hold on to the Intense Feeling’

It’s been a meta-­adolescence. Tavi has enacted a camera-ready high-school life, one in which her fashion experimentations looked fantastic rather than just ill-fitting and strange, and the whole thing was seen as a lark, hilarity worth preserving. She’s been adopted by the pop intelligentsia, who perhaps see in her a younger version of themselves, either real or idealized and imagined. Zadie Smith, whom she met after speaking at The New Yorker Festival, wrote her an email urging her not to skip college, and Stevie Nicks, whom Tavi met after mentioning her in a TED talk, gave her a cashmere blanket to wrap herself in whenever she felt like she needed a hug. Ask her if she’ll miss being a teenager and she says, “I will try to hold on to the intense feeling. I will both be glad that that’s no longer happening and kind of miss it. When you’re 14, you’re basically on drugs all the time—the hormones in your body are so crazy. But I really loved and appreciated the intensity of that. And you’re experiencing everything for the first time, so everything feels like an epiphany. And, like, I really liked the experience of having a crush, because I was like, this is my thing and it doesn’t have to do with you and you’re just some dummy boy for me to project on.”

– Amy Larocca profiles Tavi Gevinson for New York Magazine’s fall fashion issue.

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Photo: YouTube/LA Review of Books

Robin Williams: 1951-2014

Comedian and actor Robin Williams died today at the age of 63. Here are five in-depth interviews with him.

1. Robin Williams: ‘The Night Listener’ (Terry Gross, Fresh Air, Aug. 3, 2006)

Terry Gross talks to Robin Williams, and, towards the end of the interview, asks him about depression: “Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh yeah.”

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Cats and Their People: A Reading List

While my boyfriend’s parents are away, their cat(s) and I play. Well, one of them plays. The other, a very, very large tabby, resents my presence and hides under the bed, sneaking downstairs to eat only when Micah, a slim Russian Blue, and I have fallen asleep on the couch. This is my first time cat sitting.

For years, I was an avowed dog person, despite the yapping tendencies of my family’s Bichon Frisé. I liked the validation dogs provide, and I didn’t think cats liked me. I was also allergic to cats, like my mom.

Micah and his brother, Jonah, lived together in a swanky nursing home. When the authorities decided the situation wasn’t ideal for the residents or the felines, my friend Abbie adopted Jonah. Jonah won over everyone he met, including me. Russian Blues are notoriously friendly. They’re extremely affectionate, and never standoffish. In other words, they defy every cat stereotype.

Once I met Jonah, I lamented my allergies. I told Abbie I’d been searching for hypoallergenic breeds online, hoping that I, too, could own a cat. “I’ve been looking at Russian Blues,” I said. Abbie said, “Don’t you know? Jonah is a Russian Blue.” That meant Micah was a Russian Blue, too. I actually got up and danced around the apartment. Hands shaking (not a joke), I texted my boyfriend in all caps. I think I interrupted a family dinner.

A few months after my initial plea, my boyfriend’s parents took Micah home for a trial run. The week up to his homecoming, I felt like a child at Christmas. I could not get out of the office fast enough that Friday. Micah was adjusting to life in his new house, camping out in my boyfriend’s bedroom. He preferred to nap under the desk rather than in the bed of toys my boyfriend had prepared. He forced his head into my hands, begging to be petted. Now, he loves ham and cream cheese. He tends to box with Benny, the largish tabby upstairs. He sleeps on my boyfriend’s chest when he comes home from work. He’s a delight.

To honor all the cool cats in our lives, here is a list of stories. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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How Joe Cocker’s Version of ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ Ended Up as the Theme Song for ‘The Wonder Years’

Dan Lauria (Jack Arnold): I’ve heard it a couple times now that The Beatles had never allowed any of their music to be used on television. They did not own the rights at that time. It wasn’t Michael Jackson; I think it was Apple Records who owned it when we did The Wonder Years. But the story I got was that they showed Paul McCartney the pilot with them singing their version of it, and Paul McCartney made a call to Apple Records and said, “If you’re ever going to let The Beatles be used on television, this is the show,” and Apple Records said, “Ya know what, we’ll let them use the song, but we’re not going to let them use the version of you singing it.” So they got Joe Cocker to sing it. Now, I don’t know if Paul McCartney recommended Joe Cocker, but supposedly, and I’ve heard this a couple times, that he [McCartney] was the one that made the call after seeing the pilot before it was put on the air. I’ve always wanted to meet him to find out if that was true and to thank him.

Paste Magazine has an oral history of The Wonder Years with some of the actors from the show. The Wonder Years is finally being released on DVD this fall, after years of delay due to music rights issues. (Cocker originally performed “With a Little Help From My Friends” at Woodstock in 1969, and that version ended up being used for the show.)

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What It Was Like to Hear Nina Simone Live

Nina Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—she needed the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone never put many records on the charts, but people flocked to her shows. In 1966, the critic for the Philadelphia Tribune, an African-American newspaper, explained that to hear Simone sing “is to be brought into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat there.” She was proclaimed the voice of the movement not by Martin Luther King but by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose Black Power philosophy answered to her own experience and inclinations. As the sixties progressed, the feelings she displayed—pain, lacerating anger, the desire to burn down whole cities in revenge—made her seem at times emotionally disturbed and at other times simply the most honest black woman in America.

Claudia Roth Pierpont, in The New Yorker, on the life and career of Nina Simone.

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Photo: scarlatti2004_images, Flickr