Amy Winehouse: 1983 – 2011
Remembering the singer’s last days, her struggle with substance abuse, and her extraordinary talent:
“[Mark] Ronson recognized the huge-voiced singer with a bad-girl look as part of a tradition stretching back to the Sixties. ‘The Shangri-Las had that kind of attitude: young girls from Queens in motorcycle jackets,’ he told ROLLING STONE at the time. ‘Amy looks fucking cool, and she’s brutally honest in her songs. It’s been so long since anybody in the pop world has come out and admitted their flaws, because everyone’s trying so hard to project perfection. But Amy will say, like, “Yeah, I got drunk and fell down. So what?” She’s not into self-infatuation and she doesn’t chase fame. She’s lucky that she’s that good, because she doesn’t have to.'”
‘It Takes a Lot to Rattle Me’
The story of Olympian Hope Solo, the U.S. women’s soccer star whose childhood and difficult relationship with her father—who spent time in jail for kidnapping her and her brother—shaped who she would become:
“Solo’s last childhood memory of her father is from the following year. One day he reappeared in Richland, begging to take Hope and her older brother Marcus to a nearby baseball game. ‘Then we just kept driving, over the mountains, all the way to Seattle,’ she recalls. ‘We got a hotel room with a pool. We felt like we were living the life. Then I remember waking up one morning, and my dad is like, “Baby Hope, your mom just called, and she said you can stay another three days.” And I remember being like, “I didn’t hear the phone ring.” Right then, I knew that something wasn’t right.’
“A day or two later, a SWAT team surrounded Solo in a downtown Seattle bank, ‘put him in the back of a police car, and hauled him off,’ leaving Hope and Marcus ‘alone and scared on the streets of a big city,’ she recalls. Before long, Child Protective Services showed up, and Judy wasn’t far behind. But Hope refused to forgive her mother for alerting the authorities. ‘I remember not talking to her the whole ride home,’ she says. ‘My dad was sitting in jail. I was a confused little girl.'”
Rehearsals For Departure
A man copes with the loss of his wife:
“Say, for argument’s sake, we hire the car that morning and drive to Busteni, or take the train instead. Say the rental agent is not sick. We are his only business, valued customers in fact, for whom he has a late 90s Peugeot gassed up and ready to go. We make good time out of Bucharest, past the abandoned industrial parks and new farms, and arrive quickly to Busteni. We ride the cable car up the mountain, take photographs under the white cross at the top, poke around a bit. We find an easy day hike across the ridge and back, eat lunch, drink our celebratory beers on the porch outside the basement of the hostel.
“We say that it was good to get out of the city and away from our routines. We should do this more often. On the ride down the mountain, we tell our friend about our weekend in Cali Manesti, for Katie’s birthday, how we hiked near the sulfur springs and got lost in the farm where I surrendered my shoe to a manure pile. Coming down the mountain, the cable car clicks and swings, and stops for a while over the deep valley to wait out the high wind, but it starts again. We do not travel to Busteni three months later. Katie does not die on the ridge of that mountain on a Saturday in late June. The ridge is not made sacred by her violent death. A bear crosses the ridge that day and attacks no one. Instead, that afternoon in March, we cross Busteni off of our list. There are other parts of Romania to visit that summer, for my birthday, before we leave the country for good.”
Leopold’s Ghost
[Not single-page] Goucher, a small liberal-arts college, hired a French professor from Rwanda named Leopold Munyakazi through The Scholar Rescue Fund, an organization devoted to providing asylum to intellectuals whose lives and work are threatened in their home countries. Sanford J. Ungar, the president of the college, is contacted by investigative reporters at NBC, and Goucher is subsequently accused of harboring a war criminal:
“The details of the accusations were horrifying, and I sat reading the documents while my visitors watched. Between April and July 1994, Leopold had been part of a ‘joint criminal enterprise,’ the indictment alleged, and had ‘trained, indoctrinated, encouraged, provided criminal intelligence to, transported and distributed arms to members’ of the armed forces and civilian militias, who in turn ‘murdered, caused seriously [sic] bodily and mental harm, raped and pillaged Tutsi group members.’ It said he had attended meetings of Hutu in the Kayenzi commune, where he and others allegedly complained that the killing was ‘lagging behind.’ Possibly he had planned or even chaired those meetings. At one such gathering at the Kirwa primary school, Munyakazi ‘took the floor to address more than 2,000 residents,’ it claimed, ‘and publicly incited the masses to commit genocide.’ He had, according to the indictment, personally turned over to the militia a woman who had taken refuge at his home, so that she could be killed.
“I was incredulous, filled with a mixture of anger and self-doubt. As their Rwandan companion nodded quietly in agreement, the producers from NBC demanded to know how Goucher could have sheltered such an evil man. They wanted to film me reacting to the indictment, but I refused. I hid behind the Scholar Rescue Fund, protesting that Leopold had been screened and certified, and that was all we knew. Later, in a New Republic story that was part of the flurry of early, short-lived interest in Leopold’s case, the producers were even quoted as describing my attitude as ‘flippant.'”
The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?
Entrepreneurs continue to reflect on the lessons of Steve Jobs—is his story ultimately a cautionary tale about a person obsessed with the wrong things in life?
“Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract granting it the business at the current pace. As Walter Isaacson describes in his best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, the recently recrowned chief executive had a simple response: Break the contract. When an Apple manager warned him that this decision would probably mean a lawsuit, Jobs responded, ‘Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get another fucking dime from this company, ever.’
“The shipper did sue. The manager quit Apple. (Jobs ‘would have fired me anyway,; he later told Isaacson.) The legal imbroglio took a year and presumably a significant amount of money to resolve. But meanwhile, Apple hired a new shipper that met the expectations of the company’s uncompromising CEO.
“What lesson should we draw from this anecdote? After all, we turn to the lives of successful people for inspiration and instruction. But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you want.”
Bo Xilai: Power, Death and Politics
The rise and fall of one of China’s most powerful politicians:
“At the opening of the annual Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on March 2, Bo showed up and put on a brave face for the 3,000 assembled delegates and journalists. But in internal government meetings, Bo was livid, haranguing Chongqing officials and telling them that Wang’s flight and the rumours swirling around him were all part of a ‘plot instigated by foreign reactionary forces’. Over the next two weeks, Bo appeared in public nearly a dozen times. In a typical final bout of showmanship, he even held a two-hour press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.
“Appearing relaxed, Bo said that unspecified enemies had “formed criminal blocs with wide social ties and the ability to shape opinion” and were ‘pouring filth’ on him and his family. He also dismissed suggestions he was being investigated or in any political trouble. Four days later, on March 14, Bo attended the closing ceremony of the National People’s Congress and sat alongside his politburo colleagues on the stage in the Great Hall of the People. Looking tired and distracted, at one point he stared up at the cavernous ceiling of the Great Hall as if saying a silent prayer. As the ceremony ended and China’s most senior leaders got up to leave, Bo rose quickly and strode off the stage. Waiting in the wings were officers of the elite Central Guard Unit charged with protecting China’s top leaders, who led him away, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Gu and more than a dozen of Bo’s close associates were detained at the same time and are currently being held in undisclosed locations around China.”
We Are Alive
A rock icon at age 62. A look inside Bruce Springsteen’s life, at home and in preparation for another tour, following the losses of bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici:
“For the next hour and a half, the band plays through a set that alternates tales of economic pain with party-time escape. While the band plays the jolly opening riff of ‘Waiting on a Sunny Day,’ Springsteen practices striding around the stage, beckoning the imaginary hordes everywhere in the arena to sing along. There is a swagger in his stride. He is the rare man of sixty-two who is not shy about showing his ass—an ass finely sausaged into a pair of alarmingly tight black jeans—to twenty thousand paying customers. ‘Go, Jakie!’ he cries, and brings Jake Clemons downstage to solo. He practically has to kick him into the spotlight.
“A bunch of songs later, after a run-through of the set-ending ‘Thunder Road,’ Springsteen hops off the stage, drapes a towel around his neck, and sits down in the folding chair next to me.
“‘The top of the show, see, is a kind of welcoming, and you are getting everyone comfortable and challenging them at the same time,’ he says. ‘You’re setting out your themes. You’re getting them comfortable, because, remember, people haven’t seen this band. There are absences that are hanging there. That’s what we’re about right now, the communication between the living and the gone. Those currents even run through the dream world of pop music!'”
Tracking The Biggest Star In The World
David Johnson has sent more than 260 emails to Jay-Z, but has yet to receive a single reply. That may not mean his messages aren’t being read:
“‘[Jay] has opened every single one of my emails, even re-opening them to re-read,’ says Johnson. ‘He has clicked on links and had emails open for as long as 20 minutes.’ He knows this because he uses a tool called ReadNotify, which embeds a small, unique invisible image in every message he sends. When the message is opened, the image loads from ReadNotify’s servers, which record the time of the view, its duration and rough location. ReadNotify then gives the sender a read receipt, confirming that the message was seen. These services have been around for years, and they work — this kind of “bugging” is an old email marketing trick.”
‘Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is.’
[Not single-page] One year later, the survivors of the 2011 massacre in Norway recount what happened:
“At a pub across the street from the courthouse, he is seated at a sidewalk table with Anita, drinking beer and hand-rolling cigarettes. He has sad eyes and stubble and a gold hoop in his ear. On his right wrist is a black rubber bracelet embossed in white letters with a thought that a young woman active in the AUF named Helle Gannestad tweeted eight hours after Breivik’s arrest. ‘If one man can cause so much pain,’ it reads, ‘imagine how much love we can create together.’ It’s become sort of a national sentiment.
“Freddy also has a copy of Dagbladet, which in that day’s edition has a story about Elisabeth and Cathrine, and there is a large photograph of both girls spread across a page, their heads tilted together, both of them smiling. Elisabeth’s family didn’t want her to be remembered as victim number nineteen on the seventh page of an indictment.
“‘Elisabeth,’ Freddy says, ‘she was the perfect one. She was pretty, she had a lot of friends. If one of her friends had a problem, they came to her.’
“And Cathrine? She still gets winded climbing stairs, but Freddy says she’s doing better, physically. ‘Cathrine, she says, “Why me? Elisabeth was the pretty one. She had all the friends. Why did she die? Why not me?” ‘ Freddy looks away for a moment, then turns back. ‘What do you say to that? Speechless.'”
You Leave Them
[Fiction] A mother and daughter arrive in California:
“Our shirts were still sticky and sweet smelling, but the bad, sour side of sweet, when we drove into Los Angeles. My mother had called ahead for reservations at one of the hotels she’d read about, but she said she wouldn’t go there right away.
“‘Huh-uh. Look at us. And look at this car. We’re going to clean up a little first.’
“‘Why? They’re used to it, they’re a hotel, aren’t they?’
“‘Honey, the Bel Air isn’t just a hotel.’ She had the tone she always used when she was too tired to fight. ‘You’ll see.’
“‘Why can’t we wash up there?’
“‘Because. That’s why. You just don’t.'”
You must be logged in to post a comment.