Search Results for: Brooklyn

A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Entirely Underground

The Catacombs, Paris, 1931. Illustration from the book "Paris" by Ernest Flammarion. (Print Collector/Getty Images)

Will Hunt  | An excerpt from Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet | Spiegel & Grau | January 2019 | 26 minutes (6,748 words)

 

And I stared through that obscurity,
I saw what seemed a cluster of great towers,
Whereat I cried, “Master, what is this city?”
Dante, Canto XXXI, The Inferno

The first person to photograph the underground of Paris was a gallant and theatrical man with a blaze of red hair, known as Nadar. Once described by Charles Baudelaire as “the most amazing example of vitality,” Nadar was among the most visible and electric personalities in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. He was a showman, a dandy, a ringleader of the bohemian art world, but he was known especially as the city’s preeminent photographer. Working out of a palatial studio in the center of the city, Nadar was a pioneer of the medium, as well as a great innovator. In 1861, Nadar invented a battery-operated light, one of the first artificial lights in the history of photography. To show off the power of his “magic lantern,” as he called it, he set out to take photographs in the darkest and most obscure spaces he could find: the sewers and catacombs beneath the city. Over the course of several months, he took hundreds of photographs in subterranean darkness, each requiring an exposure of eighteen minutes. The images were a revelation. Parisians had long known about the cat’s cradle of tunnels, crypts, and aqueducts beneath their streets, but they had always been abstract spaces, whispered about, but seldom seen. For the first time, Nadar brought the underworld into full view, opening Paris’s relationship to its subterranean landscape: a connection that, over time, grew stranger, more obsessive, and more intimate than that of perhaps any city in the world.

A century and a half after Nadar, I arrived in Paris, along with Steve Duncan and a small crew of urban explorers, with an aim to investigate the city’s relationship to its underground in a way no one had before. We planned a traverse — a walk from one edge of the city to the other, traveling exclusively by subterranean infrastructure. It was a trip Steve had dreamed up back in New York: we’d spent months planning, studying old maps of the city, consulting Parisian explorers, and tracing potential routes. The expedition, in theory, was tidy. We would descend into the catacombs just outside the southern frontier of the city, near Porte d’Orléans; if all went according to plan, we’d emerge from the sewers near Place de Clichy, beyond the northern border. As the crow flies, the route was about six miles, a stroll you could make between breakfast and lunch. But the subterranean route — as the worm inches, let’s say — would be winding and messy and roundabout, with lots of zigzagging and backtracking. We had prepared for a two- or three-day trek, with nights camping underground. Read more…

The End of Poker Night

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Mindy Greenstein | Longreads | March 2019 | 17 minutes (4,228 words)

Poker Night was sacred in my family, even though the game couldn’t start until Motzei Shabbos — the departing of the sacred Sabbath. Arguments were as likely to break out in Yiddish — my first language — as English. Most players were Holocaust refugees residing in Brooklyn like my parents. The rest were American-born Jews, that is, the ones who “didn’t know from true suffering.” A group to which I belonged, as Ma often reminded me during my surly adolescent years. Most of the refugees were observant Orthodox Jews, like Dad. The rest were more likely to be irreligious, like Ma.

I was 6 years old in 1969, the year of my earliest poker memory. Shabbos had just ended and I had a plan. Ma had recently bought me a quilted light pink robe dotted with small dark pink and fuchsia flowers that I loved more than anything in the world. She’d taught me to loop the dark pink quilted belt asymmetrically on the left side of my waist, like the movie stars did, she said. I felt like Cinderella in that robe, or, more specifically, Leslie Anne Warren’s Cinderella from the movie. Maybe prettier, even. So entrancing that my parents and their poker buddies would forget to deal the first card.
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The Problem With Nostalgia

Sascha Kilmer/ Getty, Unsplash, Illustration by Katie Kosma

Michael Musto | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,048 words)

Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be was the hilarious title of Oscar winning actress Simone Signoret’s memoir in 1978, and it’s truer than ever. Seeing the past through rose colored glasses is an increasingly myopic process, especially as technology makes giant strides forward and former modes of communication resound with an astounding obsolescence. As I handily crank out articles like this on my computer and shoot them to my editor via email, do you really think I miss the days when I had to type out a piece on a ratty Smith Corona, make changes with Wite-Out, scissors and Scotch tape, and then hand deliver the thing — sometimes in a blizzard or rain storm — to the publication, only to have to redo the whole process when a rewrite was required (after pre-Google fact-checking took up to an entire day)? Do you somehow assume that I long for a return to the time when I was terrified to leave the house because I could miss a business call? (In the ‘70s, answering machines were not prevalent and cell phones hadn’t yet been invented.) The time when I would regularly cut calls short — even with my own mother — for fear that someone more important, career-wise, might be trying to reach me? (There was no call waiting. You had to pray that anyone who’d gotten a busy signal would try again and again. And not talk too long.) Some survivors and observers longingly look back at eras like that as “a simpler time” and “a more personal moment,” but for a writer like me, it was actually a personal nightmare.
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On Asylums

Jens Büttner/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Lisa Chen | Brick | Winter 2019 | 11 minutes (2,209 words)

 

Around this time her neighbor sent an email.

The email said her cat had entered his home several times that week. The cat had sprayed his closet, clothes, shoes, rugs, and furniture. He had also sprayed the exterior door in the back of his house, the patio area, plants, etcetera.

It’s getting really bad, the neighbor wrote.

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Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me

Longreads Pick

Kimberly Mack recalls the ways in which rock music bonded her with her African American mom, and how those fierce sounds helped them cope with the poverty, violence, and despair both outside and inside their Brooklyn home.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 22, 2019
Length: 28 minutes (7,118 words)

Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me

Associated Press / Unsplash / Virgin Records / Vertigo Records

Kimberly Mack | Longreads | February 2019 | 28 minutes (7,118 words)

 

“Will you sing to me?”

My mom’s pain had subsided for the moment, and her voice was strangely perky. Happy even. The morphine had kicked in. She was strapped in tight, on a stretcher, at the back of the ambulette. An assortment of pillows and towels cushioned her body to protect her from the impact as the wheels slowly rolled over each pothole, each bump, each uneven patch of street.

I had been warned that the ride from Midtown Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital to the Lincoln Tunnel would be the worst of it — a minefield for my 68-year-old mother, whose stage-four uterine cancer had metastasized to her liver and lungs and, as her palliative care doctor characterized it, “filled her entire abdominal cavity.” It was the pain that finally got my mom to visit the doctor seven weeks earlier. There had been other signs, but she had refused to go to the doctor before that, only repeating to me what I’d heard her say when I was growing up: “Doctors look for problems…they make you sick.”

It was August 2015. We were now headed by an ambulette service to my new home in Toledo, Ohio, ten hours away, where I was a college professor. The plan was for her to first spend a few weeks at a skilled nursing facility, so she could relearn how to walk after her recent long hospital stay. That would give us time to order a hospital bed and other medical supplies before bringing her to our house for in-home hospice care. I had been looking forward to showing my mom our new home ever since I texted a picture of it to her after we found it in June.

“Look, Mom!” I wrote. “I can’t believe the house comes with such colorful flowers. There are dark pink rose bushes in the backyard.”

“Oh Kim, it’s so beautiful,” she texted back.

“I can’t wait for you to see it,” I replied. And that was true. Neither one of us had lived in a house before.

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‘What Would Social Media Be Like As the World Is Ending?’

Hulton Archive / Getty, Greywolf Press

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | February 2019 | 22 minutes (6,069 words)

 

Mark Doten is a deranged seer, a mad scribe mapping the end of the world. In The Infernal, his wonderfully strange first novel, he tackled a host of twenty-first century horrors: Osama Bin Laden and his followers, the moral disaster of the War on Terror, the gravitational pull of the networked world on our minds, and a seemingly inevitable post-human future in which one of the few survivors is Mark Zuckerberg. Now, in Trump Sky Alpha, Doten’s produced a fierce, unexpectedly moving, and surprisingly quickly conceived book about the Trump presidency. The new novel begins with a nuclear conflagration that wipes out 90 percent of the global population. The protagonist, Rachel, a journalist steeped in the folkways of the internet, is one of the few survivors. In an effort to reboot American journalism, the New York Times Magazine, risen from the ashes, assigns her to write an article about internet humor at the end of the world. What were people tweeting as the bombs fell?

It may sound like a deliberately obscure assignment, but it soon takes Rachel into some of the darkest corners of the post-apocalyptic American landscape. Mourning her dead wife and child, Rachel is also searching for their final resting place; along the way she finds a new lover, encounters an American security state that seems just as malevolent as its pre-apocalyptic forebears, tangles with a frightful hacktivist-turned-cyber-villain, and meets a novelist dying of radiation exposure who may be the key to it all. Trump Sky Alpha begins as an elaborate farce and ends as something much more grim and compelling, covering issues of politics, resistance, identity, and what, after all these years of mindless info-consumption, the internet actually means to our society. Read more…

Wrestling With the Ghosts In My Head

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Janet Steen | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,463 words)

One of them I think of as a malevolent flower growing in my head, unfurling petal by petal, causing great distress. Another variety is an ink spill in the skull, maybe if the ink were scalding hot, starting at one precise point and then spreading heavily into every cavity. The most common is the plain old nail underneath the eyebrow, always on only one side of the face, hammered upward and lodged there for hours or possibly days, depending on whether I got the timing right with the medication. For me that’s the Wal-mart of migraines, super basic, but it’s still a fascinating one. The pain seems to be contained in one area but is so intense and pulsating you could swear it’s everywhere. So I play games with it. I try to feel with my mind — which is funny, because it’s in my mind — where the exact line of the pain stops and starts.

I may as well do something with these long expanses of time when there’s really nothing to do but feel what’s happening up there. So I try to give myself over to it. Feel the contours of the sensation. It has a shape and a texture. It spreads and moves. It’s like a country suddenly forms and establishes a government up there. Each migraine episode, if you really pay attention to it, has a personality. Oh, this one really wants to take me down. On another day it might be more passive-aggressive. This one is the toxic narcissist, gaslighting me. Sometimes when I’m not sure how bad it’s going to be I like to say I’m flirting with a migraine, but it’s really the migraine that’s flirting with me, and then I finally cave and let it have its way.
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O, Small-Bany! Part 3: Summer

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | February 2019 | 17 minutes (4,343 words)

They never empty the dedicated shitcan in the dog park. It’s always full to the brim, overflowing with poop bags, swarming with flies and wasps. Which is odd, because all the other trash cans get emptied on the regular, and the fields are mown like clockwork, every other week. Dilapidated Department of General Services carts are often seen cruising around, taking care of park business. So what’s up with the perpetually overflowing dog park shitcan? It’s the enduring mystery of summer. You can smell it from forty paces in the infernal heat.

I call the DGS every couple days to complain about the overflowing shitcan, and always speak to the same lady. We are buds.

Hey, so the poop-bag thing still hasn’t been dealt with, I say.

Yeah, she says. Okay, gotcha. I’ll let them know.

I imagine writing a short story about our relationship, me and the DGS lady. About how we eventually come to share some singular kinship based on our limited exchanges. About how our different lives are ultimately defined by a common emotional struggles. Very Raymond Carver. Maybe we eventually have a fight, or a misunderstanding. Maybe we carry private knowledge of one another like a sacred oath, far into the future. Maybe we pass on the street and don’t register a thing.

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Every Day I Write the Book

Santiago Felipe / Getty

Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (2,035 words)

Like a really good book, life has given me way more chapters than I ever expected. Alas, I couldn’t have predicted that as an Italian-American kid growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1960s. It was a time of hippie-dippie love and peace — which I read about and saw constantly on TV — though those warm and rosy feelings were apparently reserved only for the young; older people were considered business suited, untrustworthy, corrupt, and pretty much doomed. At the local movie theater, I had the misfortune of catching the 1968 youth exploitation drama Wild In The Streets, in which anyone over 30 was forcibly retired and those over 35 were rounded up for re-learning camps. Seeing this flick at an impressionable age, I wasn’t worldly enough to reject its ideas or realize it was a youth fantasy as perpetuated by the suits. I thought it was a true harbinger of things to come and was horrified by every melodramatic moment. The movie haunted my adolescence, and I went to school sensing that hitting 30 was going to mean the end of meaningfulness, so I’d better live and achieve to the max until I was ready to be carted away.

Listen to Michael Musto read “Every Day I Write the Book” on the Longreads Podcast.

Well, I’m 63 and not only not retired or in an internment camp, but I’m actually doing pretty well. I have a weekly column on a popular site called NewNowNext.com, I get freelance offers (like this one), and I’m asked to appear on TV and in documentaries to give my opinions on various pop cultural topics through the years. What’s more, having produced four books, I’m often asked by agents and publishers to crank out some more. Shady Pines is not beckoning me in the least — but I wish I’d have anticipated that fact, not only as a kid, but in my late 20s, when I thought I had already peaked as a writer. Yes, I felt like a has-been at 28!
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