Search Results for: City Journal

Alternative Reality: ‘California Divided’

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I thought that it was a good couple of weeks for alt weeklies as I surveyed recent stories published in alternative papers around the United States for the second installment in this regular reading list.

In Portland, the Willamette Week covered the city’s embattled mayor, Ted Wheeler. Maya Smith, a staff writer for the Memphis Flyer, filed a charming profile of a blind pharmacist named Charles A. Champion. Christina Sturdivant Sani looked at the underrepresentation of black journalists in D.C. for the Washington City Paper. In Phoenix, a New Times reporter zeroed in on the questionable practices of Arizona’s former parks director.

Back East, DigBoston took aim at Massachusetts’ state gun purchasing agreements. All About Beer, the country’s oldest beer mag, was eulogized in Durham’s Indy Week. Anthony Mariani, the editor of Fort Worth Weekly, wrote an intense personal essay on his brother’s suicide. And the Chico News & Review published an amusing and informative dispatch on the Jefferson separatist movement in Northern California.

It goes without saying that I came across more good writing than I could include in this modest list. But I hope this mix of profiles, investigations, and personal musings will keep you busy until next time.

1. “Portland’s Mayor Is Struggling on the Job. And It’s About to Get Harder.” (Rachel Monahan, December 5, Willamette Week)

The Willamette Week, Portland’s best alternative newspaper, gives readers a long, detailed status report on the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, whose term began at the beginning of last year. Reporter Rachel Monahan portrays an ineffectual leader who is losing the faith of his allies after failing to deliver on a number of campaign promises, such as providing a shelter bed for every homeless Portlander.

No man is an island, but Ted Wheeler looks marooned. Next month will mark his second anniversary in one of the highest-profile jobs in Oregon politics—and Wheeler is struggling in a remarkably public manner.

No one doubts his intelligence or his integrity. But nearly all of the two dozen people WW spoke to about Wheeler say those qualities are not enough. They describe a mayor unable to move the city forward on challenges large and small. He’s disappointed the left and the right, while frustrating the institutional players who want to see Portland’s achievements measure up to its potential.

Wheeler seems unable to take control.

2. “Dr. Charles Champion, a Memphis Institution for 50 Years” (Maya Smith, November 29, Memphis Flyer)

Charles A. Champion is the blind proprietor of Champion’s Pharmacy and Herb Store on Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, TN. Maya Smith, a staff writer for the Memphis Flyer, has written a lovely profile of this 88-year-old pharmacist, who now spends most of his time greeting customers at the front of the store.

Opaque lenses hide eyes that, for the last four years, have been able to make out only faint light. The man in the glasses, wearing a white coat embroidered with “Dr. Charles A. Champion,” sits in a green chair in Champion’s Pharmacy and Herb Store on Elvis Presley Boulevard. Champion is 88 years old, but still has his wits about him and shows up to work every day.

His wife of 60 years, Carolyn Champion, is sitting to his right. His cane, a stack of newspapers, and a plastic bucket of peppermints are on his left. Trusting his ears and gentle nudges from his wife, he gives one of each to everyone who walks by. Champion is the owner of the South Memphis pharmacy and has been there every day (Tuesday through Saturday) since 1991.

There are many fine details in this piece. But I liked this one in particular, a saucy quote from Champion, who has several strong opinions on medicine: “I turn down more people than I serve,” he says. “Just because you want a certain drug, it doesn’t mean you need it. I have to be the one to look out for people. I won’t give someone medicine just so they can continue living unhealthy.”

3. “California Divided” (Stephen Magagnini, November 29, Chico News & Review)

California’s Jefferson separatist movement has always served journalists well. In 1942, a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle named Stanton Delaplane won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the “gun-toting citizens” who wanted to secede from the Golden State. In the Chico News & Review, Stephen Magagnini takes stock of the movement as it exists today in Northern California, which he describes as an “unlikely assortment of survivalists and hippies, pot growers and hardline cops, real estate appraisers and loggers, fencing instructors and gun lovers, Latinos and anti-immigrants.” Jefferson’s leader is Mark Baird, a rugged Trump supporter and something of a libertarian cowboy.

The movement has long been popular with a segment of rural far-Northern California, but Baird, 65, a strapping reincarnation of John Wayne, started breathing new life into Jefferson five years ago. The 6-foot-4-inch fire tanker pilot, rancher and Siskiyou County reserve deputy sheriff cuts an impressive figure. He sports a black belt holster, but instead of a sidearm, packs his weapon of choice, a copy of the Constitution.

Though it seems unlikely that the Jeffersonians will get their way, it would be foolish to dismiss the movement outright, given that Trump’s victory was a surprise to such a large swath of the American population.

4. “The Reality of Being a Black Journalist Covering Local D.C. News” (Christina Sturdivant Sani, November 29, Washington City Paper)

Christina Sturdivant Sani, the Washington correspondent for The Commercial Observer and an urban journalism fellow at Greater Greater Washington, takes a look at the underrepresentation of black journalists in D.C.’s media scene.

As a black journalist and native Washingtonian, I am equally proud to report local news and frustrated by my industry.

Beyond local black media, such as the Washington Afro American and the Washington Informer, there’s an underrepresentation of black journalists at print and digital outlets that cover D.C news.

In a city comprised of 47 percent black residents—the largest racial demographic in the city—it pains me that “mainstream” publications are majority white, most of them by a significant margin. It’s also telling that after writing for a dozen local news outlets, I’ve only had black editors at the Afro.

To its credit, City Paper gives Sturdivant Sani the space to take a look at its own track record with diversity. “Many editorial staffs around town, including Washington City Paper,” Sturdivant Sani writes, “could use a heavy dose of melanin — to document D.C.’s historically black culture and preserve the wellness of its black journalists.”

5. “Parks and Wreckage: Meet the Archaeologist Who Brought Down Parks Boss Sue Black” (Steven Hsieh, November 29, Phoenix New Times)

Steven Hsieh, a staff writer for Phoenix New Times, digs deep into an Arizonan archeological scandal. The protagonist of his story is Will Russell, who, while serving as a compliance officer for Arizona State Parks, blew the whistle on Sue Black, the department’s director who, with her deputy director, James Keegan, approached development “with more regard for awards and political ambition than archaeological sites,” Hsieh writes.

During Russell’s year and a half at Parks, he grew angry over practices he viewed as flagrant violations of state law.

Not long after he was hired, it became clear to him that Black and her allies, especially Keegan, did not value his role as a compliance officer. Parks leaders pressured Russell to treat antiquities sites not as cultural resources in need of protection, but as obstacles to development.

Records obtained by Phoenix New Times show Arizona Parks built gardens, trails, campgrounds, picnic areas, and cabins on several archaeological sites without following procedures intended to protect Arizona’s cultural resources.

6. “Fire Sale” (Chris Faraone and Curtis Waltman, September 27, DigBoston)

DigBoston, the cleverly named alt weekly, is currently knee-deep in an investigation into Massachusetts’ opaque state gun purchasing agreements, in collaboration with the Emerson College Engagement Lab and Muckrock, the non-profit news site.

Since the beginning of this year, our team at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism has examined hundreds of state purchasing agreements, for everything from heavy crime-fighting equipment to consumables for laser printers. Of the many contracts that caught our attention, the firepower free-for-all unpacked herein (SP16-AMMO-X85, abbreviated as AMMO in following references) stands out as especially dubious, with entities on all sides operating in an unchecked fashion despite being on the radar of state prosecutors. Nearly three years into the AMMO arrangement, a malleable open call that allows for multiple contracts to be approved under it, vendors have leveraged the opportunity to make millions of dollars off the state. For most of those procurements, there was no competitive bidding. And the process is far from transparent.

The second installment in the series was published in late November, and the next part, on tasers, will come out in January, according to Chris Faraone, who co-wrote the story and serves as DigBoston’s news and features editor.

7. “Saying Goodbye” (Anthony Mariani, November 15, Fort Worth Weekly)

A recent cover story for Fort Worth’s alternative newspaper — which, every week, publishes breaking news and cultural criticism along with a longform piece that usually tops out around 5,000 words — gets quite personal. Anthony Mariani, the editor of Fort Worth Weekly, writes about his brother Adam’s suicide, and the essay is sad, manic, and occasionally uplifting.

Everyone keeps telling me not to blame myself, that there was nothing I could have said or done to have changed a thing. But why? Why can’t I blame myself if that’s going to make me a better person, a better son to my mother and a better brother to my sister and other brother? And, perhaps most importantly of all, a better husband to my wife and father to my son? I was a lazy brother to Adam. There is no doubt about that. That is a fact. I could have called him more often. I texted him a bunch but rarely ever called. And I knew. I knew he was not doing well. Our mom exploded a couple of years ago when I chose to spend my vacation with my friends instead of with Adam. What’s the big deal? I whined. I even solicited Adam’s blessing while I was living it up with my buds. Ever humble and ever supportive of his little bro, he wrote off Mummy’s angst toward my vacation as her simply being her usual neurotic self. At least that’s what he told me. He was a good brother that way.

8. “For 39 Years, Local Mag All About Beer Shaped the Craft Beer Scene. This Is How It Collapsed.” (Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, November 27, Indy Week)

America’s oldest beer magazine, the Durham-based All About Beer, founded in 1979, appears to have ceased publication in mid-October. The magazine, whose website now sits abandoned on the web like so much digital flotsam, played a large part in elevating the country’s burgeoning craft beer movement, as Michael Venutolo-Mantovani makes clear in his detailed postmortem for Indy Week, the alt weekly serving North Carolina’s Research Triangle.

At the magazine’s founding, there were fewer than one hundred breweries across America, nearly all of which were mass producers such as Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors. But even then, AAB quietly heralded the ultra-nouveau movement of craft and small-batch brewing. Its fourth issue had a brief mention of newcomer Sierra Nevada—today the seventh-largest brewer in the U.S., with production facilities in Asheville. In the decades that followed, AAB found itself on the leading edge of an exploding scene.

It’s a sad moment when a publication goes under. Let’s pour one out for All About Beer.

***

Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review.

Did the Modern Novel Kill Charles Bovary?

Imagno / Getty, Heritage / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ankita Chakraborty | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,602 words)

 

(1)

There were three of them involved in the Bovary marriage to begin with: Charles Bovary, a mediocre doctor and husband, used to being woken up in the middle of the night to set a plaster or secure a tooth in the French countryside; Emma Bovary, reader of great novels and writer of promissory notes, who sneaked away to sleep with other men as soon as her husband left for work; and Gustave Flaubert, the thirty-five-year-old writer of Madame Bovary, morally repugnant, syphilis-infected bourgeois who hated the bourgeoisie for their stupidity. As in all marriages destined for failure, there were sides to be taken. With Madame Bovary began the modern novel; on her side was the virtue of being a pioneer, of being the first in a hundred-and-sixty-year-old model, the precursor to many great novels written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stories of her adultery became sensational and her resistance to the boredom of living aspirational. For Emma could do no wrong. Great, immortal, hero — for her have been used words that are most likely to be used for men in real life. “What a woman!” how often have we thought like Rodolphe, one of her lovers, and watched her go. Read more…

Selling Vintage Records in Tokyo

All photos by Aaron Gilbreath

Aaron Gilbreath | Reprinted from the Fall 2015 issue of Kyoto Journal | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,623 words)

 

Koya Abe spent most of the six minute long, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake keeping his 78rpm records from falling off the shelves. The delicate collectibles are stored in open-mouth crates mounted on the wall of his Tokyo record shop. As the Earth shifted four inches on its axis, Koya moved back and forth in front of the crates, pressing his hands to hundreds of wobbling, shellacked disks. “Instead of running away,” he told me, “I stayed here.” The 9.0 magnitude quake was the worst in Japan’s history. Nearly 16,000 people died, yet only two of Abe’s 78s fell. Despite his luck, he installed wooden beams across the racks to hold his discs in place during the next quake.

Named after an early 20th century black American harmonica player, Noah Lewis’ Records sits on the second floor of the kind of small, bland, white building that Americans would describe as suburban office park architecture. In urban Japan, commercial buildings’ exteriors don’t matter as much as what’s inside. Noah Lewis’ Records specializes in early jazz, blues, country, doo wop, R&B and rock and roll dating from the 1920s to the 1960s, a mix of American roots music that Abe devilishly calls “pre-Beatles.” He built his business around his musical tastes, instead of the indie pop and electronica that sells at Tower Records in Shibuya or at Jet Set down the street. In his “Rockin’ Instrumentals” section, you’ll find ’60s seven-inches like The Virtues’ “Blues in the Cellar,” The Marketts’ “Out of Limits” and the String-A-Longs’ “Twist Watch.” In the “50s-60s R&R Rockabilly” section, seven-inches like Johnny Dee & The Bluenotes’ “Teenage Queen.” (Lyrics: “Teenage queen, you’re everything that my heart ever dreamed.”) Albums by Decca, Capital and Sun are everywhere.

An average day finds Koya sipping a late-afternoon beer and playing Charlie Parker. The smell of cigarette smoke hangs in the air. He hunches behind the counter, entering new items into his website. The store is barely the size of a bedroom. The only open window is a narrow slit on the front door. The walls are covered with records and posters, sheet music and display cases. Koya’s work station is wedged in back, far from any trace of sunlight. An ashtray sits by the cash register. Nearby, a dusty VCR sits stacked atop a crate holding a broken record player.

Japan contains one of the world’s highest concentrations of jazz fans per capita. The famous Blue Note and Prestige labels keep many albums in print in Japan that they’ve let lapse in America. Used record stores are filled with original period vinyl, so jazz collectors from all over the world travel to Tokyo to score rarities. “People who go to other stores who cannot find what they are looking for come here,” Abe said. “Many Japanese musicians buy here. Many, many collectors. They are mostly men in their forties.” In his experience, Japan’s most ardent jazz fans were men ranging from their forties and eighties, though a surprising number of young men and young women were into the music, too, far more than in America.

He listed stock online, but web business wasn’t his main one. Customers preferred to come to the store. His many regulars used the website to browse before visiting or calling in their order.
Read more…

The Rising Tide of Wrongful Convictions

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Lara Bazelon | an excerpt adapted from Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction | Beacon Press | 24 minutes (6,738 words)

The National Registry of Exonerations is a small, nonprofit research project founded in 2012. What the project lacks in manpower it makes up in zeal, documenting every known exoneration dating back to 1989, the first year that DNA exonerations were recorded in the United States. Staff members collect detailed information about each case from court documents and news reports, provide a comprehensive narrative about the case, and break down the data into numerous categories, including gender, race, geography, crime of conviction, factors that contributed to the wrongful conviction, and whether the case involved DNA. The registry’s website provides detailed graphs that set out the cause or causes of the wrongful convictions and chart their frequency over time.

On March 7, 2017, the registry released a report summarizing the data it had documented since its founding: 1,994 exonerations. (The number is now above 2,100.) Seventy-eight percent of the exonerations did not involve DNA evidence. This finding surprises many people, as it seems at odds with the way that crime is prosecuted on popular television shows and in movies, where the perpetrator inevitably leaves behind a tiny but undeniable bit of himself. Skin follicles are collected from under the victim’s fingernails, blood or semen is retrieved from a stain, a trace of saliva is lifted from a soda can or cigarette butt. In fictionalized accounts, diligent detectives and technicians rapidly collect and analyze this trace DNA evidence. More often than not, when the episode concludes, the bad guy has been conclusively identified, apprehended, and locked away.

The reality is much messier and more complicated. Even when DNA exists, backlogs and bureaucracy mean that it can take months, if not years, to test. Crime labs also come to erroneous conclusions, often because the technicians are incompetent, overwhelmed, or even corrupt. In 2010, at a San Francisco crime laboratory, a technician stole some of the cocaine she was supposed to be testing, resulting in a scandal that led to the dismissal of seventeen hundred pending criminal cases. Five years later, in the same laboratory, two other bad apples — a technician and her immediate supervisor — were discovered to have committed misconduct so serious it required the San Francisco district attorney’s office to review fourteen hundred criminal cases. Both employees had failed DNA proficiency testing examinations administered by a national crime lab accrediting agency a year earlier, but had kept their jobs. At least one found conclusive DNA matches where none existed. Read more…

‘I Really Hope a Lot of Men Read It’: Sohaila Abdulali on How We Talk About Rape

Garu Student Union of Bangladesh demanding the arrest of a rapist accused of raping an indigenous girl, April 14, 2014. Photo: Zakir Hossain Chowdhury/NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images.

Laura Barcella | Longreads | November 2018 | 12 minutes (3,191 words)

 

In a 2015 documentary called “India’s Daughter,” one of Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rapists, Mukesh Singh, gave a disturbing jail-cell interview in which he placed the blame for his crime squarely on his dead victim. “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” he said.

Singh’s quote is despicable, but it neatly summarizes many of the internalized myths that women all over the world walk around with each day: that women have a say in whether we end up brutalized. That we can twist our own fate by making simple choices like staying home at night, or not wearing skirts, or abstaining from drinking. It helps rapists rationalize their actions, and it makes women feel like we retain a semblance of control over what happens to us. Of course, it’s not true.

What do you think about when you think about rape? If you’re someone who has also been a victim, you might think about power, the nebulous lines of control. You might think about the outfit you wore and the plan you’d made for innocent fun with a guy you met twice before. You might think about drinking wine on the patio, of consent given and later revoked. You might think about ripped underwear; the dirt beneath the nails of his callused, unfeeling fingers; and the massive blue bruises you got in places you don’t remember being bruised before or since. You might think about the shame and humiliation of the morning after, of not knowing who to tell or what hotline to call or what to preserve in a garbage bag as “evidence.” You might think about what your friends will say; whether they’ll support your story or find a way to warp it into your fault (“I’ve seen how you act with men when you’re drunk,” “but what did you expect, inviting him over so late?”). You might think about the walk-in clinic you visited afterward and the painful tests you endured there (yes, there was blood). You might think about filing a police report, or you might remember taking to your bed for a week and trying to avoid thinking about anything at all.

In her powerful but accessibly written new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali explores how cultures around the world handle rape. She approaches this intimate, sinister type of violence with a decidedly global viewpoint, delving into how both individuals and governments treat their victims, as well as how they navigate the nuances of sexual consent. Sure, it’s different in America. But is it better? Read more…

Alexa de Paris

Warner Brothers, Getty / Corbis / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Miles Marshall Lewis | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,622 words)

When I first heard the song “Alexa de Paris” by Prince and the Revolution in the spring of 1986, I was only a year younger than Alexa, and I had no idea who she was. No one ever said. Alexa Fioroni was a painter who taught and traveled the world, but most notably, she danced. Born in Oklahoma City, she moved to the South of France with her mother after her parents’ divorce in the 1970s. She took ballet lessons there from a South American expatriate at 9 years old. By 14, she had enrolled in an intensive study program at the Opéra National de Paris, the only American pirouetting around, later advancing to the Conservatoire de Paris dance school. She remained elusive to me until I began researching this essay. As I listened to the orchestral strings and guitar solos of the song’s gorgeous symphonic rock back then, Paris was just as much a mystery to me as Alexa Fioroni.

Because what was Paris to a 15-year-old black boy from the Bronx? Beyond a vague familiarity with the Eiffel Tower, I had zero points of reference. None of the personalities well known to me much later meant anything to me then: Frantz Fanon, Serge Gainsbourg, Jean-Luc Godard, Aimé Césaire, François Truffaut, Brigitte Bardot. The advanced placement English classes at my public high school didn’t teach négritude. They eventually got around to existentialism — Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus — but not until senior year. James Baldwin lived in France, but I hadn’t read James Baldwin. Black Boy had blown me away back in sixth grade. For years, Richard Wright might’ve been the only black writer I was aware of (aside from Alex Haley), but nobody told me he’d lived in Paris. My parents didn’t have passports; my grandparents didn’t have passports.

That wasn’t always the case. Faded vacation photographs from Paris lay buried somewhere in a photo box at the bottom of a closet in our three-bedroom apartment, pictures of the trip my mom took with a girlfriend as a high school graduation gift in 1969. By 1970 she’d be a married mother, a yawning chasm stretched between the 18-year-old Evander High School student she’d been and the 19-year-old South Bronx homemaker she’d so quickly become.

* * *

My first impressions of Paris, my first time bothering to consider the city as a real place with real people walking around it came from Under the Cherry Moon, the romantic comedy Prince filmed on the French Riviera in late 1985. The movie wasn’t set in Paris. I didn’t understand that at the time. A soundtrack album, Parade, preceded the film by four months, and I pored over the packaging in my bedroom for all the clues I could find about this follow-up to Purple Rain. The packaging of the album — yes, a vinyl disc meant for turntables, enclosed in a cardboard sleeve finely designed with cover art — contained black-and-white photos of Prince and the Revolution collaged with strips of pages from a French novel. But I didn’t know French then — I skirted through Italian classes with a string of D’s. The page ribbons could have come from a porn magazine, a cookbook, or some instruction manual.


 

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The Parade album-liner photomontage fixes the Venus de Milo amid guitarist Wendy Melvoin, bassist Brown Mark, and keyboardist Matt Fink as if Aphrodite had joined the Revolution. Prince placed the melancholy piano piece “Venus de Milo” at the end of Parade’s side one. A statue of the Greek goddess is actually on permanent display at the Louvre museum in Paris. French by association I suppose. Parade also featured “Do U Lie?,” a whimsical bit of café jazz complete with accordion and introduced by a French girl explaining, “Les enfants qui mentent ne vont pas au paradis.” Children who lie don’t go to heaven. Prince flattered the object of his affection on the chorus to one of my favorites, “Girls & Boys,” with “vous êtes très belle” and talk of kissing on the steps of Versailles. (Where was that? I wondered.) Plus, the majestically beautiful instrumental “Alexa de Paris” was the flip-side bonus to Parade’s “Mountains” single. Orchestral arrangements conducted by the late Clare Fischer gave Parade more of a European feel than any of Prince’s seven previous albums — the French horns, the trumpets and trombones, the violins and violas.

Because what was Paris to a 15-year-old black boy from the Bronx? Beyond a vague familiarity with the Eiffel Tower, I had zero points of reference.

* * *

Piano practice swallowed a lot of my hours in the 1980s. An older Jewish woman a few buildings away offered lessons. My mother and father forced me out of my comforting cocoon of comic books and TV addiction to learn the piano for 12 months. I was 9. They promised I could drop the private class after a year if I wasn’t interested anymore. I wasn’t. But by the time Parade arrived I’d discovered sheet music to songs I felt like learning and came back to the piano. I’d spend just enough practice time after school to learn Janet Jackson and Doug E. Fresh and Prince songs by heart. Mostly Prince songs. My grandmother’s upright piano could never be pitch-perfectly tuned, but furniture movers hauled it from her South Bronx apartment straight to my bedroom anyway for those childhood lessons. I learned “The Beautiful Ones” on that out-of-tune Kemble. “Paisley Park,” “Pop Life” and “God (Love Theme from Purple Rain)” too. By the time I mastered the chords of “Under the Cherry Moon,” its namesake finally showed up in movie theaters.

Prince’s tragicomedy bombed, but that didn’t matter. In my mind I was following in his footsteps: learning his songs; writing terrible lyrics; taking the Truman High recording studio class taught by the choir director (a white rap producer who managed Doug E. Fresh); having sex; acting pretentious. I fantasized about moving on to guitar, or songwriting, or whatever else necessary to grow up to be just like Prince. I was 15, I had time. But with Under the Cherry Moon, Prince now knew something I definitely didn’t. He knew France. I had to get there.

* * *

I made it into college by the skin of my teeth. I returned home from Atlanta after freshman year for my first summer break and met a beautiful girl on the uptown 6 train. This was when I still marked my life and times by whichever Prince album occupied the record stores, and so it was the Year of Batman, 1989. (It was also the year of the first De La Soul album, 3 Feet High and Rising, and the year of Do the Right Thing, but with my 18-year-old obsessions, that hot summer could only have been the Year of Batman.) We peeked at one another when the other wasn’t looking, over and over, as the train stopped and started on its way to the terminus at Pelham Bay Park. We never spoke. We waved a week later at Times Square station, surprised to see each other again in another borough. I still couldn’t speak. I wasn’t much good at courageous flirtation. I’d heard Prince suffered from shyness and I could relate. When I finally saw her again — apricot skin, smiling eyes, round face draped by thin extension braids — I found my courage. Simone was a rising senior at the performing arts high school downtown, the one from Fame. Her youth didn’t make me any braver.

Simone danced in the video to Young MC’s “Bust a Move” that summer. I’d play the cassette single on a loop in my boombox back down at school and think of her. She sang, she danced, she acted. Simone idolized triple threats like Debbie Allen and Vanessa Williams, full of artistic plans and schemes. We spent the summer of Batman at the Sound Factory nightclub downtown dancing to “French Kiss.” She modeled clothes for me at Emilio Cavallini on Madison Avenue, where she worked. Right away I had romanticized my idea of her — some ingénue artiste — out of all proportion, killing any possibility of an authentic relationship. Friend zone, meet unrequited love. A pretty girl from the Bronx with dreams, so different from the handful of girlfriends in my brief history with love, Simone suffered my awkward advances through graduation and her first few years at Sarah Lawrence College.

There was no one more appropriate to introduce me to Paris than Simone, studying abroad in 1994 at the École Normale de Musique conservatory. “Do the Boodiewop” somehow failed to catapult her girl group Ariél onto the radio in ’92, but the trio’s full album remained a work in progress. The pipe-dream illusions of my own imaginary music career ended in college. I hadn’t rehearsed any Prince songs into memory since “Scandalous” back in the Year of Batman; I’d left my atrocious song-lyric poetry aside. When Simone invited me to stay at her studio in the 13th arrondissement, I was a first-year law student in New York City and an aspiring music journalist trying to build on a Vibe magazine internship from the previous summer. I was also still aspiring to sleep with Simone four years after first peeping at her on the 6 train.

I prepped myself for Paris with some rental videotapes from Tower Video: oldies like April in Paris, Funny Face, and An American in Paris. I don’t remember anything about them now; none made an impact. Terence Trent D’Arby mentioned 18th-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac in his album notes as a personal hero, so I left for France reading The Chouans — another work of art that entered in one ear and out the other. I touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in platform shoes and Gap bell-bottoms because (thanks Lenny Kravitz) how else could one arrive in Paris for the first time?

This was when I still marked my life and times by whichever Prince album occupied the record stores.

Rubbernecking from the backseat of Simone’s Martiniquan girlfriend’s red Fiat, I soaked in all the beige buildings with their decorative architecture, the crowded cafés, twentysomethings like me dressed in black and dragging cigarettes. But saying overmuch about the sights and smells of the city rings false to me. The truth is, I’d flown more than 2,000 miles across the Atlantic to get laid. France wasn’t my first time abroad. Two years prior I visited my college girlfriend studying in Madrid and already experienced my first fish-out-of-water feelings with Spanish culture. Nine months back, I’d flown to London alone for a week as a graduation gift. Still, in many ways, I was 23 going on 19, with an immature, naïve sense of entitlement telling me international travel was some kind of given. France eventually turned out to be a liberating place for me years later, for reasons that would’ve been unfamiliar that first time around. But as an eight-day vacation, visiting a crush I hoped to seduce in the most romantic city in the world, my Parisian experience went only as deep as I could receive it at the time.

Imagine Hippopotamus as the Olive Garden of Paris, an appropriate enough place for hungry young adults on a budget. My palate at the time wasn’t too far advanced beyond Chef Boyardee anyway. Out on the town with Simone, night number one, I ordered a saumon fumé expecting something like the Southern salmon croquettes I grew up on. I can’t remember what fish I expected canard to be. I’d never eaten smoked salmon or duck before. Hundreds of francs wasted. I thought we’d hail the French equivalent of a Manhattan yellow taxi, but Parisian cabs only lay in wait on certain street corners, so we walked back to her apartment sightseeing and people-watching. At her studio she introduced me to the music of an Icelander named Björk. I’d waited all night for the dessert of Simone’s lips, and before falling asleep together, she served them up. They tasted like a French kiss on the steps of Versailles.

Simone made me laugh constantly; our time together always a sitcom. She was the most talented woman I’d ever dated at that point, and cute enough to get cast in a Kwamé video. What magnetized me the most was her artist’s life, her hustle, her self-actualization. She was my first artistic love, a reflection of what I started daring to see in myself. The next morning she had an appointment at a recording studio, singing on the demo of some French musicians. I stayed behind, folding open the wrought-iron shutters in her window frame to stare out onto the Asian Quarter. James Baldwin (I’d gone from never reading him at all to reading everything he’d ever written) once said, “Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.” Many black American men my age never expected to live past 25. Both my hubris and my upbringing told me otherwise. Hands folded behind me, I stood in the sunlight of Simone’s window wearing my crown.

In the future, I’d become a lot more intimately familiar with the city, but in retrospect, Simone took me around to almost everything worth seeing in a week. A Louvre exhibit explored how ancient Egypt influenced Western art. We paid respects at the graves of artists who really didn’t mean all that much to me (Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust) and those who did (Richard Wright, Jim Morrison), walking the winding paths of Père Lachaise cemetery. We shot each other on camera climbing the iron stairway of the Eiffel Tower. The Notre Dame was closed for restoration, but the gothic Sacré-Cœur church gave us a solemn candlelit moment at the highest point in Paris one rainy night. And I braved the Métro by myself for the first time in search of Nutella crêpes, the Moulin Rouge, and New Morning, the site of my favorite Prince bootleg tape. I peered through the nightclub window with the strains of his June 15, 1987 aftershow ringing through my ears.

* * *

Like those Magic Eye posters so popular at precisely that moment in the ’90s, I could always pick out the 3D Prince significance from any 2D locale if I stared long enough. Night number seven, we saw a wack noir movie, Romeo Is Bleeding, on the Champs-Élysées and passed the Nova-Park Élysées luxury hotel on our way to the theater. I knew from Prince biographies that he stayed there in June 1985, holed up in a penthouse suite playing with new synthesizers while his management tried cajoling him into enjoying his first real trip to Paris. I once wrote something about all Prince’s lyrical references to Paris or France and topped out at almost 20. (By contrast, I can’t remember Michael Jackson, that stranger in Moscow, ever mentioning Paris.) Made-up utopias like Paisley Park and Uptown were central to Prince’s work, places where freedom reigns and anything goes — most of all dance, music, sex, and romance. Western history has forever promoted the French capital as a land of liberation, tolerance, equality, sex, and romance. This might account for his Paris obsession in songs like “Sign o’ the Times,” “Condition of the Heart,” “Cindy C,” “Sexy M.F.,” and others. What’s so funny, so typically workaholic Prince is that once he actually got to vacation in Paris, young and rich and famous enough to enjoy anything the city had to offer, he chose to stay in his hotel room playing keyboards.

By mid-August he was back — explaining to his girlfriend Susannah Melvoin why she wouldn’t be costarring in Under the Cherry Moon and proposing marriage in a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon. The beautiful ones celebrated for days at places I couldn’t afford with law school loan reimbursement checks: dinners at Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, partying at Le Palace. Soon he was off to Côte d’Azur to film a movie. He was 27.

I once wrote something about all Prince’s lyrical references to Paris or France and topped out at almost 20.

There was no Prince on the night I gambled on going beyond kisses. We’d eaten earlier in the Marais district, at an LGBTQ-popular restaurant called Foufounes (French for Pussies). I’d almost given up on the would-be love affair. At home we split a bottle of wine and aired everything out. Off and on for over four years — through Broadway plays, Alvin Ailey dance shows, movies, dinners — I’d been chasing Simone whenever I was back from college. Even after I committed to someone else: the college sweetheart I’d already been with since the year we first met. Simone always put her dreams above settling down with anybody and I always refused to accept what she was saying.

“I just felt too much pressure to live up to your idea of who I am,” she confessed. Years passed before I saw the truth she kept trying to tell me in different ways. She also just wasn’t that into me, there was that too. Ego and my emotional learning curve made all of that hard to accept. But. On the night there was no Prince, there was Miles Davis and his 18-minute blues, “Star People.” I warmed a bottle of body oil on her electric stove and lay slick, massaging fingers all over her shoulders, back, arms, backside. Then she let me go further. Not completely further, but further. Saturday morning, we woke up spooning and laughed easily.

Years later in an erotica anthology entitled Wanderlust, I published a short story, “Irrésistible,” buffing up the ballad of Simone and Miles with a spritz of sentimental Krylon spray paint. I’d renamed her Solange way before Beyoncé became a thing, a name Simone loved, the name of her Martiniquan girlfriend’s mom. “Irrésistible,” like our affair, ended like this:

In my final moments in Paris at Charles de Gaulle, Solange and I stood at the gate holding hands silently. When my final call was announced, we both smiled. She kissed me twice on the cheeks before I boarded the plane. I turned back to look at her a final time—recalling Charlene’s tears when I left Spain months ago—but Solange had turned to walk away. I turned again and stepped onto the plane.

* * *

Color her peach and black: A pretty mademoiselle in a skintight dress shimmies in a crowd of nearly 20,000 screaming Parisians. The sister dances, excited as all hell, next to her flamboyant teenage cousin Luc. And Prince is onstage — spinning, doing splits, leaping off pianos through “Housequake,” “When Doves Cry,” and “The Cross.” “Hot Thing,” “Purple Rain,” and “1999.” Her very first concert is the Bercy stadium Sign o’ the Times Tour stop, and she’s having the time of her life. Some months down the line she’ll ask a friend to design a dress for her 18th birthday inspired by protégé Jill Jones in the “Mia Bocca” video. Her brown eyes, heavy-lidded like some French-Caribbean femme fatale, hardly blink during the hour and a half drummer Sheila E. bangs her skins and dancer Cat Glover jacks her body across stage and our hero takes guitar solo after guitar solo.

I wish I’d known Christine then; we’d never see Prince together live in concert. Two thousand miles away in the Bronx that day, I might’ve been registering for summer school to make up a math class. In the Year of Sign o’ the Times, I had no idea the woman I’d marry one day was shaking her fanny and screaming for my idol over in Europe while I was fighting my way out of high school with both fists.

“Yesterday I tried to write a novel,” Prince once sang (in 1982, on “Moonbeam Levels”), “but I didn’t know where to begin / So I laid down in the grass tryin’ to feel the world turn.” My stab in the same direction came in 1995, trying to write a novel of my own, at 24, while living in south London studying abroad. Don Draper’s French mom-in-law on Mad Men once dropped a quip about her daughter I’ve never forgotten: “This is what happens when you have the artistic temperament, but you’re not an artist.” I spent most of those months in my Tooting Bec flat proving to myself that my talent outweighed my artistic temperament; my novel was the result. Naturally I can’t bear to read it now, but I finished it, and the completion pulled me out the other side of something.

Law school, in retrospect, and even at the time, was a plan B. I skipped the bar exam by the end, graduating instead into the wave of cultural critics documenting the continuing movement of hip-hop into popular mainstream culture. Eventually there were books I was prouder of: a memoir told in essays about my upbringing in the Bronx; an examination of funk pioneer Sly Stone’s 1960s-hangover album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. After Simone, I dated a few writers and editors, a wine sommelier, a yoga teacher. When “Irrésistible” got published, I left Simone a copy with the doorman of her Chelsea apartment building; I hadn’t seen her in two years. And by then I’d moved to France.

How else did I grow up after those first days in Paris? Like many of my favorite stories, this isn’t really about me, it’s about Prince. I’ll say this though. The year Prince divorced his second and final wife, Manuela Testolini, the Year of 3121 had I still been keeping track of such things, I married Christine — the mother of our Paris-born 1-year-old son — at the city hall of suburban Arcueil, France, in the spring of 2006. Christine: the Martiniquan girlfriend of Simone who’d picked me up in her red Fiat the fateful day of my first visit to her country. Our origin story as a couple belongs to another essay, from a less impressionable, far less wide-eyed time in my life. And our wedding song was Bebel Gilberto’s dreamy bossa nova, “Samba da Bênção” — not “Alexa de Paris.”

* * *

Miles Marshall Lewis is the Harlem-based author of Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar (St. Martin’s Press), due next year. His essays, criticism and celebrity profiles have appeared in GQ, The New York Times, NPR and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Living to Create: Talking Music and Writing With Drummer Emily Rose Epstein

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People who know Emily Rose Epstein know her as the propulsive drummer in Ty Segall’s band. From 2009 to 2015, Epstein toured and recorded with the guitar wizard and his crew of talented friends. She and Segall met at the University of San Francisco. They were both media studies majors. During Epstein’s first few years drumming with Segall, she continued pursuing her interests in journalism and editing. She interned at Thrasher magazine, San Francisco Weekly, Razorcake, Jello Baifra’s record label Alternative Tentacles, and she DJ’d and booked guests at the legendary student radio station, KUSF. Like her work history, her musical influences range widely, from Subhumans to Bob Wills to The Byrds. Naturally, her musical interests come through in her writing.

She wrote her graduating thesis on Patti Smith’s gender identity. She wrote an earlier paper about Led Zeppelin and the occult, and for SF Weekly, she wrote about her local Bay Area music scene. Rock musicians don’t get enough credit for their intellect or literary interests. I mean, Queen’s guitarist Brian May is a damn astrophysicist! Epstein shatters rock stereotypes. She proves that just because you thrash a Gretsch doesn’t mean you can’t curl up with books and string together beautiful sentences. You can, to be cliché¸ do things yourself. That’s what punk is: not dressing a certain way, but dictating the terms of your existence. Epstein took a break from touring in 2015 to work in LA, where she grew up, and plays in the country band, Blue Rose Rounder. She was kind enough to speak with me about her other life as a writer and reader.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: You started playing drums in a punk band at age 13 with a bunch of older guys from UCLA, and you were so young lots of venues made you sit outside before the gig. When did you get interested in writing and journalism?

Emily Rose Epstein: It was instilled in me from a young age that I would be a writer. My grandparents were both writers, and my uncle. My grandfather, Robert Epstein, was the Executive Arts Editor and a writer for the LA Times and the Herald Examiner, and he nurtured my creativity from a young age. We wrote poetry together all the time. He would share his work and make sure I was always making something new myself. He was a really inspiring person to be around ─ my first muse! I think more than anything I always thought I would be a poet, but journalism became something I could do more rigorously in an academic environment and potentially as a career. I always felt that it was more fun to make art than to cover it though, so that’s what dislodged the idea of being a career writer.

I was very into zines, punk journalism, and archives when I was younger, but I don’t think I became personally interested in journalism until I went to college. I never took it seriously until then. At that point I got deep into it ─ audio, print ─ just because it seemed like the right move for someone who was into the arts and writing.

AG: So it wasn’t the shrinking of newspapers or writers’ shaky financial prospects that dislodged the idea of a writing career? That is a tough decision for many writers and editors, though: do you take the risky road of making your own stuff, or do you pursue a hopefully more stable career editing, producing, or publicizing others’ work.

ERE: Yeah, thankfully I wasn’t faced with that. Music kind of took over my life and I lacked the time and drive to do anything but creative writing while I was playing music professionally, or whatever you want to call it, ha ha. It’s hard to say what path I would have taken had I not been whisked away by Ty.


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AG: Just to clarify, your grandfather shared his arts journalism with you, or his poetry? Or both?

ERE: Both! But mostly the poetry. Writing, brainstorming, working was central to his existence, and I think he knew I was really excited by that stuff, so we wrote every day and read every day. Writing was like magic, and he could always summon the spirits in both of us that were moved to make things. I was young when he passed, so I don’t think I was fully aware of, or able to grasp, what he was working on professionally.

AG: So poetry and prose? Have you continued writing poetry, or does it inform your other writing?

ERE: Oh of course, yeah. I’ve always written poetry, always will. I think I write less now than ever before, but now I’m writing differently. It’s interesting being in a country band: you almost have to learn a new way to write, and I’ve really been enjoying the simplicity of that. It’s satisfying to get back to the basics, to learn how to say something with fewer words, to get down to basic emotions that everyone can relate to but to figure out a way to do that in the most meaningful way.

The biggest gift the teachers gave me was telling me to get out into the city, the world.

AG: Muses are so essential to refining our interests and building confidence, so it sounds like you were fortunate to have a few in the family. Did your family history lead you to pursuing your media studies degree at USF? And did your time at USF help you refine your professional and artistic pursuits?

ERE: Perhaps, yes. Many members of my family work in the arts or are artists in some capacity, or writers, or work in the media, so I suppose it was always something I was around and in tune with. But honestly I didn’t know what I needed from school while I was there. (It’s true that “Youth is wasted on the young!”) I just knew that I needed to commit to getting a degree, and I wanted to major in something that could help me figure out what my path would be. USF’s Media Department was interesting. It certainly connected me with some fascinating people and lifelong friends, but the biggest gift the teachers gave me was telling me to get out into the city, the world, to look for real opportunities to work and create and consume media, so that’s what I did. I devoted myself to independent print, music, and film in the Bay Area in every way that I could, as a creator, consumer, lover, fighter.

AG: That is a gift, and you made incredible use of your time. Between ThrasherRazorcake, KUSF, and Alternative Tentacles, is it safe to say you were considering editing or journalism as a career?

ERE: Oh yeah, I never had any grand ideas that any of the music I would make would be popular or could support me, so I always assumed that I would work for an independent publisher or publication and do creative writing and music on the side.

AG: What was it about independent publishers that attracted you? You didn’t consider working for New York book publishers like FSG or interning at The New Yorker?

ERE: I considered working at several larger publications. I had an option to be a part of a program in London for writers that would have positioned me to intern for Rolling Stone London, but I decided to do a tour with Ty instead. I don’t know, I guess I never got far enough in my “career” as a writer or editor to know how that would have panned out, but I am a huge fan of small publishing houses where you can really sink your teeth into what you’re doing, where you can be a part of every process of publishing if you want to. I love the informality and the intimacy of that kind of environment. I’ve never been more inspired, really, as when I was working for RE/Search Publishing a few days a week, editing, transcribing, brainstorming, conducting interviews, working on layouts for books, fact-checking. I would come home and my young brain would never turn off: I had Schwaller de Lubicz and Timothy Leary and Philip Lamantia and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Andre Breton and Lydia Lunch and Leonora Carrington and Throbbing Gristle dancing through my thoughts all day and night, peppering every aspect of my life with rich new ideas. I assumed you’re not going to get that full-on immersive experience at a large publishing house, but I guess I don’t really know!

AG: Was your interest in both playing music and writing ever a problem or source of confusion for you, or did these different pursuits fit together in your mind?

ERE: It fit together at the time when I was writing for publications like SF Weekly. I was able to showcase bands in my columns that weren’t otherwise getting attention in the Bay Area, like the Baths (later the Royal Baths), Sic Alps, CCR Headcleaner, Rank/Xerox. That was exciting to me. But I do wish I had figured out ways to fit them together in my brain and body sooner; it took me a long time to feel confident with the songwriting process and letting my words collide with melodies. I think until quite recently I was self-conscious about sharing personal writing. I could write about other people’s music all day, but I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to fuse those two passions into one form, without collaborators steering me along the path or validating my work.

AG: So does that mean you’re currently writing your own music and also doing more personal writing? I was curious whether you were drawn to first-person narratives or memoir as well as journalism. As for being self-conscious about sharing, what changed for you?

ERE: Yes, I am writing a ton of music these days and have been for the past few years. That’s the bulk of the writing I do now. I still feel quite uncomfortable with the nakedness of writing memoirs or first-person narratives for anyone but myself. My songs are pretty bare, but I feel comfortable doing that because the writing is caressed by melody and rhythm. I’m an open book in a lot of ways, certainly emotionally, but I am pretty private too, so I think it would be a difficult transition to write and share in that way.

As far as being self conscious about sharing, I overcame that after getting out of a really difficult period in my life. I think for a year or two I really struggled when I left Ty’s band with understanding who I was, what I needed from life. I knew I needed to get out on my own in so many ways, but I didn’t know how, didn’t know what the goal was, didn’t know what I was capable of. I had a lot of difficult things happen in my personal life during that time, and I think when you learn really tough life lessons that force you to sort of wake up in a way you’ve never had to before, you also begin to realize how short life is, how universal pain is, how incredible people are around you. As those changes were happening within me. I really learned to love and forgive myself in a way I never had been able to before, and with that, I kind of also learned to learn to not give a fuck. There was just something in me that got lighter in the face of the heaviness. So now when I sing and write, I sing and write with a confidence I never was able to have before. I just really don’t care if people don’t like what I’m doing, and I’m even more grateful than ever when people connect with what I’m doing in a positive way, because I’m really living to create again, and I do hope that my music connects with people and is comforting in the ways that country music can be and has been for me.

I would come home and my young brain would never turn off.

AG: One of the interesting things about your writing is that you were an active part of the musical world you covered for SF Weekly. Playing music then, you were surrounded by so many incredible bands and personalities. Did profiling buddies like Sic Alps or John Dwyer present any challenges or tensions?

ERE: There’s always a strangeness to writing about your friends’ bands; you are biased in so many ways. It’s also difficult to get your friends to remember that they need to communicate with you as though you don’t know all the facts when you’re interviewing them. That stuff can be tricky. I think I spent more time editing my CCR Headcleaner interview than anything else I’ve written, just because there was so much in there that no average reader would be able to understand. Other than that, I never really experienced any challenges. All of the writing I was doing for the Weekly or my interviews for KUSF were so informal and basically fluff pieces, so the bands were just happy to be featured, and I was happy to be able to give them the attention I felt they deserved. I suppose if I had been doing longform journalism at the time, it would have been more difficult to be totally truthful or give the reader everything they think they want.

AG: On tours, did you bring along books and hit bookstores in different towns, or was that kind of literary life too difficult on the road?

ERE: I read incessantly on the road. I would go through tons of books on tour. I would finish my books and then finish Mikal’s books and then have to pick something up on the road sometimes! I loved hitting up bookstores and thrifting for books around America and the world, though. I really miss having that much time to devote to reading. It was great being on the road too, planning out what to read depending on where you were going. There was a tour where we spent a lot of time in France, so I made sure to bring Celine. Huysmans, Vonnegut, Brautigan, and Didion were always favorites of ours for traipsing through America.

AG: When you quit touring with Ty, was that an indefinite hiatus, or do you intend to drum with Ty again?

ERE: I never say never, but there’s no sign of that happening anytime in the near future. I’m not really playing drums these days, and Ty and I are on different creative wavelengths. I love him and think he’s doing great things always. He’s one of those people who has endless creative energy and I really admire that, but I know I needed to get out on my own and explore the things I wanted to do, and his creative needs are forever changing, too, so he and I are both thriving creatively but separately at this time!

Alternative Reality: An Alt-Weekly Reading List

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There have been a lot of eulogies for the alt-weekly lately, and understandably so. Over the past few years, we’ve lost a lot of them: the Village Voice, the Philadelphia City Paper, the Baltimore City Paper, Knoxville’s Metro Pulse, the Boston Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Missoula Independent. The list goes on.

But the story of alt-weeklies isn’t all about attrition. It’s also about resilience in the face of local media contraction. Around the country, alt-weeklies continue to publish deep investigations, irreverent features, and weird columns that you just don’t find in other publications, often by promising young writers who are discovering their voices. The work usually goes unnoticed because alt-weeklies have always operated under the radar. But in this regular reading list, I hope to rectify that.

Whenever I travel to a new town, the first thing I look for is its free alt-weekly, which can most often be found stacked inside a street corner box. Alt-weeklies help me get a read on my new locale, and at their best, they offer a kind of X-ray — social, cultural, political — on a city that you might not find in the daily paper.

Here are some stories which, I think, do just that — and more.

1.Miller Cane: A True and Exact History, Chapter 2, Part 4 (Samuel Ligon, November 8, 2018, Inlander)

Since mid-September, the fiction writer Samuel Ligon has been serializing a novel in Spokane’s Inlander, one of the country’s more robust, and adventurous, alt-weeklies. It’s a hard-boiled work with terse dialogue and staccato sentences. It tells the story of a guy named Miller Cane, who “has been making his living conning and comforting the survivors of mass shootings,” as an expository summary at the top of one part explains it. The installments, which are also broadcast on Spokane Public Radio, will debut every week for the next year or so. The first part jumps right into the action.

Miller Cane was six days into the Rosedale massacre when Heffner slid into the Legion Hall during an afternoon animal session. Miller didn’t recognize him at first, was focused on calming a howling beagle he’d just settled into a survivor’s lap. But the rage vibe was unmistakable, a disruption in the air over all the animal distraction, even as Heffner slouched and slunk and tried to keep himself small as he looked for a seat, finally taking a broken office chair by the coffee urns in back. It never would have occurred to Miller that a survivor from Cumberland would show up in Texas — a thousand miles away — at a completely different massacre. Maybe the man was just disturbed. Weren’t they all? Maybe his hurt came off as hatred. Miller had seen that before. But he couldn’t help wondering, just for a second, if the man might be another shooter, fresh on the scene to finish them all. He didn’t want to think that. Connie Lopez seemed to know something was off with the dude too, keeping an eye on him from her table in the center of the barroom as she chopped cilantro for chili.

The fourth part of the second chapter is the most recent installment to have been published. This is the sort of thing newspapers don’t really do anymore, and it’s a thrill to watch Ligon perform the high-wire act of writing a novel in public.

2. “Syed Irbaz Shah Wants to Be Deported, So Why Is He Still Here?” (Chris Walker, October 23, 2018, Westword)

Bureaucracy, like inertia, is a difficult subject to make compelling. But the rule doesn’t apply when it comes to the bureaucratic nightmare that is the story of Syed Irbaz Shah, a Pakistani national who was deported from the United States earlier this year but remains locked up in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Colorado because, to simplify a complex situation, he can’t get his passport.

The tension at the core of this tale is so ridiculous — and the chain of events that led to Shah’s imprisonment so serpentine — that you can’t help but continue reading to find out how and why Shah got into this predicament. Chris Walker, a staff writer for Denver’s Westword who covers local news and music, does a good job ironing out all the wrinkles in a story that amounts to a kind of low-key procedural thriller.

Today the Pakistani national remains in the Aurora immigrant detention center where he’s been held since February. While the circumstances surrounding Shah’s case are unusually complicated and technical, he, his family members and multiple lawyers believed that they could overcome any hurdles to get him out of the United States. Instead, they’ve become bit players in a Kafkaesque tale for our time, in which someone who desperately wants to be deported during the most deportation-loving U.S. administration in recent memory can’t seem to get himself booted across the border.

3. “Despite demolition efforts, blight spreads undetected throughout Detroit’s neighborhoods” (Violet Ikonomova, November 14, 2018, Metro Times)

In this deeply reported, 7,000-word investigation for Detroit’s Metro Times, Violet Ikonomova looked into the state of Detroit’s vacant houses and found that many more of them were blighted — and, therefore, abandoned — than the city’s Land Bank Authority had accounted for.

The apparently inaccurate blight calculation raises questions about the reliability of the data being used to guide the day-to-day demolition operations of the city and Land Bank.

In Detroit’s Grandale neighborhood, near West Chicago and Greenfield, Luther Johnson has been monitoring changes in the landscape for 50 years. From the well-manicured yard of the red brick Tudor where he grew up, Johnson looks directly onto a vacant lot where the city recently wrapped up a demolition. On one side stands a vacant house whose door appears to at one point have been pried open. On the other stands a worse-off vacant house, its backside crumbling and wooden bones exposed.

“They should have torn it down,” Johnson said of the ramshackle house. “And I don’t know why they didn’t — they tore this one next to it down. They should have torn that one down before they tore this one down because this one was looking better.”

The Metro Times, it’s worth pointing out, has been doing yeoman’s work of late. The paper recently broke the story on Marc Peeples, a 32-year-old man who was repeatedly harassed by three white women for the unseemly act of building a community garden on a vacant playground in a Detroit neighborhood — or, to put it another way, “gardening while black.”

4. “Dartmouth Coach Callie Brownson Is a Pioneer for Women in Football” (Dan Bolles, October 24, 2018, Seven Days)

Callie Brownson, the offensive quality control coach for Dartmouth College’s football team, is also “something else,” Dan Bolles writes in his cover story for Seven Days: “the first full-time female coach in the history of NCAA Division 1 football.” Bolles, an assistant arts editor and features writer for Seven Days, Burlington’s alt-weekly and one of the best newspapers in Vermont, spent some time with Brownson on the field, and he came back with some memorable scenes, as his lede demonstrates.

Dartmouth College quarterback Derek Kyler drops back in the pocket and surveys the chaos unfolding before him. The receivers to his right are locked down in coverage. Ditto the tight end crossing the middle of the field. But to the sophomore QB’s left, Drew Hunnicutt has shaken free of his defender and is streaking toward the end zone. In a flash, Kyler winds up and throws, hitting his wide receiver in stride. The pass is perfect, but it didn’t have to be. Hunnicutt didn’t have a defender within six yards of him.

“Hooooooly shit!” a woman’s voice erupts after the touchdown. “He was wide open! Wide open!”

Callie Brownson springs from her position under the goalposts, waving a laminated playsheet as she strides toward a group of defensive backs. “How do you let him get that wide open?” she asks in disbelief, practically teasing the dejected DBs, who mill around the field, heads hung low and hands on their hips.

Brownson, 29, has been written about by a number of outlets, but Bolles’s profile is an intimate, in-depth portrait, one that readers have come to expect from Seven Days.

5. “Who is the real ‘Lady in Blue’ of Seelbach Hotel?” (Lisa Pisterman, October 24, 2018, Louisville Eccentric Observer)

In Louisville’s charmingly named Eccentric Observer — otherwise known as LEO Weekly — the author and historian Lisa Pisterman took a look at the mysterious case of Patricia Wilson, who, in July of 1936, fell to her death down an elevator shaft at the Seelbach Hotel in downtown Louisville and is now believed to haunt the building. She is known as the “lady in blue.”

She didn’t receive word that said estranged husband died in a car accident on the way to meet her.

She didn’t throw herself down the elevator shaft in response.

She wasn’t found half-naked in a negligee and stockings.

No one heard her fall, and no one ran out in the hallway to catch Lt. Gov. Henry Denhardt stealing away.

She did fall at least six stories, and she died instantly, not hours later at the hospital. She was not penniless. She had a nice funeral, and she was buried in a quiet plot of her own. She was described as beautiful, sweet and well-liked. She was grieved by those who knew her.

She was a real person, and her name was Patricia Wilson.

Using a number of primary sources, such as city directories and coroner’s inquest records, Pisterman give us as detailed a look as possible at Wilson’s life, putting to rest many of the myths and rumors that have accumulated through the years.

6. “Twin Cities construction is booming, and human traffickers are coming to feed” (Susan Du, November 7, 2018, City Pages)

For City Pages, the alt-weekly serving Minneapolis and St. Paul, Susan Du reports that a construction boom in the Twin Cities has helped created a kind of underground economy of labor trafficking. Du hinges her story on a Honduran immigrant named Yimer Iriarte, who came to the United States and found work in the construction industry after much hardship.

Eventually he found himself building a house in Apple Valley, where his luck changed.

One day Ricardo Batres, a pint-sized, sweet-talking El Salvadoran man, walked onto the site and introduced himself as owner of American Contractors and Associates. He dazzled Iriarte with offers of a lucrative partnership, a room in a house free of charge, and—to celebrate the completion of their first project—a pleasure cruise down the Mississippi River.

They were treasures Iriarte, now 21, will never forget.

Yet time would quell his hopes. The house Batres rented for 10 workers came without heat and hot water, nor were they allowed to use the stove. The landlord eventually threatened eviction, claiming Batres hadn’t paid the rent.

It only gets worse from there.

7. “Marty Wolfson Was Broke and Homeless Until a Horse Saved His Life” (Mike Clary, November 13, 2018, Miami New Times)

Marty Wolfson doesn’t exactly fit the profile of a “Florida Man,” but his story is perhaps one that could only have come from the Sunshine State. In this sympathetic New Times profile, Mike Clary gives readers a textured look at Wolfson, the son of America’s first corporate raider who went on to become one of the most successful horse trainers in South Florida, only to lose it all when his lucky streak petered out. Clary sums up Wolfson’s weird life story in a tidy paragraph.

Ironies abound in the story of Wolfson’s fall from grace. He was a rich kid who ended up broke. He was a painfully shy young man who later posed nude for a national magazine. And for years he succeeded as a horse trainer before finding himself at a rural recovery farm where he was paired with a thoroughbred that raced but rarely won. In the end, the 11-year-old gelding would save Wolfson’s life by demanding nothing at all from him.

8. “Death of a Kinkster” (Daniel Villarreal, November 5, 2018, The Stranger)

In this disturbing piece, Daniel Villarreal investigates a death in Seattle’s gay kink community, in which a young man, Jack Chapman — otherwise known as “Pup Tank”– died after having liquid silicone injected into his genitals. Chapman was romantically connected with a man named Dylan Ray Hafertepen, “a well-known member of the Dom/sub pup play communities in San Francisco and, later, Seattle,” Villarreal writes. “To his pups, including Pup Tank and Pup Alpha, he’s called Master Dylan, but on Instagram and Tumblr, he’s widely known as Noodles and Beef.”

It may sound weird, but such injections are a fetishized form of erotic body modification. Some men fetishize enlarged scrotums as a sign of potency, much like the bronzed huevos dangling from the Wall Street bull. Some guys like to nuzzle gigantic silicone-enhanced ball sacks while giving head, or they enjoy feeling them slap pendulously against their asses while bottoming.

Since World War II, cosmetic surgeons and back-alley “pumpers” have offered liquid silicone injections as a quick and dirty form of plastic surgery. When injected, the body surrounds liquid silicone with collagen, permanently providing a rounder and fuller appearance, smoothing wrinkles and reshaping sagging butts and breasts.

Was Hafertepen responsible for Chapman’s death? Villarreal story digs into that question.

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Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review.

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.

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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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