Search Results for: Dan P. Lee

Regarding Joan Miró

Painter Juan Miro in His Studio. Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images

Sophie Beck | The Point | November 2018 | 31 minutes (6,109 words)

 

The difficulty began with the title of a painting at an exhibition of work by the Spanish artist Joan Miró. The title was Woman Entranced by the Escape of Shooting Stars (1969). I particularly like this title. The painting itself pleases and eludes me at the same time—the woman’s upturned face has a serenity and happiness that comes of no clear aspect; she has stopped doing something to contemplate the heavens. I can’t make out what objects are in her hands and, if I were to read an interpretation, I’d probably find it questionable. There are two stars: one twinkles and the other spirals. Next to the painting was a sculpture I didn’t like, and then another sculpture constructed of found objects I considered meaningless to the point of being irritating. There was a whole room beyond that full of pieces I didn’t look at very closely. It was crowded in the museum that day. People around me shuffled, stopped, and shuffled, deep in their audio tours.

I stood before Woman Entranced by the Escape of Shooting Stars absorbing the elements—woman, star, spiral star not shaped like a star, inscrutable other stuff—then it followed me into daydreams and lodged in a fold of my mind. I am not an artist or critic and lay no claim to any special understanding of Miró’s work or methods. I am not his admirer, countryman or contemporary. I just started liking the guy despite not liking the guy. I couldn’t stop thinking about him so I wanted to write about him, but the more I wrote, the more I came to believe that the key to his fantastic work, to the sheer volume of work—he kept working without pause from age nineteen to ninety—was that he was phenomenally boring. It seemed that only Miró could take the fact of being Miró and make something lustrously reality-bending, inspired, haunting and gorgeous out of it. To be removed by one degree, to write about him or his work, is to risk crafting something tedious to read. My initial essay flamed out so thoroughly that I threw it in the digital garbage on multiple occasions. Each time, I fished it back out again, attached to the gleaming scraps of something resiliently and stubbornly salvageable.

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Take Script, Add Snow

Still from Christmas in Evergreen. Front Street Pictures / The Hallmark Channel / Getty Images / Composite by Katie Kosma

Jane Borden | Longreads | December 2018 | 12 minutes (3,211 words)

In a big city, a woman lives a fast-paced life until something forces her to visit a small town, just before Christmas. Shortly after arriving, she connects with a charming small-town man. Commence ice-skating, hot chocolate, a tree lot, tree decorating, caroling, gift giving, charity work, big family meals, snow, snowmen, snowballs, snowball fights, red scarves, cookie decorating, a grand old house or country inn, sleigh bells, giddy children, and the soft plucking of stringed instruments whenever a character delivers a joke.

Every made-for-TV Christmas movie tracks the above plot. And yet, the uniformity does not prevent proliferation: This year alone, Hallmark made 38 holiday films across its two channels. Lifetime made 14. “The word is insatiable,” says Meghan Hooper, senior vice president at Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network. “We don’t seem to be able to do enough to make the audience happy.”

“Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure,“ says writer-director Ron Oliver, who has made 13 Christmas movies for TV since 2004, mostly for Hallmark, which has become synonymous with heartfelt, holiday romantic comedies (it’s the Xerox of them, or, if you will, the Kleenex). “I have not seen this happen until this year. Everybody jumped on board.“

In 2017, 83 million people watched at least one Hallmark Christmas movie during their Countdown to Christmas and Miracle of Christmas events. The Hallmark Channel was last year’s number one cable network among women 25 to 54 in quarter four, and is shaping up to remain in that spot for 2018. Both Hallmark and Lifetime boast double-digit ratings increases during December. And the field is getting crowded: UPtv produced seven original holiday movies this year, Netflix made four, and Freeform made three.

How did America become obsessed with sappy, predictable, low-budget Christmas movies? Before we delve into history and psychology, let’s finish the plot:

Our protagonist falls in love, of course. She also rights an ethical wrong, always something from the past awaiting resolution and absolution. “It all goes back to Dickens,” Oliver says, referencing Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol. Like Scrooge, our modern-day heroine receives help, her three ghosts being her new love interest, the small-town community, and a stranger who slightly resembles Santa (what Hooper calls “a Santa-like”). At the film’s end, she and the love interest kiss, usually for the first time (these are family films), and she either moves to the small town or is forever changed by it. No one asks why the moms and aunts look only 10 years older than the protagonist. Roll credits, start the next one, begin to confuse which characters are in what.

It’s easy to assume that viewers enjoy these movies in spite of the repetitive plotlines, as if the networks greedily scam us. But Hallmark and Lifetime both do extensive focus grouping and ratings analysis. They know what works — we watch these movies because the plots are the same. In fact, Oliver calls the plots peripheral: “The real elements of these movies that make people love them is this sense of returning to your own past, your own childhood and sense of innocence from that era.” The slightly varying setups and environs must be similar to deliver us. These films are not art or even entertainment — they serve a function. They are ritual, a ritual as pagan as Christmas’s origins. And their key piece of iconography is the kind of American small town that’s quickly disappearing.

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IMAGINARY AMERICA

“Small towns have always been the iconic image for human relationships,” says Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, whose work specializes in nostalgia. “The older woman lives here and the nice young family lives here. When you present the imagery of the small town, it’s portraying how we can get along in peaceful ways and help one another.”

Oliver grew up in one of these towns. He recalls, “It was this absolute Norman Rockwell Christmas town.” However, he adds, “I went back, maybe 20 years ago, and it is now strip malls. There is nothing to hold onto from there, so you hold the memories and recreate them in stories.”

He uses his hometown as a template when designing scenes and sets, but admits a challenge: “A few places exist, but they are getting harder and harder to find. We have to make them. We use every trick in the book.” Christmas Everlasting, one of this year’s Hallmark films, is partially shot in Covington, Georgia, because Oliver was drawn to its charming town square. “But when you go two blocks from there, it’s Walmart and CVS,” he says. Ultimately, the setting of the film is an amalgamation of three different small towns, plus a healthy dose of CGI.

Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure.

So these movies deliver a fantasy of a memory — except, for most of us, it’s a false memory we internalized through Norman Rockwell art, and Rockwell was also delivering the fantasy of a memory. You can trace the line of American Christmas imagery all the way to Queen Victoria: In 1848, The Illustrated London News published an etching of Victoria and Prince Albert standing around a Christmas tree with their family. It was published two years later in the States, and had a lasting impact of popularizing the tradition. “Christmas was not always a family-centered celebration,” explains Bruce Forbes, professor emeritus of Religious Studies at Morningside College, and author of Christmas: A Candid History. It became a family holiday in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the wild popularity of Queen Victoria, and to Charles Dickens, who published A Christmas Carol in 1843. “Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet,” says Forbes. “When we talk about the ‘spirit of Christmas’ now, we talk about generosity. That’s a Dickens creation.“

What did exist prior? In England, not much. As a result of the lasting effects of the Puritan revolution in the 1600s, the English hardly celebrated Christmas at all. The Puritans’ beef was twofold: Christmas was not celebrated by early Christians (the holiday didn’t appear until the 300s) and those who did celebrate Christmas, Forbes says, “went to midnight mass and then to the tavern and got drunk.” So Puritans wiped it from the English consciousness.

The Illustrated London News (1848)

Taking the baton from the Victorian image was Currier and Ives. The phenomenal success of this New York City lithography firm in the mid- and late-19th century put affordable prints of snowy landscapes into the hands of a nation. Then in the 20th century, Norman Rockwell paired nostalgia for 19th-century Christmas with images of our mid-century obsessions: the nuclear family and suburban life. It was a powder keg. Today, pulp-like TV Christmas movies recreate these images again — in their own way as prolifically as Currier and Ives — but this time they’re more reflective of our modern world. Additions include both the mundane (texting) and the imperative (finally, after years of criticism, we see characters of color). Nostalgia is meta by nature.

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ART IMITATES ART

A few years ago, Hallmark Cards, Inc., the parent company of the two Hallmark networks (aka Crown Media), tapped one of its senior illustrators, Geoff Greenleaf, to create a series of images about a fictional town called Evergreen. The series of snowy scenes in a small town, featuring quaint shops and an iconic vintage red truck, became a bestseller. In response, Crown Media turned the cards into a 2017 film titled Christmas in Evergreen. The movie, and its 2018 sequel, Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa, were shot at Burnaby Village Museum in British Columbia, itself a fictional setting designed to preserve and romanticize small towns of yore.

Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet.

Oliver believes the mid-century American imagery that these films capitalize on is so effective because it speaks to a time “when America was truly powerful and firing with all six cylinders: making great cars and great music, going to the moon, for crying out loud.” But, of course, Rockwell and his ilk rarely painted the whole picture. “It’s sanitized,” says Forbes. “It ignores all kinds of things: race, teenage pregnancy, poverty. But it was the image that white Americans had of themselves.”

TV Christmas movies have certainly perpetuated this brand of whitewashed nostalgia. As the films’ popularity rose, networks received ample criticism. Still, just five of Hallmark’s 38 holiday films this year feature leads of color. This includes Christmas Everlasting, starring Tatyana Ali, who also stars in this year’s Jingle Belle on Lifetime. “It speaks to a shift in our culture, that suddenly there is a move afoot to have more and more of our real world look like our television world,” says Oliver. Still missing in the genre are LGBTQ love stories; no lead to date has been gay. 

As American as a proclivity towards heteronormative whitewashing, so too is the tendency towards consumerism — some of the imagery within the films is for sale. Christmas in Evergreen has an adjacent product line: a keepsake ornament of the red truck, a magic snow globe, a mystery key, Santa’s mailbox. “We worked in partnership to look at a couple of the products they had that we could weave into the overall storyline,” says Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and network publicity for Crown Media Family Networks, which owns the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. And of course they did: Hallmark was a retailer long before it got into content creation. “Not all brands evoke emotional connections,” Vicary says, “but that is at the top of what this brand promises and it has been since the beginning.”

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CAPTIVE ON THE CAROUSEL OF TIME

These films are not merely delivering the past; the stories achieve a delicate balance between familiarity and novelty. In them, we see a “constant struggle between wanting to hold onto certain things from the past but wanting a new beginning,” says Batcho. That new beginning is provided primarily by the love interest — TV Christmas movies are never not romantic comedies. Hooper says her team at Lifetime learned the importance of adding a romance element, after trying other versions of holiday films without it.

This makes sense to Batcho. “Like nostalgia, romantic stories focus on relationships and the sense of the ideal,” she says, adding that early brain imaging studies suggest that romance and nostalgia produce similar hormonal releases in the brain, “the loving, feel-good, pro-social feelings.” Plus, of course, as important as it is for us to protect the village, we need new relationships to strengthen the gene pool. But Batcho also says novelty is intrinsically linked to nostalgia. She likens cyclical markings of time, such as holiday celebrations, to a carousel: Each time it goes around, the horses look the same, but different people may be sitting in different places. “By being different and new, [novelty] allows you to escape so you’re not trapped in the past,” Batcho says. “Nostalgic people tend to be more optimistic, forward-looking people.”


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Although nostalgia was originally defined as homesickness and categorized as a disease, scientists now understand its healthy and profound psychological function. Studies suggest that exercising nostalgia enhances mood, reduces stress, and increases both social connectedness and self-regard. “Nostalgia helps us rediscover aspects of our authentic self, by going into our past,” says Batcho. Studies even suggest it helps us ascertain a meaning or purpose to our lives. Batcho also describes nostalgia as a social experience, since we identify ourselves in terms of relationships. “Nostalgia actually helps diminish loneliness by reminding people that, even if you are not physically with those who have loved you, you were once loved,” she says. Further, the process isn’t random. We specifically seek past memories that will help our current state.

“Every time you turn the television on,” Oliver says, “you’re seeing news about another betrayal of an ideal that America held close for a long time. I think the country is trying to find its moral center again. There’s a consistency to these stories that people hold onto like a life raft in the middle of a cultural storm.” Perhaps, as viewers, we also try to right a wrong.

The makers of TV Christmas movies wisely trigger nostalgia in several ways. “We certainly have gone after a certain type of talent, in terms of recognizable faces we grew up with from ’80s and ’90s shows,” says Lifetime exec Hooper. Nostalgia serves us. A 2018 survey by Cigna reports that most adults are lonely — as in, the average score, on a scale from one to lonely, was at least lonely. Other studies have shown loneliness to be a major predictor of poor physical health, leading some researchers to declare loneliness both a health crisis and an epidemic.

Further, cohorts aged 18 to 22 and 23 to 37 reported more loneliness than older generations. “That’s new,“ Batcho says. A press representative for Hallmark identifies the network’s demographic as women 25 to 54, but says that during the fourth quarter – our holiday season – “our women and adults 18 to 34 are through the roof,” suggesting a potential link between loneliness and viewership. 

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WE ARE ALL JUST PAGANS BY A FIRE

Nostalgia TV has been booming for a few years now, and the seemingly endless reboots and remakes premiere all year long. So why this huge surge in viewers around Christmas? Even otherwise prestige-TV-obsessed viewers, who turn up their noses at predictable schmaltz, now indulge in made-for-TV Christmas movies. “I don’t know if the season causes it as much as the season gives you permission,” opines Oliver. “From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.”

“It’s something about the holidays that is just built in: indulgence. Drink the hot chocolate, eat the food, lay on the couch, enjoy your family,” says Hooper.

And when Batcho is asked why people insatiably consume this kind of content during the holidays, she says, “Winter represents nature dying and taking a pause. It makes you feel very sad and hoping to look forward to a rebirth in the spring, which tells us that it is very fundamental and natural for people to like cycles. Bears hibernate. Even human beings need to take a pause.”

In one way or another, they are all saying the same thing, which is that we watch Hallmark around Christmas for the same reason Christmas happens at Christmas: the solstice. In the 300s, when the church designated the holiday, it likely chose December 25th for a litany of savvy reasons: some political and some for convenience, some building off already established pagan rituals. “You could guess them even if you didn’t study the cultures,“ says Forbes. “If it’s a midwinter festival, it would be a festival of lights to push back the darkness. It would feature evergreens because they look alive when everything else has died. To get past the isolation of winter, you would have feasts. And you would have dancing, singing, and drinking.“

From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.

Part of why we’ve celebrated midwinter festivals since before recorded time is because, as Batcho said, we like cycles. They help us predict regular change: It’s cold and dark now, but abundant spring will come again, and we know it. They also help us deal with the constancy of change, with whatever on the carousel is new. “We can’t stop change. What do we do instead? Build cycles,” Batcho says. These cycles come in the form of temporal landmarks, which trigger nostalgia: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays … holiday movies. “We anchor ourselves. It is important for psychological well-being to have a sense that we are not out of control.”

The consistency of plot and its predictable ending therefore serve an important purpose: we need the films to be predictable because they are another icon of the midwinter festival. We see one and our brains not only know what to expect, but also what to do. If we seek this iconography now more than ever, then we must feel especially out of control.

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THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

It would be easy to attribute the popularity of these films to a kind of escapism resulting from the current division in our country, from the fear and hatred that many feel on both sides. But the rise of both Lifetime and Hallmark TV holiday movies started ramping up around 2012 (see graph). Perhaps the division in our country and the popularity of holiday films (and nostalgia programming in general) are effects of the same cause: an almost unfathomable acceleration of rates of cultural change.

In the 1980s, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller (he of Dymaxion House and Geodesic Dome fame) posited a theory known as the knowledge-doubling curve. This sort of stuff isn’t 100 percent measurable, but the basic idea is: The amount of information we know, as a species, doubled about every 1500 years back when we were cavemen, and every 100 years in the modern era, up until World War I, at which point, it started doubling at an ever increasing rate. In the ‘90s, Artificial Intelligence researchers estimated the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months. Today, varying estimates suggest that the amount of information in the world doubles every 10 to 13 months, and that, in our lifetimes, it could begin to double every 11 hours.

Change is coming at a furiously accelerating rate, providing us with greater and greater dominion. However, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, evolution did not equip us to handle this kind of rapidly increasing power. For millions of years, Genus Homo was positioned in the middle of the food chain. Only in the past 100,000 years did we jump to the top. “Humankind ascended … so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence.” Our genus, by contrast, stumbles along with far less than a majestic prowess: “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this overhasty jump.”

We need help adapting to cataclysmic change. Nostalgia provides aid, and so does story. Researchers discovered that character-driven narratives cause the brain to release oxytocin, which can enhance empathy, thereby motivating cooperation and leading us to trust strangers. The study, led by Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate University, also found that we continue to mimic the actions and feelings of characters after the story ends. If a protagonist accepts shifts in her life and finds optimism for the future, then so may we.

We know that loneliness is on the rise. We know that both nostalgia and story help us create and sustain relationships. And we know that more than 83 million of us are turning to nostalgic stories during the annual month when humans anchor themselves against change, all during a time in history when the pace of change threatens to destroy us. Maybe we’re obsessed with schmaltzy TV Christmas movies because humans understand, deep down, that the real savior, this season and every season, is each other. Come on, you knew this article would have a Hallmark ending.

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Jane Borden is a freelance culture writer based in Los Angeles.

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Editor: Katie Kosma

Fact checker: Sam Schulyer

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Longreads Best of 2018: Business Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business writing.

Max Abelson
A reporter on Wall Street for Bloomberg News, where his work often goes in Businessweek. His stories were included in Columbia University Press’ Best Business Writing anthologies in 2015 and 2013.

Sign Here to Lose Everything (Zeke Faux and Zach Mider, Bloomberg News and Businessweek)

Good investigative journalism can leave you with that curdled taste of outrage in your mouth, but only great journalism can introduce the world to a whole new kind of loan sharking. And it takes something really splendid to jump from a millionaire city marshal to a gangster named Jimmy Dimps, a Maltese Shih Tzu named Coco, a town called Canandaigua, a drug smuggler named Braun, actual piles of cash, bloody vomit, and 30,000 court cases. Faux and Mider’s work is the best I’ve ever read on predatory lending.

A Business With No End (Jenny Odell, The New York Times)

My favorite story on commerce of the year has more in common with the dreaminess of the nuclear sequences from Twin Peaks: The Return than the everyday stock charts on CNBC. In one sense it’s a story about absolutely nothing, if you consider that the news peg is basically some packages that started arriving at someone’s house one day. But it’s also a story about everything — Christianity, con artists, bookstores, the Internet, real estate, obsession, startups, copyrights, maps, and moisturizer. I was very sorry when it was over.

Read more…

Jack, Jacqueline — Dad

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Yvonne Conza | Longreads | December 2018 | 28 minutes (6,875 words)

 

Dad is dying. A cell phone ping alerts me to a terse, fracturing email from my father’s younger brother.

Your Father is in a Florida Hospice. My eyes freeze on the bold subject line as I’m having dinner with a friend at an East Village restaurant. The muffled music and clatter of cutlery become an inescapable tunnel of sound. Childhood memories torpedo my thoughts and conflict with the reality that Dad is close to passing away on the cusp of turning 79. Thirty years of not knowing where or how he lived vanish.

***

To most everyone, John Joseph Downes was Jack, but to a few he was Jacqueline, and to Mom, my three older siblings and me, called “Jackass” behind his back. Dad’s multiplex of enduring identities also include: door-to-door Encyclopedia Britannica salesman; entrepreneur selling jigs, molds, gauges and fixture parts to automotive plants through a business he built from scratch; and the owner of a successful home health care agency. A Buffalo Bills fan, he gave his season tickets to clients while he watched games at home eating cheese curds and pretzels. He was a seeker of public office, wearer of white button-down shirts with wife-beater tanks underneath, actual wife beater, sporadic psoriasis sufferer, excellent provider, entertainer, showoff, lover of culture and a Chivas Regal drinker who, as these wailing memories emerge, will not live two months more to celebrate his New Year’s Eve birthday.

For a few years, Dad donned a hearse-black, trapezoid-contoured toupee that our Russian Blue cat murderously stalked like a sly predator. When askew on Dad’s head, the cat didn’t tamper with the hairpiece. But once it was placed atop Mom’s dresser she pounced on it, battled with double-sided tape and amused all, even Dad, with her mischief. Stored in a cherry wood armoire and draped over a creepy female Styrofoam white mannequin wig stand was Dad’s more notable wig, a dolled up shoulder-length Jackie O. bouffant postiche with satiny strands looped into starched beach waves. Had he added oval, dark, smoke-tinted oversized sunglasses, the look would have been complete.

He had a proclivity towards cross-dressing, a marital joint venture since Mom slipped him into finery that hung inside a shared closet. Though their bedroom door was kept closed, the curtains weren’t pulled down, perhaps intentionally, to spark a pivotal conversation. As a child of 8, I was blindsided by intimate details that felt jarring and amiss. Whenever I put away his freshly laundered socks and t-shirts, I had to open the shuttered double doors of his dresser and be exposed to the cavernous storage area where timepieces and ties kept Jackie O’s foam head company.

When I was not much older, flickering flashes, not belonging to a swarm of fireflies, distracted me from Charlie’s Angels. Looking up to the wide-open windows of my parent’s second floor bedroom I saw Dad accessorized, demure and toying with puckered painted lips. Backlit and indefinably beautiful, he seemed more himself in a size 16 dress than in one of his polyester baby blue or pickle green leisure suits.

Once while snooping for Christmas presents, I discovered Polaroid portraits of Dad as Jackie stashed in a shabby shoebox on the top shelf of my parents’ bedroom closet. Clad in kitten heels, stockings and a conservative, zip-from-behind dress, he had been transformed into a chunky, rarified suggestion of Jacqueline Kennedy. When not embodying Jacqueline, he wore a suit, white shirt and tie, shaved, splashed on decadent amounts of Old Spice.  It was hard for him to keep a clean shave, 5 o’clock shadow always intruding. He bore a resemblance to Don Knotts, the billboard-sized forehead over his eyebrows, which I inherited, displaying struggle, though in a more generous light it beamed with determination. After stuffing pens in his pocket protector, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work he’d go — a tender, paunch bellied dwarf with pick and shovel who knew not to return home until a million diamonds shined, and his worth to his wife could be proven.

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Reckoning With Georgia’s Increasing Suppression of Asian American Voters

Getty / Associated Press / Flickr CC / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Anjali Enjeti | Longreads | December 2018 | 18 minutes (4620 words)

 

Early on November 6, Election Day, Kavi Vu noticed that some voters appeared distressed as they exited Lucky Shoals Park Recreation Center, one of five polling places in Gwinnett County, Georgia. A volunteer with the nonprofit, nonpartisan civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta (“Advancing Justice”), Vu had been standing outside to answer questions about voting and offer her services as a Vietnamese translator.

When she began asking the mostly African American, Asian American and Latinx voters about their voting experiences, she learned that after 2.5 hour wait times, many of them had voted via provisional ballots.

Why? As it turned out, Lucky Shoals was not their correct voting location. “A lot of people had lived in Gwinnett County their entire lives and voted at the same location and all of the sudden they were switched up to new location,” Vu said.

So when poll workers offered voters the option of voting at Lucky Shoals with provisional ballots, rather than driving elsewhere to wait in another line, the voters took them up on it. They left with I’m a Georgia Voter stickers, and printed instructions for how to cure their ballots. But poll workers didn’t verbally explain to the voters that they’d need to appear at the county registrar’s office within three days to cure their ballots, nor did the poll workers make it clear that the votes would not count at all if the voters failed to do so. What’s more, as the day wore on, poll workers ran out of the provisional ballot instructions altogether.

Vu was alarmed. In an attempt to reduce the number of voters using provisional ballots, she began offering to help voters locate their correct polling place using the Secretary of State website. That’s when poll workers repeatedly began confronting her about her presence outside of the polling place. “They told me to stop speaking with voters in line, even after I explained what I was doing.”

By mid-afternoon, Vu counted some 100 voters who had wrongly reported to Lucky Shoals. When she finally left eight hours after arriving, she was “heartbroken,” over the dreadful conditions at the polling place and the number of votes by minority voters that would likely never be counted.

Read more…

They Wanted Her Body

A family member shows pictures of slain fashion model Qandeel Baloch, July 22, 2016. Associated Press.

Rafia Zakaria | Longreads | December 2018 | 13 minutes (3,450 words)

It happened in July, amid the sweltering summer heat of the plains of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province. It was one of those days when sweat flows in streams, the beads of depleted moisture dripping down backs and armpits and foreheads as people walk and talk and complain about the heat as if it were a newcomer among them.

The murdered woman was Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani YouTube sensation, whose risqué videos, laden with erotic subtext, had so angered her brother that he strangled her to death. The deed was done late on the night of July 15th. It was late in the morning of the 16th when the first reporter from Pakistan’s rapacious 24-hour news media arrived in the neighborhood.

That journalist was Arif Nizami. After receiving an anonymous tip, he raced to the area and demanded of passersby that he be taken to the “Karachi Hotel.” “This is Karachi-Hotel,” some sympathetic soul finally told him, “the whole neighborhood is Karachi-Hotel.” The comic absurdity of this moment, while an apt metaphor for a country bewildered by looking at itself — especially in the new ways made possible by the internet, ways at which Qandeel Baloch excelled — is a contrast to the tragic scenes that were to follow, all painstakingly recreated in Pakistani journalist Sanam Maher’s book The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch. The book tells an extraordinary story: Qandeel Baloch’s internet fame was built almost entirely from suggestive innuendo-laden videos, shot and shared late at night when millions of Pakistani men go online in search of sexual satisfaction. Qandeel knew that this audience was out there, and in speaking directly to them she captured their erotic imagination.

Tragically for Qandeel Baloch, what Pakistani men love to love in private, they love to excoriate in public. Sexual fantasies, or the women who are part of them, must be shamed with the same ferocity with which their bodies are lusted after. It was this truth which led to Qandeel’s death that summer day, a grisly mix of rage and misogyny ending with her brother’s hands around her neck. In the hours after Arif Nizami arrived at the scene, a sweaty mob of media men crowded before the door of the house where Qandeel lay dead, her body already swollen from heat and decay as the temperature rose. The male gaze, lust-laden in life, had turned voyeuristic in death, the journalists, most of them men, clamoring and pushing and shoving to get a shot of her corpse. Read more…

Losing the Plot

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Sari Botton | Longreads | December 2018 | 23 minutes (5,667 words)

When I graduate from college in May of 1987, I receive a call from the Sephardic Brotherhood, an organization of which my father is a lifelong member. After congratulating me on this milestone, the man on the phone suggests I begin planning for another bigger one down the road: Would I like to be buried in their section of a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey? If I sign up now, I can lock into their special rate of just $90 per year.

I’m only 22 at the time, but I’ve just put myself through four years of college by working and scrimping and saving and worrying, and damn if I don’t recognize a bargain when I hear it — not to mention an opportunity to gain a sense of control over something. I mail off a check and then go about the business of hunting for my first real job in journalism; beginning my adult life while responsibly covering my bases for the end of it.

~

Two years later I marry for the first time, and the Sephardic Brotherhood calls again. Would I like to have my husband — he’s 25 — buried beside me?

“Hang on,” I say to the man on the other end. “Honey?? Do you want to be buried with me in the Sephardic part of a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey? It’s $90 a year.”

“I don’t know,” my husband shouts from another room in our small apartment. “Can we think about it?”

“I’ll get back to you,” I tell the man.

That weekend, at dinner with my in-laws, we inform them of the wonderful opportunity before us. “What?!” my mother-in-law shrieks. “But we’re already paying for plots for you — and your children — with the Shpitzernitzer* Society!”

(*In America from the late 19th to the early 20th Century, European Jewish immigrants formed hundreds of groups like the Shpitzernitzer Society and the Sephardic Brotherhood. Originally these societies served multiple purposes — helping members find jobs, learn English, and navigate immigration issues and assorted other legal matters. Many also became discount burial plot brokers.)

It’s news to us that our corpses and those of our theoretical future children are already spoken for, but we aren’t about to argue over it. On Monday I call the Brotherhood and cancel my burial plan. They issue a full refund.

~

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Hollywood and the New Female Grotesque

Lionsgate / Element Pictures / PalmStar Media

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2018 | 8 minutes (2,206 words)

The Favourite does not take its women at face value. Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist tragicomedy has Olivia Colman starring as Queen Anne, a crumbling presence plagued by illness and an infantile disposition, neither of which stop her from playing magical beds with her two favorites, right hand woman Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and scheming servant Abigail (Emma Stone). This is not the stuff of the male gaze, though a male is gazing: it is over the top, tilting-into-farce, Grand Guignol panto. In one scene, Colman’s doleful Anne, secluded in her bedroom, morosely sticks a fork into a banquet-sized blue cake, shoves it into her mouth, vomits into a vase (everyone vomits into vases in this film) and then, wet bits of blue staining her mouth, acid-sweet bile in ours, takes another mouthful of that same cake. It’s gloriously grotesque.

The other two actresses are burlesque in a different way. Weisz is dragged so determinedly across the screen by a well-meaning horse that her beauty is deformed into a fulvous pulp. As for Stone, those cartoon-sized eyes are almost beside the point, which is her mouth contorting into various exclamations. They are united by the fact that their muddy, beaten, twisted faces always return to an alluring resting state (scars notwithstanding). Since Hollywood continues to celebrate beautiful women for transforming into ugly women — see Nicole Kidman in Destroyer, Patricia Arquette in Escape at Dannemora, Margot Robbie in Mary Queen of Scots — these actresses can seduce us with their momentary lack of vanity while leaving us secure in the knowledge that they remain appealing.

But this year three actresses are cementing another tradition. Colman, Toni Collette in Hereditary, and Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me? are rewarded not for mutating, but for being, and not just for being, but expanding the “ugly” space in which they dwell to encroach on the sprawling establishment. This is something of a dual subversion: Not only do these women fail to meet Hollywood’s standards, they are lauded for pushing their undesirability to the extreme. It is the new female grotesque, and it supplants our idea of what a woman should be with what she is.

* * *

Five years ago, Colman was passed over by America. In 2013, Fox announced the network was developing a remake of Broadchurch, the British series in which Colman and David Tennant play detectives investigating a child murder in a small coastal town. While Tennant reprised his role in the U.S. version, Colman wasn’t even asked. She was instead replaced by Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn, six years older but also blonder and with a face that wouldn’t be out of place behind a Fox News desk. Colman reportedly said in response, “if Hollywood calls, I’m going, but I can also see why they haven’t called. I eat a bit too much, my teeth aren’t perfect, I’ve got eye bags. I look like a normal 39-year-old woman — but in England no one minds that.”

It says something about Colman that despite this blatant rejection, she leaned further into normalcy. The now-44-year-old actress put on another 35 pounds to play the imperious, mercurial Queen Anne. “I much prefer these sorts of roles because there is no pressure to be something you are not, and I am obviously not glamorous,” she told the Independent. “For Anne, I wasn’t meant to look nice or be nice, and it was liberating and brilliant.” That her approach is now being praised by the same system that initially punished her for it, suggests that England is no longer the only place where normal can not only be acceptable, but preferable.

Straining to think of farcical performances equivalent to Colman’s in The Favourite, I could only come up with this: “You’re terrible, Muriel.” In the Australian film that made her famous, 1994’s Muriel’s Wedding, Toni Collette played the homely titular anti-heroine in garish red lipstick, leopard print, and a side ponytail. In one scene, four of her friends, all of whom look like various Barbie collectibles, break up with her because she is “fat” and unstylish. “You bring us down, Muriel,” one of them says as Collette’s mouth slowly deforms into a grimace and she performs the nonpareil ugly cry: loud bawling, mouth open, teeth out, tongue out, lipstick smearing. “I’m not nothing,” she wails.

Her ascent was confirmation. The role won Collette a couple of awards and eventually landed her where she is today, in Hereditary, that same elastic face rewarded for its encapsulation of abject grief. In one scene, her son, sensing she is angry with him, asks that she release herself from her inner burden. And she does; after she yells wildly, we watch her searing hatred and anger slip into sadness, her face dragged down to hell.  As Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety, “She plays Annie as a woman who begins to wear her buried rage and guilt on the outside. It pours out of her, as if she were “possessed,” and indeed she is — but by what, or whom?” This spectacle of disfigurement helps to reframe the way in which women are allowed to express emotion, the preservation of allure  — “I don’t want to cry, my mascara will run” — shouted down into oblivion.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? yields a more quietly ugly performance. Melissa McCarthy plays serial forger Lee Israel as a dyspeptic alcoholic with a shapeless haircut, no makeup, and a perpetual frown — even her smile looks like a scowl. Though the Gilmore Girls alum is known for her jovial on-screen presence, her performance as Lee is a throwback to the role that made her famous, the oversexed, mannish Megan in Bridesmaids. There, she chewed the scenery. Here she just spreads out in it. “She cares about her intellect more than her appearance and doesn’t care about the things that we assign to women as what they’re supposed to be interested in,” director Marielle Heller has said of the character. In McCarthy’s hands, Lee is not particularly likable, but she is understandable. One wonders what she would have been in original star Julianne Moore’s — would the apartment riddled with cat shit have rung false?

Despite her toxicity, McCarthy’s Lee is not drawn asexual. She has a sweet flirtation with a woman who runs a bookstore (Dolly Wells), though her surprise at her interest and the fact that it never progresses past one date does paint her love life as unsuccessful. Still, we’ve come a long way since 1991, when Kathy Bates won the Oscar for best actress by playing a virginal psychopath in Misery. The pre-stan “number one fan” of novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan), her character, Annie Wilkes, is a milk-fed matron who turns on a dime, refuses to swear, and wears her hair in a clip paired with pinafores. Her ability to juggle G-rated phrases like “dirty birdy” with X-rated torture makes her one of the top villains of all time, though there remains a superficiality to her ferocity. When Misery moved to Broadway three years ago, Julia Roberts was considered for the lead, but, according to Lisa Rogak’s Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King, the author nixed the idea, describing Annie as simply “a brawny woman who can sling a guy around, not a pixie.” Still, Bates, who had been acting for decades, competed with Roberts and Pretty Woman for the best actress Oscar in 1991 — and won. “I’d like to thank the Academy,” she said, “I’ve been waiting a long time to say that.”

* * *

The same year Bates won for Misery, Whoopi Goldberg did for Ghost, heralding work by actresses of color which would in some ways be even more revolutionary. The only black woman nominated for best supporting actress that year, Goldberg took home the trophy for playing Oda Mae Brown, a snake-oil psychic who can actually commune with the dead. Though Goldberg was an established actress by that time and had already been nominated for an Oscar for The Color Purple, this was as rare a role for black women in general as it was for her. Instead of being straight drama or straight comedy, as Goldberg was used to, Oda Mae seamlessly threaded the absurd through the serious. Arriving 40 minutes in, she yanks Ghost out from under its beautiful white leads (“Wanna kiss my butt?”) with her voluminous hair, scene-stealing outfits, foul mouth, and resting wry face.

The quintessential Oda Mae moment comes when she is asked by ghost Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze) to withdraw $4 million of blood money from the bank. She arrives in her Sunday best looking like a fuchsia peacock, complete with jaunty pillbox hat and matching clutch (white gloves included). Buoyed by the prospect of becoming a millionairess, she motors out of the bank high on adrenalin only to be told by Sam that she has to pass on the money. He points out a church stand — “I know you don’t think I’m giving this $4 million to a bunch’a nuns!” — and she hands the money over in bad grace before walking off in a huff. Sam watches her go with a beatific expression on his face. “I think you’re wonderful Oda Mae,” he calls. At that she turns around, in the middle of a busy road, her legs almost in gridiron hut stance, and spits in his general direction. Then she harumphs away, holding her purse like a dejected football player cradling his loss.

There are two kinds of performances by black actresses that tend to be lauded by the Academy. Since Hattie McDaniel became the first black actor to win an Oscar in 1939 for Gone with the Wind, the preference has been for less Dorothy Dandridge-looking women in morally superior “Mammy” roles, such as Octavia Spencer’s turns in The Help and The Shape of Water. When black women are considered traditionally beautiful, they tend to be recognized by the Academy for being tortured, ravaged — Angela Bassett in What’s Love Got to Do With It, Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball, Lupita Nyong’o in 12 Years a Slave, Naomie Harris in Moonlight. It’s okay to be less appealing, as long as you’re a symbol of virtue or remain appealing out of costume. God help you if you’re a black woman who is deemed unattractive off screen and you have no redeeming qualities on screen either.

Mo’Nique became the rare exception in 2010 after playing the repellent abusive mother of the titular Precious. Having constructed her career on raunchy stand-up that had an enormous following in the black community (though, as the Netflix debacle suggests, that stature matters less to its white executives), Mo’Nique dropped her trademark hair and makeup to sweat through a camisole and snarl at Gabourey Sidibe. Despite her character’s almost unbelievable vileness, there was a palatability to the “poor black violent single mother” trope for a white audience (and Academy) more familiar with racial stereotypes than reality. But it didn’t come in a presentable package. Mo’Nique was too much — too loud, too assertive, too entitled. In the end her win was overshadowed by the frivolous controversy that ensued when she refused to campaign — “You want me to campaign for an award — and I say this with all the humility in the world — but you want me to campaign for an award that I didn’t ask for?” — which is why, seven years after her win, it made sense that she didn’t feel she owed much to Hollywood. “I think a big highlight for me was when they called me for the first time for the NAACP Image Awards,” she told Variety. “Because as a little girl, I didn’t see people like me receiving the Oscar.”

* * *

In her seminal 1994 book The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity, Mary Russo outlined the kind of women our culture embraces. “The classical body is transcendent and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical and sleek; it is identified with ‘high’ or official culture,” she wrote. “The grotesque body is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple and changing; it is identified with non-official “low” culture . . . and with social transformation.” But the transformation to the new female grotesque — that of the unacceptable woman pushing her unacceptability to its limits — is gaining traction. The conversation around gendered exploitation in Hollywood has helped to expand the definition of women’s roles. Lena Dunham, meanwhile, spent much of her ascent exposing her own body on screen to liberate those of regular women (as performance artist Carolee Schneeman once told me, “She’s the ideal of normal”). Women of color are also being recognized for their part in dismantling the white ideal. And the number of women behind the scenes has swelled. Toni Collette co-executive produced Hereditary, Marielle Heller directed Can You Ever Forgive Me? (which was co-written by Nicole Holofcener), and Deborah Davis co-executive produced and co-wrote The Favourite. Perhaps Davis is even responsible for The Favourite’s final scene in which Queen Anne, beset by stroke, barely able to walk, still manages to physically dominate Abigail, her hand on the younger, comelier woman’s head, possibly tearing Abigail’s hair out as she strokes the monarch’s leg. In Lady Sarah’s words: “Sometimes a lady likes to have some fun.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Bowie Knives, Concealed Rifles, and Caning Charles Sumner

South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks beating abolitionist Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the United States Senate chamber, 1856. Lithograph by J.L. Magee. Getty Archive.

Jason Phillips | an excerpt adapted from The Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future | Oxford University Press | 19 minutes (5,208 words)

 

Bowie knives first appeared in the early republic after civilians stopped wearing swords. A sign of aristocracy, swords went out of fashion after the American and French Revolutions, and even British gentlemen stopped wearing them. Social pressures encouraged men to replace swords with concealed weapons, and changes in clothing accommodated this shift by introducing more pockets in men’s coats and pants. Sword canes and percussion pistols offered more discreet forms of self-defense, but sword canes took time to unsheathe and were brittle, while pistols were inaccurate and unreliable. After the sword became socially taboo, none of the period’s other weapons replaced its usefulness in a melee.

Such fracases flourished on the southwestern frontier. Slavery was predicated on violence, and white men resorted to physical brutality to assert their authority over blacks, women, children, and each other. A code of honor encouraged men to duel and feud over misunderstandings and insults. Unsettled territories like the Old Southwest fostered fighting because they lacked local law enforcement and efficient courts. If lawmen existed, they often belonged to feuding clans. No wonder people literally took matters into their own hands. Read more…

As Beauty Does

Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap

Chaya Bhuvaneswar | Longreads | December 2018 | 13 minutes (3,169 words)

1.

The first time I was beautiful wasn’t until I was 18. “Beautiful.” A category I inhabited. It was a created condition, both objective and real. I remember the resolve, pain, doubt and certainty that preceded it, and then a day when it was effortless and the boys were coming up to me. Nearly every conversation, freshman year, was about how beautiful I was, how long I’d stay a virgin, whether I would ever date men who weren’t Indian, and on and on, boring as hell. Never revealing how much I enjoyed certain women. Never quite getting to my truth.

Beauty or truth, though. Hardly a contest. In beauty, I strutted through my young adult life. As long as my abs could be sucked in, I was indulged, allowed to dream. I could wave, dismissive, at the truth. “Your hands are so delicate,” said my first boyfriend, white. Then added, whispering, “You’re so delicate,” lifting me up so easily, in love with how light I was.

I was imprisoned by the safety of beauty, as much as by the refuge of his burly arms. I ran a set number of miles, panting with enjoyment but never giving up counting. Always, albeit with relief, I burned time stroking and measuring. Beauty was my protective shell, shielding me against overtly racist words, at least some of the time. There was still racism, I realized later, but of a different kind, constructing me into a Barbie-like peach-brown “passive Asian girl” — and then an uptight, nerdy bitch; anyone who came close got to understand that I wasn’t really passive. But there was safety, the privilege of which I didn’t believe was mine to lose. Till I lost it. Till I could longer fit into the category of “desired,” that I’d long desired. Till I didn’t fit into my favorite leggy jeans.
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