Search Results for: John Jeremiah Sullivan

For the last several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama One Tree Hill, which was on the WB and is now on the CW Network. Don’t let the off brands fool you, though; a surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It’s one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It’s bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my camp-receptor cells have died. Possibly One Tree Hill is a work of genius. Certainly it is about to go nine seasons, strongly suggesting that the mother of its creator, Mark Schwahn, did not give birth to any idiots, or if she did those people are Schwahn’s siblings. The One Tree character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking bone-thin blonde. Think coppery curls. I’d seen her on MTV right at the moment when I was first feeling too old to watch MTV. Superfriendly when we met her, superfriendly always.

“Peyton’s Place.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ

See more #longreads from John Jeremiah Sullivan

Too Much Information

Longreads Pick

When the generation-defining writer David Foster Wallace took his own life in 2008, he left behind an unfinished novel, “The Pale King,” that will either serve to round out his transcendent body of writing or place a haunting question mark at the end of his career. John Jeremiah Sullivan holes up with the new book and considers the legacy.

Source: GQ
Published: Mar 31, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,190 words)

Upon This Rock

Upon This Rock

The Final Comeback of Axl Rose

Longreads Pick

Four years after disappearing from public view, Axl Rose is back on the scene, looking like a wax figure of himself, absorbing the crushing blows of Tommy Hilfiger, biting the legs of security guards, and gyrating, shrieking, and storming off stages across the land. John Jeremiah Sullivan grapples with the ghosts of the greatest—or weirdest—frontman of all time.

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 1, 2006
Length: 35 minutes (8,911 words)