Search Results for: L.A.

The Believer Interview: Ice Cube

Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words)

 

The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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‘Music Is a Mirror of What We’re Going Through, Not the Cause of What We’re Going Through. It’s a Reaction, It’s Our Only Weapon, It’s Our Only Way to Protect Ourselves, It’s Our Only Way to Fit, It’s Our Only Way to Get There.’

Before rap music, New York might as well have been:

Paris


Africa


Australia


A thousand miles away from a thirteen-year-old Ice Cube

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Once upon a time, the name Ice Cube was analogous to explicit lyrics, guns, women as “bitches,” South Central, and attitude. Bad attitude. Not to mention mind-blowing rap music wrapped in raw emotions. But those were Ice Cube’s teen years, before he married Kimberly Jackson, became father to four kids, and turned into a true Hollywood player. A legend long before he turned thirty, Ice Cube, together with his fellow N.W.A. members, revolutionized not only the rap/ hiphop genre, but all music, by making it OK for musicians to speak their minds and then some.

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The Remnants of Maycomb: What Happened to Harper Lee’s Hometown

Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” but also the dismaying decline of the “small-town middle-class” idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There were — still are — remnants of Depression-era Monroeville, not least the old Federal-style courthouse. But even as the film came out, a drab new courthouse was being built next door. Downtown’s only movie theater burned down not long after Mockingbird had its first run, and was never rebuilt. In 1997, the city was dubbed “The Literary Capital of Alabama,” prompting Lee, who wasn’t consulted on the nickname, to remark, “The literary capital of Alabama doesn’t read.”

Harper Lee’s assisted-living apartment is on Highway Bypass 21, just a couple of blocks from the town’s real commercial center, a series of malls. There’s a place called Radley’s Fountain Grill down that way, and an old stone wall that once separated Lee’s childhood home from Capote’s — both long gone, replaced by a takeout shack called Mel’s Dairy Dream. Lee prefers the more generic places by the lingerie factory outlet (a remnant of the old Vanity Fair plant). Before her stroke, she could be found at Hardee’s, or better yet at McDonald’s, gulping down coffee during long chats with friends. (There were higher-end expeditions to the local golf club and to casinos on the Gulf coast.) When she watched an advance screening of the biopic Capote at a neighbor’s house — the Lees had no television — she opted for Burger King.

Boris Kachka for Vulturewriting about Harper Lee and her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

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Photo of the Monroe County Heritage Museum

The Pun-derful World of Competitive Punning

In L.A. Weekly, Zachary Pincus-Roth profiles 38-year-old Ben Ziek, a world pun champion titleholder:

In the first round, Ziek faces Adam Bass, a writer for Groupon in Chicago. For Bass’ whole life, he says, whenever he hears a word like scarf, he thinks immediately of both neckwear and voracious eating: “People say, ‘You were born to do this.'”

His dad, Mike Bass, took him to the Pun-Off as a 30th-birthday present. The former sports editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press used to pun — but when his sons started doing it, he realized its effect. “My head would be spinning and I’d go, enough was enough,” he says. “I had to stop. I had to be the adult.”

The category is “art and artists,” and Bass’ college art classes come in handy. “I gotta get out of here, I have a Weegee,” referencing the famous photographer as he reaches back toward his underwear. But Ziek is always quick to respond — “I’m excited for this competition. That’s why I Rodin to town early” — and eventually outlasts him.

Bass is satisfied. “It’s like that boxer who wants to go five to 10 minutes with the heavyweight champion,” he says.

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Photo: Meme Binge

The $100 Billion Antioxidant Market, and Why You're Having Fish for Dinner

Health food trends continue to grow because they are a cash cow. It’s estimated that the global antioxidant market will generate nearly $100 billion in a few years, even though most of us have no idea what an antioxidant is, and their long-term benefits are far from certain. But that doesn’t stop the California Walnut Board, the pomegranate hucksters at POM and assorted vendors of sugar drinks (from Vitamin Water to 7-Up) from proudly slapping “antioxidant” on their packaging and ads, while subtly pushing the narrative that it might possibly be the cure for cancer.

On my last night in Los Angeles, my wife and I offered to cook dinner for our friend Josh, whom we were staying with. “That would be wonderful,” he said, but the meal could have no meat, dairy, eggs, white grains, sugar or salt. “Fish is great, though,” he added, as though we had another option. There was no dessert.

David Sax in the Los Angeles Times, on the futility of health food crazes.

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More from the L.A. Times

Escape from Cuba: Yasiel Puig’s Untold Journey to the Dodgers

Longreads Pick

The story of how L.A. Dodgers star Yasiel Puig defected from Cuba to come to the U.S. to play baseball:

Given the riches that await in el exterior, it is remarkable not that so many Cuban athletes leave but that so many more stay. Nobody needs to remind them that the decision to flee is irrevocable, a one-way journey from privation to overload. “You’re afraid to leave your family, you’re afraid that maybe you won’t triumph, you’re afraid of…I don’t know, it’s just a very difficult step,” rookie infielder and Cuban defector Alexander Guerrero, in the first year of a $28 million deal, told me at the Dodgers’ spring training camp in Arizona. It took Guerrero years to build up the gumption to flee, then three attempts to succeed. “Once you board one of those boats,” he added, “you don’t know who is who and how those people are going to react, or what’s going to happen out in the sea.”

An elaborate underground of couriers and bagmen is forever shadowing Cuba’s best ballplayers. So is a state-sponsored network of secret police and paid informants. When you are being lured and monitored at every turn, caught between ambition and duty, survival sometimes means playing both sides.

Author: Jesse Katz
Published: Apr 13, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,227 words)

The Business of Books: A Reading List

1. At the small publishing company where I work, the pace these past few months has been chaotic. We send representatives to book festivals in L.A., Tucson, Philadelphia, the D.C. suburbs and New York City. We didn’t get to AWP in Seattle, though, so I was delighted by David W. Brown’s write-up for The Atlantic, “11,800 People Sharing in the Existential Agony of Writing.”

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The Hugo Problem

Longreads Pick

Hugo Schwyzer was considered “L.A.’s most prominent male feminist” until his bad behavior exposed him as a hypocrite:

During one student lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., in April 1997, he says he had sex with four coeds, three of them at the same time. This was a period when he was also drinking heavily, abusing cocaine and prescription drugs, and swept up in a stormy relationship with a woman in her twenties.

In 1998, Schwyzer, now divorced from his second wife, would see his destructive behavior catch up with him. After a drug and alcohol binge, he landed in the hospital. He went into rehab and got sober and, he says, initiated discussions with Pasadena City College officials about his past philandering with students. As part of his amends to PCC, he wrote the college’s first policy governing sexual relations between faculty and students, and then returned to the classroom. Schwyzer began carefully building a new story for himself, one that came to be known, mockingly, by his online feminist critics as “Hugo’s redemption narrative.”

Author: Mona Gable
Published: Mar 26, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,479 words)

What Hillary Wants

Longreads Pick

An in-depth 1992 profile of Hillary Clinton offers a fascinating snapshot of the pre-White House Clintons:

The president is one of Hillary’s favorite targets, and she pillories him mercilessly in her speeches. “When it’s all stripped away,” she told the L.A. crowd, “at bottom what we see is a failure of leadership, rooted in a very hollow sense of what politics is and can be.” As one listener put it, “She’s unbelievably articulate and connects with her audience with a message that hits home.” Then she joined the buzz heard all over the room: “You can’t help but think, Why isn’t she the candidate?”

She almost was. Two years ago, when Bill Clinton considered forgoing his fifth gubernatorial contest in order to build an early base for his lifelong presidential ambitions, Hillary called up a friend and former newspaper publisher in the state, Dorothy Stuck, and asked, “What would happen if I ran for governor?”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: May 1, 1992
Length: 44 minutes (11,174 words)

Bad Cops

Longreads Pick

Rafael Perez’s testimony on police misconduct ignited the biggest scandal in the history of the L.A.P.D. But was it the real story?

Eventually, Perez implicated about seventy officers in wrongdoing, and the questions he raised about police procedure cast the city’s criminal-justice system into a state of tumult. More than a hundred convictions were thrown out, and thousands more are still being investigated. The city attorney’s office estimated the potential cost of settling civil suits touched off by the Rampart scandal at a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. A city councilman, Joel Wachs, said that it “may well be the worst man-made disaster this city has ever faced.” The Rampart scandal finally broke the L.A.P.D. in a way that even the Rodney King beating, in 1991, and its bloody aftermath had not, forcing the city to accept a federal role in overseeing the police department’s operation. Yet in the view of the lead investigator, Detective Brian Tyndall, members of the task-force team investigating Rampart have come to believe that Rafael Perez is not just a rogue cop who had decided to come clean but a brilliant manipulator who may have misdirected their inquiry. “He’s a convict,” Tyndall says. “He’s a perjurer. He’s a dope dealer. So we don’t believe a word he says.”

Source: New Yorker
Published: May 21, 2001
Length: 51 minutes (12,821 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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