Search Results for: L.A.

Took You By Surprise: John and Paul’s Lost Reunion

Illustration by Homestead

David Gambacorta | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (5,128 words)

The sun was beginning to set over a mostly deserted expanse of beach in Malibu, casting long shadows behind a pair of visitors as they strolled a few feet from the water’s edge. They had the innocuous, no-particular-place-to-go demeanor of average beachgoers, except for the fact that their every step was being recorded by a local news cameraman. One was a guy who was intimately familiar with being filmed, photographed, analyzed, idolized, ridiculed, and praised: John Lennon. Read more…

The Rise and Fall of the Bank Robbery Capital of the World

Longreads Pick

In 1992, there were 2,641 bank robberies in Los Angeles — “one every 45 minutes of each banking day.” How did L.A. become the epicenter of the heist? Thanks to the dangerous combination of cars, convenience, and cocaine.

Source: CrimeReads
Published: Jun 11, 2019
Length: 20 minutes (5,164 words)

It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)

 

Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.

Read more…

Lumbersexuality, a Sport and a Pastime

Illustration by Homestead

Jonny Diamond | LongreadsJune 2019 | 22 minutes (5,308 words)

The sound is the first thing you notice, deep and hollow, burnished steel hitting chewed-up white pine. It’s not quite the warm, resonant thok of an axe in the woods, but the nearest forest of any significance is 50 miles up the Hudson River. This is Brooklyn, one very long bow shot from the Gowanus Canal.

It’s a chilly Monday night before Thanksgiving and Kick Axe Brooklyn is surprisingly full. Around two dozen people cluster in groups of six or eight across several “ranges,” tidily built versions of the old roadhouse bar-band cages, target at one end, party at the other. There doesn’t appear to be any flannel in the crowd (for now) but there are at least three reasonably grown-out beards in plain sight. One of the beards puts his beer down next to a basket of plastic Viking helmets and walks forward to pick up an axe from a squat round block of maple (each range has one of these blocks, to which the axe is returned after it is declawed from the wood).

Nobody pays much attention as he squares himself to the softwood target 16 feet away, holding the axe — specifically, an Estwing hatchet weighing about a pound and a half — with both hands and raises it above his head. Then, in a surprisingly fluid motion, he steps toward a faded red line on the floor and releases the hatchet in the direction of several concentric red and black circles painted on the wood, axe head over handle, where it strikes fast about six inches to the left of the bull’s-eye. He shakes his head, pulls the axe from the wood, and goes to collect his beer.

Scenes like this occur with increasing frequency in cities across North America, from Toronto to Austin to L.A., as axe-throwing clubs attempt to create their own niche and fill it, something like a laidback millennial bowling alley except with deadly weapons. For some, particularly since the election of Donald Trump, the physicality and latent violence of axe throwing has served a therapeutic purpose. As Megan Stielstra wrote in an essay last year for The Believer, “I threw axes throughout the fall, waking up every morning to new impossible cruelties. … I kept trying to pass the axe to my husband, but he wouldn’t take it. ‘You need it more than I do,’ he said from behind the yellow spectator line.”

Aside from its salubrious value the basic appeal of axe throwing is not complicated: Like bowling or billiards or darts, it is a way to give loose structure to any given social gathering. When I ask Kick Axe’s Nathan Oerstler if he’s ever had to deal with any drama among the beer-drinking axe throwers, the recently promoted “axe master” (up from “axe-pert” — there is no pun left unmade at Kick Axe, as the name might suggest) demurs, explaining that most of the axe-perts are comedians or actors — theater types — and serve as much as entertainers as they do instructors or referees: in short, they keep the people happy. Kick Axe opened in December 2017 and is more flannel-inflected theme park than bar, its employees communicating via headset about what targets need replacing, which axes need sharpening. This level of organization makes sense when you consider the hundreds of pounds of deadly steel flying through the air at any given moment, but axe throwing wasn’t always this professionalized: In fact, the origin of the axe-throwing social club is basically a bunch of bored Canadians in the mid aughts, standing around drinking beer and chucking hatchets at backyard waste wood.

As Backyard Axe Throwing League (BATL) founder — and one of those bored Canadians — Matt Wilson recounted, people kept showing up to throw axes in his backyard, so he had no choice but to grow. And so they did: The BATL, which has 10 locations in Canada, has since expanded into the U.S. with spots in Chicago, Nashville, Scottsdale, Houston, and Detroit. This unlikely success story has spawned competitors: Ontario’s Bad Axe now has 15 locations across the U.S.; the aforementioned Kick Axe also has locations in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and is opening more in Florida and Texas; and there are at least a half dozen independent axe-throwing venues across the country (including Massachusetts’s Half Axe, whose name heralds the end of the useful axe pun, or at least demarcates its nadir).

Whatever side of the border these clubs are on, most of them affect a shaggy, woodsy aesthetic, a little plaid here, some taxidermied animal there. One could say the same thing of many of their patrons, from Calgary to Orlando: red-and-black Buffalo check accenting high-cut oxblood Red Wings; gray chambray tucked into vintage denim; Carhartt jackets over Carhartt vests over old Woolworth’s shirts.

Most of the axe-perts are comedians or actors — theater types — and serve as much as entertainers as they do instructors or referees: in short, they keep the people happy.

This aesthetic — lumbersexual, which entered the mainstream vernacular in 2014, at a site called GearJunkie, and was just as quickly derided on Gawker and in The Atlantic — is certainly not limited to axe-throwing clubs (one could make the case that axe throwing as a pastime has arisen, inevitably, from the aesthetic). But as a loose set of fashion signifiers, lumbersexuality has been around in some form or another for a generation, competing with any number of the self-consciously vintage looks manifested in hipster culture.

As with so many of the aesthetic strands that make up any given tangle of contemporary style-consciousness, lumbersexuality’s origins can be found on the margins, one more example of straight culture borrowing heavily from gay culture, with half the commitment and none of the risk. Beards and bears and woodsy scruff have now fully entered the mainstream as the contemporary lumbersexual reappropriates the same tropes of classic American masculinity so long adopted and amplified in LGBTQ spaces. But even the original tropes themselves — of paternal strength and rugged stoicism — are products of male fragility.

As Willa Brown points out in the perfectly titled article “Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents,” the endless talk in the past decade of a crisis of masculinity is part of a long tradition in the patriarchal American imagination. In Brown’s oft-cited 2014 account for The Atlantic, the nostalgia-ridden aesthetic of the lumberjack has always been an outsize performance instigated by the insecurities of straight, white men, be it 1905 or 2005. But where Brown saw an imminent expiration date for the lumbersexual, it doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.

As traditional hierarchies very slowly flatten into a more equitable distribution of power across society, the current crisis of masculinity is finding extended life in the backwaters of the internet. And while the real crisis of masculinity is male violence against women, the proliferation of pseudo-intellectual charlatans simultaneously seeding and harvesting the anxieties of young men for their own uses isn’t helping.

Male fragility isn’t going away. Nor is the flannel. Because there’s another performance happening here: different stage, same costume.

***

Back-to-the-land nostalgia has existed in the United States for almost as long as there’s been a United States, at various points manifesting as religious isolationism (think saucer-eyed Protestant sects one valley over), transcendentalist escapism (rich white guys reading poetry in the gloaming), and communitarian anti-capitalism. Its latest incarnation — rooted chiefly in an environmentalism that gestures at change through practice rather than policy — has been about bringing the virtues of the land back to the city, reimagining the frontier as urban rather than rural: a bespoke localism that animates everything from figurative fireside hobbies like pickling and needlepoint to larger-scale industry like rooftop farming, craft-brewing, and restorative, salvage-based building.

But in the same way the “frontier” of the 18th and 19th centuries was a romantic way of describing a slow genocidal war of settler colonialism, so too did gentrification’s border zones, through the mid 1980s to the late 2000s, serve as locations of displacement much more so than the idealized renewal imagined by urban planners. From its early days, gentrification was similarly romanticized with the language of westward expansion, those in its vanguard heralded as “settlers” and “urban pioneers.”

For good or for ill, these “pioneers” — comprised largely of artists in search of an affordable life in the city, abetted by canny real estate speculators — wore the mantle proudly as they built out semi-legal living spaces in (often but not always) sparsely populated post-industrial neighborhoods, sometimes squatting entire buildings. They were essentially homesteading — stealing power from the grid rather than rendering tallow, jury-rigging plumbing instead of digging wells — leading precarious DIY lives based on many of the virtues of the old frontier: resilience, independence, ingenuity, competence.

There was among this early, punk-inflected group of gentrifiers — buried under layers of rebellion and irony — a quiet reverence for working-class utility, often expressed in an aesthetic straight from their stepfathers’ closets: old beat-up boots, blue short-sleeve work shirts (bonus points for actual name tags), paint-spattered coveralls, and … flannel.

This commodification of rural life and labor feels, at best, like a post-industrial Instagram fantasy, personal branding available a la carte or by kit.

Much ink has been spilled on the mass-cultural half-life of flannel, but it wasn’t until the Seattle grunge scene exploded into the mainstream in the early 1990s — with a look that had begun with bands like Minutemen and Minor Threat a decade earlier — that flannel would achieve its high fashion ascendancy, showing up in collections by designers like Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood and never really going away. The aesthetic and political interplay of these subcultures — gay, punk, DIY — would continue through the early 2000s as a youth culture raised on environmental angst looked further into the past for alternatives to the increasingly apparent cruelties of late capitalism, withdrawing to a kind of privileged moral quiet room in the handmade, the local, the slow.

Here then was a hardworking, readymade look, an identifying aesthetic with a notional connection to virtues of self-sufficiency, sustainability, the wild, and, if not out-and-out Luddism, at least an appreciation of analog competence.

But what happens when the performance overtakes the performer, when the flannel habit intensifies from urban axe throwing to rural woodcraft? What happens, in other words, when you finally buy an axe?

Well, it depends on the axe — and the performer, for that matter. If you’re Justin Timberlake, in his Man of the Woods era, the axe in question comes with a private Montana “ranch.” Timberlake, who grew up in suburban Memphis, has lately been performing a return to nature, (nature in this case being the exclusive 15,200-acre Yellowstone Club, a 21st-century millionaire land rush catering to those who want the gated community without having to see the gates). The streamable georgics resulting from this relocation — manifested as the 16 tracks on his February 2018 album, Man of the Woods — reveal little of Timberlake’s relationship to the actual woods (or mountains or fields or wilderness) and present more like a checklist of urban-versus-rural cliché, the kind you might find in the playbook of any halfway decent political operative aiming to divide and conquer. Here are some lyrics from the album’s seventh track, “Supplies”:

’Cause I’ll be the light when you can’t see

I’ll be the wood when you need heat

I’ll be the generator, turn me on when you need electricity

Some shit start to go down, I’ll be the one with the level head

The world could end now, baby, we’ll be living in The Walking Dead

Translation: My hard-won know-how (money) will save us when the poors run out of stuff. (Also, a cavil, but one doesn’t “turn on” a generator like a lamp, one starts it like a lawnmower … and “start me up” would have worked here!) In track 11, titled, naturally, “Flannel,” he sings:

Right behind my left pocket

That is where you’ll feel my soul

It’s been with me many winters

It will keep you warm

Ooh, here’s my flannel

The character’s in the way you wear it

Translation: I wear grandpa shirts and grandpas are good guys. Then, on track 14, “Living Off the Land,” we hear that:

You have to be comfortable with yourself

because that’s all there is

There’s you and nature

Soon as you think you got it all figured out, you know,

the wilderness will figure some way to teach you a lesson

As I’m alone in the forest, I’m one with my surroundings

and there’s a lot of peace in that solitude

I’ll be a mountain man ’til the day I die

 

(Living off the land)

And I break my back

And I work all night

[. . .] I’ll be damned, sometimes it’s hard,

the backed-up bills on the credit cards

Translation: One time I got a little lost on the way to Bill Gates’s cookout. It was tough. And these are the more thematically substantial tracks!

One might find more insight into how the Big West has rubbed off on the Big Pop Star with a quick look at the wilderness-adjacent merchandise from the Man of the Woods Collection, one item for each of the album’s tracks. These include nods to practical Americana like a wool Pendleton blanket, a tin of beard butter, and a trucker vest; objects from the collection that correspond to the tracks above are:

Track 7: A strongbox

Track 11: A flannel shirt, obviously

Track 14: A Best Made Co. felling axe, with custom-painted handle

These items, along with a cooler, a jean jacket, a bandanna, and more, were all available for sale at a Lower East Side pop-up shop the week the album was released, a kind of company store for Timberlake Inc.

As brother to a trucker and an actual lumberjack, it is hard for me to fully understand totems of daily labor so dramatically upsold to “influencers” under the banner of authenticity. But as obvious a target Timberlake is for derision, he’s more of a symptom than he is a cause, one more in a long line of mythologized white men, from Paul Bunyan to John Wayne, out there taming the wild as they tame themselves (but not too much), spokesmodels in the endless ad campaign for America that began with Horace Greeley telling us to go west and live off the land.

And that’s the dream we’re still being peddled, embodied by the upsold axe. That the axe in question is hanging on the wall of a pop-up store in downtown New York creates a particular kind of dissonance: Timberlake Inc. is almost too perfect a microcosm for the stylized repackaging of the outdoors, for the yearning after a frontier that never really existed and the rural “working-class” sensibilities that accompany it. This commodification of rural life and labor — its ruggedness, its whiteness — feels, at best, like a post-industrial Instagram fantasy, personal branding available a la carte or by kit; at worst, it perpetuates pernicious stereotypes, both racist and classist, about natural purity and rural misery, a paradox in service of the powerful.

As brother to a trucker and an actual lumberjack, it is hard for me to fully understand totems of daily labor so dramatically upsold to ‘influencers’ under the banner of authenticity.

But life adjacent to wild spaces — and the work that sustains it — can be good, regardless of your politics. The braiding of masculinity and wilderness is as old as the American frontier, but it’s worth considering how we might untangle the two, worth considering how we might live with the forest world — and all it has to offer us — without destroying it.

***

But maybe you’re not a rich, world famous pop star with a flannel fetish (if you’ve read this far, it’s likely you are not). Sure, axe throwing seems like a fun thing to try, but lately you’ve been spending more time upstate (whatever state that might be) car camping, or staying with friends who’ve left the city; there are campfires, fireplaces, wood to be chopped, logs to split. You are thinking of buying an axe of your own.

Where to start?

There are three basic types of axes you might acquire: a hatchet, for light camp use limbing branches and making kindling (12 to 18 inches long, around 1.5 pounds); an all-purpose camp axe for clearing saplings and light splitting (20 to 28 inches, around 2.5 pounds); a felling axe for chopping down trees (30+ inches, between 3 and 4.5 pounds). Within each of these basic categories there are dozens of varieties, based largely on the regions from which they originate: the Allagash Cruiser, the Hudson Bay Camp Axe, the Dayton Railsplitter, etc.

Whatever you’ve chosen, the first thing you’ll notice is the weight: a multipurpose Swedish forester’s axe — weighing three pounds — is a manageable tool, useful on smaller trees and for light splitting. You’ll probably pick it up by the end of its American-hickory handle using your dominant hand. If you’re lucky, it comes to you as an already well-used and well-loved tool, the wood worn to a tacky smoothness by years of sweat and sap and the occasional reapplication of linseed oil. It will feel heavier than three pounds should.

Next, you’ll probably hoist the heavy end up into the other hand, striking a slightly awkward pose halfway between lumberjack and serial killer.

Perhaps the light will catch the burnished cheek of the blade, and you’ll reach a tentative finger to the hardened edge, which, if properly sharpened, can dry-shave the hairs from your arm. You’ll continue to feel that weight, three pounds starting to feel like 30, and you’ll begin to wonder: What can I chop with this? The axe is one of the oldest tools we have, designed, essentially, by gravity (which does most of the work anyway) — when you pick it up, you’ll want to let it fall.

Let’s say you’re in the woods — on a weekend camping trip or at a friend’s woodsy cabin — so there’s a lot it could fall on. For a first swing, a nice, newly down log is good for practice — in a wild forest, there should be plenty of recently downed deadfall not yet rotten.

You stand square to the log — imagine it as Eastern red cedar, for its intense scent and lurid scarlet heartwood — and raise high the axe. The weight will do the rest. If the swing is true, there will resonate from the tree — through still-growing sapwood to the compressed cells of the dying core — a deeply satisfying, percussive boom, scattering birds and startling deer. The first swing invites another, and then another, until a deep ringing rhythm echoes through the forest. It’s hard work, but in its repetition it is meditative.

That sound, of axe on wood, calls back to a hundred generations of humankind, invites considerations of how our ancestors might have understood their place in a world covered by forest. Sitting there, axe across knees, taking a breather, it’s not so hard to imagine them.

Shaggy Briton woodsmen in the vast pre-Roman forests of Cumbria, gripping their sacred Langdale axes, with glimmering heads knapped from the rare volcanic greenstone mined from the Pike of Stickle.

A barefoot Japanese carpenter moving gingerly across a hinoki cypress swinging his heavy, long-handled masakari, leaving palm-size chips of wood as a massive six-by-six beam reveals itself from the 16-foot log.

A pair of Basque foresters, generations ahead of the chainsaw, laboring astride two great beech trees pulled from deep within the Irati Forest, locked in a traditional aizkolaritza, a village-wide test of strength, precision, and endurance to see who might hew the finest, fastest timber.

Tireless Henderson Islanders squaring off Pacific rosewood, adzes made from giant clamshells, chewing out chocolate shavings from the dark heartwood. 

A thousand miles and a thousand years separate these moments of labor, and at the heart of each, the same basic motion: Pick up the heavy thing and let it fall; let the weight do the work, or at least half of it.

This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence; it lets us measure our labor swing by swing, as we gather fuel for heat or timber for shelter. To look at a stand of trees, axe in hand rather than chainsaw, is to understand it not as a resource for the coming weeks or months, but for subsequent years and generations. And though the axe confers an intoxicating dominion, over woodlot and wood target both, it is a tool that invites a way of seeing that is very old indeed. The various eras of human prehistory seem named for dynastic families from alien worlds — the Mousterian, the Denisova, the Aurignacian. It is the Acheulean in which early stone hand tools begin to flourish, particularly what is now referred to by paleoanthropologists as the “hand-axe.”

The Acheulean “hand-axe” is not an axe in the modern sense; really, it’s just a big rock with two chipped-off edges, bits of flint “knapped” away to create a biface the better to dig or cut with, to remove bark from a tree or, even, to fell that tree by hand. Perhaps, also, the better to kill with, human history providing no shortage of reminders that any distinction between tool and weapon derives from delusions of civilization. 

The finer specimens of these hand-axes, unearthed across Europe and Africa, from the Fells of Cumbria to the river gorges of the Olduvai Valley, have the shape of great and heavy tears. For centuries, British farmers, turning one up with plough or spade, thought of them as thunderstones, specially formed rocks either dropped from the heart of terrible storms, or seeded deep beneath the earth by lightning strikes, gifts of creation, that man might make better dominion of a world made just for him. 

Hand-axes represent the evolution of a very basic technology, and one can imagine that moment when the blunt rock was discarded for the edged rock, followed quickly by the thought, in not so many words: “What if I made this even sharper?”

And so these rough-hewn stones-as-tools, ranging in size from an iPhone to a toaster, underwent refinement over scores of generations — and with that refinement toward balance and symmetry, they began to take on value, both material and spiritual. Hand-axes, their abundance and quality, became a symbol of wealth, a currency; and those created from rarer elements (the deeper in the earth the better) were revered as religious symbols, not to be used as tools, but rather thought of as we now think of art. As French paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan puts it, in contemplating the unlikely craftsmanship of such early humans:

It seems difficult to admit that these beings did not experience a certain aesthetic satisfaction, they were excellent craftsmen who knew how to choose their material, repair defects, orient cracks with total precision, drawing out a form from a crude flint core that corresponded exactly to their desire. Their work was not automatic or guided by a series of actions in strict order, they were able to mobilize in each moment reflection and, of course, the pleasure of creating a beautiful object.

Though Gourhan is writing about human beings 10,000 years ago, he could be describing a certain strain of contemporary axe maker, for whom an axe is just as at home on a pristine West Village gallery wall as it is in the back of a woodshed.

About a decade ago, Peter Buchanan-Smith, a Canadian designer living in New York City, found himself in need of a hatchet to make some kindling. Looking to grill a choice cut of meat over a hot, wood-fueled fire, Buchanan-Smith found himself unimpressed by the cheap, poorly made imports at nearby hardware stores (dull edges, synthetic handles), so he expanded his search for a better, American-made tool.

The story might have ended there, but shortly after Buchanan-Smith finally did get his hands on a decent axe, he decided to customize the handle in colorful stripes: and just like that, the Best Made Co. was born. (Buchanan-Smith declined to talk to me for this story and is, I’m told, transitioning away from the company.)

Things happened quickly from there. Buchanan-Smith, who’d won a Grammy for his art for a Wilco album cover and who’d done design work for Isaac Mizrahi and David Byrne, was well known among New York’s art and design community, and very soon after the first axe was painted, it was hanging on the wall of Partners + Spade in Manhattan. That was in May 2009; a month later, in anticipation of Father’s Day, the fledgling brand sold out its stock (100 axes) in an hour.

The past decade has been a good one for Best Made Co. with the opening of a flagship store in lower Manhattan, followed by a 2,700-square-foot showroom in L.A.; and on top of their apparent domination of the bespoke axe market, the company has gone all in with a full line of forest-forward gear and apparel. So, if anyone has a full view of the aesthetic arc of lumbersexuality, it’s Buchanan-Smith, who’s described his ideal customer as “Alaskan Charles Eames (rather than Brooklyn Grizzly Adams).” And while someone who relies on tools but also likes good design is certainly cooler than dresses up like someone who relies on tools, it helps that the former usually has a little more money to spend than the latter.

One might wonder how great the difference could be possibly be from one axe to the next, but it only takes an afternoon at the wood pile to appreciate good steel as opposed to bad: the former holds its shape longer, has a stronger edge, stays sharper, and is less prone to chipping or breaking, all of which makes for a safer, more efficient axe. It is taken for gospel — at least on the internet of old guys and their tools — that the older the axe, the better the steel.

You are thinking of buying an axe of your own. Where to start?

If you’re looking, it’s not hard to find someone in just about every rural county in the country with a grinding wheel, a set of files, and a strop, who will take your grandfather’s axe and return it to its former glory. And for every one of those guys there are a hundred others hanging out in online forums asking one another the best way to rebevel the edge on a timber-hewing broadaxe or how to de-pit the cheek of a 100-year-old New Jersey pattern felling axe. (To its credit, Best Made’s L.A. store has a counter devoted to restoring and refurbishing old tools, from cast-iron pans to axes.)

Navigating sites like BladeForums.com and TalkBlade.info, a theme begins to emerge: New, mass-produced things are bad; old, handcrafted things are good. And while there’s an awful lot of grumpy conservatism burbling through these forums, spiked with a mild dose of over-the-counter libertarianism, if you squint past the bumper-sticker usernames and shallow isolationism, the underlying politics run parallel to much of the contemporary green movement, from the embrace of all things local to a rejection of late-capitalist disposability. Granted, from the conservative direction these politics are rooted in a nostalgia that veers into apocalyptic nativism, but it is bewildering to see how similar in outlook — when it comes to craftsmanship, consumerism, conservation — so many people are who otherwise identify with different ends of the political spectrum.

***

Politics doesn’t come up much at my return visit to Kick Axe for the opening of spring league night — it’s likely that the ideological spectrum here is similar to any Brooklyn bar on a Monday evening, which is to say not as liberal as Twitter would have you believe. I sit back and watch 76 amateur axe throwers crowd around league master Anthony Oglesby, who stands upon a stump introducing new rules and reminding competitors of the old, part carnival barker, part vice principal.

There is more flannel in this crowd than the last time I was here, more self-conscious woodsiness expressed through beards and boots, so I’m not exactly sure where Melanie Serrapica fits in. In her late 20s, Serrapica is wearing a semiformal low-cut red dress, and if it weren’t for the custom-painted hatchet she holds lightly in her right hand, its handle a gradient from lustrous black into midnight blue, I’d assume she’d entered the wrong bar.  

“[Axe throwing] is a great way to blow off steam after coming from work, where you want to throw things at people but aren’t allowed,” Serrapica deadpans, despite having to yell over the anticipatory din of her fellow axe throwers. Her friend Sara Morabito nods in agreement. “We’re two nerds who don’t do things other than conventions,” she says, gesturing to her fiancé Chris Knowles. “This was the first athletic thing where we were both like, ‘We’re really good at this.’ It’s a great thing to do together.”

Like Serrapica, Morabito and Knowles fell hard for the pleasures of axe throwing, and also have their own custom axes (hand-painted by fellow league member, Tommy Agniello) — unlike Serrapica, they have yet to name their axes. “Yeah, I named it Axe-Po,” Serrapica says. “You know, like B-MO from Adventure Time?” (I don’t.) As the subject turns to axe care and sharpening technique, I ask the trio why they think axe throwing has become so popular. Chris (who favors a double-grit sharpening puck for maintaining his blade) gets to the heart of it: “It’s something that feels masculine and outdoorsy, and I think people are looking for that.”

This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence.

 

You don’t need a gender studies degree to understand that ideas of masculine and feminine exist on a spectrum that doesn’t map across a male-female binary; in fact, the league crowd is as diverse in gender as you’d expect of a bar in Brooklyn on a Monday night. As I circulate among teams with names like Inside the Axer’s Studio, Axes of Evil, and Well, Axetually, interrupting people as they get in a few more practice throws before the competition starts, one name keeps coming up: Rebecca. The best. Unbeatable. Rebecca is the best axe thrower. “Number one last season, and the season before.” Nobody knows if she’s coming tonight, nobody seems able to spot her or her girlfriend in the crowd. Someone thinks she might have moved upstate, “to be closer the woods,” and I can’t tell if they’re fucking with me. She’s already a legend, the more so in her absence.

People are drinking — each league night has its own beer sponsor — and it gets noticeably louder as the new season begins, the title wide open and up for grabs in this new and Rebecca-less reality. Soon into it I notice a woman pressing a call button next to her range, an intense look on her face: It’s too early for a wood replacement on the target, so she’s looking for a judgment. An axe-pert calls the league-master over, and all parties approach the target, like lawyers approaching the bench, to peer and point at an axe stuck just off the bull’s-eye. League-master Anthony waves over at Kick Axe’s manager, Nic Espier, who, with his suit and his earpiece looks like he’d take a bullet if ordered to, goes over to settle the issue.

“Seven points decided last year’s title,” he tells me, after judging in favor of the button-pusher. “These guys look like they’re having fun, but they take it pretty seriously.”

The pleasures of axe throwing or wood splitting or tree felling aren’t for everyone — nor, indeed, are they available to most. But it would be a shame to dismiss these things we yearn for — open spaces, wilderness, a particular kind of labor — simply because we’ve had them so relentlessly repackaged and sold back to us.

So let the axe be many things — tool, work of art, diversion — but let it also be a way back into the forest. Let this very old machine remind us of our limits and show us not what is ours to use, but ours to preserve.

***

Jonny Diamond is a writer and editor who splits his time between New York City and the Hudson Valley. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Geist, Hobart Pulp, Rolling Stone, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book-length object history of the axe, part investigation of its symbolism in America’s westward expansion, part interrogation of contemporary tropes of masculinity and wilderness. He is the editor-in-chief of LitHub.com

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Mama Looks for Melanin

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Illustration by Bex Glendining

Harmony Holiday | Longreads | June 2019 | 17 minutes (4,437 words)

The night my mother turned 30 we went to Spago in Hollywood. It was her, me — about 6 years old at the time — and my sister, who was about a year and half, wheeled in, asleep in her stroller. We didn’t have a reservation, and Spago is one of those pathetically coveted restaurants where celebrities go to be seen. I remember my mom walking up to the hostess at the front of a long line and making something up about who her husband was. Or maybe she just offered the truth about who he had been. We were seated right away, like it was urgent. I don’t remember what we ate or if I even did. I can just picture the three of us sitting at our center-of-the-room table and feel the eyes on us like branding irons, because it had to have been rare that a white woman went for dinner and a night on the town at the new Wolfgang Puck haven for the stars with two brown kids, one needing a high chair, and no spouse in sight. Only fame or power could make a woman that bold. Most vivid in my memory are the many glasses of wine and other types of alcohol my mom ordered and how I took on my usual posture of quiet and aloof but insubordinate disbelief, placation, and empathy.

It was her birthday and she was still mourning the death of her husband, my father. Earlier that day when the cluster of foil balloons with the number 30 etched on its centerpiece arrived for her with a card signed by her parents and siblings, I could feel the event become drastically cheerful — cheer to smother sorrow. I could feel her becoming belligerent the way I do now as an adult when I remember that I deserve and want more and set out to take it or just go the club to remind myself that this society’s idea of more, of thrill and intrigue, is perverse and unsatisfying, garish and corny. I was more my mother’s supportive friend than her daughter then. Her grief and resentment and work ethic and frequent breakdowns knew no filter, and I secretly loved the lens it gave me and reveled in witnessing the ridiculous world of those who passed for adults in Los Angeles, up close, inappropriate, and beautiful.

When we finished that imitation of a convivial family dinner and left Spago in our wobbly trio, we entered the agitating momentum of the Sunset Strip. The dazed energy of that evening possessed everything with its ridiculous blunted shimmer. We were really in Hollywood. Our cinematic migration and everything that had led to it felt complete that evening. On the way back to the car my mom started sobbing on the sidewalk, then the raging torment I had sensed pretending it was entitlement or cheer spilled forth and she started screaming at the passing cars, tears streaming down her face — Fuck you! Fuck all of you! — for what felt like an eternity of shame and glory, overcoming, ever coming. A little catatonic, I asked: Can we go back to the car now, and so we stumbled, me, her pushing my sister in the stroller, back to the Chevy my grandparents had given her after my dad died and his cars disappeared with him. Here was repossession, my dad having been another black entertainer who refused to organize his death by the laws of the West. Those were the days when you had to look at actual paper maps to determine where you were if you didn’t know for sure, and in L.A. there was a huge book of street maps, a rite-of-passage atlas that everyone kept in their glove compartment, and since we had wandered far from home, my mom took hers out to study it and find our route back.

The blurry amber light on in the car was soothing. My sister was asleep in the car seat, and the street outside was quiet — it felt like we might be shown the safest way back to composure. I watched my mom intently for signs of recovery from that stupor of outbursts on the sidewalk. And then two men got into our car on either side of her, as if the car was theirs and she was too, as if this was a planned meeting, and they pushed her between them. They had guns, they held them to her temples and started driving. They drove aimlessly like they were looking for their third man and he could be anywhere, like they were prepared to make this a caravan, and the first question they asked before they could even focus on their crime was why do you have these black kids? My sister started crying the shrill guttural way distressed infants cry, I sat in silence. I had seen a gun before. I had seen one held to my mom’s head. I had seen a black man I loved, my father, hold a gun to my mom’s head in the same way, while threatening to kill her, like it was a routine checkup on fidelity, and I didn’t believe in villains or heroes even then. If these two petty thieves thought they were gonna frighten me into hysteria, I would do what I had done with my own father: unnerve them with my calm. That’s how I felt as I watched my mom beg take me, but please don’t take my babies repeatedly. They kept driving in some performative frenzy of deliberation, busy deciding what kind of theft this was gonna be, what kind of reparations, what kind of Hollywood ending. Eventually, after what felt like a marathon or a scripted relay, they left us on the side of the road. My mom still had the book of street maps in her hands. She had been squeezing it tightly as she pleaded for our lives. She called the police from a phone booth and we were picked up and taken the to nearest station. This was familiar, too. We’d been to precincts time and again after dad’s episodes, only to go home as one happy family as if nothing had happened. We would do that on this night, too: Go home, sleep off our black secrets. What I didn’t realize at the time, as drunk and distraught as my mother was that night, is that maybe those men saved our lives. Now when I think back on that carjacking, I’m thankful.


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* * *

My mom is a starkly direct embodiment of the “be careful what you wish for” adage. Or, be careful that you don’t get caught in a loop of brutalization and self-brutalization on the road to healing or understanding. Be careful that the refrain on that road isn’t finding new ways to be a victim and survive. That night at Spago and every night, it seemed, she was unconsciously looking for Jimmy, my father, and she found the very version of him we had been forced to escape time and again. We would go to my grandparents’ house in San Diego and recover from the patterned domestic violence, only to return, both of us, to Iowa, to be with my father again. Waterloo, Iowa, where we fought our losing battle of love and justice. In a particularly misguided moment of emotional blackmail, my mom even told me she went back the final time so that I could have a brother or sister, and maybe she even believed it, such is the drugged-out effect of that kind of tortured love.

When my parents first met it was as if the American promise was giddy with the buzz of perfection: an idyllic cross-pollination. A young woman, a girl really, raised in a Chicago suburb, having gone to Catholic schools all her life, matriculating at University of Iowa with dreams of becoming a writer, meets a famous songwriter returned home to live near his mother and siblings, who had left a life as sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta for Waterloo, Iowa, during the second wave of the Great Migration. The girl, naive but serious, had gone to Iowa in hopes of finding a kind of creative freedom that she hadn’t experienced at home. The man had returned to Iowa from Hollywood after a messy divorce from his first wife and a mental breakdown that found him hospitalized and mega-dosed with the later-illegal drug Thorazine. Home was where he could be stable, take his requisite prescription of lithium, sing in church on Wednesdays and Sundays, feel protected from the trappings of celebrity culture as a black man.

When my parents first met it was as if the American promise was giddy with the buzz of perfection: an idyllic cross-pollination.

He met my mother while performing near the college. There is a tacit tradition of interracial coupling that begins with black performers having to enter white spaces and endure, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Jack Johnson to Billie Holiday and Orson Welles. There are codes and levels and degrees of longevity and conflict, but once you enter that tradition it has a momentum of its own. There’s a sense of newfound autonomy in the alienation that I could always sense between my parents. They were married within two weeks of meeting, and I was born the following spring. Besides my maternal grandparents’ initial objection and suggestion that they put me up for adoption to avoid the confusion this chiaroscuro child could cause, besides the mutual rebellion it became in that way, everything was beautiful and new. An interracial couple was still a rare thing that deep in the Midwest, but they made the best of it. My grandmother taught my mom to cook greens and how to comb and braid black hair, my dad already knew plenty about the white world from his travels, his career, his first wife, his affairs, and he was unfazed, besides, this was his world.

Peace reigned over their union and our house for a while, but naively. Wanting to inspire his creativity, my mom suggested that my dad cut back on the lithium, a drug which flipped a switch in his spirit, made him comatose at times, but gentle and at ease. He obliged her and the raging talent and the rage and jealousy and militancy in all directions that accompanied it unleashed and that was that. Once he remembered who he really was, pacifying him with that blue pill was no longer an option. The cyclical violence began: the nights they spent up all hours writing and singing and fighting until it was difficult to differentiate between conflict and collaboration. I could really see firsthand the role-play of it all. I could sense the inevitability of a dynamic that’s so electric it charges itself, propelled by a longer and much more vicious history, how it almost has to be tumult and tenderness vying for dominance until the final curtain to be at all. And so it was. If you leave me I’ll die were the last words I ever heard my father say as he was taken away by police. We moved to a battered women’s shelter where we slept on cots and had aliases and I felt safe and missed him and dreamt of a happier era. Then we moved to California.

* * *

Looking for someone like my father to fall in love with was asking for trouble and disappointment and more and more hagiography of him as each imitation failed to live up to the magic or the danger that he exclusively possessed and represented for us both. His resounding aura as he rehearsed on the piano or sang at home is the most protective energy I’ve ever known. It made us forget the suitcase full of guns in the closet. And his ability to flash a smile and crack a joke when hearts got too heavy, even if he was the one imposing the weight, made it hard to remember his fits of anger. His knack for style and his rhythm meant he could turn swarm into swoon, pain into reprieve, at will, that he was easy to forgive and impossible to forget, and kind of god in our eyes. He was a man whose torment and rage always promised they were in the name of love. Tall and spellbinding and towering over our memories with the gauntlet of his spirit even now as the standard of charisma I’ve inherited. I can tolerate its shadow side without realizing it. Some men rule by becoming the rules, the unlikely rubric of the heroic and anti-heroic. The search for someone like dad, like Jimmy, in part my mom’s natural inclination, in part because she wanted my sister and me to know exactly who we were, and be proud, was relentless. After Spago, there was nothing we couldn’t fathom Los Angeles presenting, nothing too cinematic. And mom set out to find her happy ending.

First, she had an affair with singer and songwriter Willie Hutch that lasted several years. I remember feeling the urge to scoff when I’d see him at our house, or when she’d pick me up from school, and instead of heading home we’d wind up in his Inglewood studio where I’d dismissively do my homework amid the samplers and booths. Willie was kind and loving, but he wasn’t my dad, and I always reminded him of that. My mom had enrolled me in a dance studio run by two black former Alvin Ailey dancers, Ted and D’Shawn, and they too became peripheral father figures, surrogate black dads. I spent more time with them training in ballet and other forms than I did at home, and I preferred it that way. The dance studio reminded me of life in Iowa, where I had had cousins, aunts, and uncles around at all times, and I felt most like myself while dancing and being taught new steps and techniques by iron-fisted Ted, who would turn off the music and use the tapping of a yardstick on the studio floor to keep rhythm when we messed up the barre exercises, and who tapped our legs lightly but sternly with the same yardstick when they weren’t high enough in routine extensions. That was the kind of enforced discipline my DNA recognized and craved. The dance community was a mecca, and I could escape into and be excused from some of my mom’s searchlight escapades.

Not too long after the Spago incident, I remember coming home from dance class to find a copy of the National Enquirer on our coffee table. On the cover there was mention of mom’s close friend Bridgette, along with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall. Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall lured me for sex. They watched, then laughed as guards beat me, the cover read. By my mom’s account, one night while my she and Bridgette were out at a comedy club, Eddie’s body guard invited them back to his mansion in the Hollywood Hills. While my mom says she was upstairs being wooed by Charlie Murphy, Bridgette ended up getting into a fight with Eddie, shaming him for the swarm of white women he had around him. She ran up to get my mom and leave, but as they drove away drunk in Bridgette’s Fiat, Eddie’s security guard drove past them, blocked the car, walked out and grabbed Bridgette by the hair. He slammed her into the car window repeatedly while my mom watched. Gloria Allred ended up defending Bridgette, and I believe she won a large sum. Suddenly Bridgette had a nicer house and an air of retribution about her. My mom never testified because she was afraid of retaliation, had seen too much of that kind of violence. She also fancied Charlie.

His resounding aura as he rehearsed on the piano or sang at home is the most protective energy I’ve ever known.

At the same time as this partying and discovering L.A., my mom was teaching at a private Lutheran school by day, a haven for celebrity kids where Lakers player Jamaal Wilkes’s children and the likes were among her students. Of course mom and Jamaal were friends. She had also taken up meditation with a coach. I would sneak and watch Beverly Hills 90210 during her weekly Wednesday night sessions. This was far from the prayer meetings of our life in Waterloo, an example of how healing from trauma tends to threaten a kind of estrangement from one’s roots that makes even the most resilient souls reluctant to overcome themselves. Nothing seemed to work to quell my mom’s deepening anxiety and alcoholism and desire to fall apart and be put back together as darker and safer than she was before. Some days this desire would show up as praise for my skin color that felt too close to envy and made me uncomfortable. Sometimes cold misappropriations like yelling wake your black ass up many mornings before school. In other ways her desire to experience black culture showed up as pure appreciation. We would go see Debbie Allen or Alvin Ailey or local black theater companies perform regularly. Exposing us to the arts, to Black Art, in this way, compensated for some of the trifling social incidents we had witnessed. The arts deepened our understanding of what we were seeing play out in our lives, gave us a means to name it in code and tone, and find some beauty there.  

Mom had almost exclusively black friends, all of our babysitters were black. Everyone around us but her. From the outside but also close to the inside, it seemed like her soul had suffered so much, had been so shocked by the contrast between her suburban upbringing and her adult life, that she couldn’t relate to the white world she came from in the same way anymore. It was driving her crazy, how she tried to transcend that schism and appease the white world at the same time as the black one. Watching her then was an excellent lesson in how all-or-nothing rebellion must be if you expect to survive it. You have to pick a side.

After several years looking for love or thrill or validation or escape on the L.A. scene, my mom ended up in a long-term relationship with a man who looked a lot like my father. He was also a musician. They had a child together, my youngest sister, and then they separated, but not without their share of turmoil and untransmuted rage as they enabled one other’s pathologies and addictions. I kept escaping to dance and academics, kept shaking my head in incredulity that humanity could be so many contradictions. I kept a laugh in my muted scream at them. And then the first summer I spent home from college, my mom introduced me to the legendary jazz musician from Chicago she’d fallen in love with, maybe her last affair. She’s been with him since. It’s been turbulent, tender, familiar. It would be through him that I would meet the hip-hop musician and first man I dated who reminded me of Jimmy, who won my heart for a long while with scraps of my father’s sublimated charisma. And so the cycle goes.

My mother’s affinity for black culture and black men comes with its share of perks almost equal to the dilemmas. My mom can cuss out as effectively as a black mom, maybe even more effectively, because she’s backed by white privilege, her built-in (even after all the upheaval) sense of entitlement. She’s used that skill in my defense with reckless abandon. And because of her choice of company, her taste in lovers and friends, I was surrounded by black women when I needed them most a kid and teenager. Women who stepped in and made sure my hair was done right, clothes were ironed, spirit was high and unbroken. While Mom was unraveling, I had surrogate mothers. Barbara, my dance friend Gloria’s mom who treated me like a daughter during long rehearsals, did my eyebrows for the first time, and had a sparkle in her eyes that taught me what light can never be dimmed. Our babysitter Katherine, originally from Kenya, whose house smelled more like home than home did and stayed up nights with me while I finished strange book reports I’d obsess over. Debby, my older sister from my dad’s first marriage, who was close to my mom in age and able to make me feel both cool and safe in her presence, like my dad without the violence. While my mom was looking for her renewed identity, mine was being tended to by forces that felt ancestral, as if my own biological needs were driving some of her exploits. This is repossession. And when she finally wanted to try and get sober, it was videos on holistic healing by renowned but marginal black thinkers like Dr. Sebi and Dick Gregory that I’d sent her that inspired the turnaround. I knew my audience. I knew that learning the science of melanin and not just the scene surrounding it might be enough to tempt her to regain her health and will to live. It was time to remind her that she was not an outcast, that she had cast herself out, that loving blackness does not mean courting dysfunction, but rather a pursuit of reparations starting with the self, rescuing the body from its labels, letting it finally triumph, being careful what you wish for.

* * *

It takes bravery for a white woman to admit she wants to be black in America, bravery, insanity, and the transfigured genius of brokenhearted compassion. It requires the specific kind of indomitable courage furnished by creating black bodies and realizing you’ve been charged with their safety and set up to fail and as forever changed by their doom as by the glory and beauty that overrides it every time. It’s exceedingly risky and taboo, letting your kids in on your confusion and hoping they transmute it into clear-minded self-actualization. Hoping they reject you and become who they are, embracing the tenacity but not the destruction. It’s the gambling with black lives that makes America break again and again, that makes the perfect broken family we call home a country, a bliss and abyss of contradictions. Even as the bludgeon of it being a fetish for the exotic never quite leaves. Even as I know it’s more of a calling for my mother, an awakening that cannot be reversed, an act of love and self-abnegating longing, there’s something comforting about knowing she would give up some of her good old-fashioned white privilege for a chance at the wholeness and healing she associates with blackness. And it’s healthy to have learned that even the desire to relinquish white privilege doesn’t diminish it at all. When the police pulled her over, she could still start crying and get off with a warning. When those men saved our lives by taking our car that night, we still went back to the precinct a couple weeks later and identified them in a lineup, and two more black men went to jail.

I felt most like myself while dancing and being taught new steps and techniques by iron-fisted Ted, who would turn off the music and use the tapping of a yardstick on the studio floor to keep rhythm when we messed up the barre exercises, and who tapped our legs lightly but sternly with the same yardstick when they weren’t high enough in routine extensions.

By the time I realized that my mom harbored some pent-up racism like every white person in this country does on some level, by the time the echo of comments like wake your black ass up that I’d thought regular as a child formed into a consciousness of my own mother’s love/hate relationship with her idea of blackness, by the time I was ready to let myself be aware of this, I had to reconcile the love of black bodies with the contempt and envy that often comes with it. I had to trace those tendencies in my own mother back to the earliest incentive to steal us and ship us here in the first place, and through my parents’ fraught love and my mother’s transparency, I am able to understand the U.S.’s blatant love affair with its idea of blackness as the true source of the history of this nation, and the hinge on which its soul rests to either be redeemed in atonement or annihilated in denial. My mom is not just looking for melanin, as she once put it literally, she’s looking for saviors, for heroes, for kings and queens, for regular everyday negroes and black people, for allies in her pursuit of her own wholeness. For me and my sisters and our fathers to accept her into the cypher from which she feels excluded, to help her survive America, to remind her that neither uppitiness nor self-sabotage will make her better or safer or blacker or more like who she is meant to be. I don’t blame her for being so intent, for knowing that we are the ones who can help her, as well as make her laugh it off. I don’t blame her for knowing we have.

There is no more real way to be a mother than to become the child, to want to know what it’s like, just like there’s no way to oppress without becoming oppressed, just like there’s no way to be black without being black. But in an era where just being real — battle wounds and questionable obsessions and all — is becoming obsolete, I couldn’t ask for a more surprising and empowering and achingly honest version of an American matriarch. What’s most shocking as I’ve knocked down pillars of judgement about my mother’s choices along the tally in my mind through the years, forgiven them and come to understand, is that never once did she malign my father or anyone black no matter how badly she’d been hurt. My sister and I grew up thinking dad was the hero of the family and that being black in America was valiant and irresistible. We grew up knowing the truth. And we watched our mother grow up with us, wake up from the stupor of white liberal fragmentation with a clearer sense of the boundaries between skin and words, body and soul, our blackness and her idea of it. My mother has learned to just love what she loves unapologetically, naturally. She stopped apologizing to the white world she rejected through self-destructive acts. She stopped punishing herself as severely. Because of my mother, America’s haunted love affair with blackness, its desire to be reborn in a kind of noir armor, in almost exactly the way Get Out depicts, seemed so obvious that I thought everyone knew. I thought we all understood this self-hypnosis, this two-way trance. The happy ending will be this: In real life, it’s not that bad.  

* * *

Harmony Holiday is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently HOLLYWOOD FOREVER and A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM (July 2019). Her collection of poems MAAFA is forthcoming later this year. And her collection of essays on reparations and the body, LOVE IS WAR FOR MILES, will publish in 2020. In addition, she runs an archive of jazz and diaspora poetics and is working on a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

House Un-American

Bettmann / Getty, House photo courtesy of Author, Collage by Homestead

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | June 2019 | 24 minutes (6,524 words)

 

They say you can’t go home again, but I never stop trying. Sometimes I conjure the scent of jacaranda trees mixed with swimming pool chlorine, the sweet-then-sour first bite of kumquats, the faces of the little foxes in the bushes, the gleam of their eyes in the dark. The longer I live outside of Los Angeles, the more its mysteries call to me, as though the city itself were a piece of unfinished business. Maybe “unfinished business” is the very definition of home.

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I’m Not Queer to Make Friends

Illustration by Eric Chow

Logan Scherer | Longreads | May 2019 | 12 minutes (3,274 words)

On a Sunday morning at a Chicago bowling alley, I soothed five strangers almost as desperate to manipulate people on TV as I was. Then I eviscerated them. After years of being too embarrassed to try out for Big Brother, I’d finally brought myself to attend an open-call audition. I was determined to play the social strategy game I’d followed religiously since 2005.

“I’ve only seen a few episodes here and there,” I said to the tall, gorgeous man and two normcore women standing next to me in line. “I saw an ad for this a few days ago and randomly decided to come. I have no idea what they’re going to ask us to do.”

I didn’t want them to know I had an encyclopedic knowledge of Big Brother and had done extensive research into how to manage reality TV casting call dynamics as an introvert, and that I’d been practicing this for six years. I wanted to seem harmless, to make them feel comfortable to tell me things about themselves.

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‘Little Grandpa’ and The List

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | May 2019 | 17 minutes (4,208 words)

It’s a long plane ride, so I puke in midair, grunting and coughing up the last remnants of breakfast. My mother holds the paper bag open for me, an encouraging look on her face. When I am done, she closes it up, wipes my face with a tissue from her purse, and carries the slosh to the bathroom. Down the row, a bald man in a suit looks away in disgust.

I am 10, it is May, 1988, and we are on our way to my grandfather’s funeral in Los Angeles. In the locker room at school the day before leaving, in the loudest fourth grade voice she could muster, my friend Laura announced that it was my fault that he had died. I suspect this can’t really be possible — I live in Montreal, which is in a different country, after all — but it still worries me. On the plane, lying my head across my mother’s lap, I tell her about Laura and the locker room. She glares down at me from behind the thick frames of her oversized oval glasses, then looks up and starts fiddling with the tray table. “Sweetheart,” she says. “I think it’s time for some new friends.”

My grandfather is being cremated, and I am spellbound by the word — I have learned its meaning especially for the occasion, and let it cycle through my mouth over and over again, the “eemmm” sound turning into a hum at the back of my throat. Last night, my mother explained that a lot of people didn’t like the idea of being put in a coffin and buried in the earth. Instead, she said, some preferred to be cremated, which turned out to be a fancy word for being burned into ashes. But the word seems slightly suspicious: too lovely to mean something so violent.

In bed the night before, I wondered where we’d visit Grandpa if he wasn’t lying in a cemetery next to Grandma — the two headstones side by side, their bones resting together underneath. “Cremation” made it sound like he would just disappear.

***

We arrive in L.A. in the afternoon. It is bright everywhere. Since I still feel a bit like throwing up again, the warm breeze feels good on my body. As we wait at an outdoor baggage claim, my mother yanks my long, thick hair into a tight ponytail, the tip tickling my spine. A little yellow stain, evidence of the unsettling flight, has dried on my pink-and-white striped T-shirt.

Even though she has a bad back, my mother drags our big beige bag off the carousel by herself, her red sundress riding up the back of her thighs. Once she takes hold of the handle, she yells for people to get out of the way, then drops it, the tiny wheels crashing to the cement. I stand a bit away, wishing Dad were here.

The four of us usually rent a car when we come to visit Grandpa in L.A., but since my father and older sister will arrive later in the week, we take a cab, my mother talking in a feverishly speedy tone all along the freeway. Once in the city, I roll down my window, and the familiar smell of L.A. — a cocktail of palm trees and dry grass — calms my stomach.
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The Enduring Myth of a Lost Live Iggy and the Stooges Album

Iggy and the Stooges performing at the Academy of Music, New York City, December 31, 1973. Photo by Ronnie Hoffman.

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2019 | 48 minutes (8,041 words)

 

In 1973, East Coast rock promoter Howard Stein assembled a special New Year’s Eve concert at New York City’s Academy of Music. It was a four-band bill. Blue Öyster Cult headlined. Iggy and the Stooges played third, though the venue’s marquee only listed Iggy Pop, because Columbia Records had only signed Iggy, not the band. A New York glam band named Teenage Lust played second, and a new local band named KISS opened. This was KISS’s first show, having changed their name from Wicked Lester earlier that year. According to Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop biography, Open Up and Bleed, Columbia Records recorded the Stooges’ show “with the idea of releasing it as a live album, but in January they’d decided it wasn’t worthy of release and that Iggy’s contract would not be renewed.” When I first read that sentence a few years ago, my heart skipped the proverbial beat and I scribbled on the page: Unreleased live show??? I was a devoted enough Stooges fan to know that if this is true, this shelved live album would be the only known full multitrack recording ever made of a vintage Stooges concert.

The Stooges existed from late 1967 to early 1974. They released three studio albums during their brief first life, wrote enough songs for a fourth, paved the way for metal and punk rock, influenced musicians from Davie Bowie to the Sex Pistols, popularized stage diving and crowd-surfing, and were so generally ahead of their time that they disbanded before the world finally came to appreciate their music. Their incendiary live shows were legendary. Iggy taunted listeners. He cut himself, danced, posed, got fondled and punched, and by dissolving the barrier between audience and performer, changed rock ‘n’ roll.

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Dancing Backup: Puerto Ricans in the American Muchedumbre

Illustration by Alexandra Beguez

Carina del Valle Schorske | Longreads | April 2019 | 28 minutes (7,237 words)

Muchedumbre.
Noun, feminine: An abundance of persons or things; crowd, horde
Noun, biblical: Survivors, the chosen

* * *

When I fell for the video girl in Omarion’s “Touch,” I never thought I’d come to know her name. I loved her for her low-slung baggy jeans and spangled bustier. I loved her for the wave arranged across her forehead, her sly smile, and most of all, of course, for the way she moved. In the video, Omarion spots her with her girls as she’s leaving the club, and soon they involve each other in a pedestrian duet that elaborates the walk home along the lines of a Cuban rumba: frankly sexual, magnetically relational, but rarely, barely touching.

What won my attention was an unusual liberty in her movement — unconfined, it seemed, by a tightly choreographed routine or proper place in the staged urban environment — and a looseness in her waistline I can’t help calling Spanish. In Latin music, lyrics linger less over hips and ass, lavishing attention on la cintura atómica, la cintura sueltecita as the locus of sensual movement, maybe even the primary engine of Latin culture’s successive “explosions.” Marking the waist as specifically Spanish doesn’t check out in a diasporic vocabulary that includes wining, belly dance, even hula. But that’s how I responded to her body — with recognition. I followed the current that ran up and down her torso, briefly electrifying each gesture as if it were a spoken phrase that would resolve into a statement. I wanted to know where the meaning would land.

I didn’t expect to see this dancer again. Maybe I couldn’t see past the way she’d been cast: as a girl who appears, suddenly, in the chaos of the club, then slips back — a moment, an hour, a day later — into the city’s unsyncopated working rhythm. Blink. Touch. This was 2005, before the internet’s full power was at my fingertips, before I could feel confident that “Omarion video girl” would yield a name, a résumé, a world. I didn’t try. For years I’d return to her on YouTube, exhibiting her to friends and lovers, an avatar of erotic freedom, improvisational play, anonymous genius. I wanted her to be noticed beyond the terms the screen had set. And I wanted to be noticed for noticing her.

* * *

Pop culture teaches us that backup dancers are beneath notice. They’re not real artists, and the pleasure we take in them is primitive. They are not suitable emissaries of culture, even if culture wouldn’t be any fun without them. There are no prominent prizes for video girls, no credit roll at the end of the concert naming names. When we pick favorites and mimic their moves, our mothers make sure we know not to aspire. Backup dancing is not aspirational; it’s a no-man’s-land where brown girls are liable to languish, underpaid and overworked. It’s one wrong turn away from sex work. When Cardi B brags, “I don’t dance now / I make money moves,” she’s minimizing the difference between the kind of dancing she used to do on the pole and the kind of dancing done on other stages. Neither one, she seems to say, will pay. These messages have posed a problem for me, because I grew up in a time and place in which every Puerto Rican you’d ever heard of was — or had been — a backup dancer.

The distinction between was and had been didn’t matter that much, because the fact that certain individuals had achieved star status did little to reduce the stigma of salacious amateurism that lingered with them. Especially before Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sonia Sotomayor, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to Washington, the prototypical Puerto Rican in U.S. consciousness was [Dancing Girl emoji, skin tone tan]. Probably, she still is. Even the nation’s youngest congresswoman is haunted — or rather, refuses to be haunted — by her younger body, bopping across the rooftops of Boston University in 2010. As a dweeby tween, I wasn’t ashamed: I liked being noticed in relation to something “sexy.” But I see now why my mother was. There’s an implied analogy between the backup dancer and Puerto Rico itself, as if the island exists first and foremost for the empire’s entertainment, as if Puerto Ricans can be famous, too, so long as we know our precarious, paradoxical place.


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Official policy refers to Puerto Rico as a commonwealth, but it’s really a shadow colony in plain view, hypervisible especially in relation to the colonies most Americans don’t know or name: Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands. The United States government sometimes refers to Puerto Rico as “the shining star of the Caribbean,” a phrase dreamed up for a midcentury publicity campaign designed to attract business investment to the island. But this special status has not protected Puerto Rico — or its diaspora — from myriad forms of colonial extraction. Puerto Rico is both empire’s “shining star” and, in the notorious words of U.S. Senator William B. Bate, “a heterogeneous mass of mongrels,” threatening the nation’s delicate racial and political ecosystem from the shadowy margins. There are too many of us (“mass”), and each one of us already contains too many (“mongrel”). When changes in U.S. economic priorities have displaced Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico itself, we’ve become backup bodies in cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. By the late 20th century, Puerto Ricans made up the largest “immigrant” group in New York City. Life hasn’t been much better stateside, but there is still an important sense in which the Puerto Rican pseudo-citizen moves dique freely in relation to her cousins in the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America. She won’t be deported, exactly. Instead, she’ll spin in a perpetual motion machine.

All of these myths and policies converge on the body of the Puerto Rican backup dancer. The consolation prize for second-class citizenship — really, for lack of sovereignty — has been cultural nationalism. We can shimmy and shake all we like, get loud and proud about how well we do it. But even when the backup dancer gets to be a star, she’s on the blink, appearing and disappearing like the bright spot on the nocturnal satellite map before and after Hurricane Maria.

For years I’d return to her on YouTube, exhibiting her to friends and lovers, an avatar of erotic freedom, improvisational play, anonymous genius. I wanted her to be noticed beyond the terms the screen had set. And I wanted to be noticed for noticing her.

Over the years there are certain stars I’ve come to count on, that seem to have achieved a steady glow: Rita Moreno, for example. Rosie Perez. Jennifer Lopez. Invoking them in sequence, like this, suggests a progressive history, a lineage in which I secretly attempt to situate myself. But the more I read into it, the less it feels like history and the more it feels like a cut-rate carousel. I’m stuck on the constant costume changes these women have hustled through to appear, against the backup dancer’s odds, as names we know. Despite the individuality that stardom confers, they’ve passed through many of the same institutions and come to many of the same professional crossroads. Sometimes they have literally danced in each other’s footsteps or played the same roles. They stand out from and stand in for New York City itself — Nueva York, los niuyores — a few recognizable forms in what the performance scholar Jayna Brown calls “the multijointed body of the female tableaux.” She’s talking about black vaudevillians at the turn of the 20th century, but the image translates: there’s a complex pleasure to getting lost in the crowd. Brown goes on to quote a contemporary of Josephine Baker’s: “She was just a chorus girl, baby, we all was chorus girls.” But it’s hard to hear her tone. Is the chorus girl jaded, disabusing us of the glamour we associate with the star, implying that she can never really rise above her station? Or is taking the star down a peg a way to hold her close, to include her in movement’s “we,” movement’s “all”?

* * *

Growing up, I wanted to be included — even, especially, in the mass of mongrels. I knew Senator Bate didn’t mean to make it seem like so much fun, at least not on the face of it. But by the time we get around to the 1978 Rolling Stones song “Miss You,” Mick Jagger is sure the way to sound American on R & B radio — the way to sound black — is to growl “we’re gonna come around at twelve / with some Puerto Rican girls / that’s just dying to meet you.” I liked singing along — accustomed, like women of all backgrounds, to extracting pleasure and power from pop music’s misogyny. Sometimes I still do.

Maybe I was particularly vulnerable to crude seductions because our family was the opposite of a crowd: me and my mother in California, my grandmother in New York, no siblings, no husbands. Until I left the Bay Area for New York when I was 18, my direct relatives were the only Puerto Ricans I really knew. I was grateful for my Chicanx friends at the private schools we attended on scholarship — we began our political lives together — but culturally speaking they didn’t really know where to place me, and I wasn’t in a position to help them. If Jennifer Lopez implied an urban world teeming with around-the-way girls and spontaneous block parties, I was eager to be implicated.

In Zami, Audre Lorde’s erotic memoir, she articulates her mother’s longing for her natal island of Grenada: “She missed the music you didn’t have to listen to because it was always around.” When my mother danced around the apartment it became populous — with stories of her father’s famous footwork, Motown madness with her college boyfriend, José, the live drums from the New Rican village that seemed to fall in line behind her heels. We’d angle out the closet door with the full-length mirror so she could teach me her teenage moves: the Mashed Potatoes, the Watusi, the Jerk. And then she’d spin out where I couldn’t follow, spurred into a frenzy by the telltale cowbell in “Adoración.” She was multiplied at both ends: by everything that entered her and everything her dancing made me do, the movement she started in the living room. A culture of one. Given our isolation, it would take me years of living in New York to discern which of my mother’s gestures and behaviors were the product of her powerful personality, and which were Puerto Rican cultural commonplaces. It isn’t always easy, or explanatory, to name the difference.

In her self-titled memoir, published in 2011, Rita Moreno remembers moving to Washington Heights and “sitting on the wrought iron grille base beside an open window … while our new radio, shaped like a small cathedral, blared music to me and to any other appreciative Latinos within earshot.” With neighbor girls she “put on costumes and spun through living rooms [and] even ‘entertained’ on the rooftop.” Rosie Perez credits her early dance training to the long summers she spent with her cousin Cookie “in a dilapidated tenement that she kept clean as hell … doing the Hustle in the kitchen while my wet set dried.” I wonder if we’d call it training if we never came to see her dance on TV. Was I training, too, for the pedestrian life I have, in which I’m only famous for my dancing among the friends who follow my Instagram stories? For my gracelessly improvised life as a writer?

‘She was just a chorus girl, baby, we all was chorus girls.’

The New York I live in now is more densely Caribbean than it was when Audre Lorde’s mother suffered the unmusical noise of the north. Despite the city’s constant war on public space, the air at least stays thick, stays wavy. These days the uptown bodegas play bachata, and when I walk by I like to let it inflect the rhythm of my walking — the music I don’t have to listen to because it’s everywhere, the dance I don’t have to do because it’s always in my body. It’s a trope of black diasporic dance to start small, as if walking, as if merely shifting weight, hitching a skirt — the better to dramatize the smooth continuum between everyday life and the high fever of the mess around.

My mother sometimes worries about the way I walk, especially in Washington Heights, where my grandmother lives. She migrated — pregnant with my mother — 15 years after Rita Moreno, in what historian Lorrin Thomas describes as “the postwar boom … that nearly doubled New York City’s Puerto Rican population in two years.” We’ve come to call it “la gran migración,” taking a cue — as we often do — from African American history’s Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. I still visit my grandmother in the same neighborhood — the same building — where my mother grew up.

And yet it isn’t the same. I was born post-crack and post-Reagan, so our block has always been that kind of hood to me. Now it’s gentrifying. I admit wishing we could keep the ancestral apartment, somehow, so I could live there with rent control. But she doesn’t think I understand the danger. Around here, Latinas are always the ones hit hardest by street violence, she says. I don’t know whether I am, in this case, her daughter or the daughter of my gringo father. So I ask. She thinks the corner boys can tell I’m Latin like them: You can’t do anything about the way you move. In the heat of conflict I feel a pleasurable frisson: the transmission alive in me. I wouldn’t wish that way out of my body, because I wouldn’t wish my body away. It feels safer, somehow, to stay close to my mother even when she says it isn’t.

I know that standing out can pose its own dangers, depending on how and among whom. Cue Zora Neale Hurston: I feel most colored when I am thrown against a stark white background. The image evokes the police precinct’s mugshot as vividly as the museum’s gallery wall. I also know that being singular — or at least, the idea of being singular — has mattered to both my grandmother and my mother because it’s mattered to their survival. Moving — out, away, up from poverty — is often easier alone, dissociated from the trope of the hungry horde. But even loneliness has a lineage, and I find myself feeling for it.

* * *

Rosita Dolores Alverío was not technically an only child; her mother had abandoned her younger child, a boy, when they migrated from Juncos, Puerto Rico in 1936. But in the wake of this desperate choice, Rosita was raised like one, with the intensity of attention I recognize from my mother’s only childhood and my own. Focusing on one child mitigates the economic limitations of working-class life — and of course, raises the stakes for a return on investment. Even by the impossible standards of an immigrant mother, it’s safe to say that Rosita made good as Rita Moreno, the first Puerto Rican to become a bona fide star in the United States. She’s won all four major prizes in American entertainment — the Oscar, the Grammy, the Emmy, and the Tony — and her 1962 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as Anita in the musical West Side Story remains the only Oscar ever awarded to a Latina performer.

Over time, this distinction has become a bitter sign of how tightly U.S. culture seeks to control our conditions of appearance. But in her memoir, Rita conveys the animating thrill of matriarchal ambition that first set her spinning onstage as a child dancer. In certain moments, her descriptions of their shared labor sound almost utopic:

A happy home has its own music. The house hummed with Mami’s Singer sewing machine as she worked the foot treadle. This machine was so old; it was not an electric model. All the energy came from Mami, from her foot tapping and rising and falling. It sounded like the roll of a Spanish rrrrr! As if in accompaniment, I danced in time with its pulsing, while Mami was creating headdresses and costumes for me.

I didn’t demonstrate enough talent in ballet class to warrant such a scene, but my mother did make our home into a kind of studio, ready for whatever talent might emerge for cultivation. In the “happy” immigrant home, work and play are closely intertwined by necessity. Work must become play, or play must become work, if play is to survive as a vital practice. Like my grandmother, her sisters, and the majority of Puerto Rican women immigrants to New York City, Rita’s mother first worked as a factory seamstress. At home, she turned these same skills to the fanciful project of imagining new and dramatic ways for her daughter to appear. Rita was the chosen channel for this form of dreaming, but the dream itself was more general: to produce, with the means of production at hand, a range of possible lives and the freedom to move among them.

When the doors of Hollywood opened for Rita Moreno, they didn’t open for all her possibilities. They opened for a Slave Girl, an Indian Princess, a Dusky Maiden. It was one role, really: the temporary romantic interest of the white leading man led astray by her temptations before settling down with a suitable (read: white) wife. Who can blame Rita Moreno, then, for her profound ambivalence about so-called stardom? “Cold feet” kept her from auditioning for the principal role of Maria when West Side Story was on Broadway, and her anxiety persisted even after she secured the supporting role of Anita in the film adaptation. Though Anita animated contemporary anxieties about New York’s “Puerto Rican problem,” the role was also substantial, a rare opportunity she was sure she’d somehow squander: “A shadow followed me like a backup dancer, making me worry that it would only be a matter of time before I would lose everything.”

There she is: the backup dancer, making a cameo here as a sly, flexible metaphor. If Rita’s shadow is the backup dancer, then Rita herself is surely the star. But the metaphor seems to articulate the slippage between the two positions — the backup dancer is the star’s shadow side, the constant reminder of how precarious her visibility really is. She’s on her heels, grabbing hold wherever her body touches ground. Maybe Rita felt shadowed by the roles she’d been forced to play, unable to get out from under the sense of herself as an erotic extra. Or maybe she couldn’t escape the sense that her luck would always come at someone else’s expense: she was keenly aware of replacing another Puerto Rican dancer, Chita Rivera, who’d triumphed as Anita on Broadway. She was convinced she could “never, ever be as good as Chita,” that she’d never deserve the power of her position.

She was multiplied at both ends: by everything that entered her and everything her dancing made me do, the movement she started in the living room. A culture of one.

But if the backup dancer haunts the star, she also keeps her company. “Rita the Cheetah,” as she was known in the press, would never be lonely as Anita: the role activated a rhyme of substitutes, a small crowd of Puerto Rican hopefuls passing in and out of the spotlight. In fact, Rita deliberately “sought out a friend who had played the part of Anita on a coast-to-coast tour,” eager to learn a few steps for her audition. Every dance begins in — as — someone else’s shadow. That’s just how it is. However singular her performance would turn out to be, Rita became Anita in relation to the other women who had been her. A gang of Anitas gave birth to Rita’s Anita, the gang leader.

Ultimately, it is Anita, with her active — if contentious — relationship to group identity who is West Side Story’s brightest star. It is Anita, not Maria, who seems to summon the whole urban world into being with a swirl of her purple skirts and a clap of her hands: “Here,” said the New York Times review, “are the muscle and rhythm that bespeak a collective energy.” When I imagine a world ruled by Anitas, I get a festive feeling, as if I’m climbing the fire escape to the famous rooftop scene. I can almost smell the summer-softened tar, the beer going flat, the perfumed sweat rising as banter becomes music, becomes, suddenly, a dance battle. Maybe there’s a way to wiggle free from our collective confinement without leaving each other behind. Maybe there’s a way to argue over what “America” has made of us in our own language.

From the rooftop, these dreams seem don’t seem so far off. But in her memoir, Rita Moreno asks us to stay with her in closer quarters, to find freedom in a scene where her only company is her own shadow, in a moment that’s not right for shimmying. In one of West Side Story’s most tragic turns, Anita leaves Sharks turf to deliver Maria’s message to Tony, only to be intercepted by the Jets:

When I had to play the attack scene in the candy store, I wept and broke down— right on set. It was that incredible, amazing, magical thing that happens sometimes when you’re acting and you have the opportunity to play a part so close to your heart: You pass through the membrane separating your stage self from your real self. For a time, at least, you are one person.

The “attack scene” has always been understood as an implied gang rape, which heightens the intensity of her language in this passage: why should inhabiting a scene of traumatic violence be “incredible, amazing, magical,” a restorative moment of contact with her “real self”? Trauma is usually narrated using exactly the opposite vocabulary: splitting, sundering, shattering. But for Rita Moreno, to break down is to return to a truth about her experience in the industry that her usual performance of resilience obscures: being singled out for special treatment by Hollywood’s power players had a shadow side.

Rita’s first sexual experience was what she later came to recognize as rape by a man who claimed to want to work as her agent. Immediately after the filming of West Side Story, her long-running, emotionally abusive affair with Marlon Brando would drive her to attempt suicide. Of course, these biographical details do not exactly correspond to the violation implied by the candy shop scene. Rita was never a Puerto Rican gangbanger; her working-class Washington Heights was more like my mother’s than Anita’s. And yet, the projection of these fantasies onto her body — the stereotype of her body as essentially available, disposable, and replaceable — put her in the way of real violence, mostly at the hands of white men. Becoming a star required a dangerous risk: leaving her own turf for the way her turf was rendered in show business. The candy shop wasn’t real to Rita, but the candy shop scene did feel real, with its crowd of white men curtailing her movement with threats and demands. This time, she did not have to hide her fear and anger for the sake of her career; she could dance with them.

There’s a moment in Peter Pan when Peter’s shadow runs away and Wendy intervenes to carefully stitch it to the soles of his feet: a woman’s work. I think of Rita in West Side Story as her own Wendy, mending her relationship with the shadow that would follow her everywhere in the Neverland of American show business. It’s another kind of costura, more painstaking, maybe, than the dreamwork that produced her first costumes. Here, her desire to be “one person” is not the same as a desire to escape alone, to escape intact. Instead, it reflects the difficult knowledge that she is one person only when she can bear to incorporate the parts of herself she’s disavowed.

* * *

In an interview from 1998, Jennifer Lopez refers to Rita Moreno as “the original Fly Girl,” naming her the inadvertent matriarch of the Fly Girls featured on Keenen Wayans’s hip hop driven variety show In Living Color, where Jennifer got her first big break. She shifts the focus from Rita’s moment of semi-stardom as Anita to imagine her in relation to a small collective of dancers, most of whom did not move on to fame and fortune. It’s a complicated gesture, elevating the Fly Girls by saying they have a history while at the same time pluralizing Rita’s individual achievement. She was just a chorus girl, baby. We all was chorus girls. Every genealogy of Puerto Rican performers — including the one I’m moving through in this essay — will be intimate, idiosyncratic, and provisional. But if we’re talking about the Fly Girls, specifically, it’s fair to feel like someone’s missing.

In large part because of the narrative of competition forced upon them as two Puerto Rican stars in generational proximity, Jennifer Lopez has never been very good at publicly acknowledging her debt to Rosie Perez, the In Living Color choreographer who lobbied to make her a Fly Girl in the first place. I think a lot of Latinas who came up with and through hip-hop are just beginning to see what Rosie meant to us — to mend, like Rita with her shadow, the disavowal that has often accompanied our admiration. DJ Laylo, a Bronx Dominicana, put it this way in an interview with Remezcla: “It’s a little bit of a sore spot for me because whenever I’m in predominantly white spaces, I always have people coming up to me saying, ‘Oh my god you sound like Rosie Perez.’ And I know they don’t mean it because they’re paying tribute to all that she is.”

My mother was the first one to introduce me to Rosie — we checked out Do the Right Thing from the library on VHS — but she, too, was plainly unsettled by Rosie’s accent, which she insisted had been exaggerated to make her seem Extra Rican. The theory wasn’t far-fetched; Rita was made to invent an accent she didn’t have for West Side Story. But I wasn’t really listening to my mother’s critiques. I was too mesmerized by the film’s famous opening credits — red lights, then blue — which find Rosie pumping her chest and throwing hooks in front of Brooklyn brownstones to all four minutes of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” Whatever she was fighting I felt like I was fighting too, including my own resistance to her performance. Recently I’ve been asking friends how they remember feeling about the scene back in the day. The word “unapologetic” keeps coming up, which makes me wonder what — and who — we’ve grown accustomed to apologizing for. My friend Christina’s take is a little more specific: “She seemed like she wasn’t afraid of men.”

I can almost smell the summer-softened tar, the beer going flat, the perfumed sweat rising as banter becomes music, becomes, suddenly, a dance battle. Maybe there’s a way to wiggle free from our collective confinement without leaving each other behind.

In some ways, history supports Christina’s formative impression. In several interviews, Rosie recounts how she first met Spike Lee at the L.A. nightclub Funky Reggae, where he was hosting a big booty contest to promote School Daze. Rosie wasn’t having it; she’d come to the club to dance: “disgusted…I jumped on the stage — okay, so it was a speaker — and bent over shaking my ass.” It’s a parable of her performance philosophy: the speaker becomes the stage as she insists upon her objection to performance as part of the performance itself. When Spike’s bouncers came through to pull her skinny butt back down, the young director decided he liked that trash-talking Brooklyn Rican. He picked her out from the lineup and gave her an on-screen solo.

It would be a merciless eight-hour shoot that gave Rosie swollen knees and tennis elbow: he solicited the anger she’d once directed at him and worked it to the bone. It’s not an endorsement of his abusive techniques as a director to say that in the final cut her anger seems to exceed its conscription to become the sign and symbol of the borough’s unrest. In a movie that centers on the political struggles between black and white men in the world of work, that cannot imagine a role for anyone else in the battle for representation in the face of racist violence, it is a Puerto Rican woman’s persistent and plotless physical practice that frames the narrative. Who or what is her adversary as she trains for a fight we never see go down onscreen? We can’t call it. The block, the pizza parlor, the movie set itself — the site of struggle is always changing. Rosie is slick with the sweat of staying ready wherever it finds her.

Part of the reason I find myself saying “Rosie” instead of her character’s name, “Tina,” is because the scene unfolds in a liminal space between our world as spectators and the world of the film, where the story has yet to be told. When Do the Right Thing first came out, the conservative critic Stanley Crouch complained in the Village Voice that the scene was “amateurish,” nothing more than a music video. He’s wrong to complain, but right to see it like that. Rosie isn’t really Tina yet, she’s Rosie, recognizable if you know her from Soul Train, and just a Puerto Rican girl dancing if you don’t. Soul Train’s practice of using amateurs to bring the energy of the street to the screen was being developed in new directions by MTV, and Spike Lee was making major contributions to the same culture. He wasn’t the first one to cast Rosie Perez from the club floor; her “realness” had become a hot commodity in the emerging hip-hop economy. Of course, someone like Stanley Crouch was never gonna get Rosie. But his critique magnifies an anxiety about her performance shared by those who thought they did.

Soul Train’s director, Don Cornelius, liked Rosie so much that he had her dance down the line twice on her first night on set. She was out of place — a Puerto Rican in Los Angeles — which made her stand out, trigger a double take. Her light skin and tight little body gave her immediate mainstream market value. But the way she moved and spoke from within that body also seemed to threaten the investment. “Is that your real accent?” Don Cornelius asked the first time he heard her speak, turning an invisible dial down. In her 2015 memoir, Handbook for an Unpredictable Life, Rosie remembers: “Don Cornelius did not want to see how I really danced,” anymore than he wanted to hear how she really spoke.

On Soul Train Rosie was always trying to do the moves she’d learned back in the city: the Pee Wee Herman, the Roger Rabbit. At New York clubs like the Roxy and the Latin Quarter she had her eye on the male dancers “behind Whodini and Big Daddy Kane … all doing James Brown, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, and the fabulous Nicholas Brothers moves, making them their own.” Don’s early objections to Rosie’s dancing took the form of gender management: “Nononono, you’re a girl!” Of course, the (imagined) friction between her conventional femme sexiness and her hip-hop intensity is what gave her performances heat. If her body was disciplined in a satin miniskirt, stockings, and a waist-cinching belt, her face was not: that self-possessed sneer. Louie Carr — “Cutty Mack” — remembers Rosie as “aggressive and sexy and a little street, like a machine gun.” Don Cornelius wanted the rhythm of the weapon without the war.

Don’s struggle for control over Rosie — and here, he’s only an example — reveals the risk inherent in the aesthetics of realness. A musical like West Side Story was exciting, in its time, because it suggested an intimate relationship between the singing and dancing on-screen and the changing demographics of the city itself. Rita Moreno, the only actual factual Puerto Rican with a speaking role, was the linchpin of that seductive suggestion. In the plot, her dancing always starts a debate, a competition, a party. It always demands a reply. The delight we take in her call-and-response virtuosity implicates us in the project of imagining an urban world we can all inhabit. But the industry only let the provocation of Rita Moreno’s performance go so far. It didn’t matter that she mastered the choreography. That she waited her turn for dignified, complicated starring roles that never came. That she wore a white pleated skirt to the March on Washington. The game had rules for a reason: to make sure it never got really real.

But by the time Rosie Perez was born, whatever remained of the American Dream for Puerto Ricans was dead, and she was too black and too busy trying to survive an abusive childhood to play along. Rosie’s New York was post-Civil Rights: the War on Drugs had replaced the War on Poverty, and the collective trauma of ghetto life had already yielded several generations of black-brown collaborations including bugalú, salsa, and the beginnings of hip hop. White institutions were no longer the only gatekeepers crafting and legislating the representation of urban culture. Rosie’s class position and her historical position intersected to make it clear that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t have to assimilate out of the world that made her.

Don Cornelius, with Soul Train, was a major player in that transformation. Starting in 1971, he opened the door to the creative power of regular-degular city kids, who brought their own bell-bottoms and hustles to set, collectively forming the living, breathing backdrop for some of the most iconic black performances of the ’70s and ’80s. But on Soul Train the backdrop was the real show — not the celebrity guests who mostly lip-synched anyway. The young dancers pulsed behind the permeable membrane of the screen. And on the other side the rest of us joined the party, turning the TV into a magic mirror. A girl who could be your half sister is doing the dance you do in the front yard on Sundays, and she’s making it famous. Next time, it could be your actual half sister. Next time, it could be you. In providing a major cultural platform to kids who rarely received the message come as you are, Don Cornelius modeled the possibility of an equivalent political platform.

In a movie that centers on the political struggles between black and white men in the world of work, that cannot imagine a role for anyone else in the battle for representation in the face of racist violence, it is a Puerto Rican woman’s persistent and plotless physical practice that frames the narrative.

But he also exploited the Soul Train dancers. Rosie remembers: “We didn’t get paid, just a Kentucky Fried Chicken two-piece lunch box — not kidding.” The prestige economy forced the dancers into a frenzy of competition, like “piranhas at feeding time.” Don Cornelius — and the other impresarios who followed in his footsteps — wanted to let in the feel of freedom, but carefully calibrated to align with market protocols and the agenda of their own enrichment. That’s life under racial capitalism, beibi. If he let Rosie move however she wanted to move, she might roll up the next night with her entire hip hop block demanding a living wage. On the other hand, if he didn’t, she might leave. One night, that’s what she did:

I walked back to the head of the line, paused, then strutted down as if I were Naomi Campbell on the runway, continued walking past Don to my seat, grabbed my things, and told him I was out.

It takes a special kind of grace to perform and stop performing in the same seamless gesture. The Soul Train line always pointed beyond the station; Rosie’s secret weapon has been her willingness to leave. In a 2017 interview with Desus and Mero, Rosie states it plainly: “I didn’t wanna be [in show business], so I wasn’t afraid of not getting a job. I was like, fuck this shit, I’m smart, so fuck y’all.” Almost nothing is more threatening to the star system than divestment from it. The star system often functions as an imperial structure of containment, a way to manage the unruly energy of a muchedumbre whose festivities incubate a revolutionary impulse. The Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos warned everybody back in 1937: si … te picara un tambor de danza o guerra / su terrible ponzoña / correrá siempre por tus venas. Translation: if … you’re pricked by the drum of dance or war / that terrible poison / will run forever through your veins. This kind of inheritance doesn’t care who your mother is. This kind of inheritance could go viral.

* * *

Over time I find myself feeling disappointed in Jennifer Lopez, and this might be the moment to ask myself why. It’s a refrain among Puerto Rican women I know to say girls like that are a dime a dozen in my neighborhood. My mother says it, too — that her cousin Carmencita was more beautiful, with her heavy winged eyeliner and languorous way with a pencil skirt. Eyes like black coffee trembling in a cup. I’m not sure if we say so because we’re ashamed that she’s regular — the wrong one to represent our culture’s repressed powers — or if we’re ashamed that we’re regular, too, but without the will to say so what? Jennifer Lopez never claimed to be the most talented girl in the room. In her infamous 1998 interview with Movieline, she said, “I’m not the best … that ever lived, but I know I’m pretty good.” Being humble, for her, has never required being hidden — as we so often assume it must.

But Jennifer’s mediocrity is not the source of my disappointment. I don’t care that she can’t sing, or that she’s just okay at dancing. When I think about the fact that Keenen Wayans refused, at first, to hire her as a Fly Girl — “called her chubby and corny” — I’m grateful to Rosie for fighting for that “big-ass beautiful girl from the Bronx” with the “star smile.” I like the footage from that period, especially a little promotional clip for Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” where Janet introduces her new dancers as “Jennifer, Shawn, and Nicky: three backed-up hoes!” It’s fun to watch Jennifer fire back, “Honey we’re here to wreck shop, what’s your problem?” Taken literally, the idiom suggests the end of buying and selling, the general damage “backed-up hos” intend to do with their dancing.

If these are the moments I love best, then maybe I’m less disappointed in Jennifer Lopez than I am in the nature of stardom itself. She’s achieved what long seemed impossible for a Puerto Rican performer: race-blind roles, multimillion dollar paychecks. But that doesn’t do anything to make me feel like part of an us. Her stardom feels far-off and joyless. When I try focusing on recent interviews with her, my eye always wanders from YouTube’s main screen to the little stack of further possibilities waiting in the wings, and I can’t resist clicking aimlessly. I’m more interested in the algorithm of associations than the record of any single personality.

That’s how I spot her: Omarion’s video girl, in a red crop top, striped shorts, and gold sneakers, dancing with Bruno Mars in the January 2018 video for “Finesse.” It’s a tribute to In Living Color, and Danielle Polanco — this time I can say her name — is the Fly Girl the camera loves best, leaning out from the fire escape with her girls to call down to Bruno and his boys, a Tony-and-Maria moment made plural for our pleasure. The family tree has many branches: later I learn that she danced backup for Jennifer Lopez, Janet Jackson, and Beyoncé, that she was the dance captain for the Broadway revival of West Side Story. She played Consuela, an even smaller role than Anita — a backup dancer’s backup dancer. Now, the core of her career is teaching boutique classes: “Heels” at Alvin Ailey Extension and Millennium, “Vogue Femme.” Virtuosity is not what determines a dancer’s destiny in the studio as opposed to the spotlight, and I don’t find myself wishing Danielle Polanco were a star just because I could watch her dance all day. Genius has no proper place. Insisting on the absolute distinction between genius and mediocrity drags the party down; it disrupts the circulation of genius itself.

Maybe that’s why Rosie Perez felt weird when she went to the club with her friends from Soul Train and people pointed, stared: “Look, it’s the Soul Train girls!” Just a few years earlier Rosie herself had been the random amateur scouted from the crowd. What had changed, really? The club was still her home haunt, the uncanny valley between amateurism and stardom where her career played out. It’s not hard to imagine all the other Rosies on the dancefloor who’ve remained undiscovered, but still manage to steal the show when the beat drops. Then there’s the rest of us, shoulder to shoulder, an undulating wave of body heat that breaks, now and then, into open conflagration.

Genius has no proper place. Insisting on the absolute distinction between genius and mediocrity drags the party down; it disrupts the circulation of genius itself.

* * *

Three years ago in Brooklyn a new DJ night was born, spinning salsa and reggaetón and trap en español: “A Party Called Rosie Perez.” It’s organized by Christian Martír alongside DJ Suce and DJ Laylo, the same woman who bristled when the wrong people projected a resemblance. It’s gotten hot: when my friend Cassandra went, she spotted Residente from Calle 13. The first time I go, Bobbito Garcia, the legendary hip hop DJ, is at the turntables and I’m dancing with my friend Yohanna while a video projection of Rosie on Soul Train plays on the club wall. Now and then someone bumps the shaky projector and Rosie’s head gets cut off, so she looks like a doomed chicken flapping through her final bravura performance. I can see the bright shadow of her younger body pass over Yohanna’s, Rosie’s rapid pumping playing a polyrhythm over Yohanna’s more relaxed step and slide. Since we’re the party, are we Rosie Perez? Alive and moving inside the space her body’s made? The visual effect allows me to imagine that it’s possible to dance in someone’s footsteps without replacing her. To channel someone’s spirit without making her a ghost.

My reverie is interrupted when a young white boy dancing next to me taps on my shoulder and points to the screen, shouting who is that? In America, I remember, you can immerse yourself in Puerto Rican culture without knowing it. Without ever naming a name. Months later, I think of this moment while reading La raza cómica by the scholar Rubén Ríos Ávila, who offers some counter-questions: What is pleasure worth if it cannot be deciphered? What is the joy of dance good for if we can’t know its point of origin?

I understand the impulse behind the Party as my own: a form of feeling for history. In the absence of something so static or simple as a point of origin, a name is a portal — a way into the crowd as well as a way out of it.

When I leave the club my body’s still buzzing. For a moment I think I see Danielle Polanco, striking a pose on the subway platform. Up close, I see she’s just another cinnamon girl with a high bun and hoops whose skin is dewy from the sweat of a summer night. But I can’t help feeling we’re both backup dancers. Any sudden movement might start a number. We might already be in a number without knowing it, an elaborate social production we didn’t design, roles we didn’t choose, and for which we are probably not being properly compensated. But as backup dancers we’re always ready. Are you?

* * *

Carina de Valle Schorske is a writer and translator living between New York City and San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is currently at work on her first book, a psychogeography of Puerto Rican culture, forthcoming from Riverhead and tentatively titled NO ES NADA: Notes from the Other Island.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel