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Telling Stories In Order to Live: On Writing and Money

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | January 2020 | 14 minutes (3,866 words)

I made the decision to write full time in the summer of 2008. I was leaving a teaching position in Beijing, and moving back to Oaxaca, Mexico, my husband’s hometown. I said I was going to “live from writing.” I had no idea what that really meant, but it was a leap I wanted to take.

We lived in a $150-a-month apartment in a scruffy colonia on the outskirts of the city. The financial bar I had set for myself was around $500 a month. I met this at first by grading practice TESOL exams online. This meant hours upon hours of listening to nervous Koreans analyze Harry Potter or explain worm digestion. I was so bored I pulled out enough of my own hair to give myself a bald spot.

From here, I moved on to writing practice TESOL exams, then practice SAT exams for a Korean contractor who worked for the Princeton Review in Asia. This took less time and paid more, leaving hours of the day free for me to write overwrought and purplish essays about my travel experiences. Nights, Jorge and I ate tlayudas in a nearby señora’s garage and drank forties of Corona. A few months into my full-time writing life, I got a gig as a blogger and editor at a travel site. I learned WordPress and basic HTML and got to publish my overwrought and purplish essays on a platform for an actual audience. In the meantime, I started my second personal blog, named for — cringe with me here — a Julio Cortázar short story. My blog allowed me to publish experimental essays in Spanglish and wax philosophical about the old man at the market who carved wooden airplanes. It allowed me, in other words, to suck.

My writing sucked for a long time in diverse ways, with the occasional sentence or paragraph or maybe even mini-essay that was half decent and resonant with the promise of the actually good. In late 2009, I went to a goat slaughter at an old hacienda in Huajuapan de Léon, a dry and dusty city a few hours from Oaxaca. The slaughter was an annual event in which local herders brought their goats to be killed en masse, their meat and skin and blood and bones all put immediately to use.

It allowed me, in other words, to suck.

The scene at the hacienda seemed straight out of the 1700s. The killing was more humane than I’d expected; one swift knife in the throat and the animal died instantly. Hundreds of goats were killed simultaneously so that none had to anticipate suffering. In courtyards around the hacienda, women carved the skin from the bones and hung it like underwear to dry, men etched out internal organs and tossed them in blue buckets. Kids raced around playing tag in bloody huaraches. I took notes nonstop in my little notebook. We returned to the city late at night, and the next morning I woke up at six and started writing.

It took me three days to complete a narrative of the experience. I wrote with a concentration, intensity, and focus I’d never had before, but for which all the sucky writing of the past year (and the previous decade, in bits and pieces) had prepared me. On a whim, I applied to six MFA programs and submitted the goat essay as my writing sample. One by one the rejections rolled in, until only one school was left. I not only had to get in, I had to get funding, which wasn’t guaranteed, so I figured it was probably all over. Then one day I returned from my run and opened my email and there was an acceptance from the University of Pittsburgh, guaranteeing me full funding for the duration of the three-year program. I screamed. I jumped around the apartment screaming. I dragged Jorge out of bed and we ran down the street to our friends’ apartment and we all drank shots of mezcal at nine in the morning. I would have three years to write, full-time, funded.

In 2010 Jorge and I moved back to the U.S. for my program. The following year, I got an internship at Harper’s Magazine and started Vela, my own magazine of nonfiction writing by women. The idea of the magazine was to counter some of the frustration I’d felt in New York at the narrowness of what might be called the legacy literary world, its white, male Ivy-Leagueness. I invited five women writers I knew and respected to participate, and the concept was for us to have a collective portfolio of our skills. I was idealistic in the way of the clueless outsider. I just wanted our small group of women to show that we could write. We published stories about abusive relationships. About the Zapatistas. About stepparenting. About chronic illness. About gold mines in Peru and gangs in Ecuador and the lingering impacts of genocide in Cambodia. None of our work was paid. Our crew put in hours and hours of writing, of editing each other’s work, of copyediting and designing and promoting and participating in epic rambly email threads. All of us had day jobs: grad school, teaching, editing. We wanted to prove to ourselves and the gatekeepers that we could do it. And we did.

One by one, we grew more successful: We published in major magazines. We won grants. Some of us went on to write books, others got teaching jobs. Meanwhile we opened the magazine up for submissions. Had we been a standard literary journal, pay would’ve been a nonissue. Literary journals rarely pay and if they do, they pay enough to subsidize, say, a new pair of jeans. But we operated in a liminal zone — most of us didn’t consider ourselves journalists and we didn’t define our magazine or its mission as journalism, but most of our work wasn’t in the more academic or highly “literary” essayistic style either. We were somewhere between literary journalism and travel writing and essay writing and narrative, and this ambiguity of genre had been part of the point in the first place: to push on the boundaries of those categories. It seemed clear that journalism had to be funded and well-compensated. Literary writing, less so, although why wasn’t exactly clear. I got hundreds of emails after we’d opened to submissions from writers who demanded to know how much we paid. Many of these emails consisted of semi-belligerent offers to write “guest posts” about personal travel experiences for a certain fee. When I said we didn’t pay, I often got angry rants in response, once from a woman who had no significant bylines or books, but who charged upward of $2,000 for her writing workshops. She called our magazine a scam. Meanwhile, I read the explosion of think and opinion pieces on paying writers. I was about to graduate from my MFA program and become a full-time freelancer. By this point, five years into “living from writing,” I wanted to be paid for my creative work. I knew I wouldn’t write for my own magazine if it didn’t pay. And so we ran a Kickstarter exclusively with the point of paying writers, and we raised $28,000. With that money we were able to publish some extraordinary work from writers we might not have gotten otherwise: two essays led to major book deals, others led to grants and to longer, more in-depth journalistic stories with bigger magazines.

Ultimately, our biggest mistake was not budgeting any money for ourselves: We’d been bombarded with commentary about the importance of paying writers, but not editors. The latter worked for a paltry stipend or no salary at all. None of us had the time or the desire to take on a full-time business role. Instead, we put the magazine on hiatus while we tried to figure out future funding and plans. In the meantime, dozens of other magazines sprouted up, all in that space between journalism and the literary essay. Most of these advertised boldly and proudly that they paid — but upon investigation, the pay was $50. Maybe $100 or $200 for a long-form piece. The conversation about “writing for free” continued, now focused on the insult of being asked to write “for exposure,” with the usual rants on Twitter and think pieces making the rounds. The idea of an experienced writer being asked to do her professional work for a major media corporation for “exposure” is ludicrous and insulting. But all the bombast and pressure and rhetoric around writing “for free” ignores a few key realities: Many professional and experienced writers are being asked to write for very little, which is somehow celebrated as “payment” but is in fact nowhere near a functional wage; and many inexperienced and early-career writers might not be doing work that merits payment. The latter is a reality not many people want to discuss. My early work sucked. No one would have paid for it, and I wouldn’t blame them. I wrote hundreds of thousands of pages that would, were I to print them out, fill an entire room of my house. Little snippets of them ended up published. The 70,000-word book I wrote for my MFA thesis ended up as a 7,000-word Harper’s Magazine story. Bits and pieces of work I’d written about Spanglish and Mexico and my marriage ended up as an Oxford American essay. But most of this work was compost — stinky, rotting, coffee-ground and broken-egg essays feeding richer work down the line. It wasn’t simply that it sucked. It was also that I wrote it for myself: to find out how I saw, what I cared about, how I strung my ideas and scenes together. I wrote it for the basic purpose of trying to figure out what mattered and how to convey that it mattered on the page.

But most of this work was compost — stinky, rotting, coffee-ground and broken-egg essays feeding richer work down the line.

I believe — I stake my existence on believing — that art should be compensated, and compensated with a living wage. This is not a given, which is why I live in Pittsburgh, why I have a part-time job that miraculously provides health insurance. I no longer write “for free.” I have started, in fact, demanding more pay for almost every piece, knowing that as a woman I’ll likely be offered less, and knowing that if I don’t ask I surely won’t get it. At the same time, writing with money as the end goal and predominant measure of value changes the nature of the game. Maybe this isn’t always negative; commercial pressure can work as a valuable creative restraint, forcing writers out of solipsistic indulgences. But thinking only of where a piece will sell, what I can write to make the money I need — urgently need, right now — to pay for our roof, also makes me wonder why I am still doing this. Why live this life of a writer, so poorly compensated in money and acclaim, so uncertain, so competitive, so crazy-making, if I’m not even doing it because I believe in it? If I’m not doing it because I’m writing something I have to write to figure out what it means to be human? Why do it if it’s just a job?

And yet at the same time, of course it’s just a job — this is the secret I didn’t know when I began. It requires the same grind and tedium as a job. The same negotiations for pay and promotion. The same boredom and frustration. But sometimes I need to remember that if it is just this, the meaning can bottom out — then I wonder, why do it at all. There has to be some risk, some leap that may not necessarily be compensated. That is uncertain and scary. Writing that matters is often risky — its saleability may not be immediately obvious, its style may be unconventional, it may break with standard forms and narratives. It does what it has to do to figure itself out. Certainly, there is phenomenal writing that doesn’t necessarily follow these rules, that may pop up within very familiar genres and categories. There is also plenty of writing that flaunts convention and fails to achieve anything of importance. Yet writing for a living often means writing, ultimately, what the market will bear. It means internalizing the stylistic and rhetorical and intellectual underpinnings of the literary behemoths, then shaping one’s work in their image. It means putting the cart of audience — and the style of “high magazine-ese” — before the horse of the idea, of the struggle to make sense of the intractable. It can shrink the work into manageable and predictable frames, and this can explain why so much of what is published and shared feels so familiar, and fails to generate that feeling of the whole world having been rattled and made new.

The other day, I went to a talk by a well-known writer who has become a guru on the business of writing, and she talked quite a bit about audience: She hinted that writers who don’t consider their audience aren’t savvy enough businesspeople, and maybe even self-centered or obsessed with prestige. But I wondered how it is possible to create authentic work, with that essential spark of the urgent and the curious, that is centered first and foremost on an audience’s imagined desires. Trying to derive a work from the question Who’s the audience for x and what will they like? instead of from a thorny idea, or an overpowering emotion, or a story that feels vital seems to me to quash the work’s life and purpose. It becomes purely commercial.

Trying to derive a work from the question Who’s the audience for x and what will they like? instead of from a thorny idea, or an overpowering emotion, or a story that feels vital seems to me to quash the work’s life and purpose. It becomes purely commercial.

I Skyped the other day with my little brother, a fellow artist who lives in Sweden and works as a barista and reaps all the benefits of the Scandanavian welfare state while flailing around trying to make a career out of music. “I know it’s bad when you’re Skypeing me at 1:30 p.m.,” he told me, meaning productivity, career-obsessed me, normally squeezing every last drop of potential wordage and progress out of the day, must be having a crisis if I am sitting in slippers in my backyard at 1 p.m. talking to him. He grinned through a mouthful of frozen pizza. I went on one of the flights of what-is-this-life fancy I can only indulge with him. I talked about Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and how after I read it I had that uncanny feeling of both how limited my work and life are and how profound and big the true mission and scope of art can be. It simultaneously made me want to give up — if I can never do that, why bother? and to forget all my woes and keep going, with a realigned compass focused not on publication but on that feeling I had each night I put The Overstory down. Why live this life, why embark on this madness of writing full-time, constant rejection, constant financial stress, the constant tug of pettiness and ego, if I’m not doing it because I’m trying to get at that essence of connection or meaning or mystery that makes a reader put down a book and just sit for a while and stare, or cry, or call her mother? Why do it if not for that? That, at the end of the day, has very little to do with money.

At the same time, when I have finished a piece of writing now, I am fully aware of the skill and the expertise required to create it — I cannot imagine publishing it for free. It is my livelihood. I need it to be recognized with adequate pay. I need the pay to fund my existence. The pay becomes the recognition and validation that reinforces the meaning of the work. The job and the passion blur in confusing ways, helixed so tightly it’s hard to unwind them. The irony is that the further I get into my career and the more I really need and demand money, the more I come to question what this means for my writing, what I believe and care about as a writer, what I am exchanging for what. It becomes harder and harder to write in that pure void of ideas and perseverance without knowing when the money will come and from where, trusting that eventually, if the work is good enough, it will come. Trusting that if and when it does, it means I’m doing it right. That it’s “worth it.” Eventually, the money has always come, but it has always not been enough, and I have always kept at it anyway believing eventually it will be, and on and on.

Recently, I started a newsletter. I did it in part because of all the pressure to kick off the promotion process for my second book, but also because for years now I’ve been wanting to write the kinds of essays I used to write: introspective, heartfelt, unabashedly Midwestern in spirit, with guest appearances by my dad and Annie Dillard. I didn’t write them and didn’t start the newsletter for years because I wouldn’t be paid, and I thought I should be concentrating only on what I could sell. Yet in starting the newsletter I rediscovered the joy of writing as a fundamental way of being in and moving through the world. It felt so unexpectedly good. I wrote what I wanted, what came from the gut, without any nagging train of thought in the head about who would read and where that would position me and how that would advance my career and what opportunity would open up. I just wrote for the joy of paying attention to my everyday life, thinking about what matters.

No professional writer or artist should be working for free. But neither should they be writing for $50 or $150 or $200, or for a paltry monthly stipend. Instead of painting a stark dichotomy between paid and unpaid work, I wonder if we could think of artistic careers as moving along a spectrum or timeline, from early work that might be funded by other means — MFAs, day jobs — to beginning work that might be paid a small amount, to professional work that should be paid a living wage. A publication offering $50 for an essay can’t announce “We pay!” as a sort of uniform accomplishment; the mere act of paying doesn’t necessarily make the work more valid nor does it properly compensate the work. When the focus becomes so much on the act of payment as a type of validation, not only do other metrics of value get lost — creative freedom and exploration and support — but what it means to pay meaningfully and fairly gets lost as well.

I wrote what I wanted, what came from the gut, without any nagging train of thought in the head about who would read and where that would position me and how that would advance my career and what opportunity would open up. I just wrote for the joy of paying attention to my everyday life, thinking about what matters.

I don’t regret writing for free all those years when I was figuring out how to write. But I have more complicated feelings about writing full-time now for what amounts to barely a living wage. I find it much harder in the early middle of my career to sustain and justify this work — I’m not a 28-year-old graduate student who can live on the same pizza for a week anymore. I have a child. I have a freaking mortgage. I went out for a beer the other night with a friend, also about 10 years into her writing and editing career, very accomplished and very financially unstable, and she said, “We’re too far in now to back out!” It’s true. It feels like we can’t give up. But the path forward is so uncertain — success looks so distinct for each particular artist and may not have any correlation with money. I was whining and moaning with my husband the other night about my career and when I would “make it” and he said, “Maybe you have made it,” and I realized that yes, maybe I have. Had anyone told me in graduate school I’d be writing for the magazines I write for and publishing my second book, I’d have let my head fill with self-congratulatory fantasies of greatness. Now, I spend most mornings writing at a plastic table on our front porch with a fitted sheet as a tablecloth. I am constantly hustling. Sometimes I am fulfilled in the way people can be fulfilled by a single word: writer. Often I am keening anxiously toward the future. This is an object lesson in the human condition of forever wanting more and never being aware of what is going on right here right now, but it’s also a lesson in the improbability and uncertainty of “living from writing” or from any art, of how really going at it with passion and dedication offers no guarantees or certainty or promise of stability. Yes, many artists and writers accept this as common knowledge — perhaps even as a badge of honor — starting out, but there is a very big difference between knowing it at an idealistic 28 and knowing it at 36 with a child, uncertain health insurance, and a house. I am fully aware now of the precise contours, dimensions, nooks, crannies of the gap between my ideals and financial and commercial realities. Much time is spent navigating that gap, possibly as much time as I spend writing.

Writing for free, or for very little, is something I would not and cannot do now — and yet at the same time, I long for the inhibition of that time when my writing wasn’t so hitched to my ability to pay for childcare or buy groceries. I have found it the most difficult to sustain my belief in the larger purpose of what I am doing when I am also desperately trying to get it to pay me and pay me enough. Yet at the same time, I do see progress: I am making a living. I am living from writing, my writing, still the writing I want to do and also writing I sell. But the balance is delicate and fragile. It is not so much between writing for free and writing for pay: it is between writing that makes the act of writing worthwhile, that feels somehow essential to deeper human understanding, and receiving sufficient money for this writing — between the very solitary act of making something I need to make out of a personal urgency and the needs and desires and economic whims of thousands of other people. This is the cost and the meaning of “living from writing.” I keep doing it, because I don’t know what else to do, because I am not qualified to do anything else, because I have come this far and I don’t want to give up now. I keep doing it in the hopes that someday that elusive balance will be struck between financial stability and creative freedom. In the meantime, I try to keep my compass as finely tuned to the north of what troubles me, moves me, confuses me, even as I draw up Google spreadsheets, as I write the tentative notes to editors asking for just a little more, as I cling to that ledge of living from writing and keep trying to peek over the top.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America, forthcoming from Pantheon in April 2020. Her first book, Homing Instincts, (Pantheon, 2017), was long listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has been featured in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Guernica, Oxford American, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a 2019 Creative Nonfiction Writing Fellow. Follow her on Instagram @familiasantiago. Visit her website at http://www.sarahmenkedick.com.

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Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Happily Never After

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  8 minutes (1,978 words)

“And when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough …” On January 3rd, Ukrainian immigrant Ilya Kaminsky quote-tweeted his poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” after it went viral the day Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was assassinated on the order of President Donald Trump. The poem appeared in his long-awaited 2019 poetry collection, Deaf Republic, about a town that responds to the killing of a deaf child by itself going deaf, a parable of the present-day United States, a country that responds to its own demise (and the rest of the world’s) by blocking its ears. His tweet went up in the midst of increasing tensions between the U.S. and Iran and ahead of the death of more than 50 people in a stampede during Suleimani’s funeral procession. It went up months into bushfires ravaging New South Wales that have destroyed millions of hectares and killed roughly half a billion animals. It went up in the wake of a slew of antisemitic attacks across the country. Last Sunday, while thousands in New York marched in solidarity with the Jewish community, the Hollywood awards season kicked off in Los Angeles with the Golden Globes, and the media started gleefully tweeting about couture as though the destruction of the world had politely paused for the occasion. The timing made me think of a friend who recently asked: What if all the people who went to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — tens of millions of Americans — protested instead?

“Now’s NOT the time to live happily,” read Kaminsky’s tweet after he extended his thanks for his poetry’s dissemination. He did not squander the moment the way so many of us often do, advising instead that we “write quality journalism & spicy op-eds & protest poems, get out in the street if you’re able. We won’t live happily during another war.”

But aren’t we already? Read more…

Violence Girl

Photo by Martin Sorrondeguy

Alice Bag | Violence Girl | Feral House | September 2011 | 43 minutes (7,823 words)

 

By the autumn of 1977, new bands were popping up all the time. Seemingly every week, someone who had been in the audience the week before was now onstage in their own band. The Masque reopened in mid-October with a gig featuring a band called the Controllers. The Controllers weren’t really a new band, in fact they had been one of the first bands to rehearse and play at the Masque from its inception, but they had never had a proper coming-out show, so I think of their October 15th show as their debut. Their music was tight, fast, and melodic, and some of their songs were almost poppy which was nicely balanced by the imposing figures of Johnny Stingray and Kidd Spike, who sang up front and played with a ferocity curiously incongruous with their lighthearted lyrics. The band would evolve and get even better over the next several months, with the addition of an old friend of mine named Karla Maddog on drums.

When punk came along, it was just the perfect vehicle to express who I was as an individual. It was something completely new and wide open. Just a couple of years later, that would change, and people would have to fit into preconceived notions of what punk rock was or wasn’t, but the early scene had no such limitations, because we were the ones creating and defining it. If you had been at the Masque in 1977, you would have seen very eclectic shows, ranging from the Screamers to Arthur J. and the Goldcups, from Backstage Pass to the Controllers. There was no clearly defined punk sound, no dress code; all you had to do was show up and make your presence known. The movement was one of individuals and individual expression, each of us bringing our heritage and formative experiences with us in an organic and, in my case, unplanned way.

Read more…

Still Waters

Participant, Killer Films

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  9 minutes (2,330 words)

About halfway through Dark Waters, after corporate lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) has agreed to hear out farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), after he has seen that hundreds of cows on the Tennant farm have died, after he has connected this to their town’s water system, after he has linked that to the chemical company DuPont, after he has tied that to PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acid), after he has found that PFOAs are a man-made forever chemical that can cause tumours and that the company that runs the town is effectively destroying everything within it, after all of that he’s about to sit down his pregnant wife (Anne Hathaway) to explain it to her when she looks at him square in the face and says, “I’m not listening to this.”                          

That should have been the tagline for the movie. It should be the tagline for the world. Dark Waters’ largely ignored release mirrors the larger apathetic response to the climate crisis as a whole. And yet a number of critics who saw it threw away their nonstick pans (PFOA is used to create Teflon), proving the film had the power to spur people on to some kind of action. But if it’s that effective and that timely — show me a global corporation that isn’t hoarding power and destroying the planet — why is no one talking about it? Why did only two movies seem to grab all the column inches over the past few weeks: Marriage Story, a movie about Noah Baumbach’s (sorry, “a couple’s”) divorce, and The Irishman, a movie about an aging mobster? Surely the planet has greater reach being, you know, where we actually live? 

That seems to be the problem. Dark Waters is not just about one plutonium plant (Silkwood), a single nuclear power plant (The China Syndrome), or even a Catholic church abuse conspiracy (Spotlight), it’s a story about systemic corruption that courses through the entire world. As the film’s director, Todd Haynes, told the New Yorker, “There’s no silver bullet, no magic solutions.” No one wants to listen to that.

* * *

Environmental films have been around almost as long as films themselves, and our responses to them have varied as much as our responses to the natural world. Pare Lorentz’s 1936 short The Plow That Broke the Plains, about how aggressive farming created the Dust Bowl, was actually sponsored by the U.S. government. But then World War II ended and America got richer, which meant a lusher population if not a more fruitful landscape. Lorentz wanted to keep making political movies (and what are environmental films if not political), but no one was funding them — one of the most popular films of the 1940s was called The Best Year of Our Lives. Then, in 1958, a woman named Olga Owens Huckins noticed that ten of her favorite birds had died after a DDT mixture was sprayed around her home and alerted her biologist friend Rachel Carson — she responded by writing Silent Spring.

With the 1962 arrival of Carson’s opus on pesticides — the DDT mosquito spray turned out to be killing Huckins’s birds, poisoning marine life, and was possibly also carcinogenic to humans — Americans awoke to the world around them and its abuse by corporate America. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 (not to mention Earth Day) to sate their concerns, while activist groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth sprouted up, outcrops from the era’s wider counterculture movement. This was an epoch in which regular people speaking truth to power could actually be heard. In 1976, All the President’s Men was one of the top five highest grossing films of the year and it remains the high-water mark of whistleblowing movies, while 1979 remains one of the best years ever for overtly political filmmaking in Hollywood. That year both Norma Rae, the Sally Field starrer about union activist Crystal Lee Sutton, and The China Syndrome, about the safety coverup at a fictional nuclear plant, competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. For the latter, Jack Lemmon won Cannes’ best actor for his role as the plant’s shift supervisor, and for the former, Field won the best actress Oscar. Both films were critical and commercial successes. It didn’t hurt that the nuclear power industry accused China Syndrome of mendacity, only to be hoisted on its own petard less than two weeks after the film’s premiere by the Three Mile Island nuclear partial meltdown and radiation leak in Pennsylvania.

But the 1980s came along and activism turned into consumerism. The average American now wanted reassurance, not revolution. So they reverted to conservatism, they pushed the government to deregulate, and instead of paying taxes, they watched their money pile up around them as they stayed indoors watching MTV, only trekking to the movies for escapist blockbusters. They were encouraged to buy and buy and buy, spending rather than questioning. If there was disaffection, it wasn’t with the corruption of higher powers so much as the corruption of their own psyches. In the midst of all this, Silkwood was released in 1983, with Meryl Streep playing another whistleblower. Despite its star power — Streep being Streep, Cher getting serious, Kurt Russell going dramatic — the film didn’t have the same success as its predecessors. Audiences now preferred ghostbusters and gremlins and Indiana Jones, an archeologist who unearths fortune rather than failure.

In the following decade, going to see a movie about the planet usually meant going to see an action movie with an non-man-made threat — asteroids were a favorite. From Deep Impact to Armageddon to Dante’s Peak to Volcano, these were movies about nature attacking us rather than the other way around. It speaks to how out of touch they were that Disney executives of all people, part of the corporate community that helped mold Hollywood into an action-hero-centric fantasy universe, would think that Michael Mann’s studious 1999 slow burner The Insider, about Brown & Williamson Tobacco’s attempt to silence whistleblowing biochemist Jeffrey Wigand, would have the same traction as All the President’s Men two decades prior. Despite its seven Oscar nominations, it didn’t land a huge audience.  Circumstances were different for Erin Brockovich, the film about an energy corporation poisoning a California community that came out a year later. Julia Roberts was one of the biggest stars in the world and though she wasn’t playing a superhero, the story presented her as its clear heroine with the enemy an equally clear corporate entity (Pacific Gas and Electric) negligently harming a specific location. The film is shot warmly, the dialogue is colorful, and the narrative is propulsive. Most important, it has a happy ending. The road to Erin Brockovich’s $2.5 million bonus at the end of the film led to an Oscar for Roberts and $256.3 million in worldwide box office.

That was the last time a big screen eco-thriller saw that kind of fanfare, the dissipating attention coinciding (after September 11th) with dissipating attention to nature as a whole. A Gallup poll graph tracking Americans’ interest in environmental protection versus economic growth from 1985 to 2019 shows the former steadily decreasing to a trough around 2011 — the aftermath of the great recession of 2008 — before it starts increasing again, while the latter is almost its mirror opposite. So the more people focused on the economy, the less they did on the environment and vice versa. It’s telling that the media’s favorite climate movie of the past two decades is The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s 2004 B-movie in which a series of weather events coalesce into a new ice age (he had it the wrong way around). More of a grab at cash than epiphany, the Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle is essentially nightmare nature porn, the money shot a hero conquering climate change. Unfortunately, the real story is a lot less euphoric. “We’re all participating in the climate crisis — if there is an enemy, it’s us,” Per Espen Stoknes, author of What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming, told the New York Times in 2017.

An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 film of former vice president Al Gore’s 2004 global warming slideshow, sort of tried to get that across. Despite its dryness, audiences seemed to have some thirst for an updated climate checkup and upon its release, it broke box office records, got standing ovations, and won the Oscar for best documentary. It has been credited with rejuvenating the environmental movement, though the aforementioned Gallup graph questions how much it actually did. This wasn’t like Blackfish, where it was clear SeaWorld was to blame, or Super Size Me, which could point the finger at McDonald’s. Who do you hold accountable for global warming? As Stoknes said, “It’s hard to go to war against ourselves.” 

More than a decade elapsed before Sir David Attenborough shocked his audiences by finally changing his tone from wonder to dread in the Netflix series Our Planet. “I would much prefer not to be a placard-carrying conservationist. My life is the natural world,” he told TIME. “But I can’t not carry a placard if I see what’s happening.” The natural historian was able to piggyback climate change awareness off an established brand in the way HBO miniseries Chernobyl would later riff on the 1986 disaster everyone knew about. Proving that television seems to be more hospitable to climate content, the latter dominated the discourse for weeks. Part of that was the arrestingly horrific first episode, but much of the talk also heavily associated the worst nuclear disaster in history with Trump. “We look at this president who lies, outrageous lies, not little ones but outstandingly absurd lies,” show creator Craig Mazin told the Los Angeles Times. “The truth isn’t even in the conversation. It’s just forgotten or obscured to the point where we can’t see it. That’s what Chernobyl is about.”

Dark Waters isn’t so different. Though it’s based on a lesser-known disaster, this one is farther reaching. The film adapts the 2016 New York Times Magazine article by Nathaniel Rich about Bilott suing DuPont on behalf of thousands of West Virginians and Ohioans affected by PFOA (the company settled for nearly $700 million in 2017), so the events it dramatized are more recent and the ties to those in power more direct than Chernobyl would be. “I hope that the movie starts to spur bigger conversation about who our government is actually working on behalf of,” Ruffalo, who is also a producer on the film, recently told Fast Company in the rare bit of mainstream coverage. Instead we were too busy trying to figure out how autobiographical Marriage Story was or whether Martin Scorsese was right about Marvel movies not being real cinema. When Haynes’s Dark Waters was covered, the question was not why this stylish auteur had made this ambling eco-thriller, but why he hadn’t made anything else. A master of deconstruction, Haynes had in fact denatured the genre beyond its basic elements — the company, the chemical, the casualty, the turncoat — to create a film that echoes the futility of our current circumstances. Bilott isn’t a hero; he’s a human being who sees a fellow human being destroyed by a corporation, who is himself destroyed by trying to help. Every advance is only an inch, every setback a foot. When he finally, after years, uncovers the truth, when he proves DuPont has in fact poisoned people, there is no happy ending. DuPont simply rejects reality and refuses to accept responsibility, forcing Bilott to file no fewer than 3,535 personal injury lawsuits.

Haynes was inspired by Silkwood and All the President’s Men, but the world we live in is now DuPont’s. This is a year in which only 65 percent of polled Americans believe in prioritizing environmental protection at the risk of economic growth, in which the latest climate talks ultimately came to nothing because world leaders would rather quibble over technicalities; a year in which six of the top 10 grossing films were made by Disney, in which a movie like Dark Waters actually increases the stocks of the company it calls out because, as the president has proven time and again, being honest about how awful you are is more rewarding that not being awful at all.

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“Here’s the thing: for many of us, climate change isn’t a disaster movie, it’s a kitchen sink drama,” climate scientist Kate Marvel wrote in Scientific American earlier this year. And though we’ll watch kitchen sink dramas, we prefer our humdrum slogs toward justice illuminated by big stars, or at least a romantic plot. Climate change is too relentlessly depressing; we need some kind of hope so that it doesn’t all seem so impossible, or at least distracts us from the allure of giving up. But I can’t think of anything less hopeful than denial. I can’t think of many things more depressing than the woman sitting next to me scrolling through her phone during our screening of Dark Waters while Bilott described how a company had put so much PFOA into the world that she almost certainly had some of it inside her body — maybe the critics who watched the movie and just wondered why Haynes hadn’t made another lesbian melodrama; maybe the wider audience that continues to go to the movies and conduct the various other aspects of their lives without focusing on the largest scale of all because it’s too abstract compared to an unpaid bill or a sick relative; maybe the part of that audience that could actually change things and doesn’t, like that scene in Dark Waters where Bilott holds up a picture of a baby with a congenital deformity and DuPont’s CEO, while affected, ultimately does nothing. As Haynes explained to The New Yorker: “There’s no way to just end corporate greed and corruption. But there are steps to take, and we just have to keep taking them.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Longreads Best of 2019: Food Writing

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

Mayukh Sen
James Beard Award-winning writer and Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

The Chef Who Can Teach Us a Thing or Two About Grit (Julia Bainbridge, Heated)

I tend to agree with most criticisms of using the first-person in profiles: Who cares about the writer? Why the throat-clearing about yourself? Who asked about you when I’m just trying to read about Rihanna? It takes a writer of real skill, and very little vanity, to pull off this first-person trick. I marvel at the way Julia Bainbridge gently, unobtrusively inserts herself into this Heated profile of chef Iliana Regan. In doing so, Bainbridge allows the reader to understand the subject in fuller, more generous terms.

There is a current of melancholy that runs through Bainbridge’s piece, pegged to the release of Regan’s National Book Award-longlisted memoir, Burn the Place; you get the sense that the writer understands her subject intimately. (I should note that Regan’s memoir inspired a number of very fine pieces, including those by Deborah Reid and Helen Rosner. Read those, too.) Certain details — the nervous tug of a sweater, the smell of cigarette smoke and beer wafting from a bar — could’ve read like strained flourishes in a lesser writer’s hands, but Bainbridge uses these observations sparingly, bringing Regan to life. She works carefully, sentence by sentence, with some turns of phrase that stop me dead in my tracks. “The alcohol is gone,” Bainbridge writes at one point, “but the -ism remains.” Bainbridge shows that the first-person, when deployed correctly, can showcase a profile writer’s empathy, not their ego.


Read more…

Longreads Best of 2019: Music Writing

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

Ericka Blount Danois

An award-winning journalist, writer, editor, and professor, Ericka Blount Danois has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vibe, Spin, The Washington Post, Wax Poetics, The Source, and Da Capo’s Best Music Writing 2012. She is the author of Love, Peace, and Soul.

The Empire Strikes Back (Melissa A. Weber, Red Bull Music Academy)

Melissa A. Weber’s roller-coaster ride retrospective on George Clinton, P-Funk, Funkadelic, and various offshoots of everything funky is told with a musician’s attention to detail and a storyteller’s attention to drama. In the end, it’s Clinton’s otherworldly genius and cultural impact that can’t be denied.

How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music (Emily Lordi, The New Yorker)

In Emily Lordi’s insightful New Yorker feature, she illustrates how Hayes’s 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul was an exercise in Hayes commanding his own space — musically, sartorially, and physically. The album was both an act of resistance and healing during a time when Hayes was distraught over the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His insistence on being himself remade the record industry, with songs like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which ran for 18 minutes, and “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” which Lordi refers to as an “exercise in the refusal of fear and containment.”


Ann Powers
NPR music’s critic and correspondent, previously The Los Angeles Times‘ chief pop music critic, Ann Powers is the author of Good Booty and Weird Like Us, co-author of Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, and co-editor, with Evelyn McDonnell, of the anthology Rock She Wrote

I’ve said it before: A golden age of music writing is scattering its fruits across the wild plains of the Internet. Music writing is a bastard form, journalistically unnecessary, literarily unstable, and so perfectly suitable to a virus-prone, hierarchically unstable intellectual epoch like our own. Trying to pick one or two great pieces from 2019, I fell into a vortex, revisiting instant classics, like The New York Times’ history-making investigative report about the Universal Studios fire that destroyed irreplaceable master recordings, and GQ’s powerful oral history of how sober musicians thrive creatively, and The Ringer’s illuminating trend piece about TikTok, and heartfelt stuff like this memoir in Texas Monthly. However, I had to make a choice. I started thinking about language itself. Music is language, and music encounters language; it conveys more than words can offer, but is also often bound up with them. These five pieces offer insight into this complex relationship.

I Believe I Can Lie (Kimberlé Crenshaw, The Baffler)

In the wake of the edifice-toppling documentary Surviving R. Kelly, law professor and intersectional theorist Crenshaw analyzes the lyrics to Kelly’s answer song, “I Admit,” as an example of the “SOB (Save Our Brotha”) rhetorical strategy also employed by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when faced with accusations of sexual harassment.

The Poetic Consequences of K-Pop (Emily Yungmin Yoon, The Paris Review)

This deceptively modest memoir of being seen within the crowd of BTS fans speaks volumes about how pop can literally speak for its audience.

Who’s Billie Eilish? (Meaghan Garvey, The Fader)

On the surface, this appears to be just another profile of an up-and-coming pop star, but this recounting of time spent at home with the teenage oracle of Gen Z goes deeper. Author Meaghan Garvey really listens to her Eilish and her family, and she does the work of letting the singer’s words — in conversation, but also in her journals, which Garvey reads — change her perspective on her art.

A Secret Ingredient in Songs of Summer (Reggie Ugwu, The New York Times)

Over three years of listening, Ugwu identified a three-beat pattern (“boom-ch-boom-chk”) that always got him dancing: rhythm, the basic grammar of pop. This multimedia read follows it from Jamaica to Africa and the U.S., identifying an opportunistic cross-pollination, as he writes, that only benefits our playlists.

Arizona (John Edgar Wideman, The New Yorker)

Trying to find the linguistic key to a 1980s quiet storm classic by R&B lifer Freddie Jackson — “How do you offer a space with your voice that feels real enough for a listener to enter” — the 78-year-old novelist goes to a remarkably raw and poetic place in this piece of short fiction, as he contemplates pleasure, mortality, morality, and the imprisonment of his teenage son for murder the year after the song was released.


Michael A. Gonzales

The Blacklist book columnist for Catapult, cultural critic Michael A. Gonzales has written articles, essays, and reviews for publications including The Paris Review, Pitchfork, Wax Poetics, Mass Appeal, Complex, Longreads, and The Wire U.K

How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music (Emily Lordi, The New Yorker)

While pop-cult fans know the late Stax Records singer-songwriter Isaac Hayes as the soundtrack innovator who delivered the 1972 classic “Theme from Shaft,” and the voice of the comical Chef on South Park, there was much more to him than funk and laughs. In Emily Lordi’s wonderful New Yorker feature “How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music,” she shows us a different side of bald-headed dude who was a friend of Martin Luther King and became very distraught when the civil rights leader was slain in 1968 within blocks of Stax. After mourning for months, Hayes put his anger and grief into making the 1969 psychedelic soul masterwork Hot Buttered Soul. Lordi’s essay presents a stellar portrait of a soul music modernizer.

For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway (Tari Ngangura, Catapult)

One of the coolest things about original essay sites like Catapult and Longreads are the abundance of music related pieces that double as personal essays. In August, writer Tari Ngangura, published her piece For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway, that began as a coming of age in 1999, the same year she bought and embraced Meshell Ndegeocello’s brilliant Bitter album. In the two decades since its release, the disc has served as a soundtrack and solace through various of Ngangura’s relationships. Her writing is poetic, probing and precise, and made this Bitter aficionado quite blissful.


Tom Maxwell
Journalist, Longreads Shelved columnist, and musician

The Ryan Adams Allegations Are the Tip of an Indie-Music Iceberg (Laura Snapes, The Guardian)

Two music stories from earlier this year are standouts to me. First is a piece by The Guardian’s deputy music editor Laura Snapes, published on Valentine’s Day. “The Ryan Adams Allegations Are The Tip Of An Indie-Music Iceberg” is not the most wieldy of titles, but the writing is crisp and incisive. Snapes speaks of a chronic indie rock condition, which reinforces and promotes misogyny even as it feigns enlightenment. “The industry has been slower to reckon with its abusers post-#MeToo than other art forms,” Snapes writes, “partly because it is built on a generally permissive culture of excess and blurred lines between work and leisure — but also because the myth of the unbridled male genius remains at its core.” Go read it. Practically every line is a pull quote.

Before & After ‘The B-52’s’ (Christopher Wiengarten, The New York Times)

On July 15, Christopher Wiengarten gave us an entire weekend’s worth of reading and listening, thanks to “Before & After ‘The B-52s’.” The Times has done this type of thing before, like with 2014s dazzling, multi-media longread “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie.” But this new one is pure Technicolor. I freely admit my own biases here ― not just because I’m helping the Bs write their first official biography — but because I’m a sucker for context, precedent, and insight. Wiengarten shows us, not just what might have been the musical parents for any given B-52s song, but what those songs subsequently inspired. Great music often leads to great music, and these stepping stones always lead to a life better-lived.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

The Queering of the Baby Bells

Getty, Collage by Homestead Studio

Carlos A. Ball | an excerpt adapted from The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally | Beacon Press | 2019 |  23 minutes (6,272 words)

 

In the years following the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ rights supporters chose corporations as targets for activism. At the time, some corporations had explicit anti-LGBTQ policies and practices for everyone to see. In 1970, for example, a Los Angeles bank made clear in its job application forms that it would not hire alcoholics, drug users, or “homosexuals.” At around the same time, the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, the largest private employer in California, announced that it would not hire open “homosexuals,” because doing so would “disregard commonly accepted standards of conduct, morality, or life-styles.” Until 1978, the Coors Brewing Company routinely asked job applicants, while attached to lie detector machines, whether they had engaged in same-sex sexual conduct and denied them jobs if they had. (The company’s testers also inquired whether applicants were thieves or communists.)

One reason why post-Stonewall LGBTQ activism focused on large corporations was that the firms’ interests in promoting and protecting their brands made them particularly sensitive to the negative publicity that came with exposing discrimination. Large corporations spend millions of dollars every year developing and marketing their brands and are, as a result, highly sensitive to criticisms that might tarnish those brands. Interestingly, the need to protect corporate brands from negative publicity made companies more willing to change explicit anti-LGBTQ policies than government entities. Indeed, it was more likely, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, that a large corporation targeted by queer activists would cease explicitly discriminating against sexual minorities than, for example, a government agency would stop discriminating against queer people or, just as important, a state or local legislative body would adopt sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws. To enact such laws, queer activists had to persuade a majority of elected officials in a given jurisdiction to support adding sexual minorities to civil rights laws; outside of a few liberal municipalities, this was an extremely difficult task for the embryonic LGBTQ rights movement to accomplish in the years following Stonewall.

Additionally, the fact that corporate America had tens of thousands of LGBTQ employees (most of whom were, admittedly, firmly in the closet) made corporate workplaces obvious and natural targets of LGBTQ rights activism. Whether they knew it or not, corporate leaders and heterosexual co-employees were already working alongside sexual minorities and transgender individuals, in many cases developing the cooperative bonds, mutual trust, and even lasting friendships that the pursuit of common objectives, including corporate ones, frequently engenders. In this sense, LGBTQ individuals, as a group, were not outsiders and “strange others” to corporate America; instead, they were integral members of corporate workplaces. And many of them were likely to come out of the closet and share the joys and challenges of their personal lives with their fellow workers (as heterosexual employees did all the time) if they could be guaranteed a modicum of job security and protection against discrimination. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2019: Investigative Reporting

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

Alice Driver
Long-form journalist and translator based in Mexico City.

Stories About My Brother (Prachi Gupta, Jezebel)

Gupta investigates her brother’s death with tenderness and intimacy, providing us with a rare glimpse into the way toxic masculinity affects men. She recounts childhood memories of her brother Yush and his evolving views on power and masculinity, which have been shaped by his family and his mostly white classmates and peers. As Gupta grows up, she embraces feminism, which her brother defines as a “female supremacy movement,” and from that point on, their relationship deteriorates. Gupta, haunted by her brother’s death, digs deep to push through the pain of mourning and discover the cause. When she interviews Yush’s friends, they reveal that he had deep-seated insecurities about his height which led him to seek out limb-lengthening surgery. Yush believed that being taller would make him richer and more successful. Instead, he died of a pulmonary embolism, one of the side risks of the limb-lengthening surgery. Gupta’s work is personal, revelatory, shocking and provides insight into an area where we need more work: the ways in which conventional ideas of masculinity and power harm men.

The Death and Life of Frankie Madrid (Valeria Fernández, California Sunday)

I am drawn to investigations that harness the power of one story to illuminate the situation of a whole group — in this case, the lives of young, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Fernández writes poetically about the death and life of Frankie Madrid, an undocumented teen who arrived in the U.S. with his mom when he was either 4 or 6 months old. Fernandéz begins the story with Frankie’s death — he committed suicide after being deported to Mexico — and then works her way back in time, investigating the cause of his suicide, his relationship with his mother and the difficulties of daily life while being undocumented. Via Frankie’s story, we begin to understand the pressures that undocumented kids face and to question the increasingly inhumane U.S. immigration policies and practices that played a role in his suicide.
Read more…

Longreads Best of 2019: Arts and Culture

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

Jessica Lynne
Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is co-editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives.

For Magicians Who Die On Stage (jayy dodd., Gay Magazine)

Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World (Magdalena Edwards, Los Angeles Review of Books)

As 2019 comes to a close, I would like to offer up two essays, disparate in conceit, but both worth the return.

First, there is jay dodd’s “For Magicians Who Die on Stage” published by GAY Mag. It is a beautiful meditation on the body, pain and fear, the specters of habit that might loom over our presence in the world, and the material reality of/for Black Trans Women. Using magic as structural metaphor, dodd moves us through her relationship to sobriety and the desires of self-imaging. Here is a line that stays with me: “I don’t believe I am attempting an illusion just by being alive and hurting and outside. Part of being able to be anywhere is crafting a self that feels desirable to me.” In truth though, it might be better to say that every line of this essay has stayed with me. dodd’s sentences are seared with undeniable beauty and clarity.

Secondly, I remain struck by Magdalena Edwards’ essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World,” in which Edwards recounts her experience working with the writer, editor, and Clarice Lispector translator Moser. Edwards, also a Lispector translator, vulnerably details the terms of a book translation project that, begun in deep admiration of Moser, leads to a reckoning with the ethics (or lack thereof) that guide Moser’s engagement with the work of one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Most importantly, in mining the politics of translation, Edwards centers a necessary question that remains critical for my own relationship to lineages of writing and research: “Who gets thanked for their devotion?” Edwards asks. “Who gets credit for their work?”


Jillian Steinhauer
Jillian Steinhauer is a journalist and editor whose writing appears in the New York TimesThe New RepublicThe NationThe Art Newspaper, and other publications. She’s a recipient of a 2019 Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital.

The Tear Gas Biennial (Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett, Artforum)

Psycho Analysis (Andrea Long Chu, Bookforum)

Within the world of writing, criticism gets short shrift. Sure, maybe I’m just saying that because I’m a critic, but I do believe it’s true, both financially and in terms of how our society assigns value. Despite the ongoing journalism layoffs and consolidation bloodbath, a lot of great arts and culture writing was published this year. I don’t know if these two pieces were the best — I find myself utterly unable to make such judgments — but both are excellent examples of criticism at its best. And both have stuck with me.

The first is technically an opinion piece, but it does the work of criticism by helping readers better see and understand something in the culture — in this case, the debate over how artists in the 2019 Whitney Biennial should respond to protests against the Whitney Museum’s vice chairman Warren Kanders. The situation was pretty specific and probably lost on you if you don’t participate in the contemporary art world, but that doesn’t matter. In “The Tear Gas Biennial,” Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett break down the entanglement of art and politics with incredible clarity and moral force.

The same can be said of “Psycho Analysis,” Andrea Long Chu’s review of Bret Easton Ellis’s new book White. For better or worse, takedowns — let alone good ones — are hard to find these days. This piece reminds me why they’re so delicious when done right. Chu refuses to take Ellis’s bait and get angry. Instead, with equal parts rigor and wit, she entertainingly eviscerates his “deeply needless book.”


Soraya Roberts
Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter (Sasha Bonét, Topic)

Few of the multitude of articles I read each year stick, and the ones that do tend to hail from magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian. It makes sense: Those are places that not only have the resources to nurture the best writers, but also to carve their work into its greatest form. Which is why I didn’t want to pick anything from those places. I realize that Topic magazine isn’t the biggest underdog of all, but it’s a start. And I had never heard of Sasha Bonét before I read The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter. But that’s a story that I remember. It’s a story I sent people. Even just seeing the short description in my Twitter feed — the black artist Camille Billops abandoned her 4-year-old child in the ’60s to pursue her art — I knew it was for me. I, as I’m sure a lot of women artists do, have a particular affinity for stories about women who choose their art first, when they are always expected to do the opposite.

Bonét traces how Billops becomes self actualized as an artist by shedding her past — what she had been taught about black womanhood and its attendant motherhood — including her own daughter. If she hadn’t given up her daughter, the artist says, “I would have died, and if I would have died, she would have died.” In contrast, the piece offers up Billops’ partner, a white man who not only contradicted societal norms of the time, but also provided her the emotional support for her art that she couldn’t provide her own child. Bonét illustrates how Billops, following the initial rejection of her own family, adopts a community of artists as her chosen relatives.

“Her memory collided with the new world she had carefully and meticulously molded,” she writes. The eventual fraught rapprochement of mother and daughter, itself becomes a confluence of emotion and creation. Bonét doesn’t shy away from Billops’ fundamental paradox, which is that she could only nurture that which she chose to create: “Christa had said that meeting her birth mother and her biological family saved her life, but some may argue that it led to her demise.” A devastating but beautiful piece of art about a devastating but beautiful artist.


Danielle A. Jackson
Danielle A. Jackson is a contributing editor at Longreads.

Forgotten: The Things We Lost in Kanye’s Gospel Year (Ashon Crawley, NPR Music)

For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway (Tari Ngangura, Catapult)

Like most people I know, I read a lot of articles and books and listened to a lot of music in 2019, for learning, for practice, for work. When it got to be too much, when work overwhelmed, or the world did, by way of the news or simply duty, I spent a fair amount of time reconnecting to pleasure. I needed to re-learn how to experience the art I love for the sake of sensation, for how it vibrated in my body, rearranged my cells, made me change. I never want to be too busy or too much in despair to remember that my work should be infused with pleasure, too, that what I place on the page, how I think and engage in the world must be infused with heart and feeling. These two pieces immediately struck me and stayed, guiding me through my attempts at staying connected.

First, Ashon Crawley’s examination of Kanye West’s Sunday services and their culmination, the very popular Jesus is King album, is a moving meditation on remembering, or rather, how, in the deluge of so much sensory input and so much hype, we forget precedents, echoes, entire people and eras. We lose the substance, Crawley insists, when we lose the memory. And so, we are so easily deluded, so easily bought. Crawley threads together stories of Zora Neale Hurston, who told us a century ago about the political underpinnings of Black American religious ritual, the author Hans Christian Andersen, and William Seymour, the founder of the American Pentecostal movement, to help us think through the sad, hollow spirit-lessness of Kanye’s endeavor into gospel. More importantly, Crawley proposes that failing to remember costs us in imagination and progress. In his words, “Gospel performance at its inception was the announcement of the practice of different worlds, the fact that alternatives are available, the sounding out of the here and now breaking with the normative and violent world. Sounds of otherwise possibility.”

Tari Ngangura’s Catapult piece “For Black Women, Love is a Dangerous Thing —“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway” is a story and analysis of bassist and vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello’s album Bitter, but also of Ngangura’s first encounter with it, and how the album allowed her to verbalize and move through the feelings and aftermath of an early romantic relationship. I love Ngangura’s insistence on hope through disappointment, her gentle pleas with herself to stay open. I love that a piece of art can help us do that.


Monica Castillo
Monica Castillo is a New York City-based film critic and writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, RogerEbert.com, Remezcla, The Wrap, Hyperallergic and elsewhere.

Earlier this year, while many critics and moviegoers were scratching their heads over the outpouring of love for the uncomfortable interracial buddy movie from Peter Farrelly, Green Book, Wesley Morris made sense of the ordeal by examining the way certain feel-good movies about race like Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy tend to win awards over more challenging and honest works like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The year Lee’s electric film broke out, it wasn’t even up for the Best Picture category at the Oscars. Instead, the award would eventually go to the much more saccharine movie in which Morgan Freeman played a happy-go-lucky driver hired for a racist client played by Jessica Tandy. Through his piece “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies” and a few episodes of his podcast with Jenna Wortham, “Still Processing,” Morris explores the various shortcomings of the form and why its persistence does more harm than good. For starters, these types of movies always prioritize the character arc of the white character who’s maybe a little bit racist but not explicitly so, and over the course of the film, they learn the error of their ways. Unfortunately, that journey comes at the expense of the Black character who must endure the white character’s racist nonsense as they play second fiddle to the white protagonist’s story. Morris finds a through-line in Driving Miss Daisy and to other movies before and after it like Green Book that offers an easy out for white audiences because they’re not as bad as the worst racist villains in the movie. It was the incisive reading I needed — and still need to some extent, as there are still people who want to relitigate my opinion — to back up my own misgivings on the movie. Green Book won the Oscar for Best Picture that night (and picked up a few extra awards as well), so Morris’ piece will likely continue to resonate for many more awards seasons to come.


Krista Stevens
Krista Stevens is a senior editor at Longreads.

Trigger (Michael Hall Texas Monthly)

More than anything, I love music and and I love writing that transcends time. For me, music is fifty percent art and fifty percent magic. During this most trying of years it’s been a salve I turn to (or perhaps tune in to?) every day to find solace as the planet collapses and the news cycle brings to mind Yeats’ center that cannot hold. Of all the pieces I’ve read this year as part of my curation work for Longreads, there’s one that particularly resonated with me as a keen student of guitar and bass. Back in the January 21st edition of Texas Monthly in 2013, Michael Hall wrote a lengthy ode to Trigger, Willy Nelsen’s faithful musical sidekick.

Wille’s been playing that same Martin N-20 classical for 50 years. In it, Hall chronicles Nelsen’s career through the battle scars literally etched into Trigger’s worn neck and battered body as well as the careful tending and regular repair the guitar has undergone in the span of five decades.

Reading the piece, my own small instrument family suddenly meant even more to me and it made me happier about the countless hours I’ve spent studying music. For is there anything more worthwhile than to make a bit of magic?

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

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