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On Watching Boys Play Music

Arthur Fellig / International Center of Photography / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Read an introduction to the series.

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,059 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

* * *

Three songs into their set, the band has gotten loose and they’re starting to sweat under the stage lights. From where I’m standing a few feet away, I can watch the four guys — a standard formation, with the singer playing guitar, flanked by a second guitarist, a bass player, and a drummer — grimace and grin. The music is feverish, a hook-y mix of ’90s rock and country twang. Playing it, they look expert and at ease, like they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be. 

The lead guitar player is my husband. He’s been in a few bands since we got together more than a dozen years ago, and a few before that. Rousing and charismatic, easy to move to, this is the best of them. 

With a drink in my hand and earplugs responsibly in place, I’m very aware that I’ve spent more than half my life essentially standing in the same spot: off to one side of the stage (close but not too close), eyes forward, shifting weight from foot to foot. I’d like to think that after so much time I’d be less conscious of where I used to be as it compares to the moment I’m in. But the truth is, when I’m at a show — whether the band onstage is comprised solely of men or not; whether the band is famous or unknown or the one my husband plays in — I’m never not thinking about it. 

In an important way this feels like a victory. As a teenager I was adamant that going to shows was essential to my being, something I would never outgrow. Going to a show meant supporting music that had fused with my identity and, crucially, doing it with friends who felt the same way. Going to a show meant being the kind of person who goes to shows — the kind of person I wanted and made sure to be. Even so many years later, it’s hardly a surprise that I married a musician.


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Now that I’m in my late 30s, things have shifted. Bodily and psychically, the relatively simple act of watching this band play is far removed from the ear-ringing dramatics I lost myself in as a teenager. The music itself is different: earworm Americana instead of sweetly sloppy punk. But with the shared vantage point comes echoes of some essential dynamics I’ve been steeped in — some might say implicated in — for more than 20 years, and that have informed the way I’ve listened to music and watched bands play ever since.

* * *

I’ve been watching boys play music since I was 15 years old, when I was growing up in a small town that felt farther from New York City than it actually measured in miles. It’s a classic story, the material thousands of songs are built from: The place I lived was boring and provincial; there was nothing to do but go to the mall, and music saved me. One day I started seeing flyers taped up on walls at school, broadcasting the names of a small crop of local bands alongside hastily scrawled logistical info and rudimentary collages, lazily appropriated photos, and the labored-over lettering that was the trademark of a certain kind of bored and vaguely artistic high school kid. Sometimes a photocopy would be tacked to a bulletin board in a classroom, and I’d let my eyes wander over to it while the teacher’s back was turned like I could will it to beam me up. The world they teased was one I’d been dreaming about, and the flyers were like maps to buried treasure.

My close girlfriends and I started going to shows every weekend. We could hardly believe our luck in finding this so close to home, a genuine local scene in our native territory, where we’d learned to expect little. Bands played in a big warehouse that had been converted to a skate park, or a small club in a strip mall abutting a Pizza Hut, or various firehouses and American Legion halls, and occasionally someone’s backyard. Self-deprecation was a trend when it came to naming — there was Not Good Enough, Last One Picked, and Humble Beginnings — as was alluding to a generalized toughness: Fallout, Eye 2 Eye, Inner Dam. They played catchy, snotty, buoyant punk music that was fun to jump around to, and snarling, screamy hardcore driven by bass riffs and body slams. It was all fast and loud and rude and messy, an ideal soundtrack for our restlessness.

Without exception, these bands were made up of boys, and boys accounted for the vast majority of people who came to see them play. Being a girl in this sea of boys was to be special — tough and wily and possessed of rarified taste. Right away, I knew I was where I wanted to be: in rooms where the air was thick with smoke and the floors were sticky and the sound was abrasive, with people who were attracted to things that didn’t exist for anyone’s approval. 

Kids from other towns and high schools converged at shows, and in these semi-secret spaces, we were drawn together and got close quickly. New faces gave way to new friendships and familiar frictions: long conversations and car rides, jealousy and competitiveness and unrequited love. Loyalty came quickly, and with it, the conviction that outsiders were not to be trusted — especially girls, since there couldn’t possibly be room for all of us. Everything revolved around the shows. The energy of being there rearranged my cells while sating a deep thirst; hours later, I always struggled to fall asleep, dreaming half-conscious dreams where the band was still playing, the music a stubborn throb, my limbs vibrating. 

That music was miraculous for existing within reach. Whether it featured crushing screams or a catchy chorus, it was right in front of me, something I could get my arms around. When everything was clicking — when the band was playing the songs I loved the most, when I tipped my head back and sang along, when the music pulsed intimately through my body in a crowd full of my friends, buoyed further by the promise of the night spooling out ahead of us — the glow of bliss and belonging was so pure and potent it made me dizzy.

I just want to get laid, went the chorus of one crowd-pleasing singalong, the singer repeating the line with a nasal swagger before switching to a scream for the kicker: before I die! Were these bands any good? In the thick of it, it hardly mattered. It was easy to love something that you could stand right next to, something not everyone could touch or even appreciate. It felt good. Leaning up against the stage, my face arranged into an expression of practiced nonchalance, was to insist that I belonged there — and that my attention and support mattered. It made me feel cool, probably for the first time.  

But I couldn’t do it alone. If those flyers for shows had been maps, boys were the passports. And that’s what we called the ones who were our friends: the boys. Along with monopolizing the stage, they were the ones taking money at the door, massed in the crowd, stationed behind soundboards and merch tables, and doing tricks on their skateboards outside. They were the loudest, the most obnoxious, the funniest, the sweetest and most cruel. They had less to prove than we did as girls, though that didn’t necessarily mean they were any less self-conscious or tried any less hard. They played guitar and bass and drums; they sang and scowled and snarled and cracked jokes. They scribbled setlists and hauled gear around and did sound check. They gestured for the levels to be turned up or down. It was all very important stuff, and they made clear that it had nothing to do with us.  

Were these bands any good? In the thick of it, it hardly mattered. It was easy to love something that you could stand right next to, something not everyone could touch or even appreciate. It felt good.

What did those boys really see when they looked at us? Where there was affection, there was also suspicion. One of the tensions churning had to do with authenticity. Have you seriously never heard of this band? What are you, a poser? Another related — but usually unspoken — tension had to do with intent. Did the girls really show up for the music, for the scene, or did we have a predictable ulterior motive? The relationship between us was two-sided, if not exactly reciprocal: If we were special for loving the music, the boys were special because they were the ones playing it. Our attention gave them an aura of confidence and power, while theirs made us both more scrutinized and harder to see.  

Inevitably, some of the boys who played music became our boyfriends, which came with its own set of privileges and responsibilities. I harbored crushes and dated two guitar players. On and off, for too long, I hooked up with another guy who was really the number one groupie of the whole scene, but whose gender meant that he was treated more like a celebrity than a charity case. But being someone’s girlfriend was never the point. My friends and I wanted to be noticed and known, valued as experts and familiars and friends and fans and confidants and critics — and also be desired. We quickly learned that it was impossible to comfortably be all of those things at once. In the lyrics of the boys’ songs — which we memorized and sang along to — girls were mostly agents of heartbreak, objects of longing or blame.   

Among the flyers and band photos and handwritten lyrics covering my bedroom walls, I had taped up a cartoon. Headlined “I’m On the List!” its protagonist and punch line was a serial dater of guys in bands, a girl whose style and self transformed from panel to panel, depending whose hand she was holding: She was alternately punk, goth, hippie, girl next door. “I’m on the list!” she shouted as she shoved her way to the front of lines, trying too hard in a way that made everyone around her sneer. While she cheerfully narrated all the good times she’d had being “with the band,” the illustrations revealed her to be an oblivious opportunist, a hanger-on. I’d torn it out of Details magazine and put it up as a way of showing that I got the joke. 

But I think I sensed even then that the joke was on us.

* * *

Outside of shows, watching the boys play music was a ritual — though band practice tended not to involve a whole lot of actual music playing. The girls (and some boys) would lounge around and talk, graze on snacks and soda while the band noodled around in the living room or garage. When the boys got it together enough to play a recognizable chunk of a song, we’d stop whatever we were doing and pay attention, nodding to the music, clapping appreciatively when they finished. 

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in a band myself. I did, badly. I craved the creative outlet, the spotlight, the place I would carve out, the point it would make. Hilary and I were slowly learning to play guitar; Brianna was already good at bass. We figured we could convince another friend that she wanted to be a drummer. That was what boys did; they didn’t think they needed to be good at something before pursuing it. (They didn’t necessarily have to be or get good at all; talent was not a particular requirement.) One of our male friends could start a band on a lark and have a show in a few weeks. But the mid-’90s in our leg of suburban New York could feel a little stuck in the past when it came to what girls could do. 

Still, we dreamed up band names and doodled them on our notebooks. For a while we got together to write and play songs with simple melodies and tortured lyrics. We were pretty bad, like so many young bands driven by little more than excitement and impatience, but our inability to get our shit together felt more consequential, because it meant the scene we took so much pride in still had no girls in bands. (I’d heard whispers about something called riot grrrl, but it seemed mostly like a colorful rumor in Sassy magazine, a postcard from somewhere else.)

So my friends and I started a zine. We called it Thriftstore Injection, the title partly a rip-off from the name of a girl-led band in Blake Nelson’s 1994 novel Girl. In that book, a Portland teenager named Andrea discovers her own local scene and her life becomes an enviable, angsty blur of vintage dresses, punk shows, and the intermittent attentions of a damaged musician. Here she is describing a raucous show, in her signature breathless style: 

Boys were moshing and girls too and it was this big swirl of people and me and Rebecca looked at each other and then we both ran right into the middle of it. And everyone fell down and we were getting kicked and smashed and falling over everyone and rolling on the floor and then we got up and we were dancing like crazy and whipping our hair around and it was the wildest time! 

I read this book at least 10 times, seeing in it a version of my own life: the joyful frenzy of it as well as the constant self-consciousness, the quiet humiliation of trying to get close to something that could only ever sort of belong to you.

We made a new zine every few months and sold it at shows for a buck or two. Encouraging our readers to pick up the latest recordings put out by local bands, and proclaiming nostalgia for the TV shows of our childhoods, we used our new platform mostly to convey enthusiasm. We wrote as fans not only of bands but of low-level quirky subjects — Pez, ramen, cats — that we played up partly as a way of crafting a voice and identity for ourselves. When it came to the things we really loved, we tended not to describe or interrogate them in too much depth (demos by local bands are described variously as “incredible,” “amazing,” and “kicks so much ass it’s not even funny”). In later issues some light criticism started sneaking in (“sounds like they recorded in a box which makes it kinda hard to listen to … none of the songs stick in your head”), alongside earnest rants about racism, depression, and authority figures.

I read this book at least 10 times, seeing in it a version of my own life: the joyful frenzy of it as well as the constant self-consciousness, the quiet humiliation of trying to get close to something that could only ever sort of belong to you.

We interviewed a handful of local bands — most of them friends of ours — and one bigger score, a California band signed to a prominent punk label making a stop on a longer tour. We crammed into their van on a rainy Sunday before their show and pelted them with questions about their favorite foods, their influences, and the funniest place they’d ever peed. “What do you think of our scene so far?” we asked, craving validation so plainly that it’s clear even on a faded photocopy. “Looks cool,” the lead singer said, and my heart swelled. 

Looking at these zines now, I see an overeager patchwork of underbaked passions and opinions. “I don’t think that anything could ever make me feel the way that music does,” I wrote, skimming the surface of a deep and complicated connection. “I can’t do anything without music playing. It’s even better when you’re a musician, to be able to create music and understand things about it. I feel like I owe it my life.”

I believed it, though. And regardless of the inanities and insults, I was fiercely protective of the scene. I hated when there were fights at shows, because the fights were always started by boys and were only ever about them. To me, their involvement in such stupidity was disqualifying, an offensive distraction from what I believed — or wanted to believe — the scene was supposed to be about. Among those things (despite all the evidence to the contrary) was pushing back against aggressive macho bullshit, which was alienating not only to the girls but to boys seeking a refuge from the tyranny of high school. I cared about zines because they were a place for people to say something, anything; to articulate what they thought and believed, even if it was just “school sucks.” I respected the prevalence of straight edge because it was driven by a conviction, even if it wasn’t my own. 

I wanted the scene to be about more than it was, and after a couple of years I couldn’t ignore that it wasn’t really up to me. Meanwhile the warehouse/skate park that had been the best place to see shows had closed, and some of our favorite bands had stopped playing much. Most of what was left was hardcore music. Increasingly, I wanted to be less besieged by boys, my life less dominated by the things they made. I wanted to be less peripheral to the things I poured my attention into.

* * *

The scene had gotten me through high school, but when I got to college in the fall of 2000 (in New Jersey, not all that far from my hometown but miraculously absent anyone I knew) my attention transferred effortlessly to politics. While I was funneling all that would-be-riot-grrrl energy into national elections and local activism, I started writing for my school’s alternative paper, where a review of the new Cat Power record could sit comfortably next to a critique of globalization. This time coincided with the rise of girl-driven bands like the Gossip and Le Tigre and Bratmobile and Gravy Train!!!! With a new group of friends, I went to see these bands play in larger clubs in New York, dancing and sweating and singing along until our bodies ached and our voices went raspy. In those rooms, with all those women onstage and in the audience, there was a sense that we were part of something that mattered, something that had momentum, and that needed us.

I wanted to be less peripheral to the things I poured my attention into.

I’d felt that particular mix of heady idealism and physical abundance at shows plenty of times before, a fizzy warmth that swept through my whole body and was almost holy. I was always chasing that particular shiver. I missed the version of it I’d experienced close to home: the urgency and weight of it, the insider knowledge that had been so hard-won, the pride that came with staking a claim. But when I watched Le Tigre and Sleater-Kinney dominate the stage, I knew what I’d been missing. For me, there was less immediate intimacy in these spaces, but in some ways that meant there was more freedom.  

There were still boys. Regardless of geography, activism tended to parallel and overlap with music and those who played it, which included plenty of boys who believed they knew everything there was to know about both. It was a world of impassioned attractions, to both causes and people, and within it the boys I was interested in were still mostly ones who played music. But listening to their songs and going to see them play was an occasional thing, not a habit or an identity, or part of anything beyond it.

When I was 20, I fell in love with a talented singer/guitarist who had taken a year off from college to work at Sam Ash while he tried to find success for his band on a two-semester deadline. Their songs were pretty good: shimmering melodies and brightly plaintive vocals, but as they struggled it was clear they didn’t have what it would take. Still, I cared and I wanted him to know it. My best friend and I once raced out to Asbury Park to surprise him when his band played a show at a small club on a random weeknight. We arrived during one of their first songs to find my boyfriend’s mother sitting by herself at a cocktail table, the only person in the whole place besides the sound guy. I gave him a hug after their set and we never spoke of it again. 

I think about that anecdote a lot, and it still makes me cringe. There is something about the dream of playing music that can seem like a particularly delicate thing. To be onstage is to be vulnerable, exposed. It is a display of hope with an undercurrent of need, laying bare a longing to be noticed in a sea of others who understand that hunger — and many of whom share it. There’s a kind of immediate validation in playing, but getting beyond that is a lot more difficult, and wanting it isn’t enough. 

I think, too, about the word “support” — what it means for a girl, a woman, to support a boy, a man, in his pursuits, to show up and stand by and endorse his efforts, or to support a scene at large. In both contexts support is a resource; attention is currency. They can be deployed in ways that make you a participant or that make your position more of a passive one. They can be appropriated. Maybe this is especially true in a dynamic as visible and traditionally gendered as playing music. “Support” is related to both fandom and community, but it can exist without them. The shape of my support varied over the years, but it often involved some amount of glossing over the obvious, pretending things were OK when they weren’t. It didn’t always mean the things I wanted it to, or fully belong to me.

Whatever form it took or how earnestly I bestowed it, I always recognized and resented that my gender made my support a cliché. In some ways, it was as simple as that: I didn’t want to be dismissed as a girl, or as someone who watches. Today, what I resent almost as much as the stereotype itself is its hold on me. Not only the extent to which I still feel the need to object: I am not just a girl who watches boys play music! Not only because it forces me to admit that I care what other people think. What I try and fail to resist is this facile analysis, a flattened sense of burden and blame built on one-dimensional ideas about how men and women relate to each other and what our roles are as musicians and fans. In many ways, the lessons of watching boys play music are ones I reject. But I still learned them, and the songs are stuck in my head.  

Things should be less fraught these days. I’m not ambivalent about supporting my husband’s band; they’re genuinely good and it’s fun to see them play. In going to their shows, I’m supporting a person I love, doing a thing he loves — a thing he’s really skilled at and that I want him to be recognized for. And yet: As much as this dynamic is undeniably, fundamentally different from the one I grew up with, it sometimes resembles it, with the participants in their prescribed positions. And the part of me that loves seeing my husband onstage — that is proud of him, admires his talent, loves these songs, is still turned on — can feel like it’s at odds with the part that doesn’t want to just stand there and watch. 

This feeling is not strictly useful — as a musician’s partner, it is mostly just disruptive. Still, I’ve tried to pay attention to it. And at some point I noticed that my stubborn inner conflict could feel as good, as right, as its absence used to. It reminds me of what I regret, of all the things I’ve learned to look out for, and have come to question — the compromises I’ll accept and concessions I refuse to make. It shows me what I was always right about and what I needed more time to understand. It shows me that it’s possible to outgrow something and still hang on to a part of it. It underscores the distance of two decades and makes those years disappear, all at once. It can be as nourishing as the music, now that there is, at least mostly, room for both. 

* * *

Also in Hive:
Welcome to Hive: Series Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson
Miami: A Beginning, by Jessica Lynne

* * *

Eryn Loeb is the deputy editor at Guernica. Her writing about nostalgia, books, and feminism (or some combination of those things) has appeared in Poets & Writers, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, the Awl, the Village Voice, the Rumpus, and the Millions, among other publications.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

‘Let’s Reset’: A Career Social Distancer Mends Some Fences

Sari Botton | Longreads | April 2020 | 6 minutes (1,521 words)

To appreciate the significance of the shift I’m about to share with you, it helps to know a couple of things about me.

The first is that I’ve harbored a lifelong aversion to the telephone, which stands in stark contrast to my family’s enthusiasm for it. For the entirety of my adult life, my mother and sister have spoken to each other five or more times daily, and in between chatted with countless friends and other family members. They roll seamlessly from one conversation to the next while I cower the second my muted iPhone starts vibrating, and have worked hard at Ferberizing my mom so she expects only a couple of calls from me per week.

If I were to self-diagnose I’d say my problem is rooted in lonerish introversion (a condition I’ve learned to over-compensate for; I now pass as a full-fledged extrovert), and a social anxiety that stems from my teen years when, even though I begged to have a pale yellow princess phone installed in my bedroom so I could make myself available to my friends and crushes, I dreaded actually talking to them. What if there were awkward silences I didn’t know how to fill? What if I said the wrong thing? What if, without visual cues, I spoke at the wrong time, stepping on a cute boy’s lines?

The second is my long-standing antipathy toward a group I’ve dubbed The Forgiveness Lobby — that well-meaning but preachy band of folks who, to my mind, short-circuit a multi-step process best given ample time. You know the ones — always posting platitudes such as “Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” They pressure the aggrieved into relinquishing appropriate anger well before they’re ready — and before those who’ve aggrieved them have had sufficient opportunity to suffer the consequences of their actions, and come around to making amends. I’m all for genuine forgiveness, but that is something which must unfold at its own pace.

So imagine my surprise when, a week into social distancing thanks to Coronavirus, I suddenly wanted to call or Facetime with absolutely everyone, especially a handful of people I’d previously fallen out with, so we could bury our hatchets, large and small.

Maybe it was the void created by the sudden absence of friends I’m used to spending time with IRL — and the colleagues I used to work with side-by-side in the small co-working space I operated, which Coronavirus has forced me to shutter. Maybe it was the death toll, mounting daily, reminding me of my mortality and everyone else’s. Maybe it was the arrival of a mutual enemy, which has made it easier to bond with those I’ve been at odds with. Whatever the cause, I quickly found myself emailing people, asking for appointments to talk on the phone so we could start over. (What kind of monster just calls people out of the blue without any warning? Okay, okay — some friends have recently done this and I kind of…loved it…? Who even is Pandemic Sari?)

Of course, there have been exceptions, people toward whom I am not feeling terribly generous, even in my newfound state of grace. There’s the underminer/boundary-pusher I’ve been trying to shake for going on 40 years, who keeps resurfacing no matter how fervently I try to avoid her. There are exes I am resigned never to speak to again — unless, of course, they come forth with long overdue apologies. Until such time, I am standing on ceremony, deadly plague be damned.

But for a few notable others, I am all about rapprochement right now.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Maria Elena Fernandez, Jake Bittle, Eva Holland, Naz Riahi, and Terra Fondriest.

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1. If I Wrote a Coronavirus Episode

Maria Elena Fernandez | Vulture | April 2, 2020 | 27 minutes (6,812 words)

“Tina Fey, Mike Schur, and 35 more TV writers on what their characters would do in a pandemic.”

2. On a Wing and a Mayor

Jake Bittle | The Baffler | March 30, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,274 words)

Are mayors the heroes of 21st century politics, or is going from getting the snow shoveled and the sewer lines fixed to managing a global pandemic a leap too far?

3. The Frontier Couple Who Chose Death Over Life Apart

Eva Holland | Outside | March 30, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,945 words)

“Artist Eric Bealer was living the remote, rugged good life in coastal Alaska with his wife, Pam, an MS sufferer, when they made a dramatic decision: to exit this world together, leaving behind precise instructions for whoever entered their cabin first. Eva Holland investigates the mysteries and meaning of an adventurous couple who charted their own way out.”

4. All That Is Lost and All That Is Remembered

Naz Riahi | Catapult | April 1, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,409 words)

On the 30th anniversary of her Navy captain father’s political execution, Naz Riahi recalls her love for him, and reveals a persistent grief that is always with her.

5. Ozark Life

Terra Fondriest | The Bitter Southerner | March 24, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,305 words)

“A photo essay of the intimate beauty of daily life in rural Arkansas.”

All That Is Lost and All That Is Remembered

Longreads Pick

On the 30th anniversary of her Navy captain father’s political execution, Naz Riahi recalls her love for him, and reveals a persistent grief that is always with her.

Author: Naz Riahi
Source: Catapult
Published: Apr 1, 2020
Length: 9 minutes (2,409 words)

The Danger of Desire

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Faylita Hicks | Longreads | April 2020 | 28 minutes (7,041 words)

I was late. Even though the album dropped in 2018, I didn’t know about the track until June of the next year. Which was tragic, because the first time I heard Teyana Taylor’s “WTP (Work This Pussy)” — I went off.

The command hit my speaker and I dropped the washrag I had been using to clean the dishes, into the soapy water. Splashing it all over the frail kitchen counter, I leaned forward over the sink. Gripped its metal edge in instinctive obedience, desire trickling through my body electric. Throwing my head back, I left behind the part of my day that had been filled with judges, sheriffs, the DA. I turned the music up, grinding my pelvis to the tempo, shuddering in spasmodic rhythm to twerk.

I wanted to shake out the fear I had carried since that afternoon’s Criminal Justice Committee meeting with the county officials. Forget all about the Black and Brown bodies that slept in a small metal box less than five miles away from me. Swaying from side to side with my eyes closed, I let guiltless memories of pleasure snap neon through me. Let holographic echoes of my past life — the time before I was an activist and after I was a Christian — fill to the brim the dusty corners of my small and empty Central Texas apartment. Hot, I rode the hum that rolled out from my bluetooth speakers, ignoring the sound of my phone vibrating with updates from the group chat about bail. All I wanted was to make my lower back flinch as I rolled my hips and popped to Teyana’s simple instructions — work this pussy, work this pussy, work this pussy.

But I must’ve been too tired. Too tight in the shoulders to flex and hold the pose. Too thick in the thighs now to dip low and pounce back up with ease. Too heavy with the backhanded comments about criminals and “bad decisions.” Too dizzy from the tight, bone-straight lace front that had made me feel more pretty in a room full of white. Too distracted. Too hurt. Too tired. Like trying to shake molasses off of me, I rotated my hips in place. But nothing moved as easily as it used to. My rhythm was off — and it made me wonder. How long had it been since my back was blown out?
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“The Beauty of the Moments that Pass Each Day”

Autumn in the Ozarks / Getty Images

As writer and photographer Terra Fondriest notes in this stunningly beautiful photo essay over at The Bitter Southerner, her family is among the newest on their dirt road, having only lived in rural Arkansas for 11 years. In a series of intimate portraits called The Ozark Life project, she documents her neighbors and the bounty they share and preserve in land, family, livestock, hard work, and tradition.

This Ozark Life project is a lot of things for me: a way to get to know the people around us, a way to record this time and place from my perspective for the history books, and a way to pursue a personal challenge. But, perhaps the reason that motivates me the most is connecting the Ozark culture to the life I used to live in the Chicago suburbs. By seeing moments that are totally normal in the Ozarks, moments that make me smile, and realizing how quirky those would look to a person living outside this area, I can relate our mountain world to other people.

Often these are snippets in my own family’s everyday life, but lately I am spending time photographing others in my community. I am drawn to documenting people who work using their hands and ingenuity to make a living. Those who are following their passion and those who are making a living off of the land here. I love spending time with other families similar to my own, who are navigating life here, each with its own twist.

I am still the same introverted girl who grew up in the suburbs. Getting to know new people makes me more nervous photographing for this project. It’s a challenge that is daunting on most days, but the camaraderie built by pushing through that with my subjects yields the intimacy I strive for in my storytelling. Some of the folks I photograph are friends and neighbors, but others are people I meet through circumstance, whose everyday story I find interesting and a good piece for my Ozark Life story quilt. But I approach them. I might talk to them right away about my project, or I might let it simmer a bit and get to know them over days, months, even years before I bring up my project and my request to photograph them.

Time moves, everyone in their own rhythms and situations, yet it’s a cadence we all relate to. The difference between the Ozarks and the suburbs where I grew up are the ties people have to the land, which grow deeper with every generation. Will Norton can point to the soil under his feet and say his granddad’s dad farmed the same soil where he now raises both cattle and his family. There’s a respect and connection to these hills that’s hard to put into words; it’s almost like a heartbeat that the land infuses in you.

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On Racism and Epithets

Brian Ach/Invision for Spaulding/AP Images

One of the greatest features of the literary essay is its flexibility. An essay can be linear and chronological. It can be digressive and circular. The dots it connects can form a trapezoid whose structure remains hidden until the last sentence makes everything crystal clear. The best essays are, as essayist Phillip Lopate once said in a lecture, a map of the movement of a human mind, and part of an essay’s pleasure is seeing how different minds work.

For the New England Review, fiction write Robert Lopez explores racism’s vastness and influences, in both his life and the world at large. Ranging freely to collect seemingly divergent points, he connects elements from American culture with his past and present to create a brilliant, fresh portrait of racism and its lasting effects, using particular racial epithets to lead his way. We always need powerful perspectives on American racism. His is wildly original and affecting.

I used to describe myself as half Puerto Rican and half Italian and half Cuban and half Spanish. I called it the new math.

Of course it wasn’t true, those percentages. But saying one was a quarter or eighth or some other tiny fraction of anything always felt stupid to me.

Which is akin to being classified as a quadroon or octoroon, which was also ridiculous and awful.

During American slavery, quadroon was used to designate a person of one- quarter African ancestry, that is equivalent to one biracial parent and one white or European parent; in other words, the equivalent of one African grandparent and three white or European grandparents.

Some terms for quadroons in Latin America are morisco or chino.

In the ’90s I worked at an Italian restaurant on Long Island as a waiter and, like in many restaurants in New York both then and now, Latinos staffed the kitchen. One such line cook was referred to as Chino. That’s what everyone called him and that’s what I called him. I have no idea what his given name was, perhaps it was Roberto or Jesus.

You can imagine why he was called Chino.

The term mulatto was used to designate a person who was biracial, with one pure black parent and one pure white parent, or a person whose parents are both mulatto. In some cases, it was used as a general term, for instance on US census classifications, to refer to all persons of mixed race, without regard for proportion of ancestries.

The US Government used quadroon and octoroon, etc., as distinctions in laws regarding rights and restrictions.

The only math I did as a teenager was the calculation of batting averages and earned run averages, the probability of drawing to an inside straight, now known as a gut-shot straight, which you should never attempt.

Now the only math I do is by increments of 15. 15-love, 30-15, deuce.

My tennis community here in Brooklyn is diverse and glorious. In the past year I’ve played with Mexicans, Guatemalans, Haitians, Jamaicans, folks from Qatar, Egypt, Nigeria, all manner of Europeans, quite a few Australians and South Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Pakistani, even people from Ohio.

White, black, brown, color and off-color. All kinds of fractions.

Read the story

A Long, Lonely Time

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Hannah Seidlitz | Longreads | March 2020 | 11 minutes (2,999 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

There was nothing better to do during the Sunday thunderstorm. I had never seen it, and my mother insisted. A slate of clouds had spooked the February sun from sight a few hours too early. New York dripped like Vancouver, where we had lived by the ocean when I was small. Tinny droplets thrummed the roof. We stretched out together on the olive-green sofa. Her fingers threaded through my dark curls. I remember little of the movie. I remember the warmth more than anything. The orangey glow haloing Demi Moore as she tracked a penny along the doorframe. Heat emanating off my mother’s chest. Embers sputtering in our fireplace. I don’t know where my father was. Moore’s amber eyes glittered, incandescent with awe, when her spectral beloved usurped her coin-pushing, the doorframe a Ouija board animated by yearning, devotion. I remember knowing then, with a certainty I have not felt since, that love was the only thing in the universe warm enough to conquer the cold, ineluctable and everlasting, that awaits us.

* * *

A few months after my mother died, I asked my father about their wedding song. I had seen enough movies to expect any newly anointed couple to inaugurate the ballroom reception with a waltz.

My father gripped the wheel of our Honda Pilot with one hand, the other drumming the black driver’s door through the open window. We were singing along to a scratched-up Darkness on the Edge of Town CD, my favorite of Springsteen’s. My father insisted The River eclipsed it in emotional intelligence, that on The River Bruce howled and hummed a hunger so raw, unconquerably raw, that nothing that came before it could compare. But I held true. His guitar on Darkness, I felt, told the deeper story: Rumbling through this promised land, tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea, and wash these sins off our hands. 


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“I want to get married to this song,” I said.

“No, no. It’s much too fast,” he said. “You need something to sway to.”

“‘Racing In The Street’ is kinda groovy?”  He shot me a sidelong glance.

“All right, all right,” I said, lowering the volume knob. “So what, instead?”

His brow furrowed. At once, together we realized the real question into which I had stumbled. We were quiet.

After a stretch of silent highway, I whispered in as steady a voice as I could muster, “What was you and Mom’s song?”

His eyes fixed on the road ahead of us. He sucked his upper lip through his teeth. “Unchained Melody,” he said. “From Ghost.”

* * *

My parents were married in June ’96, in the backyard of the yellow Dutch Colonial where my father grew up. She was beautiful and he still had all of his hair. In the framed photo on the dresser in my childhood bedroom, my mother leans against my father’s lapel with a sprawling bouquet of pale pink and white roses. Ivy spills out from beneath the satin bow that holds the stems. Her sweetheart gown is sleeveless, secured by a strip of organza encircling each arm; her chest bereft of jewelry, only her protrusive collarbones accessorize her décolletage. (She was 114 pounds on her wedding day, she made sure to remind me any time she bemoaned the weight that collects with age. I read in a magazine that you gain one pound every 10 years, she groused once, grimacing at the scale.) Her brown curls were swept off her face and gathered loosely beneath a beaded brooch which fastened her veil in place, exposing her Grace Kelly widow’s peak, dark eyebrows, and rosacea. All of which I inherited.     

So, they danced to “Unchained Melody.” Darkly funny, prescient. (What ruthless narrative parallelism!) It’s as though they had, paranoid or prophetic, preordained a soundtrack for grieving.

I often wonder how they came to select it. They would’ve been standing in the tiny kitchen of their cramped Greenwich apartment, staring at the pile of papers — drafted guest lists, caterers’ business cards, venue release forms — scattered across the dinner table. My father might say, Deb, no self-respecting man likes the Dixie Chicks. (This was, of course, pre-Iraq.) One hand on her hip, the other propped against the counter, she’d hiss, Sarah McLachlan is not a Dixie Chick. Whatever, he’d grunt. Let’s do “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and call it a day, he’d say, slugging his Lagunitas. Probably she would mutter under her breath, I knew I should’ve done this with Karen, which would, understandably, really set him off. Your yuppie sister doesn’t know Lou Reed from a broken dishwasher. And they would be fighting already, even though they weren’t married yet, which is when domesticity really goes sour, I guess. At least she doesn’t listen to Blink-182 when she vacuums. It’s like living with a 17-year-old. Even without children to fight about, there are always living disputes. At least I vacuum, all you do is complain! and, realizing his gaffe, he’d gush, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Deborah. I love you, falling to his knees before her, taking her hands and cupping them against his cheeks. She’d sigh. She was always sighing. I love you, too. What about something from a movie? It would be immediate. Self-evident as if it were divinely sanctioned. In unison: Ghost?

I remember feeling certain then that love was the only thing in the universe warm enough to conquer the cold which awaits each of us, inevitable and everlasting.

Prior to Ghost’s popular ascription of mourning to its lyrics, “Unchained Melody,” I imagine, was romantic: about heartbreak among the living, about infatuation, about leaving girlfriends behind to go on tour, about a distance that is literal and bridgeable. It’s strange to think that the Righteous Brothers outlive my mother. Sometimes I pretend they are singing to her:

Oh, my love
My darling
I’ve hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

Their countertenor melodies permeating the soil over which her ashes have been spread, electrifying each scorched cell, piecing them back together the way I have often dreamed, resurrecting her.         

* * *

It occurs to me now that my father may have been onto something about The River, that perhaps “Racing in the Street” isn’t the ideal first dance song after all, but instead “Drive All Night.” Its revolving drumbeat, slow and certain, Bruce’s longing gravelly and bare. Baby, baby, baby, I swear I’ll drive all night again / just to buy you some shoes, and to taste your tender charms / and I just want to sleep tonight again in your arms.

My parents took me to see him when I was 7. I’d been begging to tag along for years, desperate for a taste of the intimacy that adults seemed privy to, the urgent togetherness of live music. To my dismay, Madison Square Garden’s pounding speakers and towering bleachers, which elevated around and above me tens of thousands of strange, middle-aged headbangers, proved too overwhelming; I spent the better part of the evening curled under the stadium seats with a tray of greasy chicken fingers, clinging to my mother’s legs and failing to stave off my first panic attack. I don’t remember if my parents held hands or murmured the E Street Band’s cloying refrains in unison or exchanged inside jokes regarding all the past shows they’d been to, decades before my time, when Bruce could still somersault across the stage. I can’t remember if they kissed or cried. I can’t remember if they ever touched at all.

In the desperate bowels of stagflation, Springsteen saw a dark fissure in our country’s consciousness and filled it with effervescent synthesizers, optimistic choruses, a new national anthem. Clarence Clemons’s bright sax buoyed bleaker tableaus on timeless chart-toppers like “Dancing in the Dark,” Danny Federici’s honky-tonk keys and organ on “Glory Days.” This sound, the sound of a better future, propelled the Boss to commercial success.

I’d been begging to tag along for years, desperate for a taste of the intimacy that adults seemed privy to, the urgent togetherness of live music.

This sound, the sound of a better future, is absent, achingly so, from the Righteous Brothers’ oeuvre. Their greatest hits are elegiac. They reminisce about the better times of yore with no eye toward proaction. Their songs about “glory days” lack Bruce’s cheeky irony. Bring back that lovin’ feelin’, they sing on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Cause it’s gone, gone, gone
And I can’t go on.

* * *

My mother died six years ago in October. She was struck and killed by a car crossing the street in front of a Mexican restaurant. I’d turned 15 two days before. At her funeral I sang “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” by Bob Dylan, the Jeff Buckley version. When Jeff sings Dylan’s song the words lose their edge; they bleed into something pulsing and vulnerable. The way Dylan’s relationship-dirges croak with characteristic gruffness safeguards them against that sort of frailty. Don’t get me wrong, of course Dylan feels, and he feels consumingly, gutturally, but he manages to expel his woe by growling. Rather than bowing, succumbing to anguish like Jeff seems to, he gnashes his poetry through his teeth like some animal. The hurt filters outward, not inward.

Blood On The Tracks, which is, in no uncertain terms, one of the desert-island greatest heartbreak records of all time, quakes with this grit throughout. The stories he tells, purported to illustrate the collapse of his marriage, would be almost unbearable if not for the way he barks to banish emotion. Each verse on “Simple Twist of Fate” is more agonizing than the last, cataloguing the gradual demise of an affair, and relies on the modulated last long vowel sound of every penultimate line for catharsis.

He woke up, the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere
He told himself he didn’t care
Pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside

Here his cadence breaks down into even more of a spoken drawl, then ascends the scale as he bellows: To which he just could not relate. He nearly yells the latter syllable of relate, as if he were an ancient funeral wailer. This purgation is absent from Jeff Buckley’s soft, wounded crooning. Dylan exorcises his woe; Jeff doesn’t seem quite as conquering.

“Mama, You Been on My Mind” opens, Perhaps it is the color of the sun cut flat and coverin’ …  and his voice wavers, cleaves as though he is about to cry. He continues in a whimper, the crossroads I’m standing at, or maybe it’s the weather or something like that / Oh, but Mama, you’ve been on my mind.

I sang Buckley’s version because I do like it better, but mostly I sang Buckley’s version because he sounds like he’s crying the whole time. I knew I would probably be crying the whole time.

You know I won’t be next to you you know I won’t be near
I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind

* * *

A year after my mother’s funeral, insistently independent and 16, I spent Valentine’s Day at a friend’s house. Reclining against quilted throw pillows, I inhaled buttery crackers smeared with baked Brie, swipes of fig jam — effectively feigning epicurean sangfroid. If I could perform a coolness, an entitlement to luxury and contentment, I didn’t have to consider dearth. Somehow the warm wheel of cheese made loneliness feel farther away. Jay’s TV room swelled with laughter and the warmth of sardined bodies all crowded against the arm of the couch closest to the screen. I sat beside Jay, admiring their resemblance to their mother, against whom they were nestled, who, equally striking, gave Jay their emerald eyes, the warmth in their auburn waves. The three of us were watching When Harry Met Sally.

Young Carrie Fisher lectured, All I’m saying is that somewhere out there is the man you are supposed to marry. And if you don’t get him first, somebody else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that somebody else is married to your husband. I winced. I was entangled then in something that resembled a relationship, but the movie made me cry for the only boy I had ever really loved. It had been nearly a year since our last wistful, forbidden kiss, the sweet-sour ale taste of his tongue only teased by his breath during our hushed conversations, our faces always too near for ex-lovers. He had a girlfriend then, one whom, to my schadenfreudic surprise, he would proceed to date for only three apparently unspectacular months, before ex-post-facto-dumping her by publicly asking another girl to prom. 

If I could perform a coolness, an entitlement to luxury and contentment, I didn’t have to consider dearth.

Someone knocked at the front door, rousing me from my reverie, before entering. Jay’s father shuffled through the foyer, cane and newspaper in hand. Jay’s mother, his ex-wife, stood to greet him. Gingerly, he kissed her on the cheek. So stunned by the unlikely tenderness of their exchange, I nearly forgot myself, had to blink away inappropriate tears. That he could show affection to an old love even after they’d parted legally and domestically seemed unfair to me. Why my father couldn’t still touch my mother, couldn’t show her he loved her even after his affair, even after the years of therapy, after everything, wasn’t just. He could never atone; they could never overcome as Jay’s parents had, not even as friends. Recovery halted abruptly. Penance did not. 

* * *

My parents had never got around to formalizing their divorce. After my mother found out about his infidelity, my father slept in the guest room alone for six months.

He had been away, on a business trip in Phoenix, Arizona. She had called him in the morning from New York. The voice that answered was alien. Certainly it belonged to her husband, but it was constricted, fraught with something indiscernibly foreign. Before she could ask him if everything was alright, she heard another voice in the room — a woman. 

It’s on Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s anomalously inward-facing record, uncharacteristically centering disappointment over hope, which he released in 1987 after his separation from Julianne Phillips, that he sings of the doubts and estrangement of married life.

Now look at me baby
Struggling to do everything right
And then it all falls apart
When out go the lights
I’m just a lonely pilgrim

Perhaps my parents would have divorced had they had a few more years. They did not have a few more years. After the accident, my father began to screen the regular calls from their couple’s counselor, Cynthia, until finally the insurance company informed her that one of her clients had died. Cynthia stopped calling. My father never returned to therapy.

As I watched Jay’s father lower his lips to the rosy flush just beneath his old lover’s cheekbone, I couldn’t help but burn with envy.

Bruce continues: Tonight our bed is cold, lost in the darkness of our love. God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.

Is Harry bringing anybody to the wedding? Meg Ryan’s query reminded me to check in on my father. He was home alone. I had deserted him in the drafty house he and my mother had designed together some decade earlier on his first single Valentine’s Day in 22 years. Not out of malice, but because I couldn’t stomach the burden of his grief atop my own. Because I was terrified to see him cry. Terrified to cry in front of him.

He was under the covers with a bottle of wine watching Schindler’s List on HBO, he told me. I thought of him in the spacious master bedroom. The cold side of the king-size bed. UNACCEPTABLE, I texted back.

Fifteen minutes later his BMW pulled in front of Jay’s house. I stormed down the porch steps, “Schindler’s List! Are you kidding?”

“Yeah I know,” he raised his hands in shame, surrender. “I know.”

“Dad, you can’t be that guy,” I spat, dropping into the passenger seat.“Well, you aren’t leaving to be with me,” he hazarded. “Right?”

“No.” I lowered my gaze to the floor. “No, of course not.”

Unable to reestablish eye contact, I switched on the radio.

Lonely rivers flow, to the sea, to the sea. “Unchained Melody” blared through the car stereo. Scarcely another beat played before I slammed the power button, slumping back into my seat.

“Hannah, why’d you shut it off?”

“For fuck’s sake, Dad,” I snarled.

Without another word, he revved the ignition and sewed us into the night.

On the sleepy freeway we drove in silence for a long time. Through the moon-blackened windshield I watched skeletal trees bend by, lanky brown smudges against the pitch dark. Brake lights splashed red against the glass. At long last, after steeling myself for confrontation, I spared a glance at my father. His knuckles, bound around the steering wheel, glowed white. He was like an owl, impossibly still, his head motionless between his shoulders. All of a sudden, a swell of tears freed themselves from his eyes. I had seen my father cry only once, at the funeral. The disloyal streams slipped across his cheekbones. Swiftly, he pawed at his face, clenched his jaw, returned his fist to the wheel as though nothing had happened.

I flipped open the center console and fumbled through it for a few moments before extracting what it was I went looking for. The plastic case bore cracks on the spine from a shelf life as old as I was. I fed the scratched treasure of a disc into the CD slot.

Track 10. Play.

Three triumphant piano keys, a G chord.

Well they’re still racing out at the trestles, but that blood it never burned in her veins. Without moving his head, the corners of my father’s mouth twitched. A smile. It was ours, he knew, this familiar anthem beating through the car. With our lives on the line where dreams are found and lost / I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost … The descending riff, the cymbal crash. He was grinning now. For wanting things that can only be found / in the darkness on the edge of town.

 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang
All Mom’s Friends, by Svetlana Kitto
The Coastal Shelf, by June Amelia Rose

* * *

Hannah Seidlitz is an NYU MFA candidate and amateur semiotician living in Brooklyn. Her work appears in LitHub, Electric Literature, QZ, Entropy Mag, and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Eating for Two

Longreads Pick
Source: The Cut
Published: Mar 25, 2020
Length: 10 minutes (2,577 words)

“The Leaky Vessel”: On Lewis Carroll and the Perils of Being Female

Rachel Vorona Cote (Author photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | March 2020 | 10 minutes (2,706 words)

We’re delighted to bring you a brief excerpt from “Chatterbox” — chapter 2 of Rachel Vorona Cote’s excellent book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today.

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We’ve been fortunate to publish Rachel Vorona Cote in the past. Check out The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning, and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music.

The strictures of twenty-first-century little girlhood might, at a glance, seem inconsequential when set alongside the demands laid before Victorian children—including the Brontës—and yet, present-day expectations are enduringly rigid. It is true that the last few years have yielded a modest offering of feminine fictional icons modeling less constrained behavior—both Brave’s Merida and Moana’s titular heroine are standout examples. The latter’s release was nothing short of sensational: here, finally, is a nonwhite female character who is reduced to neither racial nor gender stereotype. Accordingly, she’s positioned neither as a damsel in distress nor as an object of desire—Moana’s romantic life receives no narrative attention, and her chutzpah saves her island, however much it unsettles her father, the film’s benevolent patriarch. But our excitement over these young heroines belies their enduring paucity. And if we’re delighted over the representation of sassy, brave girls—if we’re still registering them as novelties and dazzling exceptions—it emphasizes the extent to which American popular culture continues to proffer an idealized version of young femininity as white, docile, and amiably stifled (Moana, after all, is one of the only nonwhite heroines Disney offers its viewers).
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