Search Results for: New Yorker

‘A Beautiful Contagion’: Anthony Bourdain

Photo by Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images

At GQ, family, friends, and co-workers share their memories of chef and television host Anthony Bourdain, who died in June, 2018.

David Remnick (editor in chief, ‘The New Yorker’): My wife came home one day, and she said, “Look. There’s a really nice woman at the newspaper. Her son is a writer. She wanted you to take a look at his work,” which seemed…adorable, right? A mother’s ambition for a son. I took this manuscript out of its yellow envelope, not expecting much. I started to read. It was about a young cook, working at a pretty average steak-and-frites place on lower Park Avenue. I called this guy up on the phone. He answered it in his kitchen. I said, “I’d like to publish this work of yours in The New Yorker. I hope that’s okay.” That was the beginning of Anthony Bourdain being published. I don’t know if there’s any way to put this other than to say he invented himself as a writer, as a public personality. It was all there.

Josh Homme (frontman, Queens of the Stone Age; composed the theme song for ‘Parts Unknown’): He was such a beautiful contagion. He presented such a fascinating doorway to so many other things that aren’t within your narrow doorway of what you do. When it was time to write the song for his show, he sent over [Joey Ramone] doing “What a Wonderful World.” And I said to him, “Are you sure you want me to do this?” And he just said, “It is a wonderful world. Isn’t it?”

Michael Ruhlman (author): There was this woman who was a foodie, but she was a student and she was poor. And she used to go by his restaurant every day. She’d just stand out there, looking in and smelling the smells and thinking about it. One day Tony came out and said, “Hey, I see you here all the time.” She said, “Yeah, I can’t afford to eat here.” He said, “Come in. I’m gonna feed you.” And so he fed her a steak and a proper béarnaise sauce while she sat amongst the crowd.

Hamilton: That’s the thing about friendship with Tony. Tony lavishes you with love and friendship and generosity and kindness, and then he disappears in the night and you don’t get to reciprocate. It wasn’t mutual. But it was breathtaking to be loved by him.

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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Angora

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,822 words)

In the Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher shines a light on the dark underbellies of the things we adorn ourselves with. Previously: the grisly side of perfume.

* * *

In 2013, PETA released a video that changed the fashion industry. The footage, which is still available on YouTube, showed a man sitting on a bench, straddling a white rabbit that had been stretched out lengthwise and strapped down. It’s an angora, a rabbit breed prized for its long, thick, hollow-haired coat. The man begins to grab fistfuls of the rabbit’s soft fur and pulls it quickly, jerkily, tearing it from the rabbit’s flesh. As the video continues, you see more clips of rabbits being stripped naked to their pink skin. They look flayed and raw, and they cry out in pain. When I watched the video, the animal bleats disturbed my two dogs, who began running in circles, sniffing the air and wondering. I’m not sure if they were inspired to hunt, or if they could just smell my distress.

“They were the screams heard round the world,” proclaimed the the animal rights organization’s website. The copy accompanying the video is triumphant, notwithstanding the stomach-churning nature of the clip: “When PETA Asia released its shocking eyewitness video footage showing that workers violently rip the fur out of angora rabbits’ writhing bodies, customers shared the video widely, vowed never to wear angora again.” After this PR disaster, retailers began pledging publicly to stop using angora wool in their products. International clothing giants like H&M, ASOS, and Gap, Inc. informed customers that they would no longer offer angora products, while unsurprisingly remaining silent on their use of exploitative labor practices to produce their disposable fashion. The pain of sweet, fluffy bunnies was a bridge too far.

I’m glad corporations are being pressured to reexamine their policies around animal products. It is disturbing to witness animal suffering, and the rabbits’ squished and feral faces, their bright-white fur, their long ears, their pink mouths — all these characteristics makes it somehow worse. It doesn’t help that I had a collection of stuffed rabbits as a child; I liked to sleep surrounded by a ring of watchful plastic eyes and alert velvety ears. Like most children, I was a proto-animist, and in my primitive system of worship rabbits reigned supreme.

And yet: I own an angora sweater, made from real rabbit hair fibers. It is silky soft, and when I wear it, the appearance of my torso is elevated by the halo effect (called a “bloom”) created by thousands of tiny fibers poking through the tight weave. It makes me look a bit fuzzy and faded, like a ’60s movie star seen through a Vaseline lens. It is so soft, so light, so beautiful. I didn’t know when I bought it that angora wool came from mistreated rabbits. But I could have guessed. Most lovely things have a higher moral price tag than we like to admit.

* * *

The use of wool in clothing may date as far back as 7000 BCE. For much of that history, fabrics and knits were made from fibers harvested from sheep or goats. In 1993, archeologists found a piece of linen cloth from a site in Cayonu, Turkey. “It is not certain when people first began to weave animal fibers,” wrote John Noble Wilford for the New York Times. “It is likely that wool would have been used for weaving almost as early as flax was, but wool decays more readily than linen and so is not preserved in early archeological sites.” We know that humans had domesticated sheep and goats by this time, and it is believed that our distant ancestors were herding them for food. It is possible, and perhaps likely, that early humans were creating woven textiles from animal products some 7,000 years before Jesus Christ walked the earth.

Wool is a very sensible material, and not a very sexy one. It is naturally insulating, water-repellant, and durable. Rabbit hair sounds far more exotic than wool, and its function is slightly more decorative than sheep’s fleece. But “wool” is a bit of an umbrella term. Sometimes it refers to rabbit hair, sometimes it refers to lamb’s wool (sheared from the first coat of a newborn) and sometimes it refers to fleece from a goat or an alpaca. Sheep’s wool is the most common type, and even then it’s often broken down by providence. No matter what animal it comes from, one of the most important ways of gauging wool’s worth is by measuring the diameter of the follicle. A Shetland sheep has hair that is 23 microns thick, on average. Goat fiber under 19 microns thick is considered “cashmere” (sometimes this comes from Cashmere goats, but not always). Rabbit hair is even finer than this, and rings in at 11 microns.

I didn’t know when I bought it that angora wool came from mistreated rabbits. But I could have guessed. Most lovely things have a higher moral price tag than we like to admit.

Aside from its minuscule size, rabbit hair has other textural benefits. The fibers that come from angora rabbits are long, silky, and hollow. The scales on their surface form an interlocking chevron pattern, which makes them both harder to work with (less friction to grip other fibers) and more desirable for certain garments (the aforementioned halo effect, made when the fibers slip from their weave). Most importantly, angora feels different from wool. Anyone who has purchased an Icelandic wool sweater knows that, while warm and cozy and oh-so-hygge, thick-knit wool sweaters are itchy against naked skin and smelly when wet. Angora sweaters are fluffy and lightweight. A lobsterman pulls on a thick sheep’s wool sweater; a Hollywood ingénue dons an angora knit.

While weaving wool dates back to early civilization, sweaters didn’t begin to show up on the torso-cladding scene until the 15th century. The earliest knitted wool shirts came from the British islands of Jersey and Guernsey. The sweater as we know it was most likely invented by an anonymous fisherman’s wife, seeking to keep her breadwinner alive as he braved the freezing waters of the English Channel day in and day out, and for centuries it was most closely associated with workingmen and soldiers. Women, particularly high-class, fashionable women, did not wear sweaters. While there are examples of creatively patterned and aesthetically pleasing sweaters from before the Industrial Revolution, these pieces were attractive in the same way that folk art is beautiful: They look cool today, but weren’t considered chic or classy by the tastemakers of the day.

The sweater as a fashion item was Coco Chanel’s creation. The French designer famously MacGyvered the first modern women’s cardigan prototype out of a men’s crew-neck sweater. The neck hole was too tight to pull comfortably over her head, so Chanel took a pair of scissors and cut it down the front. She added ribbons to hide the raw edges of the wool, and began wearing it out and about. People went crazy for the new style, and soon everyone was copying Chanel.

The history of angora in fashion is inextricably linked to the history of the sweater. Angora sweaters became popular in the 1920s, more than 200 years after European sailors first brought angora rabbits from Turkey, where the breed originates, to France, where they were raised as livestock and kept as pets. While many kept rabbits for their meat and fur, angora rabbits were also popular companions for 18th century aristocracy. Legend has it that Marie Antoinette kept a fluff-themed menagerie, and various blogs have proclaimed her fondness for Maine Coon cats, Bichons, and white rabbits. (Historians have only been able to document the existence of several Papillons, so the rest may stem from Sofia Coppola’s 2006 pastel-washed movie.) For the most part, angora rabbits in Europe and America were slaughtered for their pelts rather than sheared for their fibers, but that changed around the turn of the 20th century, when sweaters became “a fashion item for women” in a way that they never had been before, according to fashion historian Jonathan Walford. In an email, he wrote:

As women became more active in sporting activities—hiking, cycling, swimming, even hockey—the sports sweater became a favorite, and quickly moved into fashion, most often as a cardigan, The Great War promoted the art of knitting as a way for civilian women to do their part by making soldiers and sailors mittens, scarves, sweaters, and balaclavas.

Furthermore, the 1920s saw a shift in women’s knitwear toward lightweight, clingy styles designed to accentuate curves, a trend that Walford says came in response to the “otherwise shapeless silhouette” of the era. The flapper dress hung loose over breasts and thighs, obscuring the waist and turning the body into a column of fabric. A well-chosen sweater could combat this. Sweaters looked more fresh and modern than nipped-waist dresses or corsets, and aligned neatly with the androgynous appeal of the flapper look.

By the 1930s and 1940s, angora was more popular than it had ever been before. It was recognized for its silky beauty and its utility, and prized for its thermal qualities and its tactile appeal. The fiber was particularly popular with two influential groups of the 20th century: Hollywood starlets and Nazi officers.

* * *

The term “sweater girl” described a particular type of Lolita-esque sexpot. The sweater girl was a study in contradictions — or the epitome of the Madonna/whore dichotomy — who was simultaneously big-breasted and womanly, and innocent and childlike. Hollywood publicists first coined the phrase to describe Lana Turner, who played a sweater-wearing teenage murder victim in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget. In the movie, 16-year-old Turner is bombshell beautiful, and her tight sweaters (paired with equally tight pencil skirts) accentuate her hourglass waist and prominent breasts. In Life magazine, screenwriter Niven Busch wrote that Turner “didn’t have to act” much, for her scene “consisted mostly of 75-ft. dolly shot of her as she hurried along a crowded street in a small Southern town. … She just walked along wearing a tight-fitting sweater. There was nothing prurient about the shot but the male U.S. found it more stimulating than a year’s quote of chorus girls dancing in wampum loin cloths.”

This was also an era when “breast fetishism” was on the rise. Women had begun wearing pointy “bullet bras” that exaggerated their shapes, turning naturally pillowy and pliable breasts into hard conical hills. A sweater paired with a bullet bra was the perfect combination of hard and soft, innocent and sexy, curvy and contained. Even though Turner was underage, it seemed permissible to lust after her, for she embodied a certain wholesome sex appeal that spoke to mid-century American audiences. “Maybe [Turner] didn’t look like the average high-school girl,” wrote Busch, “but she looked like what the average high-school boy wished the average high-school girl looked like.” Turner’s slightly risqué look resonated with women as well as men. There was a simplicity to this fashion — it was easy to replicate the sweater girl look. It was accessible and utterly American. (Busch also notes that the only person “profoundly shocked” by the audience reaction to her body was Turner herself, who began to “bitterly oppose” her sweater girl name, and for the years following her debut film, the starlet refused to wear tight-fitting knits on camera.) Following Turner’s splash as a glamorous dead girl, starlets like Jayne Mansfield and Jane Russell began adopting the style and by the 1940s and 1950s, the sweater girl was one of the more persistent tropes in American media. Walford notes that director and artist Ed Wood “always” wore angora as part of his drag. “Fit would be part of the reason,” Walford says, “because they would fit his male form better than women’s blouses, but touch was also at play. Angora has a sensual touch, like silk, camel hair, leather or rubber — all materials that have fetishistic followers.”

While wide-eyed actress in Hollywood were squeezing their torsos into fuzzy tops, soldiers in Germany had begun a focused series of experiments designed to test the long-term viability of raising angora rabbits for their hollow hairs. Angora appealed to the Nazis for several reasons. First, it had a sense of glamor to it — the fabric was associated with luxurious evening wear, and the Nazis were acutely aware of the importance of presentation and fashion (hence the continued fascination with “Nazi chic”). Secondly, angora was ideal for lining pilot’s jackets, since it was thin, water-repellant, warm, and unlikely to cause itching in the cold cockpit. They also planned to use it for sweaters, socks, and underwear — all garments that would lie close to the body and keep soldiers warm and dry while they were trekking across the Ukrainian steppe to wage war on the Eastern Front. In 1943, SS officers created a photo album to document the work they were doing at Dachau. The volume contains approximately 150 mounted photographs, maps, charts, and hand-lettered texts. There are pictures of rabbit hutches (which Stassa Edwards at Atlas Obscura calls “sanitary, modern”), descriptions of their feeding schedule, and instructions for feeding, shearing, and grooming rabbits. This album was “some of the last remaining evidence of Project Angora,” Edwards writes, “an obscure program begun by Himmler for the purpose of producing enough angora wool to make warm clothes for several branches of the German military.”

By 1943, Project Angora had been underway for two years, and workers had bred nearly 65,000 rabbits and created more than 10,000 pounds of wool. Few examples of these military textiles survive. But Project Angora isn’t notable for its material output or its influence on clothing or fashion, but rather the cleanliness of its wards, the purported humanity of it all. The rabbits housed at German concentration camps were kept in large hutches. They were fed well and petted routinely. SS officers bonded with the animals. Singrid Schultz, the reporter who uncovered the notorious photo album in 1945, described the cruel irony of the project:

In the same compound where 800 human beings would be packed into barracks that were barely adequate for 200, the rabbits lived in luxury in their own elegant hutches. In Buchenwald, where tens of thousands of human beings were starved to death, rabbits enjoyed scientifically prepared meals. The SS men who whipped, tortured, and killed prisoners saw to it that the rabbits enjoyed loving care.

The Nazis didn’t see humans as equivalent to rabbits or rats or other mammalian creatures — they had sympathy for animals and valued their welfare. That was part of their mythology; it was important to Himmler that the German people viewed the Nazis as progressive when it came to animal rights. “The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal,” wrote Paul Bloom in the New Yorker. “Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.” According to Bloom, the focus on shame and humiliation reveals that Nazis (and other racist groups) don’t use the language of the zoo to excuse their actions or annul their guilt. They don’t imagine people as animals so that they can hurt them more easily. Rather, their tortures are explicitly designed to highlight their humanity. “The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not,” Bloom argues.  

The very same Nazis who were torturing and brutalizing the Jewish people in the camps were also posing with rabbits, brushing them, and snuggling them. They were capable of offering mercy to living creatures, and they were equally capable of acting out their sadistic fantasies on other people. At Project Angora, sadism lived next-door to tenderness, and I can’t think of anything uglier than that.

* * *

On a rainy Sunday in July, I visited the Kerfluffle Fiber Farm in Lebanon, Maine, which raises alpacas, sheep, and angora rabbits for their wool. I walked among the rabbit hutches and held a Satin angora rabbit named Sweetie Pie and felt her small heart beat against my fingertips. Unlike the farms in the PETA videos, at Kerfluffle, the rabbits are not squished into cages to tremble and squeal and wait for their next brutal shearing. Yes, they live in cages, they tremble, and they are (sometimes) sheared. But though the same words can be used to describe their basic conditions, the substance is completely different. The family farm is sprawling and green, with children’s toys strewn about the lawn. The rabbit cages are housed in an old horse stall in the wooden barn. Each rabbit has enough space to move around — they can hop and play and defecate and feed without contaminating their food or making a mess of their space. The rabbits are clean and well-groomed. I don’t see any oozing sores or open wounds and the hair is never ripped from their bodies, but harvested through brushing. I hear no screams, only the sounds of geese cackling and goats bleating. As I stroke my hands down the back of the angora, I can feel how easily this fur could be removed. There is no need to yank — it comes out naturally, long white fibers sticking to my sweaty palms before blowing away on the humid summer wind like dandelion seeds.

Mandy McDonald, certified fiber sorter and owner of Kerfluffle Farm, began keeping rabbits years ago. She was a lifelong knitter on a continual quest to find the best yarn, eventually choosing to raise angora rabbits because they were more affordable than alpacas or sheep. But even though it’s possible for a dedicated knitter to raise enough rabbits to make a scarf, it is difficult to reproduce this type of humane animal husbandry on a large scale. “New England used to be the mecca of textile manufacturing in the early 1900s,” McDonald says. “But now we don’t have the type of economy where we could raise our own fiber and make a living off it.” It’s impossible to compete with the fibers from overseas, though McDonald does manage to sell some of her knitted wares, like baby bonnets and scarves. “They’re heirloom gifts,” she says.


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“Heirloom gifts” is a sweet and marketable way to phrase it. In reality, angora fur may simply be “incompatible with industrial capitalism,” writes Tansy Hoskins for The Guardian. “In this sense it should be a scarce fabric, rather than something cheaply produced.” She notes that the Chinese angora farms like the ones documented by PETA have all but killed angora production in the U.K. Out of the 3,000 tons produced each year, 90 percent comes from China, according to the International Wool Textile Association. And while there’s growing support for animal welfare laws in China, there are still few laws protecting animal rights and no nationwide laws that explicitly prohibit mistreatment of animals.

But sales of angora wool have decreased since PETA released its disturbing video. In 2010, China exported $23 million worth of angora rabbit wool, according to the International Trade Center, and in 2015 that number was down to $4.3 million. The Business of Fashion also reports that “countries with cottage industries in angora — including the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany — have also seen exports decrease.” Italy, a major angora consumer thanks to their famous fabric mills, has seen a 77 percent decrease in angora imports.

There are many stories about brands pledging not to use rabbit fur but very little information available about how the Chinese angora industry has changed  — which leads me to suspect that it hasn’t. Instead of buying pricier humane angora, retailers have simply stopped using the stuff altogether; it’s simply too expensive for cheap-chic spots like H&M and too obscure to be a true status material for higher-end brands. It’s also worth noting that China isn’t alone in their cruel treatment of these skittish creatures. In 2016, a French animal rights group went undercover at an undisclosed location in France to document similarly inhumane treatment of angora rabbits, including animals that had been exposed to extreme temperatures and plucked so indiscriminately that even their genitals were covered with painful scabs.

In order to harvest angora on a large scale and make it affordable for the average person, it seems inevitable that animals will be harmed. Raising angora the way that McDonald does would drive the prices up so high that few could afford the fabric. A set of mittens from Ambika, a New York–based independent designer whose website touts their humane treatment of rabbits and their solar-powered facilities, will set you back $260, and a cardigan-style coat costs a cool $2,175. The jacket is gorgeous, a white frothy confection made from 100 percent angora rabbit fiber, but the price tag means that this item will forever be beyond my reach. (There has never been a large angora industry in the United States, though plenty of farmers raise angora rabbits for fun or profit. People eat the meat, harvest the fur, and even breed them as show animals; the truly dedicated breeders head to Palmyra, New York, for the National Angora Show, an event the New York Times calls the “Westminster for Angoras.”)

Despite the fact that there are few economic benefits of raising rabbits, McDonald continues to raise fiber animals, including alpaca and sheep, because she loves the act of caretaking. “It makes me feel alive to nurture an animal,” she says. “And I love soft and fluffy things.” Angora is soft and silky, luscious and sensual. It’s also the product of an adorable animal, a creature that looks like an animated cloud puff. A contradiction in a sweater.

* * *

Rabbits are cute, and like most cute things, they make us want to hold them close and squeeze them, protect them from harm, bond with them. This is a visceral emotion, one that can look a little like love if you stand at a great enough distance. Even a Nazi can recognize the cuteness of an angora rabbit, stroke its wispy hair, feel its soft pink paws, and even a Nazi can think, somewhere in his monstrous mind, that this is a creature that does not deserve to suffer. This impulse can look like kindness — but it isn’t, not truly. Kindness and compassion are more complicated than protectiveness, and harder to embody. When we boycott sweaters made from abused animals yet fail to extend the same outrage to clothes made in sweatshop conditions, we’ve falling prey to the dark side of cuteness. When we break women down into individual pieces, breasts and arms and fluffy torsos, we fail to see the whole human, the sensitive teenager behind the sexpot. Cuteness narrows our vision, making it difficult to see the greater picture. Pull a thread long enough and the entire system unravels, revealing the underground abuse woven into our wardrobes and culture.

* * *

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris Review, The Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Sam Schuyler
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

Blowin’ Up the ‘90s

Mark Terrill, Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (2,795 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

The 1990s did not end on January 1, 2000. The monumental anti-climax of Y2K — a computer “bug” that was supposed to screech our Earth to a Scooby-Doo foot-cloud halt, but instead did bupkis — was a truly apt expression of the preceding decade. But even discounting Y2K, I’ve got some serious issues with the alleged “turn of the actual millennium” as the endpoint of the most intentionally underwhelming decade of the 20th century. And not just because 2000 (zero-zero) is so obvious and overplayed — though there is, of course, that.

The actual termination point of the ‘90s required an attitudinal shift that would decentralize the role of Generation X as the admittedly-petulant target of all culture and advertising — the thawing of the winter of the bong-ripping couch-slacker’s discontent; the disappearance of gin and juice from house-party bars; the centering of the hot tub on The Real World; the sobering realization that both men and women were from Earth and just sucked; the demise, for that matter, of Suck itself.

In point of incontrovertible fact, the 1990s would not end in the United States until the aughts’ resurgence of aggressive consumerism and even more aggressive vacuity came to dominate all aspects of sociopolitical and popular culture. So the only question is: When was that? There are more potential answers than squiggles on a Fido Dido sweatshirt.

Was it in 2001, when the original Fast and the Furious premiered? 1996, when Blur released that WOO-hoo song? Was it 2010 — you heard me, two thousand and ten — when enough grandparents had shuffled off the mortal coil to make the primary avenue of written news consumption digital rather than paper?

I have spent an unnecessarily and perhaps questionably extensive amount of time researching in this subfield, and I present my findings to you now in a perplexing new format (I believe it is called a “list-cicle”?) that is apparently the only thing young people are able to read.

Read more…

Who Even Watches the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Anymore?

Evan Agostini / Invision / AP, Jens Kreuter / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 9 minutes 2,184 words)

The most popular Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show picture on Instagram last year was of Bella Hadid. I burst out laughing when I saw it. It reminded me of that stereotypical image of the old-school flasher — beige trench, black trilby — ripping his coat open to reveal his anxious dick. Of course, Bella Hadid does not have a dick, but she’s posing like she does. The 5 foot 9 inch angel (if not capital-A Angel) stands legs akimbo in a room full of people minding their own business, splaying her petal pink robe to reveal hips jutting out of high-riding briefs and boobs pushed up so far they’re practically floating above her head. Read more…

Missy Elliott’s “Supa Dupa Fly” Came From the Future

Longreads Pick

The second installment in The New Yorker‘s new interactive music series about individual works explores the way Elliott’s 1997 hit album reimagined hip-hop, R&B, videos, fashion, and black female identity, and why its futuristic vision continues to influence listeners.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 20, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,711 words)

Living to Create: Talking Music and Writing With Drummer Emily Rose Epstein

Katie Stratton/Getty Images

People who know Emily Rose Epstein know her as the propulsive drummer in Ty Segall’s band. From 2009 to 2015, Epstein toured and recorded with the guitar wizard and his crew of talented friends. She and Segall met at the University of San Francisco. They were both media studies majors. During Epstein’s first few years drumming with Segall, she continued pursuing her interests in journalism and editing. She interned at Thrasher magazine, San Francisco Weekly, Razorcake, Jello Baifra’s record label Alternative Tentacles, and she DJ’d and booked guests at the legendary student radio station, KUSF. Like her work history, her musical influences range widely, from Subhumans to Bob Wills to The Byrds. Naturally, her musical interests come through in her writing.

She wrote her graduating thesis on Patti Smith’s gender identity. She wrote an earlier paper about Led Zeppelin and the occult, and for SF Weekly, she wrote about her local Bay Area music scene. Rock musicians don’t get enough credit for their intellect or literary interests. I mean, Queen’s guitarist Brian May is a damn astrophysicist! Epstein shatters rock stereotypes. She proves that just because you thrash a Gretsch doesn’t mean you can’t curl up with books and string together beautiful sentences. You can, to be cliché¸ do things yourself. That’s what punk is: not dressing a certain way, but dictating the terms of your existence. Epstein took a break from touring in 2015 to work in LA, where she grew up, and plays in the country band, Blue Rose Rounder. She was kind enough to speak with me about her other life as a writer and reader.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: You started playing drums in a punk band at age 13 with a bunch of older guys from UCLA, and you were so young lots of venues made you sit outside before the gig. When did you get interested in writing and journalism?

Emily Rose Epstein: It was instilled in me from a young age that I would be a writer. My grandparents were both writers, and my uncle. My grandfather, Robert Epstein, was the Executive Arts Editor and a writer for the LA Times and the Herald Examiner, and he nurtured my creativity from a young age. We wrote poetry together all the time. He would share his work and make sure I was always making something new myself. He was a really inspiring person to be around ─ my first muse! I think more than anything I always thought I would be a poet, but journalism became something I could do more rigorously in an academic environment and potentially as a career. I always felt that it was more fun to make art than to cover it though, so that’s what dislodged the idea of being a career writer.

I was very into zines, punk journalism, and archives when I was younger, but I don’t think I became personally interested in journalism until I went to college. I never took it seriously until then. At that point I got deep into it ─ audio, print ─ just because it seemed like the right move for someone who was into the arts and writing.

AG: So it wasn’t the shrinking of newspapers or writers’ shaky financial prospects that dislodged the idea of a writing career? That is a tough decision for many writers and editors, though: do you take the risky road of making your own stuff, or do you pursue a hopefully more stable career editing, producing, or publicizing others’ work.

ERE: Yeah, thankfully I wasn’t faced with that. Music kind of took over my life and I lacked the time and drive to do anything but creative writing while I was playing music professionally, or whatever you want to call it, ha ha. It’s hard to say what path I would have taken had I not been whisked away by Ty.


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AG: Just to clarify, your grandfather shared his arts journalism with you, or his poetry? Or both?

ERE: Both! But mostly the poetry. Writing, brainstorming, working was central to his existence, and I think he knew I was really excited by that stuff, so we wrote every day and read every day. Writing was like magic, and he could always summon the spirits in both of us that were moved to make things. I was young when he passed, so I don’t think I was fully aware of, or able to grasp, what he was working on professionally.

AG: So poetry and prose? Have you continued writing poetry, or does it inform your other writing?

ERE: Oh of course, yeah. I’ve always written poetry, always will. I think I write less now than ever before, but now I’m writing differently. It’s interesting being in a country band: you almost have to learn a new way to write, and I’ve really been enjoying the simplicity of that. It’s satisfying to get back to the basics, to learn how to say something with fewer words, to get down to basic emotions that everyone can relate to but to figure out a way to do that in the most meaningful way.

The biggest gift the teachers gave me was telling me to get out into the city, the world.

AG: Muses are so essential to refining our interests and building confidence, so it sounds like you were fortunate to have a few in the family. Did your family history lead you to pursuing your media studies degree at USF? And did your time at USF help you refine your professional and artistic pursuits?

ERE: Perhaps, yes. Many members of my family work in the arts or are artists in some capacity, or writers, or work in the media, so I suppose it was always something I was around and in tune with. But honestly I didn’t know what I needed from school while I was there. (It’s true that “Youth is wasted on the young!”) I just knew that I needed to commit to getting a degree, and I wanted to major in something that could help me figure out what my path would be. USF’s Media Department was interesting. It certainly connected me with some fascinating people and lifelong friends, but the biggest gift the teachers gave me was telling me to get out into the city, the world, to look for real opportunities to work and create and consume media, so that’s what I did. I devoted myself to independent print, music, and film in the Bay Area in every way that I could, as a creator, consumer, lover, fighter.

AG: That is a gift, and you made incredible use of your time. Between ThrasherRazorcake, KUSF, and Alternative Tentacles, is it safe to say you were considering editing or journalism as a career?

ERE: Oh yeah, I never had any grand ideas that any of the music I would make would be popular or could support me, so I always assumed that I would work for an independent publisher or publication and do creative writing and music on the side.

AG: What was it about independent publishers that attracted you? You didn’t consider working for New York book publishers like FSG or interning at The New Yorker?

ERE: I considered working at several larger publications. I had an option to be a part of a program in London for writers that would have positioned me to intern for Rolling Stone London, but I decided to do a tour with Ty instead. I don’t know, I guess I never got far enough in my “career” as a writer or editor to know how that would have panned out, but I am a huge fan of small publishing houses where you can really sink your teeth into what you’re doing, where you can be a part of every process of publishing if you want to. I love the informality and the intimacy of that kind of environment. I’ve never been more inspired, really, as when I was working for RE/Search Publishing a few days a week, editing, transcribing, brainstorming, conducting interviews, working on layouts for books, fact-checking. I would come home and my young brain would never turn off: I had Schwaller de Lubicz and Timothy Leary and Philip Lamantia and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Andre Breton and Lydia Lunch and Leonora Carrington and Throbbing Gristle dancing through my thoughts all day and night, peppering every aspect of my life with rich new ideas. I assumed you’re not going to get that full-on immersive experience at a large publishing house, but I guess I don’t really know!

AG: Was your interest in both playing music and writing ever a problem or source of confusion for you, or did these different pursuits fit together in your mind?

ERE: It fit together at the time when I was writing for publications like SF Weekly. I was able to showcase bands in my columns that weren’t otherwise getting attention in the Bay Area, like the Baths (later the Royal Baths), Sic Alps, CCR Headcleaner, Rank/Xerox. That was exciting to me. But I do wish I had figured out ways to fit them together in my brain and body sooner; it took me a long time to feel confident with the songwriting process and letting my words collide with melodies. I think until quite recently I was self-conscious about sharing personal writing. I could write about other people’s music all day, but I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to fuse those two passions into one form, without collaborators steering me along the path or validating my work.

AG: So does that mean you’re currently writing your own music and also doing more personal writing? I was curious whether you were drawn to first-person narratives or memoir as well as journalism. As for being self-conscious about sharing, what changed for you?

ERE: Yes, I am writing a ton of music these days and have been for the past few years. That’s the bulk of the writing I do now. I still feel quite uncomfortable with the nakedness of writing memoirs or first-person narratives for anyone but myself. My songs are pretty bare, but I feel comfortable doing that because the writing is caressed by melody and rhythm. I’m an open book in a lot of ways, certainly emotionally, but I am pretty private too, so I think it would be a difficult transition to write and share in that way.

As far as being self conscious about sharing, I overcame that after getting out of a really difficult period in my life. I think for a year or two I really struggled when I left Ty’s band with understanding who I was, what I needed from life. I knew I needed to get out on my own in so many ways, but I didn’t know how, didn’t know what the goal was, didn’t know what I was capable of. I had a lot of difficult things happen in my personal life during that time, and I think when you learn really tough life lessons that force you to sort of wake up in a way you’ve never had to before, you also begin to realize how short life is, how universal pain is, how incredible people are around you. As those changes were happening within me. I really learned to love and forgive myself in a way I never had been able to before, and with that, I kind of also learned to learn to not give a fuck. There was just something in me that got lighter in the face of the heaviness. So now when I sing and write, I sing and write with a confidence I never was able to have before. I just really don’t care if people don’t like what I’m doing, and I’m even more grateful than ever when people connect with what I’m doing in a positive way, because I’m really living to create again, and I do hope that my music connects with people and is comforting in the ways that country music can be and has been for me.

I would come home and my young brain would never turn off.

AG: One of the interesting things about your writing is that you were an active part of the musical world you covered for SF Weekly. Playing music then, you were surrounded by so many incredible bands and personalities. Did profiling buddies like Sic Alps or John Dwyer present any challenges or tensions?

ERE: There’s always a strangeness to writing about your friends’ bands; you are biased in so many ways. It’s also difficult to get your friends to remember that they need to communicate with you as though you don’t know all the facts when you’re interviewing them. That stuff can be tricky. I think I spent more time editing my CCR Headcleaner interview than anything else I’ve written, just because there was so much in there that no average reader would be able to understand. Other than that, I never really experienced any challenges. All of the writing I was doing for the Weekly or my interviews for KUSF were so informal and basically fluff pieces, so the bands were just happy to be featured, and I was happy to be able to give them the attention I felt they deserved. I suppose if I had been doing longform journalism at the time, it would have been more difficult to be totally truthful or give the reader everything they think they want.

AG: On tours, did you bring along books and hit bookstores in different towns, or was that kind of literary life too difficult on the road?

ERE: I read incessantly on the road. I would go through tons of books on tour. I would finish my books and then finish Mikal’s books and then have to pick something up on the road sometimes! I loved hitting up bookstores and thrifting for books around America and the world, though. I really miss having that much time to devote to reading. It was great being on the road too, planning out what to read depending on where you were going. There was a tour where we spent a lot of time in France, so I made sure to bring Celine. Huysmans, Vonnegut, Brautigan, and Didion were always favorites of ours for traipsing through America.

AG: When you quit touring with Ty, was that an indefinite hiatus, or do you intend to drum with Ty again?

ERE: I never say never, but there’s no sign of that happening anytime in the near future. I’m not really playing drums these days, and Ty and I are on different creative wavelengths. I love him and think he’s doing great things always. He’s one of those people who has endless creative energy and I really admire that, but I know I needed to get out on my own and explore the things I wanted to do, and his creative needs are forever changing, too, so he and I are both thriving creatively but separately at this time!

Decolonizing Knowledge: Stefan Bradley on the Fight for Civil Rights in the Ivy League

Yale cheer leaders Greg Parker (L) and Bill Brown give the Black Power salute during the National Anthem starting the Yale-Dartmouth football game in the Yale Bowl. November 2, 1968. Bettman / Getty

Jonny Auping | Longreads | November 2018 | 19 minutes (5,155 words)

Being steeped in tradition, by nature, requires a resistance to change; and, as Stefan Bradley points out in the introduction to his new book Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, seven of the eight Ivy League schools — often referred to as the “Ancient Eight” — existed before the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, making them perhaps “more American than the nation itself with respect to culture and history.” Attending an Ivy League school is and always has been a marker of status in this country, one boasted by many U.S. Presidents, judges, and world leaders. Racial equality was not something that came naturally to these institutions; it had to be fought for. Upending the Ivory Tower documents the struggles of early black Ivy League students as well as the demonstrations and building occupations students in the 1960s took part in to hold these elite universities accountable for their prejudice.

Dr. Bradley is currently chair of the African American Studies program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (and years ago he was also a professor of mine at Saint Louis University). In 2012, he published Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the 1960s, a book about how, as some white student activists worked to radicalize and restructure the university, black students, joining with local activists in Harlem, sought to stop the university from paving over a public park to build a private gymnasium. The perspective of outsiders allowed them to see beyond internal campus politics; to recognize the university as a force in the world which sometimes must be opposed, not just reorganized. Upending the Ivory Tower covers similar ground but has an expanded scope, covering the postwar period through 1975 and all eight Ivies, adding a new layer of nuance to our understanding of the civil rights and Black Power movements, and recounting the stories of young people who had everything to lose but were righteous in their demands for what they had yet to gain. Read more…

The Fault in Our Stars: On Fake Celebrity Interviews

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,670 words)

“I play with my breasts, not to show off but to demonstrate a kind of revulsion. I simply transform myself into a voice for all the tormented souls of this world.”

That’s Courtney Love in 1996 in SZ, the magazine belonging to one of the largest newspapers in Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung. It sounds a little crazy, but then, she’s a little crazy. And anyway, Tom Kummer, the Swiss journalist who attempted to style himself after Hunter S. Thompson, always filed outlandish exclusives and cover stories like this from Los Angeles — Pamela Anderson on her aching implants, Mike Tyson on eating cockroaches, Bruce Willis on immorality. From the mid-nineties to 2000, he was kind of a celebrity himself. Beloved by editors, he also wrote for the German magazines Der Spiegel and Stern and Switzerland’s Die Weltwoche. In fact, it was in the latter that, roughly two years before the Love interview, he wrote, funnily enough: “She plays with her breasts not to show off but to demonstrate revulsion. She wants to embody the voice of all tormented souls in the world.”

Tom Kummer had been flagged for fabrication before, but it wasn’t until an exposé in Focus magazine in 2000 that it was confirmed: he had never interviewed Love, or Brad Pitt or Sharon Stone or Kim Basinger, or anyone really. SZ followed with a breakdown of his deceit, like The New York Times would with Jayson Blair in 2003; it published an apology for the “falsified” stories and fired editors Christian Kämmerling and Ulf Poschardt. You would think Kummer would at least nod at contrition — like Janet Cooke in 1982, like Stephen Glass in 1998 — but he took the Jonah Lehrer route instead and talked boundaries. He even had a name for his approach: borderline journalism. “I wrote impressionistic, creative, literary descriptions of the life of stars in the form of so-called interviews,” he told The Guardian in 2011, adding, “Everybody loved my stuff and I guess they were addicted to some kind of illusion that stars should talk like I made them talk.” He claimed he was never asked for proof, that his editors had approved of his methods. As Stern’s publisher told the Times, they — Kummer and his editors — “appeared to have a different idea of journalism.” Read more…

Re: Hate Mail

Illustration by the author

Amy Kurzweil | Longreads | November 2018 | 9 minutes (2,322 words)

 

I’ve received 15 emails from my internet stalker in the past four days. It’s like watching an inmate from behind a two-way mirror. He read a short story I wrote once satirically titled “The Greatest Story Ever Written.” It’s about a group of male writers who lose their way. He didn’t like it. I think I’m open to criticism, but I wonder whether I really am. This correspondence has progressed for months: he condemns and insults, then catches himself being too harsh, too forward. Sometimes he apologizes. He thanks me for listening. He sends emails to courteously correct typos in his previous emails, and even these offer a Nietzsche quote as an epigraph. “We spared neither ourselves nor others…” He invites me to read his latest blogpost. If it won’t break your legs, he says, just tell me if you like it. I think about what it really means to like something. I compose responses to him in my head; clever, angry things about the patriarchy. But I don’t send them.

***

The first internet comment I ever read about myself was on YouTube, listed under an interview I’d done with my father. I was 25. Ray Kurzweil’s daughter has nice legs but her boobs aren’t that big. When I read it I thought: I feel like my boobs are pretty big. And also: I knew that dress my mother bought me was too short. And also: I felt ashamed. I was sorry I’d brought a body into a communion of ideas. I should have worn tights. The event was called “Women at the Frontier.” It honored women making great strides in technology. A snowboarder who lost her limbs spoke about prosthetics. Daughters of innovative men in technology interviewed their fathers.

I asked my dad, the inventor and genius, “What do you think you’ve learned from me?”

“You’ve helped me become a better writer,” my father answered.

 

After my first book came out, when I was 30, I received an email from a boy. In my head he was newly bar mitzvahed, 13 years old, wearing a kippah and a black suit — that’s the scene his gmail photo conjured. But he wrote like a real man, an ironic one. Should I be your husband? was the subject line. I sent back what I felt was a cunning response: The wedding has been scheduled for 12 December. Your mother should wear lilac. Your sister is not invited. I was very proud of my wit. I hope seven children suits you, and if they aren’t all girls I will cast the offending parties into the river in baskets. Do not try to retrieve them.

 

I’m not one to cold-message women on facebook, another man cold-messaged me on Facebook. He said I’d come up in conversation on a date with a woman he met on Jswipe. He said he read my book, thinks I’m attractive, has a hunch we would get along. I composed a message in my head: I am pleased to receive the news of my fame. It’s been a dream/fetish of mine to know my name is on the lips of young Jews on internet dates all across this country. Be fruitful and multiply with this woman and may all your children’s names begin with A. But something told me he wasn’t one for irony. The man’s technically unacknowledged message still lives in that wasteland of Requests, with the whatups and hiiiis and like my pages, and the Uber driver from Florida who found me somehow — I was in Naples for the Jewish Book festival and I must have been fishing for readers. Definitely interested in the convo we were having. Let’s talk over dinner next time you’re in town.

 

My internet stalker, however, isn’t seeking marriage or dinner. He isn’t interested in my body; He wants to volley with my mind. Amy, We need to fight, or else I shall keep thinking of things to say to you. My internet stalker uses the word “shall.” He’s refined. He’s quoted Lord Chesterfield from 1774 and Matthew Arnold from 1849. These are not writers I’ve read, but Arnold’s The Strayed Reveller sounds like the man I avoid at parties. My boyfriend says: ignore him. He sees me in my defensive stance, resisting the palpable urge to hold up my hands, like the gesture I make passing a neighbor’s barking dog: I’m not on your property and I have nothing to hide.

Read more…

Remembering Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange (right) in a scene from her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, a seven woman ensemble that was nominated for a Tony Award in 1977.

Ntozake Shange, whose choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf ran on Broadway for 742 shows between 1976 and 1978, making her the second Black woman to have her work performed on Broadway, died on October 27 at age 70. (The first was Lorraine Hansberry with “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 1959.) Besides her canonical play for colored girls, Shange was the author of more than a dozen other plays, four novels, five children’s books, and several collections of poetry. She’d suffered a long illness, but released a new collection of poems  just last fall, and had been working on another new book and performing spoken word around the United States in recent months.

Shange was raised in an upper middle class household in New Jersey and St. Louis where luminaries like W.E.B. DuBois and Miles Davis encircled the family. She took degrees from Barnard and USC. In a 2010 piece for The New Yorker about the feature film adaptation of for colored girls produced by Tyler Perry, Hilton Als said seeing the show  in 1977 was an introduction to a familiar yet dazzling “world of unimpeachable cool.” It showed seven different Black women on a stage dancing, singing, and speaking a language that was determinedly itself and not at all stilted by pressure to be polite or respectable. In Shange’s words, it made, “drama of our lives,” and showed future artists who were queer, female, and / or people of color that the stuff of their specific worlds was good enough material to create from.

Shange’s death produced an outpouring on the internet, and it’s a loss that marks a shift. The access and visibility of queer and female people of color in mainstream media is something we can very well nearly take for granted, and the reckonings around sexual misconduct in the public sphere owe much to the space Black women like Shange, who in for colored girls and other works “explor[ed] the various trials that black women often confronted, from rape and abortion to domestic violence and child abuse,” opened up in the ’70s.

we are compelled to examine these giants in order to give ourselves what we think they gave the worlds they lived in

Ntozake Shange, from the forward to three pieces (spell #7, a photograph: lovers in motion, and boogie woogie landscapes) 

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