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Shelved: Lee Hazlewood’s Cruisin’ For Surf Bunnies

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (2,599 words)

 

Discouraged by the British Invasion, producer and songwriter Lee Hazlewood was planning to retire in 1964. The 35-year-old had certainly earned enough money to do it. Then Hazlewood’s next-door neighbor asked if he wanted to produce Nancy Sinatra, daughter of Frank.

“I’m not interested in producing second-generation artists,” Hazlewood said flatly — he’d already done that with Dean Martin’s son’s band — but then he agreed to a meeting.

“Everybody knows I drink Chivas,” Hazlewood remembered about that night. “When I walked in their house to meet with Nancy (she was living with her mom then), all along the walls, cleverly displayed, were all these bottles of Chivas lined up. And a bunch of my friends were there. It was Bobby Darin, a bunch more, and I’m thinkin’, ‘Wait a minute, what is this? I haven’t seen these people in months.’ … Halfway through the evening her dad comes through the door and meets me. They go in the kitchen and they’re talking. He comes out, shakes my hand, and says ‘I’m glad you kids are going to be working together’ and then walks out the door. I had only said that I’d come over and meet her!”

Having accepted an offer he couldn’t really refuse, Hazlewood set about updating Nancy’s image. “You’ve been married and now you’re divorced, and people know that,” Nancy said he told her. “So, let’s lose this virgin image. Let’s get rid of it.He had Sinatra sing in a lower register. “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” his original song that she agreed to record, became a No. 1 hit. The lyrics caused a bit of a stir.

“The controversy was [the word] ‘mess,’” Hazlewood, who grew up in the South, said. “‘Mess,’ down here where I live, in those days, was ‘fuck.’ If somebody said, ‘What did you do last night?’ ‘I was out messin’.’ I thought it was that way all over the world. But it wasn’t that way in Chicago, New York, or L.A.”

And that is the story of Lee Hazlewood’s most famous song and collaboration. Not as well-known are Hazlewood’s many other songwriting credits, his groundbreaking production techniques, or his foundational work creating a voice for the electric lead guitar. Then there’s the previously unreleased surf music record that Hazlewood wrote and produced.

“What I was struck with right off the top,” Hazlewood friend and collaborator Marty Cooper said about Cruisin’ for Surf Bunnies, “it sounds to me, because it’s got 12 songs on it, and the albums in those days had 12 songs on them, this is an album in search of a band, in the sense that it doesn’t actually sound like a band, but it’s too complete to not have been submitted as … ‘find a band.’ Maybe even like the Monkees or find the successors to the Beach Boys over on Capitol. I got that impression. There are certain things about it — the fact that Lee did not write all of [the songs]. It’s very meticulous.”

No one knows exactly why Cruisin’ for Surf Bunnies by Lee Hazlewood’s Woodchucks (a catch all name for his studio band) was shelved. When it was issued in September 2018, 11 years after his death, it seemed an odd postscript to an already iconoclastic career. Instead of an outlier, it’s further proof that, as a sculptor of sound, Hazlewood’s life as a songwriter and producer ranged more widely than most of his successful peers.

Born in Oklahoma in 1929, Hazlewood and his family moved with his itinerant oilfield father’s jobs through Louisiana and Arkansas, and finally wound up in Texas. He studied medicine before leaving university to serve in the Korean War. “My mom liked pop music and my dad liked bluegrass,” Lee once said. “So she complained always about his liking bluegrass — which, by the way, was a ‘love’ complaint — I grew up kinda all mixed up. I mean with music. And then I fell in love with Stan Kenton and the blues ’cause blues comes from this part of the world. So everything’s all mixed up.”

Instead of an outlier, Cruisin’ for Surf Bunnies is further proof that, as a sculptor of sound, Hazlewood’s life as a songwriter and producer ranged more widely than most of his successful peers.

By 1955, Hazlewood found himself working as a radio DJ and the owner of his own small record label in Phoenix, Arizona. He was also writing new material. Borrowing a riff from Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, he wrote and produced the song “The Fool” for rockabilly singer Sanford Clark in 1956 — Hazlewood’s third single — a hit later covered by Elvis. Hazlewood also developed a new sound for local session guitarist Al Casey, who played on “The Fool.”

“I had to have an echo,” Hazlewood explained years later. “We just went out driving around, ’cause there’s a lot of places around Phoenix with small grain elevators. So we just went out and yelled in ’em all day. I yelled and yelled and yelled ’til I found one. … So we set it up outside the studio and put a little microphone at one end and a little speaker at the other. It worked very nice. …The only problem that we ever had with it is that birds would sit and chirp on it. It wasn’t a problem on the heavy stuff, but on the ballads, the quiet things, the birds would like to sing along. So we had to have someone out there to shoo the birds away.”

The grain silo echo effect proved popular with Hazlewood’s other collaborator, twangy instrumental guitarist Duane Eddy. Eddy’s 1958 anthem “Rebel-‘Rouser” — another Hazlewood composition — began a streak of big sellers. Hazlewood helped create a new lead guitar sound in the process.

“When I was in high school, there was a piano player I admired with slicked-back oily hair from New York called Eddy Duchin,” Hazlewood said, “and he played the melody way down there. I always thought that it would be nice if a guitarist did the same thing. When I first met Duane, I told him that I wanted to make a record with those low notes and he said, ‘I can do that.’ … We sold 25 million records over four years, which wasn’t bad.”

Hazlewood released his first solo record in 1963, a concept album called Trouble Is a Lonesome Town.

You won’t find it on any map

But take a step in any direction and

You’re in Trouble

It’s at once wry, hokey, and perceptive. Hazlewood has the vocal authority of Johnny Cash, the melodic sense of Roger Miller, and the just-this-side-of-parody folksiness of Tom T. Hall. He introduces songs on Trouble Is a Lonesome Town with extended spoken-word character sketches and cowboy poems. The instrumentation is acoustic and spare, and the touch of reverb transforms the songs into a dreamscape. Musically and thematically, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town is entirely self-contained and uniquely Lee Hazlewood. “That was a demo,” Hazlewood revealed in 2000. “I didn’t know it was a concept album. I wrote a complete story of a make-believe town.”

It says a lot that Hazlewood could put so much effort into a project he would later dismiss as only a demo. His success gave him the luxury to tinker in the studio, regardless of expense, in the same year when the Beatles recorded their first album in less than ten hours.

With this understanding, it’s easy to see how Cruisin’ For Surf Bunnies came into being. Surf music, popular since 1962, was largely instrumental and featured a typically reverb-laden lead guitar. In other words, whether its practitioners knew it or not, surf owed much of its expression to Lee Hazlewood. Working with Duane Eddy and using his grain silo reverb, he’d helped develop the technique. He had the producer’s savvy to take advantage of America’s latest musical craze. Now living in Los Angeles, Hazlewood had the connections to assemble the best studio band available — one that would famously become known as the Wrecking Crew.

“I didn’t call em the Wrecking Crew,” Hazlewood recalled. “That wasn’t my name. I brought Al Casey with me from Phoenix. I used a rhythm guitarist that nobody else used, a guy named Donnie Owens. [Drummer] Hal Blaine worked for me before he worked for anybody. He was working for Patti Page, then he worked for me, then of course we all spread the word about Hal and all the rest of the guys. Over here they were called the Wrecking Team, but when they worked for Sinatra they were called the B Team. I just called them my rhythm section ’cause I started a lot of them. Not started, but I got a lot of them a lot of work. And sometimes I couldn’t get ’em, and that really broke my heart. A year earlier you could call Hal and get him anytime.”

The reason for this is that Blaine and the rest of the Crew had become the most in-demand session players in the business, backing Jan and Dean, Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, the Monkees, Herb Alpert, and Sonny and Cher, among others. They became the Beach Boys’ house band at the time of Brian Wilson’s greatest musical achievements, and were often employed by “wall of sound” producer Phil Spector, who began his career working for Lee Hazlewood.

“Phil had just started to make records and he came over to Phoenix a few times,” Hazlewood once said plainly. “I liked Phil. He was more Lester Sills’s protégé than mine. Although Phil asked a lot of questions, and I answered as many as I could.”

In other words, whether its practitioners knew it or not, surf music owed much of its expression to Lee Hazlewood.

“I told him on a number of occasions that I reckoned Spector had stolen his ideas: You only have to listen to Lee’s early work and then compare it to Spector’s to suspect that they may well be connected,” Hazlewood biographer Wyndham Wallace once said. “But Lee would dismiss this suggestion with a wave of the hand.”

As would be expected, when the prolific Hazlewood died, he left a cache of reel-to-reel tapes of both finished and unfinished recordings in his studio vaults. Matt Sullivan, music lover and entrepreneur, gained access to Hazlewood’s vault, and Sullivan’s Light in the Attic record label began releasing material as part of their Hazlewood archive series. “Deep in the LHI tape archive,” the label wrote on their website, “hid a mysterious tape marked ‘Woodchucks.’” When you write and record as much as Hazlewood, you leave a trail of tapes in your wake that others get tasked with sifting through. Only a talent who could dismiss a fully realized record as a demo could so casually shelve a session as complete as Surf Bunnies. Unfortunately, Hazlewood didn’t leave many details about the writing or recording of the record.

Some version of the Wrecking Crew assembled to cut Cruisin’ For Surf Bunnies on October 26, 1964, in Studio E at United Records studios in Los Angeles. “I’m not sure everybody that played on it,” Hazlewood collaborator Marty Cooper said after hearing the tapes, “but I can tell you that I can’t imagine anybody but Al Casey being the guitarist on that. If you go back to [Casey’s] ‘Surfin’ Hootenanny,’ which was on that label out of Chicago that Lee got a bunch of money for … there again, he could depend on Al to give him these various sounds. That’s my first impression.”

Cooper was interviewed by Hunter Lea, who wrote the liner notes for the album when Light in the Attic Records issued Cruisin’ For Surf Bunnies in 2018. Cooper had his own surf music credentials, having written “The Lonely Surfer,” a hit for Jack Nitzsche in 1963.

“It’s got every gimmick on it that you can have,” Cooper continued. “The other thing that makes me feel like it was a project as opposed to demos: it’s so assiduously non–Duane Eddy. One of the tracks has a little bit of tremolo, but there’s no tremolo guitar, there’s no lonely surfer guitar, there’s no Duane Eddy Fender tremolo. It’s just not there. That’s what makes me think [Lee] must’ve had a grand plan for [the project] that didn’t work out.”

Only one single from the project, “Angry Generation,” was released at the time, after being “sweetened,” in Lea’s words, “with overdubs.” Later covered by surf music architect Dick Dale, it communicates an incandescent menace.

Dale wasn’t the only artist to help himself to this musical buffet. Other Surf Bunnies songs were covered by the Astronauts, Jack Nitzsche, the Ventures, and the Surfaris — as well as John Paul Jones, later to become Led Zeppelin’s bassist. The Duane Eddy low-note lead guitar is present and correct on Jones’s version of “Baja.”

The next year Hazlewood would consider retirement, then enjoy the career catapult of “These Boots Were Made for Walking.” Hazlewood and Sinatra would also duet with great success, most notably with 1967’s lush “Some Velvet Morning.”

“Some velvet morning when I’m straight,” Hazlewood sings without fear of censorship, “I’m gonna open up your gate.”

“I write songs with double and triple meanings,” Hazlewood told writer Spencer Leigh in 2004. “I know that my songs are a little different and I would say that I am the best writer of Lee Hazlewood songs.”

Another Hazlewood/Sinatra production, the Les Paul–inflected bonbon “Sugar Town” was actually about drugs.  

As would be expected, when the prolific Hazlewood died, he left a cache of reel-to-reel tapes of both finished and unfinished recordings in his studio vaults.

“In those days they were taking sugar cubes and putting acid on ’em,” he told rock ‘n’ roll archivist and collector Billy Miller. “And of course that would be ‘Sugar Town,’ wouldn’t it? You had to make the lyric dingy enough where the kids knew what you were talking about — and they did. Double entendre. But not much more if you wanted to get it played on the radio. We used to have lots of trouble with lyrics, but I think it’s fun to keep it hidden a little bit.”

Hazlewood continued releasing solo albums, as well as duetting with actress and singer Ann Margret. He founded a new record label, Lee Hazlewood Industries, which signed country rock pioneer Gram Parsons’s first group, the International Submarine Band. When Parsons later joined the Byrds, his vocals on Sweetheart of the Rodeo had to be erased because of a contractual dispute with LHI. (“We had some problems there,” Hazlewood remembered, “but we straightened them out. [Parsons] had to pay back all his royalties and everything. But he had to pay back through earnings, and I knew he never would.”)

After moving to Sweden in 1970, Hazlewood kept a low profile, releasing albums in a fitfull manner. In the late ’90s, Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley began reissuing Hazlewood records to a receptive crowd that included Beck and Jarvis Cocker. Lee’s final album, 2006’s Cake or Death, contains his epitaph, the string-laden “T.O.M. (The Old Man)”:

Have you seen the mountains? They still hug the snow

And have you seen the old man? He’s ready to go

And his tongue — his tongue tastes forever, and his mind wonders what forever will bring

In this place they call forever, will there be any songs to sing?

Hazlewood died of renal cancer the following year. “I’ve been around long enough now,” he told the New York Times shortly before his death. “I’ve lived a pretty interesting life — not too much sadness, a lot of happiness, lots of fun. And I didn’t do much of anything I didn’t want to do.”

“He was a master — there’s no question about it,” Marty Cooper noted. “He invented sounds that no one was doing.” When genres like surf music employed some of those sounds, Hazlewood played with those expressions too. Then he moved on.

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Sam Schuyler

First Contact

Illustration by Lucius Wisniewski

Sarah Watts | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,998 words)

Every Friday in the summer of 1997, my mom tended bar to pay for her masters degree and my dad took us to the movies. My twin brother Adam and I were 9 and our little brother, Jake, was 7. Because younger kids got in free, my dad would tell the ticket taker we were all under 6, and he waved us in every time without scrutiny.

We went to the drive-in not far from our house nothing more than an enormous screen looming over a gravel parking lot, littered with weeds and broken bottles. Under the screen, kids turned cartwheels, shrieking and darting out in front of the cars that crawled past. Some parents would park backward and open up their trunks, lining the bottom with blankets and pillows for the kids to lounge in; others would crack open beers from the comfort of fold-out chairs. Not us we parked facing the screen, windows up, air-conditioning running.
Read more…

The Shames of Men

Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Don Kulick | Longreads | June 2019 | 14 minutes (3,788 words)

A few months ago, in April 2019, an eyebrow-raising headline appeared in the British newspaper the Guardian: “Botched penis enlargements: Papua New Guinea doctors warn of nationwide problem.”

The article reported that over the past two years the General Hospital in the country’s capital city, Port Moresby, has treated more than five hundred men who injected baby oil and other foreign substances into their penises to make them bigger. The medical professionals who sounded the alarm about this practice warned that it seems to be widespread and is a growing threat to men’s health throughout the country.

I read this story and sighed. I knew that those doctors were glimpsing only the tip of a ghastly iceberg.

*

Only a few weeks before the Guardian article appeared, I had returned to Gapun, a remote village in an all-but-forgotten corner of Papua New Guinea where I have been doing anthropological research for the past thirty years. The village is much further off the beaten path than any doctor working at Port Moresby General Hospital is likely to have traveled. Getting there from the nearest town can take two days, but this time I made it in a record fourteen hours.

Leaving from the nearest town with my traveling companions — three health workers from a local NGO — I rode in the back of a truck with no shock absorbers on an unpaved road cratered with potholes. For nine hours. At the end of the road we climbed into a flimsy outboard motor-powered canoe, bobbing on ocean waves up the coast before entering an immense mangrove lagoon and, after three hours, arriving at the end of a shallow, narrow creek. From there, we shouldered our bags and trekked for an hour, through viscous mud and clouds of mosquitoes, across slim slippery waterlogged poles that villagers call “bridges.”

Finally we arrived in the small windless slit in the rainforest that is Gapun; a village with a usual population of about two hundred people. Read more…

These Rooms Alone

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Jill Talbot | Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,531 words)

 

Interested in more by Jill Talbot and Marcia Aldrich? Read their collaborative essays, Trouble and Someone Called Mother.

I knew I was pregnant the moment my boyfriend fell back onto his side of the bed. I pulled the blue blanket over my naked body, willing it not to be so.

In elementary school, when we were bored in social studies or math, we’d play MASH, but only the girls. We’d write the letters for mansion, apartment, shack, and house at the top; 1, 2, 3, and 4 (for number of children) on the bottom; the names of four boys (for the men we might marry) on the left; and four types of vehicles on the right. Then we’d draw a spiral in the center, count the lines, and begin moving around the square. Our future in pencil. I don’t remember enjoying the game or trusting in it the way the other girls in fifth grade did, their hushed giggles. Most girls didn’t like it when I added a 0 to the children, RV to the housing, a category of careers instead of men. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.

We were raised to follow the narrative of life — college, marriage, career, children — as if this were the only story. In my 20s, I started checking off items like I was playing MASH. I didn’t get far. During my first semester of graduate school, I listened to a nurse on the phone tell me I was pregnant, and when I told my boyfriend of four years, he proposed. This is an odd detail, but that afternoon he had bought a new watch. I remember staring at the black band and feeling the spiral tighten, my choices being crossed out. I said no to all of it. This was not the story I wanted.

***

It took me a long time to realize I was pregnant, to realize I was carrying something inside me.


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Unlike most of my girlfriends in high school I had never dreamed about a future filled with children. I did not make lists of possible names for those children or talk about whether I wanted girls or boys. My friends knew they wanted two boys and two girls and what they would name them. Not for a single second did I look ahead and see myself with a child. Was there something wrong with me, something missing — did I lack the maternal gene? I felt I was supposed to want children and look forward to that day when they would arrive. It was the culmination of my two older sisters’ desires when they became mothers. It was assumed I shared their desires, but I did not. In my fantasies I had multiple lovers but remained unattached to any. I was a singer, an actress, and finally a writer: my essential solitude the common thread. Never was there a child waiting in the wings for me to hold.

***

Everything I wanted, I wanted alone.

After reading your words, I went on a walk to think about what it was I wanted in high school. I went back to my mind at 16 , at 17, those years when decisions were made for me, when I didn’t think beyond the borders of Texas because no one else did, and my parents never offered it as an option having never left the state themselves. I didn’t grow up in a small town, but it felt that way. On my walk, I remembered, clearly, how I had hoped for one thing — to be far away. The rest of my yearnings I don’t remember, not really.

I’ve always felt the pull of elsewhere, somewhere I don’t yet see. How that desire perplexed me at a young age because I couldn’t name it, just fought against all those who tried to warn me against myself. And there were many. You think you want this now, but you’ll see. By the time I finished college, most of the people I knew were still living in my hometown or returning to it, having children, buying houses, choosing color schemes. I respected their lives, I did, but I didn’t see that for myself. What I wanted was still far away, and it wasn’t until graduate school — when I sat in professors’ offices listening to them tell me I must keep going, I must pursue a Ph.D. — that I recognized my secret self, ambition. Everything I wanted, I wanted alone.

***

About a great many things, I was unsure; about my unsuitability to be a mother I was certain.

I don’t know exactly when I got pregnant. I can’t say what I might have felt at the time of conception except to say the last thing on my mind was making a baby. It was not a momentous occasion. I’ve read about sex being enhanced because the couple thought they might be making a baby — that thought never touched me. It only finally occurred to me I might be pregnant because my symptoms couldn’t be explained by anything else. You see, the father had been told after undergoing tests that he was sterile. Until those tests I had dutifully used a diaphragm, carrying it around with me in its blue plastic case with the accompanying tube of spermicide. I hated the thing, but I used it because I knew the worst thing that could happen to me was to become pregnant. At 19 I had nothing about me to recommend I become a parent. About a great many things, I was unsure; about my unsuitability to be a mother I was certain.

***

I was surprised by the crowded waiting room, all ages and races, the way we tried to give one another the privacy we had surrendered in the parking lot.

My boyfriend and I met in college and dated, off and on, for a total of four years. He followed me to graduate school, to Lubbock, where he got a job teaching history at one of the middle schools in town. I was 23. I was following the narrative of life. Begrudgingly. Our relationship felt weary, obligatory at times, something I’d try to break free from every few months, but here we were, together. Here we were, in a gray sky bearing down without the deluge. And here we were, driving to a nondescript building one morning in October, the day after I sat through a counseling session with a nurse, who told me about my body and what it carried in an office that looked like a craft area for a kindergarten class. I restated my choice, my decision, my certainty, then I listened to the steps of the procedure, how long I would bleed, when to call a doctor. Did I understand? Was I sure? If so, come back in the morning at 7:00. Don’t eat anything after midnight. We’ll give you a Valium. I remember my only worry: how we would pay for it. The next morning, I wasn’t surprised by the gathered protestors outside the Women’s Clinic on 67th in their coats of indignation, their posters of blood and Bible verses. I was surprised by the crowded waiting room, all ages and races, the way we tried to give one another the privacy we had surrendered in the parking lot. I slumped down into the Valium, considered the affluent couple in the corner, their gray hair and look of shock, as if their bodies had betrayed them. I remember the numbing shot in my cervix and a painting of blue flowers on the wall and the sound of the vacuum and the way I trembled in the recovery room, sipping Sprite from a plastic cup and throwing up into a trash can and being told it was time to leave.

***

When the father was pronounced sterile, the outcome did not surprise him though it surprised me. I had never considered not being able to get pregnant since I lived in constant fear I would get pregnant. According to the doctor, there was some minuscule possibility I could conceive. The word miracle was used. I remember that. After receiving the doctor’s prognosis, I stopped using birth control, secure in the medical knowledge I couldn’t get pregnant. In late September, I was beset by all manner of physical symptoms I couldn’t explain. Without telling Bruce, I went to the health clinic on campus where I described what turned out to be morning sickness and was told I must be pregnant. I protested but took the test and sure enough six months after the doctor’s declaration of Bruce’s sterility, I was pregnant.

I did not run home to share the good news with Bruce. I called it a mistake, the latest in a long line of terrible mistakes I had been making or that had befallen me since I had met Bruce. It never occurred to me that this might be the only child he might conceive, his one chance at parenthood. Picture a young woman, more like a teenager, who finds herself pregnant and all she can feel is a desperate fear. Perhaps she isn’t a sympathetic character, perhaps she should have felt maternal stirrings, but she did not. There was nothing but the sense that with each passing day she was losing more of who she was, and she had already lost too much.

***

It was the years after, for me, when I lost myself — in drinking, in danger — but it wasn’t the aftershock from that October morning. I am sure of that, though the years with Dean had something to do with what became a recklessness in me. When I left Lubbock to pursue my Ph.D., I learned to act as if there were no rules except the ones I ignored.

What I did, I understand, I did alone.

Dean and I get back to his apartment, and I crawl into bed drowsy and queasy. I pull the blue blanket over me while he paces the hallway, his athletic figure darting back and forth in the door frame. The air conditioner clicks on, because this is Texas, and 20 years from now in 2013, the House will close the clinic we just left, along with half of the others in the state. I begin to doze off, hear the jingle of keys, and call after him, a question. “You have to stay with me, in case I hemorrhage,” I say, but he looks toward the front door and mumbles, “Call the school.” I hear the key turn in the lock and shuffle to the bathroom. Make sure. What I did, I understand, I did alone. I want to be kind, to say Dean couldn’t handle what he had seen that morning, but he saw only a waiting room and fists pounding on his truck when we pulled out of the parking lot. We stayed together out of some perverse, young person view that if we had gone through such a thing together, we had to honor it. When he proposed again that next spring, I said yes. Surely there’s a word other than mistake.

***

In 1970 the state of New York led the way, offering legal abortion on demand through the 24th week of pregnancy. The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade wouldn’t legalize abortion nationwide until 1973. Unlike one of my high school friends who had to fly to Mexico for an abortion and another who was secretly admitted to a high-end clinic, I made an appointment over the phone with Planned Parenthood.

It was a cold day when we drove to Syracuse. The day was gray, the waves choppy with small white caps, foamy, spraying when they rolled to the shore of Lake Cayuga, the wind biting. There was nothing fresh about the day.

We left early in the morning to make my appointment. The drive was silent. The decision had been made. There was nothing further to be said and we didn’t say the nothing that was. We parked in a lot by the nondescript building. I checked in at a small metal desk, filled out forms, verified I was 18, then was taken back to the medical part of the clinic. Bruce stayed in the waiting room, empty or nearly so except for him.

I was treated kindly. I had a vacuum aspiration, and I remember the noise of the suction and the pain of the contractions. Then I was moved to an empty recovery room and lay on a narrow bed. It was as if the clinic had been invented and staffed just for me.

***

My recovery room was a row of chairs against a wall in a very small room, more like a hallway. All I remember is white. Maybe it was the white gowns or the white trash can or the white cup I trembled in my hand. We were lined up, not looking at one another, huddled into ourselves until a nurse asked if we could stand. I wonder about the difference between the solitude of your narrow bed in the 1970s and a chair among many in a hallway 20 years later, but nothing’s that different, not really, not even now, because we still shoulder these rooms alone. I told only one person back then — a long distance phone call — a friend who responded by naming girls who snuck away for abortions before we even graduated high school.

One month before the wedding, Dean called to ask, “Ph.D. or me.” I flew from Dallas, where my mother had bought me a white dress, and I sat in the Lubbock airport bar sipping wine when Dean walked in, resignation on his face. I understood — I could chase ambition or I could stay in Texas. I had to cross one of them out. I left Dean in the parking lot, then wandered the empty corridor of the airport in a daze until morning. I got on a plane, and I got on with my life. Later I would come to understand how I sidestepped a story I didn’t want to live. Now, it’s a story I tell.

***

I didn’t tell anyone about the pregnancy and the abortion. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d share back then, and I had no one to share it with. Did I feel any regret? The girl I was felt relieved. I felt spared from a great calamity. And I felt grateful above all else that abortion was legal, that Bruce could afford to pay for it, and that I had someone who shared my feelings going forward with the decision. I felt lucky my life could resume. I held onto the idea that my getting pregnant wasn’t my fault and that I had been given incorrect assurances I couldn’t conceive. It was Bruce who felt guilty about what he put me through because unbeknownst to him he had passed along the doctor’s false assessment and I got pregnant, I bore the consequences, I had to make the decision and I had to undergo the procedure. It was me, not him, who would have to say I had an abortion when I was 19. He wouldn’t have to admit a thing. I would have to reveal this piece of information for the rest of my life on medical forms. I would have to count myself among the countless women who had abortions. I would not stand apart, unscathed.

***

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. Waveformessays.wordpress.com. Her email is aldrich@msu.edu.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy Editor: Jacob Gross

Manic Street Preachers’ Album The Holy Bible

The Manic Street Preachers at Castle roundabout, London, 1990. Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

David Evans | The Holy Bible | Bloomsbury Academic | May 2019 | 17 minutes (2.781 words)

 

Manic Street Preachers never exactly fit in. When they emerged from South Wales with their debut album Generation Terrorists in 1992, their leopard-print outfits, political sloganeering and widdly-woo guitar riffs already seemed out of date amid the musical movements du jour: Madchester, Shoegaze, Grunge. Critics tended to dismiss them as a quirk of pop history, about as relevant to the zeitgeist as that other Welsh throwback, Shakin’ Stevens.

But when The Holy Bible came out, in August 1994, it felt more than just anachronistic. Rarely has a major record been so spectacularly out of step with its cultural moment. This, after all, was the year Britpop took off; the year of girls-who-do-boys and boys-who-do-girls; the year of the New Lad and his lairy pursuit of sex and drink; the year a former barrister named Anthony Blair began remaking the Labor Party in his own primped, twinkle-toothed image. The dominant mood was a sort of willed optimism. “Things Can Only Get Better,” as D:Ream helpfully put it.

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‘Women Created Our Worlds:’ Native Art Reclaims Its Power

Parka, Artic and Subarctic, ca. 1890-1910. Image: John Bigelow Taylor. Collection of Minneapolis Institute of Art

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 |  7 minutes ( 2,039 words)

The final report of the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is 1,071 pages of 2,380 people — from survivors to their family members to community Knowledge Keepers — outlining how colonialism’s resolve to split First Nations communities from their culture has led to gendered violence that continues to this day. “To put an end to this tragedy, the rightful power and place of women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people must be reinstated, which requires dismantling the structures of colonialism within Canadian society,” one commissioner said. “This is not just a job for governments and politicians. It is incumbent on all Canadians to hold our leaders to account.” That involves voting for those (preferably Indigenous, preferably female) politicians who support this dismantling, not to mention hiring Indigenous women, especially for positions of power. Instead, Canadians quibbled over whether or not the whole thing could be categorized as a genocide. The response was a chef’s kiss, a perfect example for why the inquiry had to be conducted in the first place: Indigenous women, women who originally had as much power as men, who imbued their community’s art with this power, are universally overlooked. Except this time it’s in the public record.

A third of the people cited in the report were allowed to testify in the form of art, which ended up in the National Inquiry’s Legacy Archive, a collection of more than 340 pieces by more than 800 people that serves as a historical record of myriad Indigenous identities. “We characterize these expressions, through art, as the act of ‘calling forth,’” the report explained. “This includes calling forth the legacies of those who no longer walk among us; calling forth awareness that leads to concrete action.” Calling forth also confronts the embarrassing (and persistent) colonial tradition of ignoring Indigenous voices. Of, for instance, starting public events by acknowledging the First Nations land on which they are being held, but without actually providing the First Nations people much of a space for their work. But Indigenous artists, women in particular, are refusing to be shut out; see the recently announced Netflix partnership with three Indigenous Canadian organizations or the first major North American retrospective of Native women’s work, Hearts of Our People, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “It has to be said that none of our communities need an exhibition at a fancy art museum to tell them that their women are important and what their women do is important,” cocurator Teri Greeves tells me. “This exhibition needs to happen in an art museum for the broader audience so, hopefully — my prayer — that they understand what we’ve always known, [which] is that these women created our worlds.”

* * *

A quick Canadian history lesson for those of us who only remember Louis Riel and that book by Tomson Highway: The white settlers, armed with Christian patriarchy and blunderbusses, entered Indigenous communities hundreds of years ago and saw matrilineal societies in which power and money were passed down through women, and they were like, wha? They saw men and women with complementary roles that were equally respected and were like, wait … ? Then they saw women as advisors and policymakers and that was it. Civilization said women were designed to pump out babies and keep house and these Natives were fucking it all up with progress. So in order to convince everyone these people were better off with him, the white man came up with some bullshit about there being two kinds of Native women, the pure Pocahontas types who had the good sense to want to be civilized (read: subservient), and the Squaw, whose off-the-chain libido had to be contained in order to protect the settlers’ fragile morality (guess the ball-busting bitch wasn’t sexy enough to get her own stereotype). As laughably reductive as all of this was, it had staying power. “The myth of the deviant Aboriginal women continues to plague us, reinforced by dominant cases that coalesce prostitution and Aboriginal women into a single entity,” Lubicon Cree scholar Robyn Bourgeois said in 2011. “Contemporary Canadian society dismisses violence against Aboriginal women and girls today on the basis of these perceived deviances.”

The Indian Act officially cut down women by shifting all of their power — political, financial, familial — to men. Until 1985, First Nations women could only really define themselves through a man. Even when women were the breadwinners, their rights and recognition remained limited. Instead they became the target of their men’s resentment, and their wider invisibility made them highly vulnerable to serial killers like Robert Pickton. Convicted of murdering six women in 2007, he admitted to killing 49 in total, having preyed predominantly on sex workers on the east side of Vancouver, a group in which Indigenous women were overrepresented — another reflection of the obstacles faced by the community. For more than a decade, activist groups like the Native Women’s Association of Canada have been unofficially tracking missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. According to the National Inquiry, they are 12 times more likely than other Canadian women to be killed or disappeared. But it wasn’t until 2016, a year after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report advised it, that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the national inquiry. (In the U.S., meanwhile, since 2017 lawmakers have been attempting to pass Savanna’s Act, which would establish a law enforcement database to track disappearances.)

“The borders between the U.S. and Canada weren’t created by indigenous people, but by outside influences,” Jill Ahlberg Yohe, cocurator of Hearts of Our People, told The Guardian earlier this month. “All this work is connected to our history, whether it was made in 1500 or 2019.” Several years ago she asked Kiowa bead artist Teri Greeves to advise on a different exhibit, and out of their conversations came the realization that Native women’s art, as a whole, had never been surveyed. “She was shocked by this,” Greeves tells me. “I was not.” Greeves’s mother had a trading post for more than 25 years where her daughter noticed that the women on their reservation made everything. It turned out the iconic Native American art — beadwork, baskets, ceramics, textiles — was a way for these women to communicate. Greeves’s mother, who her daughter refers to as a “Native fashionista,” looked for literature on these textiles but found nothing. So she conducted her own research and put on educational fashion shows everywhere from museums to the YMCA. But it was more than fashion, just like the ceramics and the baskets were more than housewares. “There are layers of meaning in all this stuff,” says Greeves, “and if that’s what you mean by art with a capital A then, yes, that’s what our ladies are doing, they’re making art.”  

Not that any gentlemen cared. At the turn of the century, concerned that the destruction of Native culture would mean the destruction of Native art, a bunch of institutions sent students to save it. (Apparently the people who made the art were less important — artists were rarely, if ever, identified.) These young men all went to the same places and gathered the same objects, which is why so many of us can only call to mind a few types of Native art — Sioux warrior shirts, for instance — while the real scope is more vast and variable. (Alongside Canada’s 600+ First Nations, there are 577 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.) The collectors also dealt primarily with men, even though the women were making most of the work being sold to the white man. “If they weren’t even seeing their own white women,” says Greeves, “how were they seeing the Native women?” Today, when you walk through Native collections in museums and galleries the (limited range of) objects are often only identified by tribes, but were largely made by women. “It’s just that no one’s said it,” says Greeves.

But over the past few years, Canada’s art institutions have started to. In 2014, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights exhibited Winnipeg-based Métis artist Jaime Black’s REDress Project, an installation made up of donated red dresses that symbolize missing and murdered Indigenous women. First created in 2010, it has since traveled to the Smithsonian and red dresses have become a recognized symbol in Canada of this exploited population. In 2017, the National Gallery of Canada established the Canadian and Indigenous Galleries, which house almost 800 works, while Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario launched a department for Canadian and Indigenous art. Retrospectives of the works of Annie Pootoogook, Rebecca Belmore, and Christi Belcourt followed, and last year a nationwide project, “Resilience,” included 167 billboards exhibiting the work of 50 female artists. Film and television have been slower to adapt — Netflix just announced the cancellation of Chambers, their only original series (and one of my favorites) starring a Native American lead, San Carlos Apache actress Sivan Alyra Rose. In Canada, however, Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) associate director Kerry Swanson says that the Truth and Reconciliation report was “a watershed that shifted the dialogue.” The ISO was formed two years after that and this month — seven days before Chambers got the axe — Netflix unveiled a partnership with the ISO, ImagineNATIVE and Wapikoni Mobile. The deal involves six initiatives for First Nations producers, directors, and screenwriters, which wasn’t necessarily out of the goodness of Netflix’s heart — it was part of their five-year $375 million agreement with the federal government, which includes $19 million to develop Canadian talent.

Twelve Canadians will also be included among the 115 artists making up the millennium-spanning Hearts of Our People retrospective. Asked around five years ago to help curate the collection, Greeves, despite being an artist (not a curator), said yes in order to continue her mother’s legacy. But because she could not speak for other Indigenous groups, and because, not being an elder, she couldn’t even speak for her own, Greeves and Yohe gathered 21 artists and academics, mostly Native, to circumvent the trap of curatorial tokenism: “Museums are colonial institutions, so we’re working within a format that is set up to not listen, and we’re all aware of it because we’ve all been silenced.” With no men present, recreating the gendered spaces they form on their own reservations, the women felt comfortable enough to freely exchange ideas. The result was a show organized into three loose themes: Legacy, Relationships, and Power. The first refers to the knowledge passed down through generations, the second to the relationships that include but also extend beyond the natural world, and the third to the power of Indigenous women, in all areas of life.

* * *

When you think about what art’s supposed to be — how much it should mean — and then you think about Native art and how its meaning transcends not only us, but also space and time, it starts to look like it belongs in galleries and museums more than anything else. Not only was each work of the past sacred, but each existed to be disseminated; Indigenous work was not generally considered the property of any one individual. What it does need, however, are women, because women are the keepers of its history. If they disappear, the art disappears and vice versa. Each work not only serves to preserve Native history, but the voice of the woman who makes it and all the women who came before her. “When I go to make something, I am praying on it,” Greeves tells me. She prays for the animals that gave up their lives for the materials she uses, for the person she is making the work for, for where it goes after that, the same way the women did before her: “When I look at the historic stuff, what I know is that all that stuff was made in prayer.” And when you look at all of that work together, when you acknowledge that you don’t know about the culture that is all around you, that the pieces the women have poured themselves into are teaching you what you thought you knew, the voices of Indigenous women become so loud they’re no longer possible to ignore.  

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

¡Ay qué niñas!

Niños migrantes, algunos de los cuales son menores no acompañados, apoyados contra una cerca en la Casa Hogar del Niño en Reynosa, México. (Photos: Jacky Muniello)

Alice Driver | Longreads | Junio ​​2019 | 17 minutos (4,470 palabras)

AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

“Yo con un mapa ya” anunció con firmeza Milexi, de 16 años. Me contó que su amor por los mapas le dieron la seguridad para recorrer ella sola los cerca de 2,300 kilómetros que hay entre El Portillo, Honduras y McAllen, Texas. Cuando la entrevisté en agosto de 2018, se encontraba en el Centro de Atención a Menores Fronterizos, CAMEF; su postura estaba algo rígida y su mirada fija en el luminoso patio del lugar. Llevaba partidura en medio y su cabello brillaba bajo el sol. “Mi sueño siempre fue viajar en “La Bestia””; como se le conoce al tren que atraviesa México de norte a sur, al cual los migrantes suben y bajan continuamente para conseguir trabajo y así poder costear su viaje en suelo mexicano.  A veces corren el riesgo de perder uno o dos miembros de su cuerpo si calculan mal el salto, ya sea para bajar o para subir.  Por su parte, Milexi logró llegar hasta Reynosa vestida de hombre; ahí la detuvieron y la llevaron al centro en el que llevaba ya 57 días detenida, y donde tuvo la oportunidad de hacer su solicitud de asilo en México.

Milexi se fue de Honduras porque su padrastro golpeaba a su madre y a uno de sus hermanos.

Me contó que él llevaba años golpeando a su madre, y que incluso llegó a fracturarle la rodilla a su hermanito de 11 años. Me dijo que ella empezó a cortarse desde los 7, pero que también estaba orgullosa de sí misma, porque a pesar de la ansiedad que sentía no se había cortado ni una sola vez desde el año pasado.

Después agregó un detalle: una noche en que su padrastro golpeó a su madre, ella esperó hasta que él estuviera dormido; fue a la cocina, tomó un cuchillo y lo apuñaló. “De mala suerte clavé el cuchillo en el lugar equivocado”, explicó sin pestañear. Su padrastro sobrevivió y ella decidió abandonar Honduras.

Milexi esperaba pedir asilo en Estados Unidos por motivos de violencia doméstica, quizá sin saber que las políticas de E.E.U.U. habían cambiado. En junio de 2018, Jeff Sessions, el entonces fiscal general de Estados Unidos, en una decisión titulada “Matter of A-B-” anuló un fallo de la corte migratoria que daba asilo a mujeres que huían de sus países por motivos de violencia doméstica. Un juez federal bloqueó la medida establecida por la administración de Trump, la cual ponía fin al otorgamiento de asilo por motivos de violencia doméstica. Sin embargo, la situación de los migrantes que ya lo habían solicitado por esos motivos aún sigue en el limbo y abierta a interpretación. Ashkan Yekrangi, abogado especialista en migración radicado en Orange County, dijo que las acciones de Sessions han creado un área gris en la que los jueces no están seguros de cómo manejar las solicitudes de asilo basadas en alegatos de violencia doméstica. Según Yekrangi, actualmente ” la mayor parte de los casos son rechazados, porque tanto los jueces como el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional se están basando en la medida “Matter of A-B-”. Read more…

Oh, Girl!

Migrant children, some of whom are unaccompanied minors, lean against a fence at the Home for Children in Reynosa, Mexico. (Photos by Jacky Muniello)

Alice Driver | Longreads | June 2019 | 21 minutes (4,024 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“I will go with a map,” decided 16-year-old Milexi. Her love of maps, she said, was part of what gave her the confidence to migrate roughly 1,460 miles from El Portillo, Honduras, to McAllen, Texas, alone. When I interviewed her in August 2018, she sat, her body tense, her gaze direct, on the sunlit patio of the Border Youth Care Center (CAMEF El Centro de Atención a Menores Fronterizos) in Reynosa, Mexico. Milexi’s hair was parted down the middle, and it shined in the sun as she said, “My dream was always to travel on the Beast,” as the train that runs from one end of Mexico to the other is known; migrants hop on and off it as they work their way through the country, sometimes losing a limb or two if they miscalculate the jump onto or off of the train. Milexi dressed as a man and made it as far as Reynosa before being caught and turned over to the Center, where she had then spent 57 days and made the request to receive asylum in Mexico.

Milexi left Honduras because her stepfather beat her mom and one of her brothers. She said that he beat her mother for years, that he fractured her 11-year-old brother’s knee. She said that she started cutting herself at age 7, but was also proud of herself because, for the past year, despite feeling anxious, she had not cut herself once.

Then she added a detail: One night her stepfather beat her mother. She waited until he was asleep then got a knife from the kitchen and stabbed him. “I had bad luck and the knife struck in the wrong place,” she explained without blinking. Her stepfather survived and after that, she decided to leave Honduras.

Milexi hoped to request asylum in the United States on the grounds of domestic violence, perhaps unaware that U.S. policies related to domestic violence had changed. In June 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a decision titled Matter of A-B- vacated an immigration court decision to grant asylum to a woman fleeing domestic violence. A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s policy ending asylum for those fleeing domestic violence, but the situation for migrants who request asylum based on domestic violence claims remains in limbo and is still open for interpretation. Orange County–based immigration lawyer Ashkan Yekrangi said that Session’s actions have created a gray area in which judges are unsure of how to treat asylum cases based on domestic violence claims. For now, according to Yekrangi, “The majority of cases are still being denied because judges and the Department of Homeland Security are relying on the Matter of A-B-.” Read more…

On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense

Illustration by Homestead

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | June 2019 | 15 minutes (3,962 words)

Would you like to know if you’ve gained weight? If you’re annoying, or too talkative, or not as smart as you think? If you’re doing something, literally anything, the wrong way? Just ask a German and they will tell you immediately. Germans do not do this to hurt your feelings. There isn’t even a single long word in German for “hurt feelings,” they just translate the English directly (verletzte Gefühle), and everyone knows that direct translation from the English is how Germans demonstrate their disdain. There is, however, a common and beloved expression for an individual who makes a big show of having hurt feelings, and that is beleidigte Leberwurst, or a perennially “insulted liver sausage,” because hurt fee-fees are for weak non-German babies.

After all, Germans are just being direct: unmittelbar, or literally translated, “unmediated.” Their assertions are simply unverblümt, or “not putting a flower on it.” They’re not mean, they’re freimütig, or “free-hearted.” They’re just being forthright: offen, “open,” which is a good thing, ja? Germans couldn’t even begin to imagine why being brutally honest would hurt someone in the first place! If the truth hurts you, isn’t that more your fault than the truth’s?

Read more…

This Month In Books: ‘Look at the World, and Not at the Mirror.’

Plate 3, French Fashions, Il Corriere delle Dame, 1831. (DEA / Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Getty)

Dear Reader,

This months books newsletter is about seeing the big picture. It’s about that moment when you glance around a corner to figure out what you’re missing, and how sometimes you don’t like what you find.

Try to see, Leonel had said. It was what he was always asking me to do,” activist-poet Carolyn Forché writes in her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. “Try to see. Look at the world, he’d say, and not at the mirror.” Instead of looking at a mirror, Forché became one. As Melissa Batchelor Warnke points out in her review, Forché’s memoir is barely about Forché herself: it’s a record of what she saw and heard in El Salvador — the atrocities, the brewing war, and the resistance; it’s about her mysterious mentor and guide, Leonel; and, most importantly, it’s a facsimile of the conditions, the mood, the tense aura of censorship under which she saw and heard these things. Forché bears witness not just to the facts but to the feeling of living under dictatorship.

“When you are in a very controlling religion like this, one of the ways that they keep people inside is by painting the world outside as a very scary place,” Amber Scorah tells Jacqueline Alnes in an interview about her memoir Leaving the Witness. For Scorah, leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses was simply a matter of not being able to pretend she believed anymore. When she looked in the mirror, she saw someone she didn’t recognize: “When you’re indoctrinated, your true self is secondary to the persona that you have to adopt to exist in the world in which you live.” Living as that second person became unbearable. She could not unsee herself.


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In Eve Ewing’s book of poetry, 1919, she attempts to see clearly events that happened very close to her in space, but far away in time: Chicago’s Red Summer “riots,” when whites terrorized blacks across the city. In an interview with Adam Morgan, she says, “I think of the people in this book as our neighbors, right? They happen to be our neighbors across the span of a century, but they’re our neighbors. They’re our fellow Chicagoans.” Ewing relates that she was consistently surprised by the fact that she did not already know the things that she was learning. “It shows how compressed history really is.”

Darcey Steinke was similarly motivated to write her new memoir, Flash Count Diary, by the idea that there was a fuller story that she had not been told. In an interview with Jane Ratcliffe, Steinke says that, once her menopause symptoms hit and she tried to educate herself about the process, she found that most menopause memoirs “end with this come-to-Jesus moment of, ‘Then I accepted hormones.’ I’m not against it, but when they accept hormones, they say all their menopausal symptoms go away, so then the journey through menopause kind of stops. … I wanted to hear what it’s like for other women.” Steinke had to write a book of her own just to find out what the natural process is like.

While writing a review of two recent books about, respectively, Jewish history in Canada and the history of antisemitic conspiracy theories, Jordan Michael Smith had a revelation about his past. In his youth, when his family lived in the exurbs of Toronto, he wanted to — and did — become friends with classmates who bullied him with antisemitic slurs. “One of the awful things about oppression is that sometimes you can’t bring yourself to hate your oppressors. You want them to like you too badly.” He had forgotten all about it — “It was strategic forgetfulness, acting like I remembered less than I did. It was more convenient that way, for them and me.” — and had likewise forgotten that he himself had also once bullied a fellow student with a racial slur, a horrifying revelation. “A few years later, the kid we bullied and I became friends, too. I wonder if he forgave me, or just strategically forgot about what I’d done.”

It’s always a good idea to remember the things you’d rather forget, to see the things you’d rather not see. As Ewing puts it, “These kinds of violent histories are all around us… We have to take the time to stop and seek them out…”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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