Search Results for: Review

A Place to Stay, Untouched by Death

Unsplash / Pexels / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (2,950 words)

 

A place to stay untouched by death
Does not exist.
It does not exist in space, it does not exist in the ocean,
Nor if you stay in the middle of a mountain. 

-Buddha

When my mother grew quite ill and it became clear she would soon die, we brought her from the hospital to my parents’ house where they’d lived for nearly 50 years. My father, brother, niece, and I moved the dining-room table and chairs into the living room and hospice came in and set up one of those heavy, mechanical beds with cold metal side rails and a device that moved the head and feet up and down. It was an ugly bed. How many people before my mom had died in it, I wondered. It came with a sparse, lumpy mattress. My mom was skinny as a blade of grass by then and needed padding for her jutting bones. So we purchased an additional mattress to rest on top of her existing one; a mattress that would be hers alone, upon which no one, besides her, would die.

My parents grew up working class in London during World War II where they acquired a lifelong frugality. Inspire by one of the more popular war slogans, “Make Do and Mend,” they reused cooking oil, saved aluminum foil, and sewed up holes in our socks. So, it wasn’t a surprise to discover the Marimekko sheets of my late teen years in my parents’ linen closet. I was 54 then, but the background white on those sheets was still crisp and bright; the pinks and oranges and yellows of the flowers still exuberant. There were no other twin sheets in the house, so as my mom rested in her favorite velvet chair in the family room, my dad and I made up the bed with them. It was February, so we placed one blanket on top and folded another near where her feet, now tender in their slouchy socks, would rest.

And there it was: My mother’s death bed. All done up in my college dorm sheets.

My mind raced through the things that had happened on those sheets. Things that didn’t belong to this moment. I remembered my parents moving me into my college dorm in 1980. My mom always said that the moment all my belongings were in my room, I shushed them away. But I don’t think that’s entirely true. I remember unpacking my brand-new sheets, freshly laundered by my mom, and together, the three of us, making my bed. I remember them being so proud of me: There I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. My mom’s education had ended at age 12 when her school was bombed and my dad’s at 14 when he began his apprenticeship in the tool and dye trade. Such was England in those days.

I was struck by this repurposing of an object for a completely unexpected use. Back when I was 18, screwing my boyfriend on those sheets, slipping between them after a late night at the clubs, over-sleeping for classes sandwiched in them, eating junk food and studying for exams, books sprawled on top of them, sharing secrets with best friends with the sheets tucked around our knees, I could never have imagined my mom would die nestled between them.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

More Than Me “I am Abigail” campaign, 2012

This week, we’re sharing stories from Finlay Young, Katie Prout, Molly Crabapple, Sean Flynn, and Harley Rustad.

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‘As a Grown Woman, I Still Have To Continuously Learn To Say No’

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Wei Tchou | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,646 words)

We’re certainly living in a time of revolution. I feel a great deal of wonder when I reflect on the fact that we’ve witnessed our society’s cultural norms regarding sexual assault and consent shift in real time, on the most public of stages: Washington, Hollywood. Yet I’m perhaps less attuned to the shifts happening within myself, in light of the national conversation. I know that I conceive of my own consent and agency more intentionally now, from day to day. But where I most often notice this evolution is in the way I think about my past — it’s as if many of my memories have been entirely rewritten.

I was thinking of all of this as I read Tanya Marquardt’s Stray: Memoir of a Runaway. In the book, Marquardt writes about escaping her dysfunctional home at age sixteen and finding community within the early-nineties underground goth scene in Vancouver, British Columbia. The book is haunting and spare, and wrestles with the nuances of one’s agency, in the face of cyclical abuse. Marquardt is an award-winning performer and playwright. Her play Transmission was published in the Canadian Theatre Review, and she has published personal essays in HuffPost UK and Medium.

We became friends, back in 2011, while we we both attending the M.F.A program at Hunter College, and we sat down recently to speak about the art of crafting memory into literature, the ongoing stigma against personal writing, and the ways in which the cultural conversation surrounding consent affected the writing of her book, among other topics. Read more…

A Woman, Tree or Not

Mohammad Alizade / Unsplash, Getty Images, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Terese Marie Mailhot | Longreads | October 2018 | 10 minutes (2,419 words)

I never became a woman formally in my culture. The ceremony I had once believed was promised to me didn’t come. I can’t tell you much about what a woman’s coming of age ceremony entails — not because I don’t know, but because we keep some things secret, in case the government comes after us again. The federal governments in the US and Canada implemented policies to annihilate Indigenous languages and cultures. The policies forbade many of our most significant practices. To become a woman, I’ve had to search for the truth and ritual that should have been handed down to me openly, from a grandmother and mother who had both learned to value and teach in quietude. They taught me that there is nothing stagnant about a secret; it grows and wills itself into the light, every time.

My grandmother didn’t speak much because she favored implicit instruction. She worked in the nursery school I went to, and, when she was not there, a well-meaning white teacher named Ms. Hardy used to drag us by our arms back to class. My grandmother used her gentleness to show me the possibilities of love. People who knew her might think she showed affection to us grandchildren with pinches and food, but I think of other things. When she dressed me as a child, I remember how she helped me put my tights on. She bunched each leg slowly to put my toes inside — toes she had trimmed and rubbed her thumbs along. My tights never tore and I was always clean during that time before she passed. After she died, my mother was always in a frantic rush without her help and guidance. Sometimes I tried to wear tights, but they split in the hem, or my toes caught the nylon. I could never exact her slowness. My mother valued speed — she was a bolt of a woman.

When I get my son ready for daycare, I whisper him awake. I distract him with jokes and silly voices as I dress him, and although my hands are quick, I believe he will remember them as warm. In this way, kindness can undo years of subjugation — it can turn the tide of inherited grief.

My grandmother went to St. George’s residential school as a child, which was notoriously brutal to Indians. She did not speak our language out loud, nor did she pray in our language — she prayed to Jesus in English. She learned how to pray kneeling before a Matron in a dormitory for Indian girls, who were most likely separated into groups 1, 2, or 3. They wore stiff, thin, green uniforms. In my research, I’ve seen film footage of little Indian girls filing out of the school, following their caregivers, and I can’t see any nylons or stockings; I wonder if anyone showed my grandmother gentleness. There are stories from survivors of residential schools who recall wetting their beds night after night, and then being ridiculed by the Indians and whites alike as they hung their clothes and bedding on the line the next day. The children learned military-style marches, and how to stiffen their backs at “Attenshun!” They slept in rooms under lock and key. I don’t know how anyone could herd children this way without losing their soul. In some cases, children said they felt like employees or worse. They were given work assignments like “barn-boy.” Girls had kitchen assignments, and, when they stole cookies or apples, they were punished with ridicule and abuse. When I review testimony from Native people about this time, I always look at their eyes. Kindness can survive cruelty. It’s a lesson my grandmother taught, and never had to speak. She never needed to say what happened to her, we knew not to ask. I wanted to ask her how she became a woman, but I feared the answer.

Some children were brought there in the backs of trucks. Some children wanted to be there with their cousins, and some Indian Agents convinced parents they were harming their children if they didn’t send them away to school. Some children were given Nlaka’pamux names before they left. My grandmother’s name was Little Bird. I resist telling you in her language for political and personal reasons. I don’t know what you’ll do with deep insights into my culture, and I don’t pronounce names well.
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How the Border Patrol Threatens Civil Liberties Far from the Border

AP Photo/Elliot Spagat

Thanks to a Justice Department mandate from 1953, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection can now detain and search people within 100 air miles from the actual border. With over 40,000 agents, it’s now the largest federal law enforcement agency. Every year, its agents interact with 27 million people at both permanent and temporary checkpoints.

For the Texas Observer, Melissa del Bosque writes about the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s expansion, its overreach, and current attempts to reign it in. Bosque details the way the agency routinely detains American citizens without having to explain why, searches our cars with no warrants, and operates with little oversight. Yet its reach keeps expanding. If you drive within 100 miles of the border on a road that leads to an official border crossing, you better watch out, because if the patrol barks at you the wrong way, you could be detained for a while. And for what?

During CBP’s rapid expansion, the agency ramped up its use of interior checkpoints, subjecting ever more Americans to warrantless searches, seizures and detentions near their schools, in their neighborhoods and on public roads. CBP’s own data suggests that its interior checkpoints do little to catch what it calls “unauthorized entrants” and instead ensnare U.S. citizens on minor drug charges. (Forty percent of its seizures were 1 ounce or less of marijuana taken from citizens.) From 2013 to 2016, interior checkpoints accounted for only 2 percent of CBP apprehensions of undocumented immigrants. In May, a circuit court judge in New Hampshire threw out charges against 16 people who were arrested for possessing small quantities of drugs at a checkpoint manned by local police and Border Patrol agents, about 90 miles south of the Canadian border. “While the stated purpose of the checkpoints in this matter was screening for immigration violations,” the judge wrote, “the primary purpose of the action was detection and seizure of drugs,” which he ruled unconstitutional.

The Trump administration has been aggressively promoting further cooperation between immigration agencies and police departments. Border Patrol agents often accompany officers during routine traffic stops and serve as backup or sometimes as interpreters, but their involvement in domestic policing has had lethal consequences. In 2011, a man in Washington state called 911 because his son, 30-year-old Alex Martinez, who had a history of mental illness, was smashing the windows of their home. Border Patrol accompanied local sheriff’s deputies to the residence, likely because the call was made in Spanish. When they arrived, Martinez stepped out of his house holding something in his hand. Law enforcement say it was a hammer; the family alleges it was a flashlight. A local deputy and a Border Patrol agent, who said they felt threatened, shot Martinez 13 times. Since 2010, watchdog groups have counted 77 CBP-related fatalities—at least one-fifth of them U.S. citizens.

CBP operates with less oversight than your local police department despite having one of the largest federal budgets in Washington. The agency doesn’t reveal the names of agents or details of its internal proceedings in fatality or misconduct investigations. Until four years ago, CBP even kept its use-of-force policies secret; they were made public only after a congressional inquiry into a wrongful death resulted in an independent review. CBP hasn’t widely adopted dashboard or body cameras, although it began a six-month pilot project in May. In 2015, the Homeland Security Advisory Council, a panel of law enforcement experts formed by DHS, warned that CBP had no effective process to root out corruption and that its internal affairs office was woefully understaffed. “The true levels of corruption within CBP are not known,” the council warned. “Pockets of corruption could fester within CBP, potentially for years.”

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To Tell the Story, These Journalists Became Part of the Story

Hiroshi Watanabe / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Martha Pskowski | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,194 words)

 

The attention paid to the U.S.-Mexico border seems to ebb and flow like the tide. News coverage spikes and then recedes, giving the impression that migration itself must be doing the same, when in fact the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has been stable for the last 10 years. In summer 2014, it was the wave of unaccompanied minors arriving from Central America drew our scrutiny. The year 2018, as in so many arenas, brought new horrors, with young children forcibly separated from their parents and the ensuing debacle of reunification.

I spent the first few months of 2014 as a volunteer at a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. On the side, I was dipping my toes into journalism, pitching to small non-profit websites. On a typically sticky afternoon in Ixtepec, I asked the priest who runs the shelter, Alejandro Solalinde, what changes he had seen so far that year. More children than ever, he said. And more of them coming alone. I wrote about the rising number of unaccompanied minors for the Americas Program that April.

Just a few months later, I watched with a mix of relief and bewilderment as international media flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to cover the full-blown controversy. Few outlets had bothered to look at what had been apparent in refugee shelters in Southern Mexico for months: minors travelling solo. Only when these adolescents and children arrived on the doorstep of the United States did their situation become a “crisis” meriting media attention and presidential action. But then as now, Central American migrants were compartmentalized, and their stories simplified for easy consumption.

I stayed in touch with some of the young men and women I met in Ixtepec, meeting up in person when possible. In strip malls in Northern Virginia and Van Nuys, California, I have caught up over pupusas with young Salvadorans who made it across the border after passing through Ixtepec. Instead of writing about just a snapshot of individual border crossings, I wanted to fit together the disparate pieces of their shared stories into the bigger picture; leaving home, the dangerous journey through Mexico, and now, adjusting to the United States.

When I needed more substance, and a respite from flash-point news coverage of the border this summer, two books satisfied my desire for depth, context and nuanced empathetic storytelling: Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham. Both trace the stories of families migrating to the United States and explore the gap between the myths the immigrants had heard before arriving and the reality of the life they experienced in America. Hilgers and Markham unravel the complicated circumstances that led their subjects to come to the United States, and the unexpected barriers they faced once arriving in their respective destinations. Read more…

Charting the Love — and Betrayal — in Our Stars

Illustration by Helen Li

Cherise Morris | Longreads | October 2018 | 22 minutes (4,598 words)

 

“What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of ‘love’”? I asked you this question four months into our relationship, while writing an essay about love for a contest I never entered.

This was long before we exchanged the L-word, back when the winter’s cold gave us short days and long nights spent with no one but each other.

“Uh, can we come back to that one? Gimme some more options first.”

So, we did a quick word association activity. I stated words and you responded with the first thing each brought to mind.

I said, “water.”

You said, “me.”

“Tree.” “Life.”

“Windows.” “Light.”

“Ground.” “Floor.”

I said, “air.”

And you said, “love.”

Then, with the smile of a fox you replied, “Ah, I see what you did there.”

 

***

I was born in the image of my mother with broken teeth and a half-broken heart to match; air gave birth to air. My mother is an Aquarius, and I, a Libra — both “air signs” — and perhaps that’s why we’ve always gotten along.

I watched her, full-hearted and lonesome my entire childhood and adolescence, longing to be consumed by a certain kind of fairytale love. A love which never lies to you, never takes you for granted, never hurts or harms. But if I know anything to be true, it is that the perfection of fairytales is a grandiose illusion, which is why we love them so. Little girls are taught to long for the fairytale love stories of princesses far more than the bittersweet kind that grow us into goddesses.

According modern western astrology, Libra is the cardinal air sign of the zodiac, ruled by Venus, the planet named for the Roman goddess of love, which governs the ways Libras seek and build relationships. We value affirmation, aesthetics and the rosier side of justice above all else. At all costs we seek to avoid the topsy-turvy shakiness of conflict and anything less than perfect equilibrium, while often settling for pseudo-perfect if it will keep the boat from rocking for a while. Those living under the sign represented by the cosmic scales are obsessed with the romance of keeping up appearances, and thus, are predisposed to a sometimes-never-ending quest for alignment and acceptance through partnerships. They exalt a fabled euphoria, a dream of being made to feel weightless by the love of another. But if I know anything to be true, it is that love, despite its intangibility, is the weightiest of matters.

Although, one’s approach to love and relationships can’t be simply boiled down to the properties associated with one’s sun sign. Astrology is more complex than that. But back when I started to live this story, I did not yet have a nuanced understanding of the workings of the cosmos. I fell into the predictability of the Libran archetype, wanting to fall in love only to feel what it was like to be loved.

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Shelved: Bill Evans’ Loose Blues

Bill Evans. David Redfern / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,248 words)

 

“Loose Bloose” has a beguiling head riff. Such motifs are played at the beginning, or “head,” of a jazz or rock song. They’re typically repetitive and simple enough for musicians to remember — an arrangement kept in one’s head, not written down. Pianist Bill Evans changed that. The head riff on “Loose Bloose” is too complex to not have been notated. Played in unison and in octave harmonies on piano and tenor saxophone, it is somehow both intimate and imperious. It moves with the strange grace of a mantis. It is a part of Evans’s legacy that is without either parent or descendant.

That is partly because “Loose Bloose,” and the album with which it nearly shares a name, was shelved. Thought lost, Loose Blues remained in vaults for 20 years. It was created during a time of grief and addiction, formed from necessity and ambition, and frustrated by financial limitations. It was conceived by a man in the middle of an intensely creative period, only to be released after his death; recorded by a group of ad hoc players not fully prepared for its compositional intricacies; and produced by a man who didn’t fully believe in the project.

Recorded in two days in August 1962, Loose Blues was the product of extraordinary recording activity for a normally reticent artist, one who took almost two years to record a second solo album. “The burst really began,” remembered producer Orrin Keepnews, “when Evans surprised me by announcing that he was ready to record with his new trio; eventually it meant that he was in three different studios on a total of eight separate occasions between April and August 1962, creating four and a half albums’ worth of solo, trio, and quintet selections.”

“I don’t know how impressive that sounds to anyone else;” Keepnews wrote in the Loose Blues liner notes, “to me, who was on hand for all of it, it is still overwhelming.”

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Why Are We Still Ignoring Lee Krasner?

(Photo by Tony Vaccaro/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

According to art critic Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock was “the most radical alcoholic [he] had ever met.” At the same time, though, Pollock’s paint splattered-and-dripped canvases, a method he pioneered and honed for a three-year period in the late 1940s, “broke the ice,” says Willem de Kooning, who added a postscript-like qualifier, “It was another step in space‐time.”

More than 60 years after Pollock rammed his green 1950 Oldsmobile-88 convertible into a tree off an East Hampton, Long Island road, Vox considers whether Pollock’s stature as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century is truly deserved. Or, more bluntly, how he “became so overrated.” That’s a bold stance for Phil Edwards, host of Vox’s Overrated video series, to take, but Edwards posits that without Greenberg and his writings for the Partisan Review, ArtForum, and others, Pollock’s stature wouldn’t have achieved the same heights. Which, as a premise, has some merit: though not the only art critic opining at the time, Greenberg was not only the loudest voice in favor of “modern art,” he immersed himself in the world in which the artists lived.

As he explained in his seminal 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg felt that there was nothing more avant garde than abstract expressionism, an art movement fueled by emotions, that resisted politicizing art (which had consumed art during the period after World War I). Through Greenberg’s embrace of Pollock, whom he indeed hyped up in his writings, the artist became an emblem of the Ab-Ex movement. A by-product of Pollock’s rise was the increasing shift of the art world’s gaze away from Paris and towards New York City, where artists like Pollock, De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and others (including Greenberg) were living. The group of artists involved in Ab-Ex were a huge force, and thus NYC transformed into art’s epicenter.

So while Vox addresses how Greenberg’s influence within art criticism greatly benefited Pollock, effectively branding the artist as “the most powerful painter in contemporary America,” the video glaringly sidesteps any mention of Lee Krasner, a brilliant artist in her own right who just so happened to be married to Pollock. Krasner elicits one mention in the video, a throwaway reference during the captioning of a photo of Pollock and Greenberg at the beach, which is not only astonishing, it is frankly dismaying.

The video’s narrative is marred by a tunnel vision approach to explaining Pollock’s rise and enduring importance — yes, Greenberg boosted him, but Krasner, with her management and stability, sustained him. It was Krasner whom Pollock first turned to when his art began to radically depart from norms at the time, asking her upon completing Lucifer in 1947, “Is this a painting?” Prior to Lucifer, writes critic Jerry Saltz, “All seemed lost for him. I love his early work, but much of it is labored, muddy and glutted. Pollock is in hell. Then it happens.” And it was Krasner who convinced Pollock to agree to an interview with Life magazine in 1949; the article’s headline — “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” — and a spread featuring Pollock’s painting introduced the artist to mainstream America (and to those who didn’t regularly read Greenberg — or even know the critic’s byline). And finally, it was Krasner who managed Pollock’s estate for nearly twenty years after his death; under her stewardship, prices for Pollock’s works tripled and quadrupled, setting the standard for modern American art. More so than Greenberg, Krasner deserves credit for maintaining Pollock’s relevance and importance — without Krasner, Jackson Pollock doesn’t become Jackson Pollock.

As she told the New York Times in 1981,

Look, they don’t take de Kooning and put him up that way. And if de Kooning or Motherwell takes from Pollock, nobody even breathes a word about it. But with Lee Krasner, wow, wow. It’s been a heavy, heavy number. It’s hard for them to separate me from Pollock in that sense, you know.

Which is why omitting her from a video on Pollock’s legacy is so discouraging, especially with the wealth of research, reporting, and examination of Krasner as an artist and a person in recent years. Krasner attended the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and then later studied with Hans Hoffman, and in the years following Pollock’s death, her own abstractions evolved, earning not only acclaim but also space in museum collections worldwide. She derisively dismissed being labeled as Pollock’s widow, which many had saddled her with: “I may have resented being in the shadow of Jackson Pollock, but the resentment was never so sharp a thing to deal with that it interfered with my work…By and large, people look at my work and it is connected with me, and a lot of those old hurts are no longer there. I have utter confidence in what I’m doing.”

In Mary Gabriel’s recently published Ninth Street Women, Krasner is a main character — she was one of the 11 female artists whose work was selected to be displayed at the historic 1951 Ninth Street Show, and over the course of a thousand pages, Gabriel highlights how the artist’s experiences and work align with those of her peers (and, if some cases, veer from drastically). Krasner once told the Times that she wished feminism “should have come along 30 years earlier…We could have used it then.” But Gabriel’s impressive work doesn’t seek to explore the import of these artists merely on their gender — as Elaine de Kooning (another central figure in Gabriel’s text) said, “To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.”

Without Krasner, Vox’s video is incomplete. There is no point to any argument that questions Pollock’s artistic worth that neglects to mention Krasner’s own contributions. And while Greenberg did give Pollock a boost, Krasner remained with Pollock after the photographers from Life left. To ignore Krasner 34 years after her death is frustrating, especially in this day and age. In the most recent New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpont delves into both Gabriel’s work and Krasner’s own legacy:

The real advance has come through the dedication of feminist scholars, such as Linda Nochlin, Hayden Herrera, and Kellie Jones, who have revitalized the discipline of art history and expanded the protest against exclusion to consider race along with gender. Gabriel’s firsthand sources are extensive, but her work stands on the shoulders of biographies by other women with a mission: Gail Levin on Krasner, Patricia Albers on [Joan] Mitchell, Cathy Curtis on de Kooning and [Grace] Hartigan. (There is no biography of [Helen] Frankenthaler, as yet.) Perhaps the tipping point will come when men write about women artists as easily as women have always written about men.

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The New Feeling

TonisPan / Getty

 

Anna Moschovakis | An excerpt adapted from the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love | Coffee House Press | August 2018 | 11 minutes (2,908 words)



The story she was reading was about a forty-three-year-old unarmed civilian shot to death in a Tampa Bay movie theater by a seventy-two-year-old retired police captain who’d become “agitated” by the man during previews. Eyewitnesses said the victim had been “texting loudly.” Popcorn had been thrown.


She looked down from the screen at the bead of blood on her thumb. She watched it form a rivulet that ran down her palm and onto the white down comforter her friend had laid out on the bed for a Ukrainian folk singer arriving that night to teach a workshop in bilij holos at a nearby club. The blood formed a spot, brighter than the bead itself.


“He was a good, genuine person,” it was said of the deceased.

“He was just a funny guy. He brought life into every room.”

“Fate brought these two people together—it was ridiculous.”


None of the witnesses tried to stop the altercation. The movie was about Navy seals on a mission in Afghanistan. Its title was Lone Survivor.


She stared at the spot and then back at her thumb, where fresh blood coagulated. She thought again of the thing that had happened—that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the expressway, from which she could hear the variegated moan of afternoon traffic. She was having a hard time getting up.


Charles Cummings, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who left the theater with the victim’s blood on his clothes, said he was shocked and saddened by the incident, which took place on his sixty-eighth birthday.


“I can’t believe anybody would bring a gun to a movie,” said Cummings.

“I can’t believe I got shot,” said the victim before he died.

The recipient of the texts was the man’s three-year-old daughter, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Read more…