Search Results for: Rolling Stone

What Happens If I Don’t Like Fiona Apple?

Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,481 words)

Even the way I first listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters was oppositional. It wasn’t intentional. I knew I needed about an hour to listen to it all the way through. I knew I couldn’t really do anything else in order to give it my attention. So I took Fiona Apple’s inside record outside. At four in the afternoon in Toronto, the sun was piercing and it was open-coat weather, a strange way to listen to Apple’s nicotine voice and bedroom lyrics. Walking in the middle of a day so bright I needed to squint even through sunglasses, “Fetch the bolt cutters/I’ve been in here too long,” bounced out of my headphones, a jazzy paradox. As everyone knows by now, the album was made by a shut-in, a “messianic figurehead,” according to the New Yorker, who hadn’t produced an album in eight years. A backstory all the better for conjuring the image of a mythical genius at work on an inevitable masterpiece.

I didn’t get it.

Claustrophobia is the overarching theme, even if it isn’t, of the album that came out of Apple’s exile. And during a crisis in which we all feel that same thing, it was inevitable that the concept would eclipse the music itself. It’s also understandable that not answering Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ call would feel particularly alienating — Slate music critic and Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste author Carl Wilson, who I contacted for this column in befuddlement, said that even he was surprised by how much attention Apple’s fifth album was getting. But in the present atmosphere, with physical connection forbidden, every other kind of connection becomes that much stronger. A man singing on his balcony in Rome unites a building, and a woman pounding on a piano in her home in Venice Beach unites the rest of us. Most of us. In normal times, having the dissenting opinion is a point of pride. In pandemic times, where all you want is to not be alone, it’s a cause for concern. Which is why it felt so important to figure out why I didn’t much like Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

* * *

Technically I started listening to Apple’s album before that walk. Motivated by the unanimous praise, I went to YouTube and played the first track, “I Want You to Love Me.” But the second I heard whatever that sound is, I don’t know, a keyboard and cymbals chucka-chucka-chucka-ing, I thought, “Fuck, no.” I am not listening to that experimental shit. Later, in a more studious frame of mind, I persisted. And after about 20 seconds, that sound liquefied into a cascade of piano trills which would be familiar to any ‘90s Apple-ite. At the risk of sounding reductive, this is kind of how Fetch the Bolt Cutters goes if you aren’t feeling it; verses of relief surrounded by weird shit that plays like the opposite of an actual melody. In between hangs the kind of Apple-isms that have always clanged in my ear — mouthfuls of the kind of poetry that was once limited to high school but now stalks us all on Instagram — not to mention the insufferable repetition of words and phrases and the obnoxious holding of never-ending notes like “youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.” At the end of “I Want You to Love Me,” Apple discharges a lengthy, high-pitched throat warble that reminds me of Andie MacDowell’s dolphin-like vocalization in the 1991 Bruce Willis flop Hudson Hawk, a squall that causes Sandra Bernhard to sneer listlessly, “Just shoot her.”

I’m not going to make you suffer through much more of my non-critical thinking around music, but there’s definitely a sensation with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, if you listen to it from start to finish, of a knot being untied, of the songs relaxing into something more digestible as you pass the halfway mark (Editor’s note: “Are the songs relaxing into something more digestible, or are you relaxing into the songs?” Author’s note: It’s not me, it’s her). What doesn’t morph is the subject matter, which, restricted as it seems to Apple’s interpersonal grievances, seems all too confined for a project that was already confined in its production. The whole thing just struck me as too insular for how sweepingly it was being lauded. And despite the claims at raw unprocessed sound, those dog barks on the title song are so strategically placed I was more tickled by the actual dogs barking behind the fence I passed while listening to it. But then you can’t deny the added texture Apple’s voice has acquired with age and her own liberation from her old song strictures. The song I momentarily hated the most on the album, for the opening repetition of its title (“Ladies,” sixteen times!), is also the one I liked the most. Despite the clunky lyrics — “ruminations on the looming effect and the parallax view” — some subterranean motor seems to power this track through the history of music, from folk to rap to whatever, sailing between genres like there’s nothing to it. When people talk of genius, when Pitchfork gives the album 10 stars, I hear a glimpse of that here.

That’s the tension. If I just thought everyone had bad taste, or was dumb, I wouldn’t be tortured by disliking Fetch the Bolt Cutters. My lack of connection to it suggested I was missing some substantial sliver of intellect, which is something I can’t abide as someone who never really feels smart enough. So I groped for a music critic to explain it to me. But if I felt alienated from this particular cultural event, critics didn’t seem too concerned about inviting me in. “She sings, scats, lightly raps — and proceeds to curl her voice into an extended-vocal contortion à la Yoko or Meredith Monk, over a Reichian piano loop, signaling an avant-garde inclination,” Jenn Pelly wrote at Pitchfork. Wait, what? That isn’t critical analysis, it’s critical flexing. At The New Yorker, Carrie Battan’s use of the term “feral authenticity” to describe Apple’s oeuvre — based on her penchant for avoiding the public —  recalled my mother’s duo-syllabic reaction to Apple (“hippie”) but not much else. So, I emailed Carl Wilson. Then I called Wilson; that’s how desperate I was for Wilson to explain what was wrong with me. “I feel a little stymied by your question,” he rightfully responded, “how can I tell you how to like something you already know you don’t like?” 

But then he proceeded to write the kind of email that should have been an article, the kind of explanation that’s the reason Wilson is my favorite music critic. That space between the music and the person listening to it? He writes the bridge. Wilson explained that the reaction to Fetch the Bolt Cutters felt “disproportionate” because of Apple’s absence for so long and because it is “of the moment in its theme and feel.” That includes its lyrics on the sort of gender issues we are currently confronting — not to mention Apple’s transcendence of musical boundaries, mixing disparate genres from cabaret to hip-hop — and that raw home-recorded style that opposes today’s ubiquitous hyper-produced singles. Wilson also noted the self-selection of music critics. And that most of the reviews I read on Apple’s album were by white women, on a beat that has famously had a dearth of female voices as a whole, does imply her music still hasn’t shaken that decades-old Lilith Fair connection. 

“Personally, I wasn’t a huge fan back when — like you, I kind of felt that she was good but not great, maybe a little too self-conscious and strained to be great,” Wilson explained. But then he heard Apple’s fourth album, The Idler Wheel…, in 2012. That’s when he thought she had finally self-actualized (upon his suggestion, I listened to that album too and, indeed, the last track, “Hot Knife,” would not sound out of place on her new record). On Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Wilson noticed the piano that Apple forefronted in the past melded into layers of rhythm and percussion and vocals, her monotonous deep bluesy voice fracturing into a wider range of pitches. “To my ears that’s really opened up the space in her style, which I used to find too suffocating,” he wrote. “It has an immediacy that I find really rare in music right now, allowing by turns for both vulnerability and rapture.”

After all of that, Wilson’s final words could have very well been all he had written: “[M]aybe you just find Fiona Apple a bit much.” The irony is that the same thing I critique her for — for being too solipsistic, for making it all too self-centered — is the same reason I can’t hear her straight. My reactions to art are as impulsive as my consumption is lonely. It’s why, ultimately, I can’t trust critics’ taste though I can trust their analysis, and why I can’t trust the artists themselves, only their art and my own experience of it. If you think about it, it’s a little crazy to believe in your gut when your gut is at least in part influenced by exposure: “acquired taste” is a thing for a reason. And yet I always seem hellbent on independently deciding on the quality of everything. If nothing else, I am entirely secure in my judgment, because, the thinking goes, I may not know much about anything else, but I know myself perfectly. 

I know, for instance, that I have a particular aversion to hippies, and that during the making of this album, Apple chanted around her house with various other musicians, banging on a box of her dead pet’s bones. I know I am intimidated by the blues and by jazz and reject them because of how stupid they make me feel, a symptom of my more general difficulty with engaging in art I don’t at least marginally understand. I know I have a particular aversion to beautiful women in the arts, because it’s never just about the art. I know this particular beautiful woman has dated powerful men — most notably the director Paul Thomas Anderson, as he got more and more famous — and that never means nothing, good or bad. And I know I resented Apple as a teen for being publicly tortured when she was publicly everything girls like me tortured ourselves for not being — good enough, but, more importantly, the right package to cover up for it (as Apple herself sings: “I resent you for never getting any opposition at all.”) I know all of this, but I feel it more.

Unfortunately, you can’t think yourself out of the way you feel.  “A lot of the record is about feeling confined, emotionally and societally,” Wilson explained, “and about thinking of ways to liberate yourself.” But had Fetch the Bolt Cutters not alienated me musically, everything around it would have. I’m skeptical of blanket accolades; that something can appeal so globally suggests a lack of originality. And I can’t escape (liberate myself from?) the fact that being told another artist has achieved perfection is, as they say, triggering. The idea that someone has unlocked everything they are capable of and created something that is so purely them that it transcends time and space, God-like, to become an indisputable piece of perfection — it’s the thing every artist wants, for all their neuroses and all their intellect and all their values to coalesce into this object that by virtue of being so essentially them is essentially the rest of us as well. It’s incredibly rare, but you see it in work like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, for instance, or Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, both of which have had the added advantage of being recognized for their greatness. But this rarity makes each new proposed addition to the canon seem less believable than the last. 

More than that, though, it plagues every other artist. Every time we hear that someone else has achieved mastery, or at least been recognized for achieving it, we’re reminded that we haven’t and likely never will (let alone be acknowledged for doing so). That’s the deepest feeling of isolation for an artist of all of them, that chasm between them and immortality. That’s the one they fear most that they (I) will never breach.  

* * *

I listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters on a Spotify mix, so the album ended and then rolled into “Criminal,” Apple’s Grammy-winning 1997 single and perhaps her best known. Hearing that smooth lyrical piano and that even smoother voice felt like slipping into sweats after a long day in a pencil skirt; I think I may have sighed aloud. (Apple wrote “Criminal” when she was 17 and maybe that says something: that my music appreciation is stuck at that age.) The song, about how bad she felt for getting things so easily by virtue of her sexuality, recently resurfaced in Hustlers, with Jennifer Lopez making her entrance as stripper doyenne to Apple’s adolescent croon, “I’ve been a bad, bad girl.” That was another piece of popular culture that was unanimously praised that I was only so-so about. The difference is that I felt no tension there. I know films, and I could explain why I didn’t like Hustlers much. Because of that, because I had a reason, I allowed myself to dislike it. And until my editor mentioned it, I didn’t think that had anything to do with my gender. But now I’m starting to think it does — men never seem to require permission to opine, they don’t feel the need to be informed to do so. Which is not to say I shouldn’t — it’s to say they should. Because it means meeting a piece of art halfway, respecting the spirit in which it was made, and respecting the artist who made it.

As much as I continue to feel dissatisfied with my response to Fetch the Bolt Cutters, I’m less troubled after speaking to Wilson and researching Apple herself. A Rolling Stone profile from 1998 reminded me that when she was a kid, she carried around this quote by Martha Graham: “No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” It’s the same quote I used in a column last August. And according to her New Yorker profile from March, Apple continues to display a photograph of Graham on her piano, the one she played on Fetch the Bolt Cutters. So even if I couldn’t connect to that album, I could, in a way, connect to the woman behind it, another isolated artist, unrested, just trying to keep marching.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

“All The Best”: Rest Easy, John Prine

John Prine performs at John Anson Ford Amphitheatre on October 01, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)

Americana legend John Prine passed away on April 7th, 2020 from complications of Coronavirus. He was 73. Before he spent 50 years as a full-time musician, he was a mailman. He wrote songs as he completed his route, songs “about certain silent things that people didn’t talk about.” In this piece at Rolling Stone by Patrick Doyle, John’s widow Fiona and his son Jody remember Prine for his love of music, performing on stage, and his way of finding joy in the smallest things in life.

Prine said his grades were “too ugly” for college. After graduating high school in 1964, he took the advice of his oldest brother, Dave, and became a mailman. The pay was good, and so were the benefits. That life was upended when Prine was drafted into the Army in late 1966, just as the Vietnam War was heating up. But instead of being sent to Vietnam, he ended up in Stuttgart, West Germany, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. Prine played down his military service, describing his contribution as “drinking beer and pretending to fix trucks.”

After the war, Prine returned to his mail route, which, it turned out, was great for writing songs. Wandering the Chicago suburbs, he wrote classics like “Donald and Lydia,” about a couple who “made love from 10 miles away,” and “Far From Me,” a ballad about the chilly, purgatory-like feeling that consumed him before his first breakup. “A lot of stuff I was writing about were things I saw and felt and didn’t hear them in songs,” he said. “It was about certain silent things that people didn’t talk about.” Prine’s most fearless song looked back on his Army days: “Sam Stone,” about a vet who came home from Vietnam and ends up with a heroin habit. “I was trying to say something about our soldiers who’d go over to Vietnam, killing people and not knowing why you were there,” Prine told Rolling Stone in 2018. “And then a lot of soldiers came home and got hooked on drugs and never could get off of it.”

While the Prine family cannot have a public funeral right now, they are finding ways to celebrate him. “I’m going to wash all of his Cadillacs, park them all in the driveway,” Fiona says. “I would never let him do that.” Jody says he’s remembering his father by celebrating “the small stuff, because that’s what he loves, like a hot dog. Or an ice cream cone. We were having ice cream last night, just thinking about how, after a show, he’d always have ice cream and pretend it was someone’s birthday and get a cake.”

Read the story

Greta Thunberg: “We Just Have to Care About Each Other More”

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - MARCH 06: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (C) holds a banner as she takes part in a "Youth Strike 4 Climate" protest against global warming and climate change on March 6, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

At Rolling Stone, Stephen Rodrick profiles teen climate activist Greta Thunberg. Thunberg won’t fly, for climate reasons, and her willingness to make personal sacrifices for the Earth gets Rodrick thinking about his own influence on the planet’s future. The teen’s message is not all doom and gloom, it’s about taking action, now: she’s working tirelessly to influence politicians and decision makers because we still have eight years to reduce carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic damage to Earth.

My Greta travels featured a Vancouver-Zurich round trip and then an L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I fly from Vancouver to L.A. for another story. It’s the job, but I take stock in horror and calculate that my three flights burn more carbon than the yearly usage of the average citizen of more than 200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.

“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has come to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta moment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say you understand the science, but I don’t believe you. Because if you did and then you continue to act as you do, that would mean you’re evil. And I don’t believe that.’” Gore shook his head in wonderment. “Wow.” He then gives a history lesson: “There have been other times in human history when the moment a morally-based social movement reached the tipping point was the moment when the younger generation made it their own. Here we are.”

Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the climate’s demise.

“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”

Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.

Read the story

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

Rachel Vorona Cote (Author photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)

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

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

***

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

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

“I miss my body when it was ferocious” The Transfiguration of Paul Curreri

Paul Curreri -- All photos by Aaron Farrington

Brendan Fitzgerald | Longreads | March 2020 | 47 minutes (12,973 words)

I had seen Paul Curreri a few times around Charlottesville — pushing a cart around the local Wegmans grocery, drinking seltzer at the brewery, holding his young daughter and wearing a brace on one hand — before I worked up the nerve to write to him.

“I’m not sure if you know I’ve been fairly sidelined for the past five years via hand and vocal problems,” he wrote back. “I shouldn’t necessarily assume you know that. Perhaps you just thought I’ve been lazy as shit.” I told him I didn’t want much of his time; I had kids of my own now, too. “Truly,” he wrote back, “there is always time.”

Over a decade, Curreri had released a body of music that should have made him one of America’s most esteemed songwriters. “Paul Curreri gives what few songwriters can,” Matt Dellinger wrote in The New Yorker in 2002. “It hits you soon and hard that you’re hearing something exquisite.” His first albums, built on country blues foundations, shook with dexterous picking and a voice that keened and yipped and roared. A few early songs functioned like artist statements, little revelations of ethos bound up in the tension between the limits of Curreri’s body and the demands of his music. “If your work is shouting, deep-breasted, from sun-up to sundown, take care,” he sang on 2003’s Songs for Devon Sproule, named for the musician he’d marry a few years later. “In time, a shouter you’ll become.”

For years, Curreri’s work had shouted, and so he became a shouter of singular beauty. Then, he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

Read more…

8 Longreads by Will Storr on the Science of Storytelling

Author Will Storr (Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Getty Images)

“People change, don’t they?” journalist and author Will Storr asks at the beginning of an Aeon essay called “Plot Twist.” That question has been at the heart of Storr’s writing for years now, a question he carries with him throughout so many of his investigations into science, belief, and the human impulse to tell stories.

Storr has a knack for starting with a simple statement that anyone can intuitively understand, then revealing how deceptive both simplicity and intuition can be. Storr’s willingness to challenge even his most basic assumptions appears most often in his stories as curiosity, which he brings anew to all of his conversations with sometimes desperate story subjects who find themselves facing some of life’s most serious consequences.

Read more…

25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

* * *

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

Read more…

‘What’s this guy doing loose in Malheur County?’

Image by Curtis Perry via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Anthony Montwheeler spent 20 years in an Oregon mental healthy facility after being found not guilty of kidnapping his ex-wife by reason of insanity. He was released after claiming that he’d been faking the whole time, then immediately kidnapped another ex-wife, eventually stabbing her and killing another person during an ensuing car chase, all in full view of witnesses. And yes, he’s going to plead insanity again. How did he get the “not guilty” verdict 20 years ago? How did he get out? Is he mentally ill; what even is “mental illness” in the criminal justice context? In Rolling Stone, Rob Fischer walks us through Montwheeler’s case and the many blurry lines and troubling policies around the insanity defense in the U.S.

The hearing lasted more than two hours, but Montwheeler testified for only eight and a half minutes. When a state official asked if he ever had trouble sleeping, Montwheeler said, “No. I’ve always been able to sleep at night.” Had he ever been depressed, or felt that life is not worth living? “I’ve always been happy,” Montwheeler said. “I mean, I’ve never been depressed.” So then, the official pressed, you’ve never had any trouble getting out of bed and going about your activities? “No,” Montwheeler replied. “I’ve always showed up for work. I’ve always been Johnny on the spot.”

After a brief recess, the review board found Montwheeler was “no longer affected by a qualifying mental disease or defect,” which meant the state was legally required to discharge him. Offenders who are discharged from the state hospital, even those, like Montwheeler, released before the completion of their full term, are not diverted into penitentiaries. They are set free without additional oversight or guaranteed access to state mental health care.

The board’s chair, Kate Lieber, a Portland-based attorney, was clearly upset. “I don’t even know where to start,” she said. While maintaining a lie for 20 years, she noted, Montwheeler had avoided prison, lived rent-free, and received expensive care from trained professionals. “I mean, that is troubling on all sorts of levels,” Lieber said. “I’m assuming somebody in the system might do a forensic look at this and figure out what the hell happened. But as of now, you’re discharged.” Before Montwheeler walked out the door, she added, “My hope is that you’ll do the right thing. I am sincerely worried that you won’t.”

Read the story

Shelved: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

Frans Schellekens / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,966 words)

 

On the evening of May 29, 1997, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley and his roadie Keith Foti picked their way down the steep, weedy bank to Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, Tennessee. Buckley, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and heavy Doc Martens boots, waded into the water singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” After about 15 minutes, a boat passed. Concerned about their boom box getting wet, Foti moved it out of harm’s way. When he turned back around, Buckley was gone with the undertow. His body wouldn’t be found for days. He was 30 years old.

Jeff Buckley had mastered that most singular of instruments: his own voice. Possessing the same incredible range as opera icon Pavarotti, his phrasing could be anguished or exquisite; his breath control was phenomenal. Beyond that, he was the soul of eclecticism: Raised on prog rock, he dabbled in hair metal, gospel, country, and soul. Once, during a live performance, he improvised in the ecstatic style of Qawwali devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — someone Buckley once described as “my Elvis” — over the riff from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Read more…

Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music

Michael Tullberg / Getty

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | February 2020 | 12 minutes (3,333 words)

 

Every now and then, in one of her music videos or during a heady, live performance, singer Carly Rae Jepsen will close her eyes, raise her hands above her head, and sway her hips. It’s not choreographed, or at least it doesn’t appear to be. Instead of crisp synchronicity, Jepsen opts for fluid, extemporaneous groove. She is singing to us and moving with us — until those fleeting moments between verses or at song’s end, when she seems to have retreated, not out of reach, but rather into a full-bodied state of emotive receptivity. In this brimful pause, she is both steward and beneficiary, theorist and pupil, basking in the superabundant, prismatic feelings her music elicits.

It might not seem especially illuminating to say that Jepsen’s pop repertoire lays bare the complexity of human emotions. All music does this, although with varying degrees of nuance and success, and one could say the same about every other art form, too. But over the course of Jepsen’s 12-year career, her evocation of big tricky feelings has shifted into something of an intentional artistic inquiry. She is fascinated by the vast, labyrinthine topic of human sentiment, so much so that she organized her 2015 album — the aptly titled Emotion — around it, although her exploration is by no means circumscribed to that particular release. From the time she released her first album, the oft-forgotten Tug of War, in 2008, Jepsen’s music has thrummed with idiosyncrasies. She expresses the extraordinary and the tragic within the day-to-day, whether her premise is unrequited love for someone she knew would never be interested in her (“Your Type”), toying with an illicit sexual fling (“This Kiss”), or solicitude about her emotional intensity and its impact on her relationship (“Too Much”). Any event, especially a romantic one, holds the possibility for maximalist sentiment: Jepsen roams these vistas of the heart, shepherding those of us whose thick, cumbersome emotions render us lonely and overwhelmed.

Read more…