Search Results for: TV

At War With the Rat Army

Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer | The Farm in the Green Mountains | New York Review Books | May 2017 | 11 minutes (2,896 words) 

 

Below is an excerpt from Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer’s memoir The Farm in the Green MountainsHaving fled Nazi Germany, the Zuckmayers ended up spending several years of their exile on a farm in Vermont, where they engaged in a war of extermination against an invading army of rats. A bestseller in Germany when it was published in 1949, it was reprinted this month by New York Review Books. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

I felt suddenly that I was not alone.

It was the third summer.

That was when I saw them for the first time.

It was evening, and I had gone into the shed to mix the feed before dark.

In this shed the buckets in which the feed was kept stood across from the entrance in a long row.

There was laying meal, feed grain, and the mash for fattening the chickens. There were buckets for duck and goose feed, which we mixed ourselves.

Zuck had carried the heavy sacks into the shed for me and left them in front of the empty buckets.

I began to untie the strings of the sacks and to use a measuring scoop to fill the buckets with the prescribed amounts of oats, bran, fattening mash, and corn meal.

The quiet of evening filled the shed. Ducks and geese peeped in their sleep. Lisettchen sat above me on her beam. I called her name, but this evening she only blinked at me and wouldn’t fly down.

The feed rattled into the buckets and smelled like fields at harvest time.

Suddenly I stopped in the middle of my work, because a violent, overwhelming terror seized me, like the fear of the unaccustomed and unknown. I felt suddenly that I was not alone with my animals, that I was being watched closely from some corner.

I stood motionless and waited.

Now I heard a noise—a disembodied, ghostly tripping across the wooden floor. Then I saw something standing on the stairs. It was a large, gray-brown rat. Read more…

Into the Woods: Three Personal Essays on ‘Twin Peaks’

Image by abdurrafeykhan (CC BY 2.0)

The return of Twin Peaks fills me with dread. It’s an excited dread — I can’t imagine not watching the third season of a show that has shaped my teenage years, and which I never expected to see brought back to life. But the unease is real. If it stinks, can its failure leave the original wholly intact? (I doubt it.) If I think it’s great, can I trust my own reaction? To what extent can I decouple aesthetic judgment from the thick ropes of nostalgia that bind the mythology of the show to my carefully constructed narrative of coming of age?

I watched the original two seasons of Twin Peaks as a ninth-grader in suburban Tel Aviv. The world it depicted was not simply foreign; beyond the sheer power of narrative and emotion this was a largely hermetic surface. It invited obsessed, but mostly context-less, fandom. U.S. viewers have always seen in Lynch’s work a dark distortion of ’50s Americana; I observed it like a creepy diorama in a natural-history museum.

For better or for worse, this won’t be the case with the third season. I’ve now lived in British Columbia for six years. Those douglas firs, those clouds, that delicate balance of extreme beauty and extreme dreariness are no longer exotic. Strip away the otherworldly elements of the show, and you’re left with development, poverty, sexual violence, immigration, drug and human trafficking: the very same issues facing the Pacific Northwest / Lower Mainland I call home. What will this proximity do to the way I absorb the new season? I don’t know. For now it’s just adding another layer to the dread.

To help me process this feeling of cultural malaise, I’ve been reading a lot about the show in recent months: from its problematic representation of Native Americans and Indigenous culture to the making of Angelo Badalamenti’s matchless score. I stumbled on some contemporary features from 1990, which capture the show’s initial reception in the U.S. — something I couldn’t have experienced firsthand. But the pieces that I’ve enjoyed the most (maybe it’s the relief of seeing my narcissism refracted through others’ experiences?) are personal essays about the show and its place in the writer’s life. I belatedly discovered the Twin Peaks Project, a curated selection of writing on the show by author Shya Scanlon, and scoured its archives at length. Below are three pieces that stayed with me.

1. “The Trees, The Trees.” (Nathan Huffstutter, The Los Angeles Review of Books, February 6, 2015)

Huffstutter spent his childhood as a Pacific Northwest transplant — his family had moved from Southern California to Bend, Oregon, in the late 1970s (he has since returned to San Diego). This essay weaves together memories of teenage angst — in 1990 he wasn’t watching Twin Peaks but rather listening to Sonic Youth and the Pixies — with an exploration of the unspoken acts of violence that lurk under the surface in small towns both fictional and real. It’s a rich mix (Martin Heidegger and Michel Houellebecq make important cameo appearances) and it’s deeply satisfying and troubling.

2. “Our Doubles, Ourselves: Twin Peaks and My Summer at the Black Lodge.” (Linnie Greene, Hobart, December 12, 2014)

“In the first summer of my adulthood, after graduation, I would insert a VHS tape, already vintage, and inhale Twin Peaks like life support, transfixed and terrified.” Greene recounts a tumultuous period in her life — it included depression, an abusive relationship, and sexual assault — and how watching the show gave her a new, more sobering perspective on her position (and her limitations) as a young adult.

3. “Falling and Always Falling: Twin Peaks and the Clear-Cut Landscape.” (Matt Briggs, Moss, Winter 2014)

The endless forests of the Pacific Northwest are a key character in Twin Peaks; decades later, some establishing shots are still seared into my memory. In this piece, Briggs — who grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, where many of the show’s outdoor scenes were filmed — focuses on the abrupt transitions between old-growth forest and human-built areas. He lingers on the ever-present threat of development, and how it plays out not just in the show’s narrative, but also in the region it depicts: “The fictional town is a location that reflects the tension between the fecundity of the ancient forests and the constant change of the new. The landscape of Twin Peaks represents loss inside of loss of loss.”

Welcome to Airspace

Longreads Pick

How the same design language — “the neutered Scandinavianism of HGTV” — took over coffee shops and Airbnbs from Brooklyn to Osaka.

Source: The Verge
Published: Aug 3, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,601 words)

It Was Like Nothing Else in My Life Up to Now

Photo by Steve Photo by (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Josh Roiland | The Digital Press | May 9th 2017 | 19 minutes (5,354 words)

This essay first appeared in Haunted by Waters: The Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997 published by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Our thanks to Josh Roiland and editor David Haeselin for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

* * *

On a still summer night in the last year of last century an overweight woman in a wheelchair appeared, as if an apparition, under a street lamp in a parking lot on the west end of campus. I had not seen her when I pulled my car in. It was an hour till midnight, and I was covered in sand.

I’d spent the night playing volleyball and had returned home to married student housing where I was summering with a friend’s wife, while he interned in Minneapolis. She was a nurse who worked nights, and I was an English major lazing between my junior and senior year. We rarely saw each other; the only complication in our cohabitation resulted from my inability to lift the toilet seat when I got up to pee in the middle of the night. In the mornings we’d cross paths and she’d tell me, again, that it was no fun to come home and sit in piss.

That night in the dark parking lot, the woman rolled her heavy body from behind a street-lamp. “Excuse me,” she said, coming closer.

“Hi!” she said cheerfully. “Can you, uh—would you be able to give me a ride home?”

She worked at a telemarketing place near the corner of University Ave. and 42nd St. Work had let out, but the buses had stopped running, and she needed a way home. She crossed the busy intersection and wheeled into the expansive parking lot waiting for someone to help her. I was tired and dirty. I just wanted to slink into the stuffy efficiency, shower, and distract myself to sleep with PlayStation. But here she sat.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll give you a ride home.”

Read more…

Travel Writing for Americans Who Stay Home

Warsaw Castle Square
Warsaw Castle Square via Wikimedia, image in the public domain

Tom Swick was the travel editor of a “medium sized newspaper in a small Florida city,”  an envied and somewhat trivialized position, until it wasn’t. In LARB, he considers his career and the role travel writing plays for an audience that doesn’t get much vacation — and doesn’t share his inherent curiosity about the world.

9/11 brought a temporary end to envy of my job — suddenly nobody was jealous of frequent flyers — while at the same time elevating my status. Terrorism turned travel into something vital, threatened, precious, political.

Americans eventually started traveling again, but things did not return to normal. In my local bookstore, the travel narrative section began, inexorably, to shrink. When people said to me, “Travel writer — what a great job!” I was now tempted to ask: “Really? What was the last travel book you read?” The memoir had long been in the ascendant, which was strange; if anything, 9/11 should have made us fervently, desperately curious about the world. But as a nation we seemed to be turning our gaze inward, to our childhoods, our relationships, our obsessions, our phobias, our disorders, our illnesses, our addictions. It was helpful to our understanding of human nature, which is obviously an important part of being a member of the species. But we were also citizens of the world — the most powerful at that; didn’t we have a responsibility to learn about it? Abroad, people were astonished when I told them that only about a quarter of Americans possessed a passport. And this, I imagined them thinking, is the country that’s calling the shots?

There are countries whose citizens, without ever leaving, can’t help but be exposed to the foreign; in the United States, the exposure frequently never goes beyond the table. Years ago, the Travel Channel devolved into a kind of offshoot of the Food Network, more or less proving that, here, abroad is acceptable only if served on a plate. We do not import other countries’ TV shows, with the exception of England’s, which doesn’t really count. Some of us listen to world music, but not in the numbers that NPR would like. At night you can surf through all of your movie channels and never find a foreign film. Of the books published here every year, only three percent are works in translation. It is said that one must first love oneself before one can hope to love another, but the United States seems dangerously stuck on itself. Yes, there’s France and Italy — the book publishing darlings — but they’re viewed, because they’re so often depicted, more as pleasure gardens than real countries.

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How Temple of the Dog Pioneered a New Genre of Music Videos in the ’90s

Photo collage by Kjell Reigstad

Matt Giles | Longreads | May 2017 | 15 minutes (3,772 words)

Last month, Pearl Jam was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Introduced by David Letterman, who looked resplendent with his chin-length beard, it was a fitting honor for one of the greatest rock groups of all time. “I feel like maybe we’re about halfway there to deserving an accolade of this kind of stature, but this is very encouraging,” said Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam’s lead singer, as part of his acceptance remarks.

What was left unmentioned by Vedder and his fellow bandmates was the collaboration that directly preceded Pearl Jam’s formation more than 25 years ago in Seattle—a supergroup that enjoyed its own moment in the spotlight last year.

Temple of the Dog only released one album, but after a two-decade hiatus, the group reformed in June and announced a multi-concert tour across the United States. Normally, this wouldn’t have made headlines, but it did because Temple of the Dog was a mix of soon-to-be superstars from Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, including Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Matt Cameron, Mike McCready, Chris Cornell, and Vedder (who didn’t tour, but was in the original lineup). These rock gods had never officially toured as Temple of the Dog (there have been a few shows here and there, and every few years a video of Cornell and Vedder jamming out to “Hunger Strike,” the band’s hit single, goes viral), but this tour was the first time the musicians got together as the early-’90s super group. “We’re essentially a baby band,” Ament told Rolling Stone in a recent oral history of the band. “We’re 25 years down the road, but we’ve never toured.”

The tour renewed the attention paid to Temple’s “Hunger Strike” music video. Released three times over the ensuing decades, the video — sparse, loaded with symbolism, and an ode to both the city of Seattle and Andy Wood, the Mother Love Bone singer whose death both launched and inspired Temple’s founding — gained notoriety for helping to foment the wave of the ’90s video genre. You know what they look like: dark colors, set in nature, elderly individuals writing on a chalkboard, anthropomorphism, warped graphics, unconventional camera angles, and more. The TV sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” mocked the style in the 2013 episode, “PS I Love You”; the episode featured the alt-rock backstory of Robin Scherbatsky, whose breakout hit had all the ’90s music video trappings (including extras clad in flannel). Read more…

How President Trump Made Himself a Head Writer at SNL

Photo: AP Images

Like the old blues lyric says, I’m laughing just to keep from crying. In the age of Trump, comedy has become one of America’s most biting forms of social critique, and Alec Baldwin’s searing depiction of Donald Trump is one of the best. In The Atlantic, Chris Jones shadows Baldwin on the SNL set as the 58-year-old actor turns our dark reality into what might be his most-lasting role yet.

He hadn’t rehearsed much. He had watched Trump on TV with the sound off, hunting for tics and physical cues (Baldwin still does this, recently adding Trump’s habitual neck stretch to his repertoire), but mostly he’d just hoped lightning would strike. Now he stood in the shadows, terrified that he didn’t have it—he worried out loud that he didn’t have it—trying to remind himself that, if nothing else, he needed to look as though he were “trying to suck the wallpaper off the wall.” That “nasty scar” of a mouth was Baldwin’s only certainty: “a puckering butthole,” he calls it, dropping into his Trump voice to describe his vision of it. Then he heard Michael Che, playing debate moderator Lester Holt, summon him to the stage: “He’s the man to blame for the bottom half of all his kids’ faces. It’s Republican nominee Donald Trump.”

Baldwin walked out onto the stage and, as if by dark magic, there he was: not Trump, exactly, but some nightmarish goof on Trump, a distillation of everything gross about him, boiled clean of any remnant that could be mistaken for competence or redemption. Unlike Fey’s pitch-perfect echo of Palin, Baldwin’s Trump isn’t an impersonation. He saves his more accurate work for Tony Bennett, for Robert De Niro, for Al Pacino—for men he loves and admires. Those are mischiefs, born of appreciation. His Trump is mimicry, born of disgust. Even after so many successful appearances—even after his and Trump’s visages have become so closely associated that a newspaper in the Dominican Republic ran a photograph of his Trump instead of the real one—Baldwin can still seem as though he doesn’t have the stomach to inhabit Trump fully. “Push, push, push,” he says in his makeup chair, his lips once again threatening to burst from his distorted face. “It’s exhausting. I’m hoping I can come up with someone else I can imitate. Pence?” In the meantime, he will keep his Trump at a remove, almost like an abstract painting, not of Trump the man but of Trump’s withered soul.

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What It Takes to Remove a President Who Can’t Do the Job

(AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster)

The “Goldwater Rule” is a gentleman’s agreement between members of the American Psychiatric Association which “prohibits psychiatrists from offering opinions on someone they have not personally evaluated.” It was put in place during the 1964 candidacy of Barry Goldwater after Fact magazine surveyed more than twelve thousand mental-health professionals and found that nearly half of those who responded said the candidate was mentally unfit of office. Read more…

An Ode to Black Families: A Reading List

Photo by Johnny Silvercloud (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Moonlight tells the story of Chiron, a beautiful black boy coming of age in a dreadfully under-resourced section of Miami. As with any great work of art, it’s the tiniest details that reveal the most­­­ — the inflection of a phrase, the subtlety of a glance, the seconds of silence. Adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, with cinematography so lush, the balmy humidity of south Florida oozes off the screen, Moonlight is filled with moments like this. It happens when young Chiron avoids eye contact with a drug dealer during their first encounter, and again when Chiron welcomes an unexpected friendship on the soccer field with clear hesitation. You can see it every time Chiron flinches at his mother, and in the need that remains in the shadows of his eyes when he does. It happens when his mother makes Chiron read books instead of watching TV. “Find something for you to read,” she says.

The first time I saw Moonlight, these small revelations of humanity disarmed me. I felt exposed, and had to turn away from the screen. How did the filmmakers know, I wondered, that growing up black could be so contoured with dark peril, so layered with pure, sweet joy? That yes, absolutely, a drug dealer could be a respite, a much needed stand-in for a father?  I realized its novelty is due in large part to the sheer, sad fact that it is rare to see black characters coming of age on screen. Two thirds of the movie is dedicated to Chiron’s childhood and adolescence; we see his intelligence and sensitivity unfurl, retreat, and finally unfurl again.

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The Best Longreads From Trump’s First 100 Days

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Michelle Legro | Longreads | April 2017 | 7 minutes (1,773 words)

 

Day 100 is a Saturday, which is good because Donald Trump should probably get some rest. Saturdays are usually fairly easy for the president—he took the first one off right after his own inauguration—a day he can kick back and enjoy some quality time with a piece of chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago.

The Trump Administration introduced the American people to a new kind of time, one that moves with a glacial tick of the clock, but with the drama of a high school lunch period. To look back on the early days—yes, that was three months ago—is to find reporters breathlessly navigating the events of a single day in a flurry of tweets, with little time for a proper write-up before the next dramatic turn of events. We found ourselves asking what the fuck just happened today? as it became harder and harder to remember what happened an hour ago, let alone a day. However, it quickly became clear that journalists were digging in for the long fight. And while the best reporting has often been short, spry, and effective in these first crucial days, these were some of the longreads that stood out.

Read more…