Longreads Pick
To geologists, earthquakes are a constant in the planet’s eternal becoming. To the Japanese, they are simply a constant. In a given year, there can be hundreds, usually barely discernible micro-events. They rattle the pictures on the wall, the china on the table, but they rarely stop the conversation. Donald Keene, a professor at Columbia and the dean of Japanese-literature scholars, said, “Very often, when I have been away from Japan for a while and come back, there will be a small earthquake, and I notice it and no one else in the room does. They laugh at me.” He added, “People expect this all the time, that they will be warned. But when a quake of great magnitude happens they are shocked. The world changes.”
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Published: Mar 21, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,702 words)
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Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: By the Time We Got to Woodstock ’99
After losing money on the first Woodstock sequel in 1994, Scher told reporters at Woodstock 99 that he was determined “to try and make a profit on this one.” Organizers were later criticized for charging $150 a ticket ($180 at the gate) and $5 for beer, though those prices now seem comparable to festivals of similar size and stature. Less excusable was how decisions vital to the functionality of Woodstock 99 were made according to the tightest of tightwad standards. According to an exhaustive on-site report by Spin, Scher and his partners dutifully cut every corner to save money. Vendors weren’t provided with proper plumbing, so they were forced to create their own makeshift set-ups. Teenagers hired to pick up the garbage quit after the first day when they weren’t given water; the detritus rapidly overflowed out of trash bins when nobody was hired to replace them. Worst of all was the site itself, a former toxic waste dump located about 200 miles from the original Woodstock site. Griffiss was a stark, treeless, triangle-shaped terrain composed mostly of concrete and formed by two runway strips lined with junk-food stands and corporate hawkers of youth-oriented crapola.
By Steven Hyden, The AV Club
(via shoplifteroftheworld)
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Longreads Pick
Promoter John Scher insisted instead that the ugliness of Woodstock 99 reflected a larger moral chasm in the souls of the attendees. “I think, in some respects, the generation was irresponsible and they gave me and themselves the finger,” Scher told Spin. He wasn’t the only one who felt that Woodstock 99 amounted to a big “fuck you!” from legions of incorrigible kids. More than one writer likened Woodstock 99 to “The Day Of The Locust,” the 1939 Nathanael West novel about wanton sin and alienation in Los Angeles that ends with violent mob violence.
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Published: Feb 22, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,866 words)
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Longreads Pick
In the spring of 1968 Sargent Shriver—the founding director of the Peace Corps, the head of Johnson’s War on Poverty, and, as the husband of Eunice Kennedy, a brother-in-law of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy—was appointed U.S. ambassador to France. His appointment was not without controversy in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party—and in his own extended family.
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Published: May 1, 2004
Length: 16 minutes (4,022 words)
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Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 7: The Death of Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell
Search for Bradley Nowell videos on YouTube and you’ll find a smattering of interview clips recorded a year or so before he died. Here he is backstage on the Warped Tour looking like one of the many shirtless, deeply tanned, and blond bros lurking in the audience. He’s wearing gold Elvis sunglasses and talking about partying with the other bands on tour and hanging with champion skateboarder Remy Stratton. He reminds me of my friends from high school, who returned home from the first year of college in the summer of 1997 blasting nothing but the Sublime record. I didn’t own the album because I didn’t have to; if you spent time in a dorm in 1996 and ’97, all you heard was Sublime, Odelay, and Dave Matthews Band. The memories alone give me a contact high.
By Steven Hyden, Onion A.V. Club
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Longreads Pick
There really is life after death in ’90s rock, provided you can retain enough of your old sound to convince people to move forward with you. But while the surviving members of Alice In Chains made sure to present their band as a newly evolved entity, Sublime’s Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson are trying to pick up where they were forced to leave off in 1996, when their lead singer, Bradley Nowell, died of a heroin overdose at age 28.
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Published: Jan 12, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,022 words)
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Longreads Pick
The perils of fame in grunge-era Seattle, and the trouble with avoiding it. “Still, the video for ‘Even Flow’ succeeded in doing for Pearl Jam what the ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ video had done for Def Leppard four summers earlier: It made you wish really hard that Pearl Jam would come somewhere near your town very soon.”
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Published: Nov 2, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,787 words)
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Longreads Pick
After one of the headiest years in Chicago rock history—a time when the city usurped Seattle as the new alt-rock hotspot, thanks to Smashing Pumpkins going platinum with the colossal guitar symphony “Siamese Dream,” and Liz Phair and Urge Overkill releasing the critically acclaimed and demonstrably cool “Exile In Guyville” and “Saturation”—local music critic Bill Wyman stated an opinion that seems obvious now, but ended up being quite the shit-stirrer when he wrote it.
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Published: Nov 16, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,190 words)
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Longreads Pick
While reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose.
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Published: May 30, 2010
Length: 11 minutes (2,759 words)
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