Search Results for: The Stranger

Shelved: Tupac and MC Hammer’s Promising Collaboration

Illustration by Homestead

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (2,898 words)

 

In 1990, rapper Stanley “MC Hammer” Burrell stood at the pinnacle of popular culture. His stage show featured 32 musicians and dancers, all of whom attended a rigorous boot camp. According to an Ebony magazine article from that year, the boot camp consisted of “four miles of jogging, weight training, and at least six hours of dancing daily.” “Hammer Time” cultural saturation included demonstrations of his athletic “Hammer Dance” on Oprah and appearances in commercials for British Knights athletic shoes and Pepsi. Hammer owned 2,000 pairs of baggy “Arabian pants,” which, along with gold lamé vests, made up his distinctive stage image.

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Mother/Russia

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,965 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
Something happens to a person trying to watch six seasons of The Americans in just four weeks. First, the math: It’s about 60 hours of television, which is a realistic goal for someone without any significant responsibilities or sleep requirements.

But suppose you’re not that kind of someone.

You might find yourself, every so often, watching with the sound off and the captions on while your toddler feeds herself noodles. You know you should be stimulating her mind and promoting the development of her language, but there is work to be done. A mission, you might call it, though only to yourself. You may also realize that you’ve been wasting perfectly good time in the car and begin to listen to the show while driving, as if it is a poorly executed narrative podcast. This gets tricky when it comes to the Russian dialogue but also lends a new layer of intrigue to the prosaic tasks of suburban living. Against a soundtrack of what closed captioning calls “suspenseful music,” a seemingly innocent Target run could be anything, especially if you happen to be wearing a baseball cap. Later, when your 7-year-old refuses to clear her dinner plate, you might find yourself muttering about how when you were her age your mother was sick with diphtheria and you wished there was a dinner to clear. In short, you begin to have a secret life, which is watching The Americans.

* * *

The spy genre relies on a precise interplay between secrecy and authenticity. We enjoy stories about spies because we get to experience the thrills of skilled artifice while being privy to the comfort of the authentic; the fun comes from watching a person pretend to be someone else while knowing who they really are. The Americans, a show about Soviet spies living in a D.C. suburb in the ’80s, offers this kind of entertainment. We relish seeing Philip and Elizabeth Jennings execute their missions while sporting a dizzying array of wigs, but that pleasure would be incomplete if we didn’t also see them return home, in their natural hair, to help the kids with their homework.

The homework-type scenes are important because we assume that, for Philip and Elizabeth, the authentic part is their family. Like David Chase recognizing the impact that the domestic could have on the mob genre, The Americans brings the spy thriller into the home. And family serves somewhat of the same function for Philip and Elizabeth as it did for Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper, humanizing them by showcasing their ability to exhibit tenderness and care toward their children. To this The Americans adds another layer. In making the Jennings’ spy HQ the home where they raise their children, the show turns a story about enemy agents raising a family into a relatable metaphor for the way parenting works, the way it has to work: the dining room versus the secret basement passport cache of it all. It becomes a story about the secrets one must keep as a parent, and also about the way feelings and beliefs and habits that have become unremarkable, or perhaps simply the way things are done, become troubling — perhaps even monstrous — when seen through the eyes of one’s children.

And so, it turns out that what we initially identify as the Jennings’ authenticity reveals itself to be just another locus of secrets. Until the end of season three, neither of their children have any idea that their parents are Russian spies; poor Henry doesn’t find out until the series finale that they have already fled the country without him. Every family moment is true and a lie at the same time, and The Americans uses the Jennings family to blur the boundary separating those concepts from each other. Family itself is multiplied on this show, with Philip and Elizabeth constantly making deep connections with other people. They’re always knocking on doors, entering lives and families, gaining trust and playing house. Philip marries Martha, who wants to have a child with him. Elizabeth cooks with Young-Hee and babysits her children. In the fifth season they both play family with Tuan, a Vietnamese agent who later reports them for jeopardizing the mission by indulging “certain petty bourgeois concerns.” When we see them slip seamlessly into these other familial tableaus, it destabilizes our own ideas about what is real and what is pretend. When they return to their children amid and in the aftermath of those missions, the domestic ministrations we once thought of as real can’t help but take on the patina of performance. Which, after all, is the real family? None of these homes is free of secrets.

Of course, we are able to tell which family truly matters to our protagonists based on how much anxiety they express over it. Philip and Elizabeth spend a lot of time worrying about the threats to their family, from the FBI and the KGB alike. This dedication to their children, the precarity of their family, humanizes them. But the show tempers that humanizing effect by presenting it alongside their role in the dissolution of other families. Together and separately, Philip and Elizabeth spend a lot of time threatening other people’s families, exploiting their particular weaknesses to destroy them. They leave those families worse than they found them, a trail of broken homes and irreparably altered futures in their wake. In the end, their own family is no exception. Their separation at the end of the series is not the work of any of their adversaries but instead the inexorable result of an authentic life built on secrets. They choose to leave Henry behind in the only life he’s ever known and, in a scene that guts me every time I watch it, Paige makes a last-minute decision to stay in the U.S. Her parents learn of this decision when it’s too late, seeing her standing on the platform as their train pulls away toward Canada. Philip and Elizabeth will finally be able to live a truly authentic, albeit slightly less comfortable, life in Russia. Henry will continue to live his American life in spite of his parents’ betrayal. Paige is the show’s true victim, most likely doomed to live off the grid. She is stranded forever between worlds, between what is real and what is pretend: a citizen of no country relegated to the purgatory of drinking vodka in a D.C. safe house.

It is this refusal to deal in binaries that facilitates the astounding accomplishment of The Americans: the refusal of the show to turn on its wife.

Read the first post in this series on Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.

Blurring this line between inside and outside, between real and pretend, between work and family, is representative of The Americans’ goal of weakening our belief in the very notion of lines. The antihero genre, dedicated as it is to selling us on characters who are neither wholly good nor irredeemably evil, is the perfect vehicle for this project, and The Americans hews closely to the antihero script. Philip and Elizabeth are special because they are highly trained Soviet operatives. They are really good at what they do; they get away with things. And we want them to get away with those things because they also have interiority. We’re privy to several flashbacks and reminiscences aimed at illustrating their difficult childhoods, the sacrifices they’ve made in their lives, and the misgivings they have about their line of work. They’re humanized not only by their children but also by the remorse they feel when they kill anyone whose death does not serve their mission.

But what about the other important element of the antihero formula? Who are the easier-to-hate characters who make our murderous protagonists more likable? Here is where The Americans diverges from the genre as we know it and takes it to even grayer pastures. We would expect a show about the Cold War to present an abundance of options for antagonists and there are certainly a handful of stock villains who crop up throughout the show’s six seasons. But more often than not, The Americans surrounds Philip and Elizabeth with individuals who are, like them, neither wholly good nor irredeemably evil. Almost everyone on this show with more than a few minutes of screen time gets nuance, from Nina, who survives by making herself a helpmate to every man she meets but who ultimately risks her life for something greater than herself, to Martha, who starts off as a naïve mark but becomes one of the show’s most sympathetic and respected characters. Claudia, Philip and Elizabeth’s KGB handler, is introduced as an antagonist but by the end gains our respect and some sympathy. FBI agent Stan Beeman is the Jennings’ most proximate adversary but he is also Philip’s best friend. Characters who on any other show would have been the unsavory antagonists meant to make Philip and Elizabeth look better instead serve a more noble purpose, testifying to the ways in which people ultimately defy the categories into which we want to sort them.

It is this refusal to deal in binaries that facilitates the astounding accomplishment of The Americans: the refusal of the show to turn on its wife. When even the American-Soviet binary is called into question, it is easier to imagine a world in which an antihero husband does not need a nagging wife to win viewers’ allegiance. But this feat is still remarkable given that Elizabeth mostly refuses to traffic in what Kate Manne calls feminine-coded goods. In her monogamous American life, she bakes brownies and asks her husband if he’ll be home for dinner, but in her secret spy life she kicks serious — usually male — ass, sleeps with multiple men to gain information, and often leaves her husband and children to order takeout. That we as viewers did not turn on her is especially surprising given that she is not the kind of mother our culture respects and rewards. Flashbacks reveal that she had reservations about having kids and it’s clear that Philip is the more natural parent. The show not only gives us a wife who is smart, strategic, and quick-thinking, but it also allows that wife to be a stubborn and somewhat-absentee parent who is sometimes very, very wrong without losing her humanity and with it our empathy. The result is that we root for a wife and a marriage in a genre that has made a pastime of destroying them.

If their roles were reversed, would we have turned against Elizabeth the way we turned against Skyler? I’m not sure.

Read the second post on the wives of Ozark and House of Cards.

This is not to say that The Americans is free from the marital friction characteristic of other antihero shows. In fact, the show’s dramatic stakes depend as much on the fault line between Philip and Elizabeth as it does on whether they will be caught by the FBI. This was my second time watching the show and I had forgotten how much the pilot relied on the traditional formula for an antihero and his wife, presenting them at odds rather than as allies. Philip wants to defect and live as wealthy Americans while Elizabeth is a loyal KGB agent for whom the mission always comes first. They argue like Marty and Wendy Byrde (“So you’re just deciding for both of us?”) and Elizabeth rejects Philip’s sexual advances. The moment for defection passes by the end of the first episode but the tension between Philip and Elizabeth persists throughout the series, sometimes simmering and other times boiling over. As the one who yearns to stop spying and live a normal American life, Philip is in the position usually occupied by the antihero’s wife, standing in the way of the show’s plot and threatening to undermine its entire premise. We don’t turn on him either, though I wonder whether that’s a function of his gender. If their roles were reversed, would we have turned against Elizabeth the way we turned against Skyler? I’m not sure.


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But in crafting the Jennings’ relationship the way it did, with doubting Philip and committed Elizabeth, The Americans ends up doing something far more interesting than pitting a wife against her husband. As much as the pilot played with the elements familiar from other antihero shows, its conclusion throws the normal trajectory of such shows into reverse. First episodes of antihero shows have to work incredibly hard, establishing what its main character does wrong while making the case that we should root for him anyway. The Americans pilot does that for two different characters at once and the sum of its hard work is greater than its parts. By the closing credits the show has bound us to Philip and Elizabeth individually, and, perhaps more importantly to their relationship.

Most husband-wife pairs in antihero shows share a history of love. We imagine, or are given flashbacks to, a time when they were in a state of uncomplicated adoration and devotion. A Breaking Bad season three flashback gave us a young and upwardly mobile Walt and Skyler; Ozark’s second season offered a similar look back at the happier and non-money laundering Byrdes. Usually, by the time we get to them, most of that love is gone and only conflict remains. The Americans works in the opposite direction, both in the first episode and in the series as a whole. The pilot reveals that Philip and Elizabeth are essentially strangers sharing a home and a family, having been instructed to never divulge anything of their past lives. Their entire relationship is a lie by omission and they don’t fully trust each other. Elizabeth has even reported on Philip’s weaknesses to their KGB higher-ups in the past. But something happens over the course of the first episode. Elizabeth shares an experience from before they met and by the end of the episode has told Philip her real name; there is a moment of real affection between them. Other antihero shows begin with authenticity and devolve into secrets and lies. The Americans takes a relationship built on lies and guides it toward authenticity. It builds a marriage rather than destroying one.

We cling to this marriage like Jack Dawson to a floating doorframe in the vast and icy sea of pain and destruction that Philip and Elizabeth perpetrate throughout the six seasons of the show. We want them to keep getting away with things but we also want them to continue to love and trust each other. The final season unsettles us as the chasm between Philip’s and Elizabeth’s worldviews widens and threatens their family and their mission, if those can be said to be two different things. Philip, a devotee of EST, the personal transformation seminars popular in the ’70s and early ’80s, wants to trust his gut. A convert to the American cult of the individual, he wants to be free to live his life without destroying the lives of others. Elizabeth has put her trust in an institution and, though she is beginning to see that her loyalty may have been misplaced and abused, she still believes in the cause and the collective that she signed up for. Philip ends up spying on her, trying to figure out whether she is part of a plan to overthrow the Soviet government and derail peace talks. But just when it appears that we’ll finally get our showdown between this particular husband and wife, Philip comes out of retirement to fly to Chicago and help Elizabeth with a dangerous mission. He doesn’t want her to do what she’s doing, and he really doesn’t want to be doing what she’s doing, but when he thinks she’s in danger, he goes to help. When he said, “Sit tight, I’m on my way,” I cheered silently. The final season shows Elizabeth at her worst. Not only is she chain smoking and snapping at Philip, but she is also not getting away with things. Her missions are getting sloppier and less successful and it would be easy for us to shift our loyalty entirely toward Philip. What keeps us from turning on her?

The result is that we root for a wife and a marriage in a genre that has made a pastime of destroying them.

In the penultimate episode of the series, Philip talks about Elizabeth with fellow Soviet operative Father Andrei. This is just moments before he will realize that his cover has most likely been blown but at that moment his biggest problem is Elizabeth’s anger toward him. He admits that he has broken some of his vows — “I haven’t been as honest with her as I should have been” — but Father Andrei thinks the marriage can be saved: “There must be something between you she thinks is worth staying for.” The thing is, Philip replies, Elizabeth “thinks bigger than that … she cares about the whole world.” I think this is key to Elizabeth’s success as an antihero: her commitment to a cause outside of herself and her family, and Philip’s commitment to her. Where personal and familial ambition failed to rally us to the causes of wives like Claire Underwood and Wendy Byrde, selfless dedication to saving the world, no matter how misguided, allows us to feel empathy for Elizabeth. Perhaps more importantly, Elizabeth has what other wives do not: her husband’s love and his trust. They may not always be on the same page, but they aren’t rivals. Philip cares about her. He roots for her, so we do, too.

This is not necessarily where we need to be; wives shouldn’t have to want to save the world to gain our support, and I’m not convinced that Philip and Elizabeth could have switched roles without altering our allegiances. I suspect that a line-dancing, responsibility-shirking Elizabeth would have garnered a different audience response. Her success as an antihero is still in many ways contingent on her proximity to heteronormative marriage, and it remains to be seen whether we can root for a woman who doesn’t have a man vouching for her. But it is progress. In compelling us to root for a marriage — no small feat in an antihero show — The Americans tricks us into rooting for a wife.

Next, we’ll take a detour to the Seven Kingdoms, and consider whether Cersei Lannister could be the antihero we’ve all been waiting for.

 

Previous installments in this series:
The Blaming of the Shrew
The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards

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Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

‘Little Grandpa’ and The List

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | May 2019 | 17 minutes (4,208 words)

It’s a long plane ride, so I puke in midair, grunting and coughing up the last remnants of breakfast. My mother holds the paper bag open for me, an encouraging look on her face. When I am done, she closes it up, wipes my face with a tissue from her purse, and carries the slosh to the bathroom. Down the row, a bald man in a suit looks away in disgust.

I am 10, it is May, 1988, and we are on our way to my grandfather’s funeral in Los Angeles. In the locker room at school the day before leaving, in the loudest fourth grade voice she could muster, my friend Laura announced that it was my fault that he had died. I suspect this can’t really be possible — I live in Montreal, which is in a different country, after all — but it still worries me. On the plane, lying my head across my mother’s lap, I tell her about Laura and the locker room. She glares down at me from behind the thick frames of her oversized oval glasses, then looks up and starts fiddling with the tray table. “Sweetheart,” she says. “I think it’s time for some new friends.”

My grandfather is being cremated, and I am spellbound by the word — I have learned its meaning especially for the occasion, and let it cycle through my mouth over and over again, the “eemmm” sound turning into a hum at the back of my throat. Last night, my mother explained that a lot of people didn’t like the idea of being put in a coffin and buried in the earth. Instead, she said, some preferred to be cremated, which turned out to be a fancy word for being burned into ashes. But the word seems slightly suspicious: too lovely to mean something so violent.

In bed the night before, I wondered where we’d visit Grandpa if he wasn’t lying in a cemetery next to Grandma — the two headstones side by side, their bones resting together underneath. “Cremation” made it sound like he would just disappear.

***

We arrive in L.A. in the afternoon. It is bright everywhere. Since I still feel a bit like throwing up again, the warm breeze feels good on my body. As we wait at an outdoor baggage claim, my mother yanks my long, thick hair into a tight ponytail, the tip tickling my spine. A little yellow stain, evidence of the unsettling flight, has dried on my pink-and-white striped T-shirt.

Even though she has a bad back, my mother drags our big beige bag off the carousel by herself, her red sundress riding up the back of her thighs. Once she takes hold of the handle, she yells for people to get out of the way, then drops it, the tiny wheels crashing to the cement. I stand a bit away, wishing Dad were here.

The four of us usually rent a car when we come to visit Grandpa in L.A., but since my father and older sister will arrive later in the week, we take a cab, my mother talking in a feverishly speedy tone all along the freeway. Once in the city, I roll down my window, and the familiar smell of L.A. — a cocktail of palm trees and dry grass — calms my stomach.
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If You Should Find Yourself in the Dark

Illustration by Wenting Li

Debbie Weingarten | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,460 words)

If your son cries in the night, begin a slow insistent hush. With your lips, make the sound of a snake. Even before you are fully awake, place your bare feet on the floor. Say, Mama is coming, and then creep past the purple glow of the nightlight to where he is a ball in his bed.

Lay your hand on his back.

If the covers have gone astray, or if his brother’s pinwheel feet are in his face, or if he has rolled onto the plastic toy he took to bed — fix it all. Place the covers back beneath his chin. Readjust the brother, put the toy on the shelf, kiss the forehead. Feel your way back through the darkness, over the sleeping dog.

***

Long ago, my parents were spelunkers. They would disappear into a hole in the ground, unsure of where the cave would lead, and pick their way along in the dark, their carbide lights illuminating the stalactites and stalagmites. They insist they felt excitement and possibility.

Once they brought my brother and me to a cave they remembered from college. It was supposed to be a family adventure. Together we would explore, and my parents would remember the way out.

What I recall is the surprising totality of darkness. And the terror I felt when we squeezed through the smallest of passageways. And the solidness — the unmoveableness — of the rock. If I breathed out or turned my shoulders in a certain way, I imagined I could be stuck there forever. If anything were to give, it would not be the rock; it would be my girl-sized bones.

Decades later, I still cannot relax into the dark.
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The Joy of Watching (and Rewatching) Movies So Bad They’re Good

Wiseau-Films, Warner Bros, American International Pictures, Quintet Productions, Four Leaf Productions, Mid-America Pictures

Michael Musto | Longreads | Month 2019 | 8 minutes (2,090 words)

 

I’ve known about the power of good/bad movies since I was a kid, but I was reminded of it just a few days after 9/11, when I went to a press screening of Mariah Carey’s unwitting classic Glitter.

Naturally, New York City was traumatized, many of us going through the motions in a daze as we tried to make sense of the horror. But we had to make a living, so, along with a handful of other arts journalists, I dragged myself to the screening, not sure of what we were getting into. It turned out to be the hackneyed story of a DJ who tries to lift a backup singer (Mariah) up from her humble roots through song and romance. And it was evident quickly into the film that Mariah just didn’t have the acting chops; the new Meryl Streep this wasn’t. We uncomfortably sat there watching the pop diva try to act, but eventually we couldn’t hold back, and a few of her line readings were greeted with titters — the first time I’d heard laughter (including my own) since 9/11. It sounded both shocking and very welcome, and the unintended reaction mounted during a ludicrous scene where Mariah and the DJ were magically thinking of the same melody. By the end, when Mariah spills out of a limo in a glittery gown to visit her dirt-poor mother, we were all screaming in hilarity. This was just the catharsis we needed, and it generously helped us bond and move on.

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Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail

AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty

Suzanne Roberts| Almost Somewhere | University of Nebraska Press | September 2012 | 36 minutes (7,365 words)

 

Day 1

Summer’s 3 Percent

Whitney Portal (8,360) to Outpost Camp (10,080) 3.8 miles

 

Going on twenty-three, I fancied myself a naturalist, thought I knew about the wilderness, about wildness, because I had been an avid reader of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau. I enjoyed reading about Muir’s exciting climb into a giant Douglas spruce during a torrential windstorm. I liked to imagine a young bearded Muir climbing into the treetops, wind whipped like a kite.

Once on the trail, however, I had my doubts.

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Love on the Rocks

Longreads Pick

One young man finds lessons about what queer love is and is not from the marks that strangers carve into rocks and trees, and from the marks his sexual encounters leave on him.

Author: Thomas Dai
Published: Apr 18, 2019
Length: 21 minutes (5,364 words)

What I Learned From Doing Amateur Porn

Illustration by Homestead

Nancy Jainchill | Longreads | April 2019 | 22 minutes (5,383 words)

 

“Peter, I can’t do this.” I grabbed my boyfriend by the arm.

The crew with whom we were making a porn movie had just arrived, their footsteps like drum beats as they made their way upstairs to our second floor flat. I stared at the doorway. Didn’t they realize they had the wrong house? I must’ve been crazy to say yes. Their footsteps continued. Maneuvering past me, their tripods were like hulking robots, their metal legs clattering along the wooden floor. Peter stood nearby, lit a joint, and turned to me. “Where’s Charley?”

Of course he was concerned about our dog.

***

My star turn began in a Berkeley flat on a summer morning in 1970. As our kitchen was heating up from the sun, Peter stripped off his flannel shirt, rubbed his hands up and down on his chest, and pointed to a classified ad, “Bus boy wanted. Starts immediately.” He took a sip of coffee.

Okay, he was right. We were short on rent money, and Peter solved problems. Except Peter wasn’t bus boy material. No way that would be happening. His mother had served him dinner in front of the TV every night until he left for college, and he didn’t do dishes. Sitting down next to him, I leaned over to see what he was reading.

Balancing his cigarette on our kitchen table’s edge — one of those fifties-era Formica tables, mottled red and white with a metal rim that couldn’t burn — he flattened the paper out with both hands. “Wow. Nancy, look at this. Become a porn star overnight.” He tapped his pen on the ad, and circled it.

I sputtered on a sip of coffee. “Are you kidding me?”

Peter’s voice quickened as he read. “Listen. ‘Having trouble paying your bills? Enjoy yourself while you earn your way out of debt.’” He shoved the paper at me. “Why not? We’re short on rent money. This looks easy.” He wasn’t joking.

After scanning the ad, which offered cash for taking off my clothes, I got up and walked to the window. While I wanted to make Peter happy, this hadn’t been part of the plan. Not for me. It wasn’t that long ago that I never took off my coat. Summer or winter, my coat stayed on. I had the idea that my body wasn’t good enough, so I kept it hidden.

“C’mon Nance.” He gave my butt a light slap.

He knew I’d give in. When was the last time I’d said “no” to Peter?

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The Women Characters Rarely End Up Free: Remembering Rachel Ingalls

Gaia Banks / New Directions Publishing

Ruby Brunton | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,674 words)

Rachel Ingalls, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 78, was a writer who did not seek out the spotlight, but found it not at all unpleasant when at last it came. Beyond a small circle of loyal friends and regular visits to Virginia to see her family, Ingalls lived a fairly reclusive existence after her move from the U.S. to the U.K. in 1965. “I’m not exactly a hermit,” she said, “but I’m really no good at meeting lots of strangers and I’d resent being set up as the new arrival in the zoo. It’s just that that whole clubby thing sort of gives me the creeps.”

A writer of fantastical yet slight works of fiction, with a back catalog numbering 11 titles in total, Ingalls flew more or less under the literary radar until recent years, when the newfound interest that followed the 2017 re-issue of her best-known book, Mrs. Caliban, also finally allowed her readers to learn about her processes and motivations; the attention slowly brought her into the public eye. Reviews across the board revered the oddly taciturn novella, in which mythic elements and extraordinary happenings are introduced into the lives of otherwise normal people by a prose remarkable for its clarity and quickness. “Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness.” Wrote Lidija Haas in The New Yorker; in the same piece she described Ingalls as “unjustly neglected.” (Mrs. Caliban was also lightheartedly celebrated as a venerable addition to popular culture’s mysterious year of fish sex stories, a fittingly strange introduction of her work to a broader readership.)  Read more…

A Dispatch From the Fast-Paced, Makeshift World of High-End Catering

Chris Hondros / Getty

Matt Lee & Ted Lee | An excerpt adapted from Hotbox: Inside Catering, the Food World’s Riskiest Business | Henry Holt and Co. | April 2019 | 19 minutes (5,059 words)

 

I have one job — building the Pepper-Crusted Beef on Brioche with Celery Root Salad, an elegant little bite to be passed during cocktail hour at the Park Avenue Armory Gala, a black-tie dinner for 760 people. In theory, it’s an easy hors d’oeuvre, a thin coin of rosy beef on bread with a tuft of salad on top. It’s 4:50 now and the doors open at 6:30, so I’ve got some time to assemble this thing. The ingredients can be served at room temperature — any temperature, really — and they were prepared earlier today by a separate team of cooks at the caterer’s kitchen on the far West Side of town, then packaged on sheet pans and in plastic deli containers for a truck ride to the venue. All I have to do is locate the ingredients in the boxes and coolers, find some space to work — my “station” — and begin marshaling a small army of beef-on-toasts so I’ve got enough of a quorum, 240 pieces or so, that when serve-out begins I’ll be able to keep pace with replenishment demand through a forty-five-minute cocktail hour.

Jhovany León Salazar, the kitchen assistant leading the hors d’oeuvre (“H.D.”) kitchen, shows me the photo the executive chef supplied that reveals the precise architecture of this bite: a slice of seared beef tenderloin, rare in the center and the size of a Kennedy half-dollar, resting on a slightly larger round of toasted brioche.[1] On top of the beef is a tangle of rich celeriac slaw — superfine threads of shredded celery root slicked with mayo, with a sprinkling of fresh chives showered over the whole. This is New York–caliber catering intelligence at work: take a throwback classic — the beef tenderloin carving station — to a higher, more knowing plane in a single bite. Here, the colors are lively, the scale is humane, the meat perfectly rosy-rare and tender, its edge seared black with ground pepper and char, the celeriac bringing novelty, though its flavor is familiar enough. It’s a pro design that satisfies the meat-’n’-potatoes crowd without talking down to the epicures.

The kitchen tonight — like every night, no matter the venue — is as makeshift as a school bake sale, a series of folding tables covered with white tablecloths and fashioned into a fort-like U. Since there are two warm hors d’oeuvres on the menu, our crew has a hotbox standing by — the tall, aluminum cabinet on wheels that both serves as transport vehicle for food and, once it’s on-site and loaded with a few flaming cans of jellied fuel (the odor-free version of Sterno is favored), becomes the oven. Imagine the most flame-averse venues — the New York Public Library, City Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — even there, the ghostly blue flames in the hotbox pass muster with the fire marshal. In fact, this one fudge, this unspoken exception to the no-open-flames rule, is the secret to restaurant-quality catering in New York City. Read more…