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Brandon Teena
Brandon Teena (Lane Hickenbottom for AP)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Donna Minkowitz, Stephen Rodrick, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Nadia Berenstein, and Shanna Baker.

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How To Build An Intellectual

High schools girls smoking outside their school in New York City, 1989. (Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)

Hedia Anvar | Slice | Spring/Summer 2018 | 16 minutes (3,161 words)

On the day I constructed an intellectual from scratch, my mother, all high heels and tailored skirt, would’ve taken me to the supermarket with her. I wanted badly to go but hadn’t jumped to get ready, so she left while I was still in my underwear playing in the dirt.

We lived on the second floor of a two-story old-style complex in the Shemiran quarter of Tehran. My mother’s relatives occupied the unit below. We all shared the yard where I played. Their helpers, village women in colorful head wraps, used the yard to scrub clothes and pluck chicken feathers.

In the Tehran of 1970s, women in micro-minis walked alongside those wearing full hijab. If there was a cultural difference between a modern Iranian woman and a European one, it wasn’t exemplified by my mother with her crêpe de Chine style and mysterious — at least to preschooler me — social pursuits. The important click-clacking of her heels meant she had places to be. I wanted to be at those places with her, even the supermarket where I got to ride among the food in the cart, swinging happy feet toward her midsection.

I cherished my mother’s tummy even when her silk blouses covered it. Her stomach was the color of rice pudding. It was my father who dubbed her special complexion “rice.” Her eyes were green like ocean depths and a little dangerous, but her stomach was generous. She told me and my baby brother that we had come out of it and allowed us to knead it like dough for as long as we wanted.

The day she took off for the supermarket and left me in the yard, her voice reverberated down the stairway along with her fading steps. She was speaking to one of my uncles, and there was that word: intellectual. She pronounced it the French way, where “in” becomes “an.” In my language of Persian, “an” meant “shit.” So an an-te-lek-too-el sounded to me like something especially unpleasant.

Our yard had hard, damp soil, and between two trees yogurt drained in animal hide hanging like a hammock. I gathered twigs and clumps of earth. Then I yanked out handfuls of weed grass and found a sharp rock. I would finally figure out what an “intellectual” was because I was going to make one. I took all my soil, grass, and twigs to mash together with the rock. I kept crushing and grinding until I was left with a hairy, lumpy mass of misshapen brown, and I thought, There.

            That is an intellectual.

At almost 6 years old, I was used to being told I took after my father’s side of the family. My mother called them “artistic” and “intellectual” with enough contempt to bring substance to antelektooel before I ever constructed one out of grass and dirt.

A few years later, at the start of fourth grade, we moved to New York. Within a day of our arrival, a gust of wind in Midtown blew my mother’s skirt up in the air, but I missed it. I only caught a homeless man with a glossy face smiling and announcing, “I saw your panties.”

The four of us — my parents, my brother, and me — were waiting to cross an avenue overrun by fat checker cabs. A girl of 9, I was young enough that crossing the street brought me apprehension, but old enough for my parents to know better than to hold my hand, because who wanted to deal with the fury of an embarrassed kid? So I missed seeing my mother’s white hippie skirt, a remnant of the decade’s style, twirl above her head in a slow-motion dance — at least that’s how I would imagine it later.

She cocked her head brazenly at the homeless man, and with a Persian accent tinged with British, snickered, “Good for you.”

We were barely landed in the New York City of late-1970s crime and decrepitude, a point not lost on me, so I marveled at my mother, who was all of four-foot-eleven. My good-natured father was amused, as though both parties, his wife and the bum, were charming. My 5-year-old brother looked indignant and probably would’ve given up toys for good if it could have made that homeless man unsee his mother’s underwear.

We were heading to our hotel. The asphalt was very dark, and the lane lines bright white, which heightened the surreal quality of the city for me. We had taken leave of our country because my father, a theatrical director, had received a four-year grant to finish his doctorate at New York University — a happy accident removing us from Iran just before the fundamentalist regime took over.

New York, the greatest city in the world, had something set-like about it, not dissimilar to the sets in my father’s old productions. The buildings themselves were the unmistakable backdrops to the black-and-white Hollywood films I had watched throughout childhood in Tehran.

We slept in a gigantic king-size bed in our hotel room, the four of us in a row, jetlag waking us at four in the morning for several days. The hour was lonely and dark, so we took to turning on the TV and watching Tom and Jerry cartoons. My parents were grateful for the antics of the adorable mouse and foiled cat set to an excellent orchestra, while my brother and I didn’t want our sleep regulated because the pre-dawn ritual was an uncommon instance of solidarity for our family. My father would leave and bring back deli-hot bagels soaked with butter. Butter came to mean love and luxury for me.

When we settled into a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, rather than feeling excitement at having moved to famous New York City, I felt at attention and on edge. Learning a new language kept me in a constantly self-monitoring mode; communication was no longer second nature and had to be measured out. But I had always observed myself as if outside of my body, processing moments to transmit back fully editorialized. This activity simply multiplied once I was pried from the cozy, familiar reality of Iran and transplanted to New York.

My brother and I shared the bedroom while my parents partitioned the long living room for their own sleeping area. It felt like we were poor, but the smell of paint and parquet varnish gave the place an air of newness I associated with not being poor. “Poor” to me was the opposite of “new,” represented by frayed, faded slovenliness.

We had moved a couple of times before relocating to New York, and in our last home in Tehran, we each had our own bedroom in a modern, black-marble apartment. There, my father’s — rather than my mother’s — relatives had lived around us. His side of the family didn’t drain yogurt in animal hides or roll fruit into flat sheets outside to dry in the sun. They didn’t set up elaborate mosquito netting on the roof for sleeping in the summertime.

Sleeping on Tehran rooftops meant a mild smell of asphalt and glittering antenna branches lining the sky to the ends of the city. The nights were the blackest black and dusty with stars, balmy breezes hugging my body as I dozed next to my grandmother.

In the new, modern structure, even though my father’s relatives lived in identical apartments above and below us, I felt unprivileged compared to them. Mainly it was because they waxed their black-marble tiles to a reflective shine while ours remained dull and uncoated. This, I knew, must mean we were poor.

Although my mother wasn’t the homemaker type who’d entertain the notion of a waxing mop, we didn’t have a cleaning person either, while our relatives did. It was also the unironed, dingy collar of my school uniform — while the other girls’ collars were crisp and gleaming — that made me feel like an outsider in the private school I attended in Tehran.

I probably wouldn’t have had an inkling of poor or not-poor had my mother been good at “momming.” She, however, had little interest in most aspects of momming.

“How come you never go to the park with us?” we would ask her, and she’d smirk:

“Because I don’t like greenery.”

“Will you help us make a snowman?”

“No, snow is too white. But here’s a carrot for his nose.” She made these claims with such proud self-amusement that we couldn’t help but acknowledge her God-given right to dislike nature, or even child-rearing.

Now in New York, I no longer pined for her to take me along everywhere she went. I was too busy crossing off items from my growing-up list. I already knew how to whistle and light a match. I also clipped my own nails and was an old hand at reading books in Persian with adult-size type and no illustrations.

The four of us living in a one-bedroom apartment, albeit on the Upper East Side, expanded my definition of “poor.” Money did not flow freely to us. My parents couldn’t fool me; I was 9. We didn’t lack comfort or even trips abroad, but now I lived in the same neighborhood as rich New York families and attended school with their children, so I had occasion to compare more than just waxed tile. Those kids had country homes and tennis lessons. Us? We had floor mattresses. That’s how we’d always slept.

Even without bed frames, our bedroom was pleasing to me. The spare furnishings, an arty combination of unfinished wood and primary colors, smelled like fresh lumber and appealed to my sense of symmetry because everything was in identical pairs. My mother had been the one to choose the furniture and set up our room. This successful momming endeavor made me think of her as growing up, in the same way that I kept tabs on my own growing up.

My notion of “growing up” probably missed the mark as much as my original notion of “poor.” Aside from picking up the skills of walking, snapping my fingers, and lighting those matches without supervision, growing up to me meant becoming “nicer.” By the time I completed this unimpressive checklist, after which I could declare myself old enough to keep a passport in my own possession, it seemed not at all worth it. I would have given up being full-grown so I’d also be relieved of the daunting burden of taking care of myself. But this dismaying moment of truth lay in the future.

At not-quite 10, life had a shine to it, and no object was ordinary, not even the radiator encasement I used as a hiding place. So when I started the fourth grade, whether I or my mother was doing the growing up, it didn’t have to mean anything other than becoming nicer.

It also didn’t occur to me that coming from Iran would make me some sort of anomaly in school. New York was a big city, but being from Tehran, we were already from a big city. As a child, one is dragged around and placed in situations according to other people’s whims, and moving to America was no different. I only saw myself as a kid with too-curly hair and a secret sense of superiority, no more an outsider at school in Manhattan than I’d already been in Iran. Those who misunderstood my frown of intense thinking stayed away from me rather than picked on me, except during the next year when for a week my classmates called out “Ayatollah Khomeini” each time I walked by.

The American grade-schoolers somehow seemed to blame me for the Iran hostage crisis. I felt an active, churning hatred toward Khomeini, the deranged cleric who ruined my country. But taunting a young girl by yelling out the name of a despot didn’t cut too deep, and soon they dropped it. I worried instead about being judged for my too-short corduroys in the boy colors of brown or tan. My real self, new to English and buried beneath a shyness I couldn’t overcome, sank a little deeper because of the unfortunate clothing my mother picked out for me.

Around the time kids took to showing off the labels of their 80s jeans, my mother, too, went shopping on my behalf. She may have done right by our bedroom, but when it came to my clothes, she only managed to buy funny-looking off-brands. While other kids showcased ornate designer stitching on their butts, my new “poor people” jeans were plain and two sizes too big.

Still, the jeans represented my mother’s effort. Even though I no longer let on, I looked up to her, emotionally hoarding her momming gestures. Though the results of her cooking were inconsistent, never would I leave a morsel of uneaten food she had prepared. She buttered bread for me in the morning to go with my hot chocolate and packed fresh fruit in my lunch bag. I couldn’t fathom how other kids went through their snack bags and systematically threw out whole oranges and apples.

“Why not take home instead of wasting?” I’d ask, thinking I’d appeal to their logic but instead triggering their contempt. My accented, reluctant English also earned me the reputation of being “thick.” Those kids couldn’t have known that there was no greater insult to me than to attack my intellect — my antelekt that I’d come to regard with snickering pride, as if I were the only one my age in possession of it. For the duration of elementary school, I had to survive the wound of being considered the opposite of antelektooel while knowing its actual meaning.

On the rare occasion when kids troubled to befriend me, I was quick to alienate them. One stray new student who had joined the class midyear trotted up to me during recess before anyone had a chance to warn her of my status as weird.

“Hi, is purple your favorite color?” She was impish, and I was in awe of her ability to make her voice bright and heard.

“Not actually,” I replied with my accent and peculiar word choices, even though I knew every preteen girl’s favorite color was purple in 1980.

“Do you like Grease?” She asked. “Is it your favorite record?” She took out a big wad of purple bubblegum from her mouth and threw it on the ground.

“You should pick up that,” I said. “Someone can step. It won’t be nice for them.” She gave me a look that read, You weird, haughty little fuck, and walked away. Later I asked my father to take me to the record store.

“We are looking for the band Grease,” my father said to the store clerk. My father’s voice was deep and distinguished. He had a striking head of graying hair and eyes that seemed to reflect sunlight indoors.

“The band Grease?” The store clerk chortled. “No such band. There’s a musical. Movie came out last year.” I dropped my eyes, wondering how long it would take before my family and I stopped sticking out.

My father paid for the album, and as soon as we stepped onto the sidewalk, I tore off the cellophane. At home, I listened to the record on repeat and decided I liked Grease much better than purple.

Fifth grade was about the Ming Dynasty, Greek mythology, and sexism. Prior to my teacher’s explanation of gender inequality, I had no indication that a sane society might think less of me because I wasn’t a boy. After all, I was born to a mother who had never bothered with anyone else’s expectations and a father who had treated me with respect, not to mention that people who oppressed women were supposed to be backward fanatics like the ones who were spoiling my country.

By age 11, I also learned to smoke cigarettes under the bridge next to the East River. I hid my pack inside the radiator encasement in the bedroom I shared with my brother. Marlboro reds cost eighty-five cents at the newsstand down the street. The gruff old man with the paperboy hat didn’t miss a beat selling them to me, though I wasn’t physically developed and couldn’t have appeared more than eight. He ignored me with the same disdain he doled out to everyone else, which weirdly designated him the first New Yorker to make me feel like I was where I belonged.

Walking around my neighborhood, I would sometimes see teenage girls, tall, thin-legged, and dangerous in their heavy-metal shirts, their hair painstakingly feathered. Among us young ones the rumor ran that their gapped legs were due to sex and drugs. They wore jean jackets, extra-thick eyeliner, and a feather dangling from one ear. There was no hiding under the bridge for them — they smoked out in the open and ruled the sidewalk. At night they sat on top of the picnic tables in John Jay Park and drank beer, throwing the cans at their feet. It was hard to imagine them snuggling in bed with their parents and watching Tom and Jerry.

The next year during lunch, my sixth-grade class would walk half a block to the same John Jay Park. Us girls would sit on the swings while the boys stood on them, facing us with their legs on either side of our bodies.

“Can I ride you?” the boy would ask first, then hop onto the swing and prompt it back and forth by swaying his pelvis. So I learned what it felt like to have a boy near me, the little hairs all over my body standing at attention. Around the same time, I stopped comparing my family to other families — I was preoccupied with impending puberty and receiving my sex education from Judy Blume books.

Soon I began losing most of my Persian accent too.

A year later when I read Catcher in the Rye, the sheep fell over the cliff, and I thought of the teenage girls from my neighborhood, wondering what had become of them. One September they had disappeared from the streets, but in my mind, they remained forever those dangerous girls strutting down the block with too much eyeliner. After Catcher in the Rye, I envisioned them falling over a cliff, but somehow I was there too, falling upside down and wearing my own jean jacket.

Maybe among the truths of growing up piling around me, I grasped that happiness would never again be as uncomplicated as my mother taking me to the supermarket.

There had been a time when working out a problem — how to whistle, snap my fingers, or cross the street — took mere repetition. Back then I clumped together soil and grass to understand the nature of an antelektooel by making one. But by the time I picked up smoking under the bridge, I knew the means to satisfaction wouldn’t work the old way anymore. Living with that knowledge hurt as much as realizing we were never going back to live in Iran, that wonderland of rooftop nights and my childhood.

***

This essay first appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of SliceOur thanks to Hedia Anvar and the staff at Slice for allowing us to reprint it.

Staten Island Wilderness, Going, Going, Gone?

Helen Bohorquez/VWPics via AP Images

In 1956, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell published his now legendary story, “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” about one of the oldest survivors of a 19th-century village of black oystermen on Staten Island. That world was endangered back then. Sixty-two years later, that world is mostly gone.

For Curbed, photographeer Nathan Kensinger travels to Staten Island to document Sharrotts Shoreline, a patch of land he calls “a remote wilderness” that’s threatened by development. It’s hard to imagine any place in the five boroughs qualifying as remote wilderness, but this section of southern Staten Island is highly inaccessible, and neglect has allowed native plants and animals to thrive among the dumped cars and old spare tires.

As it wanders through a forested area, the creek cuts through an old oyster midden, where discarded oyster shells are stacked up into a high pile. These sites are often of great archaeological interest, with other artifacts often mixed in to the oyster shells. The midden is one of several in the area, and could date back to either the colonial era or to earlier Native American settlements. “You can still see Native American artifacts around Charleston,” says Matarazzo, who has extensively explored this section of Tappen’s Creek.

Further inland along its route, the creek passes through a wetlands area situated alongside Ellis Road. According to maps, the flow of the creek here is much the same as it was over 100 years ago.

Kenigner hikes with the Protectors of Pine Oak Woods, photographing as they go. As they walk, they discuss whether they can save the land’s old burial grounds and oyster middens, and they talk with neighors to gauge the potential loss to the community.

A portion of this property is currently maintained by neighbors, who have installed birdhouses for a purple martin colony. “The inky, iridescent birds winter in Brazil and migrate some 4,000 miles to return to their digs,” according to the Staten Island Advance. “It would be a shame if they sell that land. It’s so full of wildlife,” says one neighbor, who lives across the street from the Sharrotts Road development property. “It doesn’t make any sense, because just down the hill, you are on protected State land.”

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On Saving the Cuban Crocodile from American Invasion

The Cuban crocodile, C. rhombifer (Getty Images)

At Hakai Magazine, Shanna Baker reports on the ongoing bid to preserve C. rhombifer, the breed of Cuban crocodile beloved of Fidel Castro, who was known to send living and embalmed versions of the animal to allies around the world. The Cuban croc is endangered, not only due to shrinking habitat, but also to hybridization as its gene pool gets polluted by natural encounters with the bigger, shyer American crocodile.

Beside a spit of land jutting into a swampy enclosure, a female crocodile breaks the waterline, the bony ridges on her back jagged like an electrocardiogram. Her eyes track six sweat-soaked men standing in a haphazard semicircle, gripping poles twice their own height, as mosquitos orbit their straw hats. Another man works quickly with a hoe, leveling the dried grasses of her nest and chewing up the earth until he finds her unborn brood, laid just three days ago. The crocodile thrashes and lunges forward, but two men raise their weapons, ready to deliver a hard thump to the snout if she approaches.

She sinks back as the man in the middle of the mob loads her few dozen eggs plus a second set from a nearby nest into a plastic pail, cushioning them between layers of dirt. At the top, he places four last eggs—the rejects—each the size of a small mango. They feel like unpolished marble and all bear a sizable dent. The tiny would-be Cuban crocodiles (Crocodylus rhombifer) inside are goners—the membranes are too damaged—but the others are destined for an incubation room, where air conditioners humming round the clock will hopefully hold them at a steady temperature. If all goes as planned, in 75 days or so, hatchlings will emerge and help move the needle on C. rhombifer’s prospects for survival.

Conserving the Cuban croc was one of Fidel Castro’s first priorities after he steamed into power in 1959. Just months into his rule, he ordered the creation of the Criadero de cocodrilos, Ciénaga de Zapata—or Zapata Swamp Captive Breeding Facility—a cluster of ponds, rows of concrete-block pens, and a couple of narrow one-story buildings split into modest offices and workspaces for staff two and a half hours south of Havana. Castro always had a predilection for wild spaces and things, says environmental historian Reinaldo Funes-Monzote of the University of Havana. Whether he cherished endemic species because they fit with his hypernationalistic sensibilities, or he related to their untamed energy, or he was just enlightened to the inherent value of wildlife is a guess, though crocodiles must have become a point of pride for him at some stage—he eventually developed a habit of gifting them, either living or embalmed, to foreign allies.

The Cuban is bolder and hunts during the day. It has a stubby snout, a reputation for jumping, and a tendency to walk with its belly high off the ground. The American is bigger, more apt to hide, searches for prey at night, sports dark bands on its back and sides, and has a long, pointed snout and extra webbing on its hind toes. The differences are as distinct as red from blue.

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The Urban Crisis of Affluence

Skyscrapers
Photo by Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images

After three decades living in and around New York City, I, too, am leaving to make way for the only people the city is still welcoming: billionaires who don’t live here.

In Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker writes at length in “The Death of a Once Great City” about how the few who can afford to build and buy in New York don’t want to live here, either. In one affluent twenty-block corridor, “almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year.” A couple of neighborhoods south, developers at an eighty-three-unit luxury condo were recently offering “to throw in two studio apartments and two parking spots for any buyer willing to shell out $48 million for the building’s 7,000-square foot penthouse.” That’s five empty things for the price of one empty thing, in case you’d like to park dozens of millions of dollars in an investment property that’s big enough to fit dozens of homeless families.

Drawing from Michael Greenberg’s incisive piece on the city’s housing emergency last summer in The New York Review of Books, Baker connects the dots between empty penthouses and empty storefronts, decrying how “all that our urban leaders, in New York and elsewhere, Democratic as well as Republican, have been able to come up with is one scheme after another to invite the rich in.”

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there.

The new rich infesting the city are barely here. They keep a low profile, often for good reason, and rarely stick around. They manufacture nothing and run nothing, for the most part, but live off fortunes either made by or purloined from other people—sometimes from entire nations. The New Yorker noted in 2016 that there is now a huge swath of Midtown Manhattan, from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue, from 49th Street to 70th Street, where almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year. New York today is not at home. Instead, it has joined London and Hong Kong as one of the most desirable cities in the world for “land banking,” where wealthy individuals from all over the planet scoop up prime real estate to hold as an investment, a pied-à-terre, a bolt-hole, a strongbox.

A triplex at the forthcoming 220 Central Park South will reportedly be sold for $200 million, and a four-story apartment at the same address is priced to move at $250 million. These would be the largest home sales ever recorded anywhere in the United States.

Who spends this sort of money for an apartment? The buyers are listed as hedge fund managers, foreign and domestic; Russian oligarchs; Chinese apparel and airline magnates. And increasingly, to use a repeated Times term, a “mystery buyer,” often shielded by a limited liability company.

This is not the benevolent “gentrification” that Michael Bloomberg seemed to have had in mind but something more in the tradition of the king’s hunting preserves, from which local peasants were banned even if they were starving and the king was far away.

There are now so many of the supertalls gathered so closely together that they threaten to leave the lower sections of Central Park, the only true architectural marvel to be seen here, in shadow for much of the year. One simulation found that the shadows of the highest towers may knife a mile into the park on the winter solstice.

When the journalist Warren St. John protested against these towers that block the sun and literally leave children shivering in the park, he pointed out that the highest supertall apartments—when they are occupied at all—house maybe a few hundred people, as opposed to the 40 million individuals who use Central Park every year. But this seems to be the calculation on which New York now operates.

Even for those who can afford the new New York, it is unclear how much they actually like it or maintain any ability to shape it to their tastes. What is the point, after all, of paying a fortune to live in a city that is more and more like everywhere else?

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Sign O’ The Times: Paisley Park Offers A Public Tour

Prince performs during the halftime show at Super Bowl XLI on February 4, 2007 at Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

For The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich tours Paisley Park, the home and recording studio of the late Prince. What she learns is that no matter how close you may get in physical proximity, even in death Prince maintains a carefully curated distance between him, his fans, and the world.

Mostly, the tour made me feel lonesome. Absent its owner, Paisley Park is a husk. In 2004, when Prince briefly rented a mansion in Los Angeles from the basketball player Carlos Boozer, he redesigned the place, putting his logo on the front gate, painting pillars purple, installing all-black carpet, and adding a night club. (Boozer threatened to sue, but Prince restored the house before he moved out.) Yet Paisley Park feels anonymous. His studios are beautiful, but unremarkable. There are many photos of him, and his symbol is omnipresent, but I was hoping for evidence of his outsized quirks and affectations—clues to some bigger truth. I found little that seemed especially personal. Paisley Park presents Prince only as a visionary—not as a father, a husband, a friend, or a son.

Although Prince’s estate has disregarded some of his preferences—his discography is now available on Spotify, a platform he pulled his music from in 2015, in part because he believed that the company didn’t compensate artists properly—there’s something profound about how Paisley Park insists on maintaining Prince’s privacy. It does not need to modernize him (which feels unnecessary), or even to humanize him (which feels impossible). In 2016, the most common response to Prince’s death was disbelief. His self-presentation was so carefully controlled that he never once betrayed his own mortality. He’d done nothing to make us think he was like us. During parties, Prince sometimes stood in a dark corner of the balcony and watched other people dance. Visiting Paisley Park now evokes a similar sensation—of being near Prince, but never quite with him.

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A Woman’s Work: Home Economics* (*I Took Woodworking Instead)

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,600 words)

By the time I was 44 I’d never lived with a boyfriend, a fact that I, a woman living under a patriarchy and not getting any younger, sometimes thought should be bothering me more, but which didn’t.

I even had fond memories of a day when I was 41 and freshly dumped, on which I woke up alone in bed, stretched out, and had a remarkable, quite unexpected realization…

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Old In Art School

(FluxFactory/Getty)

Nell Painter | Old In Art School | Counterpoint | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,906 words)

Curiosity in my regard, and there was a lot of it, didn’t only come from inside Mason Gross, for generally the kids were cool with whatever. Curiosity came from people of my generation in my soon to be former existence. They regarded my new life, my adventure, in the words of some, my “journey,” with envy and hesitation. They identified with my break for freedom but feared their academic or lawyerly selves had already quashed their inner Beyoncé. They wondered if they, too, could leave dutiful, controlled professional personas and fling themselves into a new, hyper-saturated, Technicolor — no, RBG color-coded — artistic life of creativity and apparent abandon. I had yearned like that before actually walking away. Professing admiration for my bravery, my friends asked how I did it and hoped I would send back a report.

Why do something different? Why start something new? Why did I do it? What made me think I could begin anew in an entirely different field from history, where, truth be told, I had made a pretty good reputation? Was it hard leaving a chaired professorship at Princeton? I didn’t think so. For a long time, my answers, even to myself, were simple — too simple by far.

I said, because I wanted to.

Because I could.

I knew from my mother I could do it.

My smart, small, intense, beautiful, disciplined little mother, Dona Irvin, administrator to author, held the key to my confidence. To a very great extent, she still does. The so much more of myself beyond my sex, race, and age that I cherish is rooted in my family, in my father the gregarious bohemian, who had taught me to draw decades ago, but even more, in my mother, who starting over at sixty-five, blossomed as an older woman, transforming herself into a creator in her own right after a lifetime as a shyly dutiful wife and mother. As an older woman, she cast off the strictures of a lifetime — well, some of them — and took to wearing red or white with her dark skin and taking the bus overnight to play slot machines in Reno.

My mother had never written a book before 65. She had started her career as a school administrator late, after the civil rights movement opened opportunities for an educated black woman, and she had grown professionally. She overcame crippling shyness whose stutter made the telephone her monster. At a liberating feminist retreat at Asilomar, near Monterey, she reclaimed her own name, Dona, after decades of letting other people correct her. Yes, people tried to correct her pronunciation of her own name and talk her into accepting the more easily recognizable “Donna.” At the Asilomar retreat, she put a stop to that and made people call her by her own name. And she started writing in earnest.

Always a terrific writer of letters and reports, she’d never attempted a book. After Asilomar, she found steel within to pull it off.

She devoted ten years to research and publishing her first book, The Unsung Heart of Black America, about the middle-class black people she knew as close, long-term friends in the United Methodist church we attended in the 1950s and early 1960s in Oakland, a work the fine and generous historian John Hope Franklin blurbed.

It took me years to sense the bravery, the sturdy determination her metamorphosis demanded, for she was tougher than I could see during her lifetime. I knew she delved deep to express herself with unadorned honesty. Hard for a woman. Doubly hard for a black woman. Triply hard for a black woman of a class and a generation never wanting to let them (meaning, mainly, white people) catch even a sidelong glimmering of your doubts.

Suppressing doubt and never washing dirty linen in public came naturally to my mother. A public that was black and wore the beloved faces of her friends awaited my mother’s writing as an upstanding black person. That public’s expectation of her as a black author discouraged her speaking as an individual whose identity exceeded race. She felt that pressure and wrote her first book as a black woman, never losing sight of race in America. Yet there was more to her.

It took her ten more years to write and publish her frank and funny memoir, I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old. Just pause for a moment and imagine the guts and good humor she needed to use that title, to admit to looking good, and to write the word “old” and apply it to herself.

I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old.

People used to say that to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me.

In her memoir, she went on to claim herself as a unique individual, racialized, but with much more to her than race. She wrote as a daughter of two parents in conflict on the most intimate level. The conflict stayed within the range of ordinary human misbehavior — the usual adultery and betrayal — but talking about that exceeded the vocabulary of race alone. Hard to do in the USA, because it’s hard to describe black humanity beyond race and so easy, practically an automatic response, to interpret a claim of individuality as treason to blackness. It’s as though individuality, the pride of white Americans, belongs only to them; as though a black woman speaking as an individual must be backing away from blackness. My mother had to find words to claim both uniqueness and blackness. But find those words she did. Dona was working on a website about vigorous old people of many races when she died at ninety-one, not at all ready to leave.

Looking at her, identifying with her when I was 64, I figured, hell, I could do that. I could do something new in the quarter-century or more still before me, even starting from close to scratch. My mother’s example made me think I could lay down one life and pick up a new one.

***

I had been a youthful artist, and for years I carried a sketchbook and drew all the time. I was still drawing when I lived in Ghana with my parents in the 1960s. These three drawings, pencil on paper, were in my sketchbooks there.

Ghana gave my Bay Area eyes, squinting into a bright blue sky, a whole new palette, a landscape and architecture and people in clothes and rioted textures and colors. Something grew on every surface: bushes, flowers, or mold, or all of it all at once. The California Bay Area that I had left was a beautiful, but a eucalyptus gray place, foggy in the morning, dryly sunny in the day, with mostly light-colored people.

In Ghana, I moved through a humid world of tropical contrasts and color-wheel hues. The dirt was red, the trees and grass blue-green. White buildings, red tiled roofs. Red-orange bougainvillea climbing whitewashed buildings and cascading over fences and walls, some topped with menacing shards of broken brown glass or black wrought-iron spikes testifying to class tensions that barricaded the wealthy against the grasping poor. Together, this colorful landscape and the very black people in white and spectacular clothing altered my vision of everyday life.

In Ghana, I taught French in the language school and gave the news in French on Ghana Radio for a year. I can still hear the drums

Boom boom boom      Boom  Boom

announcing “Ghana calling!” I began graduate study in pre-colonial African history at the Institute of African Studies before a coup d’état deposing Kwame Nkrumah ended his nascent African socialism and sent us Afro-Americans, including Maya Make (later Maya Angelou) to Egypt, to Europe, and for us Irvins, home to California.

I completed my MA in African history at UCLA, having previously discovered a love of history during my junior year abroad at the University of Bordeaux. After UCLA a year of rattlebrained, youthful follies too embarrassing to mention, I ended up at Harvard for a Ph.D. in history. I quit smoking. I wrote a dissertation that became my first book, published by — ahem — Alfred A. Knopf. Many books and professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton University followed.

I was a whiz kid, tenured and promoted at Penn in three years and promoted to full professor at Chapel Hill in another three. In the early days of my career, I never questioned my ability to do well in my field. I loved history, loved research, loved writing — I still love history, love research, love writing. I published books at a regular pace: Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976), The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979), Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1986), Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (1996), Southern History Across the Color Line (2002), Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (2006), and the Penguin Classic Editions of Narrative of Sojourner Truth and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And there were fellowships (Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, &c.), scholarly societies (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Antiquarian Society, &c.), and honorary doctorates (Dartmouth, Yale, &c.).

I don’t want this to sound effortless, for it was all a lot of work, a hell of a lot of dedicated work. Good work, I mean, work that felt good to me, for writing history gave me enormous pleasure. If you want to see the whole panoply of achievement, check out my website, www.nellpainter.com or look at my Facebook page. Over the years, though, images made their way into my writing of history.

Visual art’s gravitational field had renewed its pull decades before my mother had reinvented herself as a writer. Still, I cannot shrug off my change of field as simply a matter of time. It took place step by step, as I was writing history.

My history writing tugged me toward art over the years. I used a photograph I had taken as the frontispiece of my second book, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, and I wrote about the photograph as a meaningful image, not merely an illustration. Then came the “Truth in Photographs” chapter in my fourth book, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol, on Truth’s self-fashioning through photographs. I spent hour after hour preparing that chapter in the abundance of Princeton’s Marquand Art History Library, where the art books fill four levels and you can sit comfortably for hours, with the history and theory of photography. In Marquand I learned the rhetoric of the image and critical seeing.

I illustrated Creating Black Americans with fine art. Though it’s a narrative history, Creating Black Americans gave me an introductory course in African American art history. There was, I discovered, more good art by black artists than I could ever cram into one book, even limiting the art to subjects bearing on history. None — okay, very few — of those artists figured in the art history I would study in art school.

The books I wrote weren’t art history, but each one took me beyond text into new visual archives. I loved working with images; I loved learning new history and new artists. This was not like my first undergraduate experience in art.

***

Back in the 1960s I had studied art at Berkeley, had been an art major and drawn a couple of covers for the campus humor magazine. My art major ended with a C in sculpture, a C I earned by not doing any work. Why should I have to work at sculpture, I reckoned like the kid I was, because talent should insure success. I saw talent as everything, therefore exerting myself would make no difference. What kind of reasoning is that? Dumb kid reasoning. I didn’t know how to work on learning sculpture, and I didn’t know any professional artists to show me a way. On the other hand, my academic family applauded my writing. There ended my story in art for decades. Except for occasional sketching and knitting, I put down the visual and wrote a very great deal of text. Eventually, my books returned me to art, and once back in images, I concluded, Yes, I think I could stay in the world of pictures. Let me test this out.

During my last year teaching at Princeton I took two introductory painting classes. Introductory painting came after my regular teaching and kept me in Princeton to 10 PM. After that, I’d get home to Newark in the middle of the night. My generous Princeton colleague Valerie Smith let me stay over at her house and sweetly bought one of my first drawings. At first, I didn’t know to photograph my work, so Valerie’s drawing has disappeared from my files. The office of another Princeton colleague, Edmund White, was next to my painting studio. He bought my very first painting, my attempt to depict a set-up in various surfaces and shades of red and yellow, shiny, matte, opaque and translucent, saturated and toned down. The reflective red hat contrasted with two drapes, one also reflective but mixed with blue, the other with a pattern that fractured in the folds of the cloth. The bright yellow shopping bag in front combined a shiny surface and a broken pattern.

In this first Princeton class I painted gray scales and figures and landscapes and learned light sources and perspective, as in two other early paintings. The gray scale began simply as that, a gray scale, where you alter hue and saturation between black and white. I liked that exercise and added mountains in the distance. It still looks like a gray scale, but with something else going on. The blue painting came from an exercise in creating depth through perspective, shadow, and luminosity. I made both these paintings on manufactured canvases 24 x 18”. I still have a whole pile of these canvases, which I consider beneath me now. My second Princeton painting class taught me how to make my own stretcher bars and to stretch and gesso my canvases, thoroughly enjoyable manual labor.

My Princeton painting classes took me to museums, to Philip Guston’s cadmium red, ivory black, and titanium white cigar-smoking Klansmen and John Currin’s skinny, huge breasted naked white women the color of supermarket peach flesh. I joined the throng of Guston admirers, but never acquired a taste for Currin’s virtuoso painting. I still stumble over his skinny, big-breasted women and wonder why his famously rendered Thanksgiving turkey is raw.

***

Even before art school and with what I look back on as incredible hubris, I toyed with the idea of myself as a professional artist, not a mere Sunday painter. I might want to go to art school, not just to undergraduate art school, but to graduate art school as well. I might want to work professionally. I might want to be as professional a painter as I was a historian. Well, within reason. Why would that pose a problem?

As I poke into the crevices of memory, I touch another motive for leaving history, a motive that wants to stay beneath the surface, pulling back into deeper obscurity like a darkness-dwelling troglobite I’m dragging into the light for you. It is not a nice feeling to acknowledge, but candor demands acknowledgment, for otherwise I just might have remained in the grooves of academe. For there was, as always, much more history yet for me to write. Any sentiment other than gratitude strikes me as most unbecoming in one whose achievements have been honored with a Princeton professorship, honorary doctorates from the Ivy League and beyond, and the presidencies of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. What could be more annoying (a word I learned to employ in art school) than a person of privilege whining about what hasn’t been bestowed? Nonetheless. Nonetheless, let me whine a little. There was some sour sense of limits reached, of disappointment over book prizes not won and books not reviewed. It was as though I had assumed I’d be exempt from the rules of the world, where people who looked like me or who didn’t fit an image of how they were supposed to be were never fully seen or acknowledged. For all my lovely recognition, I seemed not properly to fit in.

I’ve never been a black person easily captured in the idea of a black person—come to think of it, no one is. No person, no black or otherwise person fits a racial mold. The idea of a black person is a stereotype that shifts its shape in order never to fit anyone real. I’ve hardly suffered or overcome hardship, can’t talk ghetto, won’t don a mask of black authenticity or speak for black people as a whole. Too many disparate themes reside in me for coherent recognition: images, phrases, people, and things from the multiple worlds I live in and have lived in over many years of life. The freedom I treasure in art reminds me of walking in Bordeaux in the 1960s and inclining toward the study of history. My mother’s dismay at the appearance of aging triggers scattered associations, from the biography of a French theorist to older women artists. Driving down I-95 from Providence calls up a memory of skidding my beetle across a snow-covered bridge over the Connecticut River when I was a graduate student at Harvard. This jumble is not smooth, but its disorderliness is what makes me me.

When I sniveled to friends that I had never received a book prize of import, they pulled me up short, and not just by recalling my honors. They reminded me of the world we live in and the off-kilter nature of my writing. What on earth did I expect? I had enough, I really did have enough in many meanings of the word. Enough in hand, I left history, in the sense of no longer writing scholarly history books as I used to, with honor and fulfillment. History remains a part of me, naturally, and it remains in me even though my relation to history became uneasy in art school.

***

After my two toe-dipping Princeton painting classes, I took the summer drawing and painting marathon at the New York Studio School on 8th Street in Manhattan. The Studio School started at 9 a.m., ended at 6, with crits stretching past 9 p.m. Okay. For me that meant get up at 6 a.m. walk across the park, take Newark light rail to Newark Penn Station. New Jersey Transit to New York Penn Station, that hell of thank-you-for-your-patience dysfunction. The 2 or 3 subway downtown, get off at 4th Street, walk to 8th Street, and arrive before everyone else.

Then the pay-off. Stand up and draw and paint for eight hours. I loved it.

I L O V E D IT.

The paper, the charcoal, the canvas, the set-ups, the model, the space, the perspective, the shadows, the colors, the smell. Concentrating hard, I did it wrong, and I did it right. I painted a still life in red and blue that taught me that you can’t mix cerulean blue from ultramarine and white oil paints as they come from a tube. A figure painting asked for warm but light browns for skin and an indefinite darker shade for light skin in shadow. This shade has no name, so you mix it out of the leavings on your palette.

Here’s the best lesson of all from the Studio School marathon: Staple a 5’ x 4’ piece of tough watercolor paper to the wall; cover it with a charcoal drawing of the model in the set-up, the very best drawing you can make. Cover the entire paper. This takes hours standing up, drawing in the heat. Sweating. Now rub out your drawing with a chamois. Owwww!! All that work for nothing! Draw it again, only 10” to the right. Okay. Concentrate. Draw. Sweat. Fill up the paper. Rub it out. Erase it again? Yes. Rub it out. Draw the model and set-up 1/3 smaller. Draw draw draw. Rub it out. Again.

Lesson learned? Essential lesson learned! You can erase what you draw, even what you’ve spent a long time drawing and sweating over. You can throw away what you paint and, as I learned to do later, cut it up and incorporate it into a new painting. A lesson to take straight to heart, and not only in art making.

I loved it. Even though I was the oldest by far, I stood up and painted right up until 6. Some of the kids came late, farted around, took two-hour lunch breaks, and left before dinner without washing their brushes. Crit came after dinner break. To accommodate Newark light rail’s evening schedule, I would leave crit around 9 PM. Start all over the next morning, five days a week. Okay, I could do it! Let’s go!

I applied to Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers with a portfolio of drawings and paintings from Princeton and the Studio School marathon. Rutgers admitted me. What a thrill! What an accomplishment! My knowing Friend Bill hinted later that undergraduate art school isn’t all that hard to get into. Be that as it may, my admission puffed me up as a worthy achievement. I affiliated with Douglass College, the (sort-of formerly) all-women’s college, for its feminist tradition, of course, also for its quiet.

***

In the summer before I started at Mason Gross, Dear Husband Glenn and I attended an art exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. You will only hear of Glenn occasionally, when absolutely necessary because Glenn doesn’t want a role in this story. We were together in Paris, where the Grand Palais had installed a huge show of stirring paintings, abstract and figurative, witty videos ironic and silly, sculpture bright and colorless, and perfectly gorgeous drawings: a feast for the eyes of color and movement and sound. Wait a minute. What in creation was spilling over several folding tables—used ball-point pens, foil, torn newspaper, doodles, bits of paper, the contents of a wastepaper basket held together with cardboard and brown packing tape. A shapeless mass of faded color and haphazard images. Too-muchness splayed out from one section to another without any composition, without coherent color that I could see, as though a drunken Do-It-Yourselfer had turned over his trash barrel in the lofty Grand Palais. Hunh? An art enigma. A mistake, surely. But what did I know? I did not know this was art.

This piece by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn had won the show’s first prize, and Hirschhorn was installation art’s shining international star. I hadn’t yet heard of installation art and didn’t know that in the twenty-first century this was more than any old art; it was good art, excellent art. The best art. With work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Walker Art Center, Hirschhorn had hit all The Art World’s high notes and strutted off with its prizes.[1] Clearly, this was art, and Hirschhorn was a major artist. Hirshhorn’s work raised the oldest questions in the world of art, questions that followed me for a very long time afterward. What counts as art? Who is an artist? Over the course of several years, I learned the answers. The hard way. In art school.

***

From Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Painter, published by Counterpoint.

***

[1] By “The Art World” I mean the important museums and galleries that bestow visibility and money on selected artists, virtually all white men. Without caps, the world mans everything in and around art, regardless of sex and race and wealth and wide recognition. 

Trying to Kill the Want

Philip Toscano/PA Wire

Kristi Coulter | Nothing Good Can Come From This | MCD x FSG | August 2018 | 15 minutes (3,080 words)

I had just left Babeland and was heading to my car when I spotted the otter I thought might get me sober. He was in the window of the craft shop next door, waiting to be felted into being and then hung on a Christmas tree or something. I didn’t know what felting was, or even that it could be a verb. I assumed that felt, like most things, sprang from Zeus’s forehead in precut rectangles, ready to rock. Apparently not. I stood on the sidewalk, looking at the otter and contemplating all the things I could learn if I got my head right, before going inside.

I had a hopeful, sheepish relationship to crafting stores. I saw them as temples to utility and skill and the concept of having an interest in something besides drinking and worrying about drinking. Twice a year I would drop mounds of cash on yarn for scarves I imagined donating to homeless shelters, or embroidery thread for tooth fairy pillowcases I would donate to children’s hospitals. My crafting plans were always large-scale and philanthropic, partly to compensate the world for the wake caused by my existence but also because I needed a project. Some neophyte knitters might think that one scarf is a project. But then their goal is probably to make a scarf. My goal was to no longer want to drink a bottle of wine every night, and that would take more yarn. So I would set myself up with the needles and the patterns and the diagrams and spend about twenty minutes in earnest learning mode before realizing it wasn’t working. I was in fact not absorbed in my craft, and my nerves were not calmed the way other knitters claimed theirs were, and I still wanted to have that glass of Viognier that would become four. And all my new supplies would go into the linen closet among the sheets and beach towels, to the shelf reserved for optimistic variations of myself that rarely surfaced. Read more…

Standing in the Buffer Zone

Clinic escorts, in orange, in front of a group of anti-abortion protestors outside a Planned Parenthood clinic. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

In MEL Magazine, merritt k has an interview with Jeff, a 30-year-old man from Indiana who’s volunteered as a Planned Parenthood clinic escort for almost a decade. Patients trying to access healthcare services at Planned Parenthood clinics are often forced to make their way through a vocal gauntlet of anti-choice protestors; escorts serve as both a physical and emotional buffer. And as Jeff notes, male escorts are particularly good at redirecting protestor ire.

They prefer to yell at dude escorts, which I guess is the best case scenario for everybody — they get it out on us. What you learn quickly is that they don’t have a lot of space for women’s agency in all the ways you’d expect. Like, when they yell stuff at me, it’s particularly targeted at how “men are supposed to protect women.” The idea that women have choices isn’t involved at all. Certainly that’s the case with patient guests too. Like if you’re a girl coming in with her boyfriend, they’ll usually target him and tell him that it’s his job to be a father. You see that kind of erasure of agency happening in real time in ways that are both strange and instructive.

But it’s not all helping patients avoid the negative — Jeff is also able to offer some emotional labor to women who might have other sources of support.

But the other side of clinic escorting that I really like comes from interacting with patients or their guests. It’s just a hard day for some people, and sometimes people just want to go outside and smoke a cigarette and shoot the shit with somebody. There are times when people will disclose to you things about their lives or situations that are heavy and hard, but are born of that beautiful interaction you can have with someone where you know you’re probably never going to see them again. There’s an honesty that comes out of it that’s really cool. What you learn after a while is that on a day like that, people just need someone to vent to. Because all of this stuff has been so stigmatized that a lot of them don’t have people who aren’t going to judge them.

Read the interview