Search Results for: This Magazine

Shelved: The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s “Brain Opera”

Michael Putland / Getty, Photo Illustration by Homestead Studio

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | September 2019 | 18 minutes (3,497 words)

 

In 1993, interviewers from the psychedelic music magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope stood on Viv Stanshall’s stoop, wondering if he would answer the doorbell. Stanshall’s friend, who set up the meeting, was just beginning to apologize when she turned and gasped: A frail and obviously drunk Stanshall, according to the article, “staggering down the road clutching a carved stick and a white plastic carrier bag containing a freshly purchased bottle of Mr. Smirnoff’s elixir,” lurched toward the house.

“Vivian, you look awful!” the friend said. “Where’s your shoes?”

Read more…

‘People Can Become Houses’

Adam Shemper / Grove Press

Danielle A. Jackson  | Longreads | September 2019 | 18 minutes (4,289 words)

The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s debut memoir, tells the story of the light-green shotgun house in New Orleans East her mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961. At 19, Ivory Mae was the first in her immediate family to own a home; her mother had been born on a plantation in St. Charles Parish. Over years of renovations, the house acquired a second floor at its rear and a layer of pale yellow vinyl siding. 

The book is also about a neighborhood, a city, a nation, and how generations of systemic neglect weigh on the human beings who bear it. New Orleans East was a vast, mostly undeveloped marshland in the early ’60s, a fledgling suburb within the city held afloat by investment from retailers and oil developers. Its neighborhoods were, at the time, predominantly white. The public schools were not yet integrated. 

The Brooms built a lively home life there. Sarah, the youngest of 12, was born in 1979. Largely missing from city maps and narratives that highlight the tourist-friendly French Quarter, New Orleans East fell into disrepair by the late ’80s. As investors pulled out, its streets became lined with abandoned apartment buildings and men in cars soliciting sex.

Sarah was just 6 months old when her father, Simon Broom, died suddenly at home. She came of age with the ache of his absence. The house became increasingly difficult to maintain, and shame settled in alongside the family’s grief.

 

Throughout The Yellow House’s four sections, which Broom calls “movements,” after the parts of a symphony, she pulls from hundreds of hours of interviews to include exceptionally long passages where her family members speak for themselves; the book is, in part, an oral history. She says it is because their stories “compose” hers. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans East and destroyed their home. By then, Broom had a magazine job in New York and had been gone from her hometown for nearly a decade. Her Louisiana family recounts the storm in “Water,” the book’s riveting third movement. In the fourth, the author unravels the questions the full text poses: about grief and identity, American racism and environmental catastrophe, family and womanhood and the multiple meanings of home.

The Yellow House is beautifully wrought on a grand scale and at the level of the sentence. It is intricately researched, narratively complex, and dives into the most fundamental questions of our time: Who am I? How did I become me? How does one survive catastrophe when it is inevitable? How does one rebuild? The Yellow House was longlisted for a National Book Award and became a New York Times best seller in late August. I spoke to Broom two days before its release. A condensed version of our conversation follows. 

*

Longreads: Even before Toni Morrison passed away, I’d noticed certain things about The Yellow House that reminded me of her novels. Beloved begins by mapping the house where Sethe and her family live, the place that is haunted, with an address: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.” There’s a scene in the documentary The Pieces I Am showing how Morrison sketched out a floor plan of this house. The architecture and physicality of a house and how a house can live as an object, but also as an imagined thing, a goal, a part of us, is really the foundation of your book. Could you talk about Toni Morrison’s influence on you and your work?

Sarah M. Broom: I remember finding out that Toni Morrison had died. It was rainy and dim where I was in upstate New York, and I kept thinking, This day is so low hanging. That’s how I kept imagining it. Almost like the sky was hovering close, just above my head. I felt grief. It was bottomless and familial. The way that one grieves a family member is like grieving a part of a system, a part of an organism. And I knew this, but I really knew this after she died — she was literally a part of my system. A part of what it meant for me to be a writer. She was so interwoven in these layered ways into the ways in which I think. 

In The Yellow House, I talk about “water having a perfect memory” [from the essay “The Site of Memory”]. Most people only mention that part of the essay, about how water is forever trying to get back to where it was. But the part that comes after that is equally as important. She says, “Writers are like that, remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.” Writing this book for me was driven in some deep way by that quotation, which is really about the ways in which Morrison thought about and dealt with place. It was a given and known thing that she was from Lorain, Ohio. I think that in a way she was always writing deeply about place and about belonging.

There was an interview a few years ago in the Telegraph, where she is talking about a conversation with her sister, Lois, who still lived in their hometown. Her sister told her the street where they grew up is gone. In the interview she says that her sister drew her a map of the street and wrote in the names of the people who used to live in the houses on their street. They figured out that 20 houses were gone. What Morrison said in the interview is that loss, that absence of the houses and all the memories they held, it’s a death. That idea fueled me as I was trying to understand my book and the architecture of it. 

Another thing about Morrison, which matters so much to me: Often, especially with writers of color, people focus a lot on our story and less on our craft. Toni Morrison wrote sentences that were so multi-varied and layered and also were road maps to something. Beyond that, they had an innate musicality to them and they made you feel. I think often when certain writers make you feel, people misunderstand the difficulty of that. Making a person feel something is the greatest thing an artist can do, and it’s all about craft. It’s about rhythm and cadence and tone.

Is it also about what you have to take out to get to that? What isn’t there?

Absolutely. There is a composed-ness. It’s jazz-ical. Great language and great writing is jazz-ical, it’s spontaneous but it’s super controlled. Whenever I was at a point that I felt that I needed to remember the sounds of what writing could do, I always read Toni Morrison. And that’s a gift. I’ll probably be rereading her throughout this entire book tour because I can’t imagine not having her voice every single day. 

Read more…

Where Am I?

AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills

Heather Sellers True Story | April 2019 | 44 minutes (8,983 words)

 

I was on my way home, flying from New York back to Florida. In the heart of Manhattan, I had given a keynote address to a large group of researchers at Rockefeller University. Internationally known neuroscientists, men and women at the top of their field, had been interested in what I had to say. I still couldn’t believe how well it had gone.

When we landed in Tampa, the plane, full of Disney-bound families and snow birds, nosed up to the gate, and I strode down the jet bridge. Confident and successful in my big-city clothes — black boots, black tights, black silk tunic — I followed the stream of passengers ahead of me as we made our way past the gates.

Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: Fans, ‘Grams and Installment Plans

The Wing in Boston. (Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

On our September 20, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Essays Editor Sari Botton, Head of Audience Catherine Cusick, and Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.  

This week, the editors discuss stories in Inc., The Cut, and The Baffler.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


6:52The Wing Has $118 Million in Funding, Superfans Like Meryl Streep, and Plenty of Skeptics. It’s Just Getting Started.” (Christine Lagorio-Chafkine, October 2019, Inc.)

17:28Who Would I Be Without Instagram?” (Tavi Gevinson, September 16, 2019, The Cut)

26:00 “Revolution on the Installment Plan.” (Jessa Crispin, Sept/Oct 2019, The Baffler)

* * *

Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Dünzlullstein bild via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Emily Giambalvo, Maureen Tkacik, Zuzana Justman, Jennifer Colville, and Roshani Chokshi.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Cahiers du Post-Cinéma

Getty Images

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | September 2019 |  9 minutes (2,452 words)

The new release I most wanted to see during the Toronto International Film Festival was Unbelievable, the Netflix series that is neither a movie nor was it screening at TIFF. I was more taken by this miniseries, based on the ProPublica and Marshall Project investigation of a number of real rapes in Washington and Colorado, than by any of the movies I saw. But then, I have a particular affinity for this kind of mid-budget drama: real-looking people solving real problems in a real world, wading through the complications of humanity — “God shows up looking for someone to be of service, clean things up a bit, and he says, ‘Whom shall I send?’” — this is my shit. It’s the kind of thing you saw regularly at the cinema in the ’70s but that now tends to be relegated to streaming sites. I wonder how much of my affinity for Unbelievable — eight hours, three days — had to do with the fact that I could watch it at home. Alone. For free (well, Netflix-account free). Whether if all other things had been equal, but it had been playing at TIFF, I would have felt the same. Would I have felt the same had I chosen it over something else, doubt over my decision percolating in the background? Or if I were watching next to critics who liked it much more than I did, or much less? Or if I’d had an anxiety attack because I was assigned a middle seat (aisles only)? When the stakes are high, it’s harder to see past them. Read more…

Regarding the Interpretation of Others

Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet via Getty Images

Patrick Nathan | Longreads | September 2019 | 30 minutes (8,235 words)


“The only review of Under the Sign of Saturn would be the eighth essay — an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”

Susan Sontag, journal entry, May 1980


 

1:

Differently, we buy and borrow, and steal, our ongoing educations. American writers tend to forget this, even dissuade it. There is an assumption — general, if not unconscious — that “we” have all read Raymond Carver and Joan Didion, seen Dazed and Confused and The Princess Bride, and exhausted “prestige” television from Lost to Big Little Lies. That these works are canon in a post- or anti-canonical culture highlights the need for inexhaustible and pluralistic inspiration against the deprivation of that need. What’s worse, if you are labeled — black, queer, immigrant, disabled, trans, or a woman — those expectations constrict; the canon tightens. To be a gay writer means one must have read Edmund White and seen Mean Girls; to write as a black woman means one must have read Angela Davis and seen Kara Walker’s silhouettes. What was supposed to liberate our literary sensibilities has reduced us, clinically, to trained specialists. Under this pressure, so carefully curated and categorized, it’s difficult to will one’s own work into being. To learn passively, and ultimately write passively, is the great cultural temptation.

Yes, I have been reading — and reading about — Susan Sontag. There is nothing passive in her legacy. In her combined erudition, ambition, and seriousness, she has few peers, and for several years she has symbolized my aspirations as a writer — the uncompromising rigor with which she approached her essays; her self-proclaimed interest in “everything”; an urgency in dissenting, when ethically necessary, from received opinion; her energy in consuming art constantly; and the esteem, to the end of her life, in which she held literature, above all fiction. Her passion is contagious. Sontag’s narcotic approach to art and experience is, for a provincial writer with little access, renewably invigorating; and because Sontag’s lifetime of work is willed, Nietzscheanly, from her passions, reading about her life is its own invigorating project. In this, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, at 832 pages, is certainly her legacy’s largest complement. Read more…

Cut From the Same Cloth

All illustrations by Myfanwy Tristram

Myfanwy Tristram | Longreads | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,863 words)

 

A clatter at the door. A small package plops through our letterbox.

It’s come a long way. I can see that by the sticky labels, foreign postmarks, and scrawled scripts of postal workers around the world.

I text my daughter: 'Your wig has arrived from Japan.' After a moment, I text again: 'A phrase I never thought I’d find myself typing.'

This was never in the parenting manual.

But back to the housework.

I enter my bedroom to find the area around the mirror overrun with her makeup, her dirty laundry in pools on the floor. That girl leaves a trail of destruction.

Admittedly, this is not a remarkable complaint for any mother of a teen. Where mine differs from the grumbles of parents through the ages is that among the detritus to be picked up and put away are:

Wig caps, tossed aside and draped wherever they may land

fake eyelashes, like furry caterpillars on the bathroom sink

and the endless, infuriating, discarded colored Band-Aids that I seem to find everywhere - stuck to my work clothes, on the soles of my shoes, under the sofa... even deep in my own bed

This last year has been a revelation as my daughter blossoms into her own, rather extreme, sense of style. Liberated from parental tastes by pocket money and cash earned from neighborhood dog walking, she trawls the thrift shops and returns home triumphant with unusual clothing. She’s 14. Still in need of parental comfort, food, finances, but beginning the process of becoming her own standalone self. And what a self it is.

She’s pushing her school’s uniform rules to the limits. "Light" makeup is permitted... but here we have bright red eyeshadow and black lips. Skirt rolled up to be as short as possible. Shoes must be black. Fortunately, Doc Martens are black..once you've gone over the stitching with a Sharpie. Clip-on horns - well, hair clips are allowed. Hair has to be a "natural" color so she dyed it jet black. First day of the hols and out came the bleach and crazy color. The blazer is compulsory, but stays scrunched up in the backpack until she's in the school gates. Tights with "accidental" ripped holes [Close up on eye and nose] Band-Aid "Bean brow" - half shaved off Stickers or painted motifs Tip of the nose colored red (quite cute)

Trouble is...I can’t really complain, because at age 14, I was also breaking the school rules.

In fact, when regarding my wayward, outrageously dressed girl, I find myself experiencing a peculiar combination of pride and envy.

Both may be a sin, but pride in one’s child is an acceptable part of parenthood.

Envy, while recognized in psychology and culture, most certainly isn’t.

Fine: I’m proud of this fierce individual that appears to have inherited my own peacock inclinations. Not so fine: I find myself envious that she has a period of wild experimentation ahead of her — and a figure that means she fits into pretty much every thrift store find.

So, uncomfortable with this disagreeable feeling, and at risk of falling into the parental cliché of “you’re not going out dressed like that!” I realize that there’s just one thing to do. I need to try and understand more about where the crazy looks are coming from. Instead of sighing heavily at the mess and fruitlessly asking, once again, for her to just try and keep it in check, I sit down and ask her to give me a beginner’s guide to her style. She is delighted to assist.

Her influences come from the internet, from fast-spreading pictures on Instagram, from crazy hairstyles on TikTok. Teens’ fashion inspiration is now global, grassroots led, with the commercial interests falling over themselves to catch up.

We scroll through her favorite accounts, and I meet the strangers whose fashion tips and product endorsements indirectly result in those Band-Aids in my bed:

@ohbowie 562K followers, @yung_bishop 65.5K followers, @vrisknya 21.1K followers, @Rosemaryonette 70.8K followers, @artsydoodle 38K followers, @Safiya Nygaard 8.1M subscribers, @Punker_irl 1.1M followers, @Piaisevil 508K followers (Follower counts increasing by the day.)

These vloggers and Instagrammers, familiar friendly faces to their subscribers, set the fashion. All of them are from the U.K. or U.S., but they have something in common — they’re all looking to Japan.

I understand the appeal. I myself was responsible for introducing her to Japanese culture in toddlerhood, as we shared our enjoyment of Studio Ghibli and the adorable magic realism of Totoro and Ponyo.

Next came a wider exploration of anime and manga. She and her schoolmates swapped tips and learned from YouTubers who filmed themselves playing games like Doki Doki Literature Club and Danganronpa.

Then it was cosplay, the art of dressing like one’s favorite characters, whether with painstaking DIY costumery, or by buying outfits online, ready-made, from the Chinese kitchen table industries wise enough to surf the wave of this crazy fad as it hit the West — and able to do so thanks to global capitalism and the world wide web.

My daughter’s childhood environmental beliefs, despite my entreaties, were swept away. Her carbon footprint is forgotten in the desire to summon just the right hair clips or wig from the other side of the world.

Because then came the call of Harajuku. And that was just too strong to resist.

HARAJUKU (also in Japanese)

Since the 1980s, Japanese teens have flocked to this area of Tokyo to buy, and show off, their extreme fashions. It began with Rockabilly enthusiasts who came to dance, with music, moves, and outfits taken wholesale — ironically — from the West. Back then, fashion influences traveled in the other direction.

And then one day, as Shoichi Aoki, editor of the street photography magazine Fruits notes, something new emerged. Art school students, and girls in particular, were leaving behind the monochrome outfits that had previously been their norm. Now they were displaying a grassroots style that was completely unprecedented: yellow hair, platform shoes, ultra-bright color combos, and exciting, crazy mismatched clothing.

Thirty years on, the area of Harajuku has been taken over by big, multinational high-street stores, and true inventiveness is now to be found in its backstreets, Ura-Harajuku. But that hasn’t remotely dented its popularity abroad — which explains a lot about the state of my bedroom floor.

As with any long-lived subculture, Harajuku fashion has split into different genres, all of which my daughter explains to me with far more passion that she’ll ever apply to her school lessons:

Lolita Girls leads to Gothic Lolita or Kodona. Harajuku kimono style. Decora, has some things in common with Fairy kei. Yami kawaii ('sick cute'), not to be confused with Yume kawaii ('dream cute').

As I learn of these styles, I understand so much more. It’s exciting to see my daughter with all these creative possibilities before her: the opportunity to take what she likes, mix and match, and add a little something to make it her own. And it’s something I recognize very well.

In the ’80s, while Harajuku style was in its infancy, over here in the U.K. I was a teen myself, entirely oblivious of Japanese culture.

In the West, our pop scene was setting the high-street fashion:

Even the heartthrobs on the posters all over your 11-year-old niece’s bedroom, like Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet, were dressed in New Romantic style: billowing sleeves, flamboyant hair, lush satins and scarves, cravats, beads, and baubles. The look was inspired by the English Romantics of the 19th century: Byron, Shelley, etc, but these were the new romantics with access to the modern benefits of hairspray and crimpers. They expressed themselves through opulent clothes, accessories, hair, and makeup -- men just as much as women. They described themselves as hedonistic. Tutting dads called them 'poseurs' ... and worse.

But this was the mainstream. And if there’s any doubt about that, you only have to look at Lady Diana’s wedding dress: taffeta, lace, and enormous puffy sleeves. Definitively new romantic -- and you don’t get more 'establishment' than the royal family.

If the mainstream figures are already dressing in quite extreme fashions, those who want to show that they are different have to find another way to dress, different music to listen to, new ways to scandalize the elderly neighbors.

And here in the West, the various movements of the ’70s evolved, in the ’80s, into their own divided, intertwined subcultures. New romantic grew from glam rock, was shaped by the rise of the synth, and its forerunners paraded their outré looks at London’s Blitz and Wag nightclubs. This was the look that the high-street shops decided to mass-produce, and it was quite the norm to see big kitten bows, taffeta silks, and pearl necklaces on even the squarest kids. This was the default look by the time I was developing an interest in clothes.

The recipe for New Romantic: Glam rock. Add synths. Incubate in nightclubs.

Not far behind, goth was evolving from ’70s punk and post-punk, and also discovered the possibilities of electronic music machines. Its devotees favored the seminal Batcave club.

The recipe for Goth: 70s punk rock. Add a sprinkling of synth and drum machines. Leads to post-punk and new wave. Incubate in nightclub.

Now this was more like it. Far from the big city, in rural Devon in southwest England, my only option was to read of this from afar — in The Face, i-D, and Smash Hits magazines. Yet the minute I saw the goth bands, I knew that I had found my own look. It would help me express that I was different. Special. That I rejected the dull blandness of everyday life.

That spark in my daughter’s eye when she sees a new Harajuku look? This was the same impulse.

But for me, there was no internet, of course. No handy websites to allow me to piece together a goth look and pay for it in one go at checkout. Our looks were far more thrown together, with a mixture of ingenuity and serendipity.

Figure 1: Hair: dyed (usually black), crimped, backcombed and hairsprayed. A-line skirt, dyed in a bucket, then split down the side seam...all the better to display leggings, also split down the side seam, then laced with ribbon. If you're really lucky, you might find an Adam Ant style jacket in the antique shop. Bullet belt from the army surplus shop. We sent off for pixie boots through mail order - the more buckles the better. Figure 2: Silk scarf tied to belt loop, dad's suit trousers, Chinese slippers from the martial arts studio, studded belt, Batwing spider web knit. Figure 3: A leather jacket was the thrift shop holy grail. Once you had one, you could paint your favorite band's name on the back. Old felt hat from your gran. Get your mum to knit you a stripy mohair sweater. Doc Martens were still mainly work boots. Figure 4: Ballgown from a jumble sale. Sew the skirt hem to the waistband to make a puffball. Fishnet tights could be repurposed as sleeves. Armfuls of silver bracelets. Stripy tights.

Time passes. And now: Here I am at 50, my daughter 14.

At her age, it is fairly straightforward to dress differently, always assuming you can dodge the wrath of your school; but that’s far in the past for me.

Growing up and taking new roles, new responsibilities, means making decisions about how you present yourself. It boils down to this: Do you want to be the goth at the school gate? The outsider at that job interview?

My body has changed, too. Sagging flesh and a growing waistline have made me less inclined to let my clothes shout “look at me!” lest folk shout back, “We’ve looked, and we find you displeasing.”

I work from home: There’s little need and less time to spend hours on my hair or makeup. At the same time, I find it hard to give up the idea of dressing to display a sense of self.

Should I have stayed faithful to my gothic roots? It’s not unknown: You do see the occasional goth family with a pushchair and a kid in a Bauhaus onesie.

Fair play to them: Dealing with an infant and getting your look together each day — that can’t be easy. Myself? As a woman who came to motherhood relatively late in life, I had already set aside my more outrageous costumery as I navigated the first steps of a career in conservative office workplaces.

I graduated from the backcombed hair. I even spend good money at salons these days. My trousers have no rips. I’ve conformed — and find myself looking for other ways to express myself.

Meanwhile, age plays a part. As you enter the second half of life, it’s easy to feel that you’re not supposed to stand out. Just as you’re not supposed to show too much leg, or cleavage, it’s all part of the process of desexualization that the older woman is generally expected, in our society at least, to go through.

Because I had my daughter later in life — at age 36 — her blooming into a gorgeous, expressive experimental teenager has hit right at the same time as I’m staring into the barrel of menopause, and the attendant signs of aging that have traditionally been seen as unattractive. Let us not digress too far into the patriarchal belief that aging men become more attractive, while women must fight against white hair, wrinkles, and bingo wings.

After all, men face their challenges too. Aging male goths might have to contend with the loss of their teen pride and joy, the mane of hair — its decline hopefully not exacerbated by the crimpers and hairspray — and, like music journalist Simon Price, find more creative ways of still keeping the look alive.

The Simon Price approach to male pattern baldness

Things just aren’t as clear as they were when I could take a sample from the goth rulebook, and anything went so long as it was black.

These days, one has to try and express individuality with style, maybe a soupçon of quirkiness. But not too much — that can be unbecoming for women of a certain age.

The acceptable face of middle age: Quirky glasses (to show character). Interesting print (please don't write me off). 'Forgiving' cut: loose over the tum. Upper arms covered.

There’s no one more finely attuned to this than a teen regarding a parent: My husband was recently told, in no uncertain terms, that his striped rainbow T-shirt — colorful but well within the bounds of respectability to my eyes — was too embarrassing for my daughter to be seen beside.

She herself was dressed, that day, in full Harajuku style.

In 1945 psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, painted a very gloomy picture of menopause as a “gradual loss of femininity,” claiming that:

Speech balloon: 'Mastering the psychologic reactions to the organic decline is one of the most difficult tasks of a woman's life.'

At the time, she was 61 years old herself.

She had my attention: After all, the “organic decline” is just around the corner for me. Phrased like that, it sounds like a barrel of laughs.

So on I read … and found something that struck rather an unwelcome chord. Psychologist Terri Apter interprets Deutsch’s theories like this: “Women observe a daughter’s adolescent bloom as a sign of their own decline. In middle age, a woman is pushed out of the sexual limelight, and as she sees her daughter achieve the first blush of maturity, she grows envious.”

Whew — that was a bit too close to home.

But is this inevitable? Deutsch was writing in far more patriarchal times, when a woman was far more likely to be seen primarily as a wife and mother, and to have lost all purpose when those functions were no longer needed.

Let’s turn to today’s sociologists. I was delighted to come across the words of Julia Twigg, who studies embodiment and age, pointing out that our judgment of the aging woman is something decided by society itself:

There are rules in later years around what’s appropriate - and by and large that’s defined in terms of what’s not appropriate. It’s a set of rules about what you shouldn’t be wearing, such as a “short skirt”, a “low neck”, an “over-sexy dress” for women. Some of those changes in dress are about actual physiological change - as we get older as women, busts get larger and lower, and our waists become less sleek. So if you’re designing clothes for an older woman, you need to change your cut slightly to make them flattering and make them fit. That’s an example of responding to real changes - but responding by pushing the neckline high, covering up with sleeves and things like that are responses to cultural valuations and judgments that say that the only flesh that should be visible in society is that which is young.

That academics are pointing out the negative attitudes we have toward aging, and especially in women, is one sign of change. It also means that we can push against it if we don’t like it.

But older women also have another source of hope. Just as the internet is inspiring our children, it also lays out an alternative path for aging a little less gracefully.

A remarkable roster of role models has arisen, showing that there is no need for the older woman to succumb to societal pressure to fade into the background. In fact, these ladies do quite the opposite. Ari Seth Cohen’s photographs collected in the book and associated blog Advanced Style celebrate their exuberance. Some have risen to fame. Some were famous already for achievements in their field, and have declined to retire gracefully.

Deutsch might have dismissed these women thus:

Speech balloon: Modern fashions and cosmetics help the ageing woman to behave like a girl in puberty. Narcissistic self delusion makes her painted face appear youthful to her in the mirror.'

But they refer to themselves quite differently:

Iris Apfel, born 1921: The way I dress may be ‘different’ or ‘eccentric’ to some who feel the need to label, but that’s of no concern to me. I don’t dress to be stared at; I dress for myself. There’s nothing wrong with wrinkles. When you’re older, trying to look years younger is foolish, and you’re not fooling anyone. Fronted a MAC cosmetics advertising campaign -- age 90. Ilona Royce Smithkin, born 1920, artist. I had no feeling of aging. It’s always just been another day. Zandra Rhodes, fashion designer, known for her bright pink hair: I am tired of good taste. I want to do everything wrong. Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer, born 1941. I don't notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and then they do, and they are usually 70. Her early designs set the 'pirate' look for the New Romantics. Anna Piaggi, born 1931, Italian fashion journalist and muse to Karl Lagerfield. What is to be avoided at all costs is the twinset look.

So … there’s another option. A whole new subculture to explore. The subculture of the older, expressive, break-all-the-rules women.

Shall I try to out-outrageous my daughter?

For all I say I’m envious of my daughter’s freedoms, perhaps the older woman has more leeway, more agency.

My daughter still has to navigate the competing demands of her parents entreating her not to wear outfits that will show her knickers when she bends over, while learning, and assessing the legitimacy, of the anti slut-shaming movement.

At this moment in time she’s pulled between school’s rules on how she’s allowed to present herself, and her desire to be like the extreme dressers she sees on Instagram.

Then there’s a tension between the endless bounty to be found in thrift shops, and the limitations of restricted storage space and the frustrations that explode from me when she brings “just one more top” into the house.

I’m glad I’ve poked and prodded at this ugly feeling of jealousy and come to understand exactly where it’s come from — and that there are options other than sinking into a societally approved sea of beige.

Gaining a deeper understanding of the styles and influences that set my daughter alight has made me far more understanding about those stray fake eyelashes I keep finding around the house.

I won’t forget my own forays into extreme fashion. They may even make me, temporarily, a more favored parent: I can pass tips on about hair crimping and experimenting with scissors, stencils, and sewing machines.

While recognizing that squicking out people my age is part of the point, I’ll try to curb any harmful excesses on her part, like tattoos and tongue splitting, at least until she reaches adulthood.

And meanwhile, I’ll continue to tread my own line, expressing myself without embarrassing her during this sensitive teenage period. Since we’re in and out of charity shops so much, who knows what I’ll find in the larger sizes while she flits through the tiny ones?

For all my struggles with expressing myself, it feels like I’ll never be ready to give it up.

And the real answer is — of course — to find the joy in it all, both as a mum, and as a woman.

Reader, I dyed my hair purple

Thanks
To my daughter, for sharing her fashion knowledge.
To Professor Janet Sayers, for helping track down Helen Deutsch quotes.

* * *

Myfanwy Tristram is an illustrator with a special interest in graphic memoir. She lives in Brighton on the south coast of England, and has been recording her life through the medium of comic strips since the Eighties.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Keeping My Promise to Popo

Ada Wong / Getty

Anne Liu Kellor | Longreads | September 2019 | #of minutes (2,604 words)

No one can agree on how old my grandmother is. Because she was born in wartime China, because they use the lunar calendar, because she immigrated from the mainland to Taiwan to America and declared her own birthdate, or because she’s always been vain and told people she is younger. Is she 98, 100, 102? Her sister claims one age, Popo another, her Social Security card yet something else. How can there be such a range of unknown?

Regardless, now she is finally, undeniably, old. I watch as Popo rests in the hospital bed in Monterey Park, her body thin, dressed in a pale green gown. Oxygen tube in her nose and around her neck, short greasy hair flattened, black with white roots. Mouth curved into a frown. Hearing aid, glasses, wig, glittery rings, all removed. Fingers no longer able to scrawl characters on her erasable black board with the pointed stick. Eyes no longer able to watch Chinese soap operas on TV. Mouth involuntarily moving, like she’s chewing, or rooting. Voice involuntarily making sounds, eh, eh, eh, eh. Sleep coming in short intervals, drifting off for an hour here and there, in between nurses coming to check on her.

The nurses are Filipino, Chinese, East African. They come in and open her curtain every hour or two, glance at her vitals, rotate her body, write things down on a chart and leave. On the white board beside her bed it says “Mandarin,” so sometimes they speak to Popo in Mandarin, but the white board does not say that she is basically deaf, and that in the last many years she’s reverted to speaking Cantonese, her childhood language. They might as well be whispering to her in Tagalog or Somali. She does not hear a thing they say.
Read more…

McDreamy, McSteamy, and McConnell

Illustration by Jason Raish

Samuel Ashworth| Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,389 words)

 

Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) are nestled in one another’s arms, sweat glistening on their muscled chests. They kiss softly and tenderly. It’s the middle of the night in a hotel somewhere on the campaign trail, and they are in love.

“So, if you were an animal, which would you be?” asks Ted.

“Let me think,” says Marco. “A manatee.”

Welcome, friends, to the glorious world of congressional fan fiction. If you’ve always associated fan fiction with the kind of people who hand-sew their own Star Trek jumpsuits, think again. Since going online in the late ’90s, fan fiction — a fan-created spinoff (sometimes way, way off) of an already-existing pop culture presence — has exploded. Its protagonists range from fictional, like Han Solo, to real, like Ariana Grande or members of the British Parliament. Published stories, which can range from a few hundred words to a few hundred thousand, number in the tens of millions, and boast an immense readership. The genre also remains one of the few resolutely not-for-profit corners of the internet: Since the work often involves trademarked intellectual property, fair use rules forbid fanfic authors from making money off their writing, unless they change all recognizable details, as E.L. James did with her BDSM Twilight fanfic story, Fifty Shades of Grey. Stories about congress fall under the penumbra of “Real-person fiction,” which isn’t bound by copyright laws in the same way.
Read more…