Search Results for: Time Magazine

But Who Gets Custody of the Dog?

Image by ninjatacoshell via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

America is an uneasy amalgam of people with very different ideas of what government — and life — should look like. So what if we codified the political and cultural divisions that already exist? Secession is one option, but almost no one actually wants that. The U.S. Constitution provides another mechanism that would allow a constructive split while still maintaining a federal government: interstate compacts.

In New York Magazine, Sasha Issenberg walks us through what that version of the U.S. might look like. Some of it’s great. Some of it’s not. All of it’s fascinating.

It was not just manufacturing and resource extraction that boomed in the Red Fed. As soon as the Blue Fed established its single-payer system, medical specialists began taking their practices to states where they wouldn’t be subject to the Regional Health Service’s price controls or rationing. Sloan Kettering now treats New York as little more than an administrative base; the majority of its hospital rooms are in Texas. Johns Hopkins considered closing its medical school when nearly half the faculty decamped en masse to Baylor. Wealthy Blue Fed residents willing to pay out of pocket now invariably travel to Houston when they want an immediate appointment with a specialist of their choice. The arrivals area at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport is packed with chauffeurs from van services run by clinics supported by specializing in such medical tourism.

Auctions of public lands across the interior west, along with the privatization of the Tennessee Valley Authority, generated a quick gusher of cash. Vowing not to let the new government wealth create more bureaucracy, Red Fed leaders deposited it all in a Free States Energy Trust Fund that would pay out an annual dividend to every adult and child in the region — a no-strings-attached cash transfer of hundreds of dollars per year. The Southern Baptist Convention encouraged its members to tithe their dividend checks directly into new aid societies to help the least fortunate. The most popular charitable cause has been a relief society to aid religious conservatives in the Blue Fed seeking to migrate to the Red Fed.

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Beyond “Rumble”: Talking with John O’Connor About the Other Link Wray

David Warner Ellis/Redferns

Most stories about guitarist Link Wray focus on his 1958 radio hit “Rumble,” a vaguely menacing, instrumental rock song that had no predecessor. They talk about how he punctured his amp with a pencil to get a grittier sound, maybe about the way his slick-hair, rockabilly, leather jacket look predated Elvis’. For the Oxford American‘s new music issue, journalist John O’Connor focuses on Wray’s lesser known masterpieces: the three albums fans call the shack sessions.

Despite the influence Link Wray’s instrumentals had on rock and roll on both sides of the Atlantic, from The Who to Jimmy Page, nothing brought Link much financial security or relief from the grueling life of touring tiny holes-in-the-walls. To retool his career and break free from the instrumental rock genre where he made his name, Link and his brothers started jamming in the early 1970s in the family’s rural chicken shack. The sessions mixed blues, folk, gospel, and country, featured singing, and produced rootsy music that sound like no other in Wray’s vast catalogue. Yet somehow, few people have written about this milestone in his creative life. O’Connor’s story “Mystic Chords” stands alone in the Link Wray literary canon. O’Connor talked with me about Link, journalism, and writing this epic story.

If I read your story correctly, you didn’t know much about Link Wray before researching this article. How did you find him and the story of his shack albums?

You read it correctly. My friend Dacus put the song “La De Da” from Link Wray on a mixtape a few years ago (“mixtape” isn’t quite right, but you know what I mean, a Dropbox thing) and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” I’d always thought of myself as educated about obscure ’70s rock or Americana or whatever you want to call it. I’ve got a hard-and-fast rule in record shops about buying LPs from ’71, 72, 73 ─ precisely the Shack era ─ if the price is right, and especially if there’s a funny-looking dude on the cover. So I was embarrassed that I’d never even heard of Link. And puzzled. I mean, how was it possible that I made it into my 40s without ever hearing Link Wray and the other Shack records? What else had I missed? All this stuff came up online about him having invented the power-chord, and how the rock gods all worshipped him: Townshend and Page, Dylan and Young. My embarrassment deepened, as did a curiosity about Link. That he was Native American added a layer of intrigue, because at that point, besides Robbie Robertson of The Band and Buffy Sainte-Marie, I probably couldn’t have named a single Native American musician, I’m ashamed to say. Actually, I could’ve named some: Karen Dalton, Jesse Ed Davis, Jimmy Carl Black, who played with Zappa. But I just didn’t know they were Native American, which is weird. This was all very maddening to me. Then, trying to find out more about Link got to be pretty dispiriting pretty quick. So much of what was written about him seemed cursory, half-baked, or worse. I had two early conversations with folks ─ Greg Laxton of the now defunct website linkwray.com, and Sherry Wray, Link’s neice ─ that convinced me basically everything I thought I knew about Link was wrong. Greg put me in touch with the producer Steve Verroca, who nobody had heard from in years. The story was writing itself.

Wow, that’s a strong start. When writers have questions that they’re compelled to answer, things get interesting, and the stories that result can have more urgency than ones that arise solely from a desire to tell a story. So when you started searching for answers, was there just a dearth of information about Link? Or a lack of humanizing detail?

There were a couple of starting points, like Jimmy McDonough’s article, which came out not long after Link’s death. He knew Link and seems to have talked to everyone else who knew him. It’s a fun read. But it’s also a tribute, as McDonough admits, a piece of hero worship, and therefore limited. And it came out twelve years ago. There wasn’t much else. Link didn’t give many interviews. Not by choice. He just wasn’t asked. This partly explains why so many of the stories about him are recycled and/or patently false. When he died, some obits referred to him as “Frederick Lincoln Wray.” At no point in his life was he named Frederick. It was also said that he had one son, when he had four. Anyway, that stuff’s easy to check. What’s nearly impossible to dissect is all the family conflict and bad feeling that endure over Link’s publishing rights, and the competing narratives, some of them legal in nature, about Link and his legacy. It’s still very raw for these folks.

Producer Steve Verocca is a key player in this story. Was he surprised you found him? And what happened when you started talking to him?

Greg Laxton got me in the door with Steve. I think he was skeptical. But Link’s music is also Steve’s legacy, in a way, and he was ready to talk. He had a pretty successful and multi-tentacled career, but as I say in the piece, Link sort of presides over it all. After we talked a couple of times, Steve hinted that he had some Shack-era stuff he was willing to share with me, but he wanted me to come to Virginia to see for myself. He didn’t say what it was, only that my mind would be blown. I thought maybe he had some outtakes or something. He surprised me there. But this speaks to your question above, too. My two principle sources were Steve and Sherry Wray. They disagree on essentially every point. Not just about Link. They’d disagree about what time of day it is. By the time I started talking to Steve, I’d already spent a lot of time on the phone with Sherry. So what happened when I started talking to him was my head started really spinning.

As a journalist, how do you build trust with a skeptical source like Steve Verocca? 

By talking to them, being patient, listening. People, generally, want to talk, even to complete strangers about incredibly personal stuff. They want their versions out there. You just have to be patient. Most people will go their entire lives without anyone ever asking them what they think about something. Nobody’s ever asked them for their opinion about anything, ever, and then suddenly you come along.

So Steve Verocca and Sherry Wray’s accounts conflict on nearly every point. As a journalist, how do you negotiate that sort of conflict between sources, especialy when they’re your two primary sources?

Checking with other people as best you can. I forget what the journalism rule is, something like cross-checking with two or more sources, or trying to. I offer a caveat in the piece along the lines of, I’m just trying to find a plausible centerline here. You know, looking for the path of least resistance. I’m on the outside looking in. Link’s dead. His brothers are long dead. Almost everyone who knew him or played at the Shack is dead. So I’m kind of at the mercy of secondhand stories. Maybe a good way to think about it is like a conversation between two people who’re both monologists and waiting for the other person to shut-up so they can resume talking and finish what they were saying. You’re a moderator, but one who’s also speaking to a dozen other people who’re weighing-in about what’s being said.

Link fans will salivate to hear that a whole fourth shack album exists and remains unreleased. In your piece, Verocca says he’d like to release this “When the time’s right.” Do you know if he has anything in the works? Are you going to help get that music out there? Do I sound like a crazy fan here? It’s just, when a person reaches an advanced age, biology has sort of made the time right.

I hope he releases it, but I don’t think he plans to do it anytime soon. A mutual friend reminded me the other day that Steve’s an old school record biz cat. Releasing stuff digitally just doesn’t register. He wants a physical product. And the chances of that are probably pretty slim, unfortunately. But you never know. Steve loves this record. It’s his favorite Shack record. He’s very proud of it. So it follows that he’d want people to hear it.

You admit you’re not a fan of “Rumble.” Now that you know so much more about Link and his music, and have listened to about everything he recorded, what do you think of his earlier, better known rock instrumentals?

I mean, I know what this stuff must’ve meant at the time, given the context. A few years before, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” was No. 1 on the Billboard charts, a runaway smash hit! So, obviously an improvement. Which is the understatement of understatements. But it’d require some time-travel on my part to really appreciate “Raw-Hide” and “Jack the Ripper” and the rest.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich

Steve Miller | Detroit Rock City | DaCapo Press | June 2013 | 39 minutes (7,835 words)

 

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White StripesOur thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

* * *

Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.

Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’

Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Christophe Morin / IP3 / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas; Phil Klay, Harley Rustad, Michael Graff, and Alan Siegel.

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James Baldwin and the Lost Giovanni’s Room Screenplay

(Photo by Anthony Barboza/Getty Images)

Michael Raeburn was in his early 30s when he first met James Baldwin in 1974, a chance encounter at the London book launch for If Beale Street Could Talk. Raeburn was an aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter, with just one short film on his resume, while Baldwin was a literary giant, an essayist, and a civil rights activist. The connection between the two was instantaneous. “He was an extremely influential figure in my life,” Raeburn says. “We were very strangely connected in an almost psychic way. I knew when he would arrive somewhere—he’d travel to New York City, and I would be aware of when he’d arrive at his house.” Read more…

The Lasting Effects of the Lolita Complex

Florence Sally Horner, 1950 and Dominique Swain, 1997. Philadelphia Bulletin / Associated Press, Andrew Medichini / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lacy Warner | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,431 words)

It feels like I’m watching porn. The video is grainy and cheap looking, like an old daytime soap shot with Vaseline over the lens. In the corner there is a grey couch that sits against a wall painted the desperate sand-beige color of every strip mall in America. This is a six-minute, twelve-second YouTube video of Dominique Swain’s screen test for the title role in the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita. At the four-minute mark, director Adrian Lyne gives a line reading of the word, “slut.” He says it over and over again. Jeremy Irons, 49 years old at the time, had already been cast as Humbert Humbert. In the video, Swain is 15 years old, playing 14, though in the novel, Lolita is 12. Seconds before the end, she looks toward the camera, smiles, and says in a bad, mock-English accent, “I’m a conniving little slut.”

***

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” In 1954, Lolita was rejected by five American publishing houses. Eventually, the down-market French publisher Olympia Press agreed to publish the first edition. Riddled with errors, this initial printing would be Nabokov’s albatross for the next three years. In 1958, Lolita finally saw its American debut, and became a bestseller overnight. Critics and readers alike have called Lolita many things: the great American novel; the great road novel; an allegory for the alienation caused by exile; a satirical tale of the incompatibility between European and American cultures; a great detective novel; smut; high-brow porn — but what it has never been called, until now, is true.

Last September saw the publication of Sarah Weinman’s nonfiction book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World. Weinman investigates the 1948 case of Horner, who was abducted as a child by the con-artist and pedophile, Frank La Salle. Horner lived with La Salle as his captive for two years, spending her 12th and 13th birthdays on the road as he took her from her New Jersey hometown across the US to California. Horner’s story is also Dolores Haze’s story. Through careful critical investigation, Weinman maps out how Nabokov learned of, and developed Lolita around, reports of Horner’s kidnapping and abuse.

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The Fault in Our Stars: On Fake Celebrity Interviews

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,670 words)

“I play with my breasts, not to show off but to demonstrate a kind of revulsion. I simply transform myself into a voice for all the tormented souls of this world.”

That’s Courtney Love in 1996 in SZ, the magazine belonging to one of the largest newspapers in Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung. It sounds a little crazy, but then, she’s a little crazy. And anyway, Tom Kummer, the Swiss journalist who attempted to style himself after Hunter S. Thompson, always filed outlandish exclusives and cover stories like this from Los Angeles — Pamela Anderson on her aching implants, Mike Tyson on eating cockroaches, Bruce Willis on immorality. From the mid-nineties to 2000, he was kind of a celebrity himself. Beloved by editors, he also wrote for the German magazines Der Spiegel and Stern and Switzerland’s Die Weltwoche. In fact, it was in the latter that, roughly two years before the Love interview, he wrote, funnily enough: “She plays with her breasts not to show off but to demonstrate revulsion. She wants to embody the voice of all tormented souls in the world.”

Tom Kummer had been flagged for fabrication before, but it wasn’t until an exposé in Focus magazine in 2000 that it was confirmed: he had never interviewed Love, or Brad Pitt or Sharon Stone or Kim Basinger, or anyone really. SZ followed with a breakdown of his deceit, like The New York Times would with Jayson Blair in 2003; it published an apology for the “falsified” stories and fired editors Christian Kämmerling and Ulf Poschardt. You would think Kummer would at least nod at contrition — like Janet Cooke in 1982, like Stephen Glass in 1998 — but he took the Jonah Lehrer route instead and talked boundaries. He even had a name for his approach: borderline journalism. “I wrote impressionistic, creative, literary descriptions of the life of stars in the form of so-called interviews,” he told The Guardian in 2011, adding, “Everybody loved my stuff and I guess they were addicted to some kind of illusion that stars should talk like I made them talk.” He claimed he was never asked for proof, that his editors had approved of his methods. As Stern’s publisher told the Times, they — Kummer and his editors — “appeared to have a different idea of journalism.” Read more…

Insomnia: To Pursue Sleep So Hard You Become Invigorated By the Chase

Telling time at night using a nocturnal, 1539. Hulton Archive / Getty

Marina Benjamin | an excerpt adapted from Insomnia | Catapult | November 2018
| 8 minutes (2,134 words)

Sometimes the rattle of a clapper sounds over your bed. Or a ghostly draft lifts the hairs on the back of your neck, cooling your skin; or there’s an upstroke, feather light, along the inside of your forearm. A sudden lurch, maybe just a blink, then a sense of falling upward and it is there. So are you.

If we insist on defining something in terms of what it annuls then how can we grasp the essence of what is lost when it shows itself? And how can we tell if there is anything to be gained by its presence? This is the trouble with insomnia.

When I am up at night the world takes on a different hue. It is quieter and closer and there are textures of the dark I have begun paying attention to. I register the thickening, sense-dulling darkness that hangs velvety as a pall over deep night, and the green-black tincture you get when moisture charges the atmosphere with static. Then there is the gently shifting penumbra that heralds dawn and feels less like the suggestion of light than a fuzziness around the edges of your perception, as if an optician had clamped a diffusing lens over your eyes then quizzed you about the blurred shapes that dance at the peripheries of your vision. In sleeplessness I have come to understand that there is a taxonomy of darkness to uncover, and with it, a nocturnal literacy we can acquire. Read more…

The House on Mayo Road

Dougal Waters / Getty Images / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Dur e Aziz Amna | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,986 words)

The spring I turned 12, I moved to an all-girls school, and my family moved from a tiny two-bedroom in the outskirts of Pindi to a huge house in the heart of the city, 30 minutes from Pakistan’s capital. I remember walking into the vast emptiness of the new house, my shoes leaving imprints on the dusty floor. It was a January afternoon in 2004, and the sun came in through windows we would later find to be full of cracks. The garden sprouted weeds. My two brothers and I ran upstairs, knowing our parents would take the downstairs bedroom by the front door. There were two rooms on the second floor, both with their own bathroom. I told my mother, “Ammi, I’m the eldest, I want the bigger one.” She glared at me and said, “We’ll see.”

As we moved in over the next few months, I understood why Ammi had been in a foul mood. For me and my brothers, the house meant lots of space. It sat a stone’s throw away from GT Road, the historic highway that once ran from Kabul to Chittagong. It had a garden in the front and a yard in the back, large enough for us to set up a badminton net. For Ammi, the move brought months of scrubbing, washing, organizing. “Don’t think they ever cleaned this place, the old bastards,” she said under her breath as she threw a pail of water onto the grimy marble floor, the air alive with the smell of wet dust.

Built in the 1960s and given to senior employees in Pakistan’s civil service, the house was meant for officers who would hire an entourage of help to sweep the cavernous rooms, take cobwebs off the high ceilings, clean the furry grit that collected on the fans, and water the wild jasmine that bloomed every March, turning the living room fragrant. The lady of the house, the begum, often stayed at home to supervise and entertain. My mother had gotten her first teaching job months after I was born, charming the nearby school principal by telling him that Anna Karenina was her favorite book. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” she told me years later. “I never finished the book, but that was its first line.” I turned the sentence over in my head, a bit miffed by Tolstoy. I felt like we were happy in our own way.

In the years to come, Ammi continued teaching English at a school nearby. She would come home later than us most days, then take a nap during which we tiptoed around the house, knowing that even the slightest sound might disturb her. Once, when we went to wake her up, she made us lie down next to her and asked, “Do you wish you had one of those mothers who stayed at home all day and took care of you?” We gave emphatic nos, because we thought Ammi was quite all right.

Soon after we’d moved in, the house splintered into two worlds. There was the world downstairs: that of morning parathas, Quran lessons, and structured TV hours (one hour a day, from 8 to 9 p.m.). Here, we came dressed in our ironed school uniforms: a maroon tunic for me, white shirts and maroon ties for my brothers. Here, we acted like the good kids our parents knew us to be. After guests left from dinner parties, my parents sometimes said, “Did you see their kids? So ill-mannered.” We, on the other hand, sat in a tight three-headed row in the drawing room, speaking when spoken to, taking no more than two kebabs even when offered.

At 9, we were sent to bed, the staircase a portal to the other world. Despite my initial desire to bag rooms, we had all taken to sleeping in the bedroom my brothers shared, its walls a freshly painted blue. My room was sea green, my favorite color, but we were conscientious kids, and my parents said it was wasteful to keep two fans going. For several hours each night, we sprawled around on the bed, sometimes talking but often not. The room always had dozens of library books lying around. In a childhood shaped by discipline, books were one thing we were allowed to be obsessive and unruly about. The librarian at my mother’s school always let us check out 50 books at a time. “Jamila’s kids, such readers,” she’d marvel to her colleagues.
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Consider Who Can Afford the Oyster

You may know Ruby Tandoh as the runner-up from season 4 of The Great British Bake Off; you may not know that she’s a thoughtful writer working hard to stretch the boundaries of what “food writing” means. In Vice UK, she uses the life of ur-food writer M.F.K. Fisher — whose Consider the Oyster is about to be republished — as fertile ground for an exploration of the limits and potential of food writing.

The boundaries of food writing are hard to trace, but what is clear is that in spite of the soaring popularity of the food memoir and its ilk, little editorial time and space is being given to topics that sit in more overtly political territories. The Guardian‘s Feast magazine, and many other national food supplements, are rich with imagery, whimsy, and culinary flights of fancy, but largely apolitical. Famine, urban food deserts, food legislation, and the workplace rights of restaurant employees lie outside of the remit of much contemporary food writing, shoved sideways instead into environmental or political journalism and often taken off the plate entirely…

“Pearls,” Fisher explains, “grow slowly, secretly, gleaming ‘worm-coffins’ built in what may be pain around the bodies that have crept inside the shells.” Just as the parasite, the wound and the body converge in the milky stillness of a pearl, food writing must allow itself to crystallise around points of tenderness. Moving away from the assertive “you are what you eat,” we can venture into a more uncertain, questioning space: Why do you eat what you eat? Who has the freedom to eat for pleasure, and who does not? Why does food matter at all? We start, but do not finish, with the Fisher-esque culinary selfie. The gastronomical “me” is no longer a monolith but an anchor point: a place in time, space, family, and culture from which we might turn our lens outwards to explore issues of hunger as well as comfort, suffering as well as joy.

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