Search Results for: Time

It’s Not a Literary Renaissance When You’ve Been Telling Stories Since the Dawn of Time

AP Photo/Michael Probst

The Native literary community suffered a very public loss when author Sherman Alexie admitted to sexually harassing women. But Alexie was only one of the most visible indigenous writers. Many Native people have written strong literary work for a long time, from Leslie Marmon Silko to Joy Harjo to N. Scott Momaday. At BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen reports on the new generation who is redefining indigenous literature, and how these writers are reclaiming the means of production in the form of their own creative writing programs.

Traditional MFA programs are very Eurocentric, just as American commercial publishing is Eurocentric. Native American tribes have ancient oral traditions, proving again and again that there are many ways to tell stories outside the Western tradition. Now Native American writers have the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) MFA program to provide room to create art unburdened by white aesthetic standards. Founded in 2012, two-thirds of IAIA’s faculty are indigenous, and two of its graduates, Terese Marie Mailhot and Tommy Orange, have recently published searing books that have gotten people talking. In addition to education and encouragement, the program aims to “claim visibility,” because, as the author notes, “Many people in the US have never met a Native American; they don’t see or interact with Natives in their everyday lives. Natives aren’t characters in the books and films and music and art they consume.”

“One of the reasons I wrote a polyphonic novel is that I come from a voiceless community,” Orange told me. “And in a similar way, with IAIA, I want to usher in as many new voices as possible. We’re just trying to get to the baseline of humanity, and not be a textbook image that’s remembered and spoken of in the past tense. That’s where our urgency comes from.”

For Mailhot, Orange, and so many writers I spoke to at IAIA, it’s not just about the book deals. It’s about what they call Native Excellence — and creating a path to it with its own expectations and standards, instead of relying on those established by white academia or publishing.

“I think it’s a type of arrival, when you get to make those decisions for yourself,” Mailhot said. “It’s very different for indigenous people, and black people, and people of color, because we are so often told to doubt ourselves, and our aesthetics, and what we do, simply because some of us are not traditionally taught how to write. And even if we are, we are looked at as if we don’tknow how — that we’re not authorities of our own work. And I just don’t buy it anymore.”

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The Golden Globes’ Untimely Snubs

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins (Photo: Sipa USA via AP)

After 31 years on this earth, I was compelled this week to learn who nominates the Golden Globes. (It’s the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, in case you also did not know, and no, I do not know who is in that association.)

I was compelled to learn because their nominations this year were so wildly flawed. They are probably flawed every year, which is unfortunate because they are apparently a good predictor of who will be nominated for the Oscars.

But the flaws were particularly striking this year, as Hollywood is undergoing a reckoning, a purge even, of the bad men who have for so long controlled who gets ahead and who, despite their magnificent, obvious talent, appears to stagnate.

So it struck many people as odd that all five nominees for Best Director are men, in a year when Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird shattered box-office records and was deemed by critics as “perfect,” when Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman changed the game for superhero movies, and when Dee Rees’ Mudbound took a genre historically controlled by white men and told a story in a way that had never been done before.

Snubbing those directors seems not just unfair but illogical, as The Verge noted. The same post also reminded us that only three women have been nominated for Best Director in the last 20 years and none has won a Golden Globe. (Kathryn Bigelow did win an Oscar for her directing of The Hurt Locker in 2009 — making history as the first woman to win for directing, and one of only three women to ever be nominated at that time.)

Yes, Gerwig got a best screenplay nomination. Yes, Mudbound has two nominations as well. But Wonder Woman is nowhere to be seen. Some are chalking it up to it being a superhero movie, but let’s be honest: it did for superhero movies, and for women and young girls, something that few movies had previously achieved.

Jordan Peele also was passed over for Best Director — another truly nonsensical snub, given people are still talking about Get Out many months after it left theaters. So was Kumail Nanjiani’s much-loved The Big Sick, which Nanjiani humorously tweeted about. All the director nominees are drawn from the safe, predictable ranks of the Nolans, Spielbergs, and Scotts of the world.

In an industry notorious for access journalism — in which publicists have undue control and power over coverage — it’s notable that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association seems to be currying favor with a cohort of already-powerful men, rather than attempting to recognize the great work of more recent newcomers to the field.

The good news for Peele, Nanjiani, Jenkins, Gerwig, and Rees is that while moviegoers don’t get to give them golden statues, they’ve shown their appreciation for their groundbreaking work in other meaningful ways all year. All the HFPA showed on Monday was how deeply out of touch they are with the people who really matter: people voting with their money at box offices.

Destroying Music, One Playlist at a Time

Rex Features via AP Images

The music business is struggling. File-sharing and streaming have cut into what was for decades a lucrative industry. Sure, Americans are producing more vinyl now than they have in years, but overall album sales remain down, and the average consumer doesn’t seem to want to own music anymore. They want to listen to it, and only half-listen. So how does the industry get people to pay for a product that they’ve started expecting for free? Enter Spotify.

At The Baffler, Liz Pelly puts the world’s most popular streaming service under her microscope, to look at not only how it works, but how its algorithmic system shapes how listeners value music itself. The key is in the playlist, Pelly says, and how it strips songs of their origins or any other context besides mood, and directs listeners not to albums, but back to Spotify. Spotify user satisfaction is high, but while we’re relaxing to another chill mix, the service collects data about our tastes and songs’ performances — information that advertisers use to sell us stuff, but not anything that can help sell music. Playlists are corporate-branded. Spotify isn’t the solution to the music industry’s struggles. It’s a new threat, and our $9.99 monthly subscription finances the problem.

As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll: “Chillin’ On a Dirt Road,” “License to Chill,” “Cinematic Chill Out.” They’re all there.

These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”

Indeed, Spotify’s obsession with mood and activity-based playlists has contributed to all music becoming more like Muzak, a brand that created, programmed, and licensed songs for retail stores throughout the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the company prioritized workplace soundtracks that were meant to heighten productivity, using research to evaluate what listeners responded to most. In many ways, this is not unlike the playlist category called “Focus” that we see now on Spotify. In March 2011, Muzak was purchased by Mood Media, a company that provides in-store music, signs, scents, and video content. The similarity between the objectives of companies like Muzak and Mood Media, and the proliferation of mood-based playlists on Spotify, is more than just a linguistic coincidence; Spotify playlists work to attract brands and advertisers of all types to the platform.

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TIME Person of the Year 2017: The Silence-Breakers

Longreads Pick

In a round-up cover story, Time Magazine recognizes various women and a few men in media and other fields who had the courage this year to speak out about the sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination they endured from men in power. Unfortunately, the magazine undermined the impact of naming the “silence-breakers” of the #MeToo moment as its Person of the Year by selecting sexual-predator-in-chief Donald Trump as runner-up.

Source: Time
Published: Dec 6, 2017
Length: 31 minutes (7,885 words)

Brit Bennett Reflects on Living the Past Year in “Trump Time”

380887 34: A young African American woman listens during a civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial August 28, 1963 in Washington. (Photo by National Archive/Newsmakers)

On the night Trump was elected president, I sat at home alone feeling winded; just hours earlier, I’d been at a polling site in Bed Stuy where black and brown people, many of them women, smiled and waved and high-fived each other, certain that we’d soon be celebrating a national milestone just like we had eight years before.

Writer Brit Bennett, whose debut novel The Mothers will be adapted for film with actress Kerry Washington as producer, reflects on her experience of reality in the past year since President Trump’s election in a poignant personal essay for Vogue. Back to back scandals, large and small explosions of racial animus, and the whiplash-like event of Trump following the nation’s first black president have “compressed time,” Bennett writes, and have made the author, and her mother, who grew up in Jim Crow-era Louisiana, question the notion of progress.

In Trump Time, the clock moves backward. The feeling that time itself is reversing might be the most unsettling aspect of a most unsettling year. What else is Make America Great Again but a promise to re-create the past? Through his campaign slogan, Trump seizes the emotional power of nostalgia, conjuring a glorious national history and offering it as an alternative to an uncertain future. He creates a fantasy for his base of white Americans but a threat for many others. After all, in what version of the past was America ever great for my family? “The good ol’ days?” my mother always says. “The good ol’ days for who?”

Last September, I traveled with a publicist who is also black to a warehouse in Westminster, Maryland, in order to sign books. As we left Baltimore and headed toward a city that is, according to the latest census, 87 percent white, we began to see red Make America Great Again signs on lawn after lawn. “When I see those signs, I feel the same way as when I see a Confederate flag,” I said. She understood what I meant—that visceral sense of dread. Both symbols represent a racialized nostalgia that, to me, only evokes fear.

I did not realize then that, within the year, those two symbols would collapse into each other.

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Help Alice Driver Tell One of the Stories of Our Time

Photo credit: Cambria Harkey

With the support of Longreads, I have spent the past eight months traveling, living with and interviewing migrants in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. There are some 60 million displaced people worldwide, and they have become the slave labor of the future—a population at risk to human trafficking whose bodies are used for labor ranging from sex work, to packing drugs, to picking coffee.

I interviewed a 13-year-old Guatemalan girl whose leg had been amputated due to violence suffered on the migrant trail, a transgender woman fleeing attempted murder in El Salvador, and indigenous women migrating because they wanted better access to healthcare and sexual and reproductive rights. The reasons people migrate and the violence they suffer are the stories of our time.

Alice Driver

Help support the work of Alice Driver and journalists like her who are telling the stories of our time by contributing to our member drive. You can read the first part of Alice’s series on migration and human trafficking here.

Love in the Time of Robots

Longreads Pick

Hiroshi Ishi­guro has spent his entire life in pursuit of creating a lifelike android. But what kind of life is he trying to instill in them? For Ishi­guro, other people are just mirrors and conversation is just a set of stimuli. Can a genius inventor create a near-human if he doesn’t really understand his own kind?

Author: Alex Mar
Source: Wired
Published: Oct 17, 2017
Length: 49 minutes (12,300 words)

Production of a Lifetime: Whitney Houston and Clive Davis

Longreads Pick

Race and the cutthroat music business played significant roles in Whitney Houston’s personal and career struggles, but Houston’s inability to openly embrace her sexual orientation seems to have played a role, too. This is especially tragic considering that Clive Davis, the man who signed Houston at age 19 and helped build her career, ultimately came out himself and would not publicly address the issue.

Published: Sep 30, 2017