Search Results for: Washington Post

American Green

Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Ted Steinberg | American Green | W. W. Norton & Company | March 2006 | 43 minutes (7,070 words)

 

Although there are plenty of irrational aspects to life in modern America, few rival the odd fixation on lawns. Fertilizing, mowing, watering — these are all-American activities that, on their face, seem reasonable enough. But to spend hundreds of hours mowing your way to a designer lawn is to flirt, most would agree, with a bizarre form of fanaticism. Likewise, planting a species of grass that will make your property look like a putting green seems a bit excessive — yet not nearly as self-indulgent as the Hamptons resident who put in a nine-hole course with three lakes, despite being a member of an exclusive golf club located across the street. And what should we make of the Houston furniture salesman who, upon learning that the city was planning to ban morning mowing — to fight a smog problem comparable to Los Angeles’s — vowed to show up, bright and early, armed and ready to cut.“I’ll pack a sidearm,” he said. “What are they going to do, have the lawn police come and arrest me?”

Surprisingly, the lawn is one of America’s leading “crops,” amounting to at least twice the acreage planted in cotton. In 2007, it was estimated that there were roughly twenty-five to forty million acres of turf in the United States. Put all that grass together in your mind and you have an area, at a minimum, about the size of the state of Kentucky, though perhaps as large as Florida. Included in this total were fifty-eight million home lawns plus over sixteen thousand golf-course facilities (with one or more courses each) and roughly seven hundred thousand athletic fields. Numbers like these add up to a major cultural preoccupation.

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The Martha Stewarting of Powerful Women

Illustration by Jason Raish

Ann Foster | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,613 words)

On March 5th, 2004, Martha Stewart was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators. At the time, she was one of comparatively few female CEOs, and she was irrevocably tied to her company’s success: her smiling, serene, WASPy perfection thoroughly entwined with her company’s numerous ventures. When she first faced charges of insider trading, news media and the general population reacted with schadenfreude, or as one New York Times article coined it, blondenfreude: the glee felt when a rich, powerful, and fair-haired business woman stumbles.” And stumble she did: In the wake of the scandal, Stewart voluntarily removed herself from most of her roles at the company, and as part of her sentencing she was barred from involvement with the empire for five years. Stewart re-joined the Board of Directors in 2011, but the company never truly bounced back from effects of the scandal.

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Shelved: Jimi Hendrix’s Black Gold Suite

Larry Hulst / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | March 2019 | 20 minutes (3,275 words)

 

On a blustery winter day in February 1970, Rolling Stone managing editor John Burks entered a New York apartment on East 37th street. “Inside his manager’s neo-turn-of-the-century apartment, on a sofa near the radiant fireplace, sat Jimi Hendrix, in a gentle, almost reticent frame of mind,” Burks wrote. “The light snow had begun to fall. You could see that through the narrow slits where the curtain allowed the merest sliver of daylight and streetscene to penetrate into the gloomy dark room.”

Burks was brought in to provide the centerpiece for a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign: a feature story about the reforming of the original Jimi Hendrix Experience. The group, consisting of Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding, and drummer Mitch Mitchell (both of whom were white) had disbanded the previous autumn. Since then, the rock ‘n’ roll guitar virtuoso had busied himself by befriending other African Americans: Trumpeter Miles Davis, jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and (according to Burks) “living and jamming with an all-purpose crew of musicians — everything from older black gentlemen from the South who played blues guitar, to a band of avant garde jazz/space musicians under the general leadership of a flute player named Juma — and talking about coming up with something new.”

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Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55

Mick Hudson / Getty, istock / Getty Images Plus, Michael Ochs Archive / Getty, Vinnie Zuffante / Getty, pidjoe / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | July 9th, 2019 | 24 minutes (6,539 words)

It’s hard to tell whether Thurston Moore is being sarcastic or sincere. It’s probably a bit of both. “The biggest star in this room is Courtney Love,” says the Sonic Youth singer and guitarist in a scene from 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The documentary follows Sonic Youth’s summer 1991 European tour and features performances and backstage antics from their tourmates, including a pre-Nevermind Nirvana, Babes in Toyland, and Dinosaur Jr.

Moore comments during an interview with 120 Minutes, an MTV program that spotlighted alternative music in the days before the music channel became the home of teen moms and spoiled Laguna Beach brats. As Moore declares his love of English food to the host — most definitely sarcasm — Love is behind him trying to get the camera’s attention. She waves and appears to stand on something to make herself taller. Her efforts pay off and soon she is in front of the host, all brazen, blond, and sporting blue baby doll barrettes.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, Moore was right. Love’s band Hole wasn’t on the European tour bill that summer and their debut album Pretty on the Inside hadn’t even been released yet, but Love was already on MTV.

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The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes

Illustration by Aimee Flom

Leigh Hopkins | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,131 words)

 

The roosters started at 4:30 in the pasture behind the inn. On the second crow, I rolled onto my back and blinked at the jalousie window’s slatted light, considering my first day at The Casa. We were allowed to ask three questions, no more. A visit with the world’s most famous spiritual surgeon was like going to see the wizard.

Mariana was silent in the bed next to me, the sleep falling in loose spirals across her face. I pulled back the sheets and slipped inside. “Bom dia.”

“Bom dia, meu amor.” A soft sound from a distant place.

Seven and a half years later, I receive a text from a friend in Rio: “Did you see the news?” She links to a New York Times article: “Celebrity Healer in Brazil Is Accused of Sexually Abusing Followers.”

***

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The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Rose Eveleth | Longreads | July 2019 | 12 minutes (2,883 words)

Sarah Howe’s early life is mostly a mystery. There are no surviving photographs or sketches of her, so it’s impossible to know what she looked like. She may, at one point, have been married, but by 1877 she was single and working as a fortune-teller in Boston. It was a time of boom and invention in the United States. The country was rebuilding after the Civil War, industrial development was starting to take off, and immigration and urbanization were both increasing steadily. Money was flowing freely (to white people anyway), and men and women alike were putting that money into the nation’s burgeoning banks. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison created the lightbulb. In between those innovations, Sarah Howe opened the Ladies’ Deposit Company, a bank run by women, for women. 

The company’s mission was simple: help white women gain access to the booming world of banking. The bank only accepted deposits from so-called “unprotected females,” women who did not have a husband or guardian handling their money. These women were largely overlooked by banks who saw them — and their smaller pots of money — as a waste of time. In return for their investment, Howe promised incredible results: an 8 percent interest rate. Deposit $100 now, and she promised an additional $96 back by the end of the year. And to sweeten the deal, new depositors got their first three months interest in advance. When skeptics expressed doubts that Howe could really guarantee such high returns, she offered an explanation: The Ladies’ Deposit Company was no ordinary bank, but instead was a charity for women, bankrolled by Quaker philanthropists. 

Word of the bank spread quickly among single women — housekeepers, schoolteachers, widows. Howe, often dressed in the finest clothes, enticed ladies to join, and encouraged them to spread the news among their friends and family. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy worked, Howe’s bank gathered investments from across the country in a time before easy long-distance communication. Money came in from Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington, all without Howe taking out a single newspaper advertisement. She opened a branch of the bank in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had plans to add offices in Philadelphia and New York to keep up with the demand. Many of the women who deposited with the Ladies’ Deposit Company reinvested their profits back in the bank, putting their faith, and entire life savings, in Howe’s enterprise. All told, the Ladies Deposit would gather at least $250,000 from 800 women — although historians think far more women were involved. Some estimate that Howe collected more like $500,000, the equivalent of about $13 million today. 

It didn’t take long for the press to notice a woman encroaching on a man’s space. And not just any woman, a single woman who had once been a fortune-teller! “Who can believe for a moment that this woman, who a few years ago was picking up a living by clairvoyance and fortune-telling, is now the almoner of one of the greatest charities in the country?” asked the Boston Daily Advertiser. Reporters were particularly put off by their inability to access even the lobby of Howe’s bank, turned away at the door for being men. One particularly intrepid reporter, determined to find out what Howe’s secret was, returned dressed as a woman to gain entry and more information. 


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Then, in 1880, it all came crashing down. On September 25, 1880, the Boston Daily Advertiser began a series of stories that exposed Howe’s bank as a fraud. Her 8 percent returns were too good to be true. Howe was operating what we now know as a Ponzi scheme — 40 years before Ponzi would try his hand at it. 

Here’s how it worked: When a new depositor arrived, Howe would use their money to pay out older clients, so the whole scheme required a constant influx of new depositors to pay out the old ones. Like every other Ponzi fraudster, Howe’s bank would have eventually run out of new money. The run of stories in the Boston Daily Advertiser instilled enough fear in the bank’s investors that they began to withdraw their money, and eventually there was a run on Howe’s bank. 

Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain.

It took two weeks and five days from the first story published in the Advertiser uncovering Howe’s fraud before she was arrested. The press extended her victims a modicum of sympathy, describing their plights while also reminding the reader that they deserved their pain for trusting a woman with their money. “I put every dollar I had into the bank, and if I lose it I am a beggar,” one depositor told the Boston Globe at the time. “I wanted the interest so badly, that I placed a mortgage on my furniture to secure the principal to deposit. Oh! I wish I hadn’t now, for I shall have my goods sold from under my head,” said another. 

Howe, on the other hand, was spared no remorse. The Boston Herald claimed that Howe was “nearly as deaf as a post” and cross-eyed. Banker’s Magazine described Howe as “short, fat, very ugly, and so illiterate as to be unable to write an English sentence, or to speak without making shameful blunders.” This is all untrue, as Howe’s own statements to the press before her downfall suggest that, in fact, she had a sharp wit. In response to one newspaper’s critique of the Ladies’ Deposit Bank, Howe wrote: “The fact is, my dear man, you really know nothing of the basis, means or methods on which our affairs are conducted, and when shut up in the meshes of your savings-bank notions, you attempt an exposition of the impossibility of our existence, you boggle and flounder about like a bat in a fly trap.” 

 Nevertheless, as soon as she was caught, a backstory for Howe emerged in the papers. The Boston Herald published a story with the headline “Mrs. Howe’s Unsavory Record,” claiming she was born out of wedlock and ran away at 15 to marry an “Indian physician,” who they also referred to as “her dark-skinned Othello.” The paper claimed the marriage caused her mother such distress that she wound up dying in an asylum “raving over the heartlessness of her daughter.” The story also alleged that she then left her first husband, married two house painters in quick succession, had been in and out of prison, and even tried to lure a young girl into prostitution. Basically none of this can be confirmed by historians, but it didn’t matter. Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain. As historian George Robb writes in his paper about Sarah Howe, “She had to be ugly, vulgar and immoral.” The only way her story could make sense to readers was if Howe was some kind of abomination — a complete outlier both physically and mentally.  

 “I’m sure she was just a normal-looking person,” Robb told me. “Until the whole thing unraveled, when people talked about her, no one described her as anything other than an ordinary person.” But in Victorian-era Boston, the idea that a woman criminal could be an “ordinary person” was impossible. “People were comfortable with the idea of women as victims,” Robb told me. “The men were the crooks, the men were doing the manipulation. The women were the victims. They needed to be protected by other men.” 

Howe wound up standing trial in Boston, and was ultimately convicted (although not of fraud, but soliciting money under false pretenses — for claiming that a Quaker charity was backing the venture). She spent three years in prison, and when she got out, in classic scammer fashion, she tried the whole thing again.

“I think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future”

Next, Howe opened up a new Woman’s Bank on West Concord Street in Boston. She kept the scheme going from 1884 to 1886, offering depositors 7 percent interest and gathering at least $50,000, although historians think the number might be far higher. This time, however, Howe was never prosecuted. After being caught and closing down her bank, she gave up the game and returned to fortune-telling and doing astrology readings for 25 cents each. She died in 1892, at the age of 65, no longer wealthy, but still notorious enough to warrant an obituary in the New York Times that read: “For three months she had been living in a boarding and lodging house, carefully keeping from those whom she met the knowledge that she was the notorious Mrs. Howe of Woman’s Bank memory.” 

***

Sarah Howe was, in some ways, a product of her time. In the late 1800s, the United States was moving out of a period marked by “free banks,” in which there were very limited rules governing banks, and into a system of national banking more familiar to us today. Money was flowing into the economy, and financial advisers were telling their clients to put their cash in banks that were now more stable than they had been in the past. This advice was often targeted at women, who couldn’t use their money to, say, start their own endeavors. But they could put their money in stocks and banks, and many of them did. In fact, during that time, women were often the majority of depositors and shareholders.

But there were very few regulations on banks. The stock market was relatively new. For women like Howe, it presented an unregulated place where money was changing hands purely on the basis of confidence. And as a fortune-teller, Howe had plenty. “I think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future, and getting people to believe that you know something about how the trends are going to play,” Robb said. 

At the time there was little fear when it came to watchdogs or regulators. Howe could start her own bank with no real procedure or oversight. “Anybody could form a bank!” Robb said, “If you could get people to give you money you could call it a bank. You advertise, you rent a fancy office space, people come and give you money. It was amazing how much money you could make before anybody caught you.” As much as people love to point fingers at Howe, very rarely do people consider the complete lack of oversight that allowed her to prey upon these women. “It’s so much easier to pick individual villains and say, ‘Oh it’s these nasty scheming people who are the problem, the capitalist system can do no wrong, it’s perfect and self-regulating and we don’t want to mess with that. It’s these individual crooks that are the problem.’” 

***

In spite of her crimes, Sarah Howe is not a household name. It’s not called a Howe scheme after all, it’s a Ponzi scheme. When Howe is mentioned at all, it’s as a punchline. She’s forever stuck as a historical fun fact. “She’s become an anecdote in history, but she should be as famous or more famous than Ponzi,” historian Robyn Hulsart told me. “There’s nothing about what she did that doesn’t fit the definition of a Ponzi scheme.” (In fact, Howe wasn’t even the first to execute this type of scam. At least two other women pulled off Ponzi schemes before her — one in Berlin, the other in Madrid.) 

It’s become popular now to say that we’re living through the golden era of the scammer. “We’re living in a scammer’s paradise,” Sarah Jeong told Willamette Week recently about our current era, “not just economic scams, but intellectual scams, too.” Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, Fyre Fest, Ailey O’Toole, Jennifer Lee, Anna March — the list is long enough that everybody from WIRED to The Cut called 2018 “the year of the scam.” As the United States recovers from the fraud that was that housing market bubble, we’re in another era of deregulation. President Donald Trump and the Republican run Senate, have gone on what has been called a “deregulation spree,” increasing the cap at which banks become subject to more stringent rules from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. Robb pointed out that we never seem to actually learn. “Whenever there’s a big boom cycle in the economy everybody screams to deregulate,” he told me, and with deregulation comes increased risk for frauds like Howe’s. 

Howe’s case also demonstrates a struggle in feminist circles that persists today: How do you balance the desire to celebrate women with the need to hold bad behavior accountable?

Howe’s legacy could and should be one that we can learn from today in the so-called era of the scam. Howe’s success was one that tells us something not just about fraud, but about economics and the conditions under which fraud can blossom into a $17 million scam. Howe was aided and abetted by the economic conditions, but she was also a wizard at her craft. What Howe mastered, beyond the Ponzi scheme, is what experts call an “affinity fraud” — going after a group of people who have something in common, and most often who the scammer has something in common with too. As an “unprotected” woman herself, Howe understood what might appeal to her clientele. She decorated the bank to create a mood and aesthetic that would appeal to her ideal mark. The Advertiser described the Ladies’ Deposit Bank this way: “The furniture, of which there are many pieces, is upholstered in raw silk of old gold figured patterns, and corresponds in tone and design with the walls. … The carpets are of a deep warm tone, and all the ornaments are rich and in good taste.” She used language that drew women in, talking about her commitment to the “overworked, ill-paid sisterhood.” Hulsart points out that it’s not unlike the language used by multilevel marketing companies like Mary Kay and Amway, which generally advertise to women through  word of mouth. “They really like to say things like ‘we’re in this together,” Hulsart says.  Read more…

Remembering Dr. John

Ronald C. Modra/Sports Imagery/Getty Images

The first Dr. John died in August 1885. He was known by many names, as New Orleans chronicler Lafcadio Hearn noted in his obituary.

“Jean Montanet, or Jean La Ficelle, or Jean Latanié, or Jean Racine, or Jean Grisgris, or Jean Macaque, or Jean Bayou, or ‘Voudoo John,’ or ‘Bayou John,’ or ‘Doctor John’ might well have been termed ‘The Last of the Voudoos,’” Hearn wrote for Harper’s Weekly that November, “not that the strange association with which he was affiliated has ceased to exist with his death, but that he was the last really important figure of a long line of wizards or witches whose African titles were recognized, and who exercised an influence over the colored population.”

The second Dr. John just died on June 6, 2019. In a way he, too, was a wizard — at least in the sense that anything done wonderfully well cannot be told from magic. This latter Dr. John was also associated with New Orleans and exercised his own influence as a singer, songwriter, and musician.

Born as Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., Dr. John was part of the third wave of influence — first jazz, then rock, and then funk — to emerge from the Crescent City, a place more responsible for American popular music than any other. His career took off while he was in exile, trying to preserve the music he grew up with. It ended with the world acknowledging his efforts to broaden our vocabulary, musically and otherwise.

“I been in the right trip,” he once sang — a line written for him by Bob Dylan, “but I must have used the wrong car.”

Born on November 20, 1941, “Mac” Rebennack grew up attending gigs and recording sessions with his music aficionado father, who turned him on to New Orleans jazz greats King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.

“Well, my father’s records were what they called ‘race records,’ which was blues, rhythm and blues, traditional jazz, and gospel,” Rebennack told Smithsonian Magazine in 2009. “He owned a record shop and had a large black clientele. They would come by and play a record to decide if they liked it. I got the idea as a little kid that I wanted to be a piano player, because I remember hearing [boogie-woogie pianist] Pete Johnson. I thought why not just be Pete Johnson?”

Fats Domino’s guitarists taught the young Rebennack some stuff. Meeting the great New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair inspired him to become a professional musician. Rebennack was present when Little Richard cut “Tutti Frutti” at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Music Shop and Studio on North Rampart street. By the early 1960s, he was playing professionally, doing session work for such local luminaries as Art Neville and Allen Toussaint. Ace Records made him an A&R man at the age of 16.

By this time, Rebennack was also hooked on heroin and subsequently busted for possession. After his release from prison in 1965, he returned to a different world. It was already more difficult to play in mixed groups. “When the civil rights movement heated up, it became more dangerous to travel as part of these package shows,” he remembered. “Before then, we used to travel all over the South with no problem — me, Earl King, Guitar Slim, Chuck Berry, people like that — but then suddenly, we started getting hassled.”

Moreover, New Orleans was trying to clean up its seedy image, and many of its music venues, according to Rebennack, were “buckets of blood joints. It was not a wholesome atmosphere where you could bring your family along. There were gang fights. The security and the police would fire guns into the crowd. … Later [New Orleans District Attorney] Jim Garrison padlocked and shut down the whole music scene.” It was time to go.

Rebennack moved to Los Angeles, where he was soon playing sessions with Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Frank Zappa. “They recruited about half of New Orleans one time to go out and do The Sonny and Cher Show,” remembered Rebennack’s friend Coco Robicheaux. “They were all out there doin’ that, and Sonny was always after [Rebennack], ‘Man, I got a state-of-the-art studio, it’s there for you any time you want it. Y’all just lay around here, why don’tcha go do somethin’?”

Rebennack had an idea about a character someone could play, based on Jean Montanet. But he didn’t want to be Dr. John. He wanted his singer friend Ronnie Barron to do it. “I was never fond of front men,” Rebennack told the Smithsonian. “I didn’t want to be one.”

Barron was the reason Rebennack switched from guitar to piano. Years before, at a gig in Jacksonville, Florida, Barron was being pistol-whipped. “Ronnie was just a kid and his mother had told me, ‘You better look out for my son,’” Rebennack remembered. “Oh god, that was all I was thinking about. I tried to stop the guy, I had my hand over the barrel and he shot.”

“It just went right through my finger,” Rebennack said. “And my finger was hanging by a piece of skin. … They put it back on in the hospital and they sewed it back on very poorly and it never did work right.” When asked how he was able to play piano with a crooked finger, Rebennack quipped, “I try to avoid that finger when I play the piano.”

Barron was also responsible for creating a stage persona early on that inspired Rebennack.

“”I met Mac Rebennack when I was 15.” Barron once said.

I’d been aware of him since I was 12, and he had a good working band that played on the west side where I lived, in Algiers. New Orleans was a real fly-by-night town, where there was a big tourist crowd and people wanted to drink. They didn’t care about the music that much, just wanted to be entertained. So I created my “Reverend Ether” character, almost by accident. I made up this mythology about the voodoo and the gumbo. I’d shake the tambourine and say, “I’m gonna drop the truth on you!” I made up all this shit. This was before I worked with Mac, when I was working in a club on Bourbon Street. He’d come in and kind of watch what I was doing. … Mac realized the value in it, and after he hired me he wanted me to be the original Dr. John, because I already had a handle on the thing.

When Barron was hired by Sonny and Cher and moved west, he gave the Reverend Ether character to Rebennack.

Back in Los Angeles, Barron wasn’t interested in adopting Rebennack’s Dr. John persona. “Ronnie was like this good-lookin’ guy, liked to wear suits, he didn’t want to be no swamp thing,” Robicheaux said. “So they talked Mac into doin’ it. ‘You be Dr. John.’ And everybody loved it.”

Rebennack’s conga player told him, “Look, if Bob Dylan and Sonny and Cher can do it, you can do it.” And so Dr. John was returned to earth and put on a mission.

“I did my first record,” Rebennack said, “to keep New Orleans gris-gris alive.”

The first Dr. John was also a gris-gris man. According to Lafcadio Hearn, Jean Montanet claimed to be a prince’s son from Senegal, of the free-born Bambara tribe. As a youth, he was kidnapped by Spanish slavers. Given back his freedom, he traveled the world as a ship’s cook, finally settling in New Orleans. He became wealthy through fortune-telling and the folk magic practices that we now know as rootwork and hoodoo.

“By-and-by his reputation became so great that he was able to demand and obtain immense fees,” Hearn wrote. “People of both races and both sexes thronged to see him — many coming even from far-away creole towns in the parishes, and well-dressed women, closely veiled, often knocked at his door.” Before long, Montanet was worth $50,000 — enormous wealth for the mid-19th century.

The gris-gris originated in West Africa, and Montanet brought the practice with him. It takes the form of a fetish, carried by the user, for protection or benefit. They are often composed of an uneven number of bones, colored objects and stones, graveyard soil, salt, and other exotic ingredients such as bird nests. Gris-gris culture was already a part of Louisiana voodoo, brought to the state by enslaved West Africans, where it syncretized with elements of Catholicism. Hearn, a white man, described Montanet’s religion as “primitive in the extreme.”

If during his years of servitude in a Catholic colony he had imbibed some notions of Romish Christianity, it is certain at least that the Christian ideas were always subordinated to the African — just as the image of the Virgin Mary was used by him merely as an auxiliary fetich in his witchcraft, and was considered as possessing much less power than the “elephant’s toof.” He was in many respects a humbug; but he may have sincerely believed in the efficacy of certain superstitious rites of his own.

Rebennack had his own “notions of Romish Christianity”: He attended New Orleans’s Jesuit High School until kicked out for his musical preoccupations. Other forces connected him to Jean Montanet. “There was a guy the name of Dr. John, a hoodoo guy in New Orleans,” Rebennack once said. “He was competition to Marie Laveau. He was like her opposite. I actually got a clipping from the Times-Picayune newspaper about how my great-great-great-grandpa Wayne was busted with this guy for running a voodoo operation in a whorehouse in 1860. I decided I would produce the record with this as a concept.”

That record was 1968’s atmospheric, ominous, and thoroughly funky Gris-Gris. “One thing I always did was believe,” Rebennack told Mojo magazine. “I used to play for gigs for the Gris-Gris church. I dug the music, and that’s what I was trying to capture.”

“They call me Dr. John, known as the Night Tripper,” he sings on “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya,” in a raspy voice predictive of Tom Waits. (Rebennack once told a New Orleans paper, “I’m tripping through the shortcuts of existment to feel it and that’s good.”)

Got my satchel of gris gris in my hand

Day trippin’ up, back down the bayou

I’m the last of the best

They call me the gris gris man

“I always thought [voodoo] was a beautiful part of New Orleans culture,” Rebennack once said. “It’s such a blend of stuff; African, Choctaw, Christianity, Spanish.” He told the Smithsonian that he’d approached “some of the reverend mothers” and asked if he could perform the sacred songs. “But I couldn’t do them because it was not for a ceremony,” he said. “So I wrote something similar. One we used went ‘corn boule killy caw caw, walk on gilded splinters.’ It actually translates to ‘cornbread, coffee, and molasses’ in old Creole dialect.”

“It’s supposed to be ‘spendors’ but I turned it into ‘splinters,’” Rebennack remembered. “I just thought splinters sounded better and I always pictured splinters when I sung it.”

Coco Robicheaux had a more complex take. “Dr. John, he was very much interested in metaphysics. We had this little place on St. Philip Street. In voodoo they call the gilded splinters the points of a planet. Mystically they appear like little gilded splinters, like little gold, like fire that holds still. They’re different strengths at different times. I guess it ties in with astrology, and influence the energy. That’s what that’s about.”

Gris-Gris didn’t do that well commercially. “What is this record you gave me?” asked Rebennack’s label boss. “Why didn’t you give me a record that we could sell?” Still, the new Dr. John created a cult following by doubling down on the hoodoo visuals. He would appear onstage in a puff of smoke, decked in feathers (or merely body paint), robes, and headdresses. For a while, one of his opening acts was someone named Prince Kiyama, who would bite the heads off live chickens and drink the blood. Sometimes his backup dancers were nude.

It should go without saying that the new Dr. John’s act had as much to do with voodoo as David Seville’s 1958 hit “Witch Doctor” did to African shamanism, which is to say, not at all. When questioned about his Dr. John stage show later in life, Rebennack insisted that “it was very authentic,” and compared the abandonment of his dancers to “things that might happen in voodoo, where they’re taken by a spirit.” It seems more like the act was designed to appeal to his young, libertine audience rather than be an avenue of understanding a different, complex belief system. At any rate, he retired all that by 1976, when Rebennack appeared at The Band’s farewell concert (later immortalized in Martin Scorcese’s documentary The Last Waltz) to sing the charming, if not entirely wholesome, “Such a Night.“

America has always had two prominent cultures: the colonial and the communal. The colonial culture mimics or appropriates the voice of the underclass, manifesting itself in minstrelsy and coon songs, and even affecting civil rights–era folk music.

The communal strain of American cultural expression has been just as strong, but more fruitful. Think of Congo Square, the place in New Orleans where the first Dr. John and Marie Laveaux plied their trades. It was here that slaves were allowed to “gather, roughly by tribe, to play music, sing, and dance” in the 18th and 19th centuries. These rhythms, when combined with blues and European modalities and military marching band instruments, became jazz. Nothing like that had existed before. In the same sense, it’s how Louisiana voodoo was created out of a gumbo of multicultural spiritual and religious expressions to become something unique. Through the centuries, we have all gathered roughly by tribe. Sometimes it’s produced magic.

Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack embodied both of these cultures. His hoodoo schtick had a little of the “bone through your nose” stereotypes typified by artists like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; it didn’t contribute much to cultural understanding beyond a new vocabulary of exotic words and phrases, which he had appropriated largely for effect.

But Rebennack was a musician — and more than that, a New Orleanian — through and through. He learned from black and white people, was shocked when a New Orleans auditorium wouldn’t let his white band back Bo Diddley, and dedicated himself to preserving that rolling, loose-limbed music he believed was dying. Later on, he often recorded with the Meters, the one band that epitomized New Orleans funk. Rebennack also revered his musical ancestors, recording tributes to Professor Longhair, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, New Orleans’s great ambassador of jazz. “I’m trying to give props to Pops,” Rebennack once said about his Armstrong dedication. “I think we’re all supposed to give props to our elders.”  

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Jason Stavers

‘They Happen To Be Our Neighbors Across the Span of a Century, But They’re Our Neighbors.’

White children celebrating after having raided the home of African Americans during the race riots, Chicago, 1919. Jun Fujita / Chicago History Museum / Getty Images

Adam Morgan | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,587 words)

 

Precisely one hundred summers ago, at least 165 people were killed in “race riots” against black Americans in cities ranging from Washington, D.C. to Bisbee, Arizona. The bloodiest conflict of that “Red Summer” unfolded on the South Side of Chicago between July 27 and August 3. It started at the 29th Street Beach, where a white man threw rocks at black swimmers and killed a 17-year-old boy named Eugene Williams. Over the next few days, 38 people were killed and more than 500 were injured as roving gangs of white men terrorized Chicago’s Black Belt.

“Chicagoans tend to be enthusiastic and vocal discussants of our own history,” Eve Ewing writes in the introduction to 1919, her second book of poetry. “But 1919 didn’t seem to make it into the timeline alongside titanic stories about Fort Dearborn, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, the World’s Columbian Exposition, the 1968 riots, Richard J. Daley, or Harold Washington.”

So Ewing — the poet of Electric Arches, the scholar of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, the comic book writer of Marvel’s Ironheart, the playwright of No Blue Memories, and arguably the most powerful cultural voice in Chicago over the past five years — set about telling the story of 1919 in a characteristically clever way. Flecked with historical photos and evocative quotes from a post-riot commission report, filled with biblical and mythological references, seamlessly bending time and genre, 1919 is an unforgettable conversation-starter. Every poem leaves a bruise. Read more…

It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)

 

Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.

Read more…

Lumbersexuality, a Sport and a Pastime

Illustration by Homestead

Jonny Diamond | LongreadsJune 2019 | 22 minutes (5,308 words)

The sound is the first thing you notice, deep and hollow, burnished steel hitting chewed-up white pine. It’s not quite the warm, resonant thok of an axe in the woods, but the nearest forest of any significance is 50 miles up the Hudson River. This is Brooklyn, one very long bow shot from the Gowanus Canal.

It’s a chilly Monday night before Thanksgiving and Kick Axe Brooklyn is surprisingly full. Around two dozen people cluster in groups of six or eight across several “ranges,” tidily built versions of the old roadhouse bar-band cages, target at one end, party at the other. There doesn’t appear to be any flannel in the crowd (for now) but there are at least three reasonably grown-out beards in plain sight. One of the beards puts his beer down next to a basket of plastic Viking helmets and walks forward to pick up an axe from a squat round block of maple (each range has one of these blocks, to which the axe is returned after it is declawed from the wood).

Nobody pays much attention as he squares himself to the softwood target 16 feet away, holding the axe — specifically, an Estwing hatchet weighing about a pound and a half — with both hands and raises it above his head. Then, in a surprisingly fluid motion, he steps toward a faded red line on the floor and releases the hatchet in the direction of several concentric red and black circles painted on the wood, axe head over handle, where it strikes fast about six inches to the left of the bull’s-eye. He shakes his head, pulls the axe from the wood, and goes to collect his beer.

Scenes like this occur with increasing frequency in cities across North America, from Toronto to Austin to L.A., as axe-throwing clubs attempt to create their own niche and fill it, something like a laidback millennial bowling alley except with deadly weapons. For some, particularly since the election of Donald Trump, the physicality and latent violence of axe throwing has served a therapeutic purpose. As Megan Stielstra wrote in an essay last year for The Believer, “I threw axes throughout the fall, waking up every morning to new impossible cruelties. … I kept trying to pass the axe to my husband, but he wouldn’t take it. ‘You need it more than I do,’ he said from behind the yellow spectator line.”

Aside from its salubrious value the basic appeal of axe throwing is not complicated: Like bowling or billiards or darts, it is a way to give loose structure to any given social gathering. When I ask Kick Axe’s Nathan Oerstler if he’s ever had to deal with any drama among the beer-drinking axe throwers, the recently promoted “axe master” (up from “axe-pert” — there is no pun left unmade at Kick Axe, as the name might suggest) demurs, explaining that most of the axe-perts are comedians or actors — theater types — and serve as much as entertainers as they do instructors or referees: in short, they keep the people happy. Kick Axe opened in December 2017 and is more flannel-inflected theme park than bar, its employees communicating via headset about what targets need replacing, which axes need sharpening. This level of organization makes sense when you consider the hundreds of pounds of deadly steel flying through the air at any given moment, but axe throwing wasn’t always this professionalized: In fact, the origin of the axe-throwing social club is basically a bunch of bored Canadians in the mid aughts, standing around drinking beer and chucking hatchets at backyard waste wood.

As Backyard Axe Throwing League (BATL) founder — and one of those bored Canadians — Matt Wilson recounted, people kept showing up to throw axes in his backyard, so he had no choice but to grow. And so they did: The BATL, which has 10 locations in Canada, has since expanded into the U.S. with spots in Chicago, Nashville, Scottsdale, Houston, and Detroit. This unlikely success story has spawned competitors: Ontario’s Bad Axe now has 15 locations across the U.S.; the aforementioned Kick Axe also has locations in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and is opening more in Florida and Texas; and there are at least a half dozen independent axe-throwing venues across the country (including Massachusetts’s Half Axe, whose name heralds the end of the useful axe pun, or at least demarcates its nadir).

Whatever side of the border these clubs are on, most of them affect a shaggy, woodsy aesthetic, a little plaid here, some taxidermied animal there. One could say the same thing of many of their patrons, from Calgary to Orlando: red-and-black Buffalo check accenting high-cut oxblood Red Wings; gray chambray tucked into vintage denim; Carhartt jackets over Carhartt vests over old Woolworth’s shirts.

Most of the axe-perts are comedians or actors — theater types — and serve as much as entertainers as they do instructors or referees: in short, they keep the people happy.

This aesthetic — lumbersexual, which entered the mainstream vernacular in 2014, at a site called GearJunkie, and was just as quickly derided on Gawker and in The Atlantic — is certainly not limited to axe-throwing clubs (one could make the case that axe throwing as a pastime has arisen, inevitably, from the aesthetic). But as a loose set of fashion signifiers, lumbersexuality has been around in some form or another for a generation, competing with any number of the self-consciously vintage looks manifested in hipster culture.

As with so many of the aesthetic strands that make up any given tangle of contemporary style-consciousness, lumbersexuality’s origins can be found on the margins, one more example of straight culture borrowing heavily from gay culture, with half the commitment and none of the risk. Beards and bears and woodsy scruff have now fully entered the mainstream as the contemporary lumbersexual reappropriates the same tropes of classic American masculinity so long adopted and amplified in LGBTQ spaces. But even the original tropes themselves — of paternal strength and rugged stoicism — are products of male fragility.

As Willa Brown points out in the perfectly titled article “Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents,” the endless talk in the past decade of a crisis of masculinity is part of a long tradition in the patriarchal American imagination. In Brown’s oft-cited 2014 account for The Atlantic, the nostalgia-ridden aesthetic of the lumberjack has always been an outsize performance instigated by the insecurities of straight, white men, be it 1905 or 2005. But where Brown saw an imminent expiration date for the lumbersexual, it doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.

As traditional hierarchies very slowly flatten into a more equitable distribution of power across society, the current crisis of masculinity is finding extended life in the backwaters of the internet. And while the real crisis of masculinity is male violence against women, the proliferation of pseudo-intellectual charlatans simultaneously seeding and harvesting the anxieties of young men for their own uses isn’t helping.

Male fragility isn’t going away. Nor is the flannel. Because there’s another performance happening here: different stage, same costume.

***

Back-to-the-land nostalgia has existed in the United States for almost as long as there’s been a United States, at various points manifesting as religious isolationism (think saucer-eyed Protestant sects one valley over), transcendentalist escapism (rich white guys reading poetry in the gloaming), and communitarian anti-capitalism. Its latest incarnation — rooted chiefly in an environmentalism that gestures at change through practice rather than policy — has been about bringing the virtues of the land back to the city, reimagining the frontier as urban rather than rural: a bespoke localism that animates everything from figurative fireside hobbies like pickling and needlepoint to larger-scale industry like rooftop farming, craft-brewing, and restorative, salvage-based building.

But in the same way the “frontier” of the 18th and 19th centuries was a romantic way of describing a slow genocidal war of settler colonialism, so too did gentrification’s border zones, through the mid 1980s to the late 2000s, serve as locations of displacement much more so than the idealized renewal imagined by urban planners. From its early days, gentrification was similarly romanticized with the language of westward expansion, those in its vanguard heralded as “settlers” and “urban pioneers.”

For good or for ill, these “pioneers” — comprised largely of artists in search of an affordable life in the city, abetted by canny real estate speculators — wore the mantle proudly as they built out semi-legal living spaces in (often but not always) sparsely populated post-industrial neighborhoods, sometimes squatting entire buildings. They were essentially homesteading — stealing power from the grid rather than rendering tallow, jury-rigging plumbing instead of digging wells — leading precarious DIY lives based on many of the virtues of the old frontier: resilience, independence, ingenuity, competence.

There was among this early, punk-inflected group of gentrifiers — buried under layers of rebellion and irony — a quiet reverence for working-class utility, often expressed in an aesthetic straight from their stepfathers’ closets: old beat-up boots, blue short-sleeve work shirts (bonus points for actual name tags), paint-spattered coveralls, and … flannel.

This commodification of rural life and labor feels, at best, like a post-industrial Instagram fantasy, personal branding available a la carte or by kit.

Much ink has been spilled on the mass-cultural half-life of flannel, but it wasn’t until the Seattle grunge scene exploded into the mainstream in the early 1990s — with a look that had begun with bands like Minutemen and Minor Threat a decade earlier — that flannel would achieve its high fashion ascendancy, showing up in collections by designers like Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood and never really going away. The aesthetic and political interplay of these subcultures — gay, punk, DIY — would continue through the early 2000s as a youth culture raised on environmental angst looked further into the past for alternatives to the increasingly apparent cruelties of late capitalism, withdrawing to a kind of privileged moral quiet room in the handmade, the local, the slow.

Here then was a hardworking, readymade look, an identifying aesthetic with a notional connection to virtues of self-sufficiency, sustainability, the wild, and, if not out-and-out Luddism, at least an appreciation of analog competence.

But what happens when the performance overtakes the performer, when the flannel habit intensifies from urban axe throwing to rural woodcraft? What happens, in other words, when you finally buy an axe?

Well, it depends on the axe — and the performer, for that matter. If you’re Justin Timberlake, in his Man of the Woods era, the axe in question comes with a private Montana “ranch.” Timberlake, who grew up in suburban Memphis, has lately been performing a return to nature, (nature in this case being the exclusive 15,200-acre Yellowstone Club, a 21st-century millionaire land rush catering to those who want the gated community without having to see the gates). The streamable georgics resulting from this relocation — manifested as the 16 tracks on his February 2018 album, Man of the Woods — reveal little of Timberlake’s relationship to the actual woods (or mountains or fields or wilderness) and present more like a checklist of urban-versus-rural cliché, the kind you might find in the playbook of any halfway decent political operative aiming to divide and conquer. Here are some lyrics from the album’s seventh track, “Supplies”:

’Cause I’ll be the light when you can’t see

I’ll be the wood when you need heat

I’ll be the generator, turn me on when you need electricity

Some shit start to go down, I’ll be the one with the level head

The world could end now, baby, we’ll be living in The Walking Dead

Translation: My hard-won know-how (money) will save us when the poors run out of stuff. (Also, a cavil, but one doesn’t “turn on” a generator like a lamp, one starts it like a lawnmower … and “start me up” would have worked here!) In track 11, titled, naturally, “Flannel,” he sings:

Right behind my left pocket

That is where you’ll feel my soul

It’s been with me many winters

It will keep you warm

Ooh, here’s my flannel

The character’s in the way you wear it

Translation: I wear grandpa shirts and grandpas are good guys. Then, on track 14, “Living Off the Land,” we hear that:

You have to be comfortable with yourself

because that’s all there is

There’s you and nature

Soon as you think you got it all figured out, you know,

the wilderness will figure some way to teach you a lesson

As I’m alone in the forest, I’m one with my surroundings

and there’s a lot of peace in that solitude

I’ll be a mountain man ’til the day I die

 

(Living off the land)

And I break my back

And I work all night

[. . .] I’ll be damned, sometimes it’s hard,

the backed-up bills on the credit cards

Translation: One time I got a little lost on the way to Bill Gates’s cookout. It was tough. And these are the more thematically substantial tracks!

One might find more insight into how the Big West has rubbed off on the Big Pop Star with a quick look at the wilderness-adjacent merchandise from the Man of the Woods Collection, one item for each of the album’s tracks. These include nods to practical Americana like a wool Pendleton blanket, a tin of beard butter, and a trucker vest; objects from the collection that correspond to the tracks above are:

Track 7: A strongbox

Track 11: A flannel shirt, obviously

Track 14: A Best Made Co. felling axe, with custom-painted handle

These items, along with a cooler, a jean jacket, a bandanna, and more, were all available for sale at a Lower East Side pop-up shop the week the album was released, a kind of company store for Timberlake Inc.

As brother to a trucker and an actual lumberjack, it is hard for me to fully understand totems of daily labor so dramatically upsold to “influencers” under the banner of authenticity. But as obvious a target Timberlake is for derision, he’s more of a symptom than he is a cause, one more in a long line of mythologized white men, from Paul Bunyan to John Wayne, out there taming the wild as they tame themselves (but not too much), spokesmodels in the endless ad campaign for America that began with Horace Greeley telling us to go west and live off the land.

And that’s the dream we’re still being peddled, embodied by the upsold axe. That the axe in question is hanging on the wall of a pop-up store in downtown New York creates a particular kind of dissonance: Timberlake Inc. is almost too perfect a microcosm for the stylized repackaging of the outdoors, for the yearning after a frontier that never really existed and the rural “working-class” sensibilities that accompany it. This commodification of rural life and labor — its ruggedness, its whiteness — feels, at best, like a post-industrial Instagram fantasy, personal branding available a la carte or by kit; at worst, it perpetuates pernicious stereotypes, both racist and classist, about natural purity and rural misery, a paradox in service of the powerful.

As brother to a trucker and an actual lumberjack, it is hard for me to fully understand totems of daily labor so dramatically upsold to ‘influencers’ under the banner of authenticity.

But life adjacent to wild spaces — and the work that sustains it — can be good, regardless of your politics. The braiding of masculinity and wilderness is as old as the American frontier, but it’s worth considering how we might untangle the two, worth considering how we might live with the forest world — and all it has to offer us — without destroying it.

***

But maybe you’re not a rich, world famous pop star with a flannel fetish (if you’ve read this far, it’s likely you are not). Sure, axe throwing seems like a fun thing to try, but lately you’ve been spending more time upstate (whatever state that might be) car camping, or staying with friends who’ve left the city; there are campfires, fireplaces, wood to be chopped, logs to split. You are thinking of buying an axe of your own.

Where to start?

There are three basic types of axes you might acquire: a hatchet, for light camp use limbing branches and making kindling (12 to 18 inches long, around 1.5 pounds); an all-purpose camp axe for clearing saplings and light splitting (20 to 28 inches, around 2.5 pounds); a felling axe for chopping down trees (30+ inches, between 3 and 4.5 pounds). Within each of these basic categories there are dozens of varieties, based largely on the regions from which they originate: the Allagash Cruiser, the Hudson Bay Camp Axe, the Dayton Railsplitter, etc.

Whatever you’ve chosen, the first thing you’ll notice is the weight: a multipurpose Swedish forester’s axe — weighing three pounds — is a manageable tool, useful on smaller trees and for light splitting. You’ll probably pick it up by the end of its American-hickory handle using your dominant hand. If you’re lucky, it comes to you as an already well-used and well-loved tool, the wood worn to a tacky smoothness by years of sweat and sap and the occasional reapplication of linseed oil. It will feel heavier than three pounds should.

Next, you’ll probably hoist the heavy end up into the other hand, striking a slightly awkward pose halfway between lumberjack and serial killer.

Perhaps the light will catch the burnished cheek of the blade, and you’ll reach a tentative finger to the hardened edge, which, if properly sharpened, can dry-shave the hairs from your arm. You’ll continue to feel that weight, three pounds starting to feel like 30, and you’ll begin to wonder: What can I chop with this? The axe is one of the oldest tools we have, designed, essentially, by gravity (which does most of the work anyway) — when you pick it up, you’ll want to let it fall.

Let’s say you’re in the woods — on a weekend camping trip or at a friend’s woodsy cabin — so there’s a lot it could fall on. For a first swing, a nice, newly down log is good for practice — in a wild forest, there should be plenty of recently downed deadfall not yet rotten.

You stand square to the log — imagine it as Eastern red cedar, for its intense scent and lurid scarlet heartwood — and raise high the axe. The weight will do the rest. If the swing is true, there will resonate from the tree — through still-growing sapwood to the compressed cells of the dying core — a deeply satisfying, percussive boom, scattering birds and startling deer. The first swing invites another, and then another, until a deep ringing rhythm echoes through the forest. It’s hard work, but in its repetition it is meditative.

That sound, of axe on wood, calls back to a hundred generations of humankind, invites considerations of how our ancestors might have understood their place in a world covered by forest. Sitting there, axe across knees, taking a breather, it’s not so hard to imagine them.

Shaggy Briton woodsmen in the vast pre-Roman forests of Cumbria, gripping their sacred Langdale axes, with glimmering heads knapped from the rare volcanic greenstone mined from the Pike of Stickle.

A barefoot Japanese carpenter moving gingerly across a hinoki cypress swinging his heavy, long-handled masakari, leaving palm-size chips of wood as a massive six-by-six beam reveals itself from the 16-foot log.

A pair of Basque foresters, generations ahead of the chainsaw, laboring astride two great beech trees pulled from deep within the Irati Forest, locked in a traditional aizkolaritza, a village-wide test of strength, precision, and endurance to see who might hew the finest, fastest timber.

Tireless Henderson Islanders squaring off Pacific rosewood, adzes made from giant clamshells, chewing out chocolate shavings from the dark heartwood. 

A thousand miles and a thousand years separate these moments of labor, and at the heart of each, the same basic motion: Pick up the heavy thing and let it fall; let the weight do the work, or at least half of it.

This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence; it lets us measure our labor swing by swing, as we gather fuel for heat or timber for shelter. To look at a stand of trees, axe in hand rather than chainsaw, is to understand it not as a resource for the coming weeks or months, but for subsequent years and generations. And though the axe confers an intoxicating dominion, over woodlot and wood target both, it is a tool that invites a way of seeing that is very old indeed. The various eras of human prehistory seem named for dynastic families from alien worlds — the Mousterian, the Denisova, the Aurignacian. It is the Acheulean in which early stone hand tools begin to flourish, particularly what is now referred to by paleoanthropologists as the “hand-axe.”

The Acheulean “hand-axe” is not an axe in the modern sense; really, it’s just a big rock with two chipped-off edges, bits of flint “knapped” away to create a biface the better to dig or cut with, to remove bark from a tree or, even, to fell that tree by hand. Perhaps, also, the better to kill with, human history providing no shortage of reminders that any distinction between tool and weapon derives from delusions of civilization. 

The finer specimens of these hand-axes, unearthed across Europe and Africa, from the Fells of Cumbria to the river gorges of the Olduvai Valley, have the shape of great and heavy tears. For centuries, British farmers, turning one up with plough or spade, thought of them as thunderstones, specially formed rocks either dropped from the heart of terrible storms, or seeded deep beneath the earth by lightning strikes, gifts of creation, that man might make better dominion of a world made just for him. 

Hand-axes represent the evolution of a very basic technology, and one can imagine that moment when the blunt rock was discarded for the edged rock, followed quickly by the thought, in not so many words: “What if I made this even sharper?”

And so these rough-hewn stones-as-tools, ranging in size from an iPhone to a toaster, underwent refinement over scores of generations — and with that refinement toward balance and symmetry, they began to take on value, both material and spiritual. Hand-axes, their abundance and quality, became a symbol of wealth, a currency; and those created from rarer elements (the deeper in the earth the better) were revered as religious symbols, not to be used as tools, but rather thought of as we now think of art. As French paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan puts it, in contemplating the unlikely craftsmanship of such early humans:

It seems difficult to admit that these beings did not experience a certain aesthetic satisfaction, they were excellent craftsmen who knew how to choose their material, repair defects, orient cracks with total precision, drawing out a form from a crude flint core that corresponded exactly to their desire. Their work was not automatic or guided by a series of actions in strict order, they were able to mobilize in each moment reflection and, of course, the pleasure of creating a beautiful object.

Though Gourhan is writing about human beings 10,000 years ago, he could be describing a certain strain of contemporary axe maker, for whom an axe is just as at home on a pristine West Village gallery wall as it is in the back of a woodshed.

About a decade ago, Peter Buchanan-Smith, a Canadian designer living in New York City, found himself in need of a hatchet to make some kindling. Looking to grill a choice cut of meat over a hot, wood-fueled fire, Buchanan-Smith found himself unimpressed by the cheap, poorly made imports at nearby hardware stores (dull edges, synthetic handles), so he expanded his search for a better, American-made tool.

The story might have ended there, but shortly after Buchanan-Smith finally did get his hands on a decent axe, he decided to customize the handle in colorful stripes: and just like that, the Best Made Co. was born. (Buchanan-Smith declined to talk to me for this story and is, I’m told, transitioning away from the company.)

Things happened quickly from there. Buchanan-Smith, who’d won a Grammy for his art for a Wilco album cover and who’d done design work for Isaac Mizrahi and David Byrne, was well known among New York’s art and design community, and very soon after the first axe was painted, it was hanging on the wall of Partners + Spade in Manhattan. That was in May 2009; a month later, in anticipation of Father’s Day, the fledgling brand sold out its stock (100 axes) in an hour.

The past decade has been a good one for Best Made Co. with the opening of a flagship store in lower Manhattan, followed by a 2,700-square-foot showroom in L.A.; and on top of their apparent domination of the bespoke axe market, the company has gone all in with a full line of forest-forward gear and apparel. So, if anyone has a full view of the aesthetic arc of lumbersexuality, it’s Buchanan-Smith, who’s described his ideal customer as “Alaskan Charles Eames (rather than Brooklyn Grizzly Adams).” And while someone who relies on tools but also likes good design is certainly cooler than dresses up like someone who relies on tools, it helps that the former usually has a little more money to spend than the latter.

One might wonder how great the difference could be possibly be from one axe to the next, but it only takes an afternoon at the wood pile to appreciate good steel as opposed to bad: the former holds its shape longer, has a stronger edge, stays sharper, and is less prone to chipping or breaking, all of which makes for a safer, more efficient axe. It is taken for gospel — at least on the internet of old guys and their tools — that the older the axe, the better the steel.

You are thinking of buying an axe of your own. Where to start?

If you’re looking, it’s not hard to find someone in just about every rural county in the country with a grinding wheel, a set of files, and a strop, who will take your grandfather’s axe and return it to its former glory. And for every one of those guys there are a hundred others hanging out in online forums asking one another the best way to rebevel the edge on a timber-hewing broadaxe or how to de-pit the cheek of a 100-year-old New Jersey pattern felling axe. (To its credit, Best Made’s L.A. store has a counter devoted to restoring and refurbishing old tools, from cast-iron pans to axes.)

Navigating sites like BladeForums.com and TalkBlade.info, a theme begins to emerge: New, mass-produced things are bad; old, handcrafted things are good. And while there’s an awful lot of grumpy conservatism burbling through these forums, spiked with a mild dose of over-the-counter libertarianism, if you squint past the bumper-sticker usernames and shallow isolationism, the underlying politics run parallel to much of the contemporary green movement, from the embrace of all things local to a rejection of late-capitalist disposability. Granted, from the conservative direction these politics are rooted in a nostalgia that veers into apocalyptic nativism, but it is bewildering to see how similar in outlook — when it comes to craftsmanship, consumerism, conservation — so many people are who otherwise identify with different ends of the political spectrum.

***

Politics doesn’t come up much at my return visit to Kick Axe for the opening of spring league night — it’s likely that the ideological spectrum here is similar to any Brooklyn bar on a Monday evening, which is to say not as liberal as Twitter would have you believe. I sit back and watch 76 amateur axe throwers crowd around league master Anthony Oglesby, who stands upon a stump introducing new rules and reminding competitors of the old, part carnival barker, part vice principal.

There is more flannel in this crowd than the last time I was here, more self-conscious woodsiness expressed through beards and boots, so I’m not exactly sure where Melanie Serrapica fits in. In her late 20s, Serrapica is wearing a semiformal low-cut red dress, and if it weren’t for the custom-painted hatchet she holds lightly in her right hand, its handle a gradient from lustrous black into midnight blue, I’d assume she’d entered the wrong bar.  

“[Axe throwing] is a great way to blow off steam after coming from work, where you want to throw things at people but aren’t allowed,” Serrapica deadpans, despite having to yell over the anticipatory din of her fellow axe throwers. Her friend Sara Morabito nods in agreement. “We’re two nerds who don’t do things other than conventions,” she says, gesturing to her fiancé Chris Knowles. “This was the first athletic thing where we were both like, ‘We’re really good at this.’ It’s a great thing to do together.”

Like Serrapica, Morabito and Knowles fell hard for the pleasures of axe throwing, and also have their own custom axes (hand-painted by fellow league member, Tommy Agniello) — unlike Serrapica, they have yet to name their axes. “Yeah, I named it Axe-Po,” Serrapica says. “You know, like B-MO from Adventure Time?” (I don’t.) As the subject turns to axe care and sharpening technique, I ask the trio why they think axe throwing has become so popular. Chris (who favors a double-grit sharpening puck for maintaining his blade) gets to the heart of it: “It’s something that feels masculine and outdoorsy, and I think people are looking for that.”

This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence.

 

You don’t need a gender studies degree to understand that ideas of masculine and feminine exist on a spectrum that doesn’t map across a male-female binary; in fact, the league crowd is as diverse in gender as you’d expect of a bar in Brooklyn on a Monday night. As I circulate among teams with names like Inside the Axer’s Studio, Axes of Evil, and Well, Axetually, interrupting people as they get in a few more practice throws before the competition starts, one name keeps coming up: Rebecca. The best. Unbeatable. Rebecca is the best axe thrower. “Number one last season, and the season before.” Nobody knows if she’s coming tonight, nobody seems able to spot her or her girlfriend in the crowd. Someone thinks she might have moved upstate, “to be closer the woods,” and I can’t tell if they’re fucking with me. She’s already a legend, the more so in her absence.

People are drinking — each league night has its own beer sponsor — and it gets noticeably louder as the new season begins, the title wide open and up for grabs in this new and Rebecca-less reality. Soon into it I notice a woman pressing a call button next to her range, an intense look on her face: It’s too early for a wood replacement on the target, so she’s looking for a judgment. An axe-pert calls the league-master over, and all parties approach the target, like lawyers approaching the bench, to peer and point at an axe stuck just off the bull’s-eye. League-master Anthony waves over at Kick Axe’s manager, Nic Espier, who, with his suit and his earpiece looks like he’d take a bullet if ordered to, goes over to settle the issue.

“Seven points decided last year’s title,” he tells me, after judging in favor of the button-pusher. “These guys look like they’re having fun, but they take it pretty seriously.”

The pleasures of axe throwing or wood splitting or tree felling aren’t for everyone — nor, indeed, are they available to most. But it would be a shame to dismiss these things we yearn for — open spaces, wilderness, a particular kind of labor — simply because we’ve had them so relentlessly repackaged and sold back to us.

So let the axe be many things — tool, work of art, diversion — but let it also be a way back into the forest. Let this very old machine remind us of our limits and show us not what is ours to use, but ours to preserve.

***

Jonny Diamond is a writer and editor who splits his time between New York City and the Hudson Valley. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Geist, Hobart Pulp, Rolling Stone, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book-length object history of the axe, part investigation of its symbolism in America’s westward expansion, part interrogation of contemporary tropes of masculinity and wilderness. He is the editor-in-chief of LitHub.com

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