Search Results for: amazon

The Gaijin Who Makes Great Ramen

As a ramen maniakku or enthusiast myself, I reread Lucky Peach‘s debut Ramen Issue once a year. The issue has an essay by chef Ivan Orkin, where he tells what it was like operating a ramen restaurant in Japan, as a gaijin, or outsider. Lucky Peach is a food quarterly started by chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan in 2011. The Ramen Issue is long out of print and fetches wildly high prices on eBay and Amazon, but Lucky Peach published Orkin’s essay online for the first time, just for us. Here’s an excerpt:

The first big break came at the end of August, when I was asked to make an appearance on one of the big prime-time talk shows. The episode aired on a Sunday night; on Monday, there was a line of thirty people outside a half hour before we opened. After that, the crowds kept up every day without fail. At least ten people waiting to get in every weekday, and at least thirty every weekend. Lines even in the midst of a typhoon, which happened more than once.

Following the fans came the second wave of blog entries, good and bad. My favorites were from the infamous Channel 2 websites, where anonymous writers go after everything and everyone, and where being criticized means you’ve finally arrived. Many of the threads were conspiracy theories: some people believed I was a front for a large Korean corporation, others that I was a front for a Japanese chef. The best theory was that I was actually Japanese, and only pretending to be a foreigner. It was an idea so good I wished I’d made it up myself.

Read the story

More from Lucky Peach in the Longreads Archive

Four Stories About Merle Haggard

Merle Haggard, 1975. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Legendary country singer Merle Haggard died today at 79. Here are four profiles of the master, by four master writers, that follow him through the years.

Read more…

Come Hear My Song

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | June 2015 | 18 minutes (4,437 words)

I came here looking for something

I couldn’t find anywhere else.

Hey, I’m not tryin’ to be nobody

I just want a chance to be myself.

 ─Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, “Streets of Bakersfield”

***

On North Chester Avenue in Oildale, California, an 83-year-old honky-tonk named Trout’s stands down the block from a saloon with an aged western facade, and across the street from a liquor store that sells booze and Mexican candy.

Trout’s opened in 1931 to give hard-working locals a place to dance and drink and unwind to live music.  During the 1950s and ’60s, local country music legends Buck Owens and Merle Haggard played Trout’s, in their own bands and others, and kept people dancing while helping popularize the raw, propulsive style known as the Bakersfield Sound. Read more…

Aldous Huxley’s Influence on the Esalen Institute

Photo of Esalen by Brad Coy, Flickr

Although Murphy and Price [Michael Murphy and Dick Price, Esalen’s founders] actually met Aldous Huxley only once, in January of 1962 when the author visited them briefly in Big Sur shortly before his death on November 22, 1963 (the same day, it turns out, that JFK was assassinated), his intellectual and personal influence on the place was immense. His second wife, Laura, would become a long-time friend of Esalen, where she would fill any number of roles, including acting as a sitter for one of Murphy’s psychedelic sessions.

Aldous Huxley’s writings on the mystical dimensions of psychedelics and on what he called the perennial philosophy were foundational. Moreover, his call for an institution that could teach the “nonverbal humanities” and the development of the “human potentialities” functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen. Indeed, the very first Esalen brochures actually bore the Huxley-inspired title, “the human potentiality.” This same phrase would later morph in a midnight brainstorming session between Michael Murphy and George Leonard into the now well-known “human potential movement.” When developing the early brochures for Esalen, Murphy was searching for a language that could mediate between his own Aurobindonian evolutionary mysticism and the more secular and psychological language of American culture. It was Huxley who helped him to create such a new hybrid language. This should not surprise us, as Huxley had been experimenting for decades on how to translate Indian ideas into Western literary and intellectual culture.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, writing about the founding of New Age retreat and spiritual center the Esalen Institute in his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No ReligionThe above excerpt comes from a chapter that has been reprinted on the University of Chicago Press’s website.

Read the chapter

The Box and the Basement

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Nathan Rabin | Longreads | June 2015 | 8 minutes (1,900 words)

 

“Working in the media in 2015 is like being part of an epic game of Musical chairs. Every day the music starts and you race madly to hold onto your fragile place in the world.”

I published that in a Facebook post after being let go from my latest employer, comparing working in pop culture media in 2015 to participating in an insane daily game of musical chairs. You try your best to keep up, to maintain the heat, the buzz, and the pageviews to stay in a game that has a disconcerting obsession with putting aging writers out to pasture to make way for younger, cheaper, more malleable replacements.

Every time you see that one of your film critic colleagues has been let go or taking a buyout (see: Lisa Schwarzbaum, who was at Entertainment Weekly for 22 years before taking a buyout, or Claudia Puig who took a USA Today buyout after reviewing films there for 15 years), you breathe a nervous sigh of relief. For that day, at least, you are safe. Read more…

Everything You Ever Wanted

Jillian Lauren | Plume | May 2015 | 11 minutes (2,636 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Jillian Lauren’s memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, as recommended by Longreads contributor Sari Botton. Read her interview with Lauren about memoir and family.

* * *

In a one-bedroom apartment in West Orange, New Jersey, late winter 1973, my mother, Helene, is home in the middle of the day, dancing to the Hair soundtrack while cleaning the house, when she gets a call from an old college friend named Jillian. Jillian married a fertility specialist after graduation and lives in Chicago now. My mother called her years before, seeking advice. Helene is on a list for a study in experimental fertility drugs, but the process seems to be dragging on forever. After nearly four years of trying to conceive, her diagnosis is unexplained infertility. Read more…

When Blondes Go Wrong

(Photo by jerebu)

After I found out about the Blonde Fury, I thought I’d better colour my hair again. I bought the dye at the same drugstore where I’d bought the pregnancy test, only this time its shelves were half vacant. There was an inventory girl with dark blueberry hair who stood in front of the selection with a clipboard. She had loaded all of the Blondissima and Super Blonde into a shopping cart, presumably to be trucked away into some back warehouse, out of customer eyesight. I reached out a finger and ran it along the remaining choices, as if touching the boxes would help me. When you get to know me, you’ll find out I have to touch everything to convince myself it’s real. I touch everything except people. Your father, an exception.

Brown Sugar, Toffee, Pecan, Cedar, Acorn, Walnut. In the cardboard panel on the boxes that showed the results, and on the dingy hair loops attached to the shelves below, they all looked the same shade.

“I went for the darkest,” the employee said. “Don’t take chances.”

—From Emily Schultz’s satirical novel The Blondes, a wild and smart look at cultural theory, gender roles, and societal expectations, against the backdrop of a curious and dangerous new rabies-like disease that only turns women with blonde hair into cold-blooded killers.

Get the book

How the Modern Modeling Agency Came to Be

Photo by FordModels.com

This was a precursor for what would become the protocol by which models were paid for the rest of the century, but as Natálie [Nickerson] put it to Eileen [Ford] in their late-night Barbizon conversations, the system was back to front. According to Eileen, Natálie told her, “Models were treated as if they worked for the agencies, instead of the agencies working for them. There was too much sink-or-swim. Models needed to know exactly where they had to be for a job, and what they were supposed to bring with them, and the big agencies were not efficient in making sure their girls knew even such simple things. There was no career planning, no special training or care, no help with hair or makeup—no real system at all.”

So the two women decided to work out a system together. Eileen would act as secretary and booker to Natálie and to another model, Inga Lindgren, a Swedish beauty with high-arching eyebrows and meticulously manicured nails. Each model would pay Eileen $65 per month for her secretarial assistance and for making phone bookings, while Natálie would act as a discreet publicist and drummer-up of business, quietly recommending the energy and efficiency of Eileen’s services to other models. “I realized,” Natálie explained to Michael Gross, “that for any new operation to be successful, they had to have at least one top girl, and I was the model of the moment.” Natálie beat the bushes well. Eileen started working for her and Lindgren in the fall of 1946, and by March of the following year Natálie’s word of mouth and Eileen’s proven efficiency had attracted the signing of seven additional successful models—high-flying women who were all fed up with how men were handling their business. Each newcomer paid Eileen a further $65 for her services, which took her monthly income to almost $600—some $7,000 per year.

Robert Lacey writing in Vanity Fair about the history of Ford Models. Started by a pair of newlyweds in post-World War II Manhattan, Ford Models quickly became one of the most powerful agencies in the business and helped “launch the era of the supermodel.” Lacey’s Vanity Fair piece is adapted from his forthcoming book, Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty.

Read the story

How to Be Aca-Awesome

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,345 words)

 

After getting her start in the Chicago improv scene, Kay Cannon went on to write for 30 Rock—where she was on staff from the very beginning—and New Girl, for which she was also an executive producer. Her debut screenplay, a quirky a cappella comedy, became the hit film Pitch Perfect. The sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, is in theaters now. Cannon and I spoke by phone about why a cappella is so uncool, the movie’s treatment of weight and race, and Cannon’s feelings about her own teeth.

You first got the idea for this movie while you were at 30 Rock, when someone wrote a line about Toofer having been in an a cappella group in college. You thought it was a complete joke. When you found out that nope, a cappella is real, you thought, someone has to make a movie about this! But what I find really interesting is that you started talking about the general idea of a movie about college a cappella without any specific story or plot in mind yet. I feel like some people would be hesitant to broach such an early-stage idea, even to friends. Is that always how you’ve operated?

Yeah, I kind of put it out into the universe. I’m around a lot of creative people, so you start to talk about ideas, and maybe somebody helps spark something. I actually think this one was kismet for me, because I had said something to Elizabeth Banks, who’s my friend, just in conversation. A long while later, and separate from what I’d said to her, her husband found out about this book, Mickey Rapkin’s Pitch Perfect, and thought it would make a great movie. So when I got the call from them to say, “Hey, would you be interested in writing this?,” it was just such a wonderful collision. Read more…

The Weirdness of Near-Future America

You, Little Sylvia, will come up knowing the truth, but to the rest of the world–to jellyfishes, crackers, finkies, and swells, to Bosom families and Consolidated alike–the stars are not real. The planets are not real. Astronomy, if spoken of al all, is regarded as a delusional cult scarcely more respectable than the Jesus Lovers. The Chiefs long back did the decent thing and decided to put both gangs out of business. The Jesus Lovers dug in; you will see their lowercase t scratched on fenceposts with a ten-dollar nail. But the Astronomers went off quietly without leaving a trace or sign.

They were easily dispatched because their ideas so nearly resembled fiction. You will learn better, Little Sylvia, but to the rest of the world Astronomy is nonsense, magic on par with weather-knowing and poetry cures.

The surest way to hobble any truth is to put it in a story-book. Smart Man Tolemy wrote The Lonesome Wanderer for children so that we would come up knowing Astronomy as a fairy tale. His Astronomers were pale, hairless mountain men who believed the bright flaws in the Night Glass to be distant Suns.  They believed the Wanderers to be other worlds like our own. In contradiction of common sense and observation, their Sun did not circle the Earth but the other way around.

–From Jeffrey Rotter’s second novel The Only Words That Are Worth Rememberinga chaotic romp following the much maligned Van Zandt family as they try escape the law in a near-future America, where astronomy has become a fairy tale, and Earth has returned to its pre-Copernican status as the center of the Universe.
Get the book