Search Results for: fuck

The Hard Life and High Times of Independent Musicians

The band Dead Moon is a rock and roll institution and legend around their native Pacific Northwest. Formed in 1987 by husband and wife team Fred (guitarist) Cole and Toody (bassist) Cole, their do-it-yourself approach to making music and managing their affairs has influenced musicians around the world. This September, Fred collapsed on stage during their set at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot festival and was taken to the hospital. He’s 67 years old. In February, 2014, Callie Danger spoke with bassist Toody in She Shreds magazine about making music for a living, keeping control of their art, and keeping motivated.

She Shreds: And what are the advantages of running everything independently?

Toody Cole: It’s that you’ve got free range to do what you want with it. That’s always been a big thing. That’s why we got into having our own business. Fred used to have to work for temp labor, putting his hair up in a hat just to get hired. You guys forget how difficult it used to be, just to be weird! You have the freedom as a musician to not have to go, “Gee, would it be okay if I take off next Friday?” Because you’d just get fired. At some point, we said, “We should just create our own thing.” We’re both control freaks, so just to have the control is number one. It’s also a cost-saving thing as well, to have your own label. To just be able to go direct to the source for the mastering and the pressing. To not have to go through somebody else who would charge you for the time and labor to do it for you. We’ve always been hands-on.

She Shreds: How long do you think it took to conjure up the commanding stage presence that you have today?

Toody Cole: There used to be a big thing on the West Coast called Garage Shock that Dave Crider from Estrus Records used to have every year in Bellingham, Washington. People used to come from all over the United States, all over the world. When we went up there, it might have been one of the first times Dead Moon played. There were a bunch of these other bands—naturally, all guy bands—sitting around. We were one of the headliners. And, of course, they hadn’t heard of us. At that point, nobody really had. When I walked by, one of these guys goes, “Oh, we’re so gonna blow these guys. They’ve got a girl in the band!” I don’t get mad that easily, but man, I was so fucking pissed. “Yeah, we’ll see, dudes. We’ll see who blows who off the stage, asshole.” It wound up being one of the best gigs we ever did! [laughs] It’s a great motivator, when people underestimate you.

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Grimes and the Changing Face of the Music Industry

In the newest issue of The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote about Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, whose history in underground experimental music led her to making homemade electronic bedroom pop. Last year, Pitchfork named her song “Oblivion” the best song of the decade to date, and as she’s preparing to release her second proper album, she and artists like Lana Del Rey are redefining what pop music and independent musicians are.

Boucher has a hard time censoring herself in interviews, or on social media, which means that she provides a steady stream of content for music Web sites, whose readers love to express their sharply differing opinions of her. “I feel like if I read about myself from the media I would hate me,” she says. “I’d be, like, ‘Fuck that bitch!’ ” Online, she has shared not only her enthusiasms but also her frustration with the music industry, where “women feel pressured to act like strippers and its ok to make rape threats but its not ok to say your a feminist.” Her outspokenness has helped to make her something of a role model. Musicians are now expected to advertise their political beliefs, but Boucher is unusually thoughtful and passionate about social injustice and environmental degradation. (She travels with a canteen, and has essentially banned plastic water bottles from her tour bus.) One particularly trenchant Tumblr post, from 2013, earned a vigorous endorsement from Spin, under the headline “GRIMES’ ANTI-SEXISM MANIFESTO IS REQUIRED READING (EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT A FAN).” That last phrase hints at what is, for Boucher, a disquieting possibility: that her online presence might be even more popular, and more influential, than her music.

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‘We Value Experience’: Can a Secret Society Become a Business?

Absolute Discretion
Photo by Bill Gies

Rick Paulas | Longreads | September 2015 | 31 minutes (7,584 words)

 

The bespectacled man with short-cropped hair stood up.

“Can I ask a question!” the man shouted, vocal cords straining. The audience turned. They were all members of The Latitude, a secret society based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more…

C.J. Chivers’ Particular Brand of War Journalism

The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What the Times could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other things, its study of the weapons we use to kill one another. After reporting on a firefight—whether he was in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Ossetia, Libya, or Syria—he’d look for shell casings and ordnance fragments. If he was embedded with American soldiers or Marines, he’d ask them if he could look through what they had found for an hour or so—”finger fucking,” he’d call it—and ask his photographer to take pictures of ammunition stamps and serial numbers. Over time and in this way he would reveal a vast world of small-arms trade and secret trafficking that no other journalist had known existed before.

Mark Warren, writing for Esquire about how C.J. Chivers become “the best war reporter in a generation,” and why—after 14 bloody years of covering conflict—he decided to give up the beat.

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How Mary Karr Teaches Her Students About Memory: A Short Excerpt from ‘The Art of Memoir’

Memoirist, essayist and poet Mary Karr is often recognized as being the author with perhaps the single greatest responsibility for the resurgence of memoir in bookstores and on nightstands in recent decades. In her new collection of essays The Art of Memoir, Karr presents readers with a book-length craft talk which, true to her style, ranges from allusive to acerbic to profound, all in the span of a page. In the following excerpt, from the opening of her first chapter, Karr uses a little deception and a judicious ‘fuck’ to make a point. Read more…

The Girl Who Slept with God

Val Brelinski |The Girl Who Slept with God | Viking | August 2015 | 9 minutes (2,100 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the debut novel by Val Brelinski, as chosen by Longreads contributing editor Sari Botton, who writes:

On the approach to my fiftieth birthday, I’ve discovered a new hero: Val Brelinski, who at 58 has just published her debut book, The Girl Who Slept with God (Viking), a compelling, compassionate autobiographical novel about three daughters who’ve been raised by devout evangelical Christians in Idaho. After Grace, the oldest–and most devout–daughter returns from missionary work in Mexico pregnant with a baby whose father she claims is none other than God, she and tween-age middle daughter, Jory, are banished to an abandoned house in an isolated area until it’s time for the baby to be born. They’re deposited there by their eccentric science professor Dad, who is as fervent about jogging in circles around their back yard late at night in street clothes as he is about religious observance. At their new, temporary home, Jory befriends a sketchy guy who provides a series of opportunities for her to try out transgressing. Like Jory, Brelinski was the rebel daughter in her family, and eventually broke free, turning her back on religion for good. Here’s an excerpt.

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Los Angeles Is Itself — and Everyplace Else

In memoirs, in documentaries, in conversation, people often describe pivotal, fear-triggering events as having “changed Los Angeles overnight.” After Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family, people in the city started to lock their doors “overnight.” I was at a Christmas party when someone said to me that on the eve of the O. J. Simpson ruling everyone in Hollywood became a gun owner overnight. Nothing in Los Angeles happens overnight, but this is how people like to talk. Why, I don’t know, but I think it has something to do with wanting the city to be either a dream or a nightmare, like in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Psychologically, there are two L.A.’s. One is where Naomi Watts gets to be the sunny aspiring actress Betty and have beautiful teeth and a gorgeous lesbian relationship with an amnesiac Laura Harring. The other is where Naomi Watts is Diane, with fucked-up teeth, an unrequited romantic obsession, and a bullet in her head. They’re both the same movie, and none of it makes any sense. But it says something about how the city sees itself: things are one way, or suddenly another.

Dayna Tortorici writes in n+1 on growing up in Los Angeles, a city everyone can identify — but that has no identity.

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Phoebe Gloeckner on ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ and the Women of Juarez

At The Rumpus, Whitney Joiner recently interviewed Phoebe Gloeckner, author of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the controversial illustrated novel about a girl who loses her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend, originally published in 2002, and just made into a feature film. It was the second time Gloeckner sat down with Joiner—a senior features editor at Marie Claire and co-founder of The Recollectors, a website and storytelling community for the children of parents who died of AIDs—the first time being a dozen years ago, for a Salon piece. This time, Gloeckner confessed that the story is autobiographical. The two also talked about the projects Gloeckner has been working on in Juarez, Mexico, including a novel based on one of the many young Juarenese women who have been killed there in recent years.

Rumpus: In the transcripts of our conversation last time, there’s a lot of discussion of why you didn’t want to call it an autobiography. At this point you’ve answered that so many times. I know you don’t like answering it. You talked about how, if it you’d written it as an autobiography, then you would hate her. You needed that separation because you needed to protect her.

Gloeckner: I had to look at her and accept her as any girl. But myself—I was ugly, I kept getting kicked out of school, I had no future, no one really liked me…

…I always resisted this thing about an autobiography, because honestly, what does it matter if it’s me or not. Every work of art is about the artist.

I’m finally admitting, yes, that’s my experience. I’ve given up trying to explain to people. It’s not like I just took my life; it’s not a document. I had no interest in saying, “This is me and this is my story.”

Rumpus: It’s easier to find compassion for a fifteen-year-old girl going through that kind of experience if it isn’t you.

Gloeckner: No one gives a fuck about an old woman trying to deal with her stupid past and problems!

I had all my old diaries and I was working from those. And I realized when I was reading them, I actually really liked that person.

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A San Francisco Story

Leah Rose | Longreads | August 2015 | 12 minutes (2,876 words)

 

On a Saturday afternoon in February, a group of 15 men stood chatting on the back patio of the Eagle, a leather-themed gay bar on 12th Street in San Francisco. The lone female of the group, 55-year-old Donna Merlino, known as Downtown Donna, untangled a heap of heavy extension cords and powered up a Crock Pot full of lamb stew. Wearing a black leather vest and sturdy black boots, Donna set up two tables of food for the guys, who sipped pints of beer surrounded by paintings of pantless Freddie Mercury lookalikes with enormous genitalia. Read more…

Fox and Friends

Rachael Maddux | Longreads | August 2015 | 21 minutes (5,232 words)

 

The hounds of Shakerag Hounds, the oldest mounted fox hunt in the state of Georgia, are trained as pups to heed every note of their huntsman’s horn. They know a quick double-note means it’s time to head out into the field, three short bursts followed by a sad undulation means they’ve landed on a covert with no quarry, and three long, shimmying notes mean they’ve run their quarry to ground. It’s a fox these hounds are after, in theory—red or gray—but out here, just beyond the furthest reaches of metro Atlanta’s sprawl, they might find themselves on the trail of a coyote, a bobcat, an unlucky armadillo. Whatever they’re chasing, when they hear the horn’s three long, blooming notes, they know what to do. Three means let it go. Three means let it live.

John Eaton, Shakerag’s huntsman, likewise had the horn’s particular vocabulary ground into him at a tender age. He grew up in Somerset, England, the sixth generation of a fox hunting family. His grandfather was a huntsman, too, and his mother was a whipper-in, one of the hunt staff that rides along to keep the hounds (not “dogs,” never just “dogs”) in line. His family did the kind of fox hunting you think of when you think of fox hunting: tall boots, red and black jackets, black helmet, regal horses. The kind about which a character in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance quipped, “The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”

In the Britain of Eaton’s childhood, fox hunts operated pretty much as they had for half a millennium: as a combination sporting event, social gathering, and elaborate means of pest control. Back then, it was unheard of to call hounds off a quarry the way he now does as a matter of course—like a pinch hitter knocking one out of the park and walking off the field, or a fisherman hooking a big one then chucking his rod and reel into the lake. What’s the point of coming so close and giving up at the last moment? Why even bother at all? Read more…