Search Results for: fuck

What Good Is a Major Record Label Now?

Photo by Pixabay

“An artist gets it to a point where they’re already self sustainable and then labels swoop in and there’s going to come a point where these artists realize the reason why they’re swooping in and giving them all this money is because they can make ten times as much if they just keep doing what they’re doing,” JMSN says. “Take Chance the Rapper, he’s been offered million dollar deals and turned them down because obviously if they’re offering you million dollar deals then labels know they can make a whole lot more than that from you. When I meet with labels I ask, ‘What can you provide me that I’m not able to do myself?’ and more often than not there’s not a solid answer besides radio. Who the fuck is going to radio to discover music anymore? We live in a different time.”

Russell Dean Stone writing in Vice about what happens when musicians and their record labels part ways, why this happens, and how they can bounce back.

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Romantic Landscape: Going Mad in the Eternal City

Photo by Bert Kaufman ((CC BY-SA 2.0).

How terrifying. I’m glad you’re recovering, I write back. I’m at a dinner party in Rome and I think I’m having some kind of breakdown. I’m scared. I’m not sure who I am anymore and I don’t have a concussion to blame it on. Or Percodan. Can you email Percodan?

Sounds like we’re in the same place, he writes back. But listen: I know who you are. You are passionate and joyful. Try not to be scared. That is not your true nature.

It hits me like a slap that if my husband has ever said anything like that to me, I cannot remember it. That in fact his last words to me were along the lines of “You think you’re so put together and you don’t even see yourself. You’re a fucking trainwreck.” And that mine to him were “Thanks. Happy anniversary: enjoy your celibacy.”

I turn my face to the wall because I’m tired of crying in front of people.

Amy Glynn, in berfrois, takes us through an identity-shattering — and rebuilding — experience: the simultaneous decline of a marriage and withdrawal from psychotropic drugs in the dizzying, intense eternal city, Rome.

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Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,137 words)

Published to great acclaim earlier this year, The Argonauts blends memoir and critical theory to explore the meaning and limitations of language, love, and gender. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. 

A note: In the print edition of The Argonauts, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. We’ve tried to recreate those marginal citations here. However, due to the limitations of digital formatting, if you are viewing this excerpt on a mobile device the citations may appear directly above the quotations, as opposed to alongside them.

***

October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark of the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.

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The World’s Most Notorious Drug Trafficker Breaks Out of Prison (Again)

Photo via Day Donaldson

Drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as “El Chapo,” escaped from a maximum-security prison in Mexico this weekend. It’s his second prison escape. “Anyone who makes a mile-long tunnel from his cell and escapes on a motorcycle is necessarily in collusion with the government,” a government official told Patrick Radden Keefe in his New Yorker post about the news. Last year Radden Keefe described for the magazine how Chapo, whose Sinaloa cartel has long used tunnels to evade law enforcement, was captured after more than a decade on the run:

In the early days of Guzmán’s career, before his time at Puente Grande, he distinguished himself as a trafficker who brought an unusual sense of imagination and play to the trade. Today, tunnels that traverse the U.S.-Mexico border are a mainstay of drug smuggling: up to a mile long, they often feature air-conditioning, electricity, sophisticated drainage systems, and tracks, so that heavy loads of contraband can be transported on carts. Guzmán invented the border tunnel. A quarter of a century ago, he commissioned an architect, Felipe de Jesús Corona-Verbera, to design a grocery store that served as a front company, and a private zoo in Guadalajara for his collection of tigers, crocodiles, and bears. By this point, Guzmán was making so much money that he needed secure locations in which to hide it, along with his drugs and his weapons. So he had Corona-Verbera devise a series of clavos, or stashes—secret compartments under the beds in his homes. Inevitably, a bolder idea presented itself: if you could dig a clavo beneath a house near the U.S. border, why not continue digging and come out on the other side? Guzmán ordered Corona-Verbera to design a tunnel that ran from a residence in Agua Prieta, immediately south of the border, to a cartel-owned warehouse in Douglas, Arizona. The result delighted him. “Corona made a fucking cool tunnel,” he said. Since then, U.S. intelligence has attributed no fewer than ninety border tunnels to the Sinaloa cartel.

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Gravity

"Views of a Foetus in the Womb" (c. 1510 - 1512), drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.

Elizabeth Bachner | Hip Mama | June 2015 |  8 minutes (1,874 words)

 

This essay, recommended by Longreads contributor Maud Newton, is by the writer Elizabeth Bachner and appears in the current issue of Hip Mama magazine. The first issue of Hip Mama was published in December, 1993, by the founding editor, Ariel Gore, as a multicultural forum for radical mothers. Our thanks to Elizabeth Bachner and Hip Mama Magazine for allowing us to reprint this essay here. Read more…

All the Language in the World Won’t Make a Bookshelf Exist

Photo by Nina MacLaughlin

Nina MacLaughlin | Hammer Head, W.W. Norton | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,383 words)

The following is an excerpt from Nina MacLaughlin’s memoir Hammer Head—the story of MacLaughlin’s journey out of a drag-and-click job at a newspaper and into a carpentry apprenticeship. In this section MacLaughlin strikes out on her own to craft bookshelves for her father and meditates on the relationship between writing and carpentry, and learning to build with wood instead of words.

***

The maple leaves dropped, the temperature fell, and we slipped into winter. After the skylight, in the slowing of the year, Mary planned to pause the progress on her third-floor office space in favor of redoing a bathroom downstairs, the one with the paintbrushes in the tub and the crumbling walls.

I swung by her place to pick up the last check she owed me before we took our annual break. She walked me through her bathroom plan.

“Give me a call if you want some help,” I said.

“We’ll see if I can afford you. I’m scared shitless about how much the plumbing is going to cost.”

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The Emptiness of Offense

I’m not brave, and that’s the fucking problem. I just can’t write about anything else but what I actually care about. While I was writing this novel, I kept thinking, black people are going to resent that this discussion [of mixed-race identity] is even happening because some people are going to see it as people trying to distance themselves from blackness. Some people are going to see it as divisive and taking away much needed power in the black community by making it even smaller. Mixed people, my fellow mixed people, don’t tend, as a group, to have a great sense of humor about this stuff. They’re very sensitive about it and there’s a lot of trauma there, so even if they only slightly disagree with me, they’re going to be incredibly furious about that. White people, some of them are going to react by saying, “Why does it matter?” Because a lot of them are in the position where they don’t have to acknowledge how integral identity is as part of their lives. Then I was like, well who’s left?

—At Salon, Laura Miller interviews the incomparable novelist Mat Johnson about his new book (Loving Day), as well as satire in the time of the internet, the righteousness of the offended and mixed-race identity.

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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 Art of Running from the Police

Photo by Joe Thorn

Alice Goffman | On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City | University of Chicago Press | May 2014 | 45 minutes (12,478 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from On the Run, by sociologist Alice Goffman, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Goffman spent six years living in a neighborhood in Philadelphia. In her groundbreaking book, she explains how the young black men in her neighborhood are ensnared in a Kafkaesque legal system which makes running from the police their only option, and how these men have made running into an art. Read more…

A Woman on the Margins

Photo: Mitchell Bach

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)

 

I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.

In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.

We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.

Why do you teach so much?

I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.

Why is that?

I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach. Read more…