Longreads Pick
I fucked up with Aunt Mimi, the first time I met her. I was greeted, I was shown the bird feeder where the birds came to keep her company, I was shown around the place. And then I said, “wow, I’ve never been in a trailer before.”
I meant it nicely. I liked trailers; I got a bit jealous, every time we saw them on vacations; I wanted to live in a house like that when I grew up, self-contained and mobile. It seemed vaguely magical to me. It did not, however, seem magical to Aunt Mimi.
She whipped around on me like a snake.
“Well,” she said, “la-dee-dahhh, missy. You enjoying yourself? Is this an experience for you, coming down to see the poor trailer folks? It’s such a treat, getting visitors from the palace.”
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Published: Oct 8, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,924 words)
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Longreads Pick
After the show, Buck grabs a six-pack from the tour bus and heads toward his room. Like the other members of the band, he isn’t sure that when it comes to venues, bigger is better. He for one isn’t interested in having R.E.M. become an arena band. “People have been trying to convince me for a long time that we could play bigger places and enjoy it,” says the lanky, fidgety, garrulous Buck. “And tonight proved, if nothing else, that there’s no fucking way I can. If we ever did a stadium tour, I would imagine it would be about the last thing we’d ever do together.” Some long time fans have already accused R.E.M. of selling out, of courting mainstream success. The band doesn’t agree. “If you look at the album charts, the only thing up there on the charts that’s weirder than we are is Prince,” says Buck. “I mean, this record seems to me to be pretty uncommercial.”
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Published: Dec 3, 1987
Length: 21 minutes (5,411 words)
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Longreads Pick
I want to hear about Be Here Now. “At the time, I was taking a lot of fucking drugs, so I didn’t give a fuck,” Gallagher says. “We were taking all the cocaine we could possibly find. But it wasn’t like a seedy situation. We were at work. We weren’t passed out on the floor with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. We were partying while we were working. And when that record was finished, I took it back to my house and listened to it when there wasn’t a party happening and I wasn’t out of my mind on cocaine. And my reaction was: ‘This is fucking long.’ I didn’t realize how long it was. It’s a long fucking record. And then I looked at the artwork, and it had all the song titles with all the times for each track, and none of them seemed to be under six minutes. So then I was like, ‘Fucking hell. What’s going on there?'”
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Published: Sep 6, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,052 words)
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Longreads Pick
He talked for a while about how difficult the first year after his divorce was and how it affected his work. “For one, I couldn’t really talk about my wife anymore. Not that I was ever really talking about her, exactly, but now I couldn’t do that at all; I couldn’t talk about the woman I was divorced from. She deserves her privacy. But that meant I had no idea where I was going to get material. It was like, ‘Oh, shit, there goes my act.’ ” He didn’t really go into why his marriage ended, except to say that they hadn’t been making each other happy for a while and finally had to admit it was done. “I just sat in my pajamas for like two years,” he said. “And I was nothing for my kids. And then eventually I climbed out of it and was just like, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t fuck around like this.’ I focused on the kids, and they saved my life. I thought, ‘Everything’s based on them now.’ “
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Published: Aug 2, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,486 words)
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Longreads Pick
We had four options: join Ready Willing and Able’s program, which prepared men to become street sweepers and janitors; sign up for a Bloomberg administration program which presents participants with a one-way ticket out of town, so long as the applicants could provide a contact person in the destination city who would agree to host them; enter the city’s shelter system, which the liaison accurately portrayed as a horror show, with gang-and-drug-infested death traps like Wards Island (Said one of my brethren, “Yo, I was at Wards Island one night, woke up and a dude was laying there dead, all cut the fuck up.”); or hop in the van with him to tour Brooklyn’s three-quarter sober houses, which were private residences that sounded a lot more promising than a shelter.
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Published: May 21, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,518 words)
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Longreads Pick
On the 25th anniversary of “Licensed to Ill,” an oral history of the birth of the Beastie Boys. “Then we were like, ‘Oh, shit, we should get a D.J.! Like rap groups. They have a D.J.!’ Nick Cooper knew about this guy Rick Rubin who went to NYU and would throw parties and had turntables. And a bubble machine. We were like, ‘If we had a fucking D.J. and a fucking bubble machine, we’d be fucking killing it.'”
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Published: Apr 24, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,516 words)
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Longreads Pick
From the time he was young boy, Mark Hawthorne understood the power of words. His father was a reporter for the Associated Press and his mother was a school teacher. So when Hawthorne landed his dream job and became a reporter for The New York Times, everything seemed to fall into place. Except that it all fell apart. These days, Hawthorne uses the power of words in a different way. Mostly, it’s to say, “fuck you” or “I hate you.” For the past 25 years, Hawthorne has lived on the streets of Berkeley, where he’s developed a following and is known by the moniker “Hate Man.”
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Published: Mar 3, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,499 words)
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Coke, Hookers, Hospital, Repeat
“Here’s a peek into my insanity,” Charlie Sheen tells me one afternoon in February. “People say, ‘What are you thinking?’ and here’s the truth. It’s generally a quote from Apocalypse Now or Jaws.”
It’s Sheen’s fourteenth day of sobriety (this time around), and he’s calling from a baseball diamond on the west side of Los Angeles. Batting practice is like therapy for the former star athlete, people who know him say, and he’s spent the past few hours hitting balls with his friend Tony Todd, whom he met in Little League when they were 8 years old. This has been “the best day ever,” says Sheen, 45. His voice is relaxed and fluid. He sounds like he’s on the mend. But when I say as much, he’s quick to correct me.
“We’re past ‘on the mend,’ ” he says. “We’re not dealing with normal DNA here, you know what I’m saying? All those other sissies and amateurs, they can take their fucking time.”
By Amy Wallace, new GQ
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Longreads Pick
“Here’s a peek into my insanity,” Charlie Sheen tells me one afternoon in February. “People say, ‘What are you thinking?’ and here’s the truth. It’s generally a quote from ‘Apocalypse Now’ or ‘Jaws.'” It’s Sheen’s fourteenth day of sobriety (this time around), and he’s calling from a baseball diamond on the west side of Los Angeles. Batting practice is like therapy for the former star athlete, people who know him say, and he’s spent the past few hours hitting balls with his friend Tony Todd, whom he met in Little League when they were 8 years old. This has been “the best day ever,” says Sheen, 45. His voice is relaxed and fluid. He sounds like he’s on the mend. But when I say as much, he’s quick to correct me. “We’re past ‘on the mend,’ ” he says. “We’re not dealing with normal DNA here, you know what I’m saying? All those other sissies and amateurs, they can take their fucking time.”
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Published: Feb 27, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,254 words)
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