Search Results for: interview

Yonkers, Housing Desegregation and the Youngest Mayor in America

Lisa Belkin | Show Me a Hero, Little, Brown and Company | 1999 | 25 minutes (6,235 words)

 

Below is the first chapter of Lisa Belkin’s 1999 nonfiction book Show Me a Hero, which was recently adapted by David Simon into a six-part HBO miniseries of the same title. Belkin’s book (and the miniseries) depict the fight to desegregate housing in Yonkers, New York during the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the story of a young politician named Nick Wasicsko.  Read more…

The Nine Lives of Cat Videos

Photo: Children posing with life-size Lil Bub. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

Jillian Steinhauer | Longreads | September 2015 | 15 minutes (3,800 words)

 

The following essay is excerpted from Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong, in which 14 writers address the following question: Why can’t we stop watching cat videos?

* * *

The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself.

—Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament”

The spectacle creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: memory ceases to be necessary or desirable.

—John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”

The Grandstand filling up with people early in the night. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

The Grandstand filling up with people early in the night. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

1.

One evening in the summer of 2013, I joined 11,499 other people—give or take—at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand to sit and watch cat videos. I had spent the day leading up to the Internet Cat Video Festival (or CatVidFest, as it’s nicknamed) wandering the fair in extreme heat, eating assorted fried foods on sticks, watching butter sculptors, and paying money to take off my shoes and traverse an artsy blow-up castle with “rooms” of saturated color (think Dan Flavin goes to the fair). Hours later, dehydrated and probably sunstroked, I met up with a journalist from Minnesota Public Radio for a brief interview. He wanted to talk to me because I was an art critic, and because I had served as a juror for that year’s CatVidFest. Read more…

Revisiting the Vibrancy of Deaf Culture: A Reading List

Updated 7/17/18: Over the weekend, an astute reader noticed a reading list I wrote in 2015, “Deaf Culture and Sign Language,” which purported to celebrate Deaf culture, didn’t feature any pieces written by d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing authors. I apologized. I should have elevated the stories of Deaf people directly, rather than those speaking on their behalf. My editors and I decided the best course of action was to update this list to make it more representative and inclusive, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to rectify my mistake. Many thanks especially to Sara Nović for her advocacy and reading recommendations and to Katie L. Booth for her idea-bouncing and guidance.

1. “At Home in Deaf Culture: Storytelling in an Un-Writeable Language.”  (Sara Nović, Lit Hub, June 2016)

Sara Nović writes about living at the intersections of three languages and how different facets of her personality manifest in each one:

What does it mean to be a writer whose language negates the possibility of the written word? On one hand, perhaps this is part of its pull—I exist in the present in ASL because the anxieties of my work are bound up in another language. On the other, writing, books, the things I have loved most since I was small, are at odds with my body. On days like today, when writing is difficult, this feels like a loss. The one language in which I am fully comfortable I cannot write, not exactly. But without it I would certainly be a lesser storyteller.

2. “How the Deaf and Queer Communities are Tackling Oppression Together.” (Alex Lu, The Establishment, June 2016)

Alex Lu, a Deaf-queer academic, presents a compelling argument for the increasing interdependence of the queer and Deaf communities. I especially appreciated Lu’s analysis of the impossibility of (white, straight, cis) interpreters’ objectivity. Read more…

Thelonious Monk on the Moment He Became Aware of the Police

During the 1960s and 70s, legendary jazz drummer Art Taylor interviewed his fellow musicians. The interviews are collected in the 1993 book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, and it’s one of jazz’s greatest. The familial, casual conversations are also serious and insightful, full of history, portraiture, and revelations about race relations in America, and the lives of black musicians in a music industry run by white people. From Philly Joe Jones to Kenny Clark, Taylor knew his subjects because he played with them, so he asked probing questions. Here’s an excerpt of his 1969 talk with pianist-composer Thelonious Monk:

Monk: I don’t know. I was aware of all this when I was a little baby, five, six or seven years old; I was aware of how the cops used to act. It looked like the order of the day was for the cops to go out and call the kids black bastards. Anything you did, if you ran or something, he called you black bastards.

Taylor: That was their favorite lick.

Monk: Yeah, I remember that; it was the first thing that came out of the mouth.

Taylor: I consider myself lucky to have survived.

Monk: Sure you’re lucky to have survived, you’re lucky to survive every second. You’re facing death at all times. You don’t know where it’s going to come from.

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Art, Activism & Faith: The Life of Corita Kent

Photo: m kasahara

When I visited the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh last spring, I arrived on the last day of a retrospective of the art of Corita Kent. My interest in feminism, faith and art meant I’d encountered Kent’s artwork before, but only briefly and only online. The opportunity to see her work in-person was a gift. Strolling through the silent Warhol with several of my closest friends felt more like church—inspiration, community, big ideas that transcend time and space—than church itself. What I felt in Corita Kent’s work was love. Love radiates out of her collages and her words and her rules. She gave so much of herself in her lifetime, and her art reminds us to give of ourselves, too.

Someday Is Now, the Kent collection I viewed at the Warhol, is on display in Los Angeles at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. I implore you to visit before its closure in November, if you have the opportunity. At the LARB, Sasha Carrera, the former director of the Corita Art Center, explores the fascinating life and work of this oft-ignored figure in American art history.

The work of Immaculate Heart College — Corita’s prints, student paintings, and Sr. Magdalen Mary’s raucous confabulations of texts and images known as the Irregular Bulletin — won fans in art circles but disturbed more conservative Catholic tastes. Around this time, the mid-1950s, the cardinal requested that Corita discontinue depicting the Holy Family; she had become enamored of the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters and, over time, expanded her idea of what constituted religious art. In a 1977 interview with Bernard Galm, she says, “anything that was any good had a religious quality.”

Once Corita’s social conscience was awakened, these ideas became intertwined with her art…Indeed, her art changed rapidly in the 1960s. By 1964, Corita’s lettering had shifted into great graphic jumbles of words and color. An admirer of Pop Art’s incorporation of ordinary objects, Corita began using billboard signs, bread wrappers, and pop song lyrics — the urban landscape of Los Angeles served as raw material for her prints…In her work, Wonder Bread wrappers became Eucharist wafers.

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Lisa Frank and Growing Up in a Beautiful World

The magazine Foundations takes you behind-the-scenes of the contemporary art world. The most recent headliner? Lisa Frank, eponymous creator of the aesthetic crucial to ’90s schoolkids, based on Pop Art and hyperrealism. Interviewer Carly Mark and Frank sat down to discuss the longevity of the Lisa Frank brand, as well as her childhood exposure to fine art and her work ethic.

Carly Mark: It is crazy to think about because you have such variety. I was looking through a stack of sticker books and every single one was different with a variation of designs inside.

Lisa Frank: But that’s why we’re so hot still today. There are some companies that have been hot forever but all of a sudden are dead right now. The same image has been plastered on hundreds and hundreds of products but the consumers are not stupid.

Also believe it or not, the consumers with less money have a keener eye than the ones with more. Consumers with less money only have so much to spend. For this reason they are critical and want to buy the best of the best. I’ve always appealed to the masses because, I felt so lucky to grow up in a beautiful world, and believe just because someone has less money, why should they not be offered the best of the best, as well?

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Breaking the Mold

A co-housing community. Photo: Tim Pierce

Jessica Gross | Longreads | August 2015 | 17 minutes (4,402 words)

 

Bella DePaulo, a Harvard-trained social scientist who is now a Project Scientist at UCSB, started her career researching deception. But it was when she delved into singlehood, her personal passion—she describes herself as “single at heart“—that she first felt enormous synchronicity with her research. “The singles work was something entirely different,” DePaulo told me over the phone. “It is really where I live in the literal and the figurative sense.” She has chronicled this work in scholarly papers, blogs for Psychology Today and PsychCentral, and written books including Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After and Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It.

In her latest book, DePaulo continues to examine lifestyles that don’t quite fit cultural norms. For How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, she traveled around the United States, looking at alternative—that is, non-nuclear—ways of living. One example of this is co-housing, in which people live in separate dwellings but meet regularly in a shared common house. Another is Golden Girl Homes, an organization that helps “women of a certain age” live together. There’s also CoAbode, a registry for single mothers who want to live with other single-mom families. And there are even multigenerational homes, which function today in very different ways than we might imagine. Throughout, DePaulo stresses the balance between autonomy and community, and how our relative needs for each are so individual. The upshot is that, finally, no matter what our predilections, there is increasing space for us to create lifestyles that suit us.

* * *

You’ve written a lot about being “single at heart” and knowing that you love being and living alone. Why were you drawn to study alternate living arrangements?

Well, part of the interest was other people’s interest: It was a topic that other people just really liked to talk about. There was a blog post I wrote, “Not Going Nuclear, So Many Ways to Live and Love,” that got a genuine response of people wanting to hear each other’s stories. I also noticed that it was a topic that was appearing not just in casual conversations, but in the media, too. It seemed to be something that was resonating.

As for me, I feel so, so committed, and always have, to living by myself. I wasn’t really exploring for myself—although I wonder if, at some level, I was wondering whether, if I ever really couldn’t continue to live by myself, there was some way out there that really would work for me. Read more…

Why Would Two Girls Attempt Murder for Slender Man?

Photo: MDL70

In 2014, two 12-year-old girls stabbed a friend, arguing that they did it for a fictional internet horror creature named Slender Man. Lisa Miller tries to understand why in New York magazine:

By the age of 8 — and definitely by 12 — psychologists agree, most children are as able as adults to sort out what’s real from what is not. What sets children and adolescents apart from adults is a mental task psychologists call “discounting” — the rational inner voices that can subdue overheated emotional responses to the imagination’s powerful projections and that come with the maturing of the frontal lobe by around age 25. That’s why a 50-year-old can finish rinsing her hair even as she recalls the shower scene from “Psycho,” while a 16-year-old will find herself with a racing heart, soapy and dripping on the mat. But the feeling of being in the thrall of a fantasy (even a morbid one) can be seductive as well, as comforting as getting high, as mesmerizing as Minecraft.

In this way, the friendship of Anissa and Morgan, with its shared obsessions and mutually satisfying imaginary play, was the rather unremarkable effort of two bright, alienated kids to build a world more thrilling than their reality, a private bubble that offered them belonging, excitement, and a sense of their own power. The problem wasn’t that Morgan and Anissa didn’t know they were living in a fantasy world: Ultimately, when pressed by adults, they acknowledged the difference between fantasy and reality. The problem was that they couldn’t — or didn’t — extricate themselves from the ­fantasy. “He does not exist,” Anissa told police on the day of the stabbing. “He is a work of fiction.” Morgan, the more troubled one, had a more enduring attachment to the fairy tale they had told themselves and that had brought them to the woods. But even she admitted, in her interview, that the attack on Bella was “probably wrong,” she said. “I honestly don’t know why we did this.”

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Stephen Colbert on How All Late-Night Shows Are ‘Chopped’

GQ magazine interviews Stephen Colbert, who compares making a late-night show to the Food Network show Chopped:

Back at his office, Colbert delivered a soliloquy on the necessity of focus and intention, being fully present for whatever moment you are in. He was talking about comedy, and how to make a TV show 200 times a year, but it also felt like a text lifted from the Buddha’s sutras. The final goal, the product, is beside the point. “The end product is jokes, but you could easily say the end product is intention. Having intentionality at all times… The process of process is process.”

And then he talked about the Food Network show Chopped. The reason he loves Chopped is that it’s a show that is wholly about process, about creation within a limited range of possibilities. “This show,” he said, meaning The Late Show, “is Chopped. Late-night shows are Chopped. Who are your guests tonight? Your guests tonight are veal tongue, coffee grounds, and gummy bears. There, make a show.… Make an appetizer that appeals to millions of people. That’s what I like. How could you possibly do it? Oh, you bring in your own flavors. Your own house band is another flavor. You have your own flavor. The audience itself is a base dish, like a rice pilaf or something. And then together it’s ‘Oh shit, that’s an actual meal.’ And that’s what every day is like at one of these shows. Something is one thing in the morning, and then by the end of the day it’s a totally different thing. It’s allprocess.”

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The Responsibility of Being Both a Reporter and an Army Veteran

Photo by  US Army, Flickr

Veteran status cuts both ways. Because I’m an army veteran, other vets often tell me things they wouldn’t tell those who haven’t served. It is a privilege to be given this confidence, and yet I’m filled with an overwhelming obligation to get their stories right. Although I’m a longtime reporter, writing about veterans has been the hardest subject for me to cover, because their stories are so nuanced, and reporters, most of whom have never served in the military and have no connection with the armed services, frequently get their stories wrong and paint them as one-dimensional lunatics. I wanted to get Capps’s story right and not come off as a voyeur. There was some precedent for my concern: a month before our interview, Capps had spoken about his struggle with PTSD at the National Endowment for the Arts, which sponsors his NICoE seminar, and after his talk he told me he was destroyed for the rest of the day.

—Veteran and freelance reporter Kristina Shevory profiling Army combat veteran and former Foreign Service officer Ron Capps in The Believer. Capps was haunted by PTSD after serving in Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Kosovo; writing brought him relief and helped him make sense of his experiences. He formed the Veterans Writing Project in 2011.

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