Search Results for: movies

The Disease of Deceit

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | January 2020 | 38 minutes (9,656 words)

In June, I woke to an alert from Facebook, a notification of a memory from five years ago. It was a photo of a woman in a park, leaning over, kissing the top of my dog’s head. The woman’s face was partially hidden but I immediately knew who it was — Chaya. Read more…

Searching Sephora for an Antidote to Aging — and Grief

Illustration by Courtney Kuebler

Abby Mims | Longreads | January 2020 | 12 minutes (2,959 words)

The Sephora sales girl was in her early 20s. As she took off my makeup, I was marveling at hers, not to mention her flawless, creamy skin. Her smoky eye was perfect, all layers of dark blue, grey and black, a look that whenever I attempt it is a smeary, bruised-looking mess. Her eyebrows were expertly plucked and reinforced by a Kardashian-sized amount of brow pencil, creating arcs not found in nature. Glancing around, I saw that nearly all the salesgirls’ faces contained these same elements.

“I really need something for this situation,” I said to her, drawing a circle in the air to indicate everything between my 45-year-old chin and collarbone. “This is happening.”

“Oh, no, you look great!” she said, giggling. She was sweet, but when I turned my head, and caught my profile in the well-lit mirror, it was unmistakable. It was my grandmother’s neck, it was my mother’s neck, it was my neck. It was the beginnings of a wattle, and it was happening.

I had escaped to Sephora, which is housed in the same mall I’d haunted as a teenager, during a trip home to Portland last spring. I’m sure I arrived at the store looking a bit like a ghost myself — I was visiting from California with my 4-year-old son Jamie to help my stepfather, Jim, clean out the house where I grew up. My mother had been dead for five years, and Jim had moved in with his girlfriend, and while all the packing and sorting and moving in with girlfriends was entirely the natural course of things, I wasn’t prepared. I pictured the house preserved as it had been since my mom died, which was essentially as it was when she was alive. To his credit, Jim had tried to warn me, letting me know he’d been getting rid of things and making small improvements to the house for months, but I was stunned all the same.

When Jamie and I came through the front door, our footsteps echoed into the house’s emptiness. There was only a smattering of furniture left, and nearly everything was in boxes: there wasn’t a fork or wine opener in the kitchen, let alone the ancient bandaids or nearly empty shampoo bottles that had always lived in the far corners of the bathroom cupboards. The half-dozen or so Hindu-style altars my mother kept around the house were dismantled, and nearly all her beloved books had been packed up or given away. There were no family photos left on the walls, and the flickering electronic picture frames, the ones that I’d focused on during the four long years my mother was dying, were gone. I pictured them perfectly in my mind’s eye: alternating glimpses into my awkward teen years (spiral perms, stiff, hair-sprayed bangs, clear braces, skin a shade of orange only found in tanning beds, over-plucked eyebrows), my estranged sister’s wedding and my parents’ trip to India in 2008, six months before my 63-year-old mother was diagnosed with a glioblastoma. For now, the house will be rented out, but eventually, it will be sold. Hopefully, my husband and I will be able to buy it, but that transaction will be at some murky date in the future, if ever.

All of this was amplified by the fact that the room where Jamie and I slept was my old bedroom, and some modifications aside, the same room where my mother died. We slept there because that was the one room with a bed left in it, and it felt like a hassle to move it on top of everything else. Plus, strange as it may sound, the experience wasn’t morbid. This was in part because the room looked nothing like it had in either incarnation: the walls were a different color and it was nearly empty, aside from said bed, an old dresser, a lamp and a rolled-up area rug. Also, the room contained so much more love than sadness for me because, by the end, despite how much I loved and depended on my mother, all I wanted was for her to be free. My point of view was buoyed by the fact that she had spent her career in geriatric and hospice social work and studied Eastern religions for decades. This is to say that her views on dying were far more evolved than most: she simply viewed it as another phase of life. We were also able to give her the “good death” that she wanted — at home, on her own terms, surrounded by the people she loved. This didn’t mean she was entirely at peace about dying, or didn’t lament her impending death.

“I mean, we all die, but I don’t want to miss anything,” she often said.

Instead of the quintessential grief or sadness I had expected to feel sleeping in that room with my son, I experienced an alchemy of memories that drifted between my youthful existence and her dying process. It tended to happen in the half-sleep of early morning, as Jamie and I lay together in bed. Under a corner window, we’d listened to the caw of crows, the chatter of squirrels, and the tap-tap-tap of the occasional woodpecker – all sounds that brought back my childhood. As I looked up into the gray sky through a web of spruce branches, the window became something of a portal from the past to the present for me. I realized it is a window out of which my first love, Brian, escaped, mid-coitus, on a lazy Saturday afternoon when I was 17. My parents had come home hours early. It is the window that hosted the hummingbird feeders that captivated my mother’s attention in her final months. She would often lose her train of thought when birds alighted there, her face radiating joy when they lingered, seemingly soaking up their weight in sugar water. It is the window I looked out of during my teenage years and dreamed of being anywhere else. It is the window I looked out of with a similar desire in my mid-30s, when my mother’s diagnosis came back terminal and I was sure I could not exist in the world without her.
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What I Did for (Strange) Love

Paul Natkin / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Laura Bond | Longreads | January 2020 | 9 minutes (2,218 words)

 
I spent the final dregs of a sixth-grade summer in my brother’s room, perched on the perimeter of his waterbed, forced to listen to the weird new music he discovered every day. It was a gloomy parade of bands from England that didn’t register on FM radio in 1987: The Smiths, Soft Cell, Siouxsie and the Banshees. I hated most of this music but, like the Phoenix heat, it was inescapable. I tried to hide from it, but the sound warbled through the sheetrock wall that separated our bedrooms. It permeated my ears and consciousness.

One sweaty August evening, my brother finally played something I liked. The singer’s voice was deep, resonant, with a British twang that was both elegant and cocky, a combination I found hard to resist in music and, years later, boyfriends. The melodies were bright and catchy. On the album cover, four pale young musicians crowded together wearing leather and eyeliner, conspiratorial and cute. Depeche Mode, they were called. As we listened to the entire record, twice, I felt for the first time the whole-body percolation that accompanies the discovery of good new music.
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Deconstructing Disney: The Princess Problem of ‘Frozen II’

Elsa with blue flag behind her

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | December 2019 | 10 minutes (3,028 words)

Frozen came out the year I came out. The film was released in November 2013, one month after I’d sat in a courtroom, a newly out, 25-year-old lesbian finalizing my divorce from my fundamentalist Christian ex-husband. I went to see Frozen its opening weekend and listened to a newly crowned Disney queen with hidden magical powers accidentally out herself after a lifetime of repression (“Couldn’t keep it in, Heaven knows I’ve tried”). Elsa sang “Let It Go” on an icy mountaintop, and my baby gay self sobbed my heart out, sitting alone in a dark theater, at what was obviously a coming-out anthem. I had let go of so many things: my marriage, my faith, a complicated friendship with the woman I was in love with. “Here I stand, in the light of day — let the storm rage on” was a prayer and a promise to myself, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to commit to my own healing no matter what anyone in my life thought. 

***

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Still Waters

Participant, Killer Films

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  9 minutes (2,330 words)

About halfway through Dark Waters, after corporate lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) has agreed to hear out farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), after he has seen that hundreds of cows on the Tennant farm have died, after he has connected this to their town’s water system, after he has linked that to the chemical company DuPont, after he has tied that to PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acid), after he has found that PFOAs are a man-made forever chemical that can cause tumours and that the company that runs the town is effectively destroying everything within it, after all of that he’s about to sit down his pregnant wife (Anne Hathaway) to explain it to her when she looks at him square in the face and says, “I’m not listening to this.”                          

That should have been the tagline for the movie. It should be the tagline for the world. Dark Waters’ largely ignored release mirrors the larger apathetic response to the climate crisis as a whole. And yet a number of critics who saw it threw away their nonstick pans (PFOA is used to create Teflon), proving the film had the power to spur people on to some kind of action. But if it’s that effective and that timely — show me a global corporation that isn’t hoarding power and destroying the planet — why is no one talking about it? Why did only two movies seem to grab all the column inches over the past few weeks: Marriage Story, a movie about Noah Baumbach’s (sorry, “a couple’s”) divorce, and The Irishman, a movie about an aging mobster? Surely the planet has greater reach being, you know, where we actually live? 

That seems to be the problem. Dark Waters is not just about one plutonium plant (Silkwood), a single nuclear power plant (The China Syndrome), or even a Catholic church abuse conspiracy (Spotlight), it’s a story about systemic corruption that courses through the entire world. As the film’s director, Todd Haynes, told the New Yorker, “There’s no silver bullet, no magic solutions.” No one wants to listen to that.

* * *

Environmental films have been around almost as long as films themselves, and our responses to them have varied as much as our responses to the natural world. Pare Lorentz’s 1936 short The Plow That Broke the Plains, about how aggressive farming created the Dust Bowl, was actually sponsored by the U.S. government. But then World War II ended and America got richer, which meant a lusher population if not a more fruitful landscape. Lorentz wanted to keep making political movies (and what are environmental films if not political), but no one was funding them — one of the most popular films of the 1940s was called The Best Year of Our Lives. Then, in 1958, a woman named Olga Owens Huckins noticed that ten of her favorite birds had died after a DDT mixture was sprayed around her home and alerted her biologist friend Rachel Carson — she responded by writing Silent Spring.

With the 1962 arrival of Carson’s opus on pesticides — the DDT mosquito spray turned out to be killing Huckins’s birds, poisoning marine life, and was possibly also carcinogenic to humans — Americans awoke to the world around them and its abuse by corporate America. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 (not to mention Earth Day) to sate their concerns, while activist groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth sprouted up, outcrops from the era’s wider counterculture movement. This was an epoch in which regular people speaking truth to power could actually be heard. In 1976, All the President’s Men was one of the top five highest grossing films of the year and it remains the high-water mark of whistleblowing movies, while 1979 remains one of the best years ever for overtly political filmmaking in Hollywood. That year both Norma Rae, the Sally Field starrer about union activist Crystal Lee Sutton, and The China Syndrome, about the safety coverup at a fictional nuclear plant, competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. For the latter, Jack Lemmon won Cannes’ best actor for his role as the plant’s shift supervisor, and for the former, Field won the best actress Oscar. Both films were critical and commercial successes. It didn’t hurt that the nuclear power industry accused China Syndrome of mendacity, only to be hoisted on its own petard less than two weeks after the film’s premiere by the Three Mile Island nuclear partial meltdown and radiation leak in Pennsylvania.

But the 1980s came along and activism turned into consumerism. The average American now wanted reassurance, not revolution. So they reverted to conservatism, they pushed the government to deregulate, and instead of paying taxes, they watched their money pile up around them as they stayed indoors watching MTV, only trekking to the movies for escapist blockbusters. They were encouraged to buy and buy and buy, spending rather than questioning. If there was disaffection, it wasn’t with the corruption of higher powers so much as the corruption of their own psyches. In the midst of all this, Silkwood was released in 1983, with Meryl Streep playing another whistleblower. Despite its star power — Streep being Streep, Cher getting serious, Kurt Russell going dramatic — the film didn’t have the same success as its predecessors. Audiences now preferred ghostbusters and gremlins and Indiana Jones, an archeologist who unearths fortune rather than failure.

In the following decade, going to see a movie about the planet usually meant going to see an action movie with an non-man-made threat — asteroids were a favorite. From Deep Impact to Armageddon to Dante’s Peak to Volcano, these were movies about nature attacking us rather than the other way around. It speaks to how out of touch they were that Disney executives of all people, part of the corporate community that helped mold Hollywood into an action-hero-centric fantasy universe, would think that Michael Mann’s studious 1999 slow burner The Insider, about Brown & Williamson Tobacco’s attempt to silence whistleblowing biochemist Jeffrey Wigand, would have the same traction as All the President’s Men two decades prior. Despite its seven Oscar nominations, it didn’t land a huge audience.  Circumstances were different for Erin Brockovich, the film about an energy corporation poisoning a California community that came out a year later. Julia Roberts was one of the biggest stars in the world and though she wasn’t playing a superhero, the story presented her as its clear heroine with the enemy an equally clear corporate entity (Pacific Gas and Electric) negligently harming a specific location. The film is shot warmly, the dialogue is colorful, and the narrative is propulsive. Most important, it has a happy ending. The road to Erin Brockovich’s $2.5 million bonus at the end of the film led to an Oscar for Roberts and $256.3 million in worldwide box office.

That was the last time a big screen eco-thriller saw that kind of fanfare, the dissipating attention coinciding (after September 11th) with dissipating attention to nature as a whole. A Gallup poll graph tracking Americans’ interest in environmental protection versus economic growth from 1985 to 2019 shows the former steadily decreasing to a trough around 2011 — the aftermath of the great recession of 2008 — before it starts increasing again, while the latter is almost its mirror opposite. So the more people focused on the economy, the less they did on the environment and vice versa. It’s telling that the media’s favorite climate movie of the past two decades is The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s 2004 B-movie in which a series of weather events coalesce into a new ice age (he had it the wrong way around). More of a grab at cash than epiphany, the Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle is essentially nightmare nature porn, the money shot a hero conquering climate change. Unfortunately, the real story is a lot less euphoric. “We’re all participating in the climate crisis — if there is an enemy, it’s us,” Per Espen Stoknes, author of What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming, told the New York Times in 2017.

An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 film of former vice president Al Gore’s 2004 global warming slideshow, sort of tried to get that across. Despite its dryness, audiences seemed to have some thirst for an updated climate checkup and upon its release, it broke box office records, got standing ovations, and won the Oscar for best documentary. It has been credited with rejuvenating the environmental movement, though the aforementioned Gallup graph questions how much it actually did. This wasn’t like Blackfish, where it was clear SeaWorld was to blame, or Super Size Me, which could point the finger at McDonald’s. Who do you hold accountable for global warming? As Stoknes said, “It’s hard to go to war against ourselves.” 

More than a decade elapsed before Sir David Attenborough shocked his audiences by finally changing his tone from wonder to dread in the Netflix series Our Planet. “I would much prefer not to be a placard-carrying conservationist. My life is the natural world,” he told TIME. “But I can’t not carry a placard if I see what’s happening.” The natural historian was able to piggyback climate change awareness off an established brand in the way HBO miniseries Chernobyl would later riff on the 1986 disaster everyone knew about. Proving that television seems to be more hospitable to climate content, the latter dominated the discourse for weeks. Part of that was the arrestingly horrific first episode, but much of the talk also heavily associated the worst nuclear disaster in history with Trump. “We look at this president who lies, outrageous lies, not little ones but outstandingly absurd lies,” show creator Craig Mazin told the Los Angeles Times. “The truth isn’t even in the conversation. It’s just forgotten or obscured to the point where we can’t see it. That’s what Chernobyl is about.”

Dark Waters isn’t so different. Though it’s based on a lesser-known disaster, this one is farther reaching. The film adapts the 2016 New York Times Magazine article by Nathaniel Rich about Bilott suing DuPont on behalf of thousands of West Virginians and Ohioans affected by PFOA (the company settled for nearly $700 million in 2017), so the events it dramatized are more recent and the ties to those in power more direct than Chernobyl would be. “I hope that the movie starts to spur bigger conversation about who our government is actually working on behalf of,” Ruffalo, who is also a producer on the film, recently told Fast Company in the rare bit of mainstream coverage. Instead we were too busy trying to figure out how autobiographical Marriage Story was or whether Martin Scorsese was right about Marvel movies not being real cinema. When Haynes’s Dark Waters was covered, the question was not why this stylish auteur had made this ambling eco-thriller, but why he hadn’t made anything else. A master of deconstruction, Haynes had in fact denatured the genre beyond its basic elements — the company, the chemical, the casualty, the turncoat — to create a film that echoes the futility of our current circumstances. Bilott isn’t a hero; he’s a human being who sees a fellow human being destroyed by a corporation, who is himself destroyed by trying to help. Every advance is only an inch, every setback a foot. When he finally, after years, uncovers the truth, when he proves DuPont has in fact poisoned people, there is no happy ending. DuPont simply rejects reality and refuses to accept responsibility, forcing Bilott to file no fewer than 3,535 personal injury lawsuits.

Haynes was inspired by Silkwood and All the President’s Men, but the world we live in is now DuPont’s. This is a year in which only 65 percent of polled Americans believe in prioritizing environmental protection at the risk of economic growth, in which the latest climate talks ultimately came to nothing because world leaders would rather quibble over technicalities; a year in which six of the top 10 grossing films were made by Disney, in which a movie like Dark Waters actually increases the stocks of the company it calls out because, as the president has proven time and again, being honest about how awful you are is more rewarding that not being awful at all.

* * *

“Here’s the thing: for many of us, climate change isn’t a disaster movie, it’s a kitchen sink drama,” climate scientist Kate Marvel wrote in Scientific American earlier this year. And though we’ll watch kitchen sink dramas, we prefer our humdrum slogs toward justice illuminated by big stars, or at least a romantic plot. Climate change is too relentlessly depressing; we need some kind of hope so that it doesn’t all seem so impossible, or at least distracts us from the allure of giving up. But I can’t think of anything less hopeful than denial. I can’t think of many things more depressing than the woman sitting next to me scrolling through her phone during our screening of Dark Waters while Bilott described how a company had put so much PFOA into the world that she almost certainly had some of it inside her body — maybe the critics who watched the movie and just wondered why Haynes hadn’t made another lesbian melodrama; maybe the wider audience that continues to go to the movies and conduct the various other aspects of their lives without focusing on the largest scale of all because it’s too abstract compared to an unpaid bill or a sick relative; maybe the part of that audience that could actually change things and doesn’t, like that scene in Dark Waters where Bilott holds up a picture of a baby with a congenital deformity and DuPont’s CEO, while affected, ultimately does nothing. As Haynes explained to The New Yorker: “There’s no way to just end corporate greed and corruption. But there are steps to take, and we just have to keep taking them.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

A Woman’s Work: Becoming a Home of One’s Own

All illustrations by Carolita Johnson

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | December 2019 | 24 minutes (6,000 words)

This essay began very differently a few months ago. I had started writing it at the same time as the previous one in this series, “Till death do us part,” and, just as I observed while writing the fifth one, the very act of writing it resulted in a real-time evolution of my understanding, processing, assessment, and reassessment of what I was writing about, to the point that by the end of the essay, it was obvious I was not the same person who had begun writing it. Just as I’ve changed from the beginning of an essay to the end of it, every few months I look back on my life and think, yet again, how much more like myself I feel. Three years, three months or three pages — it can be a long, slow recovery, or it can happen in shorter but exponentially more intense increments. Recent widows and widowers will either be glad to know, or be dismayed to know that, well, from what I gather, and with luck, it never really ends.

***

Immediately after my husband Michael died I found myself alone in the house we had been renting from his daughter for the last year and a half. It had been full of his relatives for a week, from the moment he came home to die. Now, it was empty. Empty except for our stuff, and not just our stuff from our life together: preparing for a future that would now never happen, for the six months of treatment and recovery we had expected to live through after his surgery, I’d stocked up on six months’ worth of toilet paper, paper towels, laundry soap, dish soap — soap and cleaners of every kind — dry goods, anything that was heavy and not available within a mile’s walk for me, since I don’t drive. Now, I felt like a stowaway on an abandoned frigate, floating along aimlessly.

I still had our dog, Hammy, with me, a 14-year-old poodle named after the noir fiction writer, Dashiel Hammett, of the “Thin Man” movies, whose dialogue Michael and I often quoted to each other. Hammy, too, was close to approaching the home stretch of his life, but for now he was there to stand guard while I cried on every floor of the house, with a preference for the one in the kitchen. Have you ever noticed that the kitchen floor is somehow the most suited for letting your knees give out before crumpling to the floor in wretched tears? I recommend it. I suppose it’s because the kitchen is where so much of coupled life happens. That’s where you will have eaten together, had coffee in the morning together, sipped hot lemon water and honey to ward off colds together, cooked for each other. If you’re going to mourn your lost partner, it might as well be in the place where the spirit of your partnership seems to occupy every cupboard, shelf, and drawer.

A friend immediately insisted on “sitting shiva” with me, which, as a modern adaptation (though I’m not religious and am unfamiliar with this Jewish tradition), took the form of bringing me my favorite coffee beverage, a cortado, from my favorite cafe so I wouldn’t have to go outside with my leaky-faucet eyes. This is exactly how the crying began to feel: tears that puzzlingly continued even when I thought I was done crying. I mused that it was as if a pipe were broken inside me and I might need to call some kind of metaphysical plumber soon.
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Longreads Best of 2019: Profiles

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in profiles.

Lisa Whittington-Hill

Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her writing about arts, pop culture, feminism, mental health, and why we should all be nicer to Lindsay Lohan has appeared in a variety of Canadian magazines. She is currently working on a book about the band Cub to be published by Invisible Publishing.

Celine Dion is Everywhere (Suzannah Showler, The Walrus)

Alanis Morissette Isn’t Angry Anymore (Rachel Syme, New York Times Magazine)

Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair (Jessica Hopper with Sasha Geffen and Jenn Pelly,Vanity Fair and Epic Magazine)

I didn’t set out to consciously have a theme for my picks, but these three stories all feature female musical pioneers from Celine Dion to Alanis Morissette to Sarah McLachlan. They are also all, like me, Canadian. Who knew I was so patriotic? These women have been mocked and misunderstood at many points in their careers so it is nice to see them celebrated in these great pieces. Today’s Taylors and Selenas could definitely learn a thing or two from them (these are serious #squadgoals to have, ladies).

“Celine Dion is Everywhere” by Suzannah Showler examines Celine Dion, the Celinassance, and why it took the world so long to catch on to Dion’s cool. The Canadian singer has released 12 studio albums in English (27 in total), sold over 200 million albums, and has been performing for over 39 years. While she’s always been known for her good pipes, being cool, well, not so much. Showler travels to Las Vegas to not only see the singer in concert during the final days of her Celine residency, but also to interview Celine Dion impersonators whose hearts went on for her long before the internet’s did. Showler tells the fascinating history of Dion, tracing the Canadian singer’s rise from Québec to her recent Las Vegas residency, something Showler credits Dion with making cool again (think less Barry Manilow and more Britney Spears). Dion’s first Vegas stint was the highest grossing concert residency ever, earning the equivalent of $610 million (Canadian), and her recent Vegas concerts were the second highest grossing residency. Showler makes the case that Celine has always been cool and along the way brings up questions of identity, impersonation, illusion, and just what it means to be a fan. Also, the story about the bronze replica of Dion’s husband’s hand will haunt your dreams.

In “Alanis Morissette Isn’t Angry Anymore. But Jagged Little Pill Rages On” writer Rachel Syme uses both the 25th anniversary of the album and its recent Broadway adaptation as an opportunity to talk about its influence and the Canadian singer’s place in pop culture. Syme takes us back to 1995 when the album was released and Morissette was both celebrated and criticized. She topped the charts, but male critics and journalists never trusted that she got there on her own talent. For some Jagged Little Pill is the most feminist album of the ’90s, for others it’s an album that may have resonated with them at a particular point in their lives, but now just seems dated and not actually that good (these people should have rain on their wedding day always).

Syme’s piece travels back and forth between the past and the present, telling both the history of the album and how the songs are being adapted by writer Diablo Cody for a modern theater-going audience. Syme reminds us of all the obstacles Morissette dealt with when Jagged Little Pill was released. Initially manufactured as the next mall sensation a la Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, this album changed all that. But the backlash was cruel and Morissette was portrayed by the media as the angry female singer, criticized by other female performers and mocked for what many perceived to be manufactured angst. A piece about authenticity and acceptance, Syme also reminds us of the important role Morissette has had in making it okay for women to write about the difficulties and struggles in their lives, and to play four different versions of themselves in a really great video.

My last pick is technically an oral history and not a long form piece of writing, but I can’t even imagine how many interviews this piece required so I am going to include it. Also, it is a fascinating read. “Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair” tells the story of Lilith Fair, the travelling music festival started by Canadian signer Sarah McLachlan in 1997. At a time when radio station staff and record label execs couldn’t wrap their sexist little brains around having more than one woman on their rosters (We already have Sheryl Crow, take a lady hike!), McLachlan launched an ambitious festival that eventually went on to make over 130 stops during its three-year run. Lilith Fair was the opposite of the popular dudecentric festivals of the mid-to-late ’90s where the line ups tended to be over 90 percent male performers (Ladapalooza, anyone?). This history chronicles the challenges of getting female performers and sponsors to sign on, the skeptics who doubted the festival could sell tickets, and the criticism over the festival’s lack of diversity. This is a great look at both the festival’s beginnings and the many performers who played on its stages. Fun fact: Christina Aguilera played the side stage in 1999. (I did not know that until this piece).

While these three pieces really stood out, I must also give an honourable mention to two others. There was no shortage of writing this year devoted to the HBO television show Succession. No more cousin Greg think pieces please, I beg of you. He is like the Park Coke of Succession characters for me. These two stories didn’t mention the words “prestige television” or make a 1500-word case for why Succession is the best show on television. Instead, they focussed on two things I hadn’t paid much attention to while watching the show: impressive sweater collections and food. Carrie Wittmer’s ranking of the best sweaters on Succession for Vulture was funnier than Kendall Roy’s rap (We were supposed to laugh at that, right?) and was also refreshing because it was a fashion piece about the show that didn’t focus on Shiv Roy’s butt in pants. Jenny G. Zhang’s ranking of the show’s dinners by food, ambiance, and power plays illustrates how meals for the Roy family function as “battlefields on which to negotiate power, money and daddy Logan’s love.” Less dusting off of your college copy of King Lear to sound smart when you write about Succession and more of these pieces in 2020 please!


Alexis Okeowo
Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa.

The End of Straight (Gabriel Mac, GQ)

When Longreads asked me to recommend my favorite profile of this year, my mind immediately went to a piece I had read a couple of months prior that had left me devastated and hopeful for weeks afterward. And then I remembered that it actually isn’t a profile. “The End of Straight” in GQ magazine is a personal essay that, as its author Gabriel Mac, a trans man, wrote, began as a reported piece before he realized that the truth of it lay in his own experiences with the subject: gender and queerness and the performance of femininity. I opened the essay at the tail end of a summer in which I had been examining my own experiences of gender, and deciding that I was no longer satisfied with how I had settled for a limited expression of it. Mac is a fellow foreign correspondent, one who has covered similar conflict and human rights stories in an arena still dominated by men, and I was impressed with his honesty about his feelings over losing a certain kind of female-identified attractiveness and privilege. The essay is a startling and moving.meditation on what it can mean to reckon with trauma and fear of the unknown and finally choose yourself. For days and weeks after I read it, I texted friends the link to the essay with my exhilarated conclusion: it is never too late to radically change your life.

Seyward Darby
Editor in Chief, The Atavist.

Bong Joon-ho’s Dystopia Is Already Here (E. Alex Jung, Vulture)

If there were an award for best opening anecdote, this story would take it. It’s wild, guffaw-inducing, and impossible to forget. It also perfectly sets the tone and terms of E. Alex Jung’s profile of Bong Joon-Ho, director of the celebrated 2019 movie PARASITE. (If you haven’t seen it, run don’t walk.) Bong’s encounter with Harvey Weinstein’s bullying and small-mindedness is a portal into his identity as an artist: What matters to him, why, and how he brings it to bear on his films, all of which are scathing critiques of inequality, capitalism, and power. The rest of Jung’s incisive, rollicking profile situates Bong’s identity in contemporary culture as both vital and iconoclastic. Jung writes: “The hope in Bong’s movies often springs from this longing: to find a little patch of sunlight to call your own, if only for a moment.” The profile leaves readers wishing mightily for Bong to keep finding patches of his own, because the world is richer each time he does.

Danielle A. Jackson
Danielle A. Jackson is a contributing editor at Longreads.

At 82, Glenda Jackson Commands the Most Powerful Role in Theater (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Magazine)

I enjoy Parul Sehgal’s criticism, so much so that it would be more accurate to say I’m a student of it. The work of my favorite writers and critics has a generous, teaching spirit. Beyond offering context, it allows the reader to participate, to bring her own experiences to bear, to look on a subject anew. It teaches her how to look. Sehgal’s profile of actress Glenda Jackson on the occasion of a Broadway revival of King Lear appealed to me for its layers upon layers of study — on, among many things, aging, Shakespeare, Brexit, Britain’s intra-War years. Of course, it also works beautifully as character study, illuminating the subject with intricate details of her physicality as a performer, (“You could make a study of the movement of Jackson’s right hand alone,” Sehgal writes), and on the mood and tenor of the subject-reporter relationship. I was taken with the spaces of refusal, where Jackson draws borders around herself.  Sehgal’s deft rendering of the words unsaid between the two reminded me how negative space is as essential to a portrait as its main image.

Zaina Arafat
Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American writer. Her debut novel YOU EXIST TOO MUCH is forthcoming from Catapult in 2020.

Constance Wu’s Hollywood Destiny (Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker)

I haven’t stopped thinking about Jiayang Fan’s profile of Constance Wu since first I read it in September, along with the larger ideas about representation, assimilation and cross-cultural identity that percolate throughout the piece. Wu’s story is inspiring; she entered acting later in life and worked as a waitress with $40,000 of debt; at the same time, she seems an incredibly challenging person to render on the page, a woman who defies Hollywood norms (Fan describes her as “refreshingly uncircumspect for a celebrity”) and is full of contradictions. she’s a vocal critic of the lack of Asian representation in film and television yet resists the burden of being a representative, not out of a desire to resist stereotypes — “if someone just so happens to fall into stereotypical traits,” says Wu, “it doesn’t mean that we should try to take that part of her away and hide it from the light” — but because artists shouldn’t have to be role models.  Her response to success has been rather unconventional; she laments Fresh Off the Boat being renewed for another season, and missing the opportunity to take on a new challenge. Fan brings Wu to life with impeccable physical details — “her face, smooth as the inside of a seashell,” as well as quotes that reveal her rebellious character, including the first one we get in the opening scene, when speaking to her makeup artist: “I feel like you’re making me too pretty.” In Fan’s sharp observations and her fresh and funny descriptions, she brings entire characters to life on the page, including Wu’s acting coach, who Fan describes as having “the soothing voice of a mindfulness-app guide.”

Fan interrupts the piece in delightful ways; at one point she describes an instance of Wu admonishing her for texting during the interview, then speaking directly to Fan’s phone “as if recording an audiobook.” Fan even manages to capture a few rare moments of vulnerability from her subject, observing that Wu speaks of herself in third person when describing her parents’ divorce. In describing Wu’s exploration of her Asian identity through her roles, Fan reflects on her own, seamlessly and quietly entering the piece in integral ways, like mentioning that she recognizes her own mother in Wu’s Fresh Off the Boat character, feels a connection to the “band of outsiders” in Hustlers, and remembers the many occasions of being accused of sounding white and labeled a “banana,” yellow on the outside and white inside. Throughout, Fan asks the question of whether it’s possible to achieve Americanness as a child of immigrants, and if assimilation is the prerequisite.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2019: Arts and Culture

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture.

Jessica Lynne
Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is co-editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives.

For Magicians Who Die On Stage (jayy dodd., Gay Magazine)

Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World (Magdalena Edwards, Los Angeles Review of Books)

As 2019 comes to a close, I would like to offer up two essays, disparate in conceit, but both worth the return.

First, there is jay dodd’s “For Magicians Who Die on Stage” published by GAY Mag. It is a beautiful meditation on the body, pain and fear, the specters of habit that might loom over our presence in the world, and the material reality of/for Black Trans Women. Using magic as structural metaphor, dodd moves us through her relationship to sobriety and the desires of self-imaging. Here is a line that stays with me: “I don’t believe I am attempting an illusion just by being alive and hurting and outside. Part of being able to be anywhere is crafting a self that feels desirable to me.” In truth though, it might be better to say that every line of this essay has stayed with me. dodd’s sentences are seared with undeniable beauty and clarity.

Secondly, I remain struck by Magdalena Edwards’ essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World,” in which Edwards recounts her experience working with the writer, editor, and Clarice Lispector translator Moser. Edwards, also a Lispector translator, vulnerably details the terms of a book translation project that, begun in deep admiration of Moser, leads to a reckoning with the ethics (or lack thereof) that guide Moser’s engagement with the work of one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Most importantly, in mining the politics of translation, Edwards centers a necessary question that remains critical for my own relationship to lineages of writing and research: “Who gets thanked for their devotion?” Edwards asks. “Who gets credit for their work?”


Jillian Steinhauer
Jillian Steinhauer is a journalist and editor whose writing appears in the New York TimesThe New RepublicThe NationThe Art Newspaper, and other publications. She’s a recipient of a 2019 Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital.

The Tear Gas Biennial (Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett, Artforum)

Psycho Analysis (Andrea Long Chu, Bookforum)

Within the world of writing, criticism gets short shrift. Sure, maybe I’m just saying that because I’m a critic, but I do believe it’s true, both financially and in terms of how our society assigns value. Despite the ongoing journalism layoffs and consolidation bloodbath, a lot of great arts and culture writing was published this year. I don’t know if these two pieces were the best — I find myself utterly unable to make such judgments — but both are excellent examples of criticism at its best. And both have stuck with me.

The first is technically an opinion piece, but it does the work of criticism by helping readers better see and understand something in the culture — in this case, the debate over how artists in the 2019 Whitney Biennial should respond to protests against the Whitney Museum’s vice chairman Warren Kanders. The situation was pretty specific and probably lost on you if you don’t participate in the contemporary art world, but that doesn’t matter. In “The Tear Gas Biennial,” Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett break down the entanglement of art and politics with incredible clarity and moral force.

The same can be said of “Psycho Analysis,” Andrea Long Chu’s review of Bret Easton Ellis’s new book White. For better or worse, takedowns — let alone good ones — are hard to find these days. This piece reminds me why they’re so delicious when done right. Chu refuses to take Ellis’s bait and get angry. Instead, with equal parts rigor and wit, she entertainingly eviscerates his “deeply needless book.”


Soraya Roberts
Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter (Sasha Bonét, Topic)

Few of the multitude of articles I read each year stick, and the ones that do tend to hail from magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian. It makes sense: Those are places that not only have the resources to nurture the best writers, but also to carve their work into its greatest form. Which is why I didn’t want to pick anything from those places. I realize that Topic magazine isn’t the biggest underdog of all, but it’s a start. And I had never heard of Sasha Bonét before I read The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter. But that’s a story that I remember. It’s a story I sent people. Even just seeing the short description in my Twitter feed — the black artist Camille Billops abandoned her 4-year-old child in the ’60s to pursue her art — I knew it was for me. I, as I’m sure a lot of women artists do, have a particular affinity for stories about women who choose their art first, when they are always expected to do the opposite.

Bonét traces how Billops becomes self actualized as an artist by shedding her past — what she had been taught about black womanhood and its attendant motherhood — including her own daughter. If she hadn’t given up her daughter, the artist says, “I would have died, and if I would have died, she would have died.” In contrast, the piece offers up Billops’ partner, a white man who not only contradicted societal norms of the time, but also provided her the emotional support for her art that she couldn’t provide her own child. Bonét illustrates how Billops, following the initial rejection of her own family, adopts a community of artists as her chosen relatives.

“Her memory collided with the new world she had carefully and meticulously molded,” she writes. The eventual fraught rapprochement of mother and daughter, itself becomes a confluence of emotion and creation. Bonét doesn’t shy away from Billops’ fundamental paradox, which is that she could only nurture that which she chose to create: “Christa had said that meeting her birth mother and her biological family saved her life, but some may argue that it led to her demise.” A devastating but beautiful piece of art about a devastating but beautiful artist.


Danielle A. Jackson
Danielle A. Jackson is a contributing editor at Longreads.

Forgotten: The Things We Lost in Kanye’s Gospel Year (Ashon Crawley, NPR Music)

For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway (Tari Ngangura, Catapult)

Like most people I know, I read a lot of articles and books and listened to a lot of music in 2019, for learning, for practice, for work. When it got to be too much, when work overwhelmed, or the world did, by way of the news or simply duty, I spent a fair amount of time reconnecting to pleasure. I needed to re-learn how to experience the art I love for the sake of sensation, for how it vibrated in my body, rearranged my cells, made me change. I never want to be too busy or too much in despair to remember that my work should be infused with pleasure, too, that what I place on the page, how I think and engage in the world must be infused with heart and feeling. These two pieces immediately struck me and stayed, guiding me through my attempts at staying connected.

First, Ashon Crawley’s examination of Kanye West’s Sunday services and their culmination, the very popular Jesus is King album, is a moving meditation on remembering, or rather, how, in the deluge of so much sensory input and so much hype, we forget precedents, echoes, entire people and eras. We lose the substance, Crawley insists, when we lose the memory. And so, we are so easily deluded, so easily bought. Crawley threads together stories of Zora Neale Hurston, who told us a century ago about the political underpinnings of Black American religious ritual, the author Hans Christian Andersen, and William Seymour, the founder of the American Pentecostal movement, to help us think through the sad, hollow spirit-lessness of Kanye’s endeavor into gospel. More importantly, Crawley proposes that failing to remember costs us in imagination and progress. In his words, “Gospel performance at its inception was the announcement of the practice of different worlds, the fact that alternatives are available, the sounding out of the here and now breaking with the normative and violent world. Sounds of otherwise possibility.”

Tari Ngangura’s Catapult piece “For Black Women, Love is a Dangerous Thing —“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway” is a story and analysis of bassist and vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello’s album Bitter, but also of Ngangura’s first encounter with it, and how the album allowed her to verbalize and move through the feelings and aftermath of an early romantic relationship. I love Ngangura’s insistence on hope through disappointment, her gentle pleas with herself to stay open. I love that a piece of art can help us do that.


Monica Castillo
Monica Castillo is a New York City-based film critic and writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, RogerEbert.com, Remezcla, The Wrap, Hyperallergic and elsewhere.

Earlier this year, while many critics and moviegoers were scratching their heads over the outpouring of love for the uncomfortable interracial buddy movie from Peter Farrelly, Green Book, Wesley Morris made sense of the ordeal by examining the way certain feel-good movies about race like Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy tend to win awards over more challenging and honest works like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The year Lee’s electric film broke out, it wasn’t even up for the Best Picture category at the Oscars. Instead, the award would eventually go to the much more saccharine movie in which Morgan Freeman played a happy-go-lucky driver hired for a racist client played by Jessica Tandy. Through his piece “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies” and a few episodes of his podcast with Jenna Wortham, “Still Processing,” Morris explores the various shortcomings of the form and why its persistence does more harm than good. For starters, these types of movies always prioritize the character arc of the white character who’s maybe a little bit racist but not explicitly so, and over the course of the film, they learn the error of their ways. Unfortunately, that journey comes at the expense of the Black character who must endure the white character’s racist nonsense as they play second fiddle to the white protagonist’s story. Morris finds a through-line in Driving Miss Daisy and to other movies before and after it like Green Book that offers an easy out for white audiences because they’re not as bad as the worst racist villains in the movie. It was the incisive reading I needed — and still need to some extent, as there are still people who want to relitigate my opinion — to back up my own misgivings on the movie. Green Book won the Oscar for Best Picture that night (and picked up a few extra awards as well), so Morris’ piece will likely continue to resonate for many more awards seasons to come.


Krista Stevens
Krista Stevens is a senior editor at Longreads.

Trigger (Michael Hall Texas Monthly)

More than anything, I love music and and I love writing that transcends time. For me, music is fifty percent art and fifty percent magic. During this most trying of years it’s been a salve I turn to (or perhaps tune in to?) every day to find solace as the planet collapses and the news cycle brings to mind Yeats’ center that cannot hold. Of all the pieces I’ve read this year as part of my curation work for Longreads, there’s one that particularly resonated with me as a keen student of guitar and bass. Back in the January 21st edition of Texas Monthly in 2013, Michael Hall wrote a lengthy ode to Trigger, Willy Nelsen’s faithful musical sidekick.

Wille’s been playing that same Martin N-20 classical for 50 years. In it, Hall chronicles Nelsen’s career through the battle scars literally etched into Trigger’s worn neck and battered body as well as the careful tending and regular repair the guitar has undergone in the span of five decades.

Reading the piece, my own small instrument family suddenly meant even more to me and it made me happier about the countless hours I’ve spent studying music. For is there anything more worthwhile than to make a bit of magic?

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

Anyone’s Son

Fairbanks, Alaska — Monday, December 24, 2018: A vigil site Cody's Eyre's family set up at the site of his death one year prior, where the family ends the walk marking the anniversary of Cody's death and following the last several miles he walked before he was killed by police. The family organized the walk to protest the lack of transparency and accountability in his death on the part of the Fairbanks police department and Alaska State Troopers. (Ash Adams)

Wudan Yan | Longreads | December 2019 | 21 minutes (5,400 words)

Around dinnertime last Christmas Eve, the Eyre family threw on their parkas, stuffed hand warmers into their gloves and pant pockets, slung strings of Christmas lights over their jackets, and went for a walk.

Outside their tri-level house on the northern side of Fairbanks, Alaska, they turned on to Farmers Loop Road, one of the main arteries of the city, and walked along the shoulder. The frozen snow crunched beneath their shoes. It was so cold — roughly 15 below — that your breath billowed back toward you even before you fully exhaled. Cars zoomed by, likely on the way to the homes of loved ones, or completing a last-minute run to the grocery store. Twenty-nine-year-old Samantha Eyre and her younger sister, Kassandra, walked in the front with a banner. On it, their mother, Jean, painted on the shadows of six people, a bear, a moose, and the words #KeepWalkingWithCody.

Christmas is meant to be an evening of gathering and celebration, but it’s taken on a new meaning for the Eyres: Exactly one year prior, police officers shot and killed the family’s youngest and only son, 20-year-old Cody Dalton Eyre.

Cody was having a bad day. He felt suicidal. He got drunk. He brought a gun with him — not uncommon, since many people carry in Alaska. He decided to go for a walk to clear his head. And when Jean called 911, hoping the police could calm him down and bring him home, the opposite happened.

In the months after Cody’s death, the Eyres have received scant information from law enforcement on what exactly happened that night. Cody’s death has raised not only questions for the Eyre family, but other concerns about how law enforcement officers do their jobs. Why is it that police are the first responders to mental health calls? In this case, why did they respond to someone going through a mental health crisis with deadly force? Why has law enforcement been slow to release any public information on this case? And in a place where tension between Natives and law enforcement run high, how could the incidence of these deadly interactions be reduced, or better yet, stopped?

On this walk, Cody’s family now was retracing his last steps, in memoriam. Read more…

Leaning In with Alex P. Keaton

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Nicole Cyrus | Longreads | December 2019 | 10 minutes (2,713 words)

 

In the ’80s, I was a scrappy black teenage girl determined to solve for x in this equation:

buppie = a young upwardly mobile black professional
buppie + ambition = a black professional hungry for opportunity
buppie + ambition + x = a black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company

A week after I turned 16, I called my mother into the kitchen for a meeting. I was running a personal campaign to become an international business tycoon from my family’s ranch home near Washington, D.C. My mother, a registered nurse, had volunteered to be my assistant. She sat with her hands folded on the wooden table, awaiting instructions.
Read more…