Longreads Pick
Longreads’ Mark Armstrong on Steven Soderbergh’s “State of the Cinema” and four other recommended stories about the movie, music and publishing industries.
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Longreads Pick
[Not single-page] A look at tour bus drivers, who hold the lives of musical acts in their hands on a daily basis, and what it’s like to drive around music’s biggest stars:
“Providing a band with a smooth ride, free of sharp turns and unexpected pit stops, isn’t just a matter of comfort. Good drivers get work because band members trust that they can go to sleep at night knowing they’ll wake up in one piece. Ben Kitterman know this better than most, having driven for Tom Petty (‘Favorite gig ever. Extremely professional.’), Motley Crue (‘Tough gig. They’re a little bit rougher.’), Creed (‘Fuck every minute of that! Those guys thought they were such a big deal.’), and John Legend (‘Not a whole lot of interaction. He just likes reading and chilling out and doing his own thing.’). He recently made the unusual transition from driver to rider when he became Aaron Lewis’ full-time pedal steel player.
“‘Driving smoothly is really an art form,’ he says. ‘I’ve ridden with a lot of pretty well-known drivers and was surprised at how shitty the ride was. Once, I was rolled out of my bunk and dislocated two ribs. Going into four shows in a row with dislocated ribs is not a pleasant experience.’ Driving, though, is only a small part of a driver’s job. Buses must be cleaned, inside and out, on a regular basis. And as Ron Ward — who’s driven for Sean Combs (‘He lets me do whatever I want. If I need Ciroc, I can get bottles from the distributor.’), the Wu-Tang Clan (‘I have to get a new damn lung every time I come off the road with them’), and Chris Brown (‘He don’t tell me nothing but, “You want to go partying? Clubbing? Let’s go!”‘) — makes clear, there are certain things he doesn’t abide.”
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Published: Aug 16, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,383 words)
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Longreads Pick
A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple:
“A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me:
“‘Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, I, I, I don’t know—I’m baffled at this thing that I just got, this e-mail shit, I don’t know what these people—are they trying to antagonize me so that I do shit like this, so that I start fights with them? I don’t understand why there are pictures of models on a page about me. Who the fuck are they? What? What?’
“The text attached read: ‘And are you western-bound? And hi there! F’
“I had no idea what she was talking about. Two days later, I landed at LAX.”
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Published: Jun 17, 2012
Length: 29 minutes (7,287 words)
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Longreads Pick
Without Spotify, labels know only when an album is sold. If a CD is ripped for a friend or borrowed for a party, they know nothing. Spotify gives them a record, by location, age, and gender, of every single time a track is played. Jay-Z used to think he was big in London, based on U.K. album sales; it turns out he’s big in Manchester. Spotify has discovered that radio plays—on real, terrestrial, electromagnetic spectrum—still drive interest in artists, as do Sweden’s summer talk shows. Sundin has a Spotify chart tracking Rihanna and Lady Gaga over seven weeks. Both show a bump on Friday and a spike on Saturday. They are weekend artists. Spotify knows when your party plays Gaga.
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Published: Jul 13, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,977 words)
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Longreads Pick
Two years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondered aloud in the New York Times why no mass protests had arisen against what was clearly a criminal coup by the banks. Where were the pitchforks, the tar, the feathers? Where, more importantly, were the crowds? Venkatesh’s answer was the iPod: “In public spaces, serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants. Congrats Mr. Jobs for impeding social change.” Venkatesh’s suggestion was glib, tossed off—yet it was also a rare reminder, from the quasi-left, of how urban life has been changed by recording technologies.
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Published: Mar 28, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,586 words)
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Top 10 Longreads for Art, Design, Film & Music
I teamed with the wonderful BrainPickings.org to feature my favorites in this category. Some of you beat me to the punch on these, but there are a few new gems in there (Stephen Tobolowsky, I’m looking at you).
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Longreads Pick
Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation. “In no arena is dancehall—and Jamaican society overall—more troubled than in grappling with sexual orientation. Blaring on most street corners and from car radios, dancehall’s virulent homophobia, a curdled hatred for homosexuals explicitly and pervasively articulated in the music’s lyrics and deeply entrenched in dancehall culture, foments a quotidian reign of terror against Jamaican gay people. Jamaican gays call it murder music.”
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Published: Dec 1, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,334 words)
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Longreads Pick
Typography has a visceral and direct effect on everybody who reads. It can inhibit or enhance the feel of reading without being consciously noticeable. It does so by combining specific visuals that echo cultural memories, which are hopefully servile to the words they spell. Not unlike your favorite food tasting better on fine china then on paper plates, the choice of typeface can radically impact meaning while hopefully going consciously unnoticed. Try to exhort that indefinable magic in words, and you may as well be doing that over-quoted dance about architecture.
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Published: Nov 6, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,590 words)
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Longreads Pick
What should pop sound like when the country’s going to hell?
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Published: Jun 3, 2009
Length: 14 minutes (3,578 words)
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