Search Results for: music

Desperate Characters

Photo via Roger W/Flickr

Paula Fox | Desperate Characters | W.W. Norton & Company | 1970 | 16 minutes (4,046 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Desperate Characters, the novel by Paula Fox first published in 1970 and re-(re-)released this year on the 45th anniversary of its publication. Read Sari Botton’s Longreads interview with Fox about her book.  Read more…

It’s Too Late to Die Young Now

Longreads Pick

Andrew Mueller covered grunge and Britpop for the legendary UK music weekly Melody Maker. Biographile talks to him about working as a rock journalist during the the late-eighties to the mid-nineties, “the last hurrah for the music scene as we knew it.”

Source: Biographile
Published: May 21, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,000 words)

Jennifer Nix on June Carter Cash’s Influence on Her Life

Photo via Jazz Guy/Flickr

In our hotel room that night, I broke out “Press On” and we took turns listening to songs on my Discman. Johnny and June’s duet “The Far Side Banks of Jordan” visibly stirred my dad, and at song’s end he said, “I wonder which one will go first. The other won’t last long after that.” A room service tray holding two plates relieved of pecan pie sat on the bed between us—I remember that detail because it was the last time I was alone with him. Three months after he walked me down the little white church’s aisle, and just three days short of a new millennium, my 57-year-old father collapsed by the Christmas tree in our cottage and died of congestive heart failure…

…I first set out to write a tidy piece about my love for June’s voice because it is equated with some of my greatest happiness, and with pretty much the whole world I shared in celebrating the popular myth about the love between Johnny and June. After digging into the reality of that love and life, I am boundlessly inspired by the real woman’s story and my heart is open wider. Anchored in Love showed me June not only had to deal with Johnny’s continual addictions, but she saw her son and two daughters, Carlene Carter (from her first marriage to Carl Smith) and Rosie Nix Adams, struggle with alcohol and drugs, which also led to various estrangements. That they found roads to rapprochement before her death gives me hope and some courage to try to find a way back to my mother. I am a writer, and after five years of impasse, this is how it had to start for me.

—From “Pressing On,” an essay by writer Jennifer Nix about the impact of June Carter Cash’s music on her life, and the parallels between Carter’s family struggles and her own–originally published at The Rumpus. It’s now included in Here She Comes Now: Women in Music Who Have Changed Our Lives, a new anthology edited by Jeff Gordinier and Marc Weingarten, which includes essays by Rosie Schaap, Elissa Schappell and many others.

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The Romantic Comedy Spectrum: A Reading List

Seems like the first movie I ever watched was a romance. It was a Disney movie; obviously, there’s a tortured love and a singalong. The most recent film I’ve seen, Trainwreck, is also a romance. What I’m interested in: the boundaries of the romantic comedy. Romantic comedies can be teen dreams (Clueless), homages to Shakespeare (She’s The Man), stunt-filled action romps (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), or cruel tearjerkers (P.S. I Love You). I’ve been inspired by romantic comedies before to Get My Shit Together, and I think that’s really cool. They can be timeless or comforting or really terrible, or all three. Romantic comedies—the best of them—allow us to project and to process. Here, I’ve collected a handful of stories centering on the creators and aficionados of the romantic comedy. Read more…

Big Macs Are Trophies to Some People

I would scan the commercials for every tiny detail about what life was like when you lived somewhere where there was a McDonald’s: sunshine, happy music, food wrapped up like presents in special papers and boxes, cups that came with lids and straws. Straws! People in the real world ate food in brightly colored packages and lived in houses with sidewalks and lawns. Nothing bad ever happened there. No one was cold, no one got hurt, no one died. They had flush toilets and hot water, and they had McDonald’s, and they were happy all the time because of it.

We went into Fairbanks a few times each year; whenever we flew in a visit to McDonald’s was almost guaranteed. Everyone from the villages went to McDonald’s if they could: eating there meant participating in a world we, kids from “the bush” (a general way of referring to rural Alaska), didn’t feel like we had access to, but could only admire from afar. Going into Fairbanks and eating at McDonald’s conferred status.

Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes writing in Eater about the role McDonald’s played in her life growing up in the tiny “bush” town of Fort Yukon, Alaska.

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The Missing History of Ravensbrück, The Nazi Concentration Camp for Women

Sarah Helm | Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women | Nan A. Talese | March 2015 | 48 minutes (13,071 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from Ravensbrück, by Sarah Helm, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

#NoShame in Mental Illness: A Reading List

Photo: Kelsey

Even though I’ve lived with mental illness for years, I’m still learning about self-care, support systems and valuable resources. One of these resources is No Shame Day, initiated by poet and mental health advocate Bassey Ikpi. Ikpi founded The Siwe Project, which provides special mental health support for the Black community and other minority groups. On the first Monday in July, people take to social media and use the hashtag #NoShame to talk about living with mental illness and overcoming stigma and silence. Here, I’ve collected several stories about mental illness, many written by writers of color.

1. “Disrupting Domesticity: Mental Illness and Love as a Fact.” (Ashley C. Ford, The Toast, July 2015)

Ashley C. Ford interviews her partner, Kelly, about living with a person with mental illness–how to love her better, comfort her during panic attacks and hold her accountable. Kelly’s love for Ashley is so strong: “I love you for who you are. Anxiety is part of you. That part of you also shaped the person I love.” Read more…

Well-Aimed and Powerful

John C. Houbolt at blackboard, showing his space rendezvous concept for lunar landings. // NASA // Wikimedia Commons

Margaret Lazarus Dean | Leaving Orbit | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 21 minutes (5,246 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from Leaving Orbit by Margaret Dean Lazarus, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, appearing courtesy of Graywolf Press.

* * *

The astronauts walked with the easy saunter of athletes. . . . Once they sat down, however, the mood shifted. Now they were there to answer questions about a phenomenon which even ten years ago would have been considered material unfit for serious discussion. Grown men, perfectly normal-looking, were now going to talk about their trip to the moon. It made everyone uncomfortable.
—Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

Southern Festival of Books: Nashville, Tennessee, October 10, 2009

Maybe you’ve seen it. Many people have—at least 800,000 have clicked on various YouTube iterations of the same moment. It looks like nothing at first. The video is fuzzy, amateur, handheld. We hear the muffled verité sound of wind against the microphone, of the excited breath of the camera operator. People are standing around, their postures reflecting boredom, their faces and movements obscured by the shaky camera work and low resolution.

On YouTube, of course, this poor video quality, combined with a high hit count, contains an inverse promise: something is about to happen.

We can make out a white-haired man in a blue blazer, partially obscured by a sign. He seems to be talking to another man, in a black jacket, whose back is to the camera. Out of any context, the white-haired man would be unrecognizable because of the bad video quality, but if you know to look for him—and you do, because of the title on the YouTube page—the man is recognizable as astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot of Apollo 11, one of the first two men to walk on the moon.

The muffled audio obscures the voice of the black-jacketed man, who is speaking now. Passion or nervousness makes his voice waver.

“You’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t,” the man says. He is holding an object out to Buzz. A subsequent Google search reveals that it’s a Bible—he is trying to make Buzz swear upon it.

Overlapping him, Buzz Aldrin’s voice says, clearly and unwaveringly,
“Get away from me.”

“—calling the kettle black. You’re a coward and a liar and a thief—”

At that moment Buzz’s arm comes up and cracks the black-jacketed
man in the jaw. Even with the poor video, we can see that it’s an impressive punch, well-aimed and powerful. We can’t see the punched man’s face, but we see his head recoil backward. The camera recoils too, as if in sympathy. Something has changed in the scene, you can sense it. One public figure’s image has been complicated, another person now has a story to tell, a video to put on YouTube. Read more…

How Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz Freed Rock and Roll

Always the kind of personality who cut through false distinctions, Coleman could boast a lineage both in punk rock and, with his collective-improvisation aesthetic, in the very music that punk rock often claimed to set out to destroy, hippie psychedelia and stadium rock.

Bassist Jack Bruce of Cream, who had a jazz background, told the Independent in 1992 that by the late 1960s the group that did “Sunshine of Your Love” and “White Room” was secretly “an Ornette Coleman band, with Eric [Clapton] not knowing he was Ornette Coleman, Ginger [Baker] and me not telling him. But there he was, doing these unaccompanied solos for 20 minutes, incredible stuff.”

Carl Wilson writing at Slate about the way avant-garde jazz musician Ornette Coleman influenced everyone from the Velvet Underground to MC5 to to Patti Smith. Coleman died on June 18th, 2015.
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The Cult Could Become a Church: On David Foster Wallace

I once dated a David Foster Wallace fanboy. You know who I mean: He’s white. He’s straight. He went to a small liberal arts college. He interrogates you on which DFW books you’ve read—the novels, or just the essays? He’s read Infinite Jest probably more than once. He thinks he has a unique take on the author’s work and the man’s life (and death).

My ex isn’t alone; DFW fanaticism swept the literary States in the early to mid-aughts. Prepare for the fans to be flamed (or the flames to be fanned): The End of the Tour (based on an account of Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour) stars Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel and hits theaters on July 31. If you’ve never heard of this acclaimed author, treasure your last moments of innocence; then, read this primer at Vulture on DFW’s contested legacy.

David Foster Wallace has always been an unstable commodity. For two decades, the writer and his writings have been at the center of a cult with several branches. The first branch is other fiction writers, who also tend to be the most serious readers. This makes a certain obvious sense. ‘Infinite Jest’ is, on its face, the most daunting of novels; 1,079 pages, 96 of them endnotes; text in small type pointing you constantly to text in smaller type, necessitating multiple bookmarks; an immersion in two subcultures, junior tennis and addiction recovery; a time commitment to be measured in weeks, not days — two months for serious readers, Wallace thought…

The second branch are the magazine writers for whom his essays renewed the possibilities of a fast-aging New Journalism by clearing away Tom Wolfe’s cynicism and replacing it with a dazzling faux-amateur act.

The third are the academics; English professors hadn’t received the gift of fictional worlds so rich and susceptible to their hermeneutics since Nabokov, Beckett, or Joyce.

But before his suicide he compared his own fame only to that of a high-profile classical musician. 

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