Search Results for: music

The Danger of Befriending Celebrities

Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2020 | 8 minutes (2,000 words)

Meryl Streep doesn’t call me every week to go bowling. In fact, she doesn’t call me at all. And that’s a good thing. I honestly can’t recommend becoming friends with celebrities, especially if you’re a long running journalist like I am. It simply will not lead to a Hollywood ending.

As appealing as they are, celebrities are used to being the center of attention, so you’d have to subvert your ego and go into full-blown ass-kiss mode in order to even be vaguely tolerable to them. Stars live for the spotlight, and in many cases, it’s all about them, even when they pretend it’s about you. (And I like things to be about me, thank you.) What’s more, as a journalist, I’d be blurring all sorts of lines and throwing away objectivity in order to snuggle up to my famous “friends.” And they’d only be nice in return because I’m press — and/or an ass kisser — so they’d have to feign some kind of kinship while pretending that all of my hideously annoying quirks are absolutely adorable. Yes, they’d be good at acting the part, but it’s so much better for both parties to just avoid this potential landmine and don’t go there. Don’t call me, Meryl! Don’t even text!
Read more…

Direction Nowhere

Longreads Pick

When Miles Davis and Neil Young shared the bill at the Filmore East in March 1970, they were living surpisingly parallel artistic lives despite playing such different music.

Source: At Length
Published: Mar 29, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,493 words)

Sublime’s Last Show: The Oral History

Longreads Pick

Even though the band’s lead singer died over two decades ago, people still talk about Sublime’s last show and what went wrong. One musician took the time to separate the rumors from the facts by speaking to those who were there that night.

Source: KQED Arts
Published: May 24, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3,986 words)

Regarding the Pain of Oprah

KMazur / Getty, Photo Illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  8 minutes (2,233 words)

On the cover of Susan Sontag’s 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, her last publication before her death, is a Goya print from his graphic 19th-century series The Disasters of War. It shows a reclining soldier passively taking in a dead man hanging from a tree, a body in a row of indistinguishable dangling bodies. Its pain — and the indifference with which that pain can be met — is the perfect illustration of Sontag’s book, which was her response to the query, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” She questioned whether the representation of suffering has any hand in ending it. “For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war,” Sontag writes. 

Is that why American Dirt, a sensationalized, stereotype-ridden piece of telenovela exploitation written by a self-identified white (later Puerto Rican–grandmother identified) woman, was met with a seven-figure deal and trumpeted by a publishing industry — Oprah’s Book Club most notably — that ignores countless Latinx stories? Is that why On the Record, a documentary initially backed by Oprah about various women accusing Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct, premiered at Sundance when so many other films about women’s oppression have not? Both of these works have been held up in the tradition of pain iconography and as part of a wider culture that both defers to and is let off the hook by Oprah, its designated high priestess of compassion. An indigent black girl from the rural South, she was an exemplar of one of the most neglected demographics in America. That this capitalist society made her a billionaire for inspiring a cultural bloodletting has immunized it from the sort of criticism levied when white men like Jerry Springer (or white women like Gwyneth Paltrow) do the same thing. 

But the merciless critique Oprah has received both for her support of American Dirt and lack of support for On the Record points to a framework that simultaneously benefits her and uses her as a shield. This empathetic entrepreneur’s predictably myopic choices — just like her acolytes’, from Dr. Phil to Reese Witherspoon — may not serve the majority, but they do serve the system that lets her take the fall for its larger failures of representation. Oprah is one of the most salient testaments to capitalism. 

***

 

“People want to weep,” Sontag writes. “Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.” She may have been referencing war photography, but the sentiment applies to all narrative forms of suffering, which “are more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization. They invoke the miracle of survival.” This almost superhuman transcendence of misfortune, this ability to raise yourself out of your primordial pain toward the heavens, is the prototype for the American Dream. It is also the perfect paean to plutocracy. Oprah is the prime example: teen mom, child sex abuse, teen pregnancy, drug use. While working her way toward a journalism career, she was told early on that she was too emotional while anchoring the news. It was here that she found a gaping hole in the market: Oprah turned her “failure” into a touchy-feely talk show, eventually netting herself a cult of personality and an empire approaching $3 billion. Her triumph over her past imbued her with the authority to turn beleaguered strangers’ private torment into public good and served as testament to a hierarchy of success founded on flagellation. “There is nothing greater than the spirit within you to overcome,” she said on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “You and God can conquer this,” conquering here implying profiting. She was proof that it worked. Oprah may not think you are responsible for your own misery, but she does believe you are responsible for flipping your misfortune, just like she did. As she told a women’s economic conference in 1989, “There’s a condition that comes with being and doing all you can: you first have to know who you are before you can do that.”  

Her suffering was transformative, a brand of anguish Sontag defines in her book with an unintentionally spot-on characterization of how Oprah, who referred to her talk show as her “ministry,” secularized (and capitalized on) a pious approach to hardship. “It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation,” Sontag wrote. The people Oprah chose to interview (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston), the books she chose to plug (Toni Morrison, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces), and the films she chose to produce (Beloved, Precious) — all followed this same general trajectory from trauma to some semblance of deliverance, hewing with her own personal experience. They also served to convince the most downtrodden members of the population that the system was only failing to work for them because they failed to plumb their own souls deeply enough. If capitalism was unprofitable for them, it’s because they weren’t doing the work — not in the industrious sense, but in the therapeutic one.

Oprah’s recent projects fall well within that tradition, including On the Record, the Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering documentary she was executive producing for Apple TV+ (it will now air on HBO Max), which centered around a group of women accusing Russell Simmons of sexual abuse. (He has been accused by at least a dozen women in total and denies all the charges.) The question is why this high-profile film by multiple-award winning filmmakers that already had a distributor was playing at a highly sought-after festival, when a struggling independent film could have used that rare opening to seek distribution? Instead, the news out of Sundance focused on whether Oprah, who pulled out of the film at the last minute over creative differences, was siding with Simmons or not — whether she was betraying not only her own race, but her own brand (the enabling of struggling black women to claim their due). “In my opinion, there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured,” she said in a statement. This reads to me as uncomfortably on brand, Oprah squeezing as much as possible out of a desperate situation — particularly if it’s at the expense of another capitalist success story, in Simmons’s case — to get maximum returns. But this isn’t all down to her own prurience. It’s the industry around her (including Apple) that encourages her to do this, that pays her excessively for it — the same industry that doesn’t even consider the marginalized stories that do not comply with those standards (standards upheld by a black woman, remember).

Having said all of that, it is also a function of technology that our culture expects us to bleed out to survive. The more intimate media becomes, Sontag argued, the further our shock threshold moves. “The real thing may not be fearsome enough,” she wrote, “and therefore needs to be enhanced or reenacted more convincingly.” This is where you get a situation like Jeanine Cummins’s “trauma pornAmerican Dirt, the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, about a Mexican migrant fleeing a drug cartel across the border with her son. “I’m interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship,” Cummins writes in her author’s note, “in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma.” It was a direct dial to Oprah, and in particularly unfortunate timing, she expressed her support for this hyperbolic yarn about a fictional woman of color’s pain on the same CBS morning show in which she discussed pulling her support from a documentary full of actual women of colors’ pain. In a video posted on Twitter, Oprah held up the Cummins book, with its cover of watercolor birds and barbed wire, and gushed: “I was opened. I was shook up. It woke me up. And I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom.” Her description reminded me of Sontag’s portrayal of graphic battle imagery: “Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!” American Dirt was another in Oprah’s Apple streaming projects, part of her ambition to make “the world’s largest book club,” and it showed a level of outdated hubris that was revisited tenfold upon her mentions.

While the flesh-and-blood migrants who are dying at the border have not been much of a priority to the world of capitalist enterprise, the literary industry’s corner offices have been effusive in their tone-deaf praise for American Dirt, which last year celebrated its release with — no shit — barbed twig centerpieces. The hypocrisy was too much for the Latinx community (and social media) to bear. They balked at a non-Mexican woman who claimed her husband was undocumented (he’s Irish) and painted her nails with her book cover (more barbed wire) being edified for a cheap piece of Mexican cultural appropriation, while their own perhaps less uplifting (see less white) stories were serially overlooked — Oprah’s Book Club has never chosen a Mexican author. “The clumsy, ill-conceived rollout of American Dirt illustrates how broken the system is,” wrote Mexican American author and translator David Bowles in a heavily circulated New York Times op-ed, “how myopic it is to hype one book at the expense of others and how unethical it is to allow a gatekeeper like Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power.” He pointed out that a bestseller doesn’t just happen; it’s deliberately made by big publishers sinking money into its promotion and rallying press and booksellers around it. One book’s immoderate gain is then every other book’s loss: For three months in the wake of Oprah’s book announcements, other books’ sales plummet. This is a clear impoverishment of culture, but, more importantly, it limits the dissemination of ideas that do not serve big business’ hierarchical ideals. Trauma is valued as long as it’s sanctioned by the small number of powerful people who maintain an overwhelming amount of sway over the capitalist system they uphold. The voices that are ultimately projected are their own, serving their interests and no one else’s. As Drew Dixon, the woman at the center of the Simmons doc, said, echoing Bowles: “Oprah Winfrey shouldn’t get to decide for the whole rest of the world.” More importantly, the machine that created her shouldn’t get to either. 

***

“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering,” Sontag writes at the end of her book. “Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.” In the case of Oprah, it proclaims hers while hiding the main accomplices. Once among America’s most oppressed populations, her triumph is not only immune to interrogation, so is American plutocracy for having anointed her as its apostle. Oprah gamed the system that once neglected her, and her success lends it a veneer of progress and perpetuates it into the future. With her accumulated power, she shifted taboos and secured the first black American president approximately 1 million votes. But Oprah’s $2.7 billion net worth, her $25 million private jet, her empire — none of these are incidental. They are emblems of a world which has traded millions of people’s poverty for a handful of people’s riches, millions of perspectives for one authority. Oprah may still be full of good intentions, but good intentions are no longer as significant as actions, and every one of us is now accountable — and not just for ourselves. It is not enough anymore to ask people to lift themselves by their bootstraps now that people are aware that those straps are all rigged to snap.

In the midst of American Dirt landing at No. 1 on the Times bestseller list, its publisher acknowledged mistakes but also announced its epic book tour, the one which elbowed out so many other more worthy books and authors, was being canceled over safety concerns. The move proved that Flatiron — also publisher of five Oprah books — fundamentally buys into the notion that when the country’s marginalized populations interrupt the capitalist machinery, it’s a risk to the country itself. The Hispanic Caucus has since requested a meeting with the Association of American Publishers. Bowles, meanwhile, praised the director of a border library — Kate Horan of Texas’s McAllen Public Library — for declining to be part of a pilot partnership with Oprah’s Book Club. Sontag writes that a transformative approach to suffering like Oprah’s is “a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed.” But Horan’s response to the question “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” is neither Oprah’s nor the opposite — it is to reject the war itself. Oprah serves up war stories to the system that is responsible for them — her response is to meet suffering with suffering. The Latinx community sees the paradox even if Oprah, in her prism of privilege, cannot. “We’ll never meekly submit our stories, our pain, our dignity,” writes Bowles, “to the ever-grinding wheels of the hit-making machine.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Ancient Waterways of Phoenix, Arizona

The Central Arizona Project canal in Phoenix. AP Photo/Matt York

Bruce Berger | A Desert Harvest | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | March 2019 | 25 minutes (4,980 words)

 

As Mars was once thought to be, Phoenix is crisscrossed by canals. Except for what remains of its desert setting, canals may be Phoenix’s most distinguishing feature. Varying little, pooling a personality, they make soft incisions through what surrounds them. As you jockey through traffic dizzied by small businesses and their signs, numbed by miles of ranch homes and convenience stores, your eyes will flicker coolly down what seems an open tunnel of water. Receding parallels of packed desert sand, twenty feet wide, clean of vegetation, frame an even, sky-reflecting flow. Glimpses of joggers and cyclists along the banks indicate that there is still human life without combustion. For all their sterility, the canals command moving water and thus retain more mystery than anything else in the valley. Because they so prominently display what makes a desert city possible, it would seem that to get to the bottom of the canals would be to get to the bottom of Phoenix.

Part of the canals’ mystique is that some of their routes predate Phoenix by nearly two millennia. Beginning around A.D. 200, Hohokam Indians, using handheld digging tools, moved tons of earth and engineered the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. Some 250 miles of canals fanned like tufts of hair from the Salt River, irrigating several thousand acres of corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and cotton. Having reached a population of twenty thousand, the Hohokam abandoned the Salt River Valley around 1400, possibly because they had depleted the soil.

Read more…

American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere

Flatiron Books / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (5,591 words)

I first heard about American Dirt from Myriam Gurba’s scathing critique of the novel on Tropics of Meta. Her take immediately made sense, and it jolted me. Back in graduate school, I — a white, American woman — had written a novel about Mexico. I had lived there with my husband, Jorge, who is from Oaxaca, for five years. Many of our friends are Mexican; my extended family is Mexican. I speak fluent Spanish. I normally write nonfiction, and this was the only piece of fiction I had ever felt pulled to write. It was about a pregnant 17-year-old Oaxacan woman who adopts a dog. Yes. Really. I very briefly flirted with the idea of trying to publish it and was told that no one would want to read a novel that featured a Mexican protagonist — could I find a way to make the main character American?

Later, as I worked on a nonfiction book about return migration to Oaxaca, I received the same response: Could I make an American — myself, possibly, or a “young girl” living in Mexico — the main character, instead of this 35-year-old indigenous man who’d moved from L.A. back to his tiny village in the Sierra? That book didn’t sell. I was too scared to send out the novel, and I still am. As a nonfiction writer I can position myself, inquire about the limits of my understanding, push on them by asking questions. Writing fiction, one is fully laying claim to a world.

Read more…

All Mom’s Friends

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Svetlana Kitto | Longreads | February 2020 | 6 minutes (1,503 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

My parents sat us down on the edge of their bed to tell us they were separating. There was a shimmering hologram sticker of blond-haired and blue-eyed Jesus in a white robe on the door of my dad’s bedside table. I had put my fingers over it many times, trying to take Jesus into my heart like I had seen on TV. Everything I knew about America I learned from TV. Please make sure my mom and dad don’t die before I wake up. Please make sure I don’t get kidnapped like the kid on Growing Pains. Thank you, Jesus. My dad also had pictures of Hindu gods all over the house and a small Buddha statue on top of his dresser, but there was nothing about them on TV. My mom was Latvian and Jewish, but none of that was on our walls. She deferred to my dad’s New Age Englishness, and that was that.

While my parents talked to us, holding our hands and being uncharacteristically gentle, my sister cried, and I felt something inside me warm up. I stared at my mom’s pink suede and snakeskin heels on the shoe rack at the foot of the bed. She didn’t wear them anymore because they “destroyed” her back. I wanted her to wear them so badly! I didn’t want them to hurt her back and I didn’t understand how a back could hurt. My dad’s back had a hurt too, both of them had “bad backs.” I thought this had to do with them being more like old people than young because of all the drugs they had used before getting sober when I was 5. I didn’t understand that my mom was really young. She was a really young person who wanted to be with her friends. 


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


After my parents separated, my mother moved my sister and me into a tiny one-bedroom on Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood. Down on Sunset Boulevard there was the Laugh Factory and Greenblatt’s Deli and the Coconut Teaser, a place for grown-ups I knew. What did grown-ups do in places? Up the street the other way was Fountain Avenue and the mouth of Laurel Canyon where I went to elementary school, just on top of the hill. After school, I rode my bike up and down our block, and one day, on the corner of Fountain and Laurel, I had my first existential crisis. I looked up at the sky and thought, overwhelmed and slightly horrified: I am me. I was 9. 

It was a Los Angeles childhood so a lot of our time was spent in the car — a beat-up gold Corolla with a Die Yuppie Scum bumper sticker on the back. My grandmother had given my mother the car to help her start her new life, separate from my father. If it was hot, the windows would be rolled down and the AC on. My mom would either be smoking or rolling a cigarette, which she could do with one hand. We would drive all over Hollywood running errands and visiting her friends, many of them sober, some of them still using, almost all of them gay men. All the first people I loved outside of my family were gay men. 

My mom’s best friend, Al Babayan, was the first person close to us to go. He was Armenian and had spent most of his childhood in Glendale in Los Angeles. He had slept with Stephan, who everyone knew had HIV. Al loved the Smiths; he was very sensitive. The first thing he would do when he visited us was check on our German shepherd Maya and make sure she had water. 

* * *

I was very concerned about my mom’s romantic life. On the phone I would hear her say, “I’m just so fucking lonely.” I’d seen her break down in traffic, in the gold Corolla. “Your fucking father. Your fucking selfish father.” And it was true that my dad seemed to be fine, as the months went by piling on the girlfriends who looked nothing like my blond Jewish Latvian mother — women with names like Theresa Sullivan, Shannon O’Donoghue.

All the first people I loved outside of my family were gay men.

Still, I couldn’t understand my mom’s loneliness because she had so many friends and so many people who loved her and, as a result, loved her girls. Eeda and her girls had many places to go on the weekend. In the summer, my mom’s friend Tracy invited us to swim at her parent’s mansion in Santa Monica Canyon. It belonged to Tracy’s mother, who was the famous Hollywood actress Jean Simmons. She was never there when we were so we could play hide-and-seek in all the bedrooms and eat Chicken McNuggets by the pool.  

All of my mom’s friends had a different car to ride around the city in, looking out for meters that had leftover money in them, windows down and air-conditioning on at the same time, music blaring. If it wasn’t classical music, it was Massive Attack or Prince, whom my mom and her friends loved the most. He can play every instrument, Mom said. They were the same age. He’s a genius. You can’t tell if he’s gay or straight and it doesn’t matter, she said. Everyone wants to have sex with Prince. I would rewind the tape to play “Little Red Corvette,” “Kiss,” “I Would Die 4 U” over and over, and we would all sing. I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand.

One day, my mom and I were driving to our bank in West Hollywood when I had a brilliant idea.

“Mom!” I said. “Why don’t you just be with a gay man? There are so many that you like!”

My mom paused. “Sleeping with a gay man would be like blowing your brains out with a shotgun right now,” she said gravely into the rearview mirror, shifting the car into park.

* * *

The year Ryan White died, my mother moved us to a new apartment in a gated community called Park LaBrea. She had been promoted at the production house, and we were driving around in a newly leased Volkswagen convertible. Now, Tim or Tracy or Joelle would pile into the car and we would drive to the beach with the top down and the AC on. Al came over to our new place once before he died. He and my mom got into a fight. She knew he had fixed by the burn mark he left on the toilet. “No junkie wants to be told they can’t use,” she said. I remember going to see him in hospice care in Studio City. My sister cried and I thought about our dog, Maya. I wanted to cry so my mom knew I cared.

There was Daniel, whose rich parents bought him a house in Laurel Canyon with a beautiful pool that was like a dark lagoon with jets that pumped warm water. My mom had told me that Daniel’s parents bought him lots of things because they felt guilty, because they had never accepted their gay son and now he was going to die. Daniel’s skin was pocked, which I associated with his HIV, but I later learned they were actually acne scars. Daniel took lots of pictures of Eeda and her beautiful daughters by the pool and told me I looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. 

There were people who were friends of both my parents. Tim McGowan was one, and with him my mother’s relationship was a little rockier, probably because it was too much based in a shared bitterness toward my father. There was Bruce Almeda, a pastry chef from the South who called my dad Ma Bell because he was always on the phone. There was my dad’s friend Jimmy Drinkovitch who planned to commit suicide before he got really sick. He made a promise to his lover that if he killed himself he would tell him first so that they could go together. But in the end he didn’t tell him.

With the deaths of Al and Daniel, my mom had lost her two closest friends. When she was working as an editor on the movie Mo’ Money, she met a successful music supervisor, who was also her boss. She wasn’t interested in him at first. But he wouldn’t leave her alone, she said. And eventually: He has nice calves, and he’s nothing like your father. He wanted her to quit her job and let him take care of all of us. Soon we were living with him and his two sons in a big house that wasn’t ours in Santa Monica. My mom started drinking again in secret. I was a teenager so I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. I started drinking too.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang

* * *

Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in NYC. Her writing has been featured in The Cut, Hyperallergic, New York Times, Guernica, and VICE. She’s currently working on a novel called Purvs, which means “swamp” in Latvian and is the name of the country’s first gay club.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Behind the Magic: The Story of Prince’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

MIAMI GARDENS, FL - FEBRUARY 04: Musician Prince performs during the "Pepsi Halftime Show" at Super Bowl XLI between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears on February 4, 2007 at Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

At The Ringer, read an oral history of how Prince ruminated on and carefully selected the setlist for his legendary 12-minute Super Bowl XLI halftime show in 2007. As Alan Siegel reports, Prince did it all his way, from playing specially chosen cover songs during his concert, to upending the traditional pre-game press conference — a checkbox “requirement” of the halftime act — with a live performance before stunned journalists. Super Bowl organizers learned to their delight that you can plan for a lot of things, but you simply cannot plan for the genius of Prince.

Shelby J: “We’re thinking, ‘Are we gonna change some stuff? … Are we gonna wear tennis shoes now?’ Prince was like, ‘Don’t change nothing.’ And that was part of him teaching us and me personally to be fearless.”

Prince’s Super Bowl week was booked solid. In between a full show at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Wednesday and an appearance with Latin funk outfit Grupo Fantasma at a private party for CBS on Friday, he made time for the halftime act and national anthem singer’s customary press conference at Miami Beach Convention Center.

Mischer: When we said, “You’ll have to have a press conference. They would like to interview you,” Prince point blank said, “I don’t do interviews.”

Coplin: There were just a few things where he was like, “I’m not gonna do that.” We’re like, “We’re not gonna break the deal over this.”

Mischer: He said, “I’m just gonna play for them.” And we said “OK.”

Meglen: The run-through on Thursday, they have to tape that. Because if for some reason, you physically can’t really do the halftime show, they still have to have something to broadcast to the rest of the world, right? So they tape that one. But the whole time they’re in rehearsals, Prince never turned his guitar on, and never turned his vocal mic on, so he knew what everybody else was doing at all times.

Hayes: That’s why they shoot it at the dress rehearsal. If there’s something like a weather anomaly, then they’ll just run the footage, [and] cut it for television like it’s live. They had it all planned out. The prep stuff, it was always intense. He’s like, on everybody. He’s on the techs. He’s on us. He’s with the production. He’s out in the sound truck. It’s just crazy intense because he’s trying to cross every “t” and dot every “i.”

Read the story

Remembering the Things That Remain

Illustration by Adam Forster

Amos Barshad | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,985 words)

In the spring of 2019 I start getting emails from a guy in Poland named Grzegorz Kwiatkowski. He’s a poet and a musician from Gdansk, a midsize town on the north coast of Poland, on the Baltic Sea. His band is called Trupa Trupa. Read more…

How ‘West Side Story’ Was Reborn

Longreads Pick
Published: Jan 22, 2020
Length: 34 minutes (8,650 words)