Soraya Roberts | Longreads | July 2019 | 7 minutes ( 1,978 words)
“The sickness rolled through me in great waves.” Whenever I’m sick, I read The Bell Jar. I know, ironic, but there’s a chapter where Sylvia Plath describes her central character having food poisoning and it always makes me feel better — her ability to capture how urgent it feels, how relentless, how it reduces you to a vehicle for vomit and diarrhea. How cleansed you are afterwards just for you to do it all over again, eventually. It’s comforting that someone writing two decades before I was even born not only experienced this exact feeling, but could reproduce it so clearly. “There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
Nostalgia is a kind of vomiting. It’s not like you re-watch your favorite parts of Heathers because bile compels you to. But there’s the same idea of deconstructed repetition, although in nostalgia’s case, it’s so you can climb back into your memories, where you can lock yourself into a space untroubled by reality. It’s a thing that keeps coming up (sorry) because of how we manufacture culture now — not just online but in a world owned by big media. There has always been significant reworking of past cultures, but I don’t think popular culture was ever the commodity it is now, where Mickey Mouse isn’t just a drawing but an intellectual property (IP). At no other time has mainstream culture felt like such an opiate, so tied to appealing to mass comfort. Out of this comes the new season of the bingeable Netflix series Stranger Things, which is less its own story than a collection of its creators’ pop culture memories; Disney churns out live-action remakes of every one of its films until the elephants come home; and then there are the countlessstoriesin thepress celebrating the anniversaries of every movie/show/album ever made.
I guess you can’t really blame anyone for wanting to keep puking up the past when the present is so insufferable. Except anyone is not everyone, and the relief is a ruse. Read more…
In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”
We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.
We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.
The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other. Read more…
The reporting path that led to the formation of Bundyville: The Remnant was one that wound thousands of miles around the American West — from Nevada to Utah, Arizona to Oregon and Washington. It’s a story of martyrdom and mystery, told through the eyes of a long list of characters — people who, in many cases, don’t know each other, or even cross paths in this series. These biographical sketches can be used as a tool to keep names and stories straight as you read.
The pastor of Marble Community Fellowship, in Stevens County, Washington. Byrd was also the singer in the bands Legacy and the Watchman, and was one of 15 signers of a Christian Identity manifesto called the “Remnant Resolves.” Byrd attended The Ark — a known Christian Identity church in Stevens County — for years before founding Marble Country, a “Christian covenant community” with his wife, Anne.
Stella Anne Byrd
A North Carolina native, Stella Anne Byrd (nee Bulla) is married to Barry Byrd, and helped found Marble Community Fellowship. Anne often preaches from the pulpit as well, and is seen by many people raised at Marble as someone who believes she is a prophet. Two of her brothers also believe they are prophets.
Brad Bulla
Brother of Anne Byrd. Brad Bulla was one of the fifteen authors of the Christian Identity manifesto, the Remnant Resolves, alongside his brother-in-law, Barry Byrd. He also played in the band Legacy with the Byrds. Bulla was excommunicated from Marble by his sister, and now is a traveling musician.
Ammon Bundy
Son of Cliven Bundy, Ammon Bundy was considered the leader of the 2016 Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation in Southeastern Oregon. Bundy, who lives in Idaho, has since become a public speaker on his theories about the federal government and his anti-environmentalism stance. In 2018, he made headlines when he spoke out against President Trump’s remarks about a migrant caravan at the US/Mexico border.
Cliven Bundy
A Nevada cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy became a national name when, in 2014, he led an armed standoff between his militia supporters and employees of the US Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. By that point, Bundy had not paid the required fees to graze his cattle on public land for nearly 20 years, on the basis of his claim that the federal government could not actually own land. Bundy is the father of Ammon Bundy and Ryan Bundy, who led the 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Bundy was held in federal prison for two years for charges related to the 2014 standoff, but was freed when the judge dismissed the case after determining that government prosecutors had failed to turn over relevant evidence to Bundy’s lawyers. The government has appealed the dismissal
Richard Butler
As the founder of the neo-Nazi compound, the Aryan Nations, Butler established the group in North Idaho during the 1970s — which became a hub for white supremacists from around the country to gather. Butler was also an ardent believer in Christian Identity, and also ran a church devoted to the ideology at the Aryan Nations, called the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Butler lost his compound in a 2000 lawsuit, and died in his sleep in 2004.
Joshua Cluff
A nurse and former colleague of Glenn Jones, Cluff and his family were the victims of the 2016 Panaca bombing committed by Jones. Cluff is a cousin of LaVoy Finicum, and is married to Tiffany Cluff, who was home when the bombing occurred with the couple’s three daughters.
Glenn Jones
A 59-year-old former nurse at the Grover C. Dils Medical Center in Caliente, Nevada, Jones detonated two bombs at the Panaca, Nevada home of his former co-workers, Joshua and Tiffany Cluff on July 13, 2016. Jones shot himself before the bombs exploded, and died at the scene. At the end of his life, Jones lived at an RV park in Kingman, Arizona.
Robert LaVoy Finicum
In January 2016, 54-year-old Robert LaVoy Finicum was considered a leader of the 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Southeastern Oregon. Preferred to be called LaVoy, Finicum was an Arizona native who became a rancher late in life. He was the father of 11 children, and numerous foster children, and was married to Dorothea Jeanette Finicum. He was shot and killed after fleeing from police during a traffic stop on January 26, 2016 that was intended to arrest the leaders of the refuge occupation. Finicum is widely considered a martyr in the anti-government Patriot movement.
Sheriff Kerry Lee
A Panaca native, Kerry Lee has been the sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada — one of the largest counties by square foot in America — for 13 years. He is also the chief of the Panaca volunteer fire department and the county coroner. He lives down the street from the 2016 bomb site, and was one of the first people to respond to the scene.
William Keebler
An ardent hunter and Utah militiaman, William “Bill” Keebler spent two weeks at the 2014 Bundy Ranch standoff, providing supplies for Bundy’s supporters and acting as a bodyguard to the family. Keebler was an associate of LaVoy Finicum. After the standoff, Keebler returned home to Utah and founded the Patriots Defense Force (PDF) militia. In June 2016, Keebler pushed the button to detonate a fake bomb at a Arizona Bureau of Land Management building. The explosive was supplied by a PDF member who was actually an undercover FBI agent. After two years of court proceedings, Keebler was sentenced to time served and is out on parole.
Stewart Rhodes
The founder of the Oath Keepers militia, which is considered to be an anti-government group formed out of conspiratorial beliefs. Rhodes is a graduate of Yale Law School and is a former staffer for Ron Paul. During a February 2019 Trump campaign rally, Rhodes appeared in the front row of the crowd.
“Brad Miller” and “Jake Davis”
Two undercover FBI agents who infiltrated William Keebler’s Patriots Defense Force militia.
Washington State Representative Matt Shea
A six-term Washington state house member representing Spokane Valley, Matt Shea has aligned himself at the far-right of the state’s Republican party. He made headlines in 2018 when he claimed to have distributed a document called the Biblical Basis for War, which spelled out a battle plan for a holy war. Shea has long been vocal about his conspiratorial views, and has been a guest on Alex Jones’s broadcast InfoWars. He is an annual speaker at the God and Country Celebration at Marble Community Fellowship, a secretive religious community. He is a leader of the 51st State movement, which advocates for Eastern Washington to break off from the more liberal west side of the state. The new state would be called “Liberty.”
Timothy McVeigh
The perpetrator of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which left 168 people dead. McVeigh was known to hold anti-government beliefs, and said the bombing was revenge for the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents.
Dorothea Jeanette Finicum
The widow of Robert LaVoy Finicum and mother of 11, Jeanette became an activist and popular Patriot Movement speaker after her husband’s death. She filed a wrongful death lawsuit against several defendants, including the State of Oregon, because of his death, and helped create a movie about her husband called LaVoy: Dead Man Talking.
Mark Herr
Founder of the Center for Self-Governance, Herr is also the producer of LaVoy: Dead Man Talking.
Guy Finicum
LaVoy Finicum’s younger brother. A licensed mental health counselor.
Paul Glanville
A Colorado doctor who lived at Marble Country during the 1990s, but left the community after coming to believe it was a religious cult.
Jay Grimstead
Founder of the Coalition on Revival, which advocates for laws to be restructured to follow Biblical law. Grimstead briefly lived at Marble Community Fellowship, and later became a critic of the Byrds’ authoritarian structure.
Chevie Kehoe
Kehoe, who attended The Ark, a Christian Identity church in Stevens County, WA, believed he could create the white American bastion in the Northwest that racists before him, like Bob Mathews, believed in. Kehoe went on a multi-state crime spree, which included murders, robberies, and a shootout with police before he was arrested and sentenced to three life sentences. He is currently incarcerated at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado.
Kevin Harpham
A Stevens County, Washington white supremacist who planted a bomb in 2011 on the route of the Spokane, Washington Martin Luther King Jr Day Unity March. Currently in prison.
Dan Henry
A Christian Identity pastor at The Ark, now called Our Place Fellowship, in Stevens County, Washington.
Jesse Johnson
Was raised at Marble Country before being excommunicated as a teenager.
Israel Keyes
A childhood acquaintance of Kehoe who also reportedly attended the Ark, Keyes confessed to committing murders around the United States shortly before killing himself in jail.
Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich
The sheriff of Spokane County, Washington since 2006, Knezovich — a Republican — has risen as one of the loudest voices against State Rep. Matt Shea.
Robert “Bob” Mathews
A former anti-government militia leader, in 1983 Mathews formed The Order: a white supremacist group that committed bombings, robberies, and a murder around the American West in hopes of sparking a race war. Mathews hoped to turn the Northwest into a “white American bastion.”
Pete Peters
A Christian Identity pastor and radio host, Pete Peters ran a small Colorado church devoted to anti-homosexual, anti-Jewish and racist teachings in the 1980s. Peters spoke at conferences and to groups of Christian Identity adherents around the country, including at The Ark in Stevens County and the Aryan Nations compound in North Idaho. Although Peters tried to shed the Christian Identity label, he continued to preach the ideology throughout his life. Peters hosted a radio and online ministry called Scriptures for America, which still continues today in his absence. He died in 2011.
Dennis Peacocke
A California political activist-turned-spiritual leader, Peacocke is an advocate for dominionism and is something of a spiritual advisor to the Byrds.
Jay Pounder
A devout Christian and former security staffer for State Rep. Matt Shea, Pounder helped leaked the Biblical Basis for War document in 2018.
Tanner Rowe
Rowe worked security for State Rep. Matt Shea on Election Night 2016. In 2018, alongside Jay Pounder, Rowe would release a document called The Biblical Basis for War — which Shea had distributed. The paper advocates for a holy war. Rowe is also a loud critic of Shea’s 51st State Movement.
John Smith
Former Washington state representative, representing Stevens County, Washington. As a young man, Smith attended The Ark, a Christian Identity church in the county, but has since disavowed his past and become one of the loudest voices in the county against the ideology. In 2018, Smith collaborated with Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich on a three-part podcast about the presence of white supremacist ideologies in the region.
Glen Wadsworth
A native Panacan who is both a prison conservation crew supervisor and a member of the volunteer Fire Department in Panaca, Nevada. He was mowing the lawn of his childhood home on July 13, 2016, when Glenn Jones detonated two massive bombs next door.
Pastor John Weaver
A longtime neo-Confederate speaker who opposes interracial marriage, Weaver was a featured guest at the 2015 God and Country Celebration at Marble Community Fellowship.
PHOTO CREDITS Guy Finicum, Tanner Rowe, Glen Wadsworth, Kerry Lee: Ryan Haas; Jesse Johnson: Leah Sottile; Joshua Cluff: Facebook; Cliven Bundy: Gage Skidmore; Robert Finicum: The Realist Report; Ammon Bundy: Rob Kerr–AFP/Getty Images; William Keebler: Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office; Stewart Rhodes: Course Correction; Glenn Jones: KTNV; Representative Matt Shea: Ted S. Warren/AP/REX Shutterstock; Timothy McVeigh: AP Handout; Dorothea Finicum: Dave Blanchard/OPB; Mark Herr: Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action; Barry Byrd: Marble Country; Stella Byrd: Facebook; Brad Bulla: Facebook; Richard Butler: Southern Poverty Law Center; Pete Peters: Blair Godbout/The Coloradoan; John Smith: Washington State Legislature; Robert Matthews: Wiki Fair Use; Chevie Kehoe: Homeschooling’s Invisible Children; Israel Keyes: HOPD; Pastor John Weaver: Immortal 600; Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich: Spokane County; Jay Pounder: Exceptional Gent; Jay Grimstead: Reformation; FBI Badges: Getty; Dan Henry: SonPlace; Dennis Peacocke: Go Strategic; Paul Glanville: Eagles Wing Medical; Kevin Harpham: Associated Press.
In November 1998, I had sex for the first and last time. I was 19, my boyfriend was 21, and we’d been together for 10 months, long-distance. I was at university in Lancaster, a small town in the north west of England, and he lived in Essex, in the south east. I had a week off from classes, so I spent six hours taking two trains to stay in the sporadically-tidied house he shared with friends from work. On Wednesday morning, I walked to the pharmacy down the street to buy condoms and KY Jelly, shaking slightly as I handed over the cash. That night, with Ally McBeal on TV in the background, we lay on his narrow twin bed, kissing and touching each other before we slipped under the covers. I worried it might hurt, or feel awkward, or be over quickly, but it was great. Afterward, we ate chocolates, drank Coke, and swore we’d have sex all the time from then on.
We tried. Later that night; the next day; a couple of months later, on vacation in Florida. Each time, it was as if my vagina had snapped shut and no matter how hard he pushed or how vividly I pictured a tulip’s petals unfurling, nothing could convince it to open. Eventually, we gave up and went back to the heavy petting and blowjobs we’d each enjoyed, respectively, before. We were best friends, we were in love, we both had orgasms. In theory, I knew that penis-in-vagina intercourse wasn’t the only way to define sex. But it seemed like the most important, and I felt like a failure for not being a “proper” girlfriend; for being unfuckable. Read more…
Music is contradictory. Highly personal expressions can become hugely popular. Tradition can be reinvented as something completely new. Understatement can often get a point across the most forcefully. Few musicians embody these contradictions more than composer, singer, and guitarist João Gilberto, who died on July 6, at age 88.
Gilberto almost single-handedly invented bossa nova — which translates from Portuguese as “new wave” — in the mid-1950s. He did so while isolated, during an ebb in his developing career. His intimate way of singing and playing would inspire every composer in the bossa nova genre, leading to incredible commercial success and the brief, if dazzling, resuscitation of jazz as a popular art form in America.
João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born in Juazeiro, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, on June 10, 1931. From an early age he was utterly charming and only concerned with music. Singer Maria Bethânia described him as “simply … music. He plays. He sings. Without stopping. Day and night. He is very, very strange. But he is the most fascinating being, the most fascinating person, that I have encountered on the surface of the earth. João, he is mystery. He hypnotizes.”
After moving to Rio de Janeiro, Gilberto sang with the vocal group Garotos da Lua for a while, but in 1951 he was fired for turning up late for gigs — or sometimes not turning up at all. Never having a place of his own, he was a permanent houseguest for a revolving set of friends. “It was always understood by his hosts that he would never be asked to participate in paying the rent or covering other household expenses,” Daniella Thomposon wrote for Brazil magazine. “Occasionally he would bring home some fruit (tangerines were his favorites), but his most significant contributions were his surpassingly intelligent conversation and the captivating music he played.” Gilberto grew out his hair, wore shabby clothes, continually smoked marijuana, and refused to get a real job.
By 1956, Gilberto began an eight-month stay with his sister and her husband in Diamantina. Seldom changing out of his pajamas, he installed himself in the tiled bathroom, as much for privacy as acoustics, practicing guitar and voice nonstop. It was here at age 25 that he created bossa nova, largely by reducing the older musical form of samba down to its essence.
“I think João Gilberto did it like this,” guitarist Baden Powell once said. “He just took the rhythm of the tamborims [a small tambourine-like drum] of the Samba Schools to the exclusion of the other percussion instruments. That’s the clearest rhythm you hear in it all. He took out all the rest.”
Gilberto also began singing more quietly and without vibrato. He changed his phrasing and used his voice as its own percussion instrument — sometimes as a complement to the guitar, sometimes creating rhythmic tension.
Despite the musical breakthrough he accomplished in his sister’s bathroom, Gilberto’s obsessiveness caused concern. His sister and her husband sent him to live with his parents in Juazeiro.
Afraid of being ridiculed for his new vocal style, Gilberto practiced on the banks of the São Francisco river, where he wrote a song mimicking the sway of the washerwomen as they walked by, carrying baskets of laundry on their heads. He used his new vocal and rhythm techniques to compose “Bim-Bom,” and so it is considered by some to be the first bossa nova song.
Gilberto’s father, unimpressed with his abilities and embarrassed by his son’s lack of respectability, had him committed to an asylum. During one interview, Gilberto stared out the window. “Look at the wind depilating the trees,” he said. When reminded that trees have no hair, he responded, “And there are people who have no poetry.” He was released after one week.
Gilberto returned to Rio and renewed his friendship with musician Antônio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, then a composer and arranger for Odeon Records. Jobim arranged his song “Chega de Saudade” for Gilberto to record, but the artist’s perfectionist streak held up the process: Gilberto chided the musicians for little mistakes, made the unheard-of demand for separate microphones for his voice and guitar, and argued with Jobim about the chord progression. “Chega de Saudade” and “Bim-Bom” were finally cut on July 10, 1958. After a slow start, the single became a regional success.
American guitarist Charlie Byrd heard Gilberto’s music in 1961 while on a Jazz Ambassador tour organized by the State Department. Byrd returned home with some Gilberto/Jobim bossa nova albums, which he played for saxophonist Stan Getz. “I immediately fell in love with it,” Getz remembered. “Charlie Byrd had tried to sell a record of it with I don’t know how many [record] companies, and none of ‘em wanted it. What they needed was the voice — the horn.”
Getz and Byrd released Jazz Samba in April 1962. It entered the Billboard pop album chart in early March and ultimately peaked at No. 40. Getz earned a Grammy for his performance of Jobim’s “Desafinado.” The bossa nova craze had begun, and its definitive statement would come two years later, when Getz collaborated with the genre’s originator.
“I’m not a sociologist, but it was a time when people in the States wanted to turn to something other than their troubles,” João’s wife Astrud Gilberto said in 1996. “There was a feeling of dissatisfaction, possibly the hint of war to come, and people needed some romance, something dreamy for distraction.” The eight tracks on the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto provided just that. Getz’s lyrical phrasing was a match for Gilberto’s intimate vocal. Jobim’s understated piano proved a perfect complement. Jazz critic Howard Mandel called the album “another tonic for the [Kennedy] assassination’s disruption, akin for adults to the salve upbeat the Beatles had provided for teenagers after their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.”
Jobim cowrote several compositions on the album, most notably its opener “The Girl From Ipanema.” João sang the first verse in Portugese; Astrud the second in an English translation.
Both the single and the album were an astonishing success. Getz/Gilberto spent almost 100 weeks on the charts and won four Grammys, including Album of the Year. “The Girl From Ipanema” is second only to the Beatles’ “Yesterday” as the most recorded song.
Gilberto went on to release albums for five more decades, making solo records as well as collaborating with American jazz greats like Herbie Mann, and a new generation of Brazilian musicians including Gelberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. He became a cult figure in Japan.
What might be hard to understand is that the João Gilberto who locked himself away in a bathroom and eschewed a day job is the same man who would go on to change Brazilian — and popular — music. He was fortunate to have been surrounded by people who valued him and trusted his artistic vision.
In the mid-’50s, Gilberto played, or sometimes just held court, at the Clube de Chave in Porto Alegre, appearing at any hour with his guitar. After being asked why he never finished a song, he admitted to not liking his guitar’s steel strings. The patrons, many of whom had changed their sleeping habits to conform to his, chipped in and bought him a nylon-stringed instrument. This one also wasn’t quite to Gilberto’s taste. When it was exchanged for another, he began a months-long residency.
Musicians, like music, can be contradictory. Sometimes their most idiosyncratic expressions are reflections of the universal. “João Gilberto does not underestimate people’s sensitivity,” Jobim wrote in the liner notes to Gilberto’s first album. “He believes that there is always room for something new, different and pure which — although it may not seem so at first sight — may become, as they say in the jargon, highly commercial. Because people understand love, musical notes, simplicity, and sincerity, I believe in João Gilberto, because he is simple, sincere, and extraordinarily musical.”
***
Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.
Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Michael Washburn |Southern Accents| Bloomsbury Academic | April 2019 | 20 minutes (3,222 words)
Around 10 p.m. on September 25, 2017, Tom Petty told the audience at the Hollywood Bowl, “We’re almost out of time,” and struck three D chords in quick succession. “We’ve got time for this one here.”
In six minutes Petty’s public career will be over. Petty and the Heartbreakers will finish the song, thunderously and to thunderous applause. Petty will wish a good night on his audience, and then he’ll linger on stage after the band retreats. Seven days later his life will be over.
It’s hard to tell whether Thurston Moore is being sarcastic or sincere. It’s probably a bit of both. “The biggest star in this room is Courtney Love,” says the Sonic Youth singer and guitarist in a scene from 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The documentary follows Sonic Youth’s summer 1991 European tour and features performances and backstage antics from their tourmates, including a pre-Nevermind Nirvana, Babes in Toyland, and Dinosaur Jr.
Moore comments during an interview with 120 Minutes, an MTV program that spotlighted alternative music in the days before the music channel became the home of teen moms and spoiled Laguna Beach brats. As Moore declares his love of English food to the host — most definitely sarcasm — Love is behind him trying to get the camera’s attention. She waves and appears to stand on something to make herself taller. Her efforts pay off and soon she is in front of the host, all brazen, blond, and sporting blue baby doll barrettes.
Tongue-in-cheek or not, Moore was right. Love’s band Hole wasn’t on the European tour bill that summer and their debut album Pretty on the Inside hadn’t even been released yet, but Love was already on MTV.
One British man spent his adult life devoted to his favorite star. His personal collection tells us a lot about fandom—and about the life cycles of music ephemera.
The roosters started at 4:30 in the pasture behind the inn. On the second crow, I rolled onto my back and blinked at the jalousie window’s slatted light, considering my first day at The Casa. We were allowed to ask three questions, no more. A visit with the world’s most famous spiritual surgeon was like going to see the wizard.
Mariana was silent in the bed next to me, the sleep falling in loose spirals across her face. I pulled back the sheets and slipped inside. “Bom dia.”
“Bom dia, meu amor.” A soft sound from a distant place.
You must be logged in to post a comment.