Search Results for: music

The Making of a Black Fortune

Portrait of a young, well-to-do African American woman, c. 1890. (Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

Shomari Wills | Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires | Amistad | January 2018 | 6 minutes (1,450 words)

At the turn of the century, Robert Reed Church was 60 years old. He now walked with a cane. His eyes were still fiery and bloodshot, and he remained fear­less and quick-tempered. A decade earlier, in 1889, he had begun to draw up plans for a park and arena for black citizens in Memphis. As their construction neared completion, he wondered how white Memphis would react to his project. His life had been filled with attacks by Confederates, racist police officers, and segregationists for daring to strive as a black person. Many winters earlier, he had been pelted with rocks by racists for having had the audacity as a black man to be the only man in Memphis with a sled. What would they do when he opened a $100,000 arena?

As a young man, he had dealt with white men with his fist and gun. Now, gray and wrinkled, Church decided to exert a skill he had acquired with age: diplomacy. In 1900, a group of ex-Confederate soldiers decided to throw a reunion for Confederate veterans in Memphis. As they struggled to raise $80,000 to build a temporary auditorium in which to hold the affair, they received an unexpected donation of $1,000 from Church, a former slave. “I never gave a cent in my life, so cheerfully or gladly as I gave that check to the veterans’ entertainment fund,” he said afterward. He had learned that goodwill could be bought when he had helped bail out Memphis from bankruptcy. He hoped that $1,000 would be enough to protect his arena from the same resistance as his pool hall, which a white mob had burned down when he was a young entrepreneur.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Allegedly Swedish journalist Kim Wall stands next to a man in the tower of the private submarine 'UC3 Nautilus' on August 10, 2017 in Copenhagen Harbor. (Peter Thompson/AFP/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from May Jeong, Leslie Jamison, Irina Dumitrescu, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Matt Wake.

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Inadvertent Matchmaker Seeks a Love of Her Own

Once upon a time, in a gritty, rent-stabilized land called the East Village of the late ’90s and early aughts, I introduced all my smart, interesting, kind, funny, straight guy friends to all my smart, interesting, kind, funny, straight girl friends, and they all got married and lived happily ever after.

This is the story of how I came to be known, far and wide, as the “East Village Yenta.”

Introducing people IRL — old school — was considered to be something of a major mitzvah even in those days. One of the harsher ironies of living in New York City has always been that even with the crushing multitudes of people, it can be incredibly lonely. It can seem impossible to find a mate. If you think meeting someone in New York City is hard now, I promise you, it was infinitely harder in the days before Facebook and Instagram and other social media made it standard to know pretty much everything about a person before ever meeting them.

So many single people, but so little context for knowing who was single, or for simply introducing yourself and striking up a conversation. How would you know whether the cute guy on the other side of the horseshoe bar at Vazac’s, who sort of smiled at you, or the one playing pool at Sophie’s, had a girlfriend? Or a boyfriend? Or if his relationship status might fall into the category of “It’s complicated?” In those days, it was particularly helpful to have an informed human vector pointing you in the direction of that special someone.

For a handful of couples in my East Village days, I was that vector. I tried to be subtle about it, creating low-stakes alternatives to that invariably awkward, inhumane fix-up standby, the blind date. I’d throw big parties, cramming forty or more guests into my un-renovated run-down East 13th Street tenement, for the express purpose of introducing just two of them in a low-key, dignified manner. I’d sneak a surprise guest into the exclusive weekly poker game I was part of, or into casual dinners with the group I came to think of as my East Village family, at 7A, or at one of the cheap sushi places in the neighborhood.

Sometimes I acted on my instincts almost unconsciously, making a last-minute phone call to invite someone along to a bar where I was meeting others, and it would invariably lead to a love connection. But in all situations, whether I was acting deliberately or inadvertently, there was one constant: I was always the one person in the room who knew both parties.

* * *

Mine was a full-service matchmaking enterprise. Not only would I introduce my friends, but in some cases, early in their courtships, before both parties were ready to considered themselves part of an “item,” I’d even chaperone them. Sure, I’ll be a third wheel on your road trip to a sleep-inducing community theater production of The Cherry Orchard in Bristol, Pennsylvania so that you don’t have to call it a “date.” Also included in the package was relationship advice for the unattached and lovelorn, which I’d provide for free. Ironic, considering that I myself was pretty consistently unattached and lovelorn, living, as I did, on a perpetual emotional roller coaster ride, courtesy of a coterie of ambivalent man-children, most of whom were complete jerks.

Occasionally my friends would try to return the favor. But while I loved introducing couples, I, myself, hated being fixed up. First of all, none of my friends were insecure or co-dependent enough to go to the ridiculous trouble I had for them, so awkward blind dates seemed to be the only option.

Second of all, in most cases, they wanted to introduce me exclusively to short dudes they had no one else to set up with. I’m a hair under five feet myself, so I’m not in any position to rule anyone out based on their height. But that’s not what this was about. I never had a problem with short guys. I dated men who were 5’2” and 5’3”. I also dated guys who were over six feet. The problem wasn’t the men’s lack of stature. The problem was, more often than not, it was the only thing we had in common. Having already logged more than my share of meals with short men who had no sense of humor, or had never read a book, I just wasn’t interested.

Third of all, in the cases where my friends did have great guys of any height that they wanted me to meet, I was forced to confront my aversion to…great guys of any height. No, not for me, the smart, interesting, kind, funny type! Let the other girls have them! I was in the market for a different breed of suitor: the rakishly cute, brooding, unreliable, sometimes mean, always broke, and decidedly broken species known as The Beautiful Mess, native to regions like the ’90s East Village. The anti-suitor. As if it isn’t already difficult enough in New York City to find someone to settle down with; try limiting yourself to the ones who are just not that into settling down. Or you. Or both. Stubbornly, I clung to this ridiculous preference way past the age when most women outgrow it.

If I was stuck in that groove way longer than I should have been, I hold New York City somewhat accountable. It provided me with too many compelling distractions from my misery and loneliness. New York is often anthropomorphized as a bad boyfriend who’s both hard to keep and hard to leave. But for me New York was more like my gay boyfriend, who wasn’t going to give me certain things you’d want in a relationship, but who would comfort me and cheer me up with shiny diversions when I most needed it. So much to see! Art, music, street fashion, architecture, crazy tourists. I’d walk around the lower tip of Manhattan on a Sunday afternoon after a bad date Saturday night, intrigued at every turn — interesting buildings, shops, a veritable UN of cuisines, people, people, people. The blessed profusion of variety tranquilized me. Afterward, my mind could remain occupied and my spirits high, at least until the man-child du jour would do or say something just subtly rejecting enough to throw me off balance. Where another woman might recognize this as a good stop to get off that train, I’d instead expend tremendous energy trying to decipher the mixed messages, and contorting myself into someone I imagined they’d be more interested in.

* * *

The people around me got tired of my tedious suffering before I did. The last straw was my 34th birthday dinner friends put together for me in October, 1999 at Jules on St. Marks Place. Bill, the on-again-off-again boyfriend I was, for some reason, living with at the time, had said no when I asked if he wanted to join my birthday celebration. My friends wouldn’t stand for it, though. They took matters into their own hands, calling Bill and persuading him to surprise me at the restaurant for cake.

Dinner and dessert came and went. We sat and sat. I wondered why my friends all kept looking to the door but not getting up and heading toward it. My friend Donna grabbed her Nokia cell phone and stepped outside. No one spoke. When Donna came back in, she couldn’t hide her anger.

“Bill is blowing us off,” she said. “He said he was going to surprise you and come for dessert. I’m so sorry, Sari.”

I hung in with Bill for another seven or eight months. I avoided my friends. I didn’t want to be lectured. I was crumbling inside, and I didn’t want them to see. And I wasn’t ready to walk away.

It hadn’t occurred to me that my friends might have been avoiding me, too.

“Buttons,” my friend Kevin said to me when I called him one afternoon — he was using one of his many affectionate nicknames for me — “I don’t know if you’ve noticed that I haven’t been spending so much time with you these days. It’s just that I can’t watch anymore as you put yourself through the ringer with guys like Bill. I can’t watch you as you keep staying.”

After a moment, I said, “I’m working on it, Kevin.” It came out more defensive than I wanted, but I didn’t know how to fix that, and I couldn’t say more words without crying. As soon as we hung up, the tears came rushing.

What Kevin had said hurt so much, but it was what I needed to hear. It was one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me.

It got me to dump Bill for good, and to then find myself a good New York shrink. And while I was busy getting my shit together, I made my next match, almost inadvertently.

I got a call from a guy I knew who’d moved from New York to Montréal the year before. His girlfriend, a lovely young woman I’d met at their going-away party across town at the Ear Inn, was now moving back to New York City. Without him. They’d broken up. Her name was Emily, and she was this pixie-ish, booksish dancer who also liked to write. She said she had just begun her first novel.

Emily was looking for a room to rent, and it so happened my friend Dave was looking for a roommate. I called them both and invited them to meet me for dinner at Jeoaldo, the cheap sushi place on East Fourth. When I hung up, the gears in my brain started turning. I made a third phone call, this one to Kevin.

Kevin and Emily married two years later.

As a daughter of clergy who rejects religion, I probably have no business invoking a Jewish adage about matchmakers. But it’s said that if you introduce three couples who go on to marry, a place is reserved for you at the highest level of Heaven. (Of course Jewish Heaven has different levels that you have to strive toward!) Kevin and Emily were couple number three for me.

Was it just a coincidence that after I introduced them — and, granted, after $20,000 worth of shrink sessions — that I then found my mate? That job I had to contract out; Nerve Personals served as my yenta — with the help of my gay boyfriend, New York City.

After we’d communicated intermittently on Nerve Personals for about six months but never met, I spotted Brian on East 7th Street, between Avenues C and D one morning when I was out jogging. He was standing behind his car, making sure it was outside the no-parking zone in front of a church entrance. I recognized him from his dating profile photo, and had enough context, obviously, to know he was single and in the market for a girlfriend. So, I said hello.

On February 5th, 2018, we celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary.

I’ll be forever grateful to New York City and its Alternate Side Parking Rules, and to Nerve Personals. And to Kevin, for a gift even greater than the mitzvah of matchmaking.

And Headbangers Shall Know Thy Names

AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian

There are certain songs whose lyrics you know without ever owning the album. Then there are some songs that define an album. For me, “It’s So Easy” was one of the songs that defined Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 gritty classic Appetite for Destruction, and I wasn’t even a headbanger.

At LA Weekly, Matt Wake tells the untold stories of the two musicians who co-wrote two songs on GNR’s iconic album: Chris Weber and West Arkeen. Weber and Arkeen are the only two people who earned co-writing credits on the album outside of the core band members, yet only one briefly played in the band, and their faces didn’t appear as skulls on the album cover. One died young. One lives peacefully with his family in LA. Neither got rich or famous. Somehow I knew these musicians’ songs without ever knowing their names, and somehow I missed this story when it came out in summer, 2017. Fortunately, like the album, it’s evergreen.

Arkeen told Gosse he and McKagan had written “It’s So Easy” together. Before reaching its now-familiar brutality, it “was more like a hippie la-la song,” she says. “It had a twang to it, and Axl’s the one that made it more rock & roll.”

In McKagan’s compelling 2011 memoir, also titled It’s So Easy, he writes about meeting Arkeen upon moving to an apartment on El Cerrito Place in Hollywood, where Arkeen was his next-door neighbor. Funk legend Sly Stone lived on the floor above. According to McKagan, “It’s So Easy” was written at the El Cerrito apartments — as were bittersweet ballad “Yesterdays” and trippy rocker “The Garden,” two more Arkeen GNR co-writes eventually released on the Use Your Illusion LPs.

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Hierarchy of Needs

(Severin Matusek / EyeEm)

Angela Palm | Creative Nonfiction | Winter 2017 | 10 minutes (2,732 words)

“You never laugh anymore,” my seven-year-old said from the backseat of the car while I was driving. It was early November.

“What did you say?” I asked, though I had heard him clearly.

* * *

I had been thinking about what it meant that Donald Trump had not yet stopped running for president. About the errands we still had to do that night. About the balance of my credit card, and about our new mortgage and all the furniture I couldn’t afford to fill the new house. About the cost of my kids’ college. About the most recent school shooting and the new statistic I’d read that said Americans in 21 states are more likely to die a gun-related death than as a result of a car accident. About heroin overdoses and prescription pill addictions that were hitting closer and closer to home. Food insecurity. Black lives and deaths in America. Overpopulation. Prison overcrowding. The Syrian refugee crisis. Global warming. Dying oceans. My aging parents, and my own mortality. E-mail that had gone unanswered for months because I was simply tired of typing. The state of my marriage. The quality of my teaching. The exercise I wasn’t getting.

If my brain were a computer, its internal fan would make that loud, warm, whirring sound that means it’s working too hard. It probably isn’t a coincidence that adult coloring books topped Amazon’s bestseller lists last year.

* * *

I wash my body each day with liquid soap I squeeze from a bottle that reads “happiness.” I buy this product again and again to no noticeable effect and keep quiet faith in the power of the subliminal.

If that power exists, then it follows that I am also subconsciously affected by the sponsored ads on Facebook. Should I buy that period underwear? I find myself wondering several times in a single day. No, no.

* * *

The most basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological ones: air, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion of waste. Eating, fucking, snoozing, shitting. Happiness is not listed among any of the hierarchy’s tiered descriptions, but I imagine it floats somewhere above the uppermost point of the two-dimensional pyramid or surrounds the diagram’s boundaries like a cloud. Perhaps it appears intermittently as each level of the hierarchy clicks into place, and flickers out of focus again when the pyramid fluctuates. Or maybe it is measured differently altogether.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula.

Our independence, says the Declaration of Independence, guarantees a right to pursue happiness and bypasses the needs in Maslow’s hierarchy entirely. Though the document assures life and liberty in imprecise, yet enthusiastic terms, it cites no explicit guarantee of basic needs such as drinkable water or fresh air. Those are assumed here. For now.

I have everything in Maslow’s ground-floor level of needs, some things in the upper levels of needs, and many things that aren’t needs at all. But this assumes happiness relies on having as opposed to being.

* * *

Echoing Tolstoy’s assertion about happy families in Anna Karenina, a therapist wrote that unhappy people have vastly different reasons for being unhappy, but happy people all have one thing in common: They are grateful for what they have rather than being obsessed with what they want.

Through product messaging, I’ve come to believe soap might have the power to make me happy. A pill might make me happy. Stylish clothes might make me happy. Make-up. Skiing. Validation from the strangers of the Internet. Alcohol. Weight loss. Botox. Period underwear.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula. An Amazon search turns up over 92,000 books that focus on the subject. In 2008, a woman named Robyn Okrant embarked on a mission to live for a year according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice on happiness. Okrant changed her sex, her food, her clothing, her makeup, her philanthropic methods, and more. In a Forbes Magazine interview she says of the experience: “It was incredibly draining, and it made me really sad. It made me sad to think of how many hours I’ve lost — even when I wasn’t doing the project — to blindly following advice and listening to what other people tell me I should be doing to create my own happiness.”

* * *

Do you know how easy it is to mask unhappiness? Add exclamation points. That is how I text my mother: I’m great! Can’t wait for the holidays!

* * *

This past fall, Thanksgiving came and went quickly. Before my brother and his girlfriend flew back home, we spent a small fortune on lunch together at a trendy brick oven pizzeria and brewery. While we waited for our food to arrive, I heard a man at the table to my right tell another man about a gay bathhouse he recently visited. “The floor is covered in semen,” he said as he ate his salad. The other man nodded, his expression neutral and joyless. I imagined a place where men empty themselves into and around each other, and I mentally classified it as a combination of a fulfilled basic need and the freedom to pursue happiness.

To my left, beyond my brother, a large flat screen television broadcasted a continuous live video feed of a Ugandan village’s water pump, which the pizzeria had funded. I was the only person in the restaurant who watched it for longer than a few seconds. Between bites of thin crust pizza topped with speck and Brussels sprouts, I saw a young boy in red t-shirt carry a plastic jug to the pump and fill it. I saw a barefoot girl toddle across the screen, then bend over to rake her hands across the ground, her face placid and oblivious to the camera. A man crossed the screen somberly and approached the pump, filling his two jugs. Then a woman filled her jugs.

Beyond the pump was a row of homes. A telephone pole rose above them, presumably delivering electricity to the village from an unseen source beyond the camera’s lens. The area in view was free from debris, free from conflict, and nothing I could see in this tiny slice of rural Uganda echoed the violence of a twenty-year civil war. I was unsure whether to take this a sign of recovery, as I only saw what I saw, and nothing more. But whatever the context, this village remained. It moved me, though I could not articulate exactly why.

For a moment, I coveted the simplicity the live feed seemed to depict. I don’t really want to live in a world where lunch for four costs $100 and restaurant staff refills my glass more often than I need, where emotions are advertised as bath soap and adult coloring books are offered as tools for unburdening our saturated minds, but here I am.

During the 43 minutes or so that I witnessed their lives from the comparable extravagance of my own, none of the Ugandans that passed before the camera laughed, but none cried either. They drew their water from the well, and then they returned to their homes, aligned on either side of a narrow road, to clean and cook and live. I wondered whether they knew they were being watched by relatively well off and overwhelmingly white people in Vermont, day after day, and whether the cost of that water was their exploitation and subjection to an American pizzeria’s marketing plan during the restaurant’s business hours. Altruism doesn’t need a camera. Neither do the thirsty.

Carl Sagan said that there are no dumb questions, but I read an article that went one step farther. It said that happy people all ask dumb questions. Here’s one: who is the camera for, then?

* * *

Over Thanksgiving break, I graded my creative writing class’ personal essays and memoirs. Their nonfiction writing revealed wide-ranging pursuits of happiness and setbacks along the way. I never said, “Write about how you struggle,” but they did. Three women battled eating disorders. One of those three was also a cutter whose words about blood sloshing from her wrists read like intimate correspondence with a lover.

(Recently, I read a suicide prevention handbill that said the term committed suicide was offensive. Died by suicide is the preferred term. I made a mental note to remember that. But what is the appropriate term for a person who enjoys hurting themselves? Who obsesses over the color of blood and loves the pain associated with extracting it from her own veins? Who, for reasons I will never comprehend, cuts herself in pursuit of happiness?)

There were two other women whose mothers had died too young. Another student’s chronic illness forced her to withdraw from school. One young woman wrote mainly about other people’s heroin use, others’ sexual abuse, as though she was recasting a truth she couldn’t quite admit as her own. All semester, I cheered silently for her.

A young man with autism recently came out of the closet and didn’t want to be called brave for that. Another young man with ADHD was allowed, by the grace of a formal accommodation, to leave the room and use his phone whenever he felt like it. He employed this choice only when he became frustrated with the less talented writers in the class. At times, I wanted to walk out with him.

A young woman wrote a chronicle of her meaningless tattoos, detailing how being able to get inked up for no reason makes her happy. She ended her essay with the line, “This skull, if you have to believe it stands for something, means I’m dead inside.”

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them.

One young man couldn’t be bothered to do the classwork I assigned. He assumed I’d let it slide without consequence. “I’m just really into dance right now,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t doing the work — not any of it. “Are you sure my grade is right?” he asked after grades were posted.

I need an extension, they said. I need you to repeat the assignment requirements, they said. I need an electronic reminder for homework or it won’t get done, they said. I’m overwhelmed, they said. They cried when printers jammed and when they were late to class. They cried when they were given an earned poor grade. They would write me to tell me their weekend was “just too much” and they wouldn’t be able to haul themselves into the classroom.

They would stare at me like guppies, open-mouthed, waiting to be fed, and I would often have the wrong kind of nourishment. I’d read articles about trigger warnings and about millennial attitudes and about millennial parents and millennial fear of failure and low tolerance for stress, and I still couldn’t completely formulate a way to educate them effectively.

They were happiest when I brought food to class.

* * *

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them. During the prior semester alone, there had been seven shootings on American college campuses. Just after the Thanksgiving break, the following headlines populated my Facebook feed:

“Your Opinion on Gun Control Doesn’t Matter” (Daily Kos)

“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” (The Onion)

“On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying” (The New York Times)

Toward the end of the semester, I had been stumbling about my house, talking nonsensically to myself instead of writing or grading. “Refrigerator. Frigerator. Fridge,” I said while walking through the kitchen. Then, as I entered my office, fragments from Horace’s Ars poetica: in medias res. Ab ovo. Which mean, respectively, “into the middle of things” and “from the beginning.” The poet never implied that endings exist. Only that poetry is somehow perpetually on its way from one understanding to another, altered understanding. It is in pursuit.

* * *

Recently, I tried for the hundredth time to explain the concept of infinity to my five-year-old. “No. It has to end,” he sobbed angrily, and then stomped away.

How do we begin receding from too much? As individuals, as a generation, as a nation?

The first sign taught in baby sign language is “more.” There is no sign for “less.”

Once, the average person only had words for a handful of colors. In 1903, Crayola crayons were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and black. By 1949, there were 48 colors available; 64 by 1958; 72 by 1972; 120 by 1998. We learned more names for colors than we ever dreamed: magenta, fuchsia, copper, periwinkle, cornflower, ochre, onyx, royal blue, sienna, peach, beige. A box of eight crayons becomes 16 becomes 24 becomes 48 becomes 64 becomes 72 becomes 120. A child who has had a box of 48 crayons is never again satisfied with only 8. Or maybe they don’t know how to ask for less in a society of more.

Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

In 2003, Crayola officially added the colors inch worm, jazzberry jam, mango tango, and wild blue yonder and they retired the colors blizzard blue, magic mint, mulberry, and teal blue.

By that same year, it is estimated up to 20,000 children had been abducted and forced to enroll as soldiers in the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.

* * *

I admit I have an adult coloring book. I limit myself to five colors for each picture to keep the process simple, but it takes forever to choose five from my kids’ 64 pack. I’m stressed before I even begin the supposedly meditative activity.

In the phenomenon referred to as Russian blues, we discriminate between colors faster when linguistic organization presorts them.

There must be more colors to discover than we have named. There must be a Crayola 286-pack in our future, containing the shades between fuchsia and magenta, cornflower and periwinkle. Or the purple that bees see in the space between yellow and ultraviolet light.

Can we want things that we do not know about?

* * *

After the semester ended, I attended a grant-funded writing residency in Massachusetts. The Cape in winter is nearly deserted. Many of the good restaurants close for the season, and a majority of the homes sit empty. I welcomed the stillness, the solitude. For a week, there was less of everything: less motion around me, fewer people with whom to interact, less to accomplish, less to buy. There was less noise, less mess without two children. Fewer distractions without Facebook and Amazon and political headlines. I had most of what I needed — food, water, shelter — and not much more. Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

I took daily, silent walks to the vacant shore, meditatively listing to myself the places and things around me named for shells. Shellpoint Apartments, Shellhouse, Shell Inn, Shell Street. Repeat. I knelt in the cold sand and looked out across the bay. I examined the lifeless things that had washed ashore, raking my hands across the ground like that Ugandan child and gathering what the sea had discarded. A peace swept over me whenever I was near to the ground. I caught myself smiling for no reason.

At the Cape, I passed hours sitting quietly, needing nothing, wanting nothing. Pursing nothing but a few more words on a page. On the final night, four friends stopped by, including a couple with their new baby. The baby laughed and I laughed and soon we were all laughing together. All the fine dining restaurants were closed, so we ate at a Ninety Nine chain restaurant and did not make polite apologies to one another for it. We squeezed into a booth for four that was too small to accommodate our group of six. A hockey game played on the television in the bar, but we didn’t watch it. We had wine, but not water. We talked of punk music, but not war. Of banned books, but not guns. A comment about the unusually warm winter, but no mention of global warming.

I returned home the next morning, restored by fractions and of somewhat sounder body and mind. I threw away the happiness body wash. I deleted Facebook from my phone, deleted task managing apps, deleted emails, deleted unnecessary streams of information from wherever they made contact with me. I made a point to laugh in front of and with my children, and hoped it was not too late to unlearn all that I didn’t need to know.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the “Joy” issue of Creative Nonfiction, the print quarterly founded by nonfiction writer Lee Gutkind in 1993. Our thanks to Angela Palm and the staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

 

The Unsung Songwriters Who Helped Make Appetite for Destruction a Classic

Longreads Pick

Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin weren’t the only ones whose songwriting contributions made Appetite for Destruction one of the biggest rock records in history. Thirty years after the album’s debut, here are the stories of the two Los Angeles musicians who co-wrote two of Appetite‘s songs and contributed to the band’s legacy.

Author: Matt Wake
Source: LA Weekly
Published: Jun 17, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,493 words)

Politics as a Defense Against Heartbreak

Illustration by Janna Morton

Minda Honey | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (2,955 words)

One week into the new year, my friends assembled in the cellar lounge of an upscale restaurant to celebrate my 33rd birthday. On that frigid January night, we drank fancy cocktails made with bourbon, made with bitters, made with things that don’t seem like they go together but do. Music meant to be forgotten even as you’re listening to it played in the background beneath our chatter. I leapt from my seat, tugged down my short dress and flung my arms around each friend as they arrived. My friends kept my drinks coming all night and properly admired the way my 33-year-old cleavage still defied gravity in the most spectacular way. The group who turned out that night represented nearly every phase of my life from childhood to high school to college to career to the other cities I’ve lived in, but in that amateur episode of “This is Your Life” the romantic partner I longed for had yet to make an appearance. Many of my friends in the small city I call home paired off years ago. I’m always the one without a date to every party, even my own.

A girl I’ve known since we rode the bus together in elementary school offered to give me a tarot reading. She settled on the couch across from me and I cut and shuffled the deck as instructed. She flipped each card over and carefully placed it down on the small round table between us — 10 in all. First was the Wheel of Fortune, perhaps commentary on the success I’d seen over the past year as a writer, and last was the Queen of Wands, maybe insight into my passion for nurturing community and my ambitions for the upcoming year. But it was the middle card that interested me most. When my friend turned over the sixth card, the card that predicts what lies ahead, it was an older white man with a long white beard seated on a throne, The Emperor. “Oh, interesting,” she said.

She foresaw a man coming into my life. He would not be a young man. He would be a good influence. Maybe business, maybe love. I wondered, would he be the man I’ve been waiting for? Like many women, I’d thought by 30 I’d have found The One. Had there been a candle to blow out, my birthday wish would have been for the perfect man for me: an educated, financially stable, liberal feminist. A man who was a manifestation of my politics, of all the things I believed in.
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Letter to a Dog Walking Service

Illustration by Wenting Li

Diane Mehta | Longreads | February 2018 | 21 minutes (5,195 words)

Dear REDACTED,

I’m writing to inform you that you have a terrible way with people. We hired you because you offered predictability in a hectic world. The point is that each day you have sent a different person to walk our dog. We’ve been polite about it. But it stops now. Imagine if every day you came home to a different husband or there was a weird substitute for your onion bagel. But I like variety, you might say. Well, imagine that your substitute for the onion bagel was a kishka and you were a vegetarian, or that the different husband you came home to every night smelled like a kishka, and you were a vegetarian. Consistency over kishkas is the point. You’re supposed to send a regular person on a regular walk on a regular schedule.

When I hired you, I told you about the migraines. Daily since March. I’m not sure how old you are, and whether you’ve had children, but a full-blown migraine is like childbirth in your head. Put it in dog terms, you say. Think of a ferocious, rabid dog inside you clawing to get out and you’re on all fours, crying, stuck with it, and you think there’s no kind of chew toy or meat treat in the world that can stop this.

A two-hour window for dog walking is just the edge of what I can handle. What happens if she is late? Then I will get angry. One of my migraine triggers is waiting. I have learned to avoid situations in which I am waiting, and now here I am stuck waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Kishka of whatever aptitude or variety to arrive. This is not okay for me. Neither is it okay for my new dog.
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Jimmy Buffet® Incorporated

NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 08: Musician Jimmy Buffett helps open Box Office for "Escape To Margaritaville" on Broadway at Marquis Theatre on December 8, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)

The beach-bum version of Jimmy Buffett has become a huge brand® with financial interests in foodstuffs, hotels, casinos, and even adult living communities. Buffett is the original escapist who has long escaped his original slacker identity. A businessman wrapped in a Hawaiian shirt, he’s worth more money than Bruce Springsteen. (Not bad for a guy who only had one top ten song, compared to Springsteen, who has had 12.) Taffy Brodesser-Akner profiles Buffett for The New York Times.

Jimmy Buffett is not really Jimmy Buffett anymore. He hasn’t been for a while. Jimmy Buffett — the nibbling on sponge cake, watching the sun bake, getting drunk and screwing, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere Jimmy Buffett — has been replaced with a well-preserved businessman who is leveraging the Jimmy Buffett of yore in order to keep the Jimmy Buffett of now in the manner to which the old Jimmy Buffett never dreamed he could become accustomed. And therein lies the Margaritaville® Mesquite BBQ Rub: The more successful you become at selling the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle, the less you are seen as believably living the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle.

Mr. Buffett has given his fans a path to a simulacrum of the island life. In the course of it, he’s gotten very rich. How rich? According to Forbes, in 2016 Mr. Buffett, who has only had one Top 10 song (“Margaritaville” reached No. 8), was worth a reported $550 million. (Bruce Springsteen is worth a mere $460 million, according to that same list.)

To be Jimmy Buffett is to understand that the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle is one not simply of leisure, but of a leisure born of resistance to middle-class convention and upward mobility: We work too many long hours, we would rather be at a bar, we would rather be Gone Fishin’, our other car is a surfboard, our other coffee mug is a beer bottle, we would rather be lying on a beach, our skin the texture of Margaritaville® Sweet & Spicy chicken wings (recipe available online!). The Jimmy Buffett lifestyle shakes its fist at the Man even while, Jimmy Buffett, with his 5,000 employees, is basically now the Man. So he is stuck with a conundrum: How do you maintain a brand that is about being chill when it is maybe the least chill thing in the world to wake up in the grip of panic about your new multimillion-dollar musical?

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What Happens Between What Seems Like All the Facts: On Interviewing Artists

(Photo courtesy the Auping family)

Jonny Auping| Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,011 words)

Michael Auping recently retired after 25 years as the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His 40-year curatorial career, which focused on the international development of postwar art, has resulted in numerous, critically-acclaimed exhibitions featuring many of the 20th century’s most prominent visual artists.

Before becoming a curator, Auping spent his post-graduate years in mid-70s Southern California trying to figure out how to break into the art world. Around 1975, he came across the book Workingby Studs Terkel, in which the author interviews various working people — from parking valets and cab drivers to gravediggers and pharmacists — about the meaning they find in their jobs. Auping began going to the studios of Los Angeles-based artists like Robert Irwin, Tony Delap, and Craig Kauffman to record conversations about their work, their background, and most importantly, their process.

His new book, Forty Years: Just Talking About Art, is a compilation of interviews ranging from 1977 to 2017 featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman. Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and many others. Read more…