Search Results for: music

You Are a Jigsaw Puzzle with Missing Food-Shaped Pieces

Yiyang Yu / EyeEm

Lindsay Hunter | Longreads | August 2017 | 12 minutes (3,035 words)

 

I was a kid, somewhere between age seven and 10, when our neighbor rushed in telling my mom she only weighed 129 pounds. My mom was impressed. “Oh!” the woman said. “But I weighed myself before I pooped!” They both rushed off to my parents’ bathroom, where our beige scale was kept, the one with the numbers that would swing wildly to and fro before your number locked in, staring blandly up at you despite your joy, despite your disgust. I must have weighed myself on that thing a thousand times. There was rarely joy.

Even before that day with our neighbor, I was aware of my body as mostly a disappointment, my soul’s albatross. A sexless lump I had to apologize for. I remember seeing myself in the reflection of our sliding glass doors. My friends and I were running in circles inside a kiddie pool, convinced we could make a deadly whirlpool. In the reflection my friends’ legs were toned, healthy. They wore bikinis and their flat stomachs heaved slightly with laughter. Mostly their laughing just accentuated their abs even more. My friends did gymnastics, cheerleading, softball. My friends did. I saw how my belly stuck out, like a beer gut, something I’d read about in a library book. My thighs jiggled. Playing sports amplified my uselessness; I sweated too much and I couldn’t manage to do anything with grace. I worried a lot about grace, my lack of it. Chicken and the egg: was my form, my essence, preventing me from being active, or were my static days, the Florida heat bleating harshly from pre-dawn to post-dusk, the cause of my worthless body?

I was different from my friends in this way, and it didn’t feel like a harmless difference. I began sucking in my stomach whenever I was in a bathing suit. My friend’s mother complimented me. “You lost weight, I see!” She looked me up and down, approving. I felt like I was glowing. I was in third grade.

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Why the Most Beautiful Poems Defy Understanding

At The Walrus, Matthew Zapruder examines his relationships with poetry and with his father. Despite being two men with great facility for precise language, they were unable to use it to bridge the distance between them. In likening poems to people, Zapruder says that the most beautiful thing about the poems most important to him is that their meaning cannot fully be articulated.

I have found that the poems which have meant the most to me, to which I return again and again, retain a central unsayability, a place where the drama of truly looking for something essential that can never quite be reached is expressed. Somewhere in the poem, or at its end, knowingness stops. You can feel the intelligence in the poem truly exploring, clambering along the words and down the page, and also that intelligence stopping at what cannot be known. Those moments where a limit is reached can often be the greatest, and most honest, in poetry. They can come first as a surprise, then immediately afterward feel inevitable, at least for a little while.

This is why asking for a certain kind of knowledge—that way of knowing we automatically, and justifiably, expect from other texts, anything other than a poem—limits our experience with poetry. If we imagine a poem as something to be answered or solved, we will most likely find ways to do so. But I think we would be better off to think of “understanding” in a poem as an ongoing process of attention.

Simone Weil writes that attention is the purest form of generosity. A generous, open, genuinely focused attention moves us through the poem, just as it moves us through an experience, through a friendship, through anything else that means and keeps on meaning. If a poem is really good, you can’t really say what it’s “about,” that is, what its central “message” is, any more than you can do so for a painting or a piece of music or a person or a mountain.

A poem is like a person. The more you know someone, the more you realize there is always something more to know and understand. A final understanding could probably only begin upon permanent separation, or death. This is why we come back to certain poems, as we do to places or people, to experience and re-experience, to see ourselves for who we truly are, and to continue to be changed.

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More Than a Riot Going On: A ‘Detroit’-Inspired Reading List

A Michigan State police officer searches a Detroit youth on July 24, 1967. (AP)

Reactions to Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film Detroit have been polarized, and the considerable backlash may have caused its opening weekend box office to suffer. Bigelow’s films are known for their tightly-choreographed combat scenes and their fictionalization of brutal historical events. In Detroit, Bigelow takes on the story of the Algiers Motel incident, where three young black men—Carl Cooper, Fred Temple, and Aubrey Pollard—were tortured and killed by police officers in the motel’s annex. In the early morning hours of July 26, 1967, a few days into the unrest that would eventually become known as the Detroit rebellion, the three young men, along with many others, took refuge at the motel amid a city-wide curfew. Police forces received reports of sniper fire and raided the Algiers, finding a group of black men socializing with white women. There were interrogations, humiliations, assaults, and eventually murder. No gun was ever found on the grounds of the Algiers, and the police involved were found not guilty on all charges associated with the incident.

Conversation about the film has touched on questions about who has the authority to tell what stories. Bigelow is a white woman from the West Coast who said she knew herself not to be the “ideal person” to make the movie. But she and former journalist Mark Boal, the film’s screenwriter, worked with black academics, historians, and eyewitnesses to ensure a certain level of accuracy in the story. Jelani Cobb, a historian and staff writer at The New Yorker, Michael Eric Dyson, a sociology professor at Georgetown, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., head of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard were among those reportedly consulted.

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The Forgotten Song That Made The Beach Boys Cool Again

Longreads Pick

After The Beach Boys’ domestic album sales started suffering in the late 1960s and their squeaky clean surfer image fell out of favor, they co-wrote a song that helped them connect with America’s shaggy, drug-taking counterculture and regain their popularity. This is the story of that song, and the story of American pop music after the Summer of Love.

Source: Medium
Published: Jun 12, 2017
Length: 14 minutes (3,520 words)

Free at Last

Longreads Pick

You’ve heard of Miles Davis. You’ve heard of Billie Holiday. It’s time more people knew about pensive, voluminous jazz pianist Mal Waldron. He was Billie Holiday’s pianist up until her death, and contrary to Davis’ belief that expatriate jazz musicians lost “an energy, an edge,” Waldron wrote some of his most innovative music after he left the segregated United States. Waldron believed that if Holiday had moved to Europe like he had, she could have lived a longer life, too.

Author: Adam Shatz
Source: The Nation
Published: Jul 26, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,692 words)

Exploiting Mexico’s Indigenous People to Get the West Its Drugs

In the 1600s, Northern Mexico’s indigenous Tarahumara tribe escaped Spanish incursions by moving deep into the rugged Sierra Madre. There, they cultivated the steep canyons, maintained their cultural identity and traditions, and developed into some of the world’s best long-distance runners, able to run for days without stopping. The Tarahumara people have earned international renown for their phenomenal marathon endurance. Tarahumara runners have appeared on the cover of Runner’s World magazine. They’re the subject of the best-selling book Born to Run, and they compete in many international races, yet many of their villages still lack running water and electricity. As they’ve suffered drought and famine, Mexico’s drug cartels have preyed on them. Cartels clear-cut their ancient pine forests. They converted their land to marijuana and opium poppy fields, and forced these peaceful reclusive people to work for them or leave.

At Texas Monthly, Ryan Goldberg tells the tribe’s story — which is Mexico’s story — and how cartels now offer the Tarahumara endurance runners money to run drugs across the border. The dire need to keep their families fed and keep violence out of their villages has turned too many village men into felons after they get caught at the border. Although Goldberg’s article isn’t polemical, the narrative puts the responsibility in the hands of Western consumers: if you buy Mexican drugs, you are funding the destruction of these indigenous people. Even if your Saturday night coke party is an occasional weekend extravagance, it comes with a huge human cost, not just to your body. Your purchases are part of an international supply chain, and the West’s appetite for drugs is the root of this problem. Supply and demand itself is simple in theory: no demand for Mexican drugs, no cartels. The reasons for demand are varied and complicated, and addiction is very different than recreational drug use. But America is still complicit in the Tarahumara’s suffering.

As the cartel war ricocheted from one canyon to the next, Urique became one of the last towns to be engulfed by intense violence. It had once served as an outpost for tourists exploring the natural beauty of the surrounding canyons, which helped keep it relatively tranquil until a Sinaloa boss’s nephew was murdered there, in late 2014. From then on gunfire could routinely be heard in the town and up the canyon. In the days leading up to the 2015 Ultra Caballo Blanco, an eight-hour battle erupted in a village along the planned racecourse. International runners arrived to find armed gangs in the streets of Urique, while local government officials assured the competitors there were no problems. A day before the race, however, Juárez hit men stormed the police station, seizing two officers and a teenager, and American organizers called off the race. Most of the visiting runners, who had come from 23 countries, made their way out under military escort. More than five hundred Tarahumara, Silvino included, resolved to carry on anyway, and the mayor agreed to a version that cut out the downriver loop, where the major shoot-out had occurred.

A few months later, Sinaloa won control of the area—nearly a dozen planes flew out of the town of Urique in one day with the remaining Juárez fighters—but conditions worsened. With the Sinaloa in command, land theft and poppy growing increased.

Some Tarahumara activists tried to make their plight known, like Irma Chávez Cruz, a 25-year-old mother who was a friend of Silvino’s. Chávez had learned Spanish as a teenager, to serve as an interpreter for her people, then earned a university degree in ecology and gotten elected to local government. She worried about Tarahumara children losing their running traditions, so she regularly put on races in the region, including all-female events called ariweta. She helped organize the largest-ever recorded rarajipari in Chihuahua—Silvino led one of the teams—and together they traveled to Brazil, in October 2015, for the inaugural World Indigenous Games. The next year, Chávez ran in the Boston Marathon (possibly the first Tarahumara woman to do so) and, while there, spoke on a panel about indigenous running traditions. Together with her father, an activist, musician, and poet known as Makawi, she pleaded for government officials in Chihuahua to help prevent drug traffickers from stealing their land and their water. But help never came, and speaking out became risky. According to the Mexico City–based magazine Proceso, at least five indigenous activists were assassinated in 2015 and 2016.

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The Hippies Who Hated the Summer of Love

Newcomers to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in April, 1967. At the height of the "Summer of Love," the area had a population density greater than Manhattan.

Kate Daloz | Longreads | August 2017 | 11 minutes (2700 words)

The posters began to appear around the city just after New Year’s, 1967. “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-in…Bring food to share, bring flowers, beads, costumes, feathers, cymbal flags.” On Saturday, January 14, a crowd of young people began to form on the open fields of Golden Gate Park. Throughout the day, local bands — not yet famous — took turns on the stage: The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company. Poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder led Hindu chants to the bouncing rhythm of finger cymbals. Timothy Leary addressed the crowd, urging them for the first time ever to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Owsley Stanley, the rogue chemist credited with manufacturing the period’s highest-quality LSD, donated 75 turkeys for sandwiches — the bread was sprinkled lightly with crushed White Lightning acid. At one point, a skydiver descended gently into the crowd, borne by a white parachute.

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The Brief Career and Self-Imposed Exile of Jutta Hipp, Jazz Pianist

Detail of the cover for Jutta Hipp with Zoot Sims, Blue Note 93178. Via flickr4jazz on Flickr

Aaron Gilbreath | This Is: Essays on Jazz | Outpost19 | August 2017 | 21 minutes (5,900 words)

In 1960, four years after the venerable Blue Note Records signed pianist Jutta Hipp to their label, she stopped performing music entirely. Back in her native Germany, Hipp’s swinging, percussive style had earned her the title of Europe’s First Lady of Jazz. When she’d moved to New York in 1955, she started working at a garment factory in Queens to supplement her recording and performing income. She played clubs around the City. She toured. Then, with six albums to her name and no official explanation, she quit. She never performed publicly again, and she told so few people about her life in music that most of her factory coworkers and friends only discovered it from her obituary. For the next forty-one years, Jutta patched garments for a living, painted, drew and took photos for pleasure, all while royalties accrued on Blue Note’s books.

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How to Stop Apologizing for My Stutter, and Other Important Lessons

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Rachel Hoge | Longreads | August 2017 | 17 minutes (4,315 words)

 

Róisín would do all the talking. She’s the chapter leader of the support group in Brooklyn, and accustomed to the microphone. She’d wear jeans and a tunic, glasses, her hair twisted in a clip. The only odd thing, to me, would be her mouth. It would be loose, relaxed—an intentional muscle movement, perhaps a symbol of acceptance after years in the self-help community that my strained jaw wouldn’t recognize.

There are 100 people in the conference room, 100 people waiting for her to begin. Half are in their 20s, from places like Boston or New York. Some have never been farther south than Illinois. Some are from Iceland, Serbia, and beyond. All convene in a hotel on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia—the blistering peach pit of the South.

They are all connected by the way they speak.

“Welcome to Take it to the Ssssssstreets,” Róisín would say into the microphone. Everyone would clap. “Thank you for p-p-participating in one of our most p-p-p-popular workshops. I’ll give a brief explan-explan-explanation, then we’ll bbbbbreak into small groups and head outside.”

Outside. Julia and I are already there and having our own unofficial panel. We call it Pool Time. We call it Necessary. We’ve spent three days in big groups, small groups, chatty groups, quiet groups. There are 800 people at the National Stuttering Association Conference. Most of them stutter, like us, but there’s also speech language pathologists, researchers, scientists, family members, significant others. More people than we could ever interact with, more names than we can remember. The conference has been held for over three decades, but Julia and I are both first timers.

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Billy Bragg: Skiffle Songs Are Railroad Songs

Musicians Billy Bragg and Joe Henry
Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, Shine a Light tour by Egghead06 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

I tagged along with a friend to see Joe Henry and Billy Bragg’s “Shine a Light” tour. I knew nothing about the project in advance but “Don’t Try This at Home” remains one of my favorite albums. I was so happy to see Bragg and his battered guitar on stage in a small Seattle theater.

“Shine a Light” is all railroad songs. From the stage Henry and Bragg told stories of the adventures they had recording the album and I thought, “Oh, what a great book this would make!” Bragg’s love for music and the messy tapestry that is America was so apparent. And it’s a steady companion to his leftist politics, his passion for the working man and woman.

There is a book; of course there is, it’s called Roots, Radicals and Rockers How Skiffle Changed the World.  The Paris Review talked with Billy Bragg about the book, skiffle, the history of music, and duck jokes. Really.

I would occasionally have conversations with people like John Peel that led me to realize that skiffle had a huge effect on these people—Morrison, McCartney. Perhaps bigger than the effect punk had on me. The significant thing about the skiffle generation is that they’re our first teenagers. Our first generation to define themselves through their own culture. Previously, there were adults and there were children. Adults listened to crooners, children listened to novelty records, there was no intermediate space until Bill Haley and Lonnie Donegan came along in ’55. And that’s just a year after food rationing ends in the UK. I think it’s significant that this happens when the skiffle kids are twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. John Lennon is fourteen when rationing ends. He’s had his entire childhood without being able to go into a sweet shop to buy whatever he wants. There’s that pent-up desire to escape having to wear hand-me-downs—because clothing was rationed as well—to get away from the rubble of the war, to make the future happen. And for that generation, the guitar was a symbol of the future arriving. The members of that generation were trying to escape their drab world, their past, by taking up the guitar and playing American roots music—which is paradoxically the opposite of what folk fans were doing in the U.S. In the U.S., they were trying to hark back. Groups like the New Lost City Ramblers were looking to reconnect with the past. The British kids were trying to escape the past as quickly as they could and the guitar offered them the best means to do that.

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