Search Results for: village voice

When Friendship Fades But the Images Linger

Photos by Cody Doherty & Barron Roth, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | August 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

It started with pictures of Alice. She didn’t mind being put in awkward situations or uncomfortable positions for the sake of a photo. That made her a good friend. I put a tangled Rapunzel wig on her head, a plastic gun in her hands. I had her stand in the middle of the road, wearing a plaid bathrobe. Straddle a highway median in a tulle skirt and sneakers. Swan around the woods in a feather boa. She had a classically pretty face that could suggest everyone or no one. I blazed through rolls of black and white film, which I developed in my high school darkroom with clumsy chemistry and a pounding heart.

On the strength of those pictures, I was accepted to a summer photography workshop in Rockport, Maine. A small group of us — mostly but not entirely college students and recent grads — paid reduced tuition in exchange for doing odd jobs: hosing down vans, painting picnic tables, moving furniture. When we were lucky, we got to pay our dues in the darkroom, turning around contact sheets and prints for students who attended the pricey weeklong workshops, many of them taught by famous photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, Eugene Richards, and Joyce Tennyson. For those more typical students, relationships and revelations were fast-tracked. We watched their tentative arrival and swift blossoming, the compressed intensity between introductions and teary-eyed goodbyes. Our own seven week stretch wasn’t all that long, really, but measured in units of other people’s personal growth, it felt almost permanent.

It was summer and I was 19, living with a bunch of other young people who had stepped away from their fledgling lives to devote time to some version of art. Maine was dreamy, with quiet stretches of woods full of swimming holes and rope swings, lobster traps stacked in pleasing geometries. There was a glass-blowing studio in the ground floor of the house where we lived, and an old cemetery just down the road. I liked to walk around and take pictures of elaborately carved headstones memorializing wives and mothers, running my fingers over their names and honorifics. I was never without my camera. I spent hours in the darkroom but still found time to get sunburned.

When I wasn’t out shooting or cooped up printing, one of my favorite places was the library. It was a hot, lofted area in the small campus’ main building. A sign posted at the base of the stairs gave me solemn shivers. “Enter with respect for the knowledge that resides herein and with honor for those who are about to share with you their secrets and wisdom,” it read. “Maintain a serene presence.” I sat on the floor and pored over monographs: Francesca Woodman’s pictures of herself crouching in corners, hanging from window frames, a wild blur in an abandoned house. Nan Goldin’s pictures of herself and her friends all tangled up in each other, the color shots suffused with adulation and danger. Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, feral despite their polish. Judy Dater organized her images by gender; portfolios of men, of women.
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Nashville contra Jaws, 1975

Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Illustration by Homestead

J. Hoberman | An excerpt adapted from Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan | The New Press | July 2019 | 30 minutes (8,492 words)

June 1975, six weeks after Time magazine headlined the Fall of Saigon as “The Anatomy of a Debacle” and wondered “How Should Americans Feel?,” brought two antithetical yet analogous movies: Robert Altman’s Nashville and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Each in its way brilliantly modified the cycle of “disaster” films that had appeared during Richard Nixon’s second term and were now, at the nadir of the nation’s self­-esteem, paralleled by the spectacular collapse of South Vietnam and the unprecedented Watergate drama.

In fact, in their time, Jaws and Nashville were regarded as Watergate films and, indeed, both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act in the summer of 1974. On May 2, three days after Richard Nixon had gone on TV to announce that he was turning over transcripts of forty-­two White House tapes subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, the Jaws shoot opened on Martha’s Vineyard with a mainly male, no-­star cast. The star was the shark or, rather, the three mechanical sharks — one for each profile and another for stunt work — that, run by pneumatic engines and launched by a sixty-­five­-foot catapult, were created by Robert Mattey, the former Disney special effects expert who had designed the submarine and giant squid for the 1956 hit Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Brought to Martha’s Vineyard in pieces and cloaked in secrecy, Mattey’s sharks took longer than expected to become fully operational, and Jaws was further delayed by poor weather conditions. Accounts of the production routinely refer to the movie itself as a catastrophe only barely avoided: “All over the picture shows signs of going down, like the Titanic.”

In late June, a month when Jaws was still unable to shoot any water scenes, and while Nixon visited the Middle East and Soviet Union in a hapless attempt to, as the president wrote in his diary, “put the whole Watergate business into perspective,” Altman’s cast and crew arrived in the city of Nashville. They were all put up at the same motel, with everyone expected to stick around for the entire ten­-week shoot.

There is a sense in which Nashville represented a last bit of Sixties utopianism — the idea that a bunch of talented people might just hang out together in a colorful environment and, almost spontaneously, generate a movie. Even by Altman’s previous standards, Nashville seemed a free­form composition. It surely helped that neophyte producer Jerry Weintraub’s previous experience lay in managing tours, for Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley among others, and packaging TV specials. Read more…

‘We Live in an Atmosphere of General Inexorability’: An Interview with Jia Tolentino

Tampatra / iStock / Getty, Random House

 

 

Hope Reese | Longreads | August 2019 | 10 minutes (2,578 words)

 

Should we trust what we think we know? That question lies at the heart of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, critic Jia Tolentino’s debut essay collection, in which she draws on her life experiences — from being raised in a Texas megachurch to starring on the teen reality-TV show Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico — and uses them as a lens to explore the blurry line between what is real and what we present to our audience, regardless of whether we are journalists, actors, or Instagrammers. Tolentino, formerly a Jezebel editor and currently a staff writer at The New Yorker, is skeptical of the structural forces that compel us to craft a perfect image of ourselves, and Trick Mirror examines the implications of our many modern façades.

I spoke with Tolentino about her nine-essay collection on the phone while she was in New York City, ahead of her book launch. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Read more…

Death Proof

Sony Pictures, Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  8 minutes (2,183 words)

At the start of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 best seller about the 1969 Manson murders, there’s a “Cast of Characters.” The list includes all the people who investigated the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends and the “family” to which their murderers belonged. Their “casting” is a crude example of how the dead can be appropriated by the living for our entertainment. “The story you are about to read will scare the hell out of you,” the book promises in its ’70s twang. Tate and all the others who died so that tagline could live hover behind the whole enterprise like unnamed specters.

Quentin Tarantino was only a child in the late ’60s, an innocent among Hollywood’s innocence lost. His latest film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, is set around that time, and he calls it his “most personal,” a “love letter” to Los Angeles. “I think of it like my memory piece,” he recently told Esquire. “This is me. This is the year that formed me. I was six years old then. This is my world.” In Tarantino’s ’69, a paunchy Leonardo DiCaprio plays a stuttering, aging Western star named Rick Dalton, who alternates driving around the city with his hotter stuntman Cliff Booth — Brad Pitt, somehow better-looking than ever — and drunkenly weeping in his trailer over his waning career as the hippies and film auteurs elbow him out of town. Bubbling up through the narrative like champagne effervescence is newcomer Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), not saying much, not doing much, her sun-lit beauty coming off as little more than a contrast to the storm ahead.

Tarantino explained that the film’s “good-hearted spirit” is supposed to leave the audience asking how Manson fits in: “It’s like we’ve got a perfectly good body, and then we take a syringe and inject it with a deadly virus.” What he didn’t explain was that he had the antidote: that in “the Quentin universe,” he interrupts Tate’s death, preserving her like a butterfly in his own showcase of history. But we kind of knew that already, because it’s what he always does. Tarantino is the god of his own nostalgia, fossilizing what he remembers of his past into a signature masterpiece, narrowing history into a vehicle for his own edification. Read more…

Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55

Mick Hudson / Getty, istock / Getty Images Plus, Michael Ochs Archive / Getty, Vinnie Zuffante / Getty, pidjoe / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | July 9th, 2019 | 24 minutes (6,539 words)

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.

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It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)

 

Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.

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The Joy of Watching (and Rewatching) Movies So Bad They’re Good

Wiseau-Films, Warner Bros, American International Pictures, Quintet Productions, Four Leaf Productions, Mid-America Pictures

Michael Musto | Longreads | Month 2019 | 8 minutes (2,090 words)

 

I’ve known about the power of good/bad movies since I was a kid, but I was reminded of it just a few days after 9/11, when I went to a press screening of Mariah Carey’s unwitting classic Glitter.

Naturally, New York City was traumatized, many of us going through the motions in a daze as we tried to make sense of the horror. But we had to make a living, so, along with a handful of other arts journalists, I dragged myself to the screening, not sure of what we were getting into. It turned out to be the hackneyed story of a DJ who tries to lift a backup singer (Mariah) up from her humble roots through song and romance. And it was evident quickly into the film that Mariah just didn’t have the acting chops; the new Meryl Streep this wasn’t. We uncomfortably sat there watching the pop diva try to act, but eventually we couldn’t hold back, and a few of her line readings were greeted with titters — the first time I’d heard laughter (including my own) since 9/11. It sounded both shocking and very welcome, and the unintended reaction mounted during a ludicrous scene where Mariah and the DJ were magically thinking of the same melody. By the end, when Mariah spills out of a limo in a glittery gown to visit her dirt-poor mother, we were all screaming in hilarity. This was just the catharsis we needed, and it generously helped us bond and move on.

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The Growing Power of Prosecutors

Rex Wholster / Getty

Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,345 words)

In our current criminal justice system, there is one person who has the power to determine someone’s fate: the American prosecutor. While other players are important — police officers, judges, jury — the most essential link in the system is the prosecutor, who is critical in determining charges, setting bail, and negotiating plea bargains. And whose influence often falls under the radar.

Journalist Emily Bazelon’s new book, Charged, The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, brings to light some of the invisible consequences of our current judicial system — one in which in which prosecutors have “breathtaking power” that she argues is out of balance.

In Charged, a deeply-reported work of narrative nonfiction, Bazelon tells the parallel stories of Kevin, charged with possession of a weapon in Brooklyn, New York, and Noura, who was charged with killing her mother in Memphis, Tennessee, to illustrate the immense authority that prosecutors currently hold, how deeply consequential their decisions are for defendants, and how different approaches to prosecution yield different outcomes. Between these stories, she weaves in the recent push for prosecutorial reform, which gained momentum in the 2018 local midterm elections, and the movement away from mass incarceration. Read more…

Edible Complex

Getty, Alberto E. Tamargo / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jen Doll | Longreads | April 2019 | 18 minutes (4,598 words)

According to those jaded but constant belief systems that keep the worst romantic comedies in business, the third date is the make-or-break one. In these busy times, the idea goes, by date three you’ve spent enough time together to determine if either of you is a serial killer, or hiding something very bad in your closet (metaphorical or otherwise), or has the tendency to type “hehehe” when laughing by text. And if the relationship by date three veers toward make rather than break, well, finally the “rules” have lifted: It is THE MOMENT to get naked (not at the restaurant, please). The thinking is based in some combination of propriety and sexual policing and also sheer time management: You haven’t put so much energy or effort into this budding romance that uncovering an in-the-sheets incompatibility ruins your entire life — but it’s also not so soon it’s considered “rushing in,” which, when applied to women, of course, means “being too slutty.”

No matter that “slutty” is an outmoded, sexist concept and that you should sleep with a person if and when you feel like it (and if and when they consent), I grew up with “the third date’s the sex date!” pressed upon me as, if not law, then at least a kind of informed ideology: Do it then to uncover any latent micropenises or irrecoverable technique problems; do it then to get it over with because would you look at that elephant in the room?; do it then to get the rest of your relationship started; do it then because by the third date, what else is there to do?

So, when it came time for the third date with a man I’d been seeing — a guy who lived in upstate New York, which meant our third date would be more of a weekend visit; did each night count as a date, I wondered, or was it the whole package, a kind of Club Med situation with dinners and entertainment included? — there was a certain amount of buried internal stress and anticipation related to the event. Not that I was going to go get a Brazilian, or anything. I was in my 40s. Those days of paying a stranger to rip large swathes of hair from my nether regions had blessedly gone by the by. (Yes, I said “nether regions.”) But in my brain, a place far more difficult for strangers to reach, my thoughts were going a little bit wild. I’d been dumped earlier in the year, I’d gotten back up and shaken myself off, I’d tried again, and I’d actually met someone. But how many rounds of the dating game was I prepared to endure? If things went in the direction of “break” — what next, not only for me and this guy, but maybe for me and anyone? This is what rom-coms never really tackle: What happens when you get so tired of dating, so disappointed by all the prospects, you just give up?

In the absence of answers, I sought to occupy myself. I took a train to Beacon, New York, a town about an hour away from where my date lived — he’d pick me up there the next day, and our third date would begin — and met some friends I was just getting to know. We watched a poet read from her impressive collection in a garden, surrounded by trees and flowers and sunshine. I wasn’t even so sure how I felt about poetry readings, but I liked this version of me, trying new things, with different people. I bought several of the poet’s books, and had her sign one, even though I’d not known much of her work until that moment.
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‘I Don’t Think Those Feelings of Self-Doubt Ever Go Away.’

Heather Weston / Henry Holt

Amy Brady | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,627 words)

The truth has never been a universally agreed upon concept. As most psychologists will tell you, a shift in perspective can alter how a situation feels as well as what it means. And most historians agree that the “truth” of any significant event changes depending on who’s telling the story.

In her astounding fifth novel Trust Exercise, Susan Choi plays with both perspective and narrative structure to tell the truth, or “truth,” about a group of suburban performing arts high school students. The book begins with Sarah, a fifteen year old in deep lust with her peer, David. Their friends, Karen and Joelle, and outcast Manuel, round out the teenage cast. Martin is a theater teacher from England who spends a couple of weeks at the high school, and Mr. Kingsley is their beloved theater teacher who makes the students participate in trust exercises usually reserved for older, more experienced actors. His questionable teaching style and Martin’s over-familiarity with the students are clues that the adults view the teens as both children and grown-ups, as needing guidance to navigate the professional world of acting but as also already possessing the emotional development needed to withstand the cruelty it bestows upon them.

As the novel unfolds, Choi captures the rage and lust of teenage life with thrilling verisimilitude. Who hasn’t felt the devastation of unrequited love as a horny fifteen year old? Or felt mistreated in a friendship? Or held a secret from a parent? Choi’s descriptions of her characters’ psychological interiors are equally adept: The teens walk assuredly into a classroom one moment, only to feel crushed by self-doubt the next, their self-confidence ruled by roiling hormones.

The novel’s authenticity is what makes both of its structural shifts, when they arrive, so shocking; the lives of these teens feel too real to be anything but the truth. But after each shift, everything in the story that came before is changed — changed but not entirely undone. It’s as if we had been reading the novel through a telescope only to be handed a kaleidoscope to finish it; the story’s pieces are all still there, but now they are arranged in different and surprising ways.

The shifts bring revelations about what the students endured from their teachers and parents and each other. Some of the revelations are amusing in their familiarity. Others are heartbreaking for the same reason. Trust Exercise is a novel that resonates with the #MeToo movement, but it’s also a story as old as time — it’s about those in power taking advantage of those who are powerless to stop them. Read more…