Can you ever really be sure of what you’re interested in? Of what parts of the zeitgeist or the cultural conversation actually trigger you? In that framework, does Tyler, The Creator really represent anything other than the extent to which self-promotion can lift lift lift you up like a house tied to a thousand balloons with a portly asian boy scout hidden, and make you into something bigger than yourself?
I wonder this out loud because Tyler is that sort of self-styled, self-created and self-inflicted cultural totem that tends to arrive every few years and make a ruckus, represent something on the level of cultural symbolics and then, like, maybe fade away so that we can’t see them unless we squint?
"— My review of Tyler, The Creator’s newest, “Wolf”, for Rappers & Models
» "Putting together Madonna’s roughly 300-year career actually proves difficult, because Madonna was really the first pop star to be born simply as a series of images and ideas more than any singular catalogue of songs, or music videos, or film endeavors, or even high-profile relationships. Her most enduring elements are narrowed down to choice photographs taken by Richard Avedon and the like, while she was made up like Marilyn, dressed in Jean Paul Gautier, shot often in black-and-white—and with a similar sense of minimalism applied to her own mythology: girl from Detroit runs off to New York at the height of the city’s fusion of art, music, fashion and energy, and girl exploits punk and pop to culture-dominating effect."
Revisiting the Queen of Pop’s thirty-plus year career, and just what Madonna means in today’s culture.
Also, she’s over 300 years old. Did you guys know that? Is this something you knew?
Today marks the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, which is slightly less significant than than the tenth anniversary, but still significant in a “holy-shit-it’s-been-thismany-years” kind of way—which is often the only way I really grapple with 9/11 as an event. It’s so clear to me just how much of my youth, my life, my political consciousness, has been shaped by September 11: it often seems that every shade of culture I choose to color my life with has either been radically reformed by or is a direct response to that singular event.
As a longform junkie, it should come as no surprise that I think it’s narrative non-ficiton that has best captured the meaning and weight of that day. And although so much of the current political landscape has been largely defined by 9/11, the most haunting, all-consuming bits exist on a far smaller scale. Crumbled pieces of paper; emotionally distant husbands; the nameless star of a photograph. Those stories are the ones worth telling; the ethics worth questioning. Those stories are the ones worth grappling with.
One of the most recent pieces circulating involves a note dropped from the 84th floor of the second tower, and the way it alters a family’s entire narrative when it finally reaches them ten years later. Another highlights the intersection of 9/11 and money, and who exactly is profiting most from the disaster.
Scott Raab has been chronicling the rebuilding process of the World Trade Center since plans went underway in 2005, all of which are worth reading. But it’s his seventh piece, published on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, that really captures the tangible metaphor of the noise, the second-starts and the grief that comes with the opening of the memorial.
Possibly my favorite of the bunch is the New York Times Sunday Magazine feature that untangles the complex affairs of two 9/11 widows: one whose husband was lost in the towers, and the other whose husband might as well have been.
And perhaps the most famous and fascinating of any 9/11 piece published anywhere: Tom Junod’s feature for Esquire, “The Falling Man,” which dissects and discusses the subjective and contextual limitiations of what’s been called “perhaps the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”
Also: for more of Jason E. Powell’s briliant 9/11 remembrance photography (above), click here.
“The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teenage money. No recession, no sense of danger. The young could run free, indulge themselves in whatever treats they wished. But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. Attrition, continual pressure. So the new generation [of the seventies] takes few risks. It goes through high school, obedient; graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. Endures. And once a week, on Saturday night, its one great moment of release, it explodes.”
Finally getting around to reading Nik Cohn’s iconic 1976 cover story for New York Magazine, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” on the growing disco scene in the outer-boroughs of New York.
Pretty much encompasses all my favorite longform journo angles into one: cultural thinkpieces, character studies, musings on a movement, etc.
There is a moment when procrastination halts—and it is just that: momentary; just for a second, just long enough to break through, type those first words, and be somewhere close to “on your way.” It’s bewildering, that wash. Concentration and purpose all at once.
One of my favorite interviews from The Paris Review is with Toni Morrison, where she says that the most important thing for a writer to figure out is when exactly they write best. For her, it’s soon after dawn, after she’s made sure to watch the sunrise with a cup of coffee. Only then, she says, can she begin the process.
