March 10, 2017 First Person Warp and Woof By David Ramsey Listening to Chances with Wolves’s lonesome, dusty mixtapes during a year of transition, loss, and decline. Christopher Colville, Coyote #6, 2016, from the series “Beyond Reckoning.” Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York. I first listened to my favorite radio program, Chances with Wolves, in the summer of 2015, while cleaning out my parents’ longtime home. The premise, more or less, is that a pair of DJs play strange old records and periodically mix in wolf-howl noises, sound clips, and echo effects. All of their two-hour episodes—now more than 350—are streamable, so I had hundreds of hours of material for the hundreds of hours of labor in the task at hand. Sonic distractions in difficult times always leave an imprint. It was a hard year. My father has Parkinson’s and my mother has multiple sclerosis; my wife, Grace, and I had moved to Nashville to help out. There are good days and bad days, but the prognosis is uncompromising in its bleak narrative: over time, things will get worse. The arc of one’s own mortal universe bends toward decline. If asked how he’s doing, my dad likes to respond, “Better than I’ll be doing the next time you see me.” Read More
February 28, 2017 First Person Letter from Kiev By M. G. Zimeta Ukraine’s ultranationalist uprising has brought together two disparate groups: neo-Nazis and ethnic minorities. Kiev in January 2015. Photo: Sergey Galyonkin The crisis in Ukraine turns three this month. From its outset, I was struck by how clichéd the news reports of the war were, in structure and in tone; European journalists seemed to be reporting on Ukraine as if it were an African country, and, mortifyingly, as if Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write About Africa” had never happened. I wondered what would happen if the roles were reversed—if I, an Ethiopian woman, covered this European war. The conflict was said to have unleashed ultranationalist violence: as part of my preparation I hung out on Stormfront, the white-supremacist Internet forum, where I seemed to be welcome because they couldn’t tell that I’m a black intellectual. I decided that the safest way to report on these men would be to try and pass as one of them: to go in disguise as a neo-Nazi fighter. I acquired a kind of camouflage—a big coat to conceal the shape of my body, the fullest balaclava I could buy, and a wide woolly scarf to hide any skin still visible. As disguises go, it wouldn’t pass much scrutiny, but I calculated that the strength of my cover was the situation itself: they wouldn’t be expecting me. Its simplicity was its strength, and its strength was its simplicity. I set off for Ukraine in the run-up to Minsk II, when the fighting in the east was at its worst. It was late January 2015, a couple of weeks before the doomed ceasefire deal was agreed. There had been reports of neo-Nazi battalions from the front at Donbass holding rallies in city centers. Some of these gatherings were to mark the January birthday of Stepan Bandera, a controversial World War II–era hero who’d led Ukraine’s nationalist independence movement in the 1930s, and who had spent time as a Nazi prisoner of war before being released to fight against Russia under the banner of the SS. “Be careful of any protests,” a regional security analyst had advised me, “especially if they have a right-wing slant.” Be careful. Read More
February 27, 2017 First Person Like Art By Glenn O’Brien Working in advertising gave me the resources to do what I thought was art—with a logo. From the cover of Like Art. Art school is the place you go to learn how to be a creative director, even if you don’t know that yet. You start out wanting to be a painter, a sculptor, an installation artist (an installer?) or performance artist (nonentertaining performer), and so you start out learning to be an artist—drawing, painting, and reading theory—and then one day you find yourself drawing storyboards for a hipster beer. It’s just a temporary thing, or so you tell yourself. You could drive a taxi or wait tables and make art in your spare time, but of course that is exhausting and dispiriting if not demeaning, compared to the big-time artists whose lives you read about. Where’s the loft? Who’s your dealer? Where’s your summerhouse? Somehow, you may find you don’t feel like painting in a room with a bathtub in it after a day sucking carbon monoxide as a bike messenger or taxi driver. Read More
February 21, 2017 First Person Dog Star By Hilary Reid Wandering the Westminster Dog Show on Valentine’s Day. Rumor takes Best in Show at the 2017 Westminster Dog Show. Photo: Tilly Grassa A middle-aged show-dog handler in green cargo shorts and black Birkenstocks crouches in front of a gray kennel. “Wait until you see what Daddy brought you for dinner,” he says to the purebred Cesky terrier within. I watch as Daddy carefully unwraps a Burger King Whopper. “You’re a star,” he tells the dog, breaking off a piece of the meat patty and sliding it through the crate’s metal door. In just under an hour, Daddy will put on a Paisley shirt and an ivory suit; he’ll take the terrier, officially known as Bluefire Heart of a Warrior, for a walk on the pristine Astroturf at Madison Square Garden before the thousands of people gathered on Valentine’s Day for the 141st Westminster Dog Show. Established in 1877, the Westminster Dog Show is the second longest continually held sporting event in the United States, after the Kentucky Derby. The Jumbotron at MSG offers a kind of potted history, with sepia photos of old New York fading in and out; the narrator’s refined, sonorous voice floats over a violin. A hundred and forty years ago, he explains, a group of “sporting gentlemen” gathered at the bar of the bygone Westminster Hotel on Sixteenth Street and Irving Place in Manhattan to drink and brag about their hunting feats. Looking for a venue superior to the sporting field for comparing hounds, they agreed that what Manhattan really needed was a dog show. They formed the Westminster Kennel Club, named after the hotel bar, and soon after the first annual New York Bench Show of Dogs was held at Gilmore’s Garden, the predecessor of Madison Square Garden. The Westminster Dog Show, the narrator informs us, is a “quintessential part of American culture,” having survived both world wars, the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the rise of the Internet. Read More
February 6, 2017 First Person Different Sanctuaries By Bryan Washington Jane Brewster, Houses on the Bayou, 2008. Just about every Tuesday, I play soccer in City Park. Our pickup matches are in the back, behind the New Orleans Museum of Art. My first few weeks in the city, I only joined the ones out front, which were mostly made up of oil-and-gas types, or parents, or younger white dudes. One day, during a halfway decent set, a couple of Honduran guys settled on the grass to watch. Afterward, they asked what the fuck I was doing. Was I up for a real game? They told me they needed forwards. Maybe they could use me for a set, they said. Their English was a little slow, and eventually I switched to Spanish, and that’s when their eyes almost popped out of their heads. Being black and speaking anything but English in this country can do that. After living in Houston, I’d picked up pieces of Spanish, mostly to talk to boys, but also because it fuels the city, one that’s nearly half Latino and just about seven hours from the border. Mexico’s culture is virtually inextricable from Houston—the further east you drive, you’ll hit taquerias and cantinas ad infinitum. I started spending most of my time out that way, but never once was I treated like an outsider, or el pinche gringo negro. Everyone treated me like I was home. Read More
January 23, 2017 First Person The Trojan Horse of Pop By Megan Mayhew Bergman George Michael. I never minded being thought of as a pop star. People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn’t, I just wanted people to know that I was absolutely serious about pop music. —George Michael 1. Bubblegum It was no Alvin Ailey dance class. Several of us, with teeth in braces and hair pulled back into tight buns, lined up in the corner of the studio, with its splintered hardwoods and floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The instructor put on Wham’s “I’m Your Man” and we cut across the space two by two, hoisting our legs on the beat in grand battements, compromising our posture and smacking gum. I’ll be your boy, I’ll be your man … I’ll be your friend, I’ll be your toy, George Michael urges at the end. Because I was young, naive, and lived in the Reagan-era South, I took these invitations into the world of heteronormative sex at face value. I missed any whiff of insistence, darkness, or double entendre. I readjusted my floral leotard, which had gathered somewhere unseemly, and high-kicked my way to the other side of the room. We came to the center of the studio for pelvic isolations, thrusting our hips side to side, then forward, trying not to laugh out loud as we caught one another’s eye. Read More