April 4, 2017 First Person Pizza Complex Las Vegas By Joshua Baldwin At the International Pizza Expo. Stepping onto the marinara-red carpet of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s north hall, I inhaled a whiff of baking dough and followed the call of a gentle legato tune. Past a towering display of insulated delivery bags, I found the music’s source: at the Stanislaus Food Products stall (“Home of the Real Italian Tomato Since 1942”), a guitar duo plucked and strummed a Neapolitan jingle by a low white fence. As the players painted the coda, I took a few steps backward. A woman from Tyson Foods patted my arm and said she wanted to show me how they are so much more than chicken. “Would you like to try our Hillshire Farm all-natural pepperoni?” The International Pizza Expo, now in its thirty-third year, bills itself as the largest gathering of pizza professionals in the world. From Tuesday, March 28, to Thursday, March 30, twelve thousand attendees filled the vast, brightly lit convention-center floor. More than five hundred companies descend on the expo, bringing independent- and chain-pizzeria managers together with the manufacturers and service providers who populate an industry with an estimated forty-four billion dollars in American sales and 128 billion worldwide. I’m not a pizza professional, but I grew up in New York City, so the cheese slice is one of the foundational realities of my life. I’ve always been drawn to pizza, I probably worship it, and these days I’m often drawn to Las Vegas, almost like a pilgrim. So when pizza and Vegas collided for this year’s expo, I heeded the signal, and off I went to wander the aisles and consider the wares. Perhaps I would be led to the portal of the pie’s sorcery, and finally look straight into the metaphysical nucleus of the food’s mighty allure. Maybe I’d meet some hooded parmesan master and he’d disclose to me his secrets, or have my mind blown by the perfect grease-to-crunch ratio. Read More
March 31, 2017 First Person Searching for Derek Walcott By Matthew St. Ville Hunte A painting by Derek Walcott. “What is the motto of St. Lucia, boy?” “Statio haud malefida carinis.” “Sir!” “Sir!” “And what does that mean?” “Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps.” —Derek Walcott, Another Life “Sir Matthew! Sir Derek Walcott—he die!” Three excited girls bounded into my room at about twenty minutes to eight, as I ate breakfast for a change, to deliver the announcement. One of their fathers worked for Walcott and had mentioned it while dropping her off at school. I called the man, who apprehensively confirmed the story. Walcott was dead—but he didn’t want word of it to spread before the family had made a statement. I assured him that I’d tell no one, and spent the next hour wondering whether emailing someone about it would violate my promise, or indeed basic propriety. Within an hour the news broke anyway. Read More
March 13, 2017 First Person High Fade By Bryan Washington At his barber shop in Paterson, New Jersey, Louis McDowell gives Michael Young a haircut. Photo: Martha Cooper, 1994. My barber in New Orleans works a few blocks from Preservation Hall. His building sits across from the French Quarter, tucked inside the Tremé. He’s got this fat painting of Louis Armstrong sitting by the door, above a replica of that photo featuring Harlem Renaissance authors posted on a stoop; and, just under that frame, there’s a deed for the property, which my barber calls the remnant of a black neighborhood turned blue. Faubourg Tremé was the first town of free black people in the States. It was founded at the close of the eighteenth century, back when New Orleans held most of Louisiana’s emancipated people of color. The city then was a smoothy of black and Latin influence, and the Tremé testifies to that tradition—but you can only notice its history, my barber swears, if you knew about it before you got here. Read More
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