July 18, 2023 Overheard The Final Dead Shows: Part Two By Sophie Haigney A very cool van. Photographs by Sophie Haigney. We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads. The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE. Read More
July 17, 2023 Overheard The Final Dead Shows: Part One By Sophie Haigney John Mayer looking good. Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars. It was the first night of a three-night run of the final shows for this iteration of the Grateful Dead—the last tour ever, the last shows ever, though, as everyone knows, the Grateful Dead has been ending for nearly twenty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, everyone thought that was the end. In 2015, many of the original band members played a tour that was literally called “Fare Thee Well.” And yet, miraculously, it continued. But this time: Bob Weir is seventy-five, and John Mayer, the unlikely force behind this version of the band, has other things to get on to. At the very least, this is probably the last time they’ll ever sell out huge stadiums. So this was a major event that I had flown out from New York to see with five friends. I had been hearing for days that SFO was “like Bonnaroo for Deadheads.” On another friend’s flight in, the pilot told them they were flying over a wildfire in Colorado. “Wow, it’s literally ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ ” someone behind her said. Read More
July 14, 2023 Overheard @ErasTourUpdates: Taylor Swift in Philadelphia By Jake Nevins Photograph by Jake Nevins. An early-summer, late-afternoon light was catching a porcelain figurine of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus on the windowsill of Johnnie’s Italian Specialties, the twenty-eight-year-old family-owned restaurant in South Philly where, in May, I dialed up my personal hotspot, hoping to get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert taking place in the city later that night. My cheesesteak sub was dry and insufficiently cheesy and entirely beside the point—it was a formality, if a regionally appropriate one, meant to justify my seat at this funky restaurant as my sister and I refreshed four different ticket resale websites waiting for prices to drop. We were not two of the lucky 2.4 million who had gotten tickets to the Eras Tour when they’d gone on sale several months earlier, in a rollout so vexed and disorderly it caused an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into antitrust violations by Ticketmaster and Live Nation. At first, this didn’t bother me. I do not have the patience to wait in something called a virtual queue, and also I have a job. So I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would not be attending the Eras Tour, Swift’s 131-show survey of her ten studio albums—which I suppose we now call eras and not albums—and the logical, world-beating end point of her willful evolution from gee-whiz country darling to too-big-to-fail pop supernova. But then, in March, the Eras Tour commenced, and for several weeks thereafter my Twitter feed was overrun with clips from the show, which runs close to three and a half hours, includes forty-four songs, and is structured episodically as a Homeric celebration of Swift’s discography. It looked like the sort of thing I’d regret missing, the premise of a memory I could tell my kids or at least my friends’ kids about. Read More
July 14, 2023 The Review’s Review The Last Window-Giraffe By Marina Abramović Fir0002, Giraffe in Melbourne Zoo, GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons. Péter Esterházy once wrote that Péter Zilahy is the white raven of Hungarian literature who can observe the world each time as if for the first time, always fresh and original. While it’s labeled a novel, The Last Window-Giraffe is essentially uncategorizable, a hippogriff of a creation fashioned from fragments of history, autobiography, and wild invention. How such a wealth of elements—from childhood memories to political atrocities to the poignant evocation of the correspondence between sexual awakening and the deaths of dictators—could be gathered and spun into such a coherent narrative is a kind of aesthetic miracle. Read More
July 13, 2023 Overheard “Strawberries in Pimm’s”: Fourth Round at Wimbledon By Krithika Varagur Photograph by Krithika Varagur. Hangovers announced themselves on the wan faces on the District line to SW19 on the first Sunday of Wimbledon. Maybe I was projecting. It was a shame, people noted in low tones, that all the British players were now out. A pair of men splitting a salmon-colored broadsheet wondered which BBC presenter was at the center of a recent grooming scandal. “Last night was a proper, proper … if you saw the amount of tequila we were putting away,” said one handsome man, sitting between two heavily made-up girls. All of us filed out, in no particular rush, at Southfields. I went into Costa for an iced Americano before my friend arrived. “Careful, dear,” tutted an elderly woman, gesturing to my wide-open tote, the only bag I had in London. “I have no spatial awareness at all,” I admitted, surveying some almonds, a packable quilted jacket, and a copy of Persuasion, all ripe for the picking. “It’s not a rough crowd, of course,” she said, adjusting a georgette shawl, that was the same pearl color as her fluffy hair. “These days, you just never know …” She trailed off. We’d realized, I think simultaneously, that we were in our first queue of the day at Wimbledon, which isn’t just the world’s oldest tennis tournament but a pageant of exuberant restraint, where orderly lines and enclosures have the quality of rites. Read More
July 12, 2023 First Person My Lumbago Isn’t Acting Up: On Disney World By Molly Young Turkey leg and sea king. On the first day, God said, “Let the atmospheric water vapors condense and become rain,” and so there was a downpour, and it was inconvenient. But we had ponchos. It was November at Disney World, and ponchos were like noses or smartphones in that every visitor had one, of course they did, it wasn’t even a question. Soon the rain turned horizontal and worked itself inside the ponchos, and now the condensation cycle in the sky was being restaged on an individual level. You’d think this situation—thousands of humans being dumpling-steamed in plastic and packed into a slow boat or a shuttle simulator—would create a terrible odor, but Disney World was one step ahead: employees (“cast members”) stationed at the threshold of each attraction kindly asked guests to remove their ponchos before entering, and all obeyed, crumpling wet balls into pockets and backpacks … and we saw that it was good. I’d intended to keep a detailed diary at Disney World but totally failed. My notebook has only two notes, both scribbled at Living with the Land, the EPCOT ride where you hop into a boat and glide past an idyllic farmhouse and through a series of greenhouses to learn about crop rotation and pesticide reduction. “In our search for more efficient ways to grow food, we often fail to realize the impact of our methods,” a narrator explained, channeling Wendell Berry. When we passed a thicket of tomatoes, the narrator revealed that one of EPCOT’s tomato plants had yielded “thirty-two thousand fruits.” A gasp went through the crowd. Read More