July 13, 2020 Arts & Culture The Archive By Melissa Chadburn One quiet spring morning, as a plague engulfs America, I awake, brew coffee, and shuffle to my computer. Outside my windows, a cordillera of snow-thatched roofs. I feel rooted, glooming in grief and rage. The need to stay in place. In the place of our wreckage. In other homes, I imagine children in nightshirts, and daddy flipping pancakes, and some things still good. Meanwhile, the world continues to break in the ways that it has always been broken. On my computer, a host of small heartbreaks. Records, evidence, stories of child death in foster care. November 2017, I sat in on the murder trial of the stepfather of a young boy, Gabriel Fernandez. Gabriel Fernandez was tortured and beaten to death. We, the journalists, and the family members and the witnesses tuned in daily. Sitting in that small courtroom, I felt strongly that this was about more than one murder. It was about the many failures of the Department of Children and Family Services, and there were many, but also about the slow, cold violence that permeates these kinds of cases. I had become obsessively curious—not about just how one family could do this, but how a nation with wealth, how any system, could leave so many children tortured and dead. Over the last five years, I’ve reviewed all the case files of murdered children with a pending Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) investigation. I’d found shelter here, in these redacted files. The dark boxes. What I know about these children has been culled from police reports, and hospital records, and social worker investigations. The documents all come to me redacted. I spend half my days searching for names, matching names to black boxes. The names of our dead children: they give me pause, they give me agency, an agency I’m not ever certain I deserve. I create a website. I build an archive. Read More
July 10, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tricksters, Transmogrifications, and Treacherous Beauty By The Paris Review Marie NDiaye. Photo: © Francesca Mantovani. No one is condemned to being human in the world of Marie NDiaye. People become birds, skulk home as canine omens, as vapors, or transmogrify into logs. What a relief such transformations can be, since consciousness, for NDiaye, is a fraught and painful thing. Even when writing in the third person, she has an extraordinary ability to trap readers in the heads of her characters, leaving us to rattle around in their skulls, crouch in the dark confines, and peek out to witness their humiliation. In the face of a painful reckoning with the world, the mind often gives way. Perhaps the cruelest element of her work is not that her characters suffer but that they are so often left unable to perceive it. That Time of Year, first published in 1994 and elegantly rendered in English by her veteran translator, Jordan Stump, will appear this September from Two Lines Press. Herman, a Parisian, extends the family holiday past August, the end of tourist season. It is abruptly fall—a deluge begins, and his wife and son have vanished. The inhabitants of the village have no interest in the case. Herman, too, finds himself unwilling to break social codes, to plead for help or for their return. He lingers, coming to note certain details: the web of surveillance (run fast); everyone’s exceedingly blonde hair (run far). Roots peek out beneath the dye and give away the newcomers; Herman learns he is not the first to have lost his family. The only way to find them, he is told, is to stay and become one with the village. “You can’t very well change your skin in two days, can you?” There is no distinction between assimilation and dissolution: to find your family, “you have to lose every last bit of yourself.” Rain, brain, go away; the downpour continues, and Herman’s memory and body seem to dissolve. In this self-annihilation, he finds “a timid sort of pleasure.” There is a strange pleasure, too, in losing oneself in this remarkable tale. It feels true even as it is utterly unreal; it seizes the brain like a very bad dream. —Chris Littlewood Read More
July 10, 2020 Arts & Culture Walt Disney’s Empty Promise By Kent Russell © VIAVAL / Adobe Stock. If you’ve ever been to Orlando, friend, you’ve been to International Drive. It is the 14.5-mile strip of hotels, restaurants, hotels, time-shares, souvenir shops, lesser theme parks, laser tag emporiums, curio museums, outlet stores, and hotels that’s “as well-known in Boston, England, as it is in Boston, Mass.,” as the line goes. And this is an important point to make. For so very many of the millions of tourists who come to Orlando, this—Disney, Universal Studios, I-Drive, all of it—stands in for America itself. “No matter where you travel in the world, you run into a startling number of people for whom Orlando is America,” John Jeremiah Sullivan has written. “If you could draw one of those New Yorker cartoon maps in your head, of the way the world sees North America, the turrets of the Magic Kingdom would be a full order of scale bigger than anything else.” International Drive is not Orlando’s main thoroughfare—that’d be Interstate 4, which runs parallel to I-Drive—but as International Drive comprises five hundred plus businesses selling everything from digital cameras to golf clubs, weeklong stays to Argentinian steaks, it is far and away the most vital artery when it comes to Orlando’s economic health. This despite the fact that until very recently, I-Drive was nothing but sand, pines, and palmettos. What happened was an attorney turned developer named Finley Hamilton, who went looking for ways to profit from Walt Disney’s 1965 announcement that he would build a huge new theme park southwest of downtown. On April Fools’ Day 1968, Hamilton paid $90,000 for ten acres of scrubland. This patch of nothing was accessible only by dirt road—but Hamilton figured that Disney-bound tourists would spot his new Hilton Inn from the interstate, take the nearest exit, and drive north on the paved road he would build. He bought and flipped more acreage along his road in the months preceding Disney World’s opening. “I came up with International Drive,” he later recalled, “because it sounded big and important.” Within a few years, I-Drive included a dozen hotels, two dozen restaurants, and four gas stations, most of which were clustered at the road’s two major intersections. Then the nation’s first water park, Wet ’n Wild, opened in 1977. Just like that, I-Drive went from a place to sleep and eat to a destination in its own right. Arriving not long after were your Ripley’s Believe It or Not!s, your Skull Kingdoms, and the like. In short, International Drive has developed into a tacky gauntlet whereby families are stripped of armloads of cash on their way to and from Disney parks. It, like Greater Orlando, is premised upon one thing: Uncle Walt’s sloppy seconds. Read More
July 10, 2020 Eat Your Words Cooking with Steve Abbott By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. A mushroom like the one Abbott grew in his car. The Haight-Ashbury poet and activist Steve Abbott (1943–1992) has had an unusual and charmed second act as a domestic icon, though he was not known for his cooking. Abbott was married in his midtwenties while he was a student at Emory University, and he had a daughter in 1970. After his wife was killed in a car accident in 1973, he became a single parent to two-year-old Alysia Abbott and moved to San Francisco with her in what we would now consider to be astoundingly bohemian circumstances. Among other legends is the time when Alysia was eight weeks old and Abbott “took some LSD and went into the bedroom to play with her,” tripping out on the baby’s rolling eyes and flailing legs. Abbott saw “a monstrous id” and explained that “I had to leave her presence because I was too psychically vulnerable.” He also relays that when Alysia was small, he survived by catnapping between work and childcare, and hitting the gay bars only between midnight and three in the morning (and presumably leaving her unattended). It worked out. As Abbott’s daughter grew, she became a sidekick and confidante. Photos from the time show Alysia posed in costume for the cover of one of Abbott’s poetry books or curled up with him on extraordinary seventies furniture, with obvious affection beaming from every frame. In 2013, the grown-up Alysia published Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, which details their experiences as a family. In part because of that book’s ongoing success, Steve Abbott’s work is back in print as of December 2019, in the collection Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, published by Nightboat Books and edited by Jamie Townsend. Alysia has been a tireless promoter of her father’s legacy and explains in public appearances that she chose to tell their story the way she did because while gay parents have become more visible and accepted in America, the heritage of groundbreaking families like hers is less known. And so many gay parents of her father’s generation—including her father himself—died of AIDS that it has fallen on their children to tell their stories. Read More
July 9, 2020 Detroit Archives On Immolation By Aisha Sabatini Sloan In her column “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. Part of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan (Photo: Fren Lebalme) For a period of time in 2014, I couldn’t stop watching the surveillance video of a person setting fire to the Heidelberg Project, a world-renowned art installation by Tyree Guyton in a residential area of Detroit. The recorded arson struck me as a performance piece in itself. In what appears to be the very early hours of the morning, a figure approaches the threshold of a structure called “Taxi House,” a home adorned by boards of wood that have been painted with yellow, pink, green, and white vehicles labeled “taxi.” There is a painted clock, real tires, and toy cars. A meandering, peach-colored line has been painted along a sagging corner of the roof, then it comes down onto the siding, where it moves geometrically, like Pac-Man. The installation as a whole is like a painting brought to life, imbued with the spirits of Kea Tawana, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Rauschenberg. In a recent profile in The New York Times Magazine, Guyton describes how he began the installation with his grandfather, an act of reinvention rooted in nostalgia. M. H. Miller describes the collection of carefully planned assemblages as “an act of Proustian reclamation, as if Guyton were creating a new neighborhood out of the one he’d lost, embellishing his and Grandpa Mackey’s memories out of the wreckage that surrounded them.” In the video of the fire that destroys “Taxi House,” the figure holds something that resembles a gallon of milk; after a short time, a fireball blooms, and the figure runs away. The Heidelberg installation has the vibe of Plato’s lost city of Atlantis, the mythic civilization that sank into the ocean overnight after its people lost their sense of virtue. It also brings to mind Jason deCaires Taylor’s undersea sculptures, human figures engaged in activities like typing, playing the cello, or watching TV; cement bodies surrounded by schools of fish. What’s so remarkable about Guyton’s effort is that he’s constructed a frame around the present moment. The collapse he draws our eye to is not a myth or a dream of the future, it’s now. Though Guyton had originally hoped for the installation to be a solution of sorts, the traffic it brings (around two hundred thousand people a year) also serves as a reminder of the tension inherent to a city undergoing gentrification. In a book written about the project, Connecting the Dots, one neighbor explains, “Every summer night we’ve got people riding up and down looking at what we’re doing. It’s an invasion of privacy. They look at us like we’re animals on display.” From what I can tell, no motive ever emerged for the arson, and no arrests were made. The one person who checked into an emergency room for severe burns on the day of the fire had been trying to deep-fry a turkey. More fires have been set at the installation in years since. Guyton exhibits widely, and has a special fan base overseas. Recently, he has decided to take the Heidelberg Project down. According to M. H. Miller, Guyton and his wife plan to “transform the buildings that still stand into a series of cultural and educational centers dedicated to the arts, and then build housing and work spaces marketed for artists out of this central core.” As buildings around the country were set on fire in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, I thought about the Heidelberg arsonist. Widely dispersed memes featuring the Martin Luther King Jr. quote “The riot is the language of the unheard” have encouraged more and more people to see fire in the context of social upheaval not merely as an act of destruction but as an act of ritualized desecration. What language looks like at wit’s end. A kind of screaming. Read More
July 9, 2020 First Person The Devil’s Sting By Drew Bratcher © Brittney / Adobe Stock. The wasp’s quick, menacing, unpredictable stab. I am crouched beside the tire of a pickup truck in Tennessee, my fists balled around my already burning ears. It’s a Saturday in the summer. On the tailgate, my grandfather, my uncle, and their crew of posthole diggers and concrete pourers have knocked off working for long enough to eat lunch: leftover biscuits, sliced tomatoes, boiled eggs. I am nine years old, soon to be ten. When people ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I say “country singer,” I say “Braves center fielder,” but what I think I want to be is one of these men. I want to be tough like them, steady-handed. The truth is I’m not sure I could be even if I tried. What I am is in thrall to them, which is to say afraid of making a fool of myself in front of them. At the moment, though, I am more afraid of the wasp. What kind of meanness is a wasp? Even for flying bugs with stingers, of which there are legions in the hills north of Nashville, wasps seem severe. Sure, a bee can sting you, make you swell, but bees make honey, and besides, a bee will sting you just the once. Their lives tied to their weapon, they strike as a last stand, then leave their weapons behind as if offering concessions. Wasps show no such restraint. They are indiscriminate. They don’t carry a weapon, they are the weapon, knives gone airborne, anger on wings. Read More