January 8, 2019 Arts & Culture On Randy Travis’s Distinctive Whine By Drew Bratcher Randy Travis. The first song I ever loved was “On the Other Hand,” by Randy Travis. It was the first single from Travis’s debut album, Storms of Life—and it was the third single, too. The song fizzled when Travis first released it in the summer of 1985, so he rereleased it the following spring, figuring it might fare better after “1982,” the album’s second single, entered the top ten. This time, “On the Other Hand” went to number one on the charts. It was on country radio all the time, and because we listened to country radio all the time, I learned the song, as I’d learned countless others, through osmosis. We lived in Davidson County, in the hills due north of Nashville, a place where country music was less a form of entertainment than an atmospheric feature, as ubiquitous as clouds and often as nebulous. “On the Other Hand” was different from the other country music I heard at the time. Travis’s deep nasal whine, a mix of range and grog and woebegone, blew through the blur. His voice seemed to summon Hank Williams by way of a bullfrog. He was, among other things, an irresistible parody. I stood in front of the fireplace in the living room. I pinched my nostrils. “On one hand, I count the reasons I could stay with you,” I started, pausing to release my nose-hold and inhale again before continuing, “and hold you close to me, all night long.” Read More
January 7, 2019 Arts & Culture On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted By R. O. Kwon Etching by Martin Lewis Lately, I’ve come to suspect that maybe a lot of people, especially men, still have no idea what it’s like to be a woman in America going about her life while trying, and at times failing, not to be assaulted. So, these past weeks, I’ve been observing myself. I, for instance, elect to walk on certain streets, not others. The elevator doors slide open, and there’s one man inside: I evaluate his size against mine, calculating how well I could fight him off, if I had to. I check the backseat of my car before getting in, just to make sure no one’s waiting there. I don’t leave my drink unattended; when I have to use the bathroom, I take it with me. It’s a multiperson bathroom. I take it into the stall. I lock my car as soon as I get in, then I start driving, pronto, no dallying. While I’m waiting at the bar to buy a drink, a man starts talking to me. I respond politely, if briefly: I hope to indicate, without provoking his ire, that I’m not interested. I get unsettling emails from a stranger, a man. I try to decide what’s safest, if I should create a filter that directs all his missives to the trash or if I should remain aware of what he’s saying. I make the filter, then I delete it. I should be aware, I think. Read More
January 7, 2019 Arts & Culture Meeting Eve Babitz By Lili Anolik Eve Babitz. Photo strip from the collection of Mirandi Babitz. I arrived at Short Order straight from the airport. I was the first customer of the day, the hostess unlocking the door as I reached for it. The restaurant was Eve’s choice, a fifteen-minute walk (she hadn’t driven in years) from her condo, in the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax. It looked like the kind of place that would have sold hamburgers and hot dogs to beach bums and bunnies had it been located on the water, only fancy. I sat at a table by the window, sipping a seltzer, my stomach a mess from nerves and travel and being six weeks pregnant, and waited for the woman who once said she believed “anyone who lived past thirty just wasn’t trying hard enough to have fun,” now sixty-nine. And then the second customer of the day entered. I stood up from my chair, half sat back down, stood up again as I thought, It’s Eve, wait, it can’t be Eve, wait, it has to be Eve. She no longer looked like a bombshell, her hair gray, the cut short and blunt, her clothes a way of covering up her nakedness and nothing more, her glasses, black-rimmed, the lenses thick. She didn’t, however, look like a burn victim either. (Her face had been spared in the 1997 fire, started when she tried to light a cigar, dropped the match in her lap.) She looked, remarkably, unremarkable, an older woman who didn’t give much thought to her appearance out for lunch. She picked up a paper take-out menu from the hostess’s stand, began studying it. I walked over to her, touched her shoulder. She smiled, toward me rather than at me. And I saw immediately that I’d been wrong about her looking unremarkable. That was the impression she gave from a distance. Up close it was another story. Her glasses were smudged, greasy. She’d applied lipstick to her mouth, only she’d done it haphazardly, a streak of pink on her chin. She had, too, a smell about her. Not body odor—it wasn’t tart or tangy. Something else, something I could almost identify but couldn’t quite, something heavy, sweetish. She said she was starving. Read More
January 4, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Frick, Fierce Femmes, and Fan Fiction By The Paris Review Still from the video game Doom, 2016. The striking thing about Doom (2016), a game in which the player enters a portal to hell and rips demons in half with an increasingly ridiculous arsenal, is the level of subtlety and care evident in its design. Doom is the dictionary definition of over-the-top, metal, and gruesome, but I’ve played few other games that even come close to matching its buttery smooth difficulty curve and firm sense of place. Resurrected by a sinister corporation that’s solved the energy crisis by harvesting the power of hell, the main character wanders corridors of abandoned space outposts, finding everywhere scenes of capitalism taken to its logical extreme: pentagrams scrawled on the walls, holograms cheerily pledging company dogmatism, ambiguous hunks of meat hanging from the ceiling. Level by level, the game slowly stirs in more chaos, ensuring that the player is always equipped to deal with enemy encounters—but only insofar as the player survives. Comfort is elusive, perpetually just out of reach. Never did I lose the rush of fear I’d feel when I saw a hell knight charging me from across the map, nor did I escape the jumpy, amphetamine-like rush of landing in a new arena filled with horrible creatures. Doom is loud, but necessarily so; it’s refreshing to find a work so thoroughly committed to raising the hair on one’s neck. —Brian Ransom Read More
January 4, 2019 Arts & Culture Dark Fashion By Nina Edwards Darkness in fashion is seldom bland. Even where it fails, its objective is to make its mark, whether one of elegance or uniformity, modesty or dangerous seduction. Like red wine rather than white, it can suggest sophistication, even opulence; like the darks of professional makeup—the art of smoky defining shadows and dark lipstick—it can obscure what we find less appealing and hint at mysterious qualities that a scrubbed-clean face couldn’t hope to inspire. In China and Japan, for example, teeth were once lacquered black to protect the enamel, but also because it was considered beautiful, and the practice goes on today among some minorities in Southeast Asia. To paint black what should be white creates a shock that is the essence of dark fashion. Fashion is related to the desire for conformity. Even the least sartorially concerned among us might feel uncomfortable wearing bright colors at a funeral unless asked to do so, say, or be reluctant to turn up at a wedding dressed top to toe in black or, indeed, white. To ignore the unspoken rules of dress is to draw attention to oneself and to seem to make a critical statement about the status quo, as if one knows better. This is fashion in its widest sense. We may not think we give a damn about what we wear, but still we can find ourselves caring very much when even the smallest aspect of dress feels curiously unlike ourselves, as for a conservative dresser in a tie that is brighter or fractionally wider than his custom. It may be important to a person that their clothes do not look cheap—or, to another, too new. Today dark clothing has become ubiquitous. It can be sexy, flattering, neutral, daringly individualistic, and even subversive. In the recent past, as now, dark clothing was often preferred because it was easier to maintain, although in the West, at least, the advantage of “not showing the dirt” has become less important, since clothing has become cheaper in relation to income and washing machines are a common possession. In our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ day, black or dark clothing was often associated with formality, and in southern Europe it was—and sometimes still is—the uniform dress code of older women of lower status. Thus it may be that a greater formality remains attached to darker clothing. Darkness somehow lends a garment intrinsic gravitas. Read More
January 3, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: This Is the Year By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dearest Poets, The women who raised me suffered so many missed opportunities, and I am seized with guilt about it. I construct vivid images from the stories I know. I imagine my grandmother as a married seventeen-year-old woman-child, patiently waiting for the local florist to pass by our house so she could catch a whiff of the fragrant champac flowers she had no money to buy. How long did it take for her to give up on this tiny desire, I wonder? I imagine my mother doodling soft hands offering lotus obeisance to who-knows-which-god, over and over in the margins of her book. She must have been giving away her tenderness, surely? I see my aunt posing shyly for a photo, which is now torn in half. In a year, I will defend my doctoral thesis. This should be a vindication. But it doesn’t feel that way. Is there a poem for the taste of ash in my mouth right now? Yours, Vanquished Read More