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"content": "\u003cp>Looking for things to do in the Bay Area this weekend? The Do List has you covered with concerts, festivals, exhibitions, plays, performances and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can listen to this week’s episode with KQED’s Gabe Meline and Sam Lefebvre above, or read about our picks below.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Act\u003c/strong>: This Whoopi Goldberg-starring film was shot in San Francisco—Noe Valley, to be precise—in 1991. The journalist Peter Hartlaub from the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> has spent his past few weeks \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/culture/article/Sister-Act-transformed-Noe-Valley-into-a-14865742.php\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">obsessively finding the exact filming locations\u003c/a> of the movie. You won’t recognize a lot of the neighborhood in the movie—the crew even transformed a corner real estate building into an X-rated adult bookstore for the film—but that’s part of the fun. Hartlaub and his colleague Heather Knight host a screening of \u003cem>Sister Act\u003c/em> next week, with two opening acts: a bagpipe player, and the official 2019 Cable Car Bell ringing champion. That’s on Thursday, Dec. 5, at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco. \u003ca href=\"https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/purchase/2786?siteToken=52wkfzmjpwjjfpz3ye7tz8wscg\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pharoah Sanders\u003c/strong>: This 79-year-old jazz legend is immediately recognizable for his viscerally abrasive, ever-searching style of tenor saxophone, an inimitable voice honed in the Sun Ra Arkestra and John Coltrane ensembles before leading his own groups. As a bandleader in the late 1960s, Sanders continued exploring free and spiritual jazz on a staggering run of albums for the Impulse! label, by turns intoning peace with wounded lyricism and reveling in explosive, anguished intensity. Sanders last played the Bay Area in 2017, part of a program recognizing Coltrane, and returns with the same collaborators—pianist William Henderson, bassist Nat Reeves and drummer Johnathan Blake—for two sets a night on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 29 and 30, at Yoshi’s in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"https://www.yoshis.com/calendar/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ghost Ship Memorial\u003c/strong>: It’s been three years since the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland that took the lives of 36 people at an underground show. Many of them were musicians and artists, and each year, to remember them, there’ve been memorial concerts and special gatherings. The one this Sunday is both: an art show of work by artists who died at Ghost Ship, and a concert by the chamber choral ensemble Voices of Silicon Valley, who will be joined by two bands whose members were close with people who died in the Ghost Ship fire: Abandoned Footwear and Marmot. That’s on Sunday, Dec. 1, at the Lake Merritt United Methodist Church in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"https://www.voices-sv.org/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tune-Yards Listening Party\u003c/strong>: Bar Shiru opened this year in Oakland as the Bay Area’s first Japanese-style hi-fi bar, meaning it has a really nice analog sound-system and people are supposed to be quiet. Tune-Yards, the local indie-rock group, created the distinct score for Boots Riley’s funny, provocative Oakland-set film \u003cem>Sorry to Bother You\u003c/em>, and they’re hosting a listening party for it at Bar Shiru alongside a DJ set by Boots himself. This event, in keeping with Boots’ activism and the movie’s political themes, is a fundraiser. The proceeds benefit Moms 4 Housing, a group of homeless women who are occupying an empty investor-owned home in West Oakland, without permission, to protest the housing crisis. That’s Sunday, Dec. 1, at 2pm, at Bar Shiru in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"https://www.barshiru.com/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>The most intriguing thing about \u003cem>Girl on Film\u003c/em>, a comic-book memoir by someone who never set out to create comics, is that it isn’t a tragedy. Told one way, it could have been a story of a would-be artist stubbornly pursuing their dream for years, only to finally give up in despair. Cecil Castellucci chronicles her decade-plus quest to become a filmmaker from the birth of her obsession, when she first saw \u003cem>Star Wars\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Raiders of the Lost Ark\u003c/em> in junior high school, all the way through trying and failing to cut together her first feature in her early 20s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13870346\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 400px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13870346\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/9781684154531_custom-4cadac0ba6547646614a686f41255a1fad546aa2-s500-c85.jpg\" alt=\"'Girl on Film' by Cecil Castellucci, Vicky Leta, Melissa Duffy, V. Gagnon and Jon Berg.\" width=\"400\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/9781684154531_custom-4cadac0ba6547646614a686f41255a1fad546aa2-s500-c85.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/9781684154531_custom-4cadac0ba6547646614a686f41255a1fad546aa2-s500-c85-160x240.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Girl on Film’\u003cbr>by Cecil Castellucci, Vicky Leta, Melissa Duffy, V. Gagnon and Jon Berg. \u003ccite>(Archaia)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>All the while, though, we know Castellucci’s not going to become the next Spielberg. That’s because we know Castellucci not as a filmmaker, but as the bestselling author of such wonderful comics as \u003cem>Shade the Changing Girl\u003c/em>, \u003cem>The Plain Janes\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Year of the Beasts\u003c/em>. Castellucci’s also written Star Wars and Batgirl comics and all sorts of other works—from young-adult novels to opera librettos—as well as making music, creating performance pieces and, yes, directing a film (2005’s \u003cem>Happy Is Not Hard to Be\u003c/em>, which she also wrote and appeared in). She’s still not Spielberg, though.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if you think that matters, you miss the point of Castellucci’s book. More than a life story, it’s an account of how to live an artist’s life even when it looks like your artistic ambitions are grandiose and impractical. In fact, Castellucci shows, your artistic ambitions are pretty much guaranteed to be grandiose and impractical. That doesn’t matter. What matters is how you live with your big dreams, what you give up for them, what you hang onto and what you let go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Castellucci, the dream of being a filmmaker kept her on track through her teenage years, motivating her to lay the groundwork for a multifaceted creative life. Her first big existential crisis comes in eighth grade, when she applies to two renowned Manhattan high schools, the High School of Performing Arts (the one from the 1980 movie \u003cem>Fame\u003c/em>) and the Bronx High School of Science. She’s accepted to both, forcing her to admit to her parents—both scientists—that she wants to be an artist. They’re fine with that, but it’s still a turning point for young Cecil. She’s owned her ambition out loud for the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cecil goes to Performing Arts, and the next several years are a whirlwind of aesthetic education and adolescent pains. She recalls how she learned from various mentors and crossed paths with various celebs (her best story is of being gifted a Warhol painting by her friend Chaz Bono, only to have Cher call up the next day and tell her she couldn’t have it after all). Most of all, though, she shows how sheer enthusiasm is the crucial quality in a young person trying to build an artistic life. Cecil tries her hand at everything, learns all she can from everyone she meets and shrugs off every slight. Things get harder when she starts film school at NYU, only to find she can’t afford it. The next few years are chaotic: She heads briefly to Europe, continues film school in Montreal, joins a band and begins to realize filmmaking may not be her path after all. With a turn of the page she’s in Los Angeles, recording music and writing a novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Castellucci packs these twists and turns into the end of the book. She’s so committed to maintaining a sense of positivity, she breezes past the story’s only real crisis in a couple of pages. Fortunately, this doesn’t weaken her main project—fulfilled so winningly everywhere else—of showing what the life of a “baby artist” can look like. This book isn’t flagged as a young-adult title, but it cries out to be given to a creative teen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Castellucci has divided the work of illustration among four different artists. It’s an unorthodox approach that could have stumbled, but Vicky Leta, Melissa Duffy, V. Gagnon and Jon Berg complement each other well. Most use fairly heavy lines, which harmonizes their pages. Duffy’s a standout with her brusque, energetic linework. Leta’s fragile lines are the most distinctive, so Castellucci reserves her for interludes where the adult Cecil contemplates the vicissitudes of memory. These sections aren’t particularly successful, actually; they’re a distraction from the bubbly momentum of young Cecil’s journey. Said journey may not have wound up where Castellucci thought it would when she was 12, but it’s still a fascinating one to follow. Most importantly, it’s far from over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Etelka Lehoczky \u003c/em>\u003cem>has written about books for\u003c/em> The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books \u003cem>and\u003c/em> The New York Times.\u003cem> She tweets at\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__twitter.com_EtelkaL&d=DwMFaQ&c=E2nBno7hEddFhl23N5nD1Q&r=eDR3RhrQF9JBI8Rzx0SRPw&m=vR6dskFG6Pki76w8marL327xnaWSpIVAqnkFp2Pm3ak&s=Mdo8__hjawldjbQthelAboNsxAd-9SFUx24643NrlUM&e=\">@EtelkaL\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+%27Girl+On+Film%27+Grows+Up+And+Finds+Her+Artistic+Path&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The most intriguing thing about \u003cem>Girl on Film\u003c/em>, a comic-book memoir by someone who never set out to create comics, is that it isn’t a tragedy. Told one way, it could have been a story of a would-be artist stubbornly pursuing their dream for years, only to finally give up in despair. Cecil Castellucci chronicles her decade-plus quest to become a filmmaker from the birth of her obsession, when she first saw \u003cem>Star Wars\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Raiders of the Lost Ark\u003c/em> in junior high school, all the way through trying and failing to cut together her first feature in her early 20s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13870346\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 400px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13870346\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/9781684154531_custom-4cadac0ba6547646614a686f41255a1fad546aa2-s500-c85.jpg\" alt=\"'Girl on Film' by Cecil Castellucci, Vicky Leta, Melissa Duffy, V. Gagnon and Jon Berg.\" width=\"400\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/9781684154531_custom-4cadac0ba6547646614a686f41255a1fad546aa2-s500-c85.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/9781684154531_custom-4cadac0ba6547646614a686f41255a1fad546aa2-s500-c85-160x240.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Girl on Film’\u003cbr>by Cecil Castellucci, Vicky Leta, Melissa Duffy, V. Gagnon and Jon Berg. \u003ccite>(Archaia)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>All the while, though, we know Castellucci’s not going to become the next Spielberg. That’s because we know Castellucci not as a filmmaker, but as the bestselling author of such wonderful comics as \u003cem>Shade the Changing Girl\u003c/em>, \u003cem>The Plain Janes\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Year of the Beasts\u003c/em>. Castellucci’s also written Star Wars and Batgirl comics and all sorts of other works—from young-adult novels to opera librettos—as well as making music, creating performance pieces and, yes, directing a film (2005’s \u003cem>Happy Is Not Hard to Be\u003c/em>, which she also wrote and appeared in). She’s still not Spielberg, though.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if you think that matters, you miss the point of Castellucci’s book. More than a life story, it’s an account of how to live an artist’s life even when it looks like your artistic ambitions are grandiose and impractical. In fact, Castellucci shows, your artistic ambitions are pretty much guaranteed to be grandiose and impractical. That doesn’t matter. What matters is how you live with your big dreams, what you give up for them, what you hang onto and what you let go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Castellucci, the dream of being a filmmaker kept her on track through her teenage years, motivating her to lay the groundwork for a multifaceted creative life. Her first big existential crisis comes in eighth grade, when she applies to two renowned Manhattan high schools, the High School of Performing Arts (the one from the 1980 movie \u003cem>Fame\u003c/em>) and the Bronx High School of Science. She’s accepted to both, forcing her to admit to her parents—both scientists—that she wants to be an artist. They’re fine with that, but it’s still a turning point for young Cecil. She’s owned her ambition out loud for the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cecil goes to Performing Arts, and the next several years are a whirlwind of aesthetic education and adolescent pains. She recalls how she learned from various mentors and crossed paths with various celebs (her best story is of being gifted a Warhol painting by her friend Chaz Bono, only to have Cher call up the next day and tell her she couldn’t have it after all). Most of all, though, she shows how sheer enthusiasm is the crucial quality in a young person trying to build an artistic life. Cecil tries her hand at everything, learns all she can from everyone she meets and shrugs off every slight. Things get harder when she starts film school at NYU, only to find she can’t afford it. The next few years are chaotic: She heads briefly to Europe, continues film school in Montreal, joins a band and begins to realize filmmaking may not be her path after all. With a turn of the page she’s in Los Angeles, recording music and writing a novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Castellucci packs these twists and turns into the end of the book. She’s so committed to maintaining a sense of positivity, she breezes past the story’s only real crisis in a couple of pages. Fortunately, this doesn’t weaken her main project—fulfilled so winningly everywhere else—of showing what the life of a “baby artist” can look like. This book isn’t flagged as a young-adult title, but it cries out to be given to a creative teen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Castellucci has divided the work of illustration among four different artists. It’s an unorthodox approach that could have stumbled, but Vicky Leta, Melissa Duffy, V. Gagnon and Jon Berg complement each other well. Most use fairly heavy lines, which harmonizes their pages. Duffy’s a standout with her brusque, energetic linework. Leta’s fragile lines are the most distinctive, so Castellucci reserves her for interludes where the adult Cecil contemplates the vicissitudes of memory. These sections aren’t particularly successful, actually; they’re a distraction from the bubbly momentum of young Cecil’s journey. Said journey may not have wound up where Castellucci thought it would when she was 12, but it’s still a fascinating one to follow. Most importantly, it’s far from over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Etelka Lehoczky \u003c/em>\u003cem>has written about books for\u003c/em> The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books \u003cem>and\u003c/em> The New York Times.\u003cem> She tweets at\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__twitter.com_EtelkaL&d=DwMFaQ&c=E2nBno7hEddFhl23N5nD1Q&r=eDR3RhrQF9JBI8Rzx0SRPw&m=vR6dskFG6Pki76w8marL327xnaWSpIVAqnkFp2Pm3ak&s=Mdo8__hjawldjbQthelAboNsxAd-9SFUx24643NrlUM&e=\">@EtelkaL\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+%27Girl+On+Film%27+Grows+Up+And+Finds+Her+Artistic+Path&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "With New Book, 'The Hard Times' Expands Its Punk Satire Empire",
"headTitle": "With New Book, ‘The Hard Times’ Expands Its Punk Satire Empire | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>In 2016, Matt Saincome left a reputable job as \u003cem>SF Weekly\u003c/em>‘s music editor to launch a website rooted in a decidedly niche concept: what would happen if punk rock had its own version of \u003cem>The Onion\u003c/em>? At first, \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>The Hard Times\u003c/em>\u003c/a> seemed like an obscure endeavor. But over the past three years, the satire site has gone on to garner a global audience, expand into \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/live-events/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">live events\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a podcast\u003c/a> and earn praise from \u003cem>The Onion \u003c/em>itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What makes \u003cem>The Hard Times\u003c/em> so successful is its combination of satirical stories that get into the nitty-gritty of punk politics, and spoofs of news stories with wide appeal. The website’s most popular article of all time, for example, is titled: “\u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/blog/didnt-vaccinate-kids-one-lived-turned-fine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Didn’t Vaccinate My Kids and the One Who Lived Turned Out Fine\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the midst of a tour in support of hilarious new book \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>The Hard Times: The First 40 Years\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, KQED Arts caught up with Matt Saincome—who was born and raised in the East Bay town of Danville—to talk Bay Area punk, creating a business out of thin air and the sheer volume of people who still think \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em> stories are real.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What inspired you to start \u003cem>The Hard Times\u003c/em> in the first place? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I already had a punk comedy zine called \u003cem>Punks! Punks! Punks!\u003c/em> and I went to journalism school and learned some news writing skills. My friends told me to look up \u003cem>The Onion \u003c/em>and I fell in love with it, but \u003cem>The Onion\u003c/em>‘s everyman had a wife, a couple kids and a job. I wanted to create a satire magazine for people who had a band, shitty roommates and depression. That was the life my friends and I were living, and there was no satire outlet representing that culture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How did growing up in the Bay influence all this?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I grew up on [bands like] Rancid, Operation Ivy and Monster Squad and spent a lot of my formative years going to—and being banned from—\u003ca href=\"http://www.924gilman.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">924 Gilman\u003c/a>. The Bay Area has a rich history of punks who take themselves far too seriously, so that was just too tempting to start poking fun at. Anyone who has been an active member of the DIY punk scene for over five years, but still can’t spot the toxic ideologies and hypocritical scene leaders, shouldn’t be allowed to operate a motor vehicle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868734\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868734\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM-800x546.png\" alt=\"https://thehardtimes.net/\" width=\"800\" height=\"546\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM-800x546.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM-160x109.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM-768x524.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM.png 973w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">https://thehardtimes.net/\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ever since “\u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/blog/fun-date-night-ideas-youll-never-experience-date-musicians/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fun Date Night Ideas You’ll Never Experience Because You Date Band Dudes\u003c/a>” came out, it’s been a staple on my social media feed. It resonates with so many people I know. \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oh, dude. One time we booked a band and they were rude to our booker all night. Eventually, they even started flipping him off. He walked up to them and said, “Guys, is something wrong? We did our best to promote the show.” And they explained that before they left for tour, all of their girlfriends saw that article, shared it in a group chat, and now they were all in unison upset with the band. It was causing a bunch of fights, so they were pissed at us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Is that the funniest response you’ve ever had to a \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em> piece?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The funniest was probably \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MattSaincome/status/1175972367903805440/photo/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this letter\u003c/a> I received from [residential and commercial flooring publication] \u003cem>Floor Trends\u003c/em> magazine threatening legal action if I didn’t take \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/music/nofxs-linoleum-wins-25th-consecutive-song-of-the-year-award-from-floor-trends-magazine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this\u003c/a> down:\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868735\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868735\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM-800x536.png\" alt=\"https://thehardtimes.net/\" width=\"800\" height=\"536\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM-800x536.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM-160x107.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM-768x515.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM.png 980w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">https://thehardtimes.net/\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>[The letter reads in part: “This is a serious matter and we trust we will have your immediate attention. Please contact me no later than Monday to confirm the article, any related images and all references to \u003cem>Floor Trends\u003c/em> on your website, social media accounts or any other media you have control over, have been removed.” Saincome replied succinctly with a: “Go f–k yourself.”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Do bands ever get that annoyed with you? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few, but 99% are positive. People are thrilled to be on \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em>. I’ve seen huge musicians tweet excitedly that they’ve “made it” when they finally get a \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em> article. Even when it’s negative, they celebrate. It’s great to see. Alien Ant Farm was pissed though!\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868736\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868736\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM-800x537.png\" alt=\"The offending Alien Ant Farm story.\" width=\"800\" height=\"537\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM-800x537.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM-160x107.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM-768x515.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM.png 976w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The offending Alien Ant Farm story. \u003ccite>(https://thehardtimes.net/)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How often do people think \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em> articles are real?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every. Single. Day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>If you had any advice to people wanting to create a brand from scratch, what would it be?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every founder story is bullshit. It’s probably 45% timing and luck, 45% environmental class privilege stuff that makes you less risk averse, and only 10% all that visionary hustle porn stuff you see in TV and movies. Sometimes that 10% can win out, but I had the 90% advantage. I think sometimes people see founders and assume that the thing they saw on Instagram about waking up at 4am and reading 10 books a day must be real. It’s not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You’re \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_edge\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">straight edge\u003c/a>. There’s an old stereotype that says straight edgers don’t have a sense of humor. Is all of this an elaborate ploy to prove the world wrong?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s actually a long con for me to collect the IP addresses of suspected future edge breakers so I can get my straight edge revenge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>New book,\u003c/em> The Hard Times: The First 40 Years \u003cem>is out now.\u003c/em>\u003cem> Matt Saincome and website co-founder Bill Conway will be appearing at \u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/events/542681669820794/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Green Apple Books on the Park\u003c/a>, San Francisco, on Wednesday, Nov. 13.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In 2016, Matt Saincome left a reputable job as \u003cem>SF Weekly\u003c/em>‘s music editor to launch a website rooted in a decidedly niche concept: what would happen if punk rock had its own version of \u003cem>The Onion\u003c/em>? At first, \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>The Hard Times\u003c/em>\u003c/a> seemed like an obscure endeavor. But over the past three years, the satire site has gone on to garner a global audience, expand into \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/live-events/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">live events\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a podcast\u003c/a> and earn praise from \u003cem>The Onion \u003c/em>itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What makes \u003cem>The Hard Times\u003c/em> so successful is its combination of satirical stories that get into the nitty-gritty of punk politics, and spoofs of news stories with wide appeal. The website’s most popular article of all time, for example, is titled: “\u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/blog/didnt-vaccinate-kids-one-lived-turned-fine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Didn’t Vaccinate My Kids and the One Who Lived Turned Out Fine\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the midst of a tour in support of hilarious new book \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>The Hard Times: The First 40 Years\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, KQED Arts caught up with Matt Saincome—who was born and raised in the East Bay town of Danville—to talk Bay Area punk, creating a business out of thin air and the sheer volume of people who still think \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em> stories are real.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What inspired you to start \u003cem>The Hard Times\u003c/em> in the first place? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I already had a punk comedy zine called \u003cem>Punks! Punks! Punks!\u003c/em> and I went to journalism school and learned some news writing skills. My friends told me to look up \u003cem>The Onion \u003c/em>and I fell in love with it, but \u003cem>The Onion\u003c/em>‘s everyman had a wife, a couple kids and a job. I wanted to create a satire magazine for people who had a band, shitty roommates and depression. That was the life my friends and I were living, and there was no satire outlet representing that culture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How did growing up in the Bay influence all this?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I grew up on [bands like] Rancid, Operation Ivy and Monster Squad and spent a lot of my formative years going to—and being banned from—\u003ca href=\"http://www.924gilman.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">924 Gilman\u003c/a>. The Bay Area has a rich history of punks who take themselves far too seriously, so that was just too tempting to start poking fun at. Anyone who has been an active member of the DIY punk scene for over five years, but still can’t spot the toxic ideologies and hypocritical scene leaders, shouldn’t be allowed to operate a motor vehicle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868734\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868734\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM-800x546.png\" alt=\"https://thehardtimes.net/\" width=\"800\" height=\"546\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM-800x546.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM-160x109.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM-768x524.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.07.42-PM.png 973w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">https://thehardtimes.net/\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ever since “\u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/blog/fun-date-night-ideas-youll-never-experience-date-musicians/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fun Date Night Ideas You’ll Never Experience Because You Date Band Dudes\u003c/a>” came out, it’s been a staple on my social media feed. It resonates with so many people I know. \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oh, dude. One time we booked a band and they were rude to our booker all night. Eventually, they even started flipping him off. He walked up to them and said, “Guys, is something wrong? We did our best to promote the show.” And they explained that before they left for tour, all of their girlfriends saw that article, shared it in a group chat, and now they were all in unison upset with the band. It was causing a bunch of fights, so they were pissed at us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Is that the funniest response you’ve ever had to a \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em> piece?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The funniest was probably \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MattSaincome/status/1175972367903805440/photo/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this letter\u003c/a> I received from [residential and commercial flooring publication] \u003cem>Floor Trends\u003c/em> magazine threatening legal action if I didn’t take \u003ca href=\"https://thehardtimes.net/music/nofxs-linoleum-wins-25th-consecutive-song-of-the-year-award-from-floor-trends-magazine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this\u003c/a> down:\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868735\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868735\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM-800x536.png\" alt=\"https://thehardtimes.net/\" width=\"800\" height=\"536\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM-800x536.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM-160x107.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM-768x515.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.12.33-PM.png 980w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">https://thehardtimes.net/\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>[The letter reads in part: “This is a serious matter and we trust we will have your immediate attention. Please contact me no later than Monday to confirm the article, any related images and all references to \u003cem>Floor Trends\u003c/em> on your website, social media accounts or any other media you have control over, have been removed.” Saincome replied succinctly with a: “Go f–k yourself.”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Do bands ever get that annoyed with you? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few, but 99% are positive. People are thrilled to be on \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em>. I’ve seen huge musicians tweet excitedly that they’ve “made it” when they finally get a \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em> article. Even when it’s negative, they celebrate. It’s great to see. Alien Ant Farm was pissed though!\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868736\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868736\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM-800x537.png\" alt=\"The offending Alien Ant Farm story.\" width=\"800\" height=\"537\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM-800x537.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM-160x107.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM-768x515.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-23-at-2.26.15-PM.png 976w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The offending Alien Ant Farm story. \u003ccite>(https://thehardtimes.net/)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How often do people think \u003cem>Hard Times\u003c/em> articles are real?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every. Single. Day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>If you had any advice to people wanting to create a brand from scratch, what would it be?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every founder story is bullshit. It’s probably 45% timing and luck, 45% environmental class privilege stuff that makes you less risk averse, and only 10% all that visionary hustle porn stuff you see in TV and movies. Sometimes that 10% can win out, but I had the 90% advantage. I think sometimes people see founders and assume that the thing they saw on Instagram about waking up at 4am and reading 10 books a day must be real. It’s not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You’re \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_edge\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">straight edge\u003c/a>. There’s an old stereotype that says straight edgers don’t have a sense of humor. Is all of this an elaborate ploy to prove the world wrong?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s actually a long con for me to collect the IP addresses of suspected future edge breakers so I can get my straight edge revenge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>New book,\u003c/em> The Hard Times: The First 40 Years \u003cem>is out now.\u003c/em>\u003cem> Matt Saincome and website co-founder Bill Conway will be appearing at \u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/events/542681669820794/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Green Apple Books on the Park\u003c/a>, San Francisco, on Wednesday, Nov. 13.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "After Comic Garry Shandling's Death, Judd Apatow Found Zen in His Diaries",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/authors/137955750/judd-apatow\">Judd Apatow\u003c/a> was a teenager when he first “met” comic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/471775543/garry-shandling\">Garry Shandling\u003c/a> in a phone interview for his high school radio show. Years later, their paths intersected again when Shandling, who was hosting the Grammy Awards, hired Apatow to write jokes for him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13869732\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 176px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13869732\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/91WTugLawxL._AC_UY218_ML3_.jpg\" alt=\"'It's Garry Shandling's Book' is edited by Judd Apatow.\" width=\"176\" height=\"218\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/91WTugLawxL._AC_UY218_ML3_.jpg 176w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/91WTugLawxL._AC_UY218_ML3_-160x198.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 176px) 100vw, 176px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘It’s Garry Shandling’s Book’ is edited by Judd Apatow. \u003ccite>(Random House)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Shandling had been Johnny Carson’s guest host on \u003cem>The Tonight Show \u003c/em>before creating and starring in the groundbreaking comedy series\u003cem> It’s Garry Shandling’s Show\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Larry Sanders Show. \u003c/em>He became Apatow’s mentor and close friend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He completely changed my life,” Apatow says of Shandling. “He hired me to write for his show. He did a cameo on the pilot of \u003cem>The Ben Stiller Show\u003c/em>, which I thought was part of why we got picked up. He asked me to direct. … It was always mysterious to me why he was so kind to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Apatow went on to produce \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12879331\">\u003cem>Superbad \u003c/em>\u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2012/04/08/150189071/lena-dunhams-girls-still-sex-still-the-city-different-show\">\u003cem>Girls\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, and to direct \u003cem>The 40-Year-Old Virgin\u003c/em> and \u003ca href=\"#v\">\u003cem>Trainwreck\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, \u003c/em>but he always stayed in touch with his mentor. After Shandling’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/24/471773637/actor-and-comedian-garry-shandling-dies-at-66\">sudden death\u003c/a> in 2016, Apatow helped sort through his belongings—including boxes of diaries dating back to 1978.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shandling practiced Zen meditation for decades, and many pages of his journals are reminders to himself to stay calm, remain unattached to worldly things and let go of his ego.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I felt like there was so much wisdom in examining Garry’s life,” Apatow says. “Garry was a wounded person. He was a neurotic man. He was a guy constantly attempting to evolve and heal. I felt like there’s so many lessons that people can get from learning about how he lived his life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shandling is the subject of Apatow’s new book, \u003cem>It’s Garry Shandling’s Book,\u003c/em> which is a companion to the HBO documentary Apatow made last year, \u003cem>The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I saw in the journals that he wrote, ‘Learn to grow old gracefully. Learn to become a mentor gracefully,'” Apatow says. “Now I’m more tuned into the responsibility of doing that. I’m lucky enough to be in a place where I can help people who deserve to be heard from or who deserve breaks. … I definitely try to keep that Garry tradition alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paerP97n4aA\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview Highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On Shandling’s place in comedy\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Garry always cut his own path. It always felt like Garry was outside of the system in some way. So when he did \u003cem>It’s Garry Shandling’s Show\u003c/em>, there really hadn’t been a show like that, that was so experimental and weird and which made fun of the whole concept of sitcoms. \u003cem>…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then he did \u003cem>The Larry Sanders Show,\u003c/em> which was a satire of talk shows. It was a behind-the-scenes look at an anxious, neurotic talk-show host, somewhat like Garry. And in it, he tried to explore the way show business and ego prevents people from connecting and loving each other. That was his premise. And in a way, he was trying to use the show to explore his own psyche. And I always thought he was mocking the part of himself that he didn’t like, mocking the person that wanted to be rich and famous and someone who could hold this high position for a long time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was a unique, original thinker, and in a way, he was almost like an alternative rock band. And he did all this when TV didn’t have much of this. There’s a lot of television like that these days, but back in the ’80s and early ’90s, there wasn’t programming like this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how Shandling’s journals changed his understanding of Shandling \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was surprised that 30 years of journals mainly contained Garry trying to talk to his positive voice. So they weren’t journals from the point of view of someone who was just trying to spew all their toxic stuff. A lot of us write in journals like that. We just want to get the bad voice out of our head, and that’s not what Garry’s journals were like. They were a voice talking to the panicked, anxious voice. So most of the journals were reminders to try to get out of ego, to try to be more kind and loving, to let go. It’s 30 years of reminders about the type of person that he wants to be. There were some pages where he was complaining about something, but very few, considering that he did it for 30 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how Shandling’s 13-year-old brother died when Shandling was 10, and his parents didn’t talk to him about the death or let him go to the funeral \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to know for sure, but it certainly scarred him in a way that affected him throughout his life. I felt that his search for presence was based on the fact that at a moment in his life when he needed to be told the truth, he wasn’t told the truth. It’s hard to know how accurate all the details are, but what it sounds like was that he was sent away when his brother died, and he was sent to his grandparents, and that they didn’t tell him for a little while, but he basically understood what was happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then after his brother died, the family dealt with it by not talking about it, which, I think, for that time period—this is 1960—is something a lot of people did in post-World War II America. They said, “Alright, we’re going to move forward, and how we survive this is: We are going to stuff it down deep and not talk about it.” And so throughout Garry’s life, he was all for being honest and open and vulnerable and present and real—and I think that’s because at the key moment of his childhood, people were not real with him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how Apatow almost turned down a job as a showrunner for \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>The Larry Sanders Show \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>because he didn’t want to ruin his relationship with Shandling \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I always liken it to trying to paint with Picasso—that if you are painting a painting with him, he probably at some point would turn to you and go, “You’re doing it all wrong! What’s with the red?” You would always disappoint him, because the show is so in his mind and it’s so based on his feelings and experience that when you work on something so personal, how could you ever know what he would do, what’s in his heart, how he would behave? …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was painful at times. If you pitched Garry a joke and he hated it, you would feel it. It would hurt you, the whole look of disappointment in Garry’s eyes. … There were very few people that Garry felt like could write the show. So when he said, “Hey, can you do me a favor and co-showrun this last season?” I was terrified, because I loved my relationship with Garry and I didn’t want something to go terribly wrong with it. I said to him, “Garry, I’ll do it. You have to know how hard this is.” I was just honest with him in a way that probably no one ever had been. And I was honest about why he was difficult to work with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On Shandling’s perfectionism and growing interest in Zen Buddhism \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He just could not just be chill and make it easy on himself. He wanted everything to be amazing. And in his head, the stakes were incredibly high and that is pure ego, and that’s why he was always trying to remind himself not to have a big ego. It was a battle that continued, and then at some point near the end of his life, he really did let go and spent a lot more time mentoring people. He basically was satisfied with his work, and people would say, “When’s your next show?” And he would say, “Weren’t these two enough?” And he did let go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how professional success didn’t make Shandling happy \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He wrote a lot for \u003cem>The Larry Sanders Show\u003c/em> about how success doesn’t make you happy, and I think for most people that reached certain heights of success or whose dreams come true, they really learn something that a lot of people don’t learn: [which] is that most of what happens when you get to that place is you realize that it doesn’t work, and in some ways, it’s very depressing. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve looked at myself and all of my friends and we’ve all been in on a very long journey in our attempts to be creative, in our attempts to be successful and to get heard and make things. I’ve seen all the different ways that people have handled the ups and downs of their careers, and it is a struggle, because you put so much of your self-esteem in having people like you because you’re doing a good job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think that Garry felt a lot happier in some moments after he stopped trying to do the work. He was very loving and giving, and if you wrote a script or had a cut of a movie, he was always there, 100 percent of the time, to come and give you notes and be so helpful. And I think that was a happier part of show business for him than being up at midnight rewriting a script for his show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how Shandling wrote about death in his diaries \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was about to have the surgery that he knew was potentially life-threatening, and in the journals he would say things like, “Death is not a change. Embrace death. It is freedom. Be open, be ready, be joyful to die.” That’s what it said on all the different pages. It was him trying, in a very Buddhist way, to be comfortable during his exit and to not fight it and to not resist and not see it as something different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Lauren Krenzel and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and\u003c/em> \u003cem>Patrick Jarenwattananon\u003c/em> \u003cem>adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=After+Comic+Garry+Shandling%27s+Death%2C+Judd+Apatow+Found+Zen+In+His+Diaries+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/authors/137955750/judd-apatow\">Judd Apatow\u003c/a> was a teenager when he first “met” comic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/471775543/garry-shandling\">Garry Shandling\u003c/a> in a phone interview for his high school radio show. Years later, their paths intersected again when Shandling, who was hosting the Grammy Awards, hired Apatow to write jokes for him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13869732\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 176px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13869732\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/91WTugLawxL._AC_UY218_ML3_.jpg\" alt=\"'It's Garry Shandling's Book' is edited by Judd Apatow.\" width=\"176\" height=\"218\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/91WTugLawxL._AC_UY218_ML3_.jpg 176w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/11/91WTugLawxL._AC_UY218_ML3_-160x198.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 176px) 100vw, 176px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘It’s Garry Shandling’s Book’ is edited by Judd Apatow. \u003ccite>(Random House)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Shandling had been Johnny Carson’s guest host on \u003cem>The Tonight Show \u003c/em>before creating and starring in the groundbreaking comedy series\u003cem> It’s Garry Shandling’s Show\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Larry Sanders Show. \u003c/em>He became Apatow’s mentor and close friend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He completely changed my life,” Apatow says of Shandling. “He hired me to write for his show. He did a cameo on the pilot of \u003cem>The Ben Stiller Show\u003c/em>, which I thought was part of why we got picked up. He asked me to direct. … It was always mysterious to me why he was so kind to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Apatow went on to produce \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12879331\">\u003cem>Superbad \u003c/em>\u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2012/04/08/150189071/lena-dunhams-girls-still-sex-still-the-city-different-show\">\u003cem>Girls\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, and to direct \u003cem>The 40-Year-Old Virgin\u003c/em> and \u003ca href=\"#v\">\u003cem>Trainwreck\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, \u003c/em>but he always stayed in touch with his mentor. After Shandling’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/24/471773637/actor-and-comedian-garry-shandling-dies-at-66\">sudden death\u003c/a> in 2016, Apatow helped sort through his belongings—including boxes of diaries dating back to 1978.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shandling practiced Zen meditation for decades, and many pages of his journals are reminders to himself to stay calm, remain unattached to worldly things and let go of his ego.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I felt like there was so much wisdom in examining Garry’s life,” Apatow says. “Garry was a wounded person. He was a neurotic man. He was a guy constantly attempting to evolve and heal. I felt like there’s so many lessons that people can get from learning about how he lived his life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shandling is the subject of Apatow’s new book, \u003cem>It’s Garry Shandling’s Book,\u003c/em> which is a companion to the HBO documentary Apatow made last year, \u003cem>The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I saw in the journals that he wrote, ‘Learn to grow old gracefully. Learn to become a mentor gracefully,'” Apatow says. “Now I’m more tuned into the responsibility of doing that. I’m lucky enough to be in a place where I can help people who deserve to be heard from or who deserve breaks. … I definitely try to keep that Garry tradition alive.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/paerP97n4aA'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/paerP97n4aA'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview Highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On Shandling’s place in comedy\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Garry always cut his own path. It always felt like Garry was outside of the system in some way. So when he did \u003cem>It’s Garry Shandling’s Show\u003c/em>, there really hadn’t been a show like that, that was so experimental and weird and which made fun of the whole concept of sitcoms. \u003cem>…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then he did \u003cem>The Larry Sanders Show,\u003c/em> which was a satire of talk shows. It was a behind-the-scenes look at an anxious, neurotic talk-show host, somewhat like Garry. And in it, he tried to explore the way show business and ego prevents people from connecting and loving each other. That was his premise. And in a way, he was trying to use the show to explore his own psyche. And I always thought he was mocking the part of himself that he didn’t like, mocking the person that wanted to be rich and famous and someone who could hold this high position for a long time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was a unique, original thinker, and in a way, he was almost like an alternative rock band. And he did all this when TV didn’t have much of this. There’s a lot of television like that these days, but back in the ’80s and early ’90s, there wasn’t programming like this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how Shandling’s journals changed his understanding of Shandling \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was surprised that 30 years of journals mainly contained Garry trying to talk to his positive voice. So they weren’t journals from the point of view of someone who was just trying to spew all their toxic stuff. A lot of us write in journals like that. We just want to get the bad voice out of our head, and that’s not what Garry’s journals were like. They were a voice talking to the panicked, anxious voice. So most of the journals were reminders to try to get out of ego, to try to be more kind and loving, to let go. It’s 30 years of reminders about the type of person that he wants to be. There were some pages where he was complaining about something, but very few, considering that he did it for 30 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how Shandling’s 13-year-old brother died when Shandling was 10, and his parents didn’t talk to him about the death or let him go to the funeral \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to know for sure, but it certainly scarred him in a way that affected him throughout his life. I felt that his search for presence was based on the fact that at a moment in his life when he needed to be told the truth, he wasn’t told the truth. It’s hard to know how accurate all the details are, but what it sounds like was that he was sent away when his brother died, and he was sent to his grandparents, and that they didn’t tell him for a little while, but he basically understood what was happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then after his brother died, the family dealt with it by not talking about it, which, I think, for that time period—this is 1960—is something a lot of people did in post-World War II America. They said, “Alright, we’re going to move forward, and how we survive this is: We are going to stuff it down deep and not talk about it.” And so throughout Garry’s life, he was all for being honest and open and vulnerable and present and real—and I think that’s because at the key moment of his childhood, people were not real with him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how Apatow almost turned down a job as a showrunner for \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>The Larry Sanders Show \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>because he didn’t want to ruin his relationship with Shandling \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I always liken it to trying to paint with Picasso—that if you are painting a painting with him, he probably at some point would turn to you and go, “You’re doing it all wrong! What’s with the red?” You would always disappoint him, because the show is so in his mind and it’s so based on his feelings and experience that when you work on something so personal, how could you ever know what he would do, what’s in his heart, how he would behave? …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was painful at times. If you pitched Garry a joke and he hated it, you would feel it. It would hurt you, the whole look of disappointment in Garry’s eyes. … There were very few people that Garry felt like could write the show. So when he said, “Hey, can you do me a favor and co-showrun this last season?” I was terrified, because I loved my relationship with Garry and I didn’t want something to go terribly wrong with it. I said to him, “Garry, I’ll do it. You have to know how hard this is.” I was just honest with him in a way that probably no one ever had been. And I was honest about why he was difficult to work with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On Shandling’s perfectionism and growing interest in Zen Buddhism \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He just could not just be chill and make it easy on himself. He wanted everything to be amazing. And in his head, the stakes were incredibly high and that is pure ego, and that’s why he was always trying to remind himself not to have a big ego. It was a battle that continued, and then at some point near the end of his life, he really did let go and spent a lot more time mentoring people. He basically was satisfied with his work, and people would say, “When’s your next show?” And he would say, “Weren’t these two enough?” And he did let go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how professional success didn’t make Shandling happy \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He wrote a lot for \u003cem>The Larry Sanders Show\u003c/em> about how success doesn’t make you happy, and I think for most people that reached certain heights of success or whose dreams come true, they really learn something that a lot of people don’t learn: [which] is that most of what happens when you get to that place is you realize that it doesn’t work, and in some ways, it’s very depressing. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve looked at myself and all of my friends and we’ve all been in on a very long journey in our attempts to be creative, in our attempts to be successful and to get heard and make things. I’ve seen all the different ways that people have handled the ups and downs of their careers, and it is a struggle, because you put so much of your self-esteem in having people like you because you’re doing a good job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think that Garry felt a lot happier in some moments after he stopped trying to do the work. He was very loving and giving, and if you wrote a script or had a cut of a movie, he was always there, 100 percent of the time, to come and give you notes and be so helpful. And I think that was a happier part of show business for him than being up at midnight rewriting a script for his show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how Shandling wrote about death in his diaries \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was about to have the surgery that he knew was potentially life-threatening, and in the journals he would say things like, “Death is not a change. Embrace death. It is freedom. Be open, be ready, be joyful to die.” That’s what it said on all the different pages. It was him trying, in a very Buddhist way, to be comfortable during his exit and to not fight it and to not resist and not see it as something different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Lauren Krenzel and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and\u003c/em> \u003cem>Patrick Jarenwattananon\u003c/em> \u003cem>adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=After+Comic+Garry+Shandling%27s+Death%2C+Judd+Apatow+Found+Zen+In+His+Diaries+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "'We're All Struggling': Writer Saeed Jones Reflects On Identity And Acceptance",
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"content": "\u003cp>As a black gay kid growing up in Texas in the 1990s, poet Saeed Jones remembers getting negative messages about his identity from every aspect of his life. It was around the time of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/20/659122600/matthew-shepard-laid-to-rest-20-years-after-his-death\">Matthew Shepard\u003c/a>‘s murder in Wyoming, and Jones felt alone and unsafe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was seeing these cautionary tales connected to identity,” he says. “It was so clear that it was perilous to be a black gay boy in America.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet he couldn’t be any other way: “Being gay isn’t a choice, just like being black isn’t a choice,” Jones says. “I don’t stop. I do not give up. I do not take America’s ‘no’ to my identity for an answer.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his new coming-of-age memoir, \u003cem>How We Fight for Our Lives,\u003c/em> Jones reflects on his struggle to embrace his identity. The “we” in the title is intentional; he hopes the book will spark a conversation among a cross section of readers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re all struggling,” he says. “I want you to experience what’s going on in my book and think about it in relation to your own life, whether that’s because you’re like, ‘Oh this is totally different!’ Or because you’re like, ‘Hmm. This is really familiar.’ I think that’s a useful way of thinking about memoir.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview Highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On his first sexual encounter with a man, hooking up in a library bathroom and trying to kiss and being refused \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was like, “Oh, absolutely not.” And so I felt embarrassed and I think the only thing more painful than not getting what you want is almost getting it and then being shamed right at the last minute. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was deeply ashamed. I thought I had messed up. But I think really he admitted he couldn’t go there. He was working through some things, and so he was ashamed of what he was feeling or not feeling. I think that’s something that, whether people are in the closet or not, they continue to struggle with, being vulnerable and true intimacy. I think it’s possible to have sex with someone and not be intimate with them, and that’s kind of what it looks like sometimes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On equating sex with death because of AIDS \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think this is true for my generation. I’m 33 years old. I was born in 1985 and I would say until, frankly, the last two or three years — with the introduction of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/30/727731380/old-fight-new-front-aids-activists-want-lower-drug-prices-now\">PrEP/Truvada\u003c/a> — for most gay men, a defining aspect of our sexual experiences has been an awareness of not just STIs (STDs that we all need to be aware of and thoughtful about), but, “Am I going to get HIV/AIDS?” Which is no longer a death sentence, as I understood it at the time. But certainly, that is a lifelong condition that’s going to require treatment and support. There is a heaviness to that. There is a deep sense of foreboding that I think often turns into shame with time, because it feels like you’re risking punishment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On coming out to his mom by making a joke\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’d gotten a little memento from my speech team to celebrate the year or whatever, and everyone had a little motto, and my motto was like, “Not even his clothes are in the closet anymore,” which I thought was very funny. And so I was talking to her about it and she was like, “What does that mean?” And I was like, “My clothes aren’t in the closet anymore. Like I’m not in the closet anymore.” She didn’t find it funny. She was confused and she had a lot of follow-up questions. And that’s how I ended up coming out to her. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m such a Sagittarius. I am a practical joker, like, I love to laugh, but I felt like I had messed up. This was actually really significant to her. And that I’d been cracking jokes on a moment that I had been waiting for years, right? And so I felt really bad, but then she called me back and was like, “Hey, I forgot to say, I love you, and you seem happy and that’s all that matters, you know?” And that meant the world to me. It was really important for me to see that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how he “erased” himself in order to have a good relationship with his mother \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We laughed a lot. We could talk about literally anything except my being gay, which began to feel more and more like a void. But you know, we talked about the news, and we would laugh, and she was so proud of how I was doing in school and as a student and in speech. … It’s this weird dynamic where you’re struggling and you end up prioritizing the other person’s feelings over your own, and I did it because I loved her. I did it because I felt like I was causing her pain by trying to talk about this, but she was still my mom. I needed to have her wisdom in terms of love and relationships, and I didn’t get it, and really struggled as a result.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On knowing he was a writer from an early age\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was the thing that I could always count on to get praised [for] in school. … Middle school was when I started really going for it, like asking for extra credit, and like taking risks and doing more. Then also in literature discussions about short stories and fiction or whatever, it all made so much sense to me. I remember learning the narrative arc in maybe the eighth grade — resolution and climax — and it just made sense. I was like, “Oh, duh! Duh.” And I literally never heard it before … but kind of like with queerness, it felt like I was being given language to explain something I already understood. I just get it. It’s just in me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On why he moved to Columbus, Ohio after Trump became president \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Honestly, America’s depressing, right? If you’re paying attention in any substantive capacity, America is really stressful and anxiety-inducing and depressing. And I now understand that as an adult, and it’s not [my] fault. And then Trump became president, and truth is, on Inauguration Day, January 2017, I had a total breakdown. I had an absolute breakdown. I knew it was coming because I took a personal day, so I was home so I already knew on some level. But I remember watching Barack Obama and Michelle Obama walking to the helicopter, and I absolutely fell apart. I could not stop crying, and I opened the knife drawer in my kitchen. I was looking at those knives and I started saying, “I can’t go back. I can’t go back. Please don’t make me go back.” And the “back” was the months after my mom passed away. It was the worst, the most raw I had ever felt, and I’m glad that I talked to a friend and I started therapy and that helped tremendously.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, you know, the last few years working in media [at BuzzFeed], it’s required so much of all of us, really, and certainly people [for whom] this is our job to talk about these issues: We can’t just turn off our phones and stop reading the news, unfortunately. That’s a high demand. And I was starting to feel really threadbare on an ongoing basis. And so I knew I wanted to change. And so I wanted to leave New York and I wanted to leave media in the way I was working in it, to go back to the basics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Roberta Shorrock and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27We%27re+All+Struggling%27%3A+Writer+Saeed+Jones+Reflects+On+Identity+And+Acceptance&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As a black gay kid growing up in Texas in the 1990s, poet Saeed Jones remembers getting negative messages about his identity from every aspect of his life. It was around the time of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/20/659122600/matthew-shepard-laid-to-rest-20-years-after-his-death\">Matthew Shepard\u003c/a>‘s murder in Wyoming, and Jones felt alone and unsafe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was seeing these cautionary tales connected to identity,” he says. “It was so clear that it was perilous to be a black gay boy in America.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet he couldn’t be any other way: “Being gay isn’t a choice, just like being black isn’t a choice,” Jones says. “I don’t stop. I do not give up. I do not take America’s ‘no’ to my identity for an answer.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his new coming-of-age memoir, \u003cem>How We Fight for Our Lives,\u003c/em> Jones reflects on his struggle to embrace his identity. The “we” in the title is intentional; he hopes the book will spark a conversation among a cross section of readers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re all struggling,” he says. “I want you to experience what’s going on in my book and think about it in relation to your own life, whether that’s because you’re like, ‘Oh this is totally different!’ Or because you’re like, ‘Hmm. This is really familiar.’ I think that’s a useful way of thinking about memoir.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview Highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On his first sexual encounter with a man, hooking up in a library bathroom and trying to kiss and being refused \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was like, “Oh, absolutely not.” And so I felt embarrassed and I think the only thing more painful than not getting what you want is almost getting it and then being shamed right at the last minute. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was deeply ashamed. I thought I had messed up. But I think really he admitted he couldn’t go there. He was working through some things, and so he was ashamed of what he was feeling or not feeling. I think that’s something that, whether people are in the closet or not, they continue to struggle with, being vulnerable and true intimacy. I think it’s possible to have sex with someone and not be intimate with them, and that’s kind of what it looks like sometimes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On equating sex with death because of AIDS \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think this is true for my generation. I’m 33 years old. I was born in 1985 and I would say until, frankly, the last two or three years — with the introduction of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/30/727731380/old-fight-new-front-aids-activists-want-lower-drug-prices-now\">PrEP/Truvada\u003c/a> — for most gay men, a defining aspect of our sexual experiences has been an awareness of not just STIs (STDs that we all need to be aware of and thoughtful about), but, “Am I going to get HIV/AIDS?” Which is no longer a death sentence, as I understood it at the time. But certainly, that is a lifelong condition that’s going to require treatment and support. There is a heaviness to that. There is a deep sense of foreboding that I think often turns into shame with time, because it feels like you’re risking punishment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On coming out to his mom by making a joke\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’d gotten a little memento from my speech team to celebrate the year or whatever, and everyone had a little motto, and my motto was like, “Not even his clothes are in the closet anymore,” which I thought was very funny. And so I was talking to her about it and she was like, “What does that mean?” And I was like, “My clothes aren’t in the closet anymore. Like I’m not in the closet anymore.” She didn’t find it funny. She was confused and she had a lot of follow-up questions. And that’s how I ended up coming out to her. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m such a Sagittarius. I am a practical joker, like, I love to laugh, but I felt like I had messed up. This was actually really significant to her. And that I’d been cracking jokes on a moment that I had been waiting for years, right? And so I felt really bad, but then she called me back and was like, “Hey, I forgot to say, I love you, and you seem happy and that’s all that matters, you know?” And that meant the world to me. It was really important for me to see that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how he “erased” himself in order to have a good relationship with his mother \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We laughed a lot. We could talk about literally anything except my being gay, which began to feel more and more like a void. But you know, we talked about the news, and we would laugh, and she was so proud of how I was doing in school and as a student and in speech. … It’s this weird dynamic where you’re struggling and you end up prioritizing the other person’s feelings over your own, and I did it because I loved her. I did it because I felt like I was causing her pain by trying to talk about this, but she was still my mom. I needed to have her wisdom in terms of love and relationships, and I didn’t get it, and really struggled as a result.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On knowing he was a writer from an early age\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was the thing that I could always count on to get praised [for] in school. … Middle school was when I started really going for it, like asking for extra credit, and like taking risks and doing more. Then also in literature discussions about short stories and fiction or whatever, it all made so much sense to me. I remember learning the narrative arc in maybe the eighth grade — resolution and climax — and it just made sense. I was like, “Oh, duh! Duh.” And I literally never heard it before … but kind of like with queerness, it felt like I was being given language to explain something I already understood. I just get it. It’s just in me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On why he moved to Columbus, Ohio after Trump became president \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Honestly, America’s depressing, right? If you’re paying attention in any substantive capacity, America is really stressful and anxiety-inducing and depressing. And I now understand that as an adult, and it’s not [my] fault. And then Trump became president, and truth is, on Inauguration Day, January 2017, I had a total breakdown. I had an absolute breakdown. I knew it was coming because I took a personal day, so I was home so I already knew on some level. But I remember watching Barack Obama and Michelle Obama walking to the helicopter, and I absolutely fell apart. I could not stop crying, and I opened the knife drawer in my kitchen. I was looking at those knives and I started saying, “I can’t go back. I can’t go back. Please don’t make me go back.” And the “back” was the months after my mom passed away. It was the worst, the most raw I had ever felt, and I’m glad that I talked to a friend and I started therapy and that helped tremendously.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, you know, the last few years working in media [at BuzzFeed], it’s required so much of all of us, really, and certainly people [for whom] this is our job to talk about these issues: We can’t just turn off our phones and stop reading the news, unfortunately. That’s a high demand. And I was starting to feel really threadbare on an ongoing basis. And so I knew I wanted to change. And so I wanted to leave New York and I wanted to leave media in the way I was working in it, to go back to the basics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Roberta Shorrock and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27We%27re+All+Struggling%27%3A+Writer+Saeed+Jones+Reflects+On+Identity+And+Acceptance&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Novelist Ernest J. Gaines, acclaimed author of \u003cem>The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman\u003c/em>, and other novels about the struggles of African Americans in rural Louisiana, died at his home in Oscar, La., Tuesday at the age of 86.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines died in his sleep of cardiac arrest, \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/e9fe833a0686427eaa6cf3cc768d264d\">according\u003c/a> to The Associated Press, citing the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. He is survived by his wife Dianne Saulney Gaines, four stepchildren and nine siblings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The son of sharecroppers, Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, near Baton Rouge. He attended school for little more than five months out of the year. But that was more education than his family before him had received. He would say later in life that his ear for the stories of his elders was developed as he wrote letters for adults who couldn’t read or write.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the late 1940s, at the age of 15, his family moved to the Northern California city of Vallejo, about 30 miles north of San Francisco. He told \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTHwqrPLu7Y\">interviewer Lawrence Bridges\u003c/a> that in California he could do something that had been forbidden in the South: visit a library. Gaines later attended San Francisco State University. His early writing earned him a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines returned to Louisiana in 1963, inspired by James Meredith’s bid to enroll in the then-all-white University of Mississippi. He took it as a sign that the South was changing and that he could be a part of that change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As I’ve said many times before, the two greatest moves I’ve made was on the day I left Louisiana in ’48, and on the day I came back to Louisiana in ’63,” he would later \u003ca href=\"https://www.braf.org/stories/2019/11/5/an-interview-with-the-late-ernest-j-gaines-from-2007\">tell an interviewer\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than 10 years later, in 1971, he published the novel that brought him attention, \u003cem>The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman\u003c/em>. It told the story of a black woman born as a slave who lives long enough to witness the civil rights era. It was later adapted for a television movie in 1974 starring Cicely Tyson and won nine Emmy Awards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines would \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ernest-j-gaines-author-of-autobiography-of-miss-jane-pittman-dies-at-86/2019/11/05/2b89840c-000b-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html\">later say\u003c/a> that the fictional Jane Pittman was modeled after his disabled great-aunt, Augustine Jefferson, who could not walk, but was strong enough to raise a family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another novel, \u003cem>A Gathering of Old Men,\u003c/em> a tale of a group of aging black men sharing stories about their lives in rural and segregated Louisiana, published in 1983, was made into a movie in 1987.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993 for his novel\u003cem> A Lesson Before Dying\u003c/em>, a story about a young Southern black man waiting to be executed for a crime he did not commit. It later became a best-seller.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ernest-j-gaines-author-of-autobiography-of-miss-jane-pittman-dies-at-86/2019/11/05/2b89840c-000b-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html\">published eight novels\u003c/a> and many short stories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines was honored with \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/books/ernest-gaines-dead.html\">numerous other awards\u003c/a> including a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named a MacArthur Fellow — the coveted “genius grant”– in 1993. President Bill Clinton \u003ca href=\"https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/ernest-j-gaines\">awarded \u003c/a>Gaines the National Humanities Medal in 2000. In 2013, President Barack Obama \u003ca href=\"https://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernest-j-gaines/\">awarded \u003c/a>him the National Medal of Arts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With the earnings from his books and television movies, Gaines built a home on plantation land he had worked as a child and near a cemetery where his family members were buried.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an interview with Fourth Quarter 2007, published by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.braf.org/stories/2019/11/5/an-interview-with-the-late-ernest-j-gaines-from-2007\">Baton Rouge Area Foundation\u003c/a>, Gaines talked about his home in False River, La. — the nexus between the past and the present, and between the land and his ancestors whose lives and labor inspired his work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If Auntie [Augusteen Jefferson] could sit here with me, or my stepfather who took me away from here, or my Uncle George, who used to take me to those old beat-up bars in Baton Rouge—if I could, I’d just buy him a good glass of Gentleman Jack, and we could sit here and talk. Oh, I wish I could do that.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Novelist+Ernest+J.+Gaines+Dies+At+Age+86&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As I’ve said many times before, the two greatest moves I’ve made was on the day I left Louisiana in ’48, and on the day I came back to Louisiana in ’63,” he would later \u003ca href=\"https://www.braf.org/stories/2019/11/5/an-interview-with-the-late-ernest-j-gaines-from-2007\">tell an interviewer\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than 10 years later, in 1971, he published the novel that brought him attention, \u003cem>The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman\u003c/em>. It told the story of a black woman born as a slave who lives long enough to witness the civil rights era. It was later adapted for a television movie in 1974 starring Cicely Tyson and won nine Emmy Awards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines would \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ernest-j-gaines-author-of-autobiography-of-miss-jane-pittman-dies-at-86/2019/11/05/2b89840c-000b-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html\">later say\u003c/a> that the fictional Jane Pittman was modeled after his disabled great-aunt, Augustine Jefferson, who could not walk, but was strong enough to raise a family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another novel, \u003cem>A Gathering of Old Men,\u003c/em> a tale of a group of aging black men sharing stories about their lives in rural and segregated Louisiana, published in 1983, was made into a movie in 1987.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993 for his novel\u003cem> A Lesson Before Dying\u003c/em>, a story about a young Southern black man waiting to be executed for a crime he did not commit. It later became a best-seller.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ernest-j-gaines-author-of-autobiography-of-miss-jane-pittman-dies-at-86/2019/11/05/2b89840c-000b-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html\">published eight novels\u003c/a> and many short stories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaines was honored with \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/books/ernest-gaines-dead.html\">numerous other awards\u003c/a> including a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named a MacArthur Fellow — the coveted “genius grant”– in 1993. President Bill Clinton \u003ca href=\"https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/ernest-j-gaines\">awarded \u003c/a>Gaines the National Humanities Medal in 2000. In 2013, President Barack Obama \u003ca href=\"https://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernest-j-gaines/\">awarded \u003c/a>him the National Medal of Arts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With the earnings from his books and television movies, Gaines built a home on plantation land he had worked as a child and near a cemetery where his family members were buried.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an interview with Fourth Quarter 2007, published by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.braf.org/stories/2019/11/5/an-interview-with-the-late-ernest-j-gaines-from-2007\">Baton Rouge Area Foundation\u003c/a>, Gaines talked about his home in False River, La. — the nexus between the past and the present, and between the land and his ancestors whose lives and labor inspired his work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If Auntie [Augusteen Jefferson] could sit here with me, or my stepfather who took me away from here, or my Uncle George, who used to take me to those old beat-up bars in Baton Rouge—if I could, I’d just buy him a good glass of Gentleman Jack, and we could sit here and talk. Oh, I wish I could do that.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Novelist+Ernest+J.+Gaines+Dies+At+Age+86&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Andrea Long Chu Conjures the Spirit of Valerie Solanas For Provocative 'Females'",
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"content": "\u003cp>Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” a claim I could imagine making writer and critic Andrea Long Chu roll her eyes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the very least, Chu has an update: “Everyone is female,” she writes in the appropriately titled \u003cem>Females, \u003c/em>her first book, “and everyone hates it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chu has earned a reputation over the past few years as one of the sharpest new thinkers on gender and sexuality with her essays on, among other topics, transgender identity, feminism and television. (She has also picked up a rather loyal following \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/theorygurl\">on Twitter\u003c/a>, where she treats her mental health, PhD candidature and pop-culture diet all with equal wit and consideration.) In \u003cem>Females\u003c/em>—part memoir, part theoretical intervention—Chu explores and defends this claim about universal femaleness, perhaps as much to herself as to anyone else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, the “female” identity on which the book is based is admittedly less a biological condition than an existential one. Chu describes it as an experience “defined by self-negation” that includes “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” In other words, to be female—which, remember, we all are—is to not express your own desires, identity, personality but rather those of others, impressed upon you. And gender, it follows for Chu, is what people do to deal with the terrible fact of being female.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If that sounds dramatic or provocative, that’s largely Chu’s style. In 2018, she wrote a \u003ca href=\"https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/\">powerful essay\u003c/a> in the magazine \u003cem>n+1\u003c/em> about transness and the history of feminist organizing that theorist Sandy Stone credited with launching a “second wave” of transgender studies; later that year, Chu wrote an \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html\">opinion piece\u003c/a> for \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em> about transgender people’s rights to medical care. In both cases—and in much of her writing—Chu meticulously frames the popular debate about transgender people, then positions her own point of view on another plane entirely. She’s just as bored by those known colloquially as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, who deny transgender people’s identities outright as she is by the common refrain that transgender people are simply “born in the wrong body” (as when Caitlyn Jenner joked to Diane Sawyer that God gave her “the soul of a woman”). At a moment when society is largely starting to gain a vocabulary for talking, albeit in less-than-nuanced ways, about transgender civil rights, Chu’s refusal to support any mainstream narratives have made her a somewhat controversial figure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she simply isn’t interested in straightforward, respectable answers. What most of these narratives don’t account for, she argues in \u003cem>Females\u003c/em>, is desire, in all its messy, definitional power. Chu asks: Instead of something stable and inherent—known and knowable, and inescapable right down to our very souls—what if gender is an extension of who we \u003cem>want\u003c/em> to be? What if this quality of \u003cem>wanting\u003c/em> didn’t separate transgender people from cisgender people, but were instead a universal condition of gender itself?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chu writes ferociously and exactingly about the nature of desire: what it makes us do; who it makes us become; grounding these questions in the culture of everyday life. Desire is how \u003cem>Fight Club\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> get twisted in the hands of the internet “manosphere” into models of male supremacy; it’s what lies beneath feminist disagreements about pornography from the ’90s and why they play out today both in the alt-right and in Hollywood movies; it’s there in the scrupulous beauty routines of a famous trans YouTuber. “Most desire is nonconsensual,” she admits in a chapter of \u003cem>Females\u003c/em> about pornography, and all the ways we try to engage with it—hide from it, ignore it, indulge it—indelibly shape us. Desire, for Chu, is gender’s centrifugal force; it’s what makes us all so \u003cem>female\u003c/em> to begin with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chu puts these cultural products in conversation with the work of revered theorists: Sigmund Freud; Catharine MacKinnon; Andrea Dworkin; and Shulamith Firestone. But no one is so close to Chu’s heart in \u003cem>Females\u003c/em> as Valerie Solanas, the author and artist famous for writing the \u003cem>SCUM Manifesto\u003c/em>, a radical text bent on eliminating the male sex (and for shooting and nearly killing Andy Warhol in 1968). \u003cem>Females\u003c/em> started as an essay about Solanas’ play \u003cem>Up Your A–\u003c/em>—which Solanas hoped, desperately and unsuccessfully, that Warhol would produce—and lines from the play anchor each chapter. Solanas didn’t just give Chu an entrypoint into her first book; it was after encountering Solanas’ work, Chu writes, that she began to come to terms with being transgender. (At the end of one chapter, she reflects on being told about a pornographic video in which two characters are seduced by a professor who reads \u003cem>SCUM\u003c/em>, “turning them into lesbians.” Chu says the plotline “made instant, perfect sense. It’s what Valerie did to me.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Solanas is often written off as an extremist, or an unfortunate and problematic accident of the second wave—but it’s heartening to watch Chu take her seriously, taking her to task while looking at her legacy with generosity and scrutiny. If Chu knows that \u003cem>Females\u003c/em>‘ central organizing thesis is wildly untenable, it’s in Solanas’ spirit that she pursues it nonetheless. “Valerie would make statements not because they were accurate or true, but simply because she wanted to,” Chu writes; later, “We share this, I think: a preference for indefensible claims, for following our ambivalence to the end.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the end, \u003cem>Females\u003c/em> is not a polemic; it’s not a guide to escaping the tyranny of our supposed powerlessness in the face of desire. Instead, it is one woman’s attempt to make sense of a time when the possibilities for identity feel terrifying and punishingly limitless, wondering what it might look like to accept our inescapable femaleness—even if we don’t always play by its rules, Chu argues, it might help to know how the points are scored. Beneath the veneer of \u003cem>Females\u003c/em>‘ provocation, those indefensible ideas, it is a surprisingly tender book that aims to tend to a universal ache: the frayed knot of selfhood, desire and power through which, Chu argues, we might try to see ourselves and each other more clearly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=In+%27Females%2C%27+The+State+Is+Less+A+Biological+Condition+Than+An+Existential+One&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” a claim I could imagine making writer and critic Andrea Long Chu roll her eyes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the very least, Chu has an update: “Everyone is female,” she writes in the appropriately titled \u003cem>Females, \u003c/em>her first book, “and everyone hates it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chu has earned a reputation over the past few years as one of the sharpest new thinkers on gender and sexuality with her essays on, among other topics, transgender identity, feminism and television. (She has also picked up a rather loyal following \u003ca href=\"http://twitter.com/theorygurl\">on Twitter\u003c/a>, where she treats her mental health, PhD candidature and pop-culture diet all with equal wit and consideration.) In \u003cem>Females\u003c/em>—part memoir, part theoretical intervention—Chu explores and defends this claim about universal femaleness, perhaps as much to herself as to anyone else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, the “female” identity on which the book is based is admittedly less a biological condition than an existential one. Chu describes it as an experience “defined by self-negation” that includes “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” In other words, to be female—which, remember, we all are—is to not express your own desires, identity, personality but rather those of others, impressed upon you. And gender, it follows for Chu, is what people do to deal with the terrible fact of being female.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If that sounds dramatic or provocative, that’s largely Chu’s style. In 2018, she wrote a \u003ca href=\"https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/\">powerful essay\u003c/a> in the magazine \u003cem>n+1\u003c/em> about transness and the history of feminist organizing that theorist Sandy Stone credited with launching a “second wave” of transgender studies; later that year, Chu wrote an \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html\">opinion piece\u003c/a> for \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em> about transgender people’s rights to medical care. In both cases—and in much of her writing—Chu meticulously frames the popular debate about transgender people, then positions her own point of view on another plane entirely. She’s just as bored by those known colloquially as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, who deny transgender people’s identities outright as she is by the common refrain that transgender people are simply “born in the wrong body” (as when Caitlyn Jenner joked to Diane Sawyer that God gave her “the soul of a woman”). At a moment when society is largely starting to gain a vocabulary for talking, albeit in less-than-nuanced ways, about transgender civil rights, Chu’s refusal to support any mainstream narratives have made her a somewhat controversial figure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she simply isn’t interested in straightforward, respectable answers. What most of these narratives don’t account for, she argues in \u003cem>Females\u003c/em>, is desire, in all its messy, definitional power. Chu asks: Instead of something stable and inherent—known and knowable, and inescapable right down to our very souls—what if gender is an extension of who we \u003cem>want\u003c/em> to be? What if this quality of \u003cem>wanting\u003c/em> didn’t separate transgender people from cisgender people, but were instead a universal condition of gender itself?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chu writes ferociously and exactingly about the nature of desire: what it makes us do; who it makes us become; grounding these questions in the culture of everyday life. Desire is how \u003cem>Fight Club\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> get twisted in the hands of the internet “manosphere” into models of male supremacy; it’s what lies beneath feminist disagreements about pornography from the ’90s and why they play out today both in the alt-right and in Hollywood movies; it’s there in the scrupulous beauty routines of a famous trans YouTuber. “Most desire is nonconsensual,” she admits in a chapter of \u003cem>Females\u003c/em> about pornography, and all the ways we try to engage with it—hide from it, ignore it, indulge it—indelibly shape us. Desire, for Chu, is gender’s centrifugal force; it’s what makes us all so \u003cem>female\u003c/em> to begin with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chu puts these cultural products in conversation with the work of revered theorists: Sigmund Freud; Catharine MacKinnon; Andrea Dworkin; and Shulamith Firestone. But no one is so close to Chu’s heart in \u003cem>Females\u003c/em> as Valerie Solanas, the author and artist famous for writing the \u003cem>SCUM Manifesto\u003c/em>, a radical text bent on eliminating the male sex (and for shooting and nearly killing Andy Warhol in 1968). \u003cem>Females\u003c/em> started as an essay about Solanas’ play \u003cem>Up Your A–\u003c/em>—which Solanas hoped, desperately and unsuccessfully, that Warhol would produce—and lines from the play anchor each chapter. Solanas didn’t just give Chu an entrypoint into her first book; it was after encountering Solanas’ work, Chu writes, that she began to come to terms with being transgender. (At the end of one chapter, she reflects on being told about a pornographic video in which two characters are seduced by a professor who reads \u003cem>SCUM\u003c/em>, “turning them into lesbians.” Chu says the plotline “made instant, perfect sense. It’s what Valerie did to me.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Solanas is often written off as an extremist, or an unfortunate and problematic accident of the second wave—but it’s heartening to watch Chu take her seriously, taking her to task while looking at her legacy with generosity and scrutiny. If Chu knows that \u003cem>Females\u003c/em>‘ central organizing thesis is wildly untenable, it’s in Solanas’ spirit that she pursues it nonetheless. “Valerie would make statements not because they were accurate or true, but simply because she wanted to,” Chu writes; later, “We share this, I think: a preference for indefensible claims, for following our ambivalence to the end.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the end, \u003cem>Females\u003c/em> is not a polemic; it’s not a guide to escaping the tyranny of our supposed powerlessness in the face of desire. Instead, it is one woman’s attempt to make sense of a time when the possibilities for identity feel terrifying and punishingly limitless, wondering what it might look like to accept our inescapable femaleness—even if we don’t always play by its rules, Chu argues, it might help to know how the points are scored. Beneath the veneer of \u003cem>Females\u003c/em>‘ provocation, those indefensible ideas, it is a surprisingly tender book that aims to tend to a universal ache: the frayed knot of selfhood, desire and power through which, Chu argues, we might try to see ourselves and each other more clearly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=In+%27Females%2C%27+The+State+Is+Less+A+Biological+Condition+Than+An+Existential+One&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "In 'Janis,' Joplin Shown to Be a Tangle of Talents, Contradictions and Mythology",
"headTitle": "In ‘Janis,’ Joplin Shown to Be a Tangle of Talents, Contradictions and Mythology | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>In 1969, \u003cem>Newsweek\u003c/em> bestowed this honorific on Janis Joplin: “The first female superstar of rock music.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13868998 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-28-at-12.11.17-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"290\" height=\"436\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-28-at-12.11.17-PM.png 290w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-28-at-12.11.17-PM-160x241.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 290px) 100vw, 290px\">It’s also a claim that Holly George-Warren sets out to prove in \u003cem>Janis\u003c/em>, her new biography of the iconic Texan singer who rocketed to fame after becoming the frontwoman of the San Francisco blues-rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company—only to die four years later at the age of 27, a casualty of the freewheeling ’60s, the decade she came to embody.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joplin was born in 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, where she would spend much of her brief life. As a child, her tomboy brusqueness and outspoken charm complemented her complexity of mind and spirit; Port Arthur was a segregated “cultural backwater,” according to George-Warren, that only served to heighten Joplin’s independence and curiosity. After falling under the sway of blues and rock music as a teenager, she leapt eagerly into the beatnik scene. Beat author Jack Kerouac’s \u003cem>On the Road\u003c/em> floored her in 1957, and its exploration of freedom and countercultural notions set her soul ablaze. From there, sex and drugs became staples of her life, a progression that often feels formulaic in accounts of Boomer coming-of-age. But George-Warren’s deep research, eye for detail, illuminating contextualization, and clarity of delivery all make for a far more rounded and convincing image of Joplin’s precocity in the heady decades of post-World War II America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it was Joplin’s pilgrimage to San Francisco in 1966 to join the up-and-coming psychedelic band Big Brother and the Holding Company that catapulted her to the pop-culture pantheon. Her gritty, gutsy, godlike voice didn’t mesh well with the group at first; they had to bend their more progressive tendencies in order to accommodate their new singer’s far more direct and impactful sound. Big Brother’s searing appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967 cemented her stardom, and their hit single “Piece of My Heart,” an Erma Franklin cover, from their best-selling 1968 album \u003cem>Cheap Thrills \u003c/em>became an anthem for hippies and feminists everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uG2gYE5KOs\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>George-Warren traces this rise meticulously, citing contemporaneous interviews as well as fresh sources in order to paint Joplin’s ascendance far more fully than has ever been accomplished before. And her riotous anecdotes splash color on the canvas, from the time Joplin started a massive bar-brawl thanks to her sensuous dancing one night in Austin to the snapshot of her getting into a fistfight with one of her heroes, Jerry Lee Lewis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>George-Warren’s prior work includes biographies of other troubled rockers with cult followings, most recently Big Star’s Alex Chilton in her book \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2014/03/27/289062063/the-backwards-life-of-alex-chilton-in-destruction\">\u003cem>A Man Called Destruction\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. Her knack for capturing conflicted subjects is uncanny; in \u003cem>Janis\u003c/em>, she digs into Joplin’s layered emotions, fluid sexuality, unshakably low self-esteem, and unquenchable urge to transcend her racist, restricted Port Arthur upbringing. Joplin left Big Brother in early 1969 to strike out on her own, and her solo career accelerated everything in her life, good and bad, toward a terminal velocity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Janis \u003c/em>captivatingly tells the story of her two solo albums, 1969’s \u003cem>I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!\u003c/em> and 1971’s posthumous \u003cem>Pearl\u003c/em>, as well as the latter’s chart-topping hit “Me and Bobby McGee,” rendering the backdrop and behind-the-scenes genesis of these recordings with crystalline insight. Joplin’s death on Oct. 4, 1970, of an accidental heroin overdose seems like a tragic inevitability, the byproduct of a life spent leaning into the boundaries of expression and art. At \u003cem>Janis\u003c/em>‘s heart is Joplin’s voice—a ragged, sensitive, elemental howl that the singer herself explained by saying, “I just opened my mouth and that’s what I sounded like.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Domestic earth mother” versus “tough biker chick”: By book’s end, George-Warren has boiled down Joplin’s complicated psyche into this simple, vivid dichotomy. But the author is far from reductive as she does so. In encapsulating Joplin’s dual nature so concisely, George-Warren delivers the definitive portrait of one of pop culture’s most misunderstood martyrs. Joplin was both a product and an architect of her times; in dwelling so sympathetically on her tangle of talents, contradictions, and mythology, \u003cem>Janis \u003c/em>brings one of rock’s most enduring legends down to earth while holding her justly up to the light.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jason Heller is a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the new book \u003c/em>Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded. \u003cem>He’s on Twitter: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jason_m_heller\">\u003cem>@jason_m_heller\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=In+%27Janis%2C%27+Joplin+Shown+To+Be+A+Tangle+Of+Talents%2C+Contradictions+And+Mythology&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In 1969, \u003cem>Newsweek\u003c/em> bestowed this honorific on Janis Joplin: “The first female superstar of rock music.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13868998 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-28-at-12.11.17-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"290\" height=\"436\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-28-at-12.11.17-PM.png 290w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-28-at-12.11.17-PM-160x241.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 290px) 100vw, 290px\">It’s also a claim that Holly George-Warren sets out to prove in \u003cem>Janis\u003c/em>, her new biography of the iconic Texan singer who rocketed to fame after becoming the frontwoman of the San Francisco blues-rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company—only to die four years later at the age of 27, a casualty of the freewheeling ’60s, the decade she came to embody.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joplin was born in 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, where she would spend much of her brief life. As a child, her tomboy brusqueness and outspoken charm complemented her complexity of mind and spirit; Port Arthur was a segregated “cultural backwater,” according to George-Warren, that only served to heighten Joplin’s independence and curiosity. After falling under the sway of blues and rock music as a teenager, she leapt eagerly into the beatnik scene. Beat author Jack Kerouac’s \u003cem>On the Road\u003c/em> floored her in 1957, and its exploration of freedom and countercultural notions set her soul ablaze. From there, sex and drugs became staples of her life, a progression that often feels formulaic in accounts of Boomer coming-of-age. But George-Warren’s deep research, eye for detail, illuminating contextualization, and clarity of delivery all make for a far more rounded and convincing image of Joplin’s precocity in the heady decades of post-World War II America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it was Joplin’s pilgrimage to San Francisco in 1966 to join the up-and-coming psychedelic band Big Brother and the Holding Company that catapulted her to the pop-culture pantheon. Her gritty, gutsy, godlike voice didn’t mesh well with the group at first; they had to bend their more progressive tendencies in order to accommodate their new singer’s far more direct and impactful sound. Big Brother’s searing appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967 cemented her stardom, and their hit single “Piece of My Heart,” an Erma Franklin cover, from their best-selling 1968 album \u003cem>Cheap Thrills \u003c/em>became an anthem for hippies and feminists everywhere.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/7uG2gYE5KOs'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/7uG2gYE5KOs'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>George-Warren traces this rise meticulously, citing contemporaneous interviews as well as fresh sources in order to paint Joplin’s ascendance far more fully than has ever been accomplished before. And her riotous anecdotes splash color on the canvas, from the time Joplin started a massive bar-brawl thanks to her sensuous dancing one night in Austin to the snapshot of her getting into a fistfight with one of her heroes, Jerry Lee Lewis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>George-Warren’s prior work includes biographies of other troubled rockers with cult followings, most recently Big Star’s Alex Chilton in her book \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2014/03/27/289062063/the-backwards-life-of-alex-chilton-in-destruction\">\u003cem>A Man Called Destruction\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. Her knack for capturing conflicted subjects is uncanny; in \u003cem>Janis\u003c/em>, she digs into Joplin’s layered emotions, fluid sexuality, unshakably low self-esteem, and unquenchable urge to transcend her racist, restricted Port Arthur upbringing. Joplin left Big Brother in early 1969 to strike out on her own, and her solo career accelerated everything in her life, good and bad, toward a terminal velocity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Janis \u003c/em>captivatingly tells the story of her two solo albums, 1969’s \u003cem>I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!\u003c/em> and 1971’s posthumous \u003cem>Pearl\u003c/em>, as well as the latter’s chart-topping hit “Me and Bobby McGee,” rendering the backdrop and behind-the-scenes genesis of these recordings with crystalline insight. Joplin’s death on Oct. 4, 1970, of an accidental heroin overdose seems like a tragic inevitability, the byproduct of a life spent leaning into the boundaries of expression and art. At \u003cem>Janis\u003c/em>‘s heart is Joplin’s voice—a ragged, sensitive, elemental howl that the singer herself explained by saying, “I just opened my mouth and that’s what I sounded like.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Domestic earth mother” versus “tough biker chick”: By book’s end, George-Warren has boiled down Joplin’s complicated psyche into this simple, vivid dichotomy. But the author is far from reductive as she does so. In encapsulating Joplin’s dual nature so concisely, George-Warren delivers the definitive portrait of one of pop culture’s most misunderstood martyrs. Joplin was both a product and an architect of her times; in dwelling so sympathetically on her tangle of talents, contradictions, and mythology, \u003cem>Janis \u003c/em>brings one of rock’s most enduring legends down to earth while holding her justly up to the light.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jason Heller is a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the new book \u003c/em>Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded. \u003cem>He’s on Twitter: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jason_m_heller\">\u003cem>@jason_m_heller\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=In+%27Janis%2C%27+Joplin+Shown+To+Be+A+Tangle+Of+Talents%2C+Contradictions+And+Mythology&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>I’m a longtime Prince fan. I would listen to his raunchy songs with the sound turned down low so my parents couldn’t hear, because even before I understood a lot of the double entendre in his lyrics, I sensed they—and he—were naughty. And, of course, my parents confirmed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once while driving in the car with my mom, \u003cem>Erotic City\u003c/em> started playing on the radio. She reached over, snapped the radio off and said, “That Prince is just nasty.” And he \u003cem>was\u003c/em> nasty. In a good way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside tag='prince' label='More on Prince']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prince was also perspicacious and artistically brilliant and mischievous and shrewd and all the many other superlatives that have been bestowed on him over the years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect from \u003cem>The Beautiful Ones. \u003c/em>Before I had the book in hand, I read \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/09/the-book-of-prince\">an excerpt of its introduction\u003c/a> in \u003cem>The New Yorker, \u003c/em>which detailed the origin of the book. I wondered how anyone could publish a book Prince wanted to write about himself if Prince, himself, was no longer with us to write the book? How Sway?!\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868958\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868958\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-800x573.jpg\" alt=\"Prince plays a guitar in bed at his new home on France Avenue, April 1978.\" width=\"800\" height=\"573\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-800x573.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-160x115.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-768x550.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-1020x731.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-1200x860.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-1920x1376.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Prince plays a guitar in bed at his new home on France Avenue, April 1978. \u003ccite>(Joseph Giannetti/Penguin Random House, LLC)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But Prince died in 2016 without a will (this still shocks me) and, since he didn’t write down explicitly what he wanted done with his estate, others had to make their best guess. One of those decisions included finishing this memoir.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The introduction sets the stage, as it were, by explaining how writer Dan Piepenbring—an editor for \u003cem>The Paris Review \u003c/em>who was not yet 30 or a published author at the time—got pulled into the project. As I read his words I jealously thought “this lucky so-and-so, imagine your first published book is a collaboration with Prince Rogers Nelson?!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Everything Piepenbring shares about being a fan chosen to work with one of his idols resonates with me: Be cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool. I mean, this is Prince we’re talking about, dude oozed cool, so you needed to be cool, too. But not \u003cem>too\u003c/em> cool. Try not to say or do the wrong, stupid thing, but also try to prove you have the talent for the gig, and gah! somehow you still say and do the wrong, stupid thing. When Piepenbring sweeps his phone off a conference room table because Prince glanced at it and wondered if he was recording their conversation, I laughed. That’s right, just throw the whole phone away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868959\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868959\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-800x537.jpe\" alt=\"Allen Beaulieu photographed Prince and his band for the 1980 Dirty Mind album; these are some of the outtakes. Prince told Beaulieu that he wanted to appear on a bed on the album cover. It was Beaulieu's idea to buy a worn-out box spring from a junkyard and photograph Prince in front of the springs.\" width=\"800\" height=\"537\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-800x537.jpe 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-160x107.jpe 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-768x516.jpe 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-1020x685.jpe 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-1200x806.jpe 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-1920x1289.jpe 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Allen Beaulieu photographed Prince and his band for the 1980 Dirty Mind album; these are some of the outtakes. Prince told Beaulieu that he wanted to appear on a bed on the album cover. It was Beaulieu’s idea to buy a worn-out box spring from a junkyard and photograph Prince in front of the springs. \u003ccite>(Allen Beaulieu/Penguin Random House, LLC)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But Piepenbring doesn’t just want to write this memoir with Prince, he wants to do it right (whatever “right” is, Prince always colored way outside of the purple lines). Once Prince dies and the book project lives on, Piepenbring also wants to do right by his idol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prince’s mandate(s) for the book was that it “be a handbook for the brilliant community,” “a radical call for collective ownership, for black creativity,” a book about freedom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Try to create,” he told Piepenbring. “I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a whole lot of things. But then, so was Prince.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This means we get a memoir that is written by Prince, literally. Handwritten pages he had shared with Piepenbring make up Part 1, taking us from his first memory—his mother’s eyes—through the early days of his career. We learn about his epileptic seizures, his first kiss, his relationship with his parents, their relationship with each other, his adolescent years, and how Prince saw himself and his place in the world. Some of it’s sad, some funny (there’s a story about him tap dancing with no music for 28 1/2 minutes at a school talent show) and all of it pierces through some of the mystery Prince purposely cultivated around and about himself. Of course, even he admitted that he still had to brush his own teeth, like the rest of us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868960\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868960\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-800x115.jpe\" alt=\"Prince taking a phone call in bed, circa 1980-81.\" width=\"800\" height=\"115\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-800x115.jpe 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-160x23.jpe 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-768x110.jpe 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-1020x146.jpe 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-1200x172.jpe 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-1920x275.jpe 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Prince taking a phone call in bed, circa 1980-81. \u003ccite>(Allen Beaulieu/Penguin Random House, LLC)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>We also get a memoir that is carefully curated by Piepenbring, who writes that he was able to go through Paisley Park, room-by-room, sorting through Prince’s life. He describes choosing items “that communicated some intimacy; that shed a new light on his family and his art; that demonstrated his creative process, and, as he desired, would make his readers want to create, too.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of what he found anchors the next section of the memoir: a scrapbook Prince kept while making his first album, \u003cem>For You. \u003c/em>It’s like a 1977 version of Instagram. Photos of him, of his friends, his notes, drawings, song lyrics. The whimsy and playfulness in the pages made me realize that Prince maybe wasn’t a tortured artist in those early days, as I had imagined. It looked like he had a ball.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The last section’s handwritten synopsis of what later became \u003cem>Purple Rain\u003c/em> required a couple of readings. I’ve seen the movie so many times I had to shake free of what ended up on the screen in order to really take in what Prince had initially envisioned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Beautiful Ones \u003c/em>doesn’t paint a perfect picture. It’s not definitive. It can’t be, it shouldn’t be and, thankfully, it doesn’t try to be. We’ll never know what it might have been if Prince had lived. But it’s a good start. Now, it’s up to us to take what’s there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince wanted. That’s what I’m doing, anyway. It’s time we all reach out for something new.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I’m a longtime Prince fan. I would listen to his raunchy songs with the sound turned down low so my parents couldn’t hear, because even before I understood a lot of the double entendre in his lyrics, I sensed they—and he—were naughty. And, of course, my parents confirmed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once while driving in the car with my mom, \u003cem>Erotic City\u003c/em> started playing on the radio. She reached over, snapped the radio off and said, “That Prince is just nasty.” And he \u003cem>was\u003c/em> nasty. In a good way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prince was also perspicacious and artistically brilliant and mischievous and shrewd and all the many other superlatives that have been bestowed on him over the years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect from \u003cem>The Beautiful Ones. \u003c/em>Before I had the book in hand, I read \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/09/the-book-of-prince\">an excerpt of its introduction\u003c/a> in \u003cem>The New Yorker, \u003c/em>which detailed the origin of the book. I wondered how anyone could publish a book Prince wanted to write about himself if Prince, himself, was no longer with us to write the book? How Sway?!\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868958\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868958\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-800x573.jpg\" alt=\"Prince plays a guitar in bed at his new home on France Avenue, April 1978.\" width=\"800\" height=\"573\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-800x573.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-160x115.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-768x550.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-1020x731.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-1200x860.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7-1920x1376.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/joegiannetti_custom-3bfcbb527eafc3d89b15b4c604057845323a9ea7.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Prince plays a guitar in bed at his new home on France Avenue, April 1978. \u003ccite>(Joseph Giannetti/Penguin Random House, LLC)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But Prince died in 2016 without a will (this still shocks me) and, since he didn’t write down explicitly what he wanted done with his estate, others had to make their best guess. One of those decisions included finishing this memoir.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The introduction sets the stage, as it were, by explaining how writer Dan Piepenbring—an editor for \u003cem>The Paris Review \u003c/em>who was not yet 30 or a published author at the time—got pulled into the project. As I read his words I jealously thought “this lucky so-and-so, imagine your first published book is a collaboration with Prince Rogers Nelson?!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Everything Piepenbring shares about being a fan chosen to work with one of his idols resonates with me: Be cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool. I mean, this is Prince we’re talking about, dude oozed cool, so you needed to be cool, too. But not \u003cem>too\u003c/em> cool. Try not to say or do the wrong, stupid thing, but also try to prove you have the talent for the gig, and gah! somehow you still say and do the wrong, stupid thing. When Piepenbring sweeps his phone off a conference room table because Prince glanced at it and wondered if he was recording their conversation, I laughed. That’s right, just throw the whole phone away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868959\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868959\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-800x537.jpe\" alt=\"Allen Beaulieu photographed Prince and his band for the 1980 Dirty Mind album; these are some of the outtakes. Prince told Beaulieu that he wanted to appear on a bed on the album cover. It was Beaulieu's idea to buy a worn-out box spring from a junkyard and photograph Prince in front of the springs.\" width=\"800\" height=\"537\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-800x537.jpe 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-160x107.jpe 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-768x516.jpe 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-1020x685.jpe 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-1200x806.jpe 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/contact-sheet-outtakes-from-dirty-mind-cover-shoot-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-2097e42861929314c63b683918f5c5db4d81b632-1920x1289.jpe 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Allen Beaulieu photographed Prince and his band for the 1980 Dirty Mind album; these are some of the outtakes. Prince told Beaulieu that he wanted to appear on a bed on the album cover. It was Beaulieu’s idea to buy a worn-out box spring from a junkyard and photograph Prince in front of the springs. \u003ccite>(Allen Beaulieu/Penguin Random House, LLC)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But Piepenbring doesn’t just want to write this memoir with Prince, he wants to do it right (whatever “right” is, Prince always colored way outside of the purple lines). Once Prince dies and the book project lives on, Piepenbring also wants to do right by his idol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prince’s mandate(s) for the book was that it “be a handbook for the brilliant community,” “a radical call for collective ownership, for black creativity,” a book about freedom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Try to create,” he told Piepenbring. “I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a whole lot of things. But then, so was Prince.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This means we get a memoir that is written by Prince, literally. Handwritten pages he had shared with Piepenbring make up Part 1, taking us from his first memory—his mother’s eyes—through the early days of his career. We learn about his epileptic seizures, his first kiss, his relationship with his parents, their relationship with each other, his adolescent years, and how Prince saw himself and his place in the world. Some of it’s sad, some funny (there’s a story about him tap dancing with no music for 28 1/2 minutes at a school talent show) and all of it pierces through some of the mystery Prince purposely cultivated around and about himself. Of course, even he admitted that he still had to brush his own teeth, like the rest of us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13868960\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13868960\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-800x115.jpe\" alt=\"Prince taking a phone call in bed, circa 1980-81.\" width=\"800\" height=\"115\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-800x115.jpe 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-160x23.jpe 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-768x110.jpe 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-1020x146.jpe 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-1200x172.jpe 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/shots-of-prince-on-bed-on-phone-credit-allen-beaulieu_custom-cdaeca51e5c779a774328345f311b528c148cffc-1920x275.jpe 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Prince taking a phone call in bed, circa 1980-81. \u003ccite>(Allen Beaulieu/Penguin Random House, LLC)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>We also get a memoir that is carefully curated by Piepenbring, who writes that he was able to go through Paisley Park, room-by-room, sorting through Prince’s life. He describes choosing items “that communicated some intimacy; that shed a new light on his family and his art; that demonstrated his creative process, and, as he desired, would make his readers want to create, too.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of what he found anchors the next section of the memoir: a scrapbook Prince kept while making his first album, \u003cem>For You. \u003c/em>It’s like a 1977 version of Instagram. Photos of him, of his friends, his notes, drawings, song lyrics. The whimsy and playfulness in the pages made me realize that Prince maybe wasn’t a tortured artist in those early days, as I had imagined. It looked like he had a ball.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The last section’s handwritten synopsis of what later became \u003cem>Purple Rain\u003c/em> required a couple of readings. I’ve seen the movie so many times I had to shake free of what ended up on the screen in order to really take in what Prince had initially envisioned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Beautiful Ones \u003c/em>doesn’t paint a perfect picture. It’s not definitive. It can’t be, it shouldn’t be and, thankfully, it doesn’t try to be. We’ll never know what it might have been if Prince had lived. But it’s a good start. Now, it’s up to us to take what’s there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince wanted. That’s what I’m doing, anyway. It’s time we all reach out for something new.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Ronan Farrow: 'Catch and Kill' Tactics Protected Both Weinstein and Trump",
"headTitle": "Ronan Farrow: ‘Catch and Kill’ Tactics Protected Both Weinstein and Trump | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Ronan Farrow’s 2017 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/570698249/-metoo\">exposé \u003c/a>of the sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in \u003cem>The New Yorker\u003c/em> earned him a Pulitzer Prize and helped usher in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/570698249/-metoo\">#MeToo\u003c/a> movement. Now, in his new book, \u003cem>Catch and Kill,\u003c/em> Farrow writes about the extreme tactics Weinstein allegedly used in an attempt to keep him from reporting the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Harvey Weinstein’s attorneys … signed a contract with this Israeli private intelligence firm \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/562631560/black-cube\">Black Cube \u003c/a>explicitly tasking secret agents with killing reporting on Harvey Weinstein,” Farrow says. “There was a full-on international espionage operation that was built up around this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farrow says that he was followed and that his house was bugged as a result of his work on the story. He eventually moved into a safe house and put his reporting documents into a safe deposit box with a note reading, “Should anything happen to me, please make sure this information is released.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farrow had started investigating Weinstein as a reporter at NBC News. But, he says, network executives blocked the story from ever being broadcast and eventually let Farrow go. Farrow speculates that the network was doing so, in part, to protect news anchor Matt Lauer, who was subsequently accused of sexual misconduct. Farrow spoke about NBC’s efforts to stifle the Weinstein story in \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/10/11/769326096/ronan-farrow-stands-by-his-reporting-on-nbc-s-corrosive-secrecy-around-sexual-ab\">this NPR interview\u003c/a>. NBC News has maintained that Farrow’s story on the sexual misconduct allegations was not solid—that he had no accusers on record, specifically—when it refused to move forward with the story in 2017 before he took it to \u003cem>The New Yorker\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farrow notes that NBC’s efforts to quash the story are part of a broader “catch and kill” strategy, whereby powerful entities and individuals go to extreme lengths to keep unfavorable stories from being reported. His book alleges that American Media Inc., the parent company of the tabloid \u003cem>National Enquirer, \u003c/em>engaged in such practices in an effort to control negative stories about then- presidential candidate Donald Trump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I personally reported a number of stories about cases in which AMI sought or actually did buy the rights to a story in order to get rid of it during the election, and that subsequently has become the subject of a serious criminal investigation,” Farrow says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He adds that the practice of catch and kill is “used both literally in the plot with respect to several stories that AMI goes after and tries to bury for Donald Trump and others, but also figuratively about the media’s role in sometimes not just advancing, but also suppressing, stories.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the backlash he has experienced because of the book \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Doing these kinds of investigations of powerful interests means that you get a whole smear machine spun up against you every single time. It happened on the Weinstein story; it happened on the CBS story; it happened on the NBC story; it happened on the AMI story. And all I can say is I’ve been immensely heartened, Terry, by the way in which fellow reporters have rallied around the journalism in this book and defended it and independently corroborated it. And the reaction has been pretty uniform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just like with the Harvey Weinstein story, I think people have seen through the spin and I think that they have correctly pulled out of this book the important themes which is there are systems still in place at some of the top institutions in this country that aid and abet and protect people accused of serious crimes and silence accusers and shut down reporting. But there are also really brave sources who continue to speak and reporters who continue to bang their heads against the wall trying to make sure the truth comes out. And I leave this process of reporting this book with immense hope and immense optimism, because I don’t see any signs of that stopping.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how AMI’s catch-and-kill efforts relate to the Weinstein story\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[AMI] had what’s called a “kill file,” which they have for various celebrities containing all of the dirt that they haven’t published on someone. … There’s various reasons why AMI doesn’t publish things. … In a number of cases they don’t publish things because of an arrangement they broker with a powerful person. … [Chief Content Officer and Vice President] Dylan Howard develops a very close relationship with Harvey Weinstein. We have all of his statements saying, “This was purely a professional relationship,” but we document [that their relationship] extended to secretly recording people who might be used to impeach Harvey Weinstein’s accusers, really going after accusers in collaboration with Harvey Weinstein.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On AMI’s kill file on Donald Trump \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AMI did indeed purchase the rights to [\u003cem>Playboy \u003c/em>model] Karen McDougal’s story in order to bury it. Another story that I broke … is about a case in which they purchased the rights to a claim by a Trump Tower doorman that he was aware of a relationship Trump had had that had produced a “love child.” …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many of these catch-and-kill stories, it’s unclear whether the underlying claim has any veracity. The love child story … may or may not be spurious, and also on some level, who cares, right? … The thing that is absolutely worth caring about is the transaction, the fact that there was a potential violation of campaign finance law here and a media outlet acting as an arm of a political candidate. Here again there is an example of collaboration between the candidate and the news outlet, \u003cem>The National Enquirer, \u003c/em>to try to go after a story, and here again, the underlying claim in that lawsuit raises a lot of question marks. … But the fact that AMI went after it has not been disputed by them—they’ve confirmed it—and is yet another interesting data point in this unfolding saga which is still a subject of serious criminal investigation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On Trump’s personal lawyer \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/02/27/696752450/michael-cohen-to-testify-publicly-before-congress-on-alleged-trump-lawbreaking\">\u003cstrong>Michael Cohen\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003cstrong> going to the \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Enquirer \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>and requesting the kill file \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I talk about for the first time seeing the master list of all of the Trump dirt, if you will, that AMI had in its vaults. Early in 2016 … the \u003cem>National Enquirer\u003c/em> and Dylan Howard created a master list of everything that they had on Trump. And again, you’ll sense a running theme here. The story here is not what was on the list we saw. It’s about 60 entries and this is the first time a reporter has seen the insides of the vault, if you will. It is mostly news that has already been out there. There’s about five affairs—some of those haven’t become public—but consensual affairs-type items. There’s at least one allegation of abuse, but it’s the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2016/10/13/497799354/a-list-of-donald-trumps-accusers-of-inappropriate-sexual-conduct\">Jill Harth \u003c/a>allegation, which ultimately did become public. But what is a significant story is that this list was made and we have a multiple-sourced account backed by documentation of \u003cem>National Enquirer\u003c/em> leadership beginning to shred documents related to Trump in the days before the election—and this is strenuously denied by Dylan Howard. We have that denial in the book, but there are ironclad accounts of him ordering a destruction of documents and, a year later—when a senior official at the\u003cem> National Enquirer \u003c/em>went to check whether all of the Trump dirt still existed in the vault—there were documents that were missing consistent with that account of document destruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Enquirer\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>‘s endorsement of candidate Trump \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the election, the\u003cem> Enquirer, \u003c/em>as it was seeking to catch and kill stories for Trump, was also sort of descending farther and farther into this rabbit hole of endorsing Trump and really hammering on Hillary Clinton. … For the whole year she was about to die, according to the \u003cem>National Enquirer. \u003c/em>And I think that a lot of us in the press discounted the significance of that. We weren’t conscious of all of this real estate on checkout stands at grocery stores all around the country being devoted to pushing one candidate. And that’s where the criminal investigation and the nonprosecution agreement signed between AMI and prosecutors is significant, because it acknowledges that something quite possibly illegal and quite possibly material to the election and the future of this country played out. The stakes … are very high, both for the individuals involved and for the future of our democracy. We had an election that was very much, I think, affected by this practice of catch and kill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On what AMI got in return for killing unflattering stories about Trump \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They have now admitted that there was a quid pro quo and that there were meetings in which a deal was struck to collaborate in this way. … You saw things like [AMI CEO] \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/08/24/641490961/david-pecker-of-national-enquirer-publisher-said-to-have-immunity-in-cohen-case\">David Pecker \u003c/a>getting a lot of access to the White House, suddenly getting a lot of access to potential Saudi donors at a time when the\u003cem> Enquirer\u003c/em> was on its last legs and suffering from declining circulation numbers and a lot of debt. So we’re very careful not to say anything speculative, but certainly there are ways in which David Pecker, the head of the\u003cem> National Enquirer, \u003c/em>the head of AMI and others at the\u003cem> Enquirer\u003c/em> benefited from this. And we talk about Dylan Howard … the editor of the\u003cem> National Enquirer,\u003c/em> who worked under David Pecker, sending friends pictures from inaugural events, really having access and being in the corridors of power. So there was an exchange of access and largesse for killing these stories, it appears.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the\u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong> Enquirer\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>‘s attempts to discredit Farrow \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As I began to break these stories about the\u003cem> National Enquirer\u003c/em> I, too, became in Dylan Howard’s words, “\u003cem>National Enquirer\u003c/em> fodder,” and he sent a letter to [\u003cem>New Yorker\u003c/em> Editor] David Remnick, very furiously railing against me and saying, “Ronan is about to become \u003cem>National Enquirer\u003c/em> fodder,” and indeed I did. For a brief shining moment, Terry, I was an all-caps sans serif villain in the pages of the\u003cem> National Enquirer,\u003c/em> and I joke about it, but it is actually painful and intrusive and an ugly business to have an outlet that is essentially a thinly veiled attack dog for powerful people come at you and say, you better come in and talk or we’re going to just unleash whatever we want to make up or dig up about you, and with the\u003cem> Enquirer \u003c/em>it’s usually a lot of both.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Ronan+Farrow%3A+%27Catch+And+Kill%27+Tactics+Protected+Both+Weinstein+And+Trump+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "He was followed and his house bugged as he reported on allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Farrow says it's part of a pattern in which powerful entities go to extremes to quash unfavorable stories.",
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"description": "He was followed and his house bugged as he reported on allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Farrow says it's part of a pattern in which powerful entities go to extremes to quash unfavorable stories.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Ronan Farrow’s 2017 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/570698249/-metoo\">exposé \u003c/a>of the sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in \u003cem>The New Yorker\u003c/em> earned him a Pulitzer Prize and helped usher in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/570698249/-metoo\">#MeToo\u003c/a> movement. Now, in his new book, \u003cem>Catch and Kill,\u003c/em> Farrow writes about the extreme tactics Weinstein allegedly used in an attempt to keep him from reporting the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Harvey Weinstein’s attorneys … signed a contract with this Israeli private intelligence firm \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/562631560/black-cube\">Black Cube \u003c/a>explicitly tasking secret agents with killing reporting on Harvey Weinstein,” Farrow says. “There was a full-on international espionage operation that was built up around this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farrow says that he was followed and that his house was bugged as a result of his work on the story. He eventually moved into a safe house and put his reporting documents into a safe deposit box with a note reading, “Should anything happen to me, please make sure this information is released.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farrow had started investigating Weinstein as a reporter at NBC News. But, he says, network executives blocked the story from ever being broadcast and eventually let Farrow go. Farrow speculates that the network was doing so, in part, to protect news anchor Matt Lauer, who was subsequently accused of sexual misconduct. Farrow spoke about NBC’s efforts to stifle the Weinstein story in \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/10/11/769326096/ronan-farrow-stands-by-his-reporting-on-nbc-s-corrosive-secrecy-around-sexual-ab\">this NPR interview\u003c/a>. NBC News has maintained that Farrow’s story on the sexual misconduct allegations was not solid—that he had no accusers on record, specifically—when it refused to move forward with the story in 2017 before he took it to \u003cem>The New Yorker\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farrow notes that NBC’s efforts to quash the story are part of a broader “catch and kill” strategy, whereby powerful entities and individuals go to extreme lengths to keep unfavorable stories from being reported. His book alleges that American Media Inc., the parent company of the tabloid \u003cem>National Enquirer, \u003c/em>engaged in such practices in an effort to control negative stories about then- presidential candidate Donald Trump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I personally reported a number of stories about cases in which AMI sought or actually did buy the rights to a story in order to get rid of it during the election, and that subsequently has become the subject of a serious criminal investigation,” Farrow says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He adds that the practice of catch and kill is “used both literally in the plot with respect to several stories that AMI goes after and tries to bury for Donald Trump and others, but also figuratively about the media’s role in sometimes not just advancing, but also suppressing, stories.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the backlash he has experienced because of the book \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Doing these kinds of investigations of powerful interests means that you get a whole smear machine spun up against you every single time. It happened on the Weinstein story; it happened on the CBS story; it happened on the NBC story; it happened on the AMI story. And all I can say is I’ve been immensely heartened, Terry, by the way in which fellow reporters have rallied around the journalism in this book and defended it and independently corroborated it. And the reaction has been pretty uniform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just like with the Harvey Weinstein story, I think people have seen through the spin and I think that they have correctly pulled out of this book the important themes which is there are systems still in place at some of the top institutions in this country that aid and abet and protect people accused of serious crimes and silence accusers and shut down reporting. But there are also really brave sources who continue to speak and reporters who continue to bang their heads against the wall trying to make sure the truth comes out. And I leave this process of reporting this book with immense hope and immense optimism, because I don’t see any signs of that stopping.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how AMI’s catch-and-kill efforts relate to the Weinstein story\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[AMI] had what’s called a “kill file,” which they have for various celebrities containing all of the dirt that they haven’t published on someone. … There’s various reasons why AMI doesn’t publish things. … In a number of cases they don’t publish things because of an arrangement they broker with a powerful person. … [Chief Content Officer and Vice President] Dylan Howard develops a very close relationship with Harvey Weinstein. We have all of his statements saying, “This was purely a professional relationship,” but we document [that their relationship] extended to secretly recording people who might be used to impeach Harvey Weinstein’s accusers, really going after accusers in collaboration with Harvey Weinstein.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On AMI’s kill file on Donald Trump \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AMI did indeed purchase the rights to [\u003cem>Playboy \u003c/em>model] Karen McDougal’s story in order to bury it. Another story that I broke … is about a case in which they purchased the rights to a claim by a Trump Tower doorman that he was aware of a relationship Trump had had that had produced a “love child.” …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many of these catch-and-kill stories, it’s unclear whether the underlying claim has any veracity. The love child story … may or may not be spurious, and also on some level, who cares, right? … The thing that is absolutely worth caring about is the transaction, the fact that there was a potential violation of campaign finance law here and a media outlet acting as an arm of a political candidate. Here again there is an example of collaboration between the candidate and the news outlet, \u003cem>The National Enquirer, \u003c/em>to try to go after a story, and here again, the underlying claim in that lawsuit raises a lot of question marks. … But the fact that AMI went after it has not been disputed by them—they’ve confirmed it—and is yet another interesting data point in this unfolding saga which is still a subject of serious criminal investigation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On Trump’s personal lawyer \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/02/27/696752450/michael-cohen-to-testify-publicly-before-congress-on-alleged-trump-lawbreaking\">\u003cstrong>Michael Cohen\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003cstrong> going to the \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Enquirer \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>and requesting the kill file \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I talk about for the first time seeing the master list of all of the Trump dirt, if you will, that AMI had in its vaults. Early in 2016 … the \u003cem>National Enquirer\u003c/em> and Dylan Howard created a master list of everything that they had on Trump. And again, you’ll sense a running theme here. The story here is not what was on the list we saw. It’s about 60 entries and this is the first time a reporter has seen the insides of the vault, if you will. It is mostly news that has already been out there. There’s about five affairs—some of those haven’t become public—but consensual affairs-type items. There’s at least one allegation of abuse, but it’s the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2016/10/13/497799354/a-list-of-donald-trumps-accusers-of-inappropriate-sexual-conduct\">Jill Harth \u003c/a>allegation, which ultimately did become public. But what is a significant story is that this list was made and we have a multiple-sourced account backed by documentation of \u003cem>National Enquirer\u003c/em> leadership beginning to shred documents related to Trump in the days before the election—and this is strenuously denied by Dylan Howard. We have that denial in the book, but there are ironclad accounts of him ordering a destruction of documents and, a year later—when a senior official at the\u003cem> National Enquirer \u003c/em>went to check whether all of the Trump dirt still existed in the vault—there were documents that were missing consistent with that account of document destruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Enquirer\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>‘s endorsement of candidate Trump \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the election, the\u003cem> Enquirer, \u003c/em>as it was seeking to catch and kill stories for Trump, was also sort of descending farther and farther into this rabbit hole of endorsing Trump and really hammering on Hillary Clinton. … For the whole year she was about to die, according to the \u003cem>National Enquirer. \u003c/em>And I think that a lot of us in the press discounted the significance of that. We weren’t conscious of all of this real estate on checkout stands at grocery stores all around the country being devoted to pushing one candidate. And that’s where the criminal investigation and the nonprosecution agreement signed between AMI and prosecutors is significant, because it acknowledges that something quite possibly illegal and quite possibly material to the election and the future of this country played out. The stakes … are very high, both for the individuals involved and for the future of our democracy. We had an election that was very much, I think, affected by this practice of catch and kill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On what AMI got in return for killing unflattering stories about Trump \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They have now admitted that there was a quid pro quo and that there were meetings in which a deal was struck to collaborate in this way. … You saw things like [AMI CEO] \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/08/24/641490961/david-pecker-of-national-enquirer-publisher-said-to-have-immunity-in-cohen-case\">David Pecker \u003c/a>getting a lot of access to the White House, suddenly getting a lot of access to potential Saudi donors at a time when the\u003cem> Enquirer\u003c/em> was on its last legs and suffering from declining circulation numbers and a lot of debt. So we’re very careful not to say anything speculative, but certainly there are ways in which David Pecker, the head of the\u003cem> National Enquirer, \u003c/em>the head of AMI and others at the\u003cem> Enquirer\u003c/em> benefited from this. And we talk about Dylan Howard … the editor of the\u003cem> National Enquirer,\u003c/em> who worked under David Pecker, sending friends pictures from inaugural events, really having access and being in the corridors of power. So there was an exchange of access and largesse for killing these stories, it appears.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the\u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong> Enquirer\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>‘s attempts to discredit Farrow \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As I began to break these stories about the\u003cem> National Enquirer\u003c/em> I, too, became in Dylan Howard’s words, “\u003cem>National Enquirer\u003c/em> fodder,” and he sent a letter to [\u003cem>New Yorker\u003c/em> Editor] David Remnick, very furiously railing against me and saying, “Ronan is about to become \u003cem>National Enquirer\u003c/em> fodder,” and indeed I did. For a brief shining moment, Terry, I was an all-caps sans serif villain in the pages of the\u003cem> National Enquirer,\u003c/em> and I joke about it, but it is actually painful and intrusive and an ugly business to have an outlet that is essentially a thinly veiled attack dog for powerful people come at you and say, you better come in and talk or we’re going to just unleash whatever we want to make up or dig up about you, and with the\u003cem> Enquirer \u003c/em>it’s usually a lot of both.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Ronan+Farrow%3A+%27Catch+And+Kill%27+Tactics+Protected+Both+Weinstein+And+Trump+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "The Do List: Life is Living, Janelle Monáe, Stereolab and More",
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"content": "\u003cp>Looking for things to do in the Bay Area this weekend? The Do List has you covered with concerts, festivals, exhibitions, plays, performances and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can listen to this week’s episode above with Gabe Meline, Sarah Hotchkiss, Nastia Voynovskaya and Rae Alexandra, or read about our picks below.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Life Is Living Festival\u003c/strong>: The Life is Living festival is an annual party in the park with a purpose. Their tagline? “Keeping Oakland Oakland Since 2008.” You’ll get live performances from Elle Varner (a marvelous singer who’s been in Oakland before, and who counts \u003ca href=\"https://www.vibe.com/2012/09/michelle-obama-endorses-elle-varner\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Michelle Obama among her fans\u003c/a>), Shyan’G, Drew Banga and more, plus dance classes, theater, skateboarding, and local vendors. But the important thing this year is the 50th anniversary of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13867337/the-black-panther-partys-free-breakfast-program-a-50-year-old-blueprint\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Black Panthers’ free breakfast program\u003c/a>; from 10 to noon, breakfast is served, including by some of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13867337/the-black-panther-partys-free-breakfast-program-a-50-year-old-blueprint\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">very same people\u003c/a> who helped found the program in 1969. The festival runs from 10am–7pm on Saturday, Oct. 12, at Lil Bobby Hutton Park (a.k.a. DeFremery Park) in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"https://lil19.youthspeaks.org/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’\u003c/strong>: On Friday, Oct. 11, you have a chance to see \u003cem>The Last Black Man in San Francisco\u003c/em>, a movie that wowed audiences earlier this year with its poetic depiction of two black friends trying to carve out space for themselves in the rapidly gentrifying city. It’s playing at PROXY, a free outdoor “walk-in” theater in Hayes Valley, right off of Patricia’s Green. You’ll recognize \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13864913/after-last-black-man-and-us-singer-mike-marshall-gets-a-second-chance\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Mike Marshall\u003c/a>‘s version of \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d3QbwWnLbc\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this popular song\u003c/a> in the film, and much of the movie’s action takes place in the Fillmore, so this is a rare treat to see it just a few blocks from its setting. That’s Oct. 11, at 6pm. \u003ca href=\"http://proxysf.net/events/2019-proxy-fall-film-fest-the-last-black-man-in-san-francisco/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Janelle Monáe and the Roots\u003c/strong>: Janelle Monáe came to the Mission District a few years back to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/10912273/janelle-monae-jidenna-to-perform-sunday-at-mission-district-rally\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">lead a march against police brutality\u003c/a>, and now, she’s coming back—and bringing the Roots with her—for another good cause. A full 100% of the proceeds from this week’s show go to Tipping Point, a nonprofit that fights poverty in the Bay Area by funding organizations doing on-the-ground work to address homelessness and disparities in employment, housing and education. If you haven’t seen Monáe live, she puts on a killer show that celebrates queer black identity through a sci-fi lens. She and the Roots play the Fox Theater in Oakland on Oct. 12. \u003ca href=\"http://thefoxoakland.com/events/janelle-monae\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tommy Orange\u003c/strong>: Every year, the San Francisco Public Library picks one book for its \u003cem>One City One Book\u003c/em> program. This year, their pick is \u003cem>There There\u003c/em>, by local author Tommy Orange, which tells the story of generations of interconnected Native Americans living in Oakland. Sarah loved this book, and can’t wait for more people to read it so she can talk about it more. Orange speaks at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library on Wednesday, Oct. 16, at 6pm. \u003ca href=\"https://sfpl.org/?pg=1035343001\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morbid Desire\u003c/strong>: If you’re one of those people that starts celebrating Halloween the second October starts, the historic Camron-Stanford House in Oakland has an excellent exhibit to get you in the mood. \u003cem>Morbid Desire\u003c/em> has been running annually for the last four years, and is all about the strange, dark world of Victorian mourning customs. It’s a little bit different each year—this time around, the focus is on funeral rites—but it’s always educational, and always entertaining. For Rae, the best part is the fashion; particularly the \u003cem>memento mori\u003c/em> jewelry, much of which contains braided human hair and other things you probably wouldn’t want to touch. There are three tours of the exhibit every Sunday in October, and the Camron-Stanford staff are incredibly knowledgeable and enthusiastic, so it’s always a fun, if rather gothic, way to spend the afternoon. \u003ca href=\"https://cshouse.org/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Darius Jones\u003c/strong>: Here’s a chance to see a rising saxophone star from New York who’s been praised all over the country for his innovative, poetic use of the instrument. Don’t expect easy listening—Jones’ work can get dark, and tense, drawing from the history of African-American blues, spirituals and gospel. He headlines the Center for New Music, a jewel of the Bay Area’s experimental music scene; the nonprofit space provides a much-needed venue for avant-garde artists to experiment outside of the pressure to be commercially successful. The tickets are always affordable, and 100% of the door goes to the artist. It’s a place where getting weird is encouraged, and Darius Jones’ show is a benefit for the space. That’s at the Center for New Music on Oct. 12. \u003ca href=\"https://centerfornewmusic.com/calendar/darius-jones-c4nm-benefit/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Stereolab\u003c/strong>: We can’t forget the return of Stereolab, the fiercely creative prog / new wave / lounge band. After a long hiatus, they play three reunion shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco next week, Oct. 17–19. \u003ca href=\"https://thefillmore.com/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Looking for things to do in the Bay Area this weekend? The Do List has you covered with concerts, festivals, exhibitions, plays, performances and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can listen to this week’s episode above with Gabe Meline, Sarah Hotchkiss, Nastia Voynovskaya and Rae Alexandra, or read about our picks below.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Life Is Living Festival\u003c/strong>: The Life is Living festival is an annual party in the park with a purpose. Their tagline? “Keeping Oakland Oakland Since 2008.” You’ll get live performances from Elle Varner (a marvelous singer who’s been in Oakland before, and who counts \u003ca href=\"https://www.vibe.com/2012/09/michelle-obama-endorses-elle-varner\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Michelle Obama among her fans\u003c/a>), Shyan’G, Drew Banga and more, plus dance classes, theater, skateboarding, and local vendors. But the important thing this year is the 50th anniversary of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13867337/the-black-panther-partys-free-breakfast-program-a-50-year-old-blueprint\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Black Panthers’ free breakfast program\u003c/a>; from 10 to noon, breakfast is served, including by some of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13867337/the-black-panther-partys-free-breakfast-program-a-50-year-old-blueprint\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">very same people\u003c/a> who helped found the program in 1969. The festival runs from 10am–7pm on Saturday, Oct. 12, at Lil Bobby Hutton Park (a.k.a. DeFremery Park) in Oakland. \u003ca href=\"https://lil19.youthspeaks.org/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’\u003c/strong>: On Friday, Oct. 11, you have a chance to see \u003cem>The Last Black Man in San Francisco\u003c/em>, a movie that wowed audiences earlier this year with its poetic depiction of two black friends trying to carve out space for themselves in the rapidly gentrifying city. It’s playing at PROXY, a free outdoor “walk-in” theater in Hayes Valley, right off of Patricia’s Green. You’ll recognize \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13864913/after-last-black-man-and-us-singer-mike-marshall-gets-a-second-chance\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Mike Marshall\u003c/a>‘s version of \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d3QbwWnLbc\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this popular song\u003c/a> in the film, and much of the movie’s action takes place in the Fillmore, so this is a rare treat to see it just a few blocks from its setting. That’s Oct. 11, at 6pm. \u003ca href=\"http://proxysf.net/events/2019-proxy-fall-film-fest-the-last-black-man-in-san-francisco/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Janelle Monáe and the Roots\u003c/strong>: Janelle Monáe came to the Mission District a few years back to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/10912273/janelle-monae-jidenna-to-perform-sunday-at-mission-district-rally\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">lead a march against police brutality\u003c/a>, and now, she’s coming back—and bringing the Roots with her—for another good cause. A full 100% of the proceeds from this week’s show go to Tipping Point, a nonprofit that fights poverty in the Bay Area by funding organizations doing on-the-ground work to address homelessness and disparities in employment, housing and education. If you haven’t seen Monáe live, she puts on a killer show that celebrates queer black identity through a sci-fi lens. She and the Roots play the Fox Theater in Oakland on Oct. 12. \u003ca href=\"http://thefoxoakland.com/events/janelle-monae\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tommy Orange\u003c/strong>: Every year, the San Francisco Public Library picks one book for its \u003cem>One City One Book\u003c/em> program. This year, their pick is \u003cem>There There\u003c/em>, by local author Tommy Orange, which tells the story of generations of interconnected Native Americans living in Oakland. Sarah loved this book, and can’t wait for more people to read it so she can talk about it more. Orange speaks at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library on Wednesday, Oct. 16, at 6pm. \u003ca href=\"https://sfpl.org/?pg=1035343001\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morbid Desire\u003c/strong>: If you’re one of those people that starts celebrating Halloween the second October starts, the historic Camron-Stanford House in Oakland has an excellent exhibit to get you in the mood. \u003cem>Morbid Desire\u003c/em> has been running annually for the last four years, and is all about the strange, dark world of Victorian mourning customs. It’s a little bit different each year—this time around, the focus is on funeral rites—but it’s always educational, and always entertaining. For Rae, the best part is the fashion; particularly the \u003cem>memento mori\u003c/em> jewelry, much of which contains braided human hair and other things you probably wouldn’t want to touch. There are three tours of the exhibit every Sunday in October, and the Camron-Stanford staff are incredibly knowledgeable and enthusiastic, so it’s always a fun, if rather gothic, way to spend the afternoon. \u003ca href=\"https://cshouse.org/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Darius Jones\u003c/strong>: Here’s a chance to see a rising saxophone star from New York who’s been praised all over the country for his innovative, poetic use of the instrument. Don’t expect easy listening—Jones’ work can get dark, and tense, drawing from the history of African-American blues, spirituals and gospel. He headlines the Center for New Music, a jewel of the Bay Area’s experimental music scene; the nonprofit space provides a much-needed venue for avant-garde artists to experiment outside of the pressure to be commercially successful. The tickets are always affordable, and 100% of the door goes to the artist. It’s a place where getting weird is encouraged, and Darius Jones’ show is a benefit for the space. That’s at the Center for New Music on Oct. 12. \u003ca href=\"https://centerfornewmusic.com/calendar/darius-jones-c4nm-benefit/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Stereolab\u003c/strong>: We can’t forget the return of Stereolab, the fiercely creative prog / new wave / lounge band. After a long hiatus, they play three reunion shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco next week, Oct. 17–19. \u003ca href=\"https://thefillmore.com/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Granddaughter of Westboro Baptist Church Founder Chronicles Leaving in 'Unfollow'",
"headTitle": "Granddaughter of Westboro Baptist Church Founder Chronicles Leaving in ‘Unfollow’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Editor’s note:\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003cem> This book review includes a homophobic slur.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many people in Topeka, Kan., first became aware of the Westboro Baptist Church in the early 1990s, when members began what would become their trademark public action: picketing to protest what they saw as the ills of an ungodly world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Megan Phelps-Roper was 5 years old when it began; as a little girl, she stood with her parents and other family members—for that’s what the church was at the time, one extended family—holding picket signs warning of gay people in the city’s Gage Park.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The early signs were relatively benign in their wording. “I was surprised by how small and restrained some were compared to what came later,” Phelps-Roper writes in her new memoir, \u003cem>Unfollow\u003c/em>. Later, of course, Westboro made itself known far beyond one small Midwestern city, with members—including tiny children—brandishing signs saying things like “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” at the funerals of service members, “God Sent the Shooter” at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the infamous “God Hates Fags,” a message so central to its mission that it became the address of the church’s website.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, \u003c/em>Phelps-Roper tells her story of growing up in Westboro a beloved and valued granddaughter of the church’s founder, and the torturous choice she made in her late 20s to leave it behind. A devoted follower turned apostate, Phelps-Roper remains estranged from most of her family, though several of her siblings and a few cousins have also left the church. Her grief is palpable: “Losing them was the price of honesty,” she writes. “A shredded heart for a quiet conscience.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, Phelps-Roper describes a childhood that while steeped in religious extremism was also warm and loving. The grandchildren of Fred Phelps grew up together in a family compound of houses arranged around a backyard swimming pool. They attended public schools and were allowed to check out the books they wanted at the public library. There were “pool parties and trampoline jumping and tennis playing in the summer,” she writes, and “football and snowball fights and sledding down the little hill behind our garage in the winter.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The eldest daughter in a family of 11 siblings, Phelps-Roper became her mother’s “right hand,” helping with the legal and logistical work required to carry off the picketing missions. Immersed in her grandfather’s preaching, she believed that “Westboro was the only safe haven from the wrath of God, both in this life and in the world to come.” But slowly, as she matured, graduating from college and law school, she began to wonder whether her family was right in its theology, its worldview of enemies and sin, obedience and hatred. After a series of internal church squabbles, she writes, “I was beginning to see that our first loyalty was not to the truth but to the church. That for us, the church \u003cem>was\u003c/em> the truth, and disloyalty was the only sin, unforgivable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wish Phelps-Roper were able to tell us more about how her grandfather came to his bizarre theology, especially given that his early career as a lawyer was that of a white man from the South who represented primarily African American clients in Topeka. Somehow, his fervor for civil rights morphed into a warped ideology of hatred, one in which every disaster was evidence that God hates a morally bankrupt society. She quotes Scripture consistently throughout the book, especially the verses that illuminate why Westboro members felt empowered by the animus they inspired (a BBC documentary called them “The Most Hated Family in America”). But what will be difficult for most readers, I suspect, is understanding, as Phelps-Roper writes, how “people who were otherwise bright and well-intentioned could believe and behave as we did as members of Westboro.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story of how Phelps-Roper extricated herself (and one of her sisters) from Westboro unfolds like a suspense novel, so I won’t spoil it here. Suffice to say, leaving was wrenching, despite its clear necessity. And life after Westboro was disorienting—liberated but also adrift, Phelps-Roper had to face the guilt over “years I had wasted hurting people in a misguided effort to serve an image of a God that seemed less real all the time.” Still, past the pain is healing. Meeting and talking with some of her former antagonists (most of whom she had met on the picket line, or in her role running the church’s Twitter presence) helped Phelps-Roper confront the contradictions in what she had been taught. She writes:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“We could cease presuming most people were evil and ill-intentioned. The hope that sprang from this realization would become the new foundation of my life, but along with that hope came still more confusion: If there was more than one possible answer, how did anyone manage to decide between them?”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Another realization: “Westboro is not unique.” Other groups, religious and otherwise, convince their members that they alone hold purchase on the true way. One thing all those groups have in common is a fear of the other, Phelps-Roper notes. It’s for them, including perhaps her own parents, that she writes, at the book’s end, “I want to tell them that the world isn’t evil. That it’s full and complicated and beautiful and good, filled with unknown truths and unbroken hopes, and that it’s waiting just for them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Kate Tuttle is a writer and critic based in New Jersey.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Granddaughter+Of+Westboro+Baptist+Church+Founder+Chronicles+Leaving+In+%27Unfollow%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Editor’s note:\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003cem> This book review includes a homophobic slur.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many people in Topeka, Kan., first became aware of the Westboro Baptist Church in the early 1990s, when members began what would become their trademark public action: picketing to protest what they saw as the ills of an ungodly world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Megan Phelps-Roper was 5 years old when it began; as a little girl, she stood with her parents and other family members—for that’s what the church was at the time, one extended family—holding picket signs warning of gay people in the city’s Gage Park.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The early signs were relatively benign in their wording. “I was surprised by how small and restrained some were compared to what came later,” Phelps-Roper writes in her new memoir, \u003cem>Unfollow\u003c/em>. Later, of course, Westboro made itself known far beyond one small Midwestern city, with members—including tiny children—brandishing signs saying things like “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” at the funerals of service members, “God Sent the Shooter” at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the infamous “God Hates Fags,” a message so central to its mission that it became the address of the church’s website.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, \u003c/em>Phelps-Roper tells her story of growing up in Westboro a beloved and valued granddaughter of the church’s founder, and the torturous choice she made in her late 20s to leave it behind. A devoted follower turned apostate, Phelps-Roper remains estranged from most of her family, though several of her siblings and a few cousins have also left the church. Her grief is palpable: “Losing them was the price of honesty,” she writes. “A shredded heart for a quiet conscience.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, Phelps-Roper describes a childhood that while steeped in religious extremism was also warm and loving. The grandchildren of Fred Phelps grew up together in a family compound of houses arranged around a backyard swimming pool. They attended public schools and were allowed to check out the books they wanted at the public library. There were “pool parties and trampoline jumping and tennis playing in the summer,” she writes, and “football and snowball fights and sledding down the little hill behind our garage in the winter.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The eldest daughter in a family of 11 siblings, Phelps-Roper became her mother’s “right hand,” helping with the legal and logistical work required to carry off the picketing missions. Immersed in her grandfather’s preaching, she believed that “Westboro was the only safe haven from the wrath of God, both in this life and in the world to come.” But slowly, as she matured, graduating from college and law school, she began to wonder whether her family was right in its theology, its worldview of enemies and sin, obedience and hatred. After a series of internal church squabbles, she writes, “I was beginning to see that our first loyalty was not to the truth but to the church. That for us, the church \u003cem>was\u003c/em> the truth, and disloyalty was the only sin, unforgivable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wish Phelps-Roper were able to tell us more about how her grandfather came to his bizarre theology, especially given that his early career as a lawyer was that of a white man from the South who represented primarily African American clients in Topeka. Somehow, his fervor for civil rights morphed into a warped ideology of hatred, one in which every disaster was evidence that God hates a morally bankrupt society. She quotes Scripture consistently throughout the book, especially the verses that illuminate why Westboro members felt empowered by the animus they inspired (a BBC documentary called them “The Most Hated Family in America”). But what will be difficult for most readers, I suspect, is understanding, as Phelps-Roper writes, how “people who were otherwise bright and well-intentioned could believe and behave as we did as members of Westboro.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story of how Phelps-Roper extricated herself (and one of her sisters) from Westboro unfolds like a suspense novel, so I won’t spoil it here. Suffice to say, leaving was wrenching, despite its clear necessity. And life after Westboro was disorienting—liberated but also adrift, Phelps-Roper had to face the guilt over “years I had wasted hurting people in a misguided effort to serve an image of a God that seemed less real all the time.” Still, past the pain is healing. Meeting and talking with some of her former antagonists (most of whom she had met on the picket line, or in her role running the church’s Twitter presence) helped Phelps-Roper confront the contradictions in what she had been taught. She writes:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“We could cease presuming most people were evil and ill-intentioned. The hope that sprang from this realization would become the new foundation of my life, but along with that hope came still more confusion: If there was more than one possible answer, how did anyone manage to decide between them?”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Another realization: “Westboro is not unique.” Other groups, religious and otherwise, convince their members that they alone hold purchase on the true way. One thing all those groups have in common is a fear of the other, Phelps-Roper notes. It’s for them, including perhaps her own parents, that she writes, at the book’s end, “I want to tell them that the world isn’t evil. That it’s full and complicated and beautiful and good, filled with unknown truths and unbroken hopes, and that it’s waiting just for them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Kate Tuttle is a writer and critic based in New Jersey.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Granddaughter+Of+Westboro+Baptist+Church+Founder+Chronicles+Leaving+In+%27Unfollow%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"soldout": {
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