A roundup of profiles and life stories from around the web.:
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FIRST PERSON
In this compelling account, Katharine Hibbert describes the year she spent living off skips and supermarket leftovers. Having lost her job, unable to pay rent, she decided to walk away from her conventional existence and live without money. Setting off with a sleeping bag, a couple of changes of clothes and a £20 note, she went looking for the squatters and freegans who could show her how to survive. Of most surprise to her was how quickly it all became routine. In her old life Katharine was a journalist, so it’s of little surprise to us that there was a book in it. Though if you’re wondering if that supplied half her motivation there are no clues here I’m afraid.
In my first two months as a squatter and a scavenger I spent 54p – less than a penny a day. Ten pence had gone on a sheet of photocopying and the other 44p had bought me a KitKat at my lowest ebb in the first week. It was extraordinary how quickly it had become routine to get through a day without cash. I’d slept on a mattress every night and hadn’t had to go more than two days without a wash. Before I’d set out, I’d been worried I’d have to live with chaotic or drug-addicted housemates. I’d asked my boyfriend to expect a text from me every evening to tell him I was OK, so that he would raise the alarm if something went wrong. But, after the first couple of nights, I felt silly writing a message. Even when I was low and lonely, that I was safe went without saying.
FIRST PERSON
Barack’s brother George Obama had a privileged upbringing in Nairobi, Kenya, but during his teens and early 20s lost himself in drink, drugs and gangster violence, ending up in prison on robbery charges. When he was released, he founded a youth group and set up a football club for ghetto kids. While his brother has risen to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world, he says he hopes to be a leader among the poorest and most powerless.
Eventually the press found me in my slum. My new notoriety was a blessing and a curse. Many people presume I have a direct line to the White House, but I don’t. I’ve only met my big brother twice and have spoken to him just once since the election, to say congratulations. Still, because of our connection, I managed to pull in funds from philanthropists to support the work of the youth group. I raised enough money to buy the team gold and green uniforms—with their own numbers on the back. Last fall, Obama’s Champs won the Nairobi Super League—a feat that, just a couple of years back, would have been unthinkable for a team from the slums. With the sponsorship I’ve attracted because of my last name, we can now afford to take buses all across Kenya for matches.
FIRST PERSON
These four moving stories show the damage done when adults find out they were adopted as babies. All four discovered later in life, most learning the secret from strangers. One says it made him question the right to keep his father’s war medals, another who only found out aged 60, says he understands now why he always felt he didn’t belong. (Interviews by Kate Hilpern)
Hilary Moon, 60, was 48 when she discovered that she was adopted. She is divorced.
“About eight years ago, my biological sister sought me out. She put me in touch with my birth mother, to whom I look incredibly similar. I’ve met others in the extended family, too, and I even changed my full name to what it was before the adoption. With all my adoptive family dead, and a large birth family still alive, it just made sense to me. But, actually, they’re a funny lot and I can’t say I feel any great bond with them.
“The whole situation has left me feeling neither part of my adoptive nor my biological family, and the lack of a sense of belonging in either can make me feel lonely if I let it. When people ask me who is my next of kin, I say, ‘I haven’t got one’, because that’s how it feels.”
VIGNETTE
Zadie Smith’s father loved classic British sitcoms like Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son and he passed this love on to his children. Even after she left for University, education and class forcing them ever further apart, Zadie and Harvey still had Hancock, Basil Fawlty and Monty Python. They left it to the comedy to speak about the painful divisions between them. As her father lay dying in a Felixstowe nursing home, she refused to see the black humour, the absurdity, attempting instead to stage-manage his death. The futility of her efforts, and later her refusal to see his body left her “suspended in a bad joke in which a living man inexplicably becomes two pints of dust and everyone acts as if this were not a joke at all but, rather, the most reasonable thing in the world.” The power of the last paragraph is lost a little in this online version since a mistake means it runs into a repeat of the entire piece. Or were the subs having their own joke? Harvey hadn’t realized the end had come and neither will you dear reader.
Conversely, the death we speak of and deal with every day, the death that is full of meaning, the non-absurd death, this is a place-marker, a fake, a convenient substitute. It was this sort of death that I was determined to press upon my father, as he did his dying. In my version, Harvey was dying meaningfully, in linear fashion, within a scenario stage-managed and scripted by the people around him. Neatly crafted, like an American sitcom: The One in Which My Father Dies. It was to conclude with a real event called Death, which he would experience and for which he would be ready. I did all the usual, banal things. I brought a Dictaphone to his bedside, in order to collect the narrative of his life (this perplexed him — he couldn’t see the through line). I grew furious with overworked nurses.
I refused to countenance any morbidity from my father, or any despair. The funniest thing about dying is how much we, the living, ask of the dying; how we beg them to make it easy on us. At the hospital, I ingratiated myself with the doctors and threw what the British call “new money” at the situation. Harvey watched me go about my business with a puzzled half smile.
Read the rest at the Times Online
VIGNETTE
Deborah Orr commits the most nauseating act of celebrity gushing in the pages of The Guardian. She’s speaking out in defense of Sadie Frost’s naked spread in Grazia.
Sure she’s slender, she’s toned, and she keeps herself in good nick. Anyone can do that, given the motivation. But Frost’s flesh has a special quality. It looks both soft and firm, like no female flesh I’ve never seen…. I’ll never forget her unique, indefinable, pure loveliness, and the pleasure it was to just sit there, drinking it in.
STORY
Why Van Gogh cut off his own ear has been the object of much speculation. The Art Newspaper believes it can now reveal the answer. A still life painted the following year includes a letter from Van Gogh’s brother. From the postmark and other circumstantial evidence, the paper concludes that Vincent found out about his brother Theo’s engagement before his self-mutilation and that this was the cause of his distress. Vincent feared that Theo would withdraw his emotional and financial support once he was married. Not everyone is convinced by this theory, as evidenced by the comments. The paper stretches speculation further, suggesting the inclusion of the fateful letter in the painting could have additional significance. (By Martin Bailey)
Although it is speculation, the postmark on the envelope might represent a coded message that the strong links between the two brothers would survive. The Musée de La Poste in Paris told us that although “Jour de l’An” postmarks were widely used in the run-up to Christmas and New Year in the 1880s, most are fairly small marks, rather than the more prominent words inscribed by Van Gogh. This suggests that the personalised postmark may have been Vincent’s way of stressing to Theo that the letter depicted was a very particular one—and that he wished his brother well for the new year.
Read the rest at the Art Newspaper
STORY
This week felt like an episode of Spooks (or MI5 if your American, though probably actually 24) with the revelation that the suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, (aka Humam Khalil Mohammed) who killed seven CIA officers and a Jordanian spy was in fact a double agent. If this really had been Spooks, however, the fictional Harry Pearce would have made sure we never read about it in the newspapers. That Al Queda felt relaxed enough to take on the complex job of running a double agent is bad news for the rest of us. The story got several places digging through their archives for pictures of former double agents. TIME’s “dossier” includes the fantastically creased face of Dusko Popov, inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Ashraf Marwan who came to a mysteriously sticky end in 2007. The New Republic also has a good roundup.
Agency officers had traveled from Kabul, the Afghan capital, to Khost for a meeting with the informant, a sign that the C.I.A. had come to trust the informant and that it was eager to learn what he might have gleaned from operations in the field, according to a former C.I.A. official with experience in Afghanistan.
The former official said that the fact that militants could carry out a successful attack using a double agent showed their strength even after a steady barrage of missile strikes fired by C.I.A. drone aircraft.
“Double agent operations are really complex,” he said. “The fact that they can pull this off shows that they are not really on the run. They have the ability to kick back and think about these things.”
Read the rest at The New York Times
See the TIME “dossier”
See The New Republic’s slideshow
PROFILE
Former AIDS activist Larry Kramer, creator of ACT UP and co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, revolutionised the treatment of HIV, becoming a gay hero in the ’80s. Today, after nearly dying of liver disease, he is writing an alternative history of the United States, recast as a gay nation. In The American People, his sprawling work in progress with echoes of Moby Dick, he outs Lincoln, Washington and Lewis and Clark among others. In this probing profile, Jesse Green wonders if this search for a great gay father in history is driven by his lack of one in childhood. Green’s portrait is that of a man who has had his moment, unable to adapt and mellow with changed circumstances. Marginalised and disappointed, Kramer’s anger, so effective 25 years ago, is now misdirected in vicious spats with friends and associates.
But who is the enemy now? Not that old standby, the medical Establishment, which gave him a liver and thus his life. Nor his insurance company; Kramer gratefully pays almost nothing for the thousands of dollars’ worth of anti-viral and anti-rejection drugs delivered monthly to his door. As for homophobia, it may now be too diffuse to respond to the full-bore strategy of a Kramer-style attack. The “lack of anger” he finds around him, and which he has attempted in recent years to replenish from his own apparently bottomless supply, similarly cannot be attacked head on. And sitting on a sofa in his third-floor apartment (he’s terrified of heights because they invite jumping), sweet little Larry—asking after one’s health, cuddling his terrier—seems to know it. Of course one quickly remembers that even pets are made part of the struggle. A few years (and another dog) ago, when Koch moved into his building, Kramer was ordered by management to keep his distance, at least verbally. So when Kramer ran into the ex-mayor in the mailroom one day, he looked at his pooch and said, “Don’t go near him, Molly, that’s the man who murdered all of Daddy’s friends!”
Read the rest at New York Magazine
PROFILE
In 1967 when he was just 15, Choi Sung-Yong’s father, a South Korean fisher boat captain, was abducted by agents from North Korea. For four decades he’s been trying to trace his father, in the process putting in place an underground railroad between North Korea and China. So far he’s managed to free seven South Korean abductees – more than the Seoul government, reluctant to take a strong line, has managed to achieve. (By Martin Fackler.)
His efforts — and his role with Abductees’ Family Union, which lobbies for the families of 505 civilians thought by the South Korean government to have been kidnapped — have earned him wide attention in the South’s media. They have also, he says, led to death threats from the North.
As a result, he is now afraid to travel to China. But he says he will press on until he finds out what happened to his father, who would be 99 years old now if still alive, or at least retrieve his remains. His father’s former crew said his father had been kept in the North because of his war record, and Mr. Choi fears he may have been executed.
“I have been a headache for the South Korean government,” Mr. Choi said. “But I am finally carrying out my filial duty to my father.”
Read the rest at The New York Times
PROFILE
Chess genius Magnus Carlsen has had an electrifying rise. Last November, at just 18, the Norwegian teenager became the youngest World No. 1 in the game’s history earning him the moniker Mozart of Chess. His success is not the result of parental pushiness. The primary concern of his father, who says he’s spent more time urging his young son to do schoolwork than play chess, is that the game should make him happy. Despite the grumpy photo, Carlsen insists he isn’t plagued by the obsessiveness that has driven other grandmasters to madness. By Eben Harrell
Carlsen joins chess’s élite at a time of unprecedented change. He is one of a generation of players who learned the game from computers. To this day, he’s not certain if he has an actual board at home. “I might have one somewhere. I’m not sure,” he says. Powerful chess programs, which now routinely beat the best human competitors, have allowed grand masters to study positions at a deeper level than was possible before. Short says top players can now spend almost an entire game trading moves that have been scripted by the same program and that such play by rote has removed some of the mystique of chess. He likens chess computers to “chainsaws chopping down the Amazon.”
But Kasparov says Carlsen’s mastery is rooted in a “deep intuitive sense no computer can teach” and that his pupil “has a natural feel for where to place the pieces.” According to Kasparov, Carlsen has a knack for sensing the potential energy in each move, even if its ultimate effect is too far away for anyone — even a computer — to calculate. In the grand-master commentary room, where chess’s clerisy gather to analyze play, the experts did not even consider several of Carlsen’s moves during his game with Kramnik until they saw them and realized they were perfect. “It’s hard to explain,” Carlsen says. “Sometimes a move just feels right.”
OBITUARY
I’ve been hoping for an excuse to include something by Laura Barton. The way she writes about music is emotional without ever tipping into sentiment, lyrical without ever becoming pretensious. This, atypical, piece, is a tribute to Vic Chesnutt who committed suicide on Christmas Day, aged just 45. She was looking for a voice to capture how it felt to hear he had died, when she realised it was Chesnutt’s own that she was looking for – the rasping voice she first heard at a sad, lost time in her own life.
Chesnutt was one of those rare artists for whom there seems an absolute marriage between voice and lyrics. His voice was dirty and cracked, with something secondhand and much-used about it, and it seemed to rise up from some dark, deep, doleful place in the pit of him. He sang in Sponge of both “the ancient odour of the streets” and of how “all my gravy must have soaked into something”. And that is precisely how his voice sounded: well-trodden and long-aged, a stench as much as a sound, and somehow deprived of some once-known joy. There was always a pang to it, always a belly-lurch, always a feeling of the sudden gulf of loss.
OBITUARY
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, was the only official survivor of both atomic blasts to hit Japan in World War II. He died on Monday in Nagasaki, Japan aged 93. (By Mark McDonald.)
Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the so-called Little Boy device detonated above the city.
Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than two miles away from ground zero that day. His eardrums were ruptured, and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.
Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to Nagasaki, his hometown, the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people.
Read the rest in the New York Times
Read the interview in The Independent
BOOKS
In his second memoir, the poet John Burnside describes how he turned away from drugs and alcohol to find salvation in solitude and nature. After being diagnosed with apophenia, (a desperate search for meaning in unrelated things, a search for an overarching order), he walked away from the psychiatric ward and headed for suburban south London, eventually finding a way out of the madness. In the years since, Burnside has won numerous awards for his poetry. For Aida Edemariam reviewing Waking up in Toytown “the seeming disjuncture, in this memoir, between the squalor and desperation he describes and the precision and beauty of his language is like a proof of his achievement – a kind of higher sanity.”
One day, late in the book, he finds himself travelling in Norway, far inside the Arctic circle. Arriving early at the small local airport, he sits and gazes out at the whiteness of the airfield. “I sat a long time, that day, waiting for my flight – and some of me is sitting there still, enjoying the stillness, becoming the silence, learning how to vanish. Every day, in every way, I am disappearing, just a little – and it feels like flying, it feels like the kind of flight I was trying for, that first time, when I was nine years old – but it has nothing to do with the will, and it has nothing to do with trying. If it happens at all it happens as a gift: and this is the one definition of grace I can trust.”
BOOK
Elizabeth Gilbert has just published a follow up to the contrived self-help memoir Eat Pray Love that became such a ludicrously big hit. That this new book finds her just as neurotic and shallow, but without either justification or a decent tale to tell is causing reviewers no end of glee. Hitched charts Gilbert’s supposed commitment crisis when faced with the prospect of marriage. Since this seems more of a legal formality than a major life change, is her anxiety really about whether she can deliver another killer best seller? Lizzie Skurnick reviews for The Daily Beast.
Why Gilbert is so desperately undone by the notion of the green-card marriage is ostensibly the author’s question to herself, but it increasingly becomes one for the reader. Even a Homeland Security officer, as he takes Felipe away, feels compelled to explain the obvious. “No, seriously—what’s the problem?” asked Officer Tom. “You two have obviously been cohabiting already. You obviously care about each other, you’re not married to anyone else… you could always sign a prenuptial agreement… I mean, if you’re worried about going through all the financial mess of a divorce again. Or if it’s the relationship issues that scare you, maybe some counseling would be a good idea.”
Read the rest at The Daily Beast
See also Ariel Levy in The New Yorker
BOOK
When a flock of geese brought down a plane over New York last January there were two heroes responsible for the survival of everyone on board. Captain Chesley Sullenberger who successfully landed the plane in the Hudson River and Bernard Ziegler, the man behind the Airbus A320. In this review, James Salter manages to convey the drama and fascination he so enjoyed in William Langewiesche’s book Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson which interweaves the history of the Airbus with the events of that day.
A man in the back had the poise and presence of mind to call out, “Exit row people, get ready!” A woman mid-plane with a baby boy on her lap did not know what to do. The man next to her asked if he could brace her son for her, and she passed the child to him, and he did.
In the cockpit the ground warning alarm had begun, an automatic voice repeating that the plane was too low. Sullenberger called for the flaps on the wings to be extended in order to slow the plane for impact. At two hundred feet he began breaking his glide and ballooned a little. They were at 150 knots—about 180 miles an hour. He lowered the nose slightly and then, pulling back on the stick in the last few seconds before touching down, his airspeed spent, remarked coolly to Skiles, “Got any ideas?”
“Actually not,” Skiles said.
Read the rest at The New York Review of Books
BOOK
It’s ten years since Ian Drury’s death and the anniversary is being marked with a film Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and by a biography by Will Birch. Lynn Barber, who wonders what the X-Factor generation would make of “a squat, scowling geezer with a withered arm and a leg in callipers”, applauds this well-researched biography. Drury was a self invented cockney and during his time as an art teacher made unwanted sexual advances towards his students – on one occasion unzipping his jeans, pulling out his penis and pleading “Look, there’s nothing wrong with it!” But if he doesn’t come across as a nice man, Barber concludes, he was an exceptionally interesting one.
If he’d lived long enough, he might eventually have become a national treasure. Probably not, though — he was always a bit too rude, too apt to spit at people and tell them to eff off, especially when he’d had a drink or three. His minder, Fred “Spider” Rowe, a reformed cat burglar, would carry him to bed then confiscate his calliper so he couldn’t get up — but the Blockheads once found him crawling down a hotel corridor in search of drink. One of his girlfriends had a terrifying night with him when he became “psychotic”, locked her in the room and threw her bag out of the window. But she still went back to him, as people usually did.
Read the rest at The Sunday Times
BOOK
The Warren Beatty in Peter Biskind’s biography is the well known wit, charmer, and seducer, according to the author’s calculations, of 12,775 woman and this “totally entertaining, giddily salacious” book contains plenty of anecdotes about his encounters with women like Jane Fonda and Joan Collins etc. But according to Lawrence Levi reviewing the book in The LA Times, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America also reveals him to be possibly the most exasperating person who ever lived.
Packed into these pages, along with Beatty’s conquests, are the testimonies of dozens of people who have worked with him over the decades, and even those who adore him sound worn down. “He will suck you dry of all your creativity,” says one. “He exploits everybody,” another adds.
Beatty is famously private. Biskind lets him tell his side of every damning story. (Earlier this week, Beatty’s attorney Bert Fields told the Huffington Post that the book “contains many false assertions and purportedly quotes Mr. Beatty as saying things he never said.”) But Beatty’s reputation for being “one of the most difficult people to work with or for in the entire industry,” as Biskind hears it, seems earned.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Vanity Fair has taken some flack for its cover story on Tiger Woods, apparently an excuse to run photographs shot by Annie Leibovitz before the scandal broke. Buzz Bissinger’s piece doesn’t add anything new to the story, but he does link to a 1997 interview with GQ, which gives a glimpse of what we now know is the real Woods before his masquerade for the media began. I’m not sure he looks menacing, as some commentators are saying, but rather uncomfortable. Perhaps he knew these semi-nude shots would come back to haunt him.
VIDEO
Dan Buettner from National Geographic surveys the world’s centenarians in this Ted Talk. What can they teach us about how to live longer? Sadly, apart from a few tips – eat more vegetables and incorporate exercise into your daily life – if you weren’t born into a close knit community with life-long friendships and a strong support network it’s already too late to do much about it.
VIDEO
Choire says it all on The Awl. Yes, the man in this video is indeed The Sartorialist.
AND FINALLY
Writers demand the release of Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo; New York men, are you really this awful? Defend yourselves; Who would win in a war between the blogosphere and Bono’s ego?; Maybe some of us need to grow up a bit, but this photo makes me giggle every time I look at it.
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