Willy Blackmore

Books. Politics. Los Angeles. Food. CONTACT @willyblackmore willydotblackmoreatgmaildotcom var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12713424-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}

[willyblackmore]

Between the Ditches

If we can’t see the prairie we lost, can we understand what it was, what it meant, and make sense of what is left today?

OMG IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME HI TUMBLR

[willyblackmore]

Oddly, consumers aren't getting caught in the dust up as of yet. Prices haven’t gone up significantly due to the drought—USDA estimates 2 to 3 percent in 2015, which is less than average food-price inflation—and we can't exactly turn away from California to Mexico for our fruits and vegetable, as our neighbor and NAFTA partner's own farming regions are suffering from dry weather too. No, we'll continue to get a significant amount of our food from California—but the abuse of resources that doing so may require could do extensive damage.

I wrote a big piece about the drought, and how the problem is far bigger than how many gallons of water it takes to grown an almond, a strawberry, a spear of asparagus, a . . .

[willyblackmore]

Area Man Tells More

Once upon a time, I tried to be a literary agent. It didn't go well.

I was googling myself the other night, as one does (in my defense, I was searching for some old stories), and I came across this listing for Willy Blackmore, book agent, on a website called QueryTracker. It’s a sort of forum that writers use to keep tabs on agents, the queries they’ve sent out, etc., etc. Considering that I have a backlog of a couple hundred unread agenting emails sitting in a strange corner of my Gmail, it’s unsurprising that I have thoroughly shitty reviews on QueryTracker. Writers have determined that I do not find phone, email, or snail mail queries acceptable. Queries, apparently, are unacceptable.

[willyblackmore]

Growing Up in Utopia

That morning, at 29 years old, I had eaten my first pork tenderloin sandwich. As a native Iowan, I should consider this sandwich something of a birthright, but in all my childhood and adolescence I’d never even tried one. If Iowa is a pork tenderloin sandwich, Fairfield is Boca burgers. If Iowa is corn and soybeans, hog confinements, and sandwiches at Butch’s, Fairfield is farmers markets, new age-y vegetarianism, and maybe some wild-caught salmon.

I wrote an essay for The Archipelago about growing up in Fairfield, Iowa, an oddity of a little midwestern town where there's a sizable community dedicated to creating world peace by practicing Transcendental Meditation. Oh, and there are these insane pork sandwiches too.

[willyblackmore]

I Wrote This Story About Gentrification

“There’s a very literal violence with the policing that happens with gentrification,” Trujillo said, including gang injunctions and what he described as the militarization of police responses. Funneling undesirable residents into the prison system is all “for the sole purpose of keeping the neighborhoods consumable,” in the eyes of the collective, just like pushing out the poor.

“We wanted to highlight the other kinds of violence—like the displacement—that comes along with gentrification,” Trujillo said. He noted that many of the area’s renters are in an even more precarious position: Because they might not be in the U.S. legally, they are subject to being pushed not only out of their homes but out of the country altogether.

“Since gentrification is viewed as an economic market force, and it’s just capitalism working at its best, the human aspects of that tend to get erased,” he said.

It's about my neighborhood in Los Angeles, Highland Park, where there seems to be a different potential outcome for gentrification.

[willyblackmore]

I wrote about my great grandfather, John Farrar, and the counter history of the publishing house he co-founded, Farrar, Straus and Grioux, for The Awl.

What began as an interest in the man who realized how rad the tesseract was morphed as I grew older and developed as a reader. The more I read, the more I learned of the league of famous writers that were published by the house that John Farrar and Roger Straus co-founded in 1946. But the stories I collected from family members over the years did less to give shape to the man who died a decade before I was born than form a string of moments—some contradictory, some telling—that never seemed to form a cohesive narrative.

There was the shy bookworm my mother described, and the charismatic young literary star who drank with F. Scott Fitzgerald my uncle remembered being told stories about. The Skull and Bones member. The World War II spy. The man who took Carl Jung’s hand at an open window in his study and astral projected over the skies of Manhattan. The short-tempered redhead. The gay, closeted alcoholic. The failed poet. The fading not-quite retiree who read manuscripts at his apartment on 96th Street until he died.

[willyblackmore]

And then something deeply strange happens, because Morris has read the reports, including former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger’s investigation of Abu Ghraib. A report Rumsfeld himself commissioned. A document Rumsfeld cites in dismissing the notion that anything migrated from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib. When Morris reads it back, the document mirrors his own language: “The augmented techniques for Guantánamo migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were neither limited nor safeguarded.” “I find that moment very, very peculiar,” Morris told me. “You can expand that moment into a whole film.” Rumsfeld says there was no migration; Morris quotes Schlesinger saying there was a migration. Rumsfeld’s response to the quote, just seconds after saying that the idea of any migration is unfounded: “Yeah, I think that’s a fair assessment.” The men fall silent, and the shot lingers for an uncomfortably long time, Rumsfeld looking squarely at the camera, at Morris.

I interviewed Errol Morris about The Unknown Known recently. You can read my story about the documentary, Rumsfeld, and Colonel Kurtz (yes, that's right), over at TakePart.

[willyblackmore]

Barry Estabrook’s 2011 book about the Florida tomato industry,Tomatoland, helped raise awareness of the horrid working conditions, in some instances amounting to modern-day slavery, behind the off-season tomatoes grown in Florida. Yesterday’s announcement, he said, “is the happiest news to come down since I started following this story in 2006 and 2007. I don’t think you can understate how important this is going to be.”

It’s important not only because the grocer represent a huge percentage of the retail market, but because of the domino-effect approach CIW has successfully brought to bear in other sectors of the food industry. In the fast food and food service fields, CIW has fought the longest and hardest to get its first Fair Food Program agreement signed—then the second is easier, the third even more so, etc., etc.

“Until Walmart came aboard, about half of the tomatoes that were picked [in Florida] weren’t covered by the full force of the agreement—that’s what the supermarkets represent,” Estabrook says. Now that the first domino has rather effortlessly fallen, history suggests the rest of the industry will likely follow.

Walmart is down with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and that's a big fucking deal.

[willyblackmore]

I'm on page 250-something of Goldfinch, which puts me just shy of halfway through, and I keep thinking about the long section toward the beginning describing the museum bombing. The writing was kind of breathless and weird, confusing in a way that may very well have been intentionally, but the drama of the scene was really affecting—and reminded me of the speed-test / crash chapter in Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers. James Woods wrote about that novel's realism, celebrating Kushner for essentially being so damn good at making stuff up. And there is something about the richness of the racing scene she depicts—as with the detailed, albeit very real, floor plan Donna Tartt sticks to in Met scenes—that's so detailed and engrossing that, while I could give a shit about land-speed records, had me totally hooked on the chapters about Reno's bike lust and accident. The drama of the Met bombing feels, and is, more key to the plot of Goldfinch, responsible for kicking the story off, whereas what happens at the speed trials in The Flamethrowers is more about propelling the narrative. But the writing in both segments—careful, stylish prose used to narrate intense, violent drama—shares a kinship that I find really compelling. I'm reserving judgement on Goldfinch until I know where the hell things are going in that book, and I loved The Flamethrowers (I have a thing for the Futurists), but together I think these two passages represent some of the best narrative writing that I read this year.

[willyblackmore]

[willyblackmore]

Bartolomé Perez has been one of those employees for 21 years. He earned $4.25 an hour when he first started working at a McDonald’s in South Los Angeles, and his wages have risen to $10.75 over the years. Three years ago, he was cut from full-time to 30 hours per week. When I asked if he received benefits before his hours were dropped, he smiled. “For fast-food workers, [they] do not exist, benefits,” he answered in heavily accented English.

I spent the afternoon talking to striking fast food workers in Los Angeles.

[willyblackmore]

I studied printmaking in college, at the University of Iowa, and took a lot of book arts classes too--binding, letterpress, etc. We spent a lot of time looking at books in special collections in those classes, flipping through everything from the Nuremberg Chronicle to sifting through reproductions of Marcel Duchamp's notes and scraps that are housed in his Green Box. There's a page of the Gutenberg Bible in the collection, and I've run my greasy hands all over it. The ability to touch, to interact with items in a special collection make them, in some ways, a far better experience than seeing art and historical objects in a museum.

This morning I saw, via The Paris Review, that a number of detailed, miniature landscapes were discovered "hiding" on the fore-edge of a number of 19th century titles in UI's special collections. I can't help but imagine the joy experience by the librarian who found them. And now that they've been unearthed, there are gifs.

During one of those book arts classes, I became interested in a sort of benign library vandalism—like the book equivalent of Banksy hanging up his own work in a museum. For an assignment that asked us to remake a book in a way that created a form that matched the content, a printed the entirety of Alice in Wonderland in 1-point font, cut it into strips and stuffed the mini-scrolls into pill capsules. The whole seven-pill novel was housed in a day-of-the-week pill box.

Just before I graduated, I stole a copy of Alice in Wonderland from the library and replaced it with my own repackaged version. Not that my work is anywhere as artful and lovely as the fore-edge paintings, but I hope that someone had or will have a moment of joy in the stacks when they pull it off of the shelf.

[willyblackmore]

[kcrw-blog]

LA might still be an agricultural empire. A new interactive map shows the urban gardens (and farms) near you!

http://bit.ly/1dk0KIy http://on.fb.me/18Y4HgR

[latimes]

Very neat!

[caitlinshamberg]

Makes me want chickens and goats!

[willyblackmore]

Pushing through the clear vinyl flaps that hang over the entrance to “Perishable: An Exploration of the Refrigerated Landscape of America,” like stepping into a walk-in refrigerator, you come face-to-face with what could be called Big Refrigeration. The facilities depicted in the show, the photos taken by Twilley and CLUI staff and volunteers, are responsible for chilling a full 70% of what we eat. From the unripe bananas shipped in from the tropics and ripened with ethylene gas in special pressurized rooms to storage facilities for apples, fish, ice cream and even peanuts—it’s all there, chilling in the countless buildings that make up what Twilley’s calls the coldscape.  

The Big Chill: A Look at America’s Coldscape

[willyblackmore]

In death, separating Toklas from Stein is a complex undertaking—Stein is the author of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, after all—but when it comes to cooking, and the evocatively written recipes of the more literarily demure woman (and any chicken recipe, for that matter), it’s wise to keep Stein’s Tender Buttons in mind. No matter where you buy it from, chicken is alas a dirty bird.

Writing about Toklas, Stein and food safety is a good way to make your editor crazy. 

[willyblackmore]

A rare #galleybrag.