A reassessment of Amy Winehouse, a book of photos from an artist unknown in her lifetime, and what to do with all those cherry tomatoes.
1. This beautiful piece by Leslie Jamison on how we as a culture processed Amy Winehouse’s addiction and death.
Reading this essay, by the author of The Recovering and many other books, is a reminder not just of how people talked about Amy Winehouse while she was clearly dying from addiction, but—as someone who has experienced addictionn—the appeal of saying “fuck it” because getting sober is the hardest thing you’ve ever tried to do.
I remember, during all the times I tried to quit drinking, how I felt like everyone around me was waiting for me to fail, or anticipating that I would try my hardest but fail, or hoping I would succeed and feeling disappointed in me personally when I failed. Now magnify that times tens of millions of people who believed they had the right to judge or pity or just gawk at Amy Winehouse. How tempting it would be to just say “fuck it”—not because you thought things would be different this time, not because you thought drinking and smoking crack and shrinking to a shadow of your former self would be liberating or fun, but because sometimes the sheer work of the alternative seems like too much to bear.
I remember reading gossip blogs in the late 2000s that speculated recklessly and with abandon about Winehouse and her condition, often expressing faux concern while zeroing in on her bloody ballet flats, her skinny legs, her disheveled beehive. Even the late, lamented DListed, a site I loved, couldn’t resist punching down, mocking Winehouse for her devotion to her boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil and buying into the narrative that he was holding her down. As if that’s how addiction works—get rid of one “bad influence,” and the fog magically lifts.
This hit me hard:
But maybe “unrepentant” wasn’t an alternative to the fantasy of conversion so much as another flavor of fantasy. Maybe fuck it was a fantasy. Maybe our collective vision of her alchemy — ache altered into chorus — depended on a myth that wasn’t quite true. As the poet John Berryman put it, even he had to fight the “delusion that my art depended on my drinking.” That delusion was what he had to break, he felt, if he ever wanted to get sober.
Berryman never found recovery (his book, “Recovery,” is an unfinished account of his time in a residential treatment center); he jumped off a bridge in Minnesota in 1972. Winehouse, similarly, never got fully sober, although she did go to rehab at least four times. If you’ve ever been fascinated with Amy Winehouse, the cliché of the self-destructive but brilliant artist, or the internal mechanisms that keep people addicted, this 2017 piece (republished this week for Longreads) is for you.
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2. If you happen to live in New York or will be visiting in the next week, I highly recommend catching the exhibit at Fotografiska New York on “unseen artist” Vivian Meier, a street photographer who worked mostly in Chicago and New York City. (Showing in Fotografiska’s sexy space until September 29).
If you aren’t able to catch the show, this book offers a close look at this working-class artist who was little known until an archive of negatives was discovered in a Chicago storage locker. Most of Maier’s work captures ordinary people doing ordinary things in public, like retouching lipstick or falling asleep on a park bench, but the resulting images feel collaborative, even conspiratorial, not exploitative or judgmental. Meier’s self-portraits, many of them unconventionally staged, feel unselfconscious but not guileless or naive. More images of, and books about, her work are available on this website.
3. I got an unusual amount of (positive!) feedback after I wrote recently about how I dealt with a bumper crop of paste tomatoes in my P-Patch. (Update: They kept coming, even though the plant itself looked deader than dead.) This week I have a suggestion for how to deal with too many cherry tomatoes, which I suspect is a common problem in the Pacific Northwest, where many people grow cherries because they’re more likely to ripen fully before the cold sets in.
This recipe for fresh tomato sauce has slightly more ingredients but is almost as easy as the Marcella Hazan recipe I recommended last week, requiring minimal chopping and only a few hands-on steps. It’s also easy to adjust the quantity in case you’re like me and like to freeze fresh tomato sauce for the doldrums of winter.
