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The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020
A career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture
Rachel Kushner has established herself as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times—and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.
In nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.
These pieces, new and old, are electric, phosphorescently vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers.
Rachel Kushner has established herself as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times—and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.
In nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.
These pieces, new and old, are electric, phosphorescently vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers.
274 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 6, 2021
380 people are currently reading
8045 people want to read
About the author
Rachel Kushner
47 books2,658 followersRachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker Prize- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top ten book of 2013; and Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her novels are translated into 26 languages. She lives in Los Angeles and wants you to know that if you're reading this and curious about Rachel, whatever is unique and noteworthy in her biography that you might want to find out about is in her new book, The Hard Crowd, which will be published in April 2021. An excerpt of it appeared in the New Yorker here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20....
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February 25, 2023
In a recent Zoom conversation between George Saunders and Tobias Wolfe, Rachel Kushner's name came up -- Saunders said he would read whatever she wrote. She is one of those special talents who is equally at home in fiction as well as non-, and this collection of essays showcases her proficiency with the latter.
Her material covers subjects ranging from a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp to portraits of unconventional personalities, but when she is writing about her own experience, well, that's when the gloves come off (not that the gloves were there to begin with), and a reader can truly appreciate where her gutsy, take-no-prisoners style comes from. Her parents are to be commended, granting her the freedom from a very young age to hone her sense of independence. As she fearlessly enters a motorcycle race (illegal) down the Baja Peninsula or waits bar in San Francisco's Tenderloin, she has the instincts of a keen observer.
The final piece, a nostalgic lookback at growing up on the non-touristy side of San Francisco, closes with the observation "I'm talking about my own life. Which not only can't matter to you, it might bore you." No. Never. Boring is one thing that Rachel Kushner never is.
Her material covers subjects ranging from a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp to portraits of unconventional personalities, but when she is writing about her own experience, well, that's when the gloves come off (not that the gloves were there to begin with), and a reader can truly appreciate where her gutsy, take-no-prisoners style comes from. Her parents are to be commended, granting her the freedom from a very young age to hone her sense of independence. As she fearlessly enters a motorcycle race (illegal) down the Baja Peninsula or waits bar in San Francisco's Tenderloin, she has the instincts of a keen observer.
The final piece, a nostalgic lookback at growing up on the non-touristy side of San Francisco, closes with the observation "I'm talking about my own life. Which not only can't matter to you, it might bore you." No. Never. Boring is one thing that Rachel Kushner never is.
December 1, 2022
Do you ever read something and get mad that you’ll never be as interesting of a person or as good of a writer or as smart of a woman as the author of the book you just read
December 7, 2025
About a year ago I read and greatly enjoyed Kushner's Creation Lake. Its setting in rural hardscrabble France and nods towards prehistoric civilizations both appealed to me, and I was intrigued by the completely ammoral woman at the center of the story.
When I saw this book at a library book sale for three bucks, I snapped it up. Her essays are as clear-eyed and unfrilly as her fiction. About half the content is about her own life (which, wow) and the other half mostly about various other artists and artistic endeavors. I don't think it's fanboyism that leads me to conclude the former were far more interesting. Long essays on Italian cinema left me skipping pages.
Kushner is about my age, which comes as a shock. The long, shapely legs so evident on the front cover are a bequeath of her mother, a photo of which the author shares in a ~1970 photo wearing a homemade minidress from flowery cloth gifted by her father-in-law. This was from an essay about Kushner's early life, much of which took place on a psychedelically-painted school bus shuttling around the western US, her father an itinerant professor of philosophy, her mother someone that managed to creatively raise a family with no money.
The 'hard crowd' with whom Kushner has spent her adult life has exposed her to a great deal of adventure, heartache and death. Kushner's early exposure to books and respect for eductation set her apart. While most successful authors in the U.S. do things like get MFA's from Yale and attend well-known writers' workshops, Kushner is a reminder, god bless her grease-stained fingernails, that other paths still exist. The Ford Galaxie on the book cover is not intended ironically. That's her actual car.
Kusher and I both had countercultural parents in the late 60's / early 70's. Mine were ex-military and broke to the "fight the system from within" side of the fight, while hers chose full-on rebellion. She's a little vague about dates, but she was a bartender at the Fillmore at some point in the 1990's, about the time I started showing up there with some frequency. As befits the sides of the culture war we were dropped into, there is an oh-so-slender possibility she served me a beer once or twice. Rachel, if you're reading this, I sincerely hope I was very polite and tipped well.
When I saw this book at a library book sale for three bucks, I snapped it up. Her essays are as clear-eyed and unfrilly as her fiction. About half the content is about her own life (which, wow) and the other half mostly about various other artists and artistic endeavors. I don't think it's fanboyism that leads me to conclude the former were far more interesting. Long essays on Italian cinema left me skipping pages.
Kushner is about my age, which comes as a shock. The long, shapely legs so evident on the front cover are a bequeath of her mother, a photo of which the author shares in a ~1970 photo wearing a homemade minidress from flowery cloth gifted by her father-in-law. This was from an essay about Kushner's early life, much of which took place on a psychedelically-painted school bus shuttling around the western US, her father an itinerant professor of philosophy, her mother someone that managed to creatively raise a family with no money.
The 'hard crowd' with whom Kushner has spent her adult life has exposed her to a great deal of adventure, heartache and death. Kushner's early exposure to books and respect for eductation set her apart. While most successful authors in the U.S. do things like get MFA's from Yale and attend well-known writers' workshops, Kushner is a reminder, god bless her grease-stained fingernails, that other paths still exist. The Ford Galaxie on the book cover is not intended ironically. That's her actual car.
Kusher and I both had countercultural parents in the late 60's / early 70's. Mine were ex-military and broke to the "fight the system from within" side of the fight, while hers chose full-on rebellion. She's a little vague about dates, but she was a bartender at the Fillmore at some point in the 1990's, about the time I started showing up there with some frequency. As befits the sides of the culture war we were dropped into, there is an oh-so-slender possibility she served me a beer once or twice. Rachel, if you're reading this, I sincerely hope I was very polite and tipped well.
September 3, 2024
I'm talking about my own life. Which not only can't matter to you, it might bore you.
So: Get your own gig. Make your litany, as I have just made mine. Keep your tally. Mind your dead, and your living, and you can bore me.
There's something so seductive about Kushner's work, she just hooks me in every time. And the essays collected here are the ideal companion pieces to the fiction, from 'Girl on a Motorcycle' which gives an adrenaline-rush description of an illegal road race familiar to readers of The Flamethrowers, to 'Is Prison Necessary?' which explores the themes underpinning The Mars Room.
'We Are Orphans Here' is a distressingly timely piece of reportage on Shuafat, a Palestinian refugee camp located, paradoxically, in East Jerusalem; and the eponymous piece recalls Kushner's own wild life of liberation and cool.
But there are also thought-pieces on literature and authors: Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector. Unscholarly, these are personal accounts of how Kushner has found meaning in these books so that they create a dialogue with the reader.
There's something so uncategorisable about Kushner's writing that I love: and these essays attest to the sharp, cool, kooky intellect that sits behind the novels.
June 11, 2021
Rachel Kushner's books ricocheted up my must-read list after The Mars Room became one of my top reads for 2018. Rereading my review of that novel I noted :
Interesting anecdotes about prison escapes, the Norman Mailer / Jack Abott story and excerpts from the decoded Ted Kaczynski dairies, although interesting, often threatened to get in the way of the story-telling. The line between good fiction and non-fiction wears too thin for me at times
Here in full non-fiction mode and thus free of my huffy expectations for fewer snippets and more plot, Kushner reveals this bowerbird like tendency to collect obtuse and intriguing details is actually just her innate style.
It is hard to pinpoint a unifying principle for these essays except to say I think they seem to add substantially to my understanding of her as a novelist. This is a collection of essays that feels almost like her autobiography. Names of long lost friends, San Francisco buildings and bars from the 90s are rattled off at an alarming rate. It risks alienating the reader, not familiar or at least interested in, motorcycles, San Francisco, the works of Dennis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Duras or obscure European cinema generally. An interest in the visual arts also helps. A lot of this risks pretension and I had the feeling Kushner would be that diner guest where you just nod and pretend you know all about that film with Marianne Faithfull in biker leather. And yet this is all grist in the mill of understanding the author and thus great preparation for her fiction.
Essays that particularly stood out: We Are Orphans Here, Girl on a Motorcycle, The Hard Crowd, Bad Captains and Are Prisons Necessary?
Interesting anecdotes about prison escapes, the Norman Mailer / Jack Abott story and excerpts from the decoded Ted Kaczynski dairies, although interesting, often threatened to get in the way of the story-telling. The line between good fiction and non-fiction wears too thin for me at times
Here in full non-fiction mode and thus free of my huffy expectations for fewer snippets and more plot, Kushner reveals this bowerbird like tendency to collect obtuse and intriguing details is actually just her innate style.
It is hard to pinpoint a unifying principle for these essays except to say I think they seem to add substantially to my understanding of her as a novelist. This is a collection of essays that feels almost like her autobiography. Names of long lost friends, San Francisco buildings and bars from the 90s are rattled off at an alarming rate. It risks alienating the reader, not familiar or at least interested in, motorcycles, San Francisco, the works of Dennis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Duras or obscure European cinema generally. An interest in the visual arts also helps. A lot of this risks pretension and I had the feeling Kushner would be that diner guest where you just nod and pretend you know all about that film with Marianne Faithfull in biker leather. And yet this is all grist in the mill of understanding the author and thus great preparation for her fiction.
Essays that particularly stood out: We Are Orphans Here, Girl on a Motorcycle, The Hard Crowd, Bad Captains and Are Prisons Necessary?
May 23, 2021
Kushner is a fearless intellectual that has lived her life taking risks—huge risks. Risks that many of her friends and acquaintances did not survive. For instance, in ‘A Girl on a Motorcycle’, she describes her participation in the illegal Cabo 1000 motorcycle race where a fellow motorcyclist pulled out in front of her going 30mph, while she was doing 130. She wiped out—and neither she nor her motorcycle fared well. Years later, we learn that many of the cyclists she participated with that day are no longer alive.
Kushner’s parents were bohemian academics in San Francisco exposing her to far left intellectualism. For instance, there is her interaction with Nanni Balestrini, an Italian writer and political activist who translated Marx’s practice of the ‘inquest’—a questionnaire on workers lives. In 1979, he became a fugitive of Italy and escaped by skiing down Mont Blanc into France. Indeed, art and revolution are recurring themes in her essays—whether she is writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition, or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem. She reflects on the artists Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy and Marguerite Duras—individuals who boldly developed their own style and way of looking at the world.
Kushner is a fabulous writer. She was a National Book Finalist for The Flamethrowers in 2013 and a Booker Prize nominee in 2018 for The Mars Room. Her style of writing reminds one of Joan Didion—a woman that knew how to write of her own experiences. Kushner’s fearless experiences have caused her to be the sole survivor of a wild crowd whittled down by prison, drugs and early death. Recommend.
Kushner’s parents were bohemian academics in San Francisco exposing her to far left intellectualism. For instance, there is her interaction with Nanni Balestrini, an Italian writer and political activist who translated Marx’s practice of the ‘inquest’—a questionnaire on workers lives. In 1979, he became a fugitive of Italy and escaped by skiing down Mont Blanc into France. Indeed, art and revolution are recurring themes in her essays—whether she is writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition, or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem. She reflects on the artists Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy and Marguerite Duras—individuals who boldly developed their own style and way of looking at the world.
Kushner is a fabulous writer. She was a National Book Finalist for The Flamethrowers in 2013 and a Booker Prize nominee in 2018 for The Mars Room. Her style of writing reminds one of Joan Didion—a woman that knew how to write of her own experiences. Kushner’s fearless experiences have caused her to be the sole survivor of a wild crowd whittled down by prison, drugs and early death. Recommend.
June 20, 2021
'I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine. To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, to not dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home.'
July 6, 2021
It seems that of the essays by author-critics that I've been reading over the past while, some of the very best have been by women: Zadie Smith's two volumes (Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Feel Free: Essays) and Joan Didion's The White Album both seldom failed to charm, enlighten and entertain me to no end, and only the latest volume by Martin Amis (The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1986-2016) could rival them for me. And now, Rachel Kushner's The Hard Crowd continues that trend. While not perfect (and I'll get to my few quibbles later), I was simply bowled over by the combination of her (at-times-self-deprecating) erudition and street-smarts, as well as by the range of her interests—and by her concomitant ability to match the register of her voice to her material. She can cover much ground, but she can also go deep—very deep.
Essays which are marked by the latter include "We Are orphans Here", about her visit to the Shuafat (Palestinian) Refugee Camp in Jerusalem, which is devastating, of course, but also strangely life-affirming, not because of any rose-tinted filters it uses, but because like those Palestinians she meets, interviews and worries over, it portrays them as fully human individuals, "something unique, a vital integer in the stream of these people’s refusal to be reduced" to statistics or to stereotypes.
Another high point was "Earth Angel", a paean to writer Dennis Johnson. Although I'm ashamed to admit to never having read him, one of the delights of reading books like this is it gives you a vicarious sense of having done so: Kushner gets so much under the skin of those she loves and admires that it is hard to imagine a better introduction to Johnson and his work than what she has to say about him and it:
By way of giving context to one of her own novels, The Flamethrowers (which has moved up to the year 2021 in my monstrously overstuffed TBR list as a result of reading this book), Kushner also has essays on Italy and New York in the 1970s. Of these, her piece "Woman in Revolt", on Massimo Sarchielli's 1972 film, Anna, was unbelievably affecting. The titular Anna was a 16 year old girl living on the street when the director decided to "help" her by giving her a place to stay and then made a film about her, taking advantage of the invention of video tape to shoot 11 hours' worth of footage for this strange "experiment", in which the power dynamics between the filmmaker and his subject, and between men and women are laid painfully bare.
I'll end with a salute that's also a quibble: several of the works collected here will convince you that Rachel Kushner was the Zelig (or, OK, Forrest Gump—but with a big, big brain) of the 1980s and early-to-mid 90s, in that her more personal essays will definitively prove that your own experience of those years was…shall we say "under-privileged" in terms of its variety of experience, or where it fell on the core-periphery map of indie (or even mainstream) artistic culture? Did you ever catch yourself "looking for the heart of Saturday night", but on a Tuesday, and not in SF or NYC or LA but in some disquieting (to a 20-something, anyway) backwater? Cos Rachel Kushner found it, pal—and remembers it all, too. She makes living in SF, NY or LA come alive again for those of us who weren't there, in the best way. But those essays, at times, feel also like they lack a bit of the structure that some of the others clearly have, and distinctly, albeit belied by a voice which certainly rivals Didion's at making the reader her confidant, making them feel like they are riding shotgun with her across the country in that old Impala of hers. And right near the end, Kushner acknowledges that some of these particular memories make a few of these essays not so much works of art, as labours of love:
Essays which are marked by the latter include "We Are orphans Here", about her visit to the Shuafat (Palestinian) Refugee Camp in Jerusalem, which is devastating, of course, but also strangely life-affirming, not because of any rose-tinted filters it uses, but because like those Palestinians she meets, interviews and worries over, it portrays them as fully human individuals, "something unique, a vital integer in the stream of these people’s refusal to be reduced" to statistics or to stereotypes.
Another high point was "Earth Angel", a paean to writer Dennis Johnson. Although I'm ashamed to admit to never having read him, one of the delights of reading books like this is it gives you a vicarious sense of having done so: Kushner gets so much under the skin of those she loves and admires that it is hard to imagine a better introduction to Johnson and his work than what she has to say about him and it:
Three other Kushner touchstones are the artist Jeff Koons, and the novelists Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras, and Kushner successfully pulls off one magic feat after another in making their work speak to this reader, who will admit to feeling like something of a philistine when confronted such further gaps (gaps upon gaps, as well as within them!) in his knowledge.
“Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?”
The “green translucence in the yards” is high-flown, and yet I do not doubt that it was the salient vision to share. Every sentiment and gesture in Jesus’ Son feels true, and not all writers approach anything true in what they write, but instead have other types of gifts, and skills, for braiding imagery or manipulating cadence, pulling off stunts. Literature, even really good literature, is sometimes more like a beautiful baroque carpet than it is like life. Denis Johnson, in all his work, aimed to locate the hidden, actual face of things. But the new stories build without those miraculous balls of hail, and their truths are deeper, and more precise, true as you would true a wheel. Jesus’ Son, by comparison, seems like work produced by the forceful energy of all the saved-up characters bursting to be seen and known by those who weren’t there, weren’t in the bar or out at the farm on the Old Highway. Weren’t riding around with Georgie, high on stolen hospital meds. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden operates on a different set of registers; it feels like the paced vision of a writer who has been made to understand that life is fairly rude and somewhat short, but the world contains an uneven distribution of grace, and wisdom lies in recognizing where it—such grace—has presented itself. The stories are about death and immortality, art and its reach, and they ask elemental questions about fiction, not as a literary genre but as a human tendency.
By way of giving context to one of her own novels, The Flamethrowers (which has moved up to the year 2021 in my monstrously overstuffed TBR list as a result of reading this book), Kushner also has essays on Italy and New York in the 1970s. Of these, her piece "Woman in Revolt", on Massimo Sarchielli's 1972 film, Anna, was unbelievably affecting. The titular Anna was a 16 year old girl living on the street when the director decided to "help" her by giving her a place to stay and then made a film about her, taking advantage of the invention of video tape to shoot 11 hours' worth of footage for this strange "experiment", in which the power dynamics between the filmmaker and his subject, and between men and women are laid painfully bare.
I'll end with a salute that's also a quibble: several of the works collected here will convince you that Rachel Kushner was the Zelig (or, OK, Forrest Gump—but with a big, big brain) of the 1980s and early-to-mid 90s, in that her more personal essays will definitively prove that your own experience of those years was…shall we say "under-privileged" in terms of its variety of experience, or where it fell on the core-periphery map of indie (or even mainstream) artistic culture? Did you ever catch yourself "looking for the heart of Saturday night", but on a Tuesday, and not in SF or NYC or LA but in some disquieting (to a 20-something, anyway) backwater? Cos Rachel Kushner found it, pal—and remembers it all, too. She makes living in SF, NY or LA come alive again for those of us who weren't there, in the best way. But those essays, at times, feel also like they lack a bit of the structure that some of the others clearly have, and distinctly, albeit belied by a voice which certainly rivals Didion's at making the reader her confidant, making them feel like they are riding shotgun with her across the country in that old Impala of hers. And right near the end, Kushner acknowledges that some of these particular memories make a few of these essays not so much works of art, as labours of love:
Don't believe her. She is never boring, and in minding and honouring her own dead she shows us how it should be done, quite. I look forward to reading Rachel Kushner's novels, but especially to more of her essays. I'm now a fan.
The things I’ve seen and the people I’ve known: maybe it just can’t matter to you. That’s what Jimmy Stewart says to Kim Novak in Vertigo. He wants Novak’s character Judy to wear her hair like the unreachable Madeleine did. He wants Judy to be a Pacific Heights class act and not a downtown department store tramp.
“Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.”
Outrageous. He’s talking about a woman’s own hair. Of course it matters to her.
I’m talking about my own life. Which not only can’t matter to you, it might bore you.
So: Get your own gig. Make your litany, as I have just made mine. Keep your tally. Mind your dead, and your living, and you can bore me.
June 18, 2022
[3.5] I realized while I was reading these essays how much more I usually like essays about an author's experiences versus literary and cultural critiques. I was swept away by Kushner's "Girl on a Motorcycle," the first in the collection. I was not as engaged with some of the other essays but appreciated her perspective. I liked how she inserted herself in all of the pieces, even those about authors and artists.
July 9, 2024
Oh to be as engrossing, thoughtful, insightful, intelligent, and articulate as Rachel Kushner. She's the cool girl™ I aspire to be.
Through these essays, Kushner navigates different pop culture, political, and personal topics in a quasi-memoir style, while her approach to communicating her opinions remains admirably audacious and incisive. Her essay on her visit to Palestine and confronting the oppressive occupation under which Palestinians are forced to live because of Israeli settlers was the most interesting (and heart-wrenching) to me.
The essay on prison abolition is a close contender as well, it contained tones of unique discussions that I haven't seen before in texts advocating for prison abolition. The pop culture oriented essays didn't appeal to me as much because I'm a 2000s kid so I had no familiarity with the people and phenomenons that were a part of Kushner's cultural zeitgeist, but the acute way she discusses these topics were still interesting enough nonetheless.
Through these essays, Kushner navigates different pop culture, political, and personal topics in a quasi-memoir style, while her approach to communicating her opinions remains admirably audacious and incisive. Her essay on her visit to Palestine and confronting the oppressive occupation under which Palestinians are forced to live because of Israeli settlers was the most interesting (and heart-wrenching) to me.
The essay on prison abolition is a close contender as well, it contained tones of unique discussions that I haven't seen before in texts advocating for prison abolition. The pop culture oriented essays didn't appeal to me as much because I'm a 2000s kid so I had no familiarity with the people and phenomenons that were a part of Kushner's cultural zeitgeist, but the acute way she discusses these topics were still interesting enough nonetheless.
July 15, 2023
A mixed bag, but the first essay is KILLER. ‘A Girl on a Motorcycle’ describes an early, unsanctioned Baja 1000 motorcycle road-race, all on the public highway, MX-1. At the time she was living with a good (but controlling) motorcycle mechanic, and he helped her pick out and outfit a light bike for the race. My recollection is there were about 35 entrants, including her and maybe 3 or 4 other women. To be competitive, drivers had to maintain an average speed of 100 mph or better, which meant going 140 mph or more on the straightaways! This on a public, narrow, indifferently-maintained asphalt highway, at that time used by a few US tourists, but mostly by local ranchers and truckers. Rachel came to a blind corner with a sandy/gravelly wash-crossing, and came up behind a local rancher in his slow pickup. With that and the sand, she ended up dropping the bike and slid loose. Her borrowed leathers were too big and she got bad road-rash. She was badly shaken-up but otherwise unhurt. She was picked up by the 'sag wagon', but by the time she got back to her wrecked bike, it was gone. It turned out there were local scavengers who picked up the wrecks and would then sell them back to the owners!
I forget how many entrants finished. What I remember very clearly is that there were, I think, FOUR fatalities among the 35 or so entrants! She may have been lucky to crash early.
Well, this one will be hard to top, and indeed the next two or three I tried weren't even in the running. Not sure I will get back to it before the book comes due. But the first essay is GREAT. Worth checking out a library copy for that!
Book came due, returned unfinished. 4+ star rating is solely for ‘A Girl on a Motorcycle.’
I forget how many entrants finished. What I remember very clearly is that there were, I think, FOUR fatalities among the 35 or so entrants! She may have been lucky to crash early.
Well, this one will be hard to top, and indeed the next two or three I tried weren't even in the running. Not sure I will get back to it before the book comes due. But the first essay is GREAT. Worth checking out a library copy for that!
Book came due, returned unfinished. 4+ star rating is solely for ‘A Girl on a Motorcycle.’
February 12, 2021
Very well written and felt essays. I personally would have liked less essays about art, literature, film and more about life, culture, politics. Her essays about the motorcycle race and the refugee camp in Jerusalem are absolutely outstanding for instance.
Thank you Simon and Schuster and Edelweiss for the ARC.
Thank you Simon and Schuster and Edelweiss for the ARC.
January 4, 2022
This book often gets included in excellent books of non fiction.
Not sure why.
Kushner’s entries on the all day Baja motorcycle race and the Palestinian settlements in Jerusalem are the best of the lot bc they are her experiencing life.
However, too many of the stories are deconstruction of 70’s Italian artists or just name checks of all the folks she blew by in her peripatetic life.
She owns the latter by the end and that self awareness saves the collection a bit for me but I can’t see much enjoyment here unless one is really into Italian cinema or the coastal art scenes of the 70s
Not sure why.
Kushner’s entries on the all day Baja motorcycle race and the Palestinian settlements in Jerusalem are the best of the lot bc they are her experiencing life.
However, too many of the stories are deconstruction of 70’s Italian artists or just name checks of all the folks she blew by in her peripatetic life.
She owns the latter by the end and that self awareness saves the collection a bit for me but I can’t see much enjoyment here unless one is really into Italian cinema or the coastal art scenes of the 70s
August 6, 2022
I love a collection of essays as much as the next girl, but Kushner went above and beyond my expectations. First, I must say that she is a phenomenal writer. These essays drip intellect and forced me to think far outside my comfort zone. This is probably due to the fact that she covered such a wide variety of topics from 1970’s revolutionary Italy, prison reform, art, and the seedy underbelly of 1990’s San Francisco.
I love books that can teach me new things, and I learned a lot not only about Kushner’s life but about literature and art! These essay range from 2000-2020 and although they aren’t specifically dated, it was fascinating to see how Kushner’s life (and writing) transformed throughout the years.
I think people can find books like this boring, especially when they see “essays” in the title. Let me tell you, this was not only informative but fascinating!! Kushner is reminiscent of Joan Didion but definitely has her own special voice. I honestly can’t wait to read a fiction book of hers!!
I love books that can teach me new things, and I learned a lot not only about Kushner’s life but about literature and art! These essay range from 2000-2020 and although they aren’t specifically dated, it was fascinating to see how Kushner’s life (and writing) transformed throughout the years.
I think people can find books like this boring, especially when they see “essays” in the title. Let me tell you, this was not only informative but fascinating!! Kushner is reminiscent of Joan Didion but definitely has her own special voice. I honestly can’t wait to read a fiction book of hers!!
June 8, 2021
I’ll just admit straight out that I am in love with this book.
I have had an imperfect relationship with Kushner's works- I devoured and marveled at The Flamethrowers, but was not as impressed by her last novel, The Mars Room. I admired what she was trying to say, but it felt less bold, less sweeping in scope than I had expected.
But this book, in it's collection of essays, feels so potent and vibrant that I am again a convert. It may be that I am also someone who lived in SF during the same years she did. My first vehicle was also a motorcycle and I also took long, treacherous rides on it, though not as disastrous as hers was. I also know many of the people she references and places she checks from 1990s SF. I also am interested in refugee camps, prison abolition and how it's framed up for conversation and debate, Marguerite Duras, and art in general. But hearing her talk and eulogize someone I am acquainted with from many years ago was something that I don't know if I can put into words. She was able to show me another side of him, but one that also contained elements that I recognized in him.
I had no expectations that this book would speak to me so deeply and so personally. I don't know how another reader will relate to this since I feel so close to the material, so I will offer that she writes with such clarity and sharp insight She is incredibly smart, curious, and self-aware. I hope people pick this book up.
I have had an imperfect relationship with Kushner's works- I devoured and marveled at The Flamethrowers, but was not as impressed by her last novel, The Mars Room. I admired what she was trying to say, but it felt less bold, less sweeping in scope than I had expected.
But this book, in it's collection of essays, feels so potent and vibrant that I am again a convert. It may be that I am also someone who lived in SF during the same years she did. My first vehicle was also a motorcycle and I also took long, treacherous rides on it, though not as disastrous as hers was. I also know many of the people she references and places she checks from 1990s SF. I also am interested in refugee camps, prison abolition and how it's framed up for conversation and debate, Marguerite Duras, and art in general. But hearing her talk and eulogize someone I am acquainted with from many years ago was something that I don't know if I can put into words. She was able to show me another side of him, but one that also contained elements that I recognized in him.
I had no expectations that this book would speak to me so deeply and so personally. I don't know how another reader will relate to this since I feel so close to the material, so I will offer that she writes with such clarity and sharp insight She is incredibly smart, curious, and self-aware. I hope people pick this book up.
November 10, 2020
“To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home.”
May 26, 2023
Rec. by: Peter T.
Rec. for: Drivers and criers
There is such a thing as "gonzo" journalism—the feverish and headlong style exemplified and popularized by Hunter S. Thompson. Gonzo isn't defined by subject matter, though. It really is a style—a pose (or, more charitably, a stance), a way of writing.
Rachel Kushner's essay collection The Hard Crowd is not gonzo. Kushner's style is clean and lucid, even as she is describing the most extreme events. She makes it all look easy, too, even though you can tell it's not—every essay is honed. Incisive. A freshly sharpened blade that cuts through bullshit. Any one of these pieces would be worth the price of admission, but here Kushner gives us nineteen varied glimpses into her personal history.
"Girl on a Motorcycle," the lead essay in The Hard Crowd, is the one that hooked my Goodreads friend Peter T.—and rightly so. Kushner's deadpan narrative connects her father, the film by Alain Delon, and her ride in the "Cabo 1000" motorcycle race that runs the length of Baja California, proving she's a badass without any need for excessive verbal pyrotechnics. The race does not end well for her, by the way, although she does at least survive. The litany of the dead in "Girl on a Motorcycle" made me think of Jim Carroll's song "People Who Died"—and indeed Kushner brings up both Carroll and that very song explicitly later on.
"We Are Orphans Here" is a sobering visit to the decades-old Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem—in but not of Jerusalem, that is. The Wikipedia article drily notes that the camp suffers from "an absence of municipal planning, overcrowding, and potholed roads." Among other things.
In "Earth Angel," Kushner's elegy to the author Denis Johnson, the aforementioned Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries becomes part of a whole self-destructive canon, one that also (per p.48) includes Jack Black's You Can't Win, a no-holds-barred autobiography from 1926 that I read about 80 years later, written by the sort of person who doesn't usually have a voice in literature. Black was a hobo, riding the rails before the turn of the century (the 20th, that is), an opium smoker, and a small-time crook who—eventually—made good. Black's book was a formative influence on William S. Burroughs, by his own admission. Black's authentic voice and eye for detail made it a compelling read; a reissue in 2000 should make it easier to find as well. But Kushner's essay is about Johnson, an author I haven't read—although now I think I should.
"In the Company of Truckers" touched me more, I think, than any other essay in The Hard Crowd—it's a simple story of the time when Kushner was driving a 1963 Chevy Impala cross-country with intent to sell, until it broke down somewhere in Nebraska. The men who worked on the car for her, asking nothing in return ("I have a daughter"—p.57), really do seem like heroes.
Although I too have no desire "to spend time at sea as requisite literary training" (p.61), nor any experience of cruise ships with their, in Kushner's words, "nearly lethal comforts" (p.65), "Bad Captains" still manages to stir so many memories—not just with the obligatory reference to David Foster Wallace's essay in the eponymous collection, and not just of MAD Magazine, but even to the specific issue from 1973 containing "The Poopsidedown Adventure" that I remember so fondly from my own childhood. Kushner uses such lighthearted sources to highlight some serious failures, like that of captain Francesco Schettino, who in 2012 ran the Costa Concordia aground and then abandoned his ship with hundreds of passengers still aboard.
"Happy Hour" weaves its way from Jeff Koons through advertising and pop culture appropriation, with asides on The Hidden Persuaders and Subliminal Seduction, ending up at a dinner party with a Whitney Museum trustee who tells Kushner, in all seriousness, that "Tear gas is not only necessary but sometimes it's really quite desirable!" (p.78).
"Tramping in the Byways" is an intensely autobiographical review (or an intense review with autobiographical elements, anyway) of David Rattray, and more specifically of Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible.
The flying cars in "Flying Cars" aren't airborne for long—they're Gone in 60 Seconds (heh), just long enough, really, for Matthew Porter to capture their images. This meditative essay on the mystique of the muscle car appeared in Porter's 2019 collection The Heights.
"Picture-Book Horses" is a brief intro to Cormac McCarthy, an author with whom I've never really engaged, despite some pretty strong recommendations... including this one.
Rachel Kushner was "Not with the Band", but she did tend bar at concert venues in San Francisco like the Fillmore and the Warfield, which is still pretty cool.
"Made to Burn" is the centerfold of The Hard Crowd—it has all the pictures. It's also an introspective look at Kushner's process for writing her own novel The Flamethrowers.
"Popular Mechanics" is about the economic upheaval in post-WWII Italy, and specifically about Nanni Balestrini's worker-centered novel We Want Everything.
From Florence to Munich, Los Angeles to Venice, "The Sinking of the HMS Bounty" connects widely-separated dots—including at least one I am connected with myself. I too lived in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, once upon a time, just a few blocks away from the H.M.S. Bounty restaurant on Wilshire, an establishment that as of this review's writing is still afloat. Maybe I'll get to visit it, someday.
Marguerite Duras—"Duras With An S"—wrote the script for Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), among other things, and gave the profits she made from that film to her friend Georges Bataille, but those are just two of the many things I learned from reading this homage.
"Is Prison Necessary?" answers its own question with a resounding (and extensively-documented) negative.
"Woman in Revolt" documents the making of Anna (1975), a documentary about a pregnant 16-year-old (whose full name is never revealed) and the actor in Rome who attempts to rescue her.
"Lipstick Traces" is another homage, this one to the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.
"Bunny" is about Kushner's friend, the late painter Alex Brown, and about retail sales, and about memory.
"The Hard Crowd" is the capstone of Kushner's collection, and it's easy to see why. It's a deeply personal and yet star-spangled memoir of being young in San Francisco, long after the Summer of Love but before the traces of that summer, and that love, had been entirely erased from Haight-Ashbury.
*
"Scintillating" is a word that has been denatured by overuse, but here I think it is precisely descriptive: The Hard Crowd scintillates. Shield your eyes against the glare, and partake.
Table of Contents adapted from Multnomah County Library's own entry on the book, this time.
Rec. for: Drivers and criers
There is such a thing as "gonzo" journalism—the feverish and headlong style exemplified and popularized by Hunter S. Thompson. Gonzo isn't defined by subject matter, though. It really is a style—a pose (or, more charitably, a stance), a way of writing.
Rachel Kushner's essay collection The Hard Crowd is not gonzo. Kushner's style is clean and lucid, even as she is describing the most extreme events. She makes it all look easy, too, even though you can tell it's not—every essay is honed. Incisive. A freshly sharpened blade that cuts through bullshit. Any one of these pieces would be worth the price of admission, but here Kushner gives us nineteen varied glimpses into her personal history.
"Girl on a Motorcycle," the lead essay in The Hard Crowd, is the one that hooked my Goodreads friend Peter T.—and rightly so. Kushner's deadpan narrative connects her father, the film by Alain Delon, and her ride in the "Cabo 1000" motorcycle race that runs the length of Baja California, proving she's a badass without any need for excessive verbal pyrotechnics. The race does not end well for her, by the way, although she does at least survive. The litany of the dead in "Girl on a Motorcycle" made me think of Jim Carroll's song "People Who Died"—and indeed Kushner brings up both Carroll and that very song explicitly later on.
"We Are Orphans Here" is a sobering visit to the decades-old Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem—in but not of Jerusalem, that is. The Wikipedia article drily notes that the camp suffers from "an absence of municipal planning, overcrowding, and potholed roads." Among other things.
In "Earth Angel," Kushner's elegy to the author Denis Johnson, the aforementioned Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries becomes part of a whole self-destructive canon, one that also (per p.48) includes Jack Black's You Can't Win, a no-holds-barred autobiography from 1926 that I read about 80 years later, written by the sort of person who doesn't usually have a voice in literature. Black was a hobo, riding the rails before the turn of the century (the 20th, that is), an opium smoker, and a small-time crook who—eventually—made good. Black's book was a formative influence on William S. Burroughs, by his own admission. Black's authentic voice and eye for detail made it a compelling read; a reissue in 2000 should make it easier to find as well. But Kushner's essay is about Johnson, an author I haven't read—although now I think I should.
"In the Company of Truckers" touched me more, I think, than any other essay in The Hard Crowd—it's a simple story of the time when Kushner was driving a 1963 Chevy Impala cross-country with intent to sell, until it broke down somewhere in Nebraska. The men who worked on the car for her, asking nothing in return ("I have a daughter"—p.57), really do seem like heroes.
Although I too have no desire "to spend time at sea as requisite literary training" (p.61), nor any experience of cruise ships with their, in Kushner's words, "nearly lethal comforts" (p.65), "Bad Captains" still manages to stir so many memories—not just with the obligatory reference to David Foster Wallace's essay in the eponymous collection, and not just of MAD Magazine, but even to the specific issue from 1973 containing "The Poopsidedown Adventure" that I remember so fondly from my own childhood. Kushner uses such lighthearted sources to highlight some serious failures, like that of captain Francesco Schettino, who in 2012 ran the Costa Concordia aground and then abandoned his ship with hundreds of passengers still aboard.
"Happy Hour" weaves its way from Jeff Koons through advertising and pop culture appropriation, with asides on The Hidden Persuaders and Subliminal Seduction, ending up at a dinner party with a Whitney Museum trustee who tells Kushner, in all seriousness, that "Tear gas is not only necessary but sometimes it's really quite desirable!" (p.78).
"Tramping in the Byways" is an intensely autobiographical review (or an intense review with autobiographical elements, anyway) of David Rattray, and more specifically of Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible.
The flying cars in "Flying Cars" aren't airborne for long—they're Gone in 60 Seconds (heh), just long enough, really, for Matthew Porter to capture their images. This meditative essay on the mystique of the muscle car appeared in Porter's 2019 collection The Heights.
"Picture-Book Horses" is a brief intro to Cormac McCarthy, an author with whom I've never really engaged, despite some pretty strong recommendations... including this one.
Rachel Kushner was "Not with the Band", but she did tend bar at concert venues in San Francisco like the Fillmore and the Warfield, which is still pretty cool.
"Made to Burn" is the centerfold of The Hard Crowd—it has all the pictures. It's also an introspective look at Kushner's process for writing her own novel The Flamethrowers.
"Popular Mechanics" is about the economic upheaval in post-WWII Italy, and specifically about Nanni Balestrini's worker-centered novel We Want Everything.
From Florence to Munich, Los Angeles to Venice, "The Sinking of the HMS Bounty" connects widely-separated dots—including at least one I am connected with myself. I too lived in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, once upon a time, just a few blocks away from the H.M.S. Bounty restaurant on Wilshire, an establishment that as of this review's writing is still afloat. Maybe I'll get to visit it, someday.
It is amazing what, from the past, you can drag into your net, only to find that it has never left your net.
—p.158
Marguerite Duras—"Duras With An S"—wrote the script for Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), among other things, and gave the profits she made from that film to her friend Georges Bataille, but those are just two of the many things I learned from reading this homage.
"Is Prison Necessary?" answers its own question with a resounding (and extensively-documented) negative.
"Woman in Revolt" documents the making of Anna (1975), a documentary about a pregnant 16-year-old (whose full name is never revealed) and the actor in Rome who attempts to rescue her.
"Lipstick Traces" is another homage, this one to the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.
"Bunny" is about Kushner's friend, the late painter Alex Brown, and about retail sales, and about memory.
None of it matters; it is gone. But it all matters; it lingers.
—p.230
"The Hard Crowd" is the capstone of Kushner's collection, and it's easy to see why. It's a deeply personal and yet star-spangled memoir of being young in San Francisco, long after the Summer of Love but before the traces of that summer, and that love, had been entirely erased from Haight-Ashbury.
If I knew what was good for me I'd be day-trading marijuana stocks right now instead of writing this essay.
—p.242
I was fourteen: in other words not a child.Oh, my. I have to believe that Kushner is, if not quite joking here, not exactly serious either.
—p.242
Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I have known.
—p.248
*
"Scintillating" is a word that has been denatured by overuse, but here I think it is precisely descriptive: The Hard Crowd scintillates. Shield your eyes against the glare, and partake.
Table of Contents adapted from Multnomah County Library's own entry on the book, this time.
July 9, 2022
Finding a collection of consistently excellent essays is like looking for a needle in a haystack. In almost every book of essays I have read, my reaction is all over the place. Some I love, some I hate and some I am indifferent to. This is true for The Hard Crowd.
Out of the 19 essays, 5 are excellent/5 * and 5 are ok/weak 3 * and 9 are so frigging boring/1*. At the end of the book it lists where the essays were originally published and basically all the Artforum ones I didn't like. It did make me understand better why those essays were like preaching to the choir. She was preaching to the choir lol. Those essays about artists and cult writers might have been more palatable to me if she had written them for an audience who didn't know anything about the subject at hand. However, they were written for people who knew exactly what she was talking about. If I were a big Denis Johnson or Clarice Lispector fan then I would have been absolutely thrilled to come across these essays. Since I had never heard of either, I was bored to tears. She did not write about them in a way that made me want to go read them.
My favorite essays were pretty much all her personal/more memoir-y ones. Girl on A Motorcycle, (about a crazy motorcycle race she ran) Not With the Band (about bartending in SF in the 90s) The Hard Crowd (about her teenage years) and We Are Orphans Here(about her visit to a Palestinian camp) were FAB. Is Prison Necessary? was the other great essay.
I had to work against my natural inclination to hate her. We are the same age and I also lived in SF when she did. She is about a bazillion times cooler than me, though. I kept thinking, omg I bet she was one of those super intimidating girls I ran across at Farley's or Zeitgeist. She was/is interested in so many things I find incredibly dull but that are cool. When I was in my teens and twenties I halfheartedly tried to be interested in stuff like muscle cars and motorcycles and outre writers(men, of course, always men) but it was exhausting, feigning an interest. Kushner makes me think of the bit in the book Gone Girl about 'cool girls'. And yes, I am pretty sure it's lame to be referencing a best selling thriller but oh well, what can you do?
Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much!
Out of the 19 essays, 5 are excellent/5 * and 5 are ok/weak 3 * and 9 are so frigging boring/1*. At the end of the book it lists where the essays were originally published and basically all the Artforum ones I didn't like. It did make me understand better why those essays were like preaching to the choir. She was preaching to the choir lol. Those essays about artists and cult writers might have been more palatable to me if she had written them for an audience who didn't know anything about the subject at hand. However, they were written for people who knew exactly what she was talking about. If I were a big Denis Johnson or Clarice Lispector fan then I would have been absolutely thrilled to come across these essays. Since I had never heard of either, I was bored to tears. She did not write about them in a way that made me want to go read them.
My favorite essays were pretty much all her personal/more memoir-y ones. Girl on A Motorcycle, (about a crazy motorcycle race she ran) Not With the Band (about bartending in SF in the 90s) The Hard Crowd (about her teenage years) and We Are Orphans Here(about her visit to a Palestinian camp) were FAB. Is Prison Necessary? was the other great essay.
I had to work against my natural inclination to hate her. We are the same age and I also lived in SF when she did. She is about a bazillion times cooler than me, though. I kept thinking, omg I bet she was one of those super intimidating girls I ran across at Farley's or Zeitgeist. She was/is interested in so many things I find incredibly dull but that are cool. When I was in my teens and twenties I halfheartedly tried to be interested in stuff like muscle cars and motorcycles and outre writers(men, of course, always men) but it was exhausting, feigning an interest. Kushner makes me think of the bit in the book Gone Girl about 'cool girls'. And yes, I am pretty sure it's lame to be referencing a best selling thriller but oh well, what can you do?
Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much!
April 27, 2021
A Didion for the new millennium.
June 2, 2021
The essays in The Hard Crowd are on subjects varied enough it's highly unlikely they'll all be of interest to any one person, and a few of them are actually sort of muddled. The best ones, though, are nothing short of excellent. The stand-outs are: Girl on A Motorcycle, a piece that sociologically dissects a race Kushner went on, We Are Orphans Here, about a Palestinian community locked into a slummy ghetto in Jerusalem, and The Hard Crowd, about growing up in gritty, old San Francisco. I moved to SF the same year as Kushner, 1979, and she evokes that pre-gentrified (and now utterly vanished) city so well it gave me chills, all the while dispensing important profundities on memory and place. By the end of the essay I wanted very much to be her friend.
May 23, 2021
These sorts of collections are for completists. If you love everything the author does you'll enjoy it. If not, you'll find the collection forgettable. Even if you do love the author you're not going to love everything and you're really only reading it because you'll read anything she does. This collection gives a background into Kushner's interests and where she has drawn material for her novels from.
I loved Kushner's novel "The Flamethrowers" but after reading the art essays in this book I'm sure that I'm not reading the section on New York artists the way she intended it. But that's how fiction goes. The reader gets a say just like the author. Whereas she seems to take the artists at face value I read them as fatuous blowhards desperately posturing to give some sort of deeper meaning to the crap they're turning out.
I often tell people I hate art. I like books and music, so I don't really hate art. What I really hate are all the trappings and posturings that go along with most art. There's a song by the Boston hardcore band SSD called "How much art can you take" the lyrics are only that phrase repeated over and over. It kept popping into my head when reading through the art essays in the book.
The art essays made me feel like The Dude in the scene from "The Big Lebowski" with Maude and Hans The Video Artist. I'd give the book 1 star for these, but the 3 personal essays are all 5 star worthy. The first "Girl on a motorcycle" is good, "Not with the band" in the middle is great and the final "The hard crowd" is phenomenal.
"Not with the band" tells of Kushner's time as a bartender at various dive bars and iconic music venues in San Francisco. It's great stuff and as a former door guy at a dive bar/music venue so much of it was a perfect look behind the scenes to that world of shitty tippers, terrible bands, and the business side of music.
"The hard crowd" is a great piece of nostalgia about the crazy things you get up to growing up in a certain scene. In it, she references Jim Caroll and the song "people who died" which is a good parallel to the essay. It's kind of shocking to sit back and think about the people you used to know who ended up meeting some kind of crazy terrible end. You wonder how the hell you had anything in common with these crazy people.
From "the hard crowd"
"I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine. To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, to not dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home. And I left for good, left San Francisco. My friends all stayed. But the place still defined me as it has them."
I loved Kushner's novel "The Flamethrowers" but after reading the art essays in this book I'm sure that I'm not reading the section on New York artists the way she intended it. But that's how fiction goes. The reader gets a say just like the author. Whereas she seems to take the artists at face value I read them as fatuous blowhards desperately posturing to give some sort of deeper meaning to the crap they're turning out.
I often tell people I hate art. I like books and music, so I don't really hate art. What I really hate are all the trappings and posturings that go along with most art. There's a song by the Boston hardcore band SSD called "How much art can you take" the lyrics are only that phrase repeated over and over. It kept popping into my head when reading through the art essays in the book.
The art essays made me feel like The Dude in the scene from "The Big Lebowski" with Maude and Hans The Video Artist. I'd give the book 1 star for these, but the 3 personal essays are all 5 star worthy. The first "Girl on a motorcycle" is good, "Not with the band" in the middle is great and the final "The hard crowd" is phenomenal.
"Not with the band" tells of Kushner's time as a bartender at various dive bars and iconic music venues in San Francisco. It's great stuff and as a former door guy at a dive bar/music venue so much of it was a perfect look behind the scenes to that world of shitty tippers, terrible bands, and the business side of music.
"The hard crowd" is a great piece of nostalgia about the crazy things you get up to growing up in a certain scene. In it, she references Jim Caroll and the song "people who died" which is a good parallel to the essay. It's kind of shocking to sit back and think about the people you used to know who ended up meeting some kind of crazy terrible end. You wonder how the hell you had anything in common with these crazy people.
From "the hard crowd"
"I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine. To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, to not dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home. And I left for good, left San Francisco. My friends all stayed. But the place still defined me as it has them."
October 27, 2022
Cars, San Francisco nights, boho family life, motorcycles, Palestine camps, and prison reform. What is there not to like about Rachel Kushner? Nicely edited anthology of Kushner's essays from magazines, literary introductions, etc. A real joy to read.
December 9, 2023
she’s so cool and smart and interesting
worth it for the first & last essays alone but there’s a lot of good stuff in here
worth it for the first & last essays alone but there’s a lot of good stuff in here
July 10, 2024
my new personal literary it girl
September 1, 2024
Some of these were brilliant - the early ones mainly, about illegal motorbike racing and Jerusalem, and I loved hearing her thoughts on Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson.
January 1, 2022
Really Rachel Kushner is the coolest girl ever- she writes about her life in different places and travels and motorcycle racing ,and vintage cars and English 1960`s novels ,the ones i also love. She also has lived in Italy and understands Italian people very well ,she is probably 20 or more years younger than i am but much in common . Wish i was so very daring and brave at her age. if you have not read Flamethrower get right on it quite the book,quite the writer-
December 23, 2020
This was an interesting collection. I hadn't read any of her non-fiction before but really enjoyed it. Kushner is one if thoes authors I would love to hang out with. In these essays which were written throughout the last 20 years she covers a variety of subjects. Her more personal essays were my favorites. Like one about a motorcycle race down in Mexico, and another about working in various rock club. And the literary essays I enjoyed too, about Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy and another about Margaret Duras, all left me compelled to read more of their work. There is a reportage piece on the abolition of jails that was very thought provoking as well. This was a well compiled collection. I did wish that the dates she wrote the essays had been included though. There is no doubt Kushner is a magnificent writer. Being able to write interesting non-fiction as well as fiction really shows her skills. Thank you to @simonschusterca for sending me this #arc. Available April 6th.
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For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
May 2, 2021
Rtc when I collate my notes from the LRB event I went to!
September 18, 2022
Some of these essays are vivid, searing tales of adventures and lives well lived. Others were long and winding, with seemingly no motive or engine. Take the good with the bad with this one.
March 24, 2024
as someone who Does Not Drive i love when someone believes in the inherent sexiness of a good motorcycle and rachel kusher really knows!! start to finish great essays and also an unexpectedly cool thing is how much kushner writes about autonomia. if i had to pick three essential pieces its the titlular essay, the one about Anna, and the one about memories and fabric.
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