Episode 415: Shea Serrano, Anthony Bourdain, Alix Ohlin

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• Shea Serrano's 'Hip-Hop (And Other Things)' ponders some of rap history's biggest questions

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  When Shea Serrano was 17, his father bought him his first car. Freshly minted with a tax return check, Shea and his dad found a small, “kind of sketchy” dealership around their hometown of San Antonio, Texas.

  “I was like, ‘Dad, can I get this one?’ Serrano recalls to WPR’s “BETA.” “And it was within the price range, which was $2,000, so I got it.”

  It was there when Serrano became the owner of little red Hyundai with one particular special feature.

  “It had a CD player in it,” Serrano said. So, he popped in the “Harlem World” CD by Ma$e and felt the first pangs of teenage freedom. It was then that listening to rap became an even more heightened experience.

  “I just felt like I was the king of the world while I was listening to that album in that car, riding around on my own for the first time,” Serrano recalled.

  It’s no surprise to learn that part of the dedication to Serrano’s latest book, “Hip-Hop (And Other Things)” reads as follows:

  “to listening to rap while driving around in a car. Rap sounds better in cars. I don’t know why that’s true, I just know that it is.”

  “Hip-Hop (And Other Things)” or HAOT (as Serrano playfully refers to it as on Twitter) is the third and final entry into the best-selling “And Other Things” trilogy by Serrano and artist Arturo Torres. The first two are “Basketball (And Other Things)” and “Movies (And Other Things).”

  Like the two before it, Serrano structures the book as a fun and engaging series of thought experiments about the subject matter (hence the unifying subtitle of “A collection of questions, asked, answered, illustrated), but this final entry is clearly the most personal.

  “I’ve been really excited about this book in particular, because when (Torres and I) started the series out, we said, ‘Hey, what’s the one we want to end on?’” Serrano recalled. “Which of those do we want to be like the anchor, the big finale? You know you got to finish strong. You don’t want to ‘Godfather III’ the situation. You want to ‘John Wick 3’ the situation like a big flurry.”

  “We really, really care a great, great deal about rap,” he continued. “So, let’s end on that one. So, we made that decision six years ago in 2015 when we started working on all these. So, I’ve been really excited about this, and that’s why it’s No. 1 for me, just because we knew we were going to land here.”

  The book is laced with fun angles and approaches to seminal rap albums, artists, groups, beefs and debates that offer as much intrigue and history as they do fun. It’s almost like a book version of Serrano’s popular rap podcast, “No Skips.”

  In an early chapter, Serrano ponders the legacy of Missy Elliott, her place in rap history, and more specifically, how she revamped women’s roles in rap. The chapter shares the sad saga of how her successful behind-the-scenes career hit the harsh reality of the spotlight.

  Serrano lays out how Elliott wrote, produced and had a featured verse on the 1993 song, “That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of” for then child rapper Raven-Symoné. However, when the time came to film the video, unbeknownst to her, Elliott’s verse was lip-synced and filmed by another woman.

  “There’s like a thinner woman with lighter skin, she was doing Missy’s parts. And they told her that she just didn’t have the right look to be in the video,” Serrano said. “And this is, of course, the thing that broke Missy’s heart.”

  A few years later, Elliott released her debut album, “Supa Dupa Fly.” The lead single “The Rain” — which is arguably the most iconic Elliott song and helped the album achieve platinum status — featured a music video with a not-so-subtle statement. The Hype Williams-directed video showcased Elliott in a now famous inflated black leather outfit shot through a distorted fisheye lens.

  “She’s exaggerating all of the things that they said were wrong about her in the beginning. You know her, her size, her color, her shape, her everything, and she’s like, ‘No, here’s a bigger version of all of it,’” Serrano said. “And from that moment forward, everybody knew like, ‘Oh, this is a special artist that we’re watching here.’ It’s really a great moment in rap by itself, but then you learn that part, and you’re like, ‘Oh, this meant even more than you knew at the time.’”

  Throughout the book, Serrano posits fun chapters on sorting out the best rap duo of all time or offering his thoughts on Biggie vs. Tupac or trying to figure out what album was better between Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” or Kendrick Lamar’s “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.”

  “You start out with a question, and then you just go, ‘OK, like, how do we pick this apart?’ Serrano said. “I want you to walk me through, ‘How did you get there?’ Because I have found that people are much more receptive to a result, to an answer of a question, if they know how you arrived at that thing. It makes for a much more interesting conversation or reading experience.”

  Serrano also sifts through the legacy of Nas’ 1994 pantheon-worthy debut, “Illmatic” by ranking the lines on the album as the most “Nasian.” It provides a necessary and unique perspective to one of the most acclaimed rappers and albums of hip-hop’s history.

  “Number one, Nas is maybe the greatest writer in rap ever, and this is when he did the best writing of his career,” Serrano said. “And it is at once an album that plants a flag in a moment in time and says, ‘This is what rap sounds like in New York in 1994 at its highest level.’ But then also it like peeked forward as well. This is what hopefully rap will sound like for the rest of time.”

  “(Illmatic) was like all of the things you wanted to see in a rapper and in a rap album all at once, and it came from a kid,” Serrano said. “He’s in his early 20s when he does this so seemingly out of nowhere, and it just presents you with this brilliant piece of art. And everybody freaked out about it, and it didn’t matter how much you freaked out about it or heard about it beforehand. When you got the chance to listen to it, it always was better than you thought it was going to be.”

  Although he’s firm on this being the final book in the “And Other Things” series, Serrano jokes that if he was forced (or was given enough crazy money) to write another installment, he’d probably land on television as the subject for his next collection of questions asked, answered and illustrated.

  “‘Television (and other things)’ would probably be the one that made the most sense, because if you can connect it, it’s very easy to draw a line from like basketball to hip hop. We can draw that same line from movies to television,” says Serrano.

  Hopefully, Serrano’s next car that he buys has a television in it.

• Laurie Woolever takes us inside the life of Anthony Bourdain

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  Editor and writer Laurie Woolever first met Anthony Bourdain in 2002 when she was hired to recipe test and edit his book “Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook.”

  By then, the celebrity chef and travel documentarian was well known for his groundbreaking memoir “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” which came out in 2000 and marked a turning point in both his life and the hospitality industry.

  After spending nearly a decade working by his side, Woolever has published “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.” The book includes interviews with nearly 100 people who crossed paths with Bourdain throughout his life.

  Bourdain, who died by suicide in June 2018, is still missed by many.

  Woolever said when she first met Bourdain, she expected a brash, outgoing character with a big personality, but what she encountered was much more reserved.

  “The person that I met that day was actually much more reserved and quiet, kind of shy and almost socially awkward,” Woolever told WPR’s “BETA.” “We had a pretty quick meeting with his other chef and the owner of the restaurant, and it was just not at all what I expected, but he was lovely. He was much more kind of ground level than I expected, and that really was the case throughout my time knowing and working with him.”

  But his voice came out in his writing, Woolever said, pointing specifically to “Kitchen Confidential” which became a New York Times bestseller.

  “Tony had such a distinctive and really charismatic and engaging writing voice,” Woolever explained. “You know, it was funny, it was sharp. It brought in a lot of cultural and historical references. It was deeply personal in as much as he skewered other people, he was also very willing to skewer himself and lay bare his own faults and, you know, bad decisions, often to hilarious effect.”

  The timing and subject matter of his memoir also helped it skyrocket on the charts, Woolever said.

  “This was a time in food writing and food media where things were very buttoned up and all of the magazine articles really focused on high-end luxury and really just the surface of things,” she said. “Tony was the first in his era to really pull back the layers and say, ‘This is what really goes on. And this is the truth about the entire business, not just what you see on the plate or what you see at the front door, but really the whole thing.’ And people love to be told the truth and to really know the secrets of what goes on behind the facade.”

  When Woolever interviewed Bourdain’s editor Karen Rinaldi, she learned that Bourdain feared becoming a sellout for pursuing a career in TV.

  “I think he saw television as part of this grab at the brass ring,” Woolever explained. “He understood that if he wanted to keep being successful, if he wanted to figure out a way to make money and make a living and not have to go back into the kitchen, that he would have to expand his profile beyond making books. I think he understood that if you wanted to keep this thing going, he was going to have to do television.”

  Anderson Cooper told Woolever that “finding your voice as a writer is one thing. Making that into television is a completely other thing.”

  And yet Bourdain appeared to transition incredibly smoothly.

  Woolever said it helped he had the right partners — Lydia Tenaglia and Chris Collins of Zero Point Zero Productions.

  “They recognized right away that Tony had such a singular voice and they were really champions of him getting to keep that voice and getting to refine it for television. They were not willing to compromise and try and shoehorn Tony into what a network probably would have wanted from him, which is barbecue rodeo in a parking lot,” she said. “You know, they really wanted to make sure that his voice, which was the thing that broke him out into the world, that that was maintained as much as possible.”

  Bourdain also wrote some kitchen scenes for the restaurant storyline of David Simon’s HBO series, “Treme.”

  “I remember when he got the news that he was going to be a staff writer for ‘Treme’ and he said, this is an absolute high watermark for my career. He was so thrilled. They brought him in for at least two, if not three seasons, to write the restaurant’s storyline. And he was so good at it,” Woolever said.

  Bourdain launched “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” on CNN in April 2013, letting him showcase a more serious side.

  Woolever said CNN’s resources, like security and clearance, made a lot of that possible: “They were able to use those things to get deeper than they might have with the other cable networks that he was involved with in the past. So he was able to tell the kinds of stories that he really wanted to tell.”

  When thinking about Bourdain’s death, Woolever is left with more questions than answers.

  “He was someone who lived life always at 11 or at a thousand percent, right? So one thing that had really taken more and more of his time and energy was a romantic relationship that he was in for the last two years of his life. So there was some trouble in his relationship in that last week before he died,” she said. “So I think the short answer is he had a spasm of grief, loneliness, of extreme heartbreak, disappointment, and that led him to make a really terrible decision to end his own life.”

  Woolever said Bourdain left a huge legacy, inspiring a lot of people to leave their jobs to work as a line cook, a chef or a maître d’hôtel.

  “I think he’s also probably encouraged a lot of people to look at whatever it is in their lives, whatever their careers are, whatever their story is, and see something worth telling and that if you just tell the truth in an engaging way, that that could be something that somebody else wants to read,” she said.

  She also thinks he encouraged people to travel in a more mindful way and to spend time looking at the regular people who live in a place and what are their living conditions are like.

  “I think in a way that wasn’t really part of the conversation 20 or 25 years ago,” she said. “Now people are wondering, are people making enough money? Do the people who live here get enough to eat? How does the government play into how people are living and what they’re eating? So I think he just had an enormous impact on the culture.”

• Story mapping: Author Alix Ohlin on her latest book of short stories exploring the consequences of desire

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  If you enjoy reading short stories that grab your attention from the opening sentence and keep you immersed until the final line, you don’t want to miss Alix Ohlin’s latest short-story collection, “We Want What We Want.”

  Ohlin has an uncanny ability to write short stories that don’t waste any words. Her stories explore fascinating relationships between people struggling to figure out what they want out of life.

  Her newest collection of short stories is her sixth book — three short-story collections and three novels. Her novel, “Dual Citizens,” was short-listed for the Scotiabank GIller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Ohlin’s work has been published in The New Yorker, “The Best American Short Stories” and other publications. She’s also the director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing, Canada’s first creative writing program.

  The title “We Want What We Want” is a quote from the pessimistic German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. It’s referenced by the leader of a cult in one of her short stories called “The Brooks Brothers Guru.”

  Ohlin told WPR’s “BETA” the quote resonated because “in all of these stories, people want things and can’t necessarily control the effects or consequences of those desires, or at least they come up against them … And sometimes we do want things that can lead us into the realm of the ridiculous or into the realm of making mistakes.”

  “But it’s also how we learn about ourselves. We learn about what’s lacking in our lives by figuring out what we want that we don’t currently have,” she continued. “So that’s the string that ties all of these stories together. This question of what are we looking for? What are we searching for? And what happens when we try to find it?“

  There’s this sense of subtle continuity that runs throughout Ohlin’s book. It comes across as the literary equivalent of a concept album because of this connective tissue that runs throughout “We Want What We Want.”

  “I think that the experience of reading short stories all together is like an album in that each story is a bit different, but hopefully, they do come from or result in a unified, aesthetic experience,” she said. “I often think about the connections between stories and songs and songwriting and music.”

  Ohlin admits that the desire to remake one’s life that so many of her characters feel is something that resonates with her personally.

  “I’ve moved around a lot. I’ve lived in a lot of different places in the U.S. and Canada,” she explained. “And I’m still connected to some people from different chapters of my life and not connected to others. And I think a lot about that and what it means and how our lives are made up of some experiences that are continuous and others that are discontinuous and the things that change and the things that stay the same.”

  However, this doesn’t mean there’s a different kind of life Ohlin would rather be living.

  “One of the great things about being a writer is that in my work, I can experience all kinds of other lives that I’m not living myself,” she said.

  “I kind of get to have the best of both worlds,” she added. “I’m often someone who’s pretty sedate and well-behaved in my day-to-day life. And so it’s great for me to have the outlet of putting the mistakes or the wayward desires into the characters in my books, rather than having to experience those consequences myself.”

  Most short-story collections focus on short narratives; Ohlin takes that even further by focusing on small, human, granular moments. Ohlin said she’s really interested in story structure, as well as stories’ relationship to time. She loves to focus in on a certain moment in time. And she’s also really intrigued by creating leaps in time which result in a story following a character’s life five or 10 years later.

  “I think that’s something that fiction is really well-situated to explore — the interior of people’s lives and then the kind of echoing ripple effects that ensue, from someone’s childhood to adulthood or several years later,” she said. “So I often think about stories as having a physical shape or structure, a story in the shape of a triangle or in the shape of a prism. And then I’ll try to write something that, at least in my mind, reflects that structure and hope it brings me to a kind of more inventive way of putting scenes together.”

  

  When Ohlin reads stories she admires, she often finds it helpful to map their forms visually.

  “I really love visual art, and I find it a real inspiration for writing,” she explained. “And when I read, I have an almost synesthetic experience where I see the story in a visual way and I’ll often draw a map or a diagram of it.”

  “So to me, a certain story might look like a pendulum swing in my mind, and that’s how I see the journey of the characters across the page. Or a story might look like an aqueduct with some things kind of happening above and then other things happening closer to the water below.”

  “Thinking about these alternative maps or diagrams of stories is really inspiring, and it also feels to me more true to the complicated, fragmented nature of our lives today. So I use those maps and then I try to think, ‘Well, what map would make sense for my characters in this story? In this situation, what can I draw for them that would make sense?’”

  

  Sometimes Ohlin creates story maps for her own stories too.

  “I often think of where can I find the movement or the shape in my story? Where is there a swerve? I like to think of a story as having a sinuous kind of movement, like a snake slithering along the ground in the sense that I don’t want it to be a straightforward experience that’s super linear from point A to point B,” she said. “I hope that by finding some kind of unexpected angles or triangulation or curves, then I can surprise and delight the reader in the same way that I feel surprise and delight in a feeling of discovery or the unexpected myself when I’m writing these stories.”