The New Yorker - April 4, 2016

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APRIL 4, 2016
FOOD & TRAVEL ISSUE
APRIL 4, 2016
7 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
27 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson on Brussels and the G.O.P.;
a Trump bust; witchcraft; lonely city;
James Surowiecki on Valeant’s fall.
OUR FOOTLOOSE CORRESPONDENTS
Lauren Collins
32
Shon Arieh-Lerer
39
Dana Goodyear
40
Carolyn Kormann
48
Dexter Filkins
58
Roz Chast
66
Kevin Canty
68
Come to the Fair
Food, wine, and politics meet in Paris.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Grain Forecast
ANNALS OF ALCOHOL
Mezcal Sunrise
Searching for bliss in Oaxaca.
LETTER FROM LA PAZ
The Tasting-Menu Initiative
Serving the rich to elevate the poor.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
The End of Ice
News from a Himalayan glacier.
SKETCHBOOK
“Wonder-Land ”
FICTION
“God’s Work ”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
David Remnick
74
Aretha Franklin onstage.
Alexandra Schwartz
82
84
“The Association of Small Bombs.”
Briefly Noted
Alex Ross
86
Anthony Lane
88
Calvin Trillin
Joyce Carol Oates
43
65
BOOKS
MUSICAL EVENTS
Operatic startups.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
“Batman v Superman,” “Francofonia.”
POEMS
“Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?”
“This Is the Season”
COVER
Jaime Hernandez
“Bun Voyage”
DRAWINGS Amy Kurzweil, Frank Cotham, Benjamin Schwartz, Zachary Kanin, Liana Finck, Robert Leighton, Michael Maslin, Will
McPhail, Harry Bliss, Charlie Hankin, Tom Cheney, David Sipress, Barbara Smaller, Tom Toro, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Seth Fleishman
SPOTS Marie Assénat
CONTRIBUTORS
Dexter Filkins (“The End of Ice,” p. 58),
a staff writer, has been reporting about
the Himalayas since 1998.
Simon Norfolk (Photographs, pp. 58, 63)
won a 2015 Sony World Photo Award
for his photographs of the Lewis
Glacier, on Mt. Kenya, which are now
on view at the Kunst Haus Wien, in
Vienna.
Lauren Collins (“Come to the Fair,” p. 32)
is a staff writer living in Paris.
Michael Schulman (The Talk of the Town,
p. 29), the theatre editor of the Goings
On About Town section, will publish
his first book, “Her Again: Becoming
Meryl Streep,” in April.
Dana Goodyear (“Mezcal Sunrise,”
p. 40) won a 2015 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for her New
Yorker article “Élite Meat.” She is the
author of “Anything That Moves.”
Calvin Trillin (Poem, p. 43) is a regular
contributor. A collection of his New
Yorker pieces, “Jackson, 1964: And Other
Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America,” will be published in June.
Roz Chast (Sketchbook, p. 66), a cartoonist and illustrator, is the author of “Can’t
We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” Her work has appeared in the
magazine since 1978.
Kevin Canty (Fiction, p. 68) will pub-
Carolyn Kormann (“The Tasting-Menu
Initiative,” p. 48) is a member of the
magazine’s editorial staff.
Jaime Hernandez (Cover), the author
of “The Love Bunglers,” is the creator,
with Gilbert Hernandez, of the ongoing comic-book series “Love and Rockets.” This is his first New Yorker cover.
lish his eighth book, a novel entitled
“The Underworld,” later this year. He
lives in Missoula, Montana.
Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 82) is a
staff writer. Her last article for the magazine, “The Long Night,” about the
terrorist attacks in Paris, was published
in the November 30, 2015, issue.
SLIDE SHOW
Scenes from the Salon International de
l’Agriculture, France’s annual meeting
of farmers, booze, and bovines.
VIDEO
An artist pursues perfection by
creating extremely realistic dolls of
newborn babies.
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Everything in the magazine, and more.
THE MAIL
HOW TO LIVE
As an anthropologist at Amherst College, I was interested to read Nick
Paumgarten’s Profile of Peter Adeney,
a.k.a. Mr. Money Mustache, a lifestyle guru who espouses a frugal and
Spartan way of life (“The Scold,” February 29th). Mustachianism is similar
to one of my areas of study: the neomonastic movement in the United States.
The majority of the followers of this
movement are Christians in their twenties and thirties, who live communally,
share rules of life, and practice collective prayer. Almost all of them find fault
with the “typical” American life, particularly the drive to consume, and most of
them adhere to the “theology of enough,”
inspired by the Christian activist Shane
Claiborne. The impact of consumerism
on the environment is part of what drives
both eco-evangelists like Adeney and
neo-monastics to live as sparely as they
do. But neo-monastics tend to go even
further, viewing their life style as a means
to address issues of social justice and inequality. Both movements believe that
our national focus on the accumulation
of wealth and of objects has created an
unequal system—one that results in an
immoral destruction of the environment
and of individuals.
Amy Cox Hall
Amherst, Mass.
Adeney is admirable for his commitment to lowering consumption, and he
may be well aware that Mustachianism is untenable for certain people, but
it’s still worth noting the environment
in which his system of living was developed. He was born to educated,
white-collar parents, who helped fund
his education. He worked in technology, a lucrative field with salaries well
above the median levels in the U.S.,
which is often closed to people of color
and to women. He is able to bike and
walk everywhere, and he lives in Longmont, Colorado, where the local government has made that a viable option.
His accumulated wealth and skills allow
him some financial security. Adeney’s
choice to live off twenty-four thousand
dollars a year is just that: a choice, which
he is privileged to make.
Leighann Starkey
New York City
1
ALPHA AND OMEGA
In his article about the so-called leadership industry, Joshua Rothman chronicles the long history of failed theoretical models of developing leaders
(“Shut Up and Sit Down,” February 29th). The leadership-training industry may be flourishing, but a paucity of effective leaders persists. Some
courses, such as those at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of
Commerce, where I teach, have moved
away from the traditional idea of leadership as simply a set of attributes or
traits—like charisma, authenticity, and
“presence”—that are easy to oversimplify and misapply. It’s more useful to
conceive of the subject in actionable
terms: working with other people to
create constructive change. Like the
hundreds of other definitions of leadership, this one isn’t perfect. But this
model, rather than defining leadership
by a job title, makes it a set of activities that are accessible to everyone,
even to “followers.” And followership
isn’t mere compliance; followers are
closer to what Rothman refers to as
“emergent leaders,” people who lead
from below to create positive change.
Understanding leadership as a collaboration between leaders and followers means that the responsibilities of
leadership are shared and distributed.
Leadership development, then, requires
identifying important problems and
working together—up, down, and
across hierarchies.
Thomas S. Bateman
Charlottesville, V.A.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
[email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
5
MARCH 30 – APRIL 5, 2016
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Global sounds have long traversed borders more smoothly than their bearers. Anoushka Shankar’s father, Ravi,
carried the velveteen sitar west in 1956; by the sixties, with a little help from George Harrison, the classical
Indian instrument had become a pop staple. On April 2-4 at City Winery, Shankar plays from her new album,
“Land of Gold,” blending traditional sitar with pop tropes, her personal response to the trauma of displaced
refugees worldwide. Relieved of classical boundaries, she says, “the instrument’s just allowed to run free.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY GARETH MCCONNELL
1
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Metropolitan Museum
“Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play”
The Met goes C.S.I. in this show of pictures
in its collection, from nineteenth-century mug
shots of suspected anarchists rounded up by the
French police to Richard Avedon’s 1960 portrait
of Dick Hickock, one of the killers profiled in
Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Among the
familiar names here are Weegee, William Klein,
Larry Clark, and Andy Warhol (whose screen
print of an electric chair is one of the show’s few
color images). But unknown photographers, most
employed by the police, dominate, and the anonymity on both sides of the camera compounds
the impression of spying on an underworld. Unnamed pickpockets, shoplifters, and armed robbers are joined by a number of famous criminals,
including the original Wild Bunch (the basis
for Sam Peckinpah’s film), looking more dashing than dangerous in a tiny tintype, and Patty
Hearst, toting a machine gun, in the famous security-camera shot that became front-page news.
Through July 31.
Met Breuer
“Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible”
Most critical responses to this inaugural show at
the Metropolitan Museum’s annex for modern
and contemporary art (in the former home of the
Whitney) have quibbled with its theme, which
tracks changing notions of “finished” through
almost seven centuries of Western art, from Jan
van Eyck to Elizabeth Peyton. Its critics find it a
gauzy sort of curatorial idea, which it is, but with
one overriding, tremendous virtue: it calls attention to visual facts. This is a great show. Mining
the Met’s own matchless collection and applying
its muscle to extract major loans, the show convenes works of genius and items of charm and surprise. Aside from pieces obviously abandoned by
artists while still in progress, the exhibits pique
interest with variant senses of what constitutes
a stopping point. But you could also ignore the
theme and just look. The show is a non-stop sequence of arousals and exhilarations. (No need
for examples. Almost everything on view is exemplary.) The blowsy miscellany of the works in
“Unfinished” is exactly the right tenor for the Met
Breuer. Let the big house on Fifth Avenue mount,
as it does with wonderful consistency, rigorous his-
Museum of Modern Art
“A Japanese Constellation:
Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond”
This dense and satisfying show traces interrelationships in three generations of architects, with a focus
on Toyo Ito, the paterfamilias. Ito trained under the
concrete-loving Metabolists. But when he founded
his own firm, in 1971, Ito favored organic forms and
transparent surfaces, like those in his seminal Sendai Mediatheque, completed in 2001, a sheer cube
supported not by internal walls but with reticulated, off-center columns. After working for Ito in
the booming eighties, Kazuyo Sejima struck out on
her own, designing modest but deceptively multipurpose homes and community centers. In 1995, she
founded the pioneering firm SANAA with her student Ryue Nishizawa. (One of their notable projects
is New York’s New Museum, whose off-kilter boxes
look even better in a cardboard model here than
they do on the Bowery.) Some of Ito and Sejima’s
protégés are also included: Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa
Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Of the three, Fujimoto
is the most compelling; his sheer multi-platform
house in Tokyo collapses the distinction between
exhibitionists and voyeurs. Given that the Pritzker Prize was awarded to SANAA in 2010, and to
Ito in 2013, architectural oddsmakers should take
note. Through July 4.
Neue Galerie
“Munch and Expressionism”
For more than a century, Munch’s reputation has
circled the canon of modern art like a big plane
seeking a runway. He is famous, sure, for the
flayed, undulating figure of existential panic in
“The Scream” (1893) and for a few other images,
touching on love and death, from the first, rockstar-like decade of his career. But the subsequent,
prolific glories of the Norwegian painter, who lived
until 1944, are little recognized. This exciting show
settles his one textbook claim to historical consequence: he is the father of Expressionism, the most
important modern movement in German and, to
some extent, Austrian art. Powerful Expressionist
works in the show, such as Ludwig Kirchner’s sensational touchstone, “Street, Dresden” (1908), perform like an honor guard for forty-seven Munchs,
including the artist’s 1895 pastel copy of “The
Scream.” (This picture was briefly the costliest
art work ever sold at auction, when it fetched nearly
a hundred and twenty million dollars, in 2012.) The
Expressionist whom Munch liked most was Emil
Nolde, another thornily independent spirit, who
is represented in the show by a large lithograph,
“Young Danish Woman” (1913), and three handcolored repetitions of it: works of fantastic intensity, with distorted features and dissonant colors,
that dare unusual ugliness to take unusual beauty
by surprise. But even Nolde—who, incidentally, fell
prey to Nazi sympathies, as Munch did not—tends
toward generality in what he expresses. Munch
specifies. His example to other artists is simple,
really: be a highly gifted but, especially, a particular person, and go for broke. Through June 13.
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GALLERIES—UPTOWN
The artist’s hand is a long-standing subject—just think of the caves at Lascaux. “Splurt” is one of
the charming new paintings in Elena Sisto’s current exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
Aspen Mays
The Oakland-based photographer makes a subtle but solid New York début. Dispensing with
IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LORI BOOKSTEIN FINE ART, NEW YORK
ART
torical and monographic shows. This one fulfills
a yen to experience, one at a time, works whose
cynosure is their uniqueness, with no big rationale for hanging together beyond being individually very, very good. Through Sept. 4.
ART
cameras, Mays creates monochromatic photograms based on the patterns of bandannas, one of
which belonged to Georgia O’Keeffe. In several
pieces, a starburst pattern repeats until it looks
like fizzling sparklers. Elsewhere, paisley motifs
are arranged in a loose grid gone wonky. To recreate the dots on O’Keeffe’s bandanna, Mays employed rows of pins; where the paper was unexposed to light, the heads of the pins left a ghostly
design. Patterns are fragile anchors for work that
is largely abstract, but Mays introduces order only
to break it down. Through April 30. (Higher Pictures, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th St. 212-249-6100.)
1
GALLERIES—CHELSEA
Eberhard Havekost
Diehard fans of painting probably know Giovanni
de Paolo’s 1445 masterpiece, “The Creation of the
World and the Expulsion from Paradise,” which
often hangs at the Met. One sublimely weird detail, a disk of concentric rings encircling a landscape, could be an emblem of painting itself—the
mystifying union of abstraction and representation. It may come to mind in Havekost’s daringly syncopated show, and not just because its
title is “Expulsion from Paradise Freeze.” (Cinematic freeze-frames are relevant here.) Havekost’s paintings shift, radically but precisely, in
tone, scale, and subject matter. “The de Kooning Dream,” a gooey tangle of brushstrokes,
and “Sweet Exorcist,” a monochrome expanse of
the shade of peach often called “flesh,” share the
walls with a cropped portrait of parted lips and a
nine-foot-tall image of a cracked iPhone, among
other strange and deft pictures. Through April 2.
(Kern, 532 W. 20th St. 212-367-9663.)
Rosalind Solomon
The octogenarian New York photographer, a
standout in the current exhibition “This Place,”
at the Brooklyn Museum, shows work made between 1975 and 2001, in locations from South
Africa to Peru to Tennessee. (Also on view is
a three-channel video, whose soundtrack pairs
music and Solomon’s voice.) Like Diane Arbus
and Lisette Model before her, Solomon has never
been interested in pretty pictures. Her black-andwhite portraits, whether probing or empathetic,
aim to unsettle. A naked couple in an awkward
embrace, a matron wearing jewels in her bubble
bath, a birthday boy looking sullen—these pictures, like all the works here, protest complacency. Through April 16. (Silverstein, 535 W. 24th
St. 212-627-3930.)
Nicholas Hlobo
One of the most intriguing figures of South Africa’s
vibrant art scene makes his New York début. The
high point is a group of uncanny assemblages, hanks
of leather sutured to found objects. A chunk of
driftwood, conjoined to a curve of black leather and
a mass of red tentacles, has the menace of a beached
sea creature. Hlobo’s paintings, ribbons and leather
stitched onto canvas, are far less enigmatic, and occasionally feel half finished. Titles often freight
Hlobo’s work with themes of loss, tradition, and
gay black identity—but, to understand them, you’d
need to consult a Xhosa dictionary. Through April 17.
(Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie St. 212-254-0054.)
“Concept, Performance, Documentation,
Language”
Don’t let the dry title fool you. This lively gathering of more than fifty artists maps a certain propensity, in the days of three-figure loft rents in SoHo,
when the rigors of early Conceptualism evolved
into a constellation of more playful, first-person approaches. Some artists here (such as Hannah Wilke,
Vito Acconci, and Lorraine O’Grady, who is represented by photos of her avatar Mlle. Bourgeoise
Noire, or Miss Black Middle Class) won museum
recognition, but far more deserve greater attention. The video pioneer Roger Welch, in his “O.J.
Simpson Project,” interviewed the not yet notorious running back and projected the footage alongside scenes of a football game. And the witty Neke
Carson printed an advertisement for “Art Therapy
for Conceptual Artists,” sarcastically exhorting his
colleagues to remove their thinking caps and get
their hands dirty: “Put away your pens for a pound
of Plastiline.” Through April 17. (Algus, 132 Delancey
St. 212-844-0074.)
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MUSEUMS SHORT LIST
MOMA PS1 “Cao Fei.” Opens April 3. • Guggenheim Museum “Peter Fischli David Weiss: How
to Work Better.” Through April 27. • Whitney
Museum “Flatlands.” Through April 17. • Brooklyn Museum “Agitprop!” Through Aug. 7. • American Museum of Natural History “Dinosaurs
Among Us.” Through Jan. 2. • Asia Society “Ka-
makura: Realism and Spirituality in the Sculpture of Japan.” Through May 8. • Frick Collection “Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture.”
Through June 5. • Jewish Museum “Isaac Mizrahi:
An Unruly History.” Through Aug. 7. • Noguchi
Museum “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony.” Through
July 24. • Studio Museum in Harlem “Rashaad Newsome: This Is What I Want to See.” Through June 26.
1 1
GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN
GALLERIES SHORT LIST
Justin Vivian Bond
The downtown superstar—whom Hilton Als
once called “the best cabaret artist of his generation”—is a dab hand at exhibition-making, too.
Bond (who is transgender and favors the pronoun “v”) has long nursed an admiration, bordering on obsession, for the former Estée Lauder
model Karen Graham. She and Bond appear side
by side in airy (also campy) drawings here, and
on custom wallpaper whose wispy floral patterns would not look out of place in a piano bar.
A spotlight and a red carpet turn one stretch of
wallpaper into a step-and-repeat, a landing strip
for the photogenic. Whether that person is male,
female, or neither, rest assured it is somebody
fabulous. Through April 18. (Participant, Inc., 253
E. Houston St. 212-254-4334.)
B UPTOWN Tacita Dean Marian Goodman. Through
April 23. (24 W. 57th St. 212-977-7160.) • David
Hammons Mnuchin. Through May 27. (45 E. 78th
St. 212-861-0020.) • Shirley Jaffe / John Newman De Nagy. Through April 30. (724 Fifth Ave.,
at 57th St. 212-262-5050.) B CHELSEA Raoul De Keyser Zwirner. Through April 23. (537 W. 20th St.
212-517-8677.) • Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin Rosen. Through April 16. (525 W. 24th St. 212627-6000.) • Ellsworth Kelly Marks. Through
April 30. (523 W. 24th St. 212-243-0200.) B DOWNTOWN John Divola Maccarone. Through April
23. (630 Greenwich St. 212-431-4977.) • Ibrahim
el-Salahi Salon 94 Bowery. Through April 24. (243
Bowery, at Stanton St. 212-979-0001.) • “Chatham Square” Foxy Production. Through April 24.
(2 E. Broadway. 212-239-2758.)
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
NIGHT LIFE
1
ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.
“The Music of David Bowie”
“The next David Bowie lives somewhere in the
world . . . but they’re not getting a shot,” Tony
Visconti, who produced for the English singer
for more than four decades, said during a keynote
speech at this year’s SXSW music conference, in
Austin. “They’re not being financed.” Beyond
all the magic that Bowie’s music, videos, and
films gave to the world, his passing, in January,
called to mind a bygone music industry driven
by discovery and risk, and the explosive results
of pouring resources into an act that looked and
sounded like nothing else, even though it could
very well fail. Sprawling careers like Bowie’s,
marked by fluctuating successes and failures
across several decades, today seem as archaic as
the millions of vinyl records and compact disks
he sold. This star-laden tribute concert began
coming together months before Bowie died—
the singular artists on the bill couldn’t have foreseen the weight of the gig. But figures like Debbie Harry, J Mascis, Michael Stipe, the Roots,
and the Pixies, testaments to the power of fearless pop, have long lived and played by Bowie’s
example. (Carnegie Hall, Seventh Ave. at 57th St.
212-247-7800. March 31.)
RagaTone Ensemble
Its name a sly reference to another hybrid music
genre, reggaetón, this upbeat, energetic sevenman ensemble not only combines Indian and
Western instruments but also fuses classical and
pop styles, with healthy dollops of Hollywood,
Bollywood, and jazz thrown in for good measure.
The band performs with surpassing technique
and ambition—in the same way the Skatalites
made the James Bond theme seem inevitable as
a ska vehicle, RagaTone’s take on “Mission Impossible,” its syncopation and drive spiced by
Indian modalities, is a perfect fit. (Joe’s Pub, 425
Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. April 1.)
Weezer
What’s Rivers Cuomo to do? How was his disaffected, polyester alt-rock supposed to grow out
but not grow up? Weezer has long since left the
garage: it’s been more than twenty years since
their self-titled début, filled with achy, beta-male
ballads like “Buddy Holly” and “Say It Ain’t So,”
displaced Seattle grunge’s hold on early-nineties
rock radio. The Santa Monica haze of 2001’s
“Hash Pipe” carried the band through MTV’s
second golden age (when nothing guaranteed airtime more than a bleepable chorus), but the sunlit pop that surrounded the single on the “Green
Album” alienated their flock by the start of the
aughts. Sometimes it feels like fans don’t know
what they want from Weezer—some just want
another “Suzanne,” and the band delivered in
February with “L.A. Girlz,” from this month’s
“White Album,” featuring the kind of curbside
pleading Cuomo was born to deliver. The decision to strip down for this acoustic album-release
show at Rough Trade is a welcome one, and you
NIGHT LIFE
Young Fathers
The members of this Scottish troop are rappers,
just barely. They squirm around categorization so
nimbly that just about any comparison you can
conjure—Joy Division, Saul Williams, the Raincoats, the Ronettes—fits if you squint just so. It’s
best to take them as they are: “G” Hastings, Alloysious Massaquoi, and Kayus Bankole spent many
nights sulking through dance halls in Edinburgh
before they formed a group and starting noodling around with karaoke equipment. They soon
flash-recorded two demo tapes, employing rattled
ragga, tender soul hooks, and snow-static noise to
jump from sound to sound with impressive ease.
All three members are vocalists and percussionists, a shared versatility that manifests across the
pop harmonies and stomping rhythms that seem
to glue the avant sounds together. “Dead,” their
2014 début, snagged the prestigious Mercury Prize
and subsequently charted for the first time, a testament to how far ahead the trio just might be.
(Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 718-486-5400. April 2.)
Your Old Droog
This twenty-six-year-old Ukrainian-American
rapper—“droog” means “friend” in Russian—
personifies the conflation of stringent traditionalism and nostalgia cycles which, for the better
part of the past decade, has left the many New
York rap fans without a major new star to claim.
At the onset of his career, Droog self-released a
shadowy EP on which his rhyming cadence and
vocal tone so closely recalled a Queens native that
many speculated he was actually the rapper Nas.
Since the reveal, Droog has continued to make
loopy, tongue-twisting hip-hop heavily built on
samples that no doubt stir something great in the
hearts of dads citywide who came of age in the late
eighties. His newest record, “42,” an ode to yesterday’s gritty Times Square which reworks Nu
Shooz’s 1986 dance hit, “I Can’t Wait,” may not
seize local airwaves today, but it nails the era it
pines for—even if Droog was three when Giuliani
took office. (S.O.B.’s, 204 Varick St., at W. Houston
St. 212-243-4940. April 4.)
1
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Ravi Coltrane
Coltrane may never fully escape the shadow of his
iconic father, John—he’s currently instrumental
in the restoration of the Coltrane home in Dix
Hills, Long Island—but his skill as a canny tenor
and soprano saxophone stylist has carried him far
beyond the glory of his name. He’s established a
strong rapport with another keen modernist, the
trumpeter Ralph Alessi, who sets off the leader in
a sextet alongside the pianist Glenn Zaleski and
others. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St. 212-576-2232.
March 29-April 2).
Tom Harrell
This trumpeter’s spark-plug quintet has seen some
key changes of late: Ralph Moore is now the leader’s tenor-saxophone foil, while David Virelles holds
down the piano spot. Harrell, a veteran player and
composer whose roots stretch back to a memorable stint with the hard-bop avatar Horace Silver, in the seventies, has lately been on a creative
roll, delving into ambitious work including the
jazz-meets-classical “First Impressions: Debussy
and Ravel” project. (Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh
Ave. S., at 11th St. 212-255-4037. Through April 3.)
Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith
As part of a residency at the newly established
Met Breuer museum, the visionary pianist and
composer Iyer has been collaborating with a
swath of sympathetically inclined players. One
of the highlights is his duet with the trumpeter
and longtime avant-jazz lodestar Smith, with
whom Iyer recorded the haunting new ECM
album, “A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke.”
(Met Breuer Gallery, 945 Madison Ave. 212-7311675. March 30-31.)
Steven Page
If you’re a literate (and aging) rocker with poppish singer-songwriter inclinations, a gig at this
venerable yet rapidly changing night spot may be
in your not too distant future. A former member of Canada’s Barenaked Ladies, Page will
offer barbed yet reflective songs from his current “Heal Thyself Pt. 1: Instinct” album. (Café
Carlyle, Carlyle Hotel, Madison Ave. at 76th St.
212-744-1600. Through April 2.)
Bobby Watson
It’s always good news when the soulful alto saxophonist Watson, currently the director of Jazz
Studies at the University Missouri-Kansas City
Conservatory of Music and Dance, hits town
again. On this visit, he’ll be joined by the pianist Xavier Davis, as well as key associates like
the drummer Victor Lewis and the bassist Curtis Lundy. (Smoke, 2751 Broadway, between 105th
and 106th Sts. 212-864-6662. April 1-3.)
On March 31, Michael Dorf and City Winery host their twelfth annual tribute at Carnegie Hall, this one honoring the late David Bowie with a bevy of musicians
reimagining his winding catalogue of hits. Guests include the Roots, Debbie Harry, and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe; proceeds benefit music-education programs.
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
ILLUSTRATION BY STANLEY CHOW
shouldn’t think twice about hitting up this intimate affair. The kids won’t think you’ve lost
your cool. (64 N. 9th St., Brooklyn. roughtradenyc.com. April 1.)
1
OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
THE THEATRE
American Psycho
Benjamin Walker plays the murderous financier Patrick Bateman, in a musical adaptation
of the Bret Easton Ellis novel by Duncan Sheik
and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Rupert Goold directs. (Schoenfeld, 236 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.
In previews.)
Antlia Pneumatica
In a new play by Anne Washburn, directed by
Ken Rus Schmoll, a group of estranged friends
gather at a Texas ranch house to bury one of their
peers. (Peter Jay Sharp, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-2794200. In previews. Opens April 4.)
The Crucible
Ivo van Hove directs Arthur Miller’s classic
drama about the Salem witch trials, starring
Saoirse Ronan, Ben Whishaw, Ciarán Hinds,
and Sophie Okonedo. (Walter Kerr, 219 W. 48th
St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens March 31.)
Exit Strategy
Primary Stages presents a play by Ike Holter,
directed by Kip Fagan, set at a Chicago public school in the days before it closes. (Cherry
Lane, 38 Commerce St. 866-811-4111. Previews
begin March 30.)
The Room Where It
Happens
The Founding Fathers sing (but don’t
rap) in “1776.”
Of the many allusions woven
throughout Lin-Manuel Miranda’s
score for “Hamilton”—“The Pirates of
Penzance,” the Notorious B.I.G.—one
of the funniest comes in Act II, when
Alexander Hamilton unveils a published retort to John Adams, declaring,
“Sit down, John, you fat motherfucker!”
It’s a reference to “Sit Down, John,” the
opening number of “1776,” another musical that set the birth of the nation to
song. Written by Sherman Edwards
and Peter Stone, it opened on Broadway
in 1969 and ran through 1972, the same
year a film version was released, starring
William Daniels, Howard Da Silva,
and a young Blythe Danner. The main
characters include some of the Founding Fathers left unseen in “Hamilton”—
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John
Hancock—and the plot revolves around
the overbearing Adams (“I’m obnoxious
and disliked,” he sings) and his efforts
to goad the Second Continental Congress into signing the Declaration of
Independence, even as the delegates
14
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
bicker and goof off like a rowdy highschool class. (Thomas Jefferson figures
in both musicals. In “Hamilton,” he’s a
slick pimp daddy who faces off with
Hamilton in rap battles; in “1776,” he’s
a heartthrob who promises to free his
slaves. Which is less likely?)
That “Hamilton” has caused such a
commotion is probably why the “Encores!” series plans to revive its predecessor, March 30-April 3 at City Center. The staged reading, directed by
Garry Hynes, will feature Santino
Fontana as Adams, John Behlmann as
Jefferson, and John Larroquette as
Franklin. In a nod to “Hamilton”—and
a sign of its influence—the cast will be
racially mixed, with performers including André De Shields (as the Rhode
Island delegate Stephen Hopkins) and
Nikki Renée Daniels (as Martha Jefferson) stepping into roles usually played
by white actors. An all-minority cast
would have been a bolder move (why
not a black John Adams?), but what’s
clear is that “Hamilton” has gone a long
way toward broadening the way the tale
of the country’s founding gets told, and
deepening our understanding of whose
story it really is.
—Michael Schulman
Fully Committed
Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays nearly forty characters at a trendy New York restaurant, in this oneman comedy by Becky Mode, directed by Jason
Moore. (Lyceum, 149 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.
Previews begin April 1.)
King and Country:
Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings
The Royal Shakespeare Company marks the
four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s
death by performing “Richard II,” both parts of
“Henry IV,” and “Henry V” in repertory. (BAM’s
Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn. 718-6364100. In previews. Opens April 5.)
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Jessica Lange, Gabriel Byrne, John Gallagher, Jr.,
and Michael Shannon play the dysfunctional Tyrone family, in the Roundabout’s revival of the
Eugene O’Neill drama, directed by Jonathan
Kent. (American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St.
212-719-1300. Previews begin April 3.)
Love’s Refrain
Justin Sayre, who hosts the monthly series “The
Meeting,” wrote and performs this solo play,
which links his own romanticism to the birth
and death of stars. Matthu Placek directs. (La
Mama, 74A E. 4th St. 212-475-7710. Opens April 1.)
Nathan the Wise
In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s drama, adapted
by Edward Kemp and directed by Brian Kulick,
F. Murray Abraham plays a Jewish merchant in
Jerusalem in 1192. (Classic Stage Company, 136
E. 13th St. 866-811-4111. In previews.)
ILLUSTRATION BY DADU SHIN
“Encores!” revives a pre-“Hamilton” musical, from 1969, also about the birth of our nation.
The Father
Frank Langella stars in a play by the French
writer Florian Zeller, translated by Christopher Hampton and directed by Doug Hughes
for Manhattan Theatre Club, about an eightyyear-old man who is losing his grip on his life
story. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212239-6200. In previews.)
THE THEATRE
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.
Lileana Blain-Cruz directs a play by Alice Birch,
an exploration of the way people talk, featuring
Daniel Abeles, Molly Bernard, Eboni Booth, and
Jennifer Ikeda. (SoHo Rep, 46 Walker St. 212-3523101. Previews begin April 5.)
Shuffle Along
Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and
Billy Porter star in a musical about the making of
a popular African-American stage show from the
nineteen-twenties. Directed by George C. Wolfe
and choreographed by Savion Glover. (Music
Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)
Tuck Everlasting
Casey Nicholaw directs a musical adaptation of
Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 children’s novel, about a
family that accesses eternal life from a magical
spring, with music by Chris Miller, lyrics by Nathan Tysen, and a book by Claudia Shear and Tim
Federle. The cast includes Carolee Carmello,
Andrew Keenan-Bolger, and Terrence Mann.
(Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. Previews begin March 31.)
Waitress
Jessie Mueller stars in a new musical based on
the 2007 film, about a small-town waitress who
enters a baking contest, with music and lyrics by
Sara Bareilles. Diane Paulus directs. (Brooks Atkinson, 256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929. In previews.)
1
NOW PLAYING
Blackbird
In David Harrower’s meaningful ninety-minute
drama, directed by Joe Mantello, Michelle Williams plays Una, a complex and charged twentyseven-year-old woman. In a modern office building,
a fiftyish man named Ray (played by Jeff Daniels,
with a distractingly clenched jaw) leads her down
a hallway; there’s a look of twisted triumph on her
face. Turns out it’s been fifteen years since they last
saw each other. They were lovers then. At the time
that they were “together,” Una was twelve, and Ray,
a neighbor, was a grown man. Daniels vacillates between soliciting the audience’s sympathy—letting
us know that Ray himself thinks he’s a creep—and
trying to rise to Williams’s daring and nonjudgmental embodiment of her not easily assimilable
character. Harrower has the focus of a songwriter,
and his exquisitely wrought monologues are like
odes to Una and Ray’s power struggles, desires,
and elisions. (Reviewed in our issue of 3/21/16.)
(Belasco, 111 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.)
Bright Star
Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, who have released two bluegrass albums together, bring their
down-home sound to this bighearted musical, set
in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Carmen Cusack, whose clear voice comes with a
side of grits, plays Alice Murphy, the hard-nosed
editor of an Asheville literary magazine in 1945.
When a young soldier (A. J. Shively) returning
home from the war shows up at her office with a
pile of stories, she’s reminded of a doomed young
romance she had two decades earlier, with a boy
named Jimmy Ray (Paul Alexander Nolan). The
two plots converge in a soapy twist you can see
coming acres away, with a weepy ending as implausible as one of Shakespeare’s quadruple weddings. But the show sings and swings to the sound
of its lovingly and furiously played fiddle, banjo,
and mandolin. (Cort, 138 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.)
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
A Celebration of Harold Pinter
This informal, informative evening by the actor Julian Sands, directed by John Malkovich, returns to
the Irish Repertory Theatre for a short run, having
first been presented in 2012. Sands has appeared in
a number of Pinter plays, and was a friend of the
author and his wife, the historian and novelist Antonia Fraser. He was encouraged by the couple to
put together a reading of Pinter’s poems, and this
breezy, touching offering mixes personal reminiscences and correspondence among the verse, creating an impressionistic biographical portrait of the
brilliant, prickly giant of twentieth-century drama.
The poems—more directly from the heart—are not
like the plays (except in their concision and precision), and Sands is an excellent guide to exploring this lesser-known side of Pinter. (DR2, at 103
E. 15th St. 212-727-2737. Through April 3.)
Dry Powder
Bernie Sanders should send any voters on the fence
to Sarah Burgess’s play, in a slick production by
Thomas Kail: this is the financial-services industry
in all its Marie Antoinette depravity, where any hint
of ethics gets blown away like blossoms in a hurricane. Rick (Hank Azaria), the president of a private-equity firm, has a P.R. crisis: he’s just thrown
a blowout engagement party with a live elephant
the same day a company he bought out announced
major layoffs. His two protégés, Seth (John Krasinski) and Jenny (Claire Danes), are split on how
to handle a new acquisition, a custom-suitcase company: Seth wants to pursue a “growth plan,” while
Jenny wants to gut it and outsource labor to Mexico, or maybe Bangladesh. Burgess’s script can get
bogged down in financial jargon, but its argument
grows increasingly nuanced, and Danes’s portrait
of free-market greed made sociopathic is chillingly
funny. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)
The Effect
A modern love story, with scientific controls. Connie (Susannah Flood) and Tristan (Carter Hudson) have each volunteered to participate in a
weeks-long test of a new antidepressant. Administering the study is Lorna (Kati Brazda), a psychiatrist, under the auspices of a pharmaceutical
company represented by Toby (Steve Key), another psychiatrist. Given the personalities and the
histories of the people involved, things get messy,
but maybe they’re supposed to. In the first act, the
playwright, Lucy Prebble, skillfully interweaves
issues both clinical and emotional, and the mysteries multiply. The second act is bleaker, and less
engaging. The director, David Cromer, accomplishes some intriguing scene shifts and stage effects, including live video, but the acting veers—
perhaps inevitably—into the manic. In one silent
section, the two test subjects text each other, and
the shadows cast by their phones transform them
into a Frankenstein monster and his bride. (Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. 212-868-4444.)
Really
A young woman loads film into a long-barrelled
camera, positions a tall, bulky light, and poses the
mother of her recently deceased boyfriend for a
portrait. This latest work from the experimental playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury embraces
photography’s metaphorical meanings: in the
presence of the camera, and under its glare, the
players—along with their fears, resentments, and
ever-apparent sadnesses—become subjects, in
every sense of the word. Drury has an easy, teasing
way with the dadaisms of modern speech: phrases
like “Oh, um, sure” and “You know? I dunno.
Whatever” are played for surprising laughs, and
point to the impotence of words when employed
to express, or to avoid, grief. Staged intimately by
the New York City Players, under the direction of
Richard Maxwell, the piece is a quiet, sometimes
anguished exercise in seeing others for who, and
what, they are. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St.
212-352-3101. Through April 2.)
She Loves Me
Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joe Masteroff’s 1963 musical, based on the same Hungarian
play that inspired “The Shop Around the Corner”
and “You’ve Got Mail,” is as fragrant and squeaky
clean as the lily-scented soap sold at Maraczek’s
Parfumerie. It is there—Budapest, 1934—that two
lovelorn employees, Georg (Zachary Levi, adequate but bland) and Amalia (the golden-voiced
Laura Benanti) bicker while carrying on an anonymous epistolary romance: they have no idea that
they’ve fallen headlong for each other’s words.
Like the vanilla ice cream that Georg brings Amalia, the Roundabout’s revival, directed by Scott
Ellis, is sweet and harmless, full of postwar American longing for prewar European loveliness. The
most flavorful moments come from Benanti, one
of Broadway’s most incandescent leading ladies,
and from Jane Krakowski and Gavin Creel, as the
shop’s pragmatic-in-love second bananas. (Studio
54, at 254 W. 54th St. 212-719-1300.)
YOUARENOWHERE
Andrew Schneider’s performance piece—jagged
and miraculous—centers on a bad breakup or a
worse breakdown or the vagaries of human consciousness or the intricacies of quantum mechanics
or quite possibly nothing at all. It doesn’t matter.
Content is not really Schneider’s strength. (He
knows this. One of the more telling lines: “I have
things to say. I think.”) Form is, and in this hourlong work Schneider explores new ways around
and through dramatic structure, an investigation
that climaxes in an astonishing coup de théâtre.
The visual and sonic elements are frequently astounding—lights that blind and then blacken, bass
tones that shake the seats, static that assaults the
ears. Regular glitches (most of them intentional)
only emphasize the baroque wonder of the technical score. But what is most extraordinary is the
way in which these incorporeal components interact with Schneider’s sweaty, shirtless, achingly
vulnerable body. (3LD Art & Technology Center,
80 Greenwich St. 212-352-3101. Through April 3.)
1
ALSO NOTABLE
Boy Clurman. • Buried Child Pershing Square Signature Center. Through April 3. • The Color Purple Jacobs. • Disaster! Nederlander. • Eclipsed
Golden. • Familiar Playwrights Horizons. • Fiddler
on the Roof Broadway Theatre. • Fun Home Circle
in the Square. • Hamilton Richard Rodgers. • Head
of Passes Public. • Hold On to Me Darling Atlantic Theatre Company. • The Humans Helen
Hayes. • Hungry Public. Through April 3. • Ironbound Rattlestick. • Mike Birbiglia: Thank God for
Jokes Lynn Redgrave. • Old Hats Pershing Square
Signature Center. Through April 3. • Pericles Polonsky Shakespeare Center. • Red Speedo New York
Theatre Workshop. Through April 3. • The Robber
Bridegroom Laura Pels. • The Royale Mitzi E. Newhouse. • School of Rock Winter Garden. • Sense &
Sensibility Gym at Judson. • Straight Acorn. • Stupid Fucking Bird Pearl. • The Way West Bank Street
Theatre. Through April 3. • White Rabbit Red Rabbit Westside. • Widowers’ Houses Beckett. Through
April 2. • Wolf in the River Flea.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
1
OPERA
Metropolitan Opera
After flirtations with opera administration and
conducting, the much admired tenor Plácido Domingo has hit upon a fourth career as a Verdi baritone. Most of his performances in the repertoire
have met with a polite reception, but the seventyfive-year-old singer has found an enduring vehicle in Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra,” a sumptuously
scored opera about a benevolent doge in the twilight of his leadership. The Met has surrounded
Domingo with a premier team of Verdians, including Joseph Calleja, Ferruccio Furlanetto, and Lianna Haroutounian; James Levine is scheduled
to conduct. (April 1 and April 5 at 7:30.) • Also
playing: A revival of “L’Elisir d’Amore,” one of
Donizetti’s most delightful comedies, features
three engaging singers, Aleksandra Kurzak, Vittorio Grigolo, and Alessandro Corbelli; Enrique
Mazzola. (Mario Chang and Pietro Spagnoli replace Grigolo and Corbelli, respectively, in the
second performance.) (March 30 at 7:30 and April
2 at 8.) • The role of Elisabetta (Queen Elizabeth I) in “Roberto Devereux”—the third and
final monarchess in Donizetti’s so-called Tudor
Queens trilogy—is famously fearsome. In the opera’s first appearance on the Met stage, in a production by David McVicar, the soprano Sondra
Radvanovsky takes up the challenge, with a seismic sound that should stand up to the role’s demand for high-flying drama. The cast is filled out
with three first-rate principals, Elīna Garanča,
Matthew Polenzani, and Mariusz Kwiecien; Maurizio Benini conducts. (March 31 and April 4 at
7:30.) • The movie director Anthony Minghella’s
strikingly two-dimensional production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” from 2006, now has two
three-dimensional singers, the outstanding Kristine Opolais and Roberto Alagna, in the leading
roles. Also with two fine house stalwarts, Maria
Zifchak, as Suzuki, and Dwayne Croft, as Sharpless; Karel Mark Chichon. (April 2 at 1.) (Metropolitan Opera House. 212-362-6000.)
Manhattan School of Music
Senior Opera Theatre
For opera aficionados who know Léo Delibes best
for the atmospheric “Lakmé” and its ubiquitous
duet, the school’s production of “Le Roi l’a Dit”
(“The King Has Spoken”) is a reminder of the musical wit and charm for which he was renowned in
his lifetime. Jorge Parodi conducts a production by
Dona D. Vaughn. (Manhattan School of Music, 120
Claremont Ave. Free tickets are available at msmnyc.
edu. March 30-April 2 at 7:30.)
1
ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES
New York Philharmonic
Bramwell Tovey, whose combination of quick
musicianship and social ease has made him an
ideal conductor for the Philharmonic’s lighter
concerts, returns to lead the orchestra in a vivacious program of Spanish favorites which includes two masterworks by Falla: “Nights in
the Gardens of Spain” (a piano concerto in
all but name, with Joyce Yang) and the fiery
“Three-Cornered Hat” (with the mezzo-soprano
18
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
Virginie Verrez). (David Geffen Hall. 212-8755656. March 30-31 and April 5 at 7:30, April 1 at 11
A.M., and April 2 at 8.)
American Composers Orchestra
Music by composers from, and inspired by, the
culture of the Middle East and India is next on
the orchestra’s docket. George Manahan conducts
his steadfast players in world premières by Saad
Haddad (“Manarah”), Reena Esmail, and Mehmet Ali Sanlikol (with the composer as featured
soloist on vocals and oud) along with “Songs from
Solomon’s Garden,” by Matthias Pintscher. (Zankel Hall. 212-247-7800. April 1 at 7:30.)
Riverside Symphony: “An Undying Tradition”
The orchestra, concluding its thirty-fifth season,
presents a concert examining the enduring appeal
of the “classical” tendency in music, the need to
balance expressive content with abstract form. The
program opens with the Boston composer Michael
Gandolfi’s “Points of Departure” (1988), continues with Nielsen’s Flute Concerto (with Keith
Bonner), and concludes with Mozart’s haunting
Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. (Alice Tully Hall.
riversidesymphony.org. April 1 at 8.)
Miller Theatre: “Airs de Coeur”
Le Poème Harmonique, an early-music group that
assembles programs that are as enticingly dramatic
as they are musically integral, has become a favorite on the Miller series. This week, it takes to
one of the series’ satellite locations, the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, for a program of love
songs and laments by such composers as Guédron,
Leblanc, and Le Bailly which were prized by members of the seventeenth-century French aristocracy. (632 W. 156th St., between Broadway and Riverside Dr. 212-854-7799. April 3 at 3.)
“Music Before 1800” Series:
Blue Heron and Dark Horse Consort
Two star ensembles—one choral, the other instrumental—of the Northeast’s vibrant early-music
scene come together for “Cantores y Ministriles,” a
celebration of music from the Renaissance “golden
age” in Seville, featuring sacred and secular works
by such fifteenth- and sixteenth-century masters
as Guerrero, Lobo, and Morales. (Corpus Christi
Church, 529 W. 121st St. mb1800.org. April 3 at 4.)
American Symphony Orchestra:
“A Mass of Life”
The ensemble, guided by its music director Leon
Botstein’s fine taste in little-heard repertoire, presents Frederick Delius’s large-scale work for chorus
and orchestra, which marries Grieg’s light, deft
orchestration with Wagner’s declamatory melodic
style in an exalted meditation on Nietzsche’s “Also
Sprach Zarathustra.” With the Bard Festival Chorale and the vocal soloists Sarah Fox, Audrey Babcock, Rodrick Dixon, and Thomas Cannon. (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800. April 5 at 8.)
1
RECITALS
Marcy Rosen and the Momenta Quartet
A New York legend of the cello joins the enterprising young ensemble for an adventure into the
past, at Columbia University’s Italian Academy:
a program of works by Boccherini, the doyen of
the Spanish court and one of the great composercellists. It features a string quartet and a quintet by the galante master as well as an intimate
rendition of the Cello Concerto in G Major,
G. 480. (1161 Amsterdam Ave., between 116th and
118th Sts. March 30 at 7. No tickets required.)
Kronos Quartet
For many of its new-music commissions, Carnegie Hall often turns to the professionals of
this standard-setting ensemble, which goes where
other string quartets fear to tread. Its program at
Zankel Hall is typically diverse: world premières
by Aleksandra Vrebalov (“My Desert, My Rose”)
and Yotam Haber as well as pieces by Wu Man,
Karin Rehnqvist, and Albert Behar—and an arrangement from the catalogue of Pete Townshend
(“Baba O’Riley”). (212-247-7800. April 2 at 7:30.)
Brooklyn Art Song Society:
“In Context: Scott Wheeler”
Michael Brofman’s intrepid group holds a patch
of ground for classical song in New York’s diverse musical landscape. Wheeler, an admired
Boston-based composer whose intricate mating
of words and music recalls that of the great Virgil Thomson, is the focus of this concert, which
includes songs by Brahms, Schumann, Thomson
(“Mostly About Love”), and Judith Weir, in addition to the world première of “Ben Gunn,” settings of poems by Paul Muldoon (an editor at this
magazine). (Tenri Cultural Institute, 43A W. 13th
St. brooklynartsongsociety.org. April 2 at 7:30.)
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
The cellist David Finckel and the pianist Wu
Han are not only the Society’s hardworking directors but also a potent performing team. They
offer an effusive program titled “Resonance,”
featuring the Sonatas for Cello and Piano by
Strauss and Chopin and Messiaen’s “Louange à
L’Éternité de Jésus” (a luxuriantly spiritual excerpt from “Quartet for the End of Time”) in addition to chestnuts by Moszkowski and Glazunov (“Chant du Ménéstrel”). (Alice Tully Hall.
212-875-5788. April 3 at 5.)
Bruce Levingston: “Windows”
This poetic pianist has developed a range of
unique projects that bring distinctive composers together with notable cultural figures. He
marks the fifteenth anniversary of his organization, Premiere Commission, by performing a
recital with the baritone Justin Hopkins which
includes music by Schubert and Philip Glass
(a longtime colleague) as well as premières by
James Matheson and Nolan Gasser (“Repast,” a
chamber oratorio based on the life of the Mississippi civil-rights figure Booker Wright, with
a libretto by Kevin Young). (Zankel Hall. 212247-7800. April 4 at 7:30.)
Cutting Edge Concerts: “¡Cuba Today!”
Victoria Bond’s annual spring series devoted to
new works always travels in interesting directions. The first of three concerts is devoted to
music from what for many Americans will be a
newfound land, Cuba, with Florida’s Deering Estate Chamber Ensemble (a piano quartet) performing works by such composers as Aurelio de
la Vega (three pieces, from the nineteen-forties
through the seventies), Orlando Jacinto García,
and the well-known Cuban-American composer
Tania León (the string trio “A Tres Voces”).
(Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th St. symphonyspace.org. April 4 at 7:30.)
MOVIES
Chantal Akerman, at the 1982 Venice Film Festival, where she presented her romantic and choreographic masterwork “Toute une Nuit.”
To Life
RAYMOND DEPARDON/MAGNUM
A monthlong retrospective of Chantal
Akerman’s films.
Like Orson Welles, the Belgian director
Chantal Akerman revolutionized the cinema with a movie that she made in her
mid-twenties—“Jeanne Dielman,” from
1975—and then made even more artistically advanced films that never achieved
the same level of fame. Her career is a titanic project of personal cinema that redefined the art of filming oneself—of a
woman filming herself—yet most of her
films remain rare. This April is, in effect,
Chantal Akerman month in New York,
featuring screenings of most of her films
at BAM Cinématek plus sidebars at Film
Forum and Anthology Film Archives. It
comes too late. Akerman committed suicide
last October, at the age of sixty-five, just
before the New York Film Festival première
of what would be her last work, “No Home
Movie,” which opens the BAM series.
“Jeanne Dielman” (at Film Forum April
1-7) stars Delphine Seyrig as a widowed
mother in Brussels who devotes meticulous
attention to her household chores and sees
clients at home—she’s a prostitute—until
she cracks. Akerman converts the story’s
feminist psychology into choreographic
spectacle, depicting housework, sex, and
family life with a gestural and directorial
precision that renders them monumental.
It was Akerman’s second dramatic feature.
In the first, “Je Tu Il Elle,” from 1974, she
plays a young woman awaiting a lover in
vain and then hitchhiking to track her
down. She filmed herself and her co-star,
Claire Wauthion, in an extended love scene
suggesting the marmoreal sensuality of
Canova sculptures come to life.
Akerman dramatized her own story in
“The Meetings of Anna” (1978), in which
Aurore Clément plays Anne (Akerman’s
middle name), a filmmaker who travels
through Europe meeting men whom she
doesn’t love and a woman she does. Anne
also visits her mother (Lea Massari), yielding a quietly overwhelming vision of pure
love, which is matched by the intimacy of
their subsequent talk: Anne comes out to
her mother. Throughout her work, Akerman’s personal mythology unites family
(centered on her mother), identity (Akerman was Jewish), political history (her
mother was a survivor of Auschwitz), and
homosexuality, often by way of music and
dance. She filmed a balletic crisscrossing
of lovers on the streets of Brussels (“Toute
une Nuit”), made a revelatory documentary about Pina Bausch (“One Day Pina
Asked”), and followed it with a musical
romance about a family of Holocaust survivors (“Golden Eighties”). In 1980, five
years before the release of Claude
Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” Akerman made
“Dis-Moi” (“Tell Me”), a documentary
featuring interviews with women Holocaust survivors, including her mother.
(Among her other achievements, Akerman rescues the archetype of the Jewish
mother from male artists’ neuroses.)
Akerman’s final film, “No Home
Movie,” is a dual portrait of herself and her
mother, who was ill and in fact died before
the film was completed. A cinematic wanderer who captured a distinctively Jewish
sense of exile and bereavement, Akerman
filmed herself obstinately and revealingly,
contemplating her own absence and pursuing ecstatic beauty and harsh ideas, work
and love, as if to defy the void.
—Richard Brody
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
19
OPENING
Everybody Wants Some!! Richard Linklater di-
rected this comic drama, set in 1980, about the
romantic adventures of varsity baseball players at a Texas college. Opening March 30. (In
limited release.) • Francofonia Reviewed this
week in The Current Cinema. Opening April 1.
(In limited release.) • I Don’t Belong Anywhere
A documentary about the filmmaker Chantal Akerman, directed by Marianne Lambert.
Opening March 30. (Film Forum.) • Meet the
Blacks Mike Epps stars in this comedy, about
a Chicago family that moves to Beverly Hills
just when, for a twelve-hour stretch, all crime
is permitted. Directed by Deon Taylor; costarring Zulay Henao, Bresha Webb, Lil Duval,
and Mike Tyson. Opening April 1. (In limited
release.) • Miles Ahead Don Cheadle directed
and stars in this bio-pic about Miles Davis,
centered on the time in the late nineteenseventies when he gave no concerts. Co-starring Emayatzy Corinealdi, Ewan McGregor, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Opening April 1.
(In limited release.) • No Home Movie Chantal
Akerman directed this portrait of her mother
and depiction of their relationship, from afar
and in their home town of Brussels. Opening
April 1. (BAM Cinématek.) • Notfilm A documentary by Ross Lipman about “Film,” Samuel Beckett’s 1965 collaboration with Buster
Keaton. Opening April 1. (Anthology Film Archives.) • Standing Tall A drama, directed by
Emmanuelle Bercot, about a judge (Catherine Deneuve) and a special-ed teacher (Benoît Magimel) who come to the aid of an abandoned teen-ager (Rod Paradot). Opening April 1.
(In limited release.)
1
NOW PLAYING
Born to Be Blue
This bio-pic about the jazz trumpeter and singer
Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke) focusses on two
pivotal episodes in the musician’s career, both
from the mid-sixties. One, Baker’s performance
as himself in a dramatic movie about his own
life, is fictional; the other, a brutal beating that
cost Baker his front teeth and forced him to rebuild his technique from scratch, actually happened. As told by the writer and director Robert Budreau, Baker and his co-star on the film
shoot, an actress named Jane (Carmen Ejogo),
begin a relationship that helps Baker kick his
longtime heroin habit. Meanwhile, Baker is
haunted by a 1954 performance at a New York
club where his ego was deflated by a lacerating
word from Miles Davis (Kedar Brown); after
recovering from the grave injury to his mouth,
he attempts his comeback at the same venue.
Despite Hawke’s intensely committed performance, Budreau gets more from the story’s sidemen, such as a record producer (Callum Keith
Rennie), a probation officer (Tony Nappo), and
Baker’s father (Stephen McHattie). The movie
offers a more insightful view of the music business than of Baker’s art.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)
The Brothers Grimsby
Sacha Baron Cohen takes a backward lurch.
His previous films, such as “Borat” and “The
Dictator,” were a dexterous blend of innocence and outrage, but the new movie is a more
blatant affair. Cohen plays Nobby, a thickwhiskered lout who lives in Grimsby (a real
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
MOVIES
British town) with his beloved (Rebel Wilson,
given far too little to do) and a brood of canny
kids. One eats curry on the toilet; another is
named Luke—short for Leukemia, which he
pretends to have in order to get benefits. Enter
Nobby’s long-lost brother Sebastian (Mark
Strong), who is now a secret agent with M.I.6
and needs a place to hide. You expect a culture crunch (the sort of thing at which Cohen
excels), but the director, Louis Leterrier,
makes the odd decision to whisk the duo away,
and the film turns into a low-grade thriller
filled with shoot-outs and explosions in foreign
climes. We also get flashbacks to the brothers’
youth, played quite straight, as if heartstrings
needed plucking at such a time. Still, Cohen
fans praying to be grossed out will be gratified
to the hilt, although the anal fixation apparent
in all his films has passed beyond the Rabelaisian and arrived at the brink of the pathological.—Anthony Lane (In wide release.)
Cemetery of Splendor
This political ghost story by the director
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is set in an improvised military hospital in rural Thailand,
where a bunch of young male soldiers who’ve
fallen into a seemingly permanent sleep are
warehoused. Doctors attempt high-tech therapy involving colored lights, while a woman
who claims to be a psychic interprets the patients’ desires and dreams for their families.
Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner), a local resident
and volunteer nurse, visits the hospital; her
empathetic powers awaken a soldier named Itt,
whom she befriends. Jen is also visited by two
young women who claim to be age-old princesses and assert that the hospital was built on
an ancient battleground where warring kings of
yore are continuing their fight with the souls
of the sleeping soldiers as proxies. Then the
psychic channels Itt’s visions, and her friendship with Jen takes on an erotic tone. Weerasethakul films the Thai landscape and village spaces, their tones of light and color, with
a poised and painterly eye, keeping the camera
still and the action quiet, as if to invite elusive
spirits to inhabit the image. He films the trappings of modernity with a wry aversion, capturing the paradoxes of progress while advancing a mild poetic nostalgia. In Thai.—R.B. (In
limited release.)
Creative Control
Benjamin Dickinson’s first feature, set in
Brooklyn in the near future, is centered on
a hackneyed theme—the search for authentic
experience in the soul-killing field of adver-
1
THE FRONT ROW
Watch a video discussion of Kathleen Collins’s
drama “Losing Ground,” from 1982, about
a black woman professor’s intellectual and
romantic crises, in our digital edition.
tising, amid the glut of technology—but the
filmmaker, who also stars, feasts on the inside-media satire. He plays David, a creative
director at an ad agency who is overseeing the
campaign for a new product called Augmenta,
virtual-reality eyeglasses that offer simulations
to order, plus anything that a laptop can do.
Meanwhile, as David’s relationship with his
girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), a yoga
teacher, turns sour, he gets lost in augmented
fantasies about Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen), a
colleague who happens to be dating his best
friend, Wim (Dan Gill), a philandering photographer. Dickinson, who co-wrote the script
with Micah Bloomberg, tells the story in sleek
and archly composed black-and-white images
that themselves have the feel of advertising.
He conveys sardonic delight in workplace conflicts, but the most thought seems to have gone
into the screenshots of David’s virtual visions.
The pleasures of the design fade along with
those of the pat and callow drama.—R.B. (In
limited release.)
The Deadly Companions
In Sam Peckinpah’s big-screen-directing début,
from 1961, Brian Keith (the star of Peckinpah’s
TV show “The Westerner”) plays a former Union
soldier who enlists a flashy gunslinger (Steve
Cochran) and a Confederate psychopath (Chill
Wills) to rob a bank with him. Instead, they
wind up escorting a dance-hall gal (Maureen
O’Hara) on a prolonged and improbable funeral trek through Apache country. The plot
twists are hokey, but the atmosphere is bleak
and tense, and the men’s performances nuanced.
Wills makes a terrific mangy villain; he sweats
corruption through his buffalo-fur coat. His
dream of starting his own slave kingdom is as
unsettling as Peckinpah’s vision of an inebriated
Indian party that bobs madly across the horizon
(a dazzling piece of staging). They both belong
to the same nightmarish Western landscape as
Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel, “Blood Meridian.” A. S. Fleischman wrote the script.—Michael
Sragow (Film Society of Lincoln Center; March 31.)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
This elegiac 2003 comedy, by the Taiwanese
director Tsai Ming-liang, is a requiem for a
movie theatre. He dramatizes the closing of
Taipei’s cavernous Fu-Ho Grand Theatre and
its final screening, of King Hu’s martial-arts
classic “Dragon Inn.” The show attracts only
a handful of patrons, including a puckish Japanese tourist (Mitamura Kiyonobu) whose
command of his bewildered gaze could be borrowed from Jacques Tati, and several men who
seem interested solely in homosexual pickups
(a long single-take scene at a long row of urinals is a masterwork of understated, exquisitely choreographed humor). The petty disturbances that beset the tourist are matched
by the laborious rounds of the theatre’s manager (Chen Shiang-chyi), a disabled woman
who trudges through corridors and back rooms
to fulfill her mundane duties. Her attention is
absorbed by a strange cinematic object—a pink
steamed bun—but she’s the focus of a mercurial scene of virtuoso editing, when she makes
her way behind the screen and is seemingly irradiated by the heroic images that are on their
way out. A scene in which two aged patrons
are revealed to be two of the martial-arts stars
has the intimate grandeur of a grizzled Wild
West fadeout. In Mandarin.—R.B. (Museum
of the Moving Image; April 2.)
COURTESY MILESTONE FILMS
1
MOVIES
Hello, My Name Is Doris
Michael Showalter’s amiable new comedy features a taut setup that packs howls of anguish
in its contrived simplicity. Doris Miller (Sally
Field), a seventyish bookkeeper, is a fish out of
water in her cubicle at a hip young media company in Chelsea. She’s unmarried and has no children, having lived her entire life in a house in
Staten Island with her mother, who, at the start
of the film, has just died. Doris—whimsical, hypersensitive, socially awkward—is burdened by
her sudden solitude when, in an elevator at work,
she bumps into John Fremont (Max Greenfield),
the handsome and charming twentysomething
new art director in her office. She’s instantly
smitten, and takes unusual measures—aided
by Vivian (Isabella Acres), the teen-age granddaughter of her best friend, Roz (Tyne Daly)—
to insinuate herself into John’s life. Showalter,
who co-wrote the film with Laura Terruso, keeps
the tone sentimentally comedic, blending touches
of wit (Doris’s fantasies), whimsy (Doris’s excursion to a rock club in Williamsburg), and
drama (Doris’s relationship with her brother).
But within the perky antics is bewildered rage at
the prospect of aging, solitude, and irrelevance;
the best thing about the film is that it has no answers.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Knight of Cups
Who would have foretold that Terrence Malick,
once a byword for reclusiveness, would come to
seem almost prolific? His new film, arriving on
the heels of “The Tree of Life” and “To the Wonder,” maintains his distinctive approach, pushing
it to new extremes; if you catch no more than a
glimpse, you will know at once who the director
is. Christian Bale plays Rick, a screenwriter who
wanders, apparently without purpose, through
Los Angeles and the surrounding land. Actual
events, like the presence of burglars in his apartment, scarcely intrude on his ponderings; instead, we see him stranded in the desert, strolling
the boulevards, or meeting his troubled brother
(Wes Bentley) and their aging father (Brian Dennehy). On the one hand, we see so much; the
frequent wide angles pull everything into the
frame, and there are rapturous shots of glassy
buildings and the overlapping arcs of freeways.
On the other hand, the story remains in pieces;
we sense painful fissures in Rick’s relationships
with his father and with his succession of lovers
(Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto,
and others), but the movie fights shy of unbroken conversations, and of the unlovely details
that make up a regular life. The hunger for revelation is all-consuming; Malick fans will be in
heaven.—A.L. (Reviewed in our issue of 3/14/16.)
(In limited release.)
Krisha
The actress Krisha Fairchild plays the title role
of this drama. She’s the real-life aunt of the filmmaker, Trey Edward Shults, who plays Krisha’s
son, Trey. Shults’s mother plays Krisha’s sister;
his real-life grandmother plays his grandmother;
and a bunch of professional actors join Shults and
his relatives to realize an explosive, wildly funny,
and deeply disturbing fictional story of a family reunion on Thanksgiving. Filmed at Shults’s
parents’ house, in Texas, the film has the amplitude of a hefty novel and the condensed fury of
a tragedy. Krisha, a recovering alcoholic with
a lifetime of trouble, has long been estranged
from her family, and her tentative return to the
hearty, rowdy fold dredges up long-stifled resentments and plunges her into a horrific vortex
22
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
of pain. Fairchild, who performs like a counterculture Gena Rowlands, is irresistibly passionate
and volatile even in repose, and Shults displays
a bold visual and dramatic sensibility with his
impressionistic rearrangement of time and his
repertory of darting, whirling, plunging, and retreating camera moves, which seem to paint the
action onto the screen.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Midnight Special
The director Jeff Nichols has a Spielbergian
knack for working with children, and his latest fable is centered on an eight-year-old boy
named Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher). Alton
is blessed—or burdened—with extraordinary
powers. He can track the path of satellites in his
head and mimic a radio station, word for word,
without turning the radio on. At times, a ray of
blue light blazes from his eyes, conveying ineffable visions to anyone on the receiving end. For
years, he has been in the hands of a religious cult,
but, as the date of his apparent destiny nears, he
is borne away by his father (Michael Shannon).
Together with a loyal sidekick (Joel Edgerton),
they drive to a rendezvous with Alton’s mother
(Kirsten Dunst), who hasn’t seen her son in a
long while. On their trail are desperate members of the cult, plus the F.B.I. and a thoughtful fellow from the N.S.A. (Adam Driver), who
starts out skeptical but winds up pleading to
come along. The climax, though spectacular, is
something of a letdown—unavoidably so, given
the grave tension that has prevailed thus far. Yet
the movie, Nichols’s fourth, is a worthy addition
to his studies in anxiety and dread, personified
by Shannon’s troubled face.—A.L. (3/28/16) (In
limited release.)
My Golden Days
Arnaud Desplechin’s new work is a companion
piece—more prequel than sequel—to his 1996
movie “My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument.” Once again, Mathieu Amalric plays the
libidinous Paul Dédalus, now an anthropologist,
returning to Paris in middle age. The homecoming touches off a long flashback to his younger self
(Quentin Dolmaire), whom we follow first on a
mission of Cold War daring—nothing grand, but
sufficiently fraught to lodge in the memory—and
then, as befits a Parisian teen-ager, on a spree of
scholarship, smoking, and sex. His affair with Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), a girl from his home
town, assumes an intensity that still pains him decades later, and Desplechin honors that romantic zeal in the odd, misshapen structure of his
movie—lingering over some episodes and breezing through others in a spirit of play. The frequent iris shots nod to Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano
Player” (1960): one zestful chronicler of youth, you
might say, winking at another. In French.—A.L.
(3/28/16) (In limited release.)
10 Cloverfield Lane
Driving fast on a lonely road while leaving New
Orleans and her fiancé, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an aspiring young clothing designer, crashes her car and is knocked unconscious. She awakens, with a brace on her knee
and an IV needle in her arm, handcuffed to a
pipe in a sealed underground room. Her captor, Howard (John Goodman), an ex-Navy survivalist, claims to have rescued her from a catastrophic attack, either nuclear or chemical, that
killed everyone at ground level, and, to display
his benign intentions, he leads her to the shelter’s cheerfully well-stocked rec room. Is Howard a predator who’s gaslighting Michelle, or is
he a paranoid whose worst fears have come true?
And what about Emmet (John Gallagher, Jr.), the
young man who also lives there—is he an accomplice, a victim, or a fellow-survivor? This simple and suspenseful horror thriller calls for spare
technique, but the director, Dan Trachtenberg,
smothers the action in showy camera work and
an overly insistent music score. But, as the mystery unravels, he reveals flashes of a giddily hyperbolic pop imagination.—R.B. (In wide release.)
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Tina Fey gets out of rom-com jail in this brisk
and blustery comic drama, based on a memoir
by Kim Barker, about the making and unmaking of a war correspondent. Fey plays a fictionalized version of Barker named Kim Baker, a backbench network news writer in New York who, in
2003, takes an offer to go to Afghanistan as an
onscreen reporter. Based in Kabul, embedded
with Marines under the command of a crusty
colonel (Billy Bob Thornton), Kim learns the
ropes while socializing hard in the so-called Kabubble—notably, with Tanya (Margot Robbie),
a friendly competitor; Iain (Martin Freeman),
a randy one; Fahim (Christopher Abbott), her
local handler; and Sadiq (Alfred Molina), a government official who wants to be more than a
source. (Why the near uniformly Anglo casting?)
The writer, Robert Carlock, and the directors,
Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, see Afghanistan
through an American lens of gender inequality
rooted in Afghan men’s religious dogmatism
and hypocrisy, while also looking benignly at
the unifying charm of ethnic tradition. Distinguishing the American armed forces’ good intentions from wise and well-conceived actions,
the filmmakers keep to the surface of the bluntly
rowdy story while conveying apolitical layers of
regret and exasperation, in wanly comic and affectingly melodramatic action alike.—R.B. (In
wide release.)
The Wild Bunch
It’s a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery
as ambivalent as Goya’s. By a supreme burst of
filmmaking energy, Sam Peckinpah is able to
convert chaotic romanticism into exaltation;
the film is perched right on the edge of incoherence, yet it’s comparable in scale and sheer poetic
force to Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai.” The
movie, set in 1913, is about a band of killers who
flee Texas for Mexico, and Peckinpah has very
intricate, contradictory feelings about them. He
got so wound up in the aesthetics of violence that
what had begun as a realistic treatment—a deglamorization of warfare that would show how
horribly gruesome killing really is—became instead an almost abstract fantasy about violence.
The bloody deaths are voluptuous, frightening,
beautiful. Pouring new wine into the bottle of
the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle; his
story is too simple for this imagist epic. And it’s
no accident that you feel a sense of loss for each
killer of the Bunch: Peckinpah has made them
seem heroically, mythically alive on the screen.
With William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Ben Johnson, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, Bo Hopkins, L. Q. Jones, Strother
Martin, Jaime Sanchez, Emilio Fernandez,
Albert Dekker, and Dub Taylor. Released in
1969.—Pauline Kael (Film Society of Lincoln Center; March 31 and April 1.)
The Witch
A daunting début from Robert Eggers, who writes
and directs this tale of demonic possession. The
MOVIES
setting is New England, in the early seventeenth
century; the clothes, the unyielding piety, and
the turns of speech are suffused with a sense of
the period. A lofty, God-fearing fellow named
William (Ralph Ineson) takes his wife (Kate
Dickie) and their five children to start a new
life, cleansed of sin, in the wild. But sin seeks
them out nonetheless, and something, or somebody, lurks in the forest beside which the family
builds a home. The fable, its talons sharpened by
a keening musical score from Mark Korven, is
touched with a hint of the whodunit; we are never
quite sure which of the characters has caved in
to temptation. The witching that follows is rife
with visible horrors, and Eggers carefully rations out the shocks and scares, but to what extent, even at the climax, are they the product of
haunted minds? The movie finds its poise in the
striking performance, both guileless and knowing, of Anya Taylor-Joy, as Thomasin, the couple’s eldest child. She gets solid support from a
goat.—A.L. (2/29/16) (In wide release.)
Zootopia
Disney’s new animated film is about a rabbit cop,
eager and optimistic: Thumper with a badge.
Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin),
raised on a peaceful farm, comes to the city to
fight crime, undismayed by being the smallest
mammal on the force. As in “The Lion King,” the
world presented by the movie is entirely humanfree, although, in this case, no friction exists between predators and the lesser beasts. In Zootopia, everybody lives pretty much in harmony—a
mushy conceit, yet the directors, Byron Howard and Rich Moore, take care to suggest how
vulnerable such peace can be. Only by a whisker is it preserved, thanks to Judy and her sidekick, a hustling fox (Jason Bateman), who have
two days to crack a difficult case; their comradeship, unlikely as it sounds, is a furry sequel
to that of Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, in “48
Hrs.” There are no songs, apart from those performed by a superstar gazelle (Shakira), but the
beat of the movie barely dips, sustained by a
steady profusion of gags. With the voice of Idris
Elba.—A.L. (3/14/16) (In wide release.)
1
Paul Taylor’s American Dance
In its final week at the Koch, the company offers
performances of the delightfully silly “Offenbach
Overtures”—in which two extravagantly mustachioed officers duel, only to fall in love—the magisterial “Beloved Renegade,” from 2008, and Taylor’s next to last work, “Sullivaniana,” set to music
by Sir Arthur Sullivan. (Lincoln Center. 212-4960600. March 29-April 3.)
Pennsylvania Ballet
This visit is the company’s first since the former American Ballet Theatre star Ángel Corella
took over as artistic director, in 2014. Since the
three works on the program, all new to New
York, were commissioned by the previous director, esprit de corps will be the principal barometer of change. “Keep,” a 2009 work by Matthew
Neenan, the troupe’s talented resident choreographer, is an attractive sampler of romantic modes
from rapturous to playful. Trey McIntyre’s 2014
work “The Accidental” is a pop piece, fresh,
youthful, and touching. “Grace Action,” made
last year by Nicolo Fonte, is a technique exhibition, set to Philip Glass. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth
Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. March 29-April 3.)
“Live Ideas”
The New York Live Arts series, this year focussing on North Africa and the Middle East, continues with two United States premières. In
“2065 BC,” Adham Hafez, an entrepreneurial figure in Cairo’s contemporary dance scene, imagines a postwar political conference in which (reversing the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884)
Africans divide the rest of the globe into colonies. In “~55,” the Moroccan dancer Radouan
Mriziga uses the proportions of his body to create an intricate floor design with chalk and tape.
(219 W. 19th St. 212-924-0077. March 30-April 2.)
piece by the Philadelphia-based hip-hop choreographer Kyle (JustSole) Clark and another by the
extraordinary Jamar Roberts, a leading dancer in
the main company. (405 W. 55th St. 212-868-4444.
March 30-April 3. Through April 10.)
Enrico D. Wey
Wey is a supple dancer who can express subtle
strangeness and violence. He’s a choreographer
with a highly associative mind. (He’s also a puppeteer.) In “To Warring States, a Useless Tool,”
he addresses his identity as an Asian-American
male—the external assumptions and the internal
emotions. (Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church Inthe-Bowery, Second Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-4111.
March 31-April 2.)
“Spaces”
First composed by Wynton Marsalis in 2009,
“Spaces” is a dance suite, each section of which
is intended to evoke an animal. Now extended to
ninety minutes, the sonic menagerie is conjured by
the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and embodied
by two dancers of bewildering virtuosity. Lil Buck is
the lithe king of the Memphis street style known as
jookin; Jared Grimes is a smooth tap demon. Each
is accustomed to doing his own thing, but the former New York City Ballet dancer Damian Woetzel
offers some choreographic assistance. (Rose Theatre, 60th St. at Broadway. 212-721-6500. April 1-2.)
“From the Horse’s Mouth” /
Gus Solomons, Jr., Tribute
The extended-family-like structure of the dance
community lies at the heart of this series, conceived
by Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham; it’s part
reunion, part storytelling marathon, part dance
improv session. This edition, which honors the
veteran dancer, choreographer, and teacher Gus
Solomons, Jr., features more than twenty-five participants, of varying ages, including dancers, choreographers, and even writers. Each tells a story,
performs a brief solo, and then engages another
participant in a duet, after which the cycle begins
anew. The event will be preceded by a conversation with Solomons—who has danced with everyone from Pearl Lang to Merce Cunningham—led
by Wendy Perron, on March 30 at 4. (Theatre at the
14th Street Y, 344 E. 14th St. 212-780-0800. April 1-3.)
Anthology Film Archives In revival. April 1-7 at 7:
“Film” (1965, Alan Schneider). Film Forum In re-
Ailey II
There’s nothing junior varsity about the Ailey II
dancers. In fact, the ensemble is worth seeing even
in the sometimes mediocre repertory that fuels
its tours. At the Ailey Citigroup Theatre, they’ll
perform two programs, one of recent works (by
Dwight Rhoden, Manuel Vignoulle, and Jennifer Archibald) and one of novelties, including a
vival. April 1-7 (call for showtimes): “Jeanne Dielman” (1975, Chantal Akerman). Film Society of Lincoln Center The films of Sam Peckinpah. March
31 at 2: “The Deadly Companions.” F • March 31
at 4: “The Killer Elite” (1975). • March 31 at 8:30
and April 1 at 1:30: “The Wild Bunch.” F • April
1 at 9: “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” (1974). • April 2 at 6: “Major Dundee”
(1965) • April 3 at 2: “The Osterman Weekend”
(1983). • April 4 at 9 and April 5 at 6:30: “Junior
Bonner” (1972). Metrograph In revival. March
30-31 at 3, 7, and 9: “High School” (1968, Frederick Wiseman). • April 3 at 1: “Crime and Punishment” (1935, Josef von Sternberg). Museum of the
Moving Image In revival. April 2 at 7: “Goodbye,
Dragon Inn.” F Museum of Modern Art “Modern Matinees: Six New York Independents.” April
1 at 1:30: “The Small Hours” (1962, Norman C.
Chaitin). • Films by Tay Garnett. March 30-April
4 (call for showtimes): “Her Man” (1930). • March
31 at 4: “The Spieler” (1928). • April 4 at 4: “Main
Street to Broadway” (1953).
Paul Taylor’s American Dance performs “Offenbach Overtures” at the David H. Koch Theatre.
REVIVALS AND FESTIVALS
Titles with a dagger are reviewed.
ILLUSTRATION BY WESLEY ALLSBROOK
DANCE
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
23
ABOVE & BEYOND
1
AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES
In the run-up to big sales of photographs next
week, Christie’s offers two smaller auctions, one
of European furnishings and home decorations
(some from the Birmingham Museum of Art) on
March 31, and the other, on April 5, of maps and
travel narratives from a private collection. The latter includes an edition from 1486, in Latin, of Ptolemy’s “Cosmographia,” a compendium of all the
geographical information known to the Romans
in the middle of the second century. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. 212-636-2000.) • Sotheby’s
devotes two sessions to photographs on April
3, in a sale that includes works spanning three
centuries and a variety of styles, from a surrealist montage of a smiling Audrey Hepburn,
by Angus McBean, to a modernist photogram
(“Rayograph”), by Man Ray, created by suspending a ball bearing, a match, and a feather above
photographic paper and exposing them to light.
(York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.) • As chance
would have it, Phillips’s auction of photographs
on April 4 also contains an image of Audrey Hepburn—from Vik Muniz’s glitzy “Pictures of Diamonds” series—along with works by Helmut
Newton, Elger Esser, and Richard Avedon. (450
Park Ave. 212-940-1200.) • Swann’s sale of printed
and manuscript African-Americana (March 31)
is a treasure trove that includes a map of all the
hottest night clubs in Harlem in 1932 (originally
printed in Manhattan Magazine) and a copy of
Scott Joplin’s first published song, “Please Say You
Will,” from 1895. (104 E. 25th St. 212-254-4710.)
1
READINGS AND TALKS
Rizzoli Bookstore
The British artist and photographer Nick Waplington has for years gained enviable access to
the inner workings of New York City’s fashion
complexes. From 1989 to 1993, he joined the firebrand New York designer Isaac Mizrahi backstage
at his biannual fashion shows, photographing
models during fitting sessions. His photographs,
on display at the Jewish Museum as part of its
striking exhibit of Mizrahi’s couture designs,
In a sale on March 31, the auctioneer Swann offers the original art work, from 1932, for a fanciful
map of Harlem night clubs which was published in Manhattan Magazine and Esquire.
24
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
provide glimpses of Manhattan’s spontaneous
starlight, including shots of Cindy Crawford,
Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell, as
well as the harrowing club culture that writhed
just underneath the city’s slick surface. Waplington has gathered his candid shots in a hardcover
published this March, and is joined by Mizrahi
for a talk and book signing celebrating its release. (1133 Broadway. 212-759-2424. March 31 at 8.)
McNally Jackson
The author and librettist Tim Federle has written
a slew of books: everything from cocktail compilations to children’s narratives, including his
début novel, “Better Nate Than Ever,” named a
Times Notable Children’s Book in 2013. He tries
his hand at teen-age angst in “The Great American Whatever,” his first young-adult novel, which
follows a sixteen-year-old who is shaken out of
a self-imposed stupor when a friend sets him on
an existential quest for improvement. McNally
Jackson hosts a reading of the just published
novel, whose protagonist has gained warm if perhaps hasty comparisons to Holden Caulfield. (52
Prince St. 212-274-1160. April 3 at 6.)
North Brooklyn Boat Club
This boating advocacy group encompasses kayakers, sailors, environmentalists, and activists,
all devoted to cultivating nautical culture in the
tristate area’s creeks and canals. It invites Kris
Timken, author of “The New Explorers,” to discuss the contributions of twelve contemporary
female artist-explorers, with the art critic Lucy R.
Lippard and the artist Marie Lorenz. (49 Ash St.,
Brooklyn. northbrooklynboatingclub.org. April 3 at 3.)
Strand Bookstore
A considerable portion of American labor over
the past fifty years has been devoted to producing change, instead of goods—each day, more
grassroots activists turn pet passions into fulltime professions, and the net progress is showing. The face of the American working class
has changed; it’s more female and multicultural
than in any preceding generation. But its political power has also seemed to shrink, as what was
once a robust, central bloc appears to have been
relegated to the fringe, and is now shouting itself back to the stage in the tumult of the coming
Presidential election. The author and think-tank
vice-president Tamara Draut considers this state
of affairs in “Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America,” an urgent call
for the restoration of the working class’s political
and economic power as the most sound investment
the country could make in its future. She will discuss her observations with Joy Reid, the national
correspondent for MSNBC. (828 Broadway. 212473-1452. April 5 at 7.)
TOP: ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO; BOTTOM: COURTESY SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES
Macy’s Flower Show
Less well known than its Thanksgiving Day Parade counterpart, the Macy’s Flower Show is
nonetheless a welcome sign of spring’s arrival. The
two-week exhibition at Herald Square features
ornate, aromatic displays of flora from around
the country, in line with this year’s “America the
Beautiful” theme. The store’s ground level is transformed into an indoor garden with various live
plants, flowers, and trees, and special seminars
and events are held. On April 1, Dimitri and Sara
Gatanas, of New York’s Urban Garden Center,
offer tips on gardening in tiny apartments and
hand out starter pots for attendees to nurture at
home. (Macy’s Herald Square, 151 W. 34th St., 9th
Fl. 212-695-4400. April 1 at 1.)
FßD & DRINK
TABLES FOR TWO
The Cecil
PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
210 W. 118th St. (212-866-1262)
In the late spring of 1960, 118th Street
was abuzz after a lissome blonde, au naturel, stormed out of Room 308 of the
Cecil Hotel and ran through the lobby,
straight into the street. As the Amsterdam
News’s Mr. 1-2-5, the columnist Les Matthews, recounted, a patrolman was
knocked over in the ensuing kerfuffle.
Some of that same ebullient spirit is celebrated at the restaurant that now bears
the hotel’s name, in the form of a wire
sculpture of nudes which crowns the bar
by the entrance. The space seems built for
natty young things waiting for their dates.
If you’re one of them, try the Amina,
which rolls out aromas of bourbon on a
long tongue of chili-pepper-infused molasses, but know that you’ll have to settle
up before going to your table, always an
awkward start to a rendezvous.
The Cecil Hotel closed after a fire in
the nineteen-seventies. Three years ago,
new owners opened a restaurant in the
same location, giving it a spacious, contemporary-art-filled dining room. In the
nineteen-forties, the Cecil was famous
for housing the jazz club where bebop
was invented; now it’s also known for
Joseph ( JJ) Johnson’s “Afro-AsianAmerican” cooking. (The fusion is his
comment on the octopuslike reach of
the slave trade.) While there’s still lots
of jazz and blues on the restaurant’s
sound system, you’re equally likely to
hear a French rapper rhyming “Djibouti”
with “agouti”—a type of South American rodent.
A recent revision to Johnson’s menu
saw the end of well-loved dishes such as
his fried guinea hen. An excellent
collard-green salad, which melds the
softness of red adzuki beans with the
crumble of candied cashews, thankfully
remains. Along with braised goat dumplings, it is the best way to start a meal.
The menu draws attention to drinks
from Africa and the African diaspora. A
Pinotage from South Africa (a type of
red wine that is apparently very popular
these days) pairs well with the superlative
meat dishes, like the glazed oxtails,
which rest on a mess of brown-rice grits,
and the pan-roasted venison. One night,
the half lobster was less impressive—the
meat’s taste was lost in the heaviness of
miso paste and udon noodles.
Among the desserts, the pairing of
baobab mousse with olive-oil cake is
king. A peanut-and-ice-cream confection is a lowly baron in comparison.
The end of dinner here seems to stretch
out, and on most Tuesdays musicians
are on hand to soothe any distended
bellies. Watching them play, with a
forkful of that cake in hand, you might
as well be somewhere between Harlem
and Heaven. (Entrées $18-$38.)
—Nicolas Niarchos
1
BAR TAB
Subway Inn
1140 Second Ave. (212-758-0900)
For a new bar, Subway Inn is pretty old. The original haunt opened in 1937 on 60th near Lexington,
and, after seventy-seven years of serving happy-hour drinkers with sleeves either rolled up or
tattooed, as well as New York icons like Marilyn
Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Jay McInerney, the
landlord refused to renew its lease, in 2014. Like
any true New Yorker, the bar put up a fight, but
despite the best efforts of the owner Marcello
Salinas and his family the original location succumbed to the city’s seemingly inexorable mutation into a solid block of luxury condos. Happily,
since March of last year, the same old neon sign
has beamed resiliently onto Second Avenue outside
the beery Lazarus’s new home. A few nights ago,
two patrons admired the new digs, and found them
remarkably similar to the old ones: the entire bar
has been meticulously reinstalled and restored by
the Salinases, right down to an ancient conglomeration of chewed gum on the underside of one
table. The pair settled on a bench by a large window in the back which frames the Roosevelt Island
Tramway—a marked improvement on the old view
of Bloomingdale’s. “Weren’t you in here a week
ago?” a bartender asked, serving affability with a
Brooklyn Lager (Subway Inn’s beer has never cost
more than six dollars). Wendy Wasserstein once
wrote that it was “the kind of dive in which it
makes a lot of sense to not order wine.” This holds
up. After a few more non-wine drinks, conversation turned to a ride on the aerial tram. “You can
perv on apartments really well,” someone said.
The tram ride also gives a view of the big city’s
bright lights, and the return trip will take you right
back to a bar you’ve seen before.—Colin Stokes
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
25
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
BAD CHOICES
ast Wednesday, the morning after isis suicide bomb-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
L ers in Brussels killed more than thirty people, Ted Cruz
was on “Fox & Friends,” claiming that “the weakness and
appeasement” of the Obama Administration had fuelled
the growth of the Islamic State. It’s “bizarre,” he said, that
after terrorist attacks the President “lectures Americans on
Islamophobia.” Cruz was on the show to celebrate his victory, the night before, in the Utah caucuses, which he had
won with the help of Mitt Romney, and to defend his call
to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Given
that America’s three million Muslims, many of whom have
deep multi-generational roots in this country, do not tend
to live in strict segregation, it was hard to know what Cruz
had in mind—bands of armed ideological examiners roving the streets of Brooklyn?
A “clarification” from the Cruz campaign—explaining
that “every tool available” would be given to the police, who
would then “partner with non-radical Americans who want
to protect their homes”—added a hint of vigilantism and
no reassurance on issues of civil rights. Bill Bratton, the
New York Police Department Commissioner, responded quickly. “I would
remind the Senator he lives in the
United States of America,” Bratton
said. “We don’t need a President that
doesn’t respect the values that form
the foundation of this country.” There
are more than nine hundred Muslim
officers in the N.Y.P.D., many of
whom also serve in the U.S. military
in combat—something that Cruz has
never done, Bratton noted, “so the
Senator basically is really out of line
with his comments.”
And yet on this issue Cruz seems
in line with today’s Republican Party, beginning with Donald Trump,
its front-runner in the Presidential
race. With broadcast and social media still filled with images of the bombing victims at the airport and in a subway
station in Brussels, Trump and Cruz each launched a push
for votes in the next round of primaries and, it seemed, for
the low ground in the fight against terrorism. On “Today,”
Trump said, “Belgium is no longer Belgium.” It has become
a “horror show.” The problem is immigration—“They are
not assimilating”—and America is next. “We’re allowing
thousands and thousands of these people into our country,
and we’re going to have nothing but problems,” he said.
With regard to terrorism suspects, “Waterboarding would
be fine, and if they could expand the laws I would do a lot
more.” When asked if this meant he was in the camp that
believes that “torture works,” Trump replied, “Yes, I am.”
Cruz, though more legalistic in his reasoning, has said that
he, too, would permit waterboarding.
Many of the G.O.P.’s leaders, meanwhile, are getting
behind Cruz, in an effort to deny Trump the nomination. The morning after Cruz’s call for patrolling Muslims, Jeb Bush, once the moderates’ hope, endorsed Cruz
in a Facebook post, calling him “a consistent, principled
conservative.” He joined Lindsey
Graham, who had endorsed Cruz
despite having previously said that
a choice between Cruz and Trump
was like one between “being shot or
being poisoned.” A few hours earlier,
Glenn Beck, on his radio show, had
asked Cruz what he might do about
unnamed “bad Muslims” whom Jeb’s
brother George W. Bush had brought
into the government. Cruz replied
with a soliloquy about political correctness that culminated with the
two men congratulating each other
for being more willing than President
Bush had been to heed the words of
Frank Gaffney, a conspiracy-minded
jihadologist who has said that Barack
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
27
Obama may be America’s first Muslim President. Gaffney
is one of the Cruz campaign’s advisers.
Neither Jeb Bush nor any Republican was forced to
choose between Cruz and Trump, given that John Kasich,
though far behind, is still in the race (as are two Democrats).
Kasich’s positions and temperament are closer to those of a
traditional conservative, and he quickly condemned Cruz’s
comments on Muslim neighborhoods. Kasich could provide
the Party a vision of itself that is more distant from Trump,
but the G.O.P.’s leaders would have to fight hard for it—and
for a contested Convention—which would mean confronting
ideological constraints of their own creation. In many of the
states that have so far held primaries or caucuses, exit pollers have asked Republican voters if they agreed with Trump’s
proposal to temporarily bar all non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States. In every case, the number of people
who said yes (sixty-two per cent in Michigan, seventy-eight
per cent in Alabama) was greater than the number who voted
for Trump. Often, it was greater than the number of voters for
Cruz and Trump combined.
For years, the G.O.P. has failed to address voters’ concerns
about disenfranchisement and inequality, offering only
rhetoric about inner-city dependency, Beltway corruption,
birtherism, and, in the war on terror, an enemies list that
PHOTO OP DEPT.
BUSTED
ore than one Donald Trump
M recently made the rounds in Flor-
ida. Inside a campaign van, which
started in Tallahassee and crisscrossed
the state, an eighty-pound bronzegilded bust of the leading Republican
candidate for President shuttled between rallies, where members of the
electorate had a chance to pose with
it. A few days ago, offers to buy the
sculpture began coming in from New
York and Los Angeles.
“There was a time when being a sculptor was a real profession,” Keith Allen
Johnson, the bust’s creator, said the other
day, from his studio, in Flowery Branch,
Georgia. “There were sculptors who were
able to create these larger-than-life, heroic portraits. The seated Lincoln sculpture at his Memorial, in Washington,
D.C.—is there anything so powerful and
stately? That’s what I want when people look at my Donald Trump bust: to
see the stature of the man.”
Johnson, who is fifty-four and Boston28
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
has come to include the President. Paul Ryan, the Speaker
of the House, came close to acknowledging this in a speech
last Wednesday, in which he pleaded for a political life not
built around “playing the identity politics of ‘our base’ versus
‘their base.’ ” This was viewed as a rebuke to Trumpism, but
Ryan did not mention Trump by name, and he has said that
he will support him if he is the nominee and will find a way
to work with him if he is the President.
There are clear stylistic differences between Trump, who
tends to call anyone who disagrees with him stupid, weak, or
disgusting, and Cruz, who, with a pitying smile, questions dissenters’ motives, decency, and patriotism. On “CBS This Morning,” Cruz was asked about Bratton’s criticism. “Well, listen,
it’s not surprising that the Democratic political henchmen of
Mayor de Blasio are coming after me,” he said. He added that
de Blasio—who ended a surveillance program that targeted
Muslims—and other Democrats “refuse to be serious” about
keeping the city safe. Such responses are problems of politics,
not just personality. The party that talks loudest about American exceptionalism has given us a cast of characters that would
be perfectly unexceptional in any backwater oligarchy. What
the G.O.P. offers is a choice between two kinds of demagogues: one who insinuates and one who shouts.
—Amy Davidson
born, describes himself as a “classical,
realistic sculptor” and a lifelong Republican. He has sculpted six Presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman,
Kennedy, Reagan, George H. W. Bush,
and George W. Bush. His works, which
can cost six figures to commission, are
on display at hospitals and universities.
But, if everything goes according to
plan, Trump Tower will be his Louvre.
“I want to be the sculptural biographer
of Trump,” Johnson said. “There’s only
been one guy recently who sculpted
Trump besides me, and he completely
fell short in the hair.”
Had he considered celebrating the
cranium of Cruz, Kasich, or Rubio?
He explained, “I’m one of the Trump
people, because I don’t have a university degree. I don’t do big gallery shows.
I like fighters. I like risk-taking.” He
started working on the bust last Thanksgiving, he said, in an effort “to capture
the spirit of a great entrepreneur and
lover of America. It felt like lightning
coming through my hands when I was
working on it. My wife had to drag me
out so I’d eat something.”
Johnson estimates that it took him
eighty hours to create his Trump bust,
which he funded himself, and undertook without the coöperation of his
subject. He consulted some four hun-
dred photographs of Trump. “I always
had the news on in the background, or
a Trump campaign rally,” he said. “I
immersed myself in his persona.”
He described his technique: “As a
portrait artist, you want to slightly overemphasize a distinguishing characteristic.” For Reagan, Johnson focussed on
his “pronounced jowls.” Rendering Kennedy’s “buzzed sidewalls” in clay was
difficult but crucial. Trump, however,
“presented the biggest challenge of all.”
“From a facial standpoint, he carries a lot of weight under his chin,”
Johnson said. “But when you go back
to some of his younger photos he looks
more Napoleonic. I see Trump that
way: as a strongman, a protector, a
fighter.” So he firmed up the jawline.
“He does comb his hair in a very
creative way,” Johnson said. “He styles
it for fullness forward. And then he
takes it and he combs it back. And
when you do that—and I know this,
having once been a professional hair
designer—you create a lift. He also has
these beautiful side fenders and a classic ducktail. I love his hair. I think it’s
his most fantastic feature.”
Trump would undoubtedly be happy
with the artist’s attention to tailoring.
“Can you sculpt a ten-thousand-dollar
suit, as opposed to a one-thousand-
dollar suit?” Johnson asked. “You better believe you can! A ten-thousanddollar suit is smoother. The stitching
is finer. There’s a finish to the Trump
suit, and also to his silk tie, that needed
to exceed what I did for H. W. Bush.”
When Johnson finished the piece,
in late February, he called Brandon
Phillips, the director of Trump’s campaign in Georgia, and texted him some
pictures of it. “My first thought was:
that’s pretty cool that someone would
take their time to do something like
that for a candidate,” Phillips said. “I’ve
never heard of that happening before.”
Johnson then brought the bust to the
Georgia campaign office, where Phillips and his staff happily accepted it to
use in the campaign.
Trump himself finally saw the bust
after a rally at an Atlanta convention
center. Johnson and the bust waited in
a cordoned-off area “with the V.I.P.s”
while Trump gave a speech. Johnson
recalled, “They drove his motorcade in,
closed this big steel garage gate, and
there it was, covered with a royal-blue,
Presidential, high silk veil that I’d specially tailored. I was nervous. I didn’t
want to be embarrassed. But his first
words were ‘It’s gorgeous.’ And then he
said, ‘I’d love to have this in my office.’ ”
Johnson has plans for more public
works if Trump is elected. “My vision
now is to do a life-size figurative piece,”
he said. “I’m going to sculpt Trump Tower,
and he’ll be towering over it.” He went
on, “My larger dream is, at the end of
four years—I believe he’s only going to
serve one term—I’d love to have that
same piece in his Presidential library,
somewhere in New York, most likely.”
—Charles Bethea
1
THE BOARDS
BEWITCHED
he actor Ben Whishaw pulled
T up in a black car the other day and
popped into an East Village store called
Enchantments, which specializes in essential oils, talismans, books of spells,
and other witchy accoutrements. A black
cat leaped onto the cash register. “That’s
Medea,” the shop’s owner, Stacy Rapp,
said. “The Greek Medea, not the Tyler
Perry Madea.”
Whishaw, who is thirty-five, bashful,
and from Bedfordshire, caressed the
cat—he used to own several, but gave
them to his grandmother when his film
career exploded, eight years ago. He is
best known for playing Q in the two latest Bond films: not the crusty old gadget-maker made famous by Desmond
Llewelyn but a coy young tech geek with
a windswept mop of hair. He is frequently
cast as a writer ( John Keats, in “Bright
Star”; Herman Melville, in “In the Heart
of the Sea”), a rocker (Bob Dylan, or a
slice of him, in “I’m Not There”; Freddie Mercury, possibly, in a long-rumored
bio-pic), or a lover (he pined for Eddie
Redmayne in “The Danish Girl”).
Now he’s tackling a Puritan: he stars
as John Proctor in a Broadway revival
of “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s
McCar thy-minded drama about the
Salem witch trials, directed by the Belgian experimentalist Ivo van Hove.
During rehearsals, Whishaw had heard
about Enchantments from his co-star
Tavi Gevinson, the nineteen-year-old
actress and the editor of the online magazine Rookie, who goes there for candles.
“What are you interested in? Spells?”
Rapp, who wore black ear studs and a
skull-and-crossbones bandanna, asked.
“We can’t really fly on brooms, I’m sorry
to say. We do sell them, though.”
“Do you do spells?” Whishaw asked.
“Spells are basically a tool,” Rapp explained. “A spell is a tool to focus your
energy in a specific direction. We do get
a lot of people in your line of work coming in, saying, ‘I’m up for a big role, I
have this audition, I need some luck.’ ”
Whishaw said that he does own crystals, which he bought in Glastonbury, a
pagan pilgrimage site. “I have a smoky
quartz, a beautiful smoky quartz, which
I brought with me from the U.K. I’m
going to take it to the theatre and just
have it in the dressing room. I don’t know
why. I like it there.”
“Quartz is cleansing,” Rapp assured
him. She changed a light bulb as Whishaw
looked around, the floor creaking underfoot. He paused by a shelf of ceramic
skulls. He had not spent much time
studying the historical Salem, he said,
noting that Miller had strayed from fact.
“In actuality, John Proctor was in his six-
ties, and Abigail was really young—she
was twelve.” (On Broadway, she’s played
by Saoirse Ronan, who is twenty-one.)
He peered up. “What are in these bottles here?”
“These are oils,” Rapp said, and drew
Whishaw’s attention to a root called
Devil’s shoestring. “The Puritans were
big on the Devil.”
“In the play, any sinful behavior is the
Devil at work,” Whishaw said. “So if you
have sinned as John Proctor has sinned,
in the sin of lechery, you have been
touched by the Devil. It gets very com-
Ben Whishaw
plex, because he’s also a good man, but
he’s done this awful thing.”
Rapp said that she had been to Salem
several times. “It’s gotten very touristy.
I’m not crazy about it.”
“People going on witch tours and
things?” Whishaw said. He winced. “It’s
easy, because it’s so long ago, for people
to go, ‘Oh, witches! Dunkings! Trials!’
But actually it’s terrifying. I mean, they
were executing people. It’s barbaric.”
Rapp sat down under a sign that read
“The Witch Is In” and asked Whishaw,
“How does it feel playing someone like
this, seeing as you seem to have some
belief in magic?”
“I think what you were saying
about Puritanism is very important,”
Whishaw said, crouching down to
stroke Medea again. “They were like
Christian fundamentalists.”
“They left England because it was
too relaxed religiously?”
“Yeah,” Whishaw said. “They were
like religious refugees, because the Puritans were being persecuted.”
“So they turned around and did the
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
29
exact same thing,” Rapp said. “It reminds
me what things were like back in the day.
I’m lucky I can actually own a shop like
this. In certain countries it’s still illegal.”
(Saudi Arabia has an anti-witchcraft police unit, and Swaziland has threatened
to fine anyone flying a broomstick above
a hundred and fifty metres.)
Whishaw thanked Rapp and headed
around the corner to a café, where he ordered an omelette and an Americano.
He doesn’t actually believe in magic,
he clarified. “Of course, lucky things
can happen, but I don’t think they happen because you look at a candle.” As
for his smoky quartz, he added, “I just
like it aesthetically.”
—Michael Schulman
1
DEPT. OF SILENCINGS
LONELY CITY
arlier this month, attending
E Nancy Reagan’s funeral, Hillary
Clinton delivered a peculiarly revisionist encomium, praising the former First
Lady for starting “a national conversation” about AIDS and being a “very effective, low-key” advocate on behalf of
Americans with H.I.V. Clinton quickly
retracted her statement, after high-key
advocates pointed out that Mrs. Reagan and her husband had, in fact, been
derelict on the issue. A photograph circulated on social media as a reminder
of AIDS in the time of the Reagans:
an image of David Wojnarowicz, the
artist and activist, participating in an
ACT UP demonstration, wearing a jacket
bearing a pink triangle and the words
“If I die of Aids—forget burial—just
drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.”
Wojnarowicz died in 1992, four years
after the photograph was taken. He will
be the subject of a retrospective at the
Whitney in 2018; he is also one of the
subjects of “The Lonely City,” a critical meditation on New York, art, and
loneliness by Olivia Laing, the British
writer. The other day, Laing was in New
York, and she stopped by the Fales Library, at N.Y.U., where Wojnarowicz’s
archive is kept: photographs, diaries, recordings, and an orange crate crammed
with odds and ends which he called his
“Magic Box.”
“It feels like his work has this capacity for resisting all those silencings and
false histories,” Laing said, as she opened
a folder containing an early series, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York.” The photographs, taken by Wojnarowicz in the
late seventies, show a figure wearing a
mask of the French poet’s face while riding the subway, masturbating in bed,
wandering the decrepit Hudson River
piers. “I can’t think of another artist who
works in that same way—the more that
attempts at silencing happen, the more
potent they become,” she said.
Laing was born around the time those
photographs were taken. She lives in
Cambridge, England, but the book is
about a four-year period when she spent
months at a time in New York, after a
relationship had fallen apart. Finding
herself lonely, she made loneliness her
subject, choosing to examine the phenomenon not only through her own experience but also as illuminated by the
lives and work of visual artists: Edward
Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger,
and Wojnarowicz. In conversation she
speaks of “David,” as if Wojnarowicz
were an older brother. “The whole book
is about that funny closeness that you
have with artists who matter to you,” she
explained. “It does feel like this weird intimacy. Though I would never call Henry
Darger ‘Henry.’ ”
She gingerly opened the crate, which
was discovered under Wojnarowicz’s bed
after he died. Inside: a stuffed fabric snake,
a glittery plastic snowman, a tin crocodile with a real feather protruding from
its mouth. “All of these are like childhood toys of someone who didn’t really
have a childhood,” she said. The young
Wojnarowicz was subjected to repeated
abuse: his father beat him, and also served
his pet rabbit, cooked, for dinner. Laing
opened another folder, which contained
a photograph of Wojnarowicz as a child:
big ears, braces. “He’s really cute, and really uncared for,” she said. Wojnarowicz
used the photo in an art work known as
“One day this kid,” in which he recounted
the brutal consequences—“strangling,
fists, prison, suffocation, rape”—that followed his desire “to place his naked body
on the naked body of another boy.”
Laing said she identifies with Wojnarowicz’s sense of not fitting in. “So much
of my book is about gender, and frustrations of gender, and that desire to be an
anonymous person in a city in a way that
I think you only can if you are a man—
and a woman never is, because a woman
is always on some level a desirable or
non-desirable sexual object,” she said.
During her New York days, Laing would
often go to see performances by Justin
Vivian Bond, the transgender cabaret artist. She said that a school friend had reminded her that when she was eighteen
she’d said she felt like “a gay boy in a
woman’s body.” She went on, “I am aware
that my sense of myself is complicated,
and an awful lot of people’s are as well.”
Laing opened Wojnarowicz’s diary
from 1991, in which he wrote in a neat,
urgent hand about his dreams and his
pain. After he died, some of his ashes
were scattered in protest on the lawn of
the White House, which was by then
occupied by George H. W. Bush. “Those
very late deaths, just before combination
therapy, feel so devastating,” Laing said.
“There are so many people walking
around New York carrying that loss, and
the world’s moved on. The historicization becomes ‘The Reagans solved AIDS,’
and that becomes the storyline if there
isn’t a pushback.” She closed the diary.
“It’s so easy to tell cheerful lies,” she said.
—Rebecca Mead
THE FINANCIAL PAGE
THE ROLL-UP RACKET
ew falls in business history have been as sudden and
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
F as steep as that of Michael Pearson, the C.E.O. of the
drugmaker Valeant. Not long ago, he was heading a company whose stock price had risen more than four thousand
per cent during his tenure. A former McKinsey consultant,
he had developed a strategy based on acquisitions, costcutting, and price hikes. The influential hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, one of Valeant’s largest shareholders,
compared Pearson to Warren Buffett, citing his genius at
capital allocation. No one’s calling Pearson a genius anymore. In the past six months, Valeant’s stock price has fallen
almost ninety per cent, thanks to a toxic
combination of sketchy accounting, political blowback, and slowing growth.
Two weeks ago, the company announced
terrible fourth-quarter earnings, and
said that it wouldn’t be able to file its
annual report on time, which drove the
stock down fifty per cent in a day. Investors who once saw Pearson as a savior now consider him an albatross: when,
last week,Valeant announced that he
would step down, the stock price rose.
Valeant used to be a small drugmaker,
struggling to stay afloat by doing what
pharmaceutical companies typically do:
invest heavily in R. & D. in order to discover new drugs. But Pearson, who took
over in 2008, scrapped that approach.
He argued that returns on R. & D. were
too low and too uncertain; it made more sense to buy companies that already had products on the market, then slash
costs and raise prices. So Valeant became a serial acquirer,
doing more than a hundred transactions between 2008 and
2015. It invested almost nothing in its core business; R. & D.
spending fell to just three per cent of sales. It was ruthless
about bringing down costs, sometimes laying off more than
half the workforce of a company it acquired. And though
Martin Shkreli may be the public face of drug-price gouging, Valeant was the real pioneer. A 2015 analysis looked at
drugs whose price had risen between three hundred per cent
and twelve hundred per cent in the previous two years; of the
nineteen whose prices had risen fastest, half belonged to
Valeant.
The company also pulled every trick in the financialengineering handbook. In 2010, it merged with a Canadian
company, in order to bring down its tax rate, and it sheltered
its intellectual property in tax havens like Luxembourg. It
used opaque accounting methods that made it hard for investors to judge how well acquired companies were doing.
To ward off competition from generic drugs, Valeant entered into a complicated relationship with a mail-order pharmacy called Philidor. Meanwhile, it paid its executives exceedingly well, and tied their compensation to shareholder
returns, thus encouraging a single-minded focus on stock
price. Valeant embodied practically everything that people
hate about business today. So it’s no surprise that much of
Wall Street saw it as a profit-making machine.
If Wall Street was happy, what went wrong? There were
a couple of contingent problems: the dubious relationship
with Philidor made people wary of Valeant’s accounting (the
company just announced that it would have to re-state earnings for 2014 and part of 2015), while the political backlash
provoked by Shkreli limited Valeant’s ability to raise prices.
But the bigger problem was that Pearson’s buy-and-slash approach hit its inevitable limits. Valeant had become what’s
known as a roll-up: a company that buys lots of other companies, trusting that they’ll be much more profitable together
than they were apart. The challenge for
roll-ups is that they have to keep feeding the beast: if you grow by buying, you
have to keep buying to thrive. But, the
bigger you get, the fewer deals there are
that can truly boost your bottom line.
And, because your grim reputation precedes you, you end up paying big premiums, which may mean that you have
to start borrowing heavily. (Valeant’s
debt is almost three times its annual
sales.) Not surprisingly, roll-ups have a
terrible track record. A Booz Allen study
of the performance of eighty-one rollups between 1993 and 2000 found that
only eleven did better than the market
as a whole. Another study found that
more than two-thirds of roll-ups created no value for investors at all. The
only roll-ups that succeed are those which find, as one study
put it, “a fundamentally superior way to make money.” Valeant’s
collapse has shown that it had no such ability.
Valeant now says that its roll-up days are over, and that
it’s going to focus on expanding its business “organically.”
Yet it’s far from clear that this will be possible. For years,
Valeant has been less like a drug company than like a superaggressive hedge fund that just happened to specialize in
pharmaceuticals. It made money not by providing economic
value to customers but by financial engineering and by gaming the system. It exemplified a corporate era in which financialization too often eclipsed production. And, in the process, it forgot an important truth about markets; namely,
that there are few free lunches. Pearson’s promise to investors was, in effect, that other companies would do the work
of researching and developing new drugs, after which Valeant
could swoop in and reap the enormous rewards without having taken any risk. But this was a fantasy. The attempt to
evade risk turned out to be the riskiest strategy of all.
—James Surowiecki
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
31
Our Footloose Correspondents
COME TO THE FAIR
The food-and-booze fest that is France’s national agricultural exhibition.
BY LAUREN COLLINS
t would be a mistake to think of mi-
I crotourism, the latest invented word to
capture the imagination of the travel sector, as mere staycationing. The practice,
as defined by a pair of design students in
Denmark who recently completed a project on the theme, is a prerogative of a future in which “gas prices are so high that
we must develop a new form of adventure that does not require travelling great
distances.” Microtourism is not glamping (no yurt) or bleisure (no work) or
minimooning (no wedding). Nor is it
Netflix and putter. If a staycation means
pajamas and the garden shed, microtourism means sneakers and the subway.
For several years now, my favorite microtouristic destination has been the
Salon International de l’Agriculture, the
enormous show that each spring brings
the farmers of France together under the
eight roofs of the Porte de Versailles convention center, accompanied by nearly
four thousand of their bovine, ovine, caprine, porcine, equine, asinine, and canine
companions. (The weight of the manure
generated, almost three hundred tons, is
equivalent to that of the steamship in
“Fitzcarraldo.”) The Salon is about the
bounty of la France profonde. Anything
passably earthy goes. And, so, in addition to the éleveurs (animal farmers), there
are agriculteurs (farmers in general), knifemakers, beekeepers, hot-tub venders, insurance agents, representatives of feed
conglomerates, backhoe salesmen.
The notaries of France have a stand,
as does the national association of drain-
The Salon de l’Agriculture, held every year in Paris, is also a political crucible.
32
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
age. You can buy a beret or a birdcage.
You can obtain an I.D. card for your pet.
You can subscribe to Pâtre, a monthly
magazine for shepherds. Each of the
country’s eighteen regions sponsors an
area highlighting its gastronomy. Slurp
down some oysters in Arcachon, grab
some choucroute in Alsace, and then turn
a corner and you’re in Martinique, drinking Ti’ Punch. Picture the Iowa State Fair
crossed with the Aspen Food & Wine
Classic, with the Westminster Kennel
Club Dog Show going on in a side ring.
In 2013, the first year I went to the
Salon, I was living in Geneva. One Sunday morning, my husband and I caught
the seven-forty-two train to Paris. By
eleven-thirty (from Switzerland, it was
maybe a mesotour), we were sampling
what would become my favorite delicacy
in all the land, the tourteau fromagé of
Poitou-Charentes. (Giving Mancunians
and Arkansawyers a run for their money
in the demonym stakes, the area’s residents are known as the Picto-Charentais.) The tourteau fromagé is—getting
into the compound-word spirit here—a
goatcheesecake. The shortcrust pastry of
the bottom part forms a lip where it meets
the upper half, which rises domelike from
the cereal-bowl-shaped base, and looks
as though it were composed of volcanic
ash. The burnt top is deceiving. It imparts just the slightest char, in the manner of a good pizza crust. The inside is
tangy. Poke the crumb, and your finger
emerges feeling almost wet, as though
you’d stuck it into a loofah. At Tourteaux
Jahan, Joël Ricard’s stand in Pavilion 3,
the wares are displayed on risers, like a
boys’ choir at a holiday concert. Ricard
has been coming to the Salon since 1983.
In a week, he sells five thousand cakes.
After the tourteau fromagé, it was the
hatching chicks that hooked us. Watch
them struggling out of their shells—
albumen-coated miracles, translucent
and greasy—and you’ll never again classify eggs as inanimate objects. (I read
that the éleveurs brought fresh eggs every
morning from Loué, a hundred and fifty
miles southwest of Paris, a few premature emergences delighting commuters
on the high-speed train.) We went again
in 2014. And in 2015. Two months before the opening of this year’s fair, we
moved to Paris. For me, the City of Light
is as much about the allées de prestige—
the orange-carpeted promenades lined
PHOTOGRAPH BY IMMO KLINK
with prize-winning exemplars of heritage breeds—as it is about the ChampsÉlysées. Trudging their lengths with a
bulging backpack and mucky shoes, I
fell in love with the place. The Eiffel
Tower will never be as dear to me as its
produce-aisle facsimile: brassicas at the
base, apples in the arches, a soaring midsection of leeks and carrots, topped by a
four-layer finial of tomatoes, potatoes,
pears, and lemons.
Last month, I walked to the Métro
and boarded the No. 12 train, direction
Porte de Versailles. For weeks, the city had
been covered in posters featuring Cerise,
who was serving as the “muse” of this year’s
exposition. She had her own hashtag,
#Cerise. In her honor, the management
was offering free entry to anyone who
shared her name. She was a brunette, from
a small village in the Landes, the daughter of Ugolin and Sylvie, said to be “graceful but not aggressive.” She was a nineteenhundred-pound Bazadaise cow, whose
owner kept her coat lustrous by shampooing it daily with dishwashing liquid.
Thirty-five minutes later, I was blowing into a brass hunting horn the size
of a phonograph. It made a sad little
deflationary sound, like a party blower.
“Spit!” a vender at the Trompes
Millienson booth yelled, coaching me.
“Let’s go—spit!”
he Salon is a political crucible.
T Eternally obligatory, it can be, de-
pending on the year, festive or harrowing. It’s basically an unseated town-hall
meeting with tremendous amounts of
booze thrown in. Jacques Chirac, the
President of France from 1995 to 2007,
was its undisputed master. Between 1972
and 2011, he missed the Salon only once,
when he was recovering from a car accident. His version of kissing babies,
as immortalized by “Les Guignols
de l’Info”—a popular satirical puppet
show—was “tâter le cul des vaches” (“caressing the cows’ asses”). Fuck Yeah
Jacques Chirac, a blog that has reclaimed
Chirac’s retro-suave style for Parisian
hipsters, features fifteen pictures of Chi-
“We’ve already projected a winner.”
rac au Salon. He might have been a mediocre chief executive, but the man knew
how to dance to a Breton bagpipe and
drink milk through a straw.
François Mitterrand, the President
before Chirac, was not a Salon fan. Nicolas Sarkozy, the President after him, who
has always had a hard time playing folksy,
because of his distaste for wine, embarrassed himself by snarling, to a man who
refused to shake his hand, “Casse-toi, alors,
pauv’ con.” (It means, more or less, “Get
lost, asshole.”) It was a big enough deal
that in his book “La France Pour la Vie,”
published in January, Sarkozy felt compelled to revisit the incident. “I myself
was very wrong . . . to give in to provocation in responding to the individual
who had insulted me,” he wrote. “It was
an error, because he had the right to think
what he said, even if he didn’t have to say
it like that.” François Hollande, the current President of the Republic, has a reputation, according to Le Figaro, as “le marathonien du Salon.” In 2012, in full
campaign mode, he stayed for no fewer
than twelve hours.
Salonology is a pastime of the French
media, particularly in a preëlection year.
(France will choose a new President
in May, 2017.) This year, BFMTV, the
country’s most watched news channel,
was reporting a “sinister atmosphere.”
The network was, to an extent, sensationalizing the scene. But the suggestion of a certain gloom was reasonable.
One could detect the most delicate aftershocks of the November terrorist attacks in the heightened security presence, and in the cancellation of the
traditionally rowdy night sessions. (The
exhibitors had voted to suspend them,
on a trial basis, before the attacks, but
the show’s president told reporters, “This
year, given the state of emergency, it’s a
good thing to not have an evening where
we have to manage a lot of entrances
and exits.”) The main thing, though,
was la crise agricole, which was all anybody could talk about, and which meant
that—because of a complicated chain
of geopolitical events that had resulted
in an oversupply—a litre of milk, on
which a farmer needs to earn thirty-five
centimes to break even, was now yielding him twenty-nine. In four years, the
price of a metric ton of wheat has fallen
from two hundred and fifty euros to a
hundred and forty.
The farmers blamed the European
Union. They had been protesting for
months: burning tires in front of supermarkets, dousing government buildings
with slurry, blockading roads, dumping
potatoes in the street. On a Sunday night
in late February, a group of about thirty
drove their tractors right up to the house
of Stéphane Le Foll, the minister of agriculture, throwing a banner over a garden hedge that read “We are like our
cows: on the hay”—a pun, sur la paille
meaning “to be broke.” Le Foll, who
looks like Josh Brolin, came outside, in
shirtsleeves and a fleece vest. He was
controlled, speaking to the crowd for almost an hour, but clearly furious. “I understand the anger,” he told Paris Match,
but he felt that the intrusion had crossed
a line. “Everyone knows my address—
for my wife, who’s there by herself all
week, it’s disturbing.”
The farmers were well organized,
through a network of unions and mutual associations, but they were split on
what to do about the impending fair.
Emmanuel Ferrand, a grain farmer who
also serves as the vice-mayor of SaintPourçain-sur-Sioule, in the Auvergne,
was urging a boycott. “The Salon has
become the festival of neo-rustics, of
bobos, of all who in search of their roots
come looking for a little bit of local exoticism,” he wrote on his blog, adding,
“In going to the Salon, I would feel like
I was partying in the middle of a coffin
factory.”The politician Nicolas DupontAignan, a gadfly of the populist right—
he recently announced his candidacy for
the 2017 Presidential race, having received 1.79 per cent of the vote in 2012—
made a mischievous appeal: the éleveurs
should come to the fair but without their
animals.
Most of the farmers chose to show
up (as did fifteen bishops, who materialized one day in a demonstration of
solidarity). The breeders of Prim’Holsteins—the archetypal piebald dairy
cow, responsible for eighty per cent of
France’s milk supply—were almost
apologetic about the imperative of causing a ruckus. “It seems to us essential
to be, in all humility and with our
means, the mouthpiece of the catastrophic economic situation of all
French farmers,” their Web site declared. Throughout the fair, a blackand-white banner presided over their
area. Farmers wore T-shirts in the same
style, or hung them over their cows’
stalls. They read “JE SUIS éLEVEUR, JE
MEURS” (“I’m a farmer, I’m dying”).
Valentin Boulet, a twenty-one-yearold éleveur, was sitting on a bucket in
front of his two-and-a-half-year-old
Prim’Holstein. He lives on a farm in
Normandy, where he, his father, and his
older brother, Romain, have three hundred cows. (His sister is a pedicurist.)
He’d been coming to the Salon since he
was six years old, and had seen all the
politicians: Chirac, Sarkozy, Lionel Jospin,
Dominique de Villepin. He wasn’t particularly impressed by any of them. He
preferred to talk about his cow, Idée Lustre. “I use a hair dryer to fluff up her fur,”
he said. “And then I put baby gel on her
teats, to make them shine.”
Romain approached. “There was a
crisis in 2009,” he said. “But now it’s
worse than ever.”
Over in the Montbéliard section, the
vibe was merrier. Montbéliard is a small
city in eastern France, about eight miles
from the Swiss border. Montbéliardes
are its cattle, a red-and-white breed prized
for their longevity. A group of a dozen
éleveurs were standing around, joking and
laughing, and holding plastic cups of
their local cocktail—a liqueur called
Pontarlier-Anis, mixed with fir syrup.
“What are your cows like?” I asked.
“Stubborn!” someone said. “Not nice.”
Everyone wanted me to try the
liqueur.
“Why are you all so relaxed?” I said.
“You know Comté? It’s made from
Montbéliardes. We earn from cheese.”
earing the aspirants to the
“H Presidential
nomination who tra-
versed the corridors of the exposition
halls in Paris yesterday, one could sometimes find oneself in doubt that it was
indeed the Salon de l’Agriculture 2016
that they were visiting, and not the 2017
edition,” Le Figaro asserted. The politicians knew that things would be tense.
It was interesting to imagine them waking up at dawn on the mornings of their
Salon visits, steeling themselves to walk
the gantlet of éleveurs—of eye-patched
Abondances and woolly Salers; of
Basque pigs with their ikat hides—certain that they were in for abuse, the only
question being how much, and whether
they could withstand it. Hollande
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
35
ing people couldn’t eat oysters. The tally
went up:
Cleopatra 12
Napoléon 2
Manuel Valls 3
Joan of Arc 4
n Gérard Depardieu’s film “Saint
I Amour,”which came out this month,
“Follow the colorfully decorated eggs.”
•
opened the Salon, on February 27th, to
boos and whistles. “We’re not migrants!”
one farmer yelled.
That afternoon, members of a farmers’ union destroyed the booth that had
been set up for Stéphane Le Foll, an act
of disobedience that went down in the
annals of the fair as “le saccage du stand
du ministère de l’agriculture.” (A few farmers were questioned by police, but no one
was arrested.) The National Front leader,
Marine Le Pen, ogling melons and petting Cerise, received a relatively warm
welcome, as did Sarkozy and Bruno Le
Maire, a Presidential hopeful from Sarkozy’s U.M.P., who appeared at the fair
on three separate days. For a foreigner,
the visit of Manuel Valls, the Prime Minister, also served as a pedagogical exposition of typical French taunts: nul (loser),
pantin de l’Europe (Europe’s puppet),
petit zizi (small dick).
The European Commission had its
own booth. The day I swung by, people
were handing out morsels of organic
pear impaled on E.U.-flag toothpicks.
There were multimedia exhibits on
European aquaculture and expensive36
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
•
looking brochures illustrated with European fish. A crowd of fairgoers, equipped
with buzzers, were taking an interactive
multiple-choice quiz.
“What is the capital of Estonia?”
the leader of the game asked.
The results appeared on a screen:
Vilnius 6
Riga 1
Oslo 4
Tallinn 3
“Vilnius—it’s the capital of what
country?” the leader said.
“Switzerland?”
“No, it’s not Switzerland.”
“Great Britain?”
“Not Great Britain,” the leader said.
“O.K., it starts with ‘L.’ ”
Silence.
“It’s Lithuania.”
The leader talked the audience
through Riga (“Starts with ‘L,’ too!”) and
Oslo, before arriving at the fourth choice.
“Tallinn is the capital of Estonia,
mesdames et messieurs! ”
The next question asked the participants to choose which of the follow-
he plays a recently widowed éleveur
who has come to the Salon with his
adult son and their prize bull. The
son, who’s supposed to take over the
farm, isn’t much of a go-getter. Instead of helping his father to prepare
for the competition, he sneaks off on
an epic bender, weaving from Bordeaux stand to Burgundy booth in
pursuit of a self-drawn route des vins.
He ends up passed out in a pigpen,
terrifying the day-trippers.
The Depardieu character—taurine
himself, in suspenders and plaid shirt—
realizes that he and his son need to
bond and decides to take him on a real
vacation. They acquire a taxi-driver,
who becomes part of the gang, and set
out for the wine country. (The creators
of the film, Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern, initially wanted to set
the whole film at the Salon, but they
were refused permission. The scenes
that take place there were shot on the
fly.) There is a lot of drinking, there is
a lot of sex, Michel Houellebecq makes
a cameo as the owner of a dodgy bedand-breakfast, and they arrive back at
the Salon just in time to take first prize.
There’s a scene—cows in a parking
lot, their owners hosing them down
under floodlights, behind which we
glimpse just a hint of the urban skyline—that captures the paradox of the
farmer at the Salon: the closer he gets
to Paris, the more concentratedly provincial his realm becomes, the tighter
his perimeter. The Salon, depending
on one’s mood, can be a little overwhelming. There are the crowds, so
obliterating that, in the course of eight
days, the show’s security force reunited
a hundred and twenty-three lost children with their families. (“Walid!” a
mother keened, just before an officer
delivered a toddler into her arms, as
primal a sound as I heard all week.)
There is the tendency toward overeating and overdrinking. There is the information overload. One is occasionally
reminded of the Yonville agricultural
fair in “Madame Bovary,” as detailed
by M. Lieuvain, from the prefecture:
“Here it is the vine, elsewhere the apple
tree for cider, there colza, farther on
cheeses and flax. Gentlemen, let us not
forget flax, which has made such great
strides of late years, and to which I will
more particularly call your attention.”
One day, in Pavilion 4, I fell down a
rabbit hole of chickens. The keyword
that lost me an afternoon was “Sebright,”
as in “Sebright argenté à liseré noir,” which
I had seen written on one of the report
cards that the judges, dressed in white
lab coats, mounted on the cage of each
bird. (They were as hard on the birds as
if they were lycée students, marking them
for faults such as “deformed claw” or
“wrinkled wattle.”) The Sebrights were
crazy-beautiful: proud-looking, with jutting breasts, each of their silver-white
feathers edged in black, as though someone had outlined them with a Sharpie.
So I Googled “Sebright.” An ornamental bantam breed developed in the early
nineteenth century by Sir John Saunders Sebright, I learned. Sebright was a
baronet, who impressed Charles Darwin by writing in his pamphlet “The
Art of Improving the Breeds of Domestic Animals” (1809) that “the weak and
unhealthy do not live to propagate their
infirmities.” Sebrights were the first
chicken breed whose enthusiasts formed
their own club. I started reading Sebright fan fiction, which
included a diary written
from the point of view of
a chicken couple named
Gordon and Sylvia Sebright. “This morning was
jolly chilly,” they wrote.
“We shook ourselves to
puff out a little more feathering before venturing into
the yard at first light. Brrhh!
Yes it is definitely autumny.” I forced
myself to move quickly past the hollandaises huppées (which, weirdly, in English are called “Polish chickens”), black
birds with white puffballs on their heads,
like barristers’ wigs.
In his fifteen years of coming to the
Salon, Valentin Boulet, the dairy farmer
from Normandy, had never seen Paris.
So one night he called a taxi, and, between midnight and 3 A.M., the only
time he could take a break, embarked
on a whirlwind moonlight tour. “I was
really impressed by the architecture—
the Trocadéro, the Arc de Triomphe,
and, above all, the Eiffel Tower,” he wrote
to me. “I never would have thought it
was as big as that! The Champs-Élysées
was really luxurious: hotels, stores,
cars. . . . We went to Pigalle just to eat
a kebab. Other than this kebab shop, I
noticed an impressive number of sex
shops, but it was already 3 A.M., and
three hours later we had to start work
again, so we went back to the hotel.”
Boulet had done some thinking
about the agricultural crisis. “For the
politicians, there’s not much to say,” he
began. “The agricultural world feels totally abandoned by them.” The left was
doing nothing. The right, he felt, had
been equally impotent during its tenure. “The extreme right is gaining in
power here at the dawn of the elections,
and their leader, Marine Le Pen, thinks
she’s won the majority of the agricultural vote, with her desire to leave Europe,” he concluded. “For my part, I
think that the problem is European and
the solution will be European!”
he goose was just sitting there, as
T slack as a deflated basketball. Its fat-
tened liver, sliced into disks and sprinkled with sesame seeds, was sizzling on
a griddle. The chef popped the disks onto
mini-toasts, squirted them with hazelnut oil, and fed them to the spectators,
who swarmed toward the
free samples with a skittish
barnyard velocity of their
own. The juxtaposition of
live animals and their after-products might have
made for uneasiness in a
less proudly traditional setting, but the Salon treated
their proximity as a boon.
There was no disjunction,
the message seemed to be, between a
steak and a cow. The goose-gutting had
been a demo, sponsored by the region
that contains Aquitaine, of l’art de la
découpe et le déveinage. The indoctrination into unsqueamishness starts early.
One day, I glimpsed a group of elementaryschool-age kids fileting sea bass. “C’est
parfait! ” the activity leader was saying,
into a microphone. “Impeccable! ”
Whoever revived cassoulet—“Cassoulet is trendy. It’s the new ramen,” the
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
37
restaurateur Jimmy Carbone told the
New York Post—should immediately
book a ticket to the Salon de l’Agriculture. Cassoulet is not fashionable in
France. (According to a friend who grew
up in Carcassonne, the home of the dish,
“it is considered as a sort of Spam,” because it preserves well, and it is notorious for causing gas.) But it is everywhere
at the Salon, which, gastronomically, is
about an idea: the food of France, as opposed to French food—what one actually finds in the country’s refrigerators
and on its dinner tables. In the Salon’s
France, actually, there aren’t many refrigerators. It’s all saucissons and confitures, recipes invented before the age of
tetrafluoroethane. No one is ever on a
diet. No one indulges in “the worrying
changes in consumer habits” that the Salon’s official literature decried: “the decline of set meal times, particularly outside the home, snacking, the popularity
of practical, cheap products.” It would
have been nice to see a tagine or two.
Candidates for the new cassoulet
include garbure (a Gascon ham-andcabbage stew) and aligot (a dish from the
Aubrac that involves stirring cheese into
mashed potatoes, evidently with a spoon
as long as a broomstick). Think of the
potential of a chabrot bar, where you pour
red wine into the last of your soup, bring
the mixture to your lips, and drink it
straight from the bowl. It could even serve
kiwi wine, which Alexandre Villard was
pouring somewhere in the borderlands
between Rhône-Alpes and Alsace. “The
French market is complicated, because
the clients are rather ‘terroir,’ with a strong
tradition of wine rooted in the soil, and
so this type of product will take a while
to catch on,” Villard said. To combat the
problem, he was calling the beverage blanc
de kiwi. It is delicious—you heard it here
first—and he sold a thousand bottles.
It wasn’t until this year that I realized
there’s an international section at the Salon—a vast repository of “délices du monde,”
hidden away on the second floor of the
dog arena. Here, then, was the couscous
and the chebakia, the mafé and the maple
syrup, the latter being hawked by a team
of attractive young Canadians who were
wearing flannel shirts in a sporting effort
at national costume. In contrast to the carefully classified scene downstairs—A.O.P.
this, premier cru that—the rest of the
world was a free-for-all, bearing no
38
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
relation to its constituents’ size or placement on the actual map. You had Senegalese venders and their powdered gumbo
next to a Swiss-fondue hut; dehydrated
clementines that looked like bouncy balls;
fist-size snails (Achatina achatina) from
Côte d’Ivoire; a poster that read “Your
Tuna Solution”; a stateless chocolate
fountain; an Italian pig whose head was
partitioned from its body by a tinfoil
ruff. The surprise of the international
section was Bulgaria, which had gone
big, erecting a two-story cornflower-blue
chalet with white trimwork. I ordered a
pork dumpling and ate it with ljutenitsa,
a hot sauce made with red peppers. Pitka,
which reminded me of Southern yeast
rolls, were as knobbily burnished as
carved furniture. The bar was doing a
roaring trade in Bulgarian eau-de-vie,
at two euros a shot.
A banner featuring the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building, Independence Hall, and a cheeseburger caught
my eye: America, 3.7 miles from my apartment! Michèle and Éric Virrion were
serving burgers and hot potato chips. (I
think this might have been the result of
some confusion about the British “chips,”
meaning fries, and “crisps,” meaning
chips.) Sauce dispensers—andalouse, mustard, curry, cocktail, barbecue, américaine,
poivre—hung from the rafters like udders. I asked why the Virrions had chosen an American theme for their booth,
since they were from Antibes. “We like
America—and, then, the business,”
Michèle said. They had got married in
Las Vegas, at the Wynn Casino. They
thought Le Pen had some good ideas
but were not sold on voting for her.
Resuming my microtour, I saw that
they weren’t the Salon’s only American
merchants. El Rancho, a sit-down restaurant, was offering Budweiser and—why
not?—wheels of raclette. A confraternity of ruddy-faced, brush-cut older
men—wine lovers from Chinon, with
scarlet robes and medals dangling from
their necks—made their way through
the crush. They were a breed of their
own, and all the world a roving pavilion
of Homo sapiens. 
1
Correction of the week
From the Los Angeles Times.
An Oct. 19 article about the PBS genealogy show “Finding Your Roots” misspelled the
first name of writer-actress Tina Fey as Tiny.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
GRAIN FORECAST
BY SHON ARIEH-LERER
It’s hard to imagine, but a few years back,
not everyone knew what quinoa was. Now, we
can’t get away from this “super grain,” which,
incidentally, is actually a seed. . . . Which grains
are waiting in the wings to overtake quinoa?
—The Huffington Post.
RHETT
Rhett is a milled-harvest bug wheat
that can’t wait to get its grubby paws
around quinoa’s vulnerable neck. This
scheming diva of a grain can be used
as a base in a variety of summer dishes,
including rhett spread, rhett under beets,
and rhetted beets. Rhett’s ambitious
texture and “eyes on the prize” flavor
are paying off: the grain is slowly but
surely backstabbing its way to the top
of this harvest’s B-list. (Poor sorghum!)
Pro tip: Rhett is harvested from the
bottoms of used crates at the Park Slope
Food Co-op. Help the crop this year
by participating in the third annual
Rhett Scrape. ($86 entrance fee.)
OSCAR BOLTON GREEN
WORSE
Worse is the lovable underdog of
the grain world. It is a coarse-grade
compound grain with a vibrantly chalky
mouth feel. A favorite of nineteenthcentury Bavarian contractors, congealed worse is also a great substitute
for stucco; plus, it’s gluten-free! Worse
has a rich history: in the nineteenthirties, the U.S. government encour-
aged widespread consumption of the
cheap-to-harvest grain with the slogan “It’s not bad: it’s worse!”
Pro tip: Worse has valuable health
benefits. When sanded down and sterilized, it can be used as the tip of a
medical swab.
OAL-É
Roll over, quinoa, this new grain
has a dash in its name! Oal-é (pronounced “Dennis”) is a common brown
grain, native to Asia and parts of Africa, that gets its name from market-
ing executives at Whole Foods. Oal-é
is often jokingly referred to as i-oomy’a, which is a satirical nod to the
grain’s vowel-heavy moniker. Reading
through this paragraph, you’re probably pronouncing oal-é in your head
as “oh-all-aye,” even though, as stated,
it should be pronounced “Dennis.” Do
yourself a favor, and reread the paragraph, pronouncing oal-é correctly.
Pro tip: Adding some oal-é to your
evening salad is a great way to let people know that you’ve heard of oal-é.
But just remember, if you’re new to
using oal-é, you’re probably better off
calling it ei-h, eå-q-o, or “brown rice.”
ZORBA (GREEK)
Greek zorba, despite being considered a grain, is actually a legume.
A legume is any type of food that is,
surprisingly, not another type of food.
For example, peanuts are not actually
nuts, so they’re considered legumes.
Tomatoes are double legumes: they’re
not actually vegetables, which makes
them fruit and also makes them legumes, which means that they’re not
actually fruit, which makes them double legumes. Greek zorba is an infinity legume: it’s not actually a grain,
which makes it a legume, but it’s a
legume despite being a grain, which
makes it a grain, which makes it not
actually a legume, which in turn makes
it a legume again, which makes it not
actually a grain. Because zorba is so
rich in logic, it was commonly used
in the ancient Mediterranean as a
brain-booster.
Pro tip: Zorba’s flavor is umami,
which is Japanese for “impossible to
describe.” If you hear somebody try-
ing to describe the taste of zorba as
“umami,” you can tell them, “No, actually, it’s umami.”
BOOM
The big winner this season is boom.
Boom is a groat type of super oat, rich
in antioxidants, bonus fats, and hyperlinks. Load up your mega-pilaf
with some boom to send your family
a clear message that you value maximum lipids and giga-bios over baddy
acids and nega-bozos. That’s right,
boom is bad-free: it’s what Mother
Earth has been dying to serve her
children. Destined to be the new ultra-stuff, boom is also a good source
of kapow-bang science food. Mmmhealthy.
Pro tip: To avoid death or spontaneous urination, cook with quinoa. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
39
Annals of Alcohol
MEZCAL SUNRISE
Searching for the ultimate artisanal distillate.
BY DANA GOODYEAR
ricia Lopez is the mezcal queen
B of Los Angeles. Five years ago,
Lopez, who is thirty-one and imposingly savvy, persuaded her father to let
her build a mezcal bar at Guelaguetza,
the restaurant that he opened when the
family moved north from Oaxaca, a center of mezcal culture, in the mid-nineties. He didn’t know if Americans would
like mezcal, or if Mexicans would admit
that they did. But he decided to trust
Bricia, and she focussed her offerings
on premium mezcals—high proof, small
lots, no worm. At that point, there were
only a handful of brands on the market. Since then, mezcal imports have
spiked, and labels have proliferated.
Lopez now carries thirty. When I vis-
ited her at the bar the other day, she was
in the midst of a renovation, doubling
its size.
Some of Lopez’s earliest memories
of life in Mexico involve the barbecuesauce smell of cooked agave that pervaded her father’s tourist shop, where
she and her brother sat on a cement
floor, racing worms and tying little packets of sal de gusano to bottles of the family mezcal. Her job, at six, was to run
out to the square and draw the tourists
in. She is still an expert marketer: many
influential L.A. bartenders thank Lopez
for giving them their first taste of quality mezcal, in the form of a small bottle, sourced from Oaxaca by her dad and
sealed by her with wax that she bought
“Mezcal makes you cry, sing, dance, hug the neighbor you just met an hour ago.”
40
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
at Staples. Her identity is so deeply intertwined with the spirit that people
call her Goddess Mayahuel, the Aztec
deity of agave, whose children are sometimes figured as four hundred drunken
rabbits. She prefers to keep her references bicultural. Around her neck, she
wears a gold necklace that says “Mezcalifornian,” in gangster script.
Mezcal is a distilled spirit, and can
be made from some thirty varieties of
agave, or maguey. It is typically produced by farmers using a laborious and
antiquated method, at primitive distilleries known as palenques, and sold or
shared in villages to mark births, funerals, and everything in between. Contrary to popular belief, it does not induce hallucinations. Originally, “mezcal”
was a generic term, like “wine,” for a
spirit produced all over Mexico. Tequila, a two-billion-dollar global business, is just a style of mezcal; developed in the state of Jalisco, it is made
from a single variety, the blue agave,
using a largely industrialized process,
and consumed on spring break in the
form of slammers. Often mixed with
other alcohols and enhanced with caramel coloring, tequila can also pick up
flavors from the wood in which it is
aged—sometimes spent whiskey barrels bought from the United States.
Traditionally, the agaves used for mezcal are roasted in an underground pit,
wild-fermented in open vats, and distilled to proof, yielding a punchy, petroly,
funky spirit that is thought to be a
uniquely eloquent expression of terroir.
Regulations allow the proof to fall between 72 and 110—but hard-liners hold
that anything lower than 90 isn’t “real”
mezcal. There is scarcely a serious cocktail menu in a major American city that
does not feature a mezcal drink—at least
three have been named for Lopez—and
more and more restaurants offer lists of
obscure varietals, at twenty to thirty dollars for a two-ounce pour, as if they were
wines from the Loire. Lopez’s father,
like many of his compatriots, is stunned
by the turn in mezcal’s fortune. In his
time, producers emulated tequila and
did what they could to compete with it,
adding a worm for flavor and to distinguish their bottle on the shelf. Now tequila companies are looking for mezcal
and emphasizing the simplicity and rusticity of their product whenever possible.
ILLUSTRATION BY BJORN LIE
“We tried to sophisticate mezcal, but it
turned out that people like traditional
things the most,” he told me.
The mezcal boom coincides with the
popularity of farm-to-table food, the
rise of the craft cocktail, and the advent
of the bartender as an advocate for environmental and social justice. Lopez
told me, “Mezcal hits every magic
word—artisanal, organic, gluten-free,
vegan. It comes from a small village,
and you have to drive there to get it. It’s
made by a family. It automatically became cool when knowing what you eat
became cool. Tequila got to the point
where it’s like Tyson chicken—that’s
Cuervo. Now I want to know my chicken’s name. That’s mezcal.”
Mezcal’s ascent is both a victory for
those who love it and a cause for concern. The grains for whiskey are planted
and harvested each year; grapes are perennials. But most agaves—succulents,
kin to asparagus—resist domestication.
Espadín, one of the easiest to grow, takes
up to a decade to mature, and each
piña—the usable core, stripped of its
spiky blades—yields only about ten bottles of mezcal. Prized wild varieties can
take longer and yield less. Tobalá, a tiny,
feisty plant that grows under oaks on
high-altitude slopes and secretes an enzyme that breaks down granite, needs
as many as fifteen years, and gives up
about two bottles of mezcal per piña.
Tepeztate ripens over a quarter century.
The desire to consume a botanical time
capsule is fraught; every precious sip
both supports a traditional craft and
hastens its extinction. “I truly believe
mezcal will be big everywhere, because
it’s delicious,” Josh Goldman, a Los Angeles bar consultant, told me. “Though
there may be a subconscious thing going
on—see it or eat it before it’s gone.”
Throughout its history, mezcal—
which is, at heart, homemade hooch—
has periodically been banned, restricted,
penalized, and suppressed. Its new aficionados appreciate the outlaw status: the
more illegitimate a mezcal is, the more
legit it is. (A popular brand memorializes its cross-border-smuggling origin
story in its name: Ilegal.) With so much
mezcal in the marketplace, seekers must
work harder now. One evangelist, who
travels back and forth from Mexico with
a suitcase full of esoteric mezcals, told
me that his favorite distiller works in a
village three hours on a bad road from
Oaxaca City. He gave me a phone number but warned me that probably no one
would answer.
At Guelaguetza, Lopez showed me
a prized bottle, which she acquired at a
tasting six years ago and had been nursing ever since. Only an inch or two was
left. “It is everything you would want in
a mezcal,” she told me. “It is from a wild
agave. The batch was only forty litres. It
was distilled in clay. It was macerated
by hand. It was fermented in leather.
Nobody had that.” She poured some
into a jícara, the dried hull of a fruit,
often used to serve mezcal, and offered
it to me. It was tangy and slick, like a
dirty Martini, with a whiff of neat’s-foot
oil. “Mezcal doesn’t taste like this anymore,” she said. “You can’t order this
anywhere. You have to go to these places.
You have to drink it hot off the still.”
he sun was going down when I
T landed in Oaxaca City, a cluster of
pastel plaster, flanked by mountains.
Lipstick-red flame trees were in bloom,
and the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of gasoline. Twenty-five
hundred years ago, the Zapotec people
built Monte Albán, a monumental city
on a hill outside town; they worshipped
a bat god and a human-jaguar-snake
god, who brought rain and lightning.
The Aztecs overtook the region, and
then Oaxaca fell to Cortés, but the geography made colonialism a challenge.
Sixteen indigenous languages are still
spoken, and town names tend to be half
Spanish, half something else—the capitulation of some royal bureaucrat preserved forever on the map. Oaxacans
practice a spunky form of Catholicism:
in some villages, saints who fail to grant
favors risk getting slugged by their petitioners. Eating psilocybin mushrooms
is accepted as a spiritual rite; if that isn’t
your thing, four glasses of the agave beer
known as pulque will reportedly deliver
similar results. Even in the city, the culture remains stubbornly rural. At Casa
Oaxaca—where René Redzepi, Alice
Waters, and Rick Bayless like to eat—
Alejandro Ruiz serves the pre-Columbian food of his country childhood: local
herbs, exquisite moles, crickets, worms.
The society is so traditional, Ruiz says,
that “our competition is mama.”
Mezcal is integral to life in Oaxaca. It
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
41
is medicine and social glue. Spooked
children have mezcal spat into their
faces; rashy ones have mezcal rubbed
onto their skin; fussy ones have it massaged into their gums. “Mezcal is a way
to welcome you home,” Ruiz told me.
“It makes you cry, sing, dance, hug the
neighbor you just met an hour ago—
and then your soul rests.”
If your eyes are burning, if you said
something insincere, if you have a hangover the next day, you are drinking mezcal wrong. One enthusiast I met, a Colombian woman whose extreme version
of a dining club involves hunting for the
main course, told me, “You must kiss the
mezcal.” Besides the jícara, the most popular vessel is a glass votive holder with a
cross etched on the bottom. The first sip
is mouthwash—harsh, disinfecting, functional. The second reveals the flavors. By
the third, people are saying the word
“magic,” and it’s not that embarrassing.
After another round, your mouth is fresh;
your cheeks have turned to wax. You can
sleep to the sound of fireworks—because
it’s Tuesday in Oaxaca City—and wake
up cheerful to unsynched church bells
and crazed birds.
Many Americans who have learned
to drink mezcal learned from Ron Cooper, a Southern California artist who
takes credit for the phrase “sip it, don’t
shoot it.” Cooper’s first encounter was
less than sublime. It was 1963, and he
and a dozen friends from art school were
camping on the beach in Ensenada.
They spent every night at Hussong’s
Cantina, drinking Monte Albán, an
industrially made mezcal the color of
lemon Joy, with a worm at the bottom
of the bottle. “I was the fool waiting for
the worm every night,” he told me, when
I met him for dinner in Oaxaca City.
He showed me a picture of himself at
Hussong’s, flopped over, head on the
table. “I crawled back to the beach at
night to have a beer and recuperate, and
I thought, What was that stuff?”
Cooper is now in his early seventies,
with an unstudied man bun and the
wizened, tanned face of an apple doll.
He poured us mezcal Negronis from a
dented plastic water bottle that he’d
brought from home, and in a raspy voice
instructed me to stir my drink fifteen
times in each direction to unleash its
energy. The waiter remained deferential. Cooper’s luminous, pale resin sculp42
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
tures are owned by the Whitney and
the Guggenheim, but in Oaxaca he is
known as the person who made mezcal respectable. Everywhere he goes is
de-facto B.Y.O.
In 1970, Cooper and a couple of
friends—artists and surfboard shapers—
drove to Mexico on an impulse, and
stopped in Teotitlán, a weaving village
in the central valley of Oaxaca, where
they stumbled upon a Zapotec wedding.
They were invited to the altar room,
where the officiant poured mezcal on
the floor in the shape of a cross and
offered toasts, round after round, until
everyone had had a drink. Only then
could the party start. “I began to understand the ritual use of mezcal,” Cooper
said. A few months later, he flew home
to Los Angeles with a Coke bottle full
of it, and the poker invitations flowed.
Celebrities like Bing Crosby helped
make tequila famous in mid-century
America, but mezcal was a spirit for the
highbrow underground. Cooper was a
frequent guest of Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, art collectors who were behind
Gemini G.E.L., a printmaking studio
that championed L.A. artists. “William
Burroughs is there,” Cooper recalled.
“Rauschenberg is there. Tony Berlant is
there. Larry Bell is there. Everyone from
the L.A. art world is there, and I got the
good stuff and we’re all drinking it and
we’re having a good time. And then
it goes to the in-group in New York—
Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Robert
Smithson.” In 1990, he said, “I had
some fuck-you money from a couple of
large commissions” and spent six months
in Oaxaca. He gave himself permission
to explore different media, and came to
see his buzz as a work of art. “A work of
art transforms the viewer,” he said. “Mezcal gave me all these incredible, humorous thoughts—transformation.”
In 1995, Cooper began exporting
mezcal to the United States under the
name Del Maguey, emphasizing the
agave varietals in each batch and the
village of origin. (The artist Ken Price
painted all the labels.) Cooper invited
influential bartenders to Oaxaca and
took them to the villages to meet the
mezcaleros who were adhering to methods passed down by their great-greatgrandfathers. He fed his guests barbacoa, and taught them to say stigibeu, a
Zapotec word for “cheers.” Last year, he
says, he sold fifty thousand six-bottle
cases. But it isn’t like it was. “I could
take the best shit to the U.S. without
anybody checking it—it was pristine,
naïve, pure bliss,” he told me. “I converted people one person at a time, nose
to nose. I created this whole market, and
until three years ago I owned the whole
fucking deal.”
t was only a matter of time before
I someone recognized the potential of
artisanal mezcal and scaled it up. In 2013,
Fausto Zapata, an entrepreneur from Los
Angeles, launched a brand called El Silencio, an approachable mezcal aimed
at mainstream American drinkers—in
Scotch terms, a smooth, honeyed Oban
rather than a peat monster like Laphroaig.
“We’re the slick ones—as much a marketing company as a mezcal company,”
he says. “We’re elevating into a pop-culture phenomenon something that people like seeing as niche.” Jeremy Piven is
an investor; El Silencio is featured in
Aeromexico’s first-class lounge.
Zapata grew up in Mexico City, drinking tequila-and-Sprite to give himself
nerve when he went out to the clubs; as
he grew older, he took road trips to Oaxaca, in search of something authentic,
mythic, and cool, and found mezcal. His
sipper is an 80-proof combination of
wild and farmed agaves; his mixing mezcal, an 86-proof Espadín, comes in a
bottle the matte-black color of the Batmobile. He sold ten thousand cases last
year, and hopes to double that in 2016.
“We want to create a global brand,” he
told me. “You don’t just drink single malt
in a village in Scotland, or sake in Japan.”
Outside my hotel, in the bright morning light, a white bus waited, stocked
with bottled water, beer, and straw hats.
Zapata was standing by, in a pair of hiking boots and a company T-shirt. He was
taking Cedd Moses, an American bar
owner, and a few of Moses’ employees
HAVE THEY RUN OUT OF PROVINCES YET?
Have they run out of provinces yet?
If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret.
Long ago, there was just Cantonese.
(Long ago, we were easy to please.)
But then food from Szechuan came our way,
Making Cantonese strictly passé.
Szechuanese was the song that we sung,
Though the ma po could burn through your tongue.
Then when Shanghainese got in the loop
We slurped dumplings whose insides were soup.
Then Hunan, the birth province of Mao,
Came along with its own style of chow.
So we thought we were finished, and then
A new province arrived: Fukien.
Then respect was a fraction of meagre
For those eaters who’d not eaten Uighur.
And then Xi’an from Shaanxi gained fame,
Plus some others—too many to name.
Now, as each brand-new province appears,
It brings tension, increasing our fears:
Could a place we extolled as a find
Be revealed as one province behind?
So we sometimes do miss, I confess,
Simple days of chow mein but no stress,
When we never were faced with the threat
Of more provinces we hadn’t met.
Is there one tucked away near Tibet?
Have they run out of provinces yet?
—Calvin Trillin
to visit the palenque where El Silencio’s
Espadín is produced, an hour to the south,
in a village called San Baltazar Guelavila.
El Silencio is in the well at Moses’ bar
Las Perlas, in Los Angeles, which was
one of the first mezcal bars to open in
the United States. The bar goes through
six cases a week. “Our customers demand products with integrity, that don’t
use chemicals to bring the proof down,”
Moses told me. He wanted to see the
production for himself.
Moses is in his fifties, tall and rangy,
with tightly curled graying hair and a disarmingly uncertain manner; in his thirties, he was a money manager, regularly
featured in the financial press for generating spectacular returns. Now, in addition to Las Perlas, he owns fifteen bars
and restaurants in Los Angeles, and others in San Diego and Austin. He lumbered onto the bus, wearing sunglasses
and his own straw hat. “Let’s roll,” he said.
Nikki Sunseri, the general manager
of Las Perlas, a former chef with long
black hair and pale skin scrimshawed
with tattoos, had come, too, along with
Andrew Abrahamson, a gentle booze
savant who oversees Moses’ single-spirit
bars, and Pedro Shanahan, a by-donationonly yoga teacher and freelance philosopher, who is Moses’ “spirit guide.” Shanahan runs tastings and palate-education
programs at Seven Grand, Moses’ whiskey bar. “I can heal you from the yoga
with the whiskey or heal you from the
whiskey with the yoga,” he said.
We drove with the Sierra Madre de
Oaxaca on our left, until we reached
San Baltazar Guelavila, where a handpainted sign warned of dengue, and
small boys bear-wrestled beside a pickup
truck full of piñas. The palenque was
simple and clean, newly built: a pit filled
with burning coals; four fermentation
barrels brimming with mashed, cooked
agave that smelled of apple-cider vinegar; six wood-fired copper stills; two
gleaming ten-thousand-litre stainlesssteel storage tanks; and a small bottling
facility. In the center, a dingy white mare
pulled a heavy stone wheel—“like Fred
Flintstone’s tire,” Sunseri said—around
in a circle, crushing cooked agave that
would be added to the fermentation
barrels. “For breaking it down, the faster
way would be with chemicals, but it
ruins the quality,” Moses said. The horse
stopped to take a bite of agave. “That
horse has got it made,” he said.
The hills all around were stitched
with Espadín plants; cattle and goats
wandered among them. Zapata poured
mezcal, and we watched as workers unloaded a truckful of eighty-kilo piñas
onto the coals. Quartered, they looked
like an infestation of green armadillos.
The men arranged them into a mound,
and covered the mound with sacks and
then with dirt, while the heat made funhouse mirrors of the air. Pedro Hernández, El Silencio’s distiller, explained that
he waits until the coals are smoldering
before he adds the agave, to prevent the
mezcal from getting too smoky. “Hand
of the maker,” Moses said, approvingly.
Shanahan wandered over to the
stills and filled a little cup with second
distillate. He tasted, and guppied his
lips. “Sweet, huh?” Zapata said.
“Excellent,” Shanahan said. “This
gets cut with water?”
“What you’re drinking is not adjusted,”
Zapata replied; straight off the tap, it was
120 proof. El Silencio adds water to decrease the potency—sacrilege to some
makers, who distill to proof or adjust
with tails, the last products of distillation, which can be complex and flavorful but also yield inconsistent batches.
Later, sitting under a palm-thatched
roof at a long table littered with bottles,
Abrahamson turned to Zapata. “Would
you ever want to talk about a special collaboration?” he asked. Zapata nodded:
he was always ready to talk business.
“What do you have in mind?” he asked.
“A joint venture,” Moses said—an
uncut sipping spirit that could also be
used for powerful cocktails, of the kind
his customers preferred. El Silencio’s
undiluted mezcal was viscous and hightest, like cask-strength whiskey, and
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
43
there was nothing like it on the market.
“There’s no day like today,” Zapata said.
It could be ready by Q2.
Zapata started pouring Koch, a mezcal that is also produced by Hernández.
Moses sipped, while his team spieled
tasting notes that reminded me of a Shel
Silverstein poem.
“Banana, yogurt, grass clippings that
have been kept in a garbage can for a
little bit then opened. And then some
menthol.”
“There’s something gelatinous, like
okra. I would hesitate to say mucus in
a tasting note. . . .”
“Inky fern. Andrew—help me, help
me, I’m having mezcal brain!”
Hernández, the mezcalero, sat straightfaced, with his arms folded across his
chest, as a three-man band began playing classic Mexican crooners. He said
that many of the men at the palenque
had lately migrated back from the United
States, where they had been working as
gardeners and landscapers and on construction sites. His daughter, who is six,
came to sit on his lap. He brightened,
and reported that she was learning Zapotec in school.
After the mezcal was drunk up, Sunseri delivered tasting notes on the Oaxacan air. “Super-mineral, with molasses and grass,” she said. At a certain
point, Zapata interrupted the reverie to
proclaim that he had just received a
four-hundred-case order from Southern Wine and Spirits, the largest distributor in the United States. Shanahan
looked deep into Hernández’s eyes. “Village by village, let’s build this thing,” he
said. “Let’s not go big. Keep it small,
spread it out. It’s information. It’s history and culture. Es possible grandes cosas.”
Hernández received him impassively. In
poetry, not every contradiction needs to
be resolved. The stars came out, shockingly bright in a world without electricity. Abrahamson stole away with an
empty Koch bottle and filled it with the
120-proof mezcal from the still. They
would spread the love to Los Angeles,
and then the world, if they didn’t drink
it on the bus ride back to the hotel.
he popularity of distilled agave
T has, perversely, always been a prob-
lem for the makers of mezcal. The Spanish saw it as subversive, linked to preColumbian festivities and beliefs, and
banned it. In the eighteenth century, King
Carlos III, hoping to promote the sale
of Spanish products, outlawed the production of all alcohol in the Mexican colony. The prohibition was lifted a decade
later, when an ancestor of the Cuervo
family was granted permission to distill
mezcal on his property near the town of
Tequila, in Jalisco. Tequila, with its special dispensation, became a center of production; its makers acquired money and
“It says the cost of the flight went up because
we acknowledged its existence.”
status, exemplifying what one academic
calls “the hacienda fantasy heritage.”
As Mexico industrialized, and tequila started to be exported to the U.S.,
tequileros rapidly developed technology
to extract the maximum amount of liquor from each agave in the least amount
of time. Column stills were used instead
of pots, and masonry ovens replaced the
pits: no more smoke. Then masonry
ovens gave way to autoclaves, speeding
up production, and most companies invested in shredders, to break up the agave
mechanically. In some distilleries, the
agaves are no longer cooked at all; the
sugars are extracted by washing the raw
plants in a chemical bath. In 1974, tequila became the first product outside
Europe to be protected by a denomination of origin. The D.O. said little
about production methods, but explicitly allowed for the inclusion of up to
forty-nine per cent other alcohols. Intense monocropping of blue agave, the
designated source material, began.
Regular mezcal, meanwhile, largely
remained humble, unromantic, bumpkinly, but with its own mythology. Its
makers hid out in the mountain towns
and formed a loose resistance. Many
stills were portable, easy to pack up when
the authorities were near. Graciela Ángeles, the rigorously traditional fourthgeneration distiller behind a successful
label called Real Minero, told me that
her great-grandmother sold bootleg
mezcal from the back of a burro. In 1994,
the Mexican government, seeking to
develop a valuable market around what
many consider to be the unofficial national drink, created a D.O. for mezcal,
essentially copying the rules for tequila,
though by then the products were
sharply distinct. According to the D.O.,
in order for an agave spirit to be sold as
mezcal—and to be awarded the hologram sticker that marks it as an approved export—it has to come from one
of several specified regions, and submit
to a certification process that is daunting and costly. Those that don’t must be
sold as “agave distillates.”
Many mezcaleros are by long habit
suspicious of authority and more comfortable in the shadows. But a growing
international audience has foisted clout
and visibility upon mezcal, which may
bring unwanted pressure. Proposed regulations, backed by the tequila industry,
would rename the agave distillates by an
obscure Náhuatl word, komil, and forbid
producers to advertise that their products contain ingredients used in either
the tequila or the mezcal D.O. Some see
the proposal as the latest in a long line
of exclusions. “It’s a pretty egregious appropriation,” Sarah Bowen, the author
of “Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and
the Politics of Production,” told me. “The
producers are already not
allowed to use the word
‘mezcal’—which is what
they call their product to
their families and to each
other. Now they’re not even
allowed to use ‘agave,’ which
is what their product is
made from.” Imagine a
French vintner barred from
using the words “wine” and
“grape.” Pedro Jiménez, a filmmaker and
bar owner who lives in Jalisco and champions the agave distillates made there,
told me, “Tequila was just another type
of mezcal, and now they’re trying to abduct the word from them. It’s like spitting on your background.” He worried
that people wouldn’t be able to sell their
spirits; tequila companies, he said, are already approaching small producers, urging them to forsake their own businesses
and grow blue agaves for them instead.
David Suro-Piñera, an artisan tequila
maker who advocates for mezcal, told
me that many of the distillers who would
be most affected are illiterate, economically marginal, and live in communities where there is no Internet. To him,
the motive behind the proposed law was
clear: big companies, especially tequila
makers, were threatened by the rising
popularity of all things agave.They didn’t
want to be blindsided the way that large
beer companies were by microbrews,
which now control some twelve per cent
of a multibillion-dollar industry. It was
of a piece, he said, with the rest of colonial history. “When the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, they prohibited
the production of alcoholic beverages
by the indigenous people. When are
they going to let these people alone?”
One morning in Oaxaca, I went to
see Hipócrates Nolasco, the president
of the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal,
the advisory body that administers the
holograms. A chemist with a Ph.D. from
the National Autonomous University of
Mexico, Nolasco works out of a laboratory where young technicians in lab coats
test samples from hundreds of palenques,
verifying proof and checking for levels
of methanol and other volatile compounds
in a gas-chromatography machine. Music
blared from a radio, and flasks of yellow
and clear liquid were strewn about the
benches. Along the wall was a stencilled
motif of a green agave plant with a chemical flask in place of the piña.
The lab, which Nolasco ran
until 2013, is a private business; mezcal companies
pay twelve hundred pesos
to test each batch, a necessary step before the C.R.M.
can approve it for sale.
Thirty-eight and babyfaced, Nolasco wears cowboy boots and golf shirts.
His office, separated from the lab by glass
panels, is a museum of mezcal. Hundreds
of bottles—his personal collection—line
the walls on mirrored shelves. In a conference room appointed with red leather
chairs, Nolasco offered me a drink of
javelí, his favorite varietal—“It’s afternoon in Europe,” he said, smiling. He
comes from a sorghum-farming family,
in a part of Oaxaca that does not produce mezcal. His appreciation stems from
his training as a scientist. He pushed a
button, releasing a screen from the ceiling, and showed me a presentation of
side-by-side chromatographs of mezcal
and other major spirits. The line for mezcal jittered along the x-axis, jumping
up dramatically every inch or two—the
chemical profile of mezcal can include
furfural, which carries hints of bread,
nuts, and caramel, and napthalene, a hydrocarbon that lends a note of tar. Vodka’s line, by comparison, was stolid and
straight, featureless as snow.
He explained to me how the proposed regulations, which he helped craft,
would protect the growing prestige of
mezcal, as well as consumers. “We are
all agave distillates,” he said, explaining that the use of the term “agave” by
uncertified and possibly unscrupulous
distillers encroached on the D.O. In
December, he said, the C.R.M. conducted a study of the marketplace and
found that nearly half the mezcals for
sale were illegitimate—untested fakes,
any one of which could have been contaminated with methanol. “It takes only
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
45
“Either those ducks are dead or we’re standing upside down in a lake.”
•
twelve millilitres of methanol to go
blind,” he said. “In the best case, when
you drink a fake you will get a bad impression. You will get a bad hangover.
You can have a bad party. And then you
think that is mezcal. We are very jealous about what we can call real mezcal.
It’s the most expensive exported beverage in Mexico right now—it costs three
times as much per bottle as tequila—
but one problem could be catastrophic.”
During his four years at the C.R.M.,
Nolasco said, he’d brought many mezcaleros into compliance. But it was hard
going. “You confront a lot of factors,” he
told me. “Resistance, laziness, no interest in innovation, no interest in a new
challenge.” The scoundrels, he suggested,
were not the producers but the middlemen who brought uncertified spirits
to consumers. “They avoid all the taxes,”
he said. “They hide behind the idea
that they are helping a poor farmer. They
sell it in bars and restaurants, and they
even export it without permission. The
worst are the ones who pay less here but
sell the ultra-expensive bottles for two
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
•
hundred dollars in the United States.
It’s a very good business being outside
the law.”
or years, it was tough to buy ar-
F tisanal mezcal in Oaxaca City: it
was considered hillbilly moonshine, and
nobody copped to liking it. But now,
thanks in part to Ron Cooper, there are
mezcalerías in Los Angeles, New York,
and Paris; in Mexico City, it is a cliché
of privilege to drink mezcal, and practically a rite of passage for a young “junior” to own a label for a while. And
every street in Oaxaca City seems to
offer an opportunity to drink well. “It’s
sad that it took a white person to say
it’s cool, because this thing has been in
our culture for so long, but that’s Mexico,” Bricia Lopez told me.
A couple of days into my visit, Lopez
arrived in town, and she took me to El
Destilado, a new spot that focusses on
uncertified, nano-batch mezcals—the
agave distillates that may be rechristened komil. El Destilado belonged to
a twenty-eight-year-old from Fort
Wayne, Indiana, named Jason Cox and
two of his friends. El Distilado’s chef
formerly worked at Saison, a threeMichelin-star restaurant in San Francisco, and the menu—which emphasized “local, artisanal, organic” food—
was designed to be ephemeral. The walls
were painted with murals of wild agave
varietals, accompanied by their common
and their scientific names. Cox, who
graduated from Denison University,
with a degree in politics, philosophy,
and economics, is wiry and sharp-featured and has an asymmetrical haircut
that flops in his face, flustering him like
a yearling with an unruly forelock. For
much of the past year, he has studied
mezcal aggressively; after visiting dozens of palenques, he assembled a menu
of obscure offerings, which he buys
wholesale in plastic jugs and bottles in
a back room.
Having recently discovered mezcal,
Cox feels fiercely protective of its future; given the shortage of raw material, its popularity scares him. “I don’t
give a shit about the common person
who thinks mezcal is a smoked tequila,”
he said. “It’s not a drink to buy in clubs.
This is limited! It should be consumed
by people who know what they’re
talking about.”
Cox presented his favorite: an earnest
glass bottle with an agave-fibre label.
“This one’s fermented in cowhide,” he
said. It was wonderfully weird and comforting, salty-sweet and leathery, like Old
Spice on a beloved cheek. I turned the
bottle around and read the name of the
maker, “Maestro Mezcalero: Alvarado
Álvarez.” Cox said that he went to the
source, a tiny village called Santa María
Ixcatlán, every other month to pick up
an allotment of about twenty-six litres;
it happened that he was going the next
day. As for the pending regulations, he
said, the mezcalero, whose full name was
Amando Alvarado Álvarez, didn’t care
at all. “He’s going to sell it whatever the
fuck you call it. You can call it piss water,
for all he cares.”
Early the next morning, Lopez picked
up Cox and me in her father’s Jeep. Cox
had cash in his pocket, and a jug that
he stowed in the back. We drove for
three hours, through high-desert plains
weird with Joshua trees and forests
of oak festooned with air plants, like
Christmas trees in a hotel lobby. The
road dipped and rose, and we entered
Ixcatlán through a colorful gate. The
streets were empty, the cathedral flanked
by bare cement galleries where pilgrims
camp during the town’s main festival.
We stopped at Alvarado’s mother’s house
for lunch—tortillas made from her own
corn, eaten in the kitchen while love
songs played on the radio.
The palenque was at the edge of a
bio-reserve, high in the mountains, twenty
miles from where the tropics begin. We
got out and walked down a little slope,
past a pile of singed agaves to a covered
structure on the side of a hill above a
streambed. The air was heavy. Alvarado
crouched beside a small clay pot with a
bamboo pipe poking from its side which
emptied into a clay jug. The space was
rigged with an ingenious network of angled bamboo sluices, which, Swiss Family Robinson-style, used gravity to bring
cool water to the stills. Three hides full
of fermenting must bowed from treepole frames lashed together with rope.
Cox stepped up for a closer look. “This
is raw, man!” he said. “Fresh leather.”
Alvarado is twenty-five, sure-footed
and small, with a quick bright smile and
a heavy brow that is often tight with
concentration. Before deciding to follow his father into mezcal, he was a
drummer in a folk band; he left school
when he was fourteen. “If it wasn’t for
mezcal, he wouldn’t be here,” his mother
told me. “All of the other boys go to
Mexico City.” There used to be thirty
professional distillers in Ixcatlán, and
now he is the only one. At that point,
Lopez told me, she realized who Alvarado was—the maker of the bottle
she’d been harboring for so long. “Holy
shit, this is the place,” she said. “This is
the guy!”
Alvarado filled a jícara with clear liquid. The surface danced with bubbles:
the pearls, which indicate the proportion of alcohol according to how quickly
they dissipate. These pulled apart like a
ruptured spiderweb—fifty per cent alcohol by volume, or 100 proof.
“Puntas! ” he called—“Heads!” We
tasted them, warm and potent—the giblets of the mezcal. By the time the jug
filled up, the heads would be finished,
and thrown away; what came out next
would be the heart of the distillation.
Alvarado said he’d learned to distill from
his father. He didn’t know about meth-
anol, he said, but he made a practice of
never using tails.
As we drove back to Alvarado’s mother’s house, Lopez contemplated mezcal’s
predicament: fated for ruin if it got its
due. But she couldn’t help trying to figure
out a financial model above subsistence
for Alvarado. People wishing for an authentic mezcal experience should visit
him, as tourists seek out tiny wineries in
France and Spain, and buy his mezcal at
retail prices as a souvenir of the experience. “That is the huge vision,” she said
later. “People talk about making mezcal
to help the people. Paying a hundred and
eighty pesos for something you’re selling for a thousand isn’t helping the people. Helping the people is creating an
industry for the people.” At the house,
Alvarado filled Cox’s container from a
five-gallon blue plastic water jug—ten
litres for a hundred dollars, to be parcelled out in bottles that he would sell
for three hundred apiece.
Lopez asked Alvarado how he usually sold. Wholesale, he said, or through
a nonprofit brand associated with the
bio-reserve, which gave him young
agaves that he could plant as part of a
reforestation effort. That brand, supported by an ex-governor of Oaxaca,
was certified, but he chose to keep the
rest of his output outside the reach of
the C.R.M.; the hologram was too costly.
He did not like to charge too much, lest
high prices fuel a gold rush on the agave.
“If you want to take it with you in your
stomach, it’s free,” he said.
“I’ll never change the way I’m making this, but if here in Ixcatlán I had to
say ‘booze’ or ‘liquor,’ as opposed to ‘mezcal,’ people would be scared away by it.”
He was contemplating giving his product a name in Ixcatec, a language that
fewer than ten living people speak.
“Maybe it’s wrong that I stay away from
everything,” Alvarado said. “I’m trying
to join the movement. I want to fight
for the rights of the mezcaleros to respect
the right traditions, so the C.R.M. doesn’t
make laws to change the process.” He
said that an official had been out to see
him, and had recommended that he store
his mezcal not in plastic jugs but in barrels, which would change the flavor. “Because of the boom, there’s an illusion
that I’m going to get rich making mezcal,” he said. “I just want to keep doing
what I’m doing.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
47
Kamilla Seidler, center, who has worked in some of Europe’s top restaurants, leads the kitchen at Gustu, which is both a restaurant
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENJAMIN LOWY
Letter from La Paz
THE TASTING-MENU
INITIATIVE
Can a restaurant for the rich benefit the poor?
BY CAROLYN KORMANN
ook out the windows of Gustu,
the most ambitious restaurant
in La Paz, Bolivia, and you’ll
see the city climbing up toward the
looming peaks of the Andes in a lumpy,
shimmering mosaic. You might experience a momentary dread, like the one
that hits before a steep hike: you’re at
the bottom of the bowl. But in La Paz
the lower the elevation the better you
feel. The city’s average altitude is twelve
thousand feet above sea level, which
means about a third less oxygen per
breath. The lowest-altitude neighborhoods are the most desirable. In the
one called Calacoto—where Gustu is
situated, at 10,993 feet—quiet cobblestone streets are lined with embassies
and the offices of N.G.O.s. Local kids
pronounce rico, meaning rich or delicious, as an American would, without
rolling the “r”—a Bolivian version of
a Brahmin lockjaw. “In the U.S. you
pay for the view,” a resident told me.
“Here you pay for the oxygen.”
Gustu, housed in an imposing gray
concrete cube with a bank of protruding windows, is both a restaurant and
an experiment in social uplift. It was
opened in 2013 by the Danish food
entrepreneur Claus Meyer. At the time,
his most widely known venture, Noma,
in Copenhagen, had been named the
world’s best restaurant for the third
year in a row by a jury of international
chefs, critics, and restaurateurs. Meyer’s sprawling food company had come
to include an apple orchard, a vinegar
factory, a coffee roaster, and a salmon
smokehouse. “The total group suddenly went from earning a hundred
thousand dollars a year to four million a year,” he told me recently. He
was surprised, and a little uncomfortable. He had always been more concerned with things like finding “an
GETTY IMAGES REPORTAGE
L
and an experiment in social uplift.
unseen vinegar-flavor balance” or harvesting the uniquely succulent turnips
of the Faeroe Islands.
In recent years, Meyer and René
Redzepi, Noma’s head chef, have promoted an influential declaration of
gastronomic principles: the “New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto.” The document has ten points, including pleas
for using local ingredients (often highly
obscure ones) and a call for “purity,
freshness, simplicity, and ethics.” Making millions of dollars is not one of
the points. “I got to thinking I could
give a little bit away, in a nice way,
without feeling poor afterwards,”
Meyer said. He started a foundation
called Melting Pot, which taught prisoners in Denmark how to cook, but
that came to seem insufficiently ambitious. He wanted to fight against
“McDonaldization,” and see if his philosophy of food could help lift people
out of poverty. Maybe, he thought,
eating sea buckthorn and gooseberries had “something in it for mankind.”
His first idea was to open an outpost in one of the troubled countries
of southeastern Europe—Bulgaria,
Greece, Romania—or possibly in Kazakhstan. He wrote to the European
commissioner of agriculture to ask “if
she thought there would be a poor
country in Europe that would maybe
benefit.” When she didn’t answer, he
started researching other possibilities, looking for a poor (but not too
poor) place with exceptional biodiversity and relatively little crime. He
developed a ranked list and considered Ghana, Vietnam, and Nepal. Vietnamese cuisine was already too good,
Meyer decided; all the great combinations of ingredients had been discovered. Then he hit on Bolivia. Though
it is one of the poorest countries in
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
49
“Wait—there they are, behind your ear!”
•
Latin America, it has, Meyer said, “a
great undiscovered larder of fantastic products that people could be seduced by.”
Yet when Meyer visited La Paz, he
recalled, he was “frustrated and depressed.” The altitude made him so
sick that he brought an oxygen tank
to meetings. “I would never take my
family to live there,” he concluded.
“You can’t even drink the water.” The
average monthly wage was less than
two hundred dollars, and most locals
preferred to eat traditional Bolivian
dishes sold at sidewalk stalls and markets; soups made with dehydrated potatoes or beef kidneys were popular.
The tourist trade catered largely to
backpackers looking for cheap hostels and coca tea. Meyer remembered
thinking, “This can never happen. There
is no market for this. We will have
forty employees but no clients.” Then
he descended to Calacoto and began
to feel better. “We found a place in La
Paz that looked as if it had some welldressed people.”
He began planning a Bolivian
equivalent of Noma: a “fine-dining
temple” with an avant-garde tasting
menu, composed entirely from indigenous ingredients. To advance his goal
of “fighting poverty through deliciousness,” he would create a culinary school
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
•
for disadvantaged youths. Meyer
wanted to train a generation of cooks
who would educate their communities and redefine the way Bolivians perceive traditional ingredients. “When
you see kids in the slums growing up
on white rice, potatoes, and white flour,
all imported from another country,
then getting diabetes before they turn
twenty, something is wrong,” Meyer
said. He formed a partnership with a
Danish N.G.O. called IBIS, which had
been working in Bolivia for decades,
and started a Bolivian offshoot of Melting Pot. Each organization agreed to
an initial investment of five hundred
thousand dollars. To his critics, especially in Bolivia, the idea smelled like
a Viking in need of a shower. Meyer
shrugged them off.
The cooks for his restaurant could
come from the culinary school, he decided. But he needed a chef to lead
the kitchen. He approached Kamilla
Seidler, a thirty-two-year-old Dane who
had worked in some of Europe’s top
restaurants, including Mugaritz, a twoMichelin-star establishment in northern Spain that is known for such whimsical experiments as edible cutlery. To
interview for the job, Seidler went to
Meyer’s house and cooked for his family: four courses, she recalls, with a
dessert built around passion fruit
(“giving it the Latin touch”) and sorrel (“for some acidity”). She got the
job, and in the next three years she was
joined by staff members from Bolivia
and half a dozen other countries. Her
friend Michelangelo Cestari, an ItalianVenezuelan chef, was hired as Gustu’s
C.E.O. “I’m extremely impressed with
what they are doing down there,”
Meyer told me. “And the fact that they
have found—what do you call it?—
peace. I think it changed their lives in
a good way and not a strange way.”
Seidler might disagree about the
strange part. To bring prosperity to the
restaurant, she participated in a sacrifice
of a llama fetus. She helped craft a
recipe for quinoa Communion wafers
and had them delivered to Pope Francis when he passed through La Paz.
She hosted a lunch for families of Amazonian reptile hunters. Although she
went to Bolivia planning to stay for a
year, she recently bought a house next
to a tourist attraction called the Valley of the Moon—an expanse of sandstone and clay that resembles a colossal sea sponge. “I feel like I’m in a
Tarantino movie every time I drive
home,” she said.
eidler grew up in Copenhagen,
S cooking with her grandmothers,
and got her first food job, in a bakery,
at fifteen. From the start, she was implacable in the kitchen. When burglars
broke into the bakery one day, she
chased them off with a bread knife.
At Gustu, she has the attentive look
of a goalkeeper surveying the field;
the anxieties of the job show only in
her hands, which fidget constantly.
She spends most of her time at work,
but during off hours she reads about
the local cuisine or flips through Danish thrillers or goes to the movies, occasionally by herself. One evening in
La Paz, when a ticket-seller asked if
she was alone, she retorted, “Would
you like to accompany me?”
On a recent Saturday morning, Seidler drove her black Suzuki to a market in central La Paz. It was the day
before a national referendum that
would shut down the city, and shoppers jostled along the steep street, hurrying to gather provisions. Venders—
mostly fierce-looking women with
long braids and bowler hats—sat in
stalls between heaps of Andean produce: watermelons as big as a bulldog’s belly, purple corn with kernels
like gumballs, plantains the color of
paprika. Seidler, dressed all in black,
had her blond hair tied in a messy bun.
She gestured at a stall where silvery
trout were arrayed, without ice, in the
hot sun. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.
“Or terrifying.” The vender smiled
and started sharpening her knives.
When Seidler moved to Bolivia, in
October, 2012, the street food made
her sick, but she visited the market
every day. Occasionally, she was reminded of something that Meyer had
told her: “This could be the biggest
career shortcut you’ve ever made, or
the biggest mistake.” As she began to
create Gustu’s first menu, Meyer gave
her complete freedom. “He was just,
like, ‘Make sure there’s a lot of acidity in the food,’ ” she said. Although
she had prepared for her move by reading about Bolivian history, politics, and
economics, she didn’t want to know
anything about the food until she could
see and taste for herself. She discovered a cornucopia. Bolivia, two-thirds
the size of Alaska, is one of the world’s
most biodiverse nations, with more
than twenty thousand documented
species of plants. It contains an extraordinary range of ecosystems, from
the alpine valleys and salt flats of the
western highlands to the rain forest
and wetlands of the eastern lowlands.
La Paz, in the west, sits on the altiplano, a vast plateau whose altitude
prevents many trees from growing
there, leaving the wind free to rip across
its expanse. Yet even the altiplano supports some hardy nutritious plants, including quinoa, amaranth, and cañahua, which Seidler describes as “quinoa’s
little brother.”
In Scandinavia and the United
States, farmers and food producers
push samples on chefs, but in Bolivia
no one approached Seidler with ingredients. Instead, she had “to look
everything up and then go find it.”
She asked Bolivians to give her lists
of ingredients to try. Their suggestions
turned out to be as baffling as what
she saw in the market: “Huacataya,
local herb, flavor like nothing else.
Quirquiña, local herb, flavor like
nothing else. I’d be, like, what the hell
am I going to do with these lists?”
Seidler felt like Alice in Wonderland. Every day, she’d find something
new to cook. As we walked through
the market, a fruit peddler with a voice
like a piccolo sang out, “Papaya, melón,
plátano, chirimoya.” Seidler picked up
a fruit called a tumbo—the first thing
she had tasted in La Paz. “It’s like the
high-altitude cousin to passion fruit,”
she said, cracking open the yellow rind
as if it were a plastic Easter egg. The
inside was filled with pulp-covered
black seeds that looked like fish eggs
and tasted like SweeTarts. Next, she
picked up something that resembled
an oversized bean pod stuffed with
pearly gauze. “Pacay,” Seidler said. “It’s
like cotton candy.”
We paused in front of some net
sacks containing fantastically colored
potatoes. One was the papa pinta boca:
the mouth-painting potato, which
has velvety purple skin. Another was
the papalisa, the Liberace of potatoes,
which can be baby blue, pale pink, or
butter yellow with fuchsia polka dots.
Bolivia has more than a thousand
cultivated varieties of potatoes, along
with dozens of wild species. People
have been growing them for millennia on the altiplano, where the bizarre
tubers’ funk and color enliven the bleak
terrain.
I picked up a white hunk that looked
like pumice. It was tunta, a potato that
is preserved by an ancient method: left
outside to freeze and thaw repeatedly
during the dry season, soaked in a river
or a pond for as much as a month, and
then dehydrated. “Those are hard core,”
Seidler said. Eaten plain, they evoked
chalk and blue cheese. Seidler doesn’t
like tunta, but she wanted to include
it on Gustu’s menu, because it is a cornerstone of the altiplano diet. “So we
think, What can we do so that we like
it—so you get a subtle flavor of fermented potato but not the super-fer-
mented tunta whack?” She devised a
recipe for a side dish in which the potatoes are rehydrated for a day or two,
broken into pieces, glazed with banana
syrup, and flash-fried.
Seidler needed to please many
kinds of people: prominent Bolivians,
the local press, the international press,
travel bloggers, food tourists, regular
tourists, backpackers, Bolivian ex-pats
who are nostalgic for flavors from
their childhood, and judges for Latin
America’s Fifty Best Restaurants, a
ranking started in 2013. She had to
come up with a formula that nobody
else had. “It is almost like an international game,” Meyer told me. “We
don’t compete with the restaurant
next door.”
If Gustu was going to follow Noma’s lead, it needed ingredients that
would be novel even for Bolivians. “We
wanted to start extreme,” Seidler said.
She hired Joan Carbó, a Spaniard who
is getting a doctorate in distillation, to
create the Bolivian Food Lab—a place
to catalogue the country’s products.
Carbó has since moved on to El Celler
de Can Roca, a restaurant in Spain
that currently tops the World’s Fifty
Best list, but he remembers his time
at Gustu as a period of constant experimentation. Once, he told me, he
was in a taxi, and the driver pointed
out an edible cactus flower growing by
the side of the road. Carbó made the
driver stop so that he could pluck a
sample, and Seidler ended up using it
for an açaí dessert with wild herbs.
In the search for exotic produce,
Seidler found that the people who
worked at Gustu were some of her
best sources. Kenzo Hirose, a shy,
wiry twenty-one-year-old with shaggy
black hair, grew up in the Bolivian
Amazon. He asked his mother to send
anything that she thought the chefs
might like. The first package, stowed
on a passenger bus from the jungle,
contained palmito, the marrow of a
palm tree. Seidler used the palm fibres
like fettuccine, adding ribbons of llama
jerky and a poached egg yolk to create a kind of Andean-Amazonian pasta
carbonara.
In early 2013, after six months of
experimentation, Seidler settled on
Gustu’s first menu. The palmito was
on it, along with rabbit confit served
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
51
with pale kernels of choclo and lime
zest; papalisas with beetroot and hibiscus; and a boozy dessert made with
tumbo, the fruit she had given me in
the market. The food was sculptural,
deconstructed, Technicolor. Seidler
told a national paper, “It’s everything
the Bolivian people know, but prepared in a different way from anything they have tasted.” The restaurant opened in April, with a cocktail
party for three hundred, and the mayor
of La Paz gave a speech. There was
ample press coverage, but much of the
response came down to: “Who are
these Danes who think they’re going
to save Bolivian food?” A local chef
said of the meal he ate there, “Some
combinations are mainly just weird.”
A forty-year-old Paceña recalled that
her mother had appraised her dinner
and said, “This is not food.”
f you’re a lawyer taking a signifi-
I cant client out for dinner in La Paz,
you might go to Chalet La Suisse.
Prospective grooms pop the question
at Jardín de Asia or Angelo Colonial.
There is little of the kind of aspirational dining that defines the restaurant scene in New York or San Francisco; people eat for pleasure, not for
sport, and the word “foodie” is a recent import. Coral Ayoroa, Gustu’s first
Bolivian employee, previously held a
job at an upscale French restaurant,
where the chef announced his specialties on an illustrated banner outside
the door. After Ayoroa created her first
dish, he put it on the banner without
crediting her. She quit the next day.
When Ayoroa started working for
Gustu, she and three other young Bolivian chefs flew to Copenhagen to
train in Meyer’s establishments. “It was
like a dream,” she told me. She returned to La Paz and began trying to
convert Bolivians to the New Nordic
ethos. “Pretty quickly it dawned on me
that no one had any idea what I was
talking about,” she said. When she
asked around for celeriac, a vegetable
she had encountered at Noma, she was
told that it was given to livestock.
In La Paz, Ayoroa was charged with
setting up the culinary school. Students—aged eighteen to twenty-eight,
from a low-income background—would
receive full scholarships, including ac52
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
cident insurance, uniforms, and a stipend. In August, 2012, she started the
program with twenty-one Bolivians,
all inexperienced in restaurant work.
Gustu, however, was still without a
home; a plan to open in a historic building had fallen through. Ayoroa tried
sending students to restaurants around
La Paz to gain experience, but they
picked up bad habits, like using cutting boards that hadn’t been cleaned
and doctoring the food with MSG. So
Seidler persuaded the Danish Embassy
to fund two-month apprenticeships in
Peru, which in the past decade has experienced a culinary boom. The students would work in some of Lima’s
best restaurants, including La Mar,
owned by Gastón Acurio, a leading
chef. In 2007, Acurio had founded a
culinary school in a slum near Lima
and then hired its graduates. His
kitchen seemed like an ideal fit.
Ayoroa, who has intent brown eyes
and often wears a backward flat cap,
supervised the Bolivians in Peru. Although she finished college as a single mother while also managing a
fast-food chicken franchise, she told
me that the trip to Lima was “the
hardest work I’ve ever done.” One
student fell asleep on the train and
was lost in the city for several hours.
Two girls were caught drinking, and
Ayoroa shipped them home on a
bus the next day. “I had to be very
firm,” she said. She remembered one
student, a tiny, timid woman named
María Claudia Chura, who had worked
as a maid since she was a teen-ager.
“Her life had always been difficult,”
Ayoroa said. “I would tell her that
this was her one chance to get real
training, and if she wanted a change
she had to work harder.” Often, she
made Chura cry. “I’m a chef, so I’m
tough,” Ayoroa said. “I asked her,
‘Why are you crying?’ ”
The students returned to La Paz
just before Gustu opened, to help set
up. Then, unexpectedly, eight of them
quit. “It might have been that the
work was too tough for them,” Ayoroa said. The students had long shifts,
sometimes training all day and then
helping during dinner service. Another
problem was the long commute from
the neighborhoods where they lived,
in the mostly impoverished city of El
Alto, which sits on a dusty plain a
thousand feet higher than La Paz. Despite the commute, the managers demanded punctuality, and were impatient with the flexibility of “Bolivian
time.” Alejandro Cruz, a twenty-yearold with spiky hair, said, “The hardest thing was getting accustomed to
their approach to work—very upright,
direct, strict.” No one hesitated to point
out his mistakes: the sauce lacked citrus, the soup was lumpy, the presentation was sloppy.
Seidler had come of age in the
militaristic atmosphere of restaurants
that aspired to Michelin stars. In England, where she worked in her twenties, “The head chef would come in
in the morning and salute everybody
and be like, ‘Are you going to be shit,
like yesterday?’ They loved to humiliate people.” At Mugaritz, she said,
“I would wake up and not be able to
open my fingers, because you were
peeling shit all day. But I learned how
to peel the right way.” On high-pressure nights at Gustu, she reverted
to the slang she had picked up in
the kitchen at Mugaritz. Like many
Spaniards, she deploys the phrase puta
madre—roughly analogous to “motherfucker”—with alacrity. Bolivians do
not use the expression, and students
were unnerved.
Some students’ families were uncertain that kitchen work qualified as a
good job, or were uneasy about sending their children to work with foreigners. One woman’s relatives worried
that she would be kidnapped. Many of
the students are Aymara, an indigenous people who have thrived on the
altiplano for centuries by farming and
herding llamas and alpacas; for them,
the priorities of a high-end restaurant
seemed remote. “The Aymara are more
quiet, reserved, closed,” Ayoroa said.
Like the students, Seidler struggled
with the culture gap. “With these kids,
if you scream at them, they just break
down,” she said. “There’s no, like, ‘O.K.,
fuck yeah! I’ll do better.’ Instead they’ll
say, ‘I’m not going to do the fish at all.’ ”
Meyer realized that their strategy
was flawed: they could not run an ambitious restaurant and teach staff members the rudiments of kitchen work at
the same time. He devised a two-tiered
system for training employees. Melting
A network of schools affiliated with Gustu teaches basic kitchen skills and identifies talented cooks. It has nearly six hundred students.
Pot would start a network of entrylevel cooking schools in El Alto,
where their students lived. The top
graduates would be eligible for scholarships to continue their studies at
Gustu.
The network was given the name
Manq’a—“food,” in Aymara—and the
first site opened in 2014, offering a
six-month course designed by Ayoroa. El Alto’s population has tripled
in the past three decades; the city has
more than a million residents (along
with, it seems, just as many stray dogs).
But career-training programs are mostly
unknown, and Manq’a took off. By
the end of 2015, El Alto had eight
schools, with nearly six hundred students. Each school has a basic kitchen
and a few big tables, where the students serve lunch to the public: an elegantly presented soup, entrée, and
dessert for two dollars.
Manq’a graduates starting out at
Gustu spend two months on the subtleties of service: how to address various combinations of men and women;
how to describe an expensive bottle
of wine to a guy who knows nothing
about wine but wants to impress his
date. “The days of saying ‘the specialty
of the house’ are dead,” an instructor
pronounced solemnly during my visit.
Mostly, though, the students learn by
doing: they cook, bake, mix drinks,
brew coffee, wash dishes, and wait on
tables.
When I visited the kitchen before
dinner on a Friday night, it was easy
to distinguish former students by their
air of quiet command. Alejandro Cruz,
whom Seidler had hired as a cook,
sharpened his knives and sliced along
the spine of a pink slab of trout from
Lake Titicaca, a few hours north of
La Paz. Minutes later, a pile of perfectly rectangular fillets sat in front of
him, and he turned to the surubí, a
zebra-striped fish from the Amazon.
Like many of the students, Cruz commutes an hour and a half from El Alto,
but he no longer finds the work stressful. “Gustu is a major part of who I
am now,” he said.
Many of the employees seem to feel
a similar reverence. One baker, a former security guard at Gustu who quit
to attend a Manq’a school, showed me
an Eiffel Tower charm that he wore
around his neck. “Paris is the cradle
of gastronomy,” he explained. Whenever a sous chef called out an order,
the students and line cooks immediately yelled back “Oido!” (“I hear you!”)
As they worked, Seidler appeared, in
a starched white chef ’s jacket buttoned
to her collarbone, and the kitchen grew
quiet. She spoke briefly to a few cooks,
and then left. I asked her later if she
thought she intimidated the students.
“To me, intimidated means scared,”
she said. “They’re not scared. They respect me. And they want to do right.”
Ayoroa recently arranged an official certification for the program,
along with an affiliation with the
Catholic University of Bolivia San
Pablo. The current crop of students
will complete thirty months of training and coursework, and will receive
a degree in business management with
a specialization in gastronomy. Their
presence gives the kitchen and dining room the atmosphere of a research
lab, with students moving intently
from task to task. “We live and breathe
this place,” a cook named Renata
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
53
Zalles said. “People don’t care about
their lives outside.” Sumaya Prado,
Gustu’s publicist, told me, “It’s like a
black hole in the universe. Once in,
you can never get out.”
ustu’s arrival has coincided
G with an era of dramatic change in
Bolivia that began in 2005, when Evo
Morales was elected President. Morales,
the former leader of a coca growers’
union, ran for office on the Movement
Toward Socialism ticket. His administration has been true to the Party’s name,
nationalizing the country’s oil and gas
industries and investing in the welfare
of farmers, the elderly, and students. A
plainspoken man who has appeared at
major political events wearing a striped
sweater, Morales inspires deep loyalty
among his partisans. Feliciano Honoro,
a gray-haired newspaper vender on a
corner near Gustu, told me, “Never before did the government do so much for
the people.”
Critics point out that these initiatives are enabled by the booming market in natural gas, and they complain
of corruption and a growing trend toward authoritarianism. Bolivian newspapers recently reported that Morales’s
government had awarded half a billion dollars in contracts to a Chinese
corporation where a young girlfriend
of his, with whom he had fathered a
child, was a senior executive. (Morales
denied any wrongdoing.) During my
visit, the walls of La Paz were covered
with graffiti inspired by his latest effort:
a constitutional amendment that would
extend his term limit and allow him
to run for office again. Kids ran around
with “No” painted on their faces in red
and green, Bolivian national colors.
But few people in La Paz deny that
Morales has overseen a cultural shift.
For centuries, Bolivia’s indigenous people were a persistent underclass. The
Aymara, despite constituting a large
part of the population, were poor and
politically disenfranchised, unwelcome
in some neighborhoods of La Paz. Morales is the first Aymara President, and
he emphasizes his heritage: during
Carnival season, he opens the festivities by making a traditional offering
to the earth goddess Pachamama. An
Aymara middle class is growing, and
indigenous culture is celebrated and
54
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
promoted. Aymara and Quechua are
now official national languages.
Cuisine is a central part of this indigenous flowering. Morales, who has
attacked American fast food for doing
“a great deal of harm to humankind,”
emphasizes the importance of “food
sovereignty”—the right of producers
to be protected against competition
from multinational agribusiness. In
2009, the concept was enshrined in the
constitution, and Bolivian products are
gaining status, both at home and abroad.
For decades, Bolivians had an inferiority complex about their local food.
Leonardo Diab, the co-owner of a new
glass-walled distillery in El Alto that
makes a high-end vodka called 1825,
told me, “Traditionally, if Bolivians
were to pick up a bottle off a shelf,
they’d say, ‘Oh, it’s from Bolivia,’ and
put it back.” Bolivia’s favorite spirit,
singani, has been nearly impossible to
find outside the country. It is made
from Muscat of Alexandria grapes,
which have been grown in the southern mountains for centuries, and distilled at high altitude, where the boiling point is lower; the process leaves
the grape’s aromatics unusually intact,
creating a light floral flavor. Last year,
according to one report, exports to the
U.S. increased sixty per cent. A Bolivian producer called Takesi, which grows
coffee beans in the world’s highest
fields, is also doing well. Intelligentsia,
an American emporium that promotes
a vision of coffee that is “revered, yet
democratic,” sells a twelve-ounce bag
of Takesi for thirty-eight dollars.
Gustu inhabits an uneasy position
in the country’s food revolution. After
Seidler contributed to a “Bolivian food
primer” for the Web site Food Republic, she was attacked in a national newspaper, Página Siete. Camila Lechín, a
young Bolivian chef, wrote an op-ed
piece ridiculing Seidler’s descriptions
of Bolivian dishes, insisting that she
had “a tourist’s view of our gastronomy: anecdotal, exotic, distant from
the truth.” Seidler argues that she has
never claimed to be making authentic Bolivian food. We talked about the
dispute one day as we sat in a plaza,
eating sandwiches de chola—roast pork,
tooth-chipping chicharrones, and spicy
relish—bought from a vender who had
been making them for fifty-four years.
“With street food, don’t mess with traditions,” Seidler told me. “But at Gustu
we can do whatever we want.” Her
version of the sandwich comes with
air-puffed chicharrones on the side.
For some prominent Bolivians,
Gustu poses a conundrum. The restaurant attracts businesspeople and government ministers, along with a few
entertainers, but when I called Freddy
Mamani Silvestre, an Aymara architect celebrated for his dazzlingly colorful buildings in El Alto, his assistant told me that Mamani knew
nothing about Gustu: it was a restaurant for tourists, for millionaires, and
Mamani preferred to eat among the
poor in the market. (The assistant allowed that Mamani sometimes ate at
the Manq’a schools.)
There have been more serious tensions. In December, 2013, the government accused IBIS, the N.G.O. that
partnered with Gustu to found its cooking school, of meddling in Bolivia’s internal affairs. The leaders of IBIS protested that they were guilty only of
supporting organizations that had become critical of Morales. The government expelled IBIS from the country
anyway, and rumors spread that Gustu
was going to close. This turned out to
be good for business. “A lot of local people came to ‘try it at least once before
it closes,’ ” Prado, the publicist, told me.
Although the rumors subsided after a
few weeks, she said, many of those people became regulars.
In 2014, Morales was elected to a
third term, and the following January
Gustu catered his inauguration ceremony. “We did a couple of different
modern takes on classic Bolivian snacks
or dishes,” Seidler told me. There was
a slider-sized sandwich de chola and a
kind of turnover called a salteña, made
with coca-leaf powder as a nod to the
President’s past. Morales reportedly had
little interest in the fancy food, asking
instead if someone could just get him
a bowl of soup. Despite Gustu’s social
projects, it can’t be easy for a populist
President to credit a European chef with
“rescuing” local food and farmers. He is
not above a private endorsement, though.
When a Bolivian beer company flew in
Jude Law to make a promotional appearance, the actor had dinner at Gustu.
“Evo told me to eat here,” he said to a
manager. “So I had to come.”
wasn’t hungry when I first sat
I down for dinner at Gustu. One of
the challenges of running a destination restaurant in the world’s highest
capital city is that the altitude can kill
a traveller’s appetite. It seemed prudent
to start with the five-course option
rather than the fifteen-course Menú
Bolivia. I would ease into hedonism.
“We’re smoking coca leaves for your
cocktail,” the sommelier, Bertil Levin
TØttenborg, said. He was a tall Dane,
holding a tubed black device that he
called a smoking gun. “I don’t know
if it gets you high, but we’ll find out.”
I had been drinking coca tea since I
arrived; it’s illegal in the United States,
but as common as chamomile here,
where it’s used to combat fatigue, settle the stomach, and quell hunger
pangs. Carola Quispé, a former Gustu
student, aimed the gun into a glass of
foamy pink liquid and topped it off
with smoke, then added a coca-leaf
garnish. “It’s made with papa-pintaboca-infused singani, lime juice, and egg
whites, balanced with palo santo syrup,”
she said. It felt like drinking incense.
“First, you will eat cauliflower,”
Levin TØttenborg said. He set down
a piece of slate bearing a thin triangular slice of what looked like watermelon, neatly cut to leave a sliver of
green along the side. A single rectangular grain of salt sat on top. There
was no cauliflower in sight, and yet,
when I took a bite, the flavor announced
itself unmistakably as cauliflower. A
waiter set down bread—a pink hibiscus brioche and a coca-leaf bun, served
with coca butter and quinoa tofu. The
tofu was bland, but the coca butter was
savory, like a grassy crème fraîche.
A giant balloon labelled “Happy
Anniversary” floated in through the
front door, hiding a teen-age girl who
was delivering it to a large family at a
table. While most Bolivians can’t afford
to eat at Gustu, it’s become a place for
the growing middle class to celebrate
special occasions. (There were six marriage proposals in January.) A waiter
carried two Martinis, one red and one
orange, to an elegantly dressed Bolivian couple sitting under a lantern made
from strands of red and orange alpaca
wool. The dining room had high ceilings, dark-wood tables, Danish pillar
candles, and a few shelves holding vintage radios and bowls of cacao beans.
At one end of the room was a glassed-in
service kitchen, lit up like an aquarium
so that everyone could see the cooks
at work. Seidler, wearing a white jacket,
with her hair in a slightly skewed chignon, directed the action.
Rubén Gruñeiro, the restaurant’s
manager, brought me the next dish: carpaccio of caiman, a relative of the alligator. He pointed to the garnish, a sprig
that looked like a tiny lily pad. “That’s
a weed growing here in most people’s
back yards, although no one knows it’s
edible.” Raw caiman, it turns out, is mild
and slightly chewy, somewhere between
whale and whitefish; it served mostly
to connect the other ingredients, which
included tree tomato, yogurt, arugula,
and smoked red pepper. Seidler had told
me that she wanted from the beginning
to work with caiman, but it was illegal.
So she contacted the Tacanas, an indigenous group in the Amazon that hunts
caiman and has a license to sell the meat.
During the hunting season, which lasts
for twenty-five days in September, Tacana men paddle canoes along the river
at night, carrying small lanterns, looking for glowing red eyes. When they
spot a caiman that’s big enough, they
snare it in a net, tie it up, and whack it
on the head. I asked Seidler if anyone
at Gustu had gone hunting with the
Tacanas. “It’s a little dangerous,” she
said. “They know what they’re doing,
but there are people with missing arms.”
As the night went on, I ate amaranth and sipped a screwdriver made
with 1825 vodka from the distillery in
El Alto. There was llama tartare on a
beetroot rice cracker. There was a dish
of surubí bone marrow and tree tomato that had been fermented with
kimchi and smoked chilies. Seidler
placed a piece of aged duck in front of
me and spooned a dollop of duck-fat
whipped cream onto an accompanying tangle of crimson papalisas. “Make
sure you spread it all over,” she said.
The man and woman under the lantern
“With you screaming all the time, I can’t hear myself scream.”
were laughing, each with half a Martini remaining.
At the end of the evening, my check,
delivered in a block of wood, came to
about seventy-five dollars. The full
tasting menu is more than twice that,
and patrons of Gustu may be disquieted by the idea of spending as much
on dinner as the average Bolivian earns
in three weeks. At Noma, though, the
equivalent meal is four hundred and
fifty dollars. “For Bolivians in general,
Gustu is very expensive,” Seidler said.
“To foreigners, it’s super cheap.”
According to Seidler, Gustu’s patrons are forty per cent Bolivian, sixty
per cent foreign. The dining room tonight roughly reflected that split. An
older American couple (striped oxford,
llama-patterned fleece) looked contentedly dazed. A Bolivian boy sat with his
family, radiating boredom. (When I
asked Seidler if she accommodated kids,
she said, “Kids are humans, but smaller.
If they don’t want what we have, they
don’t eat.”) A dozen Japanese tourists
celebrated the recovery of those in their
party who had been hospitalized earlier that week for altitude sickness.
Has Gustu become the destination
restaurant that Meyer envisioned?
Prado, the publicist, told me that guests
had flown in from Dubai, Texas, Shanghai, and Denmark, eaten at Gustu, then
left the following day. Still, it was easy
to get a table in February, when I was
there. March was fully booked, but the
owners would undoubtedly prefer to
be booked for months in advance. In
any case, Gustu is not yet making a
profit. But its staff has grown from
seven to forty-five, and the venture
seems to be flourishing. The judges for
Latin America’s Fifty Best Restaurants
selected Gustu as No. 32 in 2014, and
as No. 17 last September. “If you’re on
a mountaintop in a developing country where no one knows what a tasting
menu is, that list is very important,”
Seidler told me. “Suddenly, it’s—boom!
Everyone’s wondering, ‘What the hell
is going on in Bolivia?’ ”
laus Meyer doesn’t spend much
C time thinking about Bolivia these
days. Last summer, he left Copenhagen and moved his family—his wife,
three daughters, and two terriers—to a
handsome brick town house in Manhattan. He is starting a Danish bakery
in Williamsburg, and this spring he will
open two eating establishments under
the lofty ceiling of Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall: an ambitious
Nordic restaurant on one side of the
hall and a food court on the other. “All
the attention toward the project—it’s
very, very scary,” Meyer said. He is also
quietly pursuing another project: a
restaurant and cooking school in
Brownsville, one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods. It will offer paid apprenticeships and free classes to residents. After a year of training, graduates
will receive a New York City food-handler license and help finding a job.
In New York, the program has a
commercial logic. The city currently
has a dearth of trained cooks, and even
a rough neighborhood is only a subway ride from hundreds of restaurants
that need employees. But in Bolivia
haute cuisine can seem like a limited
development strategy. Amy LasaterWille, an American anthropologist
who wrote a dissertation on the cooking-schools program in Peru, told me,
“People are right to be skeptical that
training restaurant cooks is going to
have any kind of large-scale social impact.” But, she said, the Peruvian schools
have had a “very positive” effect. Some
eighty thousand young people are studying to be chefs, and tourists now come
to Lima to dine. Ignacio Medina, a
Lima-based food critic, said, “In Peru,
a generation of cooks revived pride in
their cuisine to the extent that it’s become a national symbol. In Bolivia, it
should be this way, too, because a society that is growing economically needs
a cuisine that can extend its influence.”
In La Paz, Gustu alums have opened
three eateries, focussed on Bolivian ingredients. This June, Gustu will open its
own more affordable café, in a new boutique hotel. Its expanding web of socially
minded offshoots includes a refrigerated
truck that ferries produce from isolated
farms to the restaurant, a street-food tour
of venders whom Ayoroa has mentored,
and an initiative to provide healthful
school lunches to kids on the altiplano.
Manq’a has opened two more schools
outside of La Paz and another in Colombia. But the Bolivian restaurant scene
is growing slowly, and high-end kitchen
jobs are scarce. Many Manq’a graduates
will need to either start their own businesses or work in fast-food places and
dives. When the program’s funding runs
out, the Bolivian cooks will have to keep
up the momentum on their own.
ne evening, Seidler looked out
O the window of a cab in central
“ Yep, we’re still smarter.”
La Paz. We were on our way to Ali
Pacha, a new “plant-based” restaurant
started by a Gustu alum, where a trial
dinner for friends and colleagues was
set for 7:30. It was now 7:45. Vintage
Dodge buses, cop cars, vans, trucks,
car-pool taxis, and Volkswagen bugs
inched up a narrow street clouded
with exhaust. “When I first got here,
I would pull my hair out over this,”
Seidler said. “I’ve learned not to
get angry. Sure, if someone fucks up
something in the kitchen and a client
is going to be affected, I get angry.
But I can’t do anything about this
right now.”
Suddenly, the passenger door
opened. A traffic cop climbed in and
told the driver, who had been talking
on his cell phone, to head to the police station. Did he know that talking
on the phone while driving was against
the law?
“Puta madre,” Seidler said, and told
the driver to let us out. On the sidewalk, she strode uphill, fast. “That’s
the first time I’ve seen a police officer
do a single thing in three and a half
years,” she said. We were in the old
city, where tourists come to see the colonial buildings, whose paint is peeling like birch bark. As we climbed a
stone stairway, a group of Gustu people caught up with us, and at the top
we found the restaurant, flanked by an
MTV Fashion Jeans Boutique and a
bleak-looking hamburger joint. “Screw
this,” Levin TØttenborg, the sommelier, joked. “Let’s go to Hamburgón.”
We weren’t too late—only a few
tables were taken—and the staff lined
up to greet Seidler. A tiny woman in
a chef ’s jacket and a blue apron ran
out from the kitchen. “Mini-chef !”
Seidler exclaimed. María Claudia
Chura—the diminutive former student whom Ayoroa had brought to
tears—gave Seidler a hug and a nervous grin. As one of Ali Pacha’s chefs
de partie, she had been preparing for
months. Now she had to prove herself, commanding an all-male crew
of cooks.
The space, with exposed-brick
walls, wooden rafters, and painted
floor tiles, felt like a Spanish tavern,
refitted with a Gustu-style open
kitchen. Seidler was greeted by a former intern who had opened a pasta
restaurant—“the only al-dente pasta
in La Paz,” Seidler told me—and by
the proprietors of a new café that
•
brews high-end Bolivian coffee. Seidler switched between Spanish, English, and Danish. Tonight, she was
everybody’s godmother.
Dinner was a seven-course vegan
tasting menu—made, we were told repeatedly, solely with Bolivian products.
Perhaps Gustu’s most notable influence
on La Paz has been to make locavore
dining a salable proposition. At Jardín
de Asia, waiters have started giving
diners a rundown of each dish’s ingredients, in a style one patron described
as “Gustu-esque.” Although the flavors
at Ali Pacha were less complex than
those from Seidler’s kitchen, the food
was fresh and surprising. I was dubious when the owner said that one dish
was finished with the “ash of burned
beetroot, ” but I happily cleaned my
plate.
Seidler thumbed notes into her
phone as she ate—Chura would expect feedback. One dish, plated in the
geometric Gustu style, was a pale log
of seared palmito next to a circle of
almond sauce with green polka dots
of huacataya oil. Seidler had a fork-
•
ful. Her expression was inscrutable.
“For me, it’s very rancid—the almond,”
she said. “But I also know it’s not
their fault. It’s because high-quality
almonds are difficult to find. So instead of saying, ‘Your almond sauce
is shit,’ I’ll say, ‘Do you want my provider of almonds?’ ”
Chura and her comrades were trying to solve the problem that Seidler
had encountered when she came to
Bolivia: how to turn native ingredients into dishes that would draw people in. In order to prosper, they needed
to attract bureaucrats on lunch break,
locals who might otherwise go to the
hamburger place, and tourists on their
way to the salt flats. All of them would
have their own ideas of what Bolivian food ought to be. Seidler, still considering the almond sauce, said, “If it
was too sweet, too acid, too anything
else, that’s personal taste. Flavor is
very personal, because we always connect it with memories. So if I smell
apple in something, then I would go
back to my childhood in Denmark,
and I would like it.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
57
A camp on the Chhota Shigri Glacier, in India, where a group of scientists is trying to assess how rapidly it is melting. The Chinese side
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMON NORFOLK
A Reporter at Large
THE END OF ICE
Exploring a Himalayan glacier.
BY DEXTER FILKINS
of the mountain range has been studied thoroughly, but, according to one scientist, “the other side of the Himalayas is a black hole.”
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
59
he journey to the Chhota
Shigri Glacier, in the Himalayan peaks of northern India,
begins thousands of feet below, in
New Delhi—a city of twenty-five million people, where smoke from diesel
trucks and cow-dung fires dims the
sky and where the temperature on a
hot summer day can reach a hundred
and fifteen degrees. The route passes
through a churning sprawl of lowland cities, home to some fifty million
people, until the Himalayas come
into view: a steep wall rising above the
plains, the product of a tectonic collision that began thousands of years ago
and is still under way. From there, the
road snakes upward, past cows and
trucks and three-wheeled taxis and
every other kind of moving evidence
of India’s economic transformation. If
you turn around, you can see a great
layer of smog, lying over northern India
like a dirty shroud. In the mountains,
the number of cars drops sharply—
limited by government regulation, for
fear of what the smog is doing to the
ice. The road mostly lacks shoulders;
on turns, you look into ravines a thousand feet deep. After the town of
Manali, the air cools, and the road cuts
through forests of spruce and cedar
and fir.
A few months ago, I followed
that route with an international group
of scientists who were travelling to
Chhota Shigri to assess how rapidly
it is melting. Six of us were pressed
together in a van packed with scientific instruments, coldweather gear, and enough
provisions to last several
days. My guides were two
Indian scientists, Farooq
Azam and Shyam Ranjan. Azam, a thirty-threeyear-old former bodybuilding champion, has
made more than twenty
trips to Chhota Shigri. This time,
he would be carrying out measurements for the National Institute of
Hydrology, in Roorkee. Ranjan, a large,
soft-spoken man who grew up in a village on the plains of North India, had
never been on a Himalayan glacier. He
was hoping to extract an ice core—a
sample from deep inside the glacier,
which would provide a detailed picture
T
60
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
of the area’s past climate. It would be
the first such sample to be taken from
the Indian Himalayas.
There are a hundred and ninetyeight thousand glaciers in the world,
and, while many of them have been
studied extensively, the nine thousand
in India remain mostly unexamined.
On the Chinese side of the Himalayas, researchers have performed thorough surveys, but, according to one
American scientist, “the other side of
the Himalayas is a black hole.” The
reasons are largely financial: India is a
relatively poor country, and there are
scant funds available for research. “To
adequately study the Himalayan glaciers, we need thirty to forty times more
money than we actually receive,” A. L.
Ramanathan, a glaciologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who oversaw
our expedition, told me.
Scientists from other countries have
moved in to fill the void. Markus Engelhardt, a German, joined us in Manali,
and a second vehicle carried a group of
Norwegian glaciologists who were heading to a lake near Chhota Shigri to take
samples of sediment dating back as far
as twelve thousand years. For the Norwegians, the expedition amounted to a
tutorial: they were hoping to teach the
Indian scientists how to do similar experiments. “There’s a thirty-year lag
in India,” Jostein Bakke, one of the
Norwegians, said. “Without a firm understanding of the long-term dynamics of the climate, making predictions
about it is like playing the lottery.”
In India, the lack of
precise knowledge has
caused confusion. Two
years ago, an article in
Current Science, an Indian
publication, concluded
that “most of the Himalayan glaciers are retreating.” Soon afterward, the
Indian Space Research
Organization found nearly the opposite, that eighty-seven per cent of them
were stable. Some scientists expressed
doubts about both studies, saying that
data gathered only by satellites are not
reliable for making such judgments.
“You really can’t tell anything unless you
see the glacier up close,” Azam said.
“That’s why I come up here.”
For the people who live on the In-
dian subcontinent, the future of the
high-mountain climate is of more than
academic interest. The three great rivers that flow from the Indian Himalayas—the Ganges, the Indus, and the
Brahmaputra—provide water for more
than seven hundred million people in
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and
they power numerous hydroelectric
plants. Already, villages in India and
Pakistan are experiencing more frequent flooding from the melting ice;
scientists are predicting even more.
t thirteen thousand feet, our
A van arrived at a pass known as
Rohtang La—“pile of corpses,” so called
because of the many people who have
frozen to death trying to get through.
Winter was coming, and in a few days
the pass would close for six months.
The Norwegians had wanted to come
earlier, but they received permission
from the Indian government only at
the last minute; for researchers hoping
to work on India’s glaciers, the bureaucracy can be as big an obstacle as the
lack of funding. “We do not want to
get trapped on the other side for the
winter,” Bakke said.
When we reached the top of Rohtang La, the horizon appeared: a line
of mountains skidding downward half
a mile to the valley floor. Zigzagging
through switchbacks, we made our way
down. A new landscape emerged; instead of forests and grassy hillsides,
there were boulders, barren slopes, and
expanses of scree. The only signs of
human habitation were fallow, neatly
marked farm plots that crept up the
valley walls at improbable angles.
Near the valley floor, we veered onto
a rocky trail that tracked an icy river
called the Chandra. Our van halted
and a group of men appeared: Nepali
porters, who led us to an outcropping
on the river’s edge. Chhota Shigri—
six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one
of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety
gondola, an open cage reminiscent of
a shopping cart, which runs on a cable
over the Chandra. With one of the
porters working a pulley, we climbed
in and rode across, one by one, while
fifty feet below the river rushed through
gigantic boulders.
Once we had arrived at the other
side, we made our way across a rockstrewn field to get to our base camp,
elevation twelve thousand six hundred
and thirty-one feet. The sun was setting and whatever warmth was left vanished. In a few minutes, it was dark,
and the stars came out, forming a dome
of light so bright you could almost read
a book.
nnual expeditions to Chhota
A Shigri began only fourteen years
ago, so relatively little is known about
its climatic history. Chhota Shigri and
the other glaciers of the eastern Himalayas are unusual, in that, unlike the
majority of the world’s glaciers, which
get most of their snow from winter
storms, they get much of theirs from
the summer monsoons, which tend to
insulate them from more rapid melting. (Most of the glaciers of the Karakoram Mountains, in Pakistan, are not
receding at all; it’s one of the few places
in the world where this is the case.)
The data are also limited by the uneven quality of the expeditions. Glaciologists can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on research trips, but
Azam and Ranjan had only a few thousand dollars to buy equipment and to
pay porters. Some glacial expeditions
extract ice cores using cranes and
ferry them home by helicopter. The
Indian scientists would transport their
cores in dry ice, using a portable cooler,
of the kind you might use to chill
beer for a picnic, driving them by car
back to Ranjan’s laboratory, in New
Delhi— a sixteen-hour trip. Some of
the experiments that they planned to
perform on Chhota Shigri seemed comically rudimentary. In one, to measure
the volume of meltwater flowing out
of the glacier, a graduate assistant
would toss a wooden block into the
water and time its float downstream.
In the morning, the sun rose over
the mountains, but for hours the highwalled valley remained shaded and bitterly cold. Unlike glaciers in other parts
of the world—Greenland, say, or the
Alps—many of those in the Himalayas lie at the bottom of narrow valleys
that get only a few hours of direct sunlight each day. As a result, they are melting more slowly than they would on
flatter ground. It was not until 8:20 A.M.
•
that the sun shone on our camp; by
midafternoon the valley was in shadow
again.
Markus Engelhardt’s first task was
to check the camp’s weather monitor,
which had been planted four months
earlier, and recorded temperature, solar
radiation, and barometric pressure.
There was an array of similar instruments installed throughout the camp;
one of them, a five-foot-tall aluminum thistle with a crown of flaps,
looked like something you might find
in a Santa Fe sculpture garden. Engelhardt had two other weather stations
on the glacier, and he was eager to
download their data, which would
allow him to construct a precise record of fluctuations in the local climate.
As he watched information scroll
across the screen of his laptop, Engelhardt, who had been stoic during our
long ascent, could barely contain his
•
enthusiasm. “I want to go back to the
office right now and start studying the
data,” he said.
The team set out into the valley,
following a stream that was flowing
from the glacier. There were nine of
us, including three graduate assistants
who’d come with Azam and Ranjan.
I had imagined a smooth carpet of ice
that led to the top of the glacier. Instead, there was a rough track of boulders, a destructive path that marked
Chhota Shigri’s retreat. Thousands of
years ago, as the glacier moved forward, debris from the valley walls was
torn loose by the advancing ice and
tumbled onto its face, creating a craggy
obstacle course.
Azam had not visited since 2013,
when he was completing a doctorate at
the University of Grenoble, in France.
(His thesis topic: the effect of the
climate on Chhota Shigri and the
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
61
surrounding glaciers.) Like many
of the glaciologists I encountered,
Azam entered the field not because
he was drawn to science but because
he loved the outdoors. Born in the
plains state of Uttar Pradesh, he grew
up seeing the Himalayas on television and dreamt of going there.
In college, he took a sensible path,
studying chemistry, but he was also
athletically inclined; he won several
bodybuilding titles, including Mr.
Jawaharlal Nehru University. After
he finished a master’s degree in chemistry, his teachers urged him to go
into medical research. But, he said, “I
was being pulled by some invisible
force.”
That same year, he had signed up
for a mountaineering course offered by
the Indian Army, which took place on
the Dokriani Glacier, near the Chinese
border. During the course, Azam noticed a series of bamboo rods protruding from the snow: ablation stakes,
basic instruments of glaciology. “Until
then, I didn’t realize you could work
on a glacier,” he told me. Not long afterward, he went to Grenoble, where
he spent the next three years studying
ice, making field trips to India every
summer. “When I am in the mountains, on the glacier, I feel close to myself—I’m far from everybody, there’s
no technology, and I can think,” Azam
said. “Only recently has the science become more important to me.”
Ranjan, who is thirty-one, spent
years examining glaciers as a graduate student in Switzerland, but he had
never been to one in India, where the
terrain is much more rugged. On the
trail, in his heavy clothes—layers of
thermal underwear and fleece and
a down jacket—he cut a husky figure.
As we started off, he worried that he
was not fit enough to complete the
expedition. “I am not sure that I can
do this,” he said. He moved slowly,
panting heavily. The porters practically skipped across the rocky ground
as they carried several hundred pounds
of our equipment, as well as dozens
of eggs.
At higher elevations, the valley
deepened; the walls rose a thousand
feet on either side, in layers of colored
sediment, each representing a different mineral and a different epoch. The
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
landscape was desolate, but occasionally there was a surprise: a golden eagle,
a butterfly with orange wings. A solitary black crow followed us the length
of the glacier.
Rounding a bend in the stream, we
arrived at the glacier’s snout, a cave of
ice with water rushing from the entrance. Behind it, Chhota Shigri spread
upward into the peaks, a vast shoehorn of snow and ice covered with
sharp-edged boulders, most of them
the size of a car. The glaciers of the
Himalayas are scattered with geological debris, which, along with the lack
of direct sunlight, slows melting. Yet,
since Azam’s last visit, two years earlier, Chhota Shigri’s snout had receded
more than sixty feet. At its largest, the
glacier sat almost atop the Chandra,
slowly filling it with frigid meltwater;
now it is barely visible from the banks.
“It’s going very fast,” Azam said, standing on a ridge above it. The shrinking snout had left behind enormous
hunks of what glaciologists call “dead
ice,” which were melting on the glacier’s trail. A single glance belied the
reports that India’s glaciers are stable.
After this, all the activity would consist of taking small, precise measurements, to find out exactly what was
changing and how much.
The opening of Chhota Shigri’s snout
was five feet high, large enough for us
to enter. Pressing ourselves against the
interior walls and shimmying along the
narrow banks of the rushing water, we
worked our way into a vaulting palace
of ice, where ten-foot-long icicles hung
from the ceiling like giant fishhooks.
Underneath the roar, you could hear the
drip of melting ice. In the walls and the
ceiling, water and earth streamed behind sheets of clear ice, the sediment
tinting the walls orange and pale green.
Air bubbled in the water, trapped when
the glacier’s ice froze around it, more
than two hundred and fifty years ago.
“It could collapse at any moment,” Azam
said. “When we come back next year, it
will be gone.”
n one of Azam’s early trips to
O Chhota Shigri, in 2008, he and
a French scientist, accompanied by a
porter, trekked to the head of the glacier. When they started back, the next
day, Azam fell behind the others. Then
the sun went down and the temperature dropped. There was no moon,
and the way through the boulders disappeared in the darkness. Alone and
disoriented, Azam tripped and fell
into the glacial stream. On his knees,
he crawled alongside the water—his
only clear path—wondering if he
would survive. Several hours later, another member of the team found him
not far from the base camp, shivering and numb, and helped him make
his way back. At the camp, the French
scientist apologized for leaving him
behind. Azam, worried that his legs
were frostbitten, dunked them in a
barrel of steaming water. “What I
learned was nature is always stronger,” he said.
For many glaciologists, the scientific work that they perform on glaciers consumes less time and effort
than surviving the journey. There is
the cold to consider—temperatures
in Antarctica reach seventy degrees
below zero—along with steep treks
through thin mountain air, and gusts
of wind powerful enough to sweep
researchers from mountains, not to
mention rock slides, marauding polar
bears, deep crevasses, and lightning
strikes. “Logistics is about ninety per
cent of your work,” said Aaron Putnam, a glaciologist at the University
of Maine who has done field work in
Bhutan, Mongolia, western China, and
the Beagle Islands, at the tip of South
America. “The science can seem almost incidental.”
Glaciology is a diffuse field, encompassing meteorologists, geologists, and physicists. While some researchers spend most of their time in
the lab, looking at satellite imagery
and readouts from remote sensors,
many collect their data in far more
challenging environments. Mike Kaplan, a Columbia University geologist
who studies glacial and polar ice, has
fallen head first between boulders in
Patagonia and watched a polar bear
destroy his camp in northern Canada. Once, on an expedition to Baffin
Island, in the Canadian Arctic, Kaplan drifted out to sea when the engine on his Zodiac boat wouldn’t start.
“I’ve never been so miserable in my
life,” Kaplan told me. “You’re just so
cold and so uncomfortable. But you’ve
got work to do, so you have to do it.”
Lonnie Thompson, a sixty-sevenyear-old glaciologist at Ohio State
University, has completed sixty-one
expeditions to glaciers around the
world, conducting research in the
Himalayas, the Andes, and the mountains of East Africa, among other
places. He’s fallen into crevasses in
the Andes, and endured seventy-mileper-hour winds atop a twenty-thousand-foot Peruvian peak, where a pair
of Italian climbers were blown to their
deaths. A few years ago, he began to
have heart trouble, and, rather than
retire, he got a transplant. “I may be
sixty-seven, but my heart is twentyfive,” he said. Last summer, Thompson led a team of sixty to the Guliya
Glacier, in Tibet, elevation twenty-two
thousand feet; seven tons of equipment had to be hauled in on foot.
“There I was, it’s minus thirty-five in
my tent, ” Thompson said. “It’s not
for everybody.” But he was able to retrieve samples of ice that was a half
million years old. The trip had its pleasures, too. At night, the Tibetan sky
was so dark and so clear that Thompson was able to see other galaxies. “I
went into geology because I didn’t
want to sit behind a desk,” he said. “I
didn’t even know what glaciology was.
But I’m a tough dude. I can suffer.”
Until the last decade or so, glaciology was an obscure field; today it’s
being flooded with new students. Like
many of the recent recruits, Thompson is propelled by the knowledge that
the focus of his career is rapidly vanishing. The ice cores that he’s collecting make up an archive of the Earth’s
weather over the past millennia. But
the glacial ice is disappearing, and so
is the archive itself. “We are trying
to document the history of climate,”
Thompson said. “If it’s not done now,
it will never be done.” Two of the six
ice fields he had visited on Mt. Kilimanjaro are gone. By his estimate, the
glaciers in New Guinea will disappear in twenty years. “We’re on a salvage mission,” he said.
zam had come to Chhota Shi-
INSTITUTE
A gri to measure three things: the
mass of the glacier, its thickness, and
the speed with which it was moving
downhill. Glacial melt is calculated
in “mass balance,” a measure of how
much ice has been gained or lost. According to surveys conducted by Azam
and ten other scientists, Chhota Shigri’s mass has declined significantly
since 2002, losing more than twenty
feet across its surface. The glacier has
shrunk in fits and starts; its greatest
reductions have occurred in years in
which the monsoon faltered, depriving the glacier of much of its snowfall. Recently, India’s monsoons have
the spot using a G.P.S. device and
then places a small beacon—a “reco
tablet”—on the snow’s surface and
marks it with blue powder. When he
returns, he locates the beacon with
an electronic detector and drills down
until he finds the blue powder. “This
is the most amazing exercise on the
whole glacier,” he told me. “I feel like
a detective.”
One afternoon, we clambered onto
the glacier, following a steep path that
Various instruments take measurements of the changing weather on the glacier.
become more sporadic, for reasons that
many scientists ascribe to the world’s
changing climate.
Azam usually begins his expeditions by extracting a snow core, which
indicates how much fresh snow has
accumulated since the last measurement. In 2012, he climbed to seventeen thousand feet to extract a snow
core. In a video he took of the operation, he and his assistant stood in a
driving snowstorm, rotating the aluminum handle of a tool that looks
much like a gigantic corkscrew. The
tool pulled loose a foot-long cylinder, which Azam carefully weighed
on a digital scale. While he completed the measurement, two porters
stood by, unfazed, as snow piled up
on their jackets and hats. Finally,
Azam said, laughing, “So, for today,
it’s enough.” At the completion of
each season’s snow core, Azam marks
was covered in snow. The air got thinner, and it was harder to keep going.
We were walking in the “ablation
zone,” the part of the glacier where
melting exceeds accumulation; it typically comprises the lower third of a
glacier. After several minutes, we came
to a bamboo stick poking out of the
glacier; this was Ablation Stake 12,
one in a network of poles planted
across the surface. The stake, buried
deep in the ice, had been installed
years before, with a steam drill. Azam
opened his pack and pulled out his
G.P.S. device and a tape measure. “At
last I can get to work,” he said.
Standing at Stake 12, Azam measured how much of the stick was poking above the snow: about thirty
inches. Then he used the G.P.S. device to determine the stick’s precise
location. He was hoping to learn two
things. The first was how much snow
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
63
had been lost since 2013, when he was
last on Chhota Shigri. It’s a simple
calculation: if there’s more snow
against the stakes than there was in
2013, then the glacier grew; if not, it
shrank. “This seems like a normal
amount of melt, but I won’t know
until I get back to the lab,” he said.
The second measurement was the
glacier’s thickness. On a previous visit,
Azam’s colleagues, using groundpenetrating radar, had charted the
base of the glacier, where the ice meets
the earth. Now, by measuring the elevation at various points, he could
calculate the glacier’s thickness. The
data from this trip would take Azam
months to sort out. But in previous
years the patterns were clear. In 2009,
the ice near Stake 12 was four hundred and twenty feet thick. In 2013,
it had thinned to three hundred and
ninety feet.
Ranjan was far behind us now, moving slowly but waving every so often
to signal that he was O.K. At Ablation Stake 11, Azam took another measurement, gauging how much the stake
had moved down the glacier. When
snow accumulates on the surface of a
glacier, its weight pushes the ice forward and down. Using the G.P.S. beacon, Azam calculated the location;
since 2013, Stake 11 had moved about
a hundred feet down the glacier. “All
these measurements show us that the
glacier is shrinking,” he said. Indeed,
most of the other omens were not
good: the Indian monsoon season in
2015 was among the driest in decades,
and Chhota Shigri appears to have
received less snow.
The center line of the glacier,
known as the medial moraine, was
strewn with boulders that had tumbled and drifted down from the peak.
Around many of them, the snow had
melted away, leaving them perched
like giant mushrooms on stems of
snow. Stopping at one boulder, marked
with red paint, Azam lay the G.P.S.
device on top and calculated its location and elevation to find the speed
of the glacier’s flow.
As we trudged up the glacier, Azam
stopped using his instruments and
“We compromised—he can BASE jump all he
wants, as long as he does it at home.”
simply looked around, searching for
clues to how Chhota Shigri was
changing. His vision was uncanny; he
spotted a pile of boulders that appeared to be of a different mineral
than the ones around them. “You see
those? They are not from here,” Azam
said. They had originated high up on
the glacier and moved all the way
down. At one point, we stopped, and
Azam gestured to where one of the
glacier’s main tributaries jutted off. “It
seems to be detaching itself from the
main glacier,” he said. “That’s because
the glacier is thinning.”
Continuing on, we heard a noise
that sounded like a whirlpool. It was
coming from a deep gash in the surface, more than a hundred feet long,
into which ice was falling and disappearing: a moulin, a hole connected
to a river system inside the glacier.
The moulin seemed to have no bottom, but we could hear the water rushing perhaps a hundred feet below.
“Don’t stand too close,” Azam said.
“The ground around it is not stable.”
The moulin was not the only hole in
the ice; we had ventured into an area
of crevasses, many of them hidden
by snow. We had to weave back and
forth across the surface to avoid them.
Azam went back to check on Ranjan, who was stopping frequently to
catch his breath. “I will be O.K.,” Ranjan said, staring down at the snow.
“I think.”
The sun was setting behind the
peaks as we arrived at the high camp,
at nearly sixteen thousand feet, and
the horizon glowed deep orange. The
porters had set up tents, and were
donning headlamps to help prepare
the equipment for the next day’s ice
core. The temperature was dropping
fast, into the teens. We ducked inside
the main tent and found the rest of
the team huddled in the dark around
a stove, drinking cups of salty broth.
Ranjan arrived just after the sun went
down. “I am so happy to have made
it!” he said. The camp was just a handful of tents on the glacier’s slope, connected by a little stairway carved into
the snow. The porters had made a
dinner of lentils and chapati, but we
were too nauseated from the altitude
to eat more than a few bites. That
night, we slept in a ragged tent with
THIS IS THE SEASON
This is the season when the husbands lie
in their hemp-woven hammocks for the last time
reading The Nation in waning autumn light
before dusk rises from the earth
before the not-knowing if ever again the earth
will turn on its axis to the light, the great furnace
of the light, will return the husbands to the light
in their hemp-woven hammocks reading The Nation.
—Joyce Carol Oates
no tarp, its doors flapping open, directly atop the ice, nine hundred and
fifty feet thick.
he sun was remarkably strong
T when it shone on us; even though
we were freezing, our faces were burned
dry and pink. A pool of melting ice
had formed around a boulder, and a
porter crouched and filled his bucket
for cooking. At breakfast—tea and more
chapati—everyone was frigid but in
high spirits. “Did you see the stars last
night?” Ranjan asked. “You could see
the whole Milky Way.”
After breakfast, Ranjan set about
collecting the ice core. From the start,
nothing seemed to work right. His gear
consisted of a large drill, with an engine the size of an outboard motor, and
the drill bit, a clear, sharpened tube
that could be driven into the ice. The
plan was to drill down about forty feet,
where a trove of molecular evidence
was preserved in what they expected
to be century-old ice. Glaciers are
uniquely sensitive recorders of changes
in climate, and their ice contains indications of past temperature, precipitation, and volcanic activity, as well as
the effects of greenhouse gases. “If we
can connect what has happened on the
glacier to what is happening in the climate, then we should be able to predict what is going to happen,” Ranjan
said. The glaciers may already be melting, but knowing their precise state
will, he hopes, allow him to understand
what it will take to save them.
With Ranjan looking on, one of the
Nepali porters started the motor and
another pushed the drill into the ice.
Ranjan exclaimed with delight—and
then the engine stalled. The porter
started it again, but the drill could go
no deeper than a few feet before stalling. A couple of Ranjan’s assistants extracted snow samples, each the size of
a rice cake, from the drill bit.
One of the difficulties of taking cores
is that the drill bit can melt the ice,
causing samples of different ages to
mix. Several of the scientists I talked
to said that an ice core should be taken
from a higher elevation, where the
colder temperatures protect the ice from
the friction of the drill. I wondered if
Ranjan had chosen the lower altitude
because he was afraid that he wouldn’t
be able to climb higher. He told me
that the problem was the drill. “I think
we need a bigger engine,” he said.
Later in the day, Ranjan tried again,
lower on the glacier, where the snow
was not as hard. This time, he was able
to drill down about twelve feet, to ice
that was some twenty-five years old. It
wasn’t nearly as much as he’d hoped
for; scientists in Antarctica have taken
ice cores from more than a mile below
the surface. But it was better than nothing. The samples went into the beer
cooler. (Miraculously, they made the
long drive to New Delhi intact.) “I’ve
learned a lot from this,” Ranjan said.
“And I’m coming back.”
n the last day of the expedition,
O two of the graduate assistants de-
cided to hike up another fifteen hundred feet to take samples of the ice
there. Azam, standing a thousand yards
away, could see that they had wandered
into an area riven by crevasses. “You’re
going the wrong way!” he shouted, but
they couldn’t hear. They made it as far
as sixteen thousand seven hundred feet
when a faint, high-pitched cry rose up.
When the group turned, they saw the
head of Teg Bahadur, one of the porters, peeking out over the edge of a crevasse. The team’s gear, including the
G.P.S. device, had sailed down into the
crevasse and disappeared. One of the
graduate students poked the snow
around Bahadur and it collapsed, revealing the crevasse’s multicolored walls
and its seemingly bottomless depth.
Bahadur, perched on a shelf, trembled
in silence. “I’ve never been married,”
he said, mournfully. Digging their boots
into the snow, the rest of the team managed to pull him to safety. But, despite
several descents by one of the students,
the gear was lost.
The day before, I had stood with
Azam as he prepared for another ascent. Tethered to a lone porter, he
planned to climb to seventeen thousand feet and examine the ablation
stakes planted there. In the coming
year, Azam and other scientists plan to
publish a number of papers based on
research performed in the region, in
the hope of filling the gap in knowledge. There is still little money in India
for this kind of work, but the government seems to be slowly coming to appreciate its importance. In the weeks
before the recent climate talks in Paris,
some Indian politicians insisted that
they should not have to restrict their
country’s energy consumption to fix a
problem that was mostly not of their
making. Ahead of the conference,
though, India agreed to significant reforms, including greater efforts in the
Himalayas, and afterward the Prime
Minister, Narendra Modi, announced
that “climate justice has won.”
I asked Azam what he thought
would happen to Chhota Shigri, whether
it could survive global warming. “I am
not going to save this glacier,” he said.
“I am just going to find out what is
happening.”
He turned and looked up at the
peak in front of him. “Once I do that,
the next step will be to decide what
has to be done. But these things don’t
depend on science. They depend on
politics.” 
NEWYORKER.COM
Video: Climbing the Chhota Shigri Glacier.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
65
SKETCHBOOK BY ROZ CHAST
DESIGN BY CHRISTOPHER BRAND
FICTION
68
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELINOR CARUCCI
ander loves his mother. He
walks a few steps after her, wearing a new black suit that has room
for him to grow into, carrying a big black
valise of pamphlets. When his mother
goes to the front door, rings the bell,
waits for an answer, Sander stands behind her, looking over her shoulder, with
an expression on his face that he means
to be pleasant.
It’s the second day of his summer
vacation, but it still feels like spring. Lilacs bloom in every yard; irises wag their
pink and purple tongues at him.
His mother is plain. She wears a
gray sweater, despite the sun, and a black
skirt that reaches nearly to her ankles.
No lipstick, short, practical hair. Her
name is Anna. She makes up for her
plainness with a big galvanic smile. People are on her side right away, though
they rarely open the screen door and almost never take a pamphlet. Nobody
new ever comes to Fellowship. Anna
doesn’t take this as permission to stop
trying. She thinks the men and women
and children in these sleeping houses
will lose the chance to live life as God
intended unless they take the message
she brings them in the pamphlet.
Sander thinks she is lovely and brave
and admirable. Every day, she tries to
save strangers. Selfless. Sander loves his
mother.
Today! is the name of the pamphlet.
Sander has just finished his sophomore year. At the first breath of spring,
the girls all started to dress like prostitutes. With his own eyes he has seen a
pretty junior bicycling in a tank top with
one pale breast riding free. In his dreams
he sees the delicate tuft of blond pubic
hair he witnessed poking out of a pair
of low-slung jeans in study hall. This is
what Sander thinks about as he walks
behind his mother, feeling the hot sun
wherever it touches the black fabric of
his suit. That and the bad haircut he got
yesterday.
The haircut! He feels tears start
again at the thought of it. Some friend
of his mother’s, in her kitchen. When
she brought out the mirror: death. As if
every single thing in his life were there
to disqualify him.
A nice enough street, anyway. Lots
of students from the college. It’s a Tues-
S
day afternoon, so nobody much answers
the door. Those who do are mostly wearing flannel pajama bottoms and flipflops. Some of the men don’t even have
on shirts. His mother rings the bell, and
a college girl comes to the screen door,
and if she came outside Sander could
tell if she was wearing a bra under her
thin little shirt. But she says no, thanks,
not interested, thanks, and closes the
inner door on them, though it was open
before.
Another soul misses out on eternal
life in an earthly Paradise.
Why can’t he be like his mother?
Why can’t he just be good?
Immense transparency of light, the
sky a luminous blue. He takes a deep
breath and lets God’s grace fill him. All
this great gift, this flowering world. It
is not Sander’s place to question why a
God so generous can also be so exacting. Why do they have to work so hard
to come to Him? Sin is everywhere, the
path to goodness narrow and sometimes
hard to find. But this is nothing next to
His generosity.
“Another block or Taco Bell?” his
mother asks.
“I don’t know,” Sander says. “I don’t
care.”
“Are you hungry or are you not?”
He is hungry. He is always hungry.
But he doesn’t want to go there in his
new suit and with his haircut, and he
doesn’t want to go with his mother. He
says, “I’ll pass, I guess.”
“Well, I’m starving,” his mother says.
They load the valise into the back of
the blue Aerostar and drive to Broadway, where Sander watches as his mother
consumes a Gordita Supreme and an
order of tortilla chips. She eats slowly
and carefully, and she reads from a small
black Bible as she does. Next to them,
a tableful of senior girls laugh and scream
like girls at a swimming pool: Elin Peterson, Morgan McKay, Nora Austin.
Anna doesn’t seem to notice, but Sander
is worried for her. Something dangerous in that screamy life.
fter lunch he is twice as hun-
A gry and feels like an idiot.They go
back to the same neighborhood and
begin to canvass. Two houses into it, a
screen door is open, and a man in an
undershirt, his hair pulled back in a graying ponytail, answers.
“I’m here to invite you to a special
event,” Sander’s mother says.
“All right,” the man says.
“I have some good news about God’s
love,” she says, holding a pamphlet out
toward the door.
“Come on in,”the man with the ponytail says. This is not quite a surprise—
every day or two they are invited in somewhere. Usually it’s a drunk person or
someone lonely and old. This man just
looks angry.
“You want some coffee?” he asks. “I’ve
got hot coffee. I’ve got plenty.”
“No, thank you,” Sander’s mom
says.
“Is that against your religion?”
the man says. “ You don’t look like
Mormons.”
“We are not of that faith.”
“Well, do you want some coffee?”
“I’d love some,” Sander’s mother
says, and settles with a small ladylike sigh onto the sofa and takes the
valise. Sander doesn’t know about
this. Maybe the man is not drunk, but
there is certainly something wrong
with him.
“So am I going to Hell?” the man
asks, setting a steaming mug of coffee
in front of Anna.
“By my lights, you are not,” she says.
“No hellfire and no eternal damnation.”
“What, then?”
“Nothing.”
“Just nothing?”
“A blank eternity.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Consider the alternative,” Sander’s
mom says. “An eternity of bliss in the
company of God Himself.”
“You want to get high?” the man asks
Sander’s mom.
“Why, no, thank you.”
That eagle stare he gives her, ignorant and proud. Why do the heathen rage? This happens, not too often,
every couple of weeks and then not at
all for a month or two, the sinful man
who is proud of his sin. Sander is a
sinful boy—he knows this about himself. But he has the grace to be ashamed
of it.
“Oblivion,” the man says, lighting
a little brass pipe, smoking, pointing it
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
69
toward Anna, who shakes her head no.
Then toward Sander.
“I’d ask you not to do that,” Anna
says.
“Why not? If it doesn’t matter, it
doesn’t matter.”
“Your soul is at stake.”
“If it’s just nothing,” the man says,
and takes another hit off the brass
pipe. Sander has seen it done, in the
smokers’ pit behind his school, though
it’s odd to see a grown man puffing on
a tiny pipe.
“If it’s just oblivion,” he says, exhaling the words though thin smoke,
“then I don’t care. I like oblivion. I
seek after it.”
“ Think of what hangs in the
balance.”
“Or not,” he says. “Clara!”
“What?” a petulant voice answers
from the kitchen.
A needle of fear. Sander knows that
voice, that name.
“Come on out here.”
“Why?”
“Come on out here is all.”
It is exactly the person he was afraid
it was, Clara Martinson, she of the
ripped T-shirt, raccoon eyes, pierced
anything, the next grade up from his,
this girl who looks and dresses the way
every teen girl would if there was no-
body to tell her she couldn’t. Which
there isn’t. Please, dear God, make
me disappear, Sander thinks. Send me
to the solar surface and vaporize me.
“What do you want?” she says. Then
she notices Sander in his black suit
and haircut. O.K.: there is something
in each of us, in every sinner (and Sander knows that we are all sinners), that
wants to climb toward the light, and
for a moment, in Clara’s eyes, Sander
sees the longing for grace.
Then, just as quickly, the window
shuts. She says, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,
Dad.”
“Come have a hit with your old man,”
he says. “Just a little toke.”
“I’m sorry,” Clara says to Anna. “He
gets like this. You should go.”
“This is a value, too,” Clara’s dad says.
“This is a family.”
Anna presses a pamphlet into Clara’s
hand, into her father’s as well, as she
rises to her feet. “Please come to the
meeting,” she says. “We have good news
for you.”
One more glance from steely Clara
is all it takes to set Sander off into a
fury of blushing. She trails them to the
door while her father sits fuming on
the couch. As Anna leaves, Sander turns
to Clara.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “She’s just . . .”
“It turns out I’ve been inhaling when I should be exhaling
and exhaling when I should be inhaling.”
“Don’t apologize for her,” Clara says.
“Then me,” he says.
“No.” Clara shoves him out, blinking, into the bright miracle of the
day. The door closes firmly behind
them. Sander sits on the curb, his big
black valise between his feet, and
wishes he could cry. He can’t—he
doesn’t know why. Doesn’t remember
the last time.
When he looks up, his mother is
beaming. She says, “That was really
something, wasn’t it? You never know
what’s going to happen.”
“But the two of them . . .”
“We plant our seeds on stony soil,”
she says. “It is not up to us which grow
and which do not. Are you hungry
yet?”
“No,” Sander says, although he is
starving.
lara turns up at Fellowship on
C Wednesday.
She seeks out Sander and says,
“There’s no Hell. There’s really no
Hell?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll stick around and listen.”
She melts off toward the back of
the hall before the meeting starts. It’s
a basement—knotty-pine panelling
and framed pictures of the ex-presidents of the Elks on the walls. Sander
is out of the suit, but the haircut remains. And he dresses as if his mother
dressed him, which she does: chinos,
plaid shirt. What had Clara been wearing? He can’t remember—only her
face, which was mostly clean of makeup
and had a look of inquiry. He wants
to turn around and look at her. But
he must keep his mind on God’s
path. Then they stand and sing, all of
them at once, “What God Has Yoked
Together.”
They are in the same room and
singing together. They are one soul, one
breath, at least in this tiny moment.
That’s what Sander feels.
After Fellowship, the hens and chicks
of the congregation spirit Clara away,
and he doesn’t see her again. He will
never see her again. The skirts alone,
down to the ankle, will drive her away,
and the plain faces, the blouses buttoned to the neck. Clara will never have
the vision to see through the shell, the
earthly costume, to the joy that waits
for her. Words, words, words, Sander
thinks. She is a girl who might talk to
him. These women will spoil it for him,
these women he has lived among all
his life. Just now, he hates them for it.
But she comes to Fellowship again
on Saturday, and afterward, before the
hens and chicks take her away, she asks
Sander if they can go for a walk on Sunday. No, he tells her, but Monday might
be all right.
“And what are your intentions?” his
mother asks.
“I don’t have any,” Sander says.
Anna laughs out loud. They’re in the
kitchen, Sunday afternoon, summer rain
beating against the windows. Sander
still in his Sunday suit, though he’s taken
his tie off.
“That’s impossible,” his mother says.
“Everybody has intentions, good or
bad or all mixed up. What we want.
It’s what sets people in motion. But
you,” she says, and leans closer. “I don’t
want you to lose your way. She’s a very
pretty girl.”
Not really, Sander thinks. Compared
with the chicks, maybe. But there are
some real knockouts at school. Clara’s
got the edge, maybe, the interest—she’s
got a snake tattoo that curls out from
under her shirt, a little ways up her neck,
emerald and garnet—but there are definitely prettier girls.
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing,”
his mother says. “You’ve seen how she
dresses. She has no compass.”
“We’re just going for a walk,” Sander says.
“Do you wish me to come along?”
Oh, no, Sander thinks. A hot ball of
disappointment rises in his throat. He
forces himself to speak: “I’d rather you
didn’t.”
“Then think of what you are asking.”
“I’ll pray on it,” Sander says, and his
mother radiates approval, and at that
exact moment he splits into two people, the one he has always been and
some itchy, wayward newborn.
The old Sander will do as his mother
asks, will pray and puzzle, working toward the light and out of the morass of
sin. The old Sander thrills at his mother’s smile, at her approval. Old Sander,
full of grace.
The newborn Sander schemes. That
night, in his bed, as he is supposed to
be searching his conscience, he thinks
instead of the snake tattoo. He thinks
about what exactly he might say to his
mother to keep her from chaperoning,
without thinking whether this might be
lies or truth. His dreams are full of open
windows, speeding cars. The ex-presidents of the Elks laugh down at him.
t four o’clock Monday, after
A Sander and his mother have returned
from a short, hot day, Clara
shows up on her bicycle. The
sun is shining and the sky is
an empty, mindless blue. She
parks her bike alongside the
house. Sander is surprised:
Clara’s wearing a skirt down
to her ankles, a turtleneck that
hides her snake, even a beret
on her head. Plain-faced. He
barely recognizes her.
True, she’s wearing combat
boots, but Sander’s mother approves.
She says, “Very becoming.”
Clara knocks politely. His mother
invites her into the parlor and offers her
tea, which Clara accepts. Sander hangs
around the edge of the room like a curtain, a piece of furniture, while they talk
about nothing: the weather, the summer, the beautiful yellow irises that Anna
planted by the ditch in front of the house,
now in full stalky bloom.
Clara has tits under her clothes, little
ones, as far as he can tell, or maybe medium.
And she has a pussy, too, a hairy one, or
maybe a smooth, pretty one—he’ll never
know. Last year, when he was fifteen, he
let this thought torment him until he was
undressing every counter girl and lady
cop who passed by. Lately, he’s better,
most of the time. Until he can’t help it.
“An hour,” Anna says. “Then right
back here, all right?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Sander says, and Clara
looks at him to see if he’s being sarcastic,
which he is not. It’s a whole new world
for her, Sander can tell.
The park: The newborn Sander, soft,
defenseless, feels every green leaf, every
flower, every shaft of evening sunlight
penetrate into him. A bright chattery
mountain stream runs the length of the
park, and on either side are tangled thickets of birds and flowers. Here, though,
is the picnic area: bright grass, wooden
tables, bare-legged couples lying next
to each other on quilts, touching.
“The world is ending,” Clara says.
“It is,” Sander says. It’s nothing he
wants to talk about.
“When?”
“Soon,” he says. “I don’t know. People said it was going to happen a couple of years ago, but then it didn’t.”
“But you still believe it.”
“I believe in Jehovah,” Sander says.
“People make mistakes. They interpret His word, they add and subtract.
People are people. Jehovah
doesn’t change.”
“The end of the world—
that’s a terrible thing to believe,” Clara says, and sits
down on a bench. Sander sits
on the same bench, not quite
as far from her as he can get.
He feels so full of desire and
fear—it might spill out. Yet
he speaks what he believes.
“It’s God’s love at work,”
he says. “He’s given us a chance to redeem ourselves. To mean something.”
“But only through Him.”
“Only through Him,” Sander says.
She’s right there on the bench. Perhaps
he could kiss her. People have certainly
kissed her before.
“Have you ever touched a baby’s
head?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you have,” she says. “That soft
spot, up on top of their head, the place
they’re so vulnerable. Or the way they
smell—not the powders and the ointment but just the smell of a baby.”
“Sure,” he says, and he’s almost certain he has.
“Fontanelle,” she says, remembering.
“Or what about this, the flowers and
all, the green grass and the rain. There’s
so much that’s pretty about the world.”
“It’ll go on.”
“Without us.”
“Without most of us,” he says.
“Then it won’t really exist,” she says.
“Without somebody to touch it, see it.
Without somebody to breathe that
smell of baby.”
Sander is amazed. It’s something he’s
known all along, this passing sadness, the
beautiful dream of the world, only to have
it all end. Clara has put her finger on it.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she says.
“It doesn’t have to make sense,” he
says. “You don’t have to understand it.
That’s for faith to do.”
Her eyes swim up to him from
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
71
someplace deep under the surface.
“You do believe,” she says.
“I do,” he says, and in that moment
he does.
“O.K.,” she says, and gets up off the
bench and starts down the path into the
woods, in a fury of thought. Sander follows. It’s what he does, in his chinos and
black shoes: he’s a follower. Small birds
scatter and chirp as they pass. Sunlight
glints on the water of the creek.The world,
he thinks, this generous world. He is
looking at a bird by the water to see if it is
a dipper when she stops short and he runs
into her, bang, almost knocks her down.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, sorry. I wasn’t
looking.”
“It’s all right,” Clara says.
But Sander doesn’t hear. The afterprint of her body on his is too strong,
just the accidental touch—he doesn’t
get touched enough. Not nearly enough.
“Faith,” she says. “Where do you get
it? Where can I buy some?”
Sander doesn’t know. Just now he’s
nowhere near his God, dazzled by the
sunlight, the girl. He says, “It’s work
sometimes.”
“Just sometimes?”
“All the time,” he says. “And half the
time it doesn’t come, and you’re just nowhere. Sorry.”
“No, that’s O.K.,” Clara says. She
takes his hand and says, “Thank you.
Thank you for being honest.”
“Oh,” Sander says, and blushes.
“I’m not supposed to do that, am I?”
she says, dropping his hand.
And Sander almost catches the moment, almost manages to hold on. “It’s
all right,” he says. “No harm done.”
lara’s there at Fellowship again
C on Wednesday night and on Sun-
day, dressed modestly in her own way—
long skirt and combat boots, a navy
woollen beanie on her head instead of
the lace frill favored by the hens. Sander
barely sees her. The chicks are so delighted to have a new face among them
that they surround her. At one point, a
long wistful look as Clara searches out
Sander’s eyes and smiles at him: What’s
to be done? They have me.
On Monday, they go walking again,
with his mother’s blessing.
Clara wants to talk about Hell and
why they don’t believe in it. This is
where she comes in: A God who doesn’t
72
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
hate His people. Come to me or not.
Sander explains, but his mind is on the
body. Her body, his. It’s a warm afternoon, almost hot, and girls in swimsuits and cutoff jeans are lounging in
the shallows of the creek, sitting on
fallen logs and letting their feet dangle
in the rushing water, laughing, drinking beer. This wide world of pleasure,
and Sander with his blinders on. When
he can manage it.
“I tried this before, when I was twelve
or something,” Clara says. “I was Catholic for a year. I was confirmed and everything. Catherine,” she says. “That
was my confirmation name.”
“I don’t know how that works.”
“It’s like being baptized again, kind
of. My mom had me baptized when I
was a baby, but then when I was trying
to be a Catholic . . . I don’t know. It just
seemed like the thing to do.”
“You change your name?”
“You get, like, an extra name, from a
saint. They’re supposed to help you after
that. They have their specialties.”
“What does St. Catherine do?”
“I don’t know, exactly—I just thought
it sounded cool. Clara Catherine. Also,
she has a torture thing named after her.”
“Which one?”
“The Catherine wheel,” she says.
“They tie you to it and then they break
your bones.”
“Nice!” Sander says, which makes
her laugh, a coarse, cawing laughter that
sounds at home in the woods. Animal
cry, he thinks.
“The Catholic boys were worse than
the regular boys,” she says. “All they want
is blow jobs, blow jobs, blow jobs.”
Sander feels it rising but he can’t make
it stop, and even the trying to stop it
makes it worse, and then he’s blushing,
a hot and awful mess, and Clara sees
it—how could she miss it?—and the
pause in her face makes it worse, the
hot blood pulsing through his face.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
She walks off ahead of him, to
give him a chance to recover. So she is
considerate. He follows, every footstep
throbbing in his face. Slowly, slowly, it
subsides. It’s hot anyway in the afternoon sun, and his face is engorged. Just
thinking the word, “engorged,” and he
blushes more. Engorged, engorged.
She’s waiting a ways down the path,
by the creek, in the shade of a big cot-
tonwood, sitting on a log and taking her
boots off.
“I’m hot,” she says. “It’s the turtleneck. I’m going to take a dip, just for a
second. Come in the water with me?”
“No, thanks,” he says immediately,
then immediately regrets it. The stream
here falls over a tumble of rocks into a
deep, nearly still pool, shoulder-deep at
least. The bank is smooth round pebbles. She stands, all modesty in her long
sleeves and skirt, and takes the hem of
her skirt in her hand and walks out into
the still water, raising the skirt as she
goes so it won’t get soaked. It still gets
wet in places, water darkening the gray
cloth. Between the water and the hem
of her skirt, Sander glimpses the cool
white outline of her thigh, the palpable
flesh. Just an inch or two. If she wades
out any deeper . . . but she stops, and
looks back at him. Is she laughing at
him? Or just smiling?
“Come in,” she says. “It feels great.”
Yes, he thinks, oh, yes. But what’s he
going to do? Take his pants off? Also,
this is sin, and he knows it. This is the
lure of the flesh. This is the moment
they have been warning him about, all
of them.
“Come on,” she says.
“I can’t,” he says. “I shouldn’t.”
“All right, then,” Clara says, and turns
her back to him, turns her face up to the
sun. For a moment, Sander thinks she
will dive in all the way. He feels it himself: the plunge, the beautiful clear cool
water. Instead he sits on the log and feels
sorry for himself and tries not to look at
Clara, who is not looking at him, who
doesn’t care if anybody sees her or not.
He looks everywhere—the sky, the stream,
the trees—but always back to her. The
shape, even under her clothes, the curve of
her hips. Sander is hopeless. Sander is lost.
Clara wades out of the water toward
him, dropping the hem of her skirt as
she goes until the only bare part of her
is her pretty feet, which is the last thing
Sander finds to stare at. She sits next to
him on the rough log. Sander wishes he
could find a way to make it smoother
for her.
“I get it,” she says. “You’re not supposed to enjoy yourself or something.
But I don’t understand why.”
“God wants other things for me,”
he says.
“You can’t have both?”
“I don’t know,” he says, while inside
his mind he searches frantically for God
to guide him. Even the name of God
sounds like a fraud to him, a lie he’s telling himself.
“I’m really asking,” Clara says. “I want
the things you want. I want to feel like
a whole person, you know? Just at peace
with things. But then I’m, like, there’s
nothing wrong with pleasure. I’m in the
water and it’s clean water, you know? I
don’t see what’s wrong with it.”
Sander says nothing, but stretches
out his hand and lays it on the damp
fabric of her skirt, just at her knee. Clara
looks at his hand and then at his face,
with a deep sadness, almost exhaustion.
She takes his hand from her knee and
gives it back to him.
“That’s not what I want from this,”
she says. “From you.”
“O.K.,” Sander says.
“We should get going,” she says, and
laces up her big black boots.
And Sander follows—down the path
through the woods, across the bridge
and home again, where his mother waits
in the kitchen—but only a ghostly part
of Sander. The real person is still back
in the woods, still wondering where God
was, why God did not stop him from
making a fool of himself. All through
dinner, all through the night, he wonders. Where is the holy part of him? He
can’t find it, only sin. He seems to be
made of sin, to contain nothing but dirty
desires, tits and asses.
All week, his mother looks at him as
if she knows something, as if she suspects
him, and maybe she’s right to. Clara’s
white thigh torments him, the ease as
her body enters the stream, the dazzle
of sunlight on water and pale skin.
he isn’t there at Fellowship. He
S looks from face to face and doesn’t
see her. Then back to his mother, who
has seen him searching, who knows,
who is disappointed in him. This much
good remains in Sander: he’s sad for
the sake of Clara’s immortal soul that
he drove her away. His greed and sin
have pushed her back into the darkness. He sees again what a trap and a
contrivance the world is, a tangle of
sin and pain. And Sander’s God is nowhere near. He searches and searches
within himself.
Then she arrives, and Sander fills
“O.K., I’ll come in for one drink and maybe sex, but that’s it.”
•
with an unreasonable happiness. All is
not lost, not yet. She takes her place in
the women’s section and kneels and
prays, modest in her long skirt, a gray
scarf over her head. She’s naked under
her clothes, though. Sander knows this.
Maybe God will find a way for them.
Maybe they will marry. Maybe there is
a godly way. Sander is filled with lust
and virtue at the same time, seeing her
in bridal white, the tattoo snaking up
her neck. Sander in a good suit, with a
good haircut . . .
A commotion at the back of the room.
Everybody looks: it’s Clara’s father, in
undershirt and ponytail and intelligentlooking glasses.
“Come on, girl,” he says to Clara.
“We’re done here.”
“I don’t want to.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s time to go.”
He takes the scarf from her hair, not
quite roughly, grips her arm and pulls
her to her feet. Sander needs to rescue
her, Sander needs to help.
Instead it’s his mother who walks
over to them.
“Let the girl stay,” Sander’s mother
says. “For the sake of her soul.”
The father laughs the same loud cawing laugh as his daughter. The same.
Everything is being taken from Sander.
•
“Y’all sound crazy as a shithouse
mouse,” the father says. “Two years, when
she turns eighteen, she can believe whatever bullshit she wants to. But for now
I have to take care of her. Steer her in
the right direction. Come on, honey.”
He keeps his grip on her arm, up by
the shoulder, and pushes her toward the
door. Clara looks back in a kind of panic,
seeks out Sander’s face, implores him.
But he sits rooted to his chair, suddenly
heavy. This is the last he will ever see
of her. He knows it and still cannot
move. Then she’s gone, and an electric
hush falls over the room. Nobody says
anything.
A week later, they drive by Clara’s
house on the way to a different neighborhood and see the windows empty
and open. Nobody lives there now.
Sander feels it as just one more thing.
One more nothing. None of this matters. Everything that matters to him
is gone. His mother pulls to a stop a
few blocks farther on, and Sander
takes the big valise of pamphlets, walks
behind her. The sun shines down on
his black suit. Still eight weeks of summer left. 
NEWYORKER.COM
Kevin Canty on faith and desire.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
73
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
SOUL SURVIVOR
The revival and hidden treasure of Aretha Franklin.
ate on a winter night, Aretha
L Franklin sat in the dressing room of
Caesars Windsor Hotel and Casino, in
Ontario. She did not wear the expression
of someone who has just brought boundless joy to a few thousand souls.
“What was with the sound?” she said,
in a tone somewhere between perplexity
and irritation. Feedback had pierced a
verse of “My Funny Valentine,” and before she sat down at the piano to play
“Inseparable,” a tribute to the late Natalie Cole, she narrowed her gaze and
called on a “Mr. Lowery” to fix the levels once and for all. Miss Franklin, as
nearly everyone in her circle tends to call
her, was distinctly, if politely, displeased.
“For a time up there, I just couldn’t hear
myself right,” she said.
On the counter in front of her, next
to her makeup mirror and hairbrush,
were small stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
She collects on the spot or she does not
sing. The cash goes into her handbag
and the handbag either stays with her
security team or goes out onstage and
resides, within eyeshot, on the piano.
“It’s the era she grew up in—she saw
so many people, like Ray Charles and
B. B. King, get ripped off,” a close friend,
the television host and author Tavis
Smiley, told me. “There is the sense in
her very often that people are out to
harm you. And she won’t have it. You
are not going to disrespect her.”
Franklin has won eighteen Grammy
awards, sold tens of millions of records,
and is generally acknowledged to be the
greatest singer in the history of postwar
popular music. James Brown, Sam Cooke,
Etta James, Otis Redding, Ray Charles:
even they cannot match her power, her
range from gospel to jazz, R. & B., and
pop. At the 1998 Grammys, Luciano
Pavarotti called in sick with a sore throat
and Aretha, with twenty minutes’ notice,
sang “Nessun dorma” for him. What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth
of her catalogue or the cataract force of
her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the
beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a
single word or syllable, of constructing,
moment by moment, the emotional power
of a three-minute song. “Respect” is as
precise an artifact as a Ming vase.
“There are certain women singers
who possess, beyond all the boundaries
of our admiration for their art, an uncanny power to evoke our love,” Ralph
Ellison wrote in a 1958 essay on Mahalia
Jackson. “Indeed, we feel that if the idea
of aristocracy is more than mere class
conceit, then these surely are our natural queens.” In 1967, at the Regal Theatre, in Chicago, the d.j. Pervis Spann
presided over a coronation in which he
placed a crown on Franklin’s head and
pronounced her the Queen of Soul.
The Queen does not rehearse the
band—not for a casino gig in Windsor,
Ontario. She leaves it to her longtime
musical director, a seventy-nine-yearold former child actor and doo-wop singer
named H. B. Barnum, to assemble her
usual rhythm section and backup singers and pair them with some local union
horn and string players, and run them
through a three-hour scan of anything
Franklin might choose to sing: the hits
from the late sixties and early seventies—“Chain of Fools,” “Spirit in the
Dark,” “Think”—along with more recent recordings. Sometimes, Franklin
Aretha Franklin, New York, October 14, 1968 (contact print).
74
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
ABOVE: GUIDO SCARABOTTOLO; RIGHT: © THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION
BY DAVID REMNICK
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD AVEDON
will switch things up and pull out a jazz
tune—“Cherokee” or “Skylark”—but
that is rare. Her greatest concern is husbanding her voice and her energies.
When she wears a fur coat onstage, it’s
partly to keep warm and prevent her
voice from closing up. But it’s also because that’s what the old I’ve-earned-itnow-I’m-gonna-wear-it gospel stars
often did: they wore the mink. Midway
through her set, she makes what she calls
a “false exit,” and slips backstage and lets
the band noodle while she rests. “It’s a
fifteen-round fight, and so she paces
herself,” Barnum says. “Aretha is not
thirty years old.” She is seventy-four.
Franklin doesn’t get around much
anymore. For the past thirty-four years,
she has refused to fly, which means that
she hasn’t been able to perform in favorite haunts from the late sixties, like
the Olympia, in Paris, or the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam. When she does
travel, it’s by bus. Not a Greyhound, exactly, but, still, it’s exhausting. A trip
not long ago from her house, outside
Detroit, to Los Angeles proved too
much to contemplate again. “That one
just wore me out,” she said. “It’s a nice
bus, but it took days! ” She has attended
anxious-flyer classes and said that she’s
determined to get on a plane again soon.
“I’m thinking about making the flight
from Detroit to Chicago,” she said.
“Baby steps.”
Even if the concert in Windsor was
a shadow of her stage work a generation
ago, there were intermittent moments
of sublimity. Naturally, she has lost range
and stamina, but she is miles better than
Sinatra at a similar age. And she has
survived longer than nearly any contemporary. In Windsor, she lagged for a
while and then ripped up the B. B. King
twelve-bar blues “Sweet Sixteen.” Performing “Chain of Fools,” a replica of
the Reverend Elijah Fair’s gospel tune
“Pains of Life,” she managed to make it
just as greasy as when she recorded it,
in 1968.
Before the show, I was talking with
people in the aisles. More than a few
said they hadn’t seen Franklin or paid
much attention to her recordings for years.
It was an older crowd, but they hadn’t
come to see an oldies show. What reawakened them, they said, was precisely
what had reawakened me: a video, gone
viral, of Franklin singing “(You Make
Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” at
last December’s Kennedy Center Honors. Watch it if you haven’t: in under
“I refuse to invade another planet in matching outfits.”
five minutes, your life will improve by a
minimum of forty-seven per cent.
Aretha comes out onstage looking
like the fanciest church lady in Christendom: fierce red lipstick, floor-length mink,
a brocaded pink-and-gold dress that Bessie Smith would have worn if she’d sold
tens of millions of records. Aretha sits
down at the piano. She adjusts the mike.
Then she proceeds to punch out a series
of gospel chords in 12/8 time, and, if you
have an ounce of sap left in you, you are
overcome. A huge orchestra wells up beneath her, and four crack backup singers
sliver their perfectly timed accents (“Ahhoo!”) in front of her lines. Aretha is singing with a power that rivals her own self
of three or four decades ago.
Up in the first tier, sitting next to the
Obamas, Carole King is about to fall over
the rail. She is an honoree, and wrote “A
Natural Woman” with her first husband,
Gerry Goffin. From the moment Franklin starts the first verse—“Looking out
on the morning rain, / I used to feel . . .
so uninspired”—King is rolling her eyes
back in her head and waving on the music
as if in a kind of ecstatic possession. She
soon spots Obama wiping a tear from
his cheek. (“The cool cat wept!” King
told me later. “I loved that.”)
King hadn’t seen Franklin in a long
time, and when she had Franklin was
not performing at this level of intensity. “Seeing her sit down to play the
piano put me rungs higher on the levels of joy,” King says. And when Franklin gets up from the piano bench to
finish off the song—“That’s a piece of
theatre, and she’s a diva in the best sense,
so, of course, she had to do that at the
perfect moment”—the joy deepens.
King recalls how the song came
about. It was 1967, and she and Goffin
were in Manhattan, walking along
Broadway, and Jerry Wexler, of Atlantic Records, pulled up beside them in
a limousine, rolled down the window,
and said, “I’m looking for a really big
hit for Aretha. How about writing a
song called ‘A Natural Woman.’ ” He
rolled up the window and the car drove
off. King and Goffin went home to Jersey. That night, after tucking their kids
into bed, they sat down and wrote the
music and the lyrics. By the next morning, they had a hit.
“I hear these things in my head, where
they might go, how they might sound,”
King says. “But I don’t have the chops
to do it myself. So it was like witnessing
a dream realized.”
Beyond the music itself, the moment
everyone talked about after Franklin’s
performance at the Kennedy Center was
the way, just before the final chorus, as
she was reaching the all-out crescendo,
she stripped off her mink and let it fall
to the floor. Whoosh! Dropping the fur—
it’s an old gospel move, a gesture of emotional abandon, of letting loose. At Mahalia Jackson’s wake, Clara Ward, one of
Aretha’s greatest influences, threw her
mink stole at the open casket after she
sang “Beams of Heaven.” The fur is part
of the drama, the royal persona. When
Franklin went to see Diahann Carroll in
a production of “Sunset Boulevard,” in
Toronto, she had two seats: one for her,
one for the mink.
Backstage in Windsor, I asked Franklin about that night in D.C. Her mood
brightened. “One of the three or four
greatest nights of my life,” she said.
he cool cat wept, King had mar-
T velled. When I e-mailed President
Obama about Aretha Franklin and that
night, he wasn’t reticent in his reply. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R.& B., rock and roll—the
way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and
vitality and hope,” he wrote back, through
his press secretary. “American history
wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why,
when she sits down at a piano and sings
‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to
tears—the same way that Ray Charles’s
version of ‘America the Beautiful’ will
always be in my view the most patriotic
piece of music ever performed—because
it captures the fullness of the American
experience, the view from the bottom as
well as the top, the good and the bad,
and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”
So much of this history—the transformation of hardship and sorrow, the
spiritual uplift after boundless pain, gospel after blues—is a particular inheritance of the black church. In “The Souls
of Black Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois writes
that, “despite caricature and defilement,”
the music of the black church “remains
the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born
on American soil.” From the days of slavery, the black church was a refuge, a safe
house of community, worship, and speech,
and as the decades passed the music of
Sunday morning became increasingly
associated with the music of the night
before. Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of
modern gospel, was a whorehouse piano
player and the musical director of the
Pilgrim Baptist Church, in Chicago. His
songs were sung at rent parties, and at
the funeral of Dr. King. His gospel and
his barrelhouse blues—“Precious Lord,
Take My Hand” and “It’s Tight Like
That,” “Peace in the Valley” and “Big Fat
Mama”—possess, in his words, “the same
feeling, a grasping of the heart.”
Aretha’s father, Clarence LaVaughn
Franklin, was the most famous black
preacher of his day, and by far the most
profound influence on the course of her
life. He was born in 1915 and grew up
in Sunflower County, in the Mississippi
Delta. This was the same landscape
that bred Robert Johnson, Son House,
Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and
Fannie Lou Hamer. B. B. King, another
Delta neighbor, described in his memoirs
that common ground: the Klan and the
cross burnings; the fury suppressed in
every child who encountered a lynching—the “strange fruit” hanging from a
tree near the courthouse. “I feel disgust
and disgrace and rage and every emotion that makes me cry without tears
and scream without sound,” King wrote.
When C. L. Franklin was around fifteen, he experienced a vision: he saw a
single plank on the wall of his house engulfed in flames. “A voice spoke to me
from behind the plank,” he told the ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon, “and
said something like ‘Go and preach
the gospel to all the nations.’ ” By the
time he was eighteen, he was a circuit rider, an itinerant preacher hitchhiking from church to church.
Eventually, he landed a pulpit in
Memphis, where he attracted notice as
“the king of the young whoopers,” a style
of preaching that begins with a relatively
measured exposition of a passage from
Scripture and then crescendos into an
ecstatic, musical flight, with the kind of
call-and-response that became embedded in the music of James Brown.
Franklin left Memphis in 1944 and,
after a two-year residence at a church in
Buffalo, settled in Detroit, at the New
Bethel Baptist Church. There he established a reputation, acquiring one nickname after another—the Black Prince,
the Jitterbug Preacher, the Preacher with
the Golden Voice.
In those days, New Bethel was on
Hastings Street, the spine of Paradise
Valley, which was the center of the black
community. Detroit had swelled with
black migrants from the South, and Hastings Street was dense with churches and
black-run beauty salons, barbershops,
funeral homes; around the corner from
New Bethel was the Flame Show Bar
and Lee’s Sensation. Franklin was, in the
phrase of one of his congregants, “stinky
sharp.” He drove a Cadillac and took to
wearing slick suits and alligator shoes.
Franklin, his wife, Barbara Siggers,
and their four children—Erma, Cecil,
Carolyn, and Aretha—lived in a parsonage house on East Boston Boulevard, among black professionals and
businesspeople. There were six bedrooms and a living room with silk curtains and a grand piano. Yet, while
Franklin lived large, he preached a kind
of black liberation theology—Baptist,
but inflected at times with the more
convulsive accents of the Pentecostal,
or “sanctified,” church. As his scrupulous biographer Nick Salvatore writes,
he was “unique among his fellow ministers in that he welcomed all of the
residents of Hastings Street—prostitutes, drug dealers and pimps as well
as the businessmen, professionals, and
the devout working classes.”
Franklin gained national fame by recording his sermons. The albums sold
in the hundreds of thousands. On Sunday nights, he could be heard on WLAC,
a Nashville-based station that covered
half the country. John Lewis, a leader
of SNCC and a congressman since 1987,
recalls listening to Franklin on the radio
when he was growing up, in Pike County,
Alabama. “He was a master at building
his sermon, pacing it, layering it, lifting
it level by level to a climax and then
finally bringing it home,” Lewis wrote
in his memoir “Walking with the Wind.”
“No one could bring it home like the
Reverend Franklin.”
As a girl, Aretha took it all in: Sunday mornings and the nights before. She
was thoroughly absorbed in the church
life of New Bethel and in the cultural
life of her living room, which, at times,
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
77
seemed to represent the epicenter and
genealogy of African-American music.
Sitting on the stairs, she watched Art
Tatum and Nat Cole play the piano.
Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Della
Reese, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine,
and Lionel Hampton came to visit.
Dinah Washington coached the girls
on their singing. The Reverend James
Cleveland, a pillar of the gospel world,
showed Aretha how to play gospel
chords. The kids nearby
included Diana Ross,
Smokey Robinson, and
the roster of what became
Motown.
As C. L. Franklin’s
fame grew, Salvatore writes,
so did his penchant for
drinking, womanizing,
and worse. In 1940, he had
fathered a child with a twelve-year-old
girl, and he remained unrepentant.
He could also be abusive to the women
in his life. In 1948, when Aretha was
six, her mother left Detroit to live in
Buffalo. The children saw her occasionally, but there was always a looming and powerful sadness in the house.
As Mahalia Jackson, a close friend of
the Franklins, put it, “The whole family wanted for love.” C. L. Franklin’s
mother helped care for the children, as
did a string of friends, secretaries, and
lovers, including Clara Ward, of the
Ward Singers, one of the great gospel
vocalists of her time. Barbara Siggers
died in 1952.
In the mid-fifties, Franklin started
the C. L. Franklin Gospel Caravan and
toured the country for weeks at a time,
preaching his greatest hits: “ The
Eagle Stirreth Her Nest,” “Dry Bones
in the Valley,” “The Man at the Pool.”
Little Sammy Bryant, a dwarf who
was a preternaturally talented singer,
often opened the show and appeared
alongside gospel stars like the Dixie
Hummingbirds, Sister Rosetta Tharpe,
and the Soul Stirrers, featuring Sam
Cooke. Aretha was in his entourage,
playing piano and singing. The voice—
ringing, powerful, soulful—and the
musical guile were there from the start.
She could riff, bending notes as if high
on the neck of a guitar; she had fantastic range and command of every
effect, from melisma to circling the
beat. These techniques came into play
78
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
in her career in R. & B., soul, and pop,
but “all that was echt gospel,” according to the scholar Anthony Heilbut.
When Franklin was fifteen, she recorded several gospel songs, among
them “Never Grow Old” and “While
the Blood Runs Warm.” She also saw
a great deal of life, including the libertine atmosphere surrounding the
gospel-music scene. By the time she
recorded those first songs, she was pregnant with her second child.
She left school and went
on the road for, more or
less, the rest of her life.
retha did not in-
A herit a purely reli-
gious and musical legacy.
The Franklin house was
also political. She was, by
the standards of Paradise Valley, a young
woman of status and privilege, but she
suffered the same humiliations as any
black woman travelling through the
South or venturing into the white precincts of Detroit. By the time of the
murder of Emmett Till, in 1955, C. L.
Franklin had opened New Bethel up
to the movement, and, from his pulpit,
he denounced segregation and white
supremacy. When Dr. King came to
Detroit, he stayed with the Franklins.
Aretha, too, joined the movement. At
the same time, she yearned for larger
stages. She saw how Sam Cooke had
crossed over into R. & B. as if it were the
most natural of passages. In 1960, when
she was eighteen, she moved to New
York and signed with Columbia Records.
This marked the start of an extended
apprenticeship under John Hammond,
who had been behind the careers of Billie Holiday and Count Basie. Hammond
had it in his mind that Aretha should
be the next great jazz singer, even though
the form was no longer ascendant. It
wasn’t until 1966, when Franklin went
to work with Jerry Wexler and Ahmet
Ertegun, at Atlantic Records, that she
really made her hits in R. & B. But at
Columbia, even singing standards like
“Skylark” and “How Deep Is the Ocean,”
she broke into the secular world. Franklin had her father’s support and the example of Cooke, but she felt compelled
to publish a column, in 1961, in the Amsterdam News, saying, “I don’t think that
in any matter I did the Lord a disservice
when I made up my mind two years ago
to switch over.” She went on,“After all,
the blues is a music born out of the slavery day sufferings of my people.”
On June 23, 1963, C. L. Franklin
helped Dr. King organize the Walk to
Freedom, a march of more than a hundred thousand people through downtown Detroit. At Cobo Hall, King, acknowledging “my good friend” C. L.
Franklin, delivered a speech filled with
passages that he recycled, two months
later, at the March on Washington. “This
afternoon I have a dream,” he told the
crowd. “I have a dream,” that “little white
children and little Negro children” will
be “judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.”
King later confided to C. L. Franklin,
“Frank, I will never live to see forty.” At
Dr. King’s funeral, in April, 1968, Aretha
was asked to sing Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord.” She was now a central voice
in both the black community, eclipsing
her father, and in the musical world. She
had crossed over.
he songs on her first records for
T Atlantic—“Do Right Woman, Do
Right Man,” “Respect,” “Dr. Feelgood,”
“(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural
Woman,” “Think,” “Chain of Fools”—
were the resolution of her apprenticeship.
Leaving behind the American Songbook
for a while and finding just the right
blend of the church and the blues, she
was now celebrated as the greatest voice
in popular music. “Respect” and “Think”
became anthems of feminism and black
power and stand alongside “Mississippi
Goddamn,” “Busted,” and “A Change
Is Gonna Come.” “Daddy had been
preaching black pride for decades,” she
told the writer David Ritz, “and we as a
people had rediscovered how beautiful
black truly was and were echoing, ‘Say it
loud, I’m black and I’m proud.’ ”
At the same time, Franklin found that
the strains of life as a star, as a mother,
as a daughter to her tempestuous father
were at times unbearable. Ted White,
her first husband—they married in 1961
and divorced eight years later—was a
jumped-up street hustler who abused her.
In 1969, when her father let a radical organization called the Republic of New
Africa use the sanctuary at New Bethel,
the night ended in a bloody gun battle
between the group and the Detroit
police. The next year, she came out onstage, in St. Louis, and started singing
“Respect” but then walked off, unable to
continue. The promoter announced that
Franklin had suffered “a nervous breakdown from extreme personal problems.”
She soon recovered enough to perform,
but she rarely seemed unburdened, except in the studio and onstage.
“I think of Aretha as Our Lady of
Mysterious Sorrows,” Wexler wrote in
his memoirs. “Her eyes are incredible,
luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain.
Her depressions could be as deep as the
dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the
sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of
her musical aura.”
ranklin’s vulnerability has
F brought with it an intense desire for
control that often leads to still more anguish. When it came time to do an autobiography, she enlisted Ritz, a skilled
biographer and ghostwriter who had
produced fascinating books with Ray
Charles, Etta James, Bettye LaVette, and
Smokey Robinson. He found her a singularly resistant subject. She insisted on
stripping the book of nearly anything
gritty or dark. Published in 1999, it reads
like an extended press release. “Denial is
her strategy for emotional survival,” Ritz
told me. It was only at the microphone,
in her music, he concluded, that Franklin felt in command. There are reports
that she has, in recent years, been struggling with cancer, but her friends say
she’d never admit to such a thing, “not
even on her deathbed.”
Fifteen years after the autobiography was published, and flopped, Ritz
published an unauthorized biography,
filled with material that he had accumulated over time from intimate personal and professional sources. The
woman who emerges is a musical genius and a pivotal figure in the cultural
history of the black freedom movement;
she is also someone who has suffered
countless losses, been mistreated in many
ways, and at times has reactions that try
the patience of her associates, creditors,
family, and friends. Franklin denounced
the book: “Lies and more lies!” But none
of the sources, including those closest
to her, have backed away.
Even Beyoncé has had the experience of displeasing Franklin. The occa-
sion was the 2008 Grammy Awards.
Beyoncé, working from lines on a Teleprompter that were likely not of her
own devising, introduced Tina Turner
to the audience as “the Queen.” With
due respect to Tina Turner, this is Aretha’s title, as surely as it is Elizabeth II’s,
and Franklin, who is easily wounded,
issued a scathing proclamation. It was
a “cheap shot,” she said.
larger consequence of Frank-
A lin’s craving for control is that her
audience has been denied one of her
greatest treasures. Not long ago, Ahmir
Khalib Thompson, the drummer and
bandleader better known as Questlove,
posted this on his Instagram feed: “Of
all the ‘inside industry’ stuff I’ve been
privy to learn about NOTHING has tortured my soul more than knowing one
of the GREATEST recorded moments in
gospel history was just gonna sit on the
shelf and collect dust.”
Questlove was referring to the holy
grail of Aretha Studies—a filmed version, never seen in public, of “Amazing
Grace,” two gospel concerts that Franklin gave in January, 1972, at the New
Temple Missionary Baptist Church, in
south-central Los Angeles. Pop music
has long tantalized its completist fans
with rumors of “rare footage”: there was
“Eat the Document,” featuring a scene
in which a stoned John Lennon teases
an even more stoned Bob Dylan (“Do
you suffer from sore eyes, groovy forehead, or curly hair?”); and there was
“Cocksucker Blues,” Robert Frank’s collaboration with the Rolling Stones, featuring Mick Jagger snorting coke. Both
films are now pretty easy to find—and
neither is essential.
The film of “Amazing Grace” is another matter. Atlantic issued a recording from the concerts as a double LP, in
1972, and it has sold two million copies,
double platinum, making it the bestselling gospel record of all time. It is perhaps her most shattering and indispensable recording. As Franklin has said
repeatedly, “I never left the church.”The
black church was, and is, in everything
she sings, from a faltering “My Country, Tis of Thee” at Obama’s first inaugural to a knockout rendition of Adele’s
“Rolling in the Deep,” two years ago, on
the Letterman show.
By 1971, Franklin was at her peak, with
a string of hits and Grammys, but she
was also preparing for a return to gospel.
In March, she played the Fillmore West,
in San Francisco, the ultimate hippie
venue. The film of that date is on YouTube, and you can hear her singing her
hits, fronting King Curtis’s astonishing band, the Kingpins. She wins over a
crowd more accustomed to the Mixolydian jams of the Grateful Dead. And her
surprise duet with Ray Charles on “Spirit
“Would you like to grab a water sometime?”
•
in the Dark” is far from the highlight.
A few songs into the set, Franklin
plays on a Fender Rhodes the opening
chords of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over
Troubled Water,” weaving hypnotic gospel phrases between her backup singers
(“Still waters run deep . . .”) and the B-3
organ lines of Billy Preston, a huge figure
in gospel but recognized by the white
audience as the “fifth Beatle,” for his
playing on the “Let It Be” album. Just
as Otis Redding quit singing “Respect”
after hearing Aretha’s version (“From
now on, it belongs to her”), Simon and
Art Garfunkel forever had to compete
with the memory of this performance.
Simon, who wrote the song a year before, was inspired by a gospel song, Claude
Jeter and the Swan Silvertones’ version
of “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” Jeter included
an improvised line—“I’ll be your bridge
over deep water if you trust in my name”—
and Simon was so clearly taken with it
that he eventually gave Jeter a check.
Daphne Brooks, who teaches AfricanAmerican studies at Yale, aptly describes
the Fillmore West performance as a
“bridge” to the “Amazing Grace” concerts
that were just a few months away.
Franklin enlisted her Detroit mentor, the Reverend James Cleveland, to
sing and play piano, and the pastor Alexander Hamilton to conduct the Southern California Community Choir. The
gospel concert in Los Angeles opens
with “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” a spiri80
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
•
tual based on Biblical narratives of liberation and resurrection, and recorded,
in 1915, by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. It is
possibly the most wrenching music on
the album. Countless performers have
recorded the song—the Soul Stirrers,
Inez Andrews, Burl Ives, James Brown,
Bruce Springsteen—but Franklin, who
was never in better voice, seems possessed by it. She delivers a pulsing,
haunted version, taking flights of lyrical
improvisation, note after note soaring
over single syllables. In her reading, the
blues always resides in gospel, and somehow this is her version of grace.
Chuck Rainey, her bass player in the
early seventies, told me that Aretha’s
voice was so emotionally powerful that
at times she would throw the band out
of the groove. “Aretha came to me once
and held my hand and she said to me,
‘Chuck, don’t listen to me too intensely.
I know what I do to people. I need for
the bass to be where it is so I can sing.’ ”
Bernard (Pretty) Purdie, the drummer
on the “Amazing Grace” sessions, told
me that Franklin, having sung for so
long with the Reverend Cleveland at
New Bethel and in her living room, was
absolutely sure of herself. “She didn’t
have to worry about what to think about
or sing,” he said. “She knew what she
was doing from jump street.”
There’s no arguing with that. Aretha sang songs in Los Angeles that she
first sang and recorded as a girl, includ-
ing “Never Grow Old” and “Precious
Lord.” There is a ten-minute-long
“Amazing Grace,” part song, part sermon, that could come only from someone steeped in the tradition of her father’s Delta whooping.
The record is an enduring achievement, but the event, like Woodstock, was
something that also deserved to be seen.
Sydney Pollack, who had directed Jane
Fonda in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t
They?” and had been nominated for an
Academy Award, wanted to make that
happen. Pollack and his crew filmed both
nights. The sixteen-millimetre color footage was shot in the most straightforward
way, but there was a problem: Pollack
was not an experienced documentarian,
and he and his crew failed to use clapper
boards to synchronize the sound with
the images. After a months-long effort
to fix the problem, Warner Bros. shelved
the project. Pollack went on to direct
“The Way We Were,” “Three Days of
the Condor,” and “Out of Africa.” He
lost interest in “Amazing Grace.” The
film stayed in a vault for forty years.
In 2007, Alan Elliott, a record producer, approached Pollack about the
film. Pollack had cancer, and Warner
Bros. sold Elliott the rights to the film.
Pollack agreed to work on it with him,
but he died the next year.
Elliott succeeded in getting the film
synchronized, but he has not yet won
over the subject and star of the film.
For years, he and Franklin have tussled
over permissions, rights, and contracts.
The Telluride Film Festival was scheduled to show “Amazing Grace” last
September, but Franklin’s lawyers filed
suit. Judge John Kane, of the U.S. District Court in Colorado, held a slappedtogether seventy-one-minute hearing
the afternoon before the screening.
Franklin testified by telephone.
“For them to show that film” and for
Elliott “to just completely and totally
and blatantly ignore me where my name
and reputation, my concern, it would
be terrible,” she said. “This is my fiftyfifth year in the business, and he is all
but fearless.”
Elliott was proposing only to show
the film to a couple of hundred people
at Telluride, where the goal was to find
a distributor. He told me that he has
offered to pay her far more—a million
dollars and half the proceeds—than she
was originally promised. As they negotiated, Elliott and his representatives also
encountered a quality of chaos that often
surrounds Franklin’s business affairs.
Lawyers and agents came and went.
Franklin, who is the wariest of personalities, deflected and delayed, even as
some of her closest friends encouraged
her to settle the deal and enjoy the inevitable attention that would come with
“Amazing Grace.”
“Aretha gets offended when she thinks
you think you’re getting over on her,”
Tavis Smiley told me. “It’s hard to know
why that line gets blurred from time to
time, between making people respect
you and self-sabotage. But don’t ever underestimate the power of the personal.
‘Respect’ is not just a song to Aretha.
It’s the mantra for her life.
“Aretha authorizes her own reality,
and sometimes it’s hard to juxtapose that
reality to the reality,” he went on. “We’re
all guilty of that at times, but Aretha
does that to a greater extent, and it can
be dangerous. Sometimes, in life, we can
unwittingly self-sabotage when we want
ultimate control.”
In Denver, Judge Kane was protective of Franklin, issuing the injunction
against the screening in Telluride for that
evening. In his ruling, he quoted “Othello”: “He that filches from me my good
name robs me of that which not enriches
him and makes me poor indeed.” Elliott
and Franklin have meanwhile inched toward a settlement. When the hope arose
that “Amazing Grace” was a possibility
for the Tribeca Film Festival, coming
next month, Robert De Niro called
Franklin and implored her to make it
happen. That is unlikely to occur.
Watching Aretha Franklin sing from
the pulpit and at the piano somehow
intensifies everything heard on the record. It’s almost too much to absorb in
one or two viewings. I’ve watched it a
half-dozen times, and it never fails to
leave me in tears. The most touching
moment in the film comes when James
Cleveland gestures to C. L. Franklin,
who is sitting up front, next to Clara
Ward. The Reverend cannot resist a
prideful star turn at the pulpit.
“It took me all the way back to the
living room at home when she was six
and seven years of age, it took me back
to about eleven, when she started travelling with me on the road, singing gos-
pel,” he says. “I saw you crying and I saw
you responding, but I was just about to
bust wide open. You talk about being
moved, not only because Aretha is my
daughter. . . . Aretha is just a stone singer.”
Then Aretha sits at the piano and
leans hard into “Never Grow Old.”
As she sweats under the lights, her
father approaches her at the piano
and tenderly mops her forehead with
a handkerchief.
can hear Aretha’s influence
“Y ou
across the landscape of American
music, no matter the genre,” Obama wrote
me. “What other artist had that kind
of impact? Dylan. Maybe Stevie, Ray
Charles. The Beatles and the Stones—
but, of course, they’re imports. The jazz
giants like Armstrong. But it’s a short
list. And if I’m stranded on a desert island, and have ten records to take, I know
she’s in the collection. For she’ll remind
me of my humanity. What’s essential in
all of us. And she just sounds so damn
good. Here’s a tip: when you’re deejaying a party, open with ‘Rock Steady.’ ”
With the breadth of Aretha’s influence comes the regularity of musical
homage. The titans of hip-hop adore
her. Mos Def sampled “One Step Ahead,”
on “Ms. Fat Booty.” Kanye West sampled “Spirit in the Dark,” on “School
Spirit.” Alicia Keys sampled “A Natural
Woman,” and Dr. Dre and Outkast, in
accordance with the sage advice of their
Commander-in-Chief, sampled “Rock
Steady.”The Fugees, Public Enemy, Slum
Village—Aretha is everywhere. There
is no “Formation” without “Respect.”
One queen follows another.
Beyoncé may have overstepped on one
occasion, but she knew the score. A singer
like her, who is steeped in both the sacred
and the profane, who can provide flawless versions of both “Precious Lord” and
“Bootylicious,” understands the variousness of her roots and the specificity of her
debts. “The soulfulness comes from the
gospel,” she once said. “It comes from
Aretha, who listened to all of that, who
sang in the church.”
The morning after the Windsor
concert, I went to Sunday services at
the Franklins’ old church, New Bethel
Baptist. Arriving half an hour early, I met
C. L. Franklin’s successor, Pastor Robert
Smith, Jr., a stout gray-haired man in a
dark three-piece suit.
Pastor Smith led me to “the history
room,” which was filled with photographs and souvenirs of the Franklins.
The sanctuary can hold a couple of thousand worshippers, but the stream of people arriving was modest. The days of
vitality, of Paradise Valley and Black
Bottom, are long gone. The workers for
Ford and General Motors went South.
There are few middle-class parishioners
left at New Bethel. “My appeal is largely
to the broken,” Pastor Smith said. “People coming from prison, drugs. My style
of preaching doesn’t appeal to the professionals. A lot of them are going off
to the mega-churches.”
It’s been a long time since New Bethel
echoed with “The Eagle Stirreth Her
Nest.” Early one morning in 1979, six
burglars broke into C. L. Franklin’s house.
Franklin kept a gun in his room and fired
two errant shots. One of the burglars
fired back, hitting him once in the knee
and once in the groin, rupturing his femoral artery. He spent five years in a coma
and died. His funeral was among the
largest in the history of Detroit.
Like others, Pastor Smith has had his
rocky moments with Aretha Franklin
over the years, and is careful not to offend
her. Aretha is supportive of New Bethel—
sending money and food packages, organizing the occasional gospel concert—
and their relations, he says, “are better
now than they’ve been, but it’s a day-today thing.” The importance of Aretha
Franklin, he made clear, is the “sense of
higher things” that her music inspires.
The rest is dross. Her genius, her
central place in American music and
spirit, is undeniable.
“I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” Billy Preston, who died in 2006,
once said. “She can be hiding out in her
house in Detroit for years. She can go
decades without taking a plane or flying
off to Europe. She can cancel half her
gigs and infuriate every producer and
promoter in the country. She can sing
all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act
and turn off the world. But on any given
night, when that lady sits down at the
piano and gets her body and soul all
over some righteous song, she’ll scare
the shit out of you. And you’ll know—
you’ll swear—that she’s still the best
fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country
has ever produced.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
81
BOOKS
BLAST RADIUS
A novel of terror and its aftermath.
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ
Karan Mahajan traces the intimate urgencies of life after a bombing in Delhi.
n “The Association of Small Bombs”
I (Viking), Karan Mahajan’s second
novel, Shaukat (Shockie) Guru, a Kashmiri terrorist, considers the explosion he
has just set off at a busy market in Delhi
and glumly concludes that it “was all anticlimax.” This is a dark thought about
mass murder, and a dark joke about the
narrative nature of terrorism. For everyone except the men who execute it, a terrorist attack is all climax, the culmination of a story told in secret until the
moment it erupts in violence. Only
Shockie and his collaborators know that
the bomb is actually a second draft—the
first one fizzled because of dud wiring.
The do-over is as wounding to the terrorist’s twisted pride in his craft as repeating
a punch line would be to a comedian’s.
82
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
If anticlimax is a flaw in a terrorist’s
plot, it’s critical to Mahajan’s. He has
shown Shockie’s bomb going off some
fifty pages earlier, a “flat, percussive event”
that he plants in the novel’s first sentence, forcing an instant narrative crisis.
A writer puts himself in a bind if he begins his story at its point of highest intensity: where to go from here? Mahajan’s answer is to strike out in all directions. The book’s subject inspires its form,
a series of shrapnel-like sections that
cover the same temporal territory from
distinct points of view. “Blast: May 1996,”
the omniscient opening sequence that
describes the bombing, is followed by
“Victims: May 1996” and then “Terrorists: May 1996,” where we see the planning of the attack. Later, Mahajan pushes
deeper into the bomb’s aftermath, following a year in the lives of Deepa and
Vikas Khurana, a Hindu couple whose
two young sons are among the dead, before turning to a Muslim friend of the
boys who had gone with them to the
market and survived. The effect is a kind
of recurring recoil, an exercise in interrupted momentum. Every time we think
we’re moving forward, we’re thrown back
into the past.
Mahajan, who is in his early thirties,
grew up in New Delhi and moved to the
United States fifteen years ago. His eagerness to go at the bomb from every
angle suggests a voracious approach to
fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity that moves beyond the scope
of his first, very good novel, “Family Planning” (2008). A comedy of manners that
recounts the trials and tribulations of a
government minister in Delhi saddled
with a stolid wife and more than a dozen
children, that book was an exercise in
light social satire, which, like all successful entries in its genre, worked by achieving a narrow consistency of tone, the
antic goings on at Parliament and the
dinner table leavened by the amused detachment of the voice recounting them.
Tragedy deepens Mahajan’s range.
In the first few pages of his new novel,
he renders the spectacle of the bombing with a languid, balletic beauty, pitting the unhurried composure of his
prose against the violence of the events
it describes. We see how the car that
held the weapon “came apart in a dizzying flock of shards,” an image that
seems, before its meaning fully lands,
as serene and natural as the sudden
flight of birds that it conjures. People
press their hands to their wounds “as
if they had smashed eggs against their
bodies in hypnotic agreement and were
unsure about what to do with the runny,
bloody yolk.”
Mahajan has a cinematic attunement
to the spectacle of disaster, and he often
focusses on the minor rather than the
grandiose, to eerie effect. At his sons’ cremation, Vikas Khurana “noticed that
outside the ring of burning flesh and
wood, little snotty children ran naked
playing with upright rubber tires. Behind them a cow was dreadlocked in
ropes and eating ash and the wild village children kicked it in the gut.” This
string of images is unfurled so skillfully
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKKEL SOMMER
that the garish, indifferent vitality of the
children and the placidity of the cow
turn our attention away from the pyre
itself. It takes a beat before we grasp just
what kind of ash is being eaten.
A writer working with such material
could easily slip from poised precision
into a doleful rut. But Mahajan hasn’t
lost his sharp comic impulses. The bravura set piece tracking the terrorists’ plot
takes the substance of a thriller and bends
it into a mishap-strewn heist with buddycomedy overtones. To get to Delhi from
Kathmandu, where he lives in exile with
his fellow-conspirators, Shockie disguises
himself as a farmer and undertakes a
days-long trip by bus and train, a journey marked by one indignity after another: bad roads, oppressive heat, aggressive mosquitoes, ketchup sandwiches.
His accomplice is a dolt with dandruff
issues; their contact in Delhi is a useless
snob. Shockie, who, at twenty-six, is fat
and balding, nonetheless nurses a sense
of his own superiority; he daydreams
about his hero, Ramzi Yousef, the “genius of terror” behind the 1993 World
Trade Center attack, and takes “a certain
sensual, even feminine, pleasure in shopping for materials for a bomb.” But just
as Mahajan seems on the verge of flattening Shockie into a buffoon, he pulls
back. Here is Shockie arriving in Delhi,
delighting in the city’s pandemonium
with a small-town boy’s awe of its supercharged life:
Delhi—flat, burning, mixed-up, smashed
together from pieces of tin and tarpaulin,
spreading on the arid plains of the North—
offered no respite from itself. Delhi never
ended. The houses along the road were like
that too: jammed together, the balconies
cramped with cycles, boxes, brooms, pots,
clotheslines, buckets, the city minutely recreating itself down to the smallest cell. From
one balcony a boy with a runny nose waved to
another. A woman with big haunches sat astride
a stool next to a parked scooter; she was peeling onions into a steel plate and laughing. Before municipal walls painted with pictures of
weapon-toting gods—meant to keep men from
urinating—men urinated. Delhi. Fuck. I love
it too.
This sounds more like Christopher
Isherwood absorbing the atmosphere of
nineteen-thirties Berlin than like terrorists’ usual rhetoric about the corrupted
decadence of the places they seek to destroy. Even though Shockie himself had
suggested targeting Delhi, some private
part of his soul stubbornly refuses to
submit to ideology. When he returns to
the base in Kathmandu, he is congratulated for killing two hundred people,
but the true number, he knows, is only
thirteen; his is one of the “small bombs”
of the novel’s title, a minor disturbance
of next to no political import in a country used to catastrophic death. Shockie
is disgusted by his comrades’ complacent faith in their own propaganda. Terrorism is about making other people believe in your power. It’s a strategic error
to fall for your own hype.
o those who are affected by
T Shockie’s bomb, the ultimate body
count makes no difference. Stricken by
the loss of their sons, Vikas and Deepa
Khurana sink into the routines of a shared
fugue state: queasy grief sex interspersed
with bouts of weeping and visits from
members of the Khurana clan who live
alongside them in a family compound.
Chronic lack of privacy, that inevitable
theme of Indian life and fiction, and a
source of tender hilarity in “Family Planning,” here assumes oppressive form as
Vikas’s relatives descend on the bereaved
couple, theatrically slipping sleeping pills
into their tea and removing the knives
from their kitchen drawers.
For Vikas, who gave up a career as a
chartered accountant for a precarious existence as a documentary filmmaker, the
bomb brings to a boil simmering intimations of artistic and financial inadequacy. “He felt his entire life had been a
failure,” Mahajan writes, “and that it was
this failure, particularly the failure to
make money, that had brought him to
this point: if they’d had a driver, how
could this have happened?” It is typical
of Vikas’s blend of grandiosity and pettiness that he agonizes on both too large
and too small a scale. He had sent his
sons to the market to pick up the family’s outmoded TV from the repair shop;
he and Deepa tell their friends that it
was a watch, because the truth “smacked
of poverty.”
Mahajan, ever the social satirist, is
in his element here, homing in on the
egotism that underlies such tormented
self-scrutiny. What gives the novelist
trouble is the part of Vikas’s inner life
that exists beyond class and cultural anxiety. Mahajan generally tails his characters at a close third person, but at mo-
ments of great drama he slips directly
into their consciousness, as he does here
with Vikas:
How am I supposed to respond to this thing
that has happened to me? A few weeks ago I
was standing here, looking through this garbled, pearly whorled window for my kids on
the street, seeing instead the servants skulking under the ashokas. Now they’re gone, forever, no matter how long I stay here like faithful Hachiko, from their English reader. And
yet I have an urge to stay here forever. An urge
to punish myself by looking, by scouring every
inch of tarred road and glittering gutter and
veined dust-sprinkled leaf, in every season, at
all times, for my boys—to look till I go blind
or mad, till my brain revolts, staging a headache in the space where I am trying to insert
the entire city by looking.
This high-stepping internal monologue
sounds more like spoken soliloquy than
like thought, but spoken by whom? It
doesn’t sound like Vikas. It sounds like
Mahajan, whose facility for gorgeous
turns of phrase produces many passages
of vivid, startling power, and many
others that are capsized by too hefty a
verbal cargo. The formulations that
are meant to stress Vikas’s visual instinct—“garbled, pearly whorled window”; “glittering gutter”; “veined dustsprinkled leaf ”—obscure the very things
they’re supposed to make us see. A more
damaging reason that his grief comes
across as stilted, though, is that Mahajan, bent on demonstrating Vikas’s
self-absorption, quickly scrubs him of fatherly feeling. We learn that Vikas “had
no desire to be a father”; he used to complain to Deepa that the boys were spoiled
and materialistic, “Punjabi brutes with
no understanding of art.” As the novel
progresses, Vikas’s self-pity hardens into
unrelenting solipsism, shot through
with resentment at the ruin that his sons’
deaths have made of his life. It’s an attitude that conforms to the “cosmic sadness and anger” of his novelistic profile
while shrinking the character to something smaller than true human scale.
Vikas’s question of how to respond
to tragedy has no good answer. While
he wallows in his suffering, his wife tries
to sublimate hers, fixating on the idea of
seeing her sons’ killers brought to justice.
In one surreal scene, a worthy addition
to the genre of bureaucracy horror, the
Khuranas visit Delhi’s Tihar jail to meet
the man accused of carrying out the attack. They’ve never seen him before, but
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
83
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Firebrand and the First Lady, by Patricia Bell-Scott (Knopf ).
In 1938, in an impassioned letter to Eleanor Roosevelt about
the status of black Americans, the activist Pauli Murray wrote,
“We are as much political refugees from the South as any of
the Jews in Germany.” Roosevelt wrote back, “The South is
changing, but don’t push too fast.” That dynamic—ferocity
versus pragmatism—persisted, but the correspondence, as this
sensitively drawn account shows, grew into a friendship. Murray, who was gay and had enormous drive, was neither immune to Roosevelt’s charm nor cowed by it. Thrilled at having tea with the First Lady, she nonetheless soon followed up
with a letter rebuking her for crossing a picket line.
The Secret Life of the American Musical, by Jack Viertel (Sarah
Crichton Books). In this encyclopedic study, a Broadway producer and critic demonstrates that works as diverse as “Show
Boat” and “Hairspray” share a narrative structure that has stayed
relatively unchanged for more than eighty years. Through a
series of close readings peppered with gossip and autobiographical anecdotes, Viertel lays out the formal precepts: an early “I
Want” song, in which the hero reveals his most ardent desires;
a first-act climax with “a crisis that seems completely beyond
redemption”; and so on. Even “Hamilton,” its original use of
hip-hop and rap notwithstanding, respects this tradition: “My
Shot,” an engaging declaration of the Founding Father’s goals,
signals to the audience, “Watch this one.”
Tender, by Belinda McKeon (Lee Boudreaux Books). Set in Dublin, this novel takes place against the backdrop of, on the one
hand, the relatively recent decriminalization of homosexuality
and, on the other, the last months of the Northern Irish Troubles. In this charged milieu, Catherine and James embark on a
tumultuous and ultimately untenable year-long romance. When
their relationship reaches a critical point, in the aftershock of
the 1998 Omagh bombing, they are differently but equally devastated, and even when they meet many years later, equipped
with maturity and hindsight, neither has truly recovered. McKeon relates an unpredictable series of events in heart-rending
prose, expressing the full force of young love’s potential for disaster.
Loquela, by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will
Vanderhyden (Open Letter). The complex weave of this experimental work comprises three narratives—the diary of a malcontent novelist, his novel in progress, and a long letter he receives from a woman obsessed with an imaginary city. The
novelist character and the letter writer both have ominous
premonitions of being attacked or killed, while a sinister professor stalks the three narratives, trying to control the characters. As the book progresses, we understand the drama to
be partly allegorical, presenting a manifesto that calls for “the
confusion of character, writing, and author.”Essentially, Labbé
both dramatizes and gently mocks the cultural habit of teasing out which aspects of a work of fiction are drawn from life
and which invented. The hardboiled noir feel of Labbé’s prose
makes the metafictional heavy lifting a pleasure.
84
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
we have. He is Malik Aziz, Shockie’s
roommate and best friend in the Kathmandu terror cell, mistakenly arrested
in his place. We know Malik to be a
sweet-tempered man, no action and all
talk; one of the book’s best jokes is his
admiration for the writings of Gandhi,
which he draws on for his impassioned
rhetorical defenses of terror. Now, though,
he refuses to speak to the couple, who
watch impassively as he is beaten, a moment that produces a powerful confusion of readerly allegiances. Malik isn’t
guilty, but he’s not innocent, either. He
could tell the Khuranas a great deal about
their sons’ death. But compared with
Vikas, a sour, selfish person in a sympathetic predicament, Malik, whose position is repugnant, is a genuinely sympathetic character. We pity and root for
him as we pity and root for the Khuranas: a draw in a situation where everyone is bound to lose.
In another deliberately thwarted
climax, Malik disappears from view,
doomed to await an indefinitely postponed trial. Still, Mahajan hasn’t entirely
renounced the dramatic advantages of
suspense. Late in the novel, a second
plot to bomb a market in Delhi suddenly
takes shape, involving a young Muslim
activist who abandons a previous commitment to nonviolence under the pressure of a bad breakup. We have seen the
terrible private consequences of public
disaster; could private disaster yield its
own, disproportionately huge calamities? The activist has worked his way
up from rural poverty to make a life for
himself in Delhi, and as he considers
whether to go through with the attack
he thinks about the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, who trained as an urban
planner in Hamburg. Atta, he reflects,
had also chosen to punish a world that
had opened itself to him: “Earlier he’d
felt the attack was just revenge against
American imperialism, but now he’d
come to see that the reasons for such aggression would have to be idiosyncratic,
personal.” Historical and sociological
and political explanations, necessary as
they are to making sense of terror, don’t
capture the tiny, intimate urgencies that
power the life of a person caught in their
web. Mahajan can’t explain the grand
structures of violence any better than
the rest of us can. But he brings us close
enough to feel the blast. 
MUSICAL EVENTS
OPERA STARTUPS
Small companies in New York take on the Met.
BY ALEX ROSS
ast year, the British critic Philip
L Clark had a provocative response to
the perennial question of how to save
classical music from its so-called image
problem—the perception that it is stuffy,
élitist, and irrelevant. He declared, “There
is absolutely nothing wrong with classical music. It cannot pretend to be anything other than it is. And perhaps it’s
the wider cultural environment . . . that
has a problem.”
I don’t accept Clark’s entire argument.
Certain of classical music’s difficulties are
self-created: ossified concert norms, braindead programming, a pervasive fear of the
new. Yet his principal point holds. Endless chatter about the need to reinvent the
art is symptomatic of a deep-seated hostility toward fundamental features of the
concert experience: the extended duration
of works, the complexity of their construction, the attention they demand. There is
no shame in the fact that classical music
has trouble adapting to a marketplace
dominated by celebrity worship and by
the winner-take-all economy for which
celebrity serves as a seductive symbol.
Anyone tired of the disdainful clichés
lobbed at classical institutions might initially look askance at LoftOpera, one of
a number of small-scale New York companies that advertise themselves as alternatives to a decrepit establishment. Loft’s
Web site declares, “Opera is not just for
Eleni Calanos, in LoftOpera’s “Tosca,” seemed ready for a larger stage.
86
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
the rich and the aging. Opera is for the
young, the edgy, and the emerging creative class.” Inevitably, Loft has won media
attention with its us-against-them attitude, its hipster vibe, its habit of blasting
pop songs during intermissions, its drinkas-you-listen policy. A typical headline:
“While Large Operas Flounder, Small
Companies Flourish.”
The Met, despite its perpetual financial struggles, shows no signs of capsizing. Though dozens of competitors have
come and gone, it lumbers on, embattled
but essential. What it offers—and what
no pocket-sized company, however edgy,
can match—is an acoustical environment
commensurate with the grandeur of the
form. To hear an unamplified voice surmounting a full orchestra and pinging
across a large space is an elemental thrill
that lies somewhere between high culture and extreme sports. The Met’s recent revival of “Don Pasquale” gave audiences a classic you-had-to-be-there
rush, with the Mexican tenor Javier Camarena, as Ernesto, showing power and
style from the bottom to the top of his
range. The remarkable thing about Camarena is that he never seems to push his
voice: it’s as if singing a high D-flat in a
thirty-eight-hundred-seat theatre were
the most natural form of self-expression.
Still, New York’s operatic startups—
some others are Heartbeat Opera, On
Site Opera, Amore Opera, Apotheosis
Opera, Floating Opera, Opera Noire,
Utopia Opera, the long-running Bronx
Opera, and the semi-resurrected New
York City Opera—play a crucial role.
They supply cheap seats for curious newcomers, opportunities for young performers, and a theatrical intimacy that
can’t be found at the Met. At their best,
they give you the feeling of looking at
opera from the inside.
sually, the repertory of the D.I.Y.
U troupes tends toward the Baroque,
bel canto, and twentieth-century chamber opera. In early March, LoftOpera attempted “Tosca,” the kind of big-boned
late-Romantic work that more or less requires a large orchestra. In some ways,
the experiment fell short. An ensemble
of thirty-two musicians, led by Dean
Buck, conveyed much of the atmosphere
and the nuance of the first act but came
under strain in the second. The heroine’s
ceremony around Scarpia’s corpse—the
ILLUSTRATION BY MATTEO BERTON
arrangement of the candles and the rest—
was undercut by sketchy string intonation, and the frigid final chords of E minor
and F-sharp minor, which should incite
a shiver, merely wheezed.
I was riveted all the same. Loft mounted
“Tosca” in a former bus-repair facility in
Bushwick—one of several Brooklyn venues that the company has commandeered
since its founding, in 2013. Raymond Zilberberg, the director, moved the action to
a contemporary setting: Eleni Calenos,
the Tosca, sashayed in a sun hat and sunglasses; James Chamberlain, the Cavaradossi, wore a T-shirt and paint-spattered
jeans; Gustavo Feulien, the Scarpia,
prowled about in a leather jacket. We
seemed to be in a half-gentrified underworld where bohemians rubbed shoulders with sadist police. The audience sat
on two sides of the space, a few feet from
the action. Even if you lost the sensation
of voices conquering a large auditorium,
you still registered their inborn force.
There was no need for the performers to
turn toward the crowd: they sang and
acted face to face. This visceral realism
was most telling during Scarpia’s attempted rape of Tosca: the writhing bodies were as difficult to watch as on some
grim cable-TV drama.
Calenos, a young Greek-born soprano,
had the best outing. Secure in pitch, rich
in expressive detail, knifelike at the climaxes, she seemed ready for a much bigger stage. The male leads turned in credible, committed performances, although
Chamberlain sagged below pitch at times
and Feulien needed more sonorous
menace in his lower range. The orchestra was the real problem: Puccini’s lustrous instrumentation went missing for
much of the evening. Loft is probably
better suited to smaller-scale pieces, although the bravura energy of this raw,
brutal “Tosca” was something to behold.
eartbeat Opera is an even newer
H arrival, having sprung up in 2014.
Its leaders—the directors Louisa Proske,
Ethan Heard, and Jennifer Newman,
the composer-pianist Daniel Schlosberg,
and the violinist-conductor Jacob Ashworth—are recent graduates of the drama
and music programs at Yale. While Loft
was presenting “Tosca,” Heartbeat took
over the Theatre at St. Clement’s, on
West Forty-sixth Street, with a double
bill of “Lucia di Lammermoor” and
“Dido and Aeneas.” This was a more
radical endeavor—less pint-sized grand
opera than an appropriation of the genre
for theatre of the black-box type.
Schlosberg has edited and arranged
“Lucia” as a one-act, ninety-minute piece,
employing six soloists and a quintet of clarinet, cello, piano, guitar, and percussion. In
Proske’s conception, the heroine is mad
from the outset, the story unfolding as an
extended hallucination in a hospital ward.
Schlosberg’s scoring—whistling tones of
bowed vibraphone and cymbals, the harplike sound of strummed piano strings, the
slide of a shot glass on an electric guitar—
put a modernist frame around the action,
although the substance of Donizetti’s score
came through. Jamilyn Manning-White
was an agile, fiery Lucia.
Heard’s staging of “Dido” was lighter
and daffier in tone, despite the tragic ending. A cocktail party degenerates into surreal anarchy, with witches prancing about
and the lovers copulating in a bathtub.
Carla Jablonski’s poised account of Dido
was a bit too detached, but the dynamic
young baritone John Taylor Ward—portraying Aeneas, a witch, and several subsidiary characters—threw himself into
the proceedings with stylish abandon.
Ashworth, leading from his violin, elicited a performance that was elegant, boisterous, and melancholy by turns. And the
scale of the show felt exactly right; after
all, “Dido” seems to have had its première
not at an opera house but at a girls’ boarding school in London.
he crushing greatness of Bach’s
T two extant Passion settings, which in-
variably make multiple appearances in the
weeks before Easter, has often discouraged
latter-day composers from treading the
same ground. One who dared was the Swiss
master Frank Martin, whose oratorio “Golgotha” had its première in 1949. The work
has received several fine recordings, notably a version on Harmonia Mundi, but
until this year it had had only one live performance in New York. At Trinity Wall
Street recently, the New Amsterdam Singers, an amateur chorus under the direction
of Clara Longstreth, presented an intrepid
revival of “Golgotha,” with the baritone
Tyler Duncan impeccable in the role of
Jesus. Outwardly austere, seething with
inner drama, this is the only modern Passion that breathes the same air as Bach’s,
and its neglect defies comprehension. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
87
THE CURRENT CINEMA
DUELS AND RULES
“Batman v Superman” and “Francofonia.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
ere you one of those lucky view-
W ers who were watching TV, in
1987, when “The Jetsons Meet the
Flintstones” aired? Did it give you a
craving for crossovers so ravenous that
not even “Alien vs. Predator” (2004)
could sate it? Well, your time has come.
“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is here. You could argue that the
Avengers movies beat it to the punch;
to the purist, however, those are not so
much authentic crossovers as kindly
support groups, where people with a
wide range of personality disorders can
meet under the Marvel banner and exchange thumps. Batman and Superman, on the other hand, are ideally
matched: numbly heroic, bulging in all
the right places, and bent on busting
crime in the permanent hope that nobody will notice how dull they are. Unless you count the time when they went
to the same dry cleaner to get soup stains
out of their capes, they have never been
introduced. Until now.
Superman is played, as in “Man of
Steel” (2013), by Henry Cavill, whereas
Ben Affleck is a novice in the part of
Batman. A curious choice, especially
in the light of “Hollywoodland” (2006),
88
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
where he excelled in the role of George
Reeves, who starred as Superman on
TV in the early nineteen-fifties, loathed
the experience, and died of a gunshot
to the head. It was hardly a movie to
brighten one’s faith in comic books.
Since then, Affleck has become a director of steady and satisfying thrillers, including “The Town” and “Argo,”
so why risk this backward step into
the realm of beefcake? Maybe he relished the gleam of the supporting
cast—Holly Hunter, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, and Kevin Costner,
with Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Jesse
Eisenberg as a jittery Lex Luthor,
and Jeremy Irons taking over from
Michael Caine as Alfred, the venerable butler-cum-weapons designer to
Bruce Wayne.
It’s quite a lineup, and not one of
them goes unwasted. All are sacrificed
to the plot—the usual farrago of childhood trauma, lumps of kryptonite, and
panic in the streets—or, rather, to the
very loud noises that the plot creates.
The director is Zack Snyder, who
was responsible for “300” (2006),
“Watchmen” (2009), “Man of Steel,”
and other Chekhovian chamber pieces,
and whom I suspect of having worked
for NutriBullet before he joined the
movie business. When in doubt, he simply slings another ingredient into the
mix, be it an irradiated monster, an explosion on government premises, or the
sharp smack of masonry on skull. Then,
there’s the music. Hans Zimmer, seldom the most placid of composers, is
joined on this occasion by Junkie XL,
and we should give thanks for their
combined efforts, which render large
portions of the dialogue, by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer, blessedly inaudible. The drawling Irons does, now
and then, signal his fatigue at the whole
enterprise (“Even you’ve got too old
to die young,” Alfred says to his master), and there is one other good line,
but it’s stolen from Cole Porter, so that
doesn’t count.
When fans flock to this movie, it
will be not for Batman or Superman
alone but for the sake of the preposition in the title. To be blunt: how big
is that “v”? You can’t accuse Snyder of
tamping it down; his chief promoter is
Luthor, who calls it “the greatest gladiatorial contest in the history of the
world,” and suggests a number of suitable tags—blue vs. black, dark vs. light,
Coke vs. Pepsi, and so on. In the event,
the bout is like any other slugfest, with
Batman warned by the referee for using
nasty green krypto-gas in the fourth
round, and his opponent hitting back
strongly in the ninth. The winner, on
points, is Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot),
who crashes the party and leaves them
both dumbfounded, not least because
she has the wit, and the wherewithal,
to confront evil while wearing a conical bustier. And that is that, except that
the film, determined to hit the twoand-a-half-hour mark, has fifteen more
minutes to fill. These are jammed with
peekaboo teasers for sequels, since DC
comics, like Marvel, require that movies do their own marketing. The Dawn
of Justice may be over, but the lunchtime of justice is still to come, and after
that the cocktail hour of revenge. I can’t
wait.
f you really want Batman and Su-
I perman to settle their differences,
park them in front of the new Alexander Sokurov film, “Francofonia,” and
invite them to hammer out the role of
ILLUSTRATION BY DIEGO PATIÑO
historiography in modern Russian cinema. That’ll shut them up.
It’s a challenge to pin down where
and when “Francofonia” is set, since
time and space, for Sokurov, are there
to be outwitted as much as honored.
At the start, we hear an orchestra tuning up, the plaint of seagulls, and the
crackle of a ship-to-shore conversation
with the captain of a container vessel.
Only then are we granted something
to look at: a photograph of the aged
Tolstoy, and a nameless voice that asks,
as if unnerved, “Why is he staring at
me like that?” What matters at this
point, as Sokurov admirers can confirm, is to hold your nerve, and to trust
that all these strands will be threaded
into the weave of a larger design.
Much of the movie is spent in Paris—
specifically, at the Louvre. Sokurov’s
“Russian Ark” (2002) was a magniloquent tribute to the Hermitage, in St.
Petersburg, and, to judge by the latest
film, his fascination with our need to
build strongholds of art, and to weatherproof them against the storms of revolution and conflict, remains undimmed.
“Where would we be without museums?”
the voice inquires. (It is Sokurov himself speaking, on our behalf.) His camera stops to gaze at portraits, peering
close enough to inspect cracks in the
pigment, while actors playing Marianne
(the traditional figurehead of France)
and Napoleon stroll through the empty
galleries. “C’est moi,” Bonaparte declares,
beside the vast portrayal of his coronation. Then comes the Mona Lisa. “C’est
moi,” he says again. There are jokes in
Sokurov, but they tend to be lugubrious, muffled in the drapery of the past.
In truth, I’m not convinced that
Sokurov is at his best among wellknown figures. He is certainly drawn
to them: “Moloch” (1999) is about Hitler and Goebbels, “Telets” (2001) is
about Lenin, and “The Sun” (2005)
is about Emperor Hirohito. But there
is modesty and slyness in Sokurov, as
well as a taste for the broad sweep of
history, and this is where “Francofonia” scores, guiding us into the shadowy alcoves that house the barely
remembered. We are introduced, for
instance, to Jacques Jaujard, the director of French museums, including the
Louvre, under Nazi rule, and Count
Franz Wolff Metternich, the highranking German officer who oversaw
the preservation of artifacts and buildings in Occupied France. Both men
fought in the First World War. Neither was at ease in the Second.
You would expect Sokurov to assemble the facts about these men into
a documentary. Instead, he embarks
on a dramatic reconstruction of their
meeting, asking, “Were we to imagine
how this took place, might it have
been like this?” From here on, they are
played by actors—the Frenchman by
Louis-Do de Lencquesaing and the
German by Benjamin Utzerath. To
complicate things, their scenes look
hazy and speckled, like clips of archival footage. In a similar vein, a panoramic shot of the Louvre as it exists
today, with I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid
standing proud in the courtyard, is
made to resemble a hand-tinted vintage postcard, feathery at the edges.
Old and new are interlaced, and the
result comes as close as movies can to
the books of W. G. Sebald, who slipped
like a spy across the borders between
fiction, illustration, the essay form, and
mourning for the lost.
Visual mutation is a habit with
Sokurov. In the ominously beautiful
“Mother and Son” (1997), the images of
rural Russia stretched and yawned, as
if the director, impatient with the solid
shapes on which regular cinema relies,
felt compelled to morph them to his
purpose. “Francofonia” is less extreme,
but it still refuses to settle into a period
or a style. Occasionally, we revert to the
ship that we heard from at the outset,
which is bearing a cargo of museum
treasures and foundering in savage seas.
“The connection is gone again,” someone says, as the screen disintegrates into
pixels. The symbolism of this—be careful, or culture will fall overboard!—is
top-heavy with solemnity, and, when I
first saw the movie, at a festival, it wavered on the brink of the precious. That
changed on a second viewing. Most of
“Francofonia” now seems tender, stirring, and imperilled, from the polite and
awkward pact between Jaujard and Wolff
Metternich, who in a happier world
would have been friends, to the masterpieces that were removed from the
Louvre before the Germans arrived, and
stored in country houses. We see Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (another vessel in trouble) stacked casually
against a cellar wall, and the Winged
Victory of Samothrace being hoisted
into the air. Thousands of years after it
was carved, it flies at last. 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
89
CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST
Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists,
and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Michael Crawford, must be received by
Sunday, April 3rd. The finalists in the March 21st contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the
finalists in this week’s contest, in the April 18th issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon.
Any resident of the United States, Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland
age eighteen or over can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.
THIS WEEK’S CONTEST
“
”
..........................................................................................................................
THE FINALISTS
THE WINNING CAPTION
“I ain’t going back to timeout!”
Glenn Scheyd, Pembroke Pines, Fla.
“No, you grow up.”
Steven Lipoff, Conshohocken, Pa.
“Head for the carrousel! It’s our only chance!”
Norm Tabler, Indianapolis, Ind.
“We get it. You’re straight.”
Adam Agins, New York City