The New Yorker-20180423.Pdf

TRAVEL & FßD ISSUE

APRIL 23, 2018

7 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

25 THE TALK OF THE TOWN George Packer on Trump and Syria; super-car reviewer; performing-arts visas; Dolce & Gabbana; struggling playwrights.

OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS Ian Frazier 32 The Maraschino Mogul Red bees, sticky cherries, and an odd smell.

SHOUTS & MURMURS Ann Beattie 39 Tasting Notes for a Teetotalling President

A CRITIC AT LARGE Dan Chiasson 40 Anybody There? The making of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

A REPORTER AT LARGE Nick Paumgarten 44 Water and the Wall A trip along the Rio Grande.

ANNALS OF GASTRONOMY Burkhard Bilger 56 Bean Freaks The world of posh pulses.

FICTION Yiyun Li 66 “A Flawless Silence”

THE CRITICS POP MUSIC Carrie Battan 74 Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy.”

BOOKS 77 Brieﬂy Noted Adam Gopnik 78 Edward Lear’s bifurcated life.

ON TELEVISION Emily Nussbaum 84 The trouble with the “Roseanne” reboot.

THE THEATRE Hilton Als 86 “Carousel.”

POEMS Jennifer Chang 62 “We Found the Body of a Young Deer Once” Andrew Grace 70 “Not a Mile”

COVER David Hockney “The Road”

DRAWINGS Maddie Dai, P. C. Vey, Barbara Smaller, Seth Fleishman, Mitra Farmand, Edward Steed, Roz Chast, Liana Finck, John O’Brien, Emily Flake, David Sipress, Harry Bliss, William Haefeli, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Tom Cheney, Tom Toro, Amy Hwang, Drew Dernavich, Sophia Wiedeman SPOTS Pablo Amargo

CONTRIBUTORS

Nick Paumgarten (The Talk of the Town, Burkhard Bilger (“Bean Freaks,” p. 56) p. 26; “Water and the Wall,” p. 44) has been has been a staf writer since 2001. writing for the magazine since 2000. Yiyun Li (Fiction, p. 66) is the author Ann Beattie (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 39), of several books, including, most re- a contributor to The New Yorker since cently, “Dear Friend, from My Life I 1974, is the recipient of a PEN/Mala- Write to You in Your Life.” mud Award for excellence in short ﬁc- tion. “The Accomplished Guest” is her Dan Chiasson (“Anybody There?,” p. 40) latest story collection. teaches English at Wellesley College and has contributed to the magazine David Hockney (Cover), a painter based in since 2007. “Bicentennial” is his latest England and California, recently had a book of poems. career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exhibitions of his work Naomi Fry (The Talk of the Town, are currently on view in New York City, p. 30) became a staf writer in 2018. Los Angeles, and Venice, California. She also writes about pop culture for newyorker.com. Carrie Battan (Pop Music, p. 74) began contributing to the magazine in 2015, Ian Frazier (“The Maraschino Mogul,” and became a staf writer in 2018. p. 32) most recently published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” and George Packer (Comment, p. 25), a staf is working on a book about the Bronx. writer, is the author of “The Unwind- ing” and seven other books. Jennifer Chang (Poem, p. 62) teaches at George Washington University. Her Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 84), second poetry collection, “Some Say the magazine’s television critic, won the Lark,” won the 2018 William Car- the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. los Williams Award.

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GUNS IN THE HANDS OF KIDS reserve. In Drum’s ranch house, the adolescent gun users are learning how rifles up on the wall—lovely old Win- to use their tools responsibly, and that There was a strange dissonance be- chester lever-actions and such—were education is something that should be tween Sharif Hamza’s photographs of for history, not for shooting. Valuable, supported. teen-agers with guns and Dana Good- of course, if somebody stole them. But K. A. Robinson year’s accompanying article (Portfo- his really good rifles and shotguns were Montclair, N.J. lio, March 26th). Goodyear mentions well hidden and locked up. A lot of gun-related deaths and injuries, but what’s for sale out front in the gun stores I suppose the goal of Hamza’s photos mostly focusses on a “parallel realm, is tricked-out trash. I prefer archery. was to humanize gun owners and to where guns signify . . . safety, disci- Gary Snyder show us how “normal” gun ownership pline, and trust.” Hamza’s pictures, by Nevada City, Calif. is for many people. So what? We al- contrast, were outright frightening. ready know that not all gun owners are We can talk about target shooting or The majority of Americans both re- big-bellied, bearded yahoos. We have trap and skeet, but guns have only one spect a person’s passion for firearms heard plenty of stories about ladies tot- purpose, which is to kill. These armed and favor stricter gun laws, in order to ing pistols in specially made purses, children, regardless of the occasional prevent guns from being obtained by and about mothers who are gun own- smile, look menacing. There is sim- mentally unstable individuals who kill ers. We certainly don’t need remind- ply no way to take benign photos of innocent citizens. The idea that the left ing that gun owners can be young. An armed people. wants to take away someone’s Second innocent or appealing face does not Looking at the picture of Cheyenne Amendment rights is propaganda from dispel the reality that guns kill. Ham- Dalton, a sixteen-year-old from Mis- the National Rifle Association. Should za’s young figures did not convince me souri, whose mother is concerned about semiautomatic weapons designed for that a despicable activity is acceptable— self-defense, I could not help think- purposes of war be banned? As a non- only that appearances can be deceiv- ing of a New Yorker cartoon by Mat- gun-owning person, I say yes. How- ing. What a waste of ten pages. Even thew Difee, from 2011, in which a gun ever, each of us deserves the right to worse, these photos served as an ad- salesman says, “O.K., but say that you enjoy our passions. If children wish to vertisement for more gun ownership. have up to six hundred intruders per use AR-15s in sanctioned competitions, Laura Inman minute.” then I can support that choice, pro- 1Rye, N.Y. Peter Hantos vided that there are strict registration Los Angeles, Calif. and training requirements. But victims DEFINITIONS OF BEAUTY of gun violence deserved to live their There are plenty of people out beyond lives without being killed as if they I am disappointed by Anthony Lane’s the suburbs who are active and con- were in the midst of war. glib criticism of my character’s appear- scious gun owners. Many of them are Larry Kwiatkowski ance in the film “Gemini” (The Cur- appalled by what has happened with Bellingham, Wash. rent Cinema, April 2nd). To deem un- guns—the loss of training, practice, and flattering the “big jeans” and “baggy discipline in gun handling; the igno- When I lived in Manhattan, I attended gray top” I wear throughout the film is rance and apathy of gun dealers and a program sponsored by the N.R.A. to suggest a preference for heroines in police. The people I know are ranch- called Women On Target. After work, more tight-fitting clothes. And to even ers, farmers, or aficionados. They are a group of women would assemble in mention my “haircut from hell” is to not interested in military-type weap- a basement firing range on the West miss the point of my performance en- ons like the AR-15, because they’re not Side to practice responsible gun use tirely. We need to see female charac- accurate, they’re noisy, and there’s no and safety. I learned that guns are tools, ters be powerful and beautiful in ways use for them. Skeet shooting requires and that, like all tools, they are de- that don’t rely on outdated represen- well-made, balanced, and accurate shot- signed for a specific purpose. It is dis- tations of women. guns. They are an enthusiasm all their ingenuous for the N.R.A. to promote Lola Kirke own. Hunters want accuracy and reli- itself as an organization that teaches Los Angeles, Calif. ability in their long guns. After my gun safety, even as it refuses to ac- friend the late rancher Drummond knowledge the need for gun reform in • Hadley (the author of a fine book of order to promote true safety. It was Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, cowboy poems) talked to experts at a also exploitative for The New Yorker to address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited rifle company about the accuracy of a use photographs of kids with guns to for length and clarity, and may be published in new .270, they sent him one with a sidestep the fractious topic of the ep- any medium. We regret that owing to the volume super-accurate barrel that they kept in idemic of gun violence. These trained, of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 5 FLATTS VILLAGE FLATTS

YOU MAY NEVER MAKE IT BACK HOME THE SAME. APRIL 18 – 24, 2018 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Johannes Schenk’s twelve viol sonatas, by turns sprightly and solemn, and collectively called “Le Nymphe di Rheno,” were a swan song, in 1702, for the now archaic ancestors of the modern violin. Shirley Hunt, Wen Yang, and Sarah Cunningham, of New York Baroque Incorporated (above), bring the instruments back to life with one of the Schenk sonatas. They also perform works by Bach and Couperin, and a ifteenth-century paean to smoking, on April 24 at the Morgan Library, perhaps Manhattan’s closest approximation to the nymphs’ Rhineland court.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SAMANTHA CASOLARI Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: Danbi Um The Korean violinist and member of the CMS CLASSICAL MUSIC young-artist program gives an intimate recital in the Rose Studio, accompanied by Orion Weiss. 1 The unfashionably late-Romantic program, cov- Konzerthausorchester Berlin, leads an evening ering music by Korngold, Strauss, and the great OPERA of Teutonic masterworks, anchored by Anton virtuoso Fritz Kreisler, whose famously honeyed Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor. Bruck- tone Um perhaps aspires to emulate, suggests a Metropolitan Opera ner died before completing the inal section, but performer who knows what she likes and isn’t The title role of Puccini’s “Tosca” is an allur- three powerful movements make up a work of afraid to play it. April 19 at 7:30. (212-875-5788.) ing, larger-than-life diva who delivers one of the transportive drama. The second half of the pro- most beloved arias in the Italian repertoire, so gram will feature the Austrian pianist Till Fell- Ecstatic Music Festival it was especially lummoxing when Anna Ne- ner in Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 22 Julianna Barwick, a beguiling singer and com- trebko, one of opera’s undeniable superstars, in E-Flat Major. April 19, April 21, and April poser whose digitally looped and layered voice can dismissed the idea of ever singing it. That was 24 at 7:30. (David Gefen Hall. 212-875-5656.) soothe one minute and soar the next, performs in 2010; now she is making her role début as alone and in collaboration with ModernMedieval, the Roman prima donna in David McVicar’s Ensemble Échappé a new vocal trio formed by Jacqueline Horner- handsome production, which opened earlier This impressive young sinfonietta ofers an im- Kwiatek, formerly of Anonymous 4, and Martha this season. Marcelo Álvarez and Michael Volle posing selection of new and recent works, in- Cluver and Eliza Bagg, members of Roomful of are her able co-stars; Bertrand de Billy con- cluding the irst performance of Jonathan Dawe’s Teeth. The program also includes new pieces by ducts. April 21 at 8. • Bartlett Sher’s production “Astounding Angels,” featuring the clarinettist Caroline Shaw and Caleb Burhans. April 19 at 7:30. of Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette,” revived this Vasko Dukovski, and the New York première of (Merkin Concert Hall. merkinhall.org.) week, doesn’t exactly lend Shakespeare’s great Michael Hersch’s Violin Concerto, with one of love story new impact, but it brings a satisfying the composer’s most compelling interpreters, “Composer Portrait”: Frederic Rzewski simulacrum of Verona to life. Ailyn Pérez and Miranda Cuckson, as the soloist. Works by Phil Rzewski is associated most closely with the piano, Bryan Hymel, two artists who sing with pas- Taylor and Nina C. Young complete the pro- his instrument of choice, for which he has crafted sionate intensity, play the lovers. Plácido Do- gram. April 20 at 8. (St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lex- a formidable canon sufused with personality and mingo conducts. April 23 at 7:30. • Also playing: ington Ave. ensemble-echappe.com.) conscience. How refreshing, then, to have this At seventy-seven, Domingo continues to defy opportunity to hear the excellent Del Sol Quar- conventional wisdom—and, seemingly, time it- MetLiveArts: “TENET” tet perform the string quartet that Rzewski wrote self—as he takes on another Verdi baritone role, The reined early-music vocal group joins in 1955, at the age of seventeen, alongside a new his eleventh in nine years, in this season’s re- forces with Metropolis Ensemble, a versatile, piece, “Words,” commissioned by the ensemble vival of “Luisa Miller,” a bucolic tragedy based eclectic chamber orchestra. The program—a re- and Miller Theatre and completed by the com- on Schiller’s play “Love and Intrigue.” The Met sponse to the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibi- poser just before his eightieth birthday. April 19 lanks him with two superlative artists, Sonya tion “Visitors to Versailles (1682-1789)”—sets at 8. (2960 Broadway. millertheatre.com.) Yoncheva and Piotr Beczala; de Billy. (Luca “Les Plaisirs de Versailles,” a seventeenth-cen- Salsi replaces Domingo on April 18). April 18 tury divertissement by Charpentier, originally Julia Bullock at 7:30 and April 21 at 12. • “Cendrillon,” Mas- presented in the apartments of King Louis XIV, With an intrepid artistic spirit and a voice of senet’s often enchanting version of the Cinder- against world premières of two pieces also in- wide-ranging hues, the soprano explores the ella story, is only now getting its irst Met per- spired by the royal palace: a cello concerto by contributions of women—speciically, black formances. The imaginative director Laurent Timo Andres, featuring Inbal Segev as the so- women—to art music, jazz, and the blues. Sam- Pelly works with a irst-rate cast, including loist, and a piece for period and modern instru- uel Barber’s evocative “Hermit Songs,” orig- Joyce DiDonato, Alice Coote, Kathleen Kim, ments by Caroline Shaw. April 21 at 7. (Grace inally performed by Leontyne Price, shares a and Stephanie Blythe; de Billy. April 20 at 8 Rainey Rogers Auditorium. metmuseum.org.) program with pieces by Billie Holiday and Nina and April 24 at 7:30. (Metropolitan Opera House. Simone (“Four Women”); John Arida accompa- 212-362-6000.) Pacific Symphony nies on piano. April 20 at 7:30. (Weill Recital Hall. In bringing his admirable Orange County or- 212-247-7800.) Juilliard Opera: “Hippolyte et Aricie” chestra, plus the Paciic Chorale and a clutch Ballet is never far from French opera, and for of soloists, to Carnegie Hall under the auspices Lawrence Brownlee at Zankel Hall this production of Rameau’s elegant tragédie of Philip Glass’s season-long residency, the “Cycles of My Being,” an eagerly anticipated new en musique the director Stephen Wadsworth conductor Carl St. Clair evokes a pillar of that set of songs, written by Tyshawn Sorey for this and the choreographer Zack Winokur have in- composer’s creative journey: his connection expressive tenor, explores “the realities of life as tegrated modern dance into the mythic tale of to the great Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar. a black man in America.” Following a nationwide Phaedra’s illicit love for her stepson. Stephen Opening with a portion of “Passages,” on which tour, it receives its New York première from an Stubbs conducts the school’s period-instrument Glass and Shankar collaborated, the program in- all African-American ensemble, conducted by ensemble, Juilliard415. April 19 at 7:30 and April cludes Shankar’s Sitar Concerto No. 3, with his the composer. That’s draw enough, but Brown- 21 at 2. (Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Juilliard School. daughter Anoushka Shankar as the soloist, and lee and his accompanist Myra Huang also ofer events.juilliard.edu.) Glass’s “The Passion of Ramakrishna,” a grandly the week’s second chance to hear Schumann’s sweeping 2006 choral work that recounts the “Dichterliebe,” in what will doubtless be an an- Manhattan School of Music Opera saga of the eponymous nineteenth-century other accomplished performance. April 24 at 7:30. Theatre: “La Cenerentola” Hindu mystic. April 21 at 8. (212-247-7800.) (212-247-7800.) The conservatory follows up its production of 1 Rimsky-Korsakov’s moody fairy tale “The Snow New York Festival of Song at 30 Maiden” with Rossini’s bright and lively telling RECITALS Established in 1988 by the pianists and curators of Cinderella. Jay Lesenger directs, and Gary Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, this inimita- Thor Wedow conducts. April 20 at 7:30, April Mark Padmore ble concert series has celebrated song in all its 21 at 2:30 and 7:30, and April 22 at 2:30. (Gerald In 1840, when he was twenty-nine, Robert many forms—lieder and pop, hymns and show W. Lynch Theatre, John Jay College, 524 W. 59th Schumann embarked on his Liederjahr. By the tunes—with sly thematic programs that tease St. msmnyc.edu.) time it was over, he had written more than a hun- out dormant connections. In the process, the 1 dred songs, including his famous “Dichterliebe” festival has deployed (and often discovered) and the irst “Liederkreis,” both set to lyrics by many of the city’s inest voices. Eight promi- ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES Heine. Six Brahms settings of works by the same nent alumni, including Lauren Worsham, Paul poet round out a performance by Padmore, one of Appleby, William Sharp, and Julia Bullock, cap New York Philharmonic the genre’s hallowed interpreters, and his long- of a week of song with a celebration of the fes- Christopher Eschenbach, who next year will time accompanist, Paul Lewis. April 19 at 7:30. tival’s anniversary. April 24 at 8. (Merkin Concert return to his native Germany to conduct the (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788.) Hall. merkinhall.org.)

8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 MOVIES

Sandrine Bonnaire and Eriq Ebouaney play a couple in Paris whose relationship is threatened by legal obstacles in “A Season in France.”

World Wars of Abbas’s family depend on a court de- ened by the hands-on violence concealed cision about their application for asylum. in France’s administrative indiference. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s films explore Meanwhile, the family is shunted from Haroun’s first feature, “Bye Bye Af- the politics of migration. apartment to apartment. When the ap- rica,” from 1999, is another story of a sin- The Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh peal is rejected, Abbas hopes to remain gle father and his two children. Here, Haroun is the subject of a welcome ret- in France nonetheless, but his efort puts Haroun plays a character with his name. rospective at BAM, April 20-25. It features Carole at serious legal risk. Mahamat-Saleh, a filmmaker living in the U.S. première of his new film, “A “A Season in France” is a sort of ghost France, has been away from his home Season in France,” in which Haroun, who story—it’s haunted by the phantom of town of N’Djamena for ten years. After has been living in France since 1982, bit- Madeleine (Sandra Nkake), whose virtual his mother dies, he returns home, alone, terly confronts the shame and the scandal presence weighs on Abbas’s conscience and intends to make a film there. Maha- of that country’s xenophobic rejection of and on his relationship with Carole. But, mat-Saleh shoots documentary footage— recent African and Asian migrants. above all, Haroun looks keenly at the mi- including a study of the decline of Chad’s “A Season in France” is the story of grants’ practical struggles: Étienne’s hy- film industry, featuring a close look at the Abbas (Eriq Ebouaney), a refugee from giene at a communal bathhouse and his decaying movie palaces of his youth and the Central African Republic who, with job as a security guard; Asma and Yacine’s at the economic and political threats to his two young children, Asma (Aalayna awareness of the dangers that they left the African cinema. He also dramatizes, Lys) and Yacine (Ibrahim Burama Dar- behind in Africa and of the bureaucratic with anguish, the aftermath of his per- boe), has fled a conflict in which his wife, sword of Damocles that’s hanging over sonal relationship with an actress who Madeleine, was killed. Abbas, a former them. The movie’s central sequence— lives there. Mahamat-Saleh launches a teacher, lives in Paris and works at a Carole’s birthday party, in her apartment, public campaign for the production of wholesale produce market. He’s in a re- with Abbas and his children—is a long the movie he wants to make, called “Bye lationship with a co-worker named Ca- and complex scene filmed in a matched Bye Africa”—and his casting tapes pro- role (Sandrine Bonnaire), an immigrant pair of extended static takes. It’s a cheer- vide a crucial critique of his own methods, from Poland; his colleague from home, ful, familial moment realized as a sort of and of his divided sensibility, as he strug- Étienne (Bibi Tanga), a former professor theatre of ordinariness that exalts the gles to reconcile his French artistic edu- who fled with them, is a regular presence simple pleasures of a life in safety as an cation with his African identity.

COURTESY UNIFRANCE COURTESY in the household. The stability and safety elusive paradise, one that’s brutally threat- —Richard Brody

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 9 1 MOVIES NOW PLAYING over the detailed observations and nuanced in- they can, amid the sounds of silence. In an isolated sights of Wiazemsky’s book in favor of parodies farmhouse, they walk barefoot along soft paths Blockers of Godard’s earlier work, replacing its vast sub- and communicate in sign language. (Simmonds, The simple setup of this teen-centric comedy, distance, ierce originality, and unsparing intimacy a determined presence onscreen, is deaf; you can rected by Kay Cannon, yields clever and hearty with empty stylistic winks. He also eliminates feel the other actors taking their cues from her.) complications. Three suburban girls—friends most of the fascinating, ambitious activities that Dialogue is sparse, although Lee and his son can since irst grade, now high-school seniors—make nourished the couple’s romance and their art (such talk if drowned out by a thundering waterfall. The a pact to lose their virginity on prom night; their as meetings with John Lennon and Paul McCart- movie is curt and crisp, easily skirting the gaps in parents get wind of the scheme and crash the ney), and reduces his world-historical protago- its plot, and the set pieces are laid out at careful party to thwart it. The conident Julie (Kathryn nists to igments of his own thin imagination. In intervals; one sequence, packed with fear and re- Newton) has a long-term boyfriend (Graham French.—R.B. (In limited release.) sourcefulness, is set in a corn silo. Krasinski has Phillips), the adventuresome Kayla (Geraldine not really made a horror ilm; rather, he has taken Viswanathan) chooses a candidate (Miles Rob- Jeannette the warmest of American themes—the solace of bins) on a whim, and Sam (Gideon Adlon) is at- Bruno Dumont depicts the childhood of Joan of family and home—and chilled it with suspense. tracted to another girl (Ramona Young) but hasn’t Arc—her early days of charity and despair in a Take popcorn if you must, but crunch it at your come out, and goes to the prom with a boy (Jimmy war-ravaged region, her religious calling, and her peril.—A.L. (4/16/18) (In wide release.) Bellinger). A boatload of parents and guardians decision to lead the French into battle against the get pulled into the action, but the principal trio is English occupiers—as a starkly inventive, ecstat- Ready Player One Julie’s mother (Leslie Mann), Kayla’s father (John ically energetic rock opera, ilmed on location in Steven Spielberg goes back to the future, forward Cena), and Sam’s father (Ike Barinholtz), who bear raw and rustic landscapes. At the age of eight, to the past, and in any other direction that he likes. their own emotional baggage and give the movie Joan—called Jeannette (played by Lise Leplat The year is 2045, and the setting is a semi-slum in its comedic energy. There’s plenty of rowdy sex- Prudhomme)—summons a nun named Gervaise Columbus, Ohio, where Wade Watts (Tye Sher- ual humor (Cena’s athletic-coach character is the (played by the identical twins Aline and Elise idan), like everybody else, devotes as much time butt of much of it) that plays like counterpoint to Charles) to discuss faith and justice; their ex- as possible to life in the Oasis. This is an online the girls’ exuberant, earnest striving toward ma- tended disputations are punctuated by acrobat- world, created by a guru named Halliday (Mark turity. The absurdity of the parents’ intervention ics and guitar-fuelled hair-whipping. Jeannette Rylance), who has since died, though he still ex- gets symbolic weight from the deftly destructive is visited by Sts. Catherine, Margaret, and Mi- ists in digital form. The Oasis is a paradise of pop physical comedy that they have to endure. With chael, who appear to her suspended in glowing culture, littered with ofcuts of old movies, com- Gary Cole and Gina Gershon, as randy neigh- sunlight above a sparkling stream and rouse her puter games, and TV shows. Most of them hail bors.—Richard Brody (In wide release.) to action. Then, the teen-age Joan (Jeanne Voi- from the later nineteen-seventies and eighties— sin) prepares to run away from home and save the period, that is, in which Spielberg established Chappaquiddick France. The characters, ilmed with a whirling his cultural dominance. Once in the virtual zone, A perfunctory, only mildly absorbing historical and gyrating camera, sing and dance to the music Wade enrolls in a road race and other challenges drama, about the 1969 incident in which Senator of Igorrr, which ranges from power ballads to with a view to winning a powerful prize: control Edward Kennedy (played by Jason Clarke) left a hip-hop, in choreography by Philippe Decoulé of the Oasis itself. He is joined in his quest by party with his late brother Robert’s former staf that exalts the awkward grace of daily gestures. friendly rivals, such as Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), member Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara) and Dumont ilms Joan’s spiritual conlicts and con- and corporate foes, like Nolan Sorrento (Ben drove his car of a bridge, resulting in her death. frontations with playful exuberance but avoids Mendelsohn at his meanest), all of them in the The drama, written by Taylor Allen and Andrew frivolity; the ardent actors infuse Joan’s spirit guise of avatars. The movie repeatedly astounds, Logan and directed by John Curran, details what of revolt with the eternal passions of youth. In as you would expect from Spielberg; more sur- Kennedy did that night and how he handled the French.—R.B. (In limited release.) prising, and less welcome, is the mildness of its inevitable legal and public-relations problems in emotional punch.—A.L. (4/9/18) (In wide release.) the week that followed. The answer: badly. The Lean on Pete story is centered on the conlict between Ken- In his previous ilm, “45 Years” (2015), the British The Rider nedy’s conscience—embodied and emboldened director Andrew Haigh explored the later stages of In Chloé Zhao’s fusion of iction and documen- by his cousin Joe Gargan (Ed Helms)—and his a marriage. Now, shifting from rural England to tary, the real-life cowboy Brady Jandreau plays a self-interest, represented and advanced by the Oregon but sustaining the air of sorrow, he turns cowboy named Brady Blackburn, who, like Jan- family patriarch, Joe Kennedy (Bruce Dern). Ail- to a young man on the brink of adulthood. Char- dreau, has sufered a traumatic head injury in a ing and disabled but still ferocious, Joe puts Ted in ley Thompson (Charlie Plummer), who lacks a rodeo. With a fractured skull and unabated sei- the hands of the family’s high-powered ixers, in- mother and lives with his feckless father (Travis zures, Brady—who seems to be about twenty years cluding Robert McNamara (Clancy Brown), who Fimmel), is only in his mid-teens, yet his lean and old—isn’t supposed to ride again. But his sense of pull mighty strings to keep him out of jail and in solemn features and his skinny frame suggest that identity is closely bound up with his locally cel- the Senate, even as the Senator himself vacillates he has already seen and sufered enough. In the ebrated way with horses, and he needs to igure and blunders. But the sketches of Kennedy-fam- wake of a crisis, he moves out and lees, linking out what to do with his time and, for that matter, ily tensions and loyalties are thin and simplistic; up with a grumpy horse trainer named Del (Steve with the rest of his life. Brady lives with his father, the action rushes by with little insight or con- Buscemi), who needs a helper. The sole source Wayne (played by Jandreau’s father, Tim), a horse text.—R.B. (In wide release.) of joy in Charley’s life is Lean on Pete (Pete for trader, and his ifteen-year-old sister, Lilly (Jan- short), one of Del’s horses, who is nearing the dreau’s sister Lilly), who’s developmentally dis- Godard Mon Amour end of his racing days, and the movie, marked by abled, and whose remarks and actions are graceful Even if this drama, directed by Michel Hazana- a helpless sense of drift, measures the deepening and imaginative. Brady takes a frustrating job at vicius, weren’t based on the true story of the re- bond between the horse and the kid. Haigh is no a local supermarket, but his rodeo-riding friends lationship between the ilmmaker Jean-Luc God- sentimentalist, and happy endings, you soon re- push him to return to competition; meanwhile, he ard and the actress Anne Wiazemsky, in 1967 and alize, will be in short supply. Buscemi seems mis- spends time at a rehab center with a gravely dis- 1968, but were merely the story of a pair of ic- placed in this environment, as does Chloë Sevi- abled friend from the rodeo circuit, Lane Scott tional artists in political and romantic conlict, gny, in the role of a jockey, but Plummer’s grave (playing himself). Those scenes, of Brady coaching it would sink under the weight of its witless vul- presence holds the story tight.—Anthony Lane (Re- Lane, are deeply moving; others, of Brady train- garity. Louis Garrel stars as Godard, who took an viewed in our issue of 4/9/18.) (In limited release.) ing horses with a rare (if undiscussed) aptitude, intense interest in left-wing ideologies and their are exhilarating; the documentary core of the ilm cinematic implications and, at thirty-seven, was A Quiet Place has an emotional authenticity that the dramatic active in the Events of May, 1968, taking a lead- Behind John Krasinski’s ilm lies a pleasingly sequences rarely match.—R.B. (In limited release.) ing role in shutting down the Cannes Film Festi- plain idea. The world has been ravaged by sight- val. Stacy Martin plays the twenty-year-old Wi- less monsters, whose enormous ears allow them to Where Is Kyra? azemsky (on whose memoir the movie is based) pick up the faintest noise—human speech, say— Unemployed and looking for work, Kyra (Mi- as she attempts to join Godard in his working life and attack its source. Thus it is that Lee Abbott chelle Pfeifer) lives with her elderly and ail- but inds herself shunted aside by his newfound (Krasinski), his wife, Evelyn (Emily Blunt), and ing mother, Ruth (Suzanne Shepherd), in a dark political passions and wounded by his tempera- their children, Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and apartment in a rumpled Brooklyn neighborhood. mental, egotistical outbursts. Hazanavicius skips Marcus (Noah Jupe), pursue their lives, as best Kyra meets a struggling cabdriver named Doug

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(Kiefer Sutherland) in a nearby bar, and they begin a relationship. But Kyra’s situation doesn’t improve; when Ruth dies, Kyra is left without an income, and, in danger of being evicted from her DANCE apartment, she impersonates her late mother and cashes her pension and disability checks. Andrew Dosunmu directs this drama with obvious em- Lar Lubovitch Dance Company V.4 Dance Festival pathy but little curiosity; working with the ex- For ifty years, Lubovitch has gone his own way, The Visegrád Group, a cultural and political al- traordinary cinematographer Bradford Young, he making deeply musical, emotionally rich works liance among Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and frames the action in static takes, sunk in sepul- that eschew irony or modishness. This week, the the Czech Republic, has lately been showing chral shadows, that mainly keep at a restrained dis- seventy-ive-year-old choreographer marks his signs of political dissension, but aesthetic com- tance from the characters. The script, by Darci Pi- artistic half century with three programs at the monalities can still be discerned in the selec- coult, does little to illuminate thoughts, plans, or Joyce, performed by his company and guest art- tions for this two-night festival. “Guide,” by lives; the banal dialogue is delivered at a slow and ists. Programs A and B include his newest dance, Věra Ondrašíková, from the Czech Republic, pause-riddled pace, as if to infuse it with mean- “Something About Night,” a quiet, meditative is all about lasers and planes of light; “Wow,” ing and emotion that it doesn’t contain. Though quintet set to works for male vocal ensemble by by Stanislava Vlčeková, of Slovakia, uses video the on-location ilming is moody and evocative, Schubert. Program B features a quartet of Jof- to demonstrate the decline of Western civiliza- the action plays like the bare-bones sketch of a frey Ballet dancers performing excerpts from his tion. In “Total,” the Polish choreographer Pawel drama that’s still waiting to be developed.—R.B. 1997 retelling of Shakespeare’s “Othello.” Danc- Sakowicz presents a mock lecture about virtu- (In wide release.) ers from George Mason University will perform osity, while László Fülöp and Emese Cuhorka, his “A Brahms Symphony” (1985), long consid- from Hungary, ofer an absurdist, self-referen- You Were Never Really Here ered a signature work, in Program C. (175 Eighth tial take on dance performance in “Your Mother Lynne Ramsay’s ilm, her irst feature since “We Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. April 17-22.) at My Door.” (N.Y.U. Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Pl. Need to Talk About Kevin” (2011), stars Joaquin 212-998-4941. April 19-20.) Phoenix as Joe, who is hired to solve other peo- Basil Twist / “Symphonie Fantastique” ple’s problems. The solution tends to involve ex- This musical puppet extravaganza premièred “Dancing the Gods” treme brutality, with Joe favoring a hammer as twenty years ago. To Berlioz’s fantastical score, This annual festival, organized by the World his weapon of choice. His latest task is to ind a Twist creates a world out of bits of fabric, plastic, Music Institute, brings topnotch classical teen-age girl named Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), and tinsel, all of which move in mesmerizing slow Indian dance to New York. On April 21, the the daughter of a New York state senator, who has motion inside a giant tank of water, resulting in young Mumbai-based dancer and choreogra- run away and, it is said, fallen into the clutches a kind of magical mystery realm. The music, in pher Amrita Lahiri will present a solo evening of sex traickers. (We are asked to believe that a piano arrangement by Franz Liszt, is played of kuchipudi, a dance from the Eastern state of they serve the dark needs of the political estab- live by Christopher O’Riley. Not to be missed. Andhra Pradesh, full of silvery jumps and inely lishment. It’s that kind of movie.) Joe dispenses (HERE, 145 Sixth Ave., near Spring St. 866-811- wrought mime. The following night, a group justice whenever it is required, but such righ- 4111. April 17-22 and April 24. Through June 17.) billed as the Dancing Monks of Assam per- teous vengeance brings him no relief; every deed, forms in a style rarely seen in the U.S., sattriya. thanks to Phoenix’s frighteningly glum perfor- “Suspending Time” / Nora Chipaumire This dance-drama form, which involves sing- mance, is done with a penitential air. Piece by For the past few weeks, the arts organization Pen- ing and drumming, has been practiced by men piece, in quick lashbacks, Ramsay reveals her tacle has been presenting short dance pieces in in the monasteries of Assam since the ifteenth hero’s wretched past—a boyhood wrecked by an the galleries of the Rubin Museum of Art, each century. In the twentieth century, women have abusive father, and a stint in the U.S. military, inspired by the museum’s collections. Next up also been allowed to dance it. Here, the monks which also entailed the damaging of a child. The is a work by the Zimbabwe-born choreographer will be joined by two women practitioners, Mad- spell of sufering is rarely broken, sustained as it Nora Chipaumire, always a take-no-prisoners, husmita Bora and Prerona Bhuyan, whose Sat- is by the intensity of the director’s style, with its commanding force, in three twenty-minute per- triya Dance Company is based in Philadelphia. unyielding closeups and its weirdly heightened formances throughout the day. (150 W. 17th St. (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th St. 212-864- sounds. Jonny Greenwood contributes a hypno- 212-620-5000. April 18.) 5400. April 21-22.) tizing score.—A.L. (4/16/18) (In wide release.)

Zama The bureaucratic and intimate frustrations of a Spanish magistrate in a remote Argentinean out- post in the eighteenth century furnish the director Lucrecia Martel’s new ilm with rareied passions and inspire a highly original style to match. The middle-aged oicial, Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), is posted far from his wife and children, and his relentless requests for a transfer are mocked and ignored by local governors. One young subordinate openly deies him; another, a writer, troubles his conscience. He hears from Spanish settlers who’ve murdered the indigenous population and now lack slaves; an aristocratic woman seeks his help and toys with his af- fections. With a dreamlike obliviousness, Zama observes and colludes in the brutal injustices on which the colonial regime runs. Then, in despair, he volunteers for a dangerous mission in pursuit of bandits. Adapting a novel by Antonio Di Bene- detto, Martel creates a cinema of dialectical tensions; the bustling activity of oices and drawing rooms veers outside the frame while voices of authority and complaint assail the hero with a bewildering tangle of conlicting demands and desires. The dramatic fusion of physical and administrative power captures nothing less than the bloody forging of modernity. In Spanish.—R.B. (In limited release.) Nora Chipaumire performs a site-speciic work in a gallery at the Rubin Museum of Art. ILLUSTRATION BY PING ZHU PING BY ILLUSTRATION

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ical episode, or two characters in Ham- let, you have a structure for free.” “Travesties” is narrated by Henry Carr, a real person who worked for the British consulate in Zurich during the war. When he irst addresses the audience, he’s an old man in a dressing gown, recalling dazzled days; in the main matter of the play, he is a young man. When Stoppard wrote it, he was closer in age to young Henry. Now, almost ifty years later, I asked if seeing “Travesties” was like looking through the other end of a telescope. “If I’m involved in a production, it always feels in the foreground again,” Stoppard said. He went on, “Patrick made suggestions so radical I personally wouldn’t have thought of making them, but I’m grateful. For example, he said, ‘It’s a great shame that Lenin doesn’t put in an appearance in the irst act.’ And I said, ‘Hard luck, he doesn’t,’ and we left it there. Unlike with a new play, when I’m in rehearsal all the time, in a revival, especially with someone like Patrick, I go away and come back. So the next time I fetched up at the rehearsal there was Lenin in Act I, and he was playing a lute!” I asked Stoppard why the characters don’t talk much about the First World War. “Don’t they? Well, it’s not really about that,” he said. “The play is a kind of luxury, in which you pretend that James Joyce was there in Zurich at the Cult of Personality revival, directed by Patrick Marber, orig- same time as Lenin and Tristan Tzara. inated in London in 2016; it opens on It’s a kind of intellectual entertainment.” Tom Stoppard discusses the return of his Broadway, at the American Airlines He paused. “It’s something I wanted to play “Travesties.” Theatre, on April 24. write about at the time. That’s not al- The playwright Tom Stoppard was in Stoppard, who looks younger than tered. It feels alive. In a subtle way, one town recently, to see previews of his 1974 his eighty years and carries with him is watching and listening as if it is a play, “Travesties.” The drama is set in what Marber calls “his kingly bonho- laboratory experiment.” Zurich in 1917, and, amid Stoppard’s mie,” was dressed in an Oxford shirt and It’s an experiment that yields new layered, brilliant verbal erudition, it de- a tweed jacket and pants. He took a bite results. A recurring trope of the play— fends the purpose of art as an activity of his eggs and said, “It’s the job of the one of ten or so things that Stoppard that can grant a sliver of immortality. artist, to exploit connections.” And then, investigates—is what to do about the Central to the action are James Joyce, smiling: “You see, I speak on behalf of news. “Anything of interest?” Henry the poet and Dada founder Tristan the world of the artist without hesita- Carr asks, each morning, when his man- Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin—all of whom tion!” He continued, “People don’t real- servant brings in the newspapers—a landed in Zurich during the First World ize that the part of the playwright is line that a New York audience greeted War—and a production of Oscar Wilde’s inding something for people to talk last week with exhausted laughter.

“The Importance of Being Earnest.” The about. If you are writing about a histor- —Cynthia Zarin MIKKEL SOMMER BY ILLUSTRATION

14 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 D

Make Monumental Memories

call 1-888-301-7001 1 THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Summer and Smoke son) as a kind of Henry Higgins in need of sav- Transport Group’s Jack Cummings III directs ing by Sarah (the lovely Lauren Ridlof). Some Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts the Tennessee Williams drama, in which a cheeseball design choices—bell-bottoms, a Ste- One and Two Southern minister’s daughter falls in love with vie Wonder track—do the semi-dated play no fa- J. K. Rowling’s tale picks up nineteen years the neighborhood doctor. (Classic Stage Com- vors. Still, it’s thrilling to watch a marital ight after the novels end, in this play by Jack pany, 136 E. 13th St. 866-811-4111. In previews.) in sign language, with hands that scream, “Lis- Thorne, staged by John Tifany in two install- ten!” (Studio 54, at 254 W. 54th St. 212-239-6200.) ments. (Lyric, 214 W. 43rd St. 877-250-2929. In Transfers previews. Opens April 22.) In Lucy Thurber’s play, directed by Jackson Gay The Edge of Our Bodies for MCC, two students from the South Bronx In this near-solo piece from 2011, the playwright Henry V compete for a scholarship at an élite univer- Adam Rapp (“Red Light Winter”) follows the The Public’s Mobile Unit performs the his- sity. (Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher St. 866-811- sixteen-year-old Bernadette (Carolyn Molloy) tory play in its home theatre after touring New 4111. In previews. Opens April 23.) as she travels from her Vermont boarding school York City community venues. Robert O’Hara 1 to Brooklyn, where she plans to tell her boy- directs. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. friend that she’s pregnant. The problem is that Previews begin April 23.) NOW PLAYING the script, laced with literary references (Berna- dette is in a school production of “The Maids”) The Iceman Cometh Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen and dark humor (a sexual encounter with a mar- Denzel Washington stars in George C. Wolfe’s In 1993, Eliza Bent, a white teen-ager in a mid- ried man is especially bleak), doesn’t feel very revival of the Eugene O’Neill drama, set in a dle-class suburb of Boston, made a home movie theatrical. In Jacqueline Stone’s staging for the Greenwich Village saloon populated by dead- in which she played Liliuokalani, the last queen TUTA company, Bernadette narrates most of end dreamers. (Jacobs, 242 W. 45th St. 212-239- of the Kingdom of Hawaii. A quarter century the show from behind a scrim. Amping up the 6200. In previews.) later, the memory of this highly unwoke act of artiiciality, she appears to be in a sound booth: cultural appropriation becomes the jumping-of a reel-to-reel recorder lurks in the background, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire point for a wry solo meditation on race, class, and red bulbs emit vaguely ominous light. Stone Rachel Chavkin (“The Great Comet”) directs and gender. Some of what follows is intention- tries to create an almost fantastical atmosphere, Caryl Churchill’s political drama from 1976, ally cringe-inducing, like an anecdote about a but Rapp’s text would work just as well as a short which retells the revolutionary history of En- well-meaning white fourth grader who showed story. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. gland in the sixteen-forties. (New York The- up to school dressed as Harriet Tubman, com- Through April 22.) atre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475. In plete with blackface. Other moments are cali- previews.) brated to inspire but come of as dorm-room in- Frozen trospections, as when Bent contemplates how to The Disney juggernaut takes its inevitable The Metromaniacs “claim space while raising up the voices of oth- victory lap on Broadway, directed by Michael Red Bull Theatre stages David Ives’s adap- ers.” This is the work of a talented actress with Grandage. In the northern land of Arendelle, tation of the 1738 farce “La Métromanie,” by a big heart, but it’s less a theatre piece than a Princess Anna (the winning Patti Murin, a Alexis Piron, in which a Parisian bard falls in seventy-ive-minute TED talk on intersection- skilled comedian) is estranged from her older love with a poetess in disguise. Michael Kahn ality. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. 212-598- sister, Elsa (the silver-voiced Caissie Levy), directs. (The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42nd 0400. Through April 21.) whose magic powers to turn things to ice are St. 646-223-3010. In previews. Opens April 22.) hidden from Anna after a childhood accident. Angels in America The rudimentary projections and slow-moving My Fair Lady In Marianne Elliott’s revival of Tony Kushner’s ice sets are an unfortunate downgrade from the Lerner and Loewe’s classic 1956 musical re- brilliant, maddening, and necessary master- animation, and most of the dozen new songs turns to Broadway, in a Lincoln Center The- work, the Angel (Amanda Lawrence) looks like added by the original songwriters, Kristen An- atre revival directed by Bartlett Sher and star- a refugee from an old, crumbling discothèque, derson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, are unremark- ring Lauren Ambrose, Harry Hadden-Paton, or like an Edward Gorey drawing. Elliott, who able. But the show has its attractions: the fan- and Diana Rigg. (Vivian Beaumont, 150 W. 65th has won two Tonys, is especially adept at stage tastic diverse cast (including Jelani Alladin, St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens April 19.) choreography, though she does nothing to tone adorable as the strapping ice-monger Krist- down the play’s butch-femme dichotomy. (An- of); Elsa’s electric costume change at the cli- Paradise Blue drew Garield, as a gay man with AIDS, en- max of “Let It Go,” still the most persistent ear- Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs Dominique gages too much in the limp-wristed school of worm of the Disney œuvre; and the hilarious Morisseau’s play, about a jazz trumpeter in De- acting.) The nearly eight-hour, two-part play is second-act number “Hygge,” about the Scan- troit’s gentrifying Black Bottom neighborhood illed with wishes, hope, rabbinical anger, fan- dinavian concept of coziness, complete with a in 1949. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 tasy—and with the kinds of errors in charac- sauna-themed kick line. (St. James, 246 W. 44th W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. Previews begin April 24.) terization that are bound to happen when big St. 866-870-2717.) ideas come fast and furious, and when authentic Saint Joan characters with beautifully confused intentions Harry Clarke Condola Rashad plays Joan of Arc in the serve or get run over by those ideas. But, just David Cale’s louche one-man drama is back George Bernard Shaw drama, revived by Man- when you think Kushner is losing sight of how for a return engagement produced by Audible, hattan Theatre Club and directed by Daniel to handle his creations, he brings out a new and which has also released it as an audio play. But Sullivan. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. hitherto unexplored empathy for a family that there’s good reason to see it in person: namely, 212-239-6200. In previews.) is not biological, let alone chosen. (Reviewed in Billy Crudup’s full-bodied performance as the our issue of 4/16/18.) (Neil Simon, 250 W. 52nd title character (and multiple other people). The Seafarer St. 877-250-2929.) Harry Clarke doesn’t exist—he’s the inven- Matthew Broderick stars in Ciarán O’Reil- tion of one Philip Brugglestein, a shy, queer ly’s revival of the Conor McPherson drama, Children of a Lesser God boy from the Midwest who discovers his con- in which a stranger arrives at a Dublin home James Leeds, a speech therapist, arrives at a idence, and his seductive powers, in the form during a Christmas Eve poker game. (Irish school for the deaf and the hard of hearing to of a Cockney alter ego. Harry worms his way Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737. Opens ind the one student he can’t open up to his into the life of a handsome stranger, with funny, April 18.) idea of communication: Sarah, a deaf clean- sexy, and devastating results. Cale’s script has ing woman who refuses to use her voice. James the tidy structure—and the mounting implau- Summer and Sarah fall in love, but what does love sibilities—of a three-act screenplay. But, like Des McAnuf directs a musical based on the mean when you can’t share music, or silence, Harry, its sleekness belies a more troubled tale life and work of the disco queen Donna Sum- or speech? Sadly, Kenny Leon’s clunky revival about the psychic costs of passing, whether as a mer, with three actresses—LaChanze, Ariana of Mark Medof’s drama, which won the 1980 gay man in a straight world or as an Ohio sissy DeBose, and Storm Lever—sharing the title Tony Award, sidelines the script’s ambiguities— whose truest self turns out to be a swinging role. (Lunt-Fontanne, 205 W. 46th St. 877-250- and its eroticism—in favor of its didacticism, Londoner. (Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta 2929. In previews. Opens April 23.) treating Leeds (the monotonous Joshua Jack- Lane. 800-745-3000.)

16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 THE THEATRE Our members Lobby Hero time, and the play’s viewpoint is essentially fa- Does anyone do awkward earnestness as well as talistic in a way that jars uneasily with the cur- Michael Cera? In Kenneth Lonergan’s 2001 play rent activist moment. As social issues go, it’s return each year (revived by Second Stage, inaugurating its new more interested in class tension than in gun vi- Broadway home), he plays Jef, the night watch- olence, but there it’s too heavy-handed. As di- man at a Manhattan apartment building. His rected by Rebecca Taichman, the play is most as faithfully as boss, William (Brian Tyree Henry), is a black efectively insightful on the misleadingness of man whose brother has been arrested for a hor- signs and symbols: seeming revelations that the tides. rible crime; Jef gets sucked into the coverup point to nothing, or meaningless objects suf- and must decide whether to lie to two neigh- fused with unexpected import. But the heart of borhood cops, a macho sleazebag (Chris Evans) this production is Lucas Papaelias, who is un- and a mouthy rookie (Bel Powley). In a “Law & failingly authentic as the humble and underap- Order” episode, Jef would be the guy with three preciated father of a girl who survives. (Play- lines, but Lonergan expands this hapless Rosen- wrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.) crantz’s story into a funny, provocative study of how diicult it is to weigh right and wrong. The Three Tall Women ending may be too tidy—criminal-justice issues First staged in New York in 1994, Edward Al- certainly haven’t had much resolution since the bee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play bristles with play was written—but Trip Cullman’s ine pro- unresolved and unresolvable guilt and, inally, duction, wonderfully acted and staged, doesn’t with hatred undone. A (Glenda Jackson), a miss a nuance or a laugh. (Helen Hayes, 240 widow, sits upright in a straight-backed chair, W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.) her mouth a red gash—she’s rich enough to af- ford B (Laurie Metcalf), her caretaker, and C Mean Girls (Alison Pill), a lawyer who has come to look The witty and withering teen comedy is now a after her afairs. In the second half of the play, fetch Broadway musical, with an updated script it becomes clear that A, B, and C are one wom- by Tina Fey—this time, the mean girls post an—A—but at diferent stages of her life. Jack- mean GIFs—and music by her husband, Jef son, a two-time Oscar winner, is a gift that Man- Richmond. (The lyrics are by Nell Benjamin.) tello doesn’t so much squander as fail to unwrap. Erika Henningsen plays Cady, a homeschooled As in much of his directorial work, Mantello re- math whiz who relocates from Africa to Illi- conigures the script to emphasize the ire-and- nois, where she must navigate the wilds of an brimstone moments that he thinks Broadway American high school. At irst, she falls in with audiences will respond to, favoring the lash of the “art freaks,” who persuade her to iniltrate show biz over the complications of the lesh. the Plastics: a cabal of popular girls ruled by the (4/9/18) (Golden, 252 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.) glossy tyrant Regina George (the fearsome Tay- lor Louderman). Fey’s 2004 screenplay is so taut Yerma and quotable that the addition of songs seems After a run at London’s Young Vic that was ac- almost gratuitous, and Richmond’s music has claimed, above all, for Billie Piper’s fearless and the interchangeable pop-anthem sound that’s masterly lead performance, the Armory imports become standard on Broadway. But who needs Simon Stone’s radical reimagining of Federico Tina Fey to reinvent musical comedy? She does García Lorca’s 1934 play, which transplants the just ine with the help of the ace director and parable of a woman’s obsessive efort to conceive choreographer Casey Nicholaw (“The Book a child to a contemporary gentriied London of Mormon”). (August Wilson, 245 W. 52nd St. suburb. Every choice feels perfectly calibrated, 877-250-2929.) including the sudden blackouts that terminate each scene, the surround-sound bursts of Ste- Miss You Like Hell fan Gregory’s arresting choral music, and Liz- A cross-country road trip that doesn’t travel too zie Clachan’s extraordinary glass-box set, which far, this new musical from Quiara Alegría Hudes transforms as inexplicably as a magic trick. The (“In the Heights”) and Erin McKeown, directed story and its milieu are exceptionally speciic, by Lear deBessonet, is politically resonant and but, by the time the play reaches its inescapable dramatically stuck in neutral. When the sixteen- nadir, it seems to describe much more univer- year-old Olivia (Gizel Jiménez) blogs about her sal nightmares: the terrifying passage of time, suicidal ideation, her mother, Beatriz (Daphne the unspeakable explosion of a dream deferred, Rubin-Vega, always welcome), arrives to spirit and the catastrophe of human desire when it be- her away. “I wanna mommy the fuck out of my comes ungovernable and unquenchable. (Park girl,” she says. She also wants to drive Olivia Avenue Armory, Park Ave. at 66th St. 212-933- to Los Angeles in time to testify on her behalf: 5812. Through April 21.) Beatriz is undocumented, and her deportation 1 is all but assured. Much is at stake, and still the musical sputters as mother and daughter air ALSO NOTABLE past grievances and befriend predictably quirky supporting characters. Most of the ignition Admissions Mitzi E. Newhouse. • Amy and the trouble lies with McKeown’s pop and R. & B. Orphans Laura Pels. Through April 22. • Bob- songs, which are pleasant, unassuming, and ag- bie Clearly Black Box, Harold and Miriam gressively deracinated. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. Steinberg Center for Theatre. • Carousel Im- 212-967-7555.) perial. (Reviewed in this issue.) • Escape to Margaritaville Marquis. • Feeding the Dragon This Flat Earth Cherry Lane. • Flight The Heath at the Mc- Lindsey Ferrentino’s new drama is a strange bird: Kittrick Hotel. Through April 20. • King Lear it explores in wrenchingly speciic terms the be- BAM Harvey Theatre. • The Lucky Ones Con- wildering fear and heartbreak that follow a mid- nelly. • Mlima’s Tale Public. • Old Stock: A Refu- dle-school mass shooting, but then doesn’t seem gee Love Story 59E59. Through April 22. • Pygma- to know what to do with them. The inal scenes, lion Sheen Center. Through April 22. • Rocktopia though afecting, feel too indebted to Thornton Broadway Theatre. • Travesties American Air- Wilder in their evocation of the slipstream of lines Theatre. PRIVATE • AUTHENTIC • UNIQUE new in photography highlights conceptual por- traiture while including some compelling wild cards. The Ethiopian artist Aïda Muluneh com- ART mands the entrance with painterly images that evoke fashion spreads. Her pictures of dispassion- 1 ate women in colorful makeup inspired by Afri- three-dimensional iguration in subsequent centu- can body art upbraid the photographic tradition MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES ries. Great works in the exhibition range from an of exoticizing black female subjects. In the slyly anonymous German’s “Nellingen Cruciix,” from satirical black-and-white “Cargo Cults” series, the Met Breuer 1430-35, and Donatello’s “Bust of Niccolò da Uz- American artist Stephanie Syjuco, who was born “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body” zano,” from the fourteen-thirties, to contempo- in the Philippines, poses in elaborate costumes This is a mind-blowing show, hypercharged with rary sculptures by Jef Koons (“Michael Jackson of “ethnic” prints and accessories sourced from sensation and glutted with instruction. You may and Bubbles,” from 1988) and Charles Ray (“Alu- malls. Other artists use found photos to striking be torn between praising it as visionary (and also minum Girl,” completed in 2003). Crowd-pleasing efect. In a collaborative series, Huong Ngo and a great deal of fun, what with entertainments in- curiosities include the “Auto-Icon of Jeremy Ben- Hong-An Truong mine their family albums to re- cluding a voluble animatronic savant) and report- tham,” from 1832. Sitting on a chair, the realistic lect on the experiences and the cultural invisibil- ing it as a mugging to the taste police. A hundred wax-faced igure, jauntily clothed and sporting a ity of their mothers, who are both Vietnamese ref- and twenty-seven almost exclusively European cane, contains the British philosopher’s skeleton. ugees in the United States. The American artist and American renditions of human bodies, from The show’s efect, over all, is at once scholarly and Carmen Winant’s deluge of images of women giv- very old to recent and from masterpieces to curios, populist, like that of a TED talk. Through July 22. ing birth—some two thousand in all—are taped elaborate the thesis that colored igurative sculp- to a wall in an immersive meditation on an event ture has been unjustly bastardized ever since the Museum of Modern Art at once universal and mysterious. The exquisite Renaissance canonized a mistake made during its “Being: New Photography 2018” black-and-white pictures by the Polish photogra- excited revival of antiquity. The whiteness of sur- With its almost absurdly broad theme of “iden- pher Joanna Piotrowska, which conclude the show, viving Greek and Roman marbles, their original tity and personhood,” the latest installment in underscore moments when the camera’s presence polychromy lost, became de rigueur for Western the museum’s long-running showcase of what’s registers as an intrusion. Through Aug. 19.

Whitney Museum “Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables” This retrospective of the Iowan painter fascinates as a plunge into certain deliriums of the United States in the nineteen-thirties, notably a culture war between cosmopolitan and nativist sensibili- ties. But any notion that Wood—who died in 1942, of pancreatic cancer, on the day before his ifty-irst birthday—is an underrated artist izzles. “Ameri- can Gothic” is, by a very wide margin, his most ef- fective picture (although “Dinner for Threshers,” from 1934, a long, low, cutaway view of a farmhouse at harvesttime, might be his best). Wood was a strange man who made occasionally impressive, predominantly weird, sometimes god-awful art in thrall to a programmatic sense of mission: to exalt rural America in a manner adapted from Flemish Old Masters. “American Gothic”—starchy couple, triune pitchfork, churchy house, bubbly trees—succeeded, deserving the inevitable term “iconic” for its punch and tickling ambiguity. The work made Wood, at the onset of his maturity as an artist, a national celebrity, and the attendant pres- sures pretty well wrecked him. Why Wood now? A political factor might seem to be in play. Although the show was planned before the election of Don- ald Trump, it feels right on time, given the wor- ries of urban liberals about the insurgent conservative truculence in what is often dismissed—with a disdain duly noted by citizens of the respective states—as lyover country. Through June 10.

Dia:Chelsea “Rita McBride” The sixteen beams of green lasers in the Ameri- can artist’s installation “Particulates” form a criss- crossing tubular pattern that suggests a tunnel into another dimension. (Water molecules and “sur- factant compounds,” whatever those are, are also involved.) It’s a familiar form for the American sculptor, recalling her seventeen-story-tall public installation “Mae West,” in Munich. Curves somehow constructed out of straight lines are the least of the paradoxes here. Most fascinating is the way in which the light seems to occupy space as a shimmering mass. The psychedelic efect is heightened if you see McBride’s piece after viewing Dia’s “The Tragic Moor II, August 20, 2017,” by the Texas-based Nigerian artist Hakeem Adewumi, in concurrent exhibition of geometric paintings and

“Refraction: New Photography of Africa and Its Diaspora,” at the Kasher gallery. Opens April 19. sculptures by François Morellet. Through June 2. THE GALLERY COURTESY

18 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 ART

Jewish Museum Horn,” photographs from August Sanders’s “Vic- mounted in a continuous dark stripe around the “Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Your Place or tims of Persecution” series—give way to a wide gallery, are a quiet critique of the male-domi- Mine . . .” array of less familiar revelations, from the polit- nated canon of the road-trip picture, in the tradi- Since the nineteen-seventies, when the French- ical photo collages of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis to tion of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. Like born artist began to regard his small London Rudolf Wacker’s unsettling still-life “Sheep and her predecessors, Lipper documents her travels apartment as a gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of Doll,” in which nursery toys seem to hint at im- in telling fragments, contrasting the romantic art,” Chaimowicz has been exploring the over- pending atrocities. Through May 28. myth of the American West with the country’s lap of art and décor with enchanting abandon. mundane interiors, humble structures, and tum- His irst, career-spanning solo museum exhibi- New Museum bledown signage. But, in a subtle departure, she tion in the U.S. is divided into sections named “2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage” leaves traces of her own presence in unpeopled for domestic interiors, beginning with the laven- This show, co-curated by Alex Gartenfeld and shots. In one image, an untouched Wale House der-walled “L’Entrée” (“The Entrance”), which Gary Carrion-Murayari, tethers fresh artists to breakfast rests on a table; in another, the word features a row of handsome coat hooks, from stale palaver. The work of these twenty-six in- “motel” is written in soap on a mirror. One of which customized garments hang, their airy lo- dividuals and groups, ranging in age from twen- the few igures in the mix suggests a surrogate ral prints applied with a paint roller. “La Biblio- ty-ive to thirty-ive, from nineteen countries, is for the artist—a female mannequin dressed in thèque” (“The Library”) displays the disassem- for the most part formally conservative (paint- lannel and jeans, leaning against a tree. Through bled pages of Chaimowicz’s delicately illustrated ing, weaving, ceramics). The framing discourse May 5. (Higher Pictures, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th and collaged artist’s books; in “Le Salon,” he sets is boilerplate radical, adducing abstract evils of St. 212-249-6100.) the scene for a charmed life with throw pillows, “late capitalism” and (this one may be new to 1 a cocktail glass, and a rotary phone arranged on you) “late liberalism,” which the artists are pre- a rug in shades of lemon, rose, and eau de nil, sumed to subvert. In principle, the aim relects GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN whose ebullient pattern mirrors the playful, Im- the museum’s valuable policy of incubating up- pressionistic motifs of his nearby paintings and start trends in contemporary art. But it comes Lucy Dodd screens. The artist makes wonderful use of the of as willfully naïve. Nearly all the participants After entering the gallery through a beaded cur- museum’s Central Park views, bringing the gar- plainly hail from an international archipelago tain patterned like an American lag—the show’s den indoors with path-like curved platforms that of art schools and hip scenes and have launched title, “May Flower,” rifs on the founding of the display his parasols, ceramics, lampshades, and on normal career paths. Noting that they share U.S., and also on celebrations of spring—view- furniture, including “Desk on Decline,” a non- political discontents, as the young tend to do, is ers encounter a circle of mystical-looking chairs, functional marvel with a sharply slanted top— easy. Harder, in the context, is registering their arranged around “Prince Porcupine,” a canvas an invitation to shrug of work and enjoy life. originalities as creators—like bumps under an leaning against a column on the loor. Like the Through Aug. 5. ideological blanket. Two standouts are painters works mounted on the surrounding walls, the who evince independent streaks at odds with the painting’s amber depths and jet-black clouds are Morgan Library and Museum ideal of collectivity that the curators promulgate. achieved not with conventional paint but with “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life” The Kenyan Chemu Ng’ok, who is based in South lower essences, Tetley tea, cuttleish ink, and Hujar, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia Africa, has developed a conidently ebullient Ex- yew berries, among other substances. With ti- in 1987, at the age of ifty-three, was among the pressionism—faces and igures teeming in deep- tles like “The Flight of Aunt Goose” and “Slowly greatest of all American photographers and has toned, plangent colors. Even more impressive is Snail . . . Time Is Creation’s Bubble,” the artist had, by far, the most confusing reputation. This the Haitian abstractionist Thomm El-Saieh, who seems to invite viewers to read her radiant works dazzling retrospective of a hundred and sixty-four lives in Miami. From a distance, his three large like Rorschach tests for pagan rites. Through pictures, curated by Joel Smith, airms Hujar’s acrylic paintings suggest speckled veils of atmo- May 20. (Lewis, 88 Eldridge St. 212-966-7990.) excellence while, if anything, complicating his spheric color. Up close, they reveal thousands history. The works range across the genres of por- of tiny marks, blotches, and erasures, each dis- Joanne Greenbaum traiture, nudes, cityscape, and still-life—the still- cretely energetic and decisive. Through May 27. Forty small plexiglass cubes housing abstract est of all from the catacombs of Palermo, Italy, sculptures ill a table in modular columns of shot in 1963. The inest are portraits, not only Rubin Museum of Art four or ive—a memory palace of bright color of people but of cows, sheep, and, most notably, “Chitra Ganesh: The Scorpion Gesture” and brisk gesture. Greenbaum is best known an individual goose, with an eagerly coniding The Brooklyn artist’s new animations ingeniously for her exuberant abstract paintings; these mien. The quality of Hujar’s prints, tending to combine her own drawings and watercolors with coiled, squeezed, and extruded little wonders sumptuous blacks and simmering grays, trans- historical imagery, peppering the journeys of express that same energy in a riot of neon pink ixes. He was a darkroom master, maintaining bodhisattvas with contemporary pop-culture ref- and yellow, lavender, molten orange, Interna- technical standards for which he got scant credit erences. Five of these pieces are installed on the tional Klein Blue, and the shade of pink now except among certain cognoscenti. He never museum’s second and third loors amid its collec- known as millennial. The show’s title is “Caput hatched a signature look to rival those of more tion of Himalayan art, elements of which appear Mortuum,” which is Latin for “worthless re- celebrated elders who inluenced him (Richard in her psychedelic sequences of spinning man- mains.” Insigniicance has never held more ap- Avedon, Diane Arbus) or those of younger peers dalas and falling lotus lowers. (Ganesh’s works peal. Through May 20. (56 Henry, 56 Henry St. who learned from him (Robert Mapplethorpe, are activated, as if by magic, when viewers ap- 646-858-0800.) Nan Goldin). His pictures share, in place of a proach.) In “Rainbow Body,” a cave, which also style, an unfailing rigor that can only be experi- appears in a nearby painting of Mandarava, is Cary Leibowitz enced, not described. Through May 20. illed with people in 3-D glasses, watching as the In this picnic-themed installation of wooden guru-deity attains enlightenment. “Silhouette in tables and red gingham looring, the native Neue Galerie the Graveyard” is projected behind a glass case New Yorker continues his decades-long quest “Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of containing a small sculpture of Maitreya, from to entertain with self-deprecation. His text- the 1930s” late-eighteenth-century Mongolia, for a cleverly driven art, which here includes signs and pie Haunting details give this broad roundup of Aus- dioramalike efect. Prophesied to arrive during charts, white crockery scrawled with black let- trian and German art from the nineteen-thirties an apocalyptic crisis, the bodhisattva is seen here ters, and found photographs doctored with a la- an all-too-vivid sense of the period’s mounting against Ganesh’s montage, which includes foot- bel-maker, also continues to bring on the camp. anxiety. Hanns Ludwig Katz’s “Eye Operation” age of global catastrophes and political protests, Other works include Hollywood publicity stills portrays two corpse-colored hands pulling open from the Women’s March to Black Lives Mat- that read “Elizabeth Taylor Is Thinking About a man’s eye, as a third hand approaches it with a ter. Through Jan. 7. Fried Chicken” and “Joan Collins Has a Head- scalpel. Felix Nussbaum’s bone-chilling painting 1 ache,” and a brightly colored, diamond-shaped “Self-Portrait in the Camp,” made between his plywood panel captioned “Ugh, He’s Crying escape from a prison camp in southern France GALLERIES—UPTOWN Again.” Leibowitz’s jokes land best when his and his subsequent murder in Auschwitz, shows pop-cultural insight merges with his satire of the young Surrealist in three-quarter proile Susan Lipper self-grandiosity, as in a picture of Milton Berle against a sand-colored hellscape of loose bones The title of the New York photographer’s black- smoking a cigar, captioned “Cancel All My Ap- and barbed wire. Well-known touchstones—Max and-white series “trip, 1993-1999” is lowercase pointments with the Whitney.” Through May 13. Beckmann’s red-and-black “Self-Portrait with for a reason: the ifty small, unframed prints, (Invisible Exports, 89 Eldridge St. 212-226-5447.)

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 19 1 ROCK AND POP

Musicians and night-club proprietors lead NIGHT LIFE complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to conirm engagements.

Bodega Bamz New York City hip-hop is known for producing vivid storytellers and big characters; the fash- ionable cluster of young artists that includes A$AP Mob, Flatbush Zombies, and Bodega Bamz aspired to the latter when they began break- ing, around 2012. Bamz delivered his mixtape “Strictly 4 My P.A.P.I.Z.” that year, a stab at booming trap inluenced by his native Spanish Harlem. “At Close Range” was its best moment, a rare personal look into the rapper’s backstory. Bodega Bamz is releasing a new album, and plays a show at S.O.B.’s this week. (204 Varick St., at W. Houston St. 212-243-4940. April 18.)

Built to Spill This beloved Idaho band has witnessed the past twenty years of alternative rock irsthand, but has never swayed along. The group’s 1997 album, “Perfect from Now On,” is required listening for those interested in indie-rock history; the guitarist Doug Martsch was inspired to start the group after he moved to Seattle, the birth- place of grunge, and surrounded himself with musicians who were writing droning, emotive Two Jokers updates of early skeletal Def Jam pro- songs without commercial aspirations. Built to ductions and New Wave bands. Their Spill eventually signed with Warner Bros., and The twin brothers in the Garden are over-all message seems to land some- beneitted from the full promotional strength savvy scenesters earning punk yuks. of college stations and other indie outlets. The where near “You can have as much fun band’s catalogue still endures; at this intimate “All Access,” released in 2013, by the as us, if you try.” set at Baby’s All Right, added to a co-headlin- Garden, starts of loud and goofy, with The twenty-four-year-old Shears ing tour with Afghan Whigs, fans can again express their gratitude. (146 Broadway, Brooklyn. a blizzard of hard snares and synth, like brothers are from a musical family. Their 718-599-5800. April 19.) an outtake from a John Hughes-era father gigged regularly with a local punk soundtrack. Fletcher Shears goes on to band, which meant that there were al- James Chance and the Contortions This legendary short-lived outit irst appeared share a bit of life-style advice, extolling ways instruments around the house. By on Brian Eno’s 1978 compilation “No New York,” the virtues of patience, originality, indi- 2011, the twins had begun releasing lim- which packaged the city’s hippest post-punk vidualism, and getting a good night’s ited batches of records on the small label bands and christened the No Wave genre. Blend- ing the free-jazz horn theatrics of Ornette Cole- sleep. “In the end, you’re on your own,” Burger, and they were soon embraced man and Albert Ayler with wet, muted funk he warns. “Better cook up something as muses by fashion houses; designers and showman shrieks (“Contort yourself ive good while you’re home.” fell for their ﬂowing thrift-store style times!”), Chance and his group put their stamp on a fringe style that felt at once chicly nostal- The Garden, which plays at Market and costumed performances. The broth- gic and switchblade sharp. Young contempo- Hotel on April 18, has a distinct style: ers modelled for Yves Saint Laurent in rary bands still aspire to their plucky, smoky the small band from Orange County, 2013, but swatted away associations with tones and rambling structures. Chance and the Contortions return to the city for a stand at the California, employs a fast collage of the style sphere. “To me, fashion and Bowery Electric. (327 Bowery, at 2nd St. 212-228- toy instruments and wordy verses that music presentation are opposite. No 0228. April 18.) somehow add up to punk, or rap (or, feelings are alike to me. I like them both Diarrhea Planet on at least one track, jungle). The songs in diferent ways, though,” Fletcher ex- This Nashville-based sextet understands the are philosophical if you listen closely, plained in an interview. joys of maximalism and willful stupidity. Look and fun if you dance badly; many Still, the band has seized on the past its name to its live arrangement: four guitar players assemble front and center during transform two or three times within power of image: its videos are ac- performances, each with his own mike. The re- three minutes, and they’re catchy tion-packed and theatrical, featuring sult is near-perfect garage rock that sounds like enough to mumble along to for days. baseball games, mini-bikes, and cowboy a Trans Am revving out front. Efervescent college-radio hits like “Ghost with a Boner” have If you ask Fletcher or his twin brother, hats. In videos for the Garden’s new given way to a more honed sound, exempliied Wyatt, they’ll say that their genre is record, “Mirror Might Steal Your on cuts like “Announcement” and “Bob Dylan’s “vada vada,” a term that they made up. Charm,” the brothers reprise the jester Grandma,” from the band’s 2016 album, “Turn to Gold.” The group was heard in households They are similarly imaginative song- characters that they frequently play on- across the country when it performed the sin- writers, with stories of dodging cops, stage and on ﬁlm. “We’re here to enter- gle “Ain’t a Sin to Win” on “The Late Show molding life like clay, and avoiding tain,” Wyatt has said, and ticket holders with Seth Meyers”; this year, it has hitched onto a tour with the Darkness, which includes a stop bugs hidden in the bodies of suited should have little doubt. at Brooklyn Steel. (319 Frost St., Williamsburg. businessmen. Their best tracks feel like —Matthew Trammell 888-929-7849. April 20.) KEITH NEGLEY BY ILLUSTRATION

20 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 Advisory services are provided by TD Ameritrade Investment Management, LLC, a registered investment advisor. All investments involve risk, including risk of loss. TD Ameritrade, Inc., member FINRA/SIPC. © 2017 TD Ameritrade. NIGHT LIFE

MikeQ début album, and, with little recorded material zling listeners with her levitating bass lines; The ballroom and vogue music scenes, most fa- released, its precious new tunes may be best ex- she’s since played with such estimable artists mously captured in the documentary ilm “Paris perienced in the lesh. (325 Franklin Ave., Brook- as Kenny Barron and Pat Metheny. Now lead- Is Burning,” have been inluencing popular cul- lyn. cmoneverybody.com. April 21.) ing her own unit at this most hallowed of jazz ture since the nineteen-eighties, while remain- 1 venues, Oh fronts a quintet that includes the ing staunchly underground. Vogue grew out saxophonist Ben Wendel, the pianist Fabian Al- of New York’s seventies disco and house eras, JAZZ AND STANDARDS mazan, and the drummer Rudy Royston. (Vil- and crossed over when Madonna and others lage Vanguard, 178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. cribbed its sounds, its fashion, and its dance Joel Forrester 212-255-4037. April 17-22.) moves; today, a new generation maintains the Although he’s fronted many a delightfully insular, escapist energy that made the original twisted ensemble since the 1992 breakup of the Roberta Piket parties special. This twenty-seven-year-old New- Microscopic Septet, Forrester may be best ap- An exceptional modern-jazz pianist hover- ark-based d.j. started out producing on free soft- preciated as a radiant and stylistically uncatego- ing just under the radar, Piket looks beyond ware, and soon found himself spinning all over rizable pianist and composer in a solo context. the tradition while tipping her hat to its veri- New York as one of the few d.j.s willing to stick Like a present-day Fats Waller, he can dazzle you ties. She’s joined by two players who prize in- to ballroom tracks for entire sets. His irst oi- while making you laugh out loud. (Jules, 65 Saint vention and subtlety as much as she does: the cial release came out on Fade to Mind, an agen- Marks Pl. julesbistro.com. April 18.) bassist Harvie S and Piket’s husband, the crafty da-setting Los Angeles record label that special- drummer Billy Mintz. (Mezzrow, 163 W. 10th St. izes in futurist electronic music. (House of Yes, Mike McGinnis, Art Lande, and Steve mezzrow.com. April 19.) 2 Wyckof Ave., Brooklyn. houseofyes.org. April 18.) Swallow Expecting the conventional from the union of Kendra Shank 79.5 three players as idiosyncratic as the saxophon- Celebrating her birthday alongside musical This slow-paced, psychedelic outit is a regu- ist and clarinettist McGinnis and the veteran buddies, the valiant singer Shank takes to lar headliner at C’mon Everybody, a pleasantly improvisers Lande, on piano, and Swallow, the stage with the pianist Frank Kimbrough, snug bar, bordering Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy, on electric bass, is downright foolish. These the saxophonist Billy Drewes, and the bass- that’s always good for a night of music that you simpatico players revel in modernist cham- ist Dean Johnson, three longtime associates wouldn’t hear anywhere else. The six-person ber-jazz that allows for both lyricism and open- in tune with her audacious juxtaposition of ensemble, named for a radio station at the far ended jostling; they shine on McGinnis’s re- warmhearted swinging and out-on-a-limb vo- left of the dial, relishes in four-part girl-group cently released “Singular Awakening.” (Jazz calizing. Bringing lustre to standards, Shank harmonies; the cooing choral arrangements on Standard, 116 E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. April 19.) also wisely plumbs the jazz repertoire for hid- its 2012 twelve-inch “Boogie/OOO” sound like den gems from the likes of Abbey Lincoln, Donna Summer and Evelyn (Champagne) King Linda May Han Oh Quintet Fred Hersch, and Cedar Walton. (Jazz at Ki- playing a Steve Rubell club. After a fan-sourced It seems like just yesterday that the Austra- tano, 66 Park Ave., at 38th St. 212-885-7119. funding campaign, the band is still polishing its lian bassist Oh was the new kid in town, daz- April 21.)

ABOVE & BEYOND

St. Jordi Festival prone dread the impending bloom of New Gay, as well as a lecture by Hillary Clinton, who In Barcelona, St. Valentine’s seat is occupied York’s cherry blossoms. The festival celebrating will appear in conversation with the Nigerian by Jordi, a knight who, according to medieval the lowers’ arrival is in its fourteenth year at author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (April 22). legend, slew a dragon and saved a village, in- Flushing Meadows Park; this installment will (Various locations. worldvoices.pen.org. April 16-22.) cluding the daughter of a king; the dragon’s be packed with performances relecting both blood produced a rosebush where it dripped. traditional and modern Japan, including taiko The New School Catalans celebrate St. Jordi each April by drumming, martial arts, and a cosplay fashion In 2018, the word “scam” has slipped into Inter- exchanging roses and books with their loved show. (Pavilion & Astral Fountain in Flushing net meme-dom, an online inside joke: youthful ones. Two organizations, the Farragut Fund Meadows-Corona Park. bbg.org. April 21 at 11 A.M.) users everywhere are concocting schemes that for Catalan Culture in the U.S. and the Cat- 1 Ralph Kramden couldn’t dream up, in relent- alan Institute of America, aim to broaden the less over-the-top pursuits of wealth, fame, and tradition’s global recognition with a week of READINGS AND TALKS social-media followers. (When Virgil Abloh was events, including a bookstore crawl and a read- appointed the menswear designer of Louis Vuit- ing by the Catalan writer Alícia Kopf, at this PEN World Voices Festival of International ton, the style igure saw one of his old tweets, year’s PEN World Voices Festival. (Various Literature “Design is the freshest scam,” ironically resur- locations. ciofa.org. April 21-23.) This literary festival was founded by Salman face.) At the multi-session talk “Cons and Scams: Rushdie, Esther Allen, and Michael Roberts in Their Place in American Culture,” several profes- Sakura Matsuri Cherry Blossom Festival the wake of the September 11th attacks, with a sors and academics trace the history of the scam In the classic Japanese horror ilm “Under the mission to foster dialogue among writers from as a social and political phenomenon, and exam- Blossoming Cherry Trees,” from 1975, villagers around the globe. This year’s edition addresses ine its role in popular culture, art, inance, law, are warned to avoid passing beneath the pictur- a newly connected and mobilized world with a and medicine. The talk is free and open to the esque petals, as stories spread of the lowers program titled “Resist & Reimagine.” It includes public, with no snake oil for sale. (Theresa Lang

driving travellers mad. Today, only the allergy- talks by Sean Penn, R. J. Palacio, and Roxane Center, 55 W. 13th St. 212-229-5108. April 23-24.) AMARGO PABLO BY ILLUSTRATION

22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 FßD & DRINK

1 TABLES FOR TWO The impeccable, seasonally driven food BAR TAB Gem arrives in a steady parade of tiny, artful arrangements: cubes, foams, and petals of 116 Forsyth St. the sort you find at restaurants like Eleven As a kid, Flynn McGarry knew exactly Madison Park (where McGarry interned) what he wanted to be when he grew up, and Noma. On a recent evening, wedges but, unlike most kids, he didn’t have to of beet—which had been aged, smoked, wait. By the age of twelve, he was running braised, grilled, roasted, and juiced—had Ophelia a supper club out of his bedroom in Los sweet, raisiny edges, like sticky candy, and 3 Mitchell Pl., 26th oor (212-980-4796) Angeles. At fifteen, he was on the cover creamy interiors. A “stew” of Norwegian On a recent melancholy evening, two young of the Times Magazine. This year, at nine- king crab in grapefruit rosewater, the tan- women—one in want of a job, the other disap- teen, he’s opened a place all his own, called gle of sweet meat resembling a little pointed in a man—took an elevator to the twen- Gem, where he serves many of the dishes mound of pasta, topped with frizzled ty-sixth loor of the Beekman Tower. Both sought levity and, perhaps, a celebrity: the rooftop bar, himself, wearing an apron with tweezers leeks, rendered my table silent. about two months old, advertised that Frank Sina- tucked neatly over the collar. Boyishly But Gem’s tasting-menu format, with tra had loyally visited a previous iteration, for slim, with a gravity-defying shock of its sombre, methodical coursing, can feel drinks and, maybe, a heartbreaking song. Instead, the women encountered several quiet customers, strawberry-blond hair, he is poised and refined to the point of sanctimony. Mc- most in sweaters, drinking to light techno. Yet charming, but retains the slightly reluctant Garry has said that the restaurant is meant they also found, on an enclosed patio, a velvety

OOST SWARTE OOST red banquette good for consoling, undisturbed J demeanor of someone who might dodge to emulate a dinner party, a ritual whose and unjostled. A beatiic hostess appeared in the an embarrassing hug and moan “Mo-o-om.” appeal is a relaxed, convivial messiness. candlelight. Did the women want drinks? Oh, but Yet Gem is decidedly mature, the kind The closest he gets is with the final course they did, and they were grateful to her for not of place where most young people would before dessert: a collection of dishes he wincing at one woman’s decision to pronounce “Pain Killa” with an “a,” as written on the menu. go only if their parents were paying. The calls the Feast. On a recent evening, it At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink pro- service is practiced and hushed—it would included lamb two ways—shredded shank secco poured sybaritically over sherry and Cam- be strange to talk loudly here. The res- braised in cider, and medium-rare medal- pari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheas- ant, clariied the bar staf, after a brief conference. taurant accommodates just thirty-two lions of loin dressed in bagna cauda—in The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, guests a night, serving a tasting menu that a spread that ofered a respite from the through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, un- costs a hundred and fifty-five dollars a pressure of savoring each fleeting, precious forthcoming façades of Midtown East. The efect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, person, before wine. The tables in the bite. With Gem, McGarry proves himself doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities dining room—upscale Scandinavian- to be much more than a whiz kid: he’s an they should know better than to want. They looked bohemian, with mustard-colored cordu- exceptionally gifted, inventive chef by any down, through the bar-top glass, at photographs from the establishment’s original incarnation, in roy banquettes—feel spaced for comfort measure. My hope is that, having mas- the nineteen-twenties, as a residence for sorority and for privacy, and half the restaurant, tered the rules of fine dining at such a girls turned working women. “The sweetest group called the Living Room, used as a café by tender age, he will soon feel inspired to of girls this world has known,” went one sorority song, memorialized on notepaper under emptying day, is reserved at night for pre-dinner break them. (Tasting menu $155.) cocktails, “whose standards are as good as pure as

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW FOR ERIC HELGAS BY PHOTOGRAPH canapés or for lingering after dessert. —Hannah Goldﬁeld gold.”—Elizabeth Barber

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 23 www.viennesemodernism2018.info

# To Art Its Freedom

VIENNESE MODERNISM 2018 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT trils, spoke to him. The President or- Russia, of course, say that the reports MIGHT AND RIGHT dered fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise mis- from Douma are fake news. siles to be fired at the base from which Poison gas, which kills with particu- n August of 2013, the Syrian regime the gas attacks had been launched. It lar cruelty and indiscriminateness, has Iof Bashar al-Assad fired rockets filled was the first direct American strike been internationally outlawed since shortly with the nerve agent sarin at the East- against the Assad regime since the start after the First World War, but in Syria ern Ghouta area, just outside Damascus. of the war, in 2011, and Trump was widely it has become a conventional weapon. Within minutes, more than fourteen praised. The next day, Syrian planes took (Human Rights Watch has confirmed hundred civilians, including hundreds of of from the same base and bombed more than fifty government attacks.) children, began convulsing, choking, and more civilians. Trump never followed Assad regularly uses chlorine for tactical foaming at the mouth, then died, of sufo- up, and the war went on. advantage, and it works—the attack on cation. President Obama reacted to the Almost exactly a year later, on April 7th, Douma, coming at the end of two months atrocity—which not only crossed but chemical weapons—chlorine and per- of bombardment, forced rebels to surren- obliterated his self-described “red line” haps even stronger agents—again rained der one of their last important strong- for taking action in the Syrian civil war— death on Eastern Ghouta, asphyxiating holds. But he is also making a point: he by having the U.S. military draw up a more than forty civilians in the town of is showing Syrians that he will do what- plan to destroy Assad’s small Air Force. Douma. The President threatened air ever it takes to hold on to power, that Then, after deliberating with his inner strikes and warned Moscow to stay out they are helpless, that no one will come circle, Obama called of the attack, cit- of the way. “Get ready Russia, because to their aid. ing a lack of congressional authorization they will be coming, nice and new and Who can argue otherwise? Most of and of international support. He later ‘smart!’” he tweeted. “You shouldn’t be the gas attacks have gone unremarked said that he was proud of having defied partners with a Gas Killing Animal who upon in the outside world, unless they the pressure to look strong. kills his people and enjoys it!” Syria and result in horrible pictures, and in those Unfortunately, the subsequent deal cases the Western response has been so struck by the United States and Russia uncertain that it has only encouraged to remove Assad’s chemical-weapons Assad to keep going. Whether the Amer- stockpiles was full of loopholes, weakly ican President is a judicious rationalist enforced, and ultimately circumvented who cares about international law and by Syrian and Russian deception. The disdains the cowboy image or an impul- lesson that Assad seemed to draw from sive narcissist who is indiferent to every Obama’s lonely act of self-liberation norm and just wants to look tough, the was that the West would not interfere images from Syria are the same. the next time he gassed his own peo- Trump is in an especially bad posi- ple. Last April, Assad used sarin on Khan tion to respond to these atrocities. Un- Sheikhoun, a rebel-held town in north- like every other President since Jimmy ern Syria, killing at least seventy. Pres- Carter, he doesn’t even ofer human rights ident Trump’s advisers found it diicult the compliment of hypocrisy. His for- to focus his attention on the enormity eign policy is simple: might makes right. of the act, until his daughter Ivanka, He has championed brutal rulers, like after seeing pictures of dead children the Philippine President, Rodrigo Duter-

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL TOM BY ILLUSTRATIONS with foam around their lips and nos- te, and the Saudi royal family; shrugged

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 25 at genocidal killings in Burma; and force largely responsible for crushing the Free Syrian Army, or about the possible pushed our military to use levels of vi- Islamic State. U.S. diplomacy was never return of ISIS, or about the regional am- olence that have sent civilian casualties aligned with the leverage in Syria that bitions of Russia and Iran. The announce- in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan soaring. comes with force, and now we have no ment came as a surprise to his generals. Under Trump, it is nearly impossible for diplomacy at all. Any action that Trump After nearly two decades of inconclusive refugees from the Syrian civil war to find takes will be feckless at best and possi- wars in collapsed states, against elusive a haven in this country. John Bolton, his bly disastrous—triggering conflict with enemies backed by complex arrays of ac- new national-security adviser, describes Russia, or the war with Iran that Bolton tors, our military leaders no longer think international organizations and treaties and others want—for there is no strat- in terms of victory parades. They use as threats to U.S. sovereignty. On what egy to guide it except to “bomb the shit phrases like “staying in the game” and ground can the Administration punish out of them” and get out. Even a joint “pursuing your objectives.” They are far Assad for defying an international weap- attack with European allies would be too wised up to suit their shallow, frag- ons ban and killing civilians? empty without a larger efort to nego- ile, ignorant Commander-in-Chief. Seven years of indecision have left us tiate an end to the war. Trump’s taunts and reversals of the the weakest outside power in the war. A few days before the latest gas at- past week are the product of a charac- Russia and Iran have committed fighters, tack, the President declared victory over ter that we know too well. They also weapons, aircraft, and a readiness to jus- the Islamic State and announced that the reflect deep American frustration with tify any inhumanity and tell any lie on two thousand U.S. troops in Syria would the limits of our power to win these behalf of their client in Damascus, and soon come home. Maybe he will have wars or to end them. Hitting Assad now now Assad is close to the ultimate Pyr- them march down Pennsylvania Avenue, might bring a momentary sense of just rhic victory. Turkey, defying American past his reviewing stand, in the military deserts, but there is nothing to be proud pleas, is waging a brutal campaign against parade planned for later this year. Trump of in Syria, and no American solution— the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, had nothing to say about the fate of the not even for the gassing of children. our only reliable partner and the ground Syrian Kurds and our other partner, the —George Packer

VOCATIONAL STUDIES the Rolls or the Lambo.) He opens the “We had a diicult relationship. When ANGEL IN HASTINGS back door. He wants you to have the ex- I changed my name to Max, in 1993, perience. He gets in front and starts driv- my dad said, ‘Fuck you.’ I went to fat ing north. The contrast between the back camp when I was eleven. I got out seat’s spacious, buttery interior and the of special ed at thirteen and drifted driver’s livery (T-shirt, worn jeans, jean through high school. They thought I jacket) is sharp enough to make you won- was retarded. But I learned to sing and der if the car is stolen. play entire catalogues of music. I don’t osh Max is a name that turns up in But it’s not. Max, it turns out, tends read music, but I have a savant’s mem- Jyour e-mail in-box, sometimes with many lines—musician, writer, photog- ory for lyrics and melodies.” a video attached. The video might be a rapher, ordained minister, and figure Max has put this talent to great use business proposition, in the form of him model—but his most remunerative is as through the years—in a prog-rock band performing, on a portable keyboard, a a test driver and reviewer, for magazines, called Rage, a hybrid cover act (Elvis few verses he’s written to the tune of of expensive automobiles. He has been Prestello and the Distractions), a Nick Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” In doing this for eighteen years—fifty-two Drake tribute orchestra, and a lounge- place of the opening line, “Don’t go cars a year. The manufacturers deliver a-billy ensemble that he christened Josh changing,’’ he sings your name. He’s sit- the cars to him and he drives them Max’s Outfit. There were memorable ting next to an old stove. He has messy around. He’d driven the Maybach to gigs but never a lot of cash. peroxide-blond hair, a tight red T-shirt, Bellmore, on Long Island, and was now In 2000, Max became the automo- and a wild look in his eyes. taking it up the Saw Mill to the West- bile critic at the News. Life was grand: So you’d think, when other e-mails chester Hills Cemetery, in Hastings-on- “Jaguar would call and say, ‘What do arrive saying he’s going to be in the city Hudson, to visit his father’s grave—a you want?,’ and they’d bring it to me and would like to pick you up near your favorite test-driving destination. the next day.” Bentley flew him to Bei- apartment in a fancy car and drive you The Maybach pulled up, scattering jing; Bugatti had him test-drive a two- to a graveyard, that you might come up a rafter of wild turkeys. A footstone and-a-half-million-dollar Vitesse. But with an excuse not to. But the videos read “Stanley P. Friedman. 1925-2006.” that racket, like so many, got tight. He are funny. He’s persistent. And he says “We buried him with a cup of cofee, lived for a while in Park Slope, then he’ll be driving a Rolls-Royce or a Lam- mismatched socks, the Times, and a Inwood, and then, finally, in a Win- borghini. If you’ve never been in a car cigar,” Max said. Friedman was a writer nebago, parked on the Upper West Side, like that, this could be your chance. and a photographer, and a Second not far from where he’d lived as a child. On the appointed afternoon, you meet World War B-17 bombardier who’d sur- The neighborhood rebelled and, even- him on the street. He’s driving a Mercedes- vived thirty-six missions over Europe. tually, he had to split town for Phila- Maybach S560. (He couldn’t get hold of “He never talked about it,” Max said. delphia, then Colorado. “I’m so fucking

26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 broke,” he said. On this occasion, Mer- cedes had flown him to New York from his temporary perch in Longmont. “But I have no permanent home now, really,” he said. “My stuf ’s in storage in Man- hattan and Philly.” He performs up and down the Front Range, mostly solo: “It’s rare there to find people who can sing harmony. And they don’t really get my references to ‘The Honeymooners’ or ‘The God- father.’” All-request solo-piano sets have him doing lots of Billy Joel. He has a gimmick, on vocals and guitar, where he strings together snatches of sixty-four Beatles songs, in six minutes. His current show, called “Binge Mode,” has him in Rollerblades, performing on a circular saw. “The noise gets their at- And, just like that, Facebook is giving us ads for used cars, tention,” he said. He also has a regular optometrists, and couples counselling.” gig as a nude model for art students at C.U. Boulder: “I name the poses so I can remember them: the Pelican, the •• Bela Lugosi, the Shoveller, the Pugi- list.” He’s working on a memoir called is to promote cultural exchange. The assumed even greater urgency. His firm “Help Wanted.” name is a variant of “samizdat” (“self- takes those cases pro bono. “At the con- “Where to now, sir?” he asked. He published”), the Soviet term for clan- sular stage, there’s definitely some con- was headed eventually to New Jersey to destinely distributed dissident literature. fusion coming down from the Admin- take his mother bowling. She is ninety- “ ‘Tam’ means ‘over there,’ ” Covey ex- istration about how rigid to be,” he said. four. “I speak to her every day,” he said. plained the other day. “The stuf that’s Earlier this year, he tried to bring in a But first he piloted the Maybach to a taken across the border.” group of Syrian dancers. The State De- cofee shop in a nearby mini-mall. A Covey, who is fifty, is a tall, cheerful partment said no to a member of the young man was sitting out front, writ- Minnesotan. “I wanted to be a hermit troupe. “Totally a bummer,” Covey said. ing on a laptop he’d plugged into his for a really long time,” he said. “But then “I had some Scandinavian clients, and car. He said that he was driving around in grad school I studied post-colonial they were, like, ‘Oh no, are we not get- the country with a mutt named Bolt literary theory.” In 1992, after the Ber- ting in?’ And I said, ‘No, you’re Danish and blogging about it. His motto was: lin Wall came down, he and a girlfriend jazz musicians.’ ” “Be silly, find joy, live in the moment.” took university gigs in Slovakia. “We Translating arcane immigration pol- He and Max talked for a bit. It felt like found this really great indie-rock punk icy for aspiring rock stars and global- a meeting of two angels. scene there,” he said. “I wound up start- citizen d.j.s can be trying. On one form, 1—Nick Paumgarten ing a band, which was way more inter- applicants are asked whether they’ve esting than teaching. Kind of damaged- ever committed genocide. “It pushes PAPERWORK art-noise math rock.” people’s patience,” Covey said. GETTING IN The band didn’t last; neither did the The other night, Covey hosted a relationship. Covey moved to Dublin, workshop called “Navigating the Lab- then to Amsterdam, where he ran the yrinth” at his oice building, in Dumbo. Knitting Factory’s European booking He wore a plaid shirt, jeans, and black agency. He dabbled in publicity; he boots; he has glasses and a graying goa- managed the Klezmatics. “But there tee. About fifty artists gathered in a wasn’t any good system for afordably meeting room with a small disco ball dversity can inspire great art, but getting artists into the U.S.,” he said. dangling from the ceiling. A golden re- Ait can also be a time suck. For more In 1998, he and some friends launched triever greeted them at the door. “We than twenty years, Matthew Covey has Tamizdat; after 9/11, visa applicants once had a dog act write us about get- been helping musicians and other art- faced a much stricter level of scrutiny. ting visas,” Covey recalled. “We wrote ists deal with government paperwork. “We kind of drew straws as a board, back, ‘We assume that you’re talking He’s an immigration fixer; his firm, Cov- and I drew the short one,” he said. “So about the trainer?’ ” Nope. He grinned. eyLaw, handles some twenty-five hun- I wound up having to go to law school.” “Dogs don’t need visas.” dred visas every year, in ailiation with With Trump’s travel ban—in each He went on, “All these laws have to Tamizdat, a nonprofit whose mission of its iterations—Covey’s mission has do with labor policy. They’re to protect

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 27

American artists from”—he leaned into of Dolce & Gabbana clients descended a microphone—“you guys.” He pulled on New York for the first-ever Alta up a PowerPoint. “The Department of Moda event in the United States— Homeland Security’s idea of what’s four days that kicked of at the main ‘culturally unique’ is, unsurprisingly, not branch of the New York Public Library very sophisticated. In our oice, we have with an exhibit of the company’s high- the Funny Costumes and Weird Instru- jewelry, or Alta Gioielleria, line. ments Rule: if you’re wearing something The library’s entrance hall—usually weird and playing an instrument that frequented by frazzled-looking grad- can’t be bought at Guitar Center, then uate students, pufy-coated tourists, you’re probably good for a P-3 visa.” and homeless people seeking shelter— An actor asked about travel flexibil- had been transformed. Enormous sprays ity. “I think Rod Stewart has been on of blossoming plum branches loomed an O-1 visa for years,” Covey replied. everywhere; in a tribute to the loca- “Because he doesn’t want to get a green tion, oversized faux-medieval books lay card and he tours all the time, and he open on tables; and a series of vitrines wants to spend his summers in the South displayed opulent, one-of trinkets. of France, or whatever.” The Dolce & Gabbana woman can Sarah Jessica Parker and Domenico Dolce Parham Haghighi, a pianist, has an be defined by her willful rejection of the O-1 visa, but he’s from Iran, so he can’t well-known Coco Chanel edict—pre- a dozen glittering Coachella-gone- fly in and out as he pleases. “This is not ferring to put on rather than take of one Baroque flower crowns in the room, the best place to live,” he said. “But it’s final accessory before leaving the house— some flounces and some trains, hats with better than where I came from.” and the almost comically ornate jewelry veils, and colorful fur stoles, not to men- Clicking ahead, Covey advised, on display echoed this attitude. A pair tion bejewelled corsets. The clients min- “You’re going to have to get creative. of earrings were composed of kittens gled over flutes of pink Cristal, served And by creative I don’t mean fraudu- perched on pavé balls, batting at pearl by handsome waiters in maroon livery. lent. You can’t do what a lot of artists orbs dangling from diamond-flecked Domenico Dolce, bald and bespec- do, which is make up a bunch of stuf hearts. A book-shaped pendant was stud- tacled, wearing gold-embroidered loaf- and put it in your petition. Because ded with diamonds and garnets and ers with a velvet dinner jacket of the what Homeland Security has started topped by a chunky ruby; hung on a same shade as the waiters’, bobbed and to do is call those venues to check.” sturdy chain, not unlike that worn by Sid weaved among the crowd—posing for (This elicited an ominous “Oooh.”) Vicious in his heyday, it bore the hard- pictures, dispensing hugs, and passing In closing, Covey assured the artists to-argue-with legend “Love Is Beauty.” around drinks. A jovial group of four that they could follow up about their At 7:50 P.M., harried stafers were women from Hong Kong swept him up particulars. His oice has a hot line. He still bustling around, positioning jew- for a selfie. One of them, Karen Suen, a described a sample call: “ ‘The band is els on Picasso-esque busts commis- jewelry designer, who wore a flowered coming in from Toronto, and everyone sioned from the American artist Nick gown with a plunging neckline and chan- but the drummer is here.’ ” The crowd Georgiou, whose medium—appropri- delier earrings, had been an Alta Moda murmured. “It’s always the drummer.” ately or not, given the location—is re- client for two years. “Luxury!” she said. 1—Betsy Morais purposed books. The library had been “It’s one of a kind!” kept open until six. Only then were the The evening had the feel of a sum- OVER THE TOP three hundred Dolce & Gabbana work- mer-camp reunion. “It’s like a big fam- BEDAZZLED ers able to spring into action. “We were ily,” Veronica Chaves, who had flown waiting for everyone to put their books in from Paraguay, said. She wore a white down, pencils down, exit the library in gown under a structured bolero busy single file,” a publicist said. She looked with sparkly peppers and hearts, a tiara tired. The event had been in the works perching on her pale Renaissance-style for a year. At eight, a Verdi aria boomed ringlets. “Wearing Dolce & Gabbana from speakers, marking the evening’s makes you feel like you’re a queen in- or the past six years, the designers start. “Cominciare!” the publicist said side,” she said. A potential hazard— FDomenico Dolce and Stefano Gab- with a short laugh. two clients wearing the same dress— bana have staged biannual presenta- The guests began to arrive—most had to be averted, she cautioned, by tions of their haute-couture, or Alta of them Alta Moda enthusiasts who’d consulting with the company in ad- Moda, collections. The extravagant travelled from countries as far-flung as vance. “Every girl has her personal help,” events, in which the designers show China, Russia, and Brazil—and the hall she explained. (Clients also communi- custom-made, one-of-a-kind pieces for was quickly filled by a scrum of intri- cate with one another via a special both women and men, have until now cately shod, gem-adorned, heavily per- WhatsApp account.) Chaves’s husband, taken place largely in Italian resort fumed clients. The looks were gaudy who represents the Toyota company in towns. But on a recent Friday hundreds and dramatic. There were at least Paraguay, was standing quietly by her

30 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 side, his dark suit punctuated by a pair by saying, ‘I don’t have any money.’” Miki Yamashita and the director Doug of sparkly shoes. But the caller was Tim Sanford, the Hughes—who first put on an O’Don- After dinner, served at tables groan- artistic director of Playwrights Hori- nell play when the two were Harvard ing under bushels of peonies, platters zons, and he told Winkler that she’d undergraduates—joined Steve in read- of strawberries, and ornate candelabra, been chosen as the first recipient of the ing three of Mark’s pieces, among them the actress Sarah Jessica Parker led a Mark O’Donnell Prize, for “an emerg- “Manhattan Zen,” a sequence of koan- charity auction with the help of Adrien ing theater artist in recognition of her like reflections on city life: “A run-over Meyer, from Christie’s. Parker had on or his talent and promise.” The prize rat. Good! Still . . .”; “The neighbor who a turquoise turban and a gold Alta came with twenty-five thousand dol- needs voice lessons is taking them.” Moda dress. The auction benefitted the lars. Once Winkler got over the shock, “I was born first,” Steve said after- New York City Ballet and ROC United, she bought a desk. ward. “One day, in grade school, I told an organization that is dedicated to The prize was named for a play- him, ‘I’m the original, and you’re the raising the wages of restaurant work- wright, poet, novelist, cartoonist, and copy’—and he came back instantly with ers. Modelling a set of aquamarine- general-purpose humorist. He wrote ‘You’re the rough draft, and I’m the new, and-diamond earrings, bracelet, and for “Saturday Night Live,” in the eight- improved version.’ He was very fast. He necklace that were to be auctioned, ies, and he was an occasional contrib- was like a little adult when we were Parker worked the crowd, coaxing guests utor to this magazine, but commercial kids—and then, in a sort of strange to bid. “Tonight is not Alta Moda,” success eluded him, or he eluded it, until switch-around, he was very childlike Dolce cried. “It’s Altissima! Too much!” the theatre producer Margo Lion asked when he was actually a grownup.” Rob Arnott, a gray-haired entrepre- his agent, “Do you think Mark O’Don- Leah Winkler never met her bene- neur from Newport Beach, California, nell could write the book for a musi- factor, but, eerily, the first play she had who sat beside his tiara-wearing Rus- cal?” The musical was “Hairspray.” anything to do with, in high school, sian wife, Marina, bid aggressively, O’Donnell shared a Tony with his co- was an adaptation of Molière’s “Les inspiring hoots and slightly feral ap- writer, Thomas Meehan, and a few years Fourberies de Scapin,” co-written by plause. He ended up buying all the lots, later they adapted the play for film and him. “I was a wordless gendarme, but including Parker’s golden gown—which wrote the book for a second musical, that play was what made me fall in love the designers had at first been reluc- “Cry-Baby.” Prosperity didn’t visibly tant to part with—for a little more than change him, however. His twin, Steve— half a million dollars. who for years was David Letterman’s “Domenico and Stefano, can you head writer—said recently that, “Hair- throw in the dress?” Parker had asked spray” notwithstanding, his brother earlier, attempting to solicit a steeper bid. never had more than one belt. “He “No, no, no!” Dolce had at first an- owned two pairs of scufed shoes, which swered, with a laugh. “I’m Catholic— even in middle age he referred to as no naked!” his ‘gym shoes’ and his ‘good, school 1—Naomi Fry shoes,’ ” Steve said. “Despite my ofers to treat, he never had a cell phone.” LEGACY DEPT. Mark died in 2012, at the age of fifty- VERY UNIQUE eight, after collapsing in front of his apartment building, on the Upper West Side. Recently, Steve donated Mark’s “Hairspray” royalties in perpetuity to the Actors Fund, to endow the prize Mark and Steve O’Donnell and to support other fund activities, including addiction-and-recovery ser- with the experience of theatre,” she said. hen her phone rang that day, vices. (O’Donnell’s death was at least When Steve met her, he gave her cop- WLeah Nanako Winkler was broke. partly alcohol-related.) The gift and the ies of several of Mark’s plays, and she She’d come to New York on a bus, a prize were announced during a private said, “Oh, I’ve read them.” decade earlier, with forty-five hundred ceremony at what is now the Mark “That made me feel great on Mark’s dollars that she’d earned by selling her O’Donnell Theatre, at the Actors Fund behalf,” Steve recalled. “Leah’s take on eggs to a fertility clinic, and now she was Arts Center, in Brooklyn. the world is very much like his. What thinking about taking a part-time job as “As kids, we were identical enough she does is write characters that are true a dog groomer because she couldn’t to swap classes and hornswoggle adults to their own selves, so that, when they aford to both pay her rent and do the in general,” Steve said during the cer- speak, they say the kinds of dopey things only work she wanted to do: write plays. emony. “But I have to tell you, not then, that those people really would say, and “I saw that an unknown number was not now, was there anybody who was that makes you laugh. She told me that calling my phone, and I automatically like Mark O’Donnell. He was unique she doesn’t think of her plays as funny, assumed it was a telemarketer,” she said enough to carry the prohibited modifier: but to me they’re hilarious—like Mark’s.” recently. “So I answered the phone Mark was very unique.” The actress —David Owen

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 31 heat reflected from the pavement had OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS scorched the leaves of street trees, cre- ating a false, uncolorful fall. In gardens, blossoms dried and withered, THE MARASCHINO MOGUL and the weeds by highway entrances took on the appearance of twisted After the bees turned red, Arthur Mondella’s cherry empire revealed its secrets. wire. As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, BY IAN FRAZIER bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too. What next? they wondered. Bees go through a lot. Colony-collapse disorder—the decimation of entire hives—has been a worrisome problem worldwide. Pesticides, parasites, lack of flowers and other forage, er- ratic weather, and disease have caused drastic declines in bee populations. Hornets sometimes get into a hive and eat bees, honey, honeycombs, and all. Because the red bees were city bees, nobody took the sudden change in the color of their honey as a prom- ising development. Until March of that year, it had not been legal to keep bees in the city. A few beekeepers had evaded the ban by camouflaging their hives with faux- brick contact paper or otherwise making them blend in with the rooftops. The outlaws got a kick out of defying former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had initiated the ban. Immedi- In the basement, police discovered a hydroponic system for cultivating marijuana. ately after the Board of Health voted to lift it, the number of beekeepers rthur Mondella is mourned. Up inique, the vice-president, is thirty-two. multiplied. According to David Selig, Auntil the moment of his death, One might not expect that Mondel- a restaurateur who began keeping bees on February 24, 2015, he ran his fam- la’s death also would have saddened on the roof of his Red Hook apart- ily’s company, Dell’s Maraschino many of New York City’s beekeepers, ment building in 2006, the number Cherries, in the Red Hook section of but it did. People in the beekeeping of hives in the area went from about Brooklyn. His daughters Dana Mon- community, or their bees, had crossed three to more than a dozen. In the della Bentz and Dominique Mon- paths with Mondella in 2010, less than summer’s unprecedented heat, water della, who run the company now, miss five years before he died. In fact, the and nectar became harder to find. him every day. They remember him complications in Mondella’s life that At Added Value Farms, a public in their prayers and wish he could see led to his demise had a minor but garden and composting site in Red how they’ve done with the business. significant bee component. The first Hook, Tim O’Neal, who teaches bi- Their great-grandfather Arthur Mon- small signs that all was not right with ology in middle school and at Brook- della, senior, and their grandfather him arrived buzzing in the air. Though lyn College, looked into the problem. Ralph founded it in 1948. Dell’s Mar- circumstances put Mondella and the O’Neal also keeps bees and writes a aschino Cherries processes and sells bees on opposite sides of an issue, the blog, Boroughbees. In it he speculated nothing but cherries—about fourteen beekeepers still speak admiringly of him, that the red honey might be connected million pounds a year—from its sin- and express regret at his unhappy end. to the nearby service depots for M.T.A. gle Red Hook factory. Dana, the pres- The summer of 2010 was the hot- buses, and to a substance called eth- ident and C.E.O., is thirty, and Dom- test ever recorded in the city. By July, ylene glycol. Bees, pets, and children

32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 ILLUSTRATION BY JANNE IIVONEN have been known to sample motor had been in touch with Andrew Coté, “We had been legal for less than a fluids that contain ethylene glycol, be- the founder of the New York City year,” Selig said. “He could’ve made a cause it tastes sweet. The results are Beekeepers Association, to try to find fuss about why he had to deal with sometimes fatal. He thought the bees a solution. Coté is the most famous all these local bees. We appreciated might be bringing back spilled trans- beekeeper in New York. He keeps bees that his first reaction wasn’t to call the mission fluid or antifreeze from the at several city sites, including on the exterminator.” depots, and he advised his fellow- grounds of the U.N., and sells New Meanwhile, also taking an interest beekeepers not to taste any red honey York City honey at the Union Square in the story, the authorities saw an until it had been tested. Cerise Mayo, Greenmarket. He is a handsome, opportunity. According to later news a food and farm consultant who kept hazel-eyed man of French-Canadian reports, there had been rumors start- bees both in the garden and on Gov- parentage, with a suave black beard ing in 2009 that Mondella was grow- ernors Island, just of the Red Hook going gray. Coté’s life has included ing marijuana. Law enforcement shore, wondered why her island bees, many adventures, such as hanging up- hoped that the attention being di- separated from land by six hundred side down nineteen stories above rected at the cherry factory might re- yards of water, were also producing Times Square to remove a swarm of veal more about what went on inside red honey. bees from a window washer’s stan- it. Quiet inquiries were made about No one is sure who first began to chion with a special low-suction the factory’s floor plan. think of the cherry factory. Bees were bee-vacuuming device he built him- observed flying in its direction and self, and securing hives on a roof at rthur Ralph Mondella was named visiting puddles of red juice around it the request of Secret Service agents Aafter his grandfather Arthur and on the sidewalk. In early September, who planned to position snipers there his father, Ralph. The family came O’Neal took chunks of honeycomb and did not want any bees getting from Naples, though Ralph was born from hives in and near the garden, put into a sniper’s ear. in America. In Italy, Arthur, senior, them in fifty-millilitre sample tubes, “The red honey tasted terrible, by had been a baker, and he wanted to and mailed them to the state apicul- the way,” Coté told me one afternoon get out of that business because he turist, in Albany, for testing. About a at his market stall. “It was sickly sweet, did not like working seven days a week. month later, he received the results: kind of metallic-tasting, and watery. He and Ralph began making mara- the honey tested positive for F.D.&C. But, after the story went all over the schino cherries in a small factory on Red No. 40, a food-safe dye, which is place online, I could’ve sold a ton of Henry Street, in Carroll Gardens. The an ingredient of the maraschino syrup it. I had dozens of customers asking cherries, which traditionally embel- used by the Dell’s factory. for it. And all that red honey ended lish ice-cream sundaes and cocktails, In November, the Times broke the up being thrown out, and those bee- were not steeped in maraschino, the story, which ran on the front page, keepers lost a season of production.” Italian wild-cherry liqueur. (Since under the headline “In Mystery (and He showed me a few vials of the red Prohibition, most maraschino cher- Culture Clash), Some Brooklyn Bees honey he had kept as souvenirs. ries have not contained maraschino.) Turn Red.” Cerise Mayo was quoted, “I really liked Arthur Mondella,” Instead, the Mondellas used a secret voicing her distress that her bees were Coté went on. “Arthur was genuine, recipe involving sugar, citric acid, red getting their honey from the syrup. a true Brooklyn guy, and he had that coloring, and a curing process that Because her name sounded possibly accent. Out of the blue, before the never subjected the fruit to hot water. made up, and her first name means newspaper story, he got in touch about The cold-water-only approach pre- “cherry” in French, a Times researcher the bee situation and asked me to serves the cherries’ crunch, the fam- had called her to make sure she was come to the factory. I didn’t go until ily says. All of the production was real. The story considered the prob- right after the story appeared. I knew small-batch and hand-done. The lem in the context of the gentrifica- there would be a lot of reporters hours turned out to be just as long as tion of Red Hook, with the factory around, so I asked if he could be there those in a bakery. standing for the old neighborhood really early, like 5 a.m. He said, ‘I will Arthur, of the second American and the beekeepers for the new. The make it my business to be there.’ I’ll generation of the family, was born in idea of the red bees somehow clicked always remember that. I showed him 1957. He grew up in Bay Ridge, at- with readers, and scores of news out- how to put some screens up, make the tended Xavierian High School, and lets picked the story up. David Selig, lids of his bins tighter, control the got a full scholarship to New York whom it also mentioned, turned on spills. It was not a diicult adjustment University. After graduating with a his computer the morning the story at all, and we solved the problem. Af- degree in finance he went to Wall came out and found “three thousand terward, I sent him an invoice for my Street, where he found a job with an e-mails—from people I’d never heard services, he paid it, and that was that. investment firm. He did not want to of and from everybody I ever knew.” Throughout the whole thing he was work in the cherry factory at all, but The Times story contained no a gentleman.” in 1983 his father had a heart attack quotes from Arthur Mondella, who No other beekeepers dealt as ex- and Arthur set aside his financial ca- had not returned phone calls asking tensively with Mondella; all were reer to take over the company. for comment. It noted that Mondella grateful for his levelheaded response. Arthur, senior, was long dead by

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 33 then. When Arthur, the grandson, ex- always ended up getting red stains on how do I back it up?’ and he knew. amined with an ex-Wall Streeter’s eye his white shoes, and he went through He would always introduce me to the the company he had inherited, he saw a lot of them. latest technology.” room for improvement. In the nine- He lived on Staten Island, in a dis- Dana said, “He didn’t have hob- teen-seventies it had moved from Car- tant neighborhood called Graniteville, bies, he wasn’t into sports. He was roll Gardens to Dikeman Street, in until he and the girls’ mother divorced. into movies, a movie buf. When we Red Hook. Mondella set about ex- Dominique and Dana and their mother were little kids, my parents were di- panding that location into two adja- stayed in Graniteville, and Mondella vorced, so he would pick us up, and cent buildings, and eventually the fac- moved back to Brooklyn, where he we would go to Blockbuster, and we tory occupied a total floor space of eventually married a Ukrainian woman. would pick out a bunch of movies, thirty-eight thousand square feet. He They had a daughter, Antoinette, who and just watch movies. He used to scaled up what had been essentially a is more than twenty years younger than cook these huge barbecues for us, and mom-and-pop operation; his mother her half sisters. Later Mondella di- I’d be, like, ‘Dad, there’s only four of and his sister, Joanne, worked there, vorced again and moved in with his us, we could have a meal like this for, too, but he ran the show, increasing new girlfriend. But during all this time like, twenty-five people.’ ” production capacity and acquiring he spent most of his life at the factory. “He was really specific in what he large-volume food-service clients. In Dominique and Dana both went liked,” Dominique said. “If he had a 2014, he made a seven-million-dollar to Moore Catholic High School, on salad, it had to be only oil and vine- investment in automation so that one Staten Island, and then to St. John’s gar on it, or if he wanted to have this day the place would “run itself,” as he University, where Dana got a degree brand of rice it had to be this specific told his daughters. in accounting and Dominique got a brand of rice. Potato chips always had Despite automating, he wanted to degree in finance. Mondella said that to be crinkle-cut.” keep his human workforce intact. By after college one of them had to work Dana described going on an errand all accounts, he cared about his em- for him. Dominique had worked of to buy her father bread. “So I drive ployees. Lots of ex-ofenders had jobs and on at the factory since high school, from Staten Island to Brooklyn, to at Dell’s. The Red Hook Houses, a doing many jobs, from billing cus- Thirteenth Avenue, where my dad nearby low-income housing project, tomers to booking flights for her fa- wanted me to get the bread. So I call supplied him with workers who needed ther’s business trips. After she grad- him. I’m, like, ‘Dad, I can’t find the the paycheck. Mondella was known uated, she went back to the company bakery.’ He’s, like, ‘What? You don’t for giving salary advances, and loans full time. Dana was hired at Pricewa- know where it is on Thirteenth Av- whose repayment was not vigorously terhouseCoopers, the international enue?’—click!—so I found a bakery pursued. He hired a homeless man, accounting firm, and began a job at on Fourteenth Avenue. So I get to his provided him an advance for a deposit, its midtown oice right out of col- apartment, he breaks the bread open, and let him use a company truck to lege, often putting in sixteen-hour and he’s, like, ‘This isn’t from Thir- move into a new apartment. Gang tat- days. She met a man in banking, Tom teenth Avenue! This is from Four- toos could be seen on the muscular, Bentz, and they married in 2013. He teenth Avenue!’ And I’m, like, How maraschino-red-stained arms of guys also works for the family company. does this guy even know?” on the factory floor. The most commonly used news he smell of maraschino cherries, photo of Mondella shows him lean- Tnot unpleasant but eye-water- ing into a cherry-processing machine, ingly strong, fills the factory, and the small and serious-looking behind the floors remain sticky even though mass of bright-red cherries in the fore- they’re constantly mopped. Sometimes ground. He is wearing a white lab coat, neighbors in apartments overlooking and a plastic shower cap covers his the building caught a few whifs of hair. (“A terrible picture of him,” his marijuana along with the cherries. daughters say.) He was a slim man, not David Selig thought the smell of pot tall, with dark eyes and a seamed, care- Dana and Dominique share an might be the result of workmen smok- worn face. He used “colorful language,” oice next to the one that used to be ing it on their breaks. Later news sto- according to several accounts. In his their father’s. Last year, I visited them ries said that a postal employee had oice he had a video monitor that there. Dominique is pretty and dark, told authorities that marijuana was showed the factory floor, and when he Dana is pretty and blond, and both being grown on the premises. But the saw something going wrong he would intensify their eyes with mascara. “My police had failed to find suspicious appear suddenly and yell at those re- father was just a very, very smart man,” signs. An increase in energy consump- sponsible. Unless he was meeting a Dominique told me. “He wasn’t an tion consistent with the use of grow customer, he dressed in jeans and a engineer, he wasn’t a mechanic, but lights had not been detected, possi- T-shirt, but he always wore white the guys on the floor said that he could bly because the factory had its own sneakers, and asked for new pairs every fix any machine himself. Like, I could gasoline-powered generators, and a year from his family for Christmas. He ask him, ‘Dad, how do I fix my phone, drug-sniing dog had not been able

34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 to discover a definitive scent of marijuana. Independently, environmental investigators, acting on a tip, began to look into possible violations in the dumping of wastewater from the cherry-manufacturing process into the sewer. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn D.A.’s oice more or less forgot about the marijuana investigation. Inquiry into what might be going on at the cherry factory did not pro- ceed much beyond rumor and spec- ulation. The heightened attention caused by the bee episode had in- creased the factory’s visibility. In 2013, Brooklyn elected a new D.A., Ken- neth Thompson, who set out to clean up pollution in the borough. His oice decided to take a look at some stalled environmental cases. “ y father was a funny man in Mthat he didn’t share much,” “How long before the clinical trials are over?” Dominique said. “That was just the way he was. We’ve come to find out only after his death what a pioneer •• he was in this business.” Dana said, “He was very private. could’ve asked for, but we were not blazing” raid, which it was not, but We’d ask him questions when we were spoiled.” the oicers did arrive in numbers. little and his response would be, “Dana, see if you have the picture Their warrant hadn’t allowed for the ‘Whaddya, writin’ a book?’ ” of you and him and Antoinette at the searching of Arthur Mondella him- “Don’t get us wrong—he wanted wedding.” self. As the oicers moved through us to learn, but at the factory he “My dad gave me the most impres- his factory, he became more and more would’ve wanted to make the decisive, gorgeous wedding I could’ve ever agitated. While examining some sions for us,” Dominique said. asked for. It was a hundred and forty- shelves, they found what appeared to “The capacity that we’re working five people, at Our Lady Queen of be a false wall. They told him they at now, he would be so impressed,” Peace in Staten Island, and we had were going to send for a warrant to Dana said. “But I don’t know if he the reception at the Palace, in Som- search behind it. As they waited for would’ve been able to see that—not erset Park, New Jersey. I wore a white the warrant, Mondella excused him- in his lifetime, because it wasn’t in his silk dress. D’Pascual, at Nelson and self to use the bathroom. Once inside, nature to see it, to allow us to run with Amboy on Staten Island, did my hair. he locked the door and would not an idea, especially as it pertains to I watch the video of the wedding come out. here. He was the type of person that sometimes and it’s nice. My dad is The police tried to persuade him did everything on his own.” in it.” to unlock the door. He refused, and “It’s not that he didn’t have confi- “We were just very proud of him, asked them to bring his sister, Joanne. dence in who we were,” Dominique proud of our parent.” They did. Through the door, he said said. “He knew that he raised two to her, “Take care of my kids.” Then smart girls.” hen the raid finally happened, it he shot himself in the head with a “A lot of Dominique’s and my Wwas a surprise. On February 24, .357 Magnum pistol he had been car- growth didn’t occur until after his pass- 2015, a Tuesday, during working hours, rying in an ankle holster. ing. Like, if my father were here, I would oicers from the Department of En- To have strangers going through not be here. I would still be at Price- vironmental Protection, the New York his factory must have seemed, for such waterhouseCoopers doing audits.” City Police Department, and the an inward and self-created man, as if “I think you would be here.” Brooklyn District Attorney’s oice invaders were rummaging around in “Maybe down the road, but not came to the cherry factory with a war- his brain. The factory was his world, this early. Our father could be really rant to search parts of the premises he had thought out everything in it— hard on you, but when he was nice for evidence of illegal dumping of he was it. When he suddenly could you would forget about that. He gave wastewater. A lawyer for the company not control what was occurring in it, us everything financially that we later described the action as a “guns or what was about to occur, he could

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 35 erase the nightmare only by erasing small oice containing a desk with idence. The volume of the operation, himself. Experience has shown that books on plant husbandry and a copy obviously larger than was needed for the revealing of a secret life can be a of “The World Encyclopedia of Or- personal use, implied that Mondella motivation for suicide. But nobody ganized Crime.” In a garage area they had been selling it. How, and to whom, saw the catastrophe coming, or imag- came upon a collection of vintage cars, and who helped him build the farm— ined the aloneness of this man. a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce among who serviced the plumbing, the wir- “The day it happened, Dominique them, which suggested that Mondella ing, the grow lights—remained in- called me, and I was, like, ‘What? What led a flashier life when not at the fac- triguing questions he was not around do you mean? Was he depressed?’ ” tory. Later reports mentioned his use to answer. Dana said. “I mean, I didn’t under- of cocaine, his boat, his lavish spend- In his will, Mondella left an estate stand. Then all the news about the ing in restaurants, and his fiancée, a that included $8.5 million in cash, more marijuana came out. We never knew.” former Penthouse model. than enough to cover the fine. Dana “Reading the articles that came out, Had Mondella lived, he could have and Dominique received fifty-five per that was how we knew,” Dominique gone to jail for two or three years; cent of the company between them; said. “I guess he was protecting us.” more likely, he would have received Joanne, their aunt, got twenty per cent; “I remember I was actually out sick probation. The D.A. charged the com- and twenty-five went to Antoinette, that day,” Dana said. “And then I came pany with criminal possession of mar- their half sister. The older daughters here and I saw that there was a lot of ijuana in the first degree, a felony, and decided to take personal charge of the police activity, and I didn’t understand, with failing to comply with laws re- business they now controlled. After because if somebody killed themselves lating to wastewater dumping, a mis- the news of the raid, some customers why would there be this many police?” demeanor. The company pleaded dropped Dell’s for other cherry sup- Behind the false wall the oicers guilty to both charges and paid a fine pliers, but by travelling the country discovered a ladder leading down to of $1.2 million. After that judgment, to meet with customers individually a large basement, twenty-five hun- no further charges were filed. The Dana and Dominique were able to dred square feet, and space for about D.A. did not want to destroy a suc- keep most of them, and later persuaded a hundred marijuana plants in a well- cessful local business that provided a a few who’d left to come back. Most set-up system of hydroponic cultiva- number of Brooklyn residents with of their large-volume restaurant chains tion under L.E.D. grow lights. They jobs. Also, investigators had been un- stayed on. also found about a hundred pounds able to find evidence to prove that the A young employee, Joshua Sabino, of harvested marijuana, a hundred and marijuana was being sold, nor had had been hired by Mondella the day thirty thousand dollars in cash, and a they tried very hard to find such ev- before the raid. Sabino was excited about his new job, but when he saw the police everywhere he figured that the factory would have to close. He had been grateful to Mondella for hiring him. “But the factory closed for only two days,” he told me. “They kept all the workers. And we even got paid for the days it was closed. I felt like Mr. Mondella was still taking care of me.”

n May, 2016, Dana and Dominique Isued the city for recklessness and negligence in the death of their father, saying that the raid to search for environmental violations had been only a ruse, that oicers had obtained a warrant fraudulently, and that the police should have taken their father’s gun from him to protect him from harming himself. Their lawyer, Rich- ard Luthmann, of Staten Island, char- acterized the raid as a “cowboys and Indians” operation that got out of hand, and asked for fifty million dollars in damages and penalties. The following “Then I thought, I should get real and lower my April, Judge Leo Glasser, a federal expectations, and that’s when I met Evan.” judge in the Eastern District, issued a ruling in which he called the claims Joanne asked that her previous posi- law, so another lawyer will take over “preposterous” and threw the lawsuit tion, salary, and perks be restored to the intra-family lawsuits, which are out. The oicers had no duty to pro- her, or that the company be sold, so still pending. tect Mondella from suicide, Glasser she could receive her twenty per cent. said. The warrant did not call for Her mother—Dana and Dominique’s very summer, Mondella used to host searching him, he was never in police grandmother Antoinette—also sued Ea barbecue for his employees, pro- custody, and no one could have rea- them, asking for restoration of the com- viding all the food and doing the cook- sonably expected that he might shoot pany car that she had been provided ing for everyone. There was no barbe- himself over a misdemeanor environ- with for more than fifty years, which cue the summer after he died, but in mental violation. they had taken away. Commenting 2016 the tradition resumed, close to his When I called Luthmann to ask on these suits, Luthmann birthday, June 25th, and in about Glasser’s verdict, he sounded un- told the News that under 2017 the company continued daunted and said he planned to ap- Dana and Dominique the it. On the day in July when peal. Glasser is a famous judge, ninety- company was doing “bet- the event took place, I wan- four years old, a Bronze Star veteran ter than ever,” and that this dered around Red Hook in of the Second World War. “He’s a won- family squabbling was a the morning, checking out derful judge, don’t misunderstand me,” shame. He added, “It was the beehives at Added Value Luthmann said. “But he’s the same guy Joanne and Antoinette that Farms, then sheltering un- who put John Gotti away, and I think fired the first shot.” der a tent there during a he may be a little hard on Italians, and Though I never met downpour. The rain slack- suspect they’re all criminals and in the Luthmann in person, I ened to a drizzle. Dana was Mafia. Frankly, I believe this is a de- found him helpful on the sending me e-mails saying cision that could be dangerous to po- phone. A follow-up story of Decem- the barbecue was being delayed until the lice oicers, because here’s this poten- ber 16, 2017, made me wonder if I had rain stopped. Red Hook is a waterfront tial suspect who was allowed to walk been talking to the same guy. It said place, with the Statue of Liberty a near around with a weapon while the in- that Richard Luthmann—identified neighbor across the harbor, and a high, vestigation of his premises was going as a Staten Island attorney; yes, it was oceanic sky that’s larger because none on.” He added, “If the D.A.’s oice the same guy—and two other men had of the buildings are tall. I strolled past had done their homework, they could’ve been arrested for wire fraud, kidnap- businesses that are part of the neighbor- found out that this man was licensed ping, extortion, brandishing a weapon, hood’s current incarnation—Fleisher’s to carry a firearm.” identity theft, and money laundering. Craft Butchery, Widow Jane Distillery, As for Mondella’s possible crimi- There were eleven charges in all. The Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie, Flick- nal ties, his ex-brother-in-law, Salva- alleged scheme involved a scrap-metal- inger Glassworks. The hot, humid air tore Capece, the former husband of dealer co-conspirator; the sale to for- smelled of the open water it was blow- Joanne, served five years in jail for eign customers of shipments of scrap ing in from. money laundering, and Salvatore’s metal that turned out to contain mostly Finally the rain quit and patches of brother, Vincent Capece, had a rap concrete blocks; a blind client of Luth- blue sky opened up. On Dikeman sheet for drug ofenses that went back mann’s whose identity the conspira- Street’s wide sidewalk, next to a deliv- to the nineteen-eighties. In 1994, Vin- tors used in order to set up bank ac- ery gate for the cherry factory, work- cent participated in a smuggling ring counts and launder almost half a men were sitting on folding chairs be- that brought seventeen million dol- million dollars obtained by this fraud; side a table laid with sodas and picnic lars’ worth of marijuana from Califor- and the later kidnapping of the scrap- paraphernalia. Tom Bentz, Dana’s hus- nia to New York in sealed metal con- metal dealer for the purposes of ex- band, was cooking burgers, hot dogs, tainers, a crime for which he was given torting an extra ten thousand dollars and marinated chicken breasts on a gas a thirty-three-month sentence. Mon- from him at gunpoint. grill the size of a small bus. It had difer- della and Salvatore Capece had been Luthmann is a big man who ap- ent grilling venues, and ventilator hoods, known to spend time together. Glass- pears in many photos wearing a red and shelves, and control knobs of vary- er’s decision made no reference to these bow tie, a tight-fitting powder-blue ing sizes. Someone’s CD player was circumstances. suit, and round glasses. He once chal- blasting rap music with lyrics that did Despite Mondella’s last words to lenged a rival in a lawsuit to settle the not mess around. Tom, Dana, and Dom- his sister, she was not involved with issue through trial by combat. Luth- inique wore black T-shirts printed with her nieces’ assuming control of the mann spent twelve weeks in jail be- the Dell’s logo in white. Most of the company, or with their later decisions fore his release on bail a few weeks workmen wore sleeveless shirts, and all about it, and evidently this did not sit ago. He has denied all the charges and were red-spattered and generally a sun- well with her. In March, 2017, Joanne is awaiting a May trial. During his in- burn shade of maraschino red. sued Dana and Dominique for mis- carceration, the deadline lapsed for Leon Perry, who began his job at managing the company, pushing her filing an appeal of Dana and Domi- the factory after his release from prison out, slashing her salary, and ceasing nique’s suit against the city. Luthmann twenty years ago, told me how Mon- to pay for her leased Mercedes-Benz. is currently banned from practicing della had loaned him money for rent

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 37 when he started out. Minnow John- You didn’t have time to mourn. He He said that reporters had called him son, a mechanic, said Mondella had wouldn’t’ve even have wanted that. when Mondella died. “It was a dark funded his studies at trade school. Ar- He wouldn’t have wanted us to dwell. hour. Arthur was not looking to hurt thur Casey remembered when Mon- He would’ve been, like, ‘Get up, let’s anybody. He had honesty and integrity, della paid for his three-hundred-dollar go, whaddya doin’?’ ” and he made it clear, when dealing with cab ride home one night when he had “It’s definitely been very stressful, the red-honey problem, that he cared to work late. but I always think positive,” Domi- about the bees’ welfare.” Coté also Afterward, during the cleanup, Leon nique said. pointed out, apropos of Tim O’Neal’s Perry pointed to the grill, which Tom “I’m more realistic,” Dana said. “I original ethylene-glycol theory, that re- was scraping with a metal spatula, and try not to think about the factory cently some hives in East New York said, “This was his grill.” For a moment twenty-four seven, but I’m dreaming had produced a green and poisonous it was as if Mondella himself had ma- about it at night, seeing the cherries, honey whose main ingredient turned terialized there on Dikeman Street, the diferent sizes, in my head. We sell out to be antifreeze. analogized by this amazing piece of five diferent sizes, from small to me- David Selig, the restaurateur who had equipment. dium to large to extra-large to colos- been the factory’s nearest beekeeping Tom looked at the sky. “It cleared sal, with stems and without, so that’s neighbor, has created one hit restaurant up,” he said. “That was Dana and Dom- ten diferent kinds—” after another. A recent success, Rocka- inique’s father looking down.” The guys “Also crushed cherries, and cherries way Taco, has inspired him to move from posed for a group photo, smiling, with in halves,” Dominique said. “And in Red Hook to that distant part of the red arms around one another’s shoul- diferent colors. Not only red.” city. Selig is another Canadian ofspring, ders, and then went back to work. “It’s a statistic that a lot of family a wiry man with dark, Gallic features businesses don’t survive past the second and a greeter’s easy manner. asked Dominique and Dana why generation,” Dana said. “My dad was “I have great admiration for Arthur, Ithey had decided to take over run- in the third generation, and now we’re and a lot of empathy,” Selig said. “He ning the company themselves. After the fourth. You can make it work, it’s was in his factory morning and night; all, they could have assembled a com- just a lot of hard work and dedication.” at one time or another I’ve slept in every mittee of consultants, asked for input, “Growing up, he always taught us— one of my businesses. And after years done a search for a plant manager, let like, be responsible,” Dominique said. in restaurants, which in New York City someone else direct the business day “We just knew we had to step up.” have to be the most regulated industry to day. Or they could have sold it; re- on the planet, I know what he was fac- cent years have seen the buyout of other im O’Neal, who helped solve the ing. If the city and the feds had started maraschino-cherry companies by large Tred-honey mystery, tends his hives in with him, they’d still be on him to corporations like Green Giant Foods. on Saturdays at Added Value Farms. this day. He grew up in this regulatory “This is all our father left,” Dana The bizarre events of the summer of world and I’m sure he knew how it explained. “He didn’t have a home. His 2010 have never happened again. I found would go down. What he did was un- cars were taken away by the investiga- him smoking his bees—making them thinking, like pushing a friend out of tion. I didn’t get to sort through his disoriented with smoke from a small the way of a speeding car. He had that things. He lived with his girlfriend, and hand-held device—in order to do hive boyhood type of loyalty. He gave him- it’s not really my place to go in to her maintenance. O’Neal is a tall, dark- self up for his family.” apartment and start grabbing things. haired man from Troy, Ohio, and he Cerise Mayo, who was one of the What I would’ve loved would’ve been, has the accent of that part of the coun- first to notice the red honey, no longer like, even if I had a pair of culinks so try. “I felt pity when I heard Mondella keeps bees. She has dark, curly hair and I had something that’s tangible of his. died,” he said. “What a terrible situa- brown eyes, and she wears clothes fea- The only tangible thing that we have tion. He was a good neighbor. We all turing patterns from nature, such as a left of him is this place.” live in a community together—who shirt with swallows flying wingtip to “This was his life. It was his blood, cares if some dude is growing mari- wingtip. After the summer of 2010, she sweat, and tears,” Dominique said. juana? It’s practically legal now anyway. gave her bees away. The thought of how “When my father came, the busi- I’m sure he was putting out good prod- diicult it is to know what they’ll get ness was failing, and he took a risk, he uct. I was shocked the situation turned into in an urban environment discour- put everything he had into it, and he out so badly.” aged her. If she ever keeps bees again, made it so much better, a real success. The fame of Andrew Coté, the bee- she wants to be out in the country, in When we came, it looked as if it was keeping expert who helped Mondella, a more pastoral setting. “I felt horrible going to fail, because of everything that has only grown. Lately he has branched when I learned of Mr. Mondella’s death,” was happening around it. And we took out into other countries, riding a surge she said. “How hard it must have been a risk.” of interest in beekeeping worldwide. to carry all the weight he had to deal “We put every inch of ourselves The last time I talked to him at his stall with. I even saw some follow-up sto- into it.” in Union Square, tour organizers from ries that seemed to be blaming his death “I lost my father, and I had to come China stopped by to discuss arrange- on the bees. That’s crazy. The bees were back two days later and go to work. ments for his upcoming lectures there. just behaving like bees.” ♦

38 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 ( ) SHOUTS & MURMURS

1 =

( 2)

TASTING NOTES FOR A ( ) TEETOTALLING PRESIDENT 1

BY ANN BEATTIE

( 1) 1. The mouthfeel of the Stormy Dan- The major notes stride forward after iels “60 Minutes” interview is complex, a slight delay, as the wine descends gradually revealing itself in a mellow down the palate. One is sure to be bitterness that still has so much more captivated by this meticulously en- to tell. With hints of self-knowledge hanced wine, a true sparkling diamond. FIRESTONE AND PARSON paired with humor, graced by silvery- Chef has created a special recipe to 30 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 pink Underside of the Ash Tree lip- pair with the vintage, available on the (617) 266-1858 • www.firestoneandparson.com stick, the 201 Stormy holds delicious vineyard’s Web site (search “Your hide allure, ofering undertones of rasp- is cooked”), with locally sourced berries, as its mystery resolves on the “smashed” potatoes underlying deli- tongue with crumbling sweetness and ciously larded meat. a sparkle of brilliance not often seen 5. Mar-a-Lago 201 contains amus- in so humble a grape. ingly golf-ball-size notes of sour cher- 2. The terroir was propitious for this ries, intermingled with predominant year’s Banished Secretary 2018, whose notes of private-plane fuselage, grass taste lies primarily beneath the surface, clippings, and Florida lemons. It is best its low notes shivering with incautious drunk early, like a Beaujolais Nouveau, power, owing to the convergence of and you are advised to act quickly, as double allegations whose force pairs some experts believe that this wine may them in an assertive way. Though some soon go out of production. find it too strong, others will take plea- 6. As growers know, the shifting ex- sure in the sour-grape aftertaste of this igencies of our environment sometimes forceful wine, whose bruised-eye gloss- make it necessary to widen our cate- iness would best be paired with arti- gories of appreciation. It has been said, sanal young-barnyard-animal cheese. with regard to the Vin Américain 201, 3. An impressive, bold taste can be that even the archangels might be savored as the enigmatic qualities in- counted on to blow their trumpets (no herent in our 201 Special Prosecutor pun intended) in surprise. With an ap- (limited quantities) cause smacking of proach as brash as a wildfire, this wine’s the lips and eye rolls of delight com- tastes of charred almond intermix with parable to what one feels when view- flavors of gravel and redwood and top ing the stars on a winter evening in notes of burned squirrel, providing the Moscow. A sturdy wine whose flavors perfect accompaniment to barbecued unfold quickly, like collapsed tents, ribs slathered with our special sauce Special P astonishes with a minerality (ketchup “blood” with smoked wood- rarely perceived outside the graveyard. land mushrooms). This exquisite sauce 4. The taste of Melania 201 holds is equally good with rabbit, quail, ele-

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ LUCI its own among other fortiﬁed wines. phant, and donkey. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 39 “2001” is a hundred and forty-two A CRITIC AT LARGE minutes, pared down from a hundred and sixty-one in a cut that Kubrick made after those disastrous premières. There ANYBODY THERE? is something almost taunting about the movie’s pace. “2001” isn’t long because Fifty years later, the tedium and the triumph of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” it is dense with storytelling; it is long because Kubrick distributed its few nar- BY DAN CHIASSON rative jolts as sparsely as possible. Re- nata Adler, in the Times, described the movie as “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” Its “uncompro- mising slowness,” she wrote, “makes it hard to sit through without talking.” In Harper’s, Pauline Kael wrote, “The pon- derous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space.” Onscreen it was 2001, but in the theatres it was still 1968, after all. Kubrick’s gleeful machin- ery, waltzing in time to Strauss, had bounded past an abundance of human misery on the ground. Hippies may have saved “2001.” “Stoned audiences” flocked to the movie. David Bowie took a few drops of cannabis tincture before watching, and countless others dropped acid. Ac- cording to one report, a young man at a showing in Los Angeles plunged through the movie screen, shouting, “It’s God! It’s God!” John Lennon said he saw the film “every week.” “2001” initially opened in limited release, shown only in 70-mm. on curved Cin- erama screens. M-G-M thought it had on its hands a second “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) or “Ben-Hur” (1959), or perhaps The power of Stanley Kubrick’s classic is bound up with the story of its making. another “Spartacus” (1960), the splashy studio hit that Kubrick, low on funds, ifty years ago this spring, Stanley laborator, was in tears at intermission. had directed about a decade before. FKubrick’s confounding sci-fi mas- The after-party at the Plaza was “a room But instead the theatres were filling terpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” had full of drinks and men and tension,” up with fans of cult films like Roger its premières across the country. In the according to Kubrick’s wife, Christiane. Corman’s “The Trip,” or “Psych-Out,” annals of audience restlessness, these Kubrick, a doctor’s son from the the early Jack Nicholson flick with evenings rival the opening night of Bronx who got his start as a photogra- music by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” in 1913, pher for Look, was turning forty that These movies, though cheesy, found a when Parisians in osprey and tails re- year, and his rise in Hollywood had left new use for editing and special efects: portedly brandished their canes and him hungry to make extravagant films to mimic psychedelic visions. The pelted the dancers with objects. A sixth on his own terms. It had been four years iconic Star Gate sequence in “2001,” of the New York première’s audience full of setbacks and delays since the when Dave Bowman, the film’s pro- walked right out, including several director’s triumph, “Dr. Strangelove, tagonist, hurtles in his space pod executives from M-G-M. Many who Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying through a corridor of swimming ka- stayed jeered throughout. Kubrick ner- and Love the Bomb.” From the look of leidoscopic colors, could even be timed, vously shuttled between his seat in the things, the Zeitgeist was not going to with suicient practice, to crest with front row and the projection booth, strike twice. A businessman overheard the viewer’s own hallucinations. The where he tweaked the sound and the on his way out of a screening spoke for studio soon caught on, and a new tag-

focus. Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick’s col- many: “Well, that’s one man’s opinion.” line was added to the movie’s re- PHOTOFEST

40 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 designed posters: “The ultimate trip.” instructor in the R.A.F., and did two painters were brought to the studio, In “Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, terms as chairman of the British In- while companies manufactured the Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a terplanetary Society. His reputation as film’s spacesuits, helmets, and instru- Masterpiece,” the writer and filmmaker perhaps the most rigorous of living ment panels. The lines between film Michael Benson takes us on a difer- sci-fi writers, the author of several crit- and reality were blurred. The Apollo 8 ent kind of trip: the long journey from ically acclaimed novels, was widespread. crew took in the film’s fictional space the film’s conception to its opening and Kubrick needed somebody who had flight at a screening not long before beyond. The power of the movie has knowledge and imagination in equal their actual journey. NASA’s Web site always been unusually bound up with parts. “If you can describe it,” Clarke has a list of all the details that “2001” the story of how it was made. In 1966, recalls Kubrick telling him, “I can film got right, from flat-screen displays and Jeremy Bernstein profiled Kubrick on it.” It was taken as a dare. Meeting in in-flight entertainment to jogging as- the “2001” set for The New Yorker, and New York, often in the Kubricks’ clut- tronauts. In the coming decades, con- behind-the-scenes accounts with titles tered apartment on the Upper East spiracy theorists would allege that Ku- like “The Making of Kubrick’s 2001” Side, the couple’s three young daugh- brick had helped the government fake began appearing soon after the mov- ters swarming around them, they de- the Apollo 11 moon landing. ie’s release. The grandeur of “2001”— cided to start by composing a novel. Kubrick brought to his vision of the the product of two men, Clarke and Kubrick liked to work from books, and future the studiousness you would ex- Kubrick, who were sweetly awestruck since a suitable one did not yet exist pect from a history film. “2001” is, in by the thought of infinite space—re- they would write it. When they weren’t part, a fastidious period piece about a quired, in its execution, micromanage- working, Clarke introduced Kubrick period that had yet to happen. Kubrick ment of a previously unimaginable de- to his telescope and taught him to use had seen exhibits at the 1964 World’s gree. Kubrick’s drive to show the entire a slide rule. They studied the scientific Fair, and pored over a magazine article arc of human life (“from ape to angel,” literature on extraterrestrial life. “Much titled “Home of the Future.” The lead as Kael dismissively put it) meant that excitement when Stanley phones to say production designer on the film, Tony he was making a special-efects movie that the Russians claim to have de- Masters, noticed that the world of “2001” of radical scope and ambition. But in tected radio signals from space,” Clarke eventually became a distinct time and his initial letter to Clarke, a science- wrote in his journal for April 12, 1965: place, with the kind of coherent aes- fiction writer, engineer, and shipwreck “Rang Walter Sullivan at the New York thetic that would merit a sweeping his- explorer living in Ceylon, Kubrick Times and got the real story—merely torical label, like “Georgian” or “Victo- began with the modest-sounding goal fluctuations in Quasar CTA 102.” Ku- rian.” “We designed a way to live,” he of making “the proverbial ‘really good’ brick grew so concerned that an alien recalled, “down to the last knife and science-fiction movie.” Kubrick wanted encounter might be imminent that he fork.” (The Arne Jacobsen flatware, de- his film to explore “the reasons for be- sought an insurance policy from Lloyd’s signed in 1957, was made famous by its lieving in the existence of intelligent of London in case his story got scooped use in the film, and is still in produc- extraterrestrial life,” and what it would during production. tion.) By rendering a not-too-distant mean if we discovered it. Clarke was the authority on both future, Kubrick set himself up for a test: The outlines of a simple plot were the science and the science fiction, but thirty-three years later, his audiences already in place: Kubrick wanted “a an account he gave later provides a would still be around to grade his pre- space-probe with a landing and explo- sense of what working with Kubrick dictions. Part of his genius was that he ration of the Moon and Mars.” (The was like: “We decided on a compro- understood how to rig the results. Many finished product opts for Jupiter in- mise—Stanley’s.” The world of “2001” elements from his set designs were stead.) But the timing of Kubrick’s let- was designed ex nihilo, and among the contributions from major brands— ter, in March of 1964, suggested a much first details to be worked out was the Whirlpool, Macy’s, DuPont, Parker more ambitious and urgent project. look of emptiness itself. Kubrick had Pens, Nikon—which quickly cashed in “2001” was a science-fiction film try- seen a Canadian educational film tion their big-screen exposure. If 2001 ing not to be outrun by science itself. tled “Universe,” which rendered outer the year looked like “2001” the movie, Kubrick was tracking NASA’s race to space by suspending inks and paints in it was partly because the film’s imagi- the moon, which threatened to siphon vats of paint thinner and filming them nary design trends were made real. some of the wonder from his produc- with bright lighting at high frame rates. Much of the film’s luxe vision of tion. He had one advantage over real- Slowed down to normal speed, the ooz- space travel was overambitious. In 1998, ity: the film could present the marvels ing shades and textures looked like gal- ahead of the launch of the International of the universe in lavish color and sound, axies and nebulae. Spacecraft were de- Space Station, the Times reported that on an enormous canvas. If Kubrick signed with the expert help of Harry the habitation module was “far cruder could make the movie he imagined, Lange and Frederick Ordway, who than the most pessimistic prognostica- the grainy images from the lunar sur- ran a prominent space consultancy. A tor could have imagined in 1968.” But face shown on dinky TV screens would senior NASA oicial called Kubrick’s the film’s look was a big hit on Earth. seem comparatively unreal. studio outside London “NASA East.” Olivier Mourgue’s red upholstered In Clarke, Kubrick found a willing Model makers, architects, boatbuild- Djinn chairs, used on the “2001” set, be- accomplice. Clarke had served as a radar ers, furniture designers, sculptors, and came a design icon, and the high-end

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 41 lofts and hotel lobbies of the year 2001 way, the film’s scientific consultant, read liest meetings in New York, Clarke and bent distinctly toward the aesthetic of up on a doctoral thesis on psychedel- Kubrick, along with Christiane, sketched Kubrick’s imagined space station. ics advised by Timothy Leary. Theol- drafts and consulted the Surrealist paint- ogy students had taken psilocybin, then ings of Max Ernst. For a time, Chris- udiences who came to “2001” ex- attended a service at Boston Universi- tiane was modelling clay aliens in her Apecting a sci-fi movie got, instead, ty’s Marsh Chapel to see if they’d be studio. These gargoyle-like creatures an essay on time. The plot was simple hit with religious revelations. They du- were rejected, and “ended up dotted and stark. A black monolith, shaped tifully reported their findings: most of around the garden,” according to Kubrick’s like a domino, appears at the moment the participants had indeed touched daughter Katharina. Alberto Giacomet- in prehistory when human ancestors God. Such wide-ranging research was ti’s sculptures of thinned and elongated discover how to use tools, and is later characteristic of Clarke and Kubrick’s humans, resembling shadows at sun- found, in the year 2001, just below the approach, although the two men, both down, were briefly an inspiration. In the lunar surface, where it reflects signals self-professed squares, might have saved end, Kubrick decided that “you cannot toward Jupiter’s moons. At the film’s time had they been willing to try hal- imagine the unimaginable” and, after try- conclusion, it looms again, when the lucinogens themselves. ing more ornate designs, settled on the ship’s sole survivor, Dave Bowman, wit- The Jupiter scenes—filled with what monolith. Its eerily neutral and silent nesses the eclipse of human intelli- Michael Benson describes as “abstract, appearance at the crossroads of human gence by a vague new order of being. nonrepresentational, space-time aston- evolution evokes the same wonder for “2001” is therefore only partly set in ishments”—were the product of years members of the audience as it does for 2001: as exacting as Kubrick was about of trial and error spent adapting exist- characters in the film. Kubrick realized imagining that moment, he swept it ing equipment and technologies, such that, if he was going to make a film about away in a larger survey of time, wedg- as the “slit-scan” photography that finally human fear and awe, the viewer had to ing his astronauts between the apelike made the famous Star Gate sequence feel those emotions as well. anthropoids that populate the first sec- possible. Typically used for panoramic And then there is HAL, the rogue tion of the film, “The Dawn of Man,” shots of cityscapes, the technique, in the computer whose afectless red eye reflects and the fetal Star Child betokening hands of Kubrick’s special-efects team, back what it sees while, behind it, his the new race at its close. A mixture of was modified to produce a psychedelic mind whirrs with dark and secret de- plausibility and poetry, “real” science rush of color and light. Riding in Dave’s signs. I.B.M. consulted on the plans for and primal symbolism, was therefore pod is like travelling through a birth HAL, but the idea to use the company’s required. For “The Dawn of Man,” shot canal in which someone has thrown a logo fell through after Kubrick described last, a team travelled to Namibia to gather rave. Like the films of the late nine- him in a letter as “a psychotic computer.” stills of the desert. Back in England, teenth century, “2001” manifested its in- Any discussion of Kubrick’s scientific a massive camera system was built to vented worlds by first inventing the prescience has to include HAL, whose project these shots onto screens, trans- methods needed to construct them. suave, slightly efeminate voice suggests forming the set into an African land- Yet some of the most striking efects a bruised heart beating under his cir- scape. Actors, dancers, and mimes were in the film are its simplest. In a movie cuitry. In the past fifty years, our talking hired to wear meticulously constructed about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick faced machines have continued to evolve, but ape suits, wild animals were housed a crucial predicament: what would the none of them have become as authen- at the Southampton Zoo, and a dead aliens look like? Cold War-era sci-fi tically malicious as HAL. My grandfa- horse was painted to look like a zebra. ofered a dispiriting menu of extrater- ther’s early-eighties Chrysler, borrow- For the final section of the film, “Ju- restrial avatars: supersonic birds, scaly ing the voice from Speak & Spell, would piter and Beyond the Infinite,” Ord- monsters, gelatinous blobs. In their ear- intone, “A door is ajar,” whenever you got in. It sounded like a logical fallacy, but it seemed pleasantly futuristic nonetheless. Soon voice-command technology reached the public, ushering in our current era of unreliable computer in- terlocutors given to unforced errors: half-comical, half-pitiful simpletons, whose fate in life is to be taunted by eleven-year-olds. Despite the reports of cackling Amazon Alexas, there has, so far, been fairly little to worry about where our talking devices are concerned. The unbearable pathos of HAL’s disconnec- tion scene, one of the most mournful death scenes ever filmed, suggests that when we do end up with humanlike computers, we’re going to have some wild ethical dilemmas on our hands. tion: Kubrick was incapable of not making photography” was what prompted HAL is a child, around nine years old, ing Kubrick films. Maxim Gorky, who saw the Lumière as he tells Dave at the moment he senses “2001” established the aesthetic and brothers’ films at a Russian fair in 1896, he’s finished. He’s precocious, indulged, thematic palette that he used in all his to bemoan the “kingdom of shadows”—a needy, and vulnerable; more human than subsequent films. The spaciousness of mass of people, animals, and vehicles— his human overseers, with their stilted, its too perfectly constructed sets, the rushing “straight at you,” approaching near robotic delivery. The dying HAL, subjugation of story and theme to ab- the edge of the screen, then vanishing singing “Daisy,” the tune his teacher stract compositional balance, the preci- “somewhere beyond it.” taught him, is a sentimental trope out sion choreography, even—especially— “2001” is at its best when it evokes the of Victorian fiction, more Little Nell in scenes of violence and chaos, the “somewhere beyond.” For me, the most than little green man. entire repertoire of colors, astounding moment of the As Benson’s book suggests, in a way angles, fonts, and textures: film is a coded tribute to film- the release of “2001” was its least im- these were constants in films making itself. In “The Dawn portant milestone. Clarke and Kubrick as wildly diferent as “Barry of Man,” when a fierce leop- had been wrestling for years with ques- Lyndon” (1975) and “The ard suddenly faces us, its eyes tions of what the film was, and meant. Shining” (1980), “Full Metal reflect the light from the pro- These enigmas were merely handed of Jacket” (1987) and “Eyes jection system that Kubrick’s from creators to viewers. The critic Al- Wide Shut” (1999). So was team had invented to create exander Walker called “2001” “the first the languorous editing of the illusion of a vast primor- mainstream film that required an act “2001,” which, when paired dial desert. Kubrick loved the of continuous inference” from its audi- with abrupt temporal leaps, efect, and left it in. These de- ences. On set, the legions of specialists made eons seem short and tails linger in the mind partly and consultants working on the minu- moments seem endless, and its brilliant because they remind us that a brilliant tiae took orders from Kubrick, whose deployment of music to organize, and artist, intent on mastering science and conception of the whole remained in often ironize, action and character. These conjuring science fiction, nevertheless constant flux. The film’s narrative tra- elements were present in some form knew when to leave his poetry alone. jectory pointed inexorably toward a big in Kubrick’s earlier films, particularly The interpretive communities con- ending, even a revelation, but Kubrick “Dr. Strangelove,” but it was all per- vened by “2001” may persist in pockets kept changing his mind about what that fected in “2001.” Because he occupied of the culture, but I doubt whether many ending would be—and nobody who genres one at a time, each radically young people will again contend with saw the film knew quite what to make diferent from the last, you could con- its debts to Jung, John Cage, and Jo- of the one he finally chose. The film trol for what was consistently Kubrick- seph Campbell. In the era of the meme, took for granted a broad cultural toler- ian about everything he did. The films we’re more likely to find the afterlife of ance, if not an appetite, for enigma, as are designed to advance his distinct “2001” in fragments and glimpses than well as the time and inclination for pars- filmic vocabulary in new contexts and in theories and explications. The film ing interpretive mysteries. If the first environments: a shuttered resort hotel, hangs on as a staple of YouTube video wave of audiences was baled, it might a spacious Manhattan apartment, Viet- essays and mashups; it remains high on have been because “2001” had not yet nam. Inside these disparate but metic- lists of both the greatest films ever made created the taste it required to be ap- ulously constructed worlds, Kubrick’s and the most boring. On Giphy, you preciated. Like “Ulysses,” or “The Waste slightly malicious intelligence deter- can find many iconic images from “2001” Land,” or countless other diicult, am- mined the outcomes of every appar- looping endlessly in seconds-long in- biguous modernist landmarks, “2001” ently free choice his protagonists made. crements—a jarring compression that forged its own context. You didn’t solve Though Kubrick binged on pulp couldn’t be more at odds with the lan- it by watching it a second time, but you sci-fi as a child, and later listened to guid eternity Kubrick sought to cap- did settle into its mysteries. radio broadcasts about the paranormal, ture. The very fact that you can view Later audiences had another advan- “2001” has little in common with the “2001,” along with almost every film tage. “2001” established the phenome- rinky-dink conventions of movie sci- ever shot, on a palm-size device is a fu- non of the Kubrick film: much rumored, ence fiction. Its dazzling showmanship ture that Kubrick and Clarke may have long delayed, always a little disappoint- harkened back to older cinematic ex- predicted, but surely wouldn’t have ing. Casts and crews were held hostage periences. Film scholars sometimes dis- wanted for their own larger-than-life as they withstood Kubrick’s infinite futz- cuss the earliest silent films as examples movie. The film abounds in little screens, ing, and audiences were held in eager of “the cinema of attraction,” movies tablets, and picturephones; in 2011, Sam- suspense by P.R. campaigns that often meant to showcase the medium itself. sung fought an injunction from Apple oversold the films’ commercial appeal. These films were, in essence, exhibits: over alleged patent violations by citing Downstream would be midnight show- simple scenes from ordinary life—a train the technology in “2001” as a predeces- ings, monographs, dorm rooms, and arriving, a dog cavorting. Their only im- sor for its designs. Moon landings and weed, but first there was the letdown. port was that they had been captured astronaut celebrities now feel like a thing The reason given for the films’ failures by a camera that could, magically, of the past. Space lost out. Those screens suggested the terms of their redemp- record movement in time. This “mov- were the future. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 43 The Rio Grande runs along Big Bend National Park, separating Mexico, on the right, from the United States, on the left.

44 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 A REPORTER AT LARGE WATER AND THE WALL A river trip through the borderlands that Trump wants to fence of.

BY NICK PAUMGARTEN

A border wall would be devastating to life on both sides of an already threatened river.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE STEINMETZ hen Dan Reicher was eight, nosaur National Monument. He was who don’t depend on it, little more he became fixated on wol- captivated by the journals of a prede- than a boundary separating Mexico W verines. He admired their cessor there: John Wesley Powell, the from Texas, a squiggly moat on a map. ferocity but, because they were endan- Union Army major who lost an arm It represents a gateway to opportunity gered, feared for their survival. While at Shiloh and later led the first expe- or escape for the migrants and fugi- poring over a catalogue of outdoor dition to navigate the length of the tives, in life and in song, who cross it gear, he came across a parka trimmed Grand Canyon. As an undergraduate in the hope of a fresh beginning—a in wolverine fur. He was outraged. His at Dartmouth, Reicher joined the kay- kind of baptism by border. Known mother, a schoolteacher, and his fa- aking team and the Ledyard Canoe south of the border as Río Bravo del ther, an ob-gyn, urged him to put his Club, which is named for John Led- Norte, and to the indigenous Pueblo umbrage to good purpose, so he sent yard, the eighteenth-century Ameri- people as P’Osoge, its various sections the gear company a letter. After some can explorer, who dropped out of Dart- were given an array of now mostly for- time, he received a reply: the company mouth after a year and paddled down gotten names by sixteenth-century ex- was discontinuing the parka. Had his the Connecticut River, from Hanover plorers—Río Caudaloso, Río de la protest made the diference? Probably to the Long Island Sound, in a dug- Concepción, Río de las Palmas, Río not, but, still, he inferred that a citi- out canoe fashioned from a tree he de Nuestra Señora, Río Guadalquivir, zen, even a little one, had the power cut down on campus. Río Turbio, River of May, Tiguex River. to efect change. “Boy, was I misled,” In the spirit of these forebears, in The Rio Grande drops out of the San he said recently. 1977 Reicher and some fellow-Led- Juan Mountains, in southern Colo- Reicher, now sixty-one, is a pro- yardians embarked on an expedition rado, bisects New Mexico, north to fessor at Stanford and the executive of their own. A classmate, Tony Anella, south, and then, splitting El Paso and director of its Steyer-Taylor Center from Albuquerque, was preoccupied Ciudad Juárez, tacks southeast. The for Energy Policy and Finance. Pre- with his home-town river, the Rio majority of its length, from El Paso to viously, he led Google’s climate and Grande, and had determined that no the Gulf of Mexico, with the S-turn energy initiatives and served in the one in documented history had nav- of the Big Bend, forms the southern Clinton Administration as an Assis- igated the river’s nearly two thousand boundary of Texas, and of the United tant Secretary of Energy. He has spent miles, from source to sea. He planned States. The river empties into the Gulf most of his adult life trying to help to be the first. The students secured just past Brownsville, Texas. No part humankind move past its reliance on backing from the National Geographic of the river is like any other. Typically, fossil fuels. Under President Trump, Society, which, a dozen years before, it is treated more as a managed scheme conservationists have seen decades had sponsored a Ledyard trip along of discrete local parts—Taos Box, El- of gains rolled back in a matter of the Danube. For course credit, Anella, ephant Butte Reservoir, Big Bend, months. Still, Reicher, like so many a history major, would compile a his- Lower Canyons, Valle—than as an es- environmentalists, goes grimly about tory of water rights on the river, while sential artery feeding a vast corner of his business. the other principal, Rob Portman, an our continent and a watershed con- Reicher’s real obsession is water. anthropology major (and now the ju- necting interdependent ecosystems, He grew up in Syracuse, paddling on nior United States senator from Ohio), cultures, and nations. polluted lakes, and liked to collect and would take on the subject of mass mi- Reicher, with Portman and Anella test water samples. When he was gration. Reicher, a biology major, and another classmate, a photographer eleven, his parents sent him to On- would assess the water and whatever named Pete Lewitt, hiked down from tario on a canoe trip with life could survive in it. the source, at Stony Pass, just east of a drill sergeant who failed Generally, the storied Silverton, Colorado, and put in twenty- to bring an adequate sup- river descents, like so many five miles later, below the first dam, in ply of food. Reicher, get- iconic American journeys, fibreglass kayaks, brittle precursors of ting by on wild blueber- have tended to be those today’s polyethylene creek boats. Two ries and toothpaste, had which run west, down from weeks later, they encountered their first never been and would never the Continental Divide great challenge, in the tricky rapids again be as hungry, but, to the sea. And, of those, near Taos. The surge of snowmelt was even so, he loved the whole the torrent that drains the greatly reduced by dams upstream. thing. For a couple of sum- far slope of the southern (And by drought: 1977 was the worst mers in his teens, he at- Rockies, the Colorado, year, in terms of snowpack, in the past tended the Colorado Rocky seemed to draw the love half century. The second worst? 2018.) Mountain School, in Carbondale, and the lore—it had deeper cataracts, The river was, in kayak-speak, bony. where a French champion of the new- bigger flows, gnarlier rapids, bolder By the time they reached the conflu- fangled sport of white-water kayak- boatmen, and fiercer fights over dams ence with the Santa Fe, below Cochiti ing taught aspiring river-runners the and acre-feet. Dam, there wasn’t much water left. eddy turn and the high brace. Reicher The Rio Grande had neither a John Even forty years ago, the flow south got to spend a week on the Green Wesley Powell nor a Lake Powell. It of Albuquerque was so depleted by River, paddling through the vast Di- is typically considered, by those of us farmers and by the city’s sprawling

46 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 population that the kayakers had to divert to the network of irrigation ditches that run alongside the river. At one point, a farmer in an El Camino pulled up next to them, unloaded two water skis, strung a rope from the trailer hitch, and towed Reicher along the canal. “First time I ever water-skied with dust in my face,” Reicher said. Farther downriver, in the muddy flats at the head of the Elephant Butte Reservoir, in southern New Mexico, the water would neither support their weight nor allow them to paddle, so they devised a method of pushing their boats with their hands and feet while lying on the stern. Crossing into Texas, where the river meets the Mex- ican frontier, the Ledyardians switched to bicycles and rode along paved roads until, a couple of hundred miles later, the Río Conchos, running out of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, replen- ished the ancient riverbed, so that they could saddle up their kayaks •• again. Because of upstream depletions, the Rio Grande is really two rivers: one that fizzles in southern New Mex- was terribly interested,” Reicher re- the Disappearing Rio Grande Expe- ico (the locals there refer to it as the calls.) At night, burrowing into the dition. He soon discovered that the Rio Sand) and one that begins in West invasive wild cane to make camp, they river was in even worse condition than Texas. In between is the puddled and set of seismic sensors installed by the it had been forty years earlier. Ground- trenched borderland east of El Paso U.S. Border Patrol. water depletion, suburban sprawl, pe- and Juárez—the Forgotten Reach, After four months on the river, they riodic droughts (attributable, proba- which, prior to the big dams, had been reached the Gulf. They posed on the bly, to climate change): every year, regularly revived (and scoured) by sea- beach, five gringos, tan and lean, bran- people were asking more of less water. sonal floods from New Mexico. There dishing the Ledyard flag. Relations He wound up having to walk a third had even been eels in Albuquerque— among some of them had frayed, amid of the river’s length. Reicher, who had fifteen hundred miles upstream of the a clash of egos—endemic to such ex- helped McDonald raise money and Gulf of Mexico. peditions. Reicher and Anella have get attention for the trip, joined him The Dartmouth expedition, now hardly spoken since. But the trip re- for a couple of actual-water segments— five strong, made it through the deep mains a highlight of their lives. To in the Big Bend and then the last miles, canyons and riles of the Big Bend Anella, it was a religious experience. where the river limps into the Gulf. and then entered the Lower Canyons, “One-half of the hydrologic cycle—it When McDonald did a slide show in the river’s most remote leg, which Con- reached something deep in my soul,” Albuquerque, Anella approached him gress, a year later, designated part of he says. He likes to cite Ecclesiastes: afterward and said simply, “That was the National Wild and Scenic Rivers “All streams flow into the sea, yet the my trip.” System. The desert eventually gave sea is never full. To the place the streams way to a subtropical luxuriance of come from, there they return again.” fter Donald Trump was elected, palms, broccoli farms, and citrus or- Reicher prefers Heraclitus: “No man Ahe pursued his campaign prom- chards, the riverbanks and wetlands steps in the same river twice, for it is ise to build a wall along the nearly two teeming with wildlife. The birds and not the same river and he is not the thousand miles of border between the animals didn’t recognize the border. same man.” Since 1977, he has been United States and Mexico. The Rio The people, though, were defined by back to the Rio Grande six times; the Grande’s “disappearance” took on fresh it. The kayakers regularly encountered river may have changed more than he meaning. As imagined, such an un- Mexicans crossing the river with bur- has. Four years ago, a young newspa- dertaking would be devastating to life lap bundles. Near Eagle Pass, they per reporter in San Antonio named along an already threatened river. came across a bloated male corpse, Colin McDonald set out to duplicate Having been determined by the with a noose around the neck. (“We the source-to-sea trip, using Reicher’s 1848 peace treaty that ended the Mex- tried to report him, but neither side journals as a blueprint. He dubbed it ican-American War, the border traces

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 47 Rio Grande in its annual list of the ten most endangered rivers.) This wasn’t so much an expedition as a float- ing Chautauqua, with a missionary bent. He and Bob Irvin, the president of American Rivers, invited me along. Among the guests were two grandees with dynastic connections to environmental conservation: Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, whose father, Stewart Udall, spear- headed the protection of vast tracts of American wilderness and was a crucial proponent of the Wild and Sce- nic Rivers Act; and Theodore Roo- sevelt IV, whose great-grandfather, the twenty-sixth President, used his bully pulpit, and hundreds of executive orders, to turn the federal government into a force for, and an en- “Thank God she was wearing a helmet.” forcer of, land and wildlife conservation. Before American Rivers got involved, Reicher had invited Rob Portman, •• who has the kayak from the 1977 expedition mounted in his oice on Cap- the river’s deepest channel—the thal- fences. (There are about seven hun- itol Hill, but his schedule was too tight, weg—which, because the riverbed fre- dred miles of fence already, most of and he’d been back to the river a year quently shifts according to the water’s it in California and Arizona.) For a earlier, with his family. “Last thing a whims, is in some respects notional. great deal of its length, the river is in- Republican needs now is to be seen Of course, no one is proposing that a sulated on both sides by hundreds of spending a week on a river with a wall be built in the middle of the river, miles of desert—inhospitable terrain bunch of tree huggers,” Irvin told me or for that matter on Mexican soil, that does more to discourage smug- with a chuckle. even if Mexico is going to pay for it. glers and migrants than a wall ever So the wall would go on the Ameri- could. (The vast majority of hard drugs ’d never given any thought to the can side, some distance from its intercepted on the southern border is IRio Grande, despite its being the banks—miles into U.S. territory, at coming through so-called points of fourth-longest river in the United times. It would cut people of from entry—the more than forty oicial States. My first river trip was a five- their own property and wildlife from crossings—hidden in vehicles and night commercial float, on rafts, on the main (and sometimes the only) cargo.) And, while the banks of the the Middle Fork of the Salmon, in water source in a vast upland desert. river, for much of it, are free of im- Idaho’s River of No Return Wilder- The Center for Biological Diversity pediments, except for thick stands of ness. It was 1985. I was a teen-ager, has determined that ninety-three listed invasive cane and salt cedar, which with my family and about twenty or proposed endangered species would can make life miserable for the Bor- strangers—a group of gay men from be adversely afected. The wall could der Patrol, about a hundred miles of Houston and New Orleans, and a biker disrupt the flow of what meagre water it cut through deep canyons far more hippie from Portola, California. The there is, upon which an ecosystem pre- imposing and prohibitive to a travel- biker, who was a friend of one of the cariously depends. And it would es- ler on foot than a slab of concrete or guides, went by Feets (he had got sentially seal the United States of from steel. The canyons don’t require fund- himself listed in the white pages as the river and cede it to Mexico: lop- ing from Congress. Amazing Feets) and spent his Middle ping of our nose to spite their face. It This winter, Reicher put together Fork days aboard the supply boat, in would shrink the size of Texas. a trip on the Rio Grande, with Amer- jean cutofs and a white tank top, roll- There is also the matter of eicacy. ican Rivers, an advocacy group, of ing and smoking joints. I remember The wall would probably delay a hy- which he’s a board member, to cele- sitting on a sandbank one evening, pothetical crossing by a few minutes, brate the fiftieth anniversary of the after a consultation with Feets, watch- depending on its design and the man- Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and to ing the river flow—the molecules jos- ner of the breach. There are videos of begin to articulate, in an informal but tling past, toward the Main Salmon, Mexicans deploying ladders, ramps, pertinent setting, a response to Trump’s the Snake, the Columbia, and the ropes, welding torches, and tunnels wall. (Last week, American Rivers, for Pacific, and then up into the atmo- to get over, through, or under border the first time since 2003, included the sphere and the jet stream and eventu-

48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 ally, via cumulonimbus, back to the guided—raft trip on the Colorado Pulitzer-winning account of the Rio mountains upstream—and appreciat- River, through the Grand Canyon, put Grande, which, like “2001: A Space ing, really for the first time, the fact together by a few friends, some of Odyssey,” reaches about as far back as that this conveyor belt of snowmelt whom had guided on the river in their a history can. It begins: and runof never stopped rolling, a twenties. Most of us were strangers to Space. quintessence of incessance unlike anyone another, but the pixie dust was Abstract movement. thing I could conceive of, except maybe strong. Two weeks in the canyon, with The elements at large. time itself. Or an escalator. Then I no connection to the outside world. Over warm seas the air is heavy with moisture. wandered of in quest of some leftover The rim the edge of your universe, the Dutch-oven apple crisp. river your only way through it. Among The guy was speaking my language. Even in the clear-eyed light of day, the promises I made to myself, down the Middle Fork worked its magic. on the Colorado—promises that were his is why, after a five-hour eve- There was something addictive about inevitably broken—was that I would Tning drive from El Paso through the unfurling, around every bend, of spend a greater portion of my life, or the shimmering blood-meridian ex- new vistas. The fellowship, too: by the what remained of it, on swift, wild, panse of West Texas, then a morning end of the trip, all of us, clients and and scenic American rivers. of sorting gear, meeting and greeting, guides, vowed to visit one another soon, So I signed on to Reicher’s trip. At and bouncing in a shuttle van through making what I now know are routine his urging, I started reading “Great the ocotillo-and-yucca high desert of pixie-dust promises that in this case River,” Paul Horgan’s muy grande Big Bend National Park, I found my were so unlikely to be kept that it took only a few days for the spell to wear of. (A river trip is a little like summer camp that way.) I passed through Portola a year later and found “Feets, Amazing” in the local phone book. No answer. Soon afterward, I learned how to do an Eskimo roll, and spent a decade white-water kayaking wherever and whenever I could. Lehigh, Lochsa, Youghiogheny, Ocoee, Gallatin, To- hickon, Penobscot, Payette: the names of the rivers summon up boulder gardens, azure pools, high-speed surf waves, life-threatening keeper holes— and those mesmerizing cellophane stretches where the water, clear and unriled, accelerates over a rocky bed, getting ever shallower, before drop- ping into the aerated tumult of a rapid. To safely navigate big rapids, and to play in them with some assurance, you have to acquaint yourself with a fundamental principle: water seeks its own level. This is why it flows toward the sea, why it churns back on itself when it drops steeply, and why, if you lean the wrong way crossing an eddy line, it flips your boat—and why, if you fail to roll up and have to swim, it fills your boat (and your sinuses) as it dashes you against the rocks. Whatever level the water is seeking, you are better of with your head above it. Work, city life, injuries, and children put an end to my boating. But, like Ishmael, I intermittently get a strong urge to take to the ship. Sev- eral years ago, I joined a private—un- heart droop upon catching sight of a all over the country, including mak- was considered impregnable, by boat sag of umber water, its banks choked ing tubular sleeves for die-casting anyway. There is no record of anyone with cane. Great river? It looked more foundries at a factory in Milwaukee. ever having navigated it when this ter- like a polluted tidal lagoon in Flush- In 1996, he quit, moved to Terlingua, ritory belonged to Spain. In the nine- ing, Queens. The put-in was at the Texas, and, having never before worked teenth century, numerous survey par- foot of a boat ramp of bulldozed mud. on a river, set out to become a guide. ties, daunted by the prospect of big An empty beer bottle, properly hurled, He’d met his wife, also a river guide, rapids and no escape, didn’t venture would have made it over to the Mex- on the Middle Fork of the Salmon. past the entrance. Three Confederate ican side. “This is blue-collar work, too, but it’s deserters claimed to have floated from At the edge of this slough sat a awesome,” he said. “Everywhere you El Paso to Brownsville, in 1861, in a flotilla of twelve canoes, one kayak, go, there’s water.” pair of lashed-together dugout canoes and a supply raft. The lead guide, We were a few miles upriver of Bo- but left no description of the Big Bend John LeRoy, a ropy, leathery dude quillas Canyon, where the river cuts canyons, which would have represented with a gray beard and ponytail, was through the limestone fortress of the a noteworthy test. In 1899, a boating busy rigging the boats. Eventually, Dead Horse Mountains, by the Sierra expedition led by Robert Hill, an oicer he gathered everyone for an orienta- del Carmen. That’s the stretch we were for the U.S. Geological Survey, set out tion speech—safety, paddling and rig- heading for—four days, three nights, to explore the canyons. “Every bush ging technique, chain of command. just thirty-three miles, in one of the and stone was closely scanned for men He brought up the urination routine most protected sections of the Rio in ambush,” he wrote afterward. The (“Pee in the river, whenever possible. Grande. The water flow was low, the country apparently teemed with ban- Dilution is the solution to pollution”), workload light, the dangers few, the dits, the most fearsome of them a Mex- but said he’d address the poop ques- rapids negligible. This was a commer- ican named Alvarado, who was known tion later. Something about LeRoy’s cial guided float trip, cosseted and ca- as Old White Lip, because his mus- edgy forbearance seemed to say New tered. Still, we’d be out of touch and tache was half white and half black. York City, and, sure enough, he was of the grid. Four days without cellu- The Mexicans on Hill’s expedition from Elmhurst—né Jean-Yves, the son lar coverage can lead to palpitations were supposed to kill Alvarado if they of French immigrants. His father had and debilitating night sweats. So can encountered him, but, at some point, been a waiter in the theatre district. scorpions and rattlesnakes. they floated right past him, without LeRoy had worked blue-collar jobs For centuries, Boquillas Canyon realizing who it was, as he watched from the bank with a baby in his arms. Maybe he’d shaved of the mustache. Hill and his men found the going in Boquillas less arduous than expected, and filled in a new section of the map. One of our guides was named Al- varado—Austin Alvarado. No relation: his parents were from Guatemala. Al- varado had recently returned from a trip led by a twenty-nine-year-old filmmaker named Ben Masters; they’d paddled, and ridden horses and mountain bikes, along the Texas border, from El Paso to the Gulf, for a documentary Masters was making, called “The River and the Wall.” Masters, a wry, red- headed horseman with a telegenic Texas drawl, was on this trip, too, along with the film’s producer and another cameraman. This time, strictly speaking, Alvarado was a guide and Mas- ters a client. Another client was Colin McDonald, the one who’d done the source-to-sea trip in 2014, and who was now working on endangered- species policy for the Texas state comp- troller’s oice, having capitulated to the looming extinction of his own species, Reporterus localus. All told, there were twenty guests and four guides. Reicher, who had his Stewart Udall, was Secretary of the (as midstream downed limbs and trees daughter and his son along (one a re- Interior under Presidents Kennedy are called), and LeRoy pulled up on a cent graduate of Dartmouth, the other and Johnson. “L.B.J. bullied my dad,” gravel bar—Mexico—to supervise, headed there next fall), made intro- Udall said. “He considered him a Ken- while a vaquero in reflector shades and ductions. As people paired up, Udall, nedy guy.” (Stewart had supported a backward ball cap sat sentry on a unaccompanied by staf or spouse, Kennedy over Johnson in 1960.) “But burro. “Buenas tardes,” the Senator said. chose me as his stern man. He is sixty- my dad had a great relationship with “Everyone has a river story,” Udall nine years old, of medium build, and Lady Bird.” As a Mormon with deep told me. His had to do with a Grand had on a long-billed sunhat, sunglasses, roots in the Southwest and a dam- Canyon trip he took with his father, thick sunblock, a long-sleeved fishing happy constituency at home in Ari- when he was a teen-ager, in June, 1967. shirt tucked into khaki-colored quick- zona, Stewart Udall was con- As a congressman from Ar- dry pants, and Teva sandals: no Amaz- stitutionally and politically izona, and then as Interior ing Feets, my bow man. He had a inclined to develop natural Secretary, Stewart Udall Jimmy Stewart aw-shucks air about resources, rather than preserve had for many years sup- him and a way of working my first them. “I was born with a ported two controversial name into every other sentence, but shovel in my hand,” he liked projects in the Grand Can- he wasn’t above having a beer on the to say. But his adventures out- yon: proposed dams in water or sharing cold-eyed appraisals doors and his friendship with Marble and Bridge Can- of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. He Rachel Carson and other en- yons, which would have is a liberal-voting Democrat with a vironmentalists made him in- turned long sections of the lifetime score of ninety-six per cent creasingly receptive to oppos- Grand Canyon into reser- from the League of Conservation Vot- ing arguments, and he wound voirs. Eventually, Congress ers, but has some sensitivity to the up presiding over the federal govern- killed the dams. Soon afterward, Udall needs of constituents trying to make ment’s most prolific spree of land and and his family went on a raft trip in a living of the land in the arid West. species protection, including the Wil- the Grand—what he called his “ride He’d spent a lot of time outdoors derness Act, the Endangered Species on the wild side.” through the years. He’d been an in- Preservation Act, and the Wild and Tom Udall told me, “My dad structor for Outward Bound, in col- Scenic Rivers Act. wanted, as he put it, to ‘let the can- lege, and every summer he spends a yons speak for themselves.’” For the week or two backpacking in the wil- he Senator and I were getting the first time, in that wild place, Stewart derness of the Wind River Range, in Thang of our boat. It was an Old Udall came to appreciate why his op- Wyoming. (His cousin—and longtime Town canoe, almost seventeen feet ponents in the dam debates had felt travelling companion in the Winds— long and piled high with gear. We were so strongly that the river ought to be Randy Udall died there five years ago, approaching the old mining village of left alone. You had to see it to want on a solo hike.) Boquillas del Carmen, on the Mexi- to save it. He published an article soon Udall began to tell the story, over can side. Udall called out “Hola! ” to afterward taking himself to task for his shoulder, of his family and its roots some men squatting on the bank with his support of the dams. That year, in the Church of Latter-day Saints. a skif that they employed to ferry peo- he also travelled to upstate New York One great-grandfather, David King ple back and forth across the river, at and paddled a canoe with Robert Ken- Udall, was a Mormon bishop and a five dollars a head. The Boquillas nedy in the Hudson River Derby, polygamist, who went to prison for Crossing, at a shallow and slack stretch to promote the pending Wild and Sce- perjury. (He’d lied when Mitt Rom- of the river, has long been a port of nic Rivers legislation. It passed the ney’s great-grandfather was being in- entry. The Border Patrol shut it down following year. The act now covers vestigated for polygamy; his bail was in 2002, after the attacks of Septem- more than twelve thousand miles of posted by Barry Goldwater’s father.) ber 11th. This devastated the village, rivers and streams, including two A great-great-grandfather, John Lee, which, on the Mexican side, is about stretches of the Rio Grande—the who had nineteen wives, was one of four hours away from the nearest paved Lower Canyons and Boquillas. Now the leaders of the Mountain Mead- road. In the absence of tourism, some his son wanted to hear what this can- ows Massacre, in 1857, in which a Mor- hundred remaining residents scraped yon had to say to him. mon militia murdered a party of set- by for a decade. In 2013, the U.S. opened And here we were. The walls closed tlers in southwest Utah; Lee was the the crossing again, allowing Big Bend in—steep, streaked limestone clifs only one executed for the crime. visitors to go over to Boquillas for with a terra-cotta tinge, pocked high The family eventually made its way the day or the night, and Mexicans to and low with dark openings big and toward the political mainstream, as go to the other side to sell souvenirs— small, made by waterfalls during an the West fell under the sway of Wash- or to retrieve grazing cattle that might era, post-Ice Age, when these precincts ington. Mo Udall, Tom’s uncle, was a have strayed there. were lush. The water, clearer here, took liberal congressman who ran for Pres- A little farther downstream, a on the colors of the clifs, and of the ident, in 1976. Mo’s son, Mark, spent stretch of fast water steered the boats salt cedars that crowded the shore. The six years in the Senate. Tom’s father, toward a cut bank and some strainers air had a prehistoric hush, except for

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 51 of this Administration appall him. In 1903, Roosevelt’s great-grandfather, as President, established the Na- tional Wildlife Refuge system, with the designation of Pelican Island, in Florida—the first instance of the federal government putting aside land for wildlife. As it happens, one of the first sections of the border wall was scheduled to be built on a national wildlife refuge in the lower Rio Grande, the Santa Ana, one of the region’s most crucial habitats for migra- tory birds. Last year, contractors for the Department of Homeland Secu- rity arrived there to drill test holes. Just upriver last summer, at the Na- tional Butterfly Center, a privately owned refuge, a staf member discovered a crew of workers, sent by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, on the center’s property, clearing brush and chopping down trees, in preparation for the wall, which would strand two-thirds of the center’s land on the “Mexican” side of the wall. The butterfly center has sued the federal government. “We understand that not everyone in the country may be as interested in butterflies or in the en- •• vironment as we are,” the head of the center told The Texas Observer. “But everyone should care when the gov- the dip of paddles in the current and hear some light argument among ernment thinks it can do whatever it the tuneful descending song of the spouses and siblings amid the clickety- wants on your private property.” canyon wren. clack of tent poles. LeRoy shooed away This is one of the reasons that the The first night’s camp, called Puerto some grazing cattle and used a rake to Trump Administration has been eying Rico, was Mile 8, river right, a broad remove cow dung from the prime tent federal lands. Thanks to a 2005 Patriot floodplain of sand, stones, and grass. spots. Udall took over for a while. Roo- Act provision—the REAL I.D. waiver— Puerto Rico was in Mexico. (After sevelt said, “Someone has to get a pic- federal agencies were able, under the September 11th, Americans were not ture of the Senator shovelling shit.” guise of national security, to ignore en- supposed to pull ashore, much less Roosevelt, a seventy-five-year-old vironmental and historic-preservation spend the night, on the Mexican side, investment banker, who served in laws in building hundreds of miles of but in recent years the authorities have Vietnam with the Navy SEALs, was border fencing during the Bush Ad- relaxed a bit.) We set up a bucket bri- dressed like Udall, but with a Stet- ministration. Earlier this year, a law- gade to oload the accoutrements of son hat and a red bandanna around suit challenging the waiver, filed by en- our portable hotel: folding tables and his neck. He had a radio-friendly vironmental groups and the State of chairs, four-burner range, Dutch oven, baritone and a solicitous air. A life- California, came before a federal judge propane tanks, coolers, water jugs, doz- long conservationist and Republi- in San Diego, Gonzalo Curiel. Curiel, ens of dufel-size dry bags, tents, and can, by inheritance and practice, he you’ll recall, was the judge in the Trump camping mattresses known as paco is among those in his party who are University case whom Trump, during pads. You can carry a lot more in a dismayed by Trump yet are still striv- his campaign, had called “a hater of boat than in a backpack. The laws of ing, against diminishing odds, to find Donald Trump” who “happens to be, flotation allow for comfort and en- some workable common ground. He’s we believe, Mexican.” This time, Cu- courage excess. As the guides worked, the kind of environmentalist who can riel sided with Trump. the guests scattered to claim sites to acknowledge and regret the occasion- Yet, last month, Congress, in its pitch their tents. Dry bags spilled out ally invasive and inflexible nature of $1.3-trillion omnibus spending bill, es- domestic consolations: clean clothes, a federally enforced regimen. None- sentially blocked the building of a wall toiletries, pillows, headlamps. You could theless, the rollbacks and predations through the Santa Ana refuge—for

52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 now, anyway. The bill provided hun- to restore awareness of it, from the up a tent in the dark. As we lay down, dreds of millions of dollars to enhance ground up. he barked, “Scorpion!” We began existing fencing and to reinforce le- He pointed to the shrubs that clung thrashing around, our headlamps ber- vees on both sides but mandated a to the base of the steep clif: cande- serking until my beam found a pale three-mile gap. (For patrollers, this is lilla, a source of wax used in the pro- spider the size of a silver dollar, which the busiest section of Texas’s southern duction of lip balm, candles, religious he’d brushed from his leg. Masters border; they apprehended more than figurines, and chewing gum. A hun- got it with his water bottle, and, with a hundred and thirty-seven thousand dred years ago, there was a Great Wax the tent flaps slapping around in the people crossing there last year, twenty- Rush here, with factories on both sides wind, we settled down to a night of three times more than they did in the of the river, but now it’s a small-time fitful sleep. bigger but far less populous sector of afair. He described how people on the the Big Bend.) Other wildlife refuges Mexican side rip the shrubs out of the river trip is a comedy of manners along the river were not spared. The soil, boil them with sulfuric acid in A that commences each day with South Texas stretch of the Rio Grande vats at a camp downstream, skim the the sheepish, intermittent parade to was the most afected. Still, Congress wax of the surface, and then trans- the groover. The groover is the name provided nowhere near the funds port it by donkey out of the canyon, of the makeshift portable latrine, which Trump had requested, and so in re- up to the mesa, and into Boquillas. On is typically set up at some remove from cent weeks he has started talking about a good day, a candelillero can produce camp, out of sight and yet often with deploying the military to the border, about ten dollars’ worth of it. “It’s ei- a stunning outlook, to make up for the or raiding the military’s budget to fund ther that or running a ferry,” McDon- flies and the lack of a stall door. It is a wall. On April 3rd, he announced ald said. called the groover because the body of that he was calling in the National That night, after dinner (tilapia), the toilet is an old ammunition can Guard, though, strictly speaking, he flashes strobed above the canyon’s stood on its side—on a wilderness river, doesn’t, as President, have the power southern walls. “Heat lightning,” some- you must pack everything out, includ- to do so. one said, as someone usually does, and ing human waste, and an ammo can, there arose a debate about whether being sealable and unbreakable, is he kayak on the trip, which a few there really is such a thing. The wind ready-made—and, when one sits on Tof us took turns paddling, was changed direction and began honk- it, one winds up with a groove on each one of the vessels that had conveyed ing downriver. The camp seemed to cheek of one’s rear end. Usually, now- McDonald from source to sea, a few be blowing apart. Then came hot pods adays, a toilet seat is placed atop the years before. It still bore traces of the of rain. I was determined to sleep under opening, to moderate the experience. messages that his wife had written all the stars, but after an hour of being Still, the old moniker pertains, as does over it, in indelible ink, to keep him blasted by sand, amid a light show of the ritual of campers competing, with- company. Lean, bearded, fervid, and indeterminate origin and consequence, out demonstrating that they are doing quick-spoken, McDonald had brought I gave in, and Ben Masters and I set so, to be the first, or at least among along some books about the river for people to look through before dinner. He also had a photocopy of Reicher’s 1977 journal, in a freezer bag. He seemed to know more about the current state of the Rio Grande than anyone. “The Colorado, always the Col- orado—it’s like the pretty girl,” he said. “The Rio Grande isn’t seen, treated, or valued as a river. My wife’s from Brownsville, and I introduced her to the Rio Grande. People think, The river is dirty, it’s poverty, it’s disease.” He was involved in eforts to address various ills, but, in light of the obstacles (and in spite of his enthusiasm), he did not evince much hope. “We have nineteenth-century laws, twentieth-century infrastructure, and twenty-first-century problems,” he liked to say. His focus, in the short term, was finding ways to get kids on the water, to introduce them to its “I see you, Jake—but does anyone have a question glories, such as they are, and to begin that’s not about carpentry?” the first, to visit the groover, each day lem.” He prefers a so-called smart wall, Ears. Again the rituals: the load-in, after dawn. the deployment of camera and drone the scramble for good ground, dry Typically, there is a sign indicating technology to trace movement on the shorts, groover. Bob Irvin broke out a that the groover is occupied—a pad- border, especially in remote areas. You fly rod, in the hope of catching a long- dle, or a bandanna on a bush. On the can see instances of this approach here nose gar, a prehistoric fish native to Rio Grande, this was a smaller ammo and there in the Big Bend region; a these waters. McDonald brought out can, like a lunchbox, which contained giant unmanned blimp hovers high his books. There was swimming and paper, hand cleanser, and (for the lucky over the desert south of Marfa. (In beer-drinking in the sun, some explo- camper on groover detail) latex gloves. the omnibus spending bill, Congress ration of a slot canyon, and then later, The smaller box’s visible presence, approved about two hundred million after dinner (Dutch-oven lasagna), in in a designated spot en route to the dollars that could be used for this kind the dark, more Chautauqua—more groover, indicated that the facility was of security.) schemes and dreams. Another storm free. The sight of someone carrying a The group began to talk about a blew in, and at night’s end a group of lunchbox to the shit box, and the ex- kind of antidote to the wall, an idea us lingered under the kitchen tarp, tell- perience of cheerfully passing a fellow- that Reicher had only just heard of ing river tales. Killer holes, unfamiliar boater on the way to and fro (perhaps the month before but which has been beasts, mysterious strangers. Reicher with a tip of the hat and a “G’morn- around since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s recalled finding, in a hot springs in the ing, Ma’am”), become so commonplace Administration discussed it, in the Lower Canyons, a new genus of iso- that, by Day Three, any stigma sur- thirties: a binational park, linking the pod crustacean, one that glowed in the rounding the procedure is gone. The existing Big Bend park and some ad- dark, which is unusual for a freshwa- groover unites us all. jacent public lands, on the American ter bug. He took some pickled sam- This was not a topic for discussion, side, with millions of acres of wild ples back to Dartmouth and got a grant however, during the morning cofee country, both public and private, al- to do more research, but by the time conversations initiated by Reicher. The ready set aside just across the river. he returned to the hot springs a flood barracks banter typical of other river The Mexican government has desig- had washed out the pools and the bugs trips was replaced by a mediated dis- nated more than four million acres as were gone. cussion about the Rio Grande and its protected. Cemex, the Mexican build- Masters and Alvarado told a story, discontents, chief among them the ing-materials behemoth, had bought from their Rio Grande adventure, about wall. In the shade of the canyon, as up ranches along both sides of the a mischievous friend of Masters’s who the sunlight gradually made its way river, in the interest of land preserva- secretly served the two of them and a down the clifs on the American side— tion and the reintroduction of bighorn cat-loving friend an elaborate taco there’s your wall!—Reicher asked Aus- sheep. (When Trump was elected, breakfast made with bobcat meat. I tin Alvarado to say a few words to the Cemex was assumed to be a likely pro- was thinking of laying out my paco group, which was seated in a circle of vider of cement for the wall, but the pad under the tarp, but as the rain in- folding chairs. company has stated that it wouldn’t tensified a phalanx of those big pale “The idea of a wall is so un-Amer- be bidding on the job.) As it is, the spiders came up over the sand, eyes ican to me,” Alvarado said. “Is this Chihuahuan ecosystem straddles the goggling in the beams of our head- America first, or America only?” Al- border and exceeds the limits of any lamps. They kept converging on Mas- varado, twenty-five, described how his existing park. Why shouldn’t the parks ters, as though to avenge the one from mother, and later his father and and preserves be integrated somehow? the night before. We pitched a tent. brother—all of them Guatemalans— One precedent is Waterton-Glacier In the Grand Canyon, my friends had crossed the river near Browns- International Peace Park, along the had, after a week, got into a mode of ville. Udall asked, “Austin, are you a mountainous border between Mon- talking to one another almost exclu- Dreamer?” tana and Alberta. But no one had ever sively in the diction and cadence of a “No, I was born here.” thought of putting up a wall to keep nineteenth-century explorer’s journals: Someone joked, “You say ‘here,’ but out the Canadians. “Cabbage stores are mostly depleted we’re in Mexico now.” and what is left is sodden and rancid. “I was born in Austin, Texas, which he next day, we paddled eleven The men grow restless.” I found my- is how I got my name,” Alvarado said. Tmiles in the canyon. Several guests self the next morning, over pancakes “I have cousins who are Dreamers, flipped their canoes. It doesn’t take and cofee, privately lapsing into it. though.” much, once you get caught broadside Morale high, weather improving, Mas- “You’re called an anchor baby on against a rock in swift water. Roosevelt, ters unbowed. the other side,” Udall said wryly. in a boat with Masters, hit a submerged “Hey, I have an idea,” someone said. Alvarado and Masters had spent a boulder, and into the drink they went, “I have one, too,” Masters said. couple of days with Representative along with Masters’s fancy camera. “Sweet!” Will Hurd, a Republican from Texas, Everyone had a laugh. “Double sweet.” who strongly opposes the wall—which Camp was on the Mexican side It was a bluebird morning. A tail- he has called “a third-century solu- again, just upriver of a two-pronged wind, a blessing in these parts, sped tion to a twenty-first-century prob- tower of limestone known as Rabbit us out of the canyon and into an open

54 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 desert basin—out of what was, on the American side, Big Bend National Park and into the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. (It was amazing to consider that the Big Bend park is the southern terminus, geologically speaking, of both the Appalachians and the Rockies—that the ranges, or at least the rock that distinguishes them, almost touch here.) For hours, the river tunnelled lazily through the cane and wound around until Mexico, confusingly, was to our north. We camped on that side again, along a run where Irvin spent another hour in midstream, backlit amid the riles, as if in some fishing magazine, tossing a fly line toward the American side, to no avail—no gar. Udall passed around some Cohibas, then sat half-submerged and shirtless in an eddy, smoking one of them: a ride on the wild side. Some- one put out Fritos and guacamole. A group hiked to the top of a nearby mesa just before sunset and took in hundreds of square miles of mountainous desert—a good chunk of a would-be peace park. You could also see a lot of this from the groover—of which the returning mesa hikers had an unobstructed view. This was the first clear night, eagerly anticipated, since the area is a so-called dark-sky preserve, advanta- geous for gazing at the stars. The sky “You don’t need me. You don’t need anyone. You are Americans.” was soon full. After dinner (steak), a dozen or so of the group gathered by a fire and passed around a bottle of •• whiskey while playing what they called a drinking game, initiated by Mas- and, as the flotilla passed through of the river with no active border ters: “If you were President, which some slack water and a rapid that a crossing. fifty-mile stretch of unprotected river, guide called Eat Shit Rock, you could This is where the trip came to an anywhere in the United States, would begin to see, along the banks, evidence end, on a sandbar across from the ruins you designate as Wild and Scenic?” of harder use. Abandoned infrastruc- of La Linda. The vans were waiting, One by one, people spoke of their fa- ture: an old mining tram, a pier im- with trailers for the boats. Just before vorite threatened waterways—the provised out of a rusting truck chas- we got there, we passed beneath the Pecos, the Pigeon, the Crow—until, sis. The big lode around here had been defunct bridge, its underbelly warted under the spell of the whiskey and fluorspar. Dow Chemical once had up with swallows’ nests. On the road- the stars and the rustle of the Rio an operation in La Linda, on the Mex- bed above, the array of median barri- Grande, it seemed possible that each ican side, connected to the American ers and fences, including a reinforced- pronouncement had the force of law. side by a steel-and-concrete bridge, mesh overhang in the shape of a I slept outside and woke up with a high above the river. This had been a backstop, brought to mind the collec- headache. Dover’s powder depleted. The busy crossing. But the mines shut tion of wall prototypes that Trump had men complain of ague. down in the early nineties, and then, recently gone to see in San Diego— There’s something forlorn about soon afterward, the bridge did, too, the disembodied slabs that some had the last run of a river trip, when you after a drug smuggler killed a Mexi- likened to conceptual art. Would they know it ends in a shuttle van rather can customs agent. Now La Linda work? Had these? We loaded the ca- than at a camp. A cold front washed in, was a ghost town, with a ghost bridge, noes onto the trailers. From up on the bringing drizzle and a chilly headwind, in the middle of the longest stretch bank, the river didn’t look like much. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 55 ANNALS OF GASTRONOMY BEAN FREAKS On the hunt for an elusive legume.

BY BURKHARD BILGER

he best meal of my life, or at for dinner, there were only white beans home, a jar of these chilies would least the most memorable, came inside, flecked with salt pork. They had abruptly blossom with black moths, T from a can. I was thirteen at the one flavor, one texture, one purpose— hatched from eggs embedded in their time and living in France, so that may to fill my stomach—but that was enough. flesh. But Sando was just thinking how have had something to do with it. But Hunger is a simple thing, an alarm bell great they’d be with a mess of beans. I credit the beans. My older sisters and in the brain. Sometimes there’s noth- We passed tables of epazote, an herb I were at a hippie camp in the Alps that ing better than shutting it of. said to prevent flatulence, and bowls summer, not far from the Italian bor- I thought about that meal last spring, of a greenish-gray soil with a vaguely der. My parents had stashed us there when I first met Steve Sando. We were vegetal smell. “Pond scum from Lake while they went home to Oklahoma to standing at a table heaped with hibis- Texcoco,” Sando said. “We use it to check on our house, which they’d rented cus flowers, at an outdoor market in soften beans.” To Sando, everything to some graduate students while my fa- the town of Ixmiquilpan, three hours in Mexico seems to connect to beans, ther was on sabbatical. The camp was north of Mexico City in the state of and through them to the rest of world the cheapest one they could find, and Hidalgo. It was a Thursday morning cuisine. When he’s at home, in Napa, they seemed to have done next to no in May, and the stalls were full of California, he sometimes gives talks at research before signing us up. My mother women gossiping and picking through local elementary schools. He starts by just loved the name: Jeunesse du Soleil produce: corn fungus and cactus pad- asking the kids where pizza comes from. Levant, Youth of the Rising Sun. dles, purslane and pickling lime, agave “Italy!” As it turned out, we rarely woke be- buds and papalo leaf that smelled of “Wrong. Mexico! That’s where toma- fore noon. The camp had promised a mint and gasoline. Sando, who is fifty- toes are from. What about chocolate?” vigorous program of crafts, hikes, and eight, ambled among them in a white “Switzerland!” team-building games, but the coun- guayabera shirt, untucked at the waist. “Nope. Mexico! That’s where cocoa sellors were usually too hungover, or He had on loose jeans, tennis shoes, beans are from. How about vanilla?” too caught up in their tent-hopping and a bright-red baseball cap that said “Mexico?” romances, to bother. (On the last day “Rancho Gordo” above the bill. He “That’s right! And chilies, corn, and of camp, I found a stack of unopened could hardly have looked more Amer- squash, too.” Many of the staples of boxes behind the mess tent; they were ican, yet he fit in perfectly somehow. European and Asian cooking came filled with modelling clay and water- He was built like a giant bean. from Mesoamerica via the Spanish, he color paints.) We spent most after- That may seem too easy, beans being explains. It’s called the Columbian Ex- noons playing cards and plunking gui- Sando’s business. But people are often change, but it wasn’t much of a trade tars, killing time till after dinner, when shaped by their obsessions, and in San- for the Mesoamericans. They got tur- we’d hike down to the village to drink do’s case the similarities are hard to nips, barley, and spinach. beer with grenadine and dance to miss. His body is mostly torso, his skin Sando is a rather sheepish addition French disco music. both ruddy and tanned, like a pinto. to that history. He’s uneasy about im- It was paradise, mostly. The excep- He makes a colorful first impression, port regulations, fretful of cultural ap- tion was the few mornings when our gets a little starchy if you crowd him, propriation, and well aware of his fum- counsellors, seized by a spasm of con- then slowly softens up. Fifteen years bling grasp of Mexican custom. “I’m science, would roust us from our tents ago, when Sando founded Rancho not the Indiana Jones of beans,” he and lead us on forced marches through Gordo, he had no food-retailing or told me. “I’m the Don Quixote.” Every the mountains, declaring that this was farming experience. Now he’s the coun- year, he takes one or two trips to Mex- what summer camp was all about. It try’s largest retailer of heirloom beans ico to look for rare varieties and farm- was on one of those trips, on the shore and a minor celebrity in the culinary ers who might grow them for him. of a frigid lake, that I had the meal of world. He’s a side dish who’s become He was in Ixmiquilpan to search for my life. I was famished by then and a staple. an especially elusive quarry: Flor de wobbly with fatigue. I’d spent too many “This to me . . . it just makes me so Durazno, the Flower of the Peach. days lounging around, and a counsellor happy,” he said. He was holding a bag This was a dainty, pinkish-brown bean had stufed two giant cans of cassoulet of rayado chilies, smoked over an oak of uncommon taste and velvety tex- in my backpack before we left. French fire. He stuck his nose deep inside and ture, grown in Hidalgo. Sando had trail mix. When we pried them open inhaled. Weeks later, in my pantry at seen it once in his life, in a package sent

56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 Rancho Gordo’s heirloom beans look like gems in a jewelry case. The company sells half a million pounds of them a year.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CARI VANDER YACHT THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 57 to his oice by a farmer not far from ther’s sabbatical, they always seemed to Cooking beans is like going to see this market. He was hoping to buy two be covered in cheese, coated in ketchup clowns and sword swallowers at a cir- thousand pounds for his Bean Club. and molasses, or tossed into a three- cus, only to find them all sitting inside bean salad like so many protein pellets. the tent, playing canasta. “It’s God’s happen to be a member of the Bean The closest I came to the cassoulet was little joke,” Sando told me. I Club, though I’m a little reluctant the Sea Island Red Peas that I had in Sando knows how it is to have a di- to admit it. Not that it isn’t a pretty ex- Charleston one spring, thirty years later. vided nature. How a flashy exterior can clusive thing. Anyone can buy beans They were an heirloom variety, reintro- conceal a modest but hearty interior. from Rancho Gordo, but the Bean duced by the food historian Glenn Rob- As a boy, growing up in Sausalito in Club—which sends members six rare erts at Anson Mills—potent little field the early seventies, he had his share of varieties and a few other oddments, peas, possessed of an unreasonably rich social handicaps. He was gay in an era like blue hominy, every three months— brown broth. But Anson Mills had only of reflexive homophobia, overweight closed its rolls last year. Sando couldn’t the one variety to ofer, along with some long before the body-positive move- keep up with demand. Still, admitting Purple Cape beans from time to time. ment, and, as a child of divorced par- that you’re obsessed with beans is a lit- Then I found Rancho Gordo. ents, always shuttling between homes tle like saying you collect decorative The beans on Sando’s site look like and schools. He felt both anonymous plates. It marks your taste as untrust- gems in a jewelry case: crimson, violet, and glaringly conspicuous. “I was so worthy. I’ve seen the reaction often black, and gold; stippled, striped, and tired of being the fat new kid,” he told enough in my family: the eye roll and swirled. They bear evocative names— me. “I remember in sixth grade, just stifled cough, the muttered aside as I Eye of the Goat, Yellow Indian Wo- after my parents divorced, I sat down show yet another guest the wonders of man—and range in size from tiny Pin- next to this girl in summer school, and my well-lit and cleverly organized bean quitos to Royal Coronas the size of a I heard her say, ‘Well, I guess we have closet. As my daughter Evangeline put baby’s ear. There is, admittedly, some a fat fag on our hands.’ It was like I it one night, a bit melodramatically, risk of false advertising. Once the beans could hear the violins going backward.” when I served beans for the third time have cooked, the colors run and fade, His father, a former Disney animator in a week, “Lord, why couldn’t it have leaving a soupy pot of brownish seeds. who’d worked on “101 Dalmatians,” been bacon or chocolate?” The inky depth of a black bean, or the wished him sleeker and more success- Beans are the middle child of Amer- grassiness of a flageolet, is easy to taste. ful; his mother, a nurse, wished him a ican cooking, the food we forget we But most varieties aren’t nearly as dis- little more conventional. When he first love. Back in Oklahoma, after my fa- tinct as their bright costumes portend. told them that he was gay, at eighteen, “they let it be known that this was not O.K.,” Sando recalls. “But they came around. My father marched in the gay- pride parade a few years later.” In his late teens, Sando lost weight and found his crowd, learned to impro- vise on the piano, and discovered, to his great surprise, that he’d become rather good-looking. “What we call a twink now,” he says. Although he never found a true, long-term partner, he married a friend of a friend in his late thirties and had two boys with her, now nineteen and sixteen. “I’d had every lesbian on the planet ask me for sperm,” he says. “But there was a side of me that said, ‘I can’t do this as a passive bystander.’” They raised the boys in adjacent houses for a few years, then divorced. “There’s a sitcom waiting to happen,” he says. But he tells the story flatly, without griev- ance or irony, as if giving a deposition. “The truth is that your sexual identity is just about the least interesting thing about you,” he says. “Do you play an instrument? That would be interesting.” Sando now lives with his younger son in the hills above Napa Valley, in a former Seventh-Day Adventist church that he’s decorated with Mexican co- music reviewing, music licensing, a zine, just a dried bean and raised it to a new lonial art and religious icons. (The icons a Web site, a Web-site-designing busi- level, where the flavor was really in- seem to be working. A few weeks after ness—the dot-com hopscotch of the tense and it cooked so much more con- I visited, when wildfires ripped through late nineties. “Always hand to mouth, sistently,” Keller said. Within a month, Northern California, Sando sent me a always just about to make it,” as he puts it was a staple of the French Laundry. video of his property: the house was it. His mother’s family was well of, and Within a year, every chef in California untouched, the trees around it burned in the back of his mind Sando had long seemed to be serving beans. to charcoal and ash.) When he’s at ease, assumed that, if nothing else worked, Sando had got it all wrong. He’d been he can be loose and self-deprecating, an inheritance might bail him out. But selling beans as a health food, a sop for with a mildly sardonic wit. But he’s his grandmother willed everything to the meatless. He’d even named his com- never quite lost his childhood wari- his stepgrandfather, who willed every- pany with the intent of pitching a bean- ness. His default mode is a kind of thing to his nurse. “I was turning forty based diet: Rancho Gordo, Fat Ranch. prickly joviality, a gregarious misan- by then, and I thought, O.K., you’re a But all that earnest salesmanship had thropy. He likes people just enough major fuckup,” Sando says. “Just start a just made beans seem unappetizing. to spend a lot of time with them, at garden and get a job at Target.” “People don’t buy moral food,” Sando which point he realizes that, on sec- told me. “They think they do, but they ond thought, he’d rather be alone. he gardening, at least, was a suc- don’t. It’s all about the flavor.” It was an- In the years between high school and Tcess. In 2000, Sando moved to a other version of the halo efect he’d seen having children, Sando drifted between house outside Napa, on two and a half at Esprit: “You start with the chefs and gainful and fanciful employment. He acres of land. He planted heirloom Mex- you work your way down.” took a few courses at San Francisco State ican tomatoes at first, then some rare The real problem was supply, not and at the College of Marin, spent six bean varieties he’d found in seed cata- demand. Sando had reached the limits months backpacking through India, logues, and was soon overwhelmed with of his bean-farming abilities. “I’m very moved to Santa Fe, then London, then produce. “I thought I had a gift,” he good at the early stages,” he says. “I’m, to San Francisco again, where he landed told me. “But really it was Napa. Any- like, Oh, yeah, I’ve controlled nature. a job with Esprit in 1982. The company thing can grow in Napa.” When the She’s my bitch. But by August I’m was in its heyday, selling bright-colored farmers’ market in town wouldn’t have thinking, Please, let this be over.” Not clothes for the notionally idealistic. him, he settled for the scruier one in long after Keller’s visit, Sando began Sando started out answering phones and Yountville, nine miles to the north. But looking for a farmer. He tried hiring was soon overseeing multimillion-dollar sales were slow. The beans were pretty some wonky young guys with “groovy accounts. He was a natural salesman, he enough, but a little intimidating: peb- ag ideas,” but their results were as un- found, with a gift for turning that striped bles somehow to be made edible. Shop- reliable as his. He approached a few in- blouse with pearl buttons into a story pers were always mistaking them for dustrial growers, but they said his beans that buyers wanted to hear. Esprit’s hip candied nuts. “They weren’t part of the weren’t worth the bother. Heirlooms corporate culture—its non-hierarchical standard repertoire,” Sando says. “Peo- were too finicky, the yields too low, the oices and upward mobility, free Italian ple would ask, ‘What’s your best bean?’ orders too small—ten thousand pounds lessons and half-price opera tickets— And the subtext was: ‘Beans are bad. from farmers accustomed to growing left a mark on him, he says. But what Which is the least bad?’” Most of the two million. Sando’s prices could more really stuck was the shrewd branding. time, he’d suggest Good Mother Stal- than make up for all that: his beans re- The way a luxurious dress could cast lards—gorgeous, purple-and-red speck- tail for six dollars a pound, about three a halo over the rest of the line, so that led beans that make a rich broth. But times the cost of ordinary varieties. But customers felt good getting what they they’d usually shake their heads: “Oh, to cover the perceived risk he still had really wanted: the rainbow T-shirt. “They no, I don’t like dark beans.” to guarantee some contracts. The farmer wanted it because the fashion line made Then one day, in 2003, Thomas got paid even if a crop failed. Finally, them want it,” he says. Keller came by. His restaurant, the in 2012, Sando handed the crop man- Sando left for Milan after five years, French Laundry, which would later agement over to James Schrupp, an thinking that he’d eventually take a job earn three Michelin stars, happened to agronomist and former commodities in Esprit’s Italian oice. Instead, he wrote be in Yountville. “I remember, he had trader who’s married to the food writer to a local radio station ofering to host probably a dozen diferent beans on Georgeanne Brennan. Most of Schrupp’s an hour-long jazz show, and, to his shock, the table,” Keller told me recently. “To growers are in California’s San Joaquin the station agreed. The show, which he get something that freshly dried was and Sacramento Valleys and in Wash- called “Mr. Lucky,” mixed ambient cock- a revelation.” The bean that caught ington’s Columbia Basin, though Royal tail sounds with classics from Frank Keller’s eye was a greenish-yellow thing Coronas are grown in Poland. “Jim Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan (“My lis- with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean speaks farmer, which turns out to be a teners pronounced it Vo-gon”). It devel- with a hangover. Called the Vallarta, it universal language,” Sando told me. oped a following but paid next to noth- was on the verge of extinction when Rancho Gordo now sells half a mil- ing, and a year later Sando was back in Sando found it, but it had a dense, fudgy lion pounds of beans a year. The chefs San Francisco, broke. There followed a texture and gave a good broth. “Steve have been followed by other celebri- string of near-misses and half-successes: had taken something that used to be ties—bold figures like Andy Richter

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 59 and Emilio Estevez, unafraid of le- sanctuary, crumbling frescoes reached you keep some here and export the rest gumes—and then by ordinary custom- up into the nave: centaurs and griins, there’s no problem. Food migrates.” ers. Sando’s beans have sent their ten- eagle knights and coyote warriors. The Olvera is the owner of Pujol, in Mex- drils into the “Saveur 100” and O, The Otomi hadn’t just repurposed Christian ico City, which is often cited as one of Oprah Magazine, and he has published imagery; they’d replaced it with their the best restaurants in the world, and four cookbooks. A few years ago, he own. Instead of angels and saints, there of Cosme and Atla, in New York. He was looking through a list of orders on were soldiers beheading one another; met Quiroz ten years ago and has been his computer when he found one from instead of Madonnas and Christs, there a Rancho Gordo customer ever since. Marcella Hazan, the doyenne of Ital- were pregnant women sprouting from The Columbian Exchange is less lop- ian cuisine in the United States. He acanthus buds. Sando shook his head: sided than it used to be, he pointed sent her an inscribed copy of his first “Every time I come to Mexico, I feel out. Mexican cooks use cilantro and cookbook, “Heirloom Beans,” published like I know less than I did before.” cheese, from Asia and Europe. Why in 2008, and they struck up a corre- Next to him on the pew, Yunuén not share their beans? spondence. Soon he had tracked down Carrillo Quiroz gazed up at the altar Mexico is the cradle of the com- Hazan’s favorite bean: the Sorana, a with a look of mingled pride and dis- mon bean. It’s where Phaseolus vulgaris type of cannellini that grows along the quiet. She and her husband, Gabriel first evolved, two million years ago, and Pescia River, in Tuscany. This is a bean Cortés García, manage all of Rancho it still has the greatest bean diversity so tender, with a skin so vanishingly Gordo’s operations in Mexico. They in the world. “I always had a fantasy thin, that Rossini once accepted sev- are Sando’s fixers, farm managers, proof bringing beans from here,” Sando eral pounds in exchange for correcting duction coördinators, and fellow bean told me. But when he first came to another composer’s score. Sando found researchers. Quiroz, forty-two, is from Mexico, in 2001, he had no import- a farmer to grow it in California and Mexico City, the daughter of a logis- export experience, no real connections. renamed it the Marcella. When the tics supervisor at Ford; García, thirty- Although he spoke a little Spanish, Times ran a piece about it two years nine, is from a village near Ixmiquil- he’d never mastered the accent and had ago, after it went on sale at Rancho pan, the eldest son of a social worker. a disconcerting habit of mixing in Ital- Gordo, the orders crashed the Web site. Quiroz is the urban sophisticate, bright ian words. (“It’s like music, really,” he and articulate, with a round laughing says.) Worse still, he had no idea where “ his is how all our bean adven- face and connections with the best to find the best varieties. He kept get- Ttures go,” Sando said. “Mercado, restaurants in Mexico City. García is ting wrong-footed. At one point, at a iglesia, comida, siesta.” Market, church, the savvy local, quiet and watchful, with market in Mexico City, he came upon food, sleep. We were sitting in the cool a broad-shouldered frame and a good a basket of beans as bright and vari- confines of San Miguel Arcángel, the head for numbers. “It took the right ous as a designer’s color wheel. Re- coral-colored church that looms over gringo and the right Mexicans to make vuelto, the seller called them. It was Ixmiquilpan. We’d eaten a great deal this happen,” Sando said. only later, after Sando had bought sev- of mutton barbacoa at the market, then And yet the three of them straddled eral pounds, that he realized that these spent an hour exploring the deserted two cultures as uneasily as the Otomi. weren’t some magical, rainbow-colored sixteenth-century convent next door. I The frescoes were ostensibly about the variety; they were random beans tossed was ready for the siesta. Sando, though, tribe’s battles against the Chichimecas together. Revuelto means “scrambled.” wanted to see the sanctuary first. He to the north, but Quiroz saw a differ- When Sando did manage to locate loved these old colonial buildings, with ent message. “They’re a call to war for a bean that he wanted to grow in the their bare stone cells and dusky cha- all indigenous people,” she said. “Even United States, the locals wouldn’t sell pels, their peeling saints and tin reta- the eagle above the altar is wearing a it to him. “They were appalled,” he told bles, crimped with wonder and pain. native headdress. When Christ’s blood me. “They were, like, ‘Seeds are life.’” But, like so much in Mexico, they left is served at Communion, it’s a kind of Why would they give their greatest him discomfited, unsure of his role. blood sacrifice.” Quiroz told me the asset away? Sando asked if they could Was he a tourist? An amateur art col- story of La Malinche, the infamous na- grow the beans locally, then export them lector? A fair-trade emissary who’d tive woman who served as Cortés’s to the United States. But that still made volunteered for Cesar Chavez while translator and adviser during the con- no sense to them. For decades, agron- still in high school? Or was he just “the quest. As Rancho Gordo has expanded omists had been telling Mexican farm- gringo elephant in the room”? its Mexican operations, some chefs in ers to get with the program, to grow Ixmiquilpan was one of his favorite Mexico City have accused Quiroz of the latest high-yielding varieties in towns in Mexico, but it didn’t always being a culinary La Malinche. “They order to compete with China and Peru. ingratiate itself with outsiders. Its name say, ‘Why are you telling him about Now here was this strange, excitable means “place where the pigweed cuts these beans?’ ” Sando said. “ ‘Why didn’t American saying he didn’t like mod- like knives.” In 1548, when Augustinian you tell us first?’ Well, the beans were ern beans. He’d much rather have the friars arrived to convert the local Otomi, there all along.” ones their grandparents grew. “They they used forced labor to build this “It’s true that a lot of the really good were incredulous,” Sando says. He was church. The results may not have been Mexican products get exported,” the paying them to regress. what they expected. All around us in the chef Enrique Olvera told me. “But if Sando met Quiroz and García in

60 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 2008. A year earlier, the couple had started exporting dried prickly-pear- cactus fruit and other local specialties from Hidalgo. They were young, child- less (they now have a six-year-old daughter, Yunuéncita), and as hungry to explore their country as Sando was. A pattern was established: Sando would fly down and they’d pile into a truck with a few bags. Then they’d set of for Michoacán, Oaxaca, Veracruz, the Yucatán—anywhere with a great bean- cooking tradition. Which seemed to be everywhere. They’d start in the village markets, then zero in on the older ladies at the periphery, in the indigenous section, with small sacks of produce from their gardens. If they found an interesting bean, García would talk to the farmers, Quiroz would talk to the women, and Sando would stay out of the way till the deal was done. “We try not to irritate people,” Quiroz says. Everywhere they went, they found new beans. Some were spectacular, like “My favorite bean is always the last one I ate,” Steve Sando says. the delicate, rose-colored Lila that grew in Morelos, in the shadow of an active mansion and half ruin, still shunned by like a starling’s belly. He added two volcano. Others never caught on, like the local villagers. A precinct of ghosts. whole cloves of garlic, a few crystals the Ron bean from the Yucatán, with The stove is rarely used now. García’s of Mixtecan salt, which contains nat- its thick ochre skin and bland flesh, or mother and her best friend, Lupe, whose ural softeners, and a bay leaf. Then the Veronico, from the town of Te- family bought the hacienda in the Lupe set a small bowl of water on the cozautla, which looked like a pine nut nineteen-thirties, prefer the gas range. pot, to serve as a lid and to replenish but tasted like a cowpea. There were Both women are exceptional cooks in the beans, and left it to simmer. always new varieties to take their place, the elaborate Mexican home style. In Easy enough, yet everything they’d though. “It was like Ali Baba,” Quiroz the days when I was there, they laid out done was debatable. Lupe would have told me. “We discovered an explosion dozens of dishes in the hacienda’s for- used lard instead of olive oil and raw of beans.” mal dining room: black-bean rolls with instead of sautéed onion. She preferred sardines; chilaquiles with tomatillos and avocado leaves to bay, and epazote to ate one morning at the hacienda Oaxacan cheese; slender local avocados the Cuban oregano that Sando used. Lwhere García grew up, in the thorn- with edible, anise-flavored skin; and And those were just matters of taste. and-blossom-covered hills southwest sweet, buttery slices of mamey, the fruit The thornier debates were technical. of Ixmiquilpan, Sando made me a pot of a tropical evergreen tree. Lupe’s cow’s- Should beans be soaked? (Yes, most of beans. The hacienda has an enor- foot soup was made with pieces of stom- cookbooks say, but that’s only because mous wood-fired stove in the center of ach, Puya chilies, and dried prickly- store-bought beans are often years old.) the kitchen, with seven burners of vol- pear-cactus fruit. It had a deeply funky When should they be salted? (After canic stone. When the building was a flavor and a mucilaginous texture that they’re cooked, most recipes insist; but Jesuit monastery, in the eighteenth cen- was of-putting at first—it was like sip- tests have shown that soaking and cook- tury, the stove was used to feed the ping a whole cow—then weirdly ad- ing beans in salt water both plumps brethren and their servants. After the dictive. But the beans were diferent. them up and helps them hold their Spanish crown evicted the Jesuits from The beans were dead simple. shape.) How should they be cooked? Mexico, in 1767, the hacienda was Sando and Lupe began by building (Simmering is the rule, but Sando rec- bought by wealthy silver miners. While a fire on the covered porch that encir- ommends a brief hard boil first, “to let the kitchen served them and their cled the hacienda’s courtyard. She bal- them know you’re the boss.”) Is pres- guests, ranks of campesinos grew crops, anced a slender clay pot above the coals, sure-cooking allowed? (The French tended cattle, and fermented pulque then Sando poured in some olive oil Laundry swears by it; Sando says it on the surrounding land. When the and dropped in a handful of chopped kills the broth.) The simpler the food, revolution came, the hacienda was onion. When they’d cooked awhile, he the more every variable counts. looted, its chapel burned and its water put in a few cups of water and a bowl Watching Sando and Lupe cook, I lines shattered. What was left was half of Moro beans, speckled black and gray realized what I’d been doing wrong. I’d

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 61 been trying so hard to make my family love beans that my dishes had got more and more complicated, like the WE FOUND THE BODY OF A YOUNG DEER ONCE ones in Oklahoma. I’d added bacon, brown sugar, kielbasa, and Southern Whitetails licker like light in the winter woods, ham, whole heads of garlic and bunches where my dog and I crack open of sage; I’d made minestrone, pasta e the early morning, the ground a frozen patchwork fagioli, and Brazilian feijoada. Good of leaves, the brittle ice of dirt. So much recipes, but poor psychology. Instead of walking is description. Late in the year of showcasing the beans, I’d camou- the sun stops us cold. Or, walking is comparison, flaged them, turned them into a sus- these woods in New Jersey seem pect food—an element to be rooted (a passing thought) Ohioan, out, like the spinach that parents hide then I recall that late thaw in pizza. “I hate recipes,” Sando said. one March in New Hampshire. Or, “I always tell people to cook beans sim- I’m ten again wondering where ply, and they always say, ‘Oh, I did. I I last saw the deer carcass. Maybe just used a ham hock and chicken stock.’ by the creek, maybe loose ribs, a skull Well, in that case you might as well tucked into snow. use commercial pintos.” As children The best staples make a virtue of we set old logs against a middling elm, blandness. They quiet the mind. The thatched branches nuttiness in rice, the mineral in a po- into a sort of rooftop, called our dwelling tato, the hint of chocolate in a Rio Zape Antelope. My friend and I, we ignored the sky bean are all the better for being barely cutting into our shelter and made walls there. They make your senses reach out of found particleboard, to them. (That’s why turnips, sweet fragmentary, damp, worthless as kindling. and faintly bitter, don’t quite cut it; they Her mother worshipped Zoroaster. Her father have too much going on.) The conun- had an Irish-American mistress. Stub of birch, irst rime drum, for a seller of heirloom beans, is graying the last moss, that those qualities are the opposite of the ground fascinates a spray what he’s advertising. To get people to of blue jays. pay three times the cost of store-bought beans, Sando needs to convince them Her father, as a university student, had dined with the Shah. that his are dramatically diferent. That Whenever her mother polished the silver we’d joke, canned beans are a travesty by com- “The Shah is coming to tea!” parison. Yet to expect a burst of flavor From upstairs from a Moro is to miss the point. we could smell duck stewing in walnuts Sando fished a few beans from the and pomegranate syrup. Later, the darkest meat pot with a wooden spoon. He blew on fell to pieces onto bright, particulate rice. them to see if their skin split and curled It was like eating a secret, my mouth back—the sign that they were done— stunned by acid sweetness, a terrible hunger then gave them to me. They tasted like I could not explain to my own mother. a cross between black beans and pin- I wanted more, another plate of fesenjan, please— tos, with just a trace of the Cuban oregano. Had I made them at home, I instead: into the winter woods we ran would have added more salt. Maybe after this new world some cumin. And then maybe some that knew nothing of what we hid cilantro and a squeeze of lime. But they turned out to be just right as they were: the perfect foil for the cow’s-foot soup. possible attribute: shelf life, yield, in- a blank. They hadn’t tested for that. “There’s something miraculous about sect resistance, disease resistance. They To Sando, this was unforgivable. turning this rock into something that scanned the fields digitally with drones, But how diferent are heirloom beans, tastes good,” Sando said. then counted the percentage of green really? How much do Lupe’s Moros pixels to quantify each variety’s growth. owe to the cook and the setting—to ando likes to tell a story about a They used infrared cameras to show the skylit dining room and the green Sfield trial at the University of Cal- how much water the leaves were re- Oaxacan pottery, the colonial architec- ifornia, Davis, a few years ago. The taining—an indication of heat- and ture and the swallows in the fig trees— school’s agronomists had laid out test drought-resistance. But when Sando and how much to their untampered plots of hybrid beans bred for every asked about taste, the agronomists drew genes? Sando’s chief counterpart in this

62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 intervene in the forums sometimes, to correct an especially wrongheaded on our tongues—other words for dusk, post. But he doesn’t segregate beans revolution, and snow. as Sando does—into heirloom and in- We dismissed our appetites. We forgot our fathers. dustrial, authentic and engineered va- Farther, farther, I am going into the dark rieties. To Gepts, their entire history of the mind, that neighbor girl, my friend—she goes is a genetic experiment. His research by Mrs. Bell now, so I hear, lives out west, has shown that beans were domesti- plants tulips every November and come spring cated twice: in Mesoamerica, where scythes each one mid-stem. their wild forebears evolved, and in the A crystal vase in the breakfast nook. Andes. Mesoamerican beans are smaller Cheerios in her sons’ bowls, her dumb accomplished husband nodding and rounder, Andean beans more kidney- at the clock. shaped. Mesoamerican varieties tend It was with her I found be more proliﬁc, Andean varieties more the body of a young deer, fallen in a clearing, colorful. Pinto, navy, and black beans are Mesoamerican. Cranberry, cannellini, fresh snow and large lima beans are Andean. “I powdering the deer’s coat like fresh ash can see just by looking at them which fallen from a proximate ire. ones are which,” Gepts said. Quiet, To a bean breeder, the diference is quieter than I’ve ever been more than academic. Mesoamerican with anyone, we shared the death, we stood quietly, the sky and Andean beans have diferent yields and tolerances; they get diferent dis- open and gray above us. eases and thrive in diferent climates. We never said a word about the deer. I imagine that winter Crossbreed them one way and you can as helming decay, the woods consolidate their best traits in a single beastly, skeletal, far reach of the trees, bean; crossbreed them in another way the deer’s bone-cage and you may get a “lethal line” that stripped clean of lesh. withers on the vine. (Mesoamerican She showed me a map of Iran and Andean beans tend not to cross in my father’s world atlas. In Tehran, they had had well.) Building better beans is more many servants, including a gardener and a than just a commercial enterprise, Gepts night nurse for her and her brother, says. It’s essential to feeding the world. though she was too young In some African countries, beans rep- to remember any of this. resent almost half of the protein that people eat, and they’re sometimes smug- The day after solstice I note gled across borders to meet demand. an emerald shine to the pale sky. Later that day, Gepts drove me out On the question of origin, she explained, “Persian.” to the university’s experimental farm, Once I described my mother as always angry where some new breeds were being (she was born amid a civil war), but mostly tested for drought resistance. Eight bean varieties had been crossed with my childhood was a quiet one. It was not one another for three generations, pro- until years later that I learned ducing nine hundred and sixty genetic others had considered our family strange. lines, each marked by a little stick in the dirt. Half of the plots were well —Jennifer Chang watered and green; the other half were parched and yellow. Gepts stepped over to a row of scraggly-looking tepary debate is Paul Gepts, a professor of and murmured, “I am Mr. Bean.” The beans and cracked open a pod. “This plant sciences at Davis. Gepts is a small following week, he gave the keynote is the bean that can most beat the Belgian man of seemingly indetermi- address at the International Bean Con- drought,” he said, pointing to the hard nate age (he is sixty-four), with a bot- ference in Brazil. black seeds inside. “The question is, tlebrush mustache and bespectacled Gepts takes a fatherly pride in his why don’t people eat them?” eyes that glint with suppressed humor. subjects. On the bookcase in his oice, The answer seems obvious to Sando. Physically, he’s a smaller, paler version jars of beans sit side by side with pic- “Have you tasted those beans?” he asked of Sando—the navy bean to the other tures of his son. He keeps an eye on me later. “Blech!” But Gepts says it’s man’s lima. When I asked Gepts if Rancho Gordo’s Web site, he told me, not that simple. Four years ago, he and beans were his primary focus, he smiled to see which beans are selling and to some colleagues conducted a taste test

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 63 of garbanzo beans. They asked a panel all about which beans you grew up with.” the Pacific every morning to wet the of ten plant breeders, seed brokers, food For a breeder, that means the one trait plants, then parts obligingly for the sun technicians, and other professionals to you can’t mess with is appearance. “With in the afternoon. In the San Joaquin rate sixteen varieties according to seven wheat, the husks may look diferent or Valley, beans are harvested by a ma- criteria: size, flavor, texture, color, con- the seeds may be diferent shapes, but chine called Big Bertha, which can pick sistency, wholeness, and skin condition. they’ll get ground into flour eventu- and thresh fifty thousand pounds a day. The only things they couldn’t agree on ally,” Gepts said. “That’s not true with In Hidalgo, the harvests are done mostly were flavor and texture. The loss of beans.” He stepped over to another row by hand. When I asked one farmer if flavor to industrial farming can be “an of plants and snapped open a pod. “Not it was hard to plant in such rocky soil, issue,” Gepts admitted. But it’s hard to white enough,” he said. Then he reached he said, “No, no, we like the rocks. We quantify. Unlike tomatoes, say, which across to the next row. These plants pile them around the seedlings to shield are picked green and bred tough for were especially lush, and their seeds them from the sun.” transport, beans can ripen on the vine were among the most beautiful I’d seen: Sando’s growers lived in a village and stay sturdy once dried. A mealy glossy and olive brown, with a shim- north of Ixmiquilpan, past a small pink tomato tastes nothing like the mering stripe like a tiger’s-eye gem. school for indigenous Nahuatl speak- crimson fruit at a farmers’ market. A Gepts shook his head. “It’s not a com- ers, on a dirt road with goats scamper- store-bought bean still tastes like a bean. mercial plant,” he said, tossing a pod ing about. The compound was hidden Sando says that he can easily tell into the weeds. “People want beans to behind a tall palisade of cactus and the diferences among varieties—some look the way they’ve always looked.” purple bougainvillea. When we arrived, black beans are creamy, for instance, three men in jeans and denim work others more starchy or meaty—not to he Flower of the Peach was like shirts came out to greet us: a father, mention the diference between freshly Tno bean Sando had ever seen. This son, and uncle, with a few small boys dried beans like his and those that have made it irresistible to him—“I’m a peeking from behind them. They’d languished on a supermarket shelf. “And whore,” he told me. “My favorite bean stretched a blue plastic tarp above a if your point of reference is the canned is always the last one I ate”—but not picnic table in the courtyard, and their kidney bean at a salad bar, I totally un- necessarily to his customers. For all his wives and daughters were setting out derstand if you hate beans,” he said. eforts on behalf of Mexican beans, charro beans and fresh tortillas. There The chef Enrique Olvera goes further. three-quarters of his sales are still for followed a good deal of halting, touch- A bean grown in an industrial field European varieties. His top sellers are ingly formal talk about harvests and tastes nothing like the same bean grown Royal Coronas, followed by cassoulet, the maddening intermittence of rain. at a small farm where crops are rotated, flageolet, cranberry, and Marcella beans. The toughest part of working with he says. Yet those diferences may have “There are total Mexican-bean addicts, Mexican farmers, Sando had told me, little to do with how much we like a but a lot of people will never buy them,” is their circumspection. “They’re so po- bean. When I asked chefs about their he said, as we drove to meet the Flor lite, and we’re used to being so direct,” favorite bean dishes, they invariably de Durazno farmers. “Which irritates he said. “If my bookkeeper forgets to went back to their childhood. Olvera me. They’re twenty-five per cent of my pay for a crop, the farmer might say, talked about the black beans that his sales but forty per cent of my time.” ‘It’s been really hard lately. We’ve been grandmother cooked with a little lime, If anything can grow in Napa, very eating a lot of cactus.’ It’s only after a amachito pepper, and Mexican corian- little seems to grow in most of Hidalgo. while that I’ll realize, ‘Oh, you mean der. David Breeden, the chef de cui- you didn’t get the check!’” sine at the French Laundry, recalled Rancho Gordo pays its Mexican the pinto beans and corn bread that farmers anywhere from five to thirty his mother made in eastern Tennessee. per cent above the market rate, Quiroz (The version that he served me at the says. But when I asked the farmers about restaurant was the single best thing in their prices and yields for the Flor de a meal of small astonishments.) Even Durazno, an awkward, side-glancing Thomas Keller, a famously fastidious silence ensued. “It’s universal among cook, waxed nostalgic about the white- farmers,” Sando interjected. “Yield is bean soup that his mother used to make. connected to self-worth.” García hud- “She would just take some canned beans It’s Mexican cowboy country, though dled with the men for a moment, then and chicken stock and purée them,” he cattle seem to like it no better than whispered something to Quiroz, who told me. “It didn’t require a lot of at- crops do. In the small towns between came over to us. “Would you mind if tention, because the beans didn’t have ranches, lanky men in straw hats lean we all had a beer together? Gabriel says a lot of integrity, but it made this won- in shady doorways, waiting for their they’re getting nervous.” derful, velvety soup.” feed orders to be filled, their boots to These were tentative, fragile rela- Bean eaters are creatures of habit. be reheeled. It’s a landscape of relent- tionships, Sando told me later, with “It’s very marked,” Gepts said. “In Co- less sun and little water, where the fields men who’d been screwed over again and lombia, they like big red beans. In Ven- look like empty lots, scattered with again by buyers. The best way to keep ezuela, they like small black beans. It’s gravel. In Napa, the fog rolls in from their trust was to bring money year after

64 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 year and not to ask too many questions. “At some point, it’ll be nice to look back and say we helped them pave their roads, but we’re not there yet,” he said. “We’re still in the middle of this. They’re not stable, we’re not stable. And it’s been ten years. So it’s the farmer’s job to get as much as he can, and I need to get the price as low as I can. We both need to win.” He shrugged. “I’m not a saint. I’m here to make a profit. I don’t want to save the world with beans.” After the jugs had been emptied and the plates cleared, the farmers clapped García on the back and climbed into a pickup truck. Aside from a small cup of peach-colored beans that they’d passed round, there had been no sign of Sando’s order. We followed the farmers out to a small storage shed on the outskirts of the village, and they mo- tioned for us to join them. Inside, ten bulging nylon bags stood stacked in a corner, each filled with two hundred pounds of Flor de Durazno beans. They’d been there all along. “Sometimes you act like you’re the only narcissist in this marriage.” riving back to the hacienda that Dafternoon with Quiroz and García, Sando seemed, for just a moment, con- •• tent. His sales were growing by a steady fifteen to twenty per cent a year. The federal agents, who were pursuing some go to the city of Juchitán, on the Pacific Bean Club had a waiting list of more narcos ahead. More recently, the skulls Coast, where some Zapotecan men than five hundred, and he was think- of more than two hundred and fifty identify as a third gender, known as ing of reopening it in the spring. (When people, probably victims of drug car- muxe, and dress and behave like women. he launched a Facebook group for the tels, had been found in a mass grave in They have a four-day festival every No- club last August, it was flooded with Veracruz, near a house the trio used to vember, called La Vela de las Auténti- recipes and pictures. Sample comment: rent. The last time they stayed there, cas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro, “HOLY CRAP, these beans were good.”) Sando said, the electricity went out in- or the Vigil of the Authentic, Intrepid Yet Sando still mistrusted his success. explicably one night. “And I thought, Danger-Seekers. Sando grinned. “And “My father always said, ‘If you’re coast- Oh, this is how I die.” they have great beans!” ing, you’re going downhill.’” Perhaps the wiser move was to pare A few months later, back in Brook- These bean adventures were getting down Rancho Gordo’s oferings, focus lyn, a small box arrived on my door- harder to organize, he said. In the early on what sold best. “New strategy!” step. The label bore the Rancho Gordo years, the three of them could travel Sando said. “Just please the bean freaks.” logo, with a Mexican starlet licking her wherever they wanted. The goal was Yet he kept dreaming of new varieties: lips. I found the usual Bean Club bounty just to get lost. Now drug violence had Icatone white beans from the Tarahu- inside: one-pound bags of Alubia Blanca reached such a pitch—nearly thirty mara peoples in Chihuahua, or pearl- and Domingo Rojo, Yellow Indian thousand murders in 2017, higher even gray Frijolon de Zimatlán from Oa- Woman, and, buried at the bottom, the than at the peak of Mexico’s drug wars, xaca, or, best of all, the Rosa de Castilla Flor de Durazno. I cooked them sim- in 2011—that entire states were of lim- from Michoacán. “It’s my Moby Dick,” ply, as Sando and Lupe had taught me— its. “Parts of Michoacán aren’t safe at he said. “Just to look at those beans though I made an ancho-chili salsa on all,” Sando said. “Same thing with Ve- makes my knees buckle. And they’re the side, just in case. When I served racruz. I have friends in Puebla, but for absolutely delicious—velvety but light, them later, Evangeline glanced down the first time I don’t feel comfortable with a great bean broth.” The narcos at her bowl with a familiar look of res- going there at night.” Two years ear- were a problem, true. But García might ignation. She took one bite, then an- lier, on their way to an indigenous sugar be able to source the beans through an other, then turned to me with her eye- coöperative in San Luis Potosí, they’d avocado grower he knew, or a local brows slightly raised. “They’re really been pinned down for four hours by restaurant owner. Or maybe they should delicious,” she said. “For beans.” ♦

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 65 FICTION

66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE SCHEFFE few times a year, around major had not responded. Perhaps the man had. “I told the teacher to take his let- Chinese holidays, Min received would die between this month and the ter down from the display,” Sandra said. A an e-mail from a man whom next, or between this year and the next. “She should have checked with me she had met twice in her life. Every Min looked forward to the day his first. He has no idea what it means to November—after the celebration of e-mails stopped coming: for once, she be Republican.” another birthday, on November 3rd, he would win a battle through silence. “There’s no real harm done,” Min said. never failed to remind her—he also at- “Mommy, tell Emmie she’s wrong,” “All the kids will tell their parents, if tached a picture of himself, and begged Deanna said. they haven’t already,” Sandra said, and for a picture of her. In the past twelve “Mommy, tell Deanna she’s wrong.” then, before a group of parents reached years, the number of his grandchildren The previous day, the girls had re- them, “Let’s go get cofee.” had quadrupled. His oldest grandson ported the addition of two new chicks Sandra and Min had served on the had graduated from college and taken in the school garden, Pancake and school’s hospitality committee for the a good job in New York City. The next Wale, thus named because the gar- past two years, and, before that, on the two grandchildren were in college. dening teacher could not tell them lice-buster team. They got along be- There were a few more, mostly on the apart. Emmie was insisting that after cause Sandra could make the smallest West Coast. The youngest, a boy born cleaning the coop she could tell the encounter in a grocery store into a story with a noble look, the man had nick- diference between the two. Deanna with a beginning and a middle and an named J.C., for Julius Caesar. In 2012, was sensibly pointing out that the chick end, and Min liked to listen. Sandra re- his wife had died, but he was healthy Emmie called Pancake might have been minded Min of her mother, who, though in general, minus some common con- Wale in the first place. widowed young, had never lost her fond- ditions that plagued old people—high Min said that they were both right, ness for storytelling, and had always blood pressure and faulty short-term adding “in a way”—a phrase she used been quick to laugh. memory. There were other details in often when the girls were in disagree- Min had not inherited her mother’s his e-mails: a week of vacation in Ha- ment. They refuted her at once in a storytelling abilities. When the twins waii, a couple new to the farmers’ mar- joint efort. were in kindergarten, their teacher had ket who worked as elementary-school “Shall we change the subject?” Min chastised Min. “They’re strong readers,” teachers but sold blueberries on week- said. the teacher had said, “but in this coun- ends, a favorite restaurant closing be- “Amelia said she used to think pep- try we have a tradition of reading to our cause of a rent hike. Most people would per spray was a condiment,” Deanna said. children even if they can read by them- have written long ago with a stern reply, “Amelia’s middle name is some pas- selves. It’s a bonding experience.” telling the sender to stop e-mailing; ta’s name,” Emmie said. “In this country” did not sound like most people would have blocked him “No, a cheese’s name,” Deanna said. something that someone in a progres- had he persisted. “It may be both,” Min said. In a way, sive school in California would say, and “I turned eighty-four last week,” the she thought, everything can be some- Min decided not to heed the teacher’s most recent message began. “I was born thing else. comment. When the girls read together, in the Year of the Monkey. I’m attach- “Kevin is Republican,” Emmie said. they acted out each page with more live- ing a family picture taken on the day Min must have missed something. liness than Min could ofer. If the teacher of my birthday. If my memory is still “How do you know?” talked to her again, she’d say she was good, you were born in the Year of the “He wrote a letter to Trump,” Emmie hoping to foster her daughters’ creativ- Rat, so you’re forty-four. Can you send said. ity, “creativity” being a versatile password. me a picture of you so I can see what “And said, ‘Dear Mr. Trump, I’m your Now, over cofee, Sandra recounted you look like now?” supporter, but could you be a better Election Night. “Even before they started It had been 3 a.m. when the man, person so more people will like you?’” counting, I had this pit in my stomach. who lived in a suburb of Seattle, in a re- Deanna said. “Everyone else wrote to I went upstairs and worked on Kevin’s tirement facility five minutes from his Hillary.” Halloween costume. Something was eldest son’s family, wrote Min, who lived Min looked at the twins in the rear- wrong with it, I thought. One of Pika- just south of San Francisco. Min had view mirror. They nodded back con- chu’s ears looked crooked. Kevin said, chronic insomnia, and checking her vincingly. It turned out, when she ques- Mommy, it’s already past Halloween, phone when she couldn’t sleep exacer- tioned further, that the day before, during and I said I wanted to make the thing bated the condition. It was bad enough an activity called “Understanding the right so that we could donate it. But the that the man had filled the void of his Election Results,” the third graders had more I worked on it the worse it looked. night calculating Min’s age. It was much all written a letter to either Mrs. Clin- Then Chuck came in, and I heard him worse that the message had ambushed ton or Mr. Trump. yelling. He’s winning! he said. He’s win- her during her own wakefulness. She ning! Why isn’t the TV on? Kevin went thought of telling the man to leave her andra, Kevin’s mother, was in tears downstairs while Chuck kept on and alone. You’re a nuisance, she rehearsed, Swhen Min ran into her in the school on: Didn’t I tell you he’d win? Didn’t I and you should be ashamed of yourself. parking lot. Had she heard this talk say that? You didn’t believe me, did you? But in the morning, as Min drove about Kevin’s being Republican, San- I knew if I didn’t go downstairs he would the twins to school, she was glad she dra asked, and Min admitted that she go on yelling like that all night, so I

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 67 father was a Trump supporter, and they had replied that of course they wouldn’t be so stupid.

he man who would not stop writ- Ting to Min had, in a way, been responsible for her marriage, but whenever this thought occurred to her she would remind herself that nobody had forced her into marrying Rich. Min was nineteen when she first met the man, who had been introduced to her as a potential father-in-law. He was a linguistics professor at a prominent university in Beijing, and he had three sons in America. The eldest, according to the matchmaker, worked for Micro- soft, and he was the one the family had in mind for Min, but if that didn’t work out there were two other sons. “We grow all our own bad-tasting ugly things.” Min hadn’t shown much academic promise. She had attended a vocational school that trained girls to become •• secretaries. After graduation, she had worked in a department store. Why went down and told Kevin it was his their conversation rarely ventured out would any of those boys need to find bedtime. He said it was early and he of the safety zone of children and gro- a wife in China when they’re already wanted to watch TV with his dad. And cery lists and holiday plans. Rich had in America? she asked her mother. Chuck said, For God’s sake, what’s made a long, fervid speech in favor of You’re asking the blind for directions, wrong with you? Let him stay up and Trump, and when Min had simply said her mother said, but I would say that celebrate with me.” she was going to vote for Clinton he they can’t possibly find someone as There had been no raised voices in had called her brainwashed. “The lon- good as you in America. Min’s house. Neither she nor Rich, her ger a woman’s hair is, the shorter her America, Min could see, was alluring husband, had discussed the election re- sight is,” he said, quoting his favorite to her mother. Min’s father had died sults; neither had lost a moment of com- Chinese saying, which had also been during her second year of middle school, posure. Min had never revealed to San- his father’s favorite and, before that, his in an accident at the steel plant where dra that Rich was a Trump supporter. grandfather’s. he had worked since he was eighteen. Chuck owned a company that dealt in “Don’t you sometimes want some- After his death, Min and her mother had cleaning supplies, a business that had one’s death so much that you almost lived frugally on the money her mother been in the family for three genera- believe the person could die just because made running a newsstand. The com- tions. Rich, who had grown up in a of your wish?” Min said now. pensation for her father’s accident had poor neighborhood in Beijing and who “I’m sure you’re not the only one who been saved by her mother as Min’s dowry. had long ago given up his Chinese name, feels that way.” Min had once had a brief schoolgirl worked at a tech startup. Each man “Oh . . .” Min said. She wasn’t think- crush, but she had never dated. She would think that the other deserved ing about Trump, she admitted. was good-looking—not in a striking little respect. Was there any good in “Who are you talking about? Not way, but she had a classic look, like a sharing with Sandra that both their Rich, I hope.” figure in a Ming-dynasty painting or a husbands had been among the twenty “Oh, no.” period movie, her shoulders narrowing per cent in their county who had voted “Then who?” compliantly, her neck long, her com- for Trump? Humiliation would not It was unkind of her to wish an old plexion clear, her eyes and nose and bring people closer. man a speedy death. Min quickly said mouth arranged in a pleasing manner. Sandra said that she had called something about a novel she was read- Min had grown up thinking she was Chuck a bigot to his face, and he had ing and how she wished she could stran- born into a role as a flawless daughter, called her an equally bad name. Min gle a character in it. That was a poor and someday she would become a flaw- had not called Rich anything denigrat- lie. Sandra would have pressed more if less daughter-in-law, wife, and mother. ing. He had married her because she not for her own trouble. Too bad no It turned out that she was none of these, was not the kind of woman who would other children would pronounce them- yet she couldn’t see where she had fallen use strong words. They had talked about selves Kevin’s allies. Min had warned short. No one was perfect, she knew, the election only once—these days, the twins never to mention that their but women in books and films often

68 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 TIME ED O T FF I E IM R L

O 3 RD AY ER BY M

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With a wealth of historical expertise, Professor Jennifer Paxton, Director of the University Honors Program and Clinical Assistant Professor of History at The Catholic University of America carefully separates fact from myth at every turn. Come along for a ride through history to discover your inner Celt. Of er expires 05/03/18 THEGREATCOURSES.COM/4NYR 1-800-832-2412 seemed flawed in a meaningful or at- tractive way. The other mothers at the school, when they were unhappy, had NOT A MILE a sensible reason: a husband’s afair, a child’s diagnosis, a power shift on the from where my students ask me school-auction committee. why Sylvia Plath wanted to eat men, Perhaps they all lived in giant doll two men overdose. This is rural Ohio, houses. Some, like the dolls that be- and the new drugs from Columbus longed to Emmie and Deanna, had com- are cut with elephant tranquillizers. plicated life stories, with many plots and The police are nurses now. dramas and excitements. Others were They don’t dream. My students try like the only doll Min had had when to understand why the voice she was young—a little creature made in the poem brags about death but of hard plastic, with unbending arms never dies. Not a mile from here, and legs connected to a torso through two men regain consciousness ball sockets. Min had carried the doll in their living room full of litter boxes around dutifully, but she had never made and Optimos. They are not particularly scared up a story for it. The only catastrophe by the police or their I.V.s. They have both that had befallen the doll had occurred died before, and been revived with Narcan. on a winter night. Min had left it on a It’s November 6th, and the sky windowsill, and a power outage caused has been blank for so long its emptiness the temperature in the apartment to has turned supple. The men refuse drop. For reasons that neither she nor further medical treatment. One dumps her parents understood, one of the doll’s a baggie of crickets into a lizard tank. legs had disconnected from its socket My students are sincerely trying and could not be put back. to analyze death: its cadence and anaphora, The one-legged doll remained in her its German origins. The police possession. Min did not remember ever do not know how to speak feeling sad about the severed limb. A to my students. They bark and lord doll was a doll. She had not been a sen- over a scule or jaywalking timental child. because they are used to hauling the dead Min had agreed with her mother back to life and ishing names that it wouldn’t hurt to meet the pro- out of their mouths. They cannot help fessor. At nineteen, she was the kind but see everyone as needing to be saved of girl some parents wanted for their by force. Not a mile from where my students sons: pretty, meek, experienced enough show me outlines of what they are trying with hardship not to be dreamily naïve, to say about resurrection, one of the men yet not broody, either, even after los- pulls a phone out of his mesh shorts ing her father. and calls Columbus. My students worry Min and her mother met the man they cannot explain where Plath ends at the matchmaker’s apartment on a and death begins. Not a mile Sunday. They had tea together until the from our classroom, men dissolve matchmaker suggested that she and like powder in water. Men so close Min’s mother take a walk in a nearby we can’t see them. Men like air. park. Left alone with the man, Min did not know what she was expected to do —Andrew Grace to earn his approval. He looked like a professor from a film, with his wire- rimmed glasses and impeccably parted asked which level Min thought she was. the first lesson, titled “A Private Con- silver hair. When he asked her ques- She had never heard of the textbooks, versation.” Her body tensed at the close- tions, he used words her father would and the man, looking at her over his ness of their shoulders and thighs as never have used. What’s your outlook glasses, told her that if she wanted to they bent over the book. on the world? What do you do to max- go to America she should start study- Perhaps he had been acting only out imize your potential? When she did not ing English right away. of fatherliness, she tried to convince know what to say, he said that the pro- Min thought she had failed the in- herself afterward. He had left the books cess of enlightening and perfecting one- terview. She didn’t much care. with her and insisted that she call him self was like rowing a boat up a river. The man moved next to her on the the following weekend. He would ar- He then brought out a set of textbooks, sofa and opened the second book in the range his schedule so that he could called “New Concept English,” and series. He asked her to repeat after him tutor her, he said, a plan he didn’t bring

70 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 up with the matchmaker or Min’s she should have done better at miss- for the children to excel in the real mother. Instead, he told them that his ing him. She had had Max at twenty- world. “If you can’t imagine that, you son would come home for a summer one, and the motherhood that had come don’t have a right to talk about politics visit, and then the two young people too early had turned into a blur over at this table.” could properly meet. the years. She had loved her son, still Emmie stuck her tongue out. Deanna, Min never made the call. They did loved him—of this much she was cer- Rich’s favorite—a fact she knew, as he not have a telephone at home, and she tain, though she didn’t know if she liked had told her she was smarter than her hated to use public phones. Even when him. Can you love a person without sister and her mother combined—folded the professor expressed an urgent wish liking him? Max and Rich had a fraught her hands under her chin. “What are to talk with her through the match- relationship, but they viewed the world the dangers, Daddy?” maker, she remained silent. The books similarly. For both, failing to calculate “For instance, any boy could have he’d loaned to her she buried under old the price of every move in life was a used the girls’ bathroom at school if he newspapers. After a few weeks, she was character flaw; not taking advantage of wanted,” Rich said. “How would you able to pretend that she had never met someone else was a sin. have liked that?” the man, whose fingers had lingered Sometimes Min pitied her future “I thought we agreed not to talk about on her arm for a moment too long when daughter-in-law, whoever she was, and politics,” Min said. he had said goodbye. wished that the girl could have chosen “Except when I need to instruct my One day, Min’s mother told her that more wisely. children,” Rich said. the professor had decided that she wasn’t Conceiving another child had been Abruptly Min stood up and went a good choice. Not diligent or smart Rich’s solution to a marriage on the cusp to the kitchen, where she rummaged enough for his intellectual family. This of dissolution ten years ago. Divorce through the refrigerator as though she verdict had been conveyed to her mother would be a disaster for everyone, he’d had forgotten something. On the by the matchmaker. argued coolly: Max, who would expe- counter there was a bottle of wine that “Did you see the photo he showed rience adolescence with unnecessary Rich had brought home earlier, read- us?” Min’s mother said. “His son is not turmoil; Rich, who would face a finan- ing the label to her and telling her the yet thirty and already going bald. If cial setback; and Min, too—most defi- price; he wanted something special, he this professor worried that you would nitely, as he would do anything to min- said, when a couple of friends came not give him intellectual grandchil- imize his loss and maximize hers. Min over on Saturday to celebrate the elec- dren, I’d be equally concerned that his knew that Rich meant everything he tion. She thought of nudging the bot- Microsoft son would give me ugly said. Assets would be transferred back tle of the counter. He would tell the grandchildren.” to China, to avoid alimony; custody of girls to go to their bedroom if he Known as “the orphan and the Max would be fought for. But Rich wanted to yell at her. She would say it widow” to friends and neighbors, Min didn’t know that she wanted neither his was an accident, and he would say no and her mother had maintained the sol- money nor his son—for a short period, one believed that, and, even if it had emnness required by their titles, but she had found a strange relief in this been an accident, it was unforgivable. when nobody was around they had had thought. She could manage a simple It’s only a bottle of wine, she would many things to laugh about together. life on the part-time salary she earned say, and she didn’t need his forgiveness as a bookkeeper at Max’s for- for such trifles. He would t dinner a few days later, Emmie mer preschool. say something else, but Abrought up Kevin’s reputation as But what kind of mother they would be cut short a Republican, already cemented, it would so readily give up a by Emmie, who was not seemed, among their classmates. “Ev- child? If she didn’t love her as good as Deanna at wait- eryone feels bad for him,” Emmie said. husband enough, at least she ing out a storm. Why are “I don’t,” Deanna said. “You feel bad should try to love her child you guys arguing? Emmie for him because you have a crush on better. Perhaps it wasn’t a bad would say, and Rich would him.” idea to have another baby. try to soften his voice and “I don’t think you are old enough to Motherhood was like one of say that they were having talk about boys or politics,” Rich said. those contracts that were au- a grownup discussion. “You’re so ageist,” Emmie said. tomatically renewed. As long About what? Emmie Min could sense Rich’s impatience, as you did nothing, a charge would show would say. About the fundamental but he only gave Emmie a cold look up on your credit card. What’s wrong, diference between us, Min would an- before turning to Deanna and asking though, with letting the automatic take swer. Are you going to divorce? Emmie her about her day. He had mellowed over one’s life? would ask. No, of course not, they over the years. Their eldest child, Max, would say together. had grown up with a more unforgiv- “ xplain to me some of the dan- Yet this scenario, which Min had ing and volatile father, and right after Egers if Clinton had been elected,” seen in films, would never happen in college Max had moved to Singapore. Rich said to the girls now. Min wouldn’t her family. She and Rich had both Min did not feel his absence keenly, mind a silent meal, but Rich believed come into the marriage without any though she thought that as a mother in dinner conversations. A preparation fantasy about the other. Could love

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 71 find a place in a marriage if it had not pils to imagine what the boys would come to set up a regular time to meet started with some degree of fantasy? look like in twenty or thirty years. so you can study English with me.” They were realistic people, and mar- When no one spoke, the teacher Min thanked him and said that riage was weather. They lived in it with- turned to the boys. “All of you will end there was no need. out any desire to control it or change up like those men sitting out in the “Why not? You can’t lower your stan- it. They knew each other well enough alleyways on a summer evening,” she dards because of the way you were to know the forecast. said, “shirtless, stomachs folded over brought up.” your belts, a beer or a cigarette in your “I thought you decided I wasn’t a few weeks after Min had met the hands, having nothing better to do than good match for your son,” Min said. A professor, her mother had told her yell at your wives and children so that “But I’ve had a change of heart. that a young man, who was working you can feel good about yourselves. If You’re like jadeite. Less sympathetic in America and was home for a visit, your parents aren’t ashamed of you, I people would think of you as a com- was interested in meeting her. “And assure you, your children will be.” mon rock, but you are not. Someone this time,” her mother said, “I’ve asked Rich always ended his story by quot- like me, someone who understands your about his parents. They’re just like us, ing the teacher, but Min knew there value, has to make you into a polished not intellectuals.” was more to it. His father had been masterpiece.” A mail-order bride, Min thought one of those men. Her own father would Min stepped back, but the profes- of herself much later, even though she have been described similarly. She sor moved closer, his hand resting on and Rich had dated long-distance might have married a man like that her shoulder, his thumb touching her through letters and phone calls for had she stayed in Beijing. Perhaps it collarbone. “Do you understand?” he eight months. She did not dislike him, was wrong to say there had not been said. “I can do a lot for you.” though she’d never reread his letters, any fantasy. Rich had ofered her a “I’m sorry, but I don’t need your help.” which often included lists of instruc- change of scenery. She had ofered him “Why? Even my graduate students tions. “You are what you wear,” he wrote the possibility of ofspring, who would don’t get this kind of attention from me.” in one letter, going on to explain the admire and worship him. Min shook her head. His fingers importance of dressing in brand-name clutched her shoulder more tightly. “But clothes and shoes “to boost your sta- hen Min and Rich agreed, in a I’m dating someone now,” she said. tus and confidence.” “Anyone who does Wphone call, to get married, her “What do you mean you’re dating not set his heart on getting rich should mother asked her if she was sure. someone? Only two months ago you be ashamed of himself,” he wrote in Min lied and said yes. What made agreed to marry my son.” another. “Especially in America.” On her decision clear, even before Rich had “I didn’t.” the phone, he prompted Min to study brought up the subject of marriage, was “Why else did you meet me? Who English and refresh her math skills, as a visit from the professor. Her mother is this man you’re dating? Remember, his plan was to enroll her in an ac- had been at her newsstand, and when I can help you go to America.” counting program at a community col- Min opened the door the professor “I’m dating someone in America,” lege. From there, she could either find came into the apartment as though she Min said. “I’ll marry him.” a stable government job with a good had been expecting him. He studied The anger in the man’s eyes was pension or, if she was ambitious and not the anger of a concerned father— smart, join a company or a firm that even at nineteen, Min could tell that. would pay better. The resentment was that of a betrayed Rich came from a background sim- lover. “So you were only using me, but ilar to Min’s. His father worked in the now you found someone better you boiler room of a municipal bathhouse, can use,” he said. “I should’ve known and his mother in a high-school cafe- that girls like you have no honor to teria. Rich could have turned out like speak of.” many of his childhood friends, appren- Another girl would have laughed in ticing at a factory after middle school. his face and called him a lunatic. An- What had stopped him from going the old furniture and the twelve-inch other girl would have shaken of his down that path was his fifth-grade black-and-white television before turn- hand and shown him the door. “I’m teacher. Rich first told Min the story ing to her. “I’ve been waiting for your sorry if I’m disappointing you,” Min during one of their long-distance phone call,” he said. “You didn’t keep your said. “I can’t help it.” calls, and had since enjoyed repeating promise.” “Of course you can. I can still teach it to her and their children. All of a sudden, it felt childish to you English. You don’t have to marry In the story, Rich and some friends pretend she had never met the man. my son. Just come and visit me. Say yes.” had played truant one afternoon. The Childish, too, to think he would for- It was the helplessness of his plea next day, the teacher, instead of giving get that she still had his books. Min that made Min cringe with pity. She them the usual punishment of extra pulled them out from under the news- did not want the power he’d handed work, made the boys stand in front of papers and tried to come up with a sen- her. It was not really power but an ob- the class, and then asked the other pu- sible apology, but he cut her of. “I’ve ligation or, worse, a debt. The moment

72 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 he’d laid his eyes on her she owed him something. Still, she could not help feeling bad for him. You’re making a fool of yourself, she wanted to say. I’m only a girl, without any status or importance. Why are you embarrassing yourself like this? Over the years, Min had tried hard not to think about that moment. But when the man’s e-mails came she often had an urge to tell her younger self, It’s not he who made a fool of himself but you. It’s you who hastened into a marriage because you thought it was better to marry a man who would not act with such folly. You thought that a man without a crazed look in his eyes would be the right husband, but perhaps a marriage should be more like an ill- ness that the couple agrees to submit to so that they can recover together. Some succeed, others fail, yet two people can’t remain in their separate alic- tions and hope for the best. “ isten, I don’t want you to discuss Lpolitics with the girls,” Rich said to Min after the twins went to bed that night. Min did not reply. “I don’t want my children to be ex- posed to this left-wing crap.” “We’ll ofer them religion in exchange for food. If that doesn’t work, The same conversation would take we’ll kill them and take their food in the name of religion.” place in Sandra’s house, though it would be a more heated fight, with words of passion being thrown back and forth •• like grenades. Yet Sandra would stay married to Chuck, just as Min would They would find new problems, too, had to do was to remain silent. But a stay married to Rich. those they could not solve. You could silence stoically maintained, she now “And, for the record,” Rich contin- wait for a harmless man to die, but he understood, did not give her any dig- ued, “if they ask you how you voted, would not let loose his grasp, as if you nity. The next month, the month after you should either say you voted for were part of his life. next, he would send another e-mail, Trump or, if you don’t want to say that, Max had been in elementary school reminding her that she was never far tell them you didn’t vote.” when the professor first sent Min an from the girl he remembered. In his For a moment, Min felt a vindictive e-mail, “to reconnect,” as he put it. The imagination she would still be young, joy that the girls already knew to keep previous summer, he said, he had vis- pretty, and malleable. Her silence the truth about him from the world. In ited Beijing for the first time since would do nothing to stop his bound- a few years, they would be teen-agers. moving to America more than a de- less imagination. Emmie would be high-strung, unable cade earlier, and on a whim had stopped That night, when Min failed to fall to mask her moods. Deanna would be at Min’s old apartment building. Sur- asleep, she opened the man’s e-mail coyer, but when she was ready to sabo- prisingly, he wrote, the complex had from the night before. In a large font tage her father’s authority she would do not been demolished, and her mother that she hoped would be easy for him so with more tact, and with more dev- still lived there. “All these signs con- to read, she typed, “Please stop writ- astation, too. Perhaps Min could just be vinced me that I should get in touch ing me.” patient and wait for the twins to grow with you again,” the professor wrote. Then, on second thought, she erased up. Her mother might have felt the same “As a lost friend.” that, and wrote, “Go to hell.”  way after the death of Min’s father: chil- He had written out of loneliness or dren grow up, and they will solve the nostalgia, Min had told herself, try- THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST problems we can’t solve for them. ing to be kind in her dismissal. All she Yiyun Li reads “A Flawless Silence.”

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 73 THE CRITICS

POP MUSIC PUBLIC PRACTICE More studious than outrageous, Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy” is a breeze.

BY CARRIE BATTAN

f you need more proof that reality despite being more Lucille Ball than ances by hip-hop and R. & B. A-list- Itelevision and social media are this Lauryn Hill. It was a canny move. After ers: Migos, Chance the Rapper, YG, era’s greatest cultural incubators, look all, her main skill set—a knack for lan- Kehlani, and SZA. Such a name-laden no further than Cardi B (born Belca- guage and bombast—overlapped nicely track list usually indicates a shameless lis Almanzar), the twenty-five-year-old with that of most successful hip-hop attempt to search-engine-optimize a Bronx native who has taken an unprec- artists. Her first two mixtapes, “Gang- bloated body of work, but “Invasion of edented but well-documented path to sta Bitch Music,” Volumes I and II, Privacy” is a mercifully cogent thirteen- pop-world domination. In 2014, while from 2016 and 2017, had the feel of song breeze. It mixes hard-slapping working as a stripper, she launched a rough drafts. She gravitated toward a street rap with dashes of velvety, grassroots campaign for her person- pummelling street sound, with skit- heartbroken R. & B. There is also a ality on Instagram and Vine, posting tering beats and menacing choruses crafty collaboration with the Colom- bawdy, unflinching videos in which that didn’t always capture the humor bian pop superstar J Balvin and Latin she monologued about whatever was and charm she was known for; none- trap’s reigning king, Bad Bunny, on a on her mind—unfaithful boyfriends, theless, the eforts were lively. One of song called “I Like It,” a swaggering the indignity of backhanded compli- her tracks, “Lick,” was rereleased in a update of Pete Rodriguez’s Latin- ments, the relative merits of IHOP and collaboration with Ofset, a member boogaloo hit. Cardi, who grew up on Philippe Chow—in a thick New York of the chart-topping hip-hop trio a diet of bachata and reggaeton and Spanish accent. She sometimes wore Migos, who is now Cardi’s fiancé, but has never shed her Bronx accent, is a nothing but a shower cap. “I ain’t gon’ it was not until “Bodak Yellow” that fitting hip-hop star for an era of Latin- lie to y’all, these terrorist attacks got she became a legitimate force. That pop crossovers. my mental a li’l finicky. That’s why I song, a thunderous New York rap Cardi’s trajectory has been idiosyn- been in the Bronx,” she said in one record with an of-kilter beat and a cratic, but on her songs she is a tradi- video, from 2015. “Keep me away from threatening mood, elbowed its way to tionalist. She is the first to admit that downtown. Ain’t nobody tryna blow dominance. Rapping had seemed like rapping takes work, and that her prog- up the hood. ” something of an extracurricular to Car- ress has required intense study. This These little gems of street wisdom di’s career, but “Bodak Yellow” unseated makes her an outlier. Hip-hop’s pre- got her cast in Mona Scott-Young’s a Taylor Swift single to become the vailing style is heavily improvisational, VH1 reality series “Love & Hip Hop.” top song in the country. Cardi was now, less about flow and narrative than A chatterbox with a refreshingly un- astonishingly, the first female rapper about hypnotic chants and call-and- varnished self-presentation, Cardi, in to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart on response choruses. Most of the big- perhaps her greatest accomplishment, a solo track since Hill did, with “Doo gest stars, particularly those from hip- inverts the uses of the platforms she Wop (That Thing),” in 1998. hop’s capital city of Atlanta, do not first called home: in her universe, so- Major labels have typically misused put raps to paper before recording cial media and television serve as mega- unconventional or Internet-viral tal- them; instead, they enter the record- phones for candor and exuberance ent, but Cardi’s début album, “Invasion ing booth when the mood strikes rather than for deception or artifice. of Privacy,” which was released earlier them, building on catchphrases and The music industry, of course, has this month, signals that perhaps they trying to capture an energy rather than its own entrenched structures of artifice. are developing better strategies. The tell a story. These songs have an of- No realm of entertainment is littered record is clearly the product of plenty hand, whistle-while-you-work feeling with more outsiders made quickly into of money and planning, but it bottles to them. But Cardi, despite the stream afable cash cows. Cardi, who quit strip- her vitality without allowing it to go of consciousness that characterizes her ping in 2015, decided to try rapping, flat. The record is stacked with appear- social-media posts, makes studied, ZAGNOLI OLIMPIA ABOVE:

74 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 Most big hip-hop stars try to capture an energy rather than tell a story. Cardi B’s songs, by contrast, are premeditated.

ILLUSTRATION BY MVM THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 75 “Our maintenance crew is ixing a problem that should only take a few minutes but which will haunt you for the duration of the ight.” ••

premeditated songs. She is a formal- plays a multitude of characters. In ist who wears the writing process— some, she’s a proud swindler giving and her influences—on her sleeve, her followers a peek into her bag of which means she is, in a major way, a tricks. In others, she’s a gross-out throwback artist. Cardi adopted the comic or a vixen; often she is a hood measured but forceful vocal style and headmistress, admonishing women cadence of “Bodak Yellow” from “No for their transgressions or their missed Flockin,” a hit by the troubled Flor- opportunities. At her best, she is at ida rapper Kodak Black. “Get Up 10,” the top of her lungs, filibustering about the first song on “Invasion of Privacy,” her everyday gripes and the misbe- is a careful homage to Meek Mill’s havior of the people—often men—in bait-and-switch street classic “Dreams her life. This is the Cardi who dom- and Nightmares,” in which, for ninety inates “Invasion of Privacy”: she’s at seconds, accompanied by a piano and the height of success, while remain- strings, he raps about his triumph over ing disgruntled and aggressively on his circumstances, until the turbo- the defensive. The record is not a gig- charged beat drops and his voice shifts gle but a pissed-of snarl, aimed both to a frenzied bark, reminding listen- at her naysayers and at her romantic ers of his persistent hunger. It’s an interests. “Li’l bitch, I cannot stand important touchstone for the genre, you, right hand to Jesus/I might just and one that Cardi repurposes for her cut all the tongues out your sneakers,” own rags-to-riches story. In inter- she threatens, on “Thru Your Phone,” views, she has credited Pardison Fon- the track that sounds the most like taine as a co-writer of her lyrics, turn- one of her video rants. The song is a ing what would be a shameful secret gripping torrent of fury and resent- for most rappers into a simple fact of ment, levelled at a cheating lover— her process. and the other woman—but bolstered In her videos on social media, Cardi by moments of sideways levity.

76 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 The swirl of bluster and romantic sorrow on the album shows that love is one terrain that Cardi has yet to con- BRIEFLY NOTED quer. But she is a crafty exploiter of the tabloid gossip surrounding her rela- Educated, by Tara Westover (Random House). In this harrow- tionship. Recently, she appeared on ing memoir, Westover, the daughter of survivalist Christian “Saturday Night Live,” and used her fundamentalists in the Idaho mountains, defies her father performance of “Be Careful”—a vul- and ends up at Cambridge University. Unschooled in child- nerable and scornful interpolation of hood, she and her siblings are repeatedly imperilled by their Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor”—to début parents’ blistering paranoia about civilization and modern her large baby bump. It was a jarring medicine. After she leaves home, revelations include stum- moment for anyone who might have bling upon John Stuart Mill’s opinion that, of women’s na- believed that her romance was merely tures, “nothing final can be known”: “Never had I found such staged to drum up attention. Not since comfort in a void,” she writes. “It seemed to say: whatever Lana Del Rey has an artist triumphed you are, you are woman.” Westover is a keen and honest guide over such low expectations and landed to the diiculties of filial love, and to the enchantment of as a bona-fide pop star. embracing a life of the mind.

n the past year, there’s been an up- The Wife’s Tale, by Aida Edemariam (Harper). Ethiopia during Itick of people who are using hip- the reign of Haile Selassie bursts to life in this impression- hop as a way to leverage the fame istic family history. Yetemegnu, the author’s grandmother, is they’ve achieved in other realms. Cur- married at the age of eight to a powerful priest in the Ethi- rently, the industry is trying to make opian Orthodox Church. Her days soon fill with wifely du- stars out of plenty of other Internet ties: she bears her first child at fourteen, cooks, hosts holy firebrands and meme-generators. There feasts. Edemariam anchors the book in these mundane rhythms, is Danielle Bregoli, a teen-age girl who setting them against a vividly realized landscape. Political went viral after a belligerent appear- turmoil sweeps in like a dream: Yetemegnu is outside among ance on “Dr. Phil,” and signed a record the “pale gold domes of tef ” when the Italians invade her deal as Bhad Bhabie. With the sup- village, in 1936; in 1974, when Selassie is deposed, she’s watch- port of a handful of well-chosen beats, ing the sky for portents. The book elegantly collapses the dis- she makes a disconcertingly catchy tance between the vast and the intimate, showing how his- trap-rap pastiche. There is also Jake tory reaches even the most sheltered. Paul, a dopey blond vlogger and provo- cateur who recently secured a feature Being Wagner, by Simon Callow (Vintage). Callow, who has verse from Gucci Mane. The popular performed a one-man play about Wagner, assesses the com- hip-hop-podcast host Adam Grand- poser’s music in the light of his copious essays, letters, and maison, known as Adam22, is also en- other writings in this lively biography. He sees Wagner as tering the fray, along with many young always “essentially talking to himself,” and the voluminous Internet-famous video gamers. Cardi philosophical speculations as a necessary preparation for the could be considered the figurehead of operas. Wagner’s self-absorbed, volcanic personality comes this era of rap as vocation rather than across clearly, whether he is supplying grenades to revolu- as creative pursuit. tionaries, seducing his friends’ wives, or sending Nietzsche You may get the impression that on “domestic errands.” Seeing himself as an “artist-hero,” he these artists are grabbing at dollar bills believed that he could save Germany from cultural poverty, in the wind tunnel of hip-hop. There and championed nothing less than “a new world order,” with- is something unsettling about this kind out authority, class, or capital—a world he believed only his of gold rush—it’s propelled by a cyn- art could occasion. ical assumption that hip-hop can be gamed, or that it is the easiest route to The Long Hangover, by Shaun Walker (Oxford). Underpin- notoriety and riches for people who ning the disparate topics in this account of post-Soviet Rus- are lacking in quantifiable skills. Some sia—the wars in Chechnya, the annexation of Crimea, the re- of these artists will rise beyond sheer sidual trauma of the Gulags—is the new country’s attempt to sensationalism; others will flame out forge a national identity. Walker takes of from the late writer quickly. But Cardi is a shining coun- Svetlana Boym’s notion of “restorative nostalgia,” a striving to terweight. In retaining her dogged recover a vaguely defined and idealized past. He argues that openheartedness and honest work ethic, Vladimir Putin, seeking a new storyline for a people caught she has been able to prove that hip- in an existential malaise, has capitalized on the collective mem- hop is the land not of opportunism but ory of sacrifice and victory in the Second World War, the “one of opportunity.  event that had the narrative potential to unite the country.”

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 77 nationalism about him; if you read him BOOKS when you’re a small child, as more Brits seem to than Americans, he becomes, as W. H. Auden wrote, an entire land. KNOWING MR. LEAR No one would seem better quali- fied to write a biography of Lear The great master of Victorian nonsense and his harrowed soul. than Jenny Uglow, and now she has, with “Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and BY ADAM GOPNIK Nonsense” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Uglow is a matchless popular historian of the British nineteenth century; her 2002 book, “The Lunar Men,” is among the best social histories of Brit- ish life to have appeared in the past twenty or so years. It’s an account of the intermingling of art and science in the circle around Joseph Priestley and the young Erasmus Darwin at the dawn of the industrial revolution in the Midlands, and the book revealed a kind of mini-Enlightenment centered in Birmingham. When it comes to Lear, Uglow’s disability, if there is one, is that she is such an enthusiast that her enthusiasm crowds out, a little, her urge to explica- tion. That nursery nationalism kicks in. She takes Lear’s greatness for granted, piling on limericks and sketch drawings as though we, too, had known them since infancy. Her enthusiasm can become a velvet rope separating us from her subject, more than an invitation to the dance. (Enthusiasm, whatever they may say, is never actually “conta- gious.” Eloquence about an enthusiasm alone is.) For much of his life, Edward Lear was best known as a landscape painter. What is eloquent and astonishing in Uglow’s biography is her demon- ultures, like caterpillars, crawl for- on those nineteenth-century disguises. stration of how embedded Lear was in Cward in contradictions, drawing Of the two great makers of non- Victorian art and culture. Given the back and then suddenly springing for- sense, Carroll rightly has received more eccentricity of his tone and the sad, ward. The Victorians, famously puri- attention, because of his twists and self-mocking little-Englishness of, for tanical, are also famous for providing quirks, because of his photography and instance, his verse “Self-Portrait of the the template of modern pornogra- the ghost of pedophilia falsely supposed Laureate of Nonsense”— phy—the words “Victorian classic” to cling to his obsessions. About Lear on a paperback have long meant a less has been written, perhaps because He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish, He cannot abide ginger-beer: dirty book—while on the other side there does not seem as much to say. His Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish, of that earnest, progressive Victorian classic love ballad, “The Owl and the How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! rationality are the mad leaps of Vic- Pussycat,” was voted the most popular torian irrationality. All that sense, de- British childhood poem in 2014, and —you might have expected a second corum, and propriety produced the has been set to music by everyone from William Blake, living as a recluse in a first fully achieved literature of non- Stravinsky to Laurie Anderson. And row house in Lambeth. Not a bit of it: sense. Like the porn, it was amazingly no history of the limerick, or of light the younger Lear was a social figure, a generative, so that most works of Dada verse, can escape his imposing presence. permanent house guest, as deep in his and Surrealism bear the marks of But his work seems so self-enclosed time as Truman Capote was in his. mid-Victorian Englishness, descend- and self-evident that championing him He knew everyone. Reading his me- ing from Lewis Carroll and Edward has felt unnecessary, even impudent. lodic nonsense lines, one might enter-

Lear, as much as modern erotica takes Lear has a certain amount of nursery tain the thought of Lear as a kind of BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

78 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 comic Tennyson, with the same gift for as—it sounds like the beginning of murmuring sounds disguised as phi- one of his limericks—the twentieth losophy—and then, reading Uglow, one of twenty-one children, by his own discovers that Lear and Tennyson were account. (Uglow thinks that he might friends, sharing ideas and rhymes. (In have been the sixteenth of seventeen.) fact, Lear set much of Tennyson’s verse Epileptic, and seemingly what we to his own music.) A diligent student would now call “on the spectrum,” he of Charles Darwin might be struck became known as an ornithological by how much the creatures in Lear’s illustrator when still a teen-ager. Under verse—the Pobble Who Has No Toes, the indirect influence, and then the et al.—are part of a new vision of life firsthand mentoring, of the master that includes an expanded place for John James Audubon himself—they chance and oddity in nature, with the met on one of Audubon’s fund-rais- extra idea that animal happiness comes ing trips to Britain—the adolescent from nothing more than filling a pre- Lear had the brilliant idea of publish- carious niche for a necessary moment. ing a picture book about parrots, just Then one discovers that Lear was an parrots, and nothing but. attentive and informed reader of Dar- If he had published only his “Illus- win; he worked with John Gould, the trations of the Family of Psittacidae, natural-history entrepreneur who had or Parrots” (1832), Lear would still oc- actually picked apart the varieties of cupy a solid paragraph in the history finch that Darwin had brought back of Victorian art. (A parrot watercolor, from the Galápagos Islands. Lear has rather than a “nonsense” sketch, graces Ruskinian notes of dense, worried aes- the cover of Uglow’s book.) Lear’s par- theticism—and then, reading the bi- rots, for all their exoticism, strike a dis- ography, we get Ruskin weighing in on tinctly English note, and are almost Lear’s lyrics. We find, in Lear, the im- like Regency political cartoons in their mersive, overstufed feel common to airy, bright-colored clarity. In fact, the Basil Twist’s all Victoriana—and here is Victoria diferences in style between Audubon’s herself, getting a drawing lesson from and Lear’s birds suggest almost per- him. Because Lear was lodged far more fectly realized national types. Audu- securely in Victorian society than the bon was drawn to the democratic and Tickets at HERE.org donnish Carroll was, his art mirrors the encyclopedic—birds of all kinds and parodies it more precisely. Carroll occupying a common space. Lear’s sub- + was making jokes about Oxford; Lear ject was the eccentric individual, poised about London and the world. on its perch. His parrots display plum- Throughout, Uglow patiently traces age, fashion, and intelligence, mixed the contours of a closeted gay man’s with aristocratic unself-consciousness. life. Lear participated in the classic Where Audubon’s parrots gyrate and martha’s vineyard Victorian pantomime in which an older foreshorten themselves—one can al- man supported or befriended or men- most hear them chattering as they press tored younger ones, often handsome their beaks toward the picture plane— and foreign-born fellow-pilgrims and Lear’s are sphinxlike in their mysteri- guides. The pantomime tends to fall ous stillness. Audubon fixed a whole into two orders: in one, the relation- nation of birds in action in the wild, ship was discreetly consummated; in even when he had had their corpses the other, the pathos of yearning and wired and posed beforehand. Lear’s missing feels overwhelming. All of parrots, drawn from living captives in Lear’s romances seem, with perhaps the newly opened London Zoo, are one exception, to belong to the sec- rich and self-suicient on their perches. ond category. Their minimal movement—a feather We know Lear best as a befuddled astray here, a wing akimbo there— middle-aged man, but he was a prod- makes them look uncannily like Gains- igy of printmaking, a sort of Victo- borough’s feathery society beauties, who Ohana Family Camp in Vermont rian David Hockney, with a charm- are equally silent, equally sure. Swim Archery ing if odd manner that brought him His animal illustrations made his Sail Tennis early fame and easy access to the fa- reputation, if not a lot of money, and Kayak Hiking mous. Born in 1812, he rose from an on the strength of it Lear began to travel. Canoe Biking erratically middle-class background For the next forty years, he was mostly Ohanacamp.org • (802) 333-3460

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 79 endary excursions of Byron and Shel- ley as models for the wanderings of Dongs and Pobbles. Even relatively late in Lear’s career, he was set alight by memories of the Romantics. Uglow makes the suggestive point that Lear’s great ode “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” published in 1876, must have been sparked by his surprising encounter, the previous year, with the Romantic wanderer Edward John Trelawny, the sailor and friend of Byron’s, who found Shelley dead and cremated his body on a beach in Italy. (Lear had presumed Trelawny to be as dead as the poet.) “The Dong, like Trelawny, is a Romantic relic roam- ing high Victorian terrain,” Uglow remarks. (One might add that the line about the Dong’s “weary eyes on/ That pea-green sail” recalls Trelawny’s search for Shelley’s foundered boat.) This residual Romanticism gives surprising pathos and dignity to the “Of course I love you more than cheese. What a silly question. In fact, cheese Dong’s ode. We learn the tale of how and I are just friends. Nothing’s going on between cheese and me.” the graceful Jumblies once danced to his pipe, and of how one beautiful singer in particular, the Jumbly Girl, •• was the joy and fascination of his life but then took ship and sailed away. on the road, painting pictures—some- breeze-blown reeds too intense to quite “For day and night he was always times in watercolor, sometimes in oil— credit as reportage. But for the most there/By the side of the Jumbly Girl of exotic places for subscribers at home. part his work is dutifully, if cosmeti- so fair,/With her sky-blue hands, and Greece, Egypt, Italy, India, Ceylon: for cally, reportorial, placing him in the her sea-green hair.” most of his life, Lear was known pri- line of the great British travellers, like In the Dong’s world, the dance is over. marily as an intrepid traveller and land- Laurie Lee and Bruce Chatwin. He And now each night, and all night long, scape painter. The sharply etched non- was always going somewhere. Over those plains still roams the Dong; sense verse (first published under a One of the odd things about Lear’s And above the wail of the Chimp and Snipe pseudonym) and hard-edged cartoons pensive wanderings is how often they You may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe that we know best were sidelines to his tracked the sanctified wanderings of While ever he seeks, but seeks in vain To meet with his Jumbly Girl again; dreamy watercolors and oils, which oc- the British Romantic poets. He loved ... cupy a stylistic space somewhere be- visiting Shelley’s and Byron’s haunts, And all who watch at the midnight hour, tween late Turner and Holman Hunt—a Greek shores and Italian lakes, and he From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Turner-like love of light efects mar- patronized the same class of locals, but Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright, ried to a Pre-Raphaelite conscientious- he did it in a spirit that was self-con- Moving along through the dreary night,— “This is the hour when forth he goes, ness about details. sciously comical, rather than defiantly The Dong with a luminous Nose!” Nothing in the pictures would make adventurous. This immersion inspired you think that the two Edward Lears, his deeper art. By recalling the Roman- It is significant that the luminous nose picturesque and parodic, were related. tic voyaging that had preceded him, he of the Dong is not biological, like Ru- If Victorian history were as muddled could evade the straitlaced Victorian- dolph’s. It is hand-tooled, like a steam- as that of early Renaissance art, gen- ism that surrounded him. If Victorian punk machine, erations of scholars would be puzzling nonsense was a response to unbending And tied with cords to the back of his head. their way through the coexistence of Victorian sense, the forms it borrowed —In a hollow rounded space it ended two distinct Lears. Occasionally, in the for this mockery were typically Roman- With a luminous Lamp within suspended, more exotic reaches of his travels—as tic. Carroll takes Wordsworth’s impos- All fenced about in a beautiful view of Ceylon that he ing poem “Resolution and Indepen- With a bandage stout To prevent the wind from blowing it out. painted in the eighteen-seventies— dence” as his model for the White some small note of significant strange- Knight’s song, from “Through the His nose is not his wound but his bow— ness intrudes, ravishing color and Looking-Glass,” and Lear uses the leg- an up-to-date device, like an iPhone flash-

80 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 light, for finding Jumbly Girls in the dark. limericks instead always insist on a re- absurd results, Lear’s is a mockery of Victorian nonsense showed that par- petitive last line: Victorian natural science, particularly ody can be a vehicle for the renewal of the life sciences. Taxonomy, naming There was an Old Man on a hill, feeling. The Dong is in one way a mock- Who seldom, if ever, stood still; new species, domesticating the wild— ery of all those other lonely Byronic He ran up and down, that’s the ground of his joking. When wanderers. Yet his pathos and his per- In his Grandmother’s gown, Carroll deploys the White Knight or sistence are meant to touch us, and they Which adorned that Old Man on a hill. Humpty Dumpty, he is mocking the do. This is not merely mock-Romantic intellectual’s habit of trying to think verse; it is, in its own way, very good The joke is always on the dignity of through things that you can’t really think Romantic verse, comparable to Byron’s the formal designation. Someone is, in- through. (“But I was thinking of a “So We’ll Go No More a Roving,” which sistently, something, usually a very par- plan/To dye one’s whiskers green,/And must have been one of its inspirations. ticular if not terribly distinguished always use so large a fan /That they The Dong, longing for his Jumbly Girl, something—an Old Man on a hill, a could not be seen.”) When Lear invents is certainly a more persuasive, and pen- young person of Smyrna, an old lady the Pobble Who Has No Toes, he is sively dignified, image of longing than of Chertsey, a man with a beard. (They mocking the naturalist’s need to give a Tennyson’s poet moaning maudlinly for would have a diferent efect if they name to each new thing. (As with his his Maud. Mockery cleanses clichés, were more glamorous: it’s never, in Lear, parrots; Lear gave a new Latin name to and then restores emotion. a young person of Venice, or an old lady at least two.) Carroll is obsessed with of Rome, or a man with a goatee.) Then un-naming, with showing us how odd ear was a funny man from early something bizarre happens to or is made names are. (“‘The name of the song is Lon, entertaining with songs even to happen by that person—he is hor- called “Haddocks’ Eyes.”’ ‘Oh, that’s the the family of the Earl of Derby, whose ribly bored by a bee, or she sinks un- name of the song, is it?’ Alice said, try- son later served three separate terms derground, or he runs up and down in ing to feel interested. ‘No, you don’t un- as the British Prime Minister. (His res- his grandmother’s gown—and yet there derstand,’ the Knight said, a little vexed. idency began after he was commis- they are, these people, at the end, still ‘That’s what the name is called. The sioned to paint creatures in the Earl’s of Smyrna or Chertsey or just old. The name really is, “The Aged, Aged Man.”’”) personal zoo.) But Lear didn’t publish activity may alter their life but it doesn’t Lear is obsessed with the power of nam- his “Book of Nonsense” until he was alter their designation. Even threats of ing, with sticking a tag on a thing which thirty-three, and it was more for the burning can’t change them. A name, gives it a place at, and on, the table. amusement of his friends than as a se- once fixed, is fixed for good. Like Trol- rious money-making enterprise. lope’s Phineas Finn, the characters have he nonsense in Lear is suggestive With the book’s hard-contoured, experiences without arcs. Tof new sense, more than cracking deliberately naïve sketches, he found a Lear’s verse also reflects the natural- wise at the old kind. It is not an acci- second manner of drawing that was ist’s turn of mind. If Carroll’s nonsense dent of the language that some of Lear’s more potent than his first. Lear, the satirizes the rise of philosophical ideal- terms, read today, have erotic-slang consummate insider, became his own ism and the university, mocking people overtones: “What a beautiful Pussy”; outsider artist. This was in part a Vic- who think for a living and end up with the Dong. Not that he intended those torian pattern: Arthur Sullivan wrote cantatas to Longfellow’s verse and the airs for “The Mikado.” But no one was quite so extreme as Lear when it came to practicing the same art in a com- pletely diferent mode. The book worked. He eventually became famous for his limericks—though the term didn’t exist until much later— but he disarmed the limerick, so to speak, before he fired it. The classic dirty-joke limerick depends on a twist or turn in the last line. One famous limerick of this kind is attributed to Lear:

There was a young lady of Niger Who smiled as she rode on a tiger; They returned from the ride With the lady inside, And the smile on the face of the tiger.

But it isn’t in his style, and the attri- bution seems doubtful. Lear’s typical “First, we numb you by showing you today’s headlines.” overtones. It’s our need to fill up space self with blue water to “pass”—an image Lear clearly intended as a courting ex- with meaning that makes us rush into made all the more fetching by the truth pedition, Lushington relegated Lear to verbal voids, supplying words that have that it was often in crossing blue water the friend zone, seeing him only, Uglow not yet been given meaning with mean- that a gay Victorian could hope to find says, as “an older, kindly, amusing men- ings that are always seeking new words. happiness. His friend John Addington tor.” It must have been agonizing, and it (Nonetheless, the use of “dong” to mean Symonds—it was for Symonds’s two- nearly broke Lear’s heart. He found com- “penis”—as in Long Dong Silver, who year-old daughter that Lear wrote “The fort only in painting Corfu in a Turner- contributed so much to the politics of Owl and the Pussycat”—could write esque mode. (At one point, he found the American judiciary—seems to fol- frankly of gay love abroad, “All kinds of there a truly Lear-like scene, of farm an- low Lear’s use of it, though a compet- young men—peasants on the Riviera, imals brought on boats from Albania that ing case is that it derives from the on- Corsican drivers, Florentine lads . . . were purposefully tipped into the sea to omatopoetic “dong” that results when used to pluck at the sleeve of my heart.” swim ashore: “All the harbour is full of a clapper hits a bell.) Dongs must ring. (The fact that a leading voice for male black pigs—swimming away like a shoal For a long time, Lear’s amours had love was contentedly married, with a of porpoises!”) to be cloaked in the neat periphrases of two-year-old daughter, is also very much The one exception to his unfulfilled “bachelordom” and eccentric reclusion. part of the classic Victorian picture.) romantic life seems to have been a con- Uglow, a circumspect biographer, does Abroad, it was possible for men to live nection he made in Rome, around 1840, discuss his many friendships with more or less openly as homosexuals—if with a Danish painter named Wilhelm women, and some avowals about want- not “out” as lovers, then certainly enjoy- Marstrand, who belonged to a circle of ing a wife, but the general outline seems ing the kind of intimate male friendship German and Scandinavian artists. Lear clear enough, and she devotes many that was so much a part of Victorian val- burned his diary for that year, but Mar- forthright pages to Lear’s unbearably ues, the kind that Tennyson had cele- strand’s portrait of him in pencil is by melancholy love life. He was, in the brated in his relationship with Arthur far the most sympathetic and sensual Victorian manner, of the confirmed- Henry Hallam in the most famous of all image of Lear anyone ever composed: bachelor, not-made-for-women’s-com- Victorian poems, “In Memoriam.” Lear for once he looks not silly but sensitive fort kind. “Alack! For Miss Cotton!” he tried repeatedly to make that kind of last- and handsome, even though, as shy men wrote, about a woman whom friends ing connection with a male companion, will, he hides behind glasses and afects were trying to fix him up with. “And all and seems always to have failed. Frank newly sprouted facial hair. “Do you admirers. But we all know about the Lushington, a Cambridge-educated know I wear very considerable mous- beautiful glass jar which was only a white young man who became a successful law- taches now?” he wrote with delight to one after all, only there was blue water yer, was one of the most intense of these a friend. Twenty years later, now on his inside it.” A white jar trying to fill it- amours. On an 1855 trip to Corfu, which way to bachelorhood, he wrote of the time “when W. Marstrand & I used to be always together!!”

ne striking truth about Lear is Ohow little nonsense writing (and drawing) he actually did. Compared with Carroll’s two masterpieces, his long epic poem about the hunting of the Snark, and his massive “Sylvie and Bruno” and “Sylvie and Bruno Con- cluded,” it’s a meagre harvest. Lear, as Uglow’s book reminds us, was a visual artist in the first and last instance, with the rhymes and jokes the smaller, if longer-lived, portion. Lear’s last years were mostly good, if persistently melancholy, spent largely in Italian villas, with Ruskin himself ofering a late critical tribute to his nonsense. His last diary entry was addressed to Frank Lushington, and so was a final letter. His literary afterlife has been hap- pier, and richer. Carroll these days seems mostly to inspire scientists and philos- ophers; Lear inspires poets. John Ash- bery credited Lear as one of his chief influences, and Wallace Stevens’s murmuring measures echo him as well: satiric version of the normal side. In “There was a mystic marriage in Ca- Lear, everything strange is, to use the tawba,/At noon it was on the mid-day word of our decade, “normalized”: Dig deeper. of the year/Between a great captain and Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos the maiden Bawda . . . Each must the Lived on the top of the wall, other take not for his high,/His puis- For twenty years, a month and a day, sant front nor for her subtle sound,/The Till their hair had grown all pearly gray, shoo-shoo-shoo of secret cymbals round.” And their teeth began to fall. They never were ill, or at all dejected, In the middle part of the twentieth By all admired, and by some respected. . . . century, Lear inspired two remarkable works of literary art. One is Auden’s Life on top of the wall for the Dis- poem to Lear, written around the same cobboli is no diferent than life any- time as his dedications to Henry James where else. Lear’s people venture into and Sigmund Freud: “Left by his friend the mouths of volcanoes and report that to breakfast alone on the white/Italian they are not hot at all. This gift for cre- A REPORTER AT LARGE shore, his Terrible Demon arose/Over ating pathos without sacrificing absur- SCOTT PRUITT’S his shoulder; he wept to himself in the dity is what makes “The Owl and the DIRTY POLITICS night,/A dirty landscape-painter who Pussycat” one of the greatest love poems How the Environmental Protection Agency hated his nose.” Lear becomes one of in the language, of a kind that even Car- became the fossil-fuel industry’s best friend. Auden’s furtive masters, remaking the roll could never write. (When Carroll By Margaret Talbot imagination through the power of wanted to be moving, he wrote with a wounded withdrawal. much more conventional Victorian lyr- The other is an extraordinary short icism, as in the prefatory and postscript story by Donald Barthelme from 1971, verses to the Alice books.) In “Jabber- called “The Death of Edward Lear.” It wocky,” conventional meaning rushes invents a scenario far from the actual out, and has to be restored by Humpty circumstances of Lear’s death, which Dumpty’s explanations. In “The Owl occurred peacefully, at his Italian villa, and the Pussycat,” meanings rush in: in 1888. Barthelme turns Lear’s death They dined on mince, and slices of quince, into a parody of Victorian gentility, Which they ate with a runcible spoon. . . . with Lear organizing the event as some- William Ruckelshaus, who ran the E.P.A. under thing between a picnic and a corona- Not even Humpty Dumpty could ex- Nixon and Reagan, said that Pruitt and his top staff “don’t fundamentally agree with the mission tion: “Mr. Lear next ofered a short plain what a runcible spoon is. We know of the agency.” homily on the subject of Friendship. it by its verbal vibration, by its pres- Friendship, he said, is the most golden ence, by its sheer runcibleness. of the afections. It is also, he said, often It was a dream poem of a love he had the strongest of human ties, surviving never enjoyed, helped along by a well- strains and tempests fatal to less sub- wishing community. (“ ‘Dear Pig, are lime relations.” But it’s a mordant evo- you willing to sell for one shilling/Your cation, too, of the miseries of any old ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’”) This gift artist on his deathbed: “He then dis- for making something felt without hav- played copies of his books, but as ev- ing first to make it familiar is one that erybody had already read them, not we later admire in Beckett. Nonsense more than a polite interest was gener- suggesting sense is a familiar pattern. ated.” The story also contains some Nonsense suggesting the numinous is shrewd commentary on Lear’s verse. not. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that Barthelme writes, “Then something Lear’s rhymes “constitute an entirely new was understood: that Mr. Lear had been discovery in literature, the discovery that doing what he had always done, and incongruity itself may constitute a har- therefore, not doing anything extraor- mony,” and that if “Lewis Carroll is great dinary. Mr. Lear had transformed the in this lyric insanity, Mr. Edward Lear extraordinary into its opposite. He had, is, to our mind, even greater.” Lyric in- in point of fact, created a gentle, genial sanity! A menagerie marriage with a pig misunderstanding.” supplying a ring ends as the perfect image That’s true. Lear doesn’t find the of romance. An afair that should be silly, amazing in the ordinary; he finds the absurd, and ridiculous resolves into a ordinary in the amazing. In Carroll, poem that is touching, poignant, and the other side of the Victorian look- dignified. It’s a modern melody, and Lear ing glass shows us a hallucinatory and its first plaintive piper. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 83 with her Jill Stein-voting sister, Jackie ON TELEVISION (Laurie Metcalf), who wears a “Nasty Woman” T-shirt and yammers like a cartoon “lib.” But, after Trump fades WHITE-ISH away, his grin lingers. Take Roseanne’s joke. The jab was The meaning of one joke on “Roseanne.” clearly aimed at “black-ish” and “Fresh Of the Boat,” comedies that share BY EMILY NUSSBAUM ABC’s Tuesday schedule with “Rose- anne.” The line establishes a few things. One is that the Conners don’t live in the same America as the Johnsons, from “black-ish,” or the Huangs, from “Fresh Of the Boat.” There will never be a crossover episode—no fun clash, say, between an aging Jessica Huang and Roseanne, on a Conner trip to Florida. Instead, the Conners are themselves bored, alienated ABC viewers, unable even to remember titles, just that these are the “black and Asian” shows. If you read the Hollywood trades, you might sense an unsettling frame to that joke, too: ABC is owned by Dis- ney, which is seeking to buy Fox, a merger that could be scuttled by Trump, who has a habit of threatening media corporations that cross him. And Trump has opinions about “black-ish.” When the series débuted, in 2014, he tweeted, “How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled ‘Blackish’? Can you imagine the furor of a show, ‘Whiteish’! Rac- ism at highest level?” The month before “Roseanne” premièred, ABC pulled an episode of “black-ish”: in it, Dre John- son tells his baby son a bedtime story about race in America. Buh-leeve me, Currently, the reboot nods at complexity without delivering the goods. no punch line appears on ABC without getting O.K.’d all the way to the top. n the third episode of “Roseanne,” shouldn’t judge any sitcom too harshly, Of course, Roseanne Conner didn’t Ion ABC, Roseanne Conner and her early on. In a review of this type, you’d make the crude joke that Trump made— husband, Dan, wake up on their iconic emphasize the gulf between the actress so far, at least, the show doesn’t traic sofa, in Lanford, Illinois. “It’s eleven Roseanne Barr, a rich, pro-Trump Twit- in any heavy clash of perspectives, as o’clock,” Roseanne says. “We slept from ter troll, and the character Roseanne in Lear’s shows from the seventies, in ‘Wheel’ to ‘Kimmel.’” Dan replies, “We Conner, a poor, disabled rural grandma which Maude Findlay and George missed all the shows about black and who voted for Trump because he talked Jeferson held their own against Archie Asian families.” Roseanne squawks, jobs. You’d point out that neither Rose- Bunker. No one on “Roseanne” has used “They’re just like us!” Then, sardoni- anne is “Roseanne.” You might praise the word “racist,” let alone lobbed a slur; cally, “There, now you’re all caught up.” Ames McNamara, who plays Rose- instead, the show relies on code, such It would be so nice to be able to anne’s genderqueer grandson, Mark, as when Roseanne snarks that Jackie hunker down on my own sofa with or admire John Goodman, a prickly might want to “take a knee,” even as her “Roseanne,” the blockbuster sitcom force after twenty years. You could say: black granddaughter, Mary ( Jayden from my twenties, a feminist show that lie back and think of Norman Lear. Ray), sits nearby, an irony no one re- was tough about class, with pioneer- I can’t write that review, though, and marks on. The missing jokes are the ing gay characters and a memorably it’s because of zingers like the one above, show’s “tell”: when Jackie ﬁghts Rose- complex teen girl. It would feel good dog whistles that won’t let you stay in- anne, she takes no real shots at Trump, to critique the new version with a tol- side “Roseanne.” Trump comes up only narrowing the debate to jobs and Hil- erant smile—to say simply that you in the pilot, in which Roseanne scraps lary, as if the two of them were guests

84 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN on Hannity. The show’s repeated theme anne” to advertisers, a dog whistle so powerful appeal to any project that re- is always that Roseanne is not that kind strong that it might have brought Lassie assures Fox viewers without alienating of Trump voter: she’s sweet to Mary; back from the dead. the MSNBC crowd. she defends Mark against homophobic Roseanne’s crack that “they’re just The show ofers a clever finger trap bullies. You might see this as complex- like us!” has a historical context, too. for critics. Call a hit dangerous and you ity or as spin. If you’re in a darker mood, It’s an allusion to the bland family sit- imply that it’s really quite sexy. And, you might call it propaganda. coms of the nineteen-eighties, when in fact, the seventh episode, which I So, instead of a straight shot, Rose- syrupy, anti-racist “very special epi- won’t spoil, pulls a daring switcheroo, anne and Dan take a sideways jab sodes” dominated prime-time comedy one that may ofer a new lens through at their ABC slot-mates: they’re old (think “Family Ties”), treating color which to interpret Roseanne’s behav- news. They’re everywhere—an irritant, blindness as a virtue. In 1988, “Rose- ior. It’s not enough. The reboot nods a snooze. But Dan couldn’t be refer- anne” helped puncture that formula, at complexity without delivering—there ring to any other network sitcoms about and with it the liberal fantasy that big- are good people on many sides, on many black and Asian families, because none otry was just a misunderstanding that sides. If you squint, you might see the exist. That’s true even on ABC, which might be fixed by the credits. show’s true hero as Darlene (Sara Gil- just a few years ago was branding it- Roseanne’s joke makes no sense, bert), a broke single mom forced to self “the diversity network,” sparked by though. The ABC Tuesday-night “black move in with that charismatic bully the success of Shonda Rhimes. (And, and Asian” family sitcoms aren’t “they’re Roseanne. But, if that were so, we might maybe, by the presence of President just like us!” stories: to the contrary, understand Darlene’s politics, too. We’d Obama.) “Black-ish” is the first black they’re downright gonzo in their cul- more fully feel her pain and also that network family sitcom since 2006, when tural specificity, spiked with in-jokes. of her two kids, transplanted to a place “The Bernie Mac Show” ended its run Ironically, these are the shows that they find foreign and unwelcoming. on Fox. “Fresh Of the Boat” is the first most directly carry on the legacy of Instead, Roseanne’s cackling drowns Asian-family show in history, not count- the original, deeply autobiographical these stories out—that’s what star power ing “All-American Girl,” in 1994, which “Roseanne,” which was a truth serum is. In the third episode, Darlene’s daugh- ended after one season. They’re frag- in a medium devoted to reassuring ter, Harris (Emma Kenney), hogs the ile phenomena. After the success of lies. Kenya Barris’s “black-ish” is just dryer. She has her reasons, we learn: Lear and then of Bill Cosby, there were as personal, and, often, as unsettling, she is so desperate to go back to Chi- brief, exciting vogues for “ethnic com- a show: it’s a raucous series about a cago that she’s dealing shoplifted cloth- edy.” But, year by year, those shows got class-hopping African-American dad ing. But we’re encouraged to see her gentrified of the comedy block, from uncomfortable in his bougie family, a through her grandmother’s eyes, as a NBC to Fox to the WB, UPN, BET. story drawn from its creator’s life. “Fresh spoiled urban brat. When Roseanne That’s how change often works in mass Of the Boat,” whose showrunner is the calls Harris “an entitled little bitch,” culture: in waves that recede. Persian-American Nahnatchka Khan, Harris calls her “a stupid old hillbilly.” The other thing Roseanne doesn’t is a dizzy retro experiment adapted Then Roseanne tricks her granddaugh- mention is that there are two other ABC from Eddie Huang’s memoir about a ter into cleaning a plate, and, when she sitcoms about families “just like them”: hip-hop-obsessed child of Taiwanese does, Roseanne shoves Harris’s head “The Middle” (which also airs on Tues- immigrant strivers. Both shows mine into the sink, hard, then sprays her, say- day) and “Speechless.” Both shows, like their best comedy from diference, not ing, “Welcome to the hillbilly day spa.” “Roseanne,” portray white lower-middle- sameness: Asian immigrants who take The crowd goes wild. It’s Boomers class couples, weighed down by credit- pride in the gulf between them and versus Gen Y—catharsis with a pro- card debt and living with disabled fam- their neighbors; a black man so anx- wrestling jolt. (In between conspiracy ily members in messy homes they can’t ious about a white neighbor knowing theories, Roseanne tweeted “watch how aford to fix. “The Middle” is currently he can’t swim that he nearly drowns. On I handle her and her very liberal limping toward its series finale, but it both shows, family love, however relat- mother!”) But would a Chicago teen- spent eight seasons delivering a smart, able, doesn’t exist in a political vacuum. ager call her MA4A grandma a “hill- salty portrait of blue-collar life in In- As Dre Johnson and Jessica Huang billy,” musty slang from another era? diana. Roseanne and Dan aren’t watch- continually warn their children, you No way: she’d call her a bigot, an ass- ing “The Middle,” however. They don’t can’t understand who you are unless hole, or maybe, if things got heated, a make a meta-joke about how it was cre- you know your history. That probably slur with its own nasty history, “white ated by two writers who worked on the goes for sitcoms, too. trash.” That might make it an uglier original “Roseanne.” “The Middle” can’t confrontation, for sure. But a fair fight exist if “Roseanne” wants to strike that fter the new “Roseanne” débuted, 1is one that reveals the truth.  primal chord of white resentment: that Ato impressive numbers, Trump— more (or any!) black or brown faces notorious for lying about the ratings Headline in the Portola (Calif.) Reporter. mean less room for white people. This of “The Apprentice”—called Barr to MARIJUANA ERADICATION CALLS useful amnesia is also what enabled congratulate her. But, in “Roseanne”’s FOR JOINT HELP ABC to use the slogan “A Family That case, the ratings were real, which made Better rolling technique might help the cause, Looks Like Us” when selling “Rose- sense: aside from nostalgia, there’s a experts say.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 85 attracted to Billy, the quintessential THE THEATRE “bad boy.” A rock star without a band, Billy likes to play the role of the carouser. He’s detached and footloose. Trying to MAGIC WAND catch him is like trying to catch a cloud. Julie, when she meets him, is not yet The dark fantasies of “Carousel.” fully an adult and thus doesn’t know what to be afraid of. She’s a post- BY HILTON ALS adolescent creature longing to have the experiences of a woman. It’s summer- time, and the sky is as dark and purple as a plum. The stars pulsate like fireflies, and when Julie looks at Billy you can see sparks light up in her body: her attraction is based on his looks and his tough manner, plain and not so simple. Julie and her friend Carrie Pipper- idge (Lindsay Mendez, a great new star) work at a factory not far from the fairgrounds, and, when they agree to meet Billy away from the carrousel, Carrie fears that there’ll be trouble. The friends live in a boarding house attached to the factory, and if they miss curfew they’ll be out of a job. But Julie is willing to sacrifice everything for her guy, who may never truly be her guy. Her ardor becomes even stronger after the First Policeman (Antoine L. Smith) warns her that Billy uses women for money. The factory owner, Mr. Bas- combe (William Youmans), ofers to give the girls a ride home, but Julie stays behind, knowing that she’ll lose her job for a man who is, at best, uneasy with intimacy. In 1957, George Balanchine cast the young black dancer Arthur Mitchell in “Agon,” the choreographer’s astounding collaboration with Igor Stravinsky. “ arousel,” the 1945 musical by Billy Bigelow ( Joshua Henry) arrives Mitchell’s partner for one of the pas CRodgers and Hammerstein (in in a small town on the New England de deux was a white ballerina, Diana revival at the Imperial, under the di- coast, he brings with him chaos and Adams. Writing about the event, the rection of Jack O’Brien), is a kind of sex appeal. He’s a beautiful man, with always practical but startling dance critic intimate extravaganza, packed with so a back as straight as a board, a wide Edwin Denby noted, “The fact that many ideas about the body, gender roles, chest, and powerful arms, who is hired Miss Adams is white and Mr. Mitch- premarital coupling, and fear of close- as a carrousel barker at the town fair. ell Negro is neither stressed nor hidden; ness that at times its force and clum- Billy’s boss, the vulgar and mercenary it adds to the interest.” Their coupling, siness weigh on you like another body, crone Mrs. Mullin (Margaret Colin), he noted, was a kind of “novel harmony.” one that’s not necessarily harmful, just couldn’t give two figs for the happiness Jack O’Brien’s direction of Henry, who a little woozy and didactic, demanding her joy machine gives to the commu- is black, and Mueller, who is white, is that you get how it “feels.” The two- nity: her eyes are on the green, and on similarly strong, especially when it comes act spectacle, which runs just under Billy. As the apt Colin plays it, we don’t to the way the couple communicate their three hours, is about the fantasy of love, know if Billy’s been sleeping with her desire: as if it were no big deal, even as and how it gets even hotter when it’s or not; what’s clear is that she’s irri- you wait for it to be a very big deal. interrupted or shattered by lawlessness tated when a local girl named Julie O’Brien does something few white male or death. When the New York-born Jordan ( Jessie Mueller) finds herself directors have managed to do, and that is to make his characters’ racial difer- The show is packed with ideas about the body, gender, sex, and power dynamics. ence integral to the story without al-

86 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI lowing it to overwhelm equally impor- dream of love bracketed by rejection: ghost of his power than do without it tant elements, like sex and the power BILL: If I loved you. altogether. dynamics that kick in for some folks JULIE: But you don’t. O’Brien is especially good at teasing when their motors get jump-started. BILL: No, I don’t. out the ways in which women reveal Color-blind casting in which black ac- But somehow I can see just exactly how their sexuality in their closed, largely tors are dropped into white roles in I’d be . . . segregated environment. Returning from (sings) If I loved you. established theatre works is rarely suc- Time and again I would try to say a trip to New York, where she encoun- cessful: little thought is given to the All I’d want you to know. tered some showgirls, Carrie talks about characters’ history or to the way other If I loved you, how provocative and exciting they were. characters might react to how diferent Words wouldn’t come in an easy way. And though Carrie is supposed to be they look. But Henry isn’t an anomaly, Round in circles I’d go. the opposite of Julie’s older and wiser Longin’ to tell you but afraid and shy, here to make a statement outside of the I’d let my golden chances pass me by. cousin, Nettie Fowler (Renée Fleming), text; Billy comes from the less segre- with whom the young couple are living, gated world of New York City, and his you get the sense that Nettie has also racial diference feels plausible. Casting “ arousel” premièred two years after seen a thing or two. Like Aunt Eller in a black performer as the First Police- CRodgers and Hammerstein’s first “Oklahoma!,” she is a square -shouldered man as well was a brilliant stroke. The collaboration, “Oklahoma!,” changed character; no flies settle on her, not even way the First Policeman relates to Billy everything by giving America a mood- the young lovers’ roiling emotions and gives their scenes a new depth: is he an filled show that it could dance to. (Like hot tempers. Unfortunately, Fleming, Uncle Tom, currying favor with the “Carousel,” “Oklahoma!” relieved Amer- the famous soprano, is no actress. The white power base he polices the town ica of the burden of being portrayed, night I saw the show, she could barely for, or does he truly despise Billy’s shady generally, as optimistic.) In “Oklahoma!,” control her desire to look out at the au- ways? It may be both, since Billy is shady. a farm girl can’t understand her feelings dience whenever she talked, let alone We never find out much about him or for a brutish hired hand who works her sang, as though she were in the middle his background, as he dodges being family’s land. During a dream sequence, of a recital. The choreographer, Justin known and, to some degree, cherished, she fantasizes that she’s been treated Peck, does a credible job of keeping her held: to be vulnerable would be death. roughly by him, and that his world is and the rest of the cast moving, but oc- Julie’s lust, focussed and not wanton, in- populated by wicked women—will she casionally his work seems too expres- vents Billy, just as we all invent our lov- be one of them? “Carousel,” which Ham- sive for the stage: it makes the space ers, based on their physical qualities and merstein adapted from “Liliom,” a 1909 look smaller. I couldn’t tell if Henry’s who we want them to be. stage play by the Hungarian author tendency to overstate at times—some- Once Carrie, the First Policeman, Ferenc Molnár, elevates these dark un- thing Mueller avoids; her Julie is all real and Mr. Bascombe have left, Julie dercurrents to the surface. In the sec- bone and sinew—had to do with the and Billy stand on a tree-lined path ond half of the musical, Billy hits Julie— blocking, or with Peck and O’Brien’s near the shore and sing one of the first who is now his wife—and Carrie tells wanting to use him in the “right” way. big numbers in the show, “If I Loved her to leave him. Julie refuses; he’s her And because Henry himself wants to You.” It’s a perfect duet that cuts be- man for good or for ill, mostly ill. Like get it right—he’s working toward between dialogue (Billy: “I don’t need Stanley Kowalski with Stella, the sex- coming a true musical star—he can be you or anyone to help me. I got it ual chemistry is too strong for Julie to too precise in his “anger.” He has a lot figured out for myself ”) and who the give up, and when Billy’s wildness leads riding on this show, and you can feel couple imagine they would be if they to the inevitable—or the inevitable for his ambition to not only make good but loved each other. It’s a complicated a musical—she prefers to live with the be good. And he is. ♦

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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018 87 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three inalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Pia Guerra, must be received by Sunday, April 22nd. The inalists in the April 9th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the inalists in this week’s contest, in the May 7th issue. Anyone age thirteen or older 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 told your parents I would convert.” Catherine Jacobs, New York City

“This is the last time I cover your shift.” “We can take this and transfer to the B.L.T. at Forty-second.” Isabelle Carter, Evanston, Ill. Craig Troyer, Denver, Colo.

“I may not be the hero New York City needs, but I am the hero it deserves.” Scott Campbell, Louisville, Ky. ANDRE IN W D H E A R R U P T E A R

E ’ S

Photo by Andrew Harper Editor

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• Dropped 39 hotels from our collection “ remember, I am not easily impressed. But my first glimpse of Bisate left me breathless“ — both literally and figuratively. Learn more: www.andrewharper.com • 866-831-4314 – Andrew Harper Editor