The New Yorker - 04 November 2013

NOV. 4, 2013PRICE $6.99

2 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2013

13 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

37 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Steve Coll on the Tea Party’s revenge; New York time; Radio Schwartz; journalese; James Surowiecki on Upstart and student debt.

LAUREN Collins 47 FIRE�EATERS

Searching for the hottest chili pepper.

Rebecca Mead 56 JUST�ADD�SUGAR

The Greek-yogurt wars.

B.J. Novak 64 THE�MAN�WHO�INVENTED�THE�CALENDAR

ADAM Gopnik 66 BREAD�AND�WOMEN

A family uprising.

DANA Goodyear 72 BEASTLY�APPETITES

The animals we love too much to eat.

JANE Kramer 82 POST�MODENA

Massimo Bottura takes on Italian tradition.

FICTION THOMAS McGuane 94 “WEIGHT�WATCHERS”

THE CRITICS A�CRITIC�AT�LARGE

ADAM GOPNIK 100 New perspectives on J.F.K.’s assassination.

BOOKS

104 Briefly Noted

THE�ART�WORLD

PETER SCHJELDAHL 108 Christopher Wool at the Guggenheim.

POP�MUSIC

SASHA FRERE-JONES 110 Robin Carolan and Tri Angle Records.

MUSICAL�EVENTS

ALEX ROSS 112 Is Valery Gergiev still a force for good?

DANCING

JOAN ACOCELLA 114 Matthew Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty.”

THE�CURRENT�CINEMA

DAVID DENBY 116 “Dallas Buyers Club.”

Continued on page 6

N O V E M B E R 4 , 2 0 1 3

F�D I�UE


“Our chef specializes in atomic gastronomy.”

TAKEOUT

Akhil Sharma 55 BUTTER

Gabrielle HAMILTON 71 FAMILY�MEAL

LENA DUNHAM 78 DELIVERANCE

Zadie Smith 86 TAKE�IT�OR�LEAVE�IT

Donald Antrim 91 FED

POEMS

Peter Cooley 59 “Company of the Motel Room” Toi Derricotte 74 “Weekend Guests from Chicago, 1945”

ivan brunetti COVER “Fast Food”

DRAWINGS Christopher Weyant, Charles Barsotti, David Sipress, Robert Leighton,

Edward Koren, Amy Hwang, Drew Dernavich, Liana Finck, William Haefeli, Tom Toro,

Edward Steed, Victoria Roberts, Emily Flake, Barbara Smaller SPOTS Florent Tanet

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Committed to using 100% natural ingredients and being 100% delicious.

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Before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, the

diet of the Aztecs and earlier civilizations, such as

the Olmec, Maya, and Toltec, consisted primarily of

corn-based dishes flavored with chilies, herbs, and a

host of ingredients still associated with Mexican

cooking: beans, tomatoes, nopal or prickly pear,

chocolate, squash, peanuts, papaya, avocado, fowl,

and small game. Ever-abundant fish and domesti-

cated goat were also early staples upon which

many classic pre-Columbian dishes were based.

The new tastes introduced by the Spanish didn’t

change Mexican cuisine so much as expand its

range. By the second decade of the 16th century,

the Mexican diet had grown to encompass such Eu-

ropean imports as chicken, pork, beef, rice, and po-

tatoes, which, when combined with indigenous

techniques and spices, formed the basis of tradi-

tional Mexican cooking that the world knows today.

From fundamental ingredients to the most complex

regional dishes, the flavors of Mexico tell rich, fas-

cinating stories. Your tasting tour begins here.

AGAVE

Also known as maguey, agave was a major food

source for indigenous tribes in Mexico’s western

highlands long before the Spanish transformed it

into Mexico’s most famous spirit, tequila. The heart

of the agave plant, called the piña, is also the source

of tequila’s lesser-known cousin, mezcal.

CHOCOLATE

Now among the world’s most beloved indulgences,

chocolate, harvested from the tropical cacao tree,

has been under continuous cultivation for more

than 3,000 years. Xocoatl, an ancient, frothy pre-

cursor to our hot cocoa—made from cacao seeds,

vanilla, and other ingredients—was a staple for

many Mesoamerican cultures, including the Aztecs.

This page, clockwise

from top: open-air

market offerings in

Mexico City; the base

of the agave plant; a

basket full of cayenne

peppers; black bean

salsa with corn tortilla

chips in foreground.

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THE FLAVORS OF

MEXICOEven in Mexico, there is surprisingly little consensus

about which foods are “authentically” Mexican.

Each region, and even many regional capitals,

nurtures a deep affection for its particular cook-

ing traditions and the many centuries of history

that they reflect. Mexico’s culinary heritage is

evident in a wild fusion of ingredients and tech-

niques pioneered by nomadic tribes, European

conquerors, and the builders and inhabitants of

its earliest civilizations.

This page, clockwise from

top: cochinita pibil served

over banana leaf; an art-

fully stacked combination

of shrimp and ceviche;

classic chicken tortilla

soup; and an enchilada

served with mole negro.


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COCHINITA PIBIL

Also known as puerco pibil, this Maya-derived

slow-roasted pork dish hails from Yucatán. The

Mayan word pibil means buried, referring to the

fire pit in which the dish was traditionally pre-

pared. The pork is marinated in a strongly acidic

citrus juice, colored and flavored with annatto

(achiote) seed, and cooked slowly while wrapped

in banana leaves.

HUITLACOCHE

Often referred to as corn mushroom, corn fungus,

or Mexican truffle, huitlacoche is a common ingre-

dient in many dishes of eastern Mexico, including

calabacitas, a variation on succotash. On the Riv-

iera Maya, south of Cancún, sautéed huitlacoche

can be enjoyed in quesadillas and omelettes.

JAMAICA

The bright red petals of the jamaica flower, more

commonly known as hibiscus, are the basis for

agua de jamaica, a cold drink served throughout

Mexico. Jamaica is high in vitamins and minerals

and possesses greater antioxidant properties

than either cranberry or pomegranate.

MAIZE

Of the so-called Three Sisters of Native American

cooking—maize (corn), squash, and beans—maize

is by far the eldest, having been cultivated for

millennia by tribes throughout Mexico. The dough

made from hominy (dried maize) is used to prepare

corn tortillas, the basis of innumerable regional

dishes—from tamales in the north and enchiladas

in the central valley to gorditas in the south.

MOLE

The southern states of Puebla, Oaxaca, and Tlaxcala

all claim to be the originators of mole, a sauce found

in many varieties of Mexican cuisine. Two or more

types of chili pepper, including chipotle, ancho, pasilla,

and chihualce, are used in mole preparation. Silky

red mole poblano from Puebla and the darker mole

negro popular in Oaxaca typically include more than

20 ingredients—such as chocolate, pecans, crushed

seeds, and an assortment of spices—which give the

sauces their signature texture and depth.

PILONCILLO

Smoky, caramel-colored piloncillo is an unrefined

form of sugar cane that has been crushed, boiled,

and poured into molds where it hardens into cone-

shaped blocks. It is a favored ingredient in many

Mexican desserts, including capirotada, a type of

bread pudding, and champurrado, a thickened

version of hot chocolate.

PIPIAN

A classic pumpkin-seed sauce, pipian, common to

the western Yucatán, can be found in rojo (red) or

verde (green) varieties. Served with seared and

roasted meats, over enchiladas, or on chicken,

shrimp, and salmon, it is spiced with garlic, cilantro,

onion, and hot peppers.

Feed your appetite and explore all the regions

of Mexico. Go to visitmexico.com.

CONTRIBUTORS

dana goodyear (“beastly appetites,” p. 72) lives in Los Angeles. Her new book, “Anything That Moves,” comes out in November.

lauren Collins (the talk of the town, p. 41; “fire-eaters,” p. 47) is a staff writer.

akhil sharma (“butter,” p. 55) will publish “Family Life,” a novel, in April.

rebecca mead (“just add sugar,” p. 56) is the author of “My Life in Middle-march,” which comes out in January.

B.J. NOVAK (shouts & Murmurs, p. 64), a writer and an actor, will publish “One More Thing,” a collection of stories, in February.

adam gopnik (“bread and women,” p. 66; a critic at large, p. 100) is the author of “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.”

gabrielle Hamilton (“family meal,” p. 71), the chef and owner of the restaurant Prune, is the author of “Blood, Bones, and Butter.”

lena Dunham (“deliverance,” p. 78) is a writer, filmmaker, and actor. A new sea-son of her show, “Girls,” begins on January 12th, on HBO.

jane kramer (“post-modena,” p. 82) has been writing for the magazine since 1964. Her books include “Europeans” and “The Politics of Memory.”

zadie smith (“take it or leave it,” p. 86) has written four novels, including “NW.”

donald antrim (“Fed,” p. 91) is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

IVAN BRUNETTI (cover; Illustrations, pp. 55, 71, 78, 86, 91), an illustrator and a cartoonist, published “Aesthetics: A Memoir” in May.

WWW . N E W YO R K E R . C O M

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GOINGS ON

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CARTOONS

A slide show of drawings from the

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PODCASTS

The New Yorker Out Loud: Dana Goodyear and Lauren Collins talk with

Sasha Weiss about adventurous eating. Plus, the Political Scene podcast.

COMMENT

News analysis by George Packer,

Jeffrey Toobin, and others.

POP MUSIC

Sasha Frere-Jones on five tracks from Tri Angle Records.

INFOGRAPHIC

Measuring the pungency of the world’s hottest

chilis.

ART

Works from the Guggenheim’s

Christopher Wool retrospective.

POETRY

Peter Cooley reads his new poem.

FILM

Richard Brody on his DVD of the Week, “Modesty Blaise,”

from 1966.

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THE MAIL

FOUNDING MYTHS

Ari Shavit’s courageous article detail-ing the expulsion of the Palestinians deserves to be commended (“Lydda, 1948,” October 21st). I am an Ameri-can Jew working for a Muslim civil-rights and advocacy organization, and, in my three decades observing Jewish-Muslim dialogue and Israeli-Palestin-ian reconciliation efforts, I have con-cluded that national and religious self-criticism is at the heart of peace-making. Since 9/11, Muslim organiza-tions, religious leaders, and scholars have condemned extremist violence committed in the name of Islam, al-though this has been largely unre-ported. Jews must face the bitter his-torical truth: as Shavit points out, Israel’s birth was accompanied by the Jews’ destruction of another people. As in post-apartheid South Africa, the acknowledgment of past crimes can open a door to a more peaceful future. The values of justice, mercy, and com-passion in both Islam and Judaism can help smooth the difficult road to rec-onciliation. Although Shavit’s tone is one of sadness, my daily interactions with Muslims leave me feeling ever hopeful.Jacob BenderExecutive Director, Philadelphia Chapter, Council on American Islamic RelationsPhiladelphia, Pa.

In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which ended in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a number of Is-raeli soldiers published memoirs of the war, expressing ambivalence about what they had participated in. In particular, they agonized over the misery they had brought upon thousands of Palestinian civilians. In Israel, this genre was quickly mocked as “shoot ing and weeping.” Shavit elevates the genre to new heights of cynicism. Writhing with sympathy for the Palestinian victims of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Lydda, Shavit ends up shamelessly justifying the act. If he were a Serbian national expressing

equivalent views about atrocities com-mitted during the Yugoslav wars, he would be considered an apologist for ethnic cleansing. Perhaps because Israeli Jews enjoy a sort of immunity as “eternal victims,” Shavit was able to indulge in this exercise of “ethnically cleansing and weeping.” It adds insult to the injury suffered by the people of Lydda.Shlomi SegallAssociate Professor, Department of Political ScienceHebrew University Jerusalem, Israel Writing history is, in part, an accounting of facts, but it is also a documentation of perceptions and values. Shavit’s descrip-tion of the Israeli massacre and the expul-sion of Palestinians unravels essential truths about the deep conflict that persists between Israelis and Palestinians. “Forty-five years after Zionism came into the valley in the name of the homeless, it sent out of the Lydda Valley a column of homeless,” he writes. These are the facts, eloquently put. Shavit also reveals his own values, which belie the fine-tuned logic that characterizes the rest of his piece. They are values that could be ex-pressed only by the victor. “The Jewish state cannot let them return,” he writes of those who were forcibly removed from Lydda. “Israel has a right to live, and if Is-rael is to live it cannot resolve the Lydda issue.” If a Jewish State of Israel is to stake a claim to moral legitimacy, it will need to confront its history of violence. Shavit has documented with care and nuance a moving and unsettling example of this history. However, he portrays this event and similar unconscionable acts as strate-gic necessities in the realization of a Jew-ish state. Benjamin H. Bradlow Cape Town, South Africa

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Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters and Web comments may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter or return letters.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GABRIELE STABILE

Minton’s Playhouse, the Harlem jazz club founded in 1938 by the saxophonist Henry Minton, hosted

many of the greats—in the forties, Thelonious Monk appeared regularly, and Dizzy Gillespie jammed

there on Monday “celebrity” nights, along with Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, and Ben Webster. Later, its

popularity waned, and it closed in 1974, before reëmerging, briefly, in 2006. Now, under the patronage

of Richard Parsons, the former head of Citigroup and Time Warner, Minton’s has reopened as an elegant

supper club. Well-heeled jazz lovers can order from a prix-fixe menu that includes sherry she-crab soup

and smoked quail with a giblet cornbread cake, while listening to the house band (two members of

which—Alex Layne, on bass, and Leroy Williams, on drums—are pictured above). Jackets are required.

GOI�G� O� ABOUT T�W�

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2 0 1 3 3 1 S T 1 S T 2 N D 3 R D 4 T H 5 T H3 0 T H

CLASSICAL MUSIC

FOOD & DRINK | DANCE

ABOVE & BEYOND

THE THEATRE | ART

MOVIES | NIGHT LIFE


close quartersThe Calder Quartet brings L.A. style to the Met Museum.

’ into the “post-classical” era: classical musicians of all stripes are reconsidering the repertoire they play, and reimagining the way they play it. And the string quartet—once the focus of connoisseurs, now a sturdy off-road vehicle for sonic exploration—has been at the forefront. In New York, the movement has been personified by Brooklyn Rider, the fun-loving foursome whose smoothly ingratiating style emerges from a combination of new-music, early-music, and world-music influences, in addition to deep classical training. But recently, Brooklyn has had some healthy competition from Los Angeles. In the past several years, the Calder Quartet, four Californians in their early thirties, have matured from energetic upstarts to a first-rate ensemble.

The Hollywood and Angeles String Quartets flourished in Los Angeles, but the art of the quartet has not enjoyed the continuous cultivation there that has been fostered on, say, the Upper West Side. “We were on our own island,” says Andrew Bulbrook, the group’s second violinist and concert m.c. “In L.A., there aren’t string quartets living on every block.”

The group came together in 1998 at U.S.C.’s Thornton School of Music, and its style derives from the four musicians’ common California identity. Feeling distant from tradition, they devoured recordings by the great Amadeus, Emerson, and Alban Berg Quartets, while pursuing close collaborations with such distinguished composers as Christopher Rouse, whose vibrant, sinewy sounds had a palpable influence on the Calders’ development.

The players also have a surprising link to the pop-music

world, occasionally accompanying such high-profile acts as Vampire Weekend (they performed “Cousins” together on the “Tonight Show” with Conan O’Brien) and the National; while it’s obviously an effective marketing tool, it has also helped the musicians to loosen up. “There’s so much theatre in rock performances—there’s not this obsession with avoiding mistakes, like we have in the classical world,” Bulbrook says. “The crazier the situation, the more we grow. Even though we’ve known each other since we were teen-agers, it’s only recently that we’ve been discussing emotions in our rehearsals, seeing our roles as characters in a play.” Their performances glow with Old World elegance, and with the constant sense of structure that the great European groups maintained; the precise intonation that modernist composers demand is delivered with sleek expressive intensity and euphonious tonal blend.

The six quartets of Béla Bartók are an ideal showcase for the Calders’ strengths, in a current series of concerts at the Metropolitan Museum. The initial program, on October 12th, featured Bartók’s First and Fifth Quartets, as well as a fascinating work by a brilliant contemporary Hungarian, Peter Eötvös; the final two concerts continue the adventure. In the first, Bartók’s Third and Fourth Quartets precede a live collaboration with David Longstreth, who will sing arrangements of songs written for his band, Dirty Projectors, in addition to a new work for voice and quartet inspired by Bartók. The Second and Sixth Quartets provide the context for the final show, in which Iva Bittová, the charismatic Czech actress, singer, violinist, and composer, will join the group in arrangements of songs by Janáček and in several of Bartók’s Violin Duos, as well as in music of her own. (Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. 212-570-3949. Nov. 1 and Nov. 22 at 7.)

—Russell Platt

ILLUSTRATION BY JON HAN

cLSical MUSIC

The Art People christies.com/impressionist

PABLO PICASSO (1881–1973)

Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage

oil on canvas

51 1/8 x 76 3/4 in. (130 x 194.8 cm.)

Painted on 15 June–19 September 1963

$25,000,000–35,000,000

Impressionist and Modern Art

Auction: November 5–6

Viewing: October 31– November 5

20 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, NY 10020

Contact

Brooke Lampley

[email protected]

+1 212 636 2050

An artist’s job is to challenge, provoke and

immortalize the age in which they live.

Pablo Picasso is just one of the artists in our

November auctions who changed the course of

art history. We invite you to view masterpieces

by artists including Giacometti, Gris, Bacon,

Fontana, Warhol, Basquiat, Koons and others.

Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage

Pablo Picasso

A SEASON OF MASTERPIECES

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Opera

Metropolitan OperaNico Muhly’s �irst full-scale opera, “Two Boys,” �inally has its U.S. pre-mière after being commissioned six years ago, and it documents a young composer making the transition from wunderkind to seasoned pro. The plot recounts a true-crime incident that took place in the U.K.—the stabbing o� one teen by another after they met in an Internet chat room. The score is smart but facile: Muhly quickly establishes the opera’s anxious mood, with textures that shift uneasily over a handful o� recurring motifs, but the engaging drama o� this police procedural doesn’t compensate for the music’s listlessness and melodic scarcity. Bartlett Sher’s staging, with projections by 59 Productions, eerily conjures the primitive look o� the Internet in the early aughts. Alice Coote, as the �linty detective, and Paul Appleby, in ardent voice as Brian (the older teen), lead the hardworking cast; Andrew Pulver, in the treble role o� the murdered boy, brings pure, tremulous tone and much needed warmth to Act II. David Robertson conducts. (Oct. 30 at 8 and Nov. 2 at 1.)©��Also playing: In Benjamin Britten’s centennial year, the Met revives Tim Albery’s strange, hypnotic production o� the composer’s complex and intimate “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a staging that skillfully walks a �ine line between opera and school pageant, childlike and childish. With standout performances from Iestyn Davies, Elizabeth DeShong, Matthew Rose, and Barry Banks, and a beautiful realization o� the score from the conductor, James Conlon. (Oct. 31 at 7:30. This is the �inal performance.)©��The �inal performance this season o� Bellini’s “Norma,” featuring Sondra Radvanovsky in the powerhouse title role, supported by Kate Aldrich and Aleksandrs Antonenko (a heroic Pollione); Riccardo Frizza conducts. (Nov. 1 at 7:30.)©��A revival o� “Tosca” features the estimable Patricia Racette, Roberto Alagna, and George Gagnidze in the leading roles; Frizza. (Nov. 2 and Nov. 5 at 8.) (Metropolitan Opera House. 212-362-6000.)

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Orchestras and Choruses

New York PhilharmonicAfter making the Los Angeles Philharmonic the most exciting orchestra in America, Esa-Pekka Salonen decided to lead a more balanced life between conducting and composition. One o� the �inest fruits o� the latter pursuit is the Violin Concerto, which the soloist Leila Josefowicz has made her own. It’s the centerpiece o� their upcoming program with our own great orchestra, which also includes music by Ravel (the “Mother Goose” Suite) and Sibelius (the Fifth Symphony)—both Salonen favorites, and in�luences. (Avery Fisher Hall. Oct. 30-31 and

Nov. 5 at 7:30, Nov. 1 at 11 A.M., and Nov. 2 at 8.)©��In addition, the orchestra is giving Salonen another platform—at SubCulture, the new, relaxed venue for music just down the street from (Le) Poisson Rouge. In the �irst “Contact!” concert o� the season (a co-production with the 92nd Street Y), musicians from the Philharmonic will perform �ive Salonen compositions, with the composer on hand to introduce them. (45 Bleecker St. Nov. 4 at 7:30.) (nyphil.org.)

Oratorio Society of New YorkTwo pillars o� the choral repertoire—one sacred, one profane—are the focus o� the storied avocational choir’s next concert: Mozart’s Requiem (thankfully, in the original Süssmayr edition) and Mendelssohn’s seldom heard “Die Erste Walpurgisnacht,” after Goethe. The Met soprano Jennifer Zetlan leads the quartet o� soloists; Kent Tritle conducts. (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800. Nov. 4 at 8.)

White Light Festival: Cleveland OrchestraLincoln Center’s festival on spiritual themes likes intimacy, but this week it thinks big, inviting the grande dame o� American orchestras and its chief, Franz Welser-Möst, to Avery Fisher Hall. The program features Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” (in a string-orchestra version), as well as the composer’s often overlooked Mass in C Major. But the evening begins with a twentieth-century provocation, Messiaen’s fervent “Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine.” The soloists include the pianist Joela Jones, the soprano Luba Orgonášová, and the bass-baritone Ruben Drole, assisted by the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. (212-721-6500. Nov. 4 at 8.)

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Recitals

András Schiff: Bach and BeethovenThe celebrated Hungarian pianist performs the core Germanic repertoire with profound insight, consummate technique, and royal con�idence. He also likes big programs: his �irst concert o� a two-night residency at Carnegie Hall concerns Bach’s Six Partitas; the second pairs the Goldberg Variations with Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations.” (212-247-7800. Oct. 30 and Nov. 5 at 8.)

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center“Great Octets” is the theme o� the Society’s next concert, in which an outstanding assemblage o� strings (including the violist Yura Lee and the cellist Dmitri Atapine) performs works by Spohr, Shostakovich (the sizzling Two Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11), and Enescu (the eloquent

Octet in C Major). (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788. Nov. 1 at 7:30.)

“27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores”Fifteen years ago, Hahn was a violin prodigy o� almost maddening exac-titude; since then she has matured into a �ine and inquisitive artist, making great cases for the music o� Schoenberg and Ives, among many others. Her latest project is a freshly commissioned set o� encores by such varied composers as Valentin Silvestrov, Du Yun, David Lang, Nico Muhly, Tina Davidson, Paul Moravec, David Del Tredici, and Mark-Anthony Turnage. She performs them as part o� a day o� music at the Greenwich House Music School, which also includes performances by TILT Brass and the JACK Quartet, and even com-poser o��ice hours. (46 Barrow St. greenwichhouse.org. Nov. 3 at noon and 4.)

White Light Festival: Hespèrion XXIThe gambist Jordi Savall, comfortably bridging the divide between ancient classical and folk styles, brings his superb early-music group—and his commanding presence—to Alice Tully Hall this week, performing “Cycles o� Life: A Musical Exploration o� the Balkans.” (212-721-6500. Nov. 3 at 5.)

(Le) Poisson Rouge: Roomful of Teeth Last spring, a thirty-year-old graduate student at Princeton named Caroline Shaw became the youngest-ever winner o� the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The winning piece, “Partita,” a rousing post-minimalist mix o� musical styles and vocal techniques, will be performed by the adventurous chamber choir that commissioned it, along with music by Holly Herndon. (158 Bleecker St. lprnyc.com. Nov. 4 at 8.)

New York Festival of Song: “Ned Is Ninety”For some six decades, Ned Rorem has provided, mostly through the realm o� vocal music, a lyrical counterweight to the avowed mod-ernism o� Elliott Carter: music that is lyrical and emotive, but crafted with unsentimental economy and high originality. Now he is ninety years old, and the city’s eminent vocal series is honoring him with a program that blends some o� his gems (such as “Alleluia” and “The Lordly Hudson”) with great songs by such colleagues as Poulenc, Cop-land, Barber, and Theodore Chanler (“These, My Ophelia,” a lulling setting o� Archibald MacLeish that you’ll likely never hear again). The sing-ers are the gifted Kate Lindsey and Andrew Garland. (Merkin Concert Hall. 212-501-3330. Nov. 5 at 8.)

The Front Row

Richard Brody on the

films of Norman Mailer, at

nyr.kr/frontrow.

DVD of the Week

A video discussion of Joseph

Losey’s “Modesty Blaise,”

from 1966, at newyorker.com

and in our digital edition.

ON NEWYORKER.COM

A preview of Schoenberg’s

“Pierrot Lunaire” at the

Metropolitan Museum,

featuring the actress

Barbara Sukowa.

Multimedia extra

A slide show of

Christopher Wool’s paintings

at the Guggenheim, in our

digital edition.

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Between work and family obligations, and her commitment to staying healthy, Alexa

has a lot on her plate. Thankfully, Hyatt helps her keep it all in balance.

Hyatt knows that you are craving more

dining options during your hotel stay—

thoughtfully sourced, carefully prepared

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A SMALL

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HOSPITALITY.Some of you recently reminded us that you

can actually be a little bit hungry. And what

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THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2013 19

Tables for Two

toro85 Tenth Ave. (212-691-2360)

, there’s not much Boston has that New York wants. But ever since Toro, the popular South End tapas restaurant, opened a location on the West Side Highway several weeks ago, New Yorkers can’t seem to get enough. The hundred-and-twenty-seat dining room, which takes reservations, is consistently booked, and the line at the door is long with hopeful walk-ins. Five-thirty may be an unfashionable hour for dinner, but it’s perhaps the best time to eat at Toro, before the crowds swarm into the hangar-like industrial space, outfitted in heavy wood, exposed steel beams, and neat rows of hanging hams. By eight, the acoustics can be deafening (the cranked-up club music doesn’t help), and the servers, friendly but aggressive (hold on tight to your drinks), dart around the room—and up and down the stairs to the basement kitchen—at top speed.

There are no shortcuts to finding something good among the menu’s overwhelming selection of hot, cold, and grilled tapas, plus pinchos (smaller tapas) and paellas. Devilled eggs topped with salty slivers of conserved tuna belly are hard to argue with, and it’s easy to imagine eating ten of the warm Medjool dates, wrapped in jamón serrano and stuffed with Marcona almonds and Cabrales blue cheese, though they come only four to an order. Play-it-safe classics—tortilla española, patatas bravas—are lacklustre. The paella de langostino, with its mess of gummy, over-seasoned rice and measly scattering of lobster chunks and Brussels-sprout leaves, is, at ninety dollars (in a lobster glut!), downright insulting.

Hard-to-find Spanish gooseneck barnacles, which taste like littleneck clams but resemble tiny dinosaur claws, are as fun to look at as they are delicious, and the rooster’s comb in a rustic dish of sautéed mushrooms has a pleasingly fungal texture and delicate poultry flavor. House-aged duck ham, meanwhile, tastes disconcertingly of chlorine, and it’s disappointing to discover that the grilled Catalan sea cucumbers you just paid twenty-seven dollars for amount to a tiny tangle of bland, shredded muscle, drowning in butter. In a city with so much great, affordable food, not to mention transcendent, expensive food, it’s a little hard to understand this uneven newcomer’s appeal. You could chalk it up to buzz—or maybe those people clamoring for tables are actually all homesick Bostonians. On a recent evening, one particularly jovial diner was wearing pants patterned with large, colorful sailboats.

—Hannah Goldfield

Open Mondays through Saturdays for dinner. Pinchos and tapas $6-$50, paellas $30-$90.

BAR TAB The shanty

79 Richardson St., Brooklyn (718-878-3579)Before Prohibition, New York was home to hundreds of breweries and dozens of large-scale distilleries, but the current neo-speakeasy craze celebrates that one decade, in the nineteen-twenties, when gin was made in dirty bathtubs, rather than the preceding centuries of noble craftsmanship. Tom Potter, the co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery, seeks to address the imbalance with his New York Distilling Co., in Williamsburg, where he makes gin and rye in a huge warehouse and serves it in the warm glow of his in-house bar, the Shanty. Its narrow brick interior was once a truck-transmission repair shop, and a large window overlooks the metal vats and oak barrels that now line the factory floor. It feels a bit like after-hours in the manager’s office, where the spoils of grain and age become prized family recipes. The rye needs another year in the aging process, but the gin is ready to go. The 700 Songs Gimlet is a spicy mixture of Navy-strength Perry’s Tot gin (fifty-seven per-cent alcohol), cinnamon, lime, and habanero bitters. In a Martini, they use the company’s floral, slightly less intoxicating Dorothy Parker. Explaining the name, Potter said, “She struck us as the type of person you’d like to have a drink with.” Or maybe four.

—Rob Fischer

FOD & DRINK

PHOTOGRAPH BY GRANT CORNETT

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Tables for Two

city grit38 Prince St. (646-580-5720)

“ ’ ’ ” called Sarah Simmons, the founder of City Grit, which originated as a private dinner club and has evolved into a reservations-only “culinary salon” in Nolita. We were fifty-some-odd strangers gathered in a back room of a defunct Catholic school, now an antique shop packed with weathered tables, mismatched chairs, and assorted bric-a-brac (funky lights, funky cabinets). Simmons, who grew up in North Carolina and was formerly a retail strategist and an avid home cook, hosts dinners made by different chefs several nights a week. That evening, titled Collards and Carbonara, was

Visit citygritnyc.com for scheduled events.

Dinners $45-$95.

BAR TAB mcsorley’s

15 E. 7th St. (212-473-9148)Socially, this East Village saloon has evolved beyond the “Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies” era—women have been welcome since 1970—but the wooden bar, the icebox, and, one suspects, the mood of near-conspiratorial intimacy have changed little since it opened, in 1854. As for the drinks, they have only two: light and dark ale. On a recent weeknight, firemen in dress blues, and one in a kilt, toasted a promotion, bearded musicians discussed a gig, and hoodie-wearing men and women spoke French. The ponytailed server, Gregory de la Haba, knew the regulars’ names (“Take care, Lenny”; “Good to see you, Bud”). “I’ve been coming here since I’m fourteen,” de la Haba said. “My grandfather delivered the coal and the ice for forty years. And my wife, Teresa, became McSorley’s first female bartender, in 1994. That’s how I met her, because her father”—Matthew Maher, who owns McSorley’s—“commissioned me to paint her portrait. We fell in love.” Now they have two sons, and her name is tattooed on his neck. That Saturday, Teresa was washing glasses behind the bar as customers discussed another painter: Banksy, who’d just created a pop-up confessional in the street outside. “He could be here, drinking a beer,” a man said, looking around.

—Sarah Larson


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a little tough, but Brussels sprouts with speck were roasted to peak sweetness in a lovely red casserole. The marrow risotto was one of those genius dishes that makes you wonder why you’ve never seen it before. All this was shared, family style, with a pretty accountant and her app-entrepreneur fiancé at one end of the table, and a banker and his Southern-transplant fashion-publicist girlfriend at the other, all young, all repeat customers. Everyone loved the individual Mason jars layered with whipped salted peanut butter and banana pudding.

Another night, another chef, and there was no getting around eating with your hands. For Butts, Legs, and Sides, Simmons herself prepared an expert bo-ssam feast—crispy-crusted pork shoulder roasted until falling apart, served with fried oysters, kimchi, rice, and a spicy dragon sauce, all to be wrapped in lettuce leaves—followed by a platter of excellent brined, then fried chicken legs and Hoppin’ John fried rice, bright with young ginger, mixed with fluffy scrambled eggs and black-eyed peas.

City Grit is not a secret, or exclusive—anyone can log onto the Web site and pick a dinner. Once you pay, you’re in. After signing up, you might start to receive copious e-mails trying to garner excitement for regional chefs—“’. . .”—and the dinners are often connected to a cookbook publicity tour. But the excitement in that room full of strangers is genuine, and infectious, and you might just hear a story, at the table or in the food, that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

—Shauna Lyon

named after a cookbook by Andrew Ticer and Michael Hudman, the owners of the Memphis restaurant Hog & Hominy. Before even one boiled peanut hit the table, Ticer and Hudman, friends since high school, took the floor, and stumbled charmingly through an unpracticed speech about the roots of their Italian cooking with a Southern, nose-to-tail twist—essentially, “We were inspired by our mawmaws.”

The dishes that followed were more sophisticated: mini duck-ham biscuit sandwiches with hazelnut honey, seared shishito peppers with bits of homemade beef jerky. Short rib with radishes was

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faster than words do. Even a Shakespeare play can be squeezed into a short ballet. Robert Helpmann, the early star of England’s Royal Ballet, made an eighteen-minute “Hamlet”; José Limón’s “Moor’s Pavane” is a twenty-one-minute “Othello.” “The Tempest,” with its fantastic ingredients—a magician, a monster, a sprite, a pair of drunks, a shipwreck, a banquet, a masque—would seem hard to condense into one act. Yet that is what Alexei Ratmansky, the artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre, is doing at this moment. His “Tempest,” forty-six minutes long, and set to music by

to Caliban and Ariel. In a way, they are his two sides. But mostly the center of it is Prospero’s using his magic to achieve his goals and then giving this power away. He renounces.”

Ratmansky says that he wasn’t drawn just by the play. He was interested in certain A.B.T. dancers, notably Herman Cornejo. Cornejo—short, technically impeccable, with an astonishing jump—would have been a natural for Ariel. Again and again he has been assigned such roles: Puck, Cupid, hoppy little guys. Ratmansky cast him as the opposite: the grunting, resentful Caliban. “I didn’t want him to repeat Puck,” the choreographer says. “Caliban is a piece of poetry. He was educated by Prospero, and that didn’t make him happier. I think he loves Miranda. She will go away, and the other people too. He will be left alone on the island. Herman can express this. I know he can.”

The Prospero will be Marcelo Gomes, a big, handsome Brazilian with a modest manner and a gorgeous technique. Like Cornejo, Gomes is the epitome of a certain ballet type—in his case, the prince—and so that is the role he often gets. Ratmansky says that there is something else there, though, “something complex.” And so he gave Gomes the role of the conflicted Prospero. Many choreographers, both good and bad, go in for cross-casting. Still, it is always touching to see, a mark of courage and generosity, a refusal to depend on what they know. Of course, it means the world to the dancers.

—Joan Acocella

Tempest in a TeapotAlexei Ratmansky and the distilling of Shakespeare, at A.B.T.

DANCE

Sibelius, will have its première at A.B.T. on October 30th. To hear him tell it, he hasn’t cut much from the play. “Did you keep the drunks?” I ask. (Drunk scenes often devolve into cliché.) “Yes, they’re still there,” he answers. “Sibelius included music for them.” “The shipwreck?” I ask. “It’ll be there,” he replies, with a note of defiance.

“To make a ballet of ‘The Tempest,’ ” Ratmansky says, “is very big and difficult. But I thought, Maybe we can touch something, a poetic side of it: Prospero’s forgiveness of his brother, Miranda’s love of Ferdinand—young love, very poetic always—and also Prospero’s relationship

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American Ballet TheatreThe company returns to the David H. Koch Theatre—recently vacated by the ill-fated New York City Opera—for the �irst time in almost four decades. The two-week run is composed o� mixed bills, including the unveiling o� a new one-act version o� Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by the resident choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky. The company also revives Twyla Tharp’s virtuosic whirlwind “Bach Partita” (1983), unseen for almost thirty years. Another showstopper is Ratmansky’s “Piano Con-certo No. 1,” set to an early Shostakovich composition. Michel Fokine’s delicate moonlit ode “Les Sylphides” returns after an absence o� several years. The company also presents Mark Morris’s “Gong,” with hints o� South Asian gamelan; Frederick Ashton’s tale o� misguided romance on a Russian estate, “A Month in the Country”; and Balanchine’s distillation o� Russian Imperial classicism “Theme and Variations,” among others. “The Tempest” premières at the opening-night gala, alongside “Theme and Variations” and a pièce d’occasion by one o� the company’s star dancers, Marcelo Gomes. (Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600. Oct. 30 at 6:30. Through Nov. 10.)

Matthew Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty”Bourne’s retelling o� the fairy tale, which keeps Tchaikovsky’s silvered score but tweaks the story, is yet another example o� his �lair for narrative and design. Much o� the tale’s sweetness has been removed, with the action shifted to the more recent past. Aurora, played in the �irst scene by a puppet, is a holy terror; the fairies have names like Feral and Tantrum; the �inal divertissement is set in a night club. Princess Aurora’s sixteenth birthday is celebrated at an elegant Edwardian garden party. (The imaginative sets are by Lez Brotherston.) After her hundred-year slumber, Aurora awakes in modern times. Bourne also mixes up the class hierarchy: the heroine’s true love is not a prince but a sweet-natured gamekeeper. (She’s also intrigued by his alter ego, the pale and

of note Keigwin + Company

Larry Keigwin is a first-rate craftsman and a charmer. The question of

whether he can be more hovers over his company’s tenth-anniversary

season. “Mattress Suite,” a winning series of love stories from 2003, and

“Natural Selection,” a gripping thriller from 2004, recall his great promise.

Two New York premières—the intricate and balletic “Canvas” and “Girls,” an

all-female frolic with Sinatra songs and a sparkly rain curtain—reveal his less

inventive present. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800.

Oct. 29-30 at 7:30, Oct. 31-Nov. 1 at 8, Nov. 2 at 2 and 8, and Nov. 3 at 2.)

passionate Caradoc.) But the moral remains the same: good triumphs over evil. (City Center, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. Oct. 30-31 at 7:30, Nov. 1 at 8, Nov. 2 at 2 and 8, and Nov. 3 at 2.)

Boris Charmatz“Musée de la Danse: Three Collective Gestures,” the French choreographer’s auda-cious three-weekend series at the Museum o� Modern Art, �inishes with “Flip Book,” a curious take on Merce Cunningham’s cho-reography. The three hundred photographs o� Cunningham dances in David Vaughan’s career-spanning book “Fifty Years” are embodied in sequence by seven dancers, including the regal Cunningham veteran Valda Setter�ield. What will the concept animate? (11 W. 53rd St. 212-708-9400. Nov. 1-3 at 3 and 4.)

Gregory MaqomaIn his New York début, the South African choreographer presents “Exit/Exist,” a ritualistic solo that looks to the history inside himself. Evoking an ancestor—a nineteenth-century Xhosa warrior who resisted colonial encroachment—he tells stories through a mix o� contemporary and traditional dance that gains much from the live participation o� the vocal ensemble Complete and the guitarist Giuliano Modarelli. (Kumble Theatre, Long Island University, Flatbush Ave. at DeKalb Ave., Brooklyn. 718-488-1624. Nov. 1-2 at 7:30.)

Savion GloverThe tap master’s latest show, “STePz,” which premièred at the Joyce Theatre in June, makes a one-night-only stop in Brooklyn. Performed to a wide range o� recorded music, it’s a playful production, especially when the dancers are bounding up and down staircases. (Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, 2900 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn. 718-951-4500. Nov. 2 at 8.)

of note Tatyana Tenenbaum / “Private Country”

Tenenbaum, who is both a composer and a choreographer, explores the

merging of movement and sound, and how the performer can embody

the music. Her main instrument is the voice, which, through manipulation,

becomes the source of what she calls “vocal choreography.” Her interest in

the body as an instrument is reminiscent of Meredith Monk’s. Her newest

piece, “Private Country,” is a series of duets. (The Chocolate Factory, 5-49

49th Ave., Long Island City. 866-811-4111. Oct. 30-Nov. 2 at 8.)

AB�VE & B�YO�DNew York’s Village Halloween ParadeIt might be hard for anyone who’s braved the crowds to fathom, but this tradition began when a puppet-and-mask maker, Ralph Lee, was looking for something to do with his children on Halloween. That was in 1974. The parade, which now draws thousands o� participants and supporters, marks its fortieth anniversary this year, an accomplishment made all the more signi�icant after last year’s event was cancelled because o� Hurricane Sandy. The storm, which devastated the lives o� countless New Yorkers, also had a severe impact on the parade’s �inances. After a recent Kickstarter campaign, however, it is roaring back to life. According to the parade’s longtime artistic and producing director, Jeanne Fleming, it’s the best place to “watch every creature imagin-able—whether human, alien or animal—frolic, perform, shake, strut, or shimmy.” (Sixth Ave. from Spring St. to 16th St. Oct. 31, starting at 7. halloween-nyc.com.)

Seamus Heaney TributesHeaney, who has been called the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, died in August, at age seventy-four. A number o� events are planned in his honor. The celebrations commence on Nov. 4 at 7, at the Irish Repertory Theatre, where Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor o� this magazine, hosts a gathering that includes the writer Colum McCann, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, and members o� the theatrical community. (irishrep.org.) Just about every literary organization in the city has a hand in the event at the Great Hall at Cooper Union on Nov. 11 at 7, featuring Frank Bidart, Sven Birkerts, Eavan Boland, Lucie Brock-Broido, Greg Delanty, Jonathan Galassi, Eamon Grennan, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirsh�ield, Yuse� Komunyakaa, Atsuro Riley, Tom Sleigh, Tracy K. Smith, Colm Tóibín, Jean Valentine, Anne Waldman, and Kevin Young. Irish pipes will be played, and Paul Simon will be making a guest appearance. (poets.org.) On Nov. 15 at 8, the actor Gabriel Byrne, the playwright Enda Walsh, and the writers Alice McDermott and Colum McCann join Colette Bryce, Henri Cole, Mark Doty, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Meghan O’Rourke, Elise Paschen, Brenda Shaughnessy, Matthew Sweeney, and many other poets at St. Ann’s Warehouse. (irishartscenter.org.)

AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUESIn the run-up to the big sales o� Impressionist and modern art next week, Sotheby’s o��ers a selection o� prints on Oct. 31-Nov. 1 (including the Chagall gem “Daphnis and Chloe,” com-prising forty-two color lithographs illustrating the myth) and a selling exhibition o� gems by the Place Vendôme jeweler Alexandre Reza, the victim o� a spectacular twenty-one-million-dollar heist in 1994 (through Nov. 13). (York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.)©��Christie’s eases into its week o� big-ticket Impressionist-modern auctions with a two-day o��ering o� works from the collection o� the late Jan Krugier, a distinguished Geneva

art dealer (and a survivor o� Birkenau) and a prime collector o� twentieth-century art in the postwar era (Nov. 4-5). Among the many choice lots in this sale are pieces by Kandinsky (including “Herbstlandschaft,” from the period o� the artist’s transition to abstraction) and Giacometti’s delicate “Femme de Venise I.” The house’s all-important evening sale (Nov. 5) includes a vibrant collage-like composition by Juan Gris, “Guitare sur une Table,” as well as a sensitive, almost tactile portrait o� Diego Giacometti by his brother Alberto. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. 212-636-2000.)

Readings and Talks

“Brooklyn by the Book”Donna Tartt reads from her latest novel, “The Gold�inch,” and discusses her work with the writer Maud Newton. (Congregation Beth Elohim, 274 Gar�ield Pl. brooklynbythebook.com. Oct. 29 at 7:30.)

Barnes & NobleColonel Chris Had�ield, who has spent more than four thousand hours in space, talks with the journalist Miles O’Brien about his

new book, “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything.” (33 E. 17th St. 212-253-0810. Nov. 1 at 7.)

“Gigantic Talk”The literary magazine Gigantic celebrates its �ifth print edition, subtitled “Talk,” with a party featuring readings by the contributors Marie-Helene Bertino, Sparrow, and Anna Wiener; a performance by the rapper Blunt-fang; and a d.j. set from James Yeh and Lincoln Michel, both editors at the magazine. (The Silent Barn, 603 Bushwick Ave., Brooklyn. thegiganticmag.com. Nov. 2 at 7.)

“Live from the NYPL”Lou Reed talks with Paul Holdengräber, the director o� this series, about Edgar Allan Poe at the Morgan Library & Museum, which is currently displaying an exhibition about the writer. (225 Madison Ave., at 36th St. 212-685-0008. Nov. 5 at 7. Note: the exhibit will be open an hour before the talk for ticket holders.)

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with a parent-teacher conference in

an a��luent suburban charter high

school. The cultural-a��airs teacher

(Sharon Washington) is sharing a

troubling discovery with Amy (Marin

Hinkle) about Luce (Okieriete

Onaodowan), a Congolese orphan

and refugee whom Amy adopted at

age seven, who is also the school’s

most promising student and a star

athlete. It turns out that Luce may

be hiding something. We observe

the young man with his parents,

then with his teacher, manipulating,

shading the truth, and straining to

separate himsel� from the world’s

perception o� him. Onaodowan is

terri�ic, presenting a subtle mix o�

appeal and danger, but the play loses

momentum as it piles on themes;

the deceptions within this family

would be drama enough. (Claire

Tow, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.)

Marie AntoinetteMarin Ireland, who reprises her role

as the Queen o� France in David

Adjmi’s pivotal work from last year,

plays the part as a jangle o� familial

expectations, sexual confusion and

self-doubt, cultural alienation,

physical pain, and consumerism.

That the piece, directed by Rebecca

Taichman, amounts to a kind o�

collaboration between Adjmi and

Ireland—she writes in space with

her body as Adjmi’s words �ill the

stage—is one o� the production’s

unexpected pleasures. The language

o� Adjmi’s Marie is modern, and

Adjmi’s brilliance is to use trashy

vernacular speech to allude to the

way history trashes us. Ireland doesn’t

use Marie’s anger as the “reason”

for her unpleasantness; it’s just

another note in Marie’s long song

o� supersonic screeching, the temper

tantrums she throws, because, as a

spoiled and neglected child, she feels

continually forsaken. (Reviewed in

our issue o� 10/28/13.) (SoHo Rep,

46 Walker St. 212-352-3101.)

The Snow GeeseThis genteel drama, set in a country

estate near Syracuse in 1917, is not,

in fact, a long-lost midcentury piece,

dusted o�� for revival by Manhattan

Theatre Club and MCC Theatre,

but a new play, by Sharr White,

written with an ear for mildew.

(“Don’t let’s get lachrymose!”) Mary-

Louise Parker plays a widow who

refuses to accept her late husband’s

pro�ligacy. One son (Evan Jonigkeit)

is o�� to war, and the other (Brian

Cross) begs his mother to see the

red in the family ledger. Despite the

carnage abroad, the play is short on

blood and guts. Its characters are

never pushed to their extremes,

and the style is Ibsen lite. Cross,

in his Broadway début, makes the

strongest impression: the play

could use more o� his inner �ire.

(Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th

St. 212-239-6200.)

A Time to KillA play that condones murder-

ous vigilantism is bad; one that

resorts to tasteless, unjusti�iable

spectacle—in this case, burning

a giant cross onstage (prompting

audience members to check the

location o� �ire exits)—is terrible. In

Rupert Holmes’s adaptation o� John

Grisham’s courtroom drama, Carl Lee

Hailey (John Douglas Thompson)

dresses in combat fatigues, steals

into a Mississippi courthouse, and

murders two handcu��ed men with

a machine gun. We’re supposed to

take his side—not just because the

men he killed allegedly raped his

ten-year-old daughter but because he’s

an otherwise law-abiding black man,

while they and the publicity-seeking

district attorney (Patrick Page) are

Southern white monsters. Under

the uninspired direction o� Ethan

McSweeny, all the actors do their

best to breathe life into these tired

characters and this underdeveloped

script, but, in the end, even they

don’t seem to feel it. (Golden, 252

W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.)

The Winslow BoyIs there anything more we can learn

from Terence Rattigan by now? His

plays can serve a purpose, such as

when Terence Davies adapted the

British writer’s 1952 play, “The

Deep Blue Sea,” for the screen in

2011, and Rachel Weisz gave one

o� the best performances o� her

career. But Rattigan’s work can feel

mired in nostalgia, even when he’s

talking about the modern world. Set

in England during the First World

War, this 1946 drama is about the

lengths to which a father, Arthur

Winslow (Roger Rees), goes to

protect the honor o� his good son’s

name. Young Ronnie Winslow

(Spencer Davis Millford) is sent

away from school for stealing. Did

he or didn’t he? Playing on the

upper class’s interest in propriety,

Rattigan exposes the �ine English

backbone holding up that coun-

try’s sense o� social decorum and

honor—and repression. The family

hires a lawyer, Sir Robert Morton

(Alessandro Nivola), who falls for

Arthur’s feminist-minded daughter,

Catherine (Charlotte Parry). The cast

is uniformly excellent, but it’s Nivola

and Parry who bring a sexy modern

jolt to the proceedings; they play

their respective parts openly and yet

covertly, which is always a turn-on.

(American Airlines Theatre, 227

W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300.)

� ��ATRE

Also Playing

After Midnight

Brooks Atkinson, 256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929.

And Miles to Go

The Wild Project, 195 E. 3rd St. 212-352-3101. Through Nov. 2.

Betrayal

Ethel Barrymore, 243 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200.

The Commons of Pensacola

City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.

Domesticated

Mitzi E. Newhouse, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.

Fun Home

Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.

A Gentleman’s Guide to

Love & Murder

Walter Kerr, 219 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.

The Glass Menagerie

Booth, 222 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.

Good Person of Szechwan


Grasses of a Thousand

Colors


How to Make Friends and

Then Kill Them

Rattlestick, 224 Waverly Pl. 866-811-4111.

The Jacksonian

Acorn, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200.

Little Miss Sunshine

Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.

Macbeth

Vivian Beaumont, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 866-811-4111.

No Man’s Land /

Waiting for Godot

Cort, 138 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.

The Patron Saint of Sea

Monsters

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.

Twelfth Night / Richard III

Belasco, 111 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.

Openings and Previews

The MutilatedMink Stole and Penny Arcade star

in Tennessee Williams’s experimental

play from 1966, about a Texas oil

heiress and cancer survivor and

her tumultuous friendship with a

vagrant prostitute. Cosmin Chivu

directs. Previews begin Nov. 1. (New

Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher St.

888-596-1027.)

NosferatuTR Warszawa and Teatr Narodowy

present this theatre piece written

and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna,

inspired by Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”

Oct. 30-Nov. 2. (BAM’s Harvey

Theatre, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn.

718-636-4100.)

Small Engine RepairMCC presents this play by John Pol-

lono, about a reunion o� high-school

buddies, now in their thirties, at a

car-repair shop, which is interrupted

by a college-aged jock. Directed by

Jo Bonney. Previews begin Oct. 30.

(Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher St.

212-352-3101.)

2

Now Playing

The LandingThe composer John Kander, known

for his decades-long partnership

with the late Fred Ebb (“Cabaret,”

“Chicago,” “The Scottsboro Boys”),

teams up here with Greg Pierce, who

wrote the book and lyrics. Under

the direction o� Walter Bobbie,

they’ve fashioned an intermission-

less evening o� three playlets with

music, performed by a �ine quartet

led by the pianist Paul Masse. A

semi-magical current runs through

the pieces, the �irst and third o�

which, “Andra” and “The Landing,”

succeed with a light, poetic touch.

Unfortunately, “The Brick,” the

middle play—and the longest—is

a ridiculous, brash enterprise that

strives to attain a certain level o�

allegory and falls painfully short.

It very nearly destroys the good

will created by the talented cast,

made up o� Julia Murney, Frankie

Seratch, Paul Anthony Stewart, and,

especially, David Hyde Pierce, who

is unparalleled at wringing honest

humor and emotion from a simple

line. (Vineyard, 108 E. 15th St.

212-353-0303.)

LuceJC Lee’s one-act play, directed by

May Adrales for LCT3, begins

ON NEWYORKER.COM

Sasha Frere-Jones on

Morrissey’s autobiography.

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dispatchesPhotographers confront war, at the Brooklyn Museum.

. That much we know. But it has also inspired some great art, from Goya to Picasso, and some extraordinary and incendiary photographs, from Mathew Brady’s Civil War reportage to recent news images from Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the invention of the daguerreotype, in the mid-nineteenth century, much of what we think we know about war has been based on photographs, even after the advent of film and television. But how a picture is framed, captioned, and distributed can blunt, heighten, or pervert its effect. Are we being informed or manipulated? Reassured or enraged? Is war horrific or a heroic adventure?

“War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” which opens at the Brooklyn Museum on November 8th, approaches the subject from a broad historical and cultural context, presenting war not just as a battlefield or a strike zone but as a process—sometimes a frighteningly open-ended one. The show, which originated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and was organized by its curator of photography, Anne Wilkes Tucker, is structured like a narrative, with a cinematic arc that allows for both climax and digression. The result is at once brutal and humane. Images of conflict are bookended by sections about preparation (recruitment, training) and aftermath (executions,

shell shock, the impact of war on civilians). Each of these sections is organized chronologically, and, as a result, the show flashes forward and backward in time, from Civil War battlefields to D-Day, from Abu Ghraib to Zapata, and from Churchill to Elvis in uniform.

Some of the photographers (including August Sander, Cecil Beaton, Margaret Bourke-White, Weegee, and Susan Meiselas) are famous names, but most are less known photojournalists. None of the images feel incidental, and many are hard to look at. “War/Photography” is deliberately tough and unflinching when it comes to depicting injury and death. Two of the most powerful pictures were taken after the fighting was over: a Lee Miller photograph of a bloodied, terrified S.S. guard at Buchenwald who’d been beaten by his liberated prisoners and a Richard Avedon portrait of a Vietnamese woman whose face was blackened and disfigured by napalm.

By looking beyond the fighting and dying to the retribution, the refugees, the wounded, and the children, “War/Photography” makes it clear that, for many, war never really ends. In the show’s massive and essential catalogue, David Leeson, an American photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking-news photography for his work in Iraq, says, “At the height of my career covering conflicts, I truly believed . . . that there existed a series of photographs, or a single photograph, that could end war. I wanted to find that one photo.”

—Vince Aletti

Boys at play in the Shiite

Muslim suburb of Sadr City,

Iraq, photographed in 2008,

by Yuri Kozyrev.

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Museums short list

Metropolitan Museum

Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Silla:

Korea’s Golden Kingdom.” Opens Nov. 4.

Museum of Modern Art

11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“Magritte:

The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938.”

Through Jan. 12.

MOMA PS1

22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens (718-784-2084)—

“Mike Kelley.” Through Feb. 2.

Guggenheim Museum

Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500)—

“Christopher Wool.” Through Jan. 22.

Whitney Museum of American Art

Madison Ave. at 75th St. (212-570-3600)—

“Rituals of Rented Island: Object The-

ater, Loft Performance, and the New

Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970-1980.”

Opens Oct. 31.

Brooklyn Museum

200 Eastern Parkway (718-638-5000)—

“The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier:

From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.”

Through Feb. 23.

American Museum of Natural

History

Central Park W. at 79th St. (212-769-5100)—

“The Butterfly Conservatory.” Through

May 26.

Frick Collection

1 E. 70th St. (212-288-0700)—“Vermeer,

Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of

Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis.”

Through Jan. 19.

International Center of

Photography

1133 Sixth Ave., at 43rd St. (212-857-0000)—

“Zoe Strauss: 10 Years.” Through Jan. 19.

New-York Historical Society

170 Central Park W., at 77th St. (212-873-

3400)—“Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age

Portraits in America.” Through March 9.

Galleries short list

Uptown

Ilya and Emilia KabakovPace

32 E. 57th St. 212-421-3292.

Opens Nov. 2.

“Surrealism and the Rue Blomet”Eykyn Maclean

23 E. 67th St. 212-772-9425.

Opens Nov. 1.

Chelsea

Richard SerraGagosian

555 W. 24th St. 212-741-1111;

522 W. 21st St. 212-741-1717.

Both shows through Jan. 25.

Thomas DemandMarks

526 W. 22nd St. 212-243-0200.

Opens Nov. 2.

Museums and Libraries

International Center of Photography“Lewis Hine”In the early twentieth century, Hine documented immigrants, workers, and the urban poor in photographs that were recognized as art only after they’d proved their power as propaganda. Even i� you don’t know his name, you’ve seen his pictures, many o� which—such as the muscular mechanic bent before the circular valve o� a steam pump—have become icons o� American modernism, as well as agents o� social change. Begin-ning with soulful portraits o� new arrivals at Ellis Island in 1905, this careful survey includes Hines’s great muckraking exposés o� the conditions in New York tenements and the use o� child laborers, as well as his less familiar photographs o� Europe in 1918 and American factory workers under the New Deal. It peaks with photographs o� construction work-ers putting up the Empire State Building, many o� them perched precariously high above the city, in a celebration o� heroic labor that only the Russian avant-garde could match. Through Jan. 19.

New-York Historical Society“The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution”Imagine Art Basel Miami Beach crossed with “The Rite o� Spring” and you’ll be somewhere near the convulsive, bourgeois-shocking 1913 International Exhibition o� Modern Art, which brought the European avant-garde to Lexington Avenue. This invaluable centennial reconstitution gathers more than a hundred art works from that show (there were fourteen hundred in all), contrasting American realism and Impressionism-lite with the hottest experiments from France. “Nude Descending a Staircase” is here from Philly, alongside work by Marcel Duchamp’s two brothers and by Francis Picabia, whom the Times called “the Cuban who outcubed the Cubists.” Yet while Duchamp made traditionalists sco��, the real anger was reserved for the Fauves, whose primitivism �lew in the face o� Ameri-can ideals o� progress. Art students burned a copy o� Matisse’s “Blue Nude”; luckily, the original survived, and it’s as perilously forthright here as it must have been in Woodrow Wilson’s day. Through Feb. 23.

2

Galleries—Uptown

Edward BurtynskyFollowing series on factories in China, ship-breaking in Bangladesh, and North American mining, the proli�ic Canadian photographer embarked on an ambitious project about the developed and the developing worlds’ relationship to water. In the bigger o� two simultaneous (and occasionally overlapping) gallery shows (the other is at Bryce Wolkowitz in Chelsea),

large-scale color pictures o� melting glaciers, polluted rivers, irrigation projects, �ish farms, beach resorts, and dams from India to Iceland give some sense o� the project’s broad range. There are a slew o� photographic precedents for Burtynsky’s detailed aerial views (Emmet Gowin, David Maisel), but his dogged, reportorial approach does yield some astonishing results. Through Nov. 2. (Greenberg, 41 E. 57th St. 212-334-0010.)

2

Galleries—Chelsea

Sophie CalleThe French conceptualist has made a career o� channelling emotional calamity into art. Most o� the works in this a��ecting show are part o� Calle’s ongoing project o� mourning her mother, Rachel Monique, who died in 2006. There are photographs o� gravestones, long lace curtains embroidered with Monique’s last word—“Souci,” or “worry”—and documentation o� the artist’s 2009 journey, by boat, to the North Pole, where she buried her mother’s portrait, diamond ring, and Chanel necklace in a glacier. Calle is a��ec-tionate, even adoring in her recollec-tions, but sentiment is tempered by quirk: as a stand-in for maman, she bought a taxidermy gira��e, named it Monique, and mounted it on the wall o� her Paris studio. Through Nov. 16. (Cooper, 534 W. 21st St. 212-255-1105.)

Hiroyuki HamadaThe pale, geometric abstractions o� this Tokyo-born, Hamptons-resident sculptor are sparingly detailed, but restraint only ampli�ies their power. After Hamada casts his solid forms in resin (or, less frequently, in plaster), he paints the o��-white surfaces with elegant pinstripes or orthogonal marks, sometimes leaving indentations that evoke human labor. In most o� the beguiling works here, two or three simple shapes have been grafted atop one other; one wall-mounted ellipsoid bulges at its center into a cone that suggests a bird’s beak. The largest and strangest piece is an asymmetric agglomeration o�

curve-edged prisms, whose surface o� rectangles and lines could be a map o� nowhere. Through Nov. 9. (Bookstein, 138 Tenth Ave., at 18th St. 212-750-0949.)

Arlene ShechetThis unbridled show—grotesque, hilarious, lovely—makes the stron-gest case for the exaltation o� clay since the recent Ken Price survey at the Met. Fourteen works in glazed ceramic stand on all manner o� bases, from steel to concrete to split wood. In “Idle Idol,” a tangle o� robin’s-egg-blue coils rests, Medusa-like, atop a collapsing, gangrenous ovoid. “Stories,” a ghost-pale tower covered with wobbly boxes, is equal parts termite mound, scholar’s rock, and post-modernist high-rise. A terra-cotta-colored blob sprout-ing four stubby appendages looks upended, as i� it had slipped on a banana peel. The show is crowded and the works can feel overwrought; it seems Shechet has never said no to an experiment. But at her best—in control o� color and sur-face, while embracing the foibles o� chance—she perfects a kind o� wild-style wabi-sabi. Through Nov. 16. (Sikkema Jenkins, 530 W. 22nd St. 212-929-2262.)

Iké UdéThe Nigerian-born, New York-based photographer shows big, elaborately staged and costumed self-portraits from a series he calls “Sartorial Anar-chy.” Working within the conventions o� the old-fashioned studio portrait (but with nods to Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura), Udé poses in out�its and wigs that combine many di��erent cultures, styles, and periods, all carefully annotated in the captions. In one inspired mashup, he wears an embroidered coat from Afghanistan over an American Boy Scout shirt, Matsuda breeches, and Italian soccer socks. Exaggerated hairdos send several images way over the top, but his comic excesses always have a shrewd edge. Through Nov. 9. (Leila Heller, 568 W. 25th St. 212-249-7695.)

“At Zenith XIII” (1979-2013),

by William Eggleston, at the

Gagosian gallery. CO

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Now Playing

AftermathThis drama, directed by Wladyslaw Pasikowski, is a �ictionalization o� the recent discovery that the Jews o� the Polish town o� Jedwabne in 1941 were not deported by the occupying German forces but massacred by their Polish neighbors. The story is set in the nineteen-nineties, when Franciszek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop), who had been living in Chicago for twenty years, returns to his native village to visit his younger brother, Józe� (Maciej Stuhr), a farmer abandoned by his wife and the object o� his neighbors’ hatred. Franciszek learns that he has brought those troubles on himsel� by digging up roads and rooting through barns to remove and preserve desecrated gravestones from the Jewish cemetery. Teaming up to dig through archives and talk with village elders, the brothers uncover bitter truths about their town—and their family. Pasikowski’s devotion to the controversial subject is honorable but his

��VIES

and Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” But Chandor’s conception is unimaginable as anything but a movie. It’s virtually wordless, soberly spectacular, and vast and intimate at the same time, with a commitment to detailed physical reality that commands amazed atten-tion for a tight hundred minutes. Redford, now seventy-seven, is in great shape, and the planes o� his face—cheekbones, jawline, fore-head—have held up. The shell is wrinkled, but the strength o� character comes through, and he does more acting in this �ilm than he has done in all his earlier ones put together.—David Denby (Reviewed in our issue o� 10/21/13.) (In wide release.)

Blue Is the Warmest ColorThree hours o� love, sex, and food, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the director Abdellati� Kechiche and his two main performers. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high-school student in Lille, is always ravenous, often blushing, and unsure about the hungers o� her heart. After a couple o� early misses, she �inds hersel� drawn, or helplessly pulled, toward Emma (Léa Seydoux), who is in her fourth year o� art school—older and wiser, you might think, although it is Adèle who lusts and su��ers her way into a more lasting wisdom. The camera studies the women’s faces with unstinting devotion, and they repay that curiosity, through �lirtation and fracas, as we follow Adèle’s fortunes over many years. The movie has gained a certain notoriety for its unabashed view o� her sexual encounters; those desires, however, are not set apart like islands, but folded into the landscape o� her life, more o� which is probably spent in the classroom and the kitchen than in the bedroom. Three hours, in short, is only just enough. We are left wanting more. In French.—Anthony Lane (10/28/13) (In limited release.)

Captain PhillipsPaul Greengrass, the director o� “United 93” and two chapters from the peaceful life o� Jason Bourne, brings us yet another exercise in almost intolerable tension. Tom Hanks plays the title character—the captain o� a massive cargo ship, bound for Kenya, that is boarded by Somali pirates. They take the crew hostage and demand a ransom; in response, American warships and special forces are dispatched to regain the vessel and deliver Phillips from the hands o� his enemies. (The story is based on real events from 2009.) The movie works for two reasons, which tug against each other and add to its exhausting appeal. First, the Green-grass manner—quivering and quick, darting between details but determined to keep hold o� a clear narrative line—is in �ine working order. And, second, Hanks proves himsel� to be in full command o� being lost at sea. His gray-bearded character is resourceful but anxious, and also (unusually for Hanks) not especially warm; despite all the trimmings o� a thriller, this sense o� a naturally unheroic hero takes us far from the land o� Bourne. With Barkhad Abdi, relaxed but menacing, as the pirate chief.—A.L. (10/14/13) (In wide release.)

CarrieThe director Kimberly Peirce’s take on Ste-phen King’s novel outdoes Brian De Palma’s 1976 version in several key respects. In the title role, Chloë Grace Moretz conveys an

taste is execrable; blandly e��icient glossiness gives way to ludicrous histrionics, culminating in a gesture borrowed from Claude Lanzmann’s documentary about the Sobibor uprising. What seems clearly intended as homage comes out as pastiche. In Polish.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)

All Is LostA lonely yachtsman (Robert Redford), sailing the Indian Ocean, is asleep in his cabin when the absurd breaks into his life: a �loating steel shipping container, apparently having slipped o�� the deck o� some passing freighter, bashes a hole in the side o� his craft. The boat then gets assailed by weather and every kind o� misfortune; Redford (whose character has no name), struggling to survive, grows increas-ingly battered and hungry. This remarkably radical experiment by the writer-director J. C. Chandor (“Margin Call”) echoes such literary classics as Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”

Preview: November 8, 10-6; November 9, 12-5; November 11, 10-6; November 12, 10-12

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Opening

Aftermath

Reviewed below in Now Playing.�Opening Nov. 1. (In limited release.)

The Broken Circle Breakdown

A romantic drama from Belgium, directed by Felix Van Groeningen, about a bluegrass musician and a tattoo artist whose child is diagnosed with cancer. In Dutch.�Opening Nov. 1. (In limited release.)

Dallas Buyers Club

Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema.�Opening Nov. 1. (In wide release.)

Diana

A bio-pic about the late Princess of Wales, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, starring Naomi Watts and co-starring Naveen Andrews and Douglas Hodge.�Opening Nov. 1. (In limited release.)

Ender’s Game

A science-fiction film, based on the novel by Orson Scott Card, about a child who trains in outer space for intergalactic warfare. Directed by Gavin Hood; starring Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, and Hailee Steinfeld.�Opening Nov. 1. (In wide release.)

Golden Slumbers

Davy Chou directed this documentary, about the Cambodian film industry of the sixties and early seventies, which the Khmer Rouge destroyed. In Khmer and French.�Opening Oct. 31. (Anthology Film Archives.)

Last Vegas

In this comedy, Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Mor-gan Freeman, and Kevin Kline star as lifelong friends who go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party. Directed by Jon Turteltaub.�Opening Nov. 1. (In wide release.)

Also Playing

American Promise: In limited release.Bad Grandpa: In wide release.The Counselor: In wide release.

alert yet innocent vulnerability that’s all the sadder in the age o� instant Internet everything, and the director approaches the character with a heightened, sensitive empathy that gives the action a surprising boost. The telekinetic powers that drive the plot kick in early; Peirce rightly shows Carrie curiously trying them out, and depicts them with a more diverse imagination—and, ultimately, a more thrillingly destructive outburst—than did De Palma. Peirce deepens the backdrop o� community and conveys an ambient local sweetness, conjuring a web o� bonds that renders the ultimate crack-up all the more emotionally wrenching. Julianne Moore lends depth to the frenzied role o� Carrie’s mother, a repressive religious fanatic who, in Peirce’s view, is as much a victim as a victimizer. The con�luence o� conditions that made Carrie a monster appear not as a one-o�� miracle but as a result o� unfortunately replicable conditions that could well spawn successors.—R.B. (In wide release.)

Come and Get ItThe director Howard Hawks transformed Edna Ferber’s historical novel into a sprawling adventure o� hard-driving masculine will and a tragedy o� its erotic limits. The stout and brawny Edward Arnold swaggers through both in the role o� Barney Glasgow, a Wisconsin paper-mill foreman who marries the boss’s daughter and becomes a tycoon, sacri�icing his true love for Lotta Morgan (Frances Farmer), a smart and brazen saloon singer. She marries his best friend, Swan Bostrom (Walter Bren-nan); two decades later, Barney falls for their daughter, also named Lotta (and also played by Farmer), who, in turn, falls for Barney’s son, Richard (Joel McCrea). Lacing heartbreak with low comedy, Hawks captures the ravages o� a loveless marriage and the warmth o� its substitute—the tender complicity between father and daughter (Andrea Leeds), which her impending wedding puts to the test. The generational con�lict is also a clash o� brute force with technocratic modernity, and it builds to a thwarted cataclysm: the producer, Samuel Goldwyn, brought in another director, William Wyler, to �ilm a softened ending that nonetheless leaves plenty o� wreckage in plain sight. Released in 1936.—R.B. (Museum o� the Moving Image; Nov. 2.)

Emergency KissesPhilippe Garrel’s intensely romantic, self-revealing drama, from 1989, begins with a harsh �lourish: a movie director, Mathieu (Garrel himsel�), is besieged by his wife, Jeanne (Brigitte Sy, Gar-rel’s then-wife), an actress who wants to play the lead role in his upcoming �ilm—which is based on her, but in which he has cast another actress (Anémone). When the confusion o� art and life undermines his marriage, the despairing Mathieu is advised by his father (Maurice Garrel, the director’s father) to rely on the couple’s child, Louis (Louis Garrel, son o� Garrel and Sy), as an aid to reconciliation. In this painfully personal and unsparing �ilm, Garrel matches his self-excoriating sincerity with artistic self-control, elegant style, and sure taste. His is an aesthete’s rawness, a cultivated anguish. The lusciously aphoristic dialogue and high-contrast images (which make even daytime landscapes feel nocturnal) add to the exquisite—and quintessentially French—beauty o� Garrel’s art, the triple sensation o� experiencing wild emotion, beholding it,

and beholding onesel� in the act o� doing so. In French.—R.B. (French Institute Alliance Française; Nov. 5.)

The Fifth EstateThe story o� the world’s most shrinking violet, Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), as he moves from the fringe o� events, ad-dressing near-empty conference rooms, to the hub o� international anxiety—changing electoral patterns, exposing corruption, and embarrassing the U.S. government. Along the way, he befriends a Berlin computer whiz (Daniel Brühl) and then defriends him with a vengeance. Bill Condon’s movie, which badly wants—and fails—to ape the suave approach o� “The Social Network,” streams with data and leaps from one city to the next, as the Times and other newspapers follow the lead o� WikiLeaks. Whether you view Assange as a freedom �ighter or as a sinister paranoiac is beside the point; however balanced the script, and for all the dexterity o� Cumberbatch, the look o� the �ilm is entirely under his spell, and the result is as nervy and as excitable as the trade that it depicts. The best and calmest scenes belong to Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci, as a couple o� State Department of-�icials who see their livelihood, and a long tradition o� diplomacy, start to wither away in the clamor for transparency. Now there’s a subject for a movie.—A.L. (In wide release.)

GravityHorror �ilms are almost always pro pelled by fear o� the unspeakable thing that’s out there

in the woods or on the other side o� the wall. The ghost, the demon, the zombie, sooner or later, materializes. What i� the ghost were just nothing? In Alfonso Cuarón’s frightening and beautiful science-�iction thriller, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a nervous medical engineer who has never visited space before, gets cut loose after her space shuttle is destroyed by �lying debris. She is adrift, tumbling over and over, and cast into the mother o� all panics. A veteran astro-naut, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), calms her down and tries to rescue her, and the two o� them scramble for safety somewhere—anywhere. This adventure �ilm presents an existential chal-lenge: what makes life worth living when there is nothingness all around? Ed Harris provides the voice from Houston. Jonás Cuarón worked with his father on the script. Emmanuel Lubezki did the cinematography, aided by an army o� tech guys who invented everything they needed to evoke the �ilm’s sense o� reality and its commitment to physical magni�icence.—D.D. (10/7/13) (In wide release.)

Lucky LucianoFrancesco Rosi’s brilliantly staged and photographed portrait o� the Mob boss, played with brass-knuckles ingratiation by Gian Maria Volonté. It’s a peculiar political bio-pic. By casting Luciano’s real-life nemesis—narcotics agent Charles Siragusa—as himself, Rosi hits on a docu-Brecht technique. The linchpin scenes dramatize Mob-government collusion that amounts to Ma�iagate (both here and in Italy). In between come Siragusa’s bouts o� edifying speechifying—and his non-pro acting makes them oddly persuasive. With Rod Steiger, Charles Cio��i, Edmond O’Brien, and Vincent Gardenia. Rosi wrote the script with Lino Jan-nuzzi and Tonino Guerra. Cinematography by Pasqualino De Santis; music by Piero Piccioni. In English and Italian. Released in 1973.—Michael Sragow (MOMA; Oct. 31 and Nov. 3.)

MaidstoneNorman Mailer’s third feature, shot in 1968—a three-ring circus o� psychodramatic improvisations with himsel� at the center—exerts an extra ordinary extra-cinematic fascination. In the �irst ring, Mailer stars as Norman T. Kingsley, a celebrity art-house movie director who is making an improvised “sexploitation” �ilm about a male brothel for female clients—and, meanwhile, is planning to run for President. The second ring involves Kingsley’s entourage o� revolutionaries, the Cashbox, headed by his hal� brother Rey (Rip Torn). The third concerns a para-governmental agency that, fearing Kingsley’s loose-cannon candidacy, is plotting to assassinate him. Keeping the camera largely on himself, Mailer lets �ly with apocalyptic speculations on politics, sex, marriage, and metaphysics, yet he saves the best for last. He convenes the cast for a group discussion o� the work they did together, and then, as the troupe begins to disperse, Rip Torn, reverting to character, attacks Mailer with a hammer in the presence o� Mailer’s wife and children. This horror version o� home movies is both irresistible and terrify-ing, as is the spectacle o� a great writer playing lightly with his genius.—R.B. (BAM; Oct. 30.)

PrisonersLike “Mystic River” and “Zodiac,” this sombrely impressive thriller digs into the dark cellars o� American paranoia and aggression. Two very friendly couples, one African-American (Ter-rence Howard and Viola Davis) and one white (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello), are celebrating Thanksgiving when their two young daughters

leave the house to play and immediately vanish. Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), the ace o� the local police force, arrests a feebleminded, seem-ingly hapless young man (Paul Dano) as a suspect, but one o� the fathers, Keller Dover (Jackman), insists that the detective isn’t doing enough, and he rampages through town. Here, Jackman, with a hunter-trapper Vandyke, is a frightening actor. For once, he has something genuine to sink his claws into—the narrow, ignorant righteousness o� American macho at its most extreme. The violence isn’t fun; it’s actually horrifying. Written by an American, Aaron Guzikowski, and directed by a Canadian, Denis Villeneuve, who never loosen their grip throughout the complicated plot. The great Roger Deakins does the eloquently bleak cinemato g raphy.—D.D. (9/23/13) (In wide release.)

The Road to GloryIn this First World War drama, from 1936, the director Howard Hawks, working with a script co-written by William Faulkner, presents the destruction o� bodies and minds in trench warfare with cold, harrowing plainness. The howling agony o� a wounded soldier stuck on barbed wire on a blasted plain, the hectic fear o� soldiers who hear the enemy burrowing beneath their barracks, and the wizened ravage o� the commander, Captain Paul La Roche (Warner Baxter), who has lost hal� o� his regiment in battle and lives on drink and pills, are balanced by the silent self-sacri�ice o� honor-bound �ighters and the lusty, raucous ribaldry o� a gru�� veteran sergeant (Gregory Rato��). But when the captain’s mistress, Monique La Coste (June Lang), a hardened-porcelain �ield nurse, takes refuge in a basement, she meets a blu��-humored, tender-hearted musician, Lieuten-ant Michel Denet (Fredric March)—La Roche’s second-in-command—and romance ensues. The landscape o� smoke and ruins, the moral burden o� battle�ield authority, and the haunting proximity o� death infuse the a��air with frantic urgency; for all the steadfast courage and patriotic passion, Hawks and Faulkner leave a blank, metallic after-taste o� no exit.—R.B. (Museum o� the Moving Image; Nov. 3.)

Seduced and AbandonedIn this boisterously re�lexive documentary, the director James Toback lays his intentions on the line: accompanied by Alec Baldwin, he visits the Cannes Film Festival in order both to interview directors, actors, and producers whom he admires and to raise money for a movie that he wants to shoot. Toback’s project, which he describes as “Last Tango in Tikrit,” would be an erotic drama starring Baldwin, as a C.I.A. agent in Iraq, and Neve Campbell, as a left-wing journal-ist with whom he falls in love. As Toback and Baldwin seek to raise twenty-�ive million dollars from sales agents who o��er no more than �ive million and private �inanciers who turn them down �lat, Toback’s directorial intuition proves to be spot-on: their self-revealing brave face on humiliation and despair is deeply cinematic. As for the interviews, they’re done with skill and insight; Ryan Gosling’s account o� a day in the life o� young Ryan Gosling is smart and touching, and Francis Ford Coppola’s regretful confession is almost unbearably painful to hear. With many notables, including Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, James Caan, Jessica Chastain, Diablo Cody, and Je��rey Katzenberg, and a festive cast o� thousands.—R.B. (In limited release.)

A Touch of SinWith a discerning eye for the whiplash symbol, the director Jia Zhangke sets four shocking crime-blotter

E A R LY M USIC

Sat, Nov 16, 8 p.m.

A Love A�air

featuring

The Orlando Consortat the Church of St. Mar y the Virgin

145 West 46th Street

“staggeringly beautiful”

– The Times (London)

“moving and luminous”

– The New York Times

Tickets start at $30

Box O�ce 212-854-7799

2960 Broadway at 116th Street

www.millertheatre.com

The masters of medieva l and

Renaissance voca l music sing a

program centered on Machaut Õs

Le voir dit, the composerÕs exquisite

(and possibly autobiographica l)

ta le of an improbable romance


8:30: “All Cheerleaders Die” (2013, ;dRZh�<R:TT�P]S�2WaXb�BXeTacb^]��©��Nov. 1 at 7: “Curtains” (1983, Richard 2Xd_ZP��©��=ê��!�Pc�#)�±;Tc b�BRPaT�Jessica to Death” (1971, John D. Hancock).�

French Institute Alliance Française55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160)—Through Nov. 26:�The films of Philippe 6PaaT[�©=ê��$�Pc� !)"��P]S�#)�“Emergency Kisses.”©��=ê��$�Pc�7:30: “A Burning Hot Summer” (2011).

Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 F��$"aS�Bc��! !�&�'�(#'��°±C �BPeT�P]S�?a^YTRc�²©>Rc��"��Pc�#)"�)�“News from Home” (1977, Chantal 0ZTa\P]��©��>Rc��"��Pc�%)#$)�±7^cT[�<^]cTaTh²�� (&!��0ZTa\P]��©��>Rc��" �Pc�#)"�)�±8�EX]cX²��±CWT�EP]`dXbWTS²��(1953, Michelangelo Antonioni; in 5aT]RW��8cP[XP]��P]S�4]V[XbW��©��>Rc��" �Pc�&�P]S�=ê��"�Pc�#)#$)�“Lucky Luciano.”©��=ê�� Pc�$�P]S�=ê��"�at 2: “Hands Over the City” (1963, 5aP]RTbR^�A^bX��©��=ê��!�Pc�!)"�)�±2aPbW^dc²�� ($$��;TfXb�A��5^bcTa��©��=ê��!�Pc�&)"�)�±0[XPb�=XRZ�1TP[²�� (#(��John Farrow), introduced by the critic Eddie Muller.

Museum of the Moving Image"$cW�0eT��Pc�"%cW�Bc��0bcâXP��& '�&'#�0077)—Through Nov. 10:�The films of Howard Hawks.�Nov. 2 at 2: “Ceiling ITa ²�� ("%��©��=ê��!�Pc�#)�“Come and Get It.”©��=ê��"�Pc�!)�±1PaQPah�2^Pbc²�� ("$��©��=ê��"�Pc�$)�“The Road to Glory.”

episodes in China’s Wild West landscape o� pop-up cities and lays bare its psycho-political panorama o� ruthlessness. In tales o� a villager who challenges corrupt o��icials and predatory businessmen, a brazen drifter who abandons his overbearing family and stalks the new bourgeoisie, and a lonely woman pressed into prostitution at work, Jia sees new layers o� outrages piling upon older, still unredressed injustices. In an unlivable tangle o� despoiled nature, unwholesome shanties, and oppressive towers, the law—whether with a heavy hand or a cavalier absence—preserves cruel family traditions even as fami-lies are wrenched apart by economic despair and raw indi��erence and a young man’s romantic bildungsroman becomes a blanked-out cry into a futureless void. In Jia’s methodically furious vision, the ambient violence o� unchecked power erupts among the insulted and injured with a horri �ic yet liberating sense o� destruc tion and self-destruction. In Mandarin.—R.B. (In limited release.)

12 Years a Slave

Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejio-for), an African-American born and educated in New York State, is a musician living a gracious life with his family when, in 1841,

he’s kidnapped while on tour in Washington, D.C., and sold to the owner o� a Louisiana plantation, where he’s traded, loaned out, and used as collateral for a mortgage. Throughout his brutal years o� captivity, he maintains the enraged consciousness o� a free man, yet he can’t reveal much o� his mind and temperament without incurring the wrath o� men and women whose self-esteem is based on the belie� that he’s an animal. This true story (based on Northup’s 1853 book) has been turned into a soberly powerful, beautiful �ilm by the British director Steve McQueen, who, after several ritualized features (“Hunger” and “Shame”), has powerfully entered the larger world o� social reality, landscape, history, and narrative construction. With Michael Fass-bender, as a psychotic plantation owner; Sarah Paulson, as his calcu-lating wife; Lupita Nyong’o, as his slave mistress; Paul Giamatti, as a fussy slave broker; Alfre Woodard, as a cynical plantation mistress; and Paul Dano, as a brainless overseer. Some o� the scenes are almost unbearable in their cruelty. Written by John Ridley. Cinematography by Sean Bobbitt.—D.D. (10/21/13) (In wide release.)

Revivals and FestivalsTitles in bold are reviewed.

Asia Society ?PaZ�0eT��Pc�&�cW�Bc��! !�!''�%#��°±CWT�8aP]XP]�=Tf�FPeT�²©=ê��!�Pc�%)�“The Cow” (1969, Dariush Mehrjui; in Farsi).

BAM CinÉmatek30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-%"%�# ��°B_TRXP[�TeT]cb�©>Rc��"��at 7:30: “Maidstone” and “Untitled” � (#&��=â\P]�<PX[Ta��U^[[^fTS�Qh�P�SXbRdbbX^]�fXcW�<PX[Ta b�b^]�<XRWPT[��his biographer J. Michael Lennon, the critic Peter Biskind, and the critic P]S�PaRWXeXbc�<XRWPT[�2WPXZT]�©��Oct. 31 at 7:30: “The Lodger” (1926, Alfred Hitchcock; silent), with music Qh�<âaXR^]T�H dcW�©��=ê��#�Pc�&)�“Macbeth” (1971, Roman Polanski), introduced by Martin Amis.

Film ForumW. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. �! !�&!&�' ��°8]�aTeXeP[�©>Rc��"��=ê��7 (call for showtimes): “Nosferatu cWT�EP\_haT²�� (&(��FTa]Ta�7Tai^V*�X]�6Ta\P]��©��=ê��#�Pc�&)"�)�“Nosferatu” (1922, F. W. Murnau; silent).

Film Society of Lincoln CenterWalter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610)—The films of Jean-Luc Godard.�Oct. 30 at 5: ±=^caT�<dbX`dT²��!��#��©��>Rc��"��at 7: “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” (1988-('��©��±BRPah�<êXTb�²©>Rc��" �Pc�%) $�P]S�=ê��"�Pc� )#$)�±2T\TcTah�<P]²�� ((#��<XRWT[T�B^PeX��©��>Rc��" �Pc�


Halloween Shows

Eugene ChadbourneThe playfully eccentric guitarist, banjo player, and inventor o� the electric rake (the service part o� an ordinary lawn tool, a��ixed with a guitar pickup) has been involved in experimental music since the mid-seventies, when he hosted a pirate radio show in Calgary and began releasing music on his own label, Parachute Records. He’s at the Stone for a weeklong residency, Oct. 29-Nov. 3, during which he’ll present several solo sets, along with a full-band interpretation o� the music o� Merle Haggard, as well as a Halloween show called “The All-Dead Jazz and Pop Stars.” It features Chadbourne and six other musicians, each performing a song or two in the style o� a late musical hero—while each band member plays in the style o� his own chosen hero. For this performance, Chadbourne will embody the Mothers o� Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black, the pianist Evan Gallagher will be Thelonious Monk, and the vocalist Tatsuya Nakatani will be Johnny Cash. (Avenue C at 2nd St. thestonenyc.com.)

GatekeeperThe CHERYL art collective is known for throw-ing some o� the strangest parties in New York. On Halloween, it locks down Fort Greene for a goth-tinged event called “R.I.t.E.,” which promises “satanic d.j. sets, phantasmagorical visuals, esoteric dance-�loor rituals, and sinister secret-society séances.” I� you’re up for it, the bill includes a handful o� prominent musical projects on the darker end o� the spectrum, with the local duo Gatekeeper presiding. (Brooklyn Masonic Temple, 317 Cler mont Ave. cherylwillruinyourlife.info. Oct. 31.)

Mark LindsayRoaring out o� the Paci�ic Northwest in the mid-sixties with a string o� garage classics including “Hungry,” “Just Like Me,” and “Kicks,” Paul Revere and the Raiders dressed in Colonial Revolutionary gear and put up a brave defense against the British Invasion. The lead singer was Lindsay, who headlines this Cavestomp! show, which also features the Doughboys, St. Phillips Escalator, and the Connection. (Bowery Electric, 327 Bowery, at 2nd St. 212-228-0228. Oct. 31.)

Buster PoindexterDespite its reputation for quiet sophistication, the Café Carlyle has hosted its share o� lively acts over the years. But it’s safe to say that the hallowed Vertès murals have never been the backdrop for

Rock and Pop

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

BraidsThis Montreal-based art-pop act specializes in electronica that is as coldly mathematical as it is warmly melodic. Since its critically acclaimed début, “Native Speaker,” came out, in 2011, the ensemble has parted ways with its keyboard-ist, Katie Lee, and has carried on as a trio. Its

ILLUSTRATION BY JING WEI

�IGHT �FE

anything like Buster Poindexter. David Johansen, performing in his “Hot, Hot, Hot” lounge-lizard persona, will tackle material by Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the doo-woppers Billy Ward and His Dominoes, among others. (Carlyle Hotel, Madison Ave. at 76th St. 866-468-7619. Oct. 31.)

“Your Favorite Halloween Covers Show”In 2010, Pitchfork launched a sister site called Altered Zones, which published a tight-knit collective o� bloggers devoted to fostering the endless stream o� small-scale D.I.Y. musicians releasing music online. The site closed the next year, but by then it had made a genuine impact on a burgeoning scene, and when the editors launched a new music blog, Ad Hoc, they raised nearly forty thousand dollars in just over a month. Today, Ad Hoc con-tinues to draw attention to hyper-obscure music, and one o� its founding editors, Ric Leichtung, has another gig as a promoter for the cavernous industrial venue 285 Kent. He has a tradition o� organizing Halloween parties at which area bands perform, often in costume, as their musical idols; this year, the show features Butter the Children as the Pixies, Dead Stars as Nirvana, Le Rug as At the Drive-In, Turnip King as the Velvet Underground, and Honduras as Green Day. (285 Kent Ave., Brooklyn. ticket�ly.com. Oct. 30.)

Zappa Plays ZappaFrank Zappa—founder o� the Mothers o� Invention, genius rock composer, and guitar virtuoso—played Halloween shows in New York for many years, beginning in 1977. He died twenty years ago, but his son Dweezil, fronting the excellent Zappa Plays Zappa band, carries on the tradition, and gives o�� waves o� inspi-ration and pride in keeping his father’s music alive as he digs into his own polyphonic guitar excursions. (Beacon Theatre, Broadway at 74th St. 212-465-6500. Oct. 31.)

latest album, “Flourish // Perish,” has a more laptop-based sound and largely abandons the rock tones heard in the previous work. Sparse techno beats provide a glittering backdrop for trippy loops while the lead vocalist, Raphaelle Standell-Preston, sprinkles ethereal fairy dust with her childlike soprano. (Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. 212-533-2111. Nov. 3.)

Steve Earle and the DukesLike many singer-songwriters o� legendary status, the �ifty-eight-year-old Grammy-award-winning artist has had nine lives and nearly as many wives (his fellow-musician Allison Moorer is his sev-enth). He’s spent time in prison, been an actor, and written �iction, and he delivers rollicking and raw songs that tell a gritty, unmistakably American story. And, as i� he’s been making up for lost time, Earle has had a busy year. In April, he released “The Low Highway,” which reprised his old backing band the Dukes, and brought on the Duchesses. In June, he issued “Steve Earle: The Warner Bros. Years,” a boxed set featuring three albums. Also included is the DVD “To Hell and Back,” a recording o� his 1996 concert at the Cold Creek Correctional Facility in Tennessee. (Town Hall, 123 W. 43rd St. 212-840-2824. Nov. 2.)

Colin MeloyThe songwriter and singer for the Decemberists kicks o�� his �irst solo tour in �ive years, get-ting back in the musical swing o� things after publishing two novels in the children’s series the “Wildwood Chronicles” with his wife, the illustrator Carson Ellis. The concert will include material from throughout Meloy’s career, as well as some Kinks songs he recorded at home for an EP on sale during the tour. He’ll be joined by Eleanor Friedberger, one hal� o� the Fiery Furnaces, who opened for Rodriguez here in April, and her brand o� smart rock. (Town Hall, 123 W. 43rd St. 212-840-2824. Nov. 1.)

Melt-BananaSince it formed, twenty years ago, this Japanese noise-rock band has been one o� the most exhilarating acts in underground music. The group’s hyper-frenetic songs—built around the guitarist Ichirou Agata’s e��ects-laden guitar ri��s and the singer Yasuko Onuki’s loopy, inspired vocals and interstitial blasts o� noise—are beautifully showcased on its new rec-ord, “Fetch.” But it is in its live performances that the group’s beguiling mix o� precision and humor is most cathartic. With the drums-and-saxophone duet Brain Tentacles and the angular, prog-rocking

2


band Vaz. (Saint Vitus, 1120 Manhattan Ave.,

Brooklyn. saintvitusbar.com. Nov. 1.)

M.I.A. In recent months, the artist has been at war with

the National Football League over its �ining

her $1.5 million for making an obscene gesture

during Madonna’s halftime show at last year’s

Super Bowl. But she’s making music, too. Her

fourth album, “Matangi,” which had been delayed

numerous times by her label, Interscope, was

�inally given a release date (Nov. 5) after M.I.A.

threatened to leak it herself. The four singles

already released indicate that the album will be

a worthy addition to her body o� work, combin-

ing aggressive electronic beats with agitprop

lyrics and an international consciousness while

maintaining a healthy respect for the history

o� punk and early hip-hop. (Terminal 5, 610

W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. Nov. 1 and Nov. 4.)

Gary NumanPeople o� a certain age know Numan for “Cars,”

one o� the �inest singles o� the late seventies and

a landmark in the intersection o� electronic music,

New Wave, Philip K. Dick-in�luenced dystopian

science �iction, mainstream rock and roll, and the

burgeoning goth movement. Numan, who started

out as the leader o� the band Tubeway Army,

has been a venerable solo artist for decades now,

and in the most recent phase o� his career he has

embraced music made by artists he in�luenced,

such as Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode.

His new album, “Splinter (Songs from a Broken

Mind),” showcases his continued dedication to

exploring the darker side o� both sonics and

psychology. (Music Hall o� Williamsburg, 66

N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 718-486-5400. Oct. 29.)

Pop. 1280 This band takes its nom de guerre from a hard-

boiled mid-sixties crime novel by Jim Thompson,

but don’t expect an over-intellectualized approach

to its craft. It dredges the unholy depths o� post-

punk by invoking the more squalid fringes o�

New York’s Koch-era downtown art world. The

Chicago thrashers Oozing Wound, who are happy

enough doing cheap imitations o� Slayer and

Metallica, join them, along with two local noise

acts, the Dreebs and the Sediment Club. For the

full experience, bounce between this event and

the Halloween covers show around the corner,

at 285 Kent. (Death by Audio, 49 S. 2nd St.,

Brooklyn. entertainment4every1.net. Oct. 30.)

Tinderbox FestivalAt the end o� 2009, the songwriter Alyson Greenfield started Dear Lilith Fair 2010, a blog

she hoped would get her a gig at that year’s

Lilith Fair revival. It didn’t, so she founded a

women-centric charity-bene�itting festival o� her

own. Now in its fourth year, the event showcases

an array o� emerging and established female

musicians, and all the proceeds are donated

to Girls Write Now and the Willie Mae Rock

Camp for Girls. The headliner is Deerhoof, which is fronted by Satomi Matsuzaki, and

which has been making frenetic experimental

pop since the mid-nineties. Lady Lamb the Beekeeper is the stage name o� the local artist

Aly Spaltro, who seamlessly blends synth and

rock sounds in her highly personal ballads. The

compelling Canadian electronic artist Kashka

delivers honest and heartfelt dance music.

Green�ield also graces the stage, along with

more than a dozen other acts led by women.

(Music Hall o� Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St.,

Brooklyn. 718-486-5400. Nov. 1.)

Jazz and Standards

Vijay IyerIn a contemporary scene thick with impressive and

nervy young pianists, Iyer (a former collaborator

o� Rudresh Mahanthappa, who is also at the Jazz

Standard this week) �inds himsel� front and center:

he is the recent recipient o� a MacArthur “genius”

grant. His trio, which includes the bassist Harish Raghavan and the drummer Marcus Gilmore, draws on free jazz, Indian musical in�luences,

and, as exhibited on the trio’s recent albums,

a dizzyingly expansive repertoire that includes

the work o� Leonard Bernstein, Julius Hemphill,

Michael Jackson, and M.I.A. (Jazz Standard, 116

E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. Oct. 31-Nov. 1.)

Joe Lovano’s Us FiveEven without the presence o� Esperanza Spalding,

the quintet’s original bassist (a post now occupied

by Peter Slavlov), this ensemble still packs a

mighty punch, propelled by two trap drummers,

a vivacious pianist—James Weidman—and the

audacious leader. (In addition to his tenor and

soprano saxophones, Lovano has been known

to pick up the aulochrome, a recently invented

hybrid instrument that allows him to play two

soprano saxes simultaneously.) Us Five satis-

�ies the need for both daring musicianship and

infectious rhythmic verve—a rare combination.

(Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th

St. 212-255-4037. Oct. 29-Nov. 3.)

Rudresh Mahanthappa’s GamakThe alto saxophonist, who grew up in Boulder,

Colorado, studied in India with the saxophonist

Kadri Gopalnath, and has collaborated with Vijay

Iyer (also at the Jazz Standard later this week),

has been actively incorporating fusion-tinted rock

elements into his musical vision. His Gamak

quartet features the inventive guitarist Dave Fiuczynski (o� the Screaming Headless Torsos),

who applies his idiosyncratic microtonal approach

to a double-necked electric instrument. (Jazz

Standard. Oct. 29-30.)

Ted NashThe Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is full o�

talented instrumentalists who regularly step out

on their own, but few have the ambition o� Ted

Nash, who plays all varieties o� saxophone and

reed instruments in the ensemble. As on his new

release, “Chakra,” Nash helms his own seventeen-

piece big band, whose healthy size enables him

to realize his evolving gifts as a composer and

arranger. (Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Broadway at

60th St. 212-258-9595. Oct. 31-Nov. 3.)

John Pizzarelli and Jessica MolaskeyToo often, cabaret performers over�low with

spirit in an anxious attempt to disguise their

lack o� musical chops. The husband and wife

John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey do not

have this problem. He’s a warm and appealing

singer and a superb guitarist; she’s a swinging

and compelling vocalist. Both performers are

also genuinely funny, and they behave as i� the

stage is the most natural place they might �ind

themselves. Their new show is called “Children

and Art,” after the Sondheim song, and referenc-

ing their domestic life. (Café Carlyle, Carlyle

Hotel, Madison Ave. at 76th St. 212-744-1600.

Oct. 29-Nov. 23.)

Preview: November 9, 12-5; November 11 to 13, 10-6; November 14, 10-12

104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710SWANNGALLERIES.COM

Contemporary ArtNOVEMBER 14

Specialist: Todd Weyman • [email protected]

David Hockney, Myself and My Heroes (detail), etching and aquatint, 1961. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000.

© D

avid

Ho

ckn

ey

Source: Morningstar. “Double the yield” based on Investor A shares since 11/30/11, the fi rst month-end after the inception of the strategy (inception 11/28/11) to 8/31/13. The Fund’s average SEC yield over the period was double that of the Barclays US Aggregate Bond Index. Higher yield is in part achieved by taking on more risk. “Less Risk” is based on the Fund’s annualized standard deviation of monthly returns compared to that of a portfolioconsisting of 60% MSCI World Index and 40% Barclays US Aggregate Bond Index over the period. Standard deviation measures the volatility of a fund’s returns. Higher deviation represents higher volatility. Standard deviation is only one element of risk. Other components of risk should be considered.

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THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT

PARTY CRASHERS

In the late nineteen-sixties, Mitch McConnell came to Wash- ington to work as an aide to Senator Marlow Cook, a Ken-

tucky Republican. Cook backed clean-air standards and limits on strip mining. It was a time of political diversity among Re-publicans: in 1970, Senate Republicans endorsed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. McConnell was briefly a fellow-traveller of those who regarded government as a source of public protection. He once called the Nixon Administration “at worst, completely reactionary.”

In 1984, McConnell was elected to the Senate, on the coat-tails of Ronald Reagan’s landslide reëlection. By then, a move-ment of Southern and evangelical conservatives was rising within the Party. McConnell tacked right periodically, saluting the new Republican leaders. During the Administration of George W. Bush, he backed the President by voting, with Ted Kennedy, to enact No Child Left Behind and the expansion of the Medicare drug benefit. By 2009, after Wall Street melted down, McConnell had risen to Minority Leader, and he forged a deal with Democrats to bail out big banks.

Then the Tea Party rose up in fury, and McConnell moved right again, in an effort to reinvent himself as an anti-govern-ment insurgent. It wasn’t easy; he was sixty-nine, and his long jowls and round eyeglasses gave him the look of a Taft Admin-istration clerk. Nonetheless, in 2011, he led the Senate Repub-licans through a ruthless, extortionate campaign to threaten default on the national debt. It succeeded. President Obama wobbled and accepted budget cuts. Afterward, McConnell called the national debt “a hostage worth ransoming.”

This autumn, he supported the Tea Party radicals’ second threat to default on the debt and a sixteen-day shutdown of the federal government. This time, though, Obama held firm, and, in the end, McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner were forced to choose be-tween Tea Party principles and the via-bility of the world economy. McConnell

negotiated his party’s late-hour capitulation, and, within days, Tea Party groups called for his ouster. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a PAC founded by Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which has bankrolled Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, and other highly conservative candidates, announced that it would finance a Republican primary challenge against the Minority Leader next year, because he “has a liberal record and refuses to fight for conservative principles.”

Other veteran Republicans who joined McConnell on the debt-ceiling vote are facing similar challenges from Tea Party-backed candidates. Those targeted include Thad Cochran, of Mississippi, who was elected to the Senate in 1978; Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina; and Lamar Alexander, of Tennes-see. In 2012, such primary challenges weakened the Party’s com-petitive position, and allowed the Democrats to win an eight-seat majority in the Senate. Even now, the insurgents seem less interested in victory than in purification. “We know which sen-ators fought for liberty, and which ones caved to Obama,” Lee Bright, the South Carolina state senator who is challenging Gra-ham, told Slate recently. “We’ve got a list.” The Tea Party’s ap-proval ratings have plummeted since the shutdown ended. Busi-ness lobbies and their PACs, appalled by the shutdown’s estimated twenty-four-billion-dollar cost to the economy, are signalling that they may pull back from uncompromising candidates. But the fact that PACs like the Senate Conservatives Fund are will-

ing to force incumbents into expensive, distracting primary fights makes it even less probable that the Republicans can retake control of the Senate.

Like a guerrilla army, the Tea Party is learning how to influence public opin-ion even when it loses a conventional battle. The budget caps that Obama conceded in 2011 have already en-shrined in law a portion of the move-ment’s draconian fiscal agenda. And although Cruz and his allies in the House won no additional cuts this time, they managed to spread magical think-ing among their followers about a possible future debt default. (The next IL

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TICKTOCK DEPT.

NEW YORK TIME

Local government is typically the province of the mundane: making

trains run on time, rather than question-ing the nature of time itself. Yet there was Daniel Garodnick, a councilman from Manhattan’s East Side, standing near the information booth in Grand Central Terminal, one Monday, contemplating the morning commute with an existen-tialist gaze. “I mean, look at every person walking around us,” he said. “Each one is moving with a sense of purpose based on his own clock, and the clocks that sur-round him.” The clock in front of Garod-nick, above the booth, read nine-fifty. “According to my iPhone, it’s two min-utes fast,” Garodnick said—the better, perhaps, for hastening travellers to the platforms before the doors close. Garod-nick called himself “a pretty punctual per-son,” and recalled having once missed an

entire day’s worth of meetings because he’d scheduled them all back to back, without allowing for the inevitability of people showing up late. New Yorkers, you might say, are always in a rush but seldom on time.

Garodnick was concerned with more than a discrepancy of mere minutes. He consulted an aide—“What’s today’s date?”—before expressing relief that the clock and everyone’s phones and watches were not off by a full hour, as they are for eight weeks each year, according to a strict interpretation of the city’s adminis-trative code. Section 2-106 (“Daylight saving time; effect thereof on public pro-ceedings”) specifies the last Sunday in April as the moment to set clocks forward “throughout the city of New York,” and the last Sunday in October as the fallback date, even though the Times and 1010 WINS, following national protocol, urge you to make the adjustments in March and November, respectively. Depending on your perspective, then, we will all soon be ahead of schedule—celebrating happy hour, this Tuesday, say, when we still be-long at our desks—or merely lagging be-hind the Washington consensus. Garod-

nick, having done some research into the matter, unhappily favors the latter inter-pretation. “We’ve literally been living in the past,” he said.

The April and October dates are relics of the sixties, when an organization called the Committee for Time Uniformity per-suaded Congress and Lyndon Johnson to standardize what was by then a several-decades-old practice of “springing for-ward,” more or less according to regional whim. (A Times story in 1965 mentioned that bus passengers between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, once would have had to change their watches roughly every five miles—seven adjustments in all—to keep pace with local variations, and quoted a “time scien-tist” at the Naval Observatory calling the United States “the worst timekeeper in the world.”) “Fast time,” as the six months of daylight saving were sometimes called, or “summer time,” has crept forward on two occasions since, and our municipal laws haven’t kept pace. The Reagan-era Congress bumped the start date up by several weeks, from the last Sunday in April to the first, arguing that longer days and shorter nights would reduce crime,

debt-ceiling deadline arrives early next year.) Cruz and the oth-ers systematically promoted the idea—the fantasy—that, if the Treasury Department were prohibited from issuing any new debt to finance interest payments and government operations, the country would do just fine. The global economy, this story goes, far from collapsing into crisis, would prove resilient, and, while some nonessential federal departments might wither for lack of funds, that would only demonstrate how Americans could get by with a much smaller government.

This campaign has been dismissed by some Wall Street an-alysts as just a form of coercive bargaining. Washington is a grand opera of phony crises. Congress has raised the debt ceil-ing more than seventy times since 1960 without forcing an ac-tual default. It’s tempting to believe that even a diva like Cruz, who, after all, holds a law degree from Harvard and evidently aspires to higher office, would never countenance a final default. Yet history is rife with political radicals who have shocked the world by doing just what they always said they would: Confed-erate secessionists, for example, who seem to inspire so many Tea Partiers today.

The Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism reflects a longer, deeper decline in the Republican Party’s ability to tolerate a diversity of ideas and public-policy strategies, and to adapt to American multiculturalism. Mitt Romney’s poor showing among Latino voters in 2012 helped insure Barack Obama’s reëlection. Re-publican leaders, chastened and without any other obvious way to increase their vote base before 2016, pledged earlier this year to revive a comprehensive immigration-reform bill. Yet party

leaders, in part because they have been tied down since July by the debt confrontation, haven’t found a way to move legislation past the nativist caucus in the House.

As recently as 2007, when the Bush Administration almost passed a similar bill, it still seemed possible that a modernizing Republican Party might build a formidable political coalition of Latinos, evangelicals, disaffected Catholic Democrats, high-tech entrepreneurs, libertarians, social and educational reform-ers, and eclectic independents. Instead, as Geoffrey Kabaser-vice puts it in his history of the Republican decline, “Rule and Ruin,” movement conservatives have “succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling, or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party.” Political purges have no log-ical end point; each newly drawn inner circle of orthodoxy leaves a former respected acolyte suddenly on the outside. That a Tea Party-influenced purification drive now threatens such a loyal opportunist and boardroom favorite as Mitch McConnell seems a marker of the times.

McConnell’s would-be usurper is Matt Bevin, a businessman who owns a bell company; his campaign slogan is “Let Freedom Ring.” He told Glenn Beck recently, “We have got to wean peo-ple from this idea of free lunches.” (He might start with fellow Kentuckians; their state pays sixty-six cents in federal taxes for every dollar of federal spending it takes in.) Bevin pleaded, “What we need to tell the American people is that the party’s over.” Presumably, he didn’t mean the Grand Old Party, but the American people may be forgiven for thinking that he did.

—Steve Coll


among other things. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 shifted it further still, to the second Sunday in March, and added a week of autumn, insuring that Halloween would always be a little less dark for trick-or-treaters. (The theory, which is not well supported by evidence, is that this reduces electricity use.) Through legislative inac-tion, New York City, in effect, has been left as a kind of Midwestern outpost: Iowa-on-Hudson.

“I just want to make sure that New York stays in its advanced place in the world and not allow the likes of Minneap-olis or Chicago or Houston to ever catch up to us,” Garodnick said, explaining his rationale for introducing a bill that would repeal Section 2-106 and eliminate any potential contradictions in City Hall clock management. Take alternate-side-parking enforcement. “The sign says be-tween nine-thirty and eleven,” Garodnick went on. “But what is nine-thirty to eleven?” He then granted that federal law technically supersedes the municipal code, making the question moot except as a matter of philosophical inquiry. The bill remains as yet unscheduled for a vote. It was sent to committee, for review, with two co-sponsors, ten fewer than endorsed the Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety Act, which was introduced several min-utes earlier at the same Council meeting.

—Ben McGrath

is wearing roomy jeans, a denim shirt, and a Red Sox cap.

A record ends, and the dead seconds fall away, russet leaves off an oak. The air on WNYC-FM is as silent as Miss Hav-isham’s parlor. Schwartz, with no evident concern, lets the nothing happen. He fumbles with a jewel case. He slides the disk into a player. He clears his throat with an alarming liquid rip—ah-HEM! He locates a button on his console and punches it. And then, finally, he speaks.

“There was, in this world,” he says, just a breathy notch above an Alec Baldwin whisper, “until it disappeared, an album. Called ‘Bittersweet.’ By Carmen McRae.”

The pauses suggest an ego—or, bet-ter, an assurance that you, the listener, will wait. It is the assurance of a horn player—Miles Davis on “All Blues”—who comes in at his own sweet bidding, knowing that the waiting is as much a part of the music, the desired atmo-sphere, as the phrase that comes next. And that is what Schwartz is selling—not one record after another so much as the creation of an atmosphere in which the Great American Songbook is, in his view, properly tendered and absorbed. He casts the spell of steady rain at night, languor-ous autumn afternoons. Now it is 1964. The Stones have issued their début re-cord. But that is elsewhere. Norman Simmons is at the piano. Carmen McRae sings “I’m Going to Laugh You Right Out of My Life.”

Schwartz takes off his headphones and wheels around in his chair.

“You like Carmen?” he says. In the late sixties and the seventies,

Schwartz did a progressive-rock show on WNEW-FM in the prime evening spot. But he had to study the music; it wasn’t what he loved first. Now, at seventy-five, he doesn’t mind sounding out of it; hip-hop and pop sink his boat. “You know, we’ve reached rock bottom these days,” he says. “The music of the street—much of it is not music. It’s just threats, with an occasional rhyme. And the popular music sung by—what?—by nude women is, alas, hopeless.”

Schwartz is not merely obsessed with the American Songbook; it’s his biogra-phy, his soundtrack. His father was Ar-thur Schwartz, a composer just a rung below the likes of Rodgers and Hart and the Gershwins. For a decade, Jonathan sang those songs at Michael’s Pub and

other rooms around the city. At the most recent of Schwartz’s weddings, his fourth, to the actress Zohra Lampert, Tony Ben-nett sang a Schwartz-Howard Dietz stan-dard, “I See Your Face Before Me.” His Saturday-evening and Sunday-afternoon shows run four hours. It is entirely possi-ble to wish that there were fewer sugar cubes in his brew, that he played more Billie Holiday and fewer cheery cabaret singers, but it is a program, in the age of Clear Channel and Pandora and Spotify, with the rarest thing—its own voice.

For decades, Schwartz has been ra-dio’s foremost explicator of Frank Sina-tra. Which Sinatra appreciated. Except once. When, in 1980, Schwartz declared on WNEW that parts of “Trilogy” were “narcissistic,” Old Blue Eyes went dark. He made calls to powerful people. Sud-denly, Schwartz was put on “sabbatical” for three months. Seven years later, Sina-tra obliquely apologized from the stage of Carnegie Hall, telling the assembled, “There’s a man here tonight who knows more about me than I do myself. Don’t mess with Jonno, I’m tellin’ ya.”

At times in his career, Schwartz was on the air seven days a week. “I believe in

that . . . constancy,” he says. “There are so many people alone, people in hospitals, in jail, who count on a certain reassurance.” Come November 1st, Schwartz will be a constant presence online. WNYC will back, assemble, and feature a streaming site called thejonathanchannel.org. All Schwartz, all the time. Ella, Basie, Tony Bennett, the Pizzarellis. And Frank. The higher make-out music. Click. It’ll be there.

1

IN THE STUDIO

GLAD TO BE UNHAPPY

It’s the kind of late-October Sunday that they sing songs about, or did

once—sunny and cool, fareless cabs ply-ing Seventh Avenue, wordless brunchers slouching at their tables in the many va-rieties of morning-after. A short line of gossipers and smokers stand outside Film Forum, on Houston, waiting for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Tokyo Story.” Around the corner, at 160 Varick, up on the eighth floor of the public-radio building, nearly vacant today, Jonathan Schwartz, a man in the melancholy blue of his years—handsome once, a little fragile now—sits alone at a microphone in a soundproof studio. He

Jonathan Schwartz


the meme caught on. (“Boffin,” in case you’re curious, is the British version of “egghead.”) Hutton was at the airport, in Jordan, waiting to board a flight that would take him and other members of the press corps back to London after a trip to several Arab states with Prime Minister David Cameron. It was 4 A.M. “We all had this slightly manic air of peo-ple who had been up for a long time,” Hutton recalled recently. By the follow-ing evening, the list of words had two hundred and twenty-five entries, “but,” he writes, “we still didn’t have ‘sky-rocket.’ ” A few months later, Hutton was with Ed Miliband, the Labour politician, on a tour of Scandinavia. Their plane had a rough landing, and Miliband turned to Hutton and said, “LEADER OF THE OP

POSITION IN MIDAIR DRAMA.” Later, over breakfast: “Your journalese game is obsessive. I woke up at 2 A.M. think-ing ‘gainsay.’ ”

The other day, in London, Hutton agreed to meet a fellow-journalist for a practice session on a bench near the Thames. Hutton was wearing a leather jacket and drinking coffee, black. “One of my favorites is ‘foulmouthed tirade,’ ” he said. “It’s the difference between some-body saying, ‘Well, that’s a stupid idea’ and ‘That’s a fucking stupid idea.’ ”

His interlocutor, being American, asked if he had heard “canoodles,” “mulls,” “coed,” or “boffo.”

“ ‘Mulls’ is pure American journal-ese,” Hutton said. “It’s the equivalent of our ‘may’ or ‘set to’ or ‘considering.’ It’s impossible to deny that you’ve ‘consid-ered’ something. The unfalsifiable pol-icy story!”

“ ‘Canoodle,’ ” he continued. “Is that what you might do on a ‘tryst’?”

A few swipes on Hutton’s tablet

brought up the day’s edition of the New York Times, and the headline “INDUSTRY

STILL CHURNS, EVEN AS CLEANUP PLAN

PROCEEDS FOR A CANAL.”“A comma?” Hutton said. “You’d

never see a comma in a British headline.” He had more luck with the Post, linger-ing on “DE BLASIO AND LHOTA ROMP

TO CITY HALL FACEOFF.” “If you had two male politicians romp-

ing to City Hall, that would mean some-thing quite different in Britain,” Hutton said. “It would be a much better story.”

“ ‘HAPPY HALALIDAY!’—not bad,” Hutton said, moving on to the Daily News. “ ‘12YEAROLD NABBED IN CAT

SLAY.’ That’s perfect, except I don’t think we use ‘slay’ that much in Britain, partly because we don’t have that much killing.”

In the book, Hutton makes a case for journalese as a worthy dialect. The econ-omy necessitated by newspaper columns can enrich our vocabulary: instead of “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” and “in-vitro fertilization,” we have “mad-cow disease” and “test-tube babies.” The latest goings on in Washington have spawned their own contributions: “at debt’s door,” “figleaf concessions,” “the Republicans’ black eye.” Later, Hutton sent his con-versation partner an e-mail that read, “America pulled back from the brink of financial apocalypse last night as Presi-dent Obama delivered a slap-down to Republican Party bosses. Last-ditch crunch talks ended a sixteen-day stand-off that had kept official coffers locked and left government staff cash-strapped. As observers warned the two sides are still on a collision course, Obama slammed his critics for encouraging America’s en-emies.” The government shutdown, rompified.

—Lauren Collins

1

LONDON POSTCARD

MOTHER TONGUE

Two weeks ago, Mohamed Abdi Hassan travelled to Brussels, to par-

ticipate in what he thought was going to be a documentary about his life. Instead, he was arrested at the airport and charged with having led an attack on a Belgian ship off the coast of East Africa. That is how you would tell the story in regular English. But in the morning paper, as Robert Hutton explains in “Romps, Tots, and Boffins,” his guide to “the strange language of news,” such an event must be rendered in headlines as (in the Austra-lian) “MOVIEPROMISE STING NABS SO

MALI PIRATE” or (per the slightly chattier Associated Press) “HOLLYWOODSTYLE

STING NABS ALLEGED PIRATE KING

PIN.” Hassan might have been called a buccaneer, except that, according to Hut-ton’s lexicon, the word refers to “the busi-ness equivalent of an ‘auteur director.’ The ideal person to ‘helm’ a company.” He is accused of being a “fraudster” (“one who ‘dupes’ ”), but, “observers” (“a myste-rious group, who aren’t us, obviously, but for whom we can confidently speak”) wondered, was he “heartless” (“used to distinguish the thieves who steal gifts from kids’ hospitals at Christmas from those ordinary, run-of-the-mill thieves”)?

The language of the news, like Latin or C++, has no native speakers. But re-porters are sufficiently well versed in it so that, last November, when Hutton—a veteran of the Daily Mirror and the Fi-nancial Times, who now covers British politics for Bloomberg—tweeted, “Trav-elling lobby now compiling list of words only still in use in newspapers: boffin, tots, pal, frogman, lags … #journalese,”

“Your love gives me strength.”

t t

“These are important things that can last forever if given a chance,” Schwartz says, fumbling again through a stack of disks. “The music moves into the future with all of us and our children because it is good. It’s American classical music.” Then he lifts a finger, signalling “quiet.” He clears his throat. Ah-HEM. He punches a button. He waits.

—David Remnick


do, but who were instead going to accept the job at Raytheon, or whatever,” Dave Girouard, one of Upstart’s founders, told me. “They weren’t excited about the new job, but pragmatically it was the right thing to do.”

Human-capital contracts provide more flexibility. If you’re having a good year, you pay more; if you’re struggling, or going to school, you pay less. In years where you earn less than a cer-tain agreed-upon amount, you pay nothing, and the year is added to the end of the contract. This isn’t necessarily cheaper than traditional ways of raising money, but you’re less likely to get stuck with a payment you can’t afford. (At Upstart, the max-imum you’ll pay an investor is seven per cent of your income, and the average is three or four per cent.) This makes it easier to take a risk on a new venture.

Upstart is still an experiment; fewer than a hundred people have completed funding so far. Critics argue that the idea is in-herently flawed—that borrowers will hide their income or just take the money and slack off. And to some the concept seems

uncomfortably close to indentured servi-tude. As Girouard puts it, “There is that gut reaction that says, Ugh, I don’t know about this.” It’s an understandable reac-tion, but the analogy is flawed: a share of your earnings isn’t a share of yourself. And you could say that young people are already indentured—to their student loans and to credit-card companies. There are precedents, too: Muhammad Ali’s early boxing career was funded by a syndicate of backers who paid for his training in exchange for a share of his winnings. Tournament poker players are regularly staked by investors. Creative work is often funded in a similar way. Publishers advance authors sums of money and take the vast majority of the profit until the advance is recouped.

Indeed, at root, a human-capital contract is what’s called an income-contingent loan: how much you pay back depends on how much you earn. And income-contingent student loans are becoming common. Australia’s higher-education system is funded by a special tax on graduates, pegged to how much they earn. The U.K. uses an income-based repayment plan. And, as of 2009, a sizable percentage of federal student loans in the U.S. became income-based, although tight eligibility rules and general confusion have meant that most student borrowers are still stuck in fixed-payment plans.

Upstart may succeed or it may fail, but the principle behind it is unlikely to disappear. This isn’t entirely a benign develop-ment. Income-based plans make it easier for students to repay their loans, but they also reinforce the idea that education fund-ing is the responsibility of the individual rather than of the state. Still, on their own terms, they’re a step forward. The old way of borrowing was predicated on a world in which the job market was stable and everyone had a steady income. That world of work is changing. The way we finance it needs to change, too.

—James Surowiecki

This summer, Jordan Elpern-Waxman had a revelation. He’d quit his job in order to start a company that markets

craft beer, and, as most new entrepreneurs do, he’d been paying for the whole thing himself. “I had gone through my savings and put everything on my credit card, and I woke up one morning and looked at the balance and said, ‘Holy shit, how am I ever going to pay this thing off ?’ ” Elpern-Waxman told me. So he did something unusual: he sold off a share of his future.

He went to a new site called Upstart. Founded last year by former Google employees, it’s a crowdfunding marketplace where people looking to start a business, say, or pursue more ed-ucation can raise cash from investors. In exchange, they pay some of what they earn over the next five or ten years—what percentage you have to pay is determined by how much you want to raise and by the Upstart algorithm’s assessment of your earnings potential. For thirty thou-sand dollars today, you might end up pay-ing out, say, two per cent of your income for the next five years.

Economists call this kind of deal a human-capital contract. Such contracts sound like a libertarian fantasy—they were popularized by Milton Fried-man—but they’ll likely become more common. Other companies, like Lumni and Pave, are doing similar things, and the demand is there, because the biggest challenge that young Americans face these days is debt. Student-loan debt is $1.2 trillion, thanks to the rising cost of college and dwindling state support for edu-cation. The average college graduate in 2012 owed twenty-seven thousand dollars in student loans, and people who go to graduate or professional schools usually owe far more than that. The average twentysomething owes forty-five thousand dollars. Getting the money to start a business, meanwhile, seems harder than ever. A Kauffman Foundation study found that almost sixty per cent of small businesses rely on credit cards to finance their operations.

For the young, borrowing against the future can make sense, because income usually rises with age. The problem is that most young Americans have fixed-payment debts; they pay back the same amount every month, regardless of how well they’re doing. That puts a lot of pressure on people to take whatever job is available, discourages them from investing more in education, and, as a recent study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau suggested, may deter risk-taking and innovation. “I saw a repeating pattern, where you had people just out of school who had something interesting and compelling that they wanted to

THE FINANCIAL PAGE

THE NEW FUTURISM

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ECONOMICS: A SKYLINE OF SUPERCITIESImagine a global skyline populated with competitive cities from around the world. In each,

measures of economic strength play a key role.

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES

DEMOGRAPHICS Human capital gains help propel São Paulo, Brazil, up the rankings to the most-improved position–36th place in 2025.

Chart the rise of the city making the most dramatic ascent in competitiveness: a case study of the demographic edge.

SEE THE SKYLINE IN ACTION

See below for details.

A CITY IN MOTION:Download the free “Layar” app

from the app store on your

mobile device1 Launch the “Layar” app

on your device2View this page through

the app and watch the

skyline come to life3

2012-2025

SÃO PAULO +252015: High-speed rail connects to no. 76 city

Rio de Janeiro

Housing market offers huge growth potential

57% increase in legal foreign worker presence

Unemployment at historic lows

The Hot Spots 2025 report found that the cities projected to make major competitiveness gains through 2025 share a

number of common characteristics, including favorable demographics, economic might, and access to quality seaports.

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city today—and

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maturity with extra

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enhanced by

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DUBAI

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logistics, and leisure hub for northeast Asia

INCHEON, SOUTH KOREA

SEAPORT QUALITY & ACCESSCities’ proximity to thriving seaports is an advantage that stands the test of time. These seaport cities are making

the most of their geography.

MAXIMIZING THE CANAL

Under the 2005-25 Logistics and Transport Masterplan, post-Panamax-size ships

will traverse the Panama Canal starting in 2015, in effect doubling its capacity.

TWO IF BY SEA

Windows into global cities making

maritime investments.

This capital city rises faster than any other city in the

Middle East, due in part to port proximity.

MUSCAT, OMAN

+142012

78

2025

64

An overall transportation strategy—maritime

included—contributes to the Chilean capital’s rise.

SANTIAGO

+82012

68

2025

60

A development strategy including port-

infrastructure investment makes this South Africa’s

second most competitive city.

CAPE TOWN

+102012

87

2025

77

SAINT PETERSBURGRussia’s gateway to the West—and its only major

port on the Baltic Sea—will cross the 5.1-million

population threshold in 2025.

+15

2012

RANKING: 107

2025

RANKING:

92

2015 CAPACITYCURRENT CAPACITY

PANAMA CITY (65) 3RD MOST COMPETITIVE CITY IN SOUTH AND CENTRAL

AMERICA/POPULATION GROWTH RIVALING DEVELOPING ASIA

Ranked 36th,

makes fastest

overall rise

HOW DOES BRIC STACK UP?

The most competitive cities within this projected power block of emerging markets:

BRAZIL:SÃO PAULO

The capital ranks 59th but

lower-ranked Saint Petersburg

is better positioned for success.

RUSSIA:MOSCOW

This commercial capital,

ranked 51st, is third most

improved by 2025.

INDIA:MUMBAI

CHINA:HONG KONGt�'PVSUI�IJHIFTU�

overall ranking

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“Vertical City” bolsters

competitiveness

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financial maturity and

physical infrastructure

Based on research and data from

The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2013.



AN INTERACTIVE

REPORTHOT SPOTS 2025:COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES

ECONOMIC STRENGTH | INSTITUTIONAL CHARACTER | HUMAN CAPITAL | PHYSICAL CAPITAL | FINANCIAL

MATURITY | GLOBAL APPEAL | ENVIRONMENTAL & NATURAL HAZARDS | SOCIAL & CULTURAL CHARACTERINDICATOR WEIGHT KEY: HEAVIEST > LIGHTEST

Based on research and data from The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2013.

Download the full report at www.citiforcities.com for an in-depth look at the future competitiveness of 120 of the world’s top cities.

The comprehensive city study—applying assessments in areas including economics and finance,

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New varieties of “superhots” provide near-death experiences in a bowl of guacamole.

DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE

FIRE-EATERSThe search for the hottest chili.

BY LAUREN COLLINS

In mid-December of 2011, Brady Ben- nett went out drinking at Adobe Gi-

la’s at the Greene, a Mexican restaurant in Dayton, Ohio. After two beers, the bartender offered him a free shot. Ben-nett chose Patrón tequila with apple schnapps. Soon, he recalled, his throat began to swell. He struggled to breathe, and his nose, mouth, and lungs “felt as though they were on fire.” He called for an ambulance, moaning, and was taken to the hospital. A year later, Bennett filed a lawsuit against Adobe Gila’s, claiming that the bartender had spiked his drink with extract of the bhut jolokia, or ghost chili. (Adobe Gila’s denies the allega-tions.) “It wasn’t as if they gave him a lit-

tle Tabasco,” Jeff McQuiston, Bennett’s lawyer, told the Dayton Daily News. “This stuff is lethal.” The bhut jolokia is a hundred and fifty times hotter than a ja-lapeño. Gastromasochists have likened it to molten lava, burning needles, and “the tip of my tongue being branded by a fine point of heated steel.” Yet, at more than a million Scoville heat units—the Scoville scale, developed by the pharmacist Wil-bur Scoville in 1912, measures the pun-gency of foods—the bhut jolokia is at least 462,400 SHU short of being the world’s hottest chili pepper.

“Chili pepper” is a confusing term, another of Christopher Columbus’s deathless misnomers. (Columbus and

his men classified the spicy plant they had heard being referred to in Hispan-iola as aji—farther north, in Mexico, it was known by the Nahuatl word chilli—as a relative of black pepper.) Chilis belong to Capsicum, a genus of the night-shade family. Horticulturists consider them fruits, and grocers stock them near the limes and cilantro. Most chilis con-tain capsaicin, an alkaloid compound that binds to pain receptors on the tongue, producing a sensation of burn-ing. Sweet banana peppers are usually neutral. Pepperoncini (approximately 300 SHU) produce just a flicker of heat, while cayennes (40,000) are to Scotch bonnets (200,000) as matches are to blowtorches. Capsaicin is meant to deter predators, but for humans it can be too little of a bad thing. Because capsaicin causes the body to release endorphins, acting as a sort of neural fire hose, many people experience chilis as the ideal ful-crum of pain and pleasure.

In recent years, “superhots”—chilis that score above 500,000 on the Scoville scale—have consumed the attention of chiliheads, who debate grow lights on Facebook (“You can overwinter with a few well-placed T-8s”), swap seeds in flat-rate boxes (Australian customs is their nemesis), and show up in droves at fiery-foods events (wares range from Kiss My Bhut hot sauce to Vanilla Heat coffee creamer). Chilis, in general, are beautiful. There is a reason no one makes Christ-mas lights in the shape of rutabagas. Su-perhots come in the brightest colors and the craziest shapes. Their names, evok-ing travel and conquest—Armageddon, Borg 9, Naga Morich, Brain Strain—sound as though they were made up by the evil twins of the people who brand body lotions. Trinidad 7-Pots are so called because it’s said that one of them is enough to season seven pots of stew.

Like computers, superhots are evolv-ing at a rate that embarrasses the phe-nomena of just a few years ago. In 1992, Jane and Michael Stern observed, in this magazine, that five thousand Scoville units “would be considered very hot by most people, but even that is piddling compared with the blistering fury of the habanero pepper, which can reach three hundred thousand.” (The Scoville test originally measured how many drops of sugar water it would take to dilute the heat of a chili; pungency is now



determined more reliably by high-per-formance liquid chromatography, whose results can still be reported in Scoville units.) From 1994 to 2007, the Red Sa-vi na—a scarlet, heart-shaped pod rating 570,000 SHU—held the Guinness World Record for hottest chili pepper. Then the bhut jolokia, the existence of which had been whispered about for years among chiliheads, as though it were a vegetable Loch Ness monster, sur-faced on the international scene. In 2000, R. K. R. Singh, a scientist at a Ministry of Defense research laboratory in Assam, India, where the bhut jolokia is widely grown, submitted some samples for anal-ysis. The test results, which indicated that it was significantly more powerful than the Red Savina, made their way to Paul Bosland, a professor of horticulture and former sauerkraut expert who, for the past twenty-two years, has run the Chile Pepper Institute, at New Mexico State University. Bosland was skeptical of the Indian scientists’ numbers, but he managed to obtain some bhut jolokia seeds, which he grew into plants. In Jan-uary of 2007, he filed with Guinness, which awarded the C.P.I.’s bhut jolokia (1,001,300 SHU) the new world record.

In February of 2011, Guinness con-firmed that the Infinity chili, grown in Lincolnshire, England, by a former R.A.F. security guard, had surpassed the bhut jolokia by more than sixty-five thou-sand SHU. Only two weeks later, a Cumbrian farmer named Gerald Fowler introduced the Naga Viper. At 1,382,118 SHU, it was, Fowler said, “hot enough to strip paint.” He told reporters, “We’re ab-solutely, absolutely chuffed. Everyone complains about the weather and rain here in Cumbria, but we think it helped us breed the hottest chili.” He posed for the Daily Mail wearing a sombrero.

Chiliheads are mostly American, British, and Australian guys. (There is also a valiant Scandinavian contingent.) Chili growing is to gardening as grilling is to cooking, allowing men to enter, and dominate, a domestic sphere without sacrificing their bluster. “I can’t remem-ber eating anything spicy before the par-rot came along,” Fowler, a big man with a brushy mustache, told me, in July. The chili world is full of garrulous, confiding, erratic narrators who say things like “be-fore the parrot came along.” In Fowler’s case, the parrot belonged to his father’s

brother. “Uncle Jim wanted another par-rot, and his wife said, ‘Nope, you’ve got a parrot, and that’s it.’ So he made up this story that my dad wanted a parrot, and next time he visited us he brought one.” The parrot, named Murphy, came with a chili plant. (Birds can’t taste capsaicin.) Fowler quit fishing and started growing habaneros in his bedroom. Soon, he had left his job as a Web designer and founded the Chili Pepper Company, through which he sells seeds, sauces, powders, and products such as Kiss the Devil, a mouth spray made with chili-infused alcohol. “You can have just a little bit before you go to the gym, to get your endorphins up,” Fowler told me.

Chilis have become an attractive busi-ness. According to a report by IBIS-World, a market-research firm, hot-sauce production is one of America’s ten fastest-growing industries, along with solar-panel manufacturing and online eyeglass sales. Last year, the Los Angeles hot-sauce company Huy Fong Foods sold more than sixty million dollars’ worth of sriracha. (Americans bought so much sriracha in 2007 that there was a three-month national shortage.) Chilis are the male equivalent of cupcakes, tempting entrepreneurial amateurs with dreams of a more flavorful life. Gerald Fowler said, “In the last five years, you find somebody’s been made redundant, he likes chili, he’ll set up a chili business.” The month after the Naga Viper got the

Guinness record, Fowler made an extra forty thousand dollars.

At the moment, there is no definitive claimant to the title of world’s hottest pepper. Lacking a central authority, the chili community finds itself embroiled in a three-way schism. In June of 2011, a group of Australian growers captured the Guinness record with the Trinidad Scor-pion Butch T (1,463,700 SHU). Less than a year later, Bosland’s Chile Pepper Institute issued a press release: “When it

comes to bringing the heat, there’s a new king of the hill.” Bosland claimed that a C.P.I. chili called the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion had exceeded two million Sco-ville units.

Then, in August of last year, Ed Cur-rie, of the PuckerButt Pepper Company, of Fort Mill, South Carolina, unveiled a new contender. Currie announced, “The PuckerButt Pepper Company has raised the bar for hot pepper heat intensity by producing an amazing hot pepper, the Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper, which surpasses the current world record holder, the Butch T Trinidad Scorpion.” The Carolina Reaper’s recommended uses, according to PuckerButt’s Web site, in-cluded hot sauces, salsa, and “settling old scores.” Steven Leckart wrote in Maxim that eating one was “like being face-fucked by Satan.”

Currie’s announcement divided opin-ion among chiliheads, a fractious lot. His associates—battling trolls (and baiting them, too)—made their allegiances known. Joe (Pepper Joe) Arditi, who runs a seed company in Myrtle Beach and is one of four venders licensed to sell Currie’s chili, wrote in his online cata-logue, “Do we need a new World’s Hot-test? I think so. We have the Super Bowl, World Series, Grammy, and Oscar awards for new champs every year.” (Pepper Joe, who was offering Carolina Reaper seeds at ten dollars a pack, vowed to enforce “a strict 3-pack max” per cus-tomer.) He declared the Carolina Reaper “now the reigning King.”

On GardenWeb.com, a commenter wrote of Pepper Joe:

He has disrespected Guinness and the creator of the CURRENT world record holder by putting ED’s pepper at #1 WITHOUT SUB-

STANTIATION, abusing the Guinness name for PERSONAL GAIN. That is misrepresentation and THEFT.

But he knows, there is one born every minute. My two cents? Don’t be the one born in the next minute! . . . Welcome to the circus.

Eating, more than breathing or sleeping, lends itself to competition.

There are bake-offs, wing wars, contests to see who can eat the most hot dogs, bratwurst, Twinkies, tamales, cannoli, apple pies, buffalo wings, ribs, oysters, pastrami, sweet corn, deep-fried aspara-gus, ice cream, pancakes, pepperoni rolls, and boiled eggs. Superhots are the most accessible of thrills—fugu straight from the garden. For the culinary extremist, or

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exhibitionist, they provide an outlet for impulses that might have compelled his adolescent self to drink a concoction or try to swallow a teaspoonful of cinnamon. (A recent study found a positive correla-tion between chili-eating and “sensation-seeking” behavior.) As a leisure activity, superhots offer some of the pleasures of mild drugs and extreme sports without requiring one to break the law or work out. They are near-death experiences in a bowl of guacamole.

Chief among the chilihead’s occupa-tional hazards is getting burnt up. In lay-man’s terms, this means eating a chili that causes one to experience profuse sweat-ing, redness, nausea, ear-popping, ab-dominal cramps, vomiting, or all of the above. Getting burnt up can happen by accident (underestimation, misidenti-fication) or on purpose (dares, pranks, curry). At the Engine Inn, a pub a short walk from Gerald Fowler’s house in Cumbria, I sampled the Naga Viper Curry, “made with officially the world’s hottest chili pepper and served with pilau rice, mango chutney and a giant poppa-dum.” “Tastes like heaven, Burns like hell,” a chalkboard read. “594 curries sold, 397 finished.” Though the waitress had warned, “We do it almost inedible,” I made 398. Never has a runny nose been so enjoyable.

Chilis are believed to have health benefits. Four show jumpers were disqualified from the 2008 Olympics for having treated their horses with creams containing capsaicin, which can act as a stimulant. Traffic cops in China hand out chilis to keep drivers alert. In 2008, when Katie Couric asked Hillary Clinton how she kept her stamina up on the campaign trail, she replied, “I eat a lot of hot pep-pers.” But, according to Paul Rozin, of the University of Pennsylvania, who stud-ies the psychology of taste, the salutary effects of chilis aren’t substantial enough to account for their appeal to humans, the only mammals that eat them. With his theory of “benign masochism,” Rozin frames the allure of chilis as an emotional phenomenon. He writes, “We may come to enjoy our body’s negative responses to situations when we realize that there is no, or minimal, actual danger. In the case of the roller coaster, our body is scared, and sympathetically activated, but we know we are safe. Similarly for our cry-ing in sad movies, and the burn we feel

with chili pepper.” Chilis, in other words, are slasher flicks we can eat, bite-size Cyclones.

Ted Barrus, a custodian from Ham-mond, Oregon, has made a second career as Ted the Fire-Breathing Idiot, a friendly jackass and “chili reviewer.” Bar-rus started rating chilis because he liked the attention. “I still don’t really eat spicy food except when I’m doing reviews,” he said. “A typical meal for me is a regular old American meal—a burger and fries. Very rarely do I eat salad. You know, I’m a fat guy. I like fat-guy food.”

Barrus consumes whatever people send him, from raspberry-chipotle fudge to ranch-dressing soda. Armed with a jar of peanut butter and gallons of milk (ca-sein, a protein in dairy products, can alle-viate the effects of capsaicin), he regularly sets himself such stunts as eating twenty-one of the world’s hottest peppers: seven bhut jolokia, five Trinidad Scorpion Butch Ts, four Douglah 7-Pots, three Trinidad Moruga Scorpions, two Jonah 7-Pots. (He made it through eleven of them.) Last June, he and a friend decided to try the Carolina Reaper.

In the video that Barrus posted on YouTube (41,960 views), the camera homes in on a pair of pods, positioned starkly on a tabletop as though they were hand grenades seized by sheriffs’ deputies in a weapons bust.

“It looks like something from ‘The Simpsons’ or some horror movie,” Barrus says. “It’s very, very heavy and dense.”

Each of the two, Barrus and his side-kick, stuffs a whole chili into his mouth and begins to chew.

“It’s the most immediate tongue burn I’ve ever had,” Barrus says. “It’s immedi-ately frying my tongue.”

A few seconds go by.“Wow. My gums are on fire.” “Urrgh, the gut burn is intense!”“That was hell, boy. Hell in my

mouth.”When I asked Barrus, over the phone,

what he thought was the world’s hottest chili, he replied, “I always say, ‘Guinness says the Butch T, New Mexico says the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, and Ed Cur-rie says the Carolina Reaper.’ ” He con-tinued, “It’s very complicated. It’s not cut-and-dried.”

The chili industry is rife with conflicts of interest—Currie, for instance, recently flew Barrus to a convention—but Barrus

insisted that he was a reliable gauge of heat. “I go by my own burn,” he said.

According to Barrus, “most chiliheads feel you have to respect Guinness,” even though its authority is less than absolute. Guinness doesn’t perform tests itself; it just certifies results that conform to its re-quirements. In Barrus’s opinion, growers have reason to be secretive about their methods. He said, “The problem is that you have so many people who test who are affiliated with venders. Some people who create these crosses are afraid vend-ers are going to get the seeds, grow them out, rename it, and call it their own cross.”

He was unconvinced by the claims of the Chile Pepper Institute, saying, “You know, I’ve eaten Moruga Scorpions that were no hotter than a habanero.” As for the Carolina Reaper, he acknowledged that Currie’s association with Pepper Joe, who had a reputation for slick salesman-ship, had “hurt his credibility.” (Pepper Joe, for his part, said, “I’m a marketer—that’s my DNA.” He added, “We posi-tively have the data. We took a new pep-per and in fourteen months made it a household recognizable name, and to me that’s just short of astonishing.”) Barrus said, “Ed partnered up with him for the release of the Carolina Reaper. So some people look at Ed like, how much can you trust Ed Currie?”

Several weeks later, I was in South Car- olina, standing in the middle of a

field with Ed Currie. Currie had picked me up at my hotel in a GMC van. I had immediately started coughing—chili fumes. Currie rolled down a window.

Currie has a beard and an excitable yet downbeat manner. He was dressed in jean shorts, a T-shirt that said “Tree Hugger: I Will Cling to the Old Rugged Cross,” and a gold-and-silver Tag Heuer watch. He surveyed his plants, which were shoulder-high and stretched in lush rows back to a spring-fed pond. “Less talking, more working!” he yelled to some bare-chested workers who were picking pods under the sun. He turned to me and said, “I don’t really care much for the spotlight, but God’s doing it, and I’ve just got to keep on going.”

Being a North Carolina native, I asked Currie if he was from the area. He ex-plained that he had grown up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where his father was the chief financial officer of a division

of the John Hancock insurance company. Currie continued, “I went to the Univer-sity of Michigan, and I got kicked out. Before that I was at Eastern Michigan. I never went to one class—I just took the tests, which I could do because I’m a ge-nius. My family had a history of heart disease and cancer, and all this time I’m studying how not to die, never quite cor-relating that the amount of drinking and drugs I was doing might lead to prema-ture death. I was just reading, looking at places where they had low incidences of illness.” Currie developed a theory that spicy food might be good for you. “In 1982, I went to a Vietnamese restaurant in Orchard Lake, Michigan, and I said, ‘I want to eat hot chilis. What’s the hottest you’ve got?’ And they said, ‘No, no, no,’ and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ ” He smiled. “I got high as crap!”

Currie started making hot sauces. “When you’re bored, you’re bored,” he said. He went to seven different schools and eventually graduated from Central Michigan. Meanwhile, he was drinking and doing drugs. He got a D.W.I., lost his driver’s license, went to jail, got mar-ried and divorced. By 1999, he said, “I had five different liquor stores delivering to my house. I was a big fat sloppy drunk pig, and I decided I wanted to die. It was winter, and I left the door open—snow was coming in the house—and then an

angel came in and said, ‘You’ve got to get to the hospital.’ ” Currie waved a forearm in front of me and rolled up his sleeve. “See? Goosebumps.”

We got into the van. Currie, who has been clean for fourteen years, worked in the trust department at Wells Fargo until January, when he turned full time to chilis. He fielded a flurry of calls on his iPhone as we drove to his house. Even-tually, we parked next to a modest white A-frame with an extravagantly land-scaped garden: palm trees, cattails, a seven-foot-tall cosmos. “Look, palms are only supposed to bloom in the spring-time,” Currie said. “I get them to bloom all year long.” He added, “I know about nutrients, I know about plant reproduc-tive cycles—I grew pot in Michigan in the middle of wintertime!”

There was something strange about the street Currie lived on: while the front yards on the block, except for Currie’s, were largely barren, many of the back yards appeared to be as lush as tropical jungles. Currie, it turned out, had turned the neighborhood into an extended chili farm. “I might or might not have about thirty-five yards that I lease out for the summer every year,” he said. “It’s all camou-flaged,” he continued, slipping behind a house to check up on a test plot. “No one knows where it is. People have come

into my yard and tried to steal stuff.”Currie first suspected that he had a

very hot chili on his hands in 2002, when he crossed a habanero (he got the seeds, he says, from a former co-worker who was from St. Vincent) with a Pakistani Naga (these came from a Michigan friend—“a Pakistani prince” whom he used to babysit, and whom he says he can’t say more about “because of his job”). Horticultural protocol requires that a new chili self-pollinate for five to eight generations before it can be con-sidered stable and, therefore, a distinct variety. Currie says he grew his plant to five generations and then took it to nearby Winthrop University for tests. In 2010, Cliff Calloway, a chemistry pro-fessor at Winthrop, certified that the chili, which was then called the HP22B, averaged a heat of 1,474,000 SHU. The next year, the report somehow came to the attention of the local media. “It went viral,” Currie said. “People were trashing me on every forum. Ted Barrus called and said, ‘You’ve got to get on here and defend yourself.’ Apparently, I didn’t ask the pepper gods if it was all right for me to be cross-breeding chilis.”

In June of 2011, Currie wrote to Guinness:

Hello, my name is Ed Currie and I own the PuckerButt Pepper Company. We have been testing a pepper I hybrided at Winthrop University for the last several years and have a pepper that’s weighted average over the years is 1,474,000 scoville. I have attached a chart one of the grad students used for her part of the project. I actually have a pepper that is closer to two million consistently, but I am waiting on the results from this year and making sure the seed is consistent. How should I proceed and what data do I need to provide. . . . It would be great to have the US on the map for heat.

Thanks for your help. SincerelySmokin Ed

Currie paid six hundred and fifty dol-lars to Guinness to “fast-track” the appli-cation, but, for one reason or another, the proceedings stalled. Guinness says that it has never received the proper paperwork from Currie. “We keep asking for docu-mentation and he says he’ll send it, but we still haven’t got anything,” Sara Wilcox, a spokesperson for Guinness, told me. Currie argues that Guinness has failed to keep track of the documentation he’s sent—when the person he was originally dealing with left the company, in 2012, “Don’t worry—if we double the minimum wage it will still be nothing.”


he was forced to start afresh—and that Guinness keeps changing the rules for the category.

“I don’t think they want to give the rec ord to an American,” Currie said. “That’s just my personal opinion.”

Given the stalemate with Guinness, Currie decided late last year to declare the chili the world’s hottest on his own au-thority. First, he changed the HP22B’s name to the Carolina Reaper. “God brought a couple of guys into my life who used to work at Pepsi,” he told me. “They’re all about the corporate market-ing thing.”

Currie’s critics question the long-term viability of the Carolina Reaper. Ted Barrus explained, “There’s a lot of controversy over Ed Currie’s chili be-cause in Europe some people got the Reaper, they grew out the seeds, and their chilis don’t look like anybody else’s. They’re saying it’s no longer stable.” Currie acknowledged that some cus-tomers had got weird results, but the problem, he said, stemmed from a few contaminated seed packs. (Currie has recently furnished Guinness with a let-ter from a biology professor at Winthrop attesting that his plants are stable.) Be-sides, he said, the Carolina Reaper was, at this point, almost an anachronism, and he was persisting in trying to win recognition for it merely as a point of pride. “The Carolina Reaper’s the mild-est of the peppers I’ve crossed,” he said, looking me in the eye. He had goose-bumps again. “We have one hundred and sixty-two hotter ones yet to come.”

“F or over 1 year now, the Reaper has been so close to getting a record,”

Jim Duffy wrote to me recently. “Do you think people in the Industry are tired of hearing about it almost getting it over and over again? Is it the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ and now Industry people are just ignoring it?”

Duffy, of Refining Fire Chiles, in San Diego, is Ed Currie’s arch-frenemy and sometime business partner. They pray to-gether on the phone every day, and tend to preface their criticisms of each other by saying, “He’s a good friend of mine, but . . .” (As hybrids go, the chili world would make an excellent setting for both a Will Ferrell movie and an adaptation of “Julius Caesar.” Among the pejoratives the chili heads I spoke with used to de-

scribe each other were “clown,” “joke,” “Johnny-come-lately,” “whack job,” and “palooka.”) Duffy says that he’s not a rec-ord-chaser, but his beef with the Carolina Reaper may owe something to the fact that he gave Paul Bos land and the Chile Pepper Institute the seeds they used to grow the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, which they proclaimed “the hottest pep-per on the planet” in February of 2012. Duffy said of it, to the Asso-ciated Press, “Like Cabbage Patch dolls right before Christmas or Beanie Babies, it’s, like, the hot item.”

According to C.P.I. data, the Trinidad Moruga Scor-pion averages only 1.2 mil-lion Scoville units, but its heat peaks at more than two million. To assert its pri-macy, its boosters have de-vised a novel argument: the chili record should be determined by maximum, rather than mean (the scariest wolf ever, rather than the scariest wolf most of the time).To some chiliheads, this constitutes a curious reversal of methodology—only six years ago, the C.P.I. claimed the Guinness World Record by citing the bhut jolokia’s mean heat.

“It drives me nuts!” Alex de Wit, an Australian grower who is part of the team that holds the current Guinness record for the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, told me. “I think if you want a world record, you have to do it according to the rules.” De Wit e-mailed me later, “If they would beat me and did it exactly as supposed to do, well done and good on them. I am the first to applaud and clap my hands. . . . Anything else is just loose sand to my opinion, and not based upon facts but fiction.” De Wit was equally upset by Ed Currie’s claims about the Carolina Reaper: “I really do not have the time or energy for dicks (excusez le mot).” He closed his e-mail, “I wish you a spicy day.”

Jim Duffy dismissed such criticism. “Does a runner win a race on the aver-age, or does he win it by being the fast-est?” he said, when we spoke on the phone, his voice gaining Scovilles by the second. “Is any record won by the fastest, the hottest, the tallest, the big-gest, or are records given for the aver-age? Who cares about the average?” He concluded, “Every rec ord in the history of man has been based on the high.”

Duffy and Bosland have yet to secure independent recognition for the Trinidad Moruga. I asked Duffy if the use of max-imum numbers amounted to, as some chiliheads had complained, a misleading focus on outliers.

“Well, I’ll tell you, dear, you can come out here to San Diego, and you can walk in my field, and you can bite into a Reaper and you can bite into a

Moruga, and we’ll see which one you walk away from,” he said. “My grower Daniel, he’s got Reapers in his dehy-drator, and he eats them like potato chips.”

After we got off the phone, Duffy sent me an e-mail that contained a list of ten questions to ponder. The ninth suggested that some of his competitors might be

using substances that artificially inflate the capsaicin content of their chilis. “There is no test out there that can detect the use of these nutrients in the pepper,” Duffy wrote. “Yes, Virginia! Peppers can be juiced!”

Butch T, of the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, is Butch Taylor, a plumber

in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 2005, Taylor got some Trinidad Scorpion seeds from a guy named Mark in New Jersey, who had got them from a local nursery. Taylor recalled, “When I grew them down here, they just grew unbe-lievable. I got three plants out of five seeds, and every plant I grew was dedi-cated to seeds. The first time I tasted it, I just thought, This is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Taylor kept growing the plants, se-lecting at each generation for the hottest specimens. He gave the seeds away to chiliheads all over the world, sticking a little label that said “Butch T” at the bot-tom of each packet, so that absent-minded recipients would be able to keep track of where they had come from. Be-sides that, he didn’t think much of it. “I didn’t have any money to pay for test-ing—I didn’t even know how to have them tested at the time,” he told me. “And since I was growing the seeds, not selling them, I couldn’t see the purpose of setting the record.” He learned that his namesake chili was the hottest chili in the world, according to Guinness, the


day that the record was announced. The Australians who developed Taylor’s strain into a winner had named it after him. “It took me a while to get my head around it, because I’m a little more shy, unless I’ve been drinking or something,” he recalled. “I thought that was very de-cent of them.”

Butch Taylor is spoken of in reverent tones in the chili community. A human bhut jolokia, he doesn’t travel often to chili conventions, and his Web site is dor-mant. He can be a little hard to find, but, in recent years, he has maintained a steady presence on Facebook, advising fellow-enthusiasts on how to deal with fire ants or sharing observations about pod pheno-types. In January, he posted his “2013 (in-complete) grow list,” a document that in-cluded sixty-one types of chili and was pored over as though it were a Vatican encyclical. Christopher Phillips, another veteran chilihead, wrote, “Congratula-tions Butch. You have now officially set yourself up for 52,390 seed requests come harvest time? LOL. Nice list!!” Taylor likes blues piano and L.S.U. football. He misses the taste of glue on stamps. He even has his own groupie—a woman who sends him pictures of herself posing next to plants grown from his seeds.

A few years ago, Taylor and his wife, Shirley, whom he met when he was thirteen, were living in a farmhouse that they built with their own hands on some land that Taylor’s family has owned for years. The farm is about an hour north of Baton Rouge, in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. When the economic crisis hit, gas cost too much for them to make the commute every day, so they started spending the week in a travel trailer that they park in the driveway of their daugh-ter’s house. On weekends, they drive out to the country.

One day in September, Butch and Shirley picked me up at the Baton Rouge airport. Taylor did not look exactly like the picture he had sent—it was of Brad Pitt—but he welcomed me warmly. His eyes are bright blue. He was wearing shorts and a blue polo shirt with white stripes. “Hush, baby!” Shirley, who has strawberry-blond hair and a deep, hon-eyed voice, said to their shih tzu, Laila Habanero, as I climbed into their truck. A chili-pepper ornament dangled from the rearview mirror.

A couple of hours later, Taylor was

standing in the kitchen of the farmhouse, softening shallots in butter for a crawfish étouffée. “I’ve cooked since the time I could lift a skillet,” he said. Taylor had his first chili by accident. “I ate a tepín that I found growing in a flower bed when I was eleven,” he said. “It burnt me up.” As an adult, he started growing tomatoes; chilis followed. “This is based on an old recipe I came across in a preserving book from the eighteen-hundreds,” Taylor said, picking up a jar of pepper brandy that was sitting on the counter. Chilis take on a metaphysical dimension in Tay-lor’s telling. “I don’t find peppers,” he said. “Peppers find me.”

The following morning, Taylor put on his boots and went outside. Next door, his mother’s chickens were cluck-ing in a pen. Hummingbirds darted past a pecan tree. Taylor unplugged a home-made electrical fence and stepped into his chili field. “This used to be a dog yard,” he said. “My stepfather ran the hounds at Angola State Penitentiary. He used to feed them deer carcasses. The grass grew so thick that you could barely run a motor over it, so I thought it would be a good place to put a garden.”

Taylor walked through rows of plants, gathering ripe pods in a wooden basket. His plants hadn’t done partic-ularly well this season—they were smaller than usual, and their leaves were a sickly yellow. (He thought he had got a bad batch of fertilizer.) Still, even in early fall, they were yielding chilis ga-lore: chilis in the shape of bugles; chilis that glowed like Chinese lanterns; chilis that, Taylor pointed out, resembled pit bulls’ teeth. When I asked him the big question, he hedged. “What I believe is the hottest pepper? I don’t know,” he said.

Still, he couldn’t resist a tiny dig. “This is a Trinidad Scorpion from Australia,” he said, fingering a bumpy bright-red pod. He handed it to me. “Notice a re-semblance to Ed’s?”

Taylor allowed that chiliheads were a competitive bunch. “Of course, I have an unfair advantage,” he said, indicating the sun beating down overhead. “It’s kind of like bringing a Ferrari to a Volks wagen race.”

Taylor led me to a white outbuilding that serves as a dedicated hot-sauce kitchen: eight-gallon pots, nitrile gloves, face mask, radio, a de-seeding stool em-

bellished, like a hot rod, with flames. Every year, he makes a few sauces, which he sells mostly to his plumbing buddies. “I’ve been trying to convince myself that I have to sell more stuff to pay for all the different stuff I want to do,” he said. “I just can’t get into it.” Taylor has a theory about the economics of chilis: like hem-lines, they rise when times are tough. “The deal with the hot sauce is that no-body has the money to eat out, so they stay home and start cooking again. After a while, you think, Well, there’s got to be something different I can do with this.” The only problem, Taylor said, is that nobody ever buys a bottle of superhot sauce twice.

Eventually, we walked back to the house.

“How were they lookin’, baby?” Shir-ley asked.

“I’ve got a lot of peppers out there to pick this weekend,” Butch replied.

He had brought a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T in from the field. The pod had a bulbous cap and a tapering tail that re-called the stinger of a wasp. Its skin was pebbly, like the nose of a drinker. It looked as though it had been made of melted wax from the candles at an Italian restaurant.

Taylor took a knife and whittled off a flake no larger than a clove. I put it in my mouth and chewed. The capsaicin hit loud and fast, a cymbal clang of heat. My face flushed. My eyes glassed over and I started pacing the kitchen, as though I could walk off the burn. It took twenty minutes and a can of Dr Pepper to ban-ish the sensation of having a sort of tinni-tus of the mouth.

Before we came inside, Taylor had shown me his greenhouse, where he tends his most precious plants. A single bush dominated the small hut. Hanging from its branches were an assortment of pods, some of them deep red and some of them a faint green. The plant, which was not yet stable, was the third generation of an accidental cross of a 7-Pot Jonah and, most likely, a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T. Taylor was calling it the WAL—the Wicked-Ass Little 7-Pot. He shook a branch, unleashing a swarm of flies, and picked a pod from the stem. “Just off the top of my head, the first one I tasted, I’d say two million Scovilles,” he said. “But it may just be a freak of nature. You get those now and then.”

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The most important thing was loyalty. My older brother had

been brain-damaged in a swimming accident and was unable to move or talk. We took him home from the hospital and started caring for him ourselves. This was awful, but loyalty required us to pretend that it was not.

My mother packed my school lunches in the white plastic bags in

which my brother’s medical supplies arrived. The bags were printed with the pharmacy’s name and a list of items they might contain, such as urinary catheters, irrigation trays, liquid suppositories. Sitting in the cafeteria, I worried that someone would notice the bags and I would have to explain. I could have asked my mother to send my lunches in ordinary paper bags. But doing so would have lessened my misery and felt disloyal, because, if my brother and my parents were suffering, I should be, too.

We had moved to the United States, from Delhi, when I was eight, settling first in Queens and then in New Jersey. There weren’t many other Indians in my middle school. Those of us who brought Indian food from home all sat at the same table in the cafeteria. Boys would wander by our table and sing, “Shiiit. I smell shiiit.” They would lean over our shoulders, look at our food—spicy potatoes, okra, bitter gourd—and gag. Things became worse a few years later, when “Indiana

Jones and the Temple of Doom” came out: the movie shows Indians eating snakes and monkey brains. At lunch one day, a black boy asked me what I was eating, and I said snake. “Snake!” he began yelling. He sounded both happy and proud. Soon I was surrounded by a crowd. I wanted to fit in, of course, but even more I wanted to lash out.

My family ate non-Indian food only when relatives were in town. We had some relatives in Virginia who would visit us at Thanksgiving. They were cheerful people. When they came, they stayed up late, playing cards with other Indians who lived in our neighborhood, and they teased my mother for her religiosity by burping loudly and crying, “Brahma speaks!” Our relatives were willing to spend money in a way that we were not. They went to Pizza Hut. This was stressful, because periodically we had to treat.

Pizza Hut, with its strange roof, like a paper boat turned upside down and worn as a hat, seemed European and glamorous. It suggested a world where people were happy, where they lived a life that was better than mine. We almost never ate at the restaurant. It was cheaper to bring the pizza home and cut up our own onions and green peppers than to pay for toppings. Also, everyone knew that only a fool would order a soda at a

restaurant, because the glasses contained so much ice.

While we waited for our takeout pizza to be prepared, I would look for ways to hurt Pizza Hut. I took fistfuls of straws to bring home. I stuffed my pockets with the peppermint candies that were left out. When no one was looking, I wandered into a corner and, with my back to the room, drooled onto the floor.

At home, the pizza was laid out on the kitchen table. Having it at the center of the table felt like having a white person visit. We put our toppings on our slices. We ate them.

I saw the world, for the most part, through a scrim of fear and anger—fear of our not having enough money to take care of my brother, anger at other people for not suffering the way I did. Almost thirty years have passed since then. My brother is dead now. And yet so much of my fear remains that it is as if I were still living in the world of my childhood.

A millionaire acquaintance once took me and my wife to the Michelin three-star restaurant Per Se, in New York, where he spent about twenty thousand dollars on wine for us—a ’61 Palmer, an ’82 Margaux, a ’90 Cheval Blanc, an ’89 d’Yquem, a Krug.

All that spending money does for me, though, is make me angry. The more I spend now, the more I feel I deserve some explanation for why my past was the way it was. When I go to a restaurant like Per Se, I look for ways to take something with me, like the peppermint candies at Pizza Hut. I like to get a little more than I am paying for.

Per Se gets its butter from a particular herd of cows. Before I left the restaurant that night, I asked the waiter if I could have some of the butter to take home. Of course, he arranged it. Some time has passed since that dinner, but I still have the butter, sitting in my freezer. I am not sure what to do with it. IV

AN

BRU

NETTI

BUTTER

BY AKHIL SHARMA

TAKE OUT


Five years after Chobani was launched, it has reached a billion dollars in revenue.

ANNALS OF BUSINESS

JUST ADD SUGARHow an immigrant from Turkey turned Greek yogurt into an American snack food.

BY REBECCA MEAD

In 1996, Hamdi Ulukaya, a twenty-five- year-old student from Turkey, was at-

tending language school in Troy, New York. He had left home for America two years earlier. One day, his father called and announced plans to visit. In antici-pation, Ulukaya shopped for the foods that his father customarily ate for break-fast: bread, olives, and feta cheese. But the only cheese that Ulukaya could find in the local supermarket was flavorless. His father, who was equally unimpressed after sampling it, made a suggestion: why not go into the cheese business and mar-ket a really good feta?

At first, Ulukaya dismissed the idea—why come all the way from Turkey to do what he could have done back home? His

grandfather had raised sheep and goats in eastern Turkey, near the Euphrates, and his father had become the owner of a successful small business, manufacturing cheese and yogurt from the family’s yield and that of other local farmers. But the more Ulukaya considered the notion the more promising it appeared. The coun-tryside around Troy was filled with excel-lent dairy farms—the problem was merely a matter of craft. He felt confident that he could make, and find customers for, a bet-ter feta. In any case, he wasn’t sure how else he could succeed in America, and he did not want to return to Turkey: he is a Kurd, an ethnic group that has been sub-jected to discrimination there.

Initially, Ulukaya imported some of

his family’s cheeses and sold them to an Armenian distributor in New York City. Eventually, he opened a small factory in Johnstown, New York, where he began adapting his family’s cheese-making rec-ipes to local sources and American tastes. He made feta using cow’s milk rather than the traditional sheep’s milk, which can be too tangy for unaccustomed pal-ates. The cultures worked differently with cow’s milk, and a lot of tinkering was required to get the cheese right. But by 2002 the factory had produced its first pallet for sale, containing about a thou-sand pounds of feta.

Making the product, which Ulukaya registered under the name Euphrates, was the easy part. It was much harder to run the factory, hire the right people, handle sales and marketing, and secure wholesale buyers. Most nights, Ulukaya collapsed onto his couch soaked in whey from the factory. Sometimes he slept in a van, on the road between deliveries. After two years of ceaseless work, he began turning a profit, with loyal customers at specialty groceries and Greek diners. Euphrates’s sales rose even higher after Ulukaya intro-duced a packaging innovation: feta sliced into bite-size cubes.

In 2005, Ulukaya received a piece of junk mail, from a local real-estate com-pany, advertising the sale of a yogurt-and-cheese factory that had closed down. He went to see it. The factory, which was built in 1920 and had been occupied most recently by Kraft Foods, was on a country road in New Berlin, in central New York, flanked by a biker bar on one side and a cemetery on the other. Covered in peel-ing paint, the factory looked derelict, but it functioned, and Ulukaya recognized that the machinery was worth more than the asking price of the entire plant—less than a million dollars.

Ulukaya had noticed that the specialty stores sold yogurt imported from Greece by an Athens-based company called Fage. It reminded him of the yogurt he had grown up with in Turkey. Fage’s prod-uct—unlike the yogurt that Kraft had made in New Berlin—was strained, its whey removed to create a thicker con-sistency, and it was sold without fruit or sugar mixed in. The company had devoted American customers, but its niche repre-sented less than one per cent of the yogurt market. Fage was expensive, and its brand-ing was terrible: consumers weren’t sure



ethnic identity into an entirely American product—and this kind of transformation is the most American story there is.

Yogurt is made by adding live cultures to fresh milk that has been heated,

then permitting the cultures to ferment until the mixture thickens and becomes tangy. Like cheese, yogurt is a primitive processed food, a way of preserving milk beyond its natural life span. Long part of European, Middle Eastern, and Indian cuisine, it is relatively new to the Ameri-can diet. In 1922, Bertha M. Wood pub-lished the cookbook “Foods of the For-eign-Born,” which described to American readers the exotic dish of yogurt, or mat-zoun, a lunchtime staple among residents of Turkey, Greece, Armenia, and Syria, and typically prepared at home. “It is as valuable in their diet as buttermilk is in ours,” Wood wrote. Unfortunately, her recipe called for stirring into milk a table-spoon of “old matzoun,” which posed a challenge for cooks without a friendly Turkish or Syrian neighbor.

The industrial production of yogurt began in Europe. In 1919, Isaac Carasso, an entrepreneur in Barcelona, founded Danone, which eventually supplied most of the Continent. His son, Daniel Carasso, immigrated to the U.S., and in 1942 he set up shop in the Bronx, under the name Dannon, and began selling plain yogurt. That year, the Times ran an article about this obscure new foodstuff, which, it ex-

plained, could be eaten with salted crack-ers and a green salad, spooned over steamed rice or boiled vegetables, or mixed with strawberry jam and spread on wheat bread.

By the late forties, manufacturers had begun adding fruit preserves to the bottom of the yogurt container. In 1953, Dannon invented vanilla yogurt, and an-nounced that its product had been “com-pletely Americanized.” A decade or so later came “Swiss-style” yogurt, in which

how to pronounce the name—it is FA-yeh—nor could they tell if it was a diet food or not. Ulukaya became convinced that many more people would eat strained yogurt if they could find it, reasonably priced, at ordinary supermarkets.

With a loan of eight hundred thou-sand dollars from the Small Business Ad-ministration, combined with grants from local economic-development organiza-tions, Ulukaya bought the factory in New Berlin. In order to make Greek yogurt, he needed one additional piece of equip-ment: a yogurt separator. This machine, which looks like an industrial washer-dryer crossed with an unmanned space probe, spins at high speed to extract yo-gurt’s milk solids from its whey, produc-ing a creamy white mass. A new yogurt separator costs about a million dollars, so Ulukaya looked online for a secondhand machine, and eventually found one in the inventory of a dealer in Madison, Wisconsin, who agreed to sell it for fifty thousand dollars. Ulukaya drove to Mad-ison to pick it up, and on the way he came up with a brand name for his yogurt: Chobani, which derives from çoban, the Turkish word for shepherd.

It took Ulukaya two years of exper-imentation to get the consistency and flavor right—creamy, and not too tart—and to design the colorful cups in which the yogurt was to be sold, in plain, va-nilla, strawberry, peach, and blueberry flavors. (The fruit, he decided, would be on the bottom.) Ulukaya then began working to get his product on grocery shelves. He largely ignored specialty re-tailers and focussed instead on forging relationships with mass-market retailers like ShopRite. When he couldn’t afford the supermarket’s fees for shelf space, he bartered yogurt in exchange.

Five years after Chobani was launched, the company has reached a billion dollars in revenue: a growth rate more typical of a successful tech start-up than a food busi-ness. More than thirty per cent of the yo-gurt eaten in America is now Greek yo-gurt, and much of it is being made by Chobani in the New Berlin factory (which has been greatly expanded) and in a new facility in Twin Falls, Idaho. With his modest cheese business, Ulukaya made a specialty product for specialized consum-ers: people who had already acquired the taste for feta. With Chobani, Ulukaya has transformed a product with a distinctly

fruit flavoring was evenly distributed, with the help of additives such as gelatin or pectin; artificial colors guaranteed that the product would have a pleasant pastel look. Manufacturers also began adding potas-sium sorbate, a preservative, to extend yo-gurt’s shelf life.

Yogurt was reaching a mass consumer base by the mid-seventies, with market-ing campaigns touting it as a health food. Several TV spots made by Dannon cele-brated the yogurt-based diets of centenar-ian Georgians, who were seen cheerfully hoeing or chopping wood. At the same time, yogurt was marketed to women as a diet product, with advertisements for low-fat varieties featuring models in bikinis. This health-enhancing reputation helped launch the market for frozen yogurt: New

York reported that when Dannon opened its first storefront, on the Upper East Side, in 1975, customers outnumbered those at a nearby Häagen-Dazs outlet by a ratio of three to one.

Frozen yogurt, which promises an elu-sive combination of healthfulness and indulgence, follows a familiar pattern. The nineteen-eighties saw an enthusiasm for cholesterol-reducing oat bran, deliv-ered in the form of giant chocolate-chip muffins; in the nineteen-nineties, dieters turned to low-fat regimens, and manufac-turers responded by producing treats like SnackWells cookies, which compensated for the absence of fat with extra sugar. In America, yogurt, too, has tilted in the di-rection of dessert. The nutritionist Mar-ion Nestle, in her 2006 book, “What to Eat,” noted that yogurt had become avail-able in such flavors as piña colada, cotton candy, and cheesecake, and was often being sold with swirls of candy sprinkles or Oreo bits. A raspberry variety of Yo-plait’s Go-Gurt—packaged in tubes, for kids—was colored electric blue. The closer that yogurt has come to resemble junk food, the faster consumption has grown: by 2005, the average American was eating about ten pints of yogurt a year, five times the consumption of 1980. “Yogurt, it seems, has performed a mar-keting miracle,” Nestle concluded. “It is a fast-selling dairy dessert with the aura of a health food.”

Nestle’s book was published before the explosion of Greek yogurt, which has a higher protein content than other yo-gurts. There are between thirteen and eighteen grams of protein in each Chobani


cup, and little or no fat—a selling point at a moment when high-protein diets have achieved widespread popularity. Nevertheless, Chobani is as dessert-like as its mass-market predecessors: there are twenty grams of sugar in a six-ounce con-tainer of blueberry, its most popular flavor; some of the sweetness derives from the fruit and milk solids, but much of it is from cane sugar.

Chobani’s rapid success has left the es-tablished yogurt companies trying to catch up. In 2011, Dannon began selling a line of Greek yogurts under the brand name Oikos—the word means “house”—and more recently it has begun producing Greek-yogurt-based dips, in such savory flavors as cucumber-dill and roasted red pepper. Yoplait is offering Greek 100, a hundred-calorie cup endorsed by Weight Watchers. Ben & Jerry’s now manufac-tures frozen Greek yogurt in seven flavors, in-cluding banana peanut butter and straw-berry shortcake. (“We think it’ll rock your Acropolis!”) Chobani is not about to be outdone: some of its newest offerings fea-ture white- or dark-chocolate chips.

The biker bar that once stood adjacent to Chobani’s New Berlin factory is

gone. In its stead is a giant warehouse that can hold a week’s production of yogurt: up to two million cases, made from about twenty-eight million pounds of milk. Sev-enty tankers of milk arrive at the plant

every day, which means that the country roads surrounding the factory are far less quiet than they used to be. But the plant has also brought hundreds of new jobs to the region, and Chobani recently spent three hundred thousand dollars building a local Little League field.

I visited New Berlin in August, and was shown around the factory by Dave Christensen, a Chobani executive. Inside the chilled, hangar-like warehouse, cases of yogurt destined for the shelves of Costco were being packed in special branded boxes. In the vast packaging room, Chobani’s familiar brightly colored sleeves were being wrapped around filled plastic cups of yogurt, at a rate of thirty thousand cups an hour. A fruit-storage room held enormous steel barrels equipped at the bottom with large spigots, from which puréed blueberries, strawberries, and mangoes could be tapped. In the older wing of the factory, Christensen led me into what is known as Filler Alley. I watched through glass as a sleekly moving steel machine squirted what looked like blueberry compote into the bottom of half a dozen cups at a time. Then a different set of nozzles squeezed blobs of plain yogurt onto each serving of fruit, so that the con-tents of each container were topped with a perfect creamy peak, like soft-serve ice cream that has yet to be licked.

In another room, plastic cartons were being filled with yogurt mixed with choc-

olate chips. The cartons were on their way to becoming Raspberry Choco Fix Flips. The Flip is among Chobani’s latest inno-vations: flavored yogurt paired with a punnet of fruit or dry ingredients. Up-stairs, we entered the separator room, where regular yogurt is spun into Greek yogurt by more than a dozen separators. Dozens of pipes ran along the walls and ceilings, entering and exiting tanks and machines with Seussian complexity. The air was warm and moist and pungent with the scent of soured milk, like the cleavage of a nursing mother on a warm day. The yogurt was piped in here from another room, which was off-limits to visitors. The milk, Christensen explained, was in-oculated with five live cultures, following a formula that had been devised by Mus-tafa Dogan, a food chemist Ulukaya brought in from Turkey. “The yogurt de-cides when it’s ready,” Christensen added, adopting a strangely mystical air for a man who, before coming to work for Chobani, used to run an airplane factory.

In New Berlin, Ulukaya has an almost cultlike aura; employees invariably refer to him by his first name. Christensen praised his boss’s generosity, noting that last sum-mer Ulukaya took Chobani’s first five em-ployees to London for the Olympics. (Chobani was a sponsor.) Every Thanks-giving, Christensen added, Ulukaya gives each employee a turkey and a bucket of feta. Christensen told me that, last De-cember, employees at the factory had learned they would be expected to work on Christmas Day, to fulfill orders. This could have spoiled the employees’ festive season, but Ulukaya brought in a prime-rib dinner for everyone, as compensation for their lost holiday.

Ulukaya is indeed charismatic, as I dis-covered when I joined him for lunch, at his nearby home. He is a handsome man of forty-one with thick dark hair, olive skin, and a riveting capacity for eye con-tact. His manner is casual and intimate, and his chuckle so ready that it can seem to border on the hysterical. He lives in a luxurious, but not showy, contemporary house on the crest of a hill. In the open-plan living-dining room, a fireplace was set into a drystone wall; the ceiling fea-tured reclaimed vintage beams. Beyond sliding glass doors, a deck gave onto a wide lawn with a freshwater pond. The property is surrounded by gentle hills, and a state forest rambles extensively behind

COMPANY OF THE MOTEL ROOM

Red shoe under the bed, black socknestled inside it, burn mark the size of a man’s thumbon the nightstand: what has been ended here?Or what begun, since from such originsno long continuance could stay itselfas my long marriage testifies by its repeated passagesof middling weather. Tracery of cigarette ashon this windowsill . . . Who has stood where I standbefore or after love, asking why he came here,why this blue spruce I’m looking on, unflinchable,resists the winds as people never canor why this highway encircling me, alone again—my conference done, tomorrow I go home—drives some to lives of rich desserts, some livesof stolen crumbs, and for me neither. Home!I have to find a small squall there. Start one?

—Peter Cooley


Ulukaya’s barn, which he uses as a pri-vate movie theatre. On a clear day, the Catskills can be glimpsed in the distance. “I think you can see fifty miles,” Ulukaya told me. “The only limit is your sight.”

In the kitchen, he made espresso, fum-bling slightly with the machine, as if he had rarely operated it. After pizza was de-livered, from a local restaurant, he poured a glass of Gavi for me and offered me slices of his preferred feta cheese, which was imported from Turkey and is made from sheep’s milk. Discreetly placed speakers played music that was quite pos-sibly Turkish, or Greek. On the dining table was a pile of books: Rumi, Neruda, Lorca. “I’m a big Rumi guy,” he told me. The books were a recent acquisition from the McNally Jackson bookstore, in SoHo, which is around the block from Choba-ni’s New York office. Nearby, on West Broadway, is the first Chobani café, which opened last year and sells concoc-tions of plain, low-fat yogurt topped with mango, avocado, jalapeño, and cilantro, or yogurt with pistachio, honey, dark choc-olate, and orange. The café serves as a re-search lab: if a recipe proves popular, it can be adapted for mass-market production, with an inevitable diminution in flavor and subtlety. (The yogurt I ate there last summer—topped with peach, almonds, thyme, and lemon zest—was inspired. The blended-peach and pistachio Flip is more ordinary.)

Ulukaya wore jeans and a blue denim shirt that bore an embroidered Chobani crest over the left pocket, which made him look a bit like a server at the Cho-bani café, rather than like a billionaire entrepreneur. Ulukaya is unmarried. His ex-wife, a doctor named Ayse Giray, to whom he was briefly married in the late nineties, is suing him, alleging that she provided funding to Ulukaya’s business during and after their marriage, and is therefore owed a fifty-three-per-cent stake in Chobani. Ulukaya told me that he expects the case to be over soon, add-ing that he isn’t worried about the im-pact of its resolution upon his company. “One good thing about this country is that anybody can sue anybody, anytime,” he said, merrily.

Ulukaya described his origins in rural Turkey, where, he said, his family had been seminomadic. “They would go up into the mountains with their sheep and goats,” he said. “They would start in the

early spring, and as the summer came they would go further and further and further up, so by the time they reached the top it was time to come back down again.” He doesn’t know his exact date of birth, he told me, because he was born while his mother was coming back down a mountain, rather than in the local hos-pital. “My early life, and living here, I feel like I travelled a thousand years,” he said. He told me that the landscape of upstate New York reminded him of his home in Turkey; when pressed, he acknowledged that there were fewer trees there, and less lush pasture.

Ulukaya is transforming the upstate landscape, at least in terms of its dairy in-dustry. Since Chobani’s arrival in New Berlin, its original competitor, Fage, has opened a plant in Johnstown; the state is also home to Siggi’s—an Icelandic-style yogurt, made with skim milk, that is strained and less sweet than most com-mercial brands—and Müller, a German brand that is teaming with PepsiCo to ex-pand in the U.S. In the summer of 2012, Governor Andrew Cuomo convened a Yogurt Summit in Albany, to explore ways that the state could capitalize on its position as the prime producer of new-fangled yogurt. “Our cows are working overtime,” State Senator James Seward boasted to the assembled lawmakers and industry representatives.

After the summit, Cuomo moved to deregulate the state’s oversight of dairy farms with between two hundred and three hundred head of cattle. In July, the state was sued by Riverkeeper, the envi-ronmental group, which asserts that de-regulation will harm New York’s water supply. The suit also raised alarm about Greek yogurt’s chief by-product, whey—an acidic mixture, containing nitrogen and phosphorous, that is commonly dis-posed of by being added to cattle feed and fertilizer or treated in a digester, which breaks down the whey, producing meth-ane gas that can be harnessed for energy. Neither process eliminates the potential danger to soil or water, Riverkeeper main-tains. Ulukaya noted that Chobani is ex-ploring the possibility of building its own digester in New Berlin, which would ob-viate the need to transport whey elsewhere for disposal. But he argued that River-keeper has exaggerated the dangers of yo-gurt processing. “There is no whey that has gone into the rivers and is killing the

fishes,” he told me. “That shit is not hap-pening. If I know that anytime I make business it will damage one tree, one fish, one thing, I will not even make one cup.”

Ulukaya delivered a well-practiced ac-count of why he had been able to bring the tastes of Turkey and Greece to New York and beyond. His success rested upon not underestimating the taste, or the intelligence, of the average American consumer. “We say it has to be delicious, and it has to be nutritious,” he said. “Yo-gurt should be something that you can reach in the fridge and eat at any given day, any given time, without feeling guilty.” Before Chobani, he told me, Americans ate yogurt filled with coloring and stabilizers and preservatives and sug-ars not because they preferred them but because alternatives weren’t readily avail-able. “The big brands clearly knew how to make good yogurt,” he said. “They were making it in France, or in Turkey. Why wouldn’t they do it here? The an-swer they would give is that the Ameri-cans wouldn’t appreciate it—that Amer-icans would not like a yogurt unless it was overly sweetened, to get rid of the yogurt taste. One would wonder if manufactur-ers truly believed that story, and that’s why they made a product that is full of sugars and colors and other ingredients. Or maybe it was cheaper to do it that way, so they wanted to believe that story.”

Earlier this year, Chobani launched an advertising campaign with the slogan “Go Real,” touting the company’s use of natu-ral ingredients. Since the F.D.A. does not define “natural,” exactly what the term means is a matter of interpretation. Ac-cording to some critics, the “Go Real” campaign falsely implies that Chobani’s yogurts contain no added sugar (they do); that they have no artificial colors (they have dyes derived from beets and other foodstuffs); that they do not contain thickening agents (the fruit flavors con-tain pectin or locust-bean gum); that the company uses organic milk (it doesn’t); and that cows supplying milk to Chobani are not fed genetically modified grain (they often are). Ulukaya is proud that he has dissuaded farmers who supply his milk from using rBST, a synthetic hor-mone that elevates milk production; it is banned in Europe but approved by the F.D.A. Yet he is pragmatic about how natural he can afford to be. “You could argue that you want more—of course you


do,” he said. “We all do. But when we do it we want to make sure that everyday people can have access to it.” At FreshDi-rect, a single-serving container of Cho-bani blueberry yogurt costs a dollar twenty-nine, forty cents less than Oikos organic Greek yogurt.

Ulukaya spoke at length about his de-cision not to use potassium sorbate, a preservative widely used in dairy prod-ucts, and about the challenges of manu-facturing a product that contains live bac-teria. “Preservatives are an awful thing,” he said. “One of the worst things I see on labels—I can’t believe it says this—is that it lists the preservative and says ‘to main-tain freshness.’ Are you freaking kidding me? They put these ingredients next to the ‘freshness’ word, and this evil be-comes something to help you, by keep-ing our product fresh. But it’s a chemical that ends up in my gut, creating many problems.” Some scientific studies have suggested that eating yogurt with live bacteria can promote a healthy digestive tract. Forgoing preservatives, Ulukaya said, “is very difficult to do. It’s risky. If you put that ingredient in, you sleep better. You can open that yogurt cup and put it on your table and it can stay for days and days and days, and nothing will grow in there. People think that’s a good thing—but that’s a horrible thing. It means it is not alive.”

A month or so after my visit, Ulukaya had reason to lose a lot of sleep: consum-ers began complaining of containers with bloated lids and yogurt that tasted effervescent. Within days, Chobani is-sued a recall, citing mold contamination in its Idaho plant, which accounts for a third of Chobani’s over-all production. (The company refused to disclose the size of the recall.) Ultimately, the F.D.A. re-ceived more than two hundred com-plaints from consumers who had experi-enced stomach cramps, nausea, or vomiting after eating Chobani yogurt; perhaps predictably, a suit has been filed against the company. Chobani issued a state-ment explaining that the mold in ques-tion commonly occurs in dairy envi-ronments, and in most cases poses no significant threat to health. “We have done testing, and found that this is an issue of food quality and not food safety,” Nicki Briggs, the company’s chief publi-cist, told me.

Before the recall, Ulukaya had gar-

nered almost universally laudatory press, and the company’s controversies, such as they were, sometimes seemed ginned up by clever public-relations specialists. (In August, Chobani was in the news be-cause its Blueberry Power Flip had been banned by the Air Force, for fear that the hemp seeds it contained might inter-fere with drug testing; this is the kind of coolness-bestowing story that marketing money can’t buy.) But when the recall happened, Briggs told me, Ulukaya was

“heartbroken,” adding, “Companies go through recalls all the time, but this was a first for us.” Since the recall, Chobani has announced that it is giving Cornell’s food-science department a million and a half dollars, which will fund research into food safety and training protocols for dairy workers.

Last August, I went with my family to Greece for the first time, and before

I went I sought the advice of Diane Ko-chilas, the author of “The Country Cook-ing of Greece,” about how to experience yogurt as the Greeks eat it. Without hes-itation, Kochilas told me that the best yo-gurt she had ever tasted came from the dairy of a small producer outside the town of Argos, in the Peloponnese. Several weeks later, my husband, my son, and I were driving along a narrow country road through the arid hills of the Argo-lid, reverently considering the legacy of Agamemnon and scouring the roadside for a sign indicating that we had reached the dairy, Galaktokomika Karyas.

Eventually, we pulled up a driveway leading to a low, windowless building the size of a gas station. Theodosius Mavrogiannis, the owner, was waiting outside for us, alongside his twenty-two-year-old son, George, and three teen-age nieces. Mavrogiannis invited us to sit down while George translated his words into English. George explained that his father had started the business five years

ago, having worked for other cheese companies since he was a teen-ager. George’s father had grown up around sheep and goats: he was the son of a tso-pani, or shepherd. The family now owned a hundred sheep and three hundred goats, and they also processed milk from neighboring farmers, manufacturing not just yogurt but cheese, which they sold in a small store in Athens run by another son, and in a shop in Argos run by Mav-rogiannis’s wife, Aggeliki.

We went inside, where Theodosius showed me a vat, about the size of a wine barrel, where sheep’s milk was pasteurized before being mixed with yogurt cultures. Then we entered a heated room, the size of a walk-in closet, in which the milk-and-culture mixture, having been poured into small terra-cotta pots ready for vend-ing, was left for several hours to turn into yogurt. There was no sign of a yogurt sep-arator, and, after I remarked, puzzled, on its absence, George explained that when the Greeks talk about yogurt they mean the stuff that still contains whey. In Greece, I learned, strained yogurt—what Chobani, Fage, and others market in America as Greek—has another name, straggisto. It was sold not in the traditional terra-cotta pots but in plastic tubs, and was useful for cooking because it kept in the fridge for ten days, whereas traditional yogurt stays fresh for only five. “We use straggisto for tzatziki,” George said.

Theodosius, having understood that I was interested in learning about strained yogurt, disappeared around a door and re-turned bearing the company’s single yo-gurt separator: a white cloth pillowcase, complete with piping on its seams. “We put the yogurt into here, and the whey drips out,” George explained, while his fa-ther beamed at his innovation.

We went outside and sat at a picnic table underneath a grape vine, while the nieces brought forth the Mavrogiannis cheeses: a salty, feta-like one, a hard yel-low one, and a soft, young one that slid off the knife like Jell-O. A two-pound terra-cotta pot of yogurt was set in front of us, along with hunks of bread and slices of to-mato picked from a patch nearby. “The sheep eat everything you see,” George said, reeling off a list that included barley, oats, clover, and vetch.

The mountains surrounding the prop-erty looked parched—not at all like the green hills of central New York—and


George explained that his family’s yogurt production was seasonal. For several months in the summer, their sheep pro-duce no milk; they start up again when the weather cools and the lambing cycle be-gins. In order to make yogurt for me to try, he said, they had brought in supplies of milk from another farm. I had become so accustomed to the range of competing yogurt products on the shelf of my local grocery that it had not even occurred to me that yogurt had seasons, and that the production of different dairies might, like wine, have a terroir. Theodosius Mavro-giannis spooned his yogurt into glass bowls for us to try, cutting through a thin layer of cream that had risen to the surface as the cultures did their work. The yogurt was cool and sweet and mild in flavor, with a texture like panna cotta—holding its shape, like a very soft jelly, but still creamy upon the tongue. It was, as Diane Kochilas had promised, the best yogurt I have ever eaten.

When I visited Ulukaya in New Berlin, he told me that he’d made

one mistake in branding Chobani: it might have been better if he’d called it “strained yogurt,” not “Greek yogurt.” In the U.K., where Chobani is currently ex-panding, regulations do not permit a yo-gurt that isn’t actually made in Greece to be called “Greek yogurt”; moreover, yo-gurts marketed there as “Greek style” sometimes have added gelatin or milk solids, and Chobani worries about cus-tomers becoming confused. Chobani is also expanding to Australia, not just to satisfy the tastes of Australian consumers but potentially to provide a base from which to enter the enormous Asian food market. Traditionally, the Chinese are not a yogurt-eating people. But they are increasingly skeptical of their own food sources, on safety grounds, and among China’s rising affluent classes Western foodstuffs have become fashionable. If Ulukaya can persuade the Chinese to embrace Chobani, the scale of his oper-ations in New Berlin will look artisanal by comparison.

Ulukaya believes that the U.S. market has room for enormous growth, too. So far, he says, Chobani has just taken con-sumers away from the other yogurt brands; it hasn’t yet secured a whole new base, or made consumers increase their yogurt intake. “If you look at the data,

compared with Europe or Canada, Americans are eating two to four times less yogurt,” he told me. “Men are not touching it. The elders are not eating it, because they never grew up with it.” Other yogurt companies have had the same insight, including the category giant, Dannon, which has adopted John Stamos as its Greek-American spokes-person and has been advertising Oikos during the Super Bowl and in men’s mag-azines. According to Sanford C. Bern-stein & Company, an industry-research firm, Chobani, which commanded half the Greek-yogurt market two years ago, has since lost about ten per cent of its share; Dannon’s share has risen from eighteen to twenty-nine per cent. To hold on to its consumers, and to win new ones, Chobani is releasing new products, among them Chobani Bites, hundred-calorie pots that contain flavored yogurt with treats such as chocolate or caramel, aimed at the mid-afternoon or late-night snacker. Recently, Chobani won a con-tract for a pilot program to put its yogurt in school lunches, thereby opening an op-portunity to build brand loyalty at the ear-liest of ages.

Ulukaya has aspirations beyond yogurt. “We never call ourselves a yogurt com-pany,” he said. “The whole supermarket is my playground, so long as it is made by me, and it is delicious, natural, nutritious, and accessible.” Before I left his house, I asked to peek inside his refrigerator. There was a Whole Foods organic chicken that he was planning to cook that evening, many fresh vegetables, and a carton of chia seeds—which, at his suggestion, had been incorporated into the Blueberry Power Flip. (Chia seeds are rich in omega-3 fatty acids.) There were also at least a dozen different beverages, all of which contained ingredients with trendy, allegedly salubri-ous properties, like açaí berries and kom-bucha. “I go to the store and I get things I haven’t tried before,” he said.

In a shelf on the refrigerator door was a packet of butter, imported from Nor-mandy and made by Isigny Sainte-Mère. Ulukaya said that he loved the flavor—he could eat the whole thing by itself. It was so much better than what was generally available. There was a glimmer in his eye that suggested he was looking beyond put-ting it on toast, or using it to glaze the car-rots that sat in the crisper. “Somebody has to do something with butter,” he said.

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SHOUTS & MURMURS

THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE CALENDAR

BY B.J. NOVAK

January 1st—Ha! That feels fun to write. I’m excited. I’ve been thinking

about doing this for so long—I went through my notes and it turns out I came up with this idea all the way back on Day After Day After Very Cloudy Day.

January 2nd—I’m still so excited about this calendar thing. It just makes

so much sense. A thousand days a year, divided into twenty-five months, forty days a month. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?

January 3rd—Getting so many com-pliments on the calendar. One guy came up to me and said he’s going to organize his whole life around it—literally, some-one said that!

January 4th—Best day ever (or at least so far) in recorded history. I talked to Alice at the bonfire for a long time. She seemed to be into me, but I didn’t want to be presumptu-ous. Finally, I asked if she wanted to come back to my place and hang out. She said, “I don’t know. . . . I guess I’ll

have to check my calendar,” and then winked (!!!).

January 30th—People really hate January and want it to be over. I tried to explain that it’s just a label and that end-ing it wouldn’t make any difference, but no one got it. So finally I told everyone that this would be the last day of Janu-ary, and from now on months would be

thirty days instead of forty. But there wasn’t enough time to get the word out. So, to be safe, I’ll give this month thirty-one days and the rest will have thirty. Not a big deal. Everyone is excited to see Febuary.

February 1st—Another small fuckup: I put an extra “r” in all the cop-ies of the calendar I handed out, even though I already told everyone the next month coming was called Febuary. But Alice came up with the best solution! She said, “Just tell everyone it’s spelled ‘February’ but pronounced ‘Feb-u-ary.’ That way, they’ll feel stupid!” Alice is the best.

February 14th—Alice stuff weird.

Tonight we were having a nice dinner at the same place we always go, but she was unusually quiet. Finally, I asked if anything was wrong, and she said, “Do you know what day it is today?” I said, “Yes, of course I do, I invented the cal-endar. It’s February 14th. Why?” She smiled a really tight smile, said, “Yes. Yes, it is,” and then walked out. What’s that about?

February 15th—So cold. February 28th—I hate this month. I

can’t take one more day of it. This month will just have to be shorter than the rest, and if people don’t like it they can go fuck themselves.

March 9th—There’s this new type of berry that looks so good, but somebody told me it’s poison. Oh, well.

April 1st—A lot of shenanigans today, like pranks (which are lies for no reason). People say it has something to do with the calendar, which I wasn’t crazy about. But I guess it’s good when your invention takes on a life you never expected. That’s what the inventor of the scarf told me—it was originally sup-posed to be a weapon.

April 30th—I think thirty-one days was a mistake. You can’t divide thirty-one by anything, so you can’t make something half a month or half a week or whatever (because seven’s the same way). There should be a word for num-bers like that.

May 2nd—Ahh, now maybe I think


months should be thirty-one days after all. (Why am I so obsessed with this?)

May 20th—Ran into Alice and I played it cool. She congratulated me on the calendar stuff and asked if I ever thought of putting pictures on it—she said she could maybe pose for it. I said that it sounded kind of cheesy but I’d think about it. She asked when I could hang out and I told her I was busy until August. “What’s August?” she said. “Oh, it’s a month I’ve been kicking around—you’re going to love it,” I said. I could not have played it better!

June 29th—Met this really cool girl Jane at a stoning.

October 9th—Can’t believe I haven’t written in so long! Summer was amaz-ing. Harvest was amazing. Things are still going strong with Jane. This year has been awesome, and it’s only Octo-ber! There’s still November, Decem-ber, Latrember, Faunus, Rogibus, Neptember, Stonk. . . .

November 5th—Stuff with Jane is getting a little tense. She keeps wanting to push the relationship forward. She says that we’ve been together “forever.” I said it’s actually been less than five months. She just stared at me. Then I told her this idea I had: we’d choose a date in the future to make things official, and then, every year, that day on the cal-endar would be like our own personal holiday—for just the two of us! Good idea, right? “You’d never remember it,” she said.

November 6th—Things with Jane are better. I think we’re going to work this out. I love her, and that’s all that matters.

November 11th—They sacrificed Jane today. Really happy for the Sun God.

November 12th—Cold.November 13th—Dark.November 18th—Turns out those

berries aren’t poison. So now I’m the guy who discovered that.

November 23rd—Alice came by and said she felt bad about the Jane stuff and that I should hang out with her and her friends. Then it turned out her friends included this new guy she’s seeing, who—get this—invented the diary. Anyway, to be the mature one, I said, “Oh, that’s great, I use that almost every day.” Guess what he says. “Oh,

really? I invented that for girls.” What a dick! Then he said, “What else have you done?,” and I said that I’d been dis-tracted about Jane being sacrificed but that I’m planning on doing something new soon, maybe involving clocks. He said, “Well, you know what tomorrow is?” I said, “Yes, November 24th.” He said, “No. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.” And everyone said, “Aww,” and I was, like, Are you kidding me? Do you know how long it took me to get people to stop talking like that?

December 23rd—It seems like Alice and Diary Guy are really close. Really happy for them. Hard to see other peo-ple so happy this week, for some reason. Going to focus on work!

December 25th—Why do I feel so lonely today?

December 26th—Why am I so fat?December 30th—I told everyone I’m

ending the year early. I know it was im-pulsive, but I had to do it. I was ready for everyone to make fun of me, but it turned out they were way cooler about it than I expected: “That’s great.” “About time.” “Just what I need.” It was the most praise I got since I invented the calendar in the first place.

This year got away from me some-how. Looking back, I realize how many months slipped by that I can’t even re-member. The one nice thing is seeing how even though I used to be so worked up about Alice, now I really don’t care anymore. And the Jane thing ended the right way, I think—better than some long-drawn-out breakup.

So this year wasn’t everything I hoped it would be, and I didn’t get all the months in that I wanted. But, when the New Year starts, I’m going to wake up every day at dawn and get to work. See, I’d love to put a number on “dawn”—that’s why I think this clock thing can be really big. I have so many ideas. For example: I want to double the length of a second so people won’t al-ways have to say, “Can you give me two seconds?” They can just say, “One sec-ond.” I have a lot of ideas like that.

December 31st—So many parties going on tonight. On a Tuesday? Not complaining, just saying.

January 1st—Woke up at sun-past-mountain with a headache. So much for the “dawn” thing. But I still feel good.

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The secret of bread is that it is much more forgiving than non-bakers know.

PERSONAL HISTORY

BREAD AND WOMENTwo muses, one loaf.

BY ADAM GOPNIK

Like many men who cook a lot, I’m good at doing several things that look hard

but aren’t—béarnaise sauce, tuna au poivre—and not very good at doing some things that are harder than they look. I can’t make a decent vinaigrette, anything involving a “salt crust” baffles me, and, until quite recently, I had never baked a loaf of bread. For years, I told myself that I didn’t bake bread for the same reason I don’t drive a car: it’s a useful skill, unnec-essary in New York. In New York, you don’t drive because you can take the sub-way practically anywhere, and you don’t have to bake bread because there are so many good bakeries. Even at the super-market, there are baguettes from Tom Cat and cinnamon-raisin loaves from Or-washer and Eli’s empire of sourdoughs.

Just a few weeks ago, though, going through heirlooms that had been left by my wife’s ailing ninety-three-year-old mother when she moved out of the fam-ily house in Montreal, we found a beauti-ful hand-lettered, framed recipe for some-thing called Martha’s Bread. It was a long, very seventies-looking recipe, samplerlike in style, with instructions and ingredi-ents—including lecithin granules and millet and oats and honey—surrounded by a watercolor border of leaves and fall-ing petals and pumpkins.

“Martha’s Bread!” I cried. (Martha is my wife.) “When did you bake bread?” To say that I was incredulous doesn’t capture it. One way to describe Martha is to say that she looks like a woman who has never had a loaf of bread named after her—per-

fumes, dresses, and dances, perhaps, but not oat-and-honey bread. “No Loaves” might be the title of her personal mani-festo, as “No Logo” is of Naomi Klein’s.

“When I was a teen-ager,” she said. “I sewed all my own clothes and I baked all my own bread.”

This puzzled me. I knew her in her teens, and she never baked bread. She didn’t sew her own clothes, either, not that I could see. She ate matzos with bits of canned asparagus on top, and she dressed, beautifully, in Icelandic woollens and Kenzo dresses and lace-up boots. So I was genuinely curious to see what she looked like baking a loaf of bread. After many years of marriage, you tend to focus your curiosity not on the spectacular mo-ments that might yet happen but on exca-vating the stranger, smaller ones that did: your partner punching down dough at sixteen. As Proust knew, all love depends not just on current infatuation but on ret-rospective jealousy; lacking a classy old lover, a Marquis de Norpois, to be jealous of, I was jealous of the men in Montreal health-food stores who had sold her mil-let and lecithin granules.

“So why don’t you make your bread?” I asked.

“My bread’s not that easy,” she said loftily. “I have to get a big earthenware bowl to make this bread. And a big wooden breadboard. I used to have them at home. I used to make this bread with my friend Rachel. She’s the one who illu-minated the recipe. We would bake all day in aprons and then drink tea and eat our bread with honey.” The thought of her in an apron surrounded by all that homey seventies blond wood was so in-toxicating that, to shake the spell, I re-solved to start on a loaf that night. I lighted upon the now legendary “No-Knead Bread” recipe I clipped from the Times half a dozen years ago. Invented by Jim Lahey, of the Sullivan Street Bak-ery, this is bread that sort of makes it-self. I ran across the street, bought some Fleischmann’s yeast, and followed the di-rections for mixing it with water, salt, and flour. I left the dough to rise overnight and, in the morning, put it in the Le Creuset Dutch oven I normally use only for lamb and beef braises, and then into a four-hundred-and-fifty-degree oven.

An hour later, out it came. It was—bread! It wasn’t good bread—it didn’t have many of those nice, irregular bread

ILLUSTRATION BY SIMONE MASSONI


bubbles, and I must have put in too much yeast. It was oddly bitter. But it was bread, and I can’t explain how weird and pleas-ing this was. It was as if you had put a slosh of stuff in a bowl and it had come out a car, with a gleaming front and a good smell inside.

For the next couple of days, I became, for the first time in my life, acutely bread-conscious. So many breads! I marvelled as I stared at the bread counter at Dean & DeLuca. I thought of the bread I loved to eat. There was the big, round pain Poilâne at the bakery in Paris, sour and stiff and yet yielding to the bite; Montreal bagels, sweet and sesame-rich; and real crois-sants, feathery and not too buttery. Could you really make these things?

“If you’re so interested in bread-mak-ing, you should apprentice with some-one big,” said Martha, who had declared herself hors de combat, waiting for her wood. “Someone who yells at you a lot and teaches you what’s what. You know. Every writer does that now.”

I wouldn’t want to learn just one thing, though, I mused. “It would have to be someone who had range, so I could learn how to bake pain Poilâne and Montreal bagels and croissants, and—”

I stopped in mid-sentence. The larger implication of what I had been saying hit us both. We looked at each other bale-fully, as those on whom the implacable hand of fate has fallen.

“I’ll call her,” I said. When I got my mother on the phone

a few hours later—you often have to leave a message, because she and my father are always out in their fields, building things—she was delighted at the idea of a bread-baking-master-class weekend. “Yes, yes, dear,” she said. “It’s so funny you called. I’m just working on a new series of water-buffalo-milk ice creams. You’d love trying them. Do come for a visit as soon as you can. I’ll show you how to bake any-thing in the world you like.”

A week later, I found myself once again in the back seat of my parents’

all-purpose child-mover and S.U.V. My parents live these days on a farm in what their six children think of as remote rural Ontario—a designation my parents em-phatically reject, pointing out that it is only a three-hour drive from the Toronto airport, not seeing that a three-hour drive from the Toronto airport is exactly what

their six children mean by “remote rural Ontario.” They retired a decade ago to these rather Berkshire-like hills, after a lifetime as college professors.

The vibe of their property, one of their kids has pointed out, is somewhere be-tween “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Bosky though their woods are, within them are a host of strange new buildings that my mother has designed and she and my fa-ther built, laboriously, with local lumber, responding to their own unaltered eccen-tricities and the changing passions of their grandchildren. There is a Japanese tea house, complete with a little Hiroshige-style arched bridge; an Elizabethan the-atre, with a thrust stage and a “dressing house” above; a garden-size chess board, with life-size pieces, made when my own son was in the midst of a chess mania, now long past; a Tempietto, modelled on Bramante’s High Renaissance design; and a Pantheon, a domed building lined with niches, in which sit portraits, with quota-tions, of my mother’s heroes—Galileo, Shakespeare, Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and Bach among them.

My parents, you might gather, are un-usual people, although, to be honest, “un-usual” is not really an unusual enough word to describe my mother. One of the first women in North America to earn a Ph.D. in mathematical logic, she became a notable linguist and (as she would be the first to tell you) also reared six kids, for whom she cooked a big French-ish din-ner every night. We have a complex rela-tionship. I know that I am more like her than I am like anyone else on earth, for good and ill. Like her, I cook every night. Like her, I offer hyper-emotional editori-als to the television at moments of public outrage. Like her, I look accusingly at my children when they fail to devour some dish that, backed into a corner, they had acceded to at seven in the morning. (“What do you want tonight, salmon or capon?” “Uh, whatever. Salmon.”)

I even inherited some minute portion of her creative energy, which once launched a thousand shapes—from doll houses to linguistic theory—so that, com-ing home after an eight-hour family trip (during which I, like her, will have left all the driving to my spouse), I can actually enjoy whipping together a big meal, with a hot dessert, for the gang. I once realized, with a sense of fatality, that I have written

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long essays in praise of nearly every hero in her pantheon up there on the Ontario hill—only Bach and Emily Dickinson had escaped my attention, or her gravitational pull. Into one of her areas of particular mastery I didn’t even try to follow her: baking bread. As a kid, I never left for school without being equipped with crois-sants or pain au chocolat or cinnamon babka or sticky buns, often in combina-tion; on the morning before a big holi-day, the kitchen always looked like a Left Bank bakery.

As we pulled up onto the property, my mother turned around. “Did you see our new building, dear?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Last visit I saw it.” I thought she meant the Pantheon, or maybe the Tempietto.

“Oh, no, not that,” she said, as though a Pantheon were as commonplace as a lawn-mower shed. “I mean our Erechtheion!”

Alarmed by the name, I peered out the left-hand window, and, insanely enough, there it was: in wood and plaster, a nearly full-scale model of the Porch of the Cary-atids from the Acropolis, with its six Ionic columns and six draped female figures supporting the roof. The Greek girls were about six feet tall, and, in the Ontario farmland, they looked pretty impressive, though something about the way the figures were incised gave them a demure Canadian quality.

“It’s beautiful, Mom,” I said, feebly. That night, we sat down to a dinner

mostly of breads—sketches of the week-end to come. I recognized most of them from childhood, but there was a dinner roll that was the best dinner roll I had ever eaten: flaky and rich and yet somehow re-assuringly simple and eggy.

“Oh, that’s my broissant,” she ex-plained gaily. “It’s my own invention. It’s brioche dough given a croissant treat-ment—egg dough with butter folded in in layers. Do you want to try it? We’ll do it tomorrow.”

My stomach filled with gluten, I took the books on bread baking and bread his-tory I had brought with me, and went back to my old bed.

At this point, there should be a breath and a space and a new paragraph

and lots of stuff about ancient yeasts, the earliest known instances of bread, bread-in-Sumer-and-Egypt lore, and then a joke or two about the Jewish in-vention, on the lam, of the unleavened kind. I will spare the reader this, for, turning the pages in my books, I de-cided that the worst of modern food bores is the bread bore. The very uni-versality of bread, the simple alchemy that makes it miraculous, can also make it dull to discuss.

But, as I was reminded the next morn-

ing—with my mother wearing her flour-resistant “Monaghan Lumber” T-shirt—bread, though perhaps unrewarding as an analytic subject, is fascinating as a prac-tice. It is probably the case that these two things often vary inversely: activities that are interesting to read about (science ex-periments) are probably dull to do, while activities that are dull to read about (rid-ing a bike) are interesting when you at-tempt them. What makes something in-teresting to read about is its narrative grip, and stories are, of necessity, exercises in compressing time. What makes some-thing interesting to do is that—through repetition, coördination, perseverance—it stretches time.

Fortunately, my mother is also an ex-pert in-depth explainer, although her chil-dren have been known to run for doors and leap out windows when she starts up with “Well, studies show that . . .” I have a fond summertime memory of her explaining Gödel’s Proof to me; I wish I had retained it, though I recall an inde-cently vivid picture of sets struggling, in vain, to contain themselves.

Yeast, my mother explained now, is really just a bunch of bugs rooming to-gether, like Oberlin grads in Brooklyn—eukaryotic organisms of the fungus king-dom, kin of mushrooms. “When you mix the little bugs with a carbohydrate—wet wheat is a good one—they begin to eat up all the oxygen in it, and then they pass gas made up of ethyl alcohol and carbon di-oxide.” The alcohol they pass is what makes spirits. The carbon dioxide is what makes bread. The gas they pass causes the dough to rise. It’s what puts the bubbles in the bread. If you bake it, you trap or fix the bubbles inside.

As we mixed and kneaded, the com-forting sounds of my childhood reas-serted themselves: the steady hum of the powerful electric mixer my mother uses, the dough hook humming and cough-ing as it turned, and, in harmony with it, the sound of the Canadian Broad-casting Corporation in the background, offering its perpetual mixture of grave-sounding news and bright-sounding Baroque music. (A certain kind of Ca-nadian keeps the CBC on from early morning to bedtime, indiscriminately.)

Like most good cooks, my mother is sweet-tempered in the run-up to cooking, short-tempered in the actual event. (Her quick, sharp “Gop!,” instructing my father

“ I sure hope we can sign up for health care before we die of natural causes.”

t t


to do something instantly, is as familiar to her children as birdsong.) For all its univer-sality, bread’s chemistry, or, really, biology, is a little creepy. “The longer it takes the little bugs to eat up the oxygen, the better the bread tastes,” she went on. “The high heat of the baker’s oven simply kills off the remaining little bugs, while leaving their work preserved in place. It’s all those car-bon-dioxide bubbles which become fixed as the nice spongy holes in the crumb of the bread.” The tasty bits of your morning toast, I realized, are all the tombs of tiny dead creatures—the Ozymandias phe-nomenon on a miniature scale. Look on my works, you mighty, and eat them with apricot jam.

We turned to the pain Poilâne, whose starter she had made earlier; it now luxu-riated under a plastic bag in the sink. You can mix up water and wheat, she ex-plained, put it out in the air, and wait for all the wild yeast that’s drifting around in the schmutz of the kitchen to land on it and start eating the carbohydrates. This yeast tends to have more character than the yeast that you buy in the store, be-cause, as every dog knows, the schmutz on the kitchen floor has more flavor than anything else. Well-kept schmutz of this sort provides the sour taste in sourdough bread. (San Francisco has a distinctively sour kind of schmutz, so distinctive that it has a scientific name: Lactobacillus san-franciscensis.) The long-cherished deposit of ancient schmutz—a spongy mess that you can use day after day and even decade after decade, and whose exigencies you, as a baker, basically can’t escape—is called, no kidding, “the mother.”

“Bread is very forgiving,” my mother said, as she turned over the pain Poilâne dough. “In the books, they fuss end-lessly, and, you know, I used to worry and weigh, but now I know the bread will forgive. The secret of bread is that bread is much more forgiving than non-bakers know.”

We took out the breads that we had prepared the night before. “The broissant is essentially a brioche egg dough with butter folded into it,” my mother said. “Now, the trick, dear, about laminating butter is to get the thickness of the butter exactly the same as the thickness of the dough.” We cautiously beat down the butter into layers. “Then you fold it over in exact thirds, like this.” She showed me.

We began to fold. And fold. And fold

again. As I tried to fold, she frowned fe-rociously. “You have to even it out so that you don’t have those bulges at the cor-ners,” she said. The CBC rose in the back-ground. As luck and life would have it, a mildly alarmed Canadian-style piece about gluten allergies and gluten-free diets was on. In a slightly prim tone—as my sister Hilary points out, Toronto is the last big town where “hygienic,” a holy word, is pronounced as though it had five syllables—it told of how many people had given themselves a diagnosis of celiac dis-ease, and how our bread-addicted society might be ending.

“That is so stupid,” my mother bristled. She went on to rattle off facts about the in-cidence of celiac disease and the follies of self-diagnosis. But beneath it, I knew, was the simple love of bread. I imagined my mother and myself as the last bread-heads, the final gluten addicts, sitting in a stifling, overheated basement room somewhere, stuffing ourselves with broissants.

We spent two days mixing water and yeast and different flours, and then we waited for different lengths of time. We did the pain Poilâne, dark and crusty and dependent on a long, long resting period; we did bagels—real bagels, as produced in the Montreal bakeries, with a large hole, a bright sesame glow, and a sweet, firm bite. These had to be rolled, and my mom was impatient with my rolling, since un-less you do them just right they bounce back yeastily to their original form.

I was taken by the plasticity of every sort of dough, its way of being pliable to your touch and then springy—first merg-ing into your hands and then stretching and resisting, oddly alive, as though it had a mind of its own, the collective in-telligence of all those little bugs. Bread dough isn’t like dinner food, which usu-ally rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over.

Then, there are the smells. There’s the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I’m-on-my-way smell of the ris-ing loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bread smell that comes from the oven as it bakes. The deepest sensual pleasure of bread occurs not when tasting but when slicing, cutting into softness that has sud-denly gained structure: the pile of yeasty dough, after its time in the hot oven,

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not equal to their bafflement at her avid-ity? I realized that I had never once thanked her for all that bread. On the long drive to the airport and the short flight to LaGuardia, with all her bread in my bag, I reflected that the thank-yous we do say to our parents, like the ones I hear from my own kids now—our over-cheery “Great to see you!”s and “We’ll catch you in October!”s; our evasive “Christmas would be great! Let’s see how the kids are set up”—are never remotely sufficient, yet we feel constrained against saying more. (We end phone conversations by saying “Love you!” to our parents; somehow, adding the “I” seems too . . . schmutzy, too filled with wild yeast from the hidden cor-ners of life, likely to rise and grow unpre-dictably.) We imagine that our existence is thank-you enough.

Children always reinterpret their par-ents’ sense of obligation as compulsion. It’s not They did it for me but They did it be-cause they wanted to. She wanted to bake that bread; you told those bedtime stories every night, really, for yourself. There’d be no surviving without that move, the debt guilt would be too great to shoulder. In order to supply the unique amount of care that children demand, we have to enter into a contract in amnesia where neither side is entirely honest about the costs. If we ever totted up the debt, we would be unable to bear it. Parents who insist on registering the asymmetry accurately (the Jewish mother in a Roth novel, the Japa-nese father in an Ozu film) become ob-jects of frantic mockery or, at best, pity for their compulsiveness. “All I do is give and give and what reward do I get? You never call!” the Jewish mother moans in the novel, and we laugh and laugh, and she is right—she did give and give, and we don’t call. She is wrong only to say it out loud. In the market of emotions, that sacrifice is already known, and discounted for, as the price of life.

When I got back to New York, Martha was at last ready to make

her bread. She had found the right kind of earthenware bowl, and the right kind of wooden board, and even the right kind of counter scraper. After my weekend with my mother, I offered to show her how to use the dough hook on the Sunbeam, but she looked at me darkly. “My kind of bread isn’t made in an electric mixer,” she said.

“There’s a certain aesthetic to baking my bread,” she went on. “Everything has to be clean and nice.” She had, I noted, put on a black leotard and tights for the occasion, so that she looked like a Jules Feiffer heroine. She mixed together all the good natural ingredients—the brown flour and the millet and the organic honey—and then laid a length of white linen over the earthenware bowl. “It’s not a sweet bread, but it has sweetness in it,” she explained.

At last, in the silent kitchen, the dough had risen, and we all gathered around to watch. Her kneading startled her family. She kneaded in a domestic fervor, a cross between Betty Crocker and a bacchante. There was no humming mixer, just a woman and her dough. Then she began to braid three long rolls of dough to-gether, expertly.

“Mom, this is, like, such a big bread,” our fourteen-year-old said. “It’s like bread you would bring to Jesus.”

It was, too. And suddenly, crystal through the years, I saw Martha at nine-teen, on one of those bitter, beautiful Canadian mornings, eyes turned almond by the cold, fur hat on and high collar up, carrying . . . a braided loaf, in a basket, tied with a shiny purple ribbon. She had baked bread, this very bread, and brought it to me, too. And it had been lost in the family kitchen, surrounded by too many croissants and sticky buns and too many chattering and devouring mouths.

“You brought a loaf like this over to my house!” I said. “I see it now. But I can’t re-member how it tasted.” It was an anti-Proustian Proustian moment: memory flooded back in the presence of something that I had forgotten to eat.

“Of course not,” she said. “No one no-ticed. It was just, ‘Oh, how nice! Put it there.’ I don’t think you even ate any. Your mother’s whole French thing was so different. It overwhelmed my loaf. I think it was the last time I made my bread.”

When it was baked, sixty minutes in a slow oven, her loaf looked beautiful, braided like the blond hair of a Swedish child. The next day, I buttered a slice of it, delicious and long-deferred toast, and had it with my coffee. As toast al-ways will, it seemed morning-bright, and clean of complications. Women, I thought, remember everything. Bread forgives us all.

turned into a little house, with a crisp solid roof and a yielding interior of inner space. Bread is best seen in cross-section, and each cross-section is different. Each bread has a beautifully different weight and crumb as the knife cuts into it. The pain Poilâne style almost squeaks as you cut into it, the sourdough, or levain, that gives it that nice acid bite seeming to pro-test under the knife; the bagel’s firmer flesh is made less resistant by that hole; the broissants crumble, with a spray of soft crumbs, under the lightest touch, the many layers you fold into the puff pastry turning into a house of a hundred floors under your command. And greed can sometimes lead you to tear off the end of the softer breads, in a gesture satisfying in itself, even before you bite. (And if all this sounds a touch Freudian for a man bak-ing with his mother, well, the Oedipal dramas we enter knowingly leave us bet-ter sighted, not blind.)

As one project followed another, I realized why I had not been drawn to bread baking in the first place. Stovetop cooking is, at a first approximation, peeling and chopping onions and then crying; baking is mixing yeast and water with flour and then waiting. The difference between being a baker and being a cook is whether you find waiting or crying more objectionable. Waiting is anathema to me, and activity is essential to my nature—a nature I share with my mother. But then it occurred to me that my mom is that anomalous creature: an impatient baker. She fills the gaps cre-ated by enforced waiting by being active, so that each bread, as we put it down to wait for it to rise, was succeeded by an-other bread in need of mixing or punch-ing or rolling. The kitchen of my child-hood had filled up with bread as she waited for the rest of the bread to be ready.

On Monday morning, I packed the loaves and broissants and bagels in my overnight bag. I would take them home to study and share with my own children. I gave my mother a hug. “It’s such fun to bake with you, dear,” she said. “Of course, I spent years making you bread every morning. We always had croissants and muffins and—oh, dear, I always had so many things out for you.”

Was there, after all these years, a just discernible note of exasperation, a regret-ful sense that her children’s appetites were


Baby T’s a no-show. Well, not exactly a no-show. She showed,

on time even, but she was numb and weird, her face freckled with dried blood and ripe-looking bruises across her eyes. She’s scheduled to be the lunch cook, and I am scheduled to put up a new dinner menu—fifty items by 5 P.M. I’m not sure how we’re going to run lunch without her, and how we’re

going to have a dinner service if I don’t get started immediately, but now we are both in a car on our way to the E.R.

It was already a day—a get-the-two-kids-to-school solo-parent morning, a meeting, savory prep, errands, pastry prep, phone calls, lunch service, then dinner service. There is not one loose, extra minute to even wonder about the dark story behind this quiet and smart girl’s overnight episode. She insists that she went to bed at 10 P.M. and woke up like this.

I tell her, “I’m going to stay here with you, and I don’t care what your story is, but please tell it to the doctor.” And then she put her head down on the gurney and drifted into sleep.

In the hallway, I call the restaurant and try not to look too long at the openmouthed dozing, the wheezing, the full bare male leg where a gown has fallen open.

The cooks have hustled in—some from their days off, some having been there late the night before—and now we’re on speakerphone. I try to

carefully tutor the new procedure with the fresh bean curd—the soak, the purée, the temperature of the scald without scorching, the straining through a clean cotton dinner napkin. A woman with dirty hands, reeking of cigarette smoke, is sitting up on her cot, curtain fully open, vaguely calling out for assistance, her possessions in wrinkled plastic bags on the fl oor. She

can’t find her shoes, and she can’t bend over to look, so, with my phone in an ear-shoulder lock, I collect her sneakers and put them on her feet and tie them. “Don’t disturb the tender curd at all once you’ve added the coagulant. Just let it be until it sets up—it’ll take less than twenty minutes.”

I make more phone calls, push a meeting back by an hour, write lists for later. Baby T is discharged—there are no signs of drugs or alcohol, and she may have had severe dehydration and fallen during the night. In the meantime, I have gone wild imagining her in some roofied blackout. I get her into her apartment, and load her up with Gatorade and instant Cup Noodles. As I close the door and step out into the hallway, she stands, backlit, in her miniature studio, the futon inches from the kitchen stove, which is only inches from the refrigerator, and half smiles at me in a small way.

A new menu means starting from zero. It’s saner and gentler to do this incrementally, pulling out tired players

and feeding in fresh ones. But, when I try that, I end up with tired and fresh going at the same time—cellared yams and new field lettuces on the same menu. Even if that is the literal, awkward truth of the new season, I’d rather a document that, when you sit down and unfold your napkin, tells more of the hopeful, exciting truth—asparagus, peas, lettuces, and strawberries—so, when I go, I go fresh top to bottom, from zero.

But the first conversation I have with the cooks is always about what to make for family meal. It takes a leisurely half hour to puzzle out a full staff meal from what scraps there are—what bits of protein and vegetables need to be used up. We’ll try to assemble a coherent meal out of green beans, bacon ends, and eggs. When we start to realize that there is a potential salade Niçoise, we have a rough frame, and the rest of the meal could build from there: croque monsieur, cold sorrel soup. Today, we don’t have a leisurely half hour to reimagine our scraps. I tap on the office door and ask Karen, our general manager, to order takeout for ten people.

“What should I order?” she asks.“I don’t care,” I say. “I’m not going

to have time to eat it.” The delivery guy from the Indian

restaurant on Sixth Street chains his bike to the parking sign outside. He’s wearing a Day-Glo vest and a helmet, and carrying four large plastic sacks with yellow happy faces on them. He stands on the sidewalk, looking in at our tables and chairs, our napkins and silverware, and then down again at the order; he can’t reconcile the address on his receipt with the address in front of him. He’s looking for an apartment, and a row of buzzers, and can’t figure why a restaurant would order takeout from another restaurant. I want him off the street and inside as soon as possible—I hate that we haven’t cooked our own food for dinner. That we had to call for takeout. I’d like that curtain fully drawn. IV

AN

BRU

NETTI

FAMILY MEAL

BY GABRIELLE HAMILTON

TAKE OUT


One night in the fall of 2009, Crys-tal Galbraith, a slender twenty-six-

year-old vegan activist with bleached-blond hair and a mole under her right eye, put on her best dress, a knee-length, tight-fitting black number by the Row, and set out to save the animals. Crystal had read the vegan manifesto “Skinny Bitch” in college—“I was a normal eater at lunch and by dinner I was vegan,” she says—and later saw “The Cove,” a doc-umentary about the dolphin hunt in the former whaling town of Taiji, Japan. She became obsessed, volunteering at every screening, talking to viewers after-ward. Eventually, she met one of the producers, Charles Hambleton, a soft-spoken man in his late forties, with a distracted, trembly affect he ascribes to all the tuna he ate on location: he and the director, Louie Psihoyos, he says, both got severe mercury poisoning.

When I met Hambleton last year, at a coffee shop in Los Angeles, he was wearing a skull ring, a memento from his work as a pirate trainer on all four “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. For “The Cove,” he planned covert mis-sions, setting up blinds for filming the dolphin hunt and dummy blinds to trip up the local police. When I asked him what had prepared him for the job, he said, “I was good at creative problem-solving, long hours, nasty conditions.” I pressed him, and he rattled off his law-yer’s phone number from memory.

In a couple of days, Hambleton said, he’d be leaving for eastern China with Psihoyos and the six-person “Pirates of the Caribbean” prosthetics crew, who had designed a new face for him, with a broadened nose, darkened skin, and brown contact lenses, as well as a head of straight dark hair. Disguised as a Chinese-American buyer, he was going to film at a market in Wuhan where ti-gers and dolphin heads are said to be sold openly, and use the footage for a television show about environmental

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crime-solving. The prosthetics took six hours to apply. Hambleton showed me a picture: shades of Mickey Rooney.

Not long after he met Galbraith, he’d heard from a source at the renegade anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd that the Hump, a high-end sushi bar in Santa Monica, had a secret menu. If you asked the right way, apparently, the chefs would serve you whale. Hambleton, who once lived in Antigua as a dive instructor and a treasure hunter, ate whale with the old fishermen there, and has no regrets about it. (His ethical line is that he won’t eat factory-farmed meat.) But the notion that Santa Monica, one of the most en-vironmentally progressive communities in America, might be the site of such a blatant violation of national and interna-tional protections was alarming. Here was an opportunity, he thought, to carry on the mission of “The Cove,” with po-tentially sensational results. He started planning a sting, and recruited Galbraith to be the bait.

At an apartment in Santa Monica, Hambleton removed a snap from Gal-braith’s Guess purse and sewed a spy camera in its place. Galbraith brought along a Chinese friend who was fluent in Japanese. They settled on a backstory: they’d just taken jobs in Japan and wanted to acquaint themselves with the culture by eating the most exotic food possible. “I thought, This will be scary and I don’t know how I’ll feel, but there’s no other option but to leave with a sample of whale meat,” Galbraith told me. Her friend, Galbraith said, wasn’t vegan, nor was she an animal activist. She was in it for the free sushi.

The “meat paradox”—named only recently by behavioral psycholo-

gists, but well known to readers of “Charlotte’s Web”—describes the hu-man problem of loving animals and also loving to eat them. Research shows that people opportunistically assign intelli-

gence to animals; Westerners, for exam-ple, consider familiar food animals such as cows to be mentally inferior to those, like dolphins, horses, cats, and dogs, which we don’t typically eat.

The nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies in American eating were defined by narrowing: the richer we grew as a nation, the more we ate, and the fewer species. At the apex of our affluence, the food movement seeks to reverse this course, radically enlarging our sense of what is edible, introducing to restaurant menus leaves, weeds, hay, brains, in-sects, ears, and other forgotten or un-thinkable ingredients. The culinary taboos erected by prosperity are under siege.

Americans traditionally rejected whale meat on the ground that it was un-sophisticated and, worse, not tasty. (Margarine made from whale oil, being high-tech and processed, was an excep-tion.) Whales were thought of as utili-tarian, the source of lamp oil, lubri-cants, and fertilizer. In times of scarcity, though, the government has tried to override this prejudice. In 1918, at a gathering at the American Museum of Natural History, described by the Times as “a conservation luncheon,” the chef from Delmonico’s served humpback pot-au-feu and whale planked à la Van-couver. The diners, “men prominent in scientific, business, and professional spheres,” praised it: so like venison! Given its cheapness, they “were almost unanimously in favor of having whale meat substituted for beefsteak and urged its immediate adoption as a feature of the national war diet.” During the Second World War, the Times again reported, “Whales, those greatest of mammals whose pastures comprise seven seas, will be hunted for their flesh, which will be used to help fill the gap in the nation’s meat supply.” The Department of the Interior gave reassurances that the meat was “wholesome when properly handled

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We consider food animals such as cows to be mentally inferior to those, like dolphins, horses, and dogs, which we don’t typically eat.


and it does not have the fishy taste which makes seal meat almost unpalatable.”

During the next several decades, the popular conception of whales began to shift from floating oil factories to noble, cerebral beings. In 1970, Roger Payne, a marine biologist, released “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” based on recordings that he and his wife made from a sail-boat: groaning whales, creaking rigging. Whales, it seemed, were more than beasts; they had culture. Other research-ers reported different varieties of ad-vanced social behavior: humpbacks mak-ing bubble nets to trap their prey; male killer whales living with their mothers into adulthood. Much remained mysteri-ous, particularly about the baleen whales, which are too big to study in aquariums, but it was easy to make inferences from their large brains and complex neural pathways, and from the behavior of their clever smaller relatives the dolphins.

After centuries of increasingly mecha-nized hunting, several whale species were nearly extinct, and the American public began to view killing cetaceans for any reason as both an ecological and an ethi-cal tragedy. Eating them, which despite the government’s efforts never caught on here, suddenly struck people as barbaric. “We think these animals should be pro-tected because they’re really evolved,” Diana Reiss, a leading cetacean researcher and the author of “The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives,” told me. “They share many of the things we do—social complexity, tool use, social awareness. They should have a right not to be killed.” Marine mammals began to seem both too vulnerable and too humanlike to hunt, and a collection of overlapping regula-tions was put in place to reflect this spe-cial consideration. In 1972, Congress passed the Marine Mam mal Protection Act, which made it illegal to kill whales, dolphins, and porpoises, regardless of population numbers, and banned their import, export, and sale; the Endangered Species Act of 1973 outlawed the hunt, harassment, or capture of at-risk popula-tions. Violations of these laws can lead to imprisonment and hundreds of thou-sands of dollars in fines. In addition, since 1986 the International Whaling Com-mission has imposed a worldwide mora-torium on commercial whaling.

There are a few places in the world

that have never fully given up whale-eating. Japan is one. Iceland, also an island with a fierce sense of national identity and a culinary history of deep resourcefulness, is another. In 2009, at a restaurant in Reykjavík with Icelandic friends, I tried whale sashimi. The meat was unappetizingly red, with an oily flavor that recalled the smell of a burnt wick in a hurricane lamp. My friends started talking about its high mercury content and the polarizing politics of the hunt, and I regretted eating it even before the plate was cleared.

The Hump, overlooking the runway at the Santa Monica Airport, where

rattling vintage planes and featherweight experimental aircraft take off and land, had an end-of-the-earth romance to it. The chefs served things that few others could or would: blowfish, which contains

a deadly toxin and can be fatal if improp-erly prepared; cod sperm sacs; keiji, super-fatty salmon babies that, before they are sexually mature, follow the adult fish to the rivers, where they are harvested. (One in ten thousand salmon caught is keiji, and the price can be as high as a hundred and fifty dollars a pound.) A sign on the door read, “Warning! This sushi bar does prepare live sea food in full view, at the counter.” It was routine to see a chef take out a live eel and drive a spike through its brain, and serve it sec-onds later. Live lobster was cut in half and presented with the tail meat draped over the carapace, and the head—anten-nae still moving—beside it on a bed of ice. Eddie Lin, who writes an adventure-eating blog called Deep End Dining and who frequented the Hump, said, “The effect of it is the animal is watching you eat it.”

WEEKEND GUESTS FROM CHICAGO, 1945

In their brand-new caramel Cadillac,Julia and Walter arrived at four,Trunk stuffed with leather suitcases,Steaks, champagne, and oysters in a cooler,And Walter’s only drink—Johnnie Walker Blue.Julia, hands flaring, in the clunky music Of a pound of real gold charms,Walter in a tan linen jacket And shoes soft as old money.

Sweet-tempered, sweet-tongued, He’d tease the women to blushing,And let his wife reign queenIn a diamond ring to knock your eyes out.

She was known from New York to L. A.For her fried chicken and greens,And didn’t hesitate, after hours of driving,To throw an apron over a French cotton dressAnd slap the flour on thirty or more pieces.

Oh, the chicken breasts and thighs Spattering, juicy, in just the right degree of heat,As she told stories, hilarious and true,To a kitchen full of steamy womenThat made them double over and pee themselves.

Saturday morning, men to golf, And women in floral robes With cups of a New Orleans blendSo strong they said


Brian Vidor, the restaurant’s owner, is tall, with bushy white hair and the warm but slightly furtive manner of someone who has spent too much time in camp. In the seventies, he worked as a guide in the safari park at Great Adventure in New Jersey. Then Chipperfield’s, a Brit-ish circus company, hired him to go to Sudan to capture white-rhino calves, el-ephants, hartebeests, and topi for a zoo in Prague. They scouted for the animals from the air, in a Piper Super Cub, and rounded them up with trucks, darting the mothers with tranquillizers so they would not stampede when the hunters took their young.

After that, Vidor got a job with a company called International Animal Exchange, building a safari park—ba-boons, giraffes, rhinos, elephants, ti-gers—in Miyazaki, Japan. For the next fifteen years or so, he travelled all over

Asia, building zoos. In Taipei, he drank snake blood in Snake Alley and tried his first insect: a Jerusalem cricket, fried with garlic and red pepper, served with beer. In Singapore, he had scorpions on toast. By the early nineties, he had be-come a flight instructor. Landing at the Santa Monica Airport, he noticed a “For Lease” sign, and decided to become a restaurateur, re-creating his favorite Asian street foods at an establishment called Typhoon, where part of the menu was devoted to edible insects. Several years later, he opened the Hump, up-stairs, for customers who had graduated to a more morally complex and expensive confrontation with omnivorousness.

When Crystal Galbraith arrived at the restaurant, she chose a seat facing away from the bar and placed the purse with the camera in it on the table. On the chair next to her, she put her friend’s purse,

which had a gallon-size ziplock bag inside it. They ordered omakase, chef ’s choice. After they had been eating for a few hours, her friend asked the waitress, in Japanese, for whale: kujira. According to Galbraith, it came to the table, sliced very thin, on a glass plate, with special soy sauce, accompanied by several pieces of dark reddish-brown sashimi that the waitress identified as horse, which has been illegal to serve in California for more than a decade. The two women had ar-ranged a signal: Galbraith’s friend, facing the bar, pressed her leg against Gal-braith’s, and moved it away whenever the chefs were watching. They tasted both kinds of sashimi, while the chefs studied their reactions intently. As soon as the chefs turned away, Galbraith’s friend touched her leg again, and Galbraith se-creted two pieces of each kind of meat in a napkin, which she slipped into the zip-lock bag. They left with a handwritten re-ceipt, which included the words “whale” and “horse,” in English. The price for that course alone was eighty-five dollars.

Hambleton took the meat, froze it, and the following morning sent it by courier to Scott Baker, the associate di-rector of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University and an ex-pert in cetacean molecular genetics. Baker, who recently established a data-base of whale, dolphin, and porpoise DNA, identified the meat as sei, the fourth largest of the baleen whales. Fast, sleek, and elusive, sei whales live far offshore and can travel at speeds of up to thirty-five miles an hour. They have been listed as endangered since the sev-enties. Baker called the National Oce-anic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which enforces the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

A few months later, federal investiga-tors asked Galbraith to return to the Hump to collect more samples. Her Chi-nese friend had refused to go back, afraid that the yakuza were involved and might come after her, so Galbraith brought an-other friend, Heather Rally, a petite part-Asian woman in her early twenties. Hambleton tricked out the Guess purse with a better camera, from a designer of surveillance equipment in New York, who, Hambleton told me, works with Is-raeli intelligence. “A lot of the cameras we get before the military does,” he said.

Again, the women ordered omakase,

It stained the rim and turned you black;Me, in a high chair, straining For language, my bottle Stirred with a spoon of coffee And half a pint of cream.

At fifteen, My first trip cross-country on a train,I stopped to spend the night.We took the El to Marshall Field’s,Where Julia bought my first expensive cold creams And hose the shades of which—for the first time— Dared the colors of our colored skin.

She told me she had lovers,One a handsome Pullman porter.My last nights onboard,I, myself, enjoyed a notable service: A café-au-lait gentlemanWoke me for breakfastBy slipping his hand through the sealed drapesAnd gently shaking my rump.I waited all night,damp with wonder.

She had a wart on her chin or nose—I can’t remember which—She wore it Like exquisite jewelry,The way Marilyn Monroe wore her beauty mark, With unforgettable style.

—Toi Derricotte


and when they asked for whale they were allegedly served a plate of it. While they ate, Psihoyos, who was in town for the Academy Awards, sat with Ham-bleton in an S.U.V. in the restaurant’s parking lot, monitoring the audio feed. The filmmakers were as excited as they were appalled. “You could hear the live fish flapping at the table next to them!” Psihoyos told me. “The idea of taking apart a live animal for culinary enjoy-ment—now we’re out of the food world and into the world of snuff films.”

Meanwhile, agents from NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had set up a base of operations at the Beverly Hills estate of an animal-loving former rock-and-roll manager. Leaving the res-taurant with more samples, Galbraith and Rally headed to Beverly Hills. The house, vast and contemporary, with an indoor waterfall, a room with a piano and eight guitars, and an eclectic art col-lection, was also home to five rescue dogs and three cats. The agents turned a guest bathroom into a lab and tried to ignore the fact that the owner of the house, who had a serious medical condition, was walking around with a joint. “The look on their faces was great, like, ‘Keep that away from us,’ ” Hambleton said.

In the bathroom lab, the agents worked late into the night debriefing Rally and Galbraith and preparing the samples. Hambleton secretly kept a little meat for himself; he didn’t trust the Feds to resist political pressure if someone decided it would be inconvenient for U.S.-Japan relations to find sei whale for sale in the United States. But he didn’t have cause to use it: a NOAA lab identified the meat as sei, too.

Whale consumption occupies a spe-cial place in the Japanese con-

science. In “Tsukiji,” a book about the Tokyo fish market, Theodore Bestor, a professor of anthropology and of Japa-nese studies at Harvard, writes that whales are an object of “ritual concern,” mourned in special Buddhist services called kuyo. Etymologically considered fish—kujira derives from “major fish”—whales were exempt from Buddhist pro-hibitions against eating meat. (Catholics, historically, saw the issue similarly, and allowed whale on Fridays.) After the war, when there were food shortages, it be-came an important source of protein;

General MacArthur encouraged fisher-men to convert their boats to whalers. Canned whale became the Spam of mid-century Japan, remembered fondly by some aging Japanese, reviled by others as something eaten only in desperation.

But subsistence whaling, a limited, coastal phenomenon, has little in com-mon with Japanese whaling today, which takes place in both coastal waters and the open seas, including an area of the Southern Ocean that the Interna-tional Whaling Commission designated a sanctuary in 1994. Under a research exemption from the moratorium, which allows hunting for scientific purposes, the Japanese take about a thousand whales a year, including sei whales. To outsiders, their reasons can appear ten-uous. Originally, government scientists justified the hunt by saying that it was unavoidable: in order to collect the tis-sue necessary for DNA analysis—a tool for understanding stock structure—they had to kill the whales. Now that it is possible to biopsy living whales, they say that it is a matter of proper ecosystem management: they need to examine their stomachs’ contents to see what they are eating. The hunt, which is ac-complished by firing an exploding har-poon at the whale, is considered by many to be inherently inhumane. In any case, U.S. scientists have a hard time finding anything useful in the Japanese data, because the whalers go only where

they know the whales to be, and they do not carry scientific observers aboard.

Japanese pro-whaling politicians and organizations insist that whale stocks are healthy, and characterize the opposition as “culinary imperialism.” In their view, Americans, with our resource-intensive and inhumane farming operations, are poor stewards of the environment and unreliable spokespeople for animal wel-fare. The Japanese government spends copiously to support the hunt—report-

edly some forty-five million dollars in 2011, including funds intended for tsu-nami relief—though it struggles to find a market for the meat, which, according to the terms of the research exemption, it is obligated not to waste. Homey, old-fash-ioned, and not particularly prestigious, the meat nonetheless commands a high price at specialty all-whale restaurants, where businessmen and tourists eat ev-erything from tongues to testicles. The tastier tail and belly cuts of the rarer ba-leen whales are sometimes available at fancy sushi bars. But a poll published by the International Fund for Animal Wel-fare in early 2013 showed that only eleven per cent of Japanese had eaten whale in the previous year. In 2008, the govern-ment sold ten tons of whale at a discount to schools in Yokohama for Traditional School Lunch Week, and there is still a five-thousand-ton stockpile.

How to explain a propped-up, eco-logically dubious, economically precari-ous industry? Subterfuge. “The whale industry has nothing to do with whales,” said Casson Trenor, a former Sea Shep-herd activist who in 2008 started what he believes to have been the world’s first sustainable sushi bar, Tataki, in San Francisco. (Now you can eat sustainable sushi in Boise.) “It has to do with draw-ing a line in the sand about national sov-ereignty and resource management. The idea of other countries being able to determine what can and can’t be taken from the ocean is anathema to the Japanese.” To this way of thinking, Japan has created a baffle to distract Western conservation groups from the fishery it truly wants to shield from in-terference: bluefin tuna.

Using genetic information, Baker was able to trace the whale served at the

Hump definitively to the Japanese scientific hunt. A few days after “The Cove” won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the Hump’s chef, Kiyoshiro Yamamoto, and Vidor’s com-pany, Typhoon Restaurant, Inc., were charged with violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act. People were shocked. “Short of putting human body parts on the menu, there isn’t anything worse than serving whale to restaurant customers,” Mark Gold, a marine ecolo-gist who was at the time the president of Heal the Bay, in Santa Monica, wrote on


“I need everybody to come down to the garden to cheer on the tomatoes.”

t t

his blog, Spouting Off. By invoking our greatest food taboo—cannibalism—Gold was suggesting that whale meat was categorically off limits. Conserva-tionists argue, persuasively, that it’s selfish and ecologically dangerous to eat animals whose populations are threat-ened. But not all cetaceans are endan-gered. For most people, the real problem is one not of quantity but of kind; in a murky, sentimental way, some species just seem too humanlike to eat.

Less than two weeks after the federal charges were filed, the Hump’s Web site announced that the restaurant would close. It also offered an apology, which doubled as a defense of culinary relativ-ism. “The charge against the restaurant is true,” it said. “The Hump served whale meat to customers looking to eat what in Japan is widely served as a delicacy.” The message said that the Hump would do-nate to conservation organizations, and pay whatever fines the court might deem appropriate (a maximum of two hundred thousand dollars for businesses). Not long afterward, the charges were abruptly dropped, but by that time Vidor had re-purposed the Hump’s former space as a Latin restaurant with a ceviche bar.

Yamamoto used the closure of the Hump to open his own place, Yamakase, a secret sushi bar, accessible by invita-tion only, with an unlisted phone num-ber and address. A friend of mine had often entertained Japanese clients at the Hump, and told me stories of staying late, when the chefs locked the door and pulled out the strange stuff—tiny bright-green turtles, rattlesnake moonshine—from coolers underneath the bar. He knew Yamamoto well enough to get us in. He also knew to bring enough sake to share with him. When we arrived, Ya-mamoto was standing outside, smoking a cigarette on an otherwise empty street. The restaurant, a onetime gelateria next to a place advertising itself as “Home of the Pregnant Burrito,” had papered-over windows; behind them, a row of tradi-tional narrow-necked bottles showed in silhouette, like a Morandi. The sign on the door said “Closed.”

Inside: nine seats before a sushi bar, a glowing pink lump of Himalayan salt, and a gigantic, bristling Hokkaido crab with the face of an Irish brawler. Yama-moto went behind the bar and sliced a piece of Japanese wagyu into sheets,

grated a little salt on them, and seared them lightly. The ban on importing Jap-anese wagyu had just been lifted. “Only two weeks it’s been available,” he said. “It’s not on the open market yet.” He offered to get us some to cook at home.

We ate the beef, we ate the crab, we ate gumball-size baby peaches, olive green and tasting like a nineteen-forties perfume. There was slippery jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, and a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one vis-cous spoonful. That one—quiver on quiver on quiver—was almost impossi-ble to swallow, but it rewarded you with a briny, primal rush.

“Damn good!” Yamamoto, a solid, gruff guy with bushy eyebrows, said, and took a swig of sake.

The restaurant demanded stamina, and an appetite for the authentic and the obscure. One influential blogger, who posted about eating twenty-six courses there with the French chef Ludo Le-febvre, wrote, “I think Yamakase’s going to be the next big thing on the Japanese scene here in LA.” But in early 2013 the case against the Hump was revived. Ya-mamoto and his sous-chef, Susumu

Ueda, were indicted, along with Ty-phoon Restaurant, Inc., on charges that they conspired to smuggle and sell whale meat; Yamamoto was also charged with interfering with the investigation. The penalties were potentially severe: up to sixty-seven years in prison for Yama-moto and ten for Ueda, and fines of $1.2 million for Typhoon.

On the day of Ueda’s arraignment, I went downtown to the Federal Build-ing. In the hallway outside the court-room, I noticed a young Japanese woman with a long black ponytail, shushing a baby. It was Ueda’s wife, Yukiko. She said that her husband now had a job working at a sushi bar in Beverly Hills. “It’s more conventional—not so inter-esting as at the Hump,” she said. But Ueda was still trying to offer guests a memorable, though not illegal, experi-ence. “You can call in advance,” she said. “If he knows you’re coming, he will order something special for you.”

Ueda, a kind-looking man with a graying buzz cut and a short goatee, used a Japanese interpreter to enter a plea of not guilty. Sei’s status as an en-dangered animal was a legitimate source of outrage, but it wasn’t the legal matter


Family legend: I am four. It’s midafternoon, between mealtimes,

and my mother has a friend over. They are chatting in the living room and I am playing in a corner when the buzzer rings (another guest has arrived) and I cry out, “Dinner’s here!”

We are being raised on delivery, but it’s a fight. Every day around 6 P.M., my parents come home (from their

studios, which are two floors below in our building, on Broadway, with its rounded fire escapes) and the dinner debate rages.

Our nanny is an Irish girl who was in a car accident that made it so her mouth opens only a little bit. Once a day, she has to stretch her jaw with a special plastic tool resembling a shoehorn, and sometimes she lets me operate it. When she heads home for the day, she leaves us with various food options that we reject. “It’s too mushy,” I explain re shepherd’s pie.

“I have ravioli,” my mother says. “I could heat that up and cut up a cucumber.”

My sister Grace and I moan and mope, acting like political radicals refusing to consume food until there is a major policy change. Finally, the drawer of menus slides open. Will it be Empire Szechuan? Lupe’s East L.A. Kitchen? The Malaysian place that serves the mysteriously named “thousand layer pancake”?

“We can’t order every night,” my

father says. “It’s a waste of money. It has too much oil. We have a fridge full of really nice, healthy food.”

But they can take only so much resistance. When the food arrives, I insist on shovelling it right out of the container, eyes trained on the TV. I am not deterred even when I choke on a piece of beef with broccoli and my mother has to stick her finger

down my throat to unclog my airway.Deep inside, I know that my

pathological resistance to homemade cuisine comes from something more than a desire to drain my parents of their financial resources and waste endless quantities of cardboard and Styrofoam. There is something so comforting, so magical, about the meal simply arriving, already smelling like itself, laid out like a road map to satisfaction. I want dinner to be perfect every single day. Sometimes as I eat I do a commercial for what I’m consuming: “Enjoy your day the moo-shu-pancake way! So light and tangy your head will explode.”

At school every Christmas, we do something for God’s Love We Deliver, where we decorate the paper bags that contain delivery meals for homebound AIDS patients. When the bags are all decorated, we string them up across the Quaker meetinghouse for our holiday assembly. My bag isn’t very good—it’s sparsely decorated with hearts and stars—because I am too

busy asking about the menu. Does the food arrive hot? Do the AIDS patients have choices, or do they just have to eat whatever turns up?

My mother’s best friend, Sarah, is also an artist, also a mother of two, busy and modern. Sarah cooks for her children constantly, and it makes my mother crazy with guilt.

“Sarah prepares a homemade meal every night,” she tells us. “No matter what’s going on, she makes the time for that.” The only snack my mom ever makes is raw cauliflower with a little cup of mayonnaise for dipping.

“People have different priorities,” my father tells her. So she starts taking a cooking class from my friend Ruth’s mom, Jane. She only teaches you how to make impractical foods, like Cheddar biscuits the size of nickels, which take two hours to prepare, or a vat of caramel. Jane believes in maximizing your time, and so she gets her exercise by jogging in place in her beautifully renovated kitchen. Jane makes Ruth and me taste-test things, but the portions are always too small for me to get any sense at all. One winter, Ruth’s rabbit dies of diarrhea and Ruth’s parents immediately replace it with an identical one.

Sarah dies in June of 2013. It’s sudden—she falls down in the

morning and is done at night—and my mother calls me from a cab, unsure where she is going. I tell her I’ll meet her at home in an hour. I call my father and ask if I should pick up dinner, suggesting the Pakistani place my mother loves as long as we remember to get plenty of chutney.

“No,” he tells me. “She just wants something home-cooked.”

My sister is twenty-one now, and prepares food the way college students do: portions to feed an army, an odd mixture of disparate ethnic seasonings and products that don’t have corporate origins. She broils fish (not using a recipe, despite the fact that she stole IV

AN

BRU

NETTI

DELIVERANCE

BY LENA DUNHAM

TAKE OUT


at issue; the law that the chefs and the restaurant were charged with violating covers all cetaceans, endangered and not. In a sense, they were accused of not understanding that in America whales and their relatives have achieved the sta-tus of household pets.

Brian Vidor built his businesses around the thrill of eating the forbidden: tiny in-sects downstairs, massive endangered spe-cies upstairs. One place represented rapa-cious, greedy devouring of all the world’s creatures, the other broad-minded, virtu-ous globalism; one was theoretically sus-tainable, one likely not; both challenged notions of what is appropriate food. Vi-dor’s lawyer entered a not-guilty plea, too. After leaving the courtroom, he summed up his client’s position and, as far as I could tell, the attitudes of those who ate there and distanced themselves when the dark side of their thrill-seeking was ex-posed. “He owned the restaurant, but he’s a Caucasian, he’s a fun-loving guy—he wasn’t involved day to day.”

In food, the forbidden can be especially alluring. I once spent an after-

noon with a Hindu Brahman seller of exotic meat, eating yak sausage and talk-ing about his poor, disappointed vegetar-ian mother. With animal-rights activists fighting to keep the old taboos intact and to establish new ones, adventurous chefs and diners have begun to operate under their own meat paradox: the less accept-able something is, the more delicious it seems. Not long ago, Animal, a restau-rant in Los Angeles that has helped make pig ears and duck hearts fashion-able, held a fund-raising dinner to fight an impending ban on foie gras in Cali-fornia. In the kitchen, I listened to a group of chefs lament the growing list of meats Americans can’t eat.

A line cook said, “Whale is the beef of the sea.”

“We had it in Japan,” Vinny Dotolo, one of Animal’s chefs, said. “It was amazing. I was, like, I understand why people are eating this.”

“Horse!” Michael Voltaggio, the chef at Ink, in West Hollywood, said. “It sounds so much fancier when you call it cheval.”

The French eat horse; so do Bel-gians, Dutch, Mexicans, Chinese, French Canadians, Central Asians. In Italy, it’s weaning food; in Japan—

where horses are reared specifically to be eaten—it’s sashimi. Horse meat is red, bloody, and unmarbled, and is said to be reminiscent of venison. (Venison, apparently, is the chicken of the alt-meat world.) It takes a lot of grass to make a little bit of horse; they require a third more pasture per pound of body weight than cows, and metabolize it more quickly, too. Given a choice, peo-ple have preferred to use horses as work animals, for transportation, and as in-struments of war. In the first millen-nium, the Catholic Church, threatened by the stubborn pagan habit of ritual horse-eating—it was tied to Odin wor-ship in Germany and Scandinavia—took the unusual step of banning it. Mostly, the ban was successful; only Ice-land, which made exemption from the ban a condition of conversion, persisted.

The logical argument in favor of horse meat has been around for centuries. Why let the calories of retired farm animals go to waste? Parisians discovered horse the hard way, as a food of last resort during the Revolution; by the mid-nineteenth century, intellectuals were promoting it as a cheap, nutritious, and tasty solution to the problem of hunger. The zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who championed the cause, recommended horse by saying that “it has been sold in restaurants, even in the best, as venison, and without the customers ever suspect-ing the fraud or complaining of it.” In “The Curiosities of Food,” published in 1859, Peter Lund Simmonds, a British journalist who fashioned himself as a Vic-torian-era Herodotus, reported, “Horse-flesh pie, too, eaten cold, is a dainty now at Berlin and Toulouse, and boiled horse, rechauffé, has usurped the place of ra-gouts and secondary dishes!” But trusty, tin-eared Anglo-Saxon—“horse-flesh pie”—was not the way to introduce the delicacy that, Simmonds said, was “at present the rage” in Europe’s dining clubs and salons. At home in England, mem-bers of the Society for the Propagation of Horse Flesh as an Article of Food hired French chefs to prepare banquets of chevaline. Previously, the English had known chevaline by the name “cat food.”

Anxieties about sustainability also prompted another intellectual, Calvin W. Schwabe, the “father of veterinary epide-miology,” to urge a reconsideration of the obvious, spurned protein. In 1979, he

my only cookbook, the one that accompanied my New Year’s resolution to make more soup), and my mother looks glazed as she scrapes it around on her plate.

In August, we scatter Sarah’s ashes in her garden. You have a choice of distributing them with a spoon or with your hands. I choose hands, because there is a wait for the spoon, and also it seems squeamish. Afterward, we move inside for a big lunch, the kind that Sarah would have prepared effortlessly.

Since the day Sarah died, my mother has been inordinately focussed on food preparation. My father is supportive of the initiative, though he can swing far in the other direction: once, when I was in high school, my mother went away for a week and he insisted we use nothing but plastic utensils and paper napkins.

Gordon, the man behind the meal, has a sense of humor that lies somewhere between the Catskills and Rikers Island. He tells me, a glint in his eye, “I added some ashes to the paella.”

“Funny, funny,” I mutter. I’ve always found paella kind of pretentious, a food that wants to be everything and is therefore nothing. Much like the mid-nineties trend of wearing a skirt over pants, it seems the height of indecision. But everyone regards the pan of tiny squids and clamshells and fatty sausage as if it were a great work of art.

On the car ride home, my mother breaks the silence to announce, “Gordon put ashes in the paella.”

“He was joking!” I shriek from the back seat, as if I were four again.

“I don’t think he was,” she says. “I think he put a small amount of ash into the paella.”

“No, he didn’t,” Grace snorts.“He was joking,” my father says

firmly, keeping his eyes on the road. “And anyone who’d believe otherwise is just out to lunch.”


published “Unmentionable Cuisine,” which he described as “a practical guide to help us and our children prepare for the not too distant day when the world’s growing food-population problem presses closer upon us and our overly re-strictive eating habits become less tolera-ble.” (M. F. K. Fisher and Craig Clai-borne blurbed the book.) A taste for horse, he wrote, was “superficially latent” in many Americans. Case in point: Carl-son’s House of Choice Meats, a shop in Westbrook, Connecticut, which, during a period of high beef prices in the seven-ties, sold horse exclusively. “I’ll sell it as long as it moves,” Kent Carlson, the pro-prietor, told a reporter amid brisk sales on opening day. (Within a few days, a cav-alry of mounted protesters had gathered outside the shop.) Schwabe provided a recipe for meat loaf—three parts horse to one part pork—that he and his wife made often during his years in vet school.

Horse advocacy groups have long pressed for a federal ban, arguing that horses are companion animals and there-fore should not end their lives as food. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there were only three horse slaughter-houses operating in the United States, all foreign-owned, with most of the meat going to Europe, Mexico, and Japan. (The rest went to feed carnivores at U.S. zoos.) In 2007, the last of them closed, after U.S.D.A. inspections were struck from the federal budget, effec-tively banning domestic slaughter. Dur-ing the next five years, hundreds of thou-sands of live horses left America to be slaughtered in Canada and Mexico, under conditions that advocates of domestic slaughter and animal-rights groups alike deplored. PETA actually supported reviving the U.S. industry. A report by ProPublica suggested that, in spite of laws against the practice, some of the exported animals might have been wild horses captured by the Bureau of Land Management in roundups and sold to “kill buyers”; others came from racetracks and were full of steroids, anti-inflammatories, and other medications prohibited in food animals.

In 2012, funding for U.S.D.A. inspec-tions was restored, and various companies have announced plans to open slaughter-houses. While the majority of the market will likely be foreign, boosters are making a direct appeal to American foodies. “The

Promise of Cheval,” a document recently produced by the International Equine Business Association, asks, “In a country where common gastronomic choices in-clude everything from baby lambs and suckling pigs to grasshopper tacos and al-ligator tails, why can you not find the horse steak that was available on the menu of the Harvard dining room in the 1990s?” (The Faculty Club served it, with mush-room sauce and vegetables.) It goes on to describe a cheap, sweet red meat, just out of reach. “When our Canadian neighbors are dining on delightful meals of Medal-lions of Cheval au Porto, where is the same lean, tender dish to tempt our pal-ates?” When I talked to Sue Wallis, a state legislator in Wyoming who is trying to open a slaughterhouse, she said, “There’s great action going on with artisanal meats and butchery, and I think cheval would be interesting to those folks.” Wallis is also a raw-milk advocate. Her favorite, of course, is raw horse milk, which she has tried courtesy of an Amish farmer who sells it to the cosmetics industry but holds some back to drink with his family.

In early 2013, Tesco, the British supermarket chain, made a startling rev-

elation: some of its frozen beef patties contained horse meat, one sample as much as twenty-nine per cent. Then Burger King, which used the same Irish supplier (who put the blame on its sup-plier, in Poland), admitted that its meat was potentially contaminated, too. A

British food manufacturer disclosed that its beef lasagna was mostly horse. IKEA pulled its meatballs—trace horse—from locations across Europe. For Americans who worried that something similar might happen here, it was hard to say what was more disconcerting, the idea that you wouldn’t be able to taste the horse or that you would. Canada’s CBC News reported that foodies were rushing to try it.

The history of accidental horse-eat-

ing is long. Simmonds, in “The Curios-ities of Food,” remarked that no one in the English knackers’ yards could ac-count for the hearts and tongues, and suggested that the “ox tongues” sold as Russian imports might be equine in-stead. Upton Sinclair put it on a par with the other horrors depicted in “The Jun-gle,” revealing that the packers, in addi-tion to all their other crimes against purse and palate, slaughtered and canned horses. Starting in the late eighteen-hundreds, the Times reported frequently on a German butcher named Henry Bosse, “of horse-bologna sausage fame,” who operated a slaughterhouse beside the racetrack in Maspeth, Queens. His business was “transforming decrepit quadrupeds into odoriferous bologna sausages” for shipment to Belgium and Germany. Sometimes, the paper alleged, “after the horse meat was shipped to Eu-rope and manufactured into sausage it was resent to this country and sold as some of the famous brands.”

Hugue Dufour came by his horse-bologna-sausage fame differently: by openly appealing to outré tastes. Du-four, who is Canadian, grew up on a working farm; sometimes the family slaughtered and ate their horses. Before coming to New York, he worked for Martin Picard at Au Pied de Cochon, in Montreal, which is known for its he-donistic whole-animal frenzies. Picard’s affection for animals is free of compli-cating inhibitions. In one of his cook-books, he gives detailed instructions on how to make squirrel sushi, and writes, “I LOVE carcasses! I like tearing them apart and picking them clean with my fingers and I don’t feel the slightest bit shy about doing it in public.”

But, Dufour said, Au Pied de Co-chon avoided serving beef, which it saw as the product of a wasteful, unwhole-some industry, so he learned to cook red deer, venison, bison. Although the res-taurant did not serve horse, he began to wonder about it. The stuff he’d eaten as a kid had not been good; he wanted to see if as a chef he could make it deli-cious. “It has long ribs, so you can do a very Flintstone-ish rack that’s kind of cool,” he said. He played around with tartare, a classic presentation. (The Ta-tars ate their horses, too.) Ultimately, he decided that the leanness of the meat made it ideal for charcuterie.

newyorker.com/go/outloud

A conversation about adventurous eating.

In the spring of 2012, Dufour, by this time living in New York, was in-vited to participate in the Great Googa-Mooga, a food festival in Prospect Park, and was given a booth in Tony’s Corner, an area overseen by Anthony Bourdain. “It’s supposed to be the big foodie happening, so let’s see how far foodies can go,” Dufour recalled thinking. He sourced some horse from a friend with a slaughterhouse in Canada, and im-ported it legally, with the knowledge of the city Health Department. His offering was a sandwich of grilled horse bologna, cheddar, and foie gras. At his booth, there was a horse cutout—you could stick your head through and get a picture taken.

It was a moment of truth for the self-selected contingent that ventured over to Tony’s Corner. “The foodies got torn,” Dufour said. “Should I go for horse meat or should I not be a foodie?” Five thousand of them went for it. When the V.I.P. section ran out of food, the organizers came to him to beg for horse. Dufour was happily surprised. “They loved us so much,” he said. “I was, like, ‘New Yorkers are great. They have no problem with horse meat. Let’s do it.’ ”

Soon afterward, he announced that he would serve horse tartare at M. Wells Dinette, the restaurant he was opening at MOMA PS1, in Queens. The response was so virulent—angry callers told him he didn’t deserve to live in America and should leave—that he released a state-ment saying that he would drop the tar-tare from the menu. His motive, he wrote, had merely been to “offer cus-tomers new things,” beyond the trinity of beef-chicken-pork. He went on, “It was certainly not our intent to insult American culture. However, it must be said, part of living in a city like New York means learning to tolerate different customs.” Then he invited his critics to come in for a drink “and a bite of what-ever animal they do consume (if any).” At the time, the menu included foie-gras bread pudding, escargot and bone marrow, and blood pudding.

“Maybe the whole foodie counter-culture is a reaction to the oppression of just a few things to eat and big super-markets where you find the same thing everywhere,” Dufour told me. “For me, eating other animals, including horses,

is a responsible thing to do. If you like meat, it’s trying to find other sources, meat that is already around that would otherwise go to waste.” Because it’s not raised for human consumption, the meat sometimes poses a health risk—but, he says, so do conventionally raised beef and poultry. He finds the senti-mental argument against eating horse insupportable. “It’s more like recycling a dead animal,” he said. “We can’t start burying horses with tombstones every time.”

For his next restaurant, M. Wells Steakhouse, Dufour envisions a “meat temple,” where he will serve a zoo’s worth of birds and beasts, and forgotten cuts of familiar animals. “When I call my butcher, I ask for whatever people don’t want, what’s cheap, and make it nice,” he said. His plans call for a wood-fired grill, next to a concrete trough filled with lobsters, trout, sea urchins. “Everything crawling and live,” he said. “I grab and butcher them real quick and grill them.” Dufour regrets the whole tartare affair, not least for the way it has restricted the steakhouse menu. “I would have loved to do horse,” he said ruefully. Still, at the new restaurant, he

hopes to have exotic meats like rattle-snake and lion, which he imagines serv-ing in a black-peppercorn sauce.

Of all the things she ate in the name of saving animals, Crystal Gal-

braith, the young vegan operative who went undercover at the Hump, found the horse meat the most disturbing. Whale had the strange but not unpleas-ant flavor of “fishy beef,” but horse she found altogether unpalatable. “It was pungent and gamey, really disgusting,” she told me. To eat it, she said, she had to fool herself back into a pre-“Skinny Bitch” mentality. As it hap-pened, this was not the only trickery at work on Galbraith’s visits to the Hump. So committed was the restau-rant to serving the outrageous and off limits and hard to source that it re-sorted to a little subterfuge of its own. When Scott Baker’s DNA tests came back, the horse that had assaulted her palate with its strangeness was revealed to have been beef.

“I always end up buying way more black-truffle honey than I intended.”

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX MAJOLI

PROFILES

POST-MODENA

Italy’s food is bound by tradition. Its most famous chef isn’t.

BY JANE KRAMER


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Massimo Bottura’s influences include Alain Ducasse, Ferran Adrià, and his mother. Conservative Italian chefs have accused him of poisoning the national cuisine.

The words “Italy” and “new gastron-omy” were an oxymoron when the

Modena chef Massimo Bottura opened the Osteria Francescana, in 1995, and started creating the dishes that would turn him into a luminary of the culinary avant-garde. Take Black on Black, his tribute, by way of squid ink, katsuo-bushi, and a black cod, to Thelonius Monk. Or Camouflage, his nod to Pi-casso, with a civet of wild hare “hiding” in custard under a blanket of powdered herbs and spices. Today, dishes like those have earned him three Michelin stars, raised Francescana to third place on San Pellegrino’s famous list of the best restaurants in the world, and put Italy on the map for the kind of travel-lers who prefer to eat their spaghetti and meatballs at home.

Bottura gets emotional thinking about food. His friends know this, because he thinks out loud. Very loud. It happens when he starts to imagine a recipe—in-spired, perhaps, by the arrival of a new Big Green Egg cooker or a wheel of Parmesan that he’s been aging for fifty months, but just as often by, say, a Rob-ert Longo painting or some vintage Lou Reed vinyl or a line he suddenly remem-bers from Kerouac or Céline. He de-scribes the process as a kind of synesthe-sia, where the worlds he loves start coming together in his head, and he has no choice but to call someone with the news. It could be a childhood friend, a couple of blocks away in Modena, or another chef, thousands of miles from Italy, depending on who, in his words, “has to hear this.” People listen. They hear the beginning of a loud, breathless, unstoppable recitation, and know that, as one friend put it, “It’s Massimo, cross-pollinating again.” Bottura calls it, “Tasting my creativity.”

The first time I heard Bottura “think-ing,” I wondered if he was angry—or, worse, bored. I was wrong. I got used to Bottura’s shouts. I tried to think of them as bardic. I would wait for him to jump up from the breakfast table—“the best place to catch him focussed,” his Amer-ican wife, Lara Gilmore, maintains—grab his cell phone, disappear into the library, where he keeps a gleaming nine-teen-seventies Transcriptors hydraulic

turntable, a pair of MartinLogan speak-ers, and his vast collection of CDs, tapes, and records, and, with the music blasting, begin to shout. I would watch him brake his motorcycle in the middle of a Modena street, dig for his phone, and, to the accompaniment of honking horns, begin to shout. I learned a lot about food, listening to Bottura think, though I would happily have skipped the night he punched a number into his phone and yelled, “Senti questa! ”—“Lis-ten to this!”—while driving a Mercedes at perilous speed down the autostrada to Reggio Emilia and, at the same time, leaning low into the windshield to take pictures of the moon rising under the arch of a Santiago Calatrava bridge. That was unsettling, given that I had hoped to get to Modena alive that night and sample the Eel Swimming up the Po River on Bottura’s “Sensations” tast-ing menu, and even to beg a chef ’s re-prise of Black on Black, which had been “retired,” like the number of a star pitcher.

Bottura thinks of his dishes as met-aphors. They tell stories. His eel—cooked sous-vide, lacquered with a saba sauce, and served with creamy polenta and a raw wild-apple jelly—refers to the flight of the Estense dukes to Mo dena in 1598, after Clement VIII seized their capital at Ferrara and claimed its eel marshes and fisheries for the Church. Camouflage—with its custard of foie gras, dark chocolate, and espresso foam—comes from a conversation be-tween Picasso and Gertrude Stein, as a camouflaged truck rolled past them on Boulevard Raspail, in 1914. (Picasso, who had never seen camouflage before, cried, “Yes, it is we who made it, that is cubism.”) And the short story that in-spired Black on Black is about a French chef who turns out the lights when a group of irritable gourmets sit down to dinner, telling them, Eat with your pal-ates, not your eyes. Bottura thought of that story late one night in his li-brary, listening to Monk in the dark. He decided to create a recipe that would honor Monk, but he couldn’t turn out the lights at Francescana. So he filleted the cod; seared its skin in dehydrated sea urchin and an ash of burned herbs;

flipped it over to nestle in a layer of sliv-ered root vegetables and ginger (for “spaghetti”); and poached it in a dried-tuna broth, blackened with the squid ink. At Francescana, it came to the table as a beautiful deep black circle in a bowl. The “lights” went on when you picked up your knife and fork and cut into the cod’s bright white flesh. “Black and white,” Bottura says. “Piano keys.”

Bottura is one of a small, far-flung brotherhood of exceptionally gifted and inventive chefs who have deconstructed, distilled, concentrated, and, with un-common respect, reconstructed the flavors of their own traditional cuisines. They are in constant touch. They text, they tweet, they call. They travel across the planet to share their ideas and secrets and techniques—the thermal immer-sion circulators, micro-vaporizers, preci-sion smokers, and freeze dryers. They convene in August for the MAD week-end—the Noma chef René Redzepi’s annual gathering of the tribe in Copen-hagen. They fish and hunt and forage and cook together at wilderness outings like Cook It Raw, gastronomy’s extreme sport (which Redzepi once, possibly to his regret, described as Boy Scout camp). They meet at the food writer and impre-sario Andrea Petrini’s Gelinaz! (don’t ask) cook-offs and riff on the history of one dish. This year, the destination was Ghent and the dish was a classic nine-teenth-century meat-and-vegetable timbale; Bottura sent his brother Paolo, who is a car dealer, to be “Massimo Bot-

tura” and present his version, along with a video of the two men trading clothes at the airport—to make the point that no chef can claim to own a recipe, even one he has invented. They recount their most catastrophic gastronomic adven-tures to enraptured foodies at places like the New York Public Library, where Bottura was last “in conversation” with two of the American brothers, Daniel Patterson, of the San Francisco restaurant Coi, and David Chang, of Momofuku.

He told a story about trying to cook seventy reindeer tongues sous-vide, in a bath of ashes and olive oil, on the floor of a small hotel bedroom somewhere in the forests of Lapland, with the thermal circulators set so low that he had to spend twenty-four hours on the floor with them, waiting for the molecular miracle that would transform those thick, rubbery lumps into tempting morsels. This fall, in an exhibit at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, you can see the “black meteorite” sculpture of carbon ashes, ground coffee, flour, and egg whites in which he had cooked a veal tongue—an image that came to him while thinking (out loud) about the artist Lucio Fontana’s mid-century se-ries “Concetto Spaziale.”

Bottura was born in Modena and grew up in a big house not far

from the restaurant he owns now. Modena is a small city in Emilia-Ro-magna, half an hour northwest of Bo-

logna in the Po River Valley, which is to say in the country’s breadbasket, a source of agricultural wealth that is the envy of all Italy. The Po and its web of tributaries—Modena sits between two—account for a food tradition that includes the country’s only authentic Parmesan (Parmigiano Reggiano), its best prosciutto and culatello, its richest sausages (try pheasant stuffed with cotechino), its darkest Vignola cher-ries, and its finest balsamic vinegars, some of which were already on Mode-na’s tables when Cicero, writing the Philippics, described the colony, by its Latin name, as Mutina firmissima et splendidissima. Modena is steeped in praise, history, and satisfaction. Bot-tura says that when he opened Fran- cescana the local borghesi—few of whom actually thought to eat there—were instantly suspicious, convinced that no one could cook better than the way they had always cooked, meaning exactly the way their mothers and grandmothers, and all the mothers be-fore them, had. This, of course, could be said of anywhere in Italy, a country so resistant to culinary experiment that grown men will refuse to eat their wives’ cooking and go “home” for lunch instead.

So it’s probably more shocking than surprising that, at first, Modena—home to a twelfth-century university and cathedral, to Italy’s West Point, to the Ferrari founder and the Maserati factory, to a concert hall, an opera house, seven theatres, three good mu-seums, and a foundation with one of the best photography collections any-where—was immune to the lure of gastronomic refreshment. The prob-lem was pride as much as provinciality. “When you taste a Bottura dish, the flavors you thought you knew become deeper, wider, longer,” his friend Mas-simo Bergami, the dean of the Alma business school, at the University of Bologna, says. “He’s building on the genuine identity of Italian cuisine. But, to most Italians, identity has to do with borders, with saying, Go no fur-ther. Our towns were walled once, and the ones with the most ‘identity’ within their walls have often preserved it ob-stinately, defensively, in a very static way.” It seems that, while Spain was ready for a Ferran Adrià, Denmark “You’re getting close. This is the gift shop.”


for a René Redzepi, and Brazil for an Alex Atala, Modena was not quite ready for a Massimo Bottura, who said, “I want to donate my dreams to people,” in the same breath as he talked about the tortellini his mother, Luisa, made.

Luisa Bottura cooked all day. She didn’t have to. Her own mother had helped found, and run, a very success-ful fuel company, dealing first in wood and then in coal, and when Luisa mar-ried Alfio Bottura, who came from a rich landowning family, he took over her family’s business, switched to die-sel fuel, and made another fortune. But she could usually be found in the kitchen, where, with the help of her mother and her maid, she cooked for a daughter and four sons, their hungry friends, a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law who had moved in, and anyone her husband wanted to bring home for lunch or dinner except his mis-tress—“he had two ‘wives’ ” was the local term.

Bottura was the youngest son by six years. He says that his brothers would come home from school, find him watching the women cook, and chase him around the kitchen with whatever makeshift weapons were at hand. He took to hiding under the kitchen table, where, being five or six and always hun-gry, he “discovered my palate” by de-vouring the bits of tortellini dough that fell to the floor from the women’s roll-ing pins. It was instantly addictive, he says, like the taste of his wife’s cookie batter dropped from a wooden spoon. “That kitchen, under the table, was my safety place,” he told me. “I remember the yellow of the pasta on a warm day, with the sun streaming through the window. I could see it through the slats. A perfect color. I thought, Good for ta-gliatelle, too.”

In 1988, after a trip to Southeast Asia—“my first exotic vacation,” Bot-tura calls it—ended with a bout of food poisoning in Chiang Mai, he thought about how soothing a bowl of his mother’s “birthday tortellini” would be, and began to work on a dish that he called the Tortellini Are Walking on the Broth. Two layers of broth, thick-ened with a seaweed agar “to create the movement of water, and six tortellini bobbing between them, in a layer of

warm broth, crossing the Red Sea, going home.” His wife, Lara, describes it as “Max’s ultimate provocation of a town where no one would say, ‘I’m bet-ter than la mamma.’ ” Eventually, he made his compromesso storico with Modena. He called that dish Noah’s Ark, because every family’s tortellini tradition was in it. Bottura says, “My thought was you don’t let tradition bind you. You let it set you free. The broth of Noah’s Ark is the broth of many mothers. I put all their traditions to-gether in one pot—duck, pigeon, guinea fowl, chicken, veal, beef, pork, eel, and frog’s legs, with some kombu seaweed from Japan, for a wise cul-tural contamination—and make the broth. When all those flavors are con-centrated, the meat comes off the bones, the bones are roasted, and each hand-kerchief of tortellini is filled with one of those broth meats.” I asked his mother, who is eighty-nine, what she thought. “Massimo’s cooking is fan-

tastic,” she said. “But I cook better.”Bottura began to cook for his friends

when he was still in high school. They were a notorious crew—“six of us, plus twenty worshippers,” one of them told me, laughing—known as either the bad boys or the golden youth of Modena, depending on who was talking. They were all good-looking. They threw the wildest parties. They were into every Italian teen-age preoccupation—music, motorcycles, cars, soccer, girls, and clothes. (Bottura’s taste once ran to Gigli, Gaultier, and Moschino; now he’s happy in jeans, T-shirts, and a comfortable pair of New Balance.) “There were the serious, political kids, and there was us,” Massimo Morandi, a Modena businessman who is one of Bottura’s oldest friends, says. “Most of us came to school by public bus. O.K., I had a car—a Rabbit—but Max had his choice of cars. One day, it was his father’s gray Mercedes, the next his brother Andrea’s green Porsche, the

“Paper cut?”

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The first time I ordered takeout in New York, two things

confounded me: the terrific speed with which the food arrived, and the fact that, after I’d paid for it, the man from the Chinese restaurant and I stood on either side of the threshold staring at each other, though only one of us understood why. After a minute of this, I closed the door. An American

friend sat on the sofa, openmouthed: “Wait—did you just close the

door?”In London, you don’t tip for delivery.

A man on a motorbike arrives and hands over an oil-soaked bag, or a box. You give him the exact amount of money it costs or wait and look at your shoes while he hunts for change. Then you close the door. Sometimes all this is achieved without even the removal of his motorcycle helmet. The dream (an especially British dream) is that the whole awkward exchange pass wordlessly.

Every New Yorker has heard a newly arrived British person grumble about tipping. The high-minded Brits add a lecture: food-industry workers shouldn’t need to scrabble for the scraps thrown from high table—they should be paid a decent wage (although the idea that the delivery boys of Brit-ain are paid a decent wage is generally an untested assumption). Now when I’m in London I find myself tipping all kinds of people, most of whom express

a sort of unfeigned amazement, even if the tip is tiny. What they never, ever do, however, is tell me to have a nice day. “Have a good one”—intoned with a slightly melancholy air, as if warding off the far greater likelihood of an evil “one”—is the most you tend to hear.

But I’m not going to complain about Britain’s “lack of a service culture”—it’s one of the things I

cherish about the place. I don’t think any nation should elevate service to the status of culture. At best, it’s a practicality, to be enacted politely and decently by both parties, but no one should be asked to pretend that the intimate satisfaction of her existence is servicing you, the “guest,” with a shrimp sandwich wrapped in plastic. If the choice is between the antic all-singing, all-dancing employees in New York’s Astor Place Pret-A- Manger and the stony-faced contempt of just about everybody behind a food counter in London (including all the Prets), I wholeheartedly opt for the latter. We are subject to enough delusions in this life without adding to them the belief that the girl with the name tag is secretly in love with us.

In London, I know where I stand. The corner shop at the end of my road is about as likely to “bag up” a few samosas, some milk, a packet of fags, and a melon and bring them to my home or office as pop round and write my novel for me. (Its

slogan, printed on the awning, is “Whatever, whenever.” Not in the perky American sense.)

In New York, a restaurant makes some “takeout” food, which it fully intends to take out and deliver to someone. In England, the term is “takeaway,” a subtle difference that places the onus on the eater. And it is surprisingly common for London restaurants to request that you come and take away your own bloody food, thank you very much. Or to inform you imperiously that they will deliver only if you spend twenty quid or more. In New York, a boy will bring a single burrito to your door. That must be why so many writers live here—the only other place you get food delivery like that is at MacDowell.

Another treasurable thing about London’s delivery service is its frankly metaphysical attitude toward time (minicabs are equally creative on this front). They say, “He’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.” Thirty minutes pass. You call. They say, “He’s turning onto the corner of your road, one minute, one minute!” Five minutes pass. You call. “He’s outside your door! Open your door!” You open your door. He is not outside your door. You call. He is now five minutes away. He “went to the wrong house.” You sit on the doorstep. Ten minutes later, your food arrives. My most extreme encounter with this uniquely British form of torture was when, a few years back, I ordered from an Indian restaurant four minutes from my house as the crow flies. I was still being told he was on the corner of my road when I walked through the restaurant’s door, cell phone in hand, to find the delivery boy sitting on a bench, texting. As was his God-given right. It’s not as if anyone were going to tip him.

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BY ZADIE SMITH

TAKE OUT


next his brother Paolo’s black Saab. Cars like that, parked outside the school next to the teachers’ little Fiats, created a lot of envy. But Max wasn’t showing off; he was just being crazy.”

Bottura was also irrepressibly hospi-table, like his mother. Whenever he and his friends were through partying for the night, they trooped to Luisa Bottu-ra’s door for pasta. They called it the after-party. “It was never a problem,” she said. “My door was always open. I loved to watch them eat.” It wasn’t long before Max took over the three-in-the-morning shift in Luisa’s kitchen. “The atmosphere around Max was pure ‘An-imal House,’ ” his friend Giorgio de Mitri, who owns the Modena arts-communications company Sartoria, says. “But when the playing stopped it was aglio, olio, peperoncino, and there was Massimo at the stove. He was very good at cooking fast.”

There is some debate in Modena as to when Bottura became the serious cook he is now. His mother says, “In my kitchen.” Morandi says on a camping trip, in the late seventies: thirty kids, a couple of tents, and, on the last night, “a celebration, with Max cooking a spa-ghetti carbonara so perfect that we all clapped.” But Paolo Bottura knows that it happened when his best auto electri-cian left his dealership to open a restau-rant. Paolo wanted the electrician back, wooed him, and, two years later, told Max that there might be a restaurant for sale. It was a truck stop, really, in a vil-lage near Modena called Campazzo di Nonantola, but Max was at loose ends. He had finished high school with amaz-ing ease, considering that he rarely studied. He had put in his obligatory year with the Italian Army stationed at home in Modena—and won so many titles for his base’s soccer team that no one stopped him when he took to driv-ing in and out of the base, without per-mission, honking at the gates and call-ing, “Open up. It’s me, No. 1.”

He went to law school to appease his father, who wanted a lawyer in the family business. “I liked it, but it wasn’t the right place,” he says. “I didn’t feel that I was living my own life.” He was also working afternoons for his father. That ended when the two men fought over a commission that his father re-fused to pay, saying, “You sold too low.”

Bottura told me, “I started screaming and never went back. I pictured my-self waking up, every morning, foggy, fighting with my father over one cent per litre of diesel gas. I had no money. But I bought that falling-apart tratto-ria. I thought, Why not? I was already cooking for all my friends. I wanted to show that I could do it.”

Marco Bizzarri, who shared a desk with Bottura in high school and is now the president and C.E.O. of Bottega Veneta, says, “I was doing my military service, and I remember calling Max’s mother, asking for him, and Luisa say-ing, ‘He’s opened a restaurant.’ I couldn’t believe it. I was the blue-collar bad boy; my parents worked in a tile factory. But I had gone through life with Massimo. We had aced our French tests together, with Max reading from the book we were supposed to know and me mouth-ing the words and trying not to laugh. I knew Max could be anything he wanted. He was like a child, someone always growing, and you never knew what was coming next. But I never expected Campazzo. The truckers were still eat-ing there, they were yelling at him, ‘What is this? We’re paying more but eating less!’ ”

It was 1986. Bottura was twenty-three and trying to transform a roadside

trattoria where, by all accounts, the chipped glasses were as old as the trucks outside, and everything else was brown and muddy yellow except the hideous gold-painted metal food trolley that he wheeled around, pretending not to see his friends. Most of the bad boys were on their way to respectable lives, but their nights were reserved for the Trat-toria del Campazzo, the consensus being that, wherever Max was, there would be a party later. His worst prob-lem was the “entertainment”—an accor-dionist with a singing wife who came with the place and whom Bottura was either too timid or too kind to fire, until, after six months of forbearance, his friends gave him an ultimatum: us or them. Meanwhile, Campazzo was look-ing prettier. Bottura’s girlfriend at the time was studying interior design. She hung curtains and replaced the old tablecloths with creamy linens. Her mother filled in, nights, washing dishes, and Luisa Bottura came every day with

her maid to make the pasta, while Mas-simo got busy at the stove and started riffing on their old Modena recipes. “Economically, it was terrible,” he says. “But the food got better.”

A few months after Campazzo opened, a woman from the village knocked on the door, asking for the new owner. Her name was Lidia Cris-toni. She had been cooking in Modena for thirty-five years, many of them at what was then its best restaurant, but she was losing her sight and could no longer negotiate the city’s streets. Bot-tura installed her in his kitchen that morning, and, two days later, saw to it that she had an operation on her eyes. She had planned to stay for a year or two, and stayed for seven. “She was my second mother-mentor,” Bottura says. “A master pasta-maker. She could handle a hundred and sixty eggs a day.” I asked Lidia about Campazzo one day last summer, when Bottura and I vis-ited her at the clinic where she had just had heart surgery, and was already complaining about the food. “Mas-simo had a fantastic will,” she said, while Bottura dug into the lunch she had refused to finish. “But he was so nervous about the restaurant. He was grinding his teeth, he wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t eating—he was down to sixty kilos. I gave him salamis, I told him, ‘Mangia! Mangia!,’ or I’ll leave. One day, the health people showed up to say that we couldn’t use any eggs at all because of salmonella. Max didn’t know what to do, but I did. I told the inspector that I had twenty fresh eggs from my own hens. He said, ‘Give me ten,’ and left.”

The truckers left, too, once Bottura had replaced the electrician’s menu with wild-arugula salads, soft-boiled egg yolks on oysters splashed with vinegar, and wine that actually came in bottles. The crowd got younger. “It was like hav-ing a big family dinner every night,” Lidia said. “But once the service ended it was a bordello, because Max kept a little apartment above the restaurant, and ev-eryone went upstairs. One New Year’s Eve, we were a hundred and fifteen peo-ple. Max suddenly disappeared. Every-one was asking, ‘Where’s Max?’ I cov-ered for him. He was at my mother’s house. He had walked over with a big dish of her favorite panna cotta—the


kind with a base of caramel and fruit. She was ninety-two, and still making tortellini, but she couldn’t do panna cotta anymore. He was the one who thought of her, alone on New Year’s Eve.”

Giorgio de Mitri once described Bottura to me as “like a sponge, be-cause he has that rare ability to absorb influence and at the same time to stay absolutely himself, absolutely original.” With Lidia, the influence was tradi-tional Modena cuisine. Next came the basics of French cuisine, adapted to Emilia-Romagna’s bounty, and Bottu-ra’s teacher was a French chef named Georges Cogny, who had married a woman from Piacenza and eventually moved his pots and pans to Farini, a peaceful village in the Apennines, where he opened a restaurant called Locanda Cantoniera. Bottura ate there a few months after he bought Campazzo, tasted Cogny’s demi-soufflé of choco-late, and asked if he could watch him cook. For the next two years, he spent every Sunday and Monday, when Cam-pazzo was closed, driving two hours into the mountains to learn.

“I was starting to feel like a real chef,” he told me, toward the end of a swelter-ing day in late July. We were in Farini, at a chefs’ ceremony in memory of Cogny, who died there in 2006. “That was the gift Georges gave me. I remem-ber the day it happened. He was doing oysters, wrapped in pancetta and sau-téed, and asked me to taste them. ‘Too salty,’ I said. He wanted to know what I would do. I told him, ‘Crunchy pancetta, but keep the oysters raw.’ He said, ‘Massimo, your palate is going to take you far.’ ”

In 1989, a year after his lessons with Cogny ended, Bottura opened the Har-ley Club—named in honor of his new purple Springer—for the after-parties that had quickly become much too big for an apartment above a trattoria. The club was next to his motorcycle me-chanic’s shop in Modena, a few blocks from the city’s historic center. The neigh-bors complained, but it was otherwise a wild success. The best d.j.s and rock groups in Emilia-Romagna heard the buzz about this improbably cool place in fusty Modena and booked their nights. On Thursdays, well-known comedians came to hone their standup routines. Bottura himself was on a killing sched-

ule, cooking lunch and dinner at Cam-pazzo and then, as soon as the last din-ner guest was gone, heading to the Harley to cook again. He says he had never been so happy.

Bottura met Lara Gilmore in New York, in the spring of 1993, on the

day they both started working the two-to-midnight shift at Caffè di Nonna, a hitherto uninspired Italian restaurant in

SoHo, with Gilbert behind the bar, dispensing wine and cappuccino, and Bottura in the kitchen, cooking. Bot-tura had fallen in love with America, despite (or possibly because of ) an “amazingly weird” trip, in 1991, to Ar-kansas, where he and a friend from home encountered a biker by the name of Ed at a Domino’s Pizza, endured a session at Ed’s favorite tattoo parlor (Bottura chose a winged buffalo head, which by now looks like a bunny with serrated ears), drank like “Harley men” (beer and Jack Daniel’s), and were stiffed on an order of custom bikes (made from parts of a 1968 white-and-yellow Harley classic), which were no-where in evidence six months later when they flew from Italy to Ed’s me-chanic in Daytona Beach to claim them. The experience did not discour-age Bottura—not, at any rate, enough to keep him from moving to New York

for six months to “taste its food, look at its art, listen to its music, and reignite my passion.” He was turning thirty-one, and had decided to close the club, put Campazzo on the market, and use the money to open a different kind of restaurant. He was “looking for energy and inspiration to tell me what that res-taurant would be.” His one problem in New York was coffee. “I was desperate for good coffee” is how he describes the

odyssey that took him from the middle reaches of Columbus Avenue, where he had rented a one-room walkup, to SoHo, where, on his search for the per-fect espresso, he noticed an Illy coffee sign in the window of a restaurant at Grand and Mercer, walked in, ordered a double, and the next morning had a job.

Gilmore was twenty-four and living with a drummer in a sublet on the Lower East Side. Her parents lived in Bedford, in Westchester, where her father, Kenneth Gilmore, had just re-tired as the editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest. She had gone to Andover, studied art and theatre at Hampshire College, with a year off, painting at the New York Studio School—after which she had interned at the Kitchen and then at Aperture, the photogra-phy-book publisher. When she met Bottura, she was at the Actors Studio,

Bottura’s Pasta e Fagioli, a dish whose five layers pay homage to his culinary influences.


and auditioning for parts. “Lara was my dream of America,” Bottura says. She was smart, beautiful—with dark eyes and light-brown hair—and, to his surprise, knew Italian, having spent some summers studying art in Flor-ence. Bottura, in his New York incar-nation, was sporting a goatee, a pair of round blue John Lennon glasses, and a Kangol hat. Gilmore thought he looked “very cool,” and a few months

later invited him to a Wooster Group play. “I didn’t understand a thing hap-pening on that stage,” he told me. “I slept through most of it. But Lara took over my education. She opened the world of the avant-garde to me.” His Modena girlfriend, who had been liv-ing with him in New York, left him. Gilmore and her drummer parted. The party had moved to Bedford.

“They would arrive at my house late Saturday night, after the Nonna closed,” Lara’s mother, Janet Gilmore, told me. “My husband and I would wake up, Sunday mornings, and find all these wonderful young people sprawled out on the sofas, the chairs, the floors, the beds. In the summer, we always rented a big family house on Block Island. Later, when Max came, he took over the kitchen there. If we were out of wine, he would marinate the fish he’d caught in white tea. If

there was nothing for lunch, he’d im-provise and make everybody’s children pizza. He was so full of energy, like an active volcano, flowing ideas.”

Late that summer, Bottura flew home to sell Campazzo and start look-ing for the right place in Modena for a new restaurant. Gilmore surprised him there on his birthday, moved in with his old girlfriend—they had become friends—and the two women opened

an American vintage-clothing store. “Max was happy,” Gilmore says, “but I was thinking, Isn’t it time we had a conversation?” Two weeks later, the French chef Alain Ducasse, who was in Modena tasting balsamic vinegars, sat down to lunch at Campazzo. When the service ended, he walked into the kitchen and invited Bottura to cook with him at the Hôtel de Paris, in Monte Carlo. Bottura went, and Du-casse became his new mentor, the one with the exemplary kitchen battery and the scrupulous mise en place. Gilmore visited once. She and Max had their conversation. “I asked him what to ex-pect,” she told me. “He said something appalling, like ‘Gee, I don’t know, there are so many beautiful women out there I haven’t met.’ ” She left without saying another word.

Bottura couldn’t believe she was gone. He left Monaco to find her. Two

weeks later, he tracked her down in Bedford. They flew back to Modena to-gether, and in October of 1994 Bottura rented a small building, on a quiet, cob-blestoned street, that had once been an inn named Osteria Francescana, after San Francesco, the neighborhood’s thirteenth-century parish church. He restored it, opened in March, and, in July, he and Gilmore married. The groom cooked dinner for two hundred guests. The bride did the flowers and the tables. Bottura was thrown into the swimming pool (the bad boys, again). “And I had my revenge for that awful Ducasse moment,” Gilmore said, when she showed me a picture in which she digs into the wedding cake with both hands, scoops out a large chunk, and rubs it into her husband’s face. “It felt great.”

For the next three years, Gilmore and Bottura led separate lives,

with Lara at di Mitri’s company, Sar-toria, putting out an arts magazine called CUBE, and Max at the restau-rant, cooking. “The first year, we were full,” Bottura says. “Everyone I knew came, especially my friends who had helped paint it—they ate free.” The second year, we were empty. I was ready to close.” Bottura’s father was not forthcoming, and, in the event, Bottura wouldn’t have asked for help. (By the time his father died, he had sold his business and transferred nearly all his property to his mistress; Bottura didn’t receive a cent.) It was the Gil- mores who saved Francescana. “Well, we believed in Max,” Janet Gilmore told me. “We saw that he had a vision. It was a very modest sum we advanced, and we knew it wouldn’t be used for a Ferrari.”

Francescana survived. Bottura began to experiment more. “I was making ‘foam’ with a blender,” he says. “It was more foamy than it was foam, but it was different. I thought my cuisine was very interesting.” It must have been, because Francescana was getting a rep-utation abroad. It wasn’t at the cutting edge of molecular gastronomy—Bot-tura didn’t have money for that kind of equipment anyway—but he was creating small miracles of taste with the equipment he had. In 1999, Fer-ran Adrià came to Modena. He tasted

Herb nests for Snails in the Vineyard, a dish of snails with mushroom and truffle.


Bottura’s food—with the result that Bottura spent the next summer in Spain, working at El Bulli. Gilmore, who at the time was pregnant with their second child, says, “Max didn’t bring the fireworks back from Spain, just one siphon”—the secret of which turned out to be nothing more alchemical than two small cartridges—“but what he did bring back was a new way of thinking about Italian ingredients, at every sta-tion of the kitchen.”

Bottura says the experience changed his life: “Right away, I realized that it wasn’t just about technique. Before, I had made my foam in a blender, and the only difference now, with the si-phon, was that I could make foam air-ier and better. What changed me was the message of freedom that Ferran gave me, the freedom to feel my own fire, to look inside myself and make my thoughts edible. There were three of us interning with him that summer. René Redzepi was there from Copen-hagen—that’s how we met—and there was this older hairy guy from Rome, who had a bar near the Trevi Foun-tain. René and I were moving from one station to another, doing cold savory, doing pastry with Ferran’s brother, Albert, learning so much, and trading reflections on how to eat. But the guy from Rome, all he wanted to learn was how to make Parmesan ice cream. Ferran was pissed. He put him to work, hard labor: sixteen hours a day with his hands in ice water clean-ing sardines, or peeling pine nuts. Late one night, the three of us were stand-ing looking at the sea. It was one o’clock, and we had been working non-stop since eight-forty-five in the morning. We were so tired that we were almost asleep on our feet. The next morning, the Roman came in, strangely happy. He said, ‘Guys, I’m back to Rome. Fuck you!’ An hour later, he was gone.”

Adrià was Bottura’s last mentor, and Bottura thanked him in a new recipe for pasta e fagioli. The dish is layered. The bottom layer is a crème royale of foie gras, cooked with pork rind, in honor of Ducasse. The next three lay-ers are for his grandmother, his mother, and Lidia; he calls them “compressed tradition.” Lidia’s layer is radicchio and pancetta; Luisa’s is a cream of borlotti

beans; and la nonna’s, “where the pasta should be,” is Parmesan rind cooked with more beans and sliced to a chewy crunch. The top layer is for Adrià, an air of rosemary so delicate and light that it’s almost invisible; you know it’s there by the burst of flavor on your tongue. When I asked Bottura how he did that, he said, “Water is truth”—distilled and vaporized.

I ate at Francescana three times (four, if you count the night I was waiting

for Bottura—reading a book and hav-ing a glass of wine in one of its three small dining rooms—and a feast mate-rialized at my table). The first time, Bottura served me “Sensations” (thir-teen dishes that take you on a trip through Italy, from the Alps to the boot and across the Strait of Messina to Sic-ily), along with a couple of dishes from his “Classics” tasting menu (recipes so popular that he can’t retire them), which he thought I should try. Three hours later, I got up feeling as light as if I’d eaten no more than a simple pasta and a plain green salad—the reason, as Bot-tura put it, being that “my mediums are holy water, a little olive oil, and basta! ” His crèmes royales have no cream. The foam in his Memory of a Mortadella Sandwich (which is not a sandwich) is whipped with distilled mortadella “water,” concentrated in a Rotavapor. The cotechino in his ravioli loses its fat in the process of being steamed and chilled.

I learned some interesting things from Bottura. I learned that he made ri-sotto broth the way his grandmother had made it, with Parmesan crusts, sim-mered in water until their flavor leached. The night I came home to Umbria, where I was spending the summer, I sliced the crust from some Parmesan in the fridge, tossed it into a pot of water, and served my husband the best risotto Milanese either of us had ever eaten. A week later, I made Bottura’s home ver-sion of a splendid tagliatelle ragù that had appeared the night I was waiting for him at Francescana (its meat soft-ened, as I’d suspected, in the restaurant’s thermal circulator). I didn’t have a cir-culator. I didn’t even have any veal cheeks or veal tongue or beef tail or marrow, nor could I possibly have hoped to find them at my country co-op.

I was comforted by the fact that Bottura had said to relax, to use whatever was in the house, because the important thing was “no tomato” and the secret was: Don’t grind the meat; wait until the ragù is cooked, and then do what the grandmothers did—chop it or tear it apart. Taking him at his word, I de-frosted a couple of veal scaloppine and a chunk of beef filet, dusted them with a little flour, browned them in olive oil, and cooked them in leftover wine for the minute it took the liquid to evapo-rate; crisped some bits of fresh sausage and pancetta in a hot pan; made the soffrito—onion, carrot, and celery stalk—and, for marrow, chopped and browned a handful of lardo; put every-thing in a big pot with rosemary and bay leaves from the garden and left my ragù to simmer in beef broth for two hours, over heat so low that the flame on my burner kept going out. I ignored the homemade-tagliatelle part, opened a box of fettuccine, and, while the pasta cooked, tore the meat with my fingers. Bottura was right. It made all the difference.

Bottura and Gilmore work together now. She is his house skeptic, his

sounding board and critic, his editor and, often, his ghostwriter, the one who translates those loud, bardic bursts of creativity into something focussed and coherent, strips the stories he tells so well of any traces of what could be called the local operatic style, and shapes them for publication. He never neglects to say how much of the magic surrounding Francescana is hers. “She introduced me to a deep conceptual world, she gave me a critical point of view, a way of seeing,” he says. “She told me, ‘We are contem-porary people. We don’t have to cook in a nostalgic way.’ ”

Gilmore is rarely at the restaurant. If you see her there, it’s usually in the af-ternoon, arranging fresh flowers, or at a table with friends, eating—never at the door, greeting customers, or, note-pad in hand, taking orders like the traditional Italian chef ’s wife. When we met, last summer, she was polishing Bottura’s eponymous third book, which has the working subtitle “Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef.” The book, which comes out next year, is one of new gastronomy’s art-of-the-chef


I’d been having a bad time, a breakdown, a couple, actually—this

was a few years ago, long enough ago to think of as over, though, let’s face it, not that far back in time—and it went on awhile, a stretch of months, or, rather, years, when added up; at any rate, I was out of the hospital and more or less on my own in the world; and I knew that the doctors were worried

about me, a man of a certain age alone at home; and, naturally, the doctors’ worry made me worry about myself, too; and, though I was discharged and off the ward, I wasn’t out of, as they say, harm’s way; and because I was spilling things and bumping into furniture, falling short of motor competency, I wasn’t cooking, which was depressing, because normally cooking is something I love to do, especially for other people; and so, instead, at around three in the morning—night was when I took my medications and could manage a bit of an appetite, when the anxiety was low enough for me to try to eat—I’d pick up the phone and dial the twenty-four-hour diner up the street, where a man or a woman, the same man, the same woman, would take my order, the same order every night, each night a shadow of the one before; and I was never very hungry, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at me—the weight gain from the meds was significant—and, besides,

nortriptyline had pretty much burned a hole in my insides by then; and, anyhow, getting back to ordering, eventually, after a lot of deliveries, it became possible to say, simply, “It’s me,” because they knew my voice, they knew what I wanted, and, though we’d never met, we got along nicely, maybe in part because I found it soothing to say “thank you” over and over and over,

as if any contact or connection at all, at that hour especially, was holy, an interruption in the slow progress toward suicide, which was still in me as a potential, in spite of all the work that had been done in the hospital, work that had been extreme and a testament to living through whatever came, whatever it took, never mind the fact that, for me in those days, as for most acutely suicidal people, testaments and promises and occasional glimpses of light didn’t always avail; it’s in the body, the problem; it’s not an idea or a thought, a vindication or a capitulation, and sometimes it just doesn’t go away; and, though the cook and the waitress—that was how I came to imagine the man and the woman at the diner—couldn’t have known it, they were part of my team now, not doctors, more like family, the kind you choose for yourself later in life, when you’re missing too many people who are gone; and, after a time, as I recall, uneaten food was everywhere; no trash was getting taken out; plastic bags and

cheap foil trays and soda cans and ketchup packs and dirty spoons were all over the brown steamer trunk that I had taken to school and still use as a coffee table; and more bags and more trays covered the green trunk that my father had carried to school, before I was born; so many things with bites taken out of them were going bad on the bookshelves that I’d built for a play in college and then kept after the show closed; and there was garbage on the sofa and over on the love seat and down by my feet on the Persian rug that had been my grandparents’; and time was eternal in that place, this place, my living room, the place that I am writing from now, littered, back then, with the food I’d ordered and the food I hadn’t, the appetizers and the extra desserts that began to appear in the deliveries—it was as if the man and the woman at the twenty-four-hour diner felt something they weren’t saying—so much unasked for, so much uneaten, you couldn’t even walk around in here, and it kept coming; I wasn’t eating, but I was fed.

And now that the mess is cleaned up, now that eternity has ended and history has begun again, now that there is a then and a now, I think I might go by the diner and meet them and tell them what they did and what it meant. On the other hand, I might not. You don’t do that, really: you don’t make friends with the doctors and the nurses and the angels, because you’re home from the hospital, you didn’t die, your cells are no longer on fire with your own dying, and for a while, at least, you’re going to leave all that alone, you’re going to say your prayers and take your drugs and trust in love and try to get to the stove, try to make something good.

IVA

N B

RU

NETTI

BY DONALD ANTRIM

FED

TAKE OUT

tomes—photography, autobiography, history, food philosophy, and, usually reluctantly, recipes—that rarely make it from the coffee table to anybody’s kitchen, the photographs being too beautiful to subject to stains and oil splotches, and the recipes too complex for anyone without, as in Bottura’s case, a hanging eel skinner and deboner or the right syringe for injecting aged balsamic vinegar into a bar of almond-and-hazel-nut-lacquered foie gras on a Popsicle stick. Gilmore was organizing its chap-ters, which have names like “Working Class Heroes” (Bottura’s tribute to the foods of Italy’s traditional peasant lar-ders) and “Image and Likeness” (for the transformative effect of art, music, liter-ature, and travel on his cooking). She was also choosing the photographs of plated food from a stack that had just ar-rived from the Milan artist Carlo Ben-venuto, whose picture “White Table-cloth and Glasses” was one of the first pieces that Bottura bought for what is now an impressive collection of contem-porary art, much of it American, and is the first thing you see when you walk into Francescana. (Benvenuto describes himself as “the guy Max calls in the mid-dle of the night, throws out some clue as

to what he’s thinking, and asks how an artist would interpret that, what kind of food would an artist eat, walking around with that thought.”)

Gilmore enjoyed the work. The hard part was transcribing the recipes that Bottura dictated, on his feet and think-ing rapidly out loud, without much pa-tience for specifics. They were trying to adapt a few of his recipes for home kitchens, and the closest they came to arguing while I was with them involved a simple kitchen utensil. “Beat every-thing together,” Bottura said, toward the end of one recipe. “Beat with what?” Gilmore asked him. “Just say ‘Beat,’ ” Bottura told her. “But with what? A spoon? A whisk? A mixer?” She needed to know that. “Will you just say ‘Beat’!” Bottura shouted, and left the room. A few minutes later, he was back, looking contrite. “A whisk,” he whispered. Gilmore opened her laptop and wrote it down, trying not to smile.

Today, most of Modena wants to eat at Francescana. The problem

is getting a reservation. Bottura has brought the world there, and the world books tables in advance. He is now the city’s most famous citizen, like Pavarotti

before him. The mayor loves him. Strangers hail him on the street. The cook at his local pizzeria named a pizza for him. Bottura, for his part, has be-come the very visible face of Emilia-Romagna’s foods. He blends, and sells, a line of aged balsamic vinegars. He ap-pears at nearly every event having to do with agriculture, from the culatello cel-ebration we went to at a villa near Parma (complete with haystack seats and a pen of sleek black piglets) to meetings at the two agriculture schools that he has persuaded the government to revive by adding cooking courses, “to give young farmers a sense of belonging to the community, a sense of the connection between what they do and what the rest of us eat.” He works with dairy farmers to renew their herds of the area’s vanish-ing Bianca Modenese cows, and with chicken farmers to switch their produc-tion to its heritage Romagnola hens. He makes videos about old eel fishermen on the Po who have lost their livelihood to riverine neglect, and, because of his fame, and the charm of the stories he tells (they’re like Italian folktales), he has shamed the regional politicos into allocating large grants to restore fishing to the river.

Last year, when a hundred-mile swath of the province was devastated by weeks of earthquakes and more than three hundred thousand huge wheels of Parmesan were damaged, he offered his services to the Parmesan consortium, invented a recipe for ri-sotto cacio e pepe, made with Parmi-giano Reggiano instead of Pecorino, and dispatched it to cyberspace. The recipe went viral. Thousands of people bought cheese and cooked it. Six months later, nearly a million kilos of Parmesan had been sold, with one euro per kilo of the proceeds going to earth-quake victims.

It’s hard to keep up with Bottura. Giuseppe Palmieri, his estimable som-melier of thirteen years, says, “Max met me one night (he was having dinner at the restaurant where I worked), called from his car on the way home, and in-vited me to follow him. I’m still run-ning. I love him, and, if you work with Max, to love him is essential.” Bottura hires like that—fast, on instinct. His three head chefs, who take turns travel-ling with him, have been at Francescana “It’s drive-by dating.”


since 2005: Yoji Tokuyoshi knocked at the door, “starving,” on the last day of a two-week visa from Japan, was given a place to stay and a six-course feast that began with a leek-and-truffle tart and ended with a “hot-cold” zuppa inglese, and started working the next day; Da-vide di Fabio had just begun sending out applications when his phone rang and a voice said, “Hi, I’m Massimo. Come to my kitchen”; Taka Kondo ar-rived as a customer, ate lunch, and, be-fore he knew it, was at the stove, mak-ing sauces.

Bottura’s staff worries that, at fifty-one, he has been racing through matu-rity the way he races through Modena on his new Ducati. Enrico Vignoli, who studied engineering and now man-ages Bottura’s office (and his micro-vaporizer), says, “Max’s frenetic en-ergy is a curse. If he stops, he dies.” His daughter, Alexa, who is seventeen, reads Greek and Latin, and seems to have inherited his palate—he calls her “the queen of passatelli”—says, “My dad is always challenging me. Do bet-ter. Do better. It’s like he challenges the guys in the kitchen. It’s stressful, but it stretches you. He stretches him-self most of all.” Bottura has had some sobering wakeup calls. His brother Andrea died of cancer at forty, and not long ago he lost Kenneth Gilmore, whom he calls “my other father,” to Parkinson’s disease. His son, Charlie, who is thirteen, was born with a rare genetic syndrome and requires special care. What drives Bottura today in-cludes a strong desire to secure the fu-ture for his family.

Next January, and with trepidation, he is opening a traditional Italian res-taurant, in Istanbul, for Oscar Farinetti’s Eataly chain, and is sending Yoji To-kuyoshi to run it for him. He describes the project as “introducing Italy to Tur-key with a reflection on my past—on osso buco with risotto, on veal with a little sage, a little lemon.” He has been sifting through offers to endorse every-thing from refrigerators to shoes. Back in July, I drove with him to Milan for a photo shoot for Lavazza coffee, at the Ambrosiana Library. When I left at eleven to take a walk, he was arguing with a woman from the company who had just informed him that his shoot was going to include a model. When I

came back, half an hour later, he was smiling over a big pot for the photogra-pher, with three Leonardo codices be-hind them. And there was the model—dressed, from her bondage stilettos and sexy black sheath to her chaste white collar and owl-rimmed glasses, as a Helmut Newton librarian about to en-gage in some seriously painful disci-pline—mincing back and forth with a stack of books for him to drop into the

pot to simmer. Bottura suggested call-ing the shoot “Cook the Books,” but he was overruled.

Toward the end of my last week in Modena, I asked Bottura about his

worst moment as a chef. He answered right away: spring, 2009. He had his second Michelin star, and had just jumped to thirteenth place on the “world’s best restaurants” list. People were flocking to eat at Francescana—not to mention cook there. And a lot of Italian chefs were jealous, or jealous enough to pick up the phone when Ca-nale 5—Silvio Berlusconi’s version of Fox News—called with invitations to appear on its nightly show “Striscia la Notizia” (“The News Slithers”), where they accused him of poisoning Italy with his “chemical” cuisine. “Eight mil-lion people heard this,” he told me. “Alexa came home from school cry-ing—saying, ‘Daddy, is it true you’re poisoning people?’ I said, ‘Alexa, no way! They’re talking about natural things, things like soya lecithin and agar, things you find in every kitchen—even Nonna Luisa’s.”

The truth is that everything that hap-pens when you cook is chemistry. Any-one who has watched a steak char, or the broth in a risotto bubble away, or sugar in a couple of drops of water turn to caramel, knows this. But in much of Italy words like “chemical” still mean magic, science is heresy, and if you add

postmodern or molecular to that virtual pasta pot they become political—codes for something foreign, dangerous, and, worse (Berlusconi’s favorite), Commu-nist. They marked Bottura as a culinary terrorist, serving chemical weapons dis-guised as a new kind of Italian food to innocent Catholic people. Bottura is thin-skinned; I have heard him quote, detail by detail, a bad review in a restau-rant guide from 2002. But “Striscia” was arguably much worse. “They had sent people to eat at Francescana who filmed my plates with hidden cameras,” he said. “After ‘Striscia,’ we had health inspec-tors there all day. Twice. I called my guys at the restaurant together, and I said, ‘If you believe in what we’re doing, stay. If you want to leave, you’re free to go.’ All of my guys stayed.”

Bottura wasn’t alone. The other im-portant poisoners were Adrià and the British chef Heston Blumenthal. The difference was that people where they lived laughed. People in Italy stoked a debate about “authenticity” and “the health of Italy” that went on for months, and, of course, was nightly television fodder. It probably didn’t help that the well-known art critic and historian Achille Bonito Oliva, speaking in Bot-tura’s defense, called him “the sixth art-ist of the transavanguardia.” (The rest were painters like Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia.) But Bottura was thrilled. He likes to repeat those words. The irony, for him, lay in his obvi-ous devotion to Italy and its food—and to the demonstrable fact that, whatever “chemistry” he had introduced, and whatever tastes he had incorporated from abroad, Italy was vivid in every dish he served at Francescana.

Italians have made a myth of all those mothers and grandmothers happy in the kitchen. They have lived (profit-ably) with the country’s revolutions in design—in fashion, in furniture, in everything from cars to espresso-makers—but “the way we have always cooked” remains their last defense against modernity. Four years ago, Bot-tura, having reinvented the grandmoth-ers, added a selection called “Traditions” to his tasting menus. “I did it for the lo-cals,” he told me. “It was an homage to the food they liked, a way to show that it could be improved, that it was O.K. to improve it.”

94 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2013 PHOTOGRAPH BY GRANT CORNETT

FICTION


I picked up my father on a sultry morning with heavy, rumbling

clouds on the horizon. My mother had thrown him out again, this time for his weight. She’d said that he was insufficiently committed to his weight-loss journey and that if he hit two-fifty she wouldn’t live with him anymore. She seemed to know he’d be heading my way: I had been getting obesity-cure solicitations over the phone, my number doubtless supplied by her. I was tired of explaining to strangers that I wasn’t fat and of being told that a lot of fat people don’t realize how fat they are or wrongly assume that they can do something about it on their own, without paying.

By the time my father got to me, he was well over Mom’s limit and he wanted to go somewhere to eat as soon as he got off the plane. He was wear-ing a suit, rumpled from his travels, but his tie was in place: a protest against the rural surroundings. I took him on a little tour of the town—the rodeo grounds, the soccer field by the river, the old-car museum. He was happiest at the railroad shops, the smell of grease rising from a huge dis-abled locomotive, mechanics around it like Pygmies around an elephant. “When’s she go back to work?” he asked, his eyes gleaming. The me-chanics didn’t look at him; they looked at each other. My father was undis-mayed: they assumed he was manage-ment, he said.

At the diner, he asked if the chicken sandwich on the menu was actually made of chicken or was “some conglom-erate.” A blank stare from the waitress. He ordered the sandwich. “I’ll just have to find out myself.” He insisted on buy-ing our lunch, but when the cashier counted the change too rapidly for his taste he pushed it all back toward her and said, “Start over.”

A man in a suit was an uncommon sight around here and the responses to him indicated bafflement. In the af-ternoon, I rowed him down the river, still in the suit. He brought along some pie from the restaurant and asked me not to hit it with the oars; he held both hands over the pie as though to protect it.

I made dinner at my house, a place he plainly considered a dump. He sat at the card table in a kind of prissy upright

way that indicated a fear that the dump was about to rub off on him.

“What’s this stuff?”“Tofu.”“Part of the alternate life style?”“No, protein.” I hated to tee him up like this, but he

couldn’t go home unless I got some weight off him.

Dad owned a booking agency for corporate and private aircraft, and had to act as if he could afford what he booked, but just watching him handle my thrift-shop silverware you could tell that he was and always would be a poor boy. He felt that he had clambered up a few rungs, and his big fear was that I was clambering back down. As a trades-man—I run a construction crew—I had clearly fallen below the social class to which my father thought I should be-long. He believed that the fine educa-tion he’d paid for should have led me to greater abstraction, but while it’s true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for eco-nomic success, I and many of my class-mates wanted more physical evidence of our efforts. I had friends who’d trained as historians, literary scholars, and phi-losophers who were now shoeing horses, wiring houses, and installing toilets. There’d been no suicides so far.

My father believed that anything done for pleasure was escapism, except, of course, when it came to seducing his secretaries and most of my mother’s friends. He and my mother had been a glamorous couple early in their mar-riage; good looks, combined with as-sertive tastemaking, had put them on top in our shabby little city. Then I came along, and Mother thought I’d hung the moon. In Dad’s view, I put an end to the big romance. When I was a toddler, Dad caught Mom in the arms of our doctor on the screened back porch of the doctor’s fish camp. (Though there must have been some ambivalence about the event, because we continued to accept perch filets from Dr. Hudson’s pond.) A few years later, when the high-school P.E. teacher caught the doctor atop his bride and shot him, Mother cried while Dad tilted his head to the side, elevated his eyebrows, and remarked, “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

As an only child, I was the sole re-

cipient of my parents’ malignant par-enting. Their drinking took place en-tirely in the evening and followed a rigid pattern: with each cocktail they became increasingly thin-skinned, bris-tling at imaginary slights. When I was young, they occasionally tried to throw me into the middle of their fights (“I don’t believe this! She actually bit me!”), but I developed a suave detachment (“The Band-Aids are in the cupboard behind the towels”). In a real crisis, my mother brought in our neighbor Zoe Constantine for consolation, unaware that Pop had been making the two-backed beast with Zoe since I was in fifth grade—which happened to be the same year that my mother superglued Dad to the toilet seat, so perhaps she had her suspicions.

I asked about her now, not without anxiety. “She’s in bed with a bottle and the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” my father said. He was proud of this re-mark—I’d heard it before. Although my mother read a lot, she was never “in bed with a bottle.” Most likely, she was out playing golf with her friend Bernar-dine from the typing pool over at Ajax.

My mother comes from a Southern family, though she’s always lived in the North, and she has a tiny private in-come that has conditioned the dialogue since my childhood. Like a bazillion others of Southern origin, she is a re-mote beneficiary of some Atlanta phar-macist’s ingenuity, Coca-Cola—not a big remittance, but enough to fuel Dad’s rage against entitlement. That money had much to do with his deter-mination to keep my mother within sight of smokestacks all her life. As did his belief that everything outside the Rust Belt was fake. To him, the Amer-ican Dream was a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound interior lineman from a bankrupt factory town with five-second forties, a long contract with the Colts, and a bonus for making the Pro Bowl.

In the morning, we went out to my job site, and I felt happy at once. Ev-

erything there seemed to buoy my spir-its: the caked mud on the tires of a car-penter’s truck, the pleasant oily smell of tools, the cool wind coming through the sage on the hill, a screaming Skil saw already at work, the smell of newly cut two-by-fours, a nail gun going off in


the basement, three thermoses on an unfinished ledge.

The doctor who’d hired me wanted a marshy spot behind the house exca-vated for a pond, and I had my Nicara-guan, Ángel, out there with a backhoe, trying to find the spring down in the mud so that we could plumb it and spread some bentonite to keep the water from running out. So far, all we’d found was mud and buffalo skulls, which Ángel was piling to one side. I told Dad that this had once been a trap made by Indians, but he wasn’t all that interested. He was drawn to the Nica-raguan, whom he considered someone real on a machine—despite the heavy Central American accent, Dad had found his Rust Belt guy out here among all the phonies in cowboy hats. And Ángel was equally attracted to Dad’s all-purpose warmth. He slid back his ear protectors and settled in for a chat.

Evidently, I’d had a flat tire as I pulled up to the site, left front, and it was a motherfucker getting the spare out of a three-quarter-ton Ford, the Ford jacked up on the soft ground,

and the whole muddy wheel into the bed to take to town. At the tire shop, Dad looked weird in his slacks and loosened tie, amid all the noise from impact wrenches and the compressors screaming and shutting down, but no-body seemed to notice. He gazed ad-miringly at the big rough kid in a skullcap running a pry bar around the rim and freeing up the tire. The kid reached inside the tire, tugging and sweating, and presented me with an obsidian arrowhead. I nearly cut my-self just taking it from his hand. “Six plies of Jap snow tire and it never broke,” he said. I went up front and paid for the repair.

The next day, a cold, rainy day, Dad stayed at my place while I took my

crew up to Martinsdale, where we’d hired a crane to drop the bed of an old railroad car onto cribbing to make a bridge over a creek. We’d brought in a stack of treated planks for the deck, and I had a welder on hand to make up the brackets, a painfully shy fellow with a neck tattoo, who still had his New York

accent. Five of us stood in the down-pour and looked at the creek rushing around our concrete work. The rancher stopped by to tell us that if it washed out he wasn’t paying for anything. When he was gone, Joey, the welder, said, “See what a big hat can do for you?”

I’d left Dad at loose ends and I learned later that he’d driven all the way to Helena to see the state capitol and get a lap dance and then slept it off at a Hol-iday Inn a half mile from Last Chance Gulch.

I’ve been told that I come from a dysfunctional family but I have never felt that way. When I was a kid, I viewed my parents as an anthropolo-gist might view them and spent my time as I sometimes spend it now, try-ing to imagine where on earth they came from. I was conceived soon after Dad got back from Vietnam. I’m not sure he actually wanted to have chil-dren, but Mom required prompt nest-ing when he returned. I guess Dad was pretty wild back then. He’d been in a lot of firefights and loved every one of them, leading his platoon in a daredevil manner. He kept wallet pictures of dead VC draped over the hood of his jeep, like deer-camp photos. His days on leave had been a Saigon fornication blitz, and it fell to Mom to stop that momentum overnight. I was her solu-tion, and from the beginning Dad viewed me skeptically.

One night, I crept down the stairs in my Dr. Denton footies to the sound of unusually exuberant and artificial ela-tion and, spying from the door of the kitchen, saw my father on his knees, licking pie filling from one of the beat-ers of our Sunbeam Mixmaster, tearful and laughing, his long wide tongue lap-ping at the dripping goo. The extraordi-narily stern look on my mother’s face above her starched apron, as he strained upward to the beater, disturbs me to this day.

I have a million of these, but distur-bance, as I say, is not trauma, and be-sides I moved away a long time ago. I came to Montana on a hiking trip with my girlfriend after college and never went back. I’ve left here only once, to join a roofing crew in Walnut Creek, California, and came home scared after two months. I saw shit at parties there that it’ll take me years to forget.

“Can we talk through a decision that I’ve already made?”

t t

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Everyone from the foreman on down had a crystal habit. I had to pretend I was using just to get the job.

Dad returned from Helena and sat in my kitchen with his laptop to

catch up on business while I met with Dee and Helen Folsom out on Skunk Creek, leaving the whir of the interstate and veering into real outback within a quarter mile. I was building the Fol-soms’ first house, on a piece of ground that Dee’s rancher uncle had given him. Not a nice piece of ground: it’d be a midwinter snow hole and a midsummer rock pile. The Folsoms were old enough to retire, but, as I mentioned, this was their first home. They were poor peo-ple. Dee had spent forty years on a fenc-ing crew and constantly massaged his knotty, damaged hands. Helen cooked at the high school, where generations of students had ridiculed her food. I could see that this would be a kind of delayed honeymoon house, and I wanted to get it right.

The house was in frame, and Helen stood in what would be the picture window, enchanted by not much of a view—scrub pine, a shale ledge, the top of a flagless flagpole just below the hill along the road. Her expression would not have been out of place at the Sistine Chapel or on the rim of the Grand Canyon. One hand was plunged into the pocket of her army coat while the other twirled a pair of white plastic reading glasses. Dee just paced in his coveralls, happy and worried, pinching the stub of his cigarette.

I had cut this one to the bone—crew salaries and little else. The crew—car-penter, plumber, electri-cian—sensed the tone of things and worked with timely efficiency. Dee had prepared the site himself with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. We had a summer place for a plastic surgeon under way at Spring Hill, and if I’d looked a little closer I might have seen it bleeding materials that managed to end up at the Folsoms’.

While I was at work, Dad was wan-dering the neighborhood, talking to my neighbors. After a few days, he knew more of them than I did, and I would

forever more have to be told what a great guy he was. But by the time I got home he was in his underwear with the portable phone in his lap, nursing a highball and looking disconsolate. “Your mother called me from the club,” he said. “I understand there was some dustup with the manager over the sneeze shield at the salad bar. Mom said she couldn’t see the condiments, and it went from there.”

“From there to where?” I inquired peevishly.

“Our privileges have been suspended.”“Golf ?”“Mm, that, too. Hey, I’ll sort it out.”I nuked a couple of Rock Cornish

hens, and we sat down in the living room to play checkers. Halfway through the game, my father went into the guest room and called my mother. This time she told him that she’d bought a car at what she thought was the dealer’s cost. Dad shouted, “Asshole, who got the re-bate? I’m asking you, God damn it, who got the rebate?” I heard him raging about the sneeze shield then, and after he qui-eted down I heard him say plaintively—I think I heard this—that he no longer wished to live. I always looked forward to this particular locution, because it meant that they’d get back together soon.

I’m not lacking in affection for my parents, but they are locked into some-thing that is so exclusive as to be hermet-ically sealed to everyone else, includ-ing me. Nevertheless, I’d had a bellyful

by then. So when my father came back to finish the checkers game, I asked him if he’d enjoyed the lap dance.

“ ‘Enjoy’ isn’t quite the word. I’m aware that the world has changed in my lifetime and I’m interested in those changes. I went to this occasion as . . . as . . . al-most as an investigator.”

“You might want to withhold the results of your research from Mom.”

“How dare you raise your voice to me!”“Jump you and jump you again.

Checkers isn’t fun if you don’t pay attention.”

“I was distracted by the club thing. I’m red, right?”

At some point, I knew he would confide that he and my mother were

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considering a divorce. They’ve been claiming to be contemplating divorce for half of my lifetime, and I have found myself stuck in the odd trope of oppos-ing the idea just to please them. I don’t know why they toss me into this or if only children always have this kind of veto power. I do care about them, but what they don’t know, and I would never have the heart to tell them, is that the idea of their no longer being a mar-ried couple bothers me not at all. My only fear is that, separate, no one else would have them, that I’d get stuck with them one at a time or have to watch them wither away in solitude. These scenarios give me the fantods. Am I selfish? Yes and no. I’m a bache-lor and hope someday to be an old bachelor.

My father picked at a bit of imagi-nary dust on his left shirt cuff, and I suspected that this was the opener to the divorce gambit. Cruelly, I got up and left the game half finished.

“Can you pardon me? I was slammed from daylight on. I’m all in.”

“Well, sure, O.K., good night. I love you, son.”

“Love you, too, Dad.” And I did.

When my father came home from the war, he was jubilant about all

the violence he’d seen. Happy to have survived, I suppose. Or perhaps he saw it as a game, a contest in which his pla-toon had triumphed. He worked furi-ously to build a business, but there was something peculiar about his hard work. He seemed to have no specific goal.

When I was fourteen, my mother said, “Do you know why your father works so hard?”

I thought I was about to get a virtue speech. I said, “No.”

She said, “He works so hard because he’s crazy.” She never elaborated on this, but left it in play, and it has re-mained with me for more than a quar-ter of a century.

The only time my father ever hit me was when I was fifteen and he asked if I was aware of all the things he and my mother had done for me. I said, “Do you have a chart I could point to?” and he popped me square on the nose, which bled copiously while he ran for a box of Kleenex. His worst condemna-tion of me was when he’d mutter, “If you’d been in my platoon . . .”—a sen-tence he always left unfinished.

My mother was a scientist; she worked in an infectious-disease lab until my father’s financial success made her income unnecessary. Even then, she went on buying things on time, making down payments, anxiety from their poorer days leading her to believe that she wouldn’t live long enough to pay off her debts, even with her Coca-Cola money. Once they were comfort-able with affluence, they became party people, went to the tropics, brought back mounted fish, and listened to Spanish tapes in the car. But they were never truly comfortable away from the smoke and rust of their home town.

The last year I lived with them, my father came to the bizarre conclusion that he lacked self-esteem and he bought a self-help program that he was meant to listen to through headphones as he slept. From my bedroom, I could hear odd murmurings from these de-vices attached to his sleeping head: “You are the greatest, you are the great-est. Look around you—it’s a beautiful day.” You can’t make this shit up.

We were nearly done with the plas-tic surgeon’s vacation home. I

had a big crew there, and everyone was nervous about whether we’d have some-place to go next. We had remodels com-ing up, and a good shot at condomini-umizing the old Fairweather Hotel in town, but nothing for sure. I met with Dr. Hadley to lay out the basement media room. He was a small man in a blazer and bow tie, bald on top but with long hair to his collar. I asked him, “Are you sure you want this? You have beau-tiful views.” Indeed, he had a whole cor-dillera stretched across his living-room window. He was gazing around the space we were inspecting, at the bottom of some temporary wooden stairs. Push brooms stood in a pile of drywall scraps in the corner. There was a smell of plas-

“Do you mean three hundred million dollars on top of what we already have here, or three hundred million dollars

including what we already have here?”


ter. He lifted his eyes to engage mine, and said, “Sometimes it rains.” One of the carpenters, a skinny cowboy type with a perpetual cigarette at the center of his mouth, overheard this and crin-kled his forehead.

No checkers tonight. Dad was lay-ing out his platoon diagram, a kind of spreadsheet, with all his guys, as he called them, listed. “When I can’t fill this out, I’ll know I have dementia,” he said. It was remarkable, a big thing on butcher paper, maybe twenty-five names, with their specialties and rankings desig-nated—riflemen, machine gunners, ra-diomen, grenadiers, fire-team leaders, and so on. There was, characteristically, a star beside my father’s name, the C.O. Some names were crossed out with Viet-nam dates; some were annotated as nat-ural-cause eliminations. It was all so or-derly—even the deaths seemed orderly, once you saw them on this spreadsheet. I think this was how Dad dealt with mortality: when a former sergeant died of cirrhosis in his sixties, Dad crossed out his square on the spreadsheet with the same grim aplomb he’d used for the twenty-somethings in firefights; it was all war to him, from, as he said, “the erec-tion to the Resurrection.”

Although he complained all the time, Dad lost weight on my reg-

imen. When he got below the magic number, Mom didn’t believe my scale or my word, and we had to have him weighed at the fire station, with a fireman reading the number to her over the phone, while Dad rounded up a couple of guys to show him the hook-and-ladder. He’d made it by a little over a pound.

When I came home from the plastic surgeon’s house that night, Dad was packing up. He had a glass of whiskey on the nightstand, and his little tape player was belting out a nostalgic play-list: Mott the Hoople, Dusty Springfield, Captain Beefheart, Quicksilver Mes-senger Service—his courting songs. My God, he was heading home to Mom again!

“Got it worked out?” I said, flipping through one of the girlie magazines he’d picked up in Helena, a special on “barely legals.”

“We’ll see.”“Anything new?”

“Not at all. She’s the only one who understands me.”

“No one understands you.”“Really? I think it’s you that nobody

understands. Anyway, there are some preliminaries in this case that I can live with.”

“Like what?”“I can’t go to the house. I have to stay

at a hotel.”“And you’re O.K. with that?”“Why wouldn’t I be? A lot of surpris-

ing stuff happens at a hotel. For all in-tents and purposes, I’ll be home.”

And now I have to figure out how to work around Dee and Helen Fol-

som, who are on the job site continu-ously and kind of in the way. One night, they camped out on the subflooring of what will be their bedroom, when we barely had the sheathing on the roof. The crew had to shoo them away in the morning. I think the Folsoms were em-barrassed, dragging the blow-up mat-tress out to their old sedan.

I have no real complaints about my up-

bringing. My parents were self-absorbed and never knew where I was, which meant that I was free, and I made good use of that freedom. I’ve been asked if I was damaged by my family life, and the answer is a qualified no; I know I’ll never marry, and, halfway through my life, I’m unable to imagine letting anyone new stay in my house for more than a night—and prefer-ably not a whole night. Rolling over in the morning and finding . . . let’s not go there. I build houses for other people, and it works for me.

I like to be tired. In some ways, that’s the point of what I do. I don’t want to be thinking when I go to bed, or, if there is some residue from the day, I want it to drain out and precipitate me into nothingness. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of nonexistence. I view pets with extraordinary suspicion: we need to stay out of their lives. I saw a woman fish a little dog out of her purse once, and it bothered me for a year. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out.

“Oh, yeah, I took your special chair to ‘Antiques Roadshow.’”

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THE CRITICS

Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world, lucky for us,

but they can be worldly judges of poetic legislators. Lincoln’s soul survives in Whitman’s words, and the response of American poets to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, fifty years ago, suggests that there really was, beyond the hype and the teeth, an interesting man in there. An entire volume of mostly elegiac poems, “Of Poetry and Power,” with a Rauschenberg silk-screen portrait of the President for its cover, came out within months of his murder. (It was even re-corded, complete, on Folkways Records.)

John Berryman wrote a “Formal Elegy” for the President (“Yes. it looks like wilderness”); Auden an “Elegy for J.F.K.,” originally accompanied by twelve-tone music by Stravinsky. Robert Low-ell—who in the Second World War had gone to prison as a conscientious objec-tor, and in the late sixties became a Pen-tagon-bashing radical hero—wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that the murder left him “weeping through the first after-noon,” and then “three days of television uninterrupted by advertising till the grand, almost unbearable funeral.” The country, he said, “went through a mo-ment of terror and passionate chaos.” Lowell’s friend and fellow-poet Randall Jarrell called it the “saddest” public event that he could remember. Jarrell tried to write an elegy but could get no further than “The shining brown head.”

This passionate chaos was set loose, then, in every back yard. It is easy to be cynical about it in retrospect—being

cynical about it in retrospect is by now a branch of American historical studies—and say that the poets’ overwrought grief was the product of a sleight of hand worked by Jackie, no other group so eas-ily bought as American writers. (Even the Salingers were invited to the White House—and Mrs. Salinger wanted to go!) But there was more than that. The death of J.F.K. marked the last time the highbrow reaches of the American imagination were complicit in the dig-nity of the Presidency. In Norman Mail-er’s “Presidential Papers,” also published soon after Kennedy’s death, the point is that there was a “fissure in the national psyche,” a divide between the passionate inner life of America and its conformist, repressed official life: “The life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far.” For Mailer, Kennedy’s Presidency supplied the hope of an epiphany wherein the romantic-hero President would somehow lead his people on an “existential” quest to heal this breach. It sounded just as ridiculous then, but there was something gorgeous in the absurdity.

Of course, people made fun of Kennedy—the Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader was the single biggest loser after the assassination. (“Poor Vaughn Meader,” Lenny Bruce is said to have muttered in his standup act on the night of the killing.) And the John Birch right wingers hated him as implacably as their children do Obama. But the king always has his fool, and the haters were largely marginalized. Lowell wondered

A CRITIC AT LARGE

CLOSER THAN THATThe assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later.

BY ADAM GOPNIK

what character in Shakespeare Bobby, the dour younger brother, most resem-bled. Finding Shakespearean dimen-sions in politicians was an accepted sport. This kind of contemplation became in-creasingly incredible in the years that fol-lowed. (L.B.J. could be Macbeth, but only as the burlesque MacBird.) Reagan and Clinton were both larger-than-life figures drawn from simpler American entertainments—Mr. Deeds and the Music Man, the wise innocent in power or the lovable fast-talking con man who turns out to be essential to everyone’s

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still seen as a king of divine right out of the seventeenth century—the subject of endless reverie about his capacity to renew the world. And so the obsession with his body, that shining head, re-calling the seventeenth-century French court watching the King sleep and rise and defecate, leads in the end to the grisly conspiracy-theory compulsion to review every square inch of his autopsied body. (One conspiracy theorist, David Lifton, said once that he never married because every would-be bride realized

that he was more interested in the Pres-ident’s dead body than in her living one.)

The nation really did get turned inside out when Kennedy was killed, as nations do at the death of kings. But what al-tered? In many ways, it was a time more past than present. Though it’s said that the event marked the decisive move from page to screen, newspaper to television, all the crucial information was chan-nelled through the wire-service reporters, who, riding six cars back from the Presi-dent’s, were the first to get and send the news of the shots, and were still thought

of as the authoritative source. Walter Cronkite’s two most famous moments—breaking into “As the World Turns” to announce, “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired”; and his later, holding-back-tears “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, ap-parently official: President Kennedy died at 1 P.M. Central Standard Time”—were in both cases simply read from the wire-service copy. You can see the assistants ripping the copy from the teleprinter and rushing it to the anchorman.

Yet an imbalance between the flood of information and the uncertainty of our

with the Kennedys, in the Presidential limousine, in Dallas, November 22, 1963.


understanding—the sense that we know so much and grasp so little, and that reality becomes an image passing—does seem to have begun then: the postmod-ern suspicion that the more we see, the less we know. A compulsive “hyperper-spicacity,” in the term of one assassination researcher—the tendency to look harder for pattern than the thing looked at will ever provide—became the motif of the time. To dive into the assassination liter-ature fifty years on—to read the hundreds of books, with their hundreds of theories, fingering everyone from Melvin Belli to the Mossad; to visit Dealey Plaza on trips to Dallas; and to venture in the middle of the night onto the assassination forums and chat rooms—is to find two truths overlaid. The first truth is that the evi-dence that the American security services gathered, within the first hours and weeks and months, to persuade the world of the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald remains formidable: ballistics evidence, eyewitness evidence, ear-witness evidence, finger-print evidence, firearms evidence, cir-cumstantial evidence, fibre evidence. The second truth of the assassination, just as inarguable, is that the security services collecting that evidence were themselves up to their armpits in sinister behavior,

even conspiring with some of the worst people in the world to kill the Presidents of other countries. The accepted division of American life into two orders—an official one of rectitude, a seedy lower order of crime—collapses under scrutiny, like the alibi in a classic film noir.

“Know why you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes?” the guilty Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) tells his virtuous insurance colleague Barton Keyes (Edward G. Rob-inson) at the end of the great “Double In-demnity,” in a taunting confession. “I’ll tell ya. Because the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk from ya.” Keyes’s beautiful, enigmatic re-joinder is: “Closer than that, Walter.” He means that the cop and the killer share more than they knew before the crime, that temptations that lead to murder are available to us all; the lure of transgression makes us closer than we think.

These two truths lead you not so much to different claims as to differ-

ent worlds. Every decade or so, the Oswald-incriminating facts are compre-hensively reviewed—most recently by Vincent Bugliosi, in a thousand-plus-page volume, “Reclaiming History” (Norton)—and, every decade, people

who don’t care tend to accept those facts, while the people who care most remain furious and unpersuaded. The world of the conspiracy buffs has a bibliography and a set of fixed points that run parallel to but separate from reality as it is usually conceived. The buffs, for instance, rely heavily on the memoir of Madeleine Brown, who claims to have been one of L.B.J.’s mistresses, and to have been told by him, the night before the murder, “Those goddam Kennedys will never embarrass me again!” The buffs debate whether she is wholly, largely, or only sporadically reliable. In the latest volume of Robert Caro’s L.B.J. biography, by contrast, Brown is not thought worth mentioning, even to disprove. (In any case, the key conspiracy scene she paints, a kind of pre-assassination party at the millionaire Clint Murchison’s Dallas house, attended by Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon, has been conclusively debunked. No record of it exists in any Dallas newspaper, and John-son can be safely placed in Houston that night.) In the same way, the buffs take for granted the role of Joseph Kennedy, first as a bootlegger, then as a campaign fund-raiser for his son entangled with the Mafia, and argue about whether the Mafia alone was the killer or the Mafia in league with the C.I.A. Joe Kennedy’s guilty past is the entire pivot of the assas-sination in a new conspiracy book, omi-nously titled “The Poison Patriarch,” by Mark Shaw (Skyhorse); and the same idea is dramatized in the screenwriter William Mastrosimone’s Broadway-bound play “Ride the Tiger.” Yet David Nasaw’s recent, far-from-admiring biog-raphy of old Joe dismisses as complete legend the notion that he ever made a penny as a bootlegger or worked closely with the Mob. (He made his money in Hollywood and on Wall Street, mobs of their own.)

Bugliosi handles the conspiracy theo-rists with a relentless note of sarcastic condescension. But there are ways in which the pattern-seeking is a meaning-ful index of the event, and gives us more insight into its hold fifty years on than the evidence does. A web without a spi-der still catches the light. There are dis-tinct period styles in paranoia. The first generation of assassination obsessives—Josiah Thompson, still writing; Harold Weisberg, long dead—were essentially

“I’m sorry, sir, but 311 cannot bring you hangover nachos.”

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hopeful proceduralists, men and women with thick files and endless clippings, convinced that due scrutiny of the record would reveal sufficient inconsistencies, opacities, and falsehoods to compel the reopening of the entire case. Their model was journalists of the I. F. Stone kind, the isolated man of integrity who could find the truth by scrutinizing the record.

The second kind of assassination ob-sessive emerged only later, in the mid-seventies. Where the proceduralists be-lieve that the truth is in there, buried in some forgotten file folder, the fantasists believe, “X Files” style, that the truth is out there—available to those bold enough to imagine on the right scale of American extravagance. An exemplar here was David Lifton’s book “Best Evi-dence,” published in 1981, but his theo-ries percolated at lectures and conferences throughout the seventies. He put forward an obviously mad idea with admirable logic: that the President’s body was se-creted away between the killing and the autopsy, and his wounds altered.

The paradox is that, just as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo dramatizes paranoia with a texture of specificity, the paranoid types are, in their own way, often much more empirically minded—willing to follow the evidence where it leads, even if that is right through the looking-glass—than their more cautious confrères. It is, in other words, possible to construct an intricate scenario that is both cautiously inferential, richly de-tailed, on its own terms complete, and yet utterly delusional. The J.F.K. con-spiracy theorists are the first and hardiest of those movements—the truthers and birthers and moon walkers being their stepchildren—in which the old Ameri-can paranoid style, once largely marginal and murmuring, married pseudoscience and became articulate, academic, system-atized, and loud.

No matter how improbable it may seem that all the hard evidence could have been planted, faked, or coerced—and that hundreds of the distinct acts of con-cealment and coercion necessary would have been left unconfessed for more than half a century—it does not affect the production of assassination literature, which depends not on confronting the evidence but on discovering new patterns of connection and coincidence. The buffs’ books—Lamar Waldron and Thom

BRIEFLY NOTEDLONGBOURN, by Jo Baker (Knopf). This delightful re-imagining of “Pride and Prejudice” from the servants’ perspective centers on Sarah, the orphaned housemaid. Her duties include empty-ing chamberpots, feeding pigs, and scrubbing stains out of the Bennett sisters’ laundry. Abovestairs life appears to her a “a coun-try dance, where everything is lovely, and graceful, and ordered, and every single turn is preordained.” The achievement of Bak-er’s reworking is that Sarah is no mere foil for Elizabeth Bennet; her notions of individual agency and the pursuit of happiness push more forcefully against the class and social strictures of her time than any character in Austen’s novel. The result is a hero-ine whom it’s impossible not to root for, although the reader knows that her story contains a dash of Cinderella-style fantasy.

THE NIGHT GUEST, by Fiona McFarlane (Faber & Faber). In this poised début, Ruth, an aging widow, has begun to slow down. Help arrives one morning in the form of Frida, who claims to be a government care worker. Ruth is grateful, but is reluctant to surrender her independence, and an engrossing psychologi-cal tug-of-war ensues. McFarlane is a gifted writer, though rarely so subtle that it isn’t apparent what she’s being subtle about. The tiger that Ruth imagines visiting her house at night is too neat an objectification of her fears about mortality, and Frida, her smile like that “of a Madonna who always looks over the head of her child, as if deciding what to cook for Joseph’s dinner,” wears a mask of inscrutability that, in a novel, rarely turns out to conceal anything benign.

SMARTER THAN YOU THINK, by Clive Thompson (Penguin Press). “We need a new way to talk clearly about the rewards and plea-sures of our digital experiences,” Thompson writes, in this lucid and distinctly hopeful study of the ways in which modern tools are changing how we read, write, think, and act. Thompson is not a tech acolyte, and is skeptical of “the giddy boosterism of Silicon Valley,” but he makes a sharp and sustained argument against “apocalyptic warnings” that social media and constant connectedness are degrading private consciousness or public discourse. He notes that popular innovations—including text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and Web comments sec-tions—have created, for the first time, a “global culture of avid writers.”

OLD MAN RIVER, by Paul Schneider (Henry Holt). This vivid his-tory follows life on the Mississippi River from the first appear-ance of humans, more than ten thousand years ago, to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In Iowa, Schneider walks among giant bear-shaped mounds sculpted at the turn of the last mil-lennium; in Vicksburg, he finds the caves where civilians bur-rowed during the Civil War. Everywhere, he encounters the dams and levees that have been erected to divert the river’s flow, efforts that have contributed to erosion and flooding in the Delta. Today, he writes, the Father of Waters has become “the world’s largest plumbing project,” home to industrial projects and jumping fish from China, but it flows much as it always has: “as patient as gravity, as relentless as water.”


Hartmann’s “Legacy of Secrecy,” in de-velopment as a major Hollywood film, is a perfect instance—lay out ever more in-tricate and multiple patterns of apparent intention and reaction among Mafia dons and C.I.A. agents, all pointing toward Dealey Plaza. “Had ties with . . .” is the favored phrase, used to connect with sinister overtones any two personalities within the web. Waldron and Hartmann dismiss even Oswald’s murder of the Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, forty-five minutes after J.F.K.’s assassina-tion, despite the many witnesses who saw him shoot Tippit, or identified him as the man with the gun running from the scene.

Arguments like this tend to lead to-ward the same cul-de-sac, where the skeptic insists on being shown the spider and the buffs insist that it is enough to point to the web. One argument can stand for a hundred like it: a key early piece of evidence for conspiracy is that many of the doctors in the emergency ward at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where the President was brought from the fatal motorcade, said that they saw a large wound to the back of J.F.K.’s head, instead of the right front side, where the later autopsy and X-rays locate it. This is not really hard to explain. The wound was enormous, and the doctors never ex-amined it, or turned J.F.K. over to verify that there was a rear head wound. The Zapruder film of the assassination shows, unmistakably, that the horrible wound was indeed to the right front side of his skull, while the back remained intact (aside from the small, almost invisible entrance wound).

So for the claim of a “rear head wound” to be accurate, it would be necessary for the Zapruder film to have somehow been altered and turned into a cunning ani-mated cartoon. That is exactly what the “second generation” of theorists insist—that the Zapruder film itself is a fabrica-tion, produced, in the words of one buff, “in a sophisticated C.I.A. photo lab at the Kodak main industrial plant in Roches-ter, New York.” Nor is this idea simply asserted. It is patiently argued, step by step, with the name of the optical printer detailed, even though Kodak’s own expert on 8-mm. film, Roland Zavada, has dis-missed the idea of introducing complex optical-printer effects onto 8-mm. film in 1963, and declared that “there is no

detectable evidence of manipulation or image alteration on the Zapruder in-camera original and all supporting evi-dence precludes any forgery thereto.” A theory that has the Zapruder film altered is absurd—but a theory that doesn’t have the Zapruder film altered has to accept that Kennedy had no rear-exit head wound, and therefore must have been shot from above and behind.

This constant cycle of sense and spec-ulation is not about to end. Josiah Thomp-son, one of the most rational of the skep-tics, wrote once that “you pull any single thread, any single fact, and you’re soon besieged with a tangle of subsidiary questions.” And this is true: any fact as-serted can be met with a counter-fact—some of them plausible, many disputed, most creating contradictions that are un-resolvable. But this is not a fact about conspiracies. It is a fact about facts. All facts in all inquiries come at us with their own shakiness, their own shimmer of un-certainty. The threads of evidence usually seem separate and sure only because life mostly comes at us in finished fabrics, and nothing requires us to pull the thread. When we do, whenever we do, there’s a tangle waiting.

Bugliosi makes this point in a practi-cal, prosecutor’s spirit, saying that, once you are sure of the conclusion, you have to live with the evidentiary inconsisten-cies: you may not know the answer to a question, but that does not mean that the question is unanswerable. To take one of many that arise in the assassination case: much used to be made of the mysterious “three tramps” who were arrested shortly after the shots. They turned out to be, after long years of speculation . . . three tramps, with knowable names and mun-dane histories. It is a safe, though not a certain, bet that the remaining mysteries will resolve just as mundanely. In the meantime, though, every fact in the case, no matter how solid-seeming, can be countered by some other fact, however speculative. Facts provoke new patterns even as they disprove old ones.

Yet the foundational sense that there were bizarre forces at work in the pe-

riod, paranoid and violent and tightly in-terlocked in the strangest imaginable ways, and by their nature resistant to the common-sense impulses of ordinary ex-planation—this is, as far as one can tell,

true. As J.F.K. himself is claimed to have said, apropos of the then popular coup-d’état thriller “Seven Days in May,” such a coup in the United States was far from being unthinkable: “It’s possible. It could happen in this country. But the condi-tions would have to be right. If, for exam-ple, the country had a young president and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. . . . Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic ob-ligation to stand ready to preserve the in-tegrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they over-threw the elected establishment.” (He added that he intended it not to happen “on his watch.”)

By J.F.K.’s own accounting, the Bay of Pigs was the first failure. In the eyes of the national-security hawks, the Cuban missile crisis, though presented to the public as a showdown that Kennedy won, was the second, an exercise in ab-ject appeasement. Kennedy had refused the unanimous advice of his generals and admirals to bomb Cuba, and had settled the crisis by giving the Russians what they wanted, the removal of missiles from Turkey. (This was kept quiet, but the people who knew knew.) The notion that the Cold War national-security state, which Eisenhower warned against, might have decided to kill the President is not as difficult to credit as one wishes. There were C.I.A. operatives prepared to kill foreign leaders, some of them previ-ously friendly, for acts they didn’t like, and to recruit gangsters to do it, and gen-erals who were eager to invade Cuba even at the risk of nuclear war, and who resented Kennedy for restraining them. (A veteran journalist, Jefferson Morley, has been pursuing the trail of a now dead C.I.A. agent named George Joannides through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, believing that, at a minimum, the C.I.A. was keeping a much sharper eye on Oswald than it ever wanted known. Relevant documents are sup-posed to be released in 2017.)

Oddly, there’s confirmation of this in the work of the Kennedy brothers’ house historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. An establishment figure devoted to maintaining the image of the Kennedys,

“O.K., trick or treat, please. Don’t mess with me, lady—I’m on a sugar high.”

and no friend to the conspiracy theorists, Schlesinger made plain that the Kenne-dys really did believe themselves to be subject to a hostile alliance of the military and the C.I.A., largely outside their di-rect control. “Intelligence operatives, in the CIA as well as the FBI, had begun to see themselves as the appointed guard-ians of the Republic, infinitely more de-voted than transient elected officials, morally authorized to do on their own whatever the nation’s security de-manded,” Schlesinger concludes. Ted Sorensen, another Kennedy intimate, wrote in his memoir that when Jimmy Carter nominated him, in 1977, to be the director of central intelligence, agency officials worked furiously (and success-fully) to get the nomination withdrawn, quite possibly because there was evidence about J.F.K.’s death that they didn’t want him to see. Vincent Bugliosi’s confidence that these things don’t happen here isn’t shared by those closest to the case.

An assassination should be signifi cant for more than its atmospherics.

Kennedy’s should also matter for peo-ple who weren’t there, because some-thing happened in America that would not have happened had Kennedy lived. The conventional claim is that optimis-

tic liberalism died in Dallas. Ira Stoll, in his new book, “J.F.K.: Conservative” (Houghton Mifflin), makes this claim in reverse: he believes that the path of true conservatism would have gone more smoothly if Kennedy had not been killed. Stoll sincerely believes that Ken-nedy’s spiritual heir was Reagan, while shifty Nixon was the real liberal, whose heir is—who else?—shifty Obama.

Of course, every American President is in some sense a conservative—there are no Léon Blums or Salvador Allendes in our record. But Kennedy was a classic Cold War liberal: someone who believed in confronting the Communists (nonvi-olently, if at all possible) and creating a network of social welfare to relieve social anxiety. The real conservatives of the time, the John Birch Society and the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party, believed in confronting Commu-nism violently, and in abjuring any fed-eral programs of civil rights and social welfare, since these were certainly left-wing and possibly Communist. (Ronald Reagan, after all, came to notice for cru-sading against Medicare, the way his successors crusade against Obamacare.) Unable to explain why the actual right-wingers hated J.F.K. as much as they did, Stoll insists that a conspiracy of leftish

doves who surrounded J.F.K.—So-rensen and Schlesinger, in particular—warped his words and purposes retro-spectively: a conspiracy theory every bit as loony as any from the buffs.

At the other end of the spectrum, Thurston Clarke, in his new book, “J.F.K.’s Last Hundred Days” (Pen-guin), argues passionately that J.F.K. was moving ever more decisively left, flapping his wings like a dove, just be-fore he was killed. The evidence is that Kennedy began to argue, more loudly than he had before, that American pol-iticians should do everything possible to avoid provoking a nuclear holocaust that would destroy civilization. One would think this a minimal ground of sanity, rather than a radical departure from orthodoxy—but, as Clarke re-minds us, driving to the very edge of universal destruction was widely seen as an opportunity to outsmart the Sovi-ets. Conversations about how many million casualties the United States could endure were not just material for “Dr. Strangelove.” More specifically, the line goes, Kennedy was planning to get out of Vietnam by the end of 1965, or at least had made up his mind not to get drawn any farther in. Accounts of private conversations and notes from National Security Council meetings are played as cards in this game. Jeff Greenfield, in his new counterfactual book “If Kennedy Lived” (Putnam), asserts, along with many other lark-some predictions (the Beatles would have gone to the White House; Ronald Reagan would have got the Republi-can nomination in 1968), that J.F.K. would never have escalated the war in Vietnam.

It is hard to take these claims as much more than wishful thinking pro-jected retrospectively onto a pragmatic politician, whose commitment to Cold War verities, while less nihilistic than that of some others, was still complete. It’s true that Kennedy was not inclined, as his two immediate successors were, to see foreign affairs as a series of chal-lenges to his manhood; a true war hero, he truly hated war. But though the compulsions of personality are strong, the logic of American politics is stronger. Kennedy might well have felt little of the insecurity that troubled Johnson’s soul as he escalated the war. But exactly

the same political circumstances would have con fronted him. Had the North Vietnamese Army been allowed to march into Saigon in 1965 instead of in 1975, the Goldwater Republicans would not have said, “Thank God for Kenne-dy’s wisdom in not wasting tens of thou-sands of American lives and millions of Vietnamese ones in an effort to stop what was sure to happen in any case!” They would have said, “Another coun-try, another region, fecklessly lost to Communism, and on your watch!” The truth, that the fate of Vietnam, of crucial importance to the Vietnamese, was of little consequence to America, or to its struggle with the Soviet Union, was sim-ply a taboo statement on every side.

P aranoid as the period was, it was in ways more open. Oswald’s captors

decided that he would have to be shown to the press, and arranged a midnight press conference for him—not some-thing that would happen today—while a lawyer for the Warren Commission met at length with a Communist push-ing a conspiracy theory. (One doubts that a 9/11 commissioner ever felt obliged to meet with a truther.) The national-security state might have been in place, but the national-surveillance state wasn’t, quite.

Oswald was a kind of wooden pawn of the Cold War era who seemed always on the verge of being sacrificed. As a teen-ager, he educated himself as a Marxist, and he remained a fantasist who feasted on James Bond novels—just like the President!—and subscribed to both mainline Communist and Trotskyite pa-pers, without ever really grasping the difference between them. When he de-cided to flee, as a teen-age marine, to what he imagined to be the socialist par-adise of Russia, the K.G.B. seemed so bewildered that it sent him off to work in a factory in Minsk, and watched him as unhappily as the American security ser-vices did later.

Once again, the problem is not an absence of intelligence; the problem is having too much intelligence to add up intelligently. Another thousand Oswalds, long since lost to time, were under scrutiny, too. To take a specific instance: the man whom Oswald sat next to on the bus to Mexico City turned out to be, certainly unknown to him, a

con man and onetime fanatical Hitler supporter named Albert Osborne. Os-borne earned an appendix in the War-ren report; he appears briefly and then vanishes into history again. Had he shot someone, we would ask what he was doing there, and why no one knew more about him than about the odd, long-for-gotten defector Oswald. Oswald’s life reminds us that modernity in America, with its rootless wanderings and instant connections, permanent dislocations and endless reinventions, is a kind of co-incidence machine, generating two or three degrees of separation between the unlikeliest of fellows.

What is true of Oswald is true as well of his own assassin, that lesser mys-tery figure Jack Ruby. Ruby is cast in the buff literature as a sinister Mafia hit man, there to silence Oswald before he could speak. (The killing of Hyman Roth, in “The Godfather Part II,” seems mod-elled on Ruby’s act.) Jack Ruby did seek out Mafia-connected characters in the months before the assassination—but he seems to have been trying to get help to put pressure on the American Guild of Variety Artists to enforce its rules about using unpaid strippers. (He considered his rivals’ amateur striptease shows to be unfair competition to the polished pro acts at his own joint.)

Again and again, the investigation discloses bizarre figures and coinci-dences within a web of incident that seem significant in themselves. The case of Judith Campbell Exner is famous. She really was J.F.K.’s mistress, and a Sinatra girlfriend, and the mistress of the Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana, all within a few years. Even if she wasn’t actually a go-between from one to the other, that would not alter the reality that she had slept with all three, and so lived in worlds that, in 1963, no one would have quite believed could pene-trate each other so easily. Still more startling is the case of the painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was also unques-tionably one of Kennedy’s mistresses. She was the ex-wife of a high-ranking C.I.A. officer (who himself had once had pacifist leanings), an intimate of Timothy Leary, at Harvard, and an LSD user. She was murdered, in 1964, on the towpath in D.C., in murky cir-cumstances. Even if none of this points toward a larger occult truth—even if her

death was just a mugging gone wrong—the existence of such a figure says some-thing about the weave of American ex-perience. Worlds that seemed far apart at the time are now shown to have been close together, unified by men and women of multiple identities, subject to electric coincidences—no one more multiple than J.F.K. himself, the pru-dent political pragmatist who was also the reckless erotic adventurer, in bed with molls and Marilyns, and maybe even East German spies.

The passion of J.F.K. may lie in the overlay of all those strands and circles. The pattern—weaving and unweaving in front of our eyes, placing unlikely people in near proximity and then re-moving them again—is its own point. Mailer was right when he claimed that the official life of the country and the real life had come apart, but who could have seen that it would take a single vi-olent act, rather than “existential” ac-complishment, to reveal how close they really were? Oswald acted alone, but the hidden country acted through Os-wald. This is the perpetual film-noir moral lesson: that the American hierar-chy is far more unstable than it seems, and that the small-time crook in his garret and the big-time social leader in his mansion are intimately linked. When Kennedy died, and the mystery of his murder began, we took for granted that the patrician in tails with the perfect family and the sordid Os-wald belonged to different worlds, just as Ruby’s Carousel Club and the White House seemed light-years apart. When Kennedy was shot, the dignified hierar-chy seemed plausible. Afterward, it no longer did. What turned inside out, after his death, was that reality: the inner surface and the outer show, like a magician’s bag, were revealed to be interchangeable. That’s why the death of J.F.K., even as it fades into history, remains so close, close as can be, and closer than that.

1

. From the Gloucester (Mass.) Daily Times.

An Essex Avenue woman called police at 3 p.m. Sunday after the Fire Department had extinguished a fre in her kitchen.

According to police, she wanted to know if the shepherd’s pie she was making would still be safe to eat in the aftermath of the Fire Department’s fre suppression tactics.


“Untitled” (1990-91). Word painting has a history; Wool made it new.

THE ART WORLD

WRITING ON THE WALLA Christopher Wool retrospective.

BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

Like it or not, Christopher Wool, now fifty-eight, is probably the most im-

portant American painter of his genera-tion. You might fondly wish, as I do, for a champion whose art is richer in beauty and in charm: Wool’s work consists pri-marily of dour, black-and-white pictures of stencilled words, in enamel, usually on aluminum panels; decorative patterns made with incised rollers; and abstract, variously piquant messes, involving spray paint and silk screens. Let’s get over it. A dramatic retrospective at the Guggen-heim Museum confirms, besides the downbeat air, the force and the intelli-gence of a career that, according to leg-end, caught fire in 1987, after Wool saw

the words “sex” and “luv” spray-painted in black on a white delivery truck. His sten-cilled repetition of those words, on paper, is among the earliest works in the new show. A cutely vandalized truck would seem a pretty humble epiphany, as epiph-anies go, but it inspired a way of painting that quietly gained authority, while more ingratiating styles rose and fell in art-world esteem. If you are put off by the harshness of Wool’s rigor, as I was, it means that you aren’t ready to confess that our time admits, and merits, nothing co-zier in an art besieged by the aesthetic ad-vances, as well as the technical advances, of photographic and digital mediums. Once you stop resisting the gloomy mien

of Wool’s work, it feels authentic, bracing, and even, on occasion, blissful.

Wool was born in Boston, to a molec-ular-biologist father and a psychiatrist mother, and grew up in Chicago, en-thralled by art. In 1972, he entered Sarah Lawrence College, where he won permis-sion to take two exacting studio courses, in painting and photography, promising that he would buckle down to required courses the next year. Instead, he dropped out, moved to Manhattan, and enrolled in the New York Studio School, the diehard academy of Abstract Expressionist tech-nique and style. That training served him well. In a fine catalogue essay, Katherine Brinson, the curator of the Guggenheim show, notes a standard emphasis of Stu-dio School instruction: the rendering of forms in charcoal by partial erasure. (Wool’s later paintings do wonders with passages that are thinned, rubbed, over-painted, or wiped away.) Meanwhile, he plunged into the emerging East Village scene of punk rock, underground film, gallery graffiti, performance art, and up-all-night dissipation, as immortalized in the photographs of Nan Goldin. His friends and sometime collaborators in-cluded the painter James Nares, the writer Glenn O’Brien, and the poet-rocker Richard Hell. Wool briefly studied filmmaking at New York University, but by 1981 he had settled into painting, at first producing gawky abstract shapes that were influenced by the sculptor Joel Sha-piro, who employed him as an assistant.

The efflorescence in downtown art was racked with schisms. Hot neo-ex-pressionist painters like Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat went one way, feeding a vogue that became a market frenzy; and cool “Pictures” conceptual-ists, including Cindy Sherman and Rich-ard Prince, went another. Money that in-stantly favored the former eventually got around to the latter. It can’t have been clear at the time that Wool’s middle way, of earnest painterly invention, which was anything but seductive, would triumph. Several other gifted painters—among them Peter Halley, David Reed, and Jonathan Lasker—gained success with conceptually alert abstract styles. Those artists now seem a bit dated. Wool doesn’t. His works ace the crude test that passes for critical judgment in the art market: they look impeccable on walls today and are almost certain to look C

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impeccable on walls tomorrow. Lately fetching millions at auction, Wool’s art leaves critics to sift through the hows and the whys of a singular convergence of price and value. Would that the expen-sive were always so good.

Renunciation benefitted Wool. He did not use color, or expressive gesture; their meanings could not be controlled. Nor did he indulge, as his friends Robert Gober, Richard Prince, and Jeff Koons did, in the easy ironies of adopting themes and images from mass culture. (Koons wrote the press release for Wool’s solo show, in 1986, at the short-lived Cable Gallery; he keenly observed that “Wool’s work contains continual internal/external debate within itself.”) Wool liked the éclat of Pop-influenced art, but not its bor-rowed subject matter. Around the time of his delivery-truck eureka, he hit on a witty means of grounding high art in the every-day: the incised paint rollers once com-monly used by slumlords to give tenement halls and stairwells the appearance of hav-ing been wallpapered. The tall paintings that resulted—floral or grille-like pat-terns, with skips and smears suggesting haste—have just about everything you could want of an all-over abstraction, plus the humor of their absurd efficiency. Can painting be so simple? It can for an artist who has despaired of every alternative. The expedient of the rollers, like that of the words that Wool proceeded to paint, suggests the ledges to which a rock climber clings by his fingernails.

Word painting has a history, from the snatches of newspaper text favored by the Cubists to Ed Ruscha’s portraits of words that pique the mind’s incapacity to look and read in the same instant. Bar-bara Kruger and Jenny Holzer have worked primarily with language; Law-rence Weiner does so exclusively. But Wool made it new. He merged the anon-ymous aggression of graffiti with the stateliness of formal abstract painting. Se-lecting words and phrases that appealed to him, he leached them of personality, by using stencils, and of quick readability, by eliminating standard spacing, punctua-tion, and, in one case, vowels (“TRBL”). The effort required to make out the mes-sages may be rewarded, or punished, with a sting of nihilism: “CATS IN BAGS BAGS

IN RIVER” or “SELL THE HOUSE SELL

THE CAR SELL THE KIDS.” (The latter is from a deranged officer’s letter home in

“Apocalypse Now.”) Once read, the words don’t stay read. When you leave off making sense of three stacked blocks, “HYP / OCR / ITE” or “ANA / RCH / IST,” they snap back into being nonsensical graphic design. We’re not talking about a major difficulty here, but just enough to induce a hiccup in comprehension, letting the physical facts of the painting preside. The effect calls to mind Jasper Johns’s early Flag paintings, with their double-bind readings of paint-as-image (it’s a flag) and image-as-paint (it’s a red-white-and-blue painting).

Traces of past American masters—Rauschenberg’s sprawling montage, Twombly’s sensitive scribble, Warhol’s off-register printing, Guston’s clunky an-imation, and even some dynamics recall-ing the god of the Studio School, de Kooning—abound as the show unreels up the Guggenheim’s ramp. Wool increas-ingly mixes and matches mechanical and freehand methods in layered composi-tions. Thus, rolled patterns interact with splotches, transferred by silk screen from earlier paintings, and with interweaving skeins of spray paint. Wool no longer es-chews gesture; sprayed lines curl and buckle in taut relation to the scale of the pictures. (That’s de Kooningesque.) Col-ors—yellow, brownish maroon—have begun to make eloquently sputtering ap-pearances. With no hint of pastiche, and still less of nostalgia, he is reinventing cer-tain charismatic tropes of mid-century New York painting—or recovering them, as if they had been wandering around loose all this time.

I question the choice to mount many of the big paintings on cantilevered struts, so that they appear to float, in some of the museum’s curved, top-lighted bays. It’s like a magic trick that delights once. De-prived of flat walls, the pictures look lost. In a more apt tour de force, hundreds of black-and-white photographs are arrayed at intervals. Wool took them on noctur-nal rambles between his studio, in the East Village, and his loft, in Chinatown. They are dismal with a vengeance, an en-cyclopedia of wrack, ruin, and squalor, wanly bleached by flash illumination. To make the world appear uniformly horrible requires rare discipline. Wool’s grim shut-terbugging suggests a peculiar creative psychology. When he feels bad, it would seem, he perks up. And when he feels worse he’s golden. mayoclinic.org/psychiatry-psychology

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The Tri Angle record label, run by the British expatriate Robin Caro-

lan and based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is an obscure operation that also hap-pens to be the meeting point for sev-eral highly charged but very different strands of pop music. The artists on Tri Angle—who include the Haxan Cloak, Evian Christ, Clams Casino, Forest Swords, and Vessel, and who come from both the U.S. and Britain—are equally at home with commercial hip-hop and roiling, dark, atonal noise. Underlying this sonic mishmash is a gentle sense of melody—the inheritance of a generation raised less on discrete songs than on a mulch of songs that are

routinely fed through software, sam-pled, and slowed down, until they dis-solve into entirely different things.

Around 2010, when this cohort of musicians first came together, attempts to categorize the music were almost comical: some of the first records that Carolan released, by the American groups Balam Acab and oOoOO, were described as “witch house.” The term suggested links to occult aspects of darkness (witch) and also to dance music (house), though few of the rele-vant records moved at the brisk pace of house music. Now, happily, though the groups that have coalesced under Tri Angle are peaking artistically, nobody is

attempting to saddle the movement with a name.

Even when Tri Angle records are structurally dissimilar, they share a fondness for odd noises that skitter through the music. Evian Christ (a baby-faced young man named Josh Leary) produced the beat for Kanye West’s “I’m in It,” from “Yeezus,” which is likely to be the album of the year on many lists. West found Christ by lis-tening to the Tri Angle release “Kings and Them,” which compiled a number of tracks that Leary had made at home on a cheap PC and uploaded to You-Tube while he trained to be a kinder-garten teacher in Ellesmere Port, En-gland. “I’m in It” is the most sexually explicit song on “Yeezus”; the beat builds slowly, starting as just a rattling bass tone paired with silence and a female gasp. Eventually, it stumbles into inter-mittent snare drums, and sticks to a nasty, loping pace for a moment before elegantly atomizing again. It’s like a beautiful and surly teen-ager rendered as a beat—truculent but easily forgiven. At a recent show at Basilica Hudson, in upstate New York, Evian Christ played a set of spiky, distressed hip-hop and modified drum-and-bass that had the crowd moving.

In contrast, when the Haxan Cloak plays live, the only appropriate physi-cal response seems to be immobility, brought on by complete absorption in the act’s extreme volume levels. Bobby Krlic, the twenty-seven-year-old pro-ducer who performs as the Haxan Cloak, has said that for a period of time he read everything he could about the Salem witch trials. (Häxan is Swedish for “witch.”) “Excavation,” his début on Tri Angle, is an astonishing record that I’ve played almost every day since it came out, in April. Long passages con-tain no rhythms of any kind. The bassy drones and ominous swells evoke the atmosphere and the dread of a Ridley Scott movie and have, at best, a tenuous relationship to pop music. Krlic’s range is impressive—though “Excavation” was rendered electronically, the Haxan Cloak’s previous album was made largely with stringed instruments, such as viola and cello, that Krlic played himself.

“Excavation” was the beginning of a Tri Angle hat trick of exceptional re-Carolan, center, with two of his artists, the Haxan Cloak and Evian Christ.

POP MUSIC

THE DARK LORDRobin Carolan’s Tri Angle record label.

BY SASHA FRERE-JONES

PHOTOGRAPH BY ETHAN LEVITAS


leases. It was followed by Evian Christ’s “Duga-3,” a psychedelic weave of ring-ing tones and decelerated voices, and Forest Swords’ “Engravings.” On “Gather-ing,” from “Engravings,” a snatch of what sounds like choral music performed by five or six voices is chopped up irregu-larly, interspersed with silence, then ac-companied by muffled piano and drums. Like many of the releases on Tri Angle, these records have the feel of a palimp-sest, with traces of dozens of genres de-livered through the medium of digital technology. It’s as if the same computers that make music accessible to everyone also somehow abraded the sound as it flew around the globe. An enthusiastic, hungry generation has become comfort-able with what are called, in sound engi-neering, “artifacts”: the glitches and dropouts and streaks that represent missing data and the trips that data has made. If a previous era had surface noise on its vinyl, created by a mechanical stamper and the listener’s own use, this one has an array of sounds that are rooted in error, and in loss.

At the end of the last decade, Caro- lan, who was originally a curator

and a promoter, was shuttling between his native London and New York. He was contributing to a blog called 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which was known for celebrating the work of up-and-coming artists. Carolan was inspired by the musicians around him who were playing with the manipulated hip-hop coming out of Houston—beats and vo-cals that are slowed down until their sources become unidentifiable—and also with what he called “a dreamy Cocteau Twins thing.” His first Tri Angle release, which came out in 2010, when he was twenty-four, was “Let Me Shine for You,” by multiple artists, a tribute to Lindsay Lohan and to the scrutiny that female celebrities face. “I kind of thought if you could actually be inside Lindsay Lohan’s head, that’s probably a really terrifying space to be in,” he said. “So I thought maybe I could get some guys to remake her songs as if they’re actually in her head.” The album was sufficiently obscure that it’s listed in the label’s catalogue as “00.” Tri Angle’s next release, however, Balam Acab’s five-song EP “See Birds,” was praised by the music press. The

aesthetic of much of what followed on Tri Angle is in place on “See Birds”: low, buzzing bass tones, a narcotic sense of rhythm, plenty of reverb, and high, otherworldly voices and sounds that could be pipes or strings or tapes run backward—anything, really.

Carolan, a pale, tall, quiet man, has become the point person for a loose col-lective of musicians who are comfortable with pop impulses and sonic experimen-tation. “I always thought of the label as sort of a combination of Madonna, Björk, and Warp Records,” he said, referring to the pioneering British electronic-music label. Still, he said, “I do always want there to be some kind of melodic ele-ment.” Though that’s an accurate enough description of Tri Angle’s records, it doesn’t rule out an awful lot of haze and avant-garde noise. The through-line is a dark sound, but one that is flexible and often surprisingly inviting.

Carolan’s methods most resemble those of Richard Russell, the idiosyn-cratic head of XL Records. Russell has made a career of signing acts that have little in common except that they are very good: M.I.A.; Adele; Tyler, the Creator; and Vampire Weekend. Caro-lan’s most commercially successful act so far, the electronic-music duo Aluna-George, has moved to Island Records, so his business may not be as conven-tionally solid as Russell’s. But this is just another way of surviving as an inde-pendent label: finding talented artists and staying with them only as long as you can afford to. Carolan doesn’t have much of the macher about him.

When I met up with him one early-fall day, when everyone else was in shorts and T-shirts, he had on boots, very long denim shorts, and layers of black clothing under a roomy jacket. “I always dress like this,” he said. “I just hate it when it’s sunny. I can’t wait for it to get cold.” What unites the Tri Angle bands is Carolan’s cool warmth, and a belief that when the machines run down, and the rhythms fall away, beauty emerges. It’s music that seems built on its own erosion. Considering how many people on vacation traipse in and out of worn-down stone monuments, alleg-edly out of historical interest, it seems reasonable that Tri Angle is simply cel-ebrating the beauty of decay, which isn’t such a new impulse.


Valery Gergiev, the longtime artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre,

in St. Petersburg, has attained a level of worldly power perhaps unmatched by any living classical musician. The Russian edition of Forbes has placed him at No. 3 on a list of the wealthiest and most popular Russian celebrities, behind the tennis player Maria Shara-pova and the singer-songwriter Grigory Leps. Gergiev’s annual income is said to be $16.5 million. He was recently given the title of Hero of Labor by Pres-ident Vladimir Putin, who has been on friendly terms with the conductor since 1992, when Putin was a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Last spring, Gergiev presided over the opening of a seven-hundred-million-dollar addition to the

Gergiev thrives on a hectic pace, but persists in offering work of uneven quality.

MUSICAL EVENTS

IMPERIOUSThe problem with Valery Gergiev.

BY ALEX ROSS

Mariinsky complex. Putin was in atten-dance, and offered a birthday toast to Gergiev, who had just turned sixty. Big-ger plans may be afoot: there is talk of a grand merger of cultural organizations under Gergiev’s aegis.

Gergiev is a prominent supporter of the current Russian regime. Last year, in a television ad for Putin’s third Pres-idential campaign, he said, “One needs to be able to hold oneself presidentially, so that people reckon with the country. I don’t know if it’s fear? Respect? Reck-oning.” Asked to comment on the Pussy Riot case, Gergiev suggested that the young women in the band were merely out to make money. (One member has been on a hunger strike in a prison camp.) Such positions have had interna-

tional consequences. The recent passage in Russia of legislation barring gay “pro-paganda” led to demonstrations against Gergiev when he came to New York this fall: Queer Nation members staged a protest at the opening night of “Eu-gene Onegin” at the Met, which Ger-giev conducted, and again at the first of three concerts that he presented with the Mariinsky Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. In subsequent interviews, Gergiev stated that his theatre has never dis-criminated against anyone. He also claimed that the Carnegie protest had been more “aggressive” than the one at the Met, because there were no Ameri-cans onstage. To my ears, the second protest was briefer and milder.

Gergiev has not always been so in-vested in politics. When I wrote a profile of him for this magazine, in 1998, he told me, “You never know what kind of Communists or Socialists or President or military dictator will come along. You’d better just do what you can do tomorrow rather than think ahead seven years.” At that time, he was concerned mainly with keeping the Mariinsky afloat, wheedling money from donors around the world. The Mariinsky remains the center of Ger-giev’s existence, and his gestures on behalf of Putin may be less a statement of ideological solidarity than an ex-pression of gratitude for the leader’s financial largesse. Gergiev still insists that the music alone matters. When a Russian paper asked him about the gay issue, he said, “As a director of the the-atre, I have only one criterion: ability, talent.”

It appears that Gergiev wants to have it both ways: he dabbles in politics, yet insists that politics stops at the doors of art. This is an old illusion. Richard Strauss used similar language in a 1935 letter to Stefan Zweig: “For me, there are only two categories of people: those who have talent, and those who have none.” Strauss was saying that Nazi anti-Semitism had no bearing on his ar-tistic standards, despite his position in the regime. Of course, the propaganda law in Russia, obnoxious as it is, hardly rises to the level of Nazi repression. But the legislation is disturbingly retrogres-sive, and has fed a wave of anti-gay vio-lence. No one should be surprised that gay people, for whom concert halls and

ILLUSTRATION BY VICTOR MELAMED


opera houses have long been safe ha-vens, are turning away from Gergiev and other pro-Putin musicians. In this case, fear is not the same thing as respect.

F ifteen years ago, Gergiev’s friends and colleagues were worrying about

whether he could maintain a frantic schedule without injuring his health. At sixty, he appears inexhaustible. In the 2012-13 season, he conducted no fewer than two hundred and sixty-one times: with the Mariinsky, at home and on tour; with the London Symphony, of which he has been the principal conduc-tor since 2007; and with other orches-tras and opera houses, including the Met. While Gergiev seems to thrive on this hectic pace, he persists in offering work of uneven quality, not least be-cause his schedule rarely permits ade-quate rehearsal. Since 2009, the Mari-insky has been issuing recordings on an in-house label: a “Ring” cycle is under way, and although starry singers have been assembled for the occasion—Nina Stemme, René Pape, Jonas Kaufmann—the performances so far have lurched between visceral excitement and affect-less note-spinning. With the London Symphony, Gergiev has released a bril-liantly played but interpretively undis-tinguished Mahler cycle. This indis-criminate spewing of product is especially baffling given the immense resources at Gergiev’s command.

In his recent trio of concerts at Car-negie, Gergiev confined himself to Rus-sian repertory. First, there was a mar-athon program of the three great early ballets of Stravinsky: “The Firebird,” “Petrushka,” and “The Rite of Spring.” Then came the First Piano Concerto and the Eighth Symphony of Shostakovich, with the steely young virtuoso Denis Matsuev as the soloist. Finally, Ger-giev presented Rachmaninoff ’s “Sym-phonic Dances” and Third Piano Con-certo, the latter again with Matsuev. Notwithstanding the political contro-versy, the audience responded with full-throated enthusiasm. Matsuev, having rushed and banged his way through the concertos, gave a flurry of encores, in-cluding a bizarre virtuoso fantasy on “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

The Mariinsky shows more techni-cal polish than it did a decade ago; many

youngsters appear in its ranks, and they are playing at a generally high level, some awkward brass moments aside. Yet, despite the characteristic Gergiev effects (wine-dark sonorities in the cel-los and the basses, precisely calibrated explosions of percussion), the orchestra sounds more anonymous, more rou-tine, than in past years. The folklike melodies of the Princesses’ Khorovod, in “The Firebird,” lacked the distinctive vocal shape that one would expect from a Russian ensemble. The musicians weren’t helped by Gergiev’s tendency to choose lugubrious tempos: at several points in “The Firebird,” he seemed to be trying to interpolate a Mahlerian adagio, to stultifying effect. The coda was bloated and inert. A similar delib-erateness marred the “Danse Sacrale” of the “Rite,” which otherwise moved at a bruising clip.

The Rachmaninoff program had the virtue of avoiding late-Romantic sentimentality. Gergiev caught the grim mood of the “Symphonic Dances,” the composer’s valedictory statement; the final movement, with its allusions to the Dies Irae, was propulsive, even brutal. Yet there was a deficit of sing-ing warmth, and an almost total ab-sence of charm. The one fully worked-out interpretation was that of the Sho - stakovich Eighth, a sweat-inducing juggernaut that has long been a Ger-giev signature. The hammering cli-maxes hit home; so, too, did those epi-sodes of frozen lyricism which suggest a solitary figure wandering across the tundra.

At the same time, this was the per-formance that left me with the greatest psychological unease—a kind of critical despair. We have read many accounts of Shostakovich’s life under Stalin, his ter-ror-stricken accommodations with the Soviet state. How should we react when this composer’s music is led by a con-ductor who has entered his own pact with authority, who has even spoken approvingly of the politics of fear? There is no clear answer to that question. We have all made our compromises with power; everywhere, the noblest artistic strivings are circumscribed by social conditions that make them look hypo-critical and hollow. But the historical ironies surrounding Valery Gergiev are becoming uncomfortably intense.


Hannah Vassallo as Princess Aurora—even as a young woman, she’s a cute brat.

DANCING

WAKE UP!Matthew Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty.”

BY JOAN ACOCELLA

“The Sleeping Beauty” is the most conservative of great ballets. Tell-

ing of a princess who, cursed by an evil fairy, goes to sleep for a hundred years and then is restored to life by the kiss of a handsome prince, it brings us the one message we most need to hear: that ev-erything is going to be O.K. Night will fall, with all its terrors, but the sun will rise again. (The princess’s name is Au-rora.) Evil will entrap us, but goodness will return. The original Russian “Sleep-ing Beauty,” which had its première in 1890, in St. Petersburg, was born in the last blaze of Russian Imperial confidence. Within thirty years, war and revolution had brought down the empire. The tsar

and his family were dead. Some Russians had feared that this was coming, and so they were grateful for “The Sleeping Beauty,” with its promise that goodness would win out. It didn’t, but the ballet survived as a souvenir of Romanov gran-deur. The fact that it contains Tchai-kovsky’s supreme ballet score and what is said to be the crown of Marius Peti-pa’s choreography—that is, the best work of the best artists of Russian bal-let—enthroned it further. Some people may prefer other Russian ballets (I like “Swan Lake” better), but most of the bal-let world pays honor to “The Sleeping Beauty.” Therefore, it is a surprise that Matthew Bourne, the premier iconoclast

of En glish dance—the maker of a “Nut-cracker” set in an orphanage and a “Swan Lake” cast with male swans—put off making a “Sleeping Beauty” for so long. In any case, his version premièred, in London, in December and is now at City Center.

The central pillar of Bourne’s piece is the gothic: the dark, the sinister, the glamorously nasty—that is, the opposite of Petipa’s serene classicism. In most pro-ductions of “The Sleeping Beauty,” there is a sun in a blue sky. Here there is a moon, in a black sky. The fairies who come to bless the princess at her christen-ing have traded in their pastel tutus for stringy skirts that are sort of purple and black and yellow, the colors of a bruise. (It takes nothing away from Bourne to say that his shows would be, perhaps, half of what they are without his longtime set and costume designer, Lez Brothers ton. A crucial gift for a stage artist is to choose the right collaborators.) The fairies do not move daintily. They squat, they ooze, they stick their legs out in a funny way. In the 1890 version, the fairies had poetic names, like Candide and Canari. Here they are Ardor, Feral, Hibernia, Autum-nus, and Tantrum. Worse still, half of them are male. In Petipa’s ballet, the guiding spirit of the tale is the Lilac Fairy. It is she who saves Aurora from Ca ra-bosse, the wicked fairy. Bourne’s Lilac Fairy is a man, renamed Count Lilac, and he does not look very nice.

As in all Bourne’s shows, evil is inter-woven with comedy. The baby Aurora is always a problem for “Sleeping Beauty” directors. They normally can’t use a real infant, so they substitute a plastic doll or a blob of blankets—an inert, passive thing, ripe for victimization. But Bourne, in a singular inspiration, has made her a puppet, of the Bunraku variety, and has thereby given her some personality and dignity. (The puppetry is by Sarah Wright.) She sits up, in her lace bonnet, and watches the adults. Soon she wants to move like them, so she crawls out of her cradle, scoots to the side of the stage, and shinnies up the proscenium curtain. (A footman has to drag her back down.) When Aurora appears in the next act, as a real young woman, supposedly ready for marriage, she is still a cute brat. She pulls her shoes and stockings off and rolls on the floor, unmindful that we might see her bloomers. Furthermore,

ILLUSTRATION BY JEANNE DETALLANTE


the person she has chosen to roll on the floor with is not a prince—which a prin-cess needs, in order to continue the dy-nasty—but the palace gardener, Leo.

In keeping with Bourne’s long practice, part of the comedy consists just in updat-ing. His “Swan Lake” took place under Queen Elizabeth II. (There was a Fergie.) In his “Sleeping Beauty,” the christening scene takes place in 1890. The engage-ment party is in 1911, which means that when the courtiers wake up from their hundred years’ sleep—they were included in Carabosse’s curse on Aurora—the time is essentially now. Leo wears a sweatshirt. Tourists outside the palace gates take pic-tures of one another with their smart-phones. I don’t know why such time travel delights audiences. Maybe it’s our revenge for the loss of the past, or that part of it which was attractive. My favorite update in “The Sleeping Beauty” is the use of con-veyor belts, usually to move the fairies or courtiers around becomingly. At points, Bourne uses ballet vocabulary itself as an anachronism. When Count Lilac, at the end of the hundred years, is guiding Leo to the palace, the two move side by side, Count Lilac in ballet steps, mostly beauti-ful piqués arabesques, while Leo jogs in sweatpants. This is the prettiest, wittiest sight in the show. Its force is democratic. “We like fairies,” Bourne is telling us, “but we’re regular people.” (He grew up in London’s East End. His father worked for the water board.)

That contrast is obvious, too, in the pronounced historicism of the show. I saw undisguised, grateful references to nearly two centuries’ worth of ballets: Bournonville’s “A Folk Tale” (1854), Petipa and Ivanov’s “Swan Lake” (1895), Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Ju-liet” (1965). More than anything else, I saw “Giselle,” which was premièred in Paris in 1841 but extensively revised by Petipa in St. Petersburg. Leo is an avatar of Hilarion, in “Giselle,” the admirable yeoman whom the heroine rejects in favor of Count Albrecht, who more or less murders her.

Any choreographer trying to fit a new scenario to a score written for an old bal-let is going to have problems. Bourne has moved some of the music and has also cut some, and he has chucked out all the sto-rybook routines in the final act. People are going to miss the Bluebird variation, but, oh, what a joy it is not to have to look

at Puss in Boots and White Cat! With the adjustments, the plot has become very complicated. Carabosse dies and is succeeded by her handsome, homicidal son, Caradoc, who has vowed to carry out her curse on Aurora. (He is cousin to the The Stranger in Bourne’s “Swan Lake,” though not as fabulous.) But why does he look so much like Count Lilac? And—never mind that—why, at the end of Act II, does Lilac grow fangs and sink them into Leo’s neck? Many of the new inci-dents, like that one, are not just confus-ing but appalling. When Caradoc kisses Aurora—who of course is attracted to him, as we are to evil—you feel like call-ing the police.

Still, this is a gothic ballet, so it has a right to contain horrifying episodes. Also, if you want a happy ending, Bourne gives you one. A comic updating is unlikely to produce the visionary experience, the sheer dazzle, that we get from the older, more symbolic ballets. Basically, in story ballet, you’ve got a choice. You can have your heart broken into a thousand bits, as in “Swan Lake,” or, as in Petipa’s “Sleeping Beauty,” you can face some danger and overcome it. Bourne here opts for the lat-ter. This unites his ballet not just with Peti-pa’s but, I would say, with a lot of musical comedy, of the best sort. Many Bourne fans are crossovers from the musical-comedy audience, which helps to explain his box-office. From what I can tell, he is, at fifty-three, the most popular choreographer of theatrical dance—live dance—in the Western world. His “Swan Lake,” after eighteen years, is still on the road.

The first cast in New York was basi-cally the same as London’s, and it was excellent. Hannah Vassallo (Aurora) and Adam Maskell (Carabosse/Caradoc) were more than excellent. To be a viva-cious, leg-kicking young girl or a By- ronic dreamboat involves a serious risk of cliché. Vassallo and Maskell were fresh and vital. Christopher Marney (Count Lilac) was also a champ, an exact, poeti-cal, and indefatigable classical ballet dancer. Bourne has told the press frankly how much he depends on his dancers to give him choreographic suggestions. Some people have expressed surprise at this (though it is common practice). Let them look at the results: the freedom, the naturalness, the sense of ownership. These dancers really think they are Aurora and Feral and Tantrum.


McConaughey has recently become one of the most inventive actors in movies.

THE CURRENT CINEMA

GETTING SERIOUSMatthew McConaughey in “Dallas Buyers Club.”

BY DAVID DENBY

Some of the famous male movie actors of the past, like James Stewart and

John Wayne, aged slowly and naturally, achieving greater depth in their roles as a privilege of years. Robert Redford’s super-lative performance in “All Is Lost” is the major case, at the moment, for the power of ripeness. What has happened with Matthew McConaughey, now turning forty-four, is more abrupt and startling. The gleaming young man of a few years ago, with the brilliant smile and the golden torso—an easygoing sport who, tempera-mentally, never seemed more than fifty yards from the beach—has become one of the most inventive actors in movies. Just recently, McConaughey has given explor-atory, strikingly intelligent performances in a wide variety of roles: the reticent Texas lawyer in “Bernie”; the happy-in-sleaze, male-strip-club owner in “Magic Mike’’; and the fantasizing runaway out-law, in love with a faithless woman, in “Mud.” And now, in “Dallas Buyers

Club,” as the real-life Ronald Woodroof, he does work that is pretty much astound-ing. Woodroof was an electrician, rodeo hot shot, and hetero fornicator who, in 1985, tested positive for H.I.V. I’m think-ing not simply of McConaughey’s physi-cal transformation—the nearly fifty pounds lost, the change from an Adonis to a dark, spidery skeleton. His body now appears shaped by overuse and neglect, like the off-kilter frames of oil workers and coal miners in Richard Avedon’s magni ficent collection “Into the West”—men whose character is seemingly pulled by taut neck muscles right into their burning eyes. But it’s McConaughey’s spiritual transforma-tion that is most remarkable. His gaze is at once desperate and challenging.

When we first see Woodroof, he’s al-ready ill, but he doesn’t know it. A rough-and-ready guy with indifferent compan-ions (he doesn’t seem to much care for any of his friends), he works, drinks, smokes, gambles, rides bulls, and has sex with

groupies in the rodeo pens. Like a Las Vegas m.c., he swivels back from the waist as he welcomes his unappetizing chums to his plywood-lined pleasure palace in a trailer park. His style is cheap and show-offy, but who can tell him that? In his world, he’s king, an ignorant but fast-talk-ing swashbuckler, whose speech is gar-nished by belittling profanities tucked into the corners of sentences—you have to listen hard to hear them. After an acci-dent at work, Ron is taken to the hospital, and when he wakes up he’s confronted by two doctors (Dennis O’Hare and Jennifer Garner), who tell him that his T-cell count is down to nine. They give him thirty days to live. He snarls that he’s not “a faggot,” and storms out.

The French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée shot the bulk of the film in trailer parks, scrappy construction sites, and seamy rodeo pens. He doesn’t clean up anything, and he doesn’t avoid scenes of suffering. But Vallée has given “Dallas Buyers Club” the pace and the verve of a classic commercial movie. The script, by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, is raw and urgent, and McConaughey’s perfor-mance drives the movie forward the way Julia Roberts propelled “Erin Brocko-vich.” Both movies are about cocky, self-taught outsiders who take on the estab-lishment—obnoxious egotists who create new realities around them.

“Dallas” plunges us back into that pe-riod of mid-nineteen-eighties anguish when people with AIDS seemed to be liv-ing in a war zone, and help was, at best, a long way off. AZT is being given a dou-ble-blind trial in a Dallas hospital, under F.D.A. auspices, and Ron, unable to get into the trial, buys the drug from a larce-nous orderly. When he can’t get any more, he goes to Mexico, where a rene-gade American doctor (Griffin Dunne) tells him that large doses of AZT are toxic, and gives him a mixture of zinc, aloe, vitamins, fatty acids, the protein Peptide T, and the less potent drug DDC. Woodroof survives and, studying everything he can get his hands on, be-gins importing drugs approved in other countries (but not by the F.D.A.), which he blends into a primitive cocktail. He sets up a buyers club in a Dallas motel, and sells memberships for four hundred dollars a month; after paying the dues, the client gets the drugs “for free.” It’s a dicey business, dependent on smuggling,

ILLUSTRATION BY STAMATIS LASKOS


bribes, and deceit, but he wins the sym-pathy of his doctor (Garner), who agrees that the F.D.A. is moving with madden-ing caution while, across the country, people are dying. Ron’s frenzied impa-tience leads to brilliant self-creation: the rodeo bum is reborn as a world-travelling capitalist. Entrepreneurship and mutual survival join together. The distinction be-tween huckster and savior dissolves. The man has the goods.

A conventional homophobe, Ron is mortified by the disease, then becomes fu-rious as his friends back away from him. He experiences the bitterness of abandon-ment, just as many gay men did in the eighties. During one of his hospital stays, he meets another AIDS patient, Rayon ( Jared Leto), a cross-dresser with lovely eyes and a seductive and witty come-on. Leto hasn’t done much acting recently, but he’s sensational here. Lean and beau-tiful, he wears heels and furs well, and his Rayon shows a shrewd business sense. The entire movie is built around a re-demptive irony: the hyper-macho straight man needs a knowing and popular gay man to gain him entry to the Dallas sub-world—mangy parks, ecstatic bars—where he can sell memberships. Wood-roof never loses his disdain for gays, but his friendship with a cross-dressing flirt humanizes him.

Twenty years ago, few people could have guessed that McConaughey would ever play such a role. He grew up in small-town Texas (Uvalde and Longview), where his father was an oil-pipe supply dealer, his mother a kindergarten teacher. He thought briefly of becoming a lawyer, but drifted toward acting as a student at the University of Texas. In 1993, Richard

Linklater, a nascent Austin movie hon-cho, added him to the cast of the buzzed high-school comedy “Dazed and Con-fused.” McConaughey, with floppy hair and a soft mustache, plays a former foot-ball star who’s still hanging out with the seniors and hoping to score with a red-headed girl. He doesn’t really speak his lines; the words ooze out of him like melted margarine. A few years later, in “A Time to Kill” (1996), a John Grisham adaptation directed by Joel Schumacher, he graduated to the first of his attor-ney roles—a young married father who defends a black man facing the death penalty in a racially divided Mississippi town. The role isn’t clearly conceived. The lawyer seems a committed anti-racist and a feckless lazybones at the same time, and McConaughey never finds a workable rhythm. He’s vague, diffident, his voice slack. Sandra Bullock, as an aggressive vis-iting law student who helps the attorney, runs circles around him; their scenes to-gether are a little embarrassing. As a law-yer again, in Steven Spielberg’s high-minded abolitionist drama “Amistad” (1997), McConaughey picked up the pace, and attempted a Northeasterner’s speech patterns. He wore granny glasses, and his hair was fluffed into a soft blond cloud; he was so earnest and unemphatic that he hardly registered. And, again, he got swept aside by a stronger performer, Anthony Hopkins, doing a shrewdly flinty turn as John Quincy Adams.

McConaughey wasn’t much of an actor, but he always had his burnished glow, and a drawling delivery that some found sexy. Hollywood realized that this passivity could be put to use. He started playing, in romantic comedies, a great

catch who didn’t want to be caught, or a man who didn’t know what he wanted until a woman told him. Jennifer Lopez falls for him in “The Wedding Plan-ner” (2001), as does Kate Hudson in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” (2003), and Sarah Jessica Parker in “Failure to Launch” (2006). In “Failure,” he plays a thirty-five-year-old weekend athlete who is still living at home with his parents. He banters pleasantly with Parker, but ir-responsibility was becoming a chronic condition—the movie seemed to be as much about the actor as about the char-acter. You wondered how much pride McConaughey had.

Quite a lot, it turns out. His triumphs of the past few years have revealed a stir-ring streak of recklessness. “Dallas Buyers Club” doesn’t tell us how many people were helped by Woodroof ’s cocktails—or even if they were effective. (Woodroof himself lived for another seven years.) And the movie, the first major Holly-wood film to depict a straight man with AIDS, may be accused of trying to win sympathy from a mainstream audience that didn’t always give gay men much sympathy. Yet “Buyers Club” captures the defiance and the self-transformation that many people with AIDS went through (as was movingly chronicled in the 2012 documentary “How to Survive a Plague”), and it doesn’t go soft. Ron is not a nice man; he’s a cantankerous hard-pressed man with heroic strength. McConaughey stays in character as a low-down guy, his eyes darting this way and that as he calcu-lates the angles. His energy is so keenly focussed that he nearly erases memory of his vacant, earlier work. His Ron Woodroof could make a believer out of anyone.

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Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Mick Stevens, must be received by Sunday,

November 3rd. The finalists in the October 21st contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the November 18th issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the United States,

Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or over can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit newyorker.com/captioncontest.

THE WINNING CAPTION

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”

THE FINALISTS

“Who has the floor?”Valerie Vignaux, Northampton, Mass.

“Why not? We defy every other law.”Mark Edelstein, Sacramento, Calif.

“Good, very good. Now let’s all try to think it back into the box.”

Judd Morris, Arcadia, Calif.

“If their dog starts humping your leg, let it finish.”Melissa Sisk, Charlotte, N.C.

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