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Drought In Post-Apartheid Cape Town: An Interview with Eve Fairbanks

(Morgana Wingard/Getty Images)

Cape Town, South Africa has been suffering a three-year drought. Despite government intervention, citizens have taken matters into their own hands, tapping springs and modifying their homes and behavior. Their innovations prove the necessity of civic involvement and DIY innovation to endure the kind of natural disasters that will increasingly plague civilization due to climate change.

United in a common struggle, the drought has also leveled the racially divided city’s physical and social barriers in profound ways. At HuffPost Highline, Johannesburg-based journalist Eve Fairbanks examines the way Cape Town residents of different classes are using the opportunity to help and learn from each other—with white privileged residents expanding their concept of “community” to include the black South Africans previously known as “them.”

The drought has dissolved what Fairbanks calls the “infrastructure of privilege,” luxuries like pools, gardens and long showers, as well as a sense of security.  Some people in Cape Town view the drought as the inevitable reckoning with apartheid. But is this new camaraderie also a fantasy?

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In your piece, you report on the aquifer of meaning below the story’s surface, examining the surprising psychological and social dimensions of the city’s relationship to its resources.  At what point during your reporting did these layers of meaning emerge?

I love your word “aquifer.” Table Mountain, the crag that lords over Cape Town, has unusual aquifers whose depth and abundance of water are still unplumbed. Cape Town was designed for a relatively small white population, and for centuries it relied, unlike other cities, only on surface dams. Some scientists believe that tapping the Cape Flats aquifer — a vein of water that runs from the mountain to the sea ─ would solve the city’s water issues, at least in the medium term. The problem is the aquifer runs straight through several of the largest townships in the city. So to tap the aquifer would mean displacing a population. Experts said that they had to be kicked out of their homes. So these people have very good reasons not to trust experts.

It struck me that no technocratic solution to a problem like drought or climate change, or exists in a vacuum. You can’t sit in an office — as the Cape Town government has tried to do make their drought plan as neutral as possible — and diagram a solution. People have feelings and commitments about things like water that are many, many-layered.

I also really love science. I often find metaphors for social life buried in apparently technical scientific aspects of the stories I cover — the geology of the landscape of a political piece, the weather, the biome, and so on. Scientists still don’t know the contours of the Table Mountain aquifer, or what outcome tapping it would have; it parallels the profound psychological disconnect between the experts and the people they serve.

Are there other reporters or science writers whose work inspires you?

I kind of wish there wasn’t the category of science writing! So much great classical writing didn’t see itself as separate from science, since science is how we interpret the world, and we’re in the world.

One of my favorite Shakespeare passages is Mercutio’s monologue where he mentions the atom to make more vivid a riff on blame and responsibility. My favorite John Donne poems use the compass and map as visual metaphors for vague things like love or the soul. In Donne, tying those things to objects of scientific inquiry is part of the argument that they’re real.

Every writer needs science, even novelists. Once you’re making any kind of description of a landscape, or even reflecting on human motivations in politics or love, you’re entering the territories of geology, botany, physics, and psychology. I think people are sometimes scared of science, though, because it’s become a specialty. Some of the most vivid, moving conversations I’ve had related to my writing were with scientists who told me about uncertainty in physics, about botany, or about the way objects’ behavior changes according to their size.  These relate to deep questions about the scalability of projects, the singularity of truth, and so on, and give me a different way to think about abstractions like relationships or class, to make them real as forces.

Science writing today, in some cases, seems pretty specialized, and the presumption is that the science writer in a magazine is responsible for transmitting the findings of studies to the layman. This can remove the writer from the story. In some science writing, I don’t see a lot of confidence on the part of the author to ask, “Does this accord with my experience? Could this finding be wrong?” My favorite writers who incorporate science are working with science over the longer term, and they tend to be really interested in the essence of science — the history, the scientific method — rather than super excited by what it can prove.

I love Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks because they incorporate their own journeys and doubts into their science writing. They aren’t making proofs or touting answers to social problems offered by a hot new study. Simon Schama, the historian, actually uses science obliquely but wonderfully in his writings on how landscape formed cultures. I was inspired by Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. She invested years in understanding the science, but at heart it was a story about science’s limits. I also love Ben Adler at City & State. He’s doing what used to just be called geography. He writes things like landscape and infrastructure in a scientific way, but he’s deeply interested in how these things influence politics and vice versa.

It’s interesting how your story suggests that technology won’t necessarily solve all of humanity’s resource problems — that a change in simple civilian behavior is necessary. Doesn’t that contradict the ongoing fantasy of industrial civilization?

I think most of us feel the limits of the industrial fantasy now. But we’ve also built our civilization on it to the extent that we don’t know what we would do without it. The solutions we’ve imagined tend towards a rewinding of the tape back to a purer, more natural innocence. But that isn’t possible. In my own life, change has often come through some unintended break in the plan: a breakup or a firing or whatever, something that throws things into disarray and makes me live a different way. That was what I hoped to suggest with the Highline piece: that accelerating climate change, in some ways, may force its own solutions by making certain ways of life literally untenable.

I do foresee a growing conflict between government and its citizens. Governments, including in Cape Town, are tired of “politics.” They want to get away from criticisms by becoming increasingly technocratic, in the hopes that technocratic solutions will be perceived as neutral. In Cape Town, though, this desire translated into dictatorial, smug, and detached behavior, a deep distrust, and even rejection, of solutions that came from the public.

After I published the piece, the government closed the spring I highlighted in it, cementing the whole thing over, a real “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” move. It amazed me, because the spring was so small, but it was such a symbol of people’s capacities to rise above social divisions and entitlement. It amazed me the government couldn’t see how important that would be to people in the city. But I think the possibility that citizens could create their own solutions to social problems, however much governments play lip service to this ideal, really threatened the Cape Town government insofar as it suggested it might be dispensable.

You grew up in Virginia, a region still imprinted by slavery and segregation. Thinking of Cape Town’s drought, do you see any analogs in America for the way natural disaster can help build community relationships or dismantle racial divisions?

I’ve lived in South Africa for nine years. After a few years, I began to get the impression that whites here are really uncomfortable with their rarefied position in society. They know that it is both unsustainable and unjust. We tend to think of elites as evil, selfish automatons. But they’re also human, with innate moral intuitions.

In South Africa this moral intuition has tussled with a powerful fear of loss. So I was surprised by the explosion of joy in Cape Town when the drought forced elites into a somewhat less privileged position. I also wasn’t surprised. It was like disaster freed people to do what they had longed to do but, in the reigning political language and interpretation of human self-interest, could barely articulate to themselves that they wanted, which was to be more equal, and closer to everyone in their community.

It’s hard to imagine such a scenario in America. We’re such a lucky country, and we’ve managed to insulate ourselves so much from all kinds of bad fortune. In the 1980s, before white rule in South Africa ended, the novelist J.M. Coetzee wrote a book called Waiting for the Barbarians. I think that’s how we feel in America ─ we’re waiting for some kind of extraordinary shift or upending of inequality and subtle segregations; we’re in a state of terrified hypervigiliance. I can’t imagine what exactly will break it. But I do think that more people will be happy with a sea change in the American way of life than currently expect themselves to be.

Do you think the Cape Town’s reclaimed sense of self — and the changed norms drought has brought — will stick?

I talked to a middle-aged Californian recently who grew up during a drought in the state, and he told me he still feels a visceral horror when he sees a tap running and implores his wife and children not to flush every time. I think we should also recognize the more drastic attitudinal shifts probably take work to maintain — public messaging, continual nudges from the more ardent citizens to their family and friends. I worry more about the permanence of the social changes, partly because the government is set against social flux it doesn’t control.

You’re writing a book about post-apartheid South Africa. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I think there are really strong parallels between South Africa and America — between the conflict some people in the West feel between maintaining their society and letting newcomers in. Post-apartheid South Africa is that tension in miniature. For decades, a physical barrier was erected between white and non-white South Africa and that barrier has fallen. It’s an incredible place to witness some of the tensions and changes that face the whole world, but in a contained environment, it’s almost like an experiment.

My book is about two people — a black former freedom fighter and a white lawyer who fought for the apartheid regime in the most elite army unit — confronting those changes. It doesn’t really make an argument rather but tries to show us, like a play would, what happens when people try to leave their pasts behind while living in a world that offers constant reminders, nostalgic and painful, of those pasts.

The physical environment of South Africa becomes a ghost that can’t be exorcised: the informal segregation that still exists with housing and the neighborhoods people live in; the sense of nonbelonging and alienation in the cities — new in demographics, old in visual symbols and patterns of human association — that haunts both blacks and whites alike. Both blacks and whites here feel that the other group holds the real power in society, which is so reminiscent of America right now. I’m hoping the book will leave a lasting image of a particular country, but also hold a mirror up to America and Europe.

Anthony Bourdain: 1956-2018

American Chef Anthony Bourdain in the Liberdade area of Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Paulo Fridman/Corbis via Getty Images)

Forget about four-star hotels or luxury spa treatments: Bourdain is on a mission to illuminate underappreciated and misunderstood cultures, whether it’s Myanmar or Detroit. He regularly takes viewers to the sorts of places–Libya, Gaza, Congo–that most Americans know only from grim headlines about political strife and body counts. Bourdain does all of this with vivid narrative reporting, stunning visuals, palpable empathy, and a relentlessly open mind.

As with Bourdain’s previous programs, A Cook’s Tour and the long-running No Reservations, the premise is simple: he goes somewhere interesting and hangs out with the locals. “We show up and say, ‘What’s to eat? What makes you happy?’” Bourdain says. “You’re going to get very Technicolor, very deep, very complicated answers to those questions. I’m not a Middle East expert. I’m not an Africa expert. I’m not a foreign-policy wonk. But I see aspects of these countries that regular journalists don’t. If we have a role, it’s to put a face on people who you might not otherwise have seen or cared about.”

— “Anthony Bourdain Has Become The Future Of Cable News, And He Couldn’t Care Less,” by Rob Brunner, Fast Company, September 24, 2014.

What do I like to eat after hours? Strange things. Oysters are my favorite, especially at three in the morning, in the company of my crew. Focaccia pizza with robiola cheese and white truffle oil is good, especially at Le Madri on a summer afternoon in the outdoor patio. Frozen vodka at Siberia Bar is also good, particularly if a cook from one of the big hotels shows up with beluga. At Indigo, on Tenth Street, I love the mushroom strudel and the daube of beef. At my own place, I love a spicy boudin noir that squirts blood in your mouth; the braised fennel the way my sous-chef makes it; scraps from duck confit; and fresh cockles steamed with greasy Portuguese sausage.

I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.

In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit. It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family. It’s a haven for foreigners—Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Chinese, Senegalese, Egyptians, Poles. In New York, the main linguistic spice is Spanish. “Hey, maricón! chupa mis huevos” means, roughly, “How are you, valued comrade? I hope all is well.” And you hear “Hey, baboso! Put some more brown jiz on the fire and check your meez before the sous comes back there and fucks you in the culo!,” which means “Please reduce some additional demi-glace, brother, and reëxamine your mise en place, because the sous-chef is concerned about your state of readiness.”

— “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by Anthony Bourdain, The New Yorker, April 19, 1999.

Anthony Bourdain, an influential American chef, author, and television host, died in Strasbourg, France, on Friday June 8, at age 61. Bourdain, whose rise to fame started with his book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, used his influence to campaign for kitchen workers’ rights and for the marginalized communities he encountered as part of his television show travels. While he was best known for his nonfiction, Bourdain also wrote crime and graphic novels.

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‘I Love What Human Voices Do Together’: An Interview with Neko Case

AP Photo/Tony Avelar, Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Hermes | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (3,994 words)

 

Neko Case’s powerhouse voice often seems like it might level buildings. But during a 20-plus-year career, she’s put it to more constructive use, both as singular solo act and poster child for collective creativity. She formed the ultra-meta power-pop band The New Pornographers with kindred singer-songwriters Carl Newman and Dan Bejar in 1997, the same year she released her own debut LP, The Virginian, an eclectic, country-rock-leaning set of originals and deep-catalog covers: Everly Brothers, Loretta Lynn, hard-rock-era Queen. Since then she’s worked alternately with the Pornographers and under her own name, with occasional side projects like The Corn Sisters (with Carolyn Mark) and Case/Lang/Viers (a low-key supergroup with k.d. lang and Laura Viers).

Hell-On, Case’s new solo album, is as gorgeous, imaginative, and potent as any she’s made, and for a lyricist given to imagistic fables and emotional meditations, it responds to the cultural-environmental moment vividly. Songs address nature’s ruthlessness (it’s worth noting Case’s Vermont home was destroyed in a fire when she was out of the country recording songs), along with the vagaries and tyrannies of gender, the endless negotiations of love, and even the attributes of the Almighty. “God is not a contract or a guy,” she sings on the title track, a faintly hallucinatory waltz that tilts into an empowered come-on (“I am not a mess/I’m a wilderness, yes/The undiscovered continent/For you to undress/But you’ll not be my master/You’re barely my guest,” she instructs). Another standout, “Halls of Sarah,” casts a #metoo side-eye at the trope of woman-as-muse (“Our poets do an odious business loving womankind/As lions love Christians”). At the same time, “Sleep All Summer,” a song by ex-bandmate Eric Bachmann, is a heartbreaker about faded love that feels like a forgotten classic.

The recording sessions enlisted a busload of other fellow travelers: Viers and lang, punk/pop/queer/ feminist/fashion icon Beth Ditto, veteran grunge crooner Mark Lanegan, Swedish indie-pop scientist Bjorn Yttling, various Pornographers and other long-time associates, a squadron of whom are on the road with her this year. At a tour stop in Brooklyn in May, bandmates Rachel Flotard and Shelly Short formed a powerhouse frontline with Case at the club Littlefield, delivering new songs like a trio of wisecracking Valkyries.

I spoke to Case on the phone some days later, as she was idling in San Diego before another show. She spoke about the album, the fire that recently destroyed her house, and the 2016 WOMANPRODUCER conference, which she described as “the highlight of my professional career.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

(You can listen to an audio version of this interview on the Longreads Podcast here:

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Meet the New Mormons

Illustration by Lizzie Gill

Sarah Scoles| Longreads | June 2018 | 23 minutes (5,714 words)

It’s a summer day in Salt Lake City, and tourists are resting inside the Mormon Tabernacle, staring at the enormous, golden pipes of the Tabernacle organ, which are topped with carved wooden finials that appear to scrape the ceiling. These are the same pipes I stared at on a satellite feed from my hometown chapel in central Florida twice a year until I was 18. Although I’d remotely watched the church’s semiannual conference religiously as a kid, I’d never been inside the building until now, more than 12 years after leaving the church and becoming an atheist, and 10 after coming out as a lesbian. My parents have spent those years trying to come to terms with these shifts, but our détente has involved not talking much about any of it. This is the Mormon way.

It’s strange then to find myself in this Tabernacle, waiting for my mom’s plane to arrive in Salt Lake so that she and I can attend the Sunstone Symposium, a yearly gathering that includes liberal Mormons and ex-Mormons who are redefining their relationship with the church. But here I am.

Two young missionaries step up to the pulpit to demonstrate the building’s acoustics for those in attendance. One rips a newspaper, and I can hear the tear from my perch in the shadows at the back of the room. It sounds soft and wet, like the stories it contains might be smeared. The demonstration ends and the missionaries walk offstage, accompanied by a recording of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: God be with you till we meet again. The harmonies burrow into my chest like they belong there, which in some sense they always will. The Mormon worldview shaped mine — I could speak in King James English at age 4 — even though the two now stand apart, like puzzle pieces where the outcropping of one is the cavern of the other. Only together do Mormonism and I make a full picture. Read more…

A Crocodile In Paris: The Queer Classics of Qiu Miaojin

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ankita Chakraborty | Longreads | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

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D. H. Lawrence once used chickens to describe the two types of women. “A really up-to-date woman is a cocksure woman,” he wrote. “She is the modern type.” The other type is the hensure woman, “the old-fashioned demure woman who was sure as a hen is sure, that is, without knowing about it.’’ He made other references to animals and birds in his work. He often used animal lives to describe sex and male desire. “The desire rose again, his penis began to stir like a live bird,” he wrote of a man in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence seemed to have thrived on the animal spirit. Three of his novels are called The Fox, Kangaroo and The White Peacock. The more the woods and the old mining towns of his childhood seemed to give way to industrial landscapes, the more easily animals seemed to have crept into his work. Often animals from these woods were imagined as insensible beasts. The chapter called “Rabbit” in Women in Love comes to mind, where a pet sustains society’s adulation until the moment it turns against its owners.

The beast in Qiu Miaojin’s modernist novels is the consciousness in women that is aware of a deviant lust for women’s bodies. Their sexuality is their bestiality. They are not necessarily hiding behind their animal pseudonyms; but like any animal on the fringes of human settlement, they are loath to be seen. The narrator of Qiu’s cult classic Notes of a Crocodile declares very early in the novel, “I’m a woman who loves women.” Yet a few pages later, she thinks she should carry her shoes and tiptoe down the streets of Taipei so that no one will notice her. In the industrial Taiwanese society where these women live, the self-discovery of their own sexuality is considered to be a social condition and an epidemic. It made for cheap television and for trash talk. In Taiwan in 1987, everybody seemed very interested in knowing who among them was a “crocodile.” Read more…

A New Yorker, and a Sick Person

David Malan/Getty

Porochista Khakpour | Sick: A Memoir | June 2018 | 9 minutes (2,300 words)

 

Ever since I can remember, I dreamed of escaping. Escaping what was always the question, but my life had been one of escape since I was born — revolution and war sent us through Asia and Europe and eventually to America. We were in exile, my parents always reminded me, we had escaped. It was temporary. But escape was also something I longed for in eighties Southern California, which constantly felt foreign to me, a place of temporary settling but no home. Everything was tan in a way my brown skin could not compete with. Everything was blond in a way my bottle-blond mother could not recreate, gilt upon gold upon gilt. Everything was carefree and smiles, gloss and glitter, and money to no end. We, meanwhile, were poor and anxious and alone. When my brother was born in our neighboring city Arcadia, California, in 1983, I watched his pink squirming body stowed into a giant felt red heart — it was Valentine’s Day — and even stuffed in all that makeshift American affection I thought he didn’t have a chance. None of us did.

As the tremors continued, as my body somehow grew smaller rather than larger — my mother always quick to slap my hand when I reached for the leftover cake batter the way sitcom kids did, her ritual baking more American obligation than motherly delight — I also began feeling a need to escape the body. All my few friends got their periods before they were teenagers, but mine waited deep into my first teenage year, on the brink of fourteen, like an afterthought. Everything about my body felt wrong to me, especially as California went from the eighties to the nineties, and I knew escape would have to be a real revolution of presence.

My mind always went to literal distance, eyes on the globe landing without fail on New York. It’s hard to know if all the movies of the era did it, Fame and its many knockoffs, Annie and all the stories of rags-to-riches miracles in Manhattan, told me New York was the motherland for misfit creatives to thrive, for foreigners with big dreams, for girl authors. But I think where it really came from was my aunt Simin, who was the only living role model I ever had. My mother’s world, as it sought to merge with the average American woman’s more and more, spoke to me less and less — I found myself cooling from her endless mall outings, Estée Lauder free gifts, diet everything, soap operas, and department store catalogues. Instead my eyes went to my father’s sister.

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Has India’s Booming IT Industry Finally Plateaued?

AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi

A company named Infosys helped build India’s booming tech industry. Although few Americans have heard of Infosys, this large company in Bangalore employs 200,000 people and codes for companies as diverse as Nordstrom and Harley-Davidson. But trouble has struck.

At The California Sunday Magazine, Rollo Romig paints an unsettling portrait of Indian life, where the middle class that Infosys helped build now fears what one newspaper called a “bloodbath” from downsizing. American protectionism is reducing the amount of offshoring that goes on in tech. Trump has made it harder for Indian tech workers to get H-1B work visas, and automation in India threatens to eliminate even more jobs.

In April of last year, Puneet Manuja, the co-founder of YourDost, a Bangalore-based online mental-health platform that offers counseling via live chat, noticed a spike in messages from IT workers who’d lost their jobs, or worried they would soon. In response, YourDost opened a temporary hotline to field employment concerns. Over three days, they were contacted by 1,100 workers. “A lot of these people did not have a plan B,” Manuja said. “More than 60 percent of people who reached out to us had less than three months of savings left.” Many who’d lost jobs, he said, were hiding it from their parents and friends. “When we asked why people do not tell their parents, they said you are considered weak. If you’ve been fired or laid off, it’s very difficult to convince people that it’s because of some structural changes.” They heard from one young woman, he said, who lived with her parents and who, for a week or two after getting fired from her IT job, got dressed and left every day as if she were going to work.

The leading IT companies all denied that they were laying off anyone. Some IT workers told me that, to avoid admitting to layoffs, the companies had increasingly been setting impossible performance targets to push out workers. One evening I met a longtime Infosys employee in his apartment in east Bangalore. The courtyard of his housing complex was a dazzling display of lights and fountains and overwhelming scale; it was the kind of residence that would have been unimaginable in the old Bangalore, before IT took over. Early last year, he said, he took two months’ leave following the death of his father, and when he returned he felt he’d come back to a different company. His new manager, he said, removed him from his projects, gave him a poor performance review, and incessantly pressured him to resign, threatening him with termination if he didn’t. After two months of this, he surrendered. He still seemed stunned and mortified by this turn of events; he said his work had always been highly commended by managers and clients alike and showed me emails to prove it. He didn’t want me to name him because he still hoped the company would take him back.

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For Me, With Love and Squalor

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Lauren Markham | Longreads | June 2018 | 23 minutes (5,790 words)

One recent day, when it was raining and I was feeling particularly blue, I decided to visit my local bookstore. Though bookstores were once among my favorite places to spend time, ever since my own book was published eight months ago, trips into bookstores have mutated into sordid affairs. I’ll walk in the door, feign cool, casual, just your average browser, then drift over to the shelves in the way someone might sidle up to the bar with a good-looking mark in sight. I’m not really browsing, not just refilling my drink — I’m searching, quite shamefully, for my own book on the shelves.

When it’s there, with its beaming burnt-orange cover jammed somewhere near Norman Mailer, Stephane Mallarme, Katherine Mansfield, Javier Marías, I feel a blush of glee. But more often than not, it’s not on the shelves at all.

It turns out that just because you wrote a book doesn’t mean the bookstores will sell it. No matter what accolades my book has received, each visit to the bookstore feels a new test of my book’s worth — and my own.

That rainy day, I was sure that finding my book on the shelves would release me from my blueness. On the other hand, in the likely event that my book wasn’t there, I would have permission to sink lower, reclining into the indigo bleak. I stepped inside the store, delivering flecks of rain onto the floor. As I suspected — as I feared — my book was nowhere to be found. Read more…

In Just 40 Hours, You Too Can Be an Expert

A blood spatter expert shows the jury a blood-spattered sneaker during the Michael Peterson murder trial in December 2001. (AP PHOTO/CHUCK LIDDY/POOL)

For part two of “Blood Will Tell,” her New York Times Magazine/ProPublica investigation into Joe Bryan’s murder conviction and the use of blood spatter analysis as a forensic tool, Pamela Colloff took the same 40-hour course that is the sum total of the training many blood spatter experts can claim. It did not inspire confidence in the precision or reliability of the experts’ testimony.

On the last day of class, I was given my “certificate of training” after receiving a 97 on my final exam. Everyone in my class passed. Griffin had told us that even if we failed the final, we would still receive a certificate of completion, but rarely, he added, did anyone fail. Our scores on our final exams were not recorded, he assured us, nor were the exams preserved. “Don’t worry that an attorney is going to come back and say, ‘You missed Question 14,’ ” he explained.

From time to time that week, Griffin cautioned us: “You won’t be walking out of here an expert. You’ll know just enough to be dangerous.” It was a startling statement, because judges across the nation have allowed police officers with no more training than we received — 40 hours — to testify as experts. Griffin reminded us that our class was merely an introduction to bloodstain-pattern analysis, and that we would need to complete an advanced class and a mentorship program before we would be proficient enough to call ourselves experts. Yet he advised us on what to say if we were called to testify in court. On the stand, he suggested, we should avoid saying what “probably” happened, because that would give an attorney who cross-examined us an opening. “You’ll be asked: ‘How probable? Eighty-five percent? Seventy-five percent?’ And you can’t say,” he told us, alluding to the fact that an analyst’s theory of a crime often cannot be substantiated with hard numbers. It was less risky, he said, to state, “The best explanation is…”

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The Mr. Memory of Jazz

AP Photo/Jean-Jacques Levy

I’m a huge fan of saxophone genius Charlie Parker, the man known as Bird. Recently I’ve been listening to live recordings instead of his studio work, most taken from scratchy acetates of ancient radio broadcasts or lo-fi private recordings made by fans like the legendary Dean Benedetti. Even in our internet era, it can be hard to find detailed, reliable information about live recordings from, say, 1947 at LA’s long-defunct Hi-De-Ho Club. In the process of researching, I found David Remnick‘s 2008 New Yorker article “Bird Watcher.”

In it, Remnick profiles jazz historian and Charlie Parker devotee Phil Schaap, who’s hosted “Bird Flight,” on Columbia University’s radio station for three decades. Although this article is a decade old, it remains relevant because Bird’s art remains relevant, or as Remnick puts it, “There is no getting to the end of Charlie Parker.” Parker died in 1955, yet new CDs keep coming out containing historic live recordings that have finally been remastered or re-sequenced. Schaap’s knowledge is so deep that when Dean Benedetti’s lost live recordings of Bird — one of jazz’s true holy grails — needed preserving and documentation, Schaap did the job, reinforcing eight miles worth of disintegrating tape by hand. A repository of information, he relishes minutia and arcana; his show’s winding, digressive style blurs, in Remnick’s words, “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.”

Schaap is not a musician, a critic, or, properly speaking, an academic, though he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Princeton, and Juilliard. And yet through “Bird Flight” and a Saturday-evening program he hosts called “Traditions in Swing,” through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, he has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is the Bill James of his field, a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé.

For decades, jazz musicians have joked about Schaap’s adhesive memory, but countless performers have known the feeling that Schaap remembered more about their musical pasts than they did and was always willing to let them in on the forgotten secrets. “Phil is a walking history book about jazz,” Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, told me. Wynton Marsalis says that Schaap is “an American classic.”

In the eyes of his critics, Schaap’s attention to detail and authenticity is irritating and extreme. He has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes and producing efforts, but his encyclopedic sensibility is a matter of taste. When Schaap was put in charge of reissuing Benny Goodman’s landmark 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall for Columbia, he not only included lost cuts and Goodman’s long-winded introductions but also provided prolonged original applause tracks, and even the sounds of the stage crew dragging chairs and music stands across the Carnegie stage to set up for the larger band. His production work on a ten-disk set of Billie Holiday for Verve was similarly inclusive. Schaap wants us to know and hear everything. He seems to believe that the singer’s in-studio musings about what key to sing “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in are as worthy of preservation as a bootleg of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Reviewing the Holiday set for the Village Voice, Gary Giddins called Schaap “that most obsessive of anal obsessives.”

When Charlie Bird died, fans painted “Bird Lives!” on buildings around New York City. Thanks to fans like Schaap, the epitaph holds true for fans like me.

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