Search Results for: Music

Joe Biden’s Problem with Music

Longreads Pick

A different perspective on the RIAA’s takeover of the Department of Justice

Author: Ze Pequeno
Source: Tiny Mix Tapes
Published: Apr 11, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,640 words)

78 Revolutions Around the Sun: A Joni Mitchell Reading List

LOS ANGELES, CA - 1970: Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell plays her guitar at her home circa 1970 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Martin Mills/Getty Images)

By Krista Stevens 

When Rolling Stoneintroduced” Joni Mitchell in 1969, the magazine derided her as a composer, singer, and musician, saying that she was “Not bad for a girl who had no voice training, hated to read in school, and learned guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction record.” They go on — dismissing her songs as “contrived” — to suggest that listeners are smitten despite their better judgment. “She can charm the applause out of audience [sic],” the editors wrote, “by breaking a guitar string, then apologizing by singing her next number a capella, wounded guitar at a limp parade rest. And when she talks, words stumble out of her mouth to form candid little quasi – anecdotes that are completely antithetical to her carefully constructed, contrived songs. But they knock the audience out almost every time.”

If Rolling Stone didn’t get it at first, her musical contemporaries did. David Crosby (The Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) knew immediately that Mitchell was something special. In the two-part 2020 documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time, Crosby recounts inviting Eric Clapton over for the afternoon. Clapton sat, mesmerized by Mitchell’s playing and her altered guitar tunings. (Some of that mesmerization was probably due to all the weed, but let’s not allow that to take away from Mitchell and her guitar skills.) Crosby and Clapton weren’t the only ones who saw the genius in Joni.

To hear him talk about his then lady-love in Laurel Canyon, you get the strong impression that Graham Nash (The Hollies, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young) still isn’t over her, 40 years later. “I was in love from the moment that I ever spent any time with her,” says Nash, who wrote the song “Our House” about his relationship with Mitchell. Do you ever really get over the woman who took up with James Taylor after she wrote most of her highly acclaimed album, Blue, in your communal living room?


Staring at the fire
For hours and hours while I listen to you
Play your love songs all night long for me
Only for me

—”Our House” by Graham Nash, recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

BIG SUR, CA – SEPTEMBER 14-15: Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell clap during an act at the Big Sur Folk Festival at the Esalen Institue on September 14-15, 1969 in Big Sur, California. (Photo by Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Canadian painter, poet, composer, musician, singer-songwriter, guitarist, alternate-tuning queen, alto, and overall doyenne Joni Mitchell turns 78 on November 7th. Join as we celebrate Mitchell with five longreads about a brilliant artist whose career has spanned 60 years.

1) Still Travelling (Ellen Willis, The New Yorker, February 1973)

Ellen Willis gets it, or at least she’s trying to. Sort of. Maybe. In this short commentary on Blue, which was released in 1971, Willis says that “‘Blue’ established Joni Mitchell as a better singer-songwriter than Crosby, Stills, Nash & [James] Taylor combined,” but let’s not confuse compositional skill with easy likability. “Joni’s melodies and lyrics and rhythms are so rich and complicated and un-pop-songlike, her voice such a subtle instrument, her artistic pretensions so overt that if the record were any less brilliant it would be a disaster.”

2) Face to Face (Maclean’s, June 1974)

In this piece, Mitchell has a wide-ranging conversation with Malka Marom, the Iraeli singer credited with discovering her. Mitchell is at the ripe old age of 30 here and we get to learn a little bit about her in her own words. Three whole years after the album’s release, I love her personal assessment of Blue: “[It], for the most part, holds up. But there are some early songs where there is too much naïvité in some of the lyrics for me to be able now to project convincingly.”

3) Harness Joni Mitchell’s Acoustic Imagination with this Primer on Dulcimers, Altered Tunings and Cluster Chords (George Howlett, Guitar World, August 2020)

For music students, this short primer on Mitchell’s many altered tunings is fascinating not only for how she approached the guitar. It also features behind-the-scenes recording anecdotes and detail on the people and genres that influenced her music.

4) In Joni Mitchell’s Self-Portraits, She Finally Makes Her Own Image (Janique Vigier, Garage, January 2019)

At the time of this writing, Vigier notes that Mitchell had painted album covers for 12 or her studio albums, many of which were self-portraits. Those paintings allowed Mitchell to reject and transcend the milk-complected, doe-eyed image many people had of her. “But her self-portraits have endless scripts, moving between genres and styles, copying from where they can,” Vigier writes. “If she can, as she does, construct her own self-image and legacy, then it will be less stable than what’s put forward, more instinctual, intentional, veering.”

5) Chords of Inquiry (Bookforum, Carl Wilson, October 2017)

This piece opens with a fantastic anecdote involving Prince and Mitchell and just gets better from there. In this review of Reckless Daughter, David Yaffe’s Mitchell biography, Carl Wilson gives Mitchell her due as a guitarist and an artist. “Mitchell excelled at channeling the subconscious of her time, especially as it was negotiated between men and women, but she was also always trying to get outside that orbit. She didn’t want to be a case of anything, except herself. The very chords she played were unique, belonging to no tradition except the one she generated with her own tuning system. She’s called them her ‘chords of inquiry—they have a question mark in them.’ It wasn’t until she began working with jazz musicians that she found a band that could follow her (the rock dudes were hopeless).”

The Many Decades of Bond

Sean Connery and Honor Blackman in 'Goldfinger', 1964. (Photo by Express/Getty Images)

By Carolyn Wells 

It had been so long since I had walked down those steps into a poorly lit foyer with low-hanging ceiling tiles, where the scent of buttery popcorn filled the stagnant air, and posters hung limply off the walls. That’s right, I went to my local cinema: I actually saw a film with other people, on a big screen, and wore proper outdoor clothes. After nearly two years of viewings from my sofa, largely in pajamas, this felt unnerving — and exciting. Granted, the seats were still uncomfortable, the chocolate was still overpriced, and a large family walked in late, discussed loudly where to sit, and then chose the seats right in front of me. But there was also surround sound, laughter, and Daniel Craig. 

COVID-19 had kept No Time To Die, the latest James Bond film, out of the cinemas for as long as it had me; it was supposed to be released in April 2020, but when cinemas shut down around the world, 007 (or at least Universal Pictures) refused to stoop so low as a streaming platform. And so we waited. It was worth it, it’s a good film, and improbable car chases across dramatic snowy landscapes do lose something outside of the big screen. (I found myself wondering what brand of winter tire he uses, very grippy.)  

Although I don’t proclaim to be a particularly ardent James Bond fan, watching an aging Daniel Craig strut his stuff did make me start to ponder the incredible longevity of this franchise. We had waited a year and a half for this film, but that’s nothing to a spy who has been in the field since 1952.

***

James Bond has always been in my subconscious. Growing up in the UK, there were four TV channels, and I remember the films on all of them around Christmas — the broadcasters having decided we deserved a treat at that time of year. First, it was Roger Moore, arching his eyebrow at me, then he gave way to a smooth Pierce Brosnan, who my mum excitedly ordained “rather dishy.” Moore and Brosnan were my Bonds. I had missed the very start, the era of Sean Connery — and so, my curiosity piqued after my cinema trip, I decided to dig deep into my streaming platforms and watch a Sean Connery classic: Goldfinger

It’s from 1964, so I was not expecting the production values to be particularly high, and I was duly rewarded in the first scene when Connery appeared with a bedraggled stuffed seagull on his head as a disguise. We quickly move on to him kissing a woman (sans seagull), when he sees someone with a hammer sneaking up on them reflected in her eye — impressive at such close range — and in an incredibly unchivalrous move, he swings the woman round so that the man whacks her on the head rather than him. And this was all before the opening credits. 

It gets worse. In one scene 007 is getting a massage by the pool, and, just as he creepily asks the masseuse to “go a bit lower,” a guy comes up to speak to him. Connery, I kid you not, tells the masseuse to shove off, it’s “man talk,” and proceeds to slap her bottom as she exits. He then pulls on a hot pants onesie apparently made out of a used towel — a look he deserves at this point. It gets more troubling later when he pushes Pussy Galore into a hay pile and forcibly kisses her as she tries to fight him off. By the time Goldfinger has him tied to a table with a laser beam tracking toward his penis, I’m rooting for the laser beam. 

In contrast, No Time To Die does not even open with Bond, but with a little girl who, when chased by a villain, pulls a gun out and shoots right back. A retired James has also been replaced by a new 007 — a Black woman. While it is impossible to apply today’s values to a film from the early ’60s, I am pretty happy that being dismissed with a quick bum slap is no longer acceptable, and the stark differences between the two films made me again appreciate just how long Bond has been around. When he first pulled out his gun on-screen it was a very different world, and that license to kill still hasn’t expired. How has someone who is a borderline rapist, a murderer, and a potential sociopath endured through all these decades? 

We could consider the fact that all the films share the same enjoyable elements — it’s always fun to hang out in an exotic beach location, drive beautiful mountain roads, and then pop home to share some quips in a British government office. Villains with metal teeth, white cats, or dubious accents have a certain timeless appeal; and submarine cars, magnetic watches, or X-ray sunglasses are always cool. And then there is the music — the iconic theme songs have an attraction all of their own. I particularly remember Madonna’s Die Another Day, due mostly to my younger self crashing my dad’s car while trying to dance along to the bizarre techno part. (Do not dance and drive, however fun the song may be.) There are many other classics: One of the few times in Goldfinger where a woman is actually allowed to shine is Shirley Bassey singing the theme song. It’s magnificent. However, the locations, the gadgets, and even the songs cannot be enough to keep this unwieldy franchise going. 

So let’s look at how it started — with a rather posh English chap called Ian Fleming. He penned the first 007 novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, and proceeded to write another 11 Bond novels and two short story collections. The timeline in these books is rather vague, but Bond’s penchant for cars, drinking, and women remains consistent. It was a successful formula, and Fleming sold 30 million books in his lifetime — although it wasn’t until after his death that Bond entered a whole new medium, with an American film producer named Albert “Cubby” Broccoli first bringing the character to screen in 1962, under his production company Eon Productions. Unbelievably, Bond never left the tight grip of the Broccoli clan: 58 years after Bond’s first outing the producers of No Time To Die are Albert’s daughter Barbara Broccoli and stepson, Michael G. Wilson. Albert having handed the Aston Martin keys over to them back in 1995. This is a family dynasty that likes control — No Time to Die was originally supposed to be directed by Danny Boyle, who brought along his regular writer, John Hodge. This didn’t work out so well. Hodge’s script was rejected, and Boyle quit, stating “The producers wanted to go in a different direction.” The Broccolis weren’t happy, there was no way he could stay.

I think it is this iron control that is the key to Bond’s success. The Broccolis know what they are doing — after all, the family has been doing it for nearly 60 years. They have been the ones to choose the lead, the director, the locations, and now they have finished Ian Fleming’s material, the stories. A 2015 New York Times interview revealed that the creative process begins with Barbara and Michael trying to decide on a premise and a villain that can embody some topical issue or prevalent fear. This is critical: Their Bond films change to reflect the world they are going to be viewed in. It was a strategy first started by Albert Broccoli: When Star Wars turned space into a trend, 007 also reached for the stars in 1979’s Moonraker. And as Dr. Jaap Verheul, editor of The Cultural Life of James Bond, has said, “Each time a new actor becomes Bond, the series takes the opportunity to recalibrate itself to the ideology of the audience it’s trying to talk to.”

Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli did just that after brutally dismissing my mum’s crush, Pierce Brosnan. In 1997, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery rather wonderfully satirized the movies, making things groovier, but much harder for Brosnan’s rather tongue-in-cheek style to continue working. Then 9/11 happened, and the Broccolis felt the world needed a rougher, darker, Bond: A thug with hidden complexities. Brosnan had to go. They wanted Daniel Craig. With this reinvention, some of the more unpalatable elements of Bond were also tackled — for example, in Casino Royale, Bond’s drinking is portrayed for the first time as a coping mechanism for his internalized guilt. 

During this dive into the world of 007, I discovered that one of my favorite writers, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the star of Fleabag, had worked on the script of No Time to Die. She has said of Craig’s portrayal of Bond that he “let us in a bit, which makes the moments he shuts us out even more arresting … Overall he grounded a fantasy character in real emotion, which is what I think we hadn’t realized we’d missed amongst the action and the bravado. So basically, with Daniel Craig, Bond isn’t all about the arse-slapping. In fact, this Bond actually falls in love, actually cries. What I didn’t realize at first, as I sat in the cinema somewhat confused having missed the preceding film, Spectre, is that the Craig films also follow on from each other in a series — so for the first time Bond even ages as well.  But even as James Bond gets older, he is still never diluted — the Broccolis don’t allow any spin-off shows where M is venturing out to run a start-up spy business. It’s always all about 007.

These producers are smart. They know how to handle their baby. No Time To Die is Craig’s last film as 007, and the rumor mill of who will be next has started, with some speculation that it could even be a woman next time round. I don’t think it will be. The Broccolis have a good thing going. Bond is invariably going to be a white guy — there was enough backlash when he went blonde — but they will make sure to always keep shifting him just enough to make sure he is palatable to the audience, whatever decade we are in. And with the next generation of Broccolis already in the business, I suspect there will be many more. 

***

Further Reading

During my research for this post, I came across three particular long-form articles that I enjoyed — so if you feel you would like to dwell a little longer in 007’s company, keep on reading. 

What the Future of Bond Movies Could Look Like (Al Horner, BBC, September 2021)

“The world has moved on, Commander Bond. So stay in your lane. Or I will put a bullet in your knee.” — Nomi, No Time To Die.

This article is a fascinating look into how Bond has changed over the eras.

Heart of An Assassin: How Daniel Craig Changed James Bond Forever (Sam Knight, GQ, March 2020)

A thoughtful insight into the franchise through the eyes of Daniel Craig. 

The Broken Pop of James Bond Songs (Adrian Daub & Charles Kronengold, Longreads, October 2015)

A look at the messy and glorious world of the Bond Pop song. 

 

Me and You

Illustration by Mariah Quintanilla

William Torrey| Longreads | October 2021 | 30 minutes (9,100 words)

I: My Protector

Our brotherhood begins with me in a blindfold, one that’s been on for what feels like forever. I’m 18 and pledging a fraternity, and to be a pledge, I’ve learned, means you’re a constant disappointment. You have not properly mopped the bathroom after chapter dinner. You have not properly memorized the Greek alphabet. You have not attracted sufficient pussy to the Gameday tailgate. 

On this night, a hot one in late September, we’ve been summoned to the house for a meeting, one that at first seems promising, in that it involves Natural Light, but soon enough begins to get weird. The Actives line us up and tie rags around our faces, then shove us into rooms with music blaring. “NONE OF Y’ALL BITCHES SAY A MOTHERFUCKING WORD!” someone with beer breath shouts at my face. Then he slams the door so hard I’m sure it’s broken. We sit and wait for God knows what. 

In time — Twenty minutes? An hour? — they lead us out back, where we’re stripped of cigarettes, cell phones, watches, and wallets. A very drunk Active screams that we are, in essence, complete losers, unworthy, a bunch of faggot-ass pieces of shit who ought to be thrown into the Mississippi River. “That’s a great idea!” another Active yells, and before I know it, I’m in a car, still blindfolded, lying in the backseat, “so the cops don’t see,” and we’re zooming to the levee. “Torrey?” someone keeps asking. “Does your bitch ass know how to swim?” My heart pounds so hard I worry I’ll faint. I’ve been in college a month now, and until this moment, I’d fooled myself into believing fraternities weren’t that tough. But now I’m facing danger. I’ll be sodomized with a broomstick or forced to eat shit. I’ll sink to the bottom of the Mighty Mississippi. I picture my mom, asleep in Texas, getting the call in the deep dark night: Pick up your boy at the Baton Rouge morgue. 

The car stops and they line us up again, somewhere that could be anywhere but sure seems like the levee. The whirr of cicada song, the stink of refineries. Wet grass sogging our Sperrys. More yelling. Who’ll go in first? Who’ll sink and who’ll swim? I shift my weight, try not to shake. 

“Repeat after me!” a drunk Active calls. “I love my big brother!” (We repeat.) “My big brother’s better than me!” (We repeat.) “My big brother’s gotta bigger dick than me!” (We repeat.) “My big brother can fuck my date!” (We repeat.) It goes on like this, this litany, the fear inside me cooling to confusion and finally relief.

Then off comes the blindfold, and he’s there, beaming at me in the shadows by the river, my big brother: Mike from Chalmette. I blink as he hugs me. Pressed tight there against his chest, I am, for the first time in hours, not afraid. I am cared for. I am safe.  

“Come on, baby bro,” he grins, “let’s get fucked up!” 

*** 

Hours later, after we’ve won a game called Beer-a-Minute, Mike somehow drives us back to campus. Sitting in his old green Chevy, watching the first bands of dawn push through the black, he tells me he could’ve had any pledge as his little brother, but the only one he wanted was me. 

“There’s just something about you.” 

“What do you mean?” I ask, feeling special.

“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “But I do know we’re gonna be more than just fraternity brothers. Me and you, we’re gonna be real brothers. Me and you, we’re gonna be great friends.” 

“Okay,” I say, and that’s what happens.

***

In many ways, we are brothers. “Fraternal twins,” we joke, separated by a state line and precisely 13 months. We’re both silly and sensitive dreamers. The kind of guys who can’t help but push the bit, who once they’re going, can’t stop until everyone’s doubled over. The kind of guys who egg each other on until they can’t even breathe. Whenever we run into somebody Mike knows but I don’t — at Reggie’s in Tigerland, smoking Camels in the LSU quad — he never fails to introduce me as his real little brother, and more often than not, never mind that we look nothing alike — he’s short and tubby; I’m tall with a sharp-lined face — people believe him. He’s that charming.    

Like all brothers, though, we’re not the same. I make Dean’s List grades every term while Mike eeks by with C’s. I’ve dined at fancy restaurants, been to the MoMa and the Smithsonian, but when it comes to street smarts, Mike’s got me beat. He can fix a flat no problem, has a job on top of school, pays his own rent. He’s also got more self-control. As time goes by, it becomes clear that, while we both love to party — or, as we’ll call it, “rage” — I’ll always be the lightweight: snoring in the bar, blacking out, and stealing Kit Kats from the Brightside Circle K. But Mike’s always there to save me. When my eyes go glassy, he puts me to bed. When I pass out at a fraternity formal, he lays my tuxedoed carcass in someone’s car and dances with my date. He’s my protector, there for me so steadily that, by the time I’m midway through college, if I go out and Mike’s not there, I don’t feel quite safe. 


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And then there’s where we’re from. I grew up in a fancy San Antonio neighborhood called Alamo Heights, where everybody’s dad is in oil and gas and lots of moms live in yoga pants. My grandfather was the president of a bank, and my dad, who divorced my mom when I was 2, is a lawyer. My mom and I weren’t rich, at least not compared to the kids in my grade who got BMWs at 16, but I drive a new Mitsubishi, and college is covered.

Ask Mike where he’s from, and he’ll tell you, New Orleans. But that’s not true; Mike is from Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish — a place just east of the Industrial Canal that real New Orleanians call “Da Parish.” Early on in college, I get that Da Parish isn’t exactly the place you want to be from. These are your blue collars, your Y’ats, people who say axe instead of ask. My fraternity brothers from well-to-do families on the North Shore and Lafayette give Mike constant shit about it, but he takes it in stride. Chalmatians, as they’re called, are used to such jokes.

I like to think I always knew Mike was coming from less than me, but in truth, it wasn’t a subject I gave much thought. Back then we were just two guys eating frat house jambalaya, drinking cheap beer and Ten High. His cash came from waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant off I-10; while mine showed up like magic in a bank account set up by my dad. And anyway Mike never said much about Chalmette. I knew only that he was the first in his family to go to college. His dad’s some kind of mechanic and his mom’s some kind of secretary, and his little sister, who’s my age and not going to college, is expecting a baby. During freshman year winter break, just a few months into our friendship, Mike drove 500 miles to visit me in San Antonio, but it took a whole other year before I saw where he grew up, never mind that it was an hour from campus. In those days, it never occurred to me that maybe Mike didn’t want me to see where he was from, that maybe he was hiding something. But even if he was, and even if he’d told me so, I wouldn’t have understood. Of course, in those days I didn’t understand anything. 

 II: Bourbon Street Knockout

Every Mardi Gras, our fraternity fills a U-Haul with busted couches and kegs and claims a spot beneath the Pontchartrain Expressway. For days we sit in the false dark and watch parades and drink and drink and drink. Sometime on the Monday before Fat Tuesday, both of us blind with hangovers, Mike tells me he’s got to go by his parents’, and if I ride with him, I’ll get a free meal, a shower, and a clean bathroom. I’m caked in street mud and very tired of holding my breath in the St. Charles port-a-potties, so I hop in his truck without thinking. I didn’t know New Orleans well then, but as we whizzed past the Superdome and the city seemed to vanish, I knew we weren’t headed Uptown where our other friends lived.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Chalmette.”

I roll my eyes and think, Da Parish.

“Well, how far’s that?” 

He shrugs again. “Fifteen minutes.”

The little house on Rose Street is just that: little. It seems too small for Mike, let alone for Mike, his mom and dad, his sister, and her new baby. His mom greets us from the cramped front porch. She’s got a tattoo and wears a Rolling Stones shirt that’s been washed a thousand times. All I can think is how young she seems.

In my memory, we don’t stay long. There’s tension, the source of which I don’t get, and everything starts to feel rushed. We don’t eat. I don’t see his dad or sister. Mike gets what he needs, we shower and go. 

“How old are your parents?” I ask.

We’re crossing the bridge back to Orleans Parish. Mike tells me.

“Jesus,” I say, “so your dad was like … 16 when you were born?”

“Yep.” He stares straight ahead. “How old was yours?”

“I don’t know, man, like 38.” A year older than Mike’s dad is now. 

***

That night, sipping a Bourbon Street Knockout in a camp chair under the overpass, my mind won’t stop spinning. How is that where Mike grew up? How was that his mom? How did she have babies in high school? How could our lives be so … different? Da Parish, I think, what had I expected? I brood there until I’m pass-out drunk, waking with a start when my cigarette burns me. 

His cash came from waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant off I-10; while mine showed up like magic in a bank account set up by my dad.

Days later, I call my mom and tell her about Mike’s. She listens while I ramble on about the tiny house in the neighborhood filled with other tiny houses, about his mom’s tattoo, the old shirt, but after a few minutes, she breaks in. 

“Honey, don’t you get it? 

“Get what?”

“Mike,” she says, “he’s poor.”

“Oh,” I say. 

My eyes go wide. I see it now. She’s just ripped off the blindfold. 

“Well, I don’t know …” I trail off.

I knew it already — I had to — but couldn’t or wouldn’t accept it. Mike was from a place where poor people lived, and yet he wasn’t poor. Not my big brother. Was he leery that day, to show me his house? Was his mom flustered to host me? Will whose dad’s a lawyer? Will in his short shorts and his Brooks Brothers shirt? 

“Now don’t get me wrong,” my mom breaks in, “Mike’s got a heart of gold. It doesn’t matter.” 

“Right.” I snap out of it. “Of course. It makes no difference.”

“Right.” 

Six months later a storm hits, and I see that it does.

III: A State of Emergency

Katrina won’t stop changing her mind. She’s coming right at us, then she’s not, then she’s bouncing back from Florida, en route to kill us all. In my two years in Louisiana, every hurricane that was ever supposed to destroy New Orleans has petered out into a thunderstorm, and I’m sure this one will do the same. But not Mike. Mike is freaking out. 

The morning before landfall, he gets me up early to help him raid the fraternity’s ice machine. I’m annoyed. Fifteen minutes ago, I was in bed with a naked Theta. Now I’m hungover and sweating while we lug a huge cooler. 

“Why are we even doing this? Even if the storm hits New Orleans, won’t we be fine in Baton Rouge?”

Mike says we might lose power, then he tells me his parents have to come to stay with us.

“In our apartment? Can’t they just get a hotel?”

As soon as I ask this, Mike gives me The Look. It’s the one he uses when I brag about backpacking Europe. Or when my dad, out of nowhere, mails me an envelope containing not one, not three, but five hundred dollar bills. Or when I pressure him into giving up his Friday double so he can get smashed with me and be my protector. It’s a look thick with envy and contempt, one that asks the big question without saying a word: Why does your life get to be so easy?    

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I backtrack. “I just meant, like, wouldn’t they be more comfortable?”

“It’s a mandatory evacuation,” Mike tells me. “There won’t be a hotel from Baton Rouge to Houston.” What he doesn’t tell me: Even if there was, his parents couldn’t afford it.

*** 

Late that night, Mike and I drink Bud Selects in the bed of his Chevy. Upstairs, in the apartment, his parents sleep in his bed. The storm’s just hours away. The sky above us: a grey-black swirl. 

“This is gonna be fucked,” Mike says.

“I still think it’ll be okay.” 

This is the lie I’ve told myself all afternoon, one born of a nagging question: If the storm does destroy Mike’s parents’ house, will they move in with us permanently? And, if so, how might this impact my liquor, cigarette, and TV intake? After showing up this morning in a tiny black Civic, Mike’s mom spent the entire day cleaning our shithole apartment. His dad, after arriving in a truck packed to the hilt, immediately went out and bought a generator and has otherwise barely spoken. Mike’s parents are quiet generally, but when I’m around they’re practically silent. I don’t see then what’s so plain to me now: On top of worrying they might lose everything, they don’t want to be in my hair.

“I mean, it could still turn and hit Texas,” I say, lighting a Camel. 

“No,” Mike says. “It’s coming right at us. This whole thing’s just gonna be…”

“…Fucked?” 

“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

***

And he’s right. 

The next morning, I wake to find Mike and his parents in front of the TV. The national news is on — Special Report — and they’ve been watching for hours. Apparently, while I snoozed like a beer-drunk baby, one of the worst hurricanes in history made landfall and destroyed the Gulf Coast. The Mr. GO canal has flooded Lake Pontchartrain; the wind has shoved the water onto land. Much of New Orleans is underwater. Canals and levees continue to breach. We are, I learn, in a State of Emergency. 

Not knowing really what any of this means, I ask what they’ve heard about their house. Mike stares empty-eyed and mutters something that sounds like OK.

“It’s OK!?!?” I ask.

“No.” Mike sighs. “It’s underwater.” 

I’m standing in our apartment. The power’s on. Outside it’s barely raining. 

“Underwater?” 

The little house on Rose Street. Chalmette high. His dad’s shop. Da Parish. Thirteen feet.  

“Underwater,” Mike says again, the word already too familiar on his lips. 

***

As the day drags on and the big ugly picture gets bigger and uglier, I start to feel strange. On the one hand, I’m thankful I’ve escaped disaster. A devastating storm has struck within an hour of where I live, but I’m totally fine. On the other hand, I can’t help but notice my being totally fine is all I can think of. I’m surrounded by people who are newly homeless, people who happen to be my best friend’s parents, a man and a woman who cleaned my house and bought me groceries, and a generator we never had to use. I’m staring into the face of human suffering, yet all I can think of is me. 

Not that they’re complaining, these refugees. Life’s hard, but they can take it. That tired old phrase: It is what it is. I don’t like to imagine how I’d react, at 20, to the news I’d lost all my earthly possessions. The tantrum. My God. Even picturing it makes me sick.  

***

LSU shuts down and the Whole Foods where I’ve started to work, just part-time, operates on a come-in-if-you-can basis. I call my boss and say that, while I’d love to get ten bucks an hour to make free-range turkey and aioli wraps, I’ve got my roommate’s parents with me. They’re from Chalmette, so I need to help out. “Just focus on your family,” he tells me. I should correct him but don’t.  

Apparently, while I snoozed like a beer-drunk baby, one of the worst hurricanes in history made landfall and destroyed the Gulf Coast.

For the next week, instead of helping, instead of telling Mike’s parents they’re welcome to stay, I ghost and pretend Katrina didn’t happen. While poor blacks are herded like cattle into the Superdome, I fart around my fraternity house, playing MarioKart and shooting Jim Beam. While people too sick to move die horrible deaths in a hospital without power, I apathetically text the sorority girls I’m constantly leading on, until one of them tells me to come over for sex. While my big brother has to process that not simply his home but everything he’s ever associated with home — his childhood, his community — has been destroyed, I grow impatient waiting for everything to go back to normal.

After a few days, Mike gives me a call.

“Are you gonna sleep at the fraternity again?” 

“There’s a bunch of people here,” I tell him. “I’ll crash on the couch.”

“Who’s there?”

I say the names, all New Orleans guys, but not from Da Parish, so their houses are fine. We both pause to inhale smokes.

“My parents are gonna go soon,” he says. “In case you’re worried.”

“Worried? Why would I be worried?”  

***

And then they do go, just as fast as they came, only leaving behind a cleaner apartment.

As to where they went, I have no idea. It has to be someplace, but the details didn’t matter. I’d had my fill of tragedy and victims. Once they were gone, they were gone. At last, Mike and I can get back to being drunken goofballs, a couple of flat-footed dreamers. We can resume our fraternal twinhood, keep pretending we’re precisely the same. 

And we can, so long as my blindfold’s on. And for the next few years, it is, tied tight. Because, for me, the storm’s over. But for Mike, it’s only just begun. 

***

Mike and I live together another year-and-a-half, a time during which he declares a theatre major, hardly attends class, declares a general studies major, basically fails out, and then decides to “take a break.” A time during which I declare a creative writing major, get a girlfriend, study in Spain, and finish college on time. A time during which Katrina’s barely mentioned.

My last summer in Baton Rouge is a bacchanal of self-congratulation, one fueled by graduation checks and the insane presumption that I’m on my way to fame. Over the past few semesters, my fiction professors have given my stories way too much praise. Praise I rolled in like a pig in shit. Praise I’ve turned into a smug certainty that I’m destined to be some literary darling. And while I’ve spent hardly any time actually writing, the universe has nonetheless rewarded me with a full-ride fellowship to an MFA program. I’ll have the next three years to read, dream up stories, and surely win the Pulitzer.

Mike is waiting tables. 

But we’re still raging, still cracking everyone up, still staying up late on the porch drinking Franzia and smoking Camels. Still brothers. And yet, in these waning weeks, as I pack my room, things feel out of sync. I’m off to a cool new life. Mike’s staying right where he is. He’s the big brother, but he’s fallen behind.

***

On my last night in town, in August of 2007, after boudin balls and Jack and Cokes at The Chimes, a group of us heads to a friend’s for one last whatever. Once we’ve rid the fridge of Natural Lights, once we’ve told our stories — the time Mike motorboated a friend’s big sister, the Halloween I evaded arrest while dressed as a Twinkie — once we’ve stretched the night as long as we can, my girlfriend yawns and looks at her phone. 

“Time to get moving,” she tells me. 

“Guess so,” I say.

Mike and I light Camels in the courtyard while she gets the car. It’s a moment. We both know it. Not goodbye forever, but goodbye to this. We hug and cry. Mike tells me he loves me, says I’m gonna write some beautiful book. For graduation, he gave me a Royal Deluxe typewriter with a page in the spool. A two-word message: Good luck. I tell Mike I love him, too, and as we sway there beneath a flickering floodlight, I feel a pang of guilt. For the first time, I have the urge to say sorry. Sorry the storm fucked up your house. Sorry the last few years have been so tough. Sorry I never asked if you were hurting. But the moment passes. Our hug ends when my girlfriend honks the horn. 

“You’re my brother,” he says, and I tell him he’s mine. 

“Wow,” my girlfriend says as we drive off. “Mike’s really broken up.”

I tighten my blindfold and say, “He’s fine.” 

IV: Trapped in Fantasyland 

Years pass.

“I feel like I just gotta move to France,” Mike tells me. 

We’re on the phone, on a summer night when I’m home from grad school. I’m smoking on my mom’s front porch, drunk on cheap vodka. 

“And do what, exactly?” 

“I don’t know, man. Work at a cafe. Learn cuisine.”

Mike’s obsessed with cooking. He watches the Food Network religiously, loves Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman, wants to work for Thomas Keller. 

I sigh. “You don’t speak French. You don’t have a visa. You don’t have the money to get to France, let alone rent an apartment.” But at this point, I’m barely listening to myself. 

I’m starting to see that Mike might be terminally stuck, starting to worry he’ll burn his entire 20s fantasizing over dream lives. Last we spoke, he was moving to Austin to be an indie rock drummer. Before that, it was Second City in Chicago. Now it’s the CIA. And while everyone’s allowed to dream big, what’s all the more crazy-making is that Mike can actually do the things he dreams of doing. He’s a wonderful actor, has performed Shakespeare with LSU Theatre. He’s a talented chef, has a knack for flavor, can pull loose ends from the fridge and whip them up into something fancy in no time. He’s a good drummer, too, and has been in a Baton Rouge band that makes cool music. And yet, when the chips are down, he never commits to any of these dreams; he commits instead to dreaming up new ones. 

I’m off to a cool new life. Mike’s staying right where he is. He’s the big brother, but he’s fallen behind.

In the years since I’ve left Louisiana, Mike’s kept waiting tables and now has a side gig as our fraternity’s House Dad. He lives in a little apartment in the back, a five-second walk from the restaurant. When he told me his plan to move in, it seemed less than ideal, but House Dads get free room and board, and he’s got debt, so I figured he could pay it down. He’s back in school, too, part-time. So maybe this will end up good. Maybe he’ll snag a girlfriend, graduate, and get back on track. Maybe. But, of course, that doesn’t happen. What does happen is Mike finds himself, at 24 and 25, surrounded by out-of-control college kids, at the restaurant, at the fraternity, all over campus. What does happen is he drinks away his tips at the bar, gains weight, keeps ungodly hours, saves no money, never goes to class, and while the rest of his buddies get advanced degrees, buy houses, and get married, he lives in the bowels of our fraternity house, hiding. 

“Just finish school,” I tell him, incredulous. Me, the little brother who’s never been out of school. Me, whose harrowing experience with Hurricane Katrina is fodder for stories at cocktail parties.

“Easy for you,” he could’ve said but never did. Mike never called me out on a single thing. 

***

Whenever I come to Baton Rouge, I stay with Mike, and by the end of each visit, booze-whipped and bloated, I’m amazed that my deeply indulgent nostalgia trip is to some degree his normal life. But when I show up at his apartment just before the start of my last year of grad school, in August of 2009, I’m no longer amazed; I’m alarmed. 

A plumbing disaster has occurred — and, by the looks of it, not recently — destroying the room where he used to sleep. The place is a wreck. Half the ceiling is gone. Mold and mildew all over. 

“What the fuck happened?” I ask.

“Oh,” he waves it off. “Some shit with the pipes.”

“Well right. But is it getting repaired?”

Mike tells a story that can be boiled down to: He owes a guy money but won’t pay the guy until he fixes the leak, but the guy who’s owed won’t fix the leak until Mike pays.

“So it’s a war of attrition?” 

“Basically.”

“But you have to live here,” I say. “So … you lose.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not livin’ here much longer.”

“What are you gonna do?”

He shrugs. “Cooking school.”

“How? With what money?”

“I don’t know, man.”

The rest of the trip is unpleasant. We hole up in the dank apartment, drink oceans of Early Times and watch Top Chef. We play beer pong with college kids we don’t know and don’t really like, guys who get blackout drunk, take Percocets, and fight. We take Percocets ourselves one night and wake up the next morning on the deck. 

What’s going on, I wonder. The last time I saw Mike, at summer’s start, we had a blast. We went Tiki Tubing down the Amite River, played putt-putt, ate crawfish. We got stoned and drank Abitas with his bandmates and laughed until our sides hurt. Why does this trip feel so different? 

Back then, Mike kept a LiveJournal, one that’s still online. In an entry made after my first visit in May, he writes on his “dilemma.” His bandmates — the friends who replaced our crew when we graduated — have just graduated themselves and will soon move to Austin. Mike wants to go but feels like he can’t. The entry, posted at 4 a.m., is titled “What is and What Should Be.” Here’s how it ends: 

 As I’ve come closer to the day my bandmates leave, I find myself staring at nothing and thinking of everything.   

…[E]very day I spend not … doing the things I know in my heart I need to do, I die a little. I’ve known for some time now the path I need to take and yet, I’m afraid to take that leap. I do nothing to help myself.

I want to go. I need to go. Why can’t I?  

I want to cut my losses and start fresh. I want to be happy.  

The opening line of Twelfth Night reads, “If music be the food of love, play on …” 

I want to play. I want to cook. I want to eat. I want to go.

I want, I want, I want. But he never did. And over the summer, while his bandmates settled into new lives and I finished my thesis, he stared at nothing and thought of everything. He died a little. He began to fall apart. 

***

As I pack to go back to school, it dawns on me that, ever since I’ve left Baton Rouge, it’s become my Fantasyland, a place where I can pretend I’m still the crazy drunk I was in college. A guy who’s yet to dream of becoming a writer, to feel the pressure of expectation. A guy who doesn’t fret constantly about what comes next. Usually, when a visit ends, I’m sad. But this time, I’m thrilled. There’s a danger in idling. You’re not supposed to be in college forever. Mike had a similar realization back in May, but he’s still here, trapped in Fantasyland. Since Katrina, he’s survived on the idea of starting over, the idea of escape. Now he’s come to the end of the line. He’s got to do something, but he doesn’t want to disappoint anyone, so he locks up and disappoints everyone, most of all himself.

Like the leak in the roof, it’s a war of attrition. 

***

Before I leave, I tell him I’m worried. 

“You need to get out of here, Mike. This is no way to live.” 

What I don’t say: This is the home of a depressed person. 

“I know,” he says.

We hug in the grim fluorescence, and I head off to school. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder how Mike felt as he watched me drive away. Was he happy to get back to hiding? Or did he feel more lost than ever? I remember precisely how I felt: equal parts guilty and relieved. And as my Honda hummed east along the Gulf Coast, and the endless green swathes of Alabama became the slow sweeping hills of Georgia, as I got farther and farther away, I relied hard on the bad brother’s mantra: He’s at rock bottom. Things can only go up from here.

V: The Very Worst Thing

Another year. Another call from Mike. Only this time, I don’t answer.

I’m hammering away at a fresh story in my new apartment in New Orleans, where after a summer of living with my mom in Texas, of writing, manual labor, and endless nights of abject drunkenness, certain I’ve fucked up my life — I’ve somehow landed a job as an adjunct at a commuter college on Lake Pontchartrain. My students are mostly poor — black and Vietnamese kids from Gretna and Kenner, white kids from Destrehan and Da Parish. Compared to my fellow MFA grads who work as shopgirls and movers, I’m lucky to have this low-paying gig. I’m starting to see that a so-so writer with delusions of grandeur, and a penchant for blackout drinking, can end up in an unglamorous place. I’m starting to get why people study medicine or law. Starting to see that life takes money, and the more you’ve got, the better it is. Through all of grad school, I’d presumed my degree from an unheard of regional program would automatically yield a slam dunk job at a liberal arts college in the Berkshires: But lo and behold, here I am, desperately thankful to escape my mother’s, to net $20,000 a year “teaching” freshman comp in sad classrooms with overflowing trash cans on a campus so ghostly it seems like Katrina’s surge hit last month, not five years back. This is not where you’re supposed to be, I tell myself while I freak out about barely making rent and grade essays with mistakes so basic I don’t know what to say. You’ve got to live up to your potential. You’ve got to write yourself out of this mess! 

Which is what I try to do — write — unless of course, I’m busy carousing the Marigny or the Quarter, resuming my college persona, undoing the maturing I did in grad school, getting kicked out of Cooter Brown’s and Tipitina’s, and Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club … and maybe moving to America’s booziest city wasn’t my best move. And look now: Mike’s calling again, and I’ve put in a solid 20 minutes today, so I may as well power down the old laptop and see what he needs.

“Yello?” I say. 

“Will!” he says like he’s fucking choking.

“Mike? What’s wrong?” 

“My father” — again that choking sound — “My father’s. Killed. Himself.”

I stand and spin in a circle. That’s what I remember: saying “Oh my God!” then standing and spinning in a circle. Like I had to confirm I was still in my room. That I was still Will Torrey, still 25, still a man alive in the world. “Where do you need me?” I ask, and Mike tells me: his parents’, right away. Then I hang up and call my mom. 

“Why does this keep … happening to Mike?” I ask.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” she says through tears.

But, of course, we both know that’s a lie.

***

The hours and days and weeks that follow are a whirlwind of strangeness. 

I’m in Mike’s parents’ yard, in Lacombe, surrounded by his buddies from Da Parish. We pinch our lips and nod as this or that uncle or cousin goes in to be with Mike and his family, all of us just waiting there, simply existing as we try to grasp that, just after dawn this morning, Mike’s dad — a month shy of 44 — drove out to some bayou and put a bullet in his heart. That is all Mike can say when I get there, all he can cry into my ear as he hugs me so hard my back cracks: “He shot himself in the heart.” My mind goes to the morning after Katrina. “He shot himself in the heart” — the delivery, so matter of fact. It may as well be, “Our house is underwater.” 

Days later, I’m up at 3 a.m., on the phone with Mike, whose mom has just shown him the shirt his dad wore when it happened. “The hole,” he says, breathless and sad, “I saw it.” 

Later still, I’m beside Mike at a funeral home in St. Tammany Parish, staring down at the body that used to be his dad’s, a body that now seems small, his coat and tie almost juvenile, like he’s a kid getting dragged to a Sears family portrait. Mike lays a hand on his dad, and I lay a hand on Mike. I try to recall the last time I saw Mike’s dad, I’m sure it was Katrina, the day he and his now widow left our apartment. 

***

What follows is a lost time. Mike is okay but not. Sometimes, cracking jokes over hurricanes at Lafitte’s, he seems like himself. Other times, calling me from Bourbon Street, drunk off his ass with friends from Da Parish, crying and screaming, he does not. He tells me he’s worried his mom’s losing it, that maybe there’s money from a will that may or may not exist, money that he and his sister and her son should get, and could I maybe call my lawyer dad? I tell Mike to go to therapy, and he says he can’t afford it, but even if he could, I know he wouldn’t go. He shaves his head, gains weight, lets his beard puff out until he looks like Zack Galafinakis in The Hangover

I write. I publish. I teach. I take pretty girls out to bars in New Orleans.

I drink and drink and drink and wonder why I never feel good about anything.  

That is all Mike can say when I get there, all he can cry into my ear as he hugs me so hard my back cracks: ‘He shot himself in the heart.’

At some point, the restaurant where Mike’s waited tables for what feels like an eon opens a new place on the North Shore, and they pick him to run the kitchen. When he tells me the news I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself. This is it! I think. An actual dream come true! Get out of Baton Rouge, make money, grow up! 

Which he does, sort of. Mike scores a great place in Covington, starts his new job. But then he calls and says he can’t afford where he’s living. I ask him his new salary and his new rent and then tell him he absolutely can. “I dunno,” he says and sighs a long sigh.

I visit soon after and the place is half boxed.

“Please tell me you’re not moving out.”

He cuts his eyes to the floor. Standing with him there in this gorgeous apartment, with skylights, new appliances, exposed brick — a place that’s the precise opposite of the ruined House Dad Suite — I lose my patience.

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

He throws up his hands. “I can’t afford it!”

“Yes, you can!” My cheeks are hot. I want to grab him and shake him. “And you can’t just walk away from an apartment, Mike! Where the fuck are you gonna live?”

Mike tells me some story about how he never signed a lease, that he’ll eat the deposit, load his shit into his new pickup, the one that belonged to his dad, and drive off into the night. He says he’ll move in with a buddy from Da Parish, a guy who needs a roommate because his crazy wife just left him. What he doesn’t say is that the buddy’s mom will live there too. And what he doesn’t know is that having been shuffled around after Katrina, she’s grown bitter. That she’ll treat Mike like an unwelcome guest. He won’t be allowed to cook and “smell up the kitchen,” won’t be allowed to play drums. What he doesn’t see is, after just a taste of life as a grownup, he’s trading it all to live on the margins of a house that’s not his, to live by the rules of a mom that’s not his. He doesn’t see it — or he pretends not to — but that’s what happens, and in the months that follow, when he vents about it over the phone, I have no sympathy. What did you think was gonna happen. What the fuck did you think?  

I don’t recall what we did that day in Covington, but whatever it was, it was ruined by my annoyance at Mike. Why can’t you just live in an apartment like a normal person? I wonder. You’re making progress. Why sabotage yourself? What I don’t see then: Mike’s terrified of being by himself, alone with his thoughts, his ghosts. What I don’t see, too, is how tight I’m still wearing my blindfold. I’m angry at my friend because he won’t accomplish what I’ve accomplished without the touch of my privilege. I’m angry at my friend because his life’s so hard.

Why can’t you just be like me? I wonder, sitting up at night, getting drunk by myself.

Why can’t you just be like me? Lazy, but bitter that I’m not rich or famous.

VI: Off the Grid

More years. 

I keep teaching, publish stories and essays, and get a better job at LSU, where I go out for beers at the Chimes with the same professors who, years back, told me I had what it took. I live in a funky yellow house in Capitol Heights with the woman who’s now my wife. We take jogs through the neighborhood, walk to Calandro’s to buy wine, go to Radiobar with the editor of The Southern Review, have lively dinner parties with all our lively, literary friends. Life’s perfect, but that doesn’t stop my complaining — about making bullshit money, about never getting an interview for a tenure-track job, about always getting the runaround from agents, about my failure to finish the novel I’ve wallowed in for the last three years. I’m doing most of the stuff I set out to do, but all I can think of is how little I’ve done. I’m making it, I guess, in a failing kind of way.

Mike in the meantime has gone “off the grid.” He’s still running the kitchen at the restaurant, still doing mostly fine, but he’s bought a house way out in the sticks. He builds a chicken coop and talks about farming. I don’t see him much, and when we do talk, he pinballs from one new dream to another: He’ll open a vegetable stand or his own barbeque joint or a food truck or he’ll move to Colorado to grow weed. By now, this stuff washes over me, yet I can’t help but worry that, in getting this house, he’s found a new way to hide: a little compound in the middle of nowhere, a permanent home where the world can’t find him. And why don’t you want to be found? I wonder. Who do you think’s coming to get you? 

Over the summer of 2014, two of our best friends get married, and Mike skips both weddings, each time coming up with a half-cocked excuse. Can’t get off work. Can’t afford gas. 

I’m engaged now myself, and after the second missed wedding I send Mike a text.

If you pull this shit when I get married, I’ll kill you.

You know I won’t, he writes.

We need to hang. Been too long.

How would you feel, he writes, about doing some yard work?

***

I head up the Causeway the next afternoon, Lake Pontchartrain spreading out alongside me like a giant, brackish bathtub. I remember the day Mike’s father died, zooming up this bridge from my old place in New Orleans, trying to understand the pain he’s in, trying to imagine what it’d be like if my dad had done what his just did. My dad calls himself “the absent father” — and I don’t know him well — but he’s always had a knack for being there when I need him. When I finished grad school and couldn’t find a job, when I was sure I was a failure, moving back in with my mom, I called him. “You’re a white man with an education,” he said, almost laughing. “The world was made for you.” Then he mailed me a Treasury bond for $10,000.

What I don’t see then: Mike’s terrified of being by himself, alone with his thoughts, his ghosts.

The next morning, after a night of grilling pork chops, getting drunk and high, and watching “No Reservations,” Mike and I rise early, eat Adderall, buy mulch and shovels and rakes, and embark on a monumental day of work: mowing, trimming, pruning, weeding, pulling jasmine from his fence. At lunch, we break for Budweisers, and Mike gases up a chainsaw. It growls to life as he yanks the cord. He hoists it overhead, revs it with a laugh.

“What are we doing with that?” I ask.

Mike smiles, teeth bright against his dirt-caked face. 

“We’re gonna cut down a fuckin’ tree.”

***

The most important thing we know about the tree we’re cutting down is that if it falls the wrong way, it’ll destroy Mike’s house. The most important thing we don’t know about trees is how to dictate the direction in which they fall. Either way, we know that when it falls, it’ll fall fast. Either way, we know that this, like everything, is an act of faith.

Mike saws until the tree’s about to tip, and then — employing some silent brotherly language and a panicky series of moves that are at once like dancing and not — Mike pivots one way and I the other, and then, gasping for air, we push, step back, and … womp! Just womp! A sound like I’ve never heard before. A thud, a sucking, the inverse of sound. 

We are alive. The tree is felled. The house stands undestroyed. 

Mike and I blink there in the yard and share a look of wonder. Then we race over to one another and holler as we hug.

***

Late that night, drunk as skunks, sitting in the pale glow of his porchlight, Mike looks up at the moon and says, “almost four years.”

“I know,” I tell him. “Hard to believe.”  

I start to form a thought — how proud I am of him, how sorry I am, for all this shit, for always being so hard on him — only I’m too drunk, so what I say, instead, out of nowhere, is, “I’ll never forget, Mike. That day. The sound of your voice when you called.” And then I double over in a sob. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever cried without warning. 

Mike gets me up and holds me. “Don’t worry, baby bro,” he says. “It’ll all be OK.”

***

Hungover the next morning, I remember Mike’s dad’s viewing. A gang of us went out after and got wasted. At some point, those of us from New Orleans figured we’d better head back, but Mike asked me to stay. “I’ve got all these people crashing at my house,” I told him. He said he got it, but as I left and he lingered with friends from the Da Parish, I could tell he was sad. 

“Wish you coulda hung the other night,” he told me days later on the phone.

“What’d y’all do?” 

“We cut down a tree.”

***

The next summer I get married, and on my wedding day, as I sip scotch in my tux and gaze upon the scores of guests, all gathered to celebrate the love I share with my wife in a beautiful library on King Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, I feel a pang of fear. I’m 30, make no money, have nothing close to a book deal or an agent, and will never get a tenure-track job. I’m a faker, a fuckup, a whiner, a bitch. 

“I’ve got to figure out my life,” I mutter to myself, paranoid, and realize I’m drunk. “I’ve got to figure out my life.”

Two weeks later, thanks to the magic of cronyism, my wife and I are both hired at a prestigious boarding school. Campus like a country club. Huge raises. Free housing. Smartest kids.

When I call Mike to tell him we’re moving, he’s genuinely thrilled.

“Damn, Will,” he says, “You’ve got the best life.” 

VII: Helpless, Happy, Confused, Content

I see Mike next in New Orleans, and he meets my son. In the fancy condo owned by my friend’s parents, where we’ve stayed for free while savoring long strolls through the Lower Garden District and eating ourselves sick at Clancy’s and Cochon and Bacchanal, Mike holds up my boy and kisses his belly until he squeals that perfect laugh that belongs only to infants: helpless, happy, confused, content.  

Chatting after, smoking cigarettes on Coliseum Square, Mike asks what it’s like to be a dad.

“Pretty great,” I say. “Intense, but you get the hang.”

What I don’t say is how terrifying it is, how, when the midwife pulled my son out and I locked eyes with his swollen purple face, I felt not love but pressure. How night after night, as he screws his lips into the shape of a lemon and screams like a pterodactyl, I feel the stinging sense that I’m not cut out for this. How throughout my wife’s pregnancy, I made myself believe that being a dad would cure me of all my bullshit — the drinking, the depression, the anxiety — but none of that’s happened, and now that it’s too late, I get that kids aren’t some panacea; they’re a spotlight for your flaws. They’re needy little puzzles that can fucking break you. How, in my first weeks as a father, as my wife sank into postpartum as she struggled to breastfeed, I hid in the shed behind our house, inhaling Marlboro Reds in the bitter cold, certain I’d squandered my life’s easy years, that the person I was — a writer, an artist — was gone forever, that I may as well fucking vanish.

“You’re gonna be a great dad,” Mike tells me. 

“We’ll see,” I say, and we both light new ones. 

“You think you’ll have kids?” 

Smoke creeps from Mike’s nostrils as he smiles. “No,” he says, “I don’t.”

***

That night, we meet two friends at Patois. We drink martinis and eat steak frites. We remember college, how our fraternity rented whole floors of a Holiday Inn on Dauphine Island, where we’d smoke blunts and finger girls in the hot tub, how I once broke a girl’s nose during sex and then she wet my bed — and I see then that the whole of New Orleans is my new Fantasyland. The place where I can pretend I don’t have to work to be a good teacher at a great school, where I don’t have to fret about never writing enough, where I can get crazy drunk and not have to get up at 5 a.m., hating myself for being angry at my child. Where I can eat dinner with people who don’t read books and feel like the serious intellectual. In a few days, when my family and I fly back to reality, and I’m too fat to fit in my pants with a throat scorched from a hundred cigarettes, I’ll feel ready to run away from the old me, but for now nothing is real.   

And then I double over in a sob. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever cried without warning.

After we pay our tab, drunk on gin and nostalgia, we plot our next move. We decide on Avenue Pub, but just as we get moving, Mike gets wishy-washy. He needs to drive home, he says, needs to head back to the North Shore. The rest of us are up in arms. 

“What!?! We never get to see each other! You can crash with us!” 

“I don’t know,” Mike squirms, “I gotta work.”

“When?”

“I gotta be there for noon.”

All of us laugh. “We have babies! We’ll have you out the door by dawn.”

Mike says he’ll think about it while he drives us to the bar, but he’s quiet all the way down Magazine, and I know he won’t stay. This, I see, has been his plan all along: to check in from his hideaway, then hurry back off the grid. When we get to the bar, Mike asks me to stay while the others go in. I stand beside him in his idling truck. It’s a moment. We both know it.

“I gotta go,” he says. There’s fear in his voice, like the world will end if he doesn’t. 

“Why? We’re all here. Why are you so obsessed with leaving?” 

He stares out the windshield and starts to cry. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just everything. Just stuff with my dad.” So rare, this mention of his father. So often I wonder, but I always fail to ask. 

“What is it?”

“I’m just so … angry.”

“I know,” I say, even though I don’t. He looks right at me. 

“Why did all this have to happen, Will?” 

A streetcar rattles by. Cars whisper along the Pontchartrain Expressway.

“It was the storm,” I tell him. “And depression. And …”

He nods.

“All of this happened to you,” I say. “It wasn’t your fault.”

After the suicide, Mike told me he wished he could knock his dead dad to the ground, to pin him there and ask him flatly if he was satisfied with what he’d done. “What do you think he’d say?” I asked. “That killing himself,” Mike said, “was the worst mistake of his life.” 

Whenever I think of Mike’s dad, I don’t see him in that casket, his face all stunned and made-up. I see him alive, stock still on our ugly couch in the Baton Rouge apartment, watching the news, saying nothing, but knowing for certain he’d never be the same. I see the storm surge. I see the waterline and the mold. I see a day years after his death when on a drive through Da Parish, Mike and I turned down his grandparent’s street and happened upon his dad’s dad just sitting there, drinking Budweisers alone in a camp chair, broken. And when you shot yourself in the heart, I wonder, in that final beat before it all went black, did you get one last second to know what you’d done? Did you see the hurt you’d cause? Could you see your son the way he is now, afraid of a world that’s been so cruel? And what if Katrina had missed? What if all this belonged to someone else? 

“I just feel like y’all have all made it,” Mike says. The engine’s running. He’s still in the truck. “You’ve got houses and kids —”

“We haven’t had to deal with anything,” I say, and the truth of this feels good. 

I tell Mike he’s gotta get help, gotta talk to somebody, and then I see that’s what he’s doing right now.

“I’ll get better,” he says. “I promise.”

“I know,” I tell him, thinking so will I.

Mike gets out and hugs me. We don’t worry about food trucks or book deals or fathers or sons. We just sway there, two brothers, connected forever. I think of that night by the levee, that litany: I love my big brother. My big brother is better than me. What did you see in me all those years back? What made me so special? Who would I be if I’d had your life? What would you say if you wrote about me?  

“You’ve still got the best life,” Mike says and gets in his truck. 

I shake my head. “I’m just lucky.” 

“Maybe so, baby bro,” he says. “Maybe so.”

And then he pulls away. 

I stand alone there on Polymnia Street and watch Mike’s tail lights disappear down St. Charles. The night air is hot. The moon a faint ghost. In a few minutes, I’ll go into the bar to get drunk. But in this moment, I feel a whirl of emotions that leaves me unmoored, like I’m hovering over my shoulders. I’m outside of myself, I think, and then I say to no one, “This is it. This is the end of an essay I’ll write.” 

 

William Torrey’s writing has appeared in Salamander, Boulevard, River Teeth, Colorado Review, and The Florida Review, among many others. He is Writer-in-Residence at St.Andrew’s School, where he lives on campus with his wife and sons.

* * *

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo of Kurt Cobain by Michel Linssen/Redferns via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Michael Azerrad, Matthew Shen Goodman, Lisa Wells, Daniel Wells, and Mary Kay McBrayer.

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1. My Time with Kurt Cobain 

Michael Azerrad | The New Yorker| September 22, 2021| (7,102 words)

Music journalist Michael Azerrad’s piece about his friendship with Kurt Cobain is honest and lucid. Azerrad recounts a number of moments with the late Nirvana singer, starting with the first time they met in 1992, when he visits the small Los Angeles apartment Cobain shared with Courtney Love to interview him for Rolling Stone. As a journalist, Azerrad gains Cobain’s trust, and eventually goes on to write a book about the band, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, which was published in September 1993, the same month their third and final album, In Utero, was released. Azerrad remembers encounters over the next few years — an epic show at the Reading Festival, a business dinner with executives (“the grownups,” as Cobain referred to them), tense moments between band members while on tour, flashes of Cobain’s heroin addiction. My favorite bits, though, are Azerrad’s quiet, beautiful descriptions of Cobain away from the spotlight: the intimate hours the two spent in a Seattle hotel room as Cobain read Azerrad’s manuscript, and the time they wandered around an eerily empty downtown Dallas with daughter Frances, who was just 15 months old at the time. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands

2. It’s Triller Night, Marv!

Matthew Shen Goodman | n+1| September 18, 2021 | (4,386 words)

Look, just because I had zero interest in watching a card of fights between retired ex-champions on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 while Donald Trump and his namesake son commentated doesn’t mean I have zero interest in reading a gimlet-eyed, absolutely bonkers polemic about it. And that’s exactly what Matthew Shen Goodman delivers in his slightly drunken, extremely lurid critical essay, which also marks his first inclusion as a Longreads Pick. The horrors on display are many, whether Snoop Dogg “performing” with the late Marvin Gaye (the essay’s headline details Snoop’s literal answer to Marvin’s titular question during a rendition of “What’s Goin’ On”) or onetime mixed martial-arts great Tito Ortiz’s plodding defeat to other onetime MMA great Anderson Silva (“veterans of one sport playing at another, their takedowns and elbows and kicks and joint breaks pared down to only punches, four-ounce semi-articulated gloves replaced with the bulbous curve of twelve-ounce boxing mitts”). The piece is half exhausted sigh, half feverish deconstruction, and entirely memorable. Punching down may be easier than the alternative, but sometimes it’s just what you need. —Peter Rubin

3. To Be a Field of Poppies

Lisa Wells | Harper’s Magazine | September 20, 2021 | (6,064 words)

This is a story about a company that is pioneering natural organic reduction (NOR), or the composting of dead bodies. Readers get all the dirt—sorry, sorry—on the science and business behind the venture, but writer Lisa Wells offers so much more than that. Her piece is a meditation on intention and guilt; grief and fear; life and loss. Perhaps above all, it is about our species’ fraught relationship with the natural world. I will be thinking about it for a long time. —Seyward Darby

4. The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver

Daniel Riley| GQ | September 21, 2021 | (7,369 words)

Daniel Riley clearly relished reporting on the freediving competition Vertical Blue — a chance to be around 42 divers who feel they are doing something “sublime.” This event at Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas is a mecca for all serious divers, but Riley focuses on Alexey Molchanov, who, as the world’s best freediver, is tremendously skilled at staying present in a dive, with nothing “beyond the body, the breathing, the intense focus of the next meter,” until he reaches a depth where there is no light, no sound, just sensory oblivion. Riley pulls you into the water with Molchanov, to such a degree that I went from feeling the serenity of the stillness to intense claustrophobia, as we go down and down — a rather impressive gamut of emotions to feel while in fact sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea. Riley’s respect for Molchanov is evident throughout the piece — he is, after all, a man who has dedicated his life to a sport that killed his mother, and has the potential to kill him too. —Carolyn Wells

5. Dollhouse of Horrors

Mary Kay McBrayer | Oxford American | August 31, 2021 | (4,784 words)

Come for an introduction to the uncanny work of miniature construction and collecting, stay for a rumination about what it means to cope with chaos and cruelty. “I cannot control any of the horrors that happen at me,” Mary Kay McBrayer writes. “But in my dollhouse, I own everything. I make the horrors happen. I am the one.” This is a piece for fans of Hereditary and Shirley Jackson, and for anyone struggling to make sense of our world gone mad. —SD

My Time with Kurt Cobain

Longreads Pick
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 22, 2021
Length: 28 minutes (7,102 words)

A Sketch Artist, a Grieving Mother, and An Unsolved Mystery

Michael Marsicano for The Atavist Magazine

Nile Cappello | The Atavist Magazine | August 2021 | 7 minutes (1,994 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 118, “The Girl in the Picture,” written by Nile Cappello and illustrated by Michael Marsicano.

The Atavist Magazine is Longreads’ sister publication. For 10 years, it has been a digital pioneer in longform narrative journalism, publishing one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

 

PART ONE

For most residents of Holland, Michigan, there was nothing remarkable about March 11, 1989, a Saturday. Frost on the ladders of the city’s water towers thawed in the sun—spring was just over a week away. Mothers poured milk over cereal for kids watching back-to-back episodes of their favorite cartoons. Fathers who worked weekends drove pickup trucks to industrial jobs at local automotive and concrete companies.

But all was not well in the house on the corner of Lincoln Road and 52nd Street. It belonged to Dennis and Brenda Bowman, a married couple with two children. For the Bowmans, March 11 marked the last time they saw their 14-year-old daughter, Aundria, alive.

Dennis was the one who contacted the police. He told them that he’d come home from his job as a wood machinist to find Aundria missing, along with some of her belongings and $100 from his dresser. Dennis described Aundria—whom he and Brenda had adopted when she was an infant—as a troubled teenager who frequently fought with her mother and had run away to a friend’s house once before.

Dennis agreed to call around to the homes of kids Aundria knew to find out if anyone had seen her. But his wife soon took over as the family’s point of contact. It was Brenda who called the police regularly, and Brenda who corrected the amount of cash missing from her husband’s dresser to $150. That was enough for police to issue a warrant for Aundria’s arrest for larceny; the warrant listed Dennis as the victim of his daughter’s alleged crime.

With no foul play suspected, the police labeled Aundria a runaway and passed her case along to the Youth Services Bureau. Few people who knew the Bowmans questioned the official narrative. Over the years, there had been whispers about the family. Once, when Aundria was in middle school, she boarded the school bus bleeding from her wrist. Some kids gossiped about a suicide attempt, but others said Aundria had cut herself trying to get back into her house after her parents locked her out. There were rumors that Dennis, a former Navy reservist with reddish-brown hair, a goatee, and wire-rimmed glasses, and Brenda, a portly woman with curled bangs who’d once worked at the jewelry counter at Meijer department store, abused Aundria. But back then, what happened behind closed doors was considered family business.

Fifteen months before Aundria disappeared, Brenda gave birth to a daughter, Vanessa. Aundria went from being an only child to more than a big sister—she was a third parent to the chubby, redheaded baby. While other kids her age went to afterschool clubs and Friday night football games, Aundria stayed home changing diapers and cleaning bottles. She kept a photo of her sister in a school folder, where other teens might stash a magazine cutout or a polaroid of their crush. When she wasn’t with Vanessa, Aundria was anxious about the baby’s well-being.

Many people in Holland assumed that Aundria had gotten so fed up with her home life that she finally split. Maybe she’d gone looking for her birth mother. People heard that she’d hitched a ride at a local truck stop, had left town with an older boy, or was pregnant.

Brenda reported a series of tips in the weeks and months following her daughter’s disappearance, all of which seemed to confirm that Aundria had run away. At the end of March, Brenda claimed Aundria had been spotted at a 7-Eleven. In mid-April, Brenda said she received an anonymous call from someone claiming that police were looking for the teenager in the right area, but on the wrong street—whatever that meant. In June, she reported a sighting at a local property, where Aundria had supposedly been hanging out with a group of young men. And in October, Brenda said a friend had seen Aundria, pregnant and with dyed hair, in a line at Meijer. Police investigated but found nothing.

Aundria’s classmates went to prom and graduated, then got jobs or headed to college. Eventually they married and had children of their own. But Aundria remained forever 14. A single photograph formed most people’s memory of her. It was given to police when she first vanished. In it, Aundria is sitting against a blue studio backdrop and looking just off camera, with her green eyes cast hopefully upward and pieces of her dark, shaggy hair hanging over her forehead. Her smile is charmingly off-balanced. She looks suspended between adolescence and adulthood.

Photos of missing children were often printed on the sides of milk cartons or on flyers taped to the top of pizza delivery boxes. Aundria’s picture wound up somewhere else. In 1993, the band Soul Asylum debuted a music video for its song “Runaway Train,” featuring the images and names of missing kids across America. The video was a huge hit, with several versions airing on MTV and VH1. In the one that played in Michigan, Aundria’s photo appears just after the two-minute mark.

Reflecting on the video 20 years after its release, director Tony Kaye claimed that more than two dozen missing children were found because of the video. Aundria Bowman wasn’t one of them.

Back then, what happened behind closed doors was considered family business.

 

Carl Koppelman never expected to solve mysteries. He worked as an accountant until 2009, when his mother’s health began to decline. At 46, Koppelman became a full-time caregiver, and his days, once filled with reviews of spreadsheets and financial statements, now revolved around driving to doctor’s appointments and administering medications. When he wasn’t tending to his mother, Koppelman was online, exploring message boards, news sites, and social media. At the time, the story dominating headlines, and bordering on popular obsession, was the return of Jaycee Dugard.

In 1991, Dugard had been kidnapped while walking to a bus stop near her home south of Lake Tahoe, California. The blond, freckled 11-year-old was the subject of a nationwide search, but eventually the case went cold. Then, on August 26, 2009, Dugard reappeared. For 18 years, convicted sex offender Philip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, had held her captive at their home in the town of Antioch, more than 150 miles from where they’d kidnapped her. Dugard had given birth to two of Garrido’s daughters, who were now 11 and 15. To the embarrassment of local authorities, parole officers had visited the Garridos’ home several times during the years Dugard was missing. They’d failed to check the backyard, where the young woman was kept in a network of tents, lean-tos, and sheds.

Koppelman’s interest in the Dugard case led him to Websleuths, a forum where crime hobbyists and armchair detectives connect and collaborate on unsolved cases. Koppelman gravitated to posts about cold cases, the ones least likely to ever be solved. Until recently, Dugard’s had been one of them. How many more would benefit from fresh eyes and a little persistence?

Koppelman spent countless hours scrolling through the national database of missing persons and unidentified bodies, known as NamUs. There’s overlap between the two main parts of the database, the disappeared and the deceased—the trick is finding it. During late nights at his computer, in a dimly lit corner of his mother’s suburban home in El Segundo, California, Koppelman would try to match the characteristics of people who had gone missing with those of the unidentified dead. Finding a likeness could be enough to generate a tip for law enforcement.

When Koppelman noticed that the age and condition of some bodies might make it difficult for loved ones to recognize them, it sparked an idea: Koppelman liked to draw portraits for fun, and he was pretty good at it. He also had a CD-ROM of the image-editing software CorelDRAW, which someone had given to him as a gift. One day, with his mother napping in the next room, Koppelman installed the program on his computer. It was his first step toward becoming a forensic sketch artist.

He started creating lifelike renderings of Jane and John Does based on photos taken postmortem. He used CorelDRAW to open eyes, fill in sunken cheeks, and give faces more dynamic expressions. In complicated cases, where bodies had decomposed, he re-created facial structure. The goal was to make the dead more recognizable—to loved ones searching for them, and to police trying to identify them. Once he finished a rendering Koppelman sent it to NamUs, and the database would sometimes publish it. He also posted his work on Websleuths so other armchair detectives could use it in their identification efforts.

Eventually, Koppelman began working with police departments and the DNA Doe Project, which identifies human remains through genetic testing and genealogical research. Glad to help law enforcement generate leads and, in some instances, put a name to a face, Koppelman was almost always an unpaid volunteer. His renderings were instrumental in solving several cold cases, including the identification of the Caledonia “Cali” Jane Doe (Tammy Jo Alexander) in 2015.

But before all that, in 2009, when he was just starting out as an amateur sleuth, Koppelman got interested in the case of the Racine County Jane Doe. When she was found near the edge of a Wisconsin cornfield in 1999, the young woman had only been dead about 12 hours, but rain had washed away any evidence that might have been useful to investigators. It seemed likely that the young woman had been murdered elsewhere and dumped. An autopsy determined that she may have been cognitively disabled, and that she had suffered long-term abuse and neglect: She had broken bones and a cauliflower ear, and her body showed signs of sexual assault. More than 50 people from the farming community where she was found attended her funeral. But no one knew her name or what had happened to her. Her gravestone read “Gone, But Not Forgotten”—a hope more than a description.

Koppelman read everything he could find about the Racine County Jane Doe, combing through news articles and social media. He learned that she had hazel-green eyes, two piercings in each ear, and short reddish-brown hair. She was five-foot-eight and 120 pounds, and estimated to be between 18 and 30 years old. She was found wearing a men’s gray and silver western-style shirt embroidered with red flowers—a design, the manufacturer told police, from the mid-1980s.

On NamUs, Koppelman plugged in some general search criteria—gender, age, location—and clicked through the results for missing persons. With each one, Koppelman asked himself, Could this be her? In most cases, the answer was a clear no. The age didn’t match, or the location made no sense. But one entry gave Koppelman pause: Aundria Bowman.

Aundria and the Racine County Jane Doe shared physical characteristics, and their ages aligned: Aundria would have been 25 in 1999, when the Jane Doe was killed. Holland, where Aundria disappeared, sits directly across Lake Michigan from where the Jane Doe was found—it’s just four hours by car from one location to the other, tracing the lake’s southern shoreline and passing through Chicago. To test the possible identification, Koppelman created a composite image, superimposing Aundria’s photo with ones from the Jane Doe’s autopsy. He marked the similarities in red.

Koppelman took his theory to law enforcement, who found it compelling enough to investigate. To determine whether the Jane Doe was Aundria, police would need to compare DNA from the body with that of someone in Aundria’s family. Because Aundria was adopted, authorities had to track down her birth mother. Koppelman knew that could take a while, or that it might never happen, forcing investigators to find other avenues for identification.

As the police did their part, Koppelman kept poking around online, learning what he could about Aundria. One day at the end of 2012, he came across a Classmates.com page for Aundria—the premium kind you have to pay to keep active, in order to connect directly with former school acquaintances. Was this Aundria, alive and well, and trying to find old friends? And if it wasn’t her, who was it?

Read the full story at The Atavist

But Who Tells Them What To Sing?

Getty Images

Adrian Daub | Longreads | September 2021 | 21 minutes (5,894 words)

When a new trailer for the Marvel film Black Widow dropped in April of this year — after the movie had been repeatedly moved back due to the pandemic — the producers seemed intent on reminding people about why they’d been excited about the movie before the lockdowns started. They did so by closing the promo with a new version of the theme from The Avengers, probably to call back viewers to a different, less socially distanced time. How could you know this was a new version of the motif? It was choral, but that was a well Marvel had gone to before. This time it had lyrics. As best I can tell, for the first time.

As fans welcomed the callback in online comments, I was brought back to a question that I’d had when Game of Thrones did something similar at the end of its fourth season and again at the very end of the show. It’s something of a trend these days to take a highly recognizable instrumental theme and make it choral. And I get why: The gesture is big and bold and epic. But my question concerned something comparatively pedestrian: Who decides what the lyrics are? What language are they even in? And who writes them? I decided to find out.

Those of us who listen to soundtracks obsessively do so knowing that that’s not how soundtracks are intended to work on us. Whoever mixed in a chorus for a few seconds of the Black Widow trailer was going for an emotional reaction, not some new layer of meaning to be disentangled. “When I do a film score,” the late James Horner said in a TED talk in 2005, “I am nothing more than a fancy pencil” executing the vision of a filmmaker. You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.

You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.

But one place where this fancy pencil has more autonomy is when it comes to the text that a chorus sings. Perhaps it’s better to say that the pencil is condemned to freedom. When the composer John Ottman was hired to score the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, he realized that he needed a break in the texture of the soundtrack at the very end of the film. That’s because in the final scenes of the movie basically all of the even remotely redeemable characters get executed. After they had all died and the credits rolled, Ottman decided he wanted a “sense of release, because there had to be a different feeling as the audience walks out of the theater.” So he hit upon the idea of a self-contained choral piece. “The problem was though, what on earth would they be saying?”


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What on earth indeed? It’s a moment where blockbuster filmmaking — always so anxiously in control of its meanings — seems to be at a bit of a loss. And it’s a moment where we as an audience suddenly get a sense for how films make meaning, and how it isn’t always the meaning they intend to make.

So who decided what the lyrics to the theme from The Avengers were? The short answer is that I still don’t know. But the long answer to my pedestrian question leads into the high-pressure, highly collaborative world of film scoring. A world in which composers often have just a few weeks to write music that pleases the studio and the director, and potentially even test audiences. And in which they toil with assistants, orchestrators, sound editors, and many, many session musicians to find a sound for a film that is still in the process of evolving. I wanted to find out who among this massive group would be the one to say “hey, let’s add a chorus and have it sung in Sanskrit” or something along those lines.

The answer turns out to be: Pretty much any of them can and sometimes do. What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place. It’s as likely that a director had the screenwriter invent specific lyrics early in post-production as that a subcontractor, assistant composer, or orchestrator jotted down some words or went on a Wikipedia deep-dive eight weeks out from release in a desperate late-night quest for a non-copyrighted text to use with a cue that might please a bunch of suits half a world away.

What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place.

***

Choruses have been part of film scoring for over a century. People have been singing on screen since the earliest silent reels, and with increasing technical wizardry we could even hear them doing it. But something like the Black Widow trailer is what we call an non-diegetic chorus: These are voices that viewers aren’t supposed to somehow locate within the screen action. In early cinema you had to have musicians physically present, first in the cinema with a viewer, eventually in the scene with the actors. Both of which pretty much ruled out the use of a choir. And, as film music historian Mervyn Cooke points out, once technologies existed that allowed films to have at least a partial soundtrack, filmmakers initially avoided non-diegetic music — precisely because they needed to sell the illusion that the sound was coming “from” the scene.

Non-diegetic music started to become the norm only in the early ’30s. And even then the limitations of recording technology meant that non-diegetic voices were not usually worth the trouble. By the late ’30s this had changed. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) had its choir chime in even when it wasn’t for the explicit musical numbers. (Snow White was also the first soundtrack issued as an album, so choruses were part of how film soundtracks traveled semi-independently from their films from the very beginning.)

Alfred Newman had begun relying on wordless “heavenly choirs” going ooo and aaa in the background, in films like Wuthering Heights (1939), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Song of Bernadette (1943). As the music historian Donald Greig, who is also an active session singer on many modern scores, has pointed out, in the beginning choruses had to be at least somewhat motivated by theme or screen action — they were there to speak for ghosts, to intimate religious dimensions to the screen action.

And then there was Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). The film concerns the discovery of Shangri-La in the Himalayas, and when we finally get to the fabled land the soundtrack accompanies the matte-painted wonderland with a chorus singing in … well, in a language that isn’t English and doesn’t seem to be Tibetan either. And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.

And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.

Both types of choral performance have never left the Hollywood lexicon. In thinking through how film choruses make meaning, I became obsessed with what the process of recording a soundtrack looks like today and at what point in that process someone actually writes lyrics in fake Tibetan. In the Golden Age, studios kept their own choirs — professional singers would show up at the lot and ooo and aaa for a Miklós Rósza score today and belt out a ferocious battle hymn for Erich Wolfgang Korngold the next. Studios also had their house orchestrators (usually several), and while laypeople remember the composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, there are other figures that probably shaped the way films sound just as much if not more, all the while just quietly collecting their paychecks.

Speaking with modern singers about their experiences, I was struck by how little their day-to-day job description had changed since Tiomkin’s day. But the world in which they are performing is altogether different. As part of my research for this article I made a massive choir belt out the most menacing rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” ever, and all it cost me was $199 plus tax. The EastWest Symphonic Choirs software allows you to make a virtual choir sing in just about any style imaginable. Want your ooos and aaas to sound like a whisper? More Broadway or more classical? All of that’s in the package.

But there’s more: Due to a system called WordBuilder, you can have this choir sing pretty much anything — you can type in text in English, in phonetics, or a proprietary alphabet called Votox, and the software will assemble it out of a massive databank of vowels and consonants. This is a commercially available product, but there are even bigger sample libraries kept by individual composers: If you’re wondering who’s dropping by to supply a quick “agnus dei” for a Hans Zimmer score, well that’s almost certainly a proprietary sample owned by Zimmer’s film score workshop, Remote Control.

All the professional singers I spoke to were keenly aware of products like EastWest Symphonic Choirs and the sample libraries — because more likely than not they’re in them. If you’re in the business of singing on film, these days you won’t always be asked to sing for an actual score, but instead you might get booked to record samples. There’s a scary possibility that these artists are slowly eroding the industry’s need for their labor — that the fruits of their one day of paid work will perform for the studios in perpetuity and with no extra residuals. Their disembodied vowels are putting their vocal chords out of business. But that possibility hasn’t been fully realized: Often enough when they arrive in the recording studio, singers will find that there is a vocal track already, but it’s done by computer. And yet, the composer wants a live version. Almost all the singers I spoke to expressed some surprise that Hollywood still bothered.

Their disembodied vowels are putting their vocal chords out of business.

One possibility why they do: Composers simply like working with live humans and consider it part of their job to do so. As Jonathan Beard, who has been composing and orchestrating in Hollywood for over a decade, put it to me, choirs are an easy, effective way to give dimension to a scene — “because you have a human body as one of the instruments, and there’s a power the human voice [has] over us in general.”

Composers are highly trained musicians, and a lot of their training has involved singing. The composer brothers Harry and Rupert Gregson-Williams (Harry composed for films like Kingdom of Heaven, the Narnia-films, and most of Denzel Washington’s films of the last 15 years, while Rupert is best known for DC Universe films like Wonder Woman and Aquaman) were both choirboys at St. John’s College in Cambridge — it makes biographical sense that choral textures and their creation would be important to them. And that they might like to think through music with a live chorus rather than a computer. Another surprising preference that speaks to a kind of sweet traditionalism: While sometimes vocal tracks get doubled in recording (meaning what sounds like 16 singers is just eight overlaid onto each other), this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Clearly someone in the process enjoys working with large groups of people and thinks they give you an aesthetic payoff that engineering wizardry would not.

But there’s a more cynical reason as well, and it’s the reason why automation hasn’t displaced human labor in other fields: The process of booking some freelancers through a fixer, having them record for a day, and then paying them no residuals isn’t actually much of an expense. That’s how London became a preferred place for Hollywood to record: a large population of well-trained musicians, whose union doesn’t insist on residuals. Several London-based singers I spoke with suggested that the reason Hollywood doesn’t record in, say, Germany as often is that singers in continental Europe have steadier income and are less dependent on session work. And once a producer decides that even London-based musicians are too demanding — well, then there’s always Prague or Budapest. The gorgeous voices you heard in a John Ford Western were the sound of unions and full-time employment; in a Hollywood score today they are monuments to the globalizing power of the gig economy.

***

So that is the world from which these vocals emerge. Imagine you are a classically trained singer in, say, London who has done some previous work on soundtracks. You get a call from a fixer, who is assembling a chorus, or soloists, for a production company. You book the gig, and you show up for the recording session knowing which film you’re singing for, probably knowing the composer you’re recording for, but nothing else. Most recording sessions take place in the famous Abbey Road Studios, which are expensive, so you’re usually booked for no more than a certain number of union-approved hours.

Importantly, by the time you show up for the recording session, the film is pretty much “in post post production,” as one session singer put it to me. The film is basically finished, the wrangling over what the score is supposed to sound like is over. By the time you record, whatever orchestral parts you are supposed to accompany are fully assembled — you usually have them in your headphones as you sing. When you get there, you are handed a large stack of notes to sing and, according to all the singers I spoke with, you get through some portion of them in the next few hours — never through all of them. Some cues you sing will never be in the finished film, some cues you might do 10 versions of. And then the studio time the composer booked is over, you hand over your stack of notes, sign statements agreeing not to divulge anything about what you just sang, and you are on your way.

As the soprano Catherine Bott said: “You enter a studio and you open the score and off you go. You sing what you’re told, and it’s all about versatility, just being able to adapt to the right approach, whatever that may be for that conductor or that composer.” And part of that, singers told me, was singing the words — whatever they may be. As Donald Greig pointed out to me, a lot of these singers have training in classics; they certainly know their way around a Requiem or a Stabat Mater. And yet often enough when they step into Abbey Road they’re being asked to sing perfectly nonsensical phrases in pseudo-Latin — but the studio is booked, the clock is ticking, and as Bott put it, “that’s not the time to put up your hand and, you know, correct the Latin.”

Or the English: Bott sang on the soundtrack for the 1986 animated feature An American Tail. For a cue where the little immigrant mouse Fievel first lays eyes on New York harbor, composer James Horner had the choir intone the famous Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. As she was singing through the cue — “Give me your tired, your poor” — Bott realized that whoever had put together the score had written down “your huddled masses yearning to be free” rather than “breathe free.” She was pretty sure she knew better, as did some colleagues, but out of English reserve, deference to the Americans, or professionalism, no one felt it was their place to say anything. The misquote stayed in the picture and you can buy it on CD today.

Perhaps part of what made me look for the meaning behind the lyrics on some of my favorite soundtracks was exactly this professionalism. A good singer sells the emotion and the conviction, to the point that a listener sort of has to believe that it all means something. Interestingly enough, early in this long tradition of made-up languages, Hollywood felt the need to pretend that it did mean something. When Lost Horizon was released in 1937, Columbia Pictures claimed in its publicity material that Dimitri Tiomkin’s score “includes authentic folk songs of Tibet.” The same press sheet noted that the Hall Johnson Choir, a popular gospel choir, “will sing the folk song arrangements in the native Tibetan language.”

Film music historians agree that this is hogwash. There is no evidence Tiomkin researched Tibetan folk songs for his score — what the ad men were selling as “authentic folk songs” were almost certainly newly written pieces in a made-up language. Tiomkin had started out as a concert pianist and relied on a small army of orchestrators to turn his melodies into actual playable scores. Someone in that group put a pen to paper and wrote these pieces, and either that same person or someone else seems to have made up some fake Tibetan text to distribute to the singers.

But for whatever reason Columbia Pictures’ publicity department didn’t want to frame the vocals in this manner. Perhaps extradiegetic voices were still sufficiently new that they wanted to tell an audience what these voices were doing on the soundtrack. Or it had nothing to do with the soundtrack itself, and was just another way of selling the broader spectacle of filmmaking: Look at the lengths we went to.

At the same time, lyrics have a pesky way of clarifying the intended audience. After all, it is not altogether difficult to imagine why Tiomkin and company wouldn’t have bothered with actual folk songs and actual language. Lost Horizon is one of those movies that stars noted non-Asian persons H.B. Warner as “Chang” and Sam Jaffe as “the High Lama of Shangri-La.” The broad and bogus claims to authenticity are also making a point of who the movie is for. The fact that the Hall Johnson Choir was an African American group best known for singing spirituals, amplifies the sense that Lost Horizon turns non-white people’s authenticity into charming window-dressing for white audiences. Like Shangri-La for its white visitors, even when its lyrics were incomprehensible film music was still “for” white English speakers.

At other times when Hollywood filmmaking relied on choruses, the point was the opposite of exoticism: hyper-comprehensibility. Decades later Tiomkin wrote a rousing score for John Wayne’s jingoistic epic The Alamo (1960). At the end of the movie, with the siege over and one lone survivor and her little daughter leaving the ruined fort, a chorus drifts faintly onto the soundtrack, almost as though the singers were standing somewhere far away in the field of battle. Over the movie’s final shots, the choir takes over the soundtrack, singing a version of what would eventually spend some weeks on the pop charts as “The Ballad of the Alamo.” The first lines a viewer is able to clearly hear are: “Let the old men tell the story / let the legend grow and grow. / Of the thirteen days of glory / at the siege of Alamo.”

This music explicitly tells us why it needs to turn human voices singing in a language the viewer is supposed to understand. The “Ballad” tells us what to do with the story we have just heard: Pass it on, let the legend “grow and grow.” Also — since this was made by John Wayne in the ’60s — the message is probably also don’t be a communist. But note how the movie has to treat three things as essentially the same: the singing has to be audible for the casual moviegoer, over people getting out of their seats early or finishing off their popcorn; the words have to be comprehensible on a purely linguistic level to an audience that has been taught to tune out the music on some level for the last two hours; and the reason why these words were included in the movie has to be clear.

Also — since this was made by John Wayne in the ’60s — the message is probably also don’t be a communist.

The fact that these three factors are separate can be easy to forget for an English-speaking audience reared on American pop culture. I grew up on Hollywood films in dubbed versions — though those didn’t typically dub the music. Meaning, as a kid who didn’t speak English, I became pretty used to following a plot in German, then the music would swell and I’d sort of tune out for a few minutes as the soundtrack, and the English language, washed over me. I’d get the basic idea of course — the characters were happy, or sad, or patriotic — but I had no idea what they were saying, and I was okay with that.

That’s sort of how most of us feel when we listen to the theme to the 21st-century version of Battlestar Galactica — unless we happen to be familiar with the mantras of the Rig Veda. Still, it’s a culturally specific experience. These days we can’t watch fantasy or science fiction without being sung at in Sanskrit, Old Norse, Dwarvish, Elvish, Uruk-hai, Klingon, and so on. When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem. And apparently the syllables of the Sanskrit text were rearranged to the point of incomprehensibility. Clearly, these shows and movies are not addressing us as potential speakers of Klingon or Sanskrit or even Welsh — they’re interested in the feel and a sound of a language rather than its meaning. At one recording session, Donald Greig told me, “they spent ages telling us how to pronounce the Russian and then we realized, ‘well this doesn’t actually mean anything.’” This turns out to be both a pretty new and pretty old way of listening to music.

When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars-universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem.

***

Hollywood scores come in waves. The film industry isn’t known for being particularly fond of risk taking, and film scores in particular often build on previous scores. The director will often cut the film to a temp track consisting of existing pieces, and it’s easy to imagine that the filmmakers would eventually want something that sounds like their temp track to accompany the finished film. Choirs have never really left Hollywood, but there are certainly moments when producers and directors seem to have almost reflexively sought them out and others when they have avoided them. The Omen (1976) with its massive latinate choral opener, “Ave Satani,” kicked off one such wave. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy kicked off another.

This new chapter in the way films sounded started in the Town Hall, a storied concert venue in Wellington, New Zealand. That’s where composer Howard Shore recorded the earliest parts of his soundtrack for The Fellowship of the Ring (the rest would be recorded in London). The recording involved a full orchestra on ground level and rotating choirs in the balcony. It wasn’t lost on the composer that the scene was weirdly traditional: “The orchestra,” Shore explained, “was set up very much the way a pit orchestra was set up in an opera.” The collaborative process around the composition, too, felt like something Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte might have recognized. The screenwriters wrote the text the choir would be expected to sing, an on-site translator would translate them into Tolkien’s languages, and Shore would then set the Dwarven or Elvish text.

Somewhat counterintuitively it’s not actually choral music with incomprehensible lyrics that is novel and needs explaining, it is choral music with comprehensible ones. For a long time, and for far longer than instrumental music, choral music in the West belonged to the church, to the mass, and that meant to Latin. A language as native to Christian religious life as it was foreign to most Christians. The Lutheran Reformation did a lot to hand church services over to language the congregants could actually understand, but throughout Europe the experience of being talked, and in particular sung, at in Latin persisted. That’s of course not to say that people didn’t sing in their vernacular languages — just that the experience of singing words you don’t, or don’t fully, understand would have been very normal to these people.

For a long time, and for far longer than instrumental music, choral music in the West belonged to the church, to the mass, and that meant to Latin. A language as native to Christian religious life as it was foreign to most Christians.

For the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer choral music was meaningful only insofar as the words were not the point. In his The World as Will and Representation, which appeared first in 1819, was republished in 1844, and strongly influenced composers like Richard Wagner, Schopenhauer claimed that music was the purest expression of reality because it didn’t linger with “representations” — words and the things they represent — but tapped automatically into something deeper. Choral music would seem to fall short of that standard — being pretty centrally concerned with words and the things they denote — but Schopenhauer didn’t think so. After all, you shouldn’t listen to sung music primarily for the words, and often you may not even know the words. And Schopenhauer thought this was for the better.

Latin still works that way for most modern audiences: You might argue that there isn’t much of an expectation on the part of an American film composer circa 1989 (or on the part of the filmmakers who hired him) that the audience should be able to follow along with the Latin lyrics — in fact, it might well be distracting if they did. What text is included, both singers and composers confirmed to me, has far more to do with the flow of phonemes and how it interacts with the raw sound of the vocals. The words are simply yet another instrument in the repertoire the composer has at their disposal. But it’s an instrument that comes freighted with all the complications that inevitably arise when our loquacious species uses language.

The words are simply yet another instrument in the repertoire the composer has at their disposal. But it’s an instrument that comes freighted with all the complications that inevitably arise when our loquacious species uses language.

After all, unlike a humming chorus, a Latin chorus does create extra levels of meaning for those who want to listen more carefully. Composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote “Ave Satani” for The Omen as a deliberate transposition of various Catholic masses. While the individual Latin may have been hard to pick up on (and wasn’t entirely correct to boot), listeners who were Catholic likely would have recognized what was being inverted here, given that they’d spent most Sundays around the actual Latin texts. It’s not clear how seriously Goldsmith (or the choirmaster who jotted down the Latin lyrics for the composer) grappled with that dimension of the score — for one thing, the very title of the piece messes up the declension of Satan. But that dimension was there nonetheless —The Omen was part of a kind of religious revival in Hollywood, and though it plays as camp today it was taken far more seriously then.

James Horner’s score for the 1989 film Glory relies heavily on a Latin chorus, and in the film’s climactic moment that chorus sings recognizably in Latin. Glory tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment, an all-Black unit during the American Civil War, and the film ends with most of the unit being mowed down by Confederate soldiers while assaulting Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The piece in question relies on a text drawn from a Latin mass, frequently incorporated into the classical canon in various requiems from Mozart to Verdi. But, as so often, Horner (or his orchestrator) doesn’t stick to the actual text, but rather seems to create a mashup of snippets from the traditional requiem mass.

So is Horner just using the text of the requiem mass the way layout professionals use the phrase “Lorem ipsum?” Hard to imagine. After all, it makes a lot of sense to have a requiem text being sung as your characters are dying one by one. But more importantly, precisely because the text is so garbled, certain words stick out all the more: “Recordare,” Latin for “recall,” “stricte” (severely), and “judex” (judge). These pieces are largely taken from the Dies Irae, the part of the requiem mass that tells of the end of the world and God’s judgment, albeit with admixtures from just about every other part. The text, though hard to parse, is remarkably consonant-heavy for a Hollywood soundtrack, and a lot of it seems to be due (and I hope I’m hearing that right, as no actual text exists for this piece that I was able to track down) to the text’s overreliance of the future active participle, which ends in “-urus”: just in terms of pure grammar, the threatening hissing in the text is literally about what is to come.

So is Horner just using the text of the requiem mass the way layout professionals use the phrase “Lorem ipsum?” Hard to imagine.

So maybe the text, and the fact that it’s in Latin, isn’t about pretentiousness on the part of the filmmakers at all. It’s a mass for the dead and a tale of divine wrath, and it seems to make — over the heads of most of the film’s audience, admittedly — a point about retribution. It is remarkable how sophistic (white) Americans, who are frequently so proud to deal in moral absolutes, get when it comes to their Civil War. Horner’s grammatically challenged remix of the “Dies Irae,” I think, makes a point that is stark and simple and remarkably rare in American depictions of the country’s most bloody conflict: The Confederacy is evil, those who kill on its behalf are committing a sin, and they are bringing God’s wrath (and future judgment) upon themselves. There is, then, in this particular instance something to be gleaned from a text that otherwise we’re not meant to pick up on.

Which gets at an interesting disconnect — namely, that different constituencies will experience the same song differently. The choir members know what they’re saying, even if they have no clue as to what any of it means. And the composer, director, sound designer, etc., although they live with a soundtrack far longer than either the performers or even the most devoted audience, don’t tend to get to the words that go with the music until fairly late in the game. They often have to rely on orchestrators and assistants, or a helpful choirmaster who claims he really knows Latin. Their budget, and thus their time, is not tailored to their needs, but to the dictates of the director and the studio. The prose simply appears, like a ghost in this immense machine. And — in spite of the fact that most parties involved seem to be content to have it not mean very much — it winds up signifying something.

One example: An “exotic” text can only be understood by very specific listeners. But, very much to the point, they are not therefore the intended listeners. Lost Horizon wasn’t banking on a particular reception in the Tibetan community — rather the opposite: Dimitri Tiomkin and his collaborators seem to have counted on not having any actual speakers of Tibetan in the audience.

This gets a lot more troubling in the case of the phrase “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba,” likely one of the most repeated, parodied, and bowdlerized lines of text in any soundtrack. It’s clear that it isn’t addressing the average viewer with the intention of being understood. The very fact that it is in Zulu, but the story of The Lion King appears to take place in the Serengeti, thousands of miles to the north, suggests that the language is here to signal one thing and one thing only: African-ness.

For contrast, look at the way composer Michael Abels’ score for Jordan Peele’s Get Out features Swahili voices: Outside of the considerable number of Swahili speakers in the world, most people watching Get Out won’t know what the singers are saying. But what they’re saying does matter, in a way: Literally “listen to your ancestors,” but as a saying meaning something kind of like “you’re about to be in danger.” The viewer who doesn’t understand this line is missing an important warning about what is to come in the film. As is, of course, the film’s African American protagonist who cannot listen (or at least understand) his ancestors. Peele and Abels manage to wring from this small decision a whole range of subtle points.

***

But as with all exoticism, there’s a strange tug of war between condescension and appreciation in these kinds of borrowings. When Ottman decided to use a choral piece at the end of the 2008 film Valkyrie, he clearly needed a German text, and I suspect any German text would have sufficed. But he didn’t pick any German text. The film stars Tom Cruise as Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, a historic figure who led the only attempt by members of the Nazi state to get rid of Adolf Hitler. The text is “Wandrers Nachtlied,” one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s most memorable, well-known texts, and if it’s a little bit treacly by the great poet’s standards, it’s hard to deny it’s a deeply appropriate choice for this moment. Not overtly about politics, it is nevertheless about history, about reflection, about resignation. And about a different use of the German language than one is used to in Hollywood films.

For any German person it’s weird to hear bad guys so consistently speak (and butcher) your language. I’m not complaining, mind you, it makes perfect sense. But what’s remarkable about Valkyrie is that it seems unusually careful for a Hollywood-film in how it deals with the German language. Earlier in the film, Cruise’s character says that “people need to know we were not all like him,” and this final poem seems to do something similar for the German language — the filmmakers close their movie by pointing out that this language is capable of beauty and deep humanity. The poet Paul Celan — himself a Holocaust-survivor — pointed to the strangeness of writing in a language that was both “my mother’s tongue” (Muttersprache) and “the murderer’s tongue” (Mördersprache). Ottman seems to want to recover the former after showing plenty of the murderers.

The strange thing is: I am pretty sure Goethe’s “Nachtlied” is the first utterance in actual German in this film about Germany. Cruise sort of tries a German accent every other scene, the largely British supporting cast doesn’t even bother. And no one speaks any German, the way Sean Connery does with Russian at certain moments in The Hunt for Red October, or Alan Rickman in Die Hard. The film’s supporting cast is stacked with Germans who belt out accented English throughout. It almost feels like the film wants to bend over backwards a little too much: remind us what beauty and thoughtfulness this language is capable of — even though it never shows us the barbarity, which the film renders in English.

I suppose it’s moments like that one that made me obsess over what choirs sing in movies, and who decides what they sing. Because it’s a moment when blockbuster film or TV, which increasingly is created for the greatest possible global audience, which has been focus-grouped and test-audienced within an inch of its life, manages to speak far more directly, more improvisationally to a much smaller audience. All of us are sometimes in that smaller audience, sometimes not. But we’re aware it’s there. When cinema is literally speaking in tongues, how could we not? And to be the person who hears a call the object of fascination never knew it was putting out there — what better definition could there be of what a fan really is?

* * *

Adrian Daub is professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of four books on German thought and culture in the nineteenth century, as well as (with Charles Kronengold) “The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism” (related story here). He tweets @adriandaub.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Last Resort, Part 1: Let’s Go to Angola

Longreads Pick

“His father, a broke music promoter, had convinced him they could turn their lives around by arranging a complicated but lucrative hip-hop concert on New Year’s Eve in Angola. It was more complicated than they’d imagined.” The first installment of a three-part story, in partnership with Epic Magazine.

Source: Vulture
Published: Aug 23, 2021
Length: 32 minutes (8,086 words)

My Seat at the Table

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Bernice L. McFadden | Longreads | August 2021 | 15 minutes (4,049 words)

I discovered through DNA testing that my first maternal ancestor in the United States came from the country in Africa now known as Cameroon. This Cameroonian ancestor was a member of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.

The table and the chair were invented in Egypt around 2500 B.C. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. Do you find it ironic that gaining a seat at the table has become a metaphor for the advancement into spaces that are historically and predominately white and male and generally resistant to Black and female representation?

Recently, Black people and women have been crashing those homogenized parties, bringing with them their own chairs or filling vacant ones at those proverbial tables.

Some of the gatekeepers feign acceptance of the racial modifications of these platforms, while others have no qualms conveying their disdain or outright outrage at the presence of a Black person at said table. For example, on Jan. 25, 2012, Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona, stood on the airport tarmac and chastised, like a child, one Barack Hussein Obama — a Black man who was, at the time, the sitting president of the United States of America. Moments later, when Brewer was asked about the incident she said, “He was a little disturbed about my book.”

Other gatekeepers are covert with their contempt, preferring to close their arms around unwelcomed Black people in an insincere embrace as they sink a blade into their backs.

I have a longtime friend. She and I are BFFs and are as close as sisters. She is white and Filipino, and we have been friends since 1979, when we first met at our mostly white boarding school in the rural Pennsylvania town of Danville.

We are both the eldest of four children, both raised in two-parent households.

For most of our relationship, race was not a topic of discussion. However, that changed in the early 2000s when she came to New York to spend a weeklong holiday with me. She’d spent the day in Manhattan, catching up with friends and taking in theater. Over dinner that evening, she shared that she’d had an extra ticket for the play she’d seen but hadn’t considered inviting me because she assumed I wouldn’t be interested in a staged production that did not have Black characters.

That statement stalled me. I asked if she thought that because I was Black, that my interest lay only in Black-centered entertainment?

She said yes.

I was stunned by her misconception of me and Black people on the whole. I asked if she, a biracial woman living in America, was only interested in European and/or Filipino art? She confessed that her interests were indeed diverse but couldn’t explain why she presumed it did not hold true for me or others who looked like me.

I explained that contrary to what she’d been told, Black people are not a monolith. I told her that we are diverse in every conceivable way.

This was the conversation that set us off on a journey about the myth of race, systemic racism, and what it’s really like to be Black in America.

At our school I was just one of a handful of Black students. On Saturdays, we girls, Black, white, and other, would walk from school into town, to lunch at the Arthur Treacher’s or the Hoagie Shop. Oftentimes, we would go to the local Woolworth’s to buy books, candy, and millinery supplies for sewing class. Even though I knew my white classmates were secretly slipping nail polish and lip gloss into their pockets and backpacks, it was me and the other Black girls that the store employees followed and hawk-eyed.


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Sometimes I spent weekends in the homes of my white classmates, those day students who lived in and around the town. It was always a treat to get away from campus, to sleep in a cozy bed and eat a home-cooked meal.

At the time, my family and I lived in a crowded two-bedroom apartment. The kitchen was tiny, leaving little space for a dining table large enough to accommodate a family of six. So, we children ate our meals in the kitchen while my parents ate in the living room, on the couch, plates in their laps.

My father believed that children should be seen and not heard, especially at the dining table, so talking was not permitted during meals. In contrast, the parents of my white friends encouraged and participated in mealtime discussions.

It was at one of those family dinners that I remember how my BFF’s father, a tall, slim, kind man with glasses, responded aloud to a question that I had not heard posed:

“Of course, the white race is the superior race.”

To this day, I do not know who asked the question or if in fact a question was actually asked. Perhaps, this man, who had always been nothing but kind and welcoming to me, found it necessary to remind me that even though I was in his Victorian home, sitting at his dinner table, eating the food that had been lovingly prepared by his Filipino wife — I was inferior to him.

I cannot recall if my friend and her siblings fell silent, or if my friend, her siblings, or her mother looked at me for a reaction or in consolation. I remember that I kept my eyes lowered to my plate, that the grip on my fork tightened, and the leisurely pace of my heart launched into a sprint. I was 15 years old and the situation my family had warned and prepped me for as a Black person living in white America had arrived yet again.

Before that incident, another incident took place in Brooklyn in the waning days of autumn when I was on my way home from middle school. On that day, I exited the subway on the south side of Prospect Park, in a neighborhood where very few Black people lived at the time. There, I was followed by two white teenage boys who pelted rocks at me, shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!”

A year or two before, my younger brother and I were walking down Rockaway Boulevard in South Ozone Park, Queens, a neighborhood that in the ‘70s was still majority Italian. As we made our way to our grandparents’ home, a group of white teenage boys and girls stalked us for blocks, hurling soda cans, bottles, and racial slurs.

The fact that my BFF’s father chose that moment to express his deepest held beliefs about his racial superiority is not beyond me. Indeed, my presence at his table was conditional — permitted only because I made his daughter happy and he enjoyed seeing his daughter happy because his love for her was unconditional.

Do I believe his declaration was meant to wound and degrade me?

Yes, I do.

Not only was I hurt, but being an empath, I also absorbed the humiliation on behalf of his Filipino wife who had not batted an eye at the insult.

Do I think that my friend’s mother believed that she, a Filipino person of color, was less than her husband because he was white, and she was not?

Yes, I do.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Indian anti-colonial nationalist and spiritual leader, believed that Europeans were the most civilized of the races and that Indians were almost as civilized as Europeans and Africans were wholly uncivilized.

Perhaps my friend’s mother held similar beliefs.

Nevertheless, I would return to that house and eat at that table again and again, without further incident. But I would never forget the shot fired because the wound it left would not allow me to forget. The memory is lodged in me like the bullet it was intended to be.

I would return to that house and eat at that table again and again, without further incident. But I would never forget the shot fired because the wound it left would not allow me to forget. The memory is lodged in me like the bullet it was intended to be.

***

Some years after that dinner, my friend and her family traveled to the Philippines to visit her maternal family. Not too long after her return to the United States, she and I met for dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. I sat across the table from her and listened, enthralled as she recounted her trip in vivid detail. Near the end of her monologue she mentioned that when she ventured out without her Filipino mother or another Filipino family member for a walk or an excursion to one of the many marketplaces — she was baffled about why strangers addressed her in Tagalog, which is perhaps the most widely spoken language in the Philippines.

I frowned, asking, “Why was that so confusing?”

“Well,” she said, “because I don’t think I look Filipino.”

“What do you think you look like?”

“American.”

I am keenly aware that people who look like me — people born Black, without “the complexion for the protection” as comedian Paul Mooney described it — understand that when people say American, that means white. Those of us born in America who are not white are hyphenated to stress that we are not real Americans, but hybrids — like broccoflowers and limequats.

My BFF is tall, beige-complexioned with almond-shaped eyes, and long straight black hair. To me she looks Asian, but I admit, she could also pass for Native American. The one thing she cannot pass for is white, which is how she saw herself.

My BFF is tall, beige-complexioned with almond-shaped eyes, and long straight black hair. To me she looks Asian, but I admit, she could also pass for Native American. The one thing she cannot pass for is white, which is how she saw herself.

I smiled, reached for the wine glass, and asked, “Well, friend, if you look American, then what do I look like?”

I watched the epiphany rise in her eyes like the morning sun.

***

In his 1997 essay, “Deconstructing the Ideology of White Aesthetics,” John M. Kang wrote:

Like male chauvinism, the ideology of White aesthetics assumes that the politically dominant group, White people, are inherently superior to a weaker group, people of color. The ideology of White aesthetics holds that people of color, by virtue of their aesthetic inferiority to White people, deserve to remain subordinated.

Kang’s observation was validated during the 2014 National Book Awards, a major literary event that honors the best and brightest writers.

In 1953, just three years after the award was conceived, Ralph Ellison would win for his novel, Invisible Man. Ellison was the first Black writer to win a National Book Award. Two decades would pass before another Black writer would be so honored. In 1975, Virginia Hamilton received the award for her children’s book, M. C. Higgins, The Great.

In 1983, both Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor received National Book Awards for their novels: The Color Purple and The Women of Brewster Place. So if you’re counting, only four Black authors were awarded National Book Awards over a 30-year period.

The 2014 National Book Awards dinner was held at the ritzy Cipriani Wall Street restaurant located in NYC’s financial district. The nominees, their guests, and ticket holders, all dressed in their finest threads, sat at tables covered in white linen cloth. Before the awards were given, the attendees were treated to a sumptuous meal complete with wine and cocktails.

That year, Jacqueline Woodson, a Black woman, received the award in the Young People’s Literature category for her novel, Brown Girl Dreaming. After Woodson gave her acceptance speech, host Daniel Handler — aka Lemony Snicket, a white man best known for his children’s books, A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions — returned to the stage and gleefully bellowed:

“I told you! I told Jackie she was going to win. And I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind. And I said you have to put that in a book. And she said, you put that in a book.”

Handler continued: And I said I am only writing a book about a Black girl who is allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb from you, Cornell West, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama saying, ‘this guy’s OK! This guy’s fine!'”

“Alright,” he chuckled when he realized the crowd was uncomfortable. “Alright, we’ll talk about it later.”

***

The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles is a well-known comedy club that has hosted many legendary comics of all backgrounds, creeds, ethnicities, and genders. The audience sits in chairs that are arranged in the form of a C around the stage.

Back in 2006, Michael Richards, former star of the popular syndicated television show Seinfeld, was performing at the Laugh Factory when he became enraged because Black audience members were heckling him during his standup routine.

The infuriated Richards took the opportunity to remind the Black audience members that: “Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” Richards continued, “You can talk, you can talk, you’re brave now motherfucker!’

He demanded that the Black people be removed from the club, barking, “Throw his ass out. He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! A nigger, look, there’s a nigger!”

***

If the lunch counter is the heir to the table, then the chair is the progeny of the stool. For decades, Black people, those offspring of enslaved Africans, were barred from service at lunch counters in the Jim Crow south.

On Feb. 1, 1960, the Greensboro Four, who were students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College — Ezell Blair Jr. (who later took the name Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil — walked into the Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter, and ordered coffee and sandwiches.

Soon, their mission to disrupt and dissolve the segregationist edicts that supported Whites Only counters were adopted by Black people and their white allies in other segregated Southern states, and the “Sit In” movement was born.

The “Sit In” crusade was an act of non-violent, civil disobedience that was frequently met with violence.

Activists were spat on, milk poured over their heads, smoke blown into their faces —in some cases they were punched, slapped, and brutally removed from the lunch counters.

***

A news desk is similar to a luncheonette counter. Journalists sit at these desks to report the news. Guests are often invited to sit at news desks to enlighten viewers on a topic on which they may or may not have expertise. Sometimes, multiple guests are summoned to debate an issue.

On April 7, 2010, AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) secretary-general Andre Visagie, a white South African man, appeared with political analyst Lebohang Pheko, a Black South African woman on e.tv’s current affairs show Africa 360, to discuss race relations in the wake of Eugène Ney Terre’Blanche’s murder.

Terre‘Blanche was a white supremacist and Afrikaner nationalist who founded the AWB. According to Wikipedia, Terre‘Blanche swore to use violence to preserve minority rule. In 1997, Terre’Blanche was convicted and sentenced to six years in Rooigrond Prison for assaulting a gas station attendant and for the attempted murder of a Black security guard. He served three years before being released. Terre’Blanche was murdered on his farm on April 3, 2010.

During the TV show exchange, Andre Visagie became enraged when Pheko continuously interrupted him. In the video, Visagie rips off his microphone and springs from his chair. The incensed Visagie aims his finger at Pheko, declaring: “You won’t dare interrupt me!”

Chris Maroleng, the Black South African host of the show, planted himself between Pheko and the irate Visagie. For a millisecond, it seems as though the two men might come to blows until finally, Visagie addresses Pheko again, warning, “I am not finished with you.”

Andre Visagie was born and raised under an apartheid system dissolved in 1994. In 2010, he was a silver-haired old man living in a country where Black people were no longer required to be subservient to the white minority.

As I watched the exchange between the white Visagie and the Black and female Pheko, I could sense the radiating fury of Visagie as he tried to grapple with the fact that a Black woman was asserting herself, holding her ground, and speaking her mind as if she was his racial equal.

Only that the world was watching kept Visagie from pummeling Pheko to death.

***

In some academic institutions, students sit on furniture known as a combo school desk, which is a chair with a small table attached.

In October 2015, a 16-year-old Black girl was seated in a combo school desk in her math class at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina.

In South Carolina the school system remained partially segregated until 1970. In February of 1970 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Court ordered that a school desegregation directive be issued in Lamar, a town just one hour from Columbia.

Nearly 200 hundred angry white parents, irate that their children would be taught alongside Black children, armed themselves with guns, chains, bricks, and axe handles and descended on buses carrying elementary- and high school-aged students from Lamar. The mob overturned two school buses and clashed with law enforcement before they were finally subdued with tear gas. During the melee, six Black students were injured.

The young lady in the math class at Spring Valley High School was on her cell phone, which is against the rules, but not a crime. When asked to put her phone away, she took her sweet time doing so. This infuriated her white teacher, who asked her to leave the class. When she refused, the vice principal was called in. He too asked her to leave the class. Still, she refused to leave.

Senior Deputy Ben Fields, a white school resource officer, was called in to handle the situation.

According to the LA Times, Fields “… wrapped his arm around her neck and tried to pull her from her desk, which flipped backward to the floor. He dragged her out of the desk, threw her across the floor, and arrested her for disturbing the classroom.”

***

One of the games I remember playing in grade school was musical chairs. The teacher would arrange a circle of chairs that equaled one less chair than the number of players. For example, if there were 10 students, there would be nine chairs.

The teacher would play a song on the record player and we children would march around the circle of chairs. When the teacher stopped the music, we would all scramble to secure a seat. The student left standing — because he or she failed to capture a chair — was the loser.

Afterward, the teacher removed a chair, turned on the music, and the game continued until there were only two students and one chair left.

As the number of chairs decreased, the anxiety among the players heightened. Oftentimes the game turned violent. Students would push and shove their fellow classmates to keep them from stealing the chair away from them.

The point of musical chairs is to teach children fair play and sportsmanship.

***

In May of 2019, my high school friend married the love of her life in a lovely church ceremony in Pennsylvania. The intimate wedding reception, attended by close friends and family, was held at a rustic, stylish restaurant.

The bride, her groom, and all 60 of her guests sat at a long wooden table. Good wine and delectable food were served.

I was the only Black person in attendance. I was aware of my Blackness but not uncomfortable with it.

Across the table from my friend and her new husband, I sat sandwiched between my BFF’s youngest brother and a woman who was filled with so much joy that her laughter sounded like sleigh bells.

Seated next to the happy couple was the brides’ middle brother and his wife. The teenage children of both brothers filled out the remaining seats at the west end of the table.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the wife of the second brother stealing long, probing glances at me. When I suddenly turned to meet her inquisitive eyes, her face brightened with embarrassment.

We gazed at each other until flustered she asked, “So, how do you like living in New Orleans?”

I told her that I liked it just fine, to which she nodded, looked away, and wondered aloud to no one in particular how the family cat was getting on in her absence.

Afterward, I returned my attention to the woman with the jingle-bell laughter.

There were several conversations happening at once around the table. Everyone spoke at an even decibel — just loud enough to be heard by the person they were speaking to, but not so loud that their exchange could be heard by guests seated two or three seats away.

The woman I was conversing with said something funny, and I chuckled into my palm, stifling my usual, open-mouthed guffaw, because I was aware that more often than not, white people find Black joy invasive.

I was conscious of this even before August 2015, when the Black women members of the Sistahs on the Reading Edge Book Club, were kicked off of a Napa Valley wine train in California because white passengers found their laughter “offensive.”

The woman I was conversing with said something funny, and I chuckled into my palm, stifling my usual, open-mouthed guffaw, because I was aware that more often than not, white people find Black joy invasive.

I had wiped a tear from my eye with one hand and was reaching for my water glass with the other, when one of the teenagers asked a question, loud enough for the entire table to hear:

What’s the name of that song by NWA?

I brought the water glass to my lips and even though I kept my eyes trained on the woman who’d made me laugh my eyes wet, I could no longer hear the words tumbling out of her mouth, for my ears were tuned for the response to the question. Heat crept through me and I realized that my anxiety had escalated from low-risk stage green to warning-risk stage yellow.

The question was repeated — this time a decimal above the initial inquiry.

What’s the name of that song by NWA?

To me the question sounded like the clearing of a throat, a tap on my shoulder, a nudge in my side — which is to say it yearned for my attention.

The question had been posed twice — by two of the grandchildren of the man who wounded me decades earlier. He had been dead for years, leaving his progeny to continue his legacy.

I believe his grandchildren wanted me to turn around so they could see the fire that they’d lit in my eyes. Perhaps too, they wanted to witness, firsthand, the infamous angry Black woman that is lore in white imaginations.

But I did not give them the satisfaction of seeing my anger and my pain and the leaking wound their words had reopened. Instead, I maintained my position — head turned, back to them — enduring the mental and emotional weathering — the erosion those words inflicted on me.

The microaggression veiled as an innocent question about a group whose name is an acronym for Niggaz Wit’ Attitude was asked a third time, this time by the mother who had abruptly ended her short conversation with me to wonder about her cat.

No,” she giggled, “I don’t remember the name of that song by N … W … A.

She dragged the letters for effect.

Nigger was the trigger to which I was expected to react. And even though the foul word itself had not been uttered, its implication was as clear as the crystal wine glasses on the table.

I understood that this word play was my verbal reminder that my seat at that table was untenable. I understood that my presence was tolerated but not welcomed and that if they had to deal with my company because the bride loved me and they loved the bride, well then, their lenience would come with a side of cruelty.

Nigger was the trigger to which I was expected to react. And even though the foul word itself had not been uttered, its implication was as clear as the crystal wine glasses on the table.

***

The table and the chair were invented in Egypt. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. I am a descendant of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.

Egypt is in Africa.

Egypt is in Africa.

* * *

Bernice L. McFadden is the author of 15 novels and the recipient of the 2017 American Book Award as well as NACCP Image Award for Outstanding Literature for her novel, The Book of Harlan. She is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo