Justin Nobel | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,068 words)
Earlier this year, as the climate crisis continued to spin out of control and our president divvied up our public lands and coastal waters to the oil and gas industry, many of us good happy Americans in the Resistance sat in our cubicles and living rooms to watch SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy hurtle toward our nearest red orb neighbor, gleefully convinced that this was the beginning of the thing that was going to save us. “One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event,” wrote the man behind the rocket, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, in 2017. “The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”
I find myself disagreeing and wondering what mind-numbing drug everyone is smoking. Then I find myself realizing, oh wait, this is just American culture, and we’ve had this idea that this land is the best, that we are the greatest, that there is nowhere or nothing better rammed down our throats since birth. Sure, we’re great, I don’t discount our freedoms, but were not all the peoples and cultures trampled and annihilated to forge this county also great? And here is the point: We are going into space with the same domineering mind-set that colonists have had when they’ve entered every new continent and realm.
Even the language and rhetoric of the latest space wave, which Musk is happily at the helm of, is the same. Colonizing. Taking over a “dead” world. Bringing our wonderful gifts of technology and culture to some godforsaken place. The saving of a race, the saving of an entire world, the nationalistic pride, the promise of an unfettered new land, the promise of bounty, the extraction of new resources. I am sorry, this leads nowhere good, and the reason is that there is no spirituality involved. If we enter space without a spiritual reckoning for what we’ve done to the Earth, we will kill space just as we are killing Earth. In fact, our contamination of space is well on its way. Read more…
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
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Huw Williams is not a hermit. Not exactly. For one thing, he answers a telephone while I’m visiting him. The phone connects to a jack somewhere, although I don’t understand how it can function properly; it seems impossible that a cabin so rudimentary and run-down could support something as technologically advanced as a telephone.
The floors are covered with broken power tools, a machete, unmarked VHS tapes, decades-old newspapers and knocked-over litter boxes once filled by the three cats prowling around. Stenches of urine and filth are masked only by the rot on the stove, where the remains of long-ago meals are eating through the pans they were prepared in. And the cabin is so cold that when anyone speaks, breath becomes vapor.
Dried-out orange peels hang from the ceiling. “It’s a way of breaking up the straight lines,” the 76-year-old Williams tells me cryptically. “I’m averse to being inside a box, with all straight lines.” A radio plays environmental talk radio here in Edwall, a tiny community about 35 miles by car from Spokane, Washington. The radio is part of an ’80s-style dual cassette player, but the trays where the cassettes should go are broken off.
When I came upon Williams’ cabin on a wet afternoon last September, I assumed it was empty. My GPS couldn’t locate it, and neighbors were unsure if it was inhabited. Rusted-out trucks and cars surround the house, which is up on a slight hill atop a dirt road that bisects another dirt road that runs off a few other dirt roads.
But for all his isolation, Williams is not hiding. He grew up on this land, which his parents ran as a cattle and wheat farm. He moved back here in the 1970s after his first wife ran off with their friend and took the kids. He also lived here with his second wife, until she too left him for another man. Anybody could find him, if anybody cared to. Maybe that’s the hardest part.
Williams has prostate cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, melanomas, multiple sclerosis, and he thinks he might be bipolar. He speaks slowly and softly, as if he might run out of breath at any second. He looks the Unabomber part, with his long beard and ragged clothing. But then, he was idiosyncratic even when he used to get out more. He hitchhiked across the country to protest nuclear war, got arrested a time or two, and, after going through a brief celibate period, was a swinger who had sex with his wife’s boyfriend’s mother. Most spectacularly, in 1963 he founded a 240-acre farm nearby that is among the longest-lasting remnants of the ‘60s communes that Charles Manson gave a bad name to. And it was based on the teachings of Leo Tolstoy. Read more…
It’s another day with tragic news — as are most days these days. It’s always something. If not race-related violence in America, it’s suicide-bombings in northern Nigeria or the massacre in Plateau State or a trailer falling over a bridge in Lagos and crushing people to death; or that fuel tanker exploding on Otedola bridge, eating multiple vehicles and people in a billowing tower of black smoke; or it’s another #metoo story; or some more violence against LGBTQIA+ people across the world. Or it’s the suicides. Those backtobacktoback suicides.
“Watch out for your faves who are quiet on this matter,” says the tweet, “because silence is complicity.” I scroll down two more to figure out which of the matters we’re discussing now, even though I know I shouldn’t have. As I suspected, it’s a noisepool of rage, triggering links and photos attached. But I’m in it now.
“‘Your silence will not protect you, it’s better to speak knowing that we were never meant to survive – Audre Lorde.’ #enoughsaid,” says another tweet. “Share your stories, let’s name and shame these monsters. By not sharing, we’re giving them more power and they might do it to someone else!”
“People are literally dying” says a tweet linking to a video of a woman with a great body, in a neon dress, “and children are being put in cages!” 1.4 thousand likes.
I scroll faster.
Further down, an author is announcing their publication date but prefaces the thread with an apology. “I know this is a difficult time, and I feel bad having to do this now but please —” It’s not the first time I’ve seen this, either. It’s been less than 10 minutes on the app, and between those minutes and these tweets, there’s now a brick tower of anxiety in my chest.
On Instagram: “If you ever wondered what you’d have been doing during slavery or the holocaust or the civil rights movement, you’re doing it right now.” Following that, information about another tragedy. Do something! the post adds. It takes less than ten minutes!
In response, I go madder. I think to myself that if I’m feeling this from the comfort of my bedroom, then what everyone in the bloodshot eye of each violence must be experiencing must be a million times worse, and it makes me hate the world even more strongly. So, I retweet, repost, retweet people talking about each issue, even though I know I won’t be able to look at my profile afterwards. It’s all fury now, fueling and felling me at the same time. I’m thinking (knowing?) — obsessively, manically — that the world is drooling at the mouth with wicked intention for all of us, that nowhere feels safe, no one is safe and we’re all fucked. That voice settles in me, grows a sturdy femur, and I feel it happening: that indifferent stroll towards the cliff that my brain does. There’s no point being here, it tells me, sounding bored and done, let’s go. My brain means it. And that’s how I know I’m in trouble.
An editor asked me for an essay about porches with an upbeat takeaway, and I thought about how porches let us navigate the zone between public and private life and connect. But I’d just sat on my porch in Texas and had conversations that sent me back inside, feeling scalded. My small talk had taken a dark turn, my fault. Most people can’t hear about trouble without suggesting a quick fix because they want you to feel better. I tried to write about porches and ended up writing about social life. I tried to write about social life and ended up writing about social media, where we also navigate the zone between public and private life and connect. Or don’t. On social media, our virtual porch, we converse with friends, friends of friends, the occasional somebody no one knows, and decide who to wave over and who to dodge. People to avoid weren’t easily detectable. I couldn’t tell except in meandering conversation. They seemed like people who might be companions, consolation. And they looked like me, white. My daughter is black.
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An early inkling of trouble occurred on November 11, 2016, the first Friday night after the presidential election. She was two hours away, a college freshman in east Texas. While she was sleeping, her car was jumped on or slammed with a blunt instrument, painted with a slur (your first guess is correct), festooned with posters on which the slogan “Make America Great Again” had been altered to read “Make America White Again.”
The door to her college-owned student apartment was vandalized too. Other black students in the building woke to find their cars and doors vandalized. It seemed obvious that some white students, neighbors, had made note of black students coming and going, who lived where and drove what. Otherwise how could vandals (is that the word?) have known which cars and apartments to target? This inference might seem like overthinking it, a sin in the annals of self-help. But it was my first thought, and the first thought mothers of my daughter’s black college friends had too. Our children had been under surveillance, however inexpert, added to a list.
A friend: “But your insurance will cover it, right?”
Another: “Yes, we all feel bad the country is so misogynist it wouldn’t elect a woman.”
For months I’d watched as one candidate first descended into his campaign via an escalator, then deeper and deeper into auditoriums in small cities across America where black people were shoved and punched, sometimes at the candidate’s urging. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on February 1, 2016: “Knock the crap out of him. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” About a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 21, 2015: “He should have been roughed up.” Sometimes blacks were ejected for being black. In Valdosta, Georgia, on March 1, 2016, black college students with no plans to protest were removed as whites yelled, “Go home, nigger.”
Pundits called this “dog-whistle racism,” as in only dogs hear it and come running and so, it follows, only racists hear it and come running. But it wasn’t muted. My daughter was born in 1997, a time after name-calling and reserving spaces as white-only had diminished to the point that, as sociologist Lawrence Bobo found, a majority of white Americans believed racism was rare. By the time my daughter was 10, the term “post-racial” had gained currency. Social scientists began to study implicit, systemic inequality and those barely articulated prejudices by which, in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s research, subjects describe themselves as not racist but explain lack of contact with people of color as “natural” and use terms like “unqualified” to describe them.
Eighteen years later, I worried my daughter wasn’t safe. Her property had been damaged. I hoped her corporeal self wouldn’t be. I hoped her incorporeal self wouldn’t be either, but concern for that shifted to the backburner. I was like the Ancient Mariner, who must have been good enough company once but can’t act normal now. As more bad events befell my daughter and people I knew, and people I ended up knowing, I ran into friends and neighbors whose lives proceeded as usual except for political outrage I shared, but theoretically not viscerally, and when they said “How are you?” en route to somewhere pleasant — like wedding guests on their way into a wedding — I detained them and recounted bad news.
This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine and appears in issue no. 7.
Losers are a fixture of my workday as a sportswriter.
Talking to a person coming off court who was just dealt a crushing defeat, and offering some vague, platitudinous comfort to assuage their raw battle wound, is a necessary task in the job. On rarer occasions, I’ve talked to those who have just suffered a defeat so harrowing and derailing that it has them visibly doubting the viability of their career. But for most losers, even in down moments, there’s the credibility and dignity of having just performed for an appreciative crowd of some size in a respected, aspirational pursuit like professional sports.
There’s nothing remotely aspirational, though, about the Applebee’s restaurant I found myself in during day 6 of the 2017 US Open. And sitting across a table bearing mozzarella sticks and glasses of tap water, these were not my normal losers.
Rainer Piirimets, a three-year veteran of the tennis tour from Estonia, was knocked out of the US Open the day before, exiting Arthur Ashe Stadium in the early afternoon. His partner, a fellow Estonian who has been on tour for 10 years, sat beside him.
Piirimets left the stadium not through the tunnel to the locker room, but out a side gate. His wrists bore no sweatbands, only handcuffs.
The request for this interview was not made, as most I do, through the tournament media desk, but rather through a Facebook message. Piirimets eagerly accepted. Meeting at Applebee’s was his suggestion, but he wasn’t hungry—just eager to set the story straight after spending 10 hours in police custody the day before.
“We’re not criminals,” Piirimets said, a phrase he and his friend would use as a refrain over the next two hours.
Piirimets had sure been treated like a criminal the day before. While watching the third-round match between Petra Kvitova and Caroline Garcia, he was spotted in his seat in the upper deck (Section 331) by tournament security officials and escorted out. He was then arrested in a small room just off the concourse by police, who then perp-walked him out of the stadium. The cops steered him through a dense crowd of staring, perplexed tennis fans and ducked him into a waiting police car outside the tournament gates.
Piirimets, a competitive high jumper in his youth, was then put in a jail cell at the 110th Precinct in Queens, which he shared with, he said, an agitated, profane homeless man. After several hours in the lockup, he was brought to a court for arraignment before a judge. He was then released and given a summons to appear in court again seven weeks later. He doesn’t plan on attending.
His friend, who I’ll call Pete, was equally animated about the treatment Piirimets had received.
“To keep him for 10 hours in prison, for doing what?” said Pete. “He made a little mistake, no big deal.”
His crime was trespassing. Piirimets had also been kicked out of the US Open the year before, and during that first ouster he was given paperwork acknowledging that he was to be banned from the tournament grounds for 20 years. He said he didn’t think that threat was serious, and that he didn’t think he was bound by the forms because he didn’t sign the line at the bottom. Nor did he understand that trespassing was a crime that could get him arrested in the United States. After all, he said, he’s been kicked out of lots of tournaments, all over the world, and nothing like this has ever happened before. Because why would it? He’s not a criminal, he said, flummoxed.
What Piirimets is, he admitted, is a member of a rogue, impish species in the tennis ecosystem: a courtsider. But with their hunters getting more and more adept, courtsiders—arguably justifiably so—have become an endangered species. Only the most stubborn of their breed persist. Even though sports betting is becoming legalized in the United States, they will still be persona non grata at this year’s US Open, which they will attempt to attend again.
Though only the second courtsider ever arrested at a Grand Slam event, Piirimets was the eighth caught in the first five days of the 2017 US Open, according to the USTA—which prides itself on “vigorously combatting” courtsiding and was quite excited to alert the media to his arrest. Twenty courtsiders—17 men and three women (none American)—had been caught during the 2016 tournament, hailing from as far away as Sri Lanka, each thinking they had the skills to beat the system. All were given notice of a 20-year ban from the tournament. Read more…
Elisa Albert | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (5,940 words)
Her name was Sally. Sally-bo-bally. The Salster. Sometimes we called her Butt-Wiggle, for the way she shook it when she saw us. Or butt-wig, for short. You know how it is with nicknames, the language of love. We found her on a rescue organization’s website. Sally! She was bright-eyed and smiling. Hi! Someone had tied a bandana around her neck. I adored her on sight. She was up for adoption the following Saturday in a parking lot behind a warehouse in Schenectady.
I’d never had a dog. My mother said it was dirty to have animals in the house.
We resolved to keep open minds and meet all the dogs, let the right one find us, not force anything, but it was always going to be Sal. She stood on her hind legs and wagged her whole ass at us. She was practically dancing. Sally-Sal! Jet black, with a short, shiny coat. Pit/lab mix? Pit/lab/hound? Pit/whippet/lab? Who knew. Who cared. The chemistry was perfect. Love at first lick. Not like poor little Buddy, over in the corner with a bad case of worms, or pretty retriever Julius, who wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. It was always going to be Sal. Four months old, spayed and vaccinated. No one else showed the slightest interest in her. She was ours. We filled out the paperwork and took her home.
***
Her eyes! The way she looked at you, and didn’t look away. So present and soulful, a real lover. She was like a person, if we’re talking about the most honest loving open deep good authentic funny sort of person, and how many of those have you ever met? She’d curl herself up next to you, close as she could get. She wanted to crawl under the sheets next to you. She wasn’t satisfied unless she had her body in the sweetest possible proximity to yours. She was like one of those rare massage therapists whose touch feels psychic: exactly where you want it, exactly how you want it. Magic.
I was never into dog memoirs or whatever, never understood that mad devotion to pets. Seemed weird to be that into an animal. It seemed fairly sad to be that into an animal. Like, why don’t you find yourself some more people to love? I didn’t get it. Now I got it. People are way overrated.
How creepy it is when people talk of “completing” their families, as though a family is a construction project or a vocational course, a finite thing, a theoretical ideal. How moronic and hubristic I find that attitude. It’s like the ugliest kind of nationalism, on a microcosmic scale. And yet. And yet. Sally gave us something new to love, and in so doing gave our family a new dimension, this whole new love to share between us. I felt a weird, delicious sense of… completeness. I was past having babies, but Sal was my sweet darling beloved lil’ boo. We were in love with her and in love with each other and in love with the way she loved us back and generally high off our own abundance of love and good fortune. There was this warmth in my chest. We redrew our goofy family crest to include her. We sang ridiculous songs to and with and about her. We spoke to her in a silly dialect. Dare I say it? We were happy. Read more…
Michael Gonzales | Longreads | August 2018 | 21 minutes (5,551 words)
Back in the early 1980s, rap was primarily a boys club, but a few girls still managed to sneak in and do their thing. Although uptown girls Sha-Rock from the Funky Four + 1 and the Mercedes Ladies were pioneers of the genre, it was a teenager from Queens named Roxanne Shante who gets credit for laying down a verbal foundation for other fem rhyme slayers to follow for decades. As seen in the gritty Netflix biopic Roxanne Roxanne,which details the rapper’s humble beginnings and hard knock life, Shante was just another around-the-way girl with an attitude living in Queensbridge Projects when she was discovered by record producer Marley Marl, who lived and worked in the same public housing sprawl. Marley’s rap posse the Juice Crew featuring Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie and MC Shan were some of the best rappers in the city and being down with them meant something special.
Going by her government name Lolita Shanté Gooden, she began rapping at ten years old and was known within those brick buildings to be the best at freestyling and battling alongside the boys. Unlike a decade later when the scantily clad Foxy Brown and Lil’ Kim became the most popular female rappers, in the ‘80s it wasn’t about sex appeal (often “lady rappers,” with the exception of The Sequence, dressed like the boys), but simply skills. “Shante was a gem,” Marley told me in 2008. “All her songs were made up on the the spot. All you had to do was give her a subject and she would run with it.”
Recruited to bring her dis-heavy rhymes to a record designed to answer back to U.T.F.O.’s popular 1984 jam “Roxanne Roxanne,” a somewhat sexist song featuring Brooklyn rappers Kangol Kid, Educated Rapper and Doctor Ice (Mix Master Ice was their DJ) that steadily insults a “stuck up” young woman who was new to their block, Shante adopted a new first name and brought the pain. “Roxanne Roxanne” might’ve been a sensation and a best-seller for U.T.F.O., but when Shante’s squeaky yet powerful response “Roxanne’s Revenge” was released a few months later, U.T.F.O., as well as the rest of the world, were caught off-guard. Rox called them out individually, verbally taking down the entire crew as she delivered the goods and changed hip-hop history.
The rap sisterhood soon included Sparky D, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, LA Star, Monie Love, Lauryn Hill, Lil Kim, Foxy Brown, Nicki Minaj and countless others. For many of the women rappers who’ve succeeded throughout the years, as former Def Jam artist Nikki D says in the 2010 documentary My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth About Women And Hip Hop directed by Ava DuVernay, “They were doing double of what a dude could do.”
While Roxanne was an obvious inspiration to her fellow female MCs for decades to come, her voice and lyrics also inspired many young women who never touched a mic to pursue their path regardless of any barriers the boys might put in their way.
‘She Begat This’ is a celebration of the Bad Boy boom bap Wu Tang neo-soul Missy Elliott roaring 1990s, an end-of-the-century era that was an important period in black popular culture.
Like hip-hop itself, writing about rap music was mostly the beat of male (the main quartet being Nelson George, Greg Tate, Barry Michael Cooper and Harry Allen) music journalists in the the early years, but by the mid-’80s, that too would change. There were the Village Voice scribes Carol Cooper and Lisa Jones, though neither wrote that much about the genre. Additionally, there were also the often overlooked women from the glossy teen zines: Cynthia Horner (Right On!), Gerrie Summers (Word Up), Kate Ferguson, Yvette Noel-Schure (who today is Beyonce’s publicist), Marcia Cole and Belinda Trotter. However, progressing into the ‘90s, the textual landscape began to change as women who came of age within the culture — whether hanging at park jams, clubbing with the b-boys or simply enthralled by the booming beat underground sounds that were slowly becoming mainstream — decided that they too had something to say about the scene. The shortlist of then young scribes includes future powerhouse writers/editors Kierna Mayo, dream hampton, Mimi Valdes, who produced the movie Roxanne Roxanne, and Danyel Smith, but it was the writings of Joan Morgan, author of the recently released She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, that I remember reading first.
For me, Joan was the hip-hop writer version of Roxanne Shante. Certainly, she wasn’t the first woman hip-hop writer on the scene, but from jump she was one of the best. While She Begat This, which includes a forward by Mayo, is a tribute to Hill’s masterful album that was released 20 years ago this past weekend, on August 25th, 1998, it’s also a celebration of the Bad Boy boom bap Wu Tang neo-soul Missy Elliott roaring 1990s, an end-of-the-century era that was an important period in black popular culture as well as in the professional and personal lives of those who were there as participants and witnesses, writing from the frontlines with Afro abandon. Back then, besides our personal stereos and radios, The Miseducation could be heard blaring from house parties, spoken word readings, cool clothing stores, restaurants, cars parked on the street and bubbling brown sugar bars everywhere.
These days Joan Morgan, between raising her son as a single mother, teaching at various universities and working on her Ph.D. dissertation, hardly ever writes about hip-hop culture, but when the publisher 37 INK offered her the project to riff on Hill’s landmark disc she felt it was her responsibility to do the right thing. Still, anyone anticipating a 33 1/3-type book filled with nerdy details describing recording sessions, Hill’s writing process, a close reading analysis of the lyrics or an interview with the featured artist, or at least with some of the musicians and collaborators, will be sorely disappointed. Morgan, whose book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999) is as influential a text amongst a certain sector of the literary hip-hop audience as Hill’s music, chose instead to write “a cultural history of the album.”
In addition to her personal observations and opinions of Lauryn as seen (heard) through a womanist lens, Morgan also interviews her girlfriends, fellow writers and thinkers who were also a part of the New York City (and Brooklyn) scene when Miseducation was first released. Serving as an intellectual Greek chorus throughout the book, they share their thoughts on Hill in relation to colorism, mental health, style, relationships and black genius.
However, considering all the interviews Hill did when the album was released, it’s striking that not one was quoted in She Begat This. Morgan talks about the beauty of the Harper’s Bazaar cover Lauryn appeared on, as well as the “lily-whiteness” of that magazine, which usually kept black faces regulated to the interior pages, but never once mentions what Hill said inside that issue . The only person Morgan spoke with who was actually connected to The Miseducation was Lauryn’s former personal manager Jayson Jackson, who gave the writer some juicy tidbits, including the fact that the record company was unhappy with the project when it was first presented to them.
“Truthfully, when I thought about it I knew that no one would be able to write the book the way I would,” says Morgan via cellphone from an Amtrak train leaving Martha’s Vineyard back to New York City. “But, I only had four months to complete the book and I didn’t have time to chase Lauryn down for an interview, so I interviewed other people (including dream hampton, Michaela Angela Davis, Dr. Yaba Blay, Karen Goode Marable, Akiba Solomon and former Honey magazine editor Joicelyn Dingle) to get their take on what made the project iconic.”
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Twenty years later The Miseducation is still relevant and winning honors; most recently it was voted #2 on NPR’s list of The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women, sandwiched between #1 Joni Mitchell (Blue) and Lauryn’s spiritual godmother Nina Simone (I Put a Spell On You) at #3. As writer Paula Mejia stated in her essay on The Miseducation, “The album, rife with Hill’s biting rhymes and sharp turns of phrase, is a wonder from start to finish.” With lyrics that were as piercing and probing as an Alice Walker novel (“…blessed with a broad literary arsenal that… reflected her dexterity as a wordsmith,” Morgan writes) and as musically lush as a seventies Ann Peebles song produced by Willie Mitchell, the album was obviously brilliant, but for Lauryn Hill it would be both a gift and a curse.
The curse came later that year when the production team New-Ark, who helped Hill with producing and songwriting but never signed any contracts, sued for more money (they were originally paid $100,000) and for writing credits. Hill eventually settled with the musicians, and it’s hard for observers not to speculate that the suit embarrassed Lauryn or even scarred her emotionally — a narrative passively reinforced not least by her inability to create a follow-up studio album.
Morgan’s writings helped many rap-loving women navigate through the gray areas of the music that they might’ve loved dearly, but didn’t always love them back.
Hill’s strange behavior both onstage and off has been documented heavily, including in a recent interview with respected jazz pianist Robert Glasper detailing his bad experiences working with her in 2008. Appearing on Houston, Texas, radio station 97.9 The Box, Glasper told tales: from being instructed to address her as Ms. Hill (something that everyone is supposed to do) to never looking her in the eye to her habit of firing her touring bands no matter how good they might be. Addressing Hill directly on the show, Glasper said, “You haven’t done enough to be the way you are…the one thing you did that was great, you didn’t do…” In a recent Medium essay, “Addressing Robert Glasper and other common misconceptions about me (in no particular order)” Ms. Hill responded to the criticism.
Film producer/director Lisa Cortes (Precious), who is currently directing the documentary The Remix: Hip Hop x. Fashion, says, “I don’t think that [sharing credits with New-Ark] should’ve made people look at her negatively.” As a former record executive, Cortes worked closely with R&B and hip-hop producers in the late ’80s/early ’90s. “Plenty of music men have used ghostwriters or other producers to help them finish tracks, but they’ve never been dragged the way Lauryn was. The writing and producing she has done with others (Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Whitney Houston) speaks for her talents and The Miseducation remains a remarkable achievement.”
The controversy of creation never deterred me from listening to The Miseducation and continually embracing its brilliance, but I’ve always been upset that Hill never released another full-length project. With the exception of the much maligned MTV Unplugged project (Village Voice critic Miles Marshall Lewis was the only writer I know who liked that album, calling the 2002 project “the most powerful artistic document to emerge from hip-hop America post-9/11”) and a single with the Fugees (“Take It Easy”), there has been nothing. “From what I understand, Lauryn never stopped recording,” says Morgan, “she just hasn’t put anything out. Who knows, maybe she’ll put out some new music in time for the anniversary.”
Though Lauryn still tours, often showing up hours late and performing her songs in a variety of different arrangements that sometimes angers the audience, The Miseducation remains Hill’s only solo album. After announcing an anniversary tour in April, by July most of the dates were postponed or canceled. “This album chronicled an intimate piece of my young existence,” Hill said in a statement released when the tour was announced. “It was the summation of most, if not all, of my most hopeful and positive emotions experienced to that date.”
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Interviewing Morgan on her book’s publication date, we reminisce about those early days when she was a young writer at the Village Voice, hanging out in the lounge where she befriended writers and editors including Joe Levy, who suggested she cover the Mike Tyson rap trial in 1992. “I was completely untrained,” she says. “People were telling me that they liked my voice (in print), but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t breaking the rules, I just didn’t know what they were.” My introduction to Morgan’s work was her 1990 review of former N.W.A. member Ice Cube’s solo debutAmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (Priority), which was also published in the Village Voice.
Living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn with my buddy Havelock Nelson while we worked on our book Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture, I sat in the CD-cluttered kitchen and read the piece twice, loving every word of it. Morgan’s writing was powerful, poetic and bold, with the review itself written in the style of a short story involving her girlfriends in Martha’s Vineyard and the Cube cassette. Balancing Cube’s angry Black man stance (his post-Panther arguments with the government and the police) and his sexism, Morgan was split between loving the album and throwing the record into a bonfire. “I think of that review as the first in hip-hop feminism,” she says.
Filmmaker Syreeta Gates, who is currently working on Write On! The Legend of Hip-Hop’s Ink Slingers, a documentary about hip-hop writers from the ‘90s, says, “Straight out the gate her Ice Cube piece had us reimagine our relationships not only with the culture but with the artists in relation to their lyrics…For me, she gave space to play in the grays that I never thought was possible in the realm of hip-hop culture. Her ideology around hip-hop feminism gave a generation of young women a [language for] something that I think for the most part we made a distinct choice to participate in.”
A self-proclaimed “cultural chameleon,” Morgan was a Bronx-bred homegirl who was part prep school (she’d attended the prestigious Fieldston School), part Phillies blunt; an Ivy League graduate who was reared by strict Jamaican parents, but still managed to get her party on. “I can still remember lying to my mother about what block I was on, so I could go with my friends to the park jams,” Morgan laughs. “I listened to what my peers listened to with curiosity and fascination, but I never thought of it as a career.” Still, just because she could recite the raunchiest rap stanzas didn’t mean she wasn’t going to challenge sexism, classism and stereotypes. Her writings helped many rap-loving women navigate through the gray areas of the music that they might’ve loved dearly, but didn’t always love them back.
Regina R. Robertson, west coast editor of Essence and editor of the essay collection He Never Come Home says, “I recently pulled When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost from my bookshelf and started flipping through it again. That book had such an impact on me. I was struck by Joan’s honesty. That book also made me take a step back and reexamine the roles that we all play. Although it’s almost twenty years since it came out, it has stood the test of time.”
Joan Morgan never planned on becoming a music critic, let alone a “hip-hop writer.” In 2006 she explained to interviewer Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “When I started writing, there was no such thing as ‘hip-hop journalism.’ I am part of that generation of writers that, for better or worse, created that as a genre and it really was a term that other people applied to our writings.” Within months of the Cube review, I began seeing her name regularly in the Voice and Spin, and began looking forward to her take on a culture that she obviously cherished.
This was another golden era of black writing, and Morgan’s work at ‘Vibe’ was at the forefront of a literary movement that would inspire a generation.
During that early ‘90s period, Joan was a teacher at the Fieldston School, but that was simply a stopover until the universe expanded and so-called “urban” magazines (most noticeably The Source, Vibe and RapPages) exploded on the scene. “Funny enough, I had very little respect for music journalism,” Morgan tells me, “because I didn’t really understand it. My thinking was, ‘Who needs a review to figure out what they wanted to hear.’ My real dream was to become an actor.”
In 1993, although The Source was already a heavy newsstand presence in the hip-hop mag department, the Time Inc./Quincy Jones-owned Vibe was promoted as bigger and deffer, as though it was the Esquire of urban magazines. With its larger size, better graphics, more experienced editorial direction and a writing staff that included Kevin Powell, Scott Poulson-Bryant and Joan Morgan, the magazine was an instant success. Coming at a time when most mainstream music/lifestyle publications, namely Rolling Stone, had no “writers of color” composing funky fresh features or reviews, The Source and Vibe was where more than a few African-American writers honed their craft, sharpened their skills and were allowed to have their words read by thousands of readers across the world.
This was, as writer Dean Van Nguyen recently documented in the Pitchfork piece “How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement,” another golden era of black (Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement) writing, and Morgan’s work at Vibe was at the forefront of a literary movement that would inspire a generation. Teenagers read the rap mags on the subway and buses, college students studied them in their dorms, with some hanging favorite articles pin-up style on the wall, and the mostly white world of New York City magazine journalism was forced to pay attention to the new kids in town. Morgan would go on to write several wonderful stories for Vibe including a controversial one on alleged homophobic Jamaican singer Buju Banton and, in 1994, a memorable cover story on TLC (The Fire This Time) that centered on the group’s rebellious rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who had, several months before, accidentally burned down her professional football player boyfriend’s Atlanta mansion after setting his sneakers on fire.
West coast entertainment journalist Ronke Reeves was an editorial assistant at Vibe during those formative years, and remembers well Morgan’s contributions. “In that male dominated world, Joan had a bold, prominent voice that broke new ground and inspired a generation of young writers. Even after she left Vibe and went to work at Essence and ultimately finish her book, I still followed her work, because, from a female perspective, there was nobody writing like that.”
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A few months before the house burning in Atlanta, writers from the hip-hop magazines were introduced to a new rap trio calling themselves the Fugees. The music on their debut Blunted on Reality was a fusion of streetwise rap and soul mixed with swaggering dancehall riddims. Assigned by RapPages editor-in-chief Sheena Lester, the first woman editor of a national hip-hop publication, I went to the midtown Manhattan offices of their label Sony Music and was introduced to the group, which consisted of Wyclef Jean, a rapper and multi-instrumentalist, his cousin and group founder Pras Michel, and Lauryn Hill, a singer and rapper who was as beautiful as she was talented.
With the exception of a rapper/singer named Smooth, whose album You’ve Been Played was released the year before, no other artists were displaying those dual talents on disc. Lauryn, then all of 19 years old, was an English major at Columbia University who, the year before, had appeared alongside Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2. It wasn’t uncommon for Hill to be seen doing homework in the conference room between interviews or in the dressing room when the group did shows. Tonya Pendleton, a former editor at the BET-owned YSB magazine, remembers being impressed. “Lauryn was so incredibly talented as an equally dope singer and rapper,” she says. “Although she had an incredible singing voice, Lauryn is, in my view, the greatest female rap artist of our time, if only because she’s a beast lyrically. The only thing making that arguable is that there are less albums to debate with.”
Hailing from Northern New Jersey, the guys lived in the Newark area while Hill came from South Orange. In author Brian Coleman’s essential text Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (2007), Pras explained, “Our strength was in being three individuals who blended together perfectly. Clef brought the musicality, Lauryn brought the soulfulness and I brought the roughness and flash.” From the first time I’d listened to an advance cassette, hearing Hill’s dope lyrics on “Some Seek Stardom,” a track she recorded alone, I remember I could tell there was something special about her. Lauryn was a teenager who could hold her own as a rapper, but she also threw in a little jazzy soul singing to keep us on our toes. In a New York Times piece penned by Amy Linden, Hill described the Fugees’ sound as “a little rice and peas mixed with a little collard greens, a little mango with watermelon.”
While Blunted on Reality had followers, the sales were low and The Fugees were almost dropped from the label because of it. According to Jayson Jackson, a former Sony Music Group product manager who later became Hill’s manager, it would have happened if it wasn’t for him conning the publicity department for a few grand to get Caribbean-American producer Salaam Remi to do a remix of their singles “Nappy Heads” and “Vocabs.” In She Begat This, the producer tells Morgan, “They sent me the Fugees because they were Haitian, and they needed that bridge to get them to the mainstream. They had talent. They just haven’t figured out how to channel it.”
The Fugees’ careers were up in the air for awhile until they were given another chance by Sony that led to their critically acclaimed sophomore album The Score in 1996. “It (Blunted on Reality) wasn’t successful,” Pras told writer Brian Coleman, “but it was part of us feeling our way, figuring ourselves out as artists. It had to be what it was in order for us to evolve into The Score.” With their advance money, the group bought equipment and instruments, and constructed their own studio which they dubbed the Booga Basement. Alongside bassist Jerry “Wonda” Duplessis, another of Clef’s cousins, the Fugees recorded their follow-up in a mere six months.
With Clef and Lauryn also contributing to the production, the trio tightened up their style and raised the bar for themselves and rap records in general. The Score’s first single “Fu-Gee-La” was cool, but it was their second joint, a hip-hop remake of Roberta Flack’s classic “Killing Me Softly” sung by Lauryn, that became an unexpected hit and helped them cross over. The third single “Ready or Not” became known as the first time Hill revealed her love for singer Nina Simone and, by merely mentioning the legend’s name, introduced a generation of rap listeners to the activist blues singer. “As far as I know, no one in hip-hop had ever tossed out a Nina Simone reference before, so that was a big deal,” poet LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs says. “Nina represented so much to Lauryn, but later she seemed to also adapt Simone’s radicalness, rage and unpredictability.”
Years later, in light of the shift that Lauryn’s life took, I’d think back to that afternoon we spent together and Lauryn’s pre-release giddiness. Truthfully, after the release of ‘The Miseducation’ and shame of the lawsuit, her public persona would never be so joyful again.
At the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, when Simone was posthumously inducted, Hill performed “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair,” and “Feeling Good” as part of a tribute to the late artist. In her lifetime, Nina with her smooth dark skin represented blackness, as in Black is beautiful, which was also a message that Lauryn was communicating. Indeed, in She Begat This there is much conversation (with Yaba Blay and Tarana Burke) about Lauryn’s “deep chocolate brown skin” inspiring other dark girls who felt rejected by both hip-hop culture and their own communities.
“Witnessing Lauryn and her dark skin and natural hair shine brightly on magazine covers was affirming for Black girls to see,” says Newark-based arts writer fayemi shakur. “But, there was something deeper underneath her beauty to celebrate. She embodied a unique blend of style, Black cultural and political consciousness, with serious divine feminine energy. Any Black girl beginning to loc their hair back then could smile with pride in the mirror because Lauryn’s beauty reflected our own. It wasn’t always a popular thing to have natural hair.”
By the end of ‘96, The Score had sold six million units and won two Grammys including one (Best R&B Performance) for “Killing Him Softly.” Writer/filmmaker (Fresh Dressed) Sacha Jenkins, who in 1996 wrote a cover story on the group for Vibe, says, “As someone with Haitian blood dancing through his veins, that Fugees record meant a lot. They made Haitians cool — or rather, they helped a broad range of folks to better appreciate our talents, and recognize the uniqueness of our identity… That record also helped to expand what was acceptable in hip hop, as in, you don’t always have to spit the bars that you ripped out of your Rikers Island prison cell. You can sing, play guitar — scat even. Hip-hop had a lot of rules and the Fugees pissed on all of them. Hip-hop finally had a leading lady. Lauryn isn’t Haitian but, on that album, she’s honorary for sure.”
Of course, Hill too was a cultural chameleon, adopting a bit of Haitian music, jazzy vibes, southern soul and Jamaican yardie in her music. In 1996, the new and improved Lauryn was full of confidence and moxy, but, unknown to the general public, she and Wyclef had become lovers although he was already married. Their relationship became quite messy a year later when Lauryn had a baby, her pop-song-celebrated son Zion, with Rohan Marley, himself the son of reggae legend Bob Marley. Wyclef, whose own solo album The Carnival was a critical and sales success , kept telling the press that he would be producing and writing Lauryn’s album. “You would think after co-producing an album that sold millions that I’d be able to produce and write my own project, but it was a battle,” Lauryn told me the day I spent with her in June of 1998, two months before the albums release. And then she laughed.
On that afternoon I had set out to South Orange, New Jersey to interview Hill for a Source magazine cover story. Forty-five minutes away from Manhattan, the Lincoln Town Car pulled in front of the house where Hill was raised. Having moved a few years before to a different dwelling a few miles away, the old home had since been transformed into a recording studio, one of the many where The Miseducation was made. Earlier in the day, I’d met her mom and young son Zion and learned that she was also pregnant with her second child Selah Louise Marley, who would be born in November. Even at her then young age, motherhood was important to Lauryn.
“What bugs me is the fact that men never have to defend having children,” she’d tell me later. “Women are the ones who are asked, ‘How is this going to affect your career?’ If anything, having a growing family will make me even more motivated to create good music. My grandmother had 13 children and 32 grandchildren. Looking at her life has made me realize what a blessing it is to have family around.” Today Lauryn has six children.
We’d hung out together most of the day and I had gone with her into New York to meet with director Joel Schumacher about starring in the film version of Dreamgirls that he was supposed to make. After lunch at the Tribeca Grill, we returned to Jersey so Lauryn could play the complete album for me. An hour later, I made no secret to her that I was blown away, but also surprised by how much soul music, including wondrous collaborations with D’Angelo (“Nothing Even Matters”) and Mary J. Blige (“I Used to Love Him”), was the bedrock of the project. “What does it say about hip-hop when one of the better hip-hop records of the year contains little actual rapping?” Amy Linden wrote in a review.
Of course there were brilliant rap tracks including the opening song “Lost Ones” and the awesome “Doo Wop (That Thing),” whose split screen/time travel video was one of the most innovative of 1998, but the majority of the album had more in common with the then new neo-soul (D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell) than it did with hardrock hip-hop. “When I was six-years-old, I found boxes of old school 45s in the basement,” Lauryn told me, explaining the origins of her soul music love. “The first record I discovered was ‘If I Should Lose You’ by the Dream Ups. Next, I found a bunch of boxes and there were about 500 to 600 records from ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ to Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Super Fly.’ The boxes were overflowing with Motown, Stax, Philadelphia International and a bunch of others. While other kids in the neighborhood were rapping about New Edition, I was trying to school them on Roberta Flack and Marvin Gaye. Those old records had become a significant part of my life.”
In She Begat This writer/filmmaker dream hampton argues that The Miseducation, which she hated, sounded under-produced, but for me the music took me back to coming of age in the days of Soul Train on television, slow grindin’ at basement parties and live bands with real instruments jamming in smoke-filled venues. As Lester Bangs once said of Patti Smith, “her sound is (was) new-old.” Songs like “Ex-Factor” and “When It Hurts So Bad” were reminiscent of Willie Mitchell’s golden touch on Ann Pebble’s tracks, especially “Trouble Heartaches & Sadness,” or channeling Etta James at her most heartbroken. “I feel like the blueprint of this record has been in my head for years,” Hill said. “Although I rarely discussed my ideas with anyone before I started working, it was all in my mind.”
At the time I didn’t know that the label had originally rejected her masterwork, but perhaps I should’ve picked up on that when she said, “When Marvin Gaye created What’s Going On, even Berry Gordy thought he was crazy and trying to ruin his own career. It’s that kind of risk-taking that is sorely missing in music, be it rap or rhythm & blues.” Of course, the label turned out to be wrong; The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sold millions, topped year-end best-of charts and propelled the then 23-year-old to superstar status. No one could’ve predicted that the album would’ve been as successful as it was.
Years later, in light of the shift that Lauryn’s life took, I’d think back to that afternoon we spent together and Lauryn’s pre-release giddiness. Truthfully, after the release of The Miseducation and shame of the lawsuit, her public persona would never be so joyful again.
“That album is a tour de force from a Black woman’s specific view with lyrics that speak to personal heartbreak as well as public, cultural issues,” Tonya Pendleton explains. “Whether she’s wondering why a lover can’t give more or why an artist can’t say more, she’s using her distinct voice and point of view to serve the music. There is so much richness to this album that’s it’s hard to believe it’s as old as it is. It seems as though she presciently covered all of the hot-button issues to come, from fuckbois to cold corporate rap to both the fear and anticipatory joy of becoming a working mother captured so beautifully on ‘Zion.’ It would difficult for me to chose a favorite song, but the opening track ‘Lost Ones’ may be one of the most lyrically potent fuck-you songs ever created.”
Within months of its release, Lauryn had become an even bigger star than she was during the Fugees reign, appearing on numerous magazine covers, including the beautiful Jonty Davis pic that graced the September, 1998 issue of The Source where my interview appeared. “That same year, a few months after The Miseducation came out, I saw her perform at my school at the University of Virginia,” journalist Tomika Anderson remembers. “Afterward, a few of us met her and shook her hand. She was so accessible and classy and beautiful, we were just blown away by her. She was just such a wonderful role model.”
Twenty years later, we’re still talking and writing about The Miseducation, but, as Hill would discover, with great genius often comes great consequences. Her post-millennium breakdown (or crack-up, in the Fitzgeraldian sense of the word) hasn’t always been easy to watch, especially for those who believed that she was a goddess hovering over us mere mortals. “[Hill] became a figurehead and touchstone and it was easy to forget how young she was,” Amy Linden says. “Being the Voice of a Generation has to be difficult, especially when you are dealing with personal drama that her fans and label might not have been privy to.”
Although She Begat This isn’t the music geek examination of that classic album that I was expecting, Joan Morgan succeeds at revealing other layers of our Lauryn love, while also humanizing a woman who many tried to transform into a deity two decades ago. As Roxanne Shante, never one to dish out compliments, said in 2010, “Lauryn Hill is in a category of her own.”
* * *
Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales writes The Blacklist book column for Catapult. He has written for The Paris Review, The Village Voice, Pitchfork, New York magazine and the upcoming Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop edited by Vikki Tobak. A former hip-hop journalist, his articles, essays and reviews have appeared in The Source, RapPages, Vibe, Ego Trip, XXL, Complex and Mass Appeal. In addition, he is the co-author of Bring The Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (1991). Currently he is working on a hip-hop novel.
At Deadspin, David Davis‘s sprawling oral history of the original Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach is gritty, fun, and brimming with ’70s sleaze and addictive banter. Beyond piecing together the early years of the legendary gym, the story zooms out to show the broader shifts that took bodybuilding from a small Southern California subculture to a multibillion-dollar industry — and then zooms all the way in to focus on the quirks of its ensemble cast. This group of pioneer bodybuilders happens to include Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course: fresh off the proverbial boat, and making his first, heavy-accented moves in the state of which, decades later, he would become the governor.
[Chet] Yorton: I beat this young kid in the [NABBA] Mr. Universe contest in ‘66. He was very subdued. He needed an interpreter because he spoke very little English. He followed me around like a puppy dog backstage. He wanted to know what to do for his calves, what to do for this and that. He came in second to me, but at 20 years old you could tell he was unbelievable. When I came back to Gold’s I told everybody, “You’re not going to believe this guy Arnold Schwarzenegger.” I knew then.
[Frank] Zane: I won Mr. America in September of ‘68. A week later was [IFBB] Mr. Universe in Miami. Arnold was there. He’d just come over to the States. He was white, smooth, didn’t pose good, had missing body parts, couldn’t speak any English. I beat him, and he took it real hard. But Joe Weider immediately fell in love with Arnold and whisked him off to California, where he was moving his business empire [from New Jersey]. Arnold got a Volkswagen, paid apartment, free supplements, couple hundred bucks a week. From Joe Weider, that was pretty amazing.
[John] Balik: Without question, Joe Weider was the most important person in establishing Arnold here. Arnold wouldn’t be here without Joe Weider making the first step and supporting him.
Joe Weider first told Arnold to go to Vince’s because they were doing business together. I was standing next to Vince at the desk when Arnold walked in for the first time. He was wearing flip-flops, white shorts, and a string T-shirt. Arnold was probably the biggest he’d ever been; he weighed maybe 255 pounds. He said in very broken English, “I’m Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m Mr. Universe.” Vince took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “You just look like a fat fuck to me.”
The phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work sets you free) appears at the entrance to Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps. Automatik, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sven Hoppe / AP. Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Adam Skolnick | Longreads | August 2018 | 9 minutes (2,415 words)
“Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,” said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso. We were on set of Operation Finale, huddled under a tent next to acclaimed Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, and the specific lie up for debate was whether to turn a sunset scene into sunrise. That switch triggered some hand-wringing because moviemaking is an attempt to capture a scramble of moments, and if the look of one is altered, because, say, Oscar Isaac is still being primped in wardrobe as precious light fades from the sky, there are ripple effects, which can torpedo narrative flow and make even a true story feel false.
Whether or not the man Isaac was playing, Peter Malkin, actually landed at Ezeiza International Airport at dawn or dusk when he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1960 to help hunt down fugitive Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann, is beside the point. What matters is that Malkin’s arrival and all the moments thereafter feel real because this is a true story, one with urgent modern relevance. Plus, for Weitz this project is personal.
Chris Weitz, director of Operation Finale (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
If he missed an opportunity to shoot the scene as planned, the production schedule would be shredded, money wasted from an already stretched budget, and that matters because this is not the kind of movie studios like to make anymore. The 48-year-old director credits MGM for investing in an entertaining movie about a serious topic (read: there are no flying robots), but he’d declined to shoot in Budapest, which would have saved cash, preferring the authenticity of Buenos Aires — and now this.
“¿Qué estamos esperando?” Aguirresarobe asked nobody in particular. Weitz was wondering the same thing. It was 6:42 p.m. and the sky was darkening, but despite the pressure and his caffeine load, Weitz projected an aura of calm on his bustling bilingual set.
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“Every day you’re making a movie it sort of gravitates toward a clusterfuck,” Weitz reasoned as he rolled up the sleeves of his pin-striped button down. “You just have to surf it.” Scattered all around us were a range of cherry vintage vehicles (a Citroën, two DeSotos, and a few Di Tellas, Argentina’s endemic automotive brand) and more than 50 extras dressed in mid-century period attire. All of it — the dusky light, the location, the costumes, the stakes — produced a magical quality as if we were in the eye of a Fellini or Kurosawa dream sequence.
We’d met up earlier that morning at Weitz’s rented house in Buenos Aires’ hip Palermo district, with its trendy restaurants, corner cafés, and cobbled streets, hopped in his chauffeured Camry, and drove an hour out of town to set, during which time I peppered him with questions about his 20-year career. Weitz has imagined almost every movie genre starting with the iconic coming-of-age sex comedy, American Pie, which he produced and directed with his brother Paul. Their follow-up, About A Boy (they cowrote and codirected), placed them among the best screenwriters of their generation and garnered an Oscar nomination. Since then he’s directed fantasy popcorn (New Moon) and channeled his inner Star Wars geek to cowrite a smash hit franchise spin-off in Rogue One. In between he published three young-adult novels in a post-apocalyptic trilogy, and contemplated ditching Hollywood “to do something a bit more useful,” he said. Makes sense for a man who sits on the board of Homeboy Industries and is a sucker for the radical inclusiveness of Burning Man, where he met his wife, Mercedes Martinez. This was his first turn at the helm of a major studio movie in six years.
As soon as we arrived on the Argentine air force base doubling as Ezeiza, he was whisked away by production designer David Brisbin (Drugstore Cowboy, New Moon) and prop master Ellen Freund (Mad Men) to approve the throwback terminal and control tower. A bit later he was greeted by the base’s real-life commandant, distinguished in his flight suit, who invited him to a pig roast the following evening. His invitation sounded more like an order, but in each instance Weitz was gracious and unflappable, because, when it comes to making movies, he has seen it all.
‘Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,’ said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso.
Weitz was raised around the business. His grandfather Paul Kohner was a prominent agent and producer who married Mexican-born actress Lupita Tovar. Their daughter, Susan, Weitz’s mother, also became an actress, who won two Golden Globes and was nominated for an Oscar for the 1959 film Imitation of Life. The brothers Weitz grew up in New York City, but visited their grandparents in L.A. often. That meant attending sprawling Bel Air dinners with scions of Old Hollywood, John Huston and Ingmar Bergman among them, but the reason MGM’s Jonathan Glickman hired Weitz for Operation Finale was because of his father’s history.
John Weitz was 10 when Adolf Hitler was declared Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Part of a wealthy Jewish family, he was sent from Berlin to St. Paul’s School in London, where he would stay until 1938 when the rest of his family finally fled Nazi Germany. Together they made their way to the United States. Weitz joined the army in 1943, and as a well-educated native German speaker, matriculated into the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor to the CIA. In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. He shared what he witnessed with a few close friends in a series of letters, but he never told his grisly war stories to his sons.
“When I think about it now,” Weitz said of his father, “it’s quite likely that he had some kind of PTSD. He never slept very well. He was tightly wrapped.”
After retiring from a successful career in New York fashion, John Weitz began writing biographies of Nazis, including one of the Minister of Economics under Hitler, Hjalmar Schacht, as if Nazism was a riddle he was still trying to solve. When Chris returned home for the summers while earning his degree at Cambridge, he was dispatched to the main branch of the New York Public Library to help with research. That meant poring over giant leather-bound catalogs in search of obscure German diplomatic histories. He’d frequently return to his father’s study with photocopies of entire books in hand.
In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand.
“He was fascinated with how the upper classes in Germany made accommodations and kind of allowed or justified Nazis to themselves,” Weitz said, “having first mocked everything about it.” Still, his father never showed his scars from Dachau. It wasn’t until 2014, 12 years after his death, that Weitz received a copy of a letter signed by his father, dated May 5, 1945. It details a descent into an unfathomable waking nightmare.
Prisoners are milling around everywhere, the way they looked cannot be described … starved, beaten, scarred … They showed me the horrors… The gas chamber… the label over the door says in bitter irony “Brausebad”… cement walls and floors, little barred windows knee high… and eighteen nozzles in the ceiling… and next door the “control room” … where the SS men used to turn on the hot water then turn off the hot water and turn on the gas… and then the hundred or so… would choke to death, scraping their hands bloody on the cruel cement walls… tens of thousands died here… it can be smelled from hundreds of yards away… the stink of death …
Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann. He planned the logistics first for the mass deportation of Jews, then their herding into urban ghettos across Europe, and finally transporting them like abused livestock by train to concentration camps. Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.
Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann…Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.
Within weeks of reading his father’s letters for the first time, Weitz received the Operation Finale script from Glickman, who calls the movie “a riveting thriller” about Israel’s daring operation to capture Eichmann in 1960. Weitz knew the history. In the chaos that followed allied victory, some of the worst war criminals slipped free, including Eichmann, who escaped from a POW camp before he could be identified. Penniless and on the run, he worked as a lumberjack then a chicken farmer before connecting to an underground railroad for war criminals run by Nazi sympathizers within the Catholic Church. It was a cabal of priests that wrangled him a Red Cross passport — the same document Holocaust survivors depended upon — and, with the help of former SS-affiliated Argentinians, facilitated his escape from Italy to Argentina, where he built a life as Ricardo Klement and eventually sent for his family. It wasn’t until the daughter of a Holocaust survivor started dating his son, who still carried the Eichmann name, that his presence would register on the radar of Israel’s national intelligence agency, Mossad.
The original script, a debut written by 28-year-old Brit Matthew Orton, was terrific, and Weitz guided rewrites that would make it even better. Eichmann could have had an inner Hannibal Lecter quality, but Orton and Weitz resisted this interpretation. “That’s very juicy stuff, but I wanted him to be less of a villain so that he could end up more of a threat,” Weitz said. “Humanize him, and he becomes even worse.” That tracks historically, too. By the time Mossad agents found him, Eichmann was living the ordinary life of a factory foreman on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, hidden in plain sight.
In a fascinating bit of casting, Weitz tapped Sir Ben Kingsley to play Eichmann, which offers the Oscar winner, who brought Itzhak Stern to life in Schindler’s List, a chance to explore the Holocaust from the wrong side of history. Soon after, Oscar Isaac came on board as a Mossad agent who is haunted by his family’s death at the hands of Nazis. One week into shooting, Weitz shared the Dachau letter with his cast.
Originally slated for production in 2016, the schedule shifted to 2017 to accommodate Isaac, and an old story found modern relevance thanks to Brexit, Trump’s election, and a widening acceptance of racist, authoritarian thought. There was Charlottesville, of course, and Trump’s reaction to the tiki torch bearers who managed to be shocking, yet easy to dismiss in their buffoonery, making them even more dangerous. After all, how many steps is it from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Warsaw, Poland, where 60,000 angry people, including thousands of skinheads and Nazis took over the streets last November. And how different is the Trump administration — which championed a horrifying and brutal family separation policy for illegal immigrants that was widely condemned as child abuse (at least 528 children remain separated from their deported parents, and one toddler who was taken into ICE custody on the border has died) — from the coalition government in Austria, which includes leaders of their radical right Freedom Party, or Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary, which has consolidated power by demonizing Muslim immigrants and refugees. Are we just as bad? Are we worse? How much worse might we soon become?
I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents. A similar Nazi resurgence swept Europe, particularly Germany, in 1960, when Israel sent Mossad agents to Buenos Aires to kidnap Eichmann to put him on trial in the promised land. Back then, Germany hadn’t yet tuned their education system toward truth and reconciliation. Cleansed of blood, denial was comforting. The thrill of nationalism, nourishing. If Eichmann was offered a fair trial, the theory went, with the opportunity to defend himself, hard evidence could be displayed, witnesses would testify, and the entire truth about the Holocaust could be laid bare before a worldwide televised audience.
I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents.
“There is a line in the movie when Eichmann says, ‘Your lawyers and your lying press will frame me,’” Weitz said. “That very phrase is propped up in ‘alt-right’ circles today because if you attack the sources of information you attack the notion of truth itself, and if you destroy those sources you have the right to impose your will.”
Weitz has no illusions that his film, which includes a depiction of that trial, will influence policy or stem the tide of nationalism, as if it’s 1960 all over again. His focus has always been to tell an entertaining and suspenseful tale. “What’s cool about this story,” Weitz said, “is the [good guys] don’t have guns. Their job was to get him out alive.”
Of course, first they had to find him, and that meant a sunset — or perhaps sunrise — arrival at an exotic airport for Peter Malkin. Just before 7 p.m., Isaac appeared on set looking every bit the movie star, and the cameras rolled. By 7:10 p.m., after a couple of hiccups there was just enough light for one more take, and Isaac delivered. Though the scene was utilitarian — he’s getting picked up curbside — and is more an orchestration of extras and camera movements, he found the tension in his rival agent in the driver’s seat. “Avi sent you?” Isaac asked, annoyed. The camera held for a long beat, and the entire set exhaled.
“OK, OK, OK,” Weitz said, “We live.”
***
Adam Skolnick is an author and journalist living in Los Angeles.
Operation Finale stars Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, and Mélanie Laurent, and is in theaters on August 29, 2018.
Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2018 | 12 minutes (3,139 words)
The end of the world in Ling Ma’s novel Severance comes not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but a stream of misinformation, social media hysteria, and plenty of willful denial. If this sounds familiar, it’s far from dreary. Ma injects comic levity into a world ravaged by “Shen Fever,” whose victims perform habitual tasks in a mute, somnambulant state until they waste away. Candace Chen, a New York-based, Chinese-American millennial, is immune to the disease, and joins a small group of survivors led by a former I.T. specialist.
Although this post-apocalyptic remnant waves a typical number of red flags — micro-authoritarianism, liberal use of euthanasia — Candace makes do as they scavenge for food and mercy kill the “fevered.” Ma depicts the end times with alternating chapters on Candace’s pre-apocalyptic life: dating in Brooklyn, navigating adulthood, and working at a book production company. She specializes in Bibles and takes occasional business trips to printing facilities in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
Ma has fun with the end of the world: Severance reads like The Walking Dead infected with the anarchic spirit of Office Space. Candace’s coworkers sport designer flu masks, idly wonder about the colleague who didn’t return on Monday, and debate whether to take the spot bonus for staying on when everyone else has the good sense to get the hell out of NYC.
Candace doesn’t have good sense. She maintains her routines and eventually moves into her office. She updates a photo blog called NY Ghost with images of the empty city. And we learn Candace is guarding a secret which may imperil her chances with her newfound “friends.” Read more…
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